I am getting my own rooooooom! Say goodbye to the festivities hall ( where the kids ran around crazy and all i had was a tiny scrap of chalk board), I have been given a room. Granted it needs a lot of work, but I have two full chalk boards and a space to leave my materials. sunday I am cleaning and decorating with a bunch of kids. It is big enough to even start a potential English resource center. I am envisioning a room full of book shelves and books and materials. When things get settled I am going to try and start an english book drive...so save up your books folks. I can probably get them shipped for free. But I must stop jumping ahead of myself. First things first, we must clear out the cobwebs and separate the broken desks from the usable ones. I just put in new lightbulbs today. They call my room the dungeon, partly due to the fact that it has no windows and also it is not connected to the rest of the school building. I am really happy.
I also have started a new routine I like to call "Nina the bitch." I am not taking absences and excuses. I am doing things the way I want them and Rule number 3 in my class is NO COMPLAINING. I made grade books for the year and I feel a bit more organized. Thank goodness the test run is over, this year I can actually teach something!

Croatia...oh croatia. how i love thee. let me count the expensive ways..one kuna, two kuna, three kuna, a thousand. croatia is venice with a "da" instead of "si". There is little eastern europeaness about it including the prices. To put my blissfull experience in a nut shell..I will list everything that happened to me.
arrived in Zagreb ( the capital of croatia) 5:00 am monday...brushed my teeth in the train station bathroom (the toilets were so clean you could lick the seats), meandered around the city whose streets twist up, down and around like the intestines of a constipated medieval king (can't spell), Jackie spotted the Subway and we ate our first 6-inch in a year and a half, we walked to the center of the old part, we ate subway again...hopped on the bus to Dubrovnik on the dalamatian coast....(heaven on earth) imagine if you will white villas crumbling (in a strictly romanitic way) into the crystal adriatic sea. On each villa green shutters blink open watching the sea. The sea was so clear I could see the bottom, twenty meters below me when i swam. There was not a cloud in the sky the entire time we were there. Every morning we grabbed our suits and just lay in the sun and jumped in and out of the water. It was very salty and you could just float, bobbing along in the waves without so much as kicking your feet. At sunset the whole island turned pink and we watched the sun drop into the sea while swimming in the sea.
I got pooped on by a pigeon.
I ate gelato, or I tried to eat gelato. Happily skipping along with my ice cream, I tripped over my own feet and it fell sadly to the ground. You don't understand how good that ice cream was...vanilla and biscotti, raisin and rum, butter pecan in three perfect scoops on the ground. I even dropped the waffle cone. Jackie and Cia are howling with laughter at my tragic face. Then without a thought I picked up what was left of my cone and scooped up the non-tainted gelato. Thirty-second rule! Well, it should work for icecream as much as it works for hard foods. Jackie and Cia were blue at this point and watched my second attempt. I will sacrafice sanitary for delicious gelato goodness. Then as I began to lick the warped waffle cone the ice cream fatally fell again to the ground. This time Jackie and Cia couldn't breath. I pouted all the way home and stole licks from Jackie's cone.
We took a ferry to Korcula a small island and Jackie and I rented bikes for the morning. We raced around the island and almost got hit by a car. We went to Lush a British version of Bath and Body Works and I bought shampoo soap. Jackie bought soap that smelled so good I wanted to eat it. Jackie hid it away so I wouldn't. The mundane details are the details.
Then (tear, tear) we went home. Back to Romania. We hit belgrade again for a quick two hour interlude and right off the train in the turkish toilet bathroom that smelt like piss, i felt nostalgic for the sweet smells of Romania. HOME..for nine more months. What will this year bring?