Pre-Carnival Ramblings of the Randomest Variety

So it's almost Canival time here. To celebrate the beginning of Lent, a huge party is thrown and people dress up and get drunk. It beats Pancake Day. My students' have been telling me that Carnival is not such a big deal in Lisbon because everybody is too busy, nobody is religious and a whole load of other trite generalisations. To celebrate the festivities, I get an extra-long four day weekend next week and I'm hoping to get away somewhere and see some of Portugal. I'm ashamed to say that in almost five months I have barely strayed outside the capital. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. Anybody who has ever taught English to foreigners will tell you that students can be a well of local knowledge that you can dredge regularly. As you will also know, they will all give you the same answers. When I asked them where I should go fo Carnival, they all said the same places and gave the same reason - because all of the tourists go there for Carnival! When I explain that I am not really a tourist and would quite like to go somewhere that doesn't contain fat, bald men shouting at underpaid waiters, the students just laugh.

Work has been weird recently because we are really under-staffed at the moment. Last week I taught three classes of the same level on the sameday. Obviously, I taught the same lesson three times- laughing at the same jokes and asking the same questions, knowing that I would receive the same answers. It would fry your brain doing it all of the time, but it was fun to switch off for the day and auto-teach. It's also exam time at the school which means that I can take my Nintendo to class legitimately to give me something to do. Just between us, I was given some great advice about making the test a little light. This means that the ninety minute test is completed by even the most dim-witted student in about an hour. At the end of the test, students are free to sit in silence for the rest of the lesson, or they can leave early. Thus, teacher is able to make an early dart home to watch most of the Portugal v Spain match!! Even better, you don't even have to mark the tests. You can go through them in class "so the students can see how they made their mistakes." Brilliant! I even heard of one teacher getting higher level students to mark lower level papers as an error-correction exercise!!

Going to get back to my book now. I'm reading Perfume, which is ace. Just grisly and gothic enough without becoming plain-old-nasty. It describes eighteenth century France exactly how I would have imagined it. I hqven't seen the film of the same name, but I might give it a whirl when I have finished the book.
Adeus.