September 26, 2010: a gloomy day in my apartment

September 26, 2010: A rather gloomy day. Perfect weather for cleaning the apartment now that I have a vacuum cleaner. And I'm going to cook that pork roast I bought the ingredients for. I also plan on revamping the teaching materials for my beginning English students – after due consideration, I've realized that some (not all) of the beginning students are truly beginners (not false beginners) and really need easier materials than what I've been teaching. I'll be giving the students my first written exam next week so I'll see exactly what their capabilities are. I've told some of them about my past experience in Korea when I taught some students who I thought would never be able to learn English conversation and surprised me beyond my expectiations. I compared their progress to trying to break a pencil: at first the pencil is stiff and seemingly unbreakable – the pencil only bends slightly at first and then SNAP it breaks. Exactly like their English fluency – veeeerrrrrry slow at first and then all of a sudden they can speak long sentences like a native speaker. That's their goal to learning English in my class – to speak fluently and coherently. It requires a lot of work and constant practice, and so far many of them are trying very hard. I know they will succeed.

This evening, Andras is supposed to come over to install my wireless connection. So, I'll again have Skype access and can upload all of my blog entries again! Won't that be great.

Some other miscellaneous notes:

• My apartment's elevator motor stopped working meaning I now have to walk up and down five flights of steps to the fifth floor. Hungarians start with the ground floor as 0 and the first floor would be the second floor in the US, etc. so that means I actually have to climb five flights of steps. Hopefully, they'll fix the elevator next week. At least I don't live on the tenth floor in the apartment building!
  
• Hungarians (and perhaps many other European countries) switch the decimal point and commas in their numbers. For example, "50.000.000,00" is really "50,000,000.00" in our numbering system.
  
• Hungarian apartment toilets seem to recycle washing machine water into the toilet system. The toilet water always seems to be filled with laundry detergent soap. A good way to recycle water?
  

Later: Just finished vacuuming my apartment for the first time. The little vacuum cleaner sure worked well! Having a small apartment has its advantages when it comes to vacuuming – I was done in no time at all. As I write this, I am smelling my pork roast in the oven. Hopefully, I'll have a great dinner tonight.

Still later: The roast was as good as it smelled! The clay pot that they gave me sure worked well. I had a enough juices left over after baking it to make a nice gravy. I'll have to do that more often since a roast is the easiest thing a person can make.