My school is changing over to the international baccalaureate program and so we teachers are being sent to training courses. Some to Peru, some to Chile but because of my limited Spanish, I was sent to a course in the US Rocky Mountains.
After flying out of Mexico City at an ungodly hour of the morning, customs at Houston was an interesting experience. The agent had tattoos all over his arms and barked short commands without looking up from my papers: ‘right index finger’, ‘left index finger’, ‘photo’. On the form you need to give a US address and I had written ‘Las Vegas, New Mexico’. When he read this, the agent gave me a frighteningly blank stare, one that made me think he'd spent time shooting children in Iraq, and informed me that Las Vegas is in Nevada. Feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck, I wrote down an imaginary new destination and he let me go. He did not say “Welcome to America”.
But after that it was all plain sailing. Flight Houston to Albuquerque, bus Albuquerque to Las Vegas. Something like 12 hours in transit.
The training course was held in the grounds of a late 19th century gentleman’s folly: a more or less genuine castle that has been used as a school for the last 20 years as part of the United World Colleges network, an outreach program for disadvantaged international students on scholarships. The Afghani students must have had a hell of a time at Houston airport.
We studied from 8.30AM to 3PM every day and had the afternoons to do whatever we liked. The organizers took us to a winery one day, an utterly forgettable and very hot bus trip that took more than an hour each way. Another day we had the option of going to Santa Fe but I stayed on campus to write some reports for school. For me, the highlights of the trip were a solo jog around the beautiful mountains followed by a soak in a hot springs. The hot springs were next to a cold river so I dunked myself alternately in hot and cold until I started to get all dizzy and had to stop.
On Thursday afternoon some of the people from my course took me for a drive to see a wildlife sanctuary and during this trip I took the photo ‘storm over plains’: attached to this story. I spent another afternoon laughing my head off with a mob of people trying to find a way up the castle’s towers. We never did find the way but got some good pictures of stairwells trying.
After dinner there was an open bar overlooking the football pitch which somehow didn’t gel with the fact that classes started at 8:30AM. Most mornings I was late, shabby and grumpy. But then, that goes for most mornings regardless.
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