Finishing well...

Last night, Wednesday, was the Talent Night, a time when the students display their talents or just let it all go loose. There were 12 performances ranging from Grand piano to singing to ballet to gymnastics performances. It was great to see the students out of their elements. The Polish group did a spoof on SLI with a teacher scaring the kids to death with lessons. They ended by stripping off their shirts to spell "SLI...I'm Lovin it." [See photos]

Before supper, Jude and I jumped on a bus with about 8 others to go for supper near Old Town. Today also starts Europeade, a European song and cultural festival, this year held in Klaipeda. There are 4,000 participants in town and thousands more tourists. All the participants are staying in schools, sleeping on the floors. And they are all being fed at LCC between 4 and 10 p.m.. Our campus, chaotic enough with 235 students, now has a few more added into the mix. The city put up a giant tent in addition to the gymnasium, filled both with tables and chairs, and then serves food for all the participants. In addition, we got onto a bus in Old Town to come back to school for the talent show, not realizing the busses would be crammed, crammed, did I say crammed with people going to eat at LCC, the same stop as ours. It reminded me of broken ribs and busses in Russia. In Old Town we ran into some of Erica Bauer's students dressed in costume for the festival. [see photo].

We also introduced the word "Auction" to the students during the Talent Show. We auctioned off stuff that some of the teachers didn't want to take back home. For example, I put in the auction one of the books that my students were reading--The True Story of Hansel and Gretel. It brought in 28 litas. In all, we raised over 300 litas for the orphanage to help them buy products like shampoo, toilet paper, tooth brushes...New concepts like vocabulary words are interesting. Erwin, our teacher auctioneer, started the bidding at 10 litas for some cookies, and one Polish student then bid 15 litas...outbidding himself. And so it went...

Thursday is our last day of teaching. Jude's class and my class are having a sort of vocabulary competition. Jude's class learned the vocabulary . My class should know the words since it's Advanced. We will each have five minutes to see which class can give the most synonyms for the chosen words and get the teacher to say the word. It's a fun way to end the sessions. Then, we take pictures and say our good byes.

On Sunday, we catch a bus at 6 a.m. for Vilnius and fly to Poland to see Ewa, our exchange daughter from 1995. But, that's a whole other chapter...