In the last few days, I’ve been thinking about some of the many amazing meals P and I have managed to whip up since arriving in Saigon.
I could just be a navel-gazer and say we had it in us all along, but. I’ve never been a navel-gazer after all, have I.. that title is reserved for my wonderful friend Bharti.
And here’s a wonderful moment for an aside. You see, I received an email from this wonderful navel-gazing friend of mine today. A one-liner – not to express her how much she misses me, but to ask whether I was pissed with her over something. Read More →
I love the Story telling game to revise past tense with my little kids. It’s also a great way to practice speaking.
FOR KIDS: Divide your class into small groups of 3-4. The smaller the group, the more speaking practice the kids get. Have the kids sit in a circle. Give each group a line to start with. For e.g. – There was a little boy/chicken/monkey. The first person in the group must come up with a sentence in the past tense to continue the story. And so on..
Monitor all the groups to make sure all the kids are using the past tense form of the verbs. I’ve used this with my pre-intermediate 8-10 year olds who are in the process of learning past tense.
To give them a little impetus, you can do a board race with past tense verbs on the board so students don’t run out of verbs to use. Read More →
I’ve never been a fruity person. He he.. Well, in some ways yeah.. but never been an active member of the fruit-lovers’ clique. I turned my nose up at the pitiful squishy oranges that came in the ration, and the blackened bananas. Mangoes were too fibrous, except the bihari malda, apples too tart, pomegranates too seedy (literally). 
Vietnam, however, has brought a major overhaul in the way I perceive fruits. I see sidewalk vendors sitting on low stools behind their beautiful piles of gleaming fruits and I have this urge to buy all and eat all right there. Large, firm oranges, glossy apples, giant pomelos, and the dragon of all fruits – the dragon fruit. Read More →
I have no idea why I didn’t think of this earlier, and why, in my incessant trolling of the world wide web, I didn’t find a recipe for this kinda avocado omelet. Serious to goodness, this has to be the only decent way of eating omelettes, hell, eating eggs.
This is how you do it.
For one omelet, for one healthy person, with a healthy appetite:
Take a large, ripe avocado. It has to be squishy and mushy, not tender green. Scoop it out and mash it with a fork or whatever you may have at hand. If you scrub your hands well enough, you’re allowed to get messy 
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This is such a simple game, and can evoke some very imaginative ideas if you have some motivated students.
Take a flashcard to class. It could have any picture on it, but I prefer something with a scene, not a single object. The last time I took a picture of a blue lake surrounded by mountains and a small yellow fish jumping out of the lake.
Show your SS a half-second glimpse of the picture. Elicit what they saw and let them discuss and debate. Obviously, different SS will end up seeing different things. Flash the picture again, this time for a little longer, perhaps a second. This would give them a lot more to talk about. Read More →
I’m very obsessed with eggplant, very.
There was a time when I used to scrunch up my nose at the mere mention of baingan, or eggplant. Perhaps it was just that I had grown up on a weekly diet of awful baingan sabzi (which had healthy amounts of heeng, that I used to hate) and aloo baingan bhujiya, which was mildly tolerable. i never enjoyed baingan in any form until I met Pratik, or more accurately went to his Bilaspur home.
Now, I don’t know whether it’s true for all Bengali homes (would be too much of an essentialization if it were), but Pratik’s Bilaspur home is full of some very awesome Bengali cooks. Whether it’s his kaku, kaki, peeshi, or jethu,jethima – they’re all magicians once they enter the kitchen. It’s amazing how many spectacular dishes they turn out at meal times. That is not to say all the food is healthy. In fact, some of it is very deep fried. But oh my gawd, is it yummy! Read More →
Here’s an excellent ESL icebreaker game that I always go back to on the first day of a new class.
Preteach Language -
1. What’s your name?
2. When’s your birthday?
Round 1 -
Have all SS stand in a semi-circle in the classroom. On the floor, write down January 1 at one end of the semi-circle, and December 31 at the other end. Now, ask SS to rearrange their circles based on their birthdays. SS will have to ask the same question many times, and there will be a lot of discussion about who stands where. Read More →
I know a post is overdue but Phu Quoc is too close to my heart to be written about at the moment.
Here are the pictures though.. hundreds of them. Just for the sake of a memory and a date entry.
http://picasaweb.google.com/Pulkit.Vasudha/PhuQuoc
This is a fantastic warmer to revise vocabulary with ESL students. Divide the class into teams of no more than 3-4 people each. In this game, only one person in every team is active at any point of time, so if the teams are big, the other students tend to get bored and/or distracted.
In my classes of 12-18 students, I divide them into groups of 3-4. Bring as many chairs as there are teams to the middle of the classroom, and arrange them in a circle.
One student from every team comes to the middle and sits in their chair. Read More →
I had two days off.. believe it or not.. it was my first two days off in a row since I started working at ILA. So we took off to Vung Tau, a small seaside town about 125 km from Saigon.
We’d heard the hydrofoil was the romantic way to head to Vung Tau, so we headed to the riverside early Thursday morning, hoping to catch the next hydrofoil.. apparently they run every hour. Well, our xe om drivers dropped us off at Greenlines Hydrofoil kiosk and we found out that one boat had just left and the next one would leave two hours from now, i.e. around 12.30. We guessed there would be other hydrofoil companies along the riverside, but the heat and humidity of Saigon does not really support adventure. We bought two tix for 12.30 and headed into downtown (along the river).
The Saigon downtown is huge.. it spans at least 2-3 square kms. There are an endless number of shops, restaurants, souvenir stores, salons and street-sellers. P and I have been to downtown several times since January, when we moved to Saigon, but we still found a few new streets to explore in the two hours we had. Read More →
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