See the school

After getting used to the island we got to check out the school that I will be working at.  It's a nice spot with an open air auditorium and a bunch of classrooms (without airconditioning).  Here's a quick look at it:

The area is quite nice.  It's right on the beach, close to some little shops and even has it's own little cantina right near the auditorium (which you can see the bleachers of on the far right of the pic).  There is one main school building (on the left) where most of the classes are held and a smaller building toward the back with another 4 or 5 classrooms.  Everyone was extremely friendly and happy to see us.




It also happened that the day we came by was the schools Open Day.  What this consists of is many of the students showing off their different projects that they had made.  There were various chemistry projects (most of which included the use of fire, some with projectiles), physics projects, building projects, business models, and many others.  One of the more interesting ones was a pressure gun that a student had made using piping.  He would use a bike pump to build the pressure in the gun and then had a challenge that if you shot the target you would win $3 Belize ($1.50 U.S.), with a $1 Belize buy in.  One of my fellow UNCW student teachers gave it a try:
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/oudwk_C6Fw4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The open day was a lot of fun.  I'm looking forward to meeting my teacher and the students soon.

First Days in Belize

After a day of travel, I arrive in Belize about 1pm local time (3pm East Coast).  I hop on a little puddle jumper and fly from Belize City to San Pedro.  As I climb into the seat directly behind the pilot (I could have tapped him on the shoulder), I see this:

So I'm feeling really good about this trip at this point.  The scenery is beautiful and the plane ride was a lot of fun.  We touch down and I grab a cab with another person that arrived with me from our group.  We pull up to the place in which we'll be staying for quite awhile. Not too shabby.

We stay in a hostel like area and the owner of the place is awesome.  He's a fun guy to talk to and he's quite the character. While it looks fun, we're already starting to work on the stuff we have to. Luckily, as you can see with Colin, we get to do our work right next to the pool.

We also have some visitors at the hostel on our first day.

The next spot we go to on the island is the High School.  This and more on the next post.

(Here's a quick video of what we see more than once a day walking around belize.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVRJwVm5f0M&list=UUzDPi8VhiibqV09rV5Y8MzQ&index=2&feature=plcp