A Thursday..

Since my poor little book went missing I've completely lost count of what day it is that I've been here. Hell, I have hard enough time remembering the date and day of the week. Since I don't go to a structured job or school or anything I find myself constantly having to check my blackberry to see what day it is. That's basically all it is for over here since it doesn't work as a cell phone. And to take pictures. Oh, and play brick breaker on long car trips.

But today is a Thursday!

I used the teaching help e-mail address that Geovisions provided me so that I could come up with some new ideas for fun teaching games- basically anything. I am finding it really hard to teach adults without it being weird. I don't think they find it weird, but I feel awkward. I don't want to sound like I'm talking down to them like I'm teaching two children.

Anyways, some of the ideas they gave me were great! One of them was to bust out the kids cookbook that my parents shipped to me in a care package. The book we used is I think for Kindergarten level and it's an ABC's cook book, so there is a recipe for every letter and the instructions are very simple (actually, perfect for me since I'm a terrible cook). Nathalie looked through the recipes and found Banana Bread. They had never seen this before and wanted to try it post-haste. What I had in mind though for this exercise wasn't what happened. I ended up making the recipe! She collected all the ingredients for me and chopped the nuts. Somehow she turned the game around on me and made me do it while she watched. Talk about pressure. We also had trouble at first translating baking soda and baking powder. I did a little google-cooking-translation and found the names of the two ingredients and when they saw the name of baking soda I'm pretty sure they thought I was trying to poison them. Weird cultural difference - they don't use baking soda in any cooking whatsoever! Dominique finally found a box of baking soda under the bathroom sink! Apparently here they use it to Clean! And brush their teeth (but they don't use it for that in this house but they told me some people use it for that). So no wonder I got strange looks when I asked them basically for toilet cleaner to put in their dessert. I also had to convert it all to metric again. Bah.

The bread turned out good thankfully! They are getting the wrong idea about my cooking skills since the two things I've baked actually came out - good. Gulp.