Throwing myself out the window.

I guess the stress of life is making me do weird things. On Tuesday, I threw myself out the second story classroom window... no I wasn't dreaming.

We had the fire department come to our school to show us how to save our kids or to relieve some stress. It was just the teachers and two firefighters. No, English is definitely NOT a requirement to become a firefighter. Not a cultural experience, a complete explosion.

All the teachers sat in little desks as this firefighter explained the rules of fire safety to us. He spoke quickly in Chinese while trying to demonstrate the safety procedures. He spoke quickly and used complicated words... hence, I and any of the other teachers who spoke Chinese were not really getting anything. May, our secretary, was there to assist us. The firefighter would talk for a couple minutes and then may would say, "Put the thing around here" and point to her waist. All the teachers were cracking up. The firefighters were so excited to be teaching foreigners and were snapping pictures left and right and we couldn't stop laughing at this massacre of cultural bridging. The firefighters were nice and our secretary got to learn words like, winch, harness, lower, resistance, tighten, strap, rappel, carribiner(sp?), and spool. See why I didn't understand a single word the man from the red truck said? We learned how to set up the hoist, clip the winch on with the carribiner and drop the spool out the window so we can descend on our harnesses while trying to rappel. We learned that the sign for our school is a pain in the ass and is a problem to rappel over, this was discovered when my boss went out and banged his infected foot, cut and bruised his arm and cut his chin on the bloody sign. The rest of us made it down unscathed. I know May took some pictures, hopefully there is one of me.

On another note, it appears that I cannot get out of my Friday class, but not for lack of trying, so I think I will move my flight to Saturday. I will leave at 8:25 Saturday night, and arrive in Edmonton at 1AM Saturday night/Sun morning... 5 hours to transverse the globe ain't bad is it? (No, I don't want to know why this doesn't make sense, just thinking about it makes me bored and sore)

My kids are disappointed that there's no English class for two weeks... well, some of them. I would be happy, but they still have to go to Chinese school for Christmas, so it's not a big deal either way.

Oh yeah, as for my cognitive functioning, I met with two other teachers in the "7-11" below our school and none of us knew what day it was, not even the day of the week... well, it's not something to brag about, but at least I'm not alone.

Here's another picture of the Kenting sky from the weekend.