My Spanish...oops

I spent a great deal of time during my spring break reading blogs, researching, and basically doing anything and everything that I could to prepare myself mentally for my move to Chile.  I'm trying to be proactive about tuning into Chilean Spanish so that it doesn't take me 6 months to finally understand what people are saying to me.  As one of many millions of fans of "The Office", I was thrilled to discover clips on You Tube of "La Ofis" (the Chilean version) and wasted a lot of time watching those and trying to convince myself that I could understand everything just fine without the English subtitles.  Riiight. 

Another one of my bright ideas was to try to find podcasts to listen to since I am huge fan of using these in my classroom, especially Notes in Spanish.  I stumbled upon the opportunity to stream Chilean radio stations and spent hours listening while packing boxes and lingering near the computer waiting for the music to stop playing so that I could hear some callers engaged in actual conversations.  I mean come on, it's kind of embarrassing to be a Spanish teacher going to a Spanish speaking country and then be like, um, yeah, I don't understand your Spanish!

Great idea Heather, I'm thinking that one of the many pop-ups that I allowed was infected with some vicious malware that slowly started taking over my school computer.  By the time I was back at school the second week after spring break, I had to throw my hands up, hand it to the tech guys, and wish them luck. Outlook is crashing, Word is saving nothing, Internet Explorer is closing every two seconds, I swear, I wasn't looking at anything bad!  So, I guess I will stick to my harmless blog reading and learning from all of the blogger experts out there who are a few steps ahead of me on this journey.

The 3 piles

I'd like to think that I'm a pretty organized person by nature.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that friends (Meg) would say that I am a little TOO organized.  Well friends, said organization has been crucial to the 3 pile process. 

Pile #1= this is definitely going to Chile and I am so sure that it's not even getting used/worn until I get there.

Pile #2= (sometimes gets split into 2 sub-piles) Repeat Street so I can maybe get like $4 back for a dress that I paid $60 for and wore twice, and the NCCS Truck who gets all of my other non-fashion sense donations. 

Pile #3= this is getting boxed and going to my parents giant basement and hopefully I saved it for a reason and will want it when I come back...yes? no? maybe?  And now that it looks like I might have someone to live in my townhouse, (fingers crossed) this process is becoming all the more tedious.  Please let me sell some furniture on Craig's List and live to tell about it.

So far, my process hasn't failed me.  It's April and I have so much done already that I should be able to enjoy most of my summer.  Thank you D127.  Early school start=early school finish.  May 20th is not that far away.

GCHS Supports Haiti and Chile

Students wearing red to support Haiti and "Fuerza Chile"

The transition

Time to dust off the blog and get it ready for my adventures in Chile! I don't know how it could even compare to the other amazing expat blogs out there, but at least it will be a way for my friends, family, and students to keep tabs on me. I figure if I could compose a halfway decent post at midnight after a 14-16 hour day in China, then I can set my standards for future posts a little higher starting now.

There is lots that I have left to do before August, but thankfully the school year is wrapping up very quickly and I'll have a lot of time to finish my preparations and see my little bro get married on August 7th, and then board a plane for Santiago on the 11th.

Signing Off

Thank you to everyone back home who followed my adventure. It was a bit overwhelming at times to try to keep up on my blog since I had a few internet glitches and we had a very busy schedule! However, it was a great way to stay connected to home over the course of almost 5 weeks and hopefully to show you all a little bit of what China is all about. This experience was everything I was and wasn't expecting all wrapped up into one trip if that makes any sense. Most of all, I hope it was only one of many opportunities to travel with other educators and it only inspires me to learn even more about other cultures around the world.

Additional Videos

I am in the process of adding videos to some older posts since I was unable to do so while I was in China. If you feel like looking back, you can see clips on:

Ferry Ride
Students from Changzhou Senior High
Roll out the red carpet
Hutongs
The Great Wall
Forbidden City (2)
Overnight Train
Crater Lake

"Chinglish"

One of the most entertaining aspects of our time in China was the botched translations that we all looked forward to reading everywhere. There are actually books of "Chinglish" signs that you can purchase there. Mostly they amount to inaccurate translations that could have been much more simply stated. We had so much fun with these that it was actually disappointing to be in Hong Kong where you can find proper British English everywhere.  I'm pretty sure the one posted here should just say "Keep Off".

Read more about Chinglish here.