I’m hanging out in Budapest with a Viennese, a couple of Hungarians, a Belgian lad, a Brit, and assorted few from other countries, speaking a variety of different languages, and….

there is simply nothing odd about this.

I’m beginning to wonder if this isn’t part of the couchsurfing phenomenon. because in new york city, I was hanging out on a regular basis with a phillipino bloke, a variety of frenchmen, a brit here and there, some indians, and a rather lot of germans.

amusingly, couchsurfing has now made the new york times. oh la la. the article’s not bad; they even opened with neil. neil! brilliant. see for yourself

In other news, my art skills seem to have taken a rather terrible plunge for the worse. It took a full fifteen minutes to attempt a drawing of a dog for picture bingo for my 1st graders tonight, and in the end it looked a lot more like cujo than clifford.

On the up side, after three weeks of gentle prodding, I’ve managed to procure the english textbooks (used by the the hungarian english teachers) of almost every grade, so I’ve almost, almost got an idea of what these lovely children have already learned. miracle upon miracle, I truly feel I’ve just won an olympic gold that’s how heroic this task seemed.

when writing a curriculum for 8 grades with varying levels one must remember to disregard logic completely and fly entirely by the seat of one’s linguistic pants. I’m fairly sure the biggest hit in last week’s ‘find someone who’ game (in which students must wander around asking such stimulating questions as ‘do you like the colour blue’ and ‘can you swim’) was the query ‘do you eat monkeys’ which I threw in for absolutely no logical reason whatsoever.