25 August 2011

So ... (all sentences in Ohio begin with ‘so’)... so the day began with an early breakfast and Bill Kline kindly fetched us from our hotel. We arrived at school fairly early to see various trees and branches blown down by the previous night’s storm – which we all slept through. It must have been a humdinger as the lights when out in a good portion of the student’s houses. As a result Nathan (who houses Joshua and who, it should be said, is late for everything anyway) was late, as was Joshua. It is also the birthday of Dylan and Victor. Apparently there is a surprise being planned for them by the Chagrin students, but we have not been let in on it. We shall find out tomorrow when we all travel to the Rock and Roll Hall of fame. I asked the Chagrin students if they could name any famous Rock and Rollers from Cleveland but they were a bit vague on this point. So it seems that the term Rock and Roll was coined in Cleveland but no Rock and Rollers actually come from here. The school day was fascinating. The Cornwall students mostly followed their partners around the school for a full school day. We bumped into them from time to time. At one stage I met Michael in passing and asked if his accent was scoring him any credit with the American girls. He said yes, but he was not acting upon it. I continue to wonder what this means, exactly.

Having learnt some rudimentary Arabic (Saba!) and the ‘SoapsTone’ method of analysing non-fictional literature, I bumped into our group outside, planning for tomorrow’s assembly. Samantha has taken this task in hand and they seem ready to show off our school a bit. A general consensus was that the school work is easy – Roxy was especially pleased with her ability to handle Maths and Science and the small SATS test that the class she attended wrote. The teachers then bunked the last class of the day and snuck into town for some Starbucks coffee. We walked back and saw a local mum (and kids) being pulled over by a patrol car, clearly for violating the code of the road – serious patrolman with Raybans, checks his on- board computer for previous violations, before he gets out and approaches the suspect with hand on holster. Lynette pointed out that in SA the crime finding laptop would have been stolen from his vehicle while he was speaking to the offender – given that it was still running, maybe the vehicle would have gone missing too!

Tomorrow we become experts on the history of Rock and Roll – watch this space.