Thank God I'm Already a Citizen

I love teaching ESL. I love teaching citizenship. And most of all, I love teaching my students. But teaching middle-age Chinese speakers about US citizenship in English is no easy task. English is hard!

Forget for the moment my embarrassment at trying to explain to my students (who are all a good twenty to thirty years older than me) what a prostitute is, what it means to solicit a prostitute, and the definition of a habitual drunkard. Let's focus instead on the funny things my students say when trying to learn English. Here are three of my favorites:

Q: What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
A: The Bill of Rice

Q: What are the two main political parties in the US?
A: The republican party and the demonic party

Q: What form of government does the US have?
A: A reproblem

I was lucky to have some of the best students around; Mr. Hahn, who wore awesome gold-rimmed glasses; Ms. Ho, who would giggle into her hand after answering a question and always tried to help the other students with hand signals; Ms. Chen, who answered every question half in Chinese and half in English; and Ms. Yeung, who passed her test and is now a US Citizen!

Success!

(Boy am I glad I don't have to learn English or be tested on the Constitution cause I might not pass!)

Sex on the beach...

...Sorta.

For Mother's Day weekend my mom and I decided to hike down to Stinson from Mt Tam and stay at a little B&B by the ocean. We left after school on Friday and made the 2 mile hike in good time. There was a little hiccup when we got to Stinson and couldn't find the B&B but after an hour of wandering the streets (and I use that term loosely) of Stinson we found it. And I'd just like to say that we wouldn't have wandered nearly so long if Stinson had proper street signs! You know, ones that actually mark a continuous street.

Anyhow, our B&B was great and the proprietor was awesome. He had a story for everything and everyone and would often says things along the lines of "Oh, no way, I knew a guy who looks just like you, he was arrested for embezzling 60 million from the bank he worked at and then ran off with his attorney who left her husband and they lived together on a boat in the amazon and had fourteen wild children and there was a monkey..."

On Saturday we grossly overestimated our hiking abilities. After a revolting breakfast of some sort of meat product and eggs we decided to hike to Audubon to see the birds. Now on the map Audubon is not that far from Stinson, at least by car. Even by foot it is only about 8 miles away.
But the first 2.2 miles are straight uphill and the last 2 miles are straight downhill. So on our hike, which we fondly dubbed the Hike from Hell, we vetoed the idea of walking to Audubon and decided instead to hike about a mile and a half on the Coastal Trail and then head back down to the beach via a fire road. So after walking straight up a cliff for about 2 hours we walked in the baking sun for another hour and found ourselves on a fire road that in places was not wide enough to walk side by side.

And that brings me to the title of this post, "Sex on the beach" or rather, sex in the forest. It was mid-afternoon, our knees hurt, we were hungry for something other than trail mix and apples, and our calves screamed from the effort of not slipping on the gravel and flying down the "fire road" on our behinds. My mom started doing something funny. She kept saying "look to your left, look, Kate over there, look on the left!" My mind was split between focusing on the trail and fantasizing about a swim in the ocean and I didn't see anything. When I asked her "what?" she didn't reply so I kept looking to my left, down the hill but I didn't see anything and she still wasn't answering me. I didn't know what was going on and in frustration said quite loudly, "Mom! What am I looking at?" And at that moment I saw them. Stretched out beneath a tree going at it like squirrels, or some other woodland creature. I tried not to laugh but honestly, as my mom said, "they weren't fifty feet off the trail!" Hmmm, not something you usually see or want to see on a hike with your mother...Happy Mother's Day Mom!

Jamaica Bay

Jamaica Bay Wildlife Center is in Queens near JFK airport so I thought it would be a nice break from the city but it was a little disappointing. It's a very small circuit around a small lake surrounded by the bay on three sides and a highway! on the other. Wherever you are on the track you can see the city and you can hear airplanes going past. But there were all kinds of birds out and I saw a few frogs so that was fun.

Nyack Hike

Here are some pictures from a hike I took with my friend Lisa in Nyack around February or March. These photos don't do justice to the beauty of Nyack or show how exciting it was to walk through the bare trees and spot a patch of fresh white snow on the ground!

I'm Baaack!

I made it back to beautiful San Anselmo in one piece! My flight arrived at noon yesterday and I spent the rest of the afternoon helping my mom teach her first graders about tidepools. We made all kinds of seaweed from construction paper, balloons and toilet paper rolls. After an hour with the kids I realized I do NOT have the energy to be a first grade teacher. I don't know how mom does it! Just the prep time alone is enough to wipe me out. Then again, I had just come off a 5.5 hour flight from NY with zero sleep...
I was so exhausted last night that I went to bed at 8:30pm. Kind of sad. But I woke up at 5:30 this morning to go running and this afternoon mom and I are heading out to west marin to go hiking for the weekend. Then I have five days until Laura's wedding. The next day is a family party and a couple days later I head to Europe! It’s so great to be back!