Arrival

The surreality is wearing off now: it was a frantic few days, getting to the airport and faced with a €1000 excess baggage charge; a flight home via Schipol, where I was hit over the head with more Euro-fun given the current crippling exchange rate. And then home for a few hours with Wife and Bairn. Thursday morning, partial unpacking and repacking; a lift from my dad here to a University at an Unnamed City in Northern England (UCNE).

The Assistant Course Director, (ACD) has done a brilliant job in holding everything together. We chatted things over, and everything seems fine. Next I had an informal meeting with my opposite number, Welfare Director. My job is the teaching, hers is everything else. Head Office had told me that she was "a bit of a flapper", (and on the poor phone line to HUDC I thought they were saying "slapper"). Whatever. Let's just say that she's not laid back.

There are forty something Italian students, thirty-odd Spanish. Friday, I met the Group Leaders, the students' teachers from their own countries. Two Spanish and three Italians. Experience at previous summer schools suggests that keeping these ladies sweet is the crux of the biscuit, so I did my best to make up for being absent for a week. The rest of Thursday was spent sorting out my room, which is in the halls of residence normally used by 1st year undergrads. Very nice, with cable internet access - the download speeds make me dizzy after the connexion in HUDC.

Friday I was intending to catch up with paperwork, of which there's a lot, it seems. I had a meeting with the teachers, who all seem very nice but very young and a bit nervous, (or maybe I'm just old and thick skinned?) One of them was off sick, and so I covered her class - I had no time for prep but "winging it" is my middle name so that was ok. The class was 13 year old Italians. Lovely kids, after teaching the cynical, miserable and often downright nasty blokes in HUDC.

A morning's teaching, actually, was just the ticket to get me oriented and to know some, at least, of the students. I think I'll try to get an hour with each of the classes over the next week. There is a special relationship between teachers and students, established over a relatively short time. Better to have that underlying your connexion with learners than being some kind of remote figure, "El Director", as I overheard the other day.

The residential staff are in "flats" of nine en-suite rooms and a kitchen. So that's an adult and 8 students. My flatmates are Spanish boys, 16 and 17 years old and very noisy. They can't seem to enter or leave the place without chanting the way you do at a football match.

This necessary supervision of the flats is a problem: we have one residential teacher, me, and three activity staff (including WD). That's enough for one adult per flat. But on Thursday this week the Italian group go home to be replaced by a much larger group of their compatriots. WD doesn't think we'll have enough adult bodies to supervise them. I've promised to look at the numbers and try to sort something out this week. The new intake will also leave me a teacher short. Head Office have said they are dealing with that.

Speaking of HO, they seem to be very good. I'm dealing with a woman I'll call Nichola. We spoke on the phone on Friday, and she actually apologised for not contacting me sooner, saying she felt guilty about leaving me in the lurch... I explained that I'd spent the last fortnight in a swamp of guilt over my non-arrival, so we could feel even on that score.

That's it. Here. Settled. Been a bit of a long weekend, actually, the euphoria of repatriation having subsided. Last night I went to a shisha cafe, amazingly, just across the road. It was strange, after HUDC, smoking indoors, with techno music and women fetching the pipes. The old legs felt very heavy when I left - can't be good, all those charcoal fumes indoors.