I am a terrible person.

I have a year seven student who has family in Thimphu which means he has seen a lot of foreign, as in American, movies.  He will often come and tell me about movies that he's seen such as Toy Story and numerous superhero movies.
Now, I am not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to superheroes but I can normally fake my way through conversations.  You know, I'll chat about how Steve Banner flew his invisible plane from Krypton because his parents were shot and that's how he became Wolverine.  Flawless.  I do have my own superhero, though.  Her name is Drake and she has dragon powers which she got when a dragon saved her life after she had been thrown into a volcano in Iceland.  I then decided how it was totally unfair that male superheroes often have titles like 'Captain' or 'Professor' and female superheroes don't really so I thought that Drake should get a title. So I changed her to Captain... Drake.  Hmmm.  Can I do that?  Those of you who have studied English history will know about the Tudor era privateer who, I believe, was the first Englishman to sail around the world.  Can I use his name for a half human/half dragon superhero?
I seem to have become sidetracked.  Sorry.  Anyway, my student, who had recently seen Iron Man 3, asked me how Tony Stark's suit was able to put itself on him.  I tried to explain CGI which I brilliantly described as 'kind of cartoons made with computers' but he stopped me and asked how Tony Stark did it.  While I was thinking how to answer this he asked me if I had ever met Iron Man.  I was slightly thrown by this question.  Looking back, I could have said something like, 'No, but I had tea with the Hulk last week.'  but I didn't.  I really had no idea what to say.  I said that I had not met him and, I am so sorry for this, I said that he is a comic book character.  I did NOT say that he wasn't real but I felt really, really bad.  I would like to say that the student is thirteen or fourteen and was one of the students who previously asked me if My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was real.  What would you have done?  Am I the worst person in the world?  Aargh!
Hugs to All!

MOM, STOP READING WHEN WARNED TO, SERIOUSLY!!

It's my last day in Thimphu and I'm already suffering from internet withdrawals!  How will I survive without xkcd, Jesus and Mo and adorable cat pictures?  I could just immerse myself in work, I guess.

Since I've been super lazy with blog so some of these things happened a while ago but hopefully I'll remember enough or be able to make something up.

A few weekends ago I did something which most people find strange, but I find those people strange so meh.  I went looking for serpents.  (Spoilers to keep mommy happy: I didn't find any and, if I had, I would never have touched them)  I took my walking stick and headed out to a pretty, foresty area by the river and had absolutely no luck finding any reptiles at all.  Fortunately, it was still a fairly nice day and I didn't really expect to find any when I set out.  After a couple hours of meandering, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and thought that a bunch of cats had come down to the river.  But they were totally squee, chirpy little otters!  Little Skipper and Tag and Tarka!  I wasn't quick enough to get a picture of them on shore but managed to grab some of them swimming.

See those blobs?  Those are adorably cute otters!  Promise!

Another animal I saw recently, but have no photo of, sorry, was a bird that was enjoying mocking some students and me.  Sadly, the season's just finished, but in spring there are these really nice berries which grow on bushes on the way to school.  Imagine orangey-yellow raspberries and that's what the berries look like.  Sadly, the bushes have a really mean habit of growing on the edge of steep slope which means humans can only reach about a third of the berries safely.  Birds, on the other hand, can get pretty all the berries and one afternoon, some students and I were desperately trying to get as many berries as we could and were looking longingly and the fat, juicy ones out of reach when a bird landed on the far side of the bush and happily gobbled up most of the fruit and I swear it was laughing at us poor, flightless creatures.  I looked it up the next day and think it is called a Himalayan tree pie. A Himalayan tree pie!  I can just hear Homer's 'mmmm.'  

Oooh, tree pie! (courtesy of google image search)

Since it's the exams obviously the exams are all over and I am hoping to do another awards blog but haven't quite finished marking yet and there are some year sixes who I have high hopes for when it comes to winning awards.  On the whole I feel like I may have taught my year 7s and 8s too well as there were far fewer amusing answers than last year.  How terribly irritating that my students are learning and improving their English!  They could have warned me that they were doing that!  However, due to not quite knowing determiners and possessive pronouns as well as they should, about 90% of my year 7s will be getting the 'Ich Bin Ein Berliner' award for their answer to the question 'I have a hat.  It is ____ hat.'  and they put 'mine.'  Now I just need to teach them German spelling.  Just to show off for a moment though, I did have a student who made no mistakes in the grammar section.  And that was totally all me.  Her studying tonnes every night had nothing to do with it.

MOM IS NOT TO READ PAST THIS POINT. SERIOUSLY MOM, STOP READING RIGHT NOW!



Has she stopped?


Ok.  As some of you may have noticed, I'm very fond of reptiles.  This means I have kids bringing me geckos and skinks which they find around school.  My message of 'Don't touch wild animals' hasn't really sunk in with lizards but fortunately it has with serpents.  But I certainly never said 'Don't take photos of wild animals' so one of the teachers when he heard his neighbour had a cobra behind his house grabbed his iphone and ran to grab photos for me.

Isn't it cute!  I really hope my mom can't see this!

 ISI! ISI! (The cobra is the mascot of the International School of Islamabad.  Way cooler than Karachi's knight and Murree's water buffalo).  You will be happy to know that nobody, including the cobra, was hurt.

Lots of hugs to all and I miss T'eo.

edited by Divvies to correct comic title typo caused by internet deficiency.