Nicole's Adventures

My trip to the US went by sooo quickly! I was sad to be away from Joel (and MEL) for the first three weeks but the time really flew and both of us were so busy it went by in a blink! I flew home on December 6th. For the first time in my flying history... or that I can remember the airline lost my bag! My flight from Porto to Madrid landed late and my 2 hour connection turned into a 40 minute connection. This would have been okay if I didn't have to cross the world in that time. I was running to make it through. I was one of the last passengers to board my Madrid-Chicago flight. When I arrived in Chicago I was going to have to recheck my bag after clearing customs.. So I already knew in Chicago that it didn't make it. I definitely suffered from a bit of jet lag and kept waking up in the early mornings, which was okay when I decided to teach a few classes during my break and not lose all my kiddos. When I taught classes at home it was usually from 5am to 7am.. however I did ha...

OOPS! It has been sooo long since I have posted, and there are lots of very exciting things to catch up on! October was a really exciting month. We unexpectedly... well maybe not unexpectedly but many many months earlier than planned rescued a sweet puppy. Well actually sweet might be a little bit of a lie, she is sweet filled with wild on the side. Mel, which means honey in Portuguese and short for Melbourne for  us was found tied up outside of a grocery store in Lisbon by a friend of Joel's co worker. They searched a week for an owner and were just about to take her to the shelter when Joel and I agreed to adopt her on a Monday. We anxiously waited until Saturday to head to Lisbon and pick her up. We really had no idea how big she was going to be, because we only had photos to go by but nothing in the photos besides her to scale. We didn't know if the collar we bought would fit, etc. They weren't sure of the breed, but for sure large amounts of Black Labrador. The fa...

Hey Guys, I thought I would just create a little blog post here for some of my friends thinking about VIPkid and how it all works. VIPKid is a company based out of the US and China which teaches one on one English classes to students in China. It is a huge company with more than 20,000 teachers and over 200,000 students and continually growing! I am paid with direct deposit through my US bank account monthly. Your base wage is determined in your initial interview. I believe the base pays range from $7-9 USD per class. In addition to that, if you are on time to every class you teach during the month, you get an extra dollar per class. Then another $1 per class if you teach more than 45 classes a month! A class lasts for 25 minutes. If a class is booked within 24 hours, you get an extra $2 on top of all the others. If a student who is enrolled in the program doesn't show up you still get your full pay. If the student is a trial, or someone just seeing what VIPkid is like, you ear...