Footnotes From Afar: First Days

It's been a fast and furious two days since I posted last. Tuesday was the first day of school and 70 of us new teachers arrived with bright, shiny faces. As the group introduced themselves, I was amazed at the diversity of our group. We have people from South Africa, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia, Turkey, Canada, US, UK, Trinidad and Tobago, Lebanon, and more but that's all I can remember for now. As for where people have been working around the world, 'all over' about sums it up. One couple was teaching in China last year and were about 50 miles away from the epicenter of the earthquake. I can't wait to hear their stories! We seem to have a plethora of Kims: Kimann, Kim, and me. I can go by Kim or Kimberly or 'hey you' works too. So I may need to change names here. :-P

The rest of the school day consisted of a tour of the school and being issued laptops. The tour took so long because the campus is huge. Huge. It's as big as most of the suburban high schools in the US that have 3000 to 4000 students. We have about 1700 students from Pre-K through 12th grade. My computer lab has 25 iMacs lining the walls and an LCD projector (every classroom has one). It's a great setup and I'm so happy. I see there are new Lego Robotics kits that arrived over the summer and there is a rather large 'sand table' (minus the sand) in the center of the room that seems to be for the Legos. In the afternoon, all 70 of us were each given a new MacBook to use while here. We can take it home and bring it back to school each night, whatever we need. It's awesome!

Here are some pictures of my apartment, or flat as it is called here. It is sparsely decorated for now. My shipment will hopefully be delivered to my apartment sometime soon.