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Almost there
I knew that the year was ending soon, but It wasn't until last week, that I suddenly realized how close it is. School's out in only 2 and a half weeks! Woah! I will see a few on my classes only 1 more time. Wow! How did that happen? I was just getting into the swing of things. It's a bittersweet feeling. I'm looking forward to getting back to the states for the summer, but I really like teaching most of these kids too. The seniors are already gone - they graduate about a month before school's ends for the rest of the students.
I finally got an airplane ticket back to the states for the summer too. That's good. For a while I didn't know if I would be able to get one. I went to a travel agent a few weeks ago. I figured I had about 6 weeks until I had to leave, and I didn't need to leave on any specific day, so it wouldn't be a problem getting a ticket. Wrong. When I asked for a ticket, the travel agent laughed at me! "You want to go when? hahaha Ok, we can look. hahaha" So they put me on several waiting lists, but it didn't look good. So I was complaining to one of my classes that next day when and a student said, "My mom has a friend in a travel agency, she can get you a ticket." "Sure. I said. There aren't any left, but she can look." Sure enough, next day, that student found me, "OK, Mr. Ericsson, I have a ticket for you. We just need to go to the travel agent to pay for it." Dang. It's all about who you know.
Posted by neal on May 28, 2002 at 07:48 AM | Comments (0)
combines
Hi again. I'm back. I took a break from adding additional journal entries a few months ago because some students discovered these pages. I knew I hadn't put anything here that that absolutely couldn't read, so it wasn't a huge deal, but it still made me uncomfortable. It made me feel very self conscious about what I could say on these pages. But there's so much I want to tell you about that I just couldn't hold back any longer.
I saw something heartwarming tonight. I was waiting to use the phone booth at the corner (we can't make local calls from the phone in our apartment) and a police car came racing down the main road and stopped at the intersection to block traffic from the side street. I had seen something like this a few months ago - I was waiting for the tram when 5 police motorcycles came racing up the street. Two of them stopped to block traffic at the intersection, and the other 3 went on ahead to block the next intersection. Then, racing up now traffic-free the street, came a very ordinary -looking van flanked by 7 more police motorcycles. I don't know what was going on, but it was like something out of a movie. OK, but back to the original story...The police car blocked traffic, so I was expecting something exciting or dangerous to come down the street. Instead, what I saw warmed the very cockles of my American heart; 4 big, green John Deere combines. The only more-American thing I could think of was if several big apple pies came driving down the street too. Beautiful.
Posted by neal on May 23, 2002 at 07:49 AM | Comments (0)