Il corso all'ospedale

Well, I don't know why I got nervous on Monday, after all I have already been teaching adults for a while. The class at the hospital is very friendly and open. There is one doctor and a lot of nurses and health technicians. Their biggest problem is that they believe German to be much more difficult than other languages.

Today I also met some of my kids in town when I was on my way to the station. There is an American girl who is very open and friendly and I got a chance to change a few words with her.

The kids from that class, however, are still having difficulties staying quiet for an entire lesson. That is, quiet enough so that I don't have to yell and that others can work with concentration. After almost 10 years at public schools they aren't yet used to working quietly. Sometimes it frustrates me that I have to punish them all in order to do something. But a lot of times (almost all of the times) it is not one student talking but a group of them.

The first vocabulary test, on the other hand, went great! Lots of sixes (equivalent to a German 1 and an American A) and fives.

Today, during the break at noon I went down to the lake. All the colors were pastell like and the lake was placid and still. It was very humid and I had only just finished eating when the sky started grumbling. I looked up and knew right away, this one was a fast one (living in the Alps you learn these things rapidly). So I started running up the hill (at least some sport...) and right after I reached the door of my school, the sky broke open and a wall of water came down. Just like that. Boom. The nuns came running controlling all the windows and it turned into a nice little thunderstorm.

We had already had a thunderstorm last night that woke me a few times and one of my students hadn't slept at all.

Yesterday, Lago Maggiore

Yesterday we had some hours to pass between my two job interviews and so we took a catnap on the shore of Lago Maggiore. The sand was still warmed by the sun but a thunderstorm was building up over the mountains. Oh, I wish you could've seen it! It was so pretty with the lightenings over the mountains and the thunder rolling, the threatening black clouds over the water and the lake all upset making little waves on the shore. The thunderstorm kept to the other side of the lake until I had to leave for the interview at a privat school at Locarno. During the interview I could still hear the thunder rolling and the head of the school said "Che bell temporale!" What a beautiful thunderstorm!! Later we did get some rain and rain we do need desperately. The lake is almost at it's all time low and the river Ticino is becoming smaller and smaller every day. The other day when I returned from Italy with my parents there was already a fire in the mountains above Ascona, with helicopters flying and filling their water sacks in the lake...