Malay). They all can read; I am working on higher reasoning and deciphering skills. One of the boys is quite hyper – funny and sweet but distracting. At 10:30 we all get a tea break/recess. Most of the staff come to the staff lounge – I think 2 are on duty for recess. The kids seem to play together well; I haven’t observed any fights. Being an urban school, recess is in a large paved courtyard. The staff lounge is very nice with kitchen facilities and a large sitting area, and big enough for meetings, I am told. After tea I have 1-3 boys (self identified as Irish, Scottish, and NZ) that I work with on handwriting in the 3/4th grade for a half hour. One of them is the kind of stubborn kid that it is hard to get him to do anything that he doesn’t like to do. Finally at 11:30, I get my favorite group, 3 first graders – 2 twins from Oregon and a boy who says he was born in Chile. They are very enthusiastic about learning to read, and it is really interesting to listen to them sounding out words. They are doing well, but I guess they are somewhat behind the class as a whole. I think each term lasts 10 weeks, then there is a 2 week break, except that the summer break is 6 weeks. I asked about grading and report cards. They don’t use an A-F grade system; I think they may use a mastery report. They have parent 
conferences twice a year. Generally, children advance with their age cohort. They do not get a lot of extra support staff, so they appreciate the volunteers. I can definitely report that kids (and teachers) are very similar between our two countries.Ron and I have both started taking evening language classes – Ron Dutch for his Statia research and me Spanish just in case. I am enjoying my class very much. I find I remember conjugations better than I would have thought but am uncertain of my vocabulary. I went into the third term of the beginners’ class, which is working out just about right. I am enjoying the people in the class too. Our teacher even had a party at his house, which was fun to go to.
We have made two car trips this month. On the first, we packed a picnic lunch and headed back to the South Coast that was one of our first excursions. The weather was not as clear as the first time, so we couldn’t see the South Island, but our goal was different. We hiked 2-3 kilometers into the Turakirae Heads Scientific Reserve to see if we could find the winter seal colony. It was a good thing we passed some returning hikers who were able to report that seals were there, because the trail is far enough away from the shore that it is hard to spot them at first. But once we started spotting brown lumps on the rocks, we could see more. To hike closer we had to maneuver around rocks and tussock grass and small pools, but we were able to get pretty close, as you can see by the pictures. Our presence barely seemed to disturb them at all. Occasionally, one would look up and check us out, and then go back to sunbathing. It was surprising how high up they were able to climb on the rocks.
The second trip was to the Southward Car Museum on the Kapiti Coast, supposedly the biggest car museum in the southern hemisphere. It was way bigger than I expected, and particularly focused on really early vehicles. It also, of course, had early imports to New Zealand, and a number of hand modified cars & trucks by NZ do-it-yourselfers. It did not have many cars from the 40s and 50s, which is what Ron enjoys. I like that it also had bicycles, motorcycles, baby carriages, model cars, and a lot of other old stuff. We had a nice lunch afterwards and a walk on the beach. On the drive home, we came to a part of the coast road where traffic was really slowed down and many cars had pulled over to the verge. We realized that they were looking at a whale swimming just off the beach, so we pulled over too. We couldn’t really see much – occasionally a fin, mostly its back, sometimes spray from the blowhole – but none the less it was quite magical and exciting. We read about it in the paper the next day, and the opinion was that it was just resting in its migration and not in distress or anything.
August was actually feeling quite Spring like. We took a wonderful walk around the Botanical gardens one day and were quite surprised by the rhododendrons and magnolias in bloom, as well as camellias, which have been blooming for a couple of months. I have also been digging up and preparing parts of the vegetable garden, and planted a whole bunch of peas, and some beets and scallions. We shall see if I was too optimistic. The weather has gotten windier again – equinoxal gales, I am told – but the highs are more frequently around 15C (upper 50sF) than before.We continue to go to movies, especially on Tuesdays, which is a discount day. We saw Coraline in 3-D, which we enjoyed, but which you probably all know about, because it opened awhile ago in the States. We saw a New Zealand film called Separation City, which we also enjoyed, but that may never open in the US. It is a pretty funny comedy about that time in married life (7 year itch?) when the relationship can seem stale and blah and you wonder where all the magic went. It particularly follows one man and one woman (many voiceovers to let you know what they are thinking; I am not a fan of voice overs) who are in the same set of couple friends and start getting attracted to each other, especially after she breaks up with her husband having found him sleeping with someone else. They have a number of very amusing failed attempts at
hooking up. Eventually the guy realizes that he is more uxorial than he thought, and he and his wife get back together for a happy ending. (The other woman is reasonably happy with where she ends up too.)The woman who owns the car we have been using returned from England on August 31, so we are reducing our carbon footprint even more. Trains are pretty good in the local area, and I assume we could rent a car for a day if we really wanted to, so I don’t think it will make a great difference in our lifestyle.
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