random updates

a few quick thoughts/updates/predictions:

- I led a one hour career preparation workshop for 119 11th and 12th grade students this morning - needless to say that my project is now in full swing.  In addition to the fact that the  room I was given had an intended capacity of somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 (some students were standing, others were sitting on each other's laps, and the entire front row was within two feet of the front blackboard sitting on benches that were brought in for the occasion), it was also long and narrow with three relatively loud fans spread down the middle.  My voice is a little sore coming out of it, but a technique that I learned at City Year (hands up) definitely kept me from losing my voice altogether.  Overall it went very well, and I learned today that they want me to come up with a different career-themed presentation every Friday while I'm here.
- A slightly different kind of story...yesterday I sat in on a training session for Kolkata "teachers" (not fully trained, but still providing a much-needed service) that was being held at the Loreto School.  A lot of the strategies that were being taught involved teaching through songs and games, so I jumpd right in with everyone else - luckily it was being taught in English.  During the training, though, I saw a white lizard crawling along the ceiling above me.  I later asked the trainer about it, and he said not to worry because they were safe.  That made me feel better, and I told him I had been a little antsy because I knew that some lizards bite or were poisonous.  He then said something like "oh yeah, it's poisonous, but you still don't need to worry about it - we just keep them here to catch bugs".   For any Simpsons fans out there, it made me think of the episode where the lizard birds were celebrated because they ate the town's annoying pigeons, and all fears of what to do with the lizard birds, themselves, were brushed away by the suggestion to just get a bigger animal to eat them - I believe it was a mongoose, but I may be mistaken (I also believe Homer may have called it the "circle of life" or "nature's cycle" - regardless, good times...  Either way, I must admit that I'm just not a big fan of any poisonous reptile that crawls along the ceiling above my head, even if I "don't need to worry about them".
- Finally, if anything is going kill me here I'm convinced it will be an umbrella - it is no fun being tall in a city of largely shorter people now that it is raining pretty much every day (the monsoon has arrived).  If the umbrellas themselves don't get me, I think a bus might when I tilt my head into the street to avoid the umbrellas...either way, I just want the record to show that I called it if it actually happens...