Ay, ay, ay!

I wish I had a bit more information to impart, but as it stands this post will mostly contain winjing.  What in the world is winjing you ask?  Well to be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that’s how you spell it, but that’s the Aussie term for whining or complaining.  I feel as if I’ve been quite busy the last few days.  Monday was my first morning of chaperoning the Nova students and it was good.  They’re between the ages of 14-17 and they’re all very sweet.  We did walking tours of Cairns on Monday and yesterday morning I went with the first group to the Zoom Wildlife Dome (it’s a small zoo on top of the casino in Cairns).

 About halfway through the morning Shoko and I went back to the office so I could get set up to do my training (using a skype-like setup) with Vaughn (he’s from New Zealand, but lives in Japan apparently).  Anyway, I really did not like the training.  I hate role-playing and it was a lot of pretending you have students and showing him what you would do, acting out the instructions and stuff.  I’d much rather he just explain it and then I sit in on a few classes.  I feel like I learned more sitting in on 2 of Anne’s classes than I did in the hour or so I spent with him.  On top of that, Shoko, Anne, and I all thought that I was being trained to teach the Adult Program, but Vaughn was teaching/training on the kids program.  When Shoko found out she was rather annoyed, but wasn’t sure exactly what to do about it.  Oh well.  We didn’t get through very much of the material and so he wanted to try using skype today.  I warned him that my efforts with skyping have a terrible track record, but we could certainly try.  Because of our previous difficulties with time differences I swear I double-checked that we would try at 10am Cairns time.

So this morning I logged on, got everything set up about 10 minutes early and waited for him to call.  By 10:10 I realized he must have meant 11am Cairns time.  Very frustrating as today was to be my only day off this week, and now I was wasting it, sitting around waiting!  Of course by 10:50am the internet at the hostel was connecting and disconnecting like it was some sort of game.  I had no way of contacting him to explain the issues so I texted Shoko to ask her to call Japan and explain the situation.  After half an hour of trying to connect I finally got a phone call from Shoko.  She said she hadn’t been able to get a hold of Vaughn, but she had left a message for him explaining the situation and giving him my phone number so he could just call me and try to set up a new time.  So now I’m waiting for a phone call from him and there’s a possibility I’ll have to go into the school to use their system later this afternoon.  I shouldn’t complain, it’s all in the hopes of getting a paid job (and the training is supposed to be paid as well), but I just hate waiting around and not being able to make any plans.  So yeah, the kids are great and I have lots of fun on our outings.  The company seems to be rather disorganized and lacking in communication, which seems ironic that they’re so terrible at communicating when that’s the whole point of the company: teaching students to communicate in English!!  Ok, I’ll stop now.

 In other news, today is my wonderful sister’s birthday and I’m so thankful she’s my sister.  I got a random box of Peanut Butter in the mail today from First Abroad so that was cool.  I had fun playing volleyball Monday night and Tuesday night.  Emma, Pukari, and I are going out for Korean food tomorrow night – my first time eating Korean food.  And on Friday I get to have a BBQ with the Nova students.  Think on the positives, that’s what I gotta do….