One of the reasons I came to Fuzine this summer was to help teach English. The Fuzine Community School of English turned out to be a great success. Brajna worked really hard on developing the curriculum and the students loved it. In the reviews they said they learned a lot, and that they can't wait until the next semester! There were more than 30 students in 3 classes. We had a low-intermediate and an upper-intermediate group that Brajna taught, and a beginning group that Tea taught. I got to help with all three groups, which was a great way to meet lots of people who live in Fuzine and the neighboring villages, and to see how different levels of students learn. Some of my favorite moments during FCSE were seeing the students enjoy using their new language skills, and spend time with each other during the special events we planned. Movie nights were a favorite. We even had one movie night where we showed a movie in English with no Croatian subtitles! We planned a picnic for one day and we were going to take everyone down by the lake, but it rained so we stayed at the house and played English games. It was so fun, and the students loved it! One other funny memory I have is of the low-intermediate group. There is a restaurant in Fuzine called Bitoraj - everyone who has been to Fuzine will know it, it's the yellow one right in the middle of "downtown." Well, the owner (also the current mayor of Fuzine) is remodeling and expanding it to be a four-star hotel, so the staff are on break until it's finished. So, he paid for all of his employees to take our classes, and the low-intermediate class was designed especially for them to learn vocabulary for the hotel/restaurant business. Brajna had made flash cards of different useful phrases. One of these cards read, "Here is the front desk, and this is Louise." Lousie continued to show up in their conversations, and I think that if they ever have a guest named Louise at Bitoraj, the staff is going to have a very hard time controlling their laughter!
Another fun thing I got to partake in was watching Eurovision. Apparently this song contest has been going on in Europe since the '50s, but the first time I heard about it was this year from my friend Crystal, who was living in Belgrade, Serbia, for the last year and a half. Crystal told me that Serbia's candidate was good, and it seems that Europe thought so, too, because she won! Which means that the final show next year will be held in Belgrade.
We had lots of rain in May, and some intense thunder and lightning storms. I actually enjoy them, as long as I don't have to be outside in them. A couple times, Brajna and I had to do errands in Rijeka, and got caught out in the rain.
One morning, after a big storm, we looked out our window, and found that the storm had damaged the tree outside our window. Poor tree.
