What a Week!

Hello world. (as WordPress would say!)

Now that I’ve had a two-hour nap, let me bring you up to date.

The last couple of weeks have been very exciting for us. Both Lyn and I have started our new jobs. Amazingly, both of us are still upright!

The amount of energy it takes to teach is incredible. Both of us spent Saturday in a near coma. Lyn, after five days of teaching teenagers. Me after one six-hour class. The adrenaline of “performing” for that length of time takes its toll. Not that I mind! I had a great time!

I was sooooo nervous! The Anglo has very particular ways of doing its lesson planning. The materials are different from what I am used to as well. Never mind trying to make a six-hour class interesting.

My first attempt at lesson planning was okay. After meeting with Hector a few times and sitting in on a couple of classes, I finally found my own voice. The second drafts were much better. And, surprisingly, I was able to fill up all that time! Of course, it helped that the students had been taking Saturday classes there for a while. They knew what to expect. In fact, the group was primarily made up of the students from the class I sat in on, so everything felt familiar. There was one new student. He blended in very well.

Lyn, too, had a good week. Unlike me, though, he is an introvert. So, by the end of the week, he was totally spent. But, he LOVED IT. He has around 100 students in four classes. From what he tells me, they are really adorable. Typical pre-teens, yet since they have been at this school for a while, they know the routine.

The school has some very strict policies. In fact, even the teachers have to conform to a dress code: blue pants, white or blue shirts. The shirt color is determined by what day of the week it is. It certainly makes it easy to decide what to wear, particularly given that Lyn gets up around 5:30 in the morning to get to school on time.

Oh-Dark Thirty

Speaking of 5:30, I have another new class that started today at 7:00 in the morning. That means that I have to get up at 5:30 too! OMG. While painful to the max, there is one benefit — I get to see Orion setting out my window. The mornings are a little cool here, so, for me, choosing my outfit is a bit more of a challenge. I am trying to be organized. I actually picked out my clothes last night and had them ready to go.

One thing I didn’t anticipate was how much traffic there would be at 6:30 in the morning. Who the heck is on the road? I hit so much traffic, that I had to call the school and have Hector start the class for me. A typical 15-20 minute drive was 45 minutes this morning.

Lesson learned. Tomorrow I’m getting up and leaving even earlier. Hopefully, I will be able to sleep tonight. A two-hour nap can sometimes make that challenging.

Payday

One of the more interesting things about working here is the every company has its own banking relationship. For us, that means that each of us has to open a bank account at a different bank just so we can get paid. My account is at CitiBanamex and Lyn’s will be at Scotiabank. We have a third, joint account at Santander.

Opening a bank account here is almost as much work as getting a visa. Seriously! You need so many documents to prove that you are who you are and live where you live. It’s crazy. CitiBanamex was fairly easy, although it did take me two trips. Lyn is having a bit more trouble. He’s already gone twice — once with me and once with some bilingual friends to help translate — and still hasn’t been able to open an account.

The first issue is just the timing. The bank only opens new accounts during the week until 3 p.m. and until 2 p.m. on Saturdays. Well, Lyn works until 3:30 every day, and I work until 2:00 on Saturdays. He can’t go alone as he doesn’t speak enough Spanish.

Some of my friends from the dog park volunteered to go with him for the second trip. It turned out that Lyn still didn’t have the right documentation — they wanted the original copy of our electrical bill and our lease contract. This is because our electric bill comes in the name of our landlord. It is too complicated to change it, so we just pay it. That means another trip is forthcoming. We are going to try to do it tomorrow, as he can get out a little earlier. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, I did get my first paycheck. For less than 15 days, it was just shy of my monthly salary at Globoworld.

YES!