New Experiences

The Heat, Observations and New Experiences
It's really too hot to do much exploration, but I'm experiencing new things daily. As I'm typing it's 97 degrees Fahrenheit(9 pm). I checked at 4, one morning, and it was 99.  The high today, at 11 am, was 115 degrees. Some days are unbearably humid and some are dry. I guess the hot weather of my recent Haitian summer was foreshadowing in my story.  I don't sweat here though because I just run from one air-conditioned place to another.

What I have seen:
- Sand colored high rise apartments covering the desert landscape.
- Most things seems to be in a state of construction with lots of scaffolding, surrounded by piles of sand. 
- It's hazy, but I'm not sure if it's sand or pollution.
- Bits of green here and there, increasing as you go towards the city center. 
- Some areas are quite well done and maintained, but overall there is very little landscaping. Sidewalks, in general, are scarce.

Shopping

I checked off a few things from my To Do list. I took my first taxi ride with friends. We called a suggested driver who is trusted by our fellow teachers. He took us to a fancy mall right on the gulf, in Al Kout. It has a music and light fountain show that is especially pretty at night. It is only about a 15 minutes drive from our apartments. 

It was a good thing I had that taxi experience and the driver's number saved in my phone because I needed it again very soon. On our third day of meetings, I missed the bus the school provides to school. For the record I was, at the most, 1 minute late. I wasn't stranded though, because I called my taxi driver friend and he knew where to take me. 

I also went  to The Avenues, an even more extravagant shopping center, twice this week,

got a few household items at Ikea,
 

ate a doughnut at Tim Horton's

and checked out my favorite clothing store from Hungary, H&M (I know it's actually Swedish)(as is Ikea). Not surprisingly, they have lots of high end stores at the affluent mall, but also Payless shoes, Claire's and Texas Road House.

Marked off things on my To Buy list, too. I now have a local cell and internet in my apartment because of the generous help of a veteran teacher. 

Food

My new favorite food may be Lebanese. We tried out one such restaurant at an all-new-staff dinner out: falafel, hummus and baba ganoush(a spread made of mainly eggplant) are among my favorites. There was a really good arugula salad, too.

I tried the Indian restaurant across the street, too. It's cheap and also good.

I still haven't ordered my food from the food ordering app yet, but I want to try it soon.

I did however call Caribou from work and they delivered. My small hot chocolate with skim milk and no whip tasted exactly like it does in Nebraska. A school security guard calls me when it arrives.  Pretty sweet.

Most things are expensive here. For example, the small hot chocolate cost 1.5 KD, which sounds cheap, right? But 1 Kuwaiti Dinar is equal to 3.50 dollars. So the small drink cost me 5.25 USD. My taxi ride to school on that lesson learning day, cost 3 KD, or 10.50 USD.

School Stuff
The school did a really great job of creating opportunities for us to get to know the other new teachers. And now that the returning teachers have arrived we are getting to know our teaching teams.  My third grade team consists of 6 Americans.

Meetings are going well.  I'm working on my classroom. 

Students come next Tuesday.  I wish there was a little more technology (though I do have an interactive whiteboard in my class), but they make up for it in other ways. I'm overall impressed. The administration seems very professional, organized and approachable. 

For my teacher friends: 

   -The school is on a 7 day rotation, which is new to me. In that rotation, the students go to the following specials: Art, PE, Music, Reader's Theater(it's a special!), Arabic(45 minutes everyday), Spanish or religion and technology. 

   -We use the Reader's(including Daily 5) and Writer's workshops. 

   -We have NO standardized testing. We do, do MAPS to monitor progress.

   -We use Common Core standards for Math and Language Arts, Arrow standards for Social Studies and Next Generation for Science.  

We were told, "They have never had a new group of teachers laugh as much as us."

Random Things
I love how most things are written in English on one side and Arabic on the other.

The mosque next door is under construction, so that is why I don't hear the call to prayer.

My apartment is the short one to the right.

The water that comes out of the tap is hot. (BTW it is not brownish anymore and I have a filtered tap in the kitchen) I don't have my hot water heater on. The water is stored on the roof so it is just hot from the sun. Even the water in the toilets is steaming hot. You can not get cold water, in fact. So, you can't wash your clothes on cold and the filtered drinking water is hot.  It will cool down here in a few months and then I'll turn on the hot water heater.  I hear I will use my central heating, too.