Traveloteacher

Travelers don’t teach, teachers don’t travel, right? No, absolutely not! Take this blog's name, for instance. Traveloteacher. I invented it because I wanted to write not only about my own travels, but also about school exchanges and projects I organize with my students. But, to be honest, my blog has always been more about traveling, and much less about teaching. Then suddenly and for a reason as silly as following Ashton Kutcher, Twitter became a site I couldn't do without, although not before I got to know some amazing people from the ELT world, most of whom write brilliant edublogs and who have all contributed to my professional development as a teacher. I've been teaching for 23 years, and although I've been trying really hard to use new technologies for almost 13 years, I'm still a newbie, a digital immigrant in the e-world. Some of these blogs that I've been following ever since, are a real eye-opener, and have made me contemplate the idea about starting m...

Here are the reasons why we, a decent, law abiding family of four, decided to sleep at Dublin Airport. The first Lufthansa flight from Dublin was scheduled very early in the morning, with the check in starting at 5. This meant we had to get up at 4. The four of us exceeded the capacity of the rooms in most of the hotels in the airport area (children stop being children at the age of twelve in European hotels!) so we were supposed to book two rooms at a price that definitely exceeded the money we were willing to spend for such a short stay. There might be other people sleeping at the airport so we won't be standing out. If we get arrested, we'll sheepishly apologise and promise not to do that ever again, after which they might let us go find a room, well, two rooms in the nearest hotel. But it turned out to be an awesome experience, which we shared with people of all ages from different parts of the world. We ended up at a Starbucks on the third floor, where there are large armc...

This is my 100th post so I'm going to write about my fave destination, the Croatian Adriatic. It's definitely the hottest destination this and every summer for different reasons . This is our little house. I absolutely adore the palms and the pink oleanders. Let the photos speak of the beauty of my favourite sea:

Here are some photos we took in Dublin .

Dia duit! The weather on our trip was unbelievably good for April. Every single day it was sunny with occasional showers. That is, until we arrived in Dublin. Actually the first evening was fine, but the rain that started in the morning didn't stop for three days and it was cold and windy and grey all the time. The city itself is bigger than I imagined, or read about it. It is compact and easily walkable, but not when it's raining incessantly. What impressed me most was the striking Memorial to the Great Irish Famine, a poignant testament to one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Ireland. The Trinity College Library is also very impressive with its rare books and manuscript collections. It brought to mind my visit to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where there is an equally beautiful, although much smaller library, where we were made to put some huge slippers on our shoes. As a sensible shopaholic ( can these two words even go together?) I can't but mention Grafton Street...

Yes, it's a beer, and a very good one, indeed. But it's also a charming medieval city, and although I spent only a couple of hours there, I think it's the nicest city in Ireland. It's small, it's walkable, with beautiful well-preserved buildings and a splendid castle overlooking the River Nore. The streets, called slips, are narrow, which, come to think of it, reminds me of little towns on the Adriatic coast and its islands. Butter Slip, one of the smallest in the city, is named after the butter stalls that lined this alley. Kilkenny was named after a 6th century monk St Canice. Kil or kill means church in Irish. For those interested in learning Irish , Dia duit means hello.

At first we thought we can easily squeeze both in our tight itinerary, especially since the Lakes are part of the Ring of Kerry, and then drive to Cork, see the sights and on to Waterford for the night. It turned out that such a schedule was absolutely impossible, so we put the Ring on our next time list. The Ring is about 200 km long, and one day is hardly enough to see its amazing beauty. The upper part, the Lakes of Killarney, is also part of the Killarney National Park. Its most famous spots are the Muckross House and the Abbey, The Torc Waterfall and the Ladies View, or to be sincere, these were the ones we saw. Now if I had to decide which of these was the most beautiful, I'd say it's the Muckross House with its lush gardens. The coolest, though, was at the Ladies View, because it was there of all the places we visited in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, that we saw this world-famous leprechaun signpost . Speaking of leprechauns, you know what you should never do ...