Off to school
While you, Gobal Village students, are basking somewhere in the sun, or getting drenched elsewhere in the rain, your Global Village teachers are packing their laptops and getting ready for ‘teacher boot camps’ in Britain. Like warriors do. All in preparation for the challenges of the 2007/08 and beyond. Four of us go to various teacher training courses within the next few months. Chronologically:
- albs_t goes to ‘Creative methodology for the classroom’ at Pilgrims, Canterbury, Kent, 5-18 August
- justyna_t goes to the same course at Pilgrims, between 19 and 30 August
- michał_t heads for ‘Speaking activities that work’ at Horizon Language Training, Totnes, Devon, 15-26 October
- basia_t embarks on ‘Drama techniques in the English language classroom’ at International Projects Centre, Exeter, Devon, 13-25 January 2008.
All courses have been made available through Socrates Programme and its component called Grundtvig, implementing the concept of lifelong learning.
Lisbon, round midnight, by the sea
You have nothing to lose.
seven minutes of summer bliss (.mp3, approx. 7MB)
Roman holiday continues
basia_t lost in Rome: ‘Everything has to be big there.’
Kraków revisited
In the age of commerce taking over our lives the book has become a commodity, not any different from meat or a toilet roll. No wonder then that books are designed, promoted, sold, and bought in the way basic commodities are handled these days. Thousands of titles get dumped in heaps in megastores where customers are given those tacky supermarket baskets to shop with. Intimidated and disorientated by the space and sheer mass of printed paper on display, you are likely to forget what book you are after. The staff, equally lost or untrained, is never very helpful either.
Within a 10-minute walk from Kraków branch of
empikmegastore(pełnakulturaczydogłębnazgroza?)
we found a bookshop which is a true escape from the world the megastore offers. A marvel. Off the beaten track, but still in the centre. Well-hidden, but easily accessible for the curious who don’t follow the crowd in the Square. If you are into English, a good read, independent media, wooden floors, real music and radio (not muzak), peace and quiet, coffee and home-made cakes, you’ll feel at home in an instant. The place defies an easy description and we won’t attempt at any, which is part of the surprise when you are there one day.
Four souls lost in Smokovec
Indeed, this may easily happen to an unsuspecting casual hiker even while coming down a mountain. That’s why most innocent forms of socializing, chatting or a playful conversation, on a trail may lead straight to a trap. Mountains demand absolute concentration and abandonment of many comfortable lowland habits and social conventions. Screaming with joy seems so out of place here, farting, for that matter, so natural…
The southern slopes of High Tatra range possess the power to silnce all but most gregarious people. A short, mere 2 hour, hike along Magistrala is a rewarding experience. One after another, the massifs of Lomnica, Prostredni Hrot and Slavkovski come to the fore, dark and awesome against impossibly blue sky. Crisp October air, dense with concentrated scents of a short mountain summer, evenly diffuses light over the walls and pillars of bare rock so that from a distance they take on some soft texture of umber velvet. Look the other way, and you’ll see sloping expanses of dark alpine green, washed with blots of fiery atumn yellow and red; and down below, melting in the haze, tiny roofs of Smokovec scattered over now barren woodland, a painful reminder of ‘vichrica’ in November 2004.
Later in the evening, a good dose of aquatic pleasures in the basement of nostalgic, off-season Grand.
GV lost in Kraków
At long last, we happily grabbed the opportunity to get away from the strains of placement tests and group forming. We deserved this break for a variety of reasons, one of them being our 10th anniversary, another one the celebration of … (those in the know, please finish this sentence).
The spell of glorious autumnal weather only adds to the attraction of the place. Within more than a decade, Kraków has become yet another showcase of Europe, putting on a heavy layer of cosmopolitan make-up over its weathered face. Yet, it’s still Kraków we learned about at school, visited on school trips and read about. A city thriving on its past and reminding us with dignity of the fact that there is more to Poland than this ongoing ridiculous and shameful tug-of-war political rivalry a few hundred kilometres down the same river Kraków is on.
