Gobabeb and Grinnell!! (weeks 3-4 of holiday)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone! Hope yours were splendid.

The end of my holiday was spent at the Gobabeb Research and Training Centre with lots of Grinnellians!!! It was really awesome (and really disconcerting) to see people from Grinnell again. I’m definitely preparing myself to be re-culture-shocked when I get back to site after spending so long with people from home.

The research station itself is right in between the gravel plains (desert. nothing but desert. sand and gravel and nothing.) and the dunes (reddish sand for as long as you can see), where the Kuiseb river divides them. Apparently the river is actually the reason for the divide, since dunes are constantly moving and shifting, but they can’t cross the river. So the gravel plains are left on the other side.

watching the sunset from the top of a dune by Gobabeb

From Gobabeb, we drove out (don’t worry, Dan or whoever is reading this, I didn’t do any of the driving) to a bunch of really cool sites! I’m going to mess up the names of all of them so I’m not even going to try, but there are a bunch of cool silt and rock formations from when the river came through. It’s so cool to see some of the rocks just come up out of nowhere in the middle of plains! We did a bunch of exploring, though, and it was really really awesome to get to hear the history/geology/science of some of the places with the Grinnell students. I miss science around here sometimes!

science!

Dad, this one's mostly for you.

It was also pretty great to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s with Noah and Anna and the class from Grinnell. Familiar faces, you know.

Now (the beginning of Jan) I'm back in Tses gearing up for the new school year. Teachers start on the 10th, learners on the 15th. I'm slowly seeing my learners trickle back into Tses from their various summer destinations - usually visiting the farm with families or working in town somewhere. A few of them made it out to the coast or somewhere as a vacation destination with their parents, but not many I don't think. 

I'm definitely looking forward to starting up a new year with my own classes, rather than taking over in the middle of the school year. We'll see how things go! As always, if anyone has any brilliant teaching advice (or really, any advice at all) I'd love to hear it. I'm sure classroom management and keeping the kids interested will continue to be pretty much my biggest struggle heading into this term. 

Anyway, that's all I got for now. Hope everyone everywhere had a wonderful winter/summer/Christmas/WHATEVER holiday, here's to a great 2013!