ILA Summer School

So, its been a few weeks since I finished the Cabridge YL-extension and I'm back to work. As I said the course was very good and I'm able to put into practise what I learnt.  In a few weeks time my school will be starting its 'Summer School' which means extra classes for me over the next few months.

The 'Tiger' Team

To launch this event ILA held a staff 'launch day' at a sports centre close to the school, there must have been about 500 people in attendance. This is a very Vietnamese thing apparently, the start of the event involved chanting my schools name several times and watching some choreographed dancing with ILA flags, it was funny and reminded me a bit of the events we used to do at the Bank before the credit crunch minus the excessively expensive champagne, food and celebrities RBS used to bring along.



The winning team



There were a number raffles and competitions. The main competition was a team event. In the weeks running up to the event all our centres had to enter teams of 5 into this competition. There were a total of 23 teams (115 people) that took part in three events, the first was answering questions, the second was making a square with rope blindfolded and the third was putting up a tent blindfolded.



On stage (and TV) collecting our winnings



The great news is our team won the whole competition. We only missed out on the maximum of 240 points by 6! We won the tent putting up race (I guess scouts came in handy!) and answered all the questions correctly. We won a big hamper and brought glory to my centre.

With our prize

It was very hot day and the sports hall had no air conditioning as you can imagine it was a very sweaty day.

One other piece of news is that since I've started this blog I've had a number of emails from people asking me about teaching English and living in Vietnam. I received one a year or so ago from a woman who I gave some advice. Today I met her! She is living in HCMC and working at ILA. It turns out I've been going to Vietnamese lessons with her for the past month or so. I'm not sure if the chat with me influenced her decision in an way but its quite a nice thing to happen.

There are some more photos below of our team at the ILA Summer School launch day.

Team 4 looking happy after winning the tent race

Messin' around and putting the tent down