Jam n Cam in Vientiane
25th Jan 2007A night at the aussie residence By Cam _____________ I had a pretty hectic day today! The first slot in my schedule was a job interview with Logos, a Korean-run English school in the morning. It turns out they don`t actually have any work at the moment and why they called me in for an interview I don`t know. Anyway, the boss was away but his wife was running the show in his absence. She said there`d be some work around April. I`d been looking just for some part time work - perhaps one or two hours a week - because I am very busy with tutoring now. I have four students now and I some of them I tutor three times per week. Unfortunately Logos don`t do part-time work, it`s full time or nothing with them. In the end I offered my services as a substitute for the time being. I`d been a very successful espionage agent and my cover was still safe. Through my questioning I was able to find out the amount of students in the school, the fee structure and finally I was taken on a tour of the school which enabled me to gauge their facilities. I must say I was very impressed with Logos. It`s not a pretty school but they certainly make up for it with their facilities. They have a nice computer lab, a very good teacher`s lounge and even a ping-pong table for the students to use! I also feel better about our future school now because the Logos building is structurally similar and the classrooms are around about the same size. The lady told me they were actually shooing away students after reaching their limit of 23 per class. This means there`s definitely still a market if your fees are cheap enough. I spent the next couple of hours working on lesson plans and then I had some lunch. After lunch I headed off to VIS where I was taking a P.E. class for a teacher who was away. I didn`t have a teacher`s assistant so I had to go through the warm-ups and stretches myself (which wasn`t a problem though, I can remember various stretches from when I used to play Hockey). I had the kids take some soccer balls each and pass between each other and then got them to play a game called `Monkey in the Middle`. They broke into groups of four for this game. Three kids made a triangle and one kid was in the middle - the monkey. The kids in the triangle pass the ball to one another and the monkey has to try to intercept it. If the monkey intercepts it, the kid that loses the ball becomes the monkey. We played this for a while, then I tried out having them do a big game of Monkey in the Middle with the whole class and having three Monkeys. This didn`t work very well and fell into chaos very quickly. Finally I put them into two teams and they played a soccer match until the end of the lesson. After P.E. I went to the library whilst I waited for Jamie to finish work. One of my students was in there so I helped her with her homework. At 4:00 I took Jamie home and then went to my student`s house for his lesson. We did some exercises on the past simple tense and before I knew it I had to go rushing home. I said sayonara and headed back home where I had to shower and change. Jamie was already in a very nice brown and white dress she`d bought in Thailand. I wore my one special occasion outfit (the brown pants and green shirt I`d worn to Jamie`s uncle`s wedding) and fiddled about with cufflinks for a while before we departed, bound for the Australian Ambassador`s Residence for the Australia Day function. We probably looked pretty funny all dressed up but rocking up on a beaten up old motorbike. Nevertheless we found a parking spot - eventually - and in we went. We had to show our special invitation and then got shakes on the hands from some important people - embassy workers I guess. It was a garden party, so we walked down the side gate and then into the back garden. It was huge! Who knows how many Aussies were there, at least a couple of hundred, and they all fitted in the middle of the lawn. There were waiters walking around offering drinks on trays and everyone was in formal attire. The surrounding trees were all done up with fairy lights and there was a small marquee over a stage where the ambassador read out a speech. He made an effort to speak Lao which I`m sure was appreciated by the Lao people there. He also read the speech out in English. They then played the Lao anthem followed by the Australian anthem. I must admit I felt a pang of patriotism whilst it was playing. I hadn`t heard the Aussie anthem in a while. Along the outskirts of the lawn were several food stalls offering different things to eat. To my delight I spotted one which had a sign up that read `roasting beef`. I hotfooted it over there and got myself a nice plate of roast beef. For desert there was a whole bunch of cakes and fruit. I had lots of wine and gin and tonics and everyone had a good mingle before it was time to go. I met some interesting people, mainly through Jamie because most of the people there had children at VIS. All in all it was an interesting night and a good way to finish up the day.
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