“Enjoying” writing as a hobby, you see, is actually quite the opposite – the tortured writer sits in front of his computer for hours at end, composing and writing, rewriting and erasing – and the work he produces is never quite good enough. For some reason, I like to put an intense pressure on myself for the quality of these writings – It must be witty! It must be intelligent! It must be well-written! I argue with myself.
The self-torture, then, results in extremely long posts that take hours to compose and blog posts are actually then done only once every few weeks as a result.
The other option is to just write a few day to day account of my activities here in Ust-Kamenogorsk, which I personally find distasteful since the activities don’t seem all that interesting to me for my reading public – but in a recent email, a friend pointed out as she chided me for lack of blog posts, “I don’t care if you’re shopping for clothes or drinking coffee or teaching a class – whatever you’re doing, because you’re doing it in Kazakhstan, it makes it much more interesting than whatever I’m doing here.”
Fair enough. It’s difficult for me to have a post every day, since I’ve discovered now that internet connection from home costs quite a bit of dinero, so I’ll only be accessing the internet from the library for short periods of time at the end of the week. What that means is the posts that I put up will probably come once or twice a week, and usually be a recap of the past week’s events. What will happen is that I’ll change the dates on the posts to reflect the actual dates, so if you really are THAT interested, you may have to scroll down a few posts to be caught up since I’ll be posting a few posts at a time. This week's starts from this past Saturday.
Photo Gallery Updated Again!
Friday, October 14, 2005
Went and saw a gymnasium today, which is essentially a private school for children from Kindergarten to 11th form students. The school was ridiculously fabulous, with a very nice cafeteria, dormitory, and many different rooms for various instruction. Students were uniformed, and every student spoke Russian, Kazakh, and English. It was amazing – some of the students spoke better English than some of our university level students.
The gymnasium started all the way with kindergarteners, which of course, made me think nothing more than "AWWWW, HOW CUTTTEEEE" when I saw them.
I spent some time working on their English tests for a competition that they plan to have – apparently next Friday I’ll be there as some sort of VIP, I’m not entirely sure how that’s going to work out, but reports then.
Outside of that, lessons have been going as normal – we’re finishing up the second lesson in the “American Dream” unit, basically discussing the student’s future plans and what they’re thinking about doing after University, as well as introducing the concept of the American Dream as a whole.
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