Visas, Preparation, and PIECES

I'm getting more and more excited about teaching in Nicaragua. I looked up whether I would need a visa today, and it seems that for 90 days or less is is unnecessary. :) This is good, because I didn't want to have to send my passport anywhere. Ah, the laziness of the busy college student. I looked at http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_985.html and it looks like I'll just have to purchase a tourist card when I get there.

I'm trying to look around for lesson plans, suggestions, and supplies to make a fun teaching atmosphere. One of the resources I was given by the Ometepe Bilingual School director is the PIECES blog at: http://www.thepieces.org/pieces-blog/
It is a blog posted by students from Switzerland who traveled to Nicaragua in February to teach, and I have been using it to get an idea of what works well in teaching the students, and what I should focus on as I prepare. According to the blog, there is at least one student interested in engineering, so hopefully I can come up with some good lesson plans that show how much fun engineering can be. :)

A staff member at Clarkson, David Bowen, has lent me a book on traveling in Nicaragua, and has offered some travel tips. He's traveled there in the past, and by our conversations I'm getting excited about meeting the people that live on the island.

Hopefully I'll have a decent amount of time to devote to preparing to teach, as I've been trying to both keep up with school work and prepare our electric snowmobile for its trip to Greenland. The semester is almost over, and that means I'm that much closer to Costa Rica and Nicaragua!