It has been some time since I’ve posted – we’ve been pretty busy!
The beginning of October means new courses and new students for me, and there is an initial busy period while new students focus on getting used to speaking English so much.
I’ve got a full plate of classes – a weekly class for new employees (six classes of four students each), a twice-a-month class for the new production workers (65 students in one class – wow!), twice weekly classes for thirteen individual students, a weekly business negotiation course for four students, and then an after work/before work special casual conversation session for however many students decide to show up twice a week.
So, very busy. That makes free time precious, and at work most of my extra time goes into lesson planning and preparing materials. It is busy now and will continue to be busy right up until we leave in December for our next trip.
Kuniko is also busy, and she often has to work one or two days on the weekends. Luckily she can get other days off in exchange, but we have odd schedules now and that makes the time that we can spend together more fun.
We have been continuing to hold wine tastings through the regions of Italy, and a few weeks ago we tasted one of the more famous (and expensive) regions – Piemonte. We found some really interesting wines this time and one in particular that we’ll remember the rest of our lives… so I can see why the region we were tasting gets so much attention. Next time we’ll move to the more affordable wine region of Liguria.
Also we’ve been cooking different culture’s dishes each month. In October we cooked Korean food and we certainly improved our skills making kimpa, chapche, chijimi, kimchi, namul, and bossam. This month we’ve switched to Indian food, and so far we made two chutneys (peanut cilantro, and coconut spice), a pumpkin masala, potato turmeric masala, toasted chanai dal, and a beautifully creamy split uraad dal that really made me understand Indian comfort food. We’ll see what dishes we can come up with next.
The cooking different culture thing has been good to push my skills a little, and also to learn more about the food cultures and techniques of different countries. We are only scratching the surface of each culture, but I think we can come back and hit beyond the highlights in the future.
So with all this going on, Christmas shopping in the background, and getting ready for some holiday parties with friends and neighbors, we have (literally) a lot on our plates.
Hope to have more time after the first of the year, but we’ll see if things settle down. Anything could happen!
