I have a blog! Well, a lot has happened in the last two months or so since I have posted. I am still in Saipan and still enjoying it! School is going really well. I really enjoy my students and am finding that this teaching thing isn't so bad after all. But other than teaching, what have I been up to, you might ask?
I read a really good book called
The Name of the Rose that Roommate and Ian sent me for my birthday. It's by an Italian guy named Umberto Eco, and I highly recommend it to people fascinated with history and books. The story takes place in 1311 in a monastery in northern Italy and is entirely about monks, books, libraries, and murder. It is chock full of history and fascinating factoids.
I also spent a weekend on the little island of Tinian, just a mile off the shore of Saipan. Seven of us took the ferry and went to enjoy the Chinese New Year and the Tinian Annual Red Pepper Festival. We spent an entire day exploring the island on scooters that we rented. I saw the loading sites of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan and raced down one of the six massive abandoned runways that used to be the busiest in the world. It was quite an enjoyable trip.
A couple weeks ago I accepted a teaching job in Moscow, Russia! I had applied in early January and had really been hoping for the job. I will be teaching elementary ESL at the private international school Moscow Economic School. I will be leaving Saipan at the end of the school year and returning to Montana for a couple months before heading to Russia. I am looking into the possibility of exploring South-East Asia before I head back the the US of A, but we'll see how expensive it is.
I am feeling anxious to get in all the fun things I want to do before I leave here for good. I am SO excited to go to Russia, and yet sometimes I feel like I just barely got to Saipan and now I am leaving. It is a little bit sad, but I look forward to new adventures ahead!
One last thing I will leave you with. I am continually fascinated with language and words and my parents got me this great book for Christmas called the
Verbivore's Feast. It gives the origin and use of many words and phrases. Here is one of my favorite that I just came upon.
"Parents Pay Through the Nose for Kid's Admission." "Phone Callers Pay Through the Nose." "Paying Through the Nose for Blogs."
These are titles of recent articles appearing in newspapers and journals from India, New Zealand, and the United States. Each story, of course, bewails the high price of a service.
The bizarre sounding idiom
pay through the nose, used with gusto throughout the English-speaking world, has some explaining to do. How could this combination of words possibly have any synonymy with "pay too much" or "pay until it hurts?"
The tale commonly associated with this cliche alludes to a tax the Danes levied on the Irish in the 9th century under the code of Scandinavian rules called the Danelaw. Anyone faling to satisfy the tax assessor's request was punished by getting his nose slit; he literally "paid through the nose."
I will leave you with that happy thought! Maybe next time I will tell you all about PEZ!
