Sunday Morning Walk

I suspect it takes more than two repetitions to declare  that a behaviour is a habit,  but I have on two occasions gone for a walk in the park of a Sunday morning, and am hoping to make it a habit. Who knows? Maybe I'll throw in Saturday as well...
The fact is, that early morning is the only time of day I can bear to be outside.
If you look closely, you will see that even at 8 am, the air is heavy with
humidity, but since the temperature is merely in the mid to high

twenties, and since I don't have to look presentable upon arrival, I can handle the heat.

Anyway, today I went right instead of left when I hit the park and came upon this fairytale pond in front of a hotel. Presumably, a little later in the day, someone will be here renting these paddle boats.

Something that I like about the tropics is seeing what I consider to be house plants growing in the wild.

After walk, water. Ah.

You call that a hurricane?

Last week Hurricane Danny blew itself out before it reached Hispaniola, but this week I got another chance to experience a tropical storm as Erica approached. It got exciting when the Canadian government sent me an email warning. When I got to school, I learned that the public schools had never opened that day, the government having issued a school closure notice at 5 am. Oops. We opened. At nine, we sent our students home, and by ten, when the last of the chauffeurs had driven off with their precious cargo, teachers got to leave as well. The bus took us home, and we all hunkered down.

At 1, the power went off. Just as advertised, the inverter kicked in, and the apartment started running on the four car batteries in the laundry room. How long would they last, I wondered. Answer? At least nine hours because it came back on just as I was getting into bed.

However, the cause was a bit of a mystery. It was blowy, all right, and some rain fell, but nothing like what you imagine would be required to pull the plug on a city of 5 million. Year round, gets dark here around 6:30, so I got a chance to light some candles. (I didn't want to have more than one bulb on at any one time so as to conserve the aforementioned car batteries. One bulb, one fan, and the fridge.) Cooking was no problem because the stove is propane.

This was the storm at its stormiest. Palm trees are such drama queens.

The next day, I learned that the BC lower mainland had been hit by a storm that knocked the power out to 440,000 people, toppling trees that crushed cars and causing all kinds of havoc. And those people didn't even have to leave home!

Here comes Erika!

Last week, Hurricane Danny diminished to a tropical storm, and then veered to miss the island entirely. I must admit to having been a bit disappointed. This morning, we dismissed students almost upon arrival because of the imminence of Hurricane Erika. (Public schools were closed by fiat late last night, an example we should have followed IMHO.) Anyway, our students have all left, and an email just arrived saying teachers could now leave.

Two days ago, Erika was a tropical depression. Yesterday, she was upgraded to a tropical storm. Now she's a hurricane, although no cyclone is predicted. People are hoping it really just means lots of rain for Hispaniola. 

Here is the message from our Security Department: 

The Government of the Dominican Republic has issued a Tropical Storm Warning for the south coast of the Dominican Republic west of Isla Saona because of Tropical Storm Erika.

Maximum sustained winds are near 50 mph (85 km/h) with higher gusts.
Some weakening is forecast today as Erika moves over land, followed by little change in strength through Saturday.

Tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 150 miles (240 km) to the north and east of the center. A Weatherflow station in Las Mareas, Puerto Rico, recently reported a wind of 52 mph (84 km/h).

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/hurricane/resources/TropicalCyclones11.pdf

I'm going home!

A look at the Secondary Library

As you enter

On the left

24 computers

English fiction

Lounge area and stairs to 2nd floor

Spanish circulation desk

Lots of meetings happen upstairs

English non-fiction is also on the 2nd floor

A peek at Carol Morgan School

Manila palm on my way to school

It must be lost

Art building

PE teacher modelling life-long fitness

Part of my building

I love the gardens

Entrance to the secondary school library

Garden hangout

3-D art room

Zen Garden

Typical hallway

Bamboo garden

Admin building

Entrance way with croton garden

The kindness of strangers

A strange thing is happening to me. Every morning, I wake up before my alarm. Even today, when there was no alarm, I woke up early and kept making myself go back to sleep. When I eventually got out of bed, it was only 8:25. Before breakfast, I went for a good walk in Mirador Sur Park, and missed my dog a lot. 

It wasn't until I was back and showered, that I noticed that there was water on the entire length of the floor of my main room, over two feet wide. Since there was no dampness on the walls or ceiling, I have to assume that rain water blew in through the living room window overnight. (Note to self: Close windows before going to bed. The slightly cooler air is not worth it.)

I had neither the tools nor the strength to deal with it, so I made good on an offer from my upstairs neighbour, Coronel Rodriquez, to ask for help whenever I need it. His maid came down and had the whole place clean and dry in about fifteen minutes. She filled the floor bucket twice, so there were close to five gallons of water on the floor. I took a couple of shots of her broad, capable footprints before they dried. Muchas gracías, Antonia.

Layers and layers of bad idea

So I'm stuck in traffic on my way to a second mall where I will fail to find a shopping trolley - beloved object in Istanbul, so much better for the carless than lugging home groceries, and apparently unknown here. I have a lead, though, and I'm hot on it. Hot is the operative word, of course. 36 degrees and 52% humidity of hot. 

What we have here is a woman jay-walking while not looking where she is going, a man without a helmet carrying a load of God knows what on the back of a motorcycle, while in the background, a man leans a ladder directly against electric lines - please note, the ladder has no other means of support - while he attempts to affect some sort of repair to those same cables.

When I got home, sans grocery trolley, my hydro had been off for 26 minutes. Coincidence? I think not.

Colonial Santo Domingo

Cristobál Colón, Christophe Colombe, Kristoffer Kolumbus, Christoph Kolumbus, Christoffel Columbus, Christopher Columbus - any way you spell it it means discoverer of the Americas, and it all began here. Mr. C. landed on one side of what is now Santo Domingo, discovered it was overrun with ants, crossed the river and created a settlement that we explored last night. Funny thing, since I didn't know that the Spanish version of his name was Colón, it had never occurred to me that our word colony comes from him.
The Colonial Zone contains many firsts. For example, the Calle des Damas (1502) is the world's oldest paved street. And slavery may have begun here.

An original canon, set to protect the port. Don't mess with Chris.

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These walls are six feet thick, and protected by fairies

Catedral Santa Maria la Menor - the oldest in the Americas

Sunset on the campanula

Our group strolls down Calle del Conde

I just liked the lines

A very serious chess game, complete with fans, on Calle del Conde

 The evening ended it one of the worst meals of my life. I ordered something like "seashells stew in criole", which I took to mean simmered shell fish in creole sauce. This is possibly true if passed through a grinder. What came looked like Sloppy Joes or possibly barf. Barf with a side of mashed potatoes. It tasted mostly like salt, and I ate it. We got there at 7:30 and food didn't come until 9, so I would have eaten just about anything. No more group dining for me.

I'll go back to the zone and stroll around on my own some Sunday. Apparently from 5 to 9, there's lots of free music.

Meet my boss

I was off sick most of the week, but worked at my desk Thursday morning and then attended a high school meeting Friday morning. Here, my principal is speaking right from the heart about the four students who will not be returning this year because of unmet standards. While wearing a shark attack hat. I'm going to love it here.

The school's mascot is eating my principal!

She's no Mabrouka

When I was living in Tunisia, I had a wonderful housekeeper. Every week day, she came and walked Libby. On Tuesdays, she cleaned. On Thursdays, she washed, ironed and cooked. And oh, could she cook! She thought it was plain Tunisian cooking, but I loved it. I fell into the habit of inviting a rotating list of colleagues over on Thursdays to share the bounty. Otherwise, I would have been eating for days.

This week was my maid's first week. She did a great job with the cleaning. I asked her to shop and cook on Thursday, and invited my neighbour and colleague, Paula, and her daughter Bemnet to join me. Paula's phone situation has been problematic and I took the picture of the empty table because I really didn't think she had remembered to come. 

Unfortunately for them, they did.

Paula and Bemnet

Paula and Bemnet  - my first dinner guests. Next time, I'll cook.

Still recovering, suavemente.

And therefore mostly indoors.

You know when you cut a mango, you first cut off the two sides, or cheeks? There's a great life hack that I now use where you scrape the flesh off the skin using a water glass. The flesh plops into the glass, and the skin is all in your hand with very little waste. I like it better than cutting it in squares, trying not to nick the skin, and turning it inside out. You're still left with the peel to deal with. 

Regardless of how you deal with the cheeks, you're left with a few bits of harder to get off fruit stuck to the top and the thin edges of the pit, right? It's not a small deal here. This is a really big cereal bowl, and it is full of those bits. That's what I call a big, juicy mango!

I ate the cheeks yesterday and the day before.

This is an inverter and battery pack. Apparently the DR does not suffer from as many power blackouts as it once did, and when they occur, they are not as long, but the school has made sure that every household has one of these puppies. It will kick in within a second and run lights and small appliances for several hours. Our only responsibility is to check the water level in those white caps once a month or so, and top up as needed. Pretty cool.

After almost three days at home, I decided to test my strength by going to a one-hour merengue lesson at school. I had a ball! The teacher is apparently known throughout the country, and for some reason chose me to demonstrate. Here I am with all these gorgeous young thangs, having a ball. 

Carlos, the man in the green shirt, peeked in to see what was going on. Short of men, the teacher insisted that he join us. He kept trying to leave - he had our payroll to get out - but she simply wouldn't let him!

Now I'm at home, coughing and being very quiet and good.

Misterioso

 

Since I'm confined to quarters today, I had to look around for something to show you. Can you guess what it is?

Hint. It was given to me by my bank.

Did you get it? This fob generates a new six digit passcode every minute of every day. To log on to do online banking, I enter the passcode of the minute. Safe as houses.

Meet my new best friends

The school has not one, but THREE doctors. I felt so awful this morning - sore throat, hot ears, burning lungs - that after the full staff meeting, I went to see the one who is on duty for orientation week. She sent me right off to see a pulmonologist. He saw me right away! Apparently, I have some sort of sinus/bronchitis/asthma combo and he prescribed all of this, plus four days at home. What a way to start a new school!

Week Two - See Week One below

Last week - which was only four days for us - was all about getting us settled in. They took us shopping to several different kinds of stores, got us bank accounts and helped us get to know the school and each other a little. This week was largely focused on working within the school's philosophy of education.

The first full week of orientation was largely taken up with Tribes Training. This is the philosophy/system to which the school subscribes in order to create a collaborative, respectful, engaged community where students and teachers can flourish. I am now certain that I have come to the right place. It is clear that my new colleagues were selected because they were autonomous, creative, responsive teachers, and that the administration genuinely values those qualities. Even the school's new Director went through most of the training with us - as meetings allowed.  It would have been an easy thing to excuse herself from, and it bodes well that she did not.

The school AC is killing me!

Several of us have been teachers for decades, and are a little jaded with this sort of thing, but we were all impressed by both the program and the three school trainers and were glad we'd had the chance to attend.

A symbolic gift from the Counselling Department.

On Sunday night, I had sent in a list of small things that needed attention around the apartment and gently asked if they ever put together my two IKEA purchases. Apparently they do, because when I got home from the first day of training, this is the sight that greeted me. Hooray for having "people"!
In the end they had to give up. "He win," they told me. I was very glad that I had not tried in this heat and my general state of bewilderment. The guys won the following day.

After Tuesday's training, the orientation committee had another surprise for us in the form of dinner at El Conuco Restaurant.

The Dominican seated to my right ordered this big beige ball of squishy stuff sitting on top of a banister. It's called Mofongo and she pronounced it delicious. It is made of mashed plantain and pork crackling. Vegetarians and the cholesterol conscious need not order.



Two other people had the chicken breast with passionfruit cream sauce. I got a bite of that and it was amazing. I had real trouble deciding, but ended up with the classic Dominican Flag - white rice, beans and meat, with fried plantains and salad.

Man, it's hot!

Let the show begin!

This young woman is spinning while standing on a rum bottle.

Now it's her partner's turn.

I got to teach a Dominican the expression "dark horse" when describing our new IT/Robotics teacher. He had lived here twenty years ago, and kept all his notes from the dance classes he took. Here he is amazing our HR director.

The culminating activity of our Tribes training was for each Tribe to present two chapters of a middle school book called Stone Fox. (Don't read it. It's one of those books where the dog dies.) Our tribe had chapters 7 and 8 of the 11 total, and here we are describing the start of the dog race.

Clarissa (elem. asst), Alison (En 10) , Jessica (Gr. 1) , Richard (Athletics) and me going for an Oscar

After Friday's Tribes training session - we went to a nearby hotel that has a gym, tennis courts and pool, and offers corporate membership to Carol Morgan teachers. I think I'll join. There's a $100 sign-up fee, after which it's $20 a month. The twenty minute walk there can be my warmup.

Man it's hot!

Today, Sunday, I went for an hour's walk with a colleague in the huge park what runs through a lot of the city. All day Sunday and from 4-7 every week day, the road through the park is closed to traffic, and the whole city seems to be out running and biking. There is free yoga in one place, and salsa lessons in another, both free. Today we just walked - and melted. Man it's hot and humid!

Sadly, I have come down with a cold. The AC in the room where we had our training was the aggressive, blowy kind. Sitting under it all day, with interspersed experiences of the over 30 degree kind has done me in. Man, it's hot!