2nd Teaching Day

Today my morning class were boys from the 5th grade class. Their energy level was so different from that of the girls yesterday that I was very grateful they were not mixed together. When I mentioned this I learned that right now the boys and girls "can't stand each other!"

We again spent one class period doing multiplication bingo. When the class was nearly over I said I wanted a picture of the table and then we would clean up. (Global Volunteers has a policy of not taking pictures until relationships are established, so that's why my intention was only of the table.) I looked up and boys were all posed for the photo. I asked if it was OK to take their picture and they agreed.

On my way down the stairs at the school I took some pictures.

Here is a collection of pottery and other hand crafts that is on the 2nd floor landing. By the way, in the United States we would call this the 3rd floor landing. In Romania as most elsewhere in the Europe what we call the 1st floor is called Floor 0. As one goes down the steps this collection  of pictures provides a greeting.

They are done in the style of icons and are original work of older students in the school.

My afternoon class was another group of 4th graders. They arrived asking to play Simon Says -- not at all my favorite game because I want activities that keeps everyone involved, not games in which people are tossed out the game. We did struggle through the alphabet and vocabulary words, despite their complaints of  this being boring. I find they really need this work for when they say A I truly don't know if they mean A or E.

After school the principal took us to the Berlin pastry shop. As we we were driving I kept seeing signs that said Amanet. He pulled over to a parking place and said he had to do a two minute errand. Again there was the sign.

I pulled out my dictionary and tried to find the word. The ones closest to it meant either lover or mistress and that surely didn't seem to fit the context. We asked and he explained it was where one took things to get some money -- oh! it means pawn. Looked up pawn on the English side and there it was-- amanet.

As we entered the shop, the principal turned me to me and said everytime his family goes there, they remembered my cracking my head on a flower planter that sticks out over the stair well as one climbs to the 2nd floor. I said, "Watch out" just at the same time,before another volunteer did the same thing.

Take a look at what awaited us at the pastry shop. I was "forced" to eat something called the chocolate bomb and have a cup of espresso.

Then we were back to the hotel for only a few minutes before we went off to a wonderful Italian restaurant in Barlad for our evening meal.

Here's our team after we had eaten a wonderful appetizer, an entree, and then went to the dessert case to chose the final course.

I'm in the green sweater in the front row on the right hand side. In the middle is the daughter of the Romania country managers. One of country managers for Romania, Mihaela, is in the center of the row of those standing. Our team consists of a mom and her adult son from Arizona, a married couple from Minnesota, a woman from Texas, and me, also from Minnesota.  Nice, nice people.