8/27 and 8/28 - housing?

August 27 & 28:                Never got around to writing on the 27^th, but no big loss. The 27^th was much like the last few days. Short presentation at the school and asking again to what to do next. We felt like we were wasting a lot of time. Today was better. Started out with the free breakfast again, and then waiting for the bus to take us to school. Today at school from 8:00 to 12:00 we had actual professional development to attend. Today’s session was on lesson planning, more of a why rather than a how. I thought it was actually a pretty good presentation. After that we tried to get some more clerical details taken care of, such as getting our finger print in the time clock system. There was a lot of time spent on talking about our accommodation. There seems to be discontent among the teachers, and what we were promised for our housing. The school wants to give us a (low) allowance for housing, we were all made to believe that the school would provide us private furnished apartments. Today they offer shared apartments for six months, a lot of teachers didn’t like this. So housing still remains up in the air. One other teacher that has been in the UAE for a year already is really trying to help us. For now we remain at the hotel. After work we took off to Carrefour to buy some supplies, we brought a long a new teacher from the UK. It’s nice to have another teacher that speaks fluent English, albeit with a British accent. Oh and to my family: you thought I spoke fast, this new teacher has me beat for sure! We found Mexican food for the first time at the mall too. On the way out I grabbed an AED 1 = $0.27 USD ice cream cone from McDonalds. In an effort to stay awake until bed time I watched more shows on Hulu, worked fairly well but for some reason NBC shows don’t work as well. Other streaming works well, such as radio stations. After asking about laundry a teacher at the school offered to do it for me, so I got it all in a bag ready to take to her. So nice, since it’s really expensive to have done here! Time to crash and hopefully make it through the night two nights in a row!