I need a vacation..

Man i need a vacation from all this terrible music that the play here in Planaltina lol. Finally though last night they didnt decide to play any more music so i was able to try to get some sleep. But as it happened it wasnt really possible because someones dog was barking and whining all night long. Well we think it was because the owners were beating the dog, you'll soon discover here that animal cruelty is a big thing here in Brasil. In fact Brasilian seem to be proud of this and love to have people see them beating their horses with sticks and whips and stuff. Its a real shame that here they dont have the same laws we have in the UK as these people would be locked in a cell now getting the crap kicked out of the by the fellow prisoners. The UK is a nation of animal lovers for those of you who dont know, as soon as i can find the house where this noise comes from im going to slap up a big poster outside it to embarrass these people into having respect for the creatures of the earth.

Anyway i'll try to get some sleep later on this afternoon before my classes start, at the moment im waiting for Roberta to arrive and also practicing my portugues by talking to the other secretaries in Taguatinga on the internet. I have to get around to spending more time with my portugues books, i usually have a couple of nights a week free for this but at the beginning of the semester i have less time as the groups all get up and running. I hope that my students will have some of their books this week, it will be alot easier for them once they can read them at home as well as in the lessons with me. I have some games that we are going to play today to make drill practice a bit more fun, well thats if we get around to making them this class. If not i have something else lined up to do with them, always got something up my sleeve ;-)

I wonder if they have any coffee in the kitchen, let me go check..

Theres none around here, i had to nip into the house and get something instead. Good job i went shopping the other day hehe. Theres always some kind of juice in the fridge or coffee at my place. I live on the stuff ;-)

They are ringing the church bells here, they ring them three times a day, 6am, 12pm and again at 6pm to remind people to go to the church and give all their money so the priest can buy a new car or have money for his retirement. If i tell you that the main church is a catholic church i think it'll explain alot right? After all everyone has seen how they stood quietly to one side letting all those people in Africa become infected with AIDS when they could have spoken up about condom use and other things to try to help people understand what they were dealing with. These people need to be flogged for allowing this to happen. I always manage now to get out of anything here that my students invite me to that involves the Catholic church as i will not be part of anything that involves this religion as that would be just condoning everything they do or dont do. At least other religions are trying to do something about it, i read in Newsweek mag that there are priests that are now handing out condoms and other forms of contraception advice in Africa especially inthe parts that have been decimated by HIV & AIDS. Its about time the Catholic church woke up, of course with the Pope not well and not being able to control the idiots in the Vatican it will be a long time before this happens :-( When you live in a predomanantly Catholic country you can easily see what a terrible job they do of everything they touch :-(

Im just looking at the lesson plan for this evenings class, we are a little behind on the schedule but i'll pull it back on by the end of the class as its mostly conversation questions and reviewing grammar. I hate grammar, some people love to spend hours on grammar and structure but its not really all that important. The most important things are read, write, speak and communicate. I think the reason some teachers like to concentrate so much on grammar and structure is when they have a sort of fear of speaking with their students or they are afraid of the students asking them many questions especially about slang. My students love slang and of course its very important they master slang as we use informal english all of the time and hardly ever use formal english except in only a very few occasions. I love to try to get the conversation going whenever possible, even if i get behind in my schedule hehe!!

I'd better go get some emails written here or i wont have time to get them all done today..

posted at 9:25 AM by john |   

Monday, August 16, 2004

Monday mornings..

I have coffee here on hand as i try to get going this morning. Some assholes here were playing music at a concert until god knows what time this morning and i kept waking up on and off all the time. People have been basically playing any sort of dul crappy music here at the exposition center until stupid times every morning for around the last three weeks, they have no consideration for other people what so ever. It wouldnt be so bad if they actually stopped at a decent hour but they dont give a damn about that here. I saw yesterday that hopefully yesterday should be the last day of it so we can all try to get some sleep now.

I saw may times on other peoples websites a list of sites that had referred to them and wondered how they did it thinking maybe it was because they hosted their site on their own servers etc. I found a site online that puts this list onto your webpage with just a single line of code which made doing this very simple. You can go to Truefresco.org and copy the free code needed from the site. It works quite well, a shame we cant alter things a little but i think it looks okayish now :-) Im curious to see where people come from and what sites reffered people to mine, im just a little nosey you see ;-)

I hope Roberta gets here soon as im starving, i was going to make lunch but i think her gandmother already made it for us. anyway it only takes a minute to take the lid of the cookie tin hahaha!! I think Roberta is going to spend the afternoon preparing for some presentation she has to give. I would like to go see these presentations but they are just for the course at the hospital and also they tend to be in portugues too. Im going to get her to join some of my MEC4 classes though as we are very short of students this semester and i need to have enough to do some of the activities. It'll be good fun for her to join in with this group, she knows everyone and also it improve her english vocab alot. I have some conversation stuff set up already for them to try out. This group love to talk in english even when they arent in the classroom :-)

Wow just found an interesting story here, apparently they have found a cave that they think was used by John the Baptist. I'll just put the story and pic here for you guys to read..


Group Discovers John the Baptist Cave

KIBBUTZ TZUBA, Israel - Archaeologists said Monday they have found a cave where they believe John the Baptist anointed many of his disciples — a huge cistern with 28 steps leading to an underground pool of water.

During an exclusive tour of the cave by The Associated Press, archaeologists presented wall carvings they said tell the story of the fiery New Testament preacher, as well as a stone they believe was used for ceremonial foot washing.

They also pulled about 250,000 pottery shards from the cave, the apparent remnants of small water jugs used in baptismal ritual.

"John the Baptist, who was just a figure from the Gospels, now comes to life," said British archaeologist Shimon Gibson, who supervised the dig outside Jerusalem.

However, others said there was no proof that John the Baptist ever set foot in the cave, about 2 1/2 miles from Ein Kerem, the preacher's hometown and now part of Jerusalem.

"Unfortunately, we didn't find any inscriptions," said James Tabor, a religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Tabor and his students have participated in the excavations.

Both Tabor and Gibson said it was very likely that the wall carvings, including one showing a man with a staff and wearing animal skin, told the story of John the Baptist. The carvings stem from the Byzantine period and apparently were made by monks in the fourth or fifth century.

Gibson said he believed the monks commemorated John at a site linked to him by local tradition.

Gibson said the carvings, the foot washing stone and other finds, taken together with the proximity of John's hometown, constituted strong circumstantial evidence that the cave was used by John.

John, a contemporary of Jesus who also preached a message of redemption, is one of the most important figures in Christianity. The discovery, if confirmed, would be among the most significant breakthroughs for biblical scholars in memory.

The cave is on the property of Kibbutz Tzuba, an Israeli communal farm just outside Jerusalem. A member of the kibbutz, Reuven Kalifon, knew of the cave's existence — the community's nectarine orchards run right up to the mouth of the cave — but it was filled with soil almost to the ceiling.

In 1999, Kalifon asked Gibson to inspect the cave more closely.

The archaeologist, who has excavated in the Holy Land for three decades, crawled through the small opening and began removing boulders near the wall of the cave. When he pushed aside one of the stones, he saw a head carved into the wall — the top of the figure he believes depicts John.

Gibson, who heads the Jerusalem Archaeological Field Unit, a private research group, organized an excavation. During the five-year project, he wrote a book, entitled "The Cave of John the Baptist," to be published later this week.

Gibson said the cave — 24 yards long, around four yards wide and four yards deep — was carved in the Iron Age, somewhere between 800 and 500 B.C., by the Israelites who apparently used it as an immersion pool.

"It apparently was adopted by John the Baptist, who wanted a place where he could bring people to undergo their rituals, pertaining to his ideas of baptism," Gibson said.

Believers would have walked down 28 stone steps. To their right, they would have discarded their clothes in a niche carved into the wall.

At the bottom of the steps, they would have placed the right foot onto a stone with an imprint of a foot. A small depression to the right of the imprint would have contained oil, to be poured over the foot for cleansing, Gibson said.

posted at 10:59 AM by john |