Category Archives: Teacher Meets World

First Breath of Bangkok

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I didn’t know how to begin. (And I didn’t feel very Zen about it either.)


I didn’t know how to begin telling you about Bangkok. I’ve been away from this little blog space for weeks while we have moved continents and so much has happened… Finally, I thought that I should just dive in. Here are some moments from our first few weeks in Bangkok…

1. We left Ottawa at 6:40 a.m. on a Friday morning. Three flights and two layovers… four hours in Chicago and four hours in Tokyo. We landed in Thailand at midnight on Saturday night. Practically Sunday. This is not a journey for the faint of heart.


2. When we first arrived in Bangkok, we lived in a hotel for 10 days. A man held the door open for us every time we arrived or departed. We ate brunch in the hotel restaurant. I told DP that I thought maybe we could live there. He didn’t think so.


3. We started new teacher orientation on our third day in Bangkok. The other new people seem lovely. The school is enormous and well equipped. It has a gym and a theatre and a performance studio and a multi-purpose hall and several fields. We feel very fortunate.

4. For a several days we lived in an apartment a few floors above the one we’ve rented while it was cleaned and painted. I chose to paint one wall of our bedroom bright red. I’m not sure if this is auspicious or not.

5. Last weekend, we took a trip to the ancient city of Ayutaya where there were once more than 400 temples. The area with the highest concentration of ruins is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.






6. It’s true. The traffic in Bangkok is bad. Horrific at times. (We read a guidebook that explained that the way to enjoy Bangkok is to drink lots of water and avoid rush hour.) We will not be driving a car here. Ever.


7. Most days we walk to school. It’s about a ten minute walk because I am not a fast walker at the best of times and I have to be particularly careful as the sidewalks here are a bit treacherous. I actually ripped one of my favourite shirts on a garbage can on the first day of school. Oops. On Tuesday morning we took our building’s tuk-tuk to school. We left the apartment at 6:35 a.m. Ouch!

8. Every day we come home to a plastic container of fresh fruit, cut up by our maid, in the fridge. We have had watermelon, pineapple, langsat and pomelo.

9. The sun sets earlier than it did in Barcelona. Here’s the view from our apartment.


10. We feel strangely at home already. I’ll keep telling you my stories…

New York Memories in Black and White

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1. Crossing Broadway near Ellen’s Stardust Diner
2. View of Manhattan from The River Cafe in Brooklyn
3. Entering the Gershwin Theater to see Wicked
4. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge with Santi
5. Grand Central Park the night the New York Philharmonic played

My week in New York was simply amazing! There’s so much to say but I think I’ll let the photos tell the story.

I can’t believe how quickly the summer is passing… DP is back from the west coast where he was taking a course for his Masters… and we leave for Thailand in just three days. (Ack! Yes… I am both excited and nervous!)

What has been your favourite part of this summer?

Change is worth the risk

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I want to be the kind of woman who can juggle one million things with grace and style. I want to finish off my work this week, say good-bye to our dear friends in Barcelona, pack up the apartment, return emails, do the laundry and maybe even blog a little. The truth is that this perfect woman does not exist (really she doesn’t… the pressure is off!) so I’m going to give myself a little break and focus on essentials for the next couple of weeks.

I’ll be back here by mid-July, blogging from my ancestral home of Canuck-landia… and also from New York City. There will be Bangkok blogging by August.

In the mean time, here are some images that I shot from inside the Cafe du Marche on Rue Cler in Paris. DP and I were in Paris for three days over the weekend and this was the one and only time it rained. The staff scurried about, unrolling the huge sheets of plastic that protected the diners from the downpour. Waterproofed, we tucked into our meal of roast chicken and lovely profiteroles covered in chocolate and cream… and then I took some cool street shots through the plastic. You never know what cool things will happen (grow, develop, unfold) if you just take the risk. If you leap!


What risks are you taking right now?

Good-byes by Polaroid

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Here’s another polaroid from the enchanting town of Cadaques which we visited a few weeks ago. We were just beginning our round of good-byes that weekend, trying on that leaving-Barcelona-state-of-mind like a suit jacket you need… but are not so sure you like.

The cycle is almost complete. Our apartment is practically empty… our belongings were packed up by the movers on Wednesday (an experience I enjoyed almost as much as chocolate) and the shipment is now being loaded onto a slow boat to Thailand. The landlady’s art is back on the walls and even she agrees that the place looked better when it was filled with our lovely photographs and belongings. Every morning we drop off items in the teachers’ lounge… novels and travel guides… a never-used curling iron and a mountain of canvas book bags (how did we ever end up with so many?). These items are claimed before we leave the room… flying off to new homes. Colleagues have started to look right through us, the way people do when you are leaving an international school. You start to be gone even when you are still here. (That never gets any easier.) One of our good friends has cried.

It’s official. It’s time to buy that suit jacket.

On Sunday, we’re off to Sitges with friends. I need to find my hat… I hope I didn’t pack it. We’ll walk on the beach and take photos and then find a lovely cafe where we’ll sit and watch the world go by during the hottest part of the day.

Two weeks left. This morning our Director said, “I hope you are savouring every moment.”

We’re doing our best.

At Deb Dubrow’s blog, Delicious Baby, people are coming and going too. See their Friday photos here.

Everyday Lovely, Issue 5

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I have often walked
Down the street before,
But the pavement always
Stayed beneath my feet before.
All at once am I
Several stories high,
Knowing I’m on the street where you live.
- from On the Street Where You Live by Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe

This lovely street is on our journey home each evening. When we get to this street we’re almost there. School… bus down the big hill… walk… train… (sometimes) bakery… lovely street as pictured above… home. I took this photo with my new polaroid camera!

Tonight, DP and I are packing as the moving men (I think they’ll be men) arrive at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. We are coming across many lovely things that we had forgotten we owned.

What’s lovely in your world? (You can link to your blog or a flickr photo… or leave me a comment below.)

Leaving Barcelona

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At the beginning of next week, I’ll be meeting with students who are leaving our little yellow high school at the end of June. We will be talking about how it feels to be leaving. I will encourage the kids to create rituals for saying good-bye to their friends, to the school, to the city. We’ll talk about organizing celebrations with friends and finding time for one last visit to their favourite restaurant.

Everything I say to the kids is equally true for DP and me. With our move just three weeks from now, I have begun making a collection… of photographs and memories… of my favourite Barcelona moments. These are some of them. (To see the photos in a larger format, just click on them.)

What would you miss most about your hometown if you left?

For more travel photos, Deb Dubrow has invited you to join her for Photo Friday at Delicious Baby.

Everyday Lovely, Issue 4

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It’s finally summer in Barcelona. The city is bursting with colour. Suddenly the metro cars downtown are crowded with people, clad in sarongs and flip flops, heading for Barceloneta beach. The lines at the Gaudi houses on Passeig de Gracia stretch around the block. Kids find it hard to focus in class… as do some of their teachers.

What are the signs that it’s summer in your city?

THE INVITATION:
Please share your everyday lovely bits below. Please note that you can leave a link to your blog or to a photograph in flickr. You can read more about this weekly feature here.

If you are reading this post in a feed reader or via email, please click through to my blog to view all the photo links for this week.

Dreaming of Cadaques on the Costa Brava

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Our friends took us to Cadaques to say good-bye. (This trip was the first of a round of dinners and excursions in our honour.) It’s funny how a thing can be so lovely and sad at the same time. Bittersweet.

Cadaques is on the Costa Brava of the Mediterranean, two and a half hours from Barcelona. The people of this region say that you cannot turn a rock over without finding an artist. Salvador Dali had a house here, at nearby Port Lligat, and artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro spent time in Cadaques as well. I can certainly understand the draw. I asked DP what he loved about the town and he said, “It’s pretty. Even the name is pretty.” (It’s true… we took a load of photos of this picturesque town.) I would add that the town is laid-back… I felt relaxed from the moment we arrived. Visiting Cadaques is like being inside a postcard… but in a good way. The day was sunny… there was a breeze coming off the sea… and the temperature was 23 degrees Celsius. So lovely.

One friend told us that Cadaques is definitely THE place “to see and be seen” for los Barceloneses (people from Barcelona) so we laughed right out loud when we bumped into friends from our school.

Our itinerary:
1. Arrive in Cadaques. Find table for five at sea-side cafe belonging to El Casino. Drink coffee. Take photographs.
2. Eat lunch at Casa Anita which is an institution in Cadaques. (Dali was a regular here. He told the owner that the place was perfect and that he should not change the place.)
3. Take gentle stroll around town. More photographs.
4. Drive up to Cap de Creus (8 kilometres drive). Take in astonishing view. Sit down at cafe. Order coffee.
5. Stop at the tiny town of Port Lligat. More photographs.
6. Drive home.

It was a perfectly perfect day in Cadaques. We wished we had stayed the night.

Mara at Mother of All Trips is hosting Monday are for Dreaming. You can check it out here.

Everyday Lovely, Issue 3

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Photo Credit: DP

Everyone in our household (well, that would both of us) has their own thing. A shining thing that is their own. DP has an abundance of brilliant ideas. He has so many ideas that I am forced to put buckets down all over the house to catch them in. Today I want to tell you about one of his great ideas.

A couple of weeks ago, DP realized that the birthdays of two close friends were just around the corner. (This is one of the hardest things about being so far away from our beloved ones… missing these celebratory rituals… birthdays and Christmas and Easter… the lovely marking of time with our tribe.) DP wanted to do something lovely for his friends and so, on the morning of their birthdays, he grabbed his camera and took a long, leisurely walk around our Barcelona neighborhood of Gracia. He tried to capture the everyday lovely moments of a morning in our neighbourhood. But not just any morning… the morning of the anniversary of his friends’ birth. When he got home, he downloaded the shots and chose the best ones. (I think even DP was surprised at how good the birthday photos were. My theory is that they were composed with love.) Then he attached them to an email and sent them off to his friends that very day.

It’s true… it’s not the same as being there but his photographic birthday gift is a lovely way of saying, “this is what life looks like today (on your day) in the place where we live… where we are missing you and loving you and wishing you the happiest of birthdays.”

Isn’t he brilliant? The shot above was taken by DP yesterday in celebration of the birthday of Littlest, my youngest sister. She emailed to say that she loved them all… that she could not choose a favourite… that she would start a “Day in the Life of Barcelona” gallery in her new home. I do have a favourite. It’s featured above.

My gift? I make things happen. Weekend trips to Paris, little blogs with lovely readers, packing and renting new apartments and moving across the world. DP would say, “It all works out!”

THE INVITATION:
Please share your everyday lovely bits in the COMMENTS section below. (Mr. Linky is not working right now.) Please note that you can leave a link to your blog or to a photograph in flickr. You can read more about this weekly feature here.

If you are reading this post in a feed reader or via email, please click through to my blog to view all the photo links for this week.

P.S. Here’s the link to a lovely video entitled “The Beckoning of Lovely.” Enjoy!

P.P.S. Please visit Photo Friday at Delicious Baby for more lovely photographs.