Polska: tydzieñ jed. Poland: week one. [/Wogan] ►

◄ Jak daleko je... Praha? Miuvite anglicky?

Monday, and the football game still hasn't materialised, although I think there's still supposed to be a bonfire this evening. If not, I suspect there may be screaming.

On the plus side, we're probably going to Prague at the weekend. We also finally reclaimed Elaine's classroom keys and got a TV and video… so finished up playing the garden card and doing fruit & veg today, with a bit on Guy Fawkes at the end. It's "English Day" on Wednesday. As usual, no-one can tell us what this means, although Rob has been given the go-ahead to write a shopping list for cake ingredients as it's Jane's birthday on the 7th...well, the kids don't like the food here, so we strive to alternativise (oh, go away, it should be a word... :p )

New people... well, we held out hope that anyone APASS would bother sending out this late might be a teacher. Nosiree, plus we now have yet another slightly bored teenager knocking around the place. Oh well… nine whole teaching days to go... nothing I haven't done before, with colds just as sneaky and irritating. We still have that sodding video to watch... Okay, it's now Tuesday and one of the two TV/video sets we now have in our classroom won't work with the cabling supplied. That we have even one working set of equipment is only because managerial eyebrows were raised when we tracked down another set due to the fact assurances were given and nothing ever arrived. That's a grammatically horrible sentence, but I'm leaving it in.

My positive contribution over the weekend was to write postcards, in a gesture to keeping in touch with all you fine people (well, those of you whose addresses I have, or hadn't lost...) And by the way, I'm not kidding when I say that net access here is held together with spit & bogies, although it seems to work better for some sites than others. The internet cafe on the way into town is as bad as camp—by the time of day we get down there access has slowed to a crawl. This is another issue we have with the timetabling: because lunch is a very small gap in the day, there isn't an awful lot of time to get to town and back. Some of the kids don't seem to have had chance to get postcards yet. It comes to something when one of your major achievements on camp is to have legged it into town and returned triumphantly with an aerial extension cable, having managed to capitalise on the syllables "nyeh SCART" and some hand gestures. Two verkink TV & video sets! . . .ah, Sesame Street. The Count was obviously on acid.

That was Wednesday. The itinerary for "English Day" turned out to be a very welcome pork and egg breakfast and a rather less edible attempt at fish & chips. I don't think many of the kids will be anxious to try traditional British food in the future on the strength of this... but then they've suggested to us that the regular dishes at camp aren't very representative of quality Polish traditions, either. Rob has taken to holding most of his lessons in Pizza Lucia, in an effort to escape what has become known almost universally as 'the ming'. I dunno. Sometimes the soup's worth having a few bowls of.

Being "English Day", a little more effort was made to make the day's activities tie-in. Which is why—don't laugh—I found myself gloriously free of the internet room and trying instead to teach cricket. I don't know if bowling straight is a lot easier when using something heavier than a tennis ball, but most people seemed to struggle. The pitch (resembling nothing so much as the surface of Mars) wasn't exactly ideal, I suppose, but I seemed to do better than average. Maybe there is something to be said for genetics.

Thursday I got off teaching internet classes again, as the afternoon activity was "a walk" ...which someone neglected to tell us involved a mountain. By the time we got to the top, I was not a particularly happy bunny. In fact, I was a rather peeved animal with a heavy and superfluous backpack which I would have left on the coach had I been given the slightest inkling of the plan. I cheered up lots after ice cream, though, and we'd walked back down the hill and the torrential storm started. We were more-or-less all huddled beneath a wooden canopy by then, sated with scorched barbeque products and the disarray. Cue an electrifying dash through the rain—yes, we felt alive! Selah. :)

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