Week 1: zero to 'normalny bilet'

Its been a very busy week!

Myself and a fellow newbie had orientation on Monday but  by Tuesday we were teaching out first groups. If I was astonished, the students were amazed!! The students here are lovely, the teens are really well behaved, if a little reticent sometimes, and the adult students (16+) are delightful. I have three groups , 6 lessons per week all 90 mins long. In addition, I have 2 1:1’s so far and a company lesson which hasn’t started as yet. There is a big company called PESA which makes trains and trams, and they are one of the companies we provide English lessons for. The staff are from all over the northern hemisphere with a few British nationals sprinkle in the mix. We are predominantly newly qualified teachers, I think they have been very canny in making this a feature of their school, as such there is a lot of support and help in the two staff rooms and we have been buddied up with more senior teachers to help us find our way around the systems and processes.

 The biggest challenge at the beginning of the week was the walk to and from work as I was tired and alongside this navigating the enormous underpasses; they are so large they have shops underneath them as tube stations in London do. It was Thursday before I managed to catch a bus and two days later when I googled what ‘normalny bilet’ means. On my first day, I was really lucky to run into a colleague, CJ who showed me the way. 

 Google translate camera has been a Godsend. I finally got to the supermarket this week and with the help of the google translate camera app was able to separate the feta cheese from cottage cheese and lentils from rice. Strangely no Greek yogurt in Lidl but Icelandic yogurt instead (??) I have also been able to put some washing on curtesy of Google translate but had to resort to Janeck in England to find Mass times when this noticed turned out to be unhelpful!

I finally got to Mass this morning, more Google maps and surreptitiously trailing a family. The Church of the Holy Spirit was  as Jan put it, a reverse Tardis; enormous on the outside and tiny on the inside. Also very beautiful but not very chatty so my quest for a parish community continues but there are MANY more to explore in the neighbourhood!