Skipped the beer, met a bear. . .

Hi all -

Well, besides the immense amount of writing I completed this week - "Big Burma Project" is in need of a few edits and it will be FINITO - I went to Plzen to visit my collegues from CEELI who are working at a "TEFL" school. For those of you who are anti-acronym, a TEFL school is a place where there are people a) learning English as a foreign language and b) learning how to teach English as a foreign language. Charles is on the administration of the school and has been working in Plzen for the past 18 summers. Julie, the project manager for CEELI and therefore my "boss" for the summer, is taking the TEFL course and teaching her own course on language for legal studies.

So, I took the hour bus, traversed Plzen, watched the course, met lots and lots of people from Memphis (Charles is a professor at the University of Memphis - so many of his students and collegues attend the course), and did a very small amount of site-seeing. Plzen is not the most beautiful city in the Czech Republic, but seeing the school and discussing my project with Julie was very useful.

I was supposed to go to the famous Plzen brewery the next morning, before Julie and I would leave to go back to Prague, however, beer and fermentation were not all that interesting to me at 9 am. So instead, I decided to go to another zoo. Not expecting a whole lot from the Plzen zoo, I was pleasantly surprised. . .especially when I got to get very up close and personal with some lemurs who left their enclosure and roamed around, one of them nearly hopping onto my back as I bent down to take another one's picture. It was pretty fun, I have to say. The last few pictures on the slideshow are from Amanda and my night out last night - we had the largest, most ridiculous drink you've ever seen - the pictures will prove it.



I have two weeks left here, some of which will be taken up by my ventures to Cesky Krumlov and Rome - so I'm trying to make the most of it. Pray for less rain - because I really need to do laundry and it hasn't stopped for several days. I'm meeting with Christoph and Sabe to make my final presentation to them regarding the work I've done and to hand over the CD-Roms with the work I've done. I have to say, I'm pretty proud of myself. I love curriculum writing and planning - so this project ended up being a great match. I could definitely see myself in the capacity of a project manager or on staff at a university. . .or maybe even back in the education system as a curriculum director. I'm excited to get started looking for a career, armed with the skills I learned this summer. Now, I just need a job. :)