Well there is a saying that things happen in "3s" so after my eventful hospital visit I waited to see what would come next. No sooner had I recovered from that and I came down with a bad head cold.....then last weekend I went to the swimming pool and managed to get bitten by hundreds of ants!!! I now figure my 3 bad things have happened and am looking forward to some good things.

Life goes on here in a rather monotonous way in the new city. With next to no facilities there is very little to do. Living and working with the same people makes it feel like "compound" living. My days are routine, get up,, go to work, come home, go for a walk or a swim, prepare dinner, relax for a bit then go to bed only to start the process again the next day. I miss restaurants, shops and meeting new people.....

I did manage one weekend break into Saigon with a group which was nice. We dined out, went shopping, went and had spa treatments etc etc. On the Saturday night we went to see the production of Jekyll and Hyde at the Saigon Opera House which made for a great change. On the Sunday we headed to the foreign food market to stock up on goods before heading back to our apartments

We have finished teaching for another quarter - 2 down, 2 to go - and the students gave us a party on the last day before exams. Tanya and I have been team teaching 2 wonderful classes of students with whom we feel we have made great progress. They would not let us contribute anything towards the party so we all sat down and enjoyed snacks and drinks together. Some of the students entertained us with singing and we had not realised how many musically talented students we had....or maybe they spend too much time at Karaoke!!!

This week the students sat their final exam and even that did not happen without problems. On Monday they had to sit their Listening, Reading, Grammar and Writing exam. Supposedly conducted in that order....however we started the exam with the listening only to find that the CDs did not work. My poor students looked up in total panic when it skipped a whole section and they could not answer the questions. A bit of quick thinking and I said "stop the exam, let me do the panicking". There were a few laughs as I explained that we would do the reading and grammar while I sorted out the listening CDs Fortunately I had a new teacher helping me invigilate so could leave the students with him while I headed to the office to sort out the mess. Now I am not technologically minded so had to look to other helpful teachers to reconvert files and re-burn CDs then headed back to the classroom. My head was spinning so heavens only knows how the students were feeling. We finally completed the listening and I sighed with relief. After the exam my dear students all said thank you to me for calming things down and they felt that they had done their best. Tuesday was the speaking exam and we don't examine our own students so I headed into the holding room to give them a pep talk before they started. I was greeted with lovely smiles and plenty of "we are going to do well for you". Wednesday was a mad scramble to get the exam papers marked so that class allocation for next quarter could be done. Today we have sat around waiting to hear what is happening next quarter and finally got told mid afternoon. There has been some movement of teachers between different levels - some were even asked if they had a preference but others like me were not given a choice. I am again teaching Intermediate level English. As most of my students passed and are moving up a level I will get another 2 new classes.....and spend most of the quarter trying to remember all their names!!!

We have tomorrow to do lesson planning and orientate the new teachers...... and then the new quarter starts on Monday......no rest for the wicked here!!!

Hoping I have more exciting news to tell in my next post!! Bye for now. xx