Snow day like the first day of class

oh my goodness, what a LONNNNNGGGG day! Left the apartment at 8, got home at 9, whooo.

Today was the first day of the TEFL course! I was wicked early since I wasn't quite sure where it was located but luckily found it with a slightly awkward 30 minutes to spare. The school shares space with a tourism university so there are tons of different people coming in and out of the building all day. 

The class is made up of 16 people- 1 girl from Romania, 1 from England, 3 from Canada and the rest from various parts of the States. The teachers are all from England and seem really knowledgeable and fantastic! They were so excited which made all of us really excited for this 4 week course. It's going to be really intense, and we even start practice teaching on Wednesday, what?! The first couple of hours were spent doing nerdy icebreakers, hearing of our schedule for the week- basically we have 3 weeks of intense classes and then the 4rth week we take a test and get our certificates. There is a job guidance counselor who we can meet with once a week, which is really awesome. Plus a great job board in which jobs all over the world are posted on, neat!

It was nice, relatively easy first day- a few of the girls and I grabbed bread, jamon, mandarins and cheese and HOUMMOUS which we randomly found and made sandwiches and got to know each other. I'd say about 8 of the 16 plan on leaving right after the month, and the rest of us plan on staying for a few months/indefinitely. I think I'm really going to enjoy working with these people, and learning how to be a teacher .I just got sad from speaking English all day, how weird is that? I know that if I'm an English teacher that's obviously my job but still, what can I say, I'm a Spanish fanatic.

We each had to pick something to teach to the rest of the class for peer teaching- some people chose how to teach self defense, how to make a good cup of English tea, how to fold a napkin, how to make drinks with Canadian whiskey- I chose how to do a sun salutation in yoga, and it was hilarious, people were groaning and laughing, so I think it went fairly well.

We ended the day by observing practiced English teachers and that was pretty awesome, I guess we do that at least 4-5 hours a week and we will eventually be teaching at least every other day, wow! There was also an informal tapas/sangria dinner thing at a close by restaurant so we got to do that awkward first-day-mingling that inevitably happens, but was really nice. I like a lot of the people!

Exhausted, must rest up for another loooong day.

Interesting tidbit: Um, it SNOWED today?! Like SNOWED SNOWED, as in like a nor'easter in which people were tying plastic bags on their feet. They said it hasn't snowed here in 15 years and all of a sudden, we got to see this. Ridiculous! They closed the schools and the metro was running so slow, and some brat pelted me with a snowball haha! Really hilarious I got to see this. Love this city.