misc.

So today, Friday, nobody came to my 5 o’clock class. Right now I’m writing this in another teacher’s class. I decided to crash his class because they’re watching The Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s probably not a good movie to show ESL students because even I don’t understand what the hell the actors are saying sometimes. On Fridays you’re lucky to get half of your students; the same statistic is true for when it rains. Surely I’m committing some sort of logical fallacy when I reason that nobody came to class because it is raining and it’s Friday… I wonder if it’s sounder to say that a quarter of my students should have showed up (half of half, right?).

 

Three female teachers are slated to move into the teachers’ house. I’m not looking forward to that. Luckily however, I should only have to tolerate the lack of elbow room for a week or so. Tomorrow we’re going to be checkin’ out a place around the corner – furnished… affordable… If for some reason we don’t want it, we still have another place available to us: An apartment soon to be vacated by two current teachers. It, too, is affordable and furnished. This plan B also has 2 completely functional toilets, as of now. For as long as the current tenants have lived there, a Brit and South Carolinian, one of the toilets had never worked. The shower in that same bathroom also had (or has still, I’m not sure) a leak that ran (or runs) into the downstairs apartment, directly into a 6 year old girl’s bed. When the other toilet finally broke, they decided to piss into that shower – forgetting that has a leak. The other day after class these guys went home to find the downstairs neighbor patiently waiting at their door to remind them not to use that shower. To the best of their knowledge, the neighbor believes that all that dripped into his little girl’s bed was water. The other funny bit needs less explanation. These guys shat into bags until their toilets were fixed. I don’t know what became of the bags.

 

My neck is killing me and I think my wisdom teeth are coming in. I’m told that dentists are cheep and reliable here. The Brit, for example, got a few fillings for a mere 500 pesos. As with all my past dental troubles, I will probably wait until I’m in unbearable pain. Currently it’s only an occasional nag.

 

Once again, we don’t have any water. I think that either the ground tank is leaking into the ground or that we’re not getting any water from the city. In either case, I have serious doubts about getting a shower within the next week. Pretty soon I’ll have to start teaching French instead of English. To flush our shits, we’ve been filling up a bucket with water from what’s left in the water heater. This won’t last for long however until I, too, am shitting into bags.