Guadalajara and the Secondaria Tecnica

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Safe in Gudalajara at last, I was collected from the bus stop on Saturday evening by staff from the teaching project organisation who could not believe the weight of my bag and taken to my host family's house in Zapopan, a suburb of Guadalajara. The family: Señora Rebeca, Señor Carlos, Ernesto, Oscar, Carlos, Carolina and Paulina and Gina the famiy's cousin are all lovely and I will be loving in their house for the next 3 months with all of them and Ann, a volunteer from Germany who I am also working with at the school and with whom I share a bedroom.

After the somewhat false starts of being taken to a school who didn't actually need any volunteers and the laundrey dying all my white clothes with blue spots (now thankfully expunged using gallons of water and patience (of which I have learnt a lot in the past year)) I think I finally feel settled here and am looking forward to spending the next few weeks being a teacher.

Today was our first proper day at school, the low-light of which has to be discovering that we will be starting our classes at 7am tomorrow which means leaving home at 6am! On the plus side we will be done by 10, and have all afternoon free, if we have any energy to do anything. In the school we are taking classes aged 12-15, and they are really hard work. The discipline in the worst I have ever seen (episodes of Grange Hill included!) - talking, messing around, standing, eating etc and their level is pretty poor, most cannot say what their name is and where they are from despite having 2 years of English behind them. But today we were rather thrown in at the deep end and hopefully tomorrow will be better now we have invested in some board pens and have been given a text book to use and our supervising teachers are lovely. I will be teaching, at least to begin with, with Ann and another girl Kaley from the USA, and hopefully we will have safety in numbers.

I have visited the centre of Guadalajara breifly for a pretty useless tour with some of the other new volunteers but will return soon and will let you all know more about it then. We also went to a canyon which was pretty but I can't for the life of me remember what it is called. Ann and I have also been to a really nice park and for some walks around the neighbourhood and are finally getting the hang of the confusing bus routes, and the locations of the super, cinema, internet, landrey etc etc. I'm sure it'll feel like we've been here forever in no time at all!

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Photos

Bedroom
Ann and I plan our first Eniglish classes in our bedroom