What I've Been Doing Lately

So its time for a brief update on what I've been doing.  Unfortunately, the answer is not much new/keeping busy.  Grades were due today, so I put in 11 hour days Monday-Wednesday.  I'm glad that's over and I can be back on a more reasonable schedule.  I'm also working on getting my pen-pal project off the ground.  I've been playing basketball three times a week.  I play on Sunday with a group of people I met on expats.cz, a website for foreigners in the Czech Republic.  That game is quite international, and as a result I've played with people from the Czech Republic, Austria, Australia, Poland, Israel and (of course) the U.S.  On Tuesdays I play with a game run by a Czech friend of mine.  I'm the only non-Czech that plays in that game unless I bring along a friend.  And on Wednesdays, I play in a game with a fellow teacher that is Czechs vs. Americans.  So in short, I'm playing a lot of basketball with a lot of different people.

I also decided to get into Bach.  I started by listening to a lot his work for keyboard as performed by Glenn Gould (The Goldberg Variations, The Well Tempered Clavier, The English Suites, The French Suites, Overture in the French Style, & The Art of Fugue).  After all of that, I listened to his four Orchestral Suites.  I think my favorite so far is The Art of Fugue and The Well Tempered Clavier.  Up next is probably the Brandenburg Concertos (all 6 of them) and then maybe the Harpsichord Concertos.  On the popular side of music, I've also been listening to The Cranberries (Irish rock with powerful, female vocals), Gogol Bordello (Eastern European Alternative/Gypsy Music), and Balkan Beat Box (Israeli Alternative/Hip Hop Music).

And the one big piece of news is that I officially have a summer job.  I'll be working at a summer camp in England this July.  Its very popular for Europeans to send their kids to England for the summer to learn English and be immersed in the language.  I'll be teaching English classes, running sports classes, and chaperoning tours of nearby London and Cambridge.  The camp is at Framlingham College, which is in the English countryside.  You can look at the program here.  I'll be one of only a few Americans working there, since the paperwork is easier for EU passport holders, but I was able to talk them into hiring me because of my experience teaching high school aged kids, working at a summer camp, and my sports background.  I'm pretty excited to get to see England and to get to teach students from a plethora of countries.

That's all the news for now.  More later!