Photos #21 May 31, 2010

It’s really hard to choose just one photo out of a folder of nearly 300.  I have now hit Italy.  In February 2007 a classmate and I took advantage of cheap European airfares and flew to Venice for a long weekend for Carnivale.  And because Venice is relatively close to the moutains, we took advantage and spent a couple days in the Dolomites and a couple days in Venice proper.  I’m choosing two photos from each location – my favorite one from each place that captures the beauty and my favorites that capture equally the culture and the ridiculousness we had in it.

It was on that trip that my winter-hating self discovered that snow can actually be enjoyable given the right conditions.

The beautiful:

And the “beautiful”:

This is not actually a picture of my friend. Check out the ladies in their fur.

We definitely were not in Italy for the men.

Daaaaang!

On Friday I was sitting at my back table with a student working on his autobiography.  He had filled in a questionnaire and now needed to rewrite his answers as sentences.  I read the question, “How old are you?”  He said, “Eight.”  I asked him how he would say that in a complete sentence.  He had no clue.  To model it to him, I said, “Okay, you ask me.”  So he asked, “How old are you?”  I said, “I am 32.  How old are you?” At this point, I noticed other students nearby perking up their ears because up until then no one had ever asked me how old I was.  One student who was passing by said, “Daaaaang, Ms. Hubers!”  I said, “Whaaaaat, C.?”  He replied, shaking his head, “You OOOOOld!”

Photo #20 May 22, 2010

It snowed in Brighton one night when I lived there.  I knew there were chances of sleet, but the light in my room was strangely bright when I woke up in the morning.  I was up early enough to catch the entire city blanketed in white, so I snuck out of the house right away to wander around the city and along the beach taking pictures.  (It’s a funny thing to see snowmen on a beach.)

I have some great snow pictures, but my favorite photo in the folder has nothing to do with snow.  In fact, I’m not sure what it does have to do with!  It was a sign I saw posted on a door of an apartment I was walking past one day.

Oh My Goodness! May 21, 2010

After school today my partner teacher asked me if I say, “Oh my goodness,” a lot.  She was grading stories her kids had written about if a dinosaur came to visit the school.  She teaches a bilingual class, so all the writing was in Spanish.  One of her kids wrote:  ‘If a dinosaur came to school, Ms. Hubers would scream, “Oh my goodness, Dios mio!” and faint.’  It was all in Spanish, except for the “oh my goodness” part.  I was also drawn with a big flower in my hair.

I do, in fact, say, “Oh my goodness”, a lot!

Photo #19 May 19, 2010

In January 2007 I had an interview at Oasis for my job in Mozambique.  I took the train up for the meeting but then spent the rest of the day wandering around.  It’s one of those things that I normally enjoy doing on my own but felt a bit odd that day with the events of Christmas break still fresh, the reality that I had indeed made the decision to pursue Africa instead of return to Houston to settle down, and the brand new possibility of going to a country I knew nothing about.  Plus it was a gloomy day.  But I did what I normally enjoy doing in London:  wandering a new market, walking along the river, sight-seeing, and people-watching.

This photo is unfortunately not very well-taken, but it’s my favorite because of the couple in it.  They were walking along very slowly holding hands, doing their shopping, oblivious of the crowds.  I was sitting on a curb eating something, watching everyone rush around, mostly young people.  Then I noticed this couple, and they were just so sweet, the wife taking care of her husband.  I wanted to know their story.  I simultaneously felt really happy and really sad.  Really happy to know that couples like that do exist, even in the hustle and bustle of a major city.  And I wanted whatever they had.  That’s also the part that made me kind of sad.  Also sad to know that what they had probably wouldn’t last very much longer.

Photo #18 May 18, 2010

Whenever I start feeling nostalgic about England, I need to remember the weather.  It is truly cold and rainy all the time.  And I even lived in one of the sunniest places.  I will say the one benefit to the gloom was that there was often not much else to do than study.

Because it was England, I have an entire folder titled “Rain”.

Photo #17 May 13, 2010

Christmas in Chicago.  The month of winter holidays that was meant to be split three weeks in Houston and one week in Chicago, which traumatically ended up being switched around one week in Houston and three weeks in Chicago.  What surprises me about this picture is how happy I look when it definitely wasn’t a happy holiday.  But the good friends that they are, Zach and Renee came to see me, which made it happy.

I do remember that evening being particularly fun as my whole family and Z&R walked up and down Michigan Avenue, window shopping, people watching, and eventually finding ourselves around a table enjoying Chicago-style pizza and later around another table enjoying a plateful of decadent chocolates.