A typical day in Bahrain

A few of you asked what a typical day in Bahrain looks like for us. Mike posted his very entertaining response yesterday, while I typed up the entirety of my thoughts before publishing them - and now here they are. Here is a typical day for us (it's very long - if you make it through the whole thing, I applaud you...) -

- wake up around 5:10 a.m. (or 5:20, or 5:30 at the latest)

- keep on the lookout for cockroaches as we go into the kitchen to eat breakfast (we have had a bit of a cockroach problem here - we've probably seen about 25 of them in our kitchen over 6 weeks. They are not big (about an inch long), but are quite gross. We've had our place sprayed three times now, and (knock on wood) we haven't seen a cockroach since the last time the people sprayed - about a week ago. After spraying and disposing of any of the little guys, we usually eat breakfast very quickly (at least I do), so we are not the last ones on the bus.

- catch the bus to school around 6:15 (we ride the bus with a bunch of our colleagues - it is the transportation that's provided by our school). We would like to get a car soon, but are glad to have the bus for now.

- arrive at school at about 6:50 a.m. It takes a long time to get to school because of traffic - there are soooo many cars here, and poorly planned intersections. Also, our school is one of about 4 in the same area - including a university. The civil engineers who came up with that make me wonder...

- teach (in English, to Arabic-/English-speaking kids) 4-5 classes each day, from 7:10 a.m. until 2:10 p.m. The day goes quickly because we only have two 20-minute breaks, rather than a longer lunch break. The good thing is that we have two planning periods each day. We both teach very demanding courses that require several hours each day of planning/preparation/studying, so those planning periods are really helpful. The students that we teach are very nice, and very impulsive. They tend to say whatever they want, whenver they want, without really thinking about if that would be disruptive or not. They are extremely chatty. This can be a challenge to deal with - Mike and I are both working hard at getting them to raise their hands and to not blurt things out. They are learning, slowly but surely. The students are also very good at coming to class prepared, having homework done, etc., so that is really nice. They all bring their books, they all do the warmup problems, and I'll usually only have one or two kids a week who have an incomplete homework. They are very hard workers, and ask a lot of questions. They are energetic and fun. Also, their English is perfect, as they have been learning to read/write/speak in English from about 3 years of age. One of our jokes about them is that they do not use contractions, and they enunciate very clearly ("I would like to see number twen-tee"). We think that is fun.

- The bus picks us up from school around 3:30, and we usually get home by 4:00 p.m. Sometimes I stay late to try to get more work done, but other times I will take work home. Some evenings I spend 2-3 hours on math work, and Mike often spends time as well working on his curriculum. I have to do lots of math problems every night in order to stay ahead of the kids. Half of what I'm teaching is stuff that I haven't taught before, so I have to spend a lot of time recollecting what I learned in college (7 years ago!!), and then figuring out how to explain it well to high school students. Also, I get very nervous in front of the class when they ask me questions on their homeworks (for the higher level year 11 and year 12 students), so I try to do the homeworks on my own at night so that I can answer their questions the next day.

- Aside from working in the evenings, we often do some form of exercise. I am running about three days a week, and Mike plays a lot of afterschool sports with our colleauges (soccer is his favorite - they also play basketball and hockey, and sometimes cricket). It is very hot and is humid about every other day right now, so I have been trying to gain back my running endurance that I had when we moved. I am finally starting to get acclimated, and am now able to run farther/faster than when we got here. It is a nice feeling. More on running: Every Thursday afternoon, the Bahrain Road Runners club has a race (3K,5K,8K, so far). There are usually about 30-40 people there, and everybody is very nice. They all like Mike and me, and are always encouraging us. One guy, Hussain, tells me every week that we will keep getting better as we keep training in this climate, and as we keep training in general. He is super nice.

- Some nights we go to the Brit Club to work out in the gym there or to sit by the pool or swim. The Brit Club is a social/sport club where they have a couple of restaurants and a couple of bars/smoking rooms/soccer-watching rooms, as well as nice athletic facilities. Mike and I got memberships for the year. It is about a 10-minute walk from our flat, so that is nice. They have a very large, very nice pool outside, with lots of lounge chairs and people who will bring you food/drink, so that is really fun. I have only done the pool thing twice so far, but Mike has been several times - it is very relaxing. There is also a cute orange cat that wanders around the area, and sometimes sits in the lounge chairs. Mike and I have named him orangey. ...There are lots of cats here, and they are all homeless. We see them hanging out in and around garbage cans all the time, because that's how they eat. Some of them are very small and sickly-looking, so I get sad sometimes when we see them. I bought a little box of dried cat food, and sometimes take a baggie with me when we walk to the grocery store, so that I can feed some of them. They are wary of people, so I usually just dump some food by the garbage can and then hope that they come eat it later. I am attempting to "make friends" with the cat near the garbage cans closest to our flat, but it doesn't seem to be working very well.

- Another night activity, of course, is making dinner or ordering dinner. It's super cheap to order food, and everybody delivers - a huge dinner (with enough left-overs for lunch the next day) costs about $5-$11, depending on where we order from. So far, we have ordered more food than we've cooked. We are trying to cook more, though, and have made a few lovely meals. One notable meal was pasta with white sauce and parmesan cheese on top, with broccoli on the side. It was notable because white sauce is hard to find (there was only one kind at the store, and now there isn't any), and the canister of asiago/romano/parmesan cheese mix that we bought cost about 6-8 dollars, I think. It was a special treat, so we decided it was worth it. Food is actually not very hard to get here, depending on what you're looking for. The imported food can be expensive (Frosted Mini Wheats ($5-6 a box), Driscoll raspberries ($8 for about 20-30 berries in a tiny container), a block of Kraft cheddar cheese ($8-9)), but there are often local brands that are good prices. Bread is very inexpensive, and there are a lot of really good kinds to choose from. Some kinds of produce, like bananas and cucumbers and carrots, are also quite cheap. Most other things cost about the same as in the States.

- The other thing that I like to do in our free time is walk places. We live in a city, so there are a lot of cars and everything is always very busy. It's kind of nice just to get out and watch things/people go by. It is also very safe here, so going out after dark, even by myself, is never scary. It is a 10-minute walk to the grocery store or to the Starbucks next to the grocery store, and is only about 5 minutes farther to a string of shops and restaurants. Starbucks is a special treat (I think I have had it 4 times since we got here), because it is a bit more expensive than in the States (about $5 for a tall frappucino). It's funny, though, because when you go inside, you feel like you could be anywhere in the world. The decor/music/colors/smells are all just like Starbucks at home. It is nice sometimes to have something comfortable and familiar like that. (Wow, I am certainly part of a target market, I think).

- After doing any of the above evening activities, we usually go to bed about 10:30 p.m., after I check the bed for cockroaches, which really bugs Mike (no pun intended) :-)

And that is a typical day at the Kopp household in Bahrain. Pretty much what you would expect, right?