Anemia, Grammar Exams, and Things that go Thump in the Night

Урррраааааа!!!!!!!!! Hoooorrraaaayyyy! OFFICIALLY DONE WITH THE INTERN TRAINING!!!
    This is a cause for great rejoicing for many reasons, not the least of which is that I can finally update this blog! The past couple of weeks have been really intense. The week before last our schedule had not really changed - still the usual in-class-all-day-teach-til-late-at-night-spend-every-spare-moment-lesson-planning, but keeping up the pace seemed to be getting a lot harder. At the beginning of the week I decided I must be coming down with a slight cold - after about the first hour of classes I would start getting a bit of a headache, and I just didn't seem to have any energy or motivation. As the week progressed, the headaches started to get worse, as did my inertia. Then on Thursday I almost fainted when I stood up too quickly. That set alarm bells off - I wouldn't faint from a common cold! And suddenly I realized that I hadn't eaten almost any meat or eggs since I arrived in Russia four weeks before...Yep, you guessed it (if you didn't already cheat and see the title) I had anemia. I went home that night and made pelmeni (little dumpling-like things with meat inside them) and immediately started to feel better. It's amazing how such a little change in your diet can make such a big difference in how you feel. Anyway, I don't plan to be that stupid again. I surfed the internet and went grocery shopping the next day and filled my fridge with beets, eggs, and meat.
     Speaking of beets - I successfully made borscht! I got the recipe off the internet if you want to try it the recipe is here, except I changed it a bit - I cooked the meat and onions together and added soy sauce and red pepper to the spices, but I think it tastes good, and my flatmate tasted it and testified that it even tastes like real borscht! The recipe said to use three beets to make ten servings, so I wisely one-thirded the recipe and used only one beet, but still somehow ended up with about six servings...don't ask me how that math works out; I think I'm cursed to only be able to cook too much of everything... Anyway, here's a picture of it, because I'm proud that it worked...actually, on second thought I'm not going to post a picture because I just looked at the two pictures I took and they both make it look gross. So you'll just have to take my word for it.
     Of course, now I'm getting out of order...I made the borscht this past Thursday night, when I should have been studying for my grammar exam...that means I missed telling you about last weekend. Lena invited us over to her house for a blini party on Sunday. We spent a good eight hours eating, playing cards, and even drinking a bit of champagne...it was great fun. AND we managed to fit six people into Lena's tiny kitchen - quite an accomplishment and quite amusing! I was in charge of pouring the tea, which involved twisting around backwards one way to reach the tea kettle and the other way to reach the samovar - it was a good way to stretch out.
     It was also a great way to relax before the last week of the ITP, which was even more intense since we had a comprehensive grammar and phonetics exam on Friday. And it didn't only cover phonetics, it covered the differences between American and British phonetics, complete with rhotic rs, different pronunciations and stresses...don't even get me started. Someone had the bright idea of giving us the exam and having us teach on the same Friday, and of course that was the day I decided to come down with a nasty cold and that was the day only three people decided to show up for what I'd planned as an eight-person class...needless to say, I'm glad Friday is over. But the good news is, I passed the ITP and the grammar exam and now I'm officially going to start teaching! I'm also really excited because I get to teach kids - nine-year-olds, eleven-year-olds, and a group of young teens. Of course, given my flatmates' experiences teaching kids maybe I shouldn't be so excited... Laura actually had one very rich young girl offer her 600 rubles, then 20,000 dollars, then a villa in Italy in order to be excused from class early (!!!), and she's had problems with kids throwing wet paper towels around the classroom and hitting each other with chairs. Of course, in all my naivete I'd like to think my kids won't be that bad, but honestly I have no idea. I could always bring a bullwhip to class, though...and at the very least I'll bring all the experience I've gained from bossing my siblings around throughout the years! The other bit of good news is that all of those classes fall only on Wednesday and Friday from 3 in the afternoon until 8:45 in the evening, which leaves me with a lot of free time during the week and especially during the morning to dance. Hopefully by next week I'll be taking some classes to get back in shape before I start trying for companies. I can't wait to be dancing again.
     I didn't do much of interest this weekend - I felt pretty rotten all day Saturday, and today it was all I could do to get to church. That in itself was pretty neat, though - it was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the cathedral, so there were a total of 42 priests and a cardinal there to celebrate the Mass today. Of course, it was more confusing than usual - instead of only being in Russian, half of the Mass was in Latin, and the half that was in Russian was hard to understand because the cardinal was from Slovakia and had a heavy accent. But it was still really cool! Since I have tomorrow off, I will probably go and see some stuff then...maybe I'll take a stroll through the city center and go see the Bolshoi Theatre - I'm so lucky that it is re-opening this year after being under construction for so long!
     Okay, I know this is a long blog, but I want to write about the last bit of my title - "Things that go Thump in the Night." As you probably know from my previous blogging, I live in a flat on the third floor of a large apartment block. Well, the walls are quite thin, which means that I have to get used to a whole range of different noises from what I'm used to. Back in NC, we have creaky floors and walls from our old house settling, especially when the weather changes. And I'm used to hearing my brother-whom-I-will-not-name-here-to-save-his-dignity snoring REALLY loudly. And I'm used to tuning out my other brothers' really loud alarm clock and our dogs whimpering because they think they should be fed at 3:00 in the morning. That makes it sound like our house is really loud at night...but actually, it's quite quiet.
     Well, here it is a whole different story. Not that the streets are filled with carousing revellers all night, and we don't have any night-clubs below the apartments, which is quite fortunate, but there is quite a range of sounds I've had to get used to. For instance, a couple of weeks ago I was asleep with the window open, and some lady decided to have an extremely loud phone conversation on the street below...at 5 in the morning. I don't know who Masha is, but she must have gotten an earful, because the lady was yelling at her for a good half-hour. Then there are the neighbors above us, who decided to have a party last weekend with a karaoke machine. I know it was karaoke because the music for some song would begin playing quite loudly in one key, and then the karaoke-er would start singing, also quite loudly, but in some key that was not even on speaking terms with the first key. This was all happening at about 12:00 midnight, of course. The first couple of weeks, when I was home alone late at night because Laura was still teaching in the ITP, I was almost scared out of my wits because people knocking/unlocking the neighbors' door sounded like someone unlocking our door, and I swear that the air freshener machine in the bathroom makes a sound like a large man sneezing - leading me to believe that there was someone in the apartment with me! And then I think our neighbor upstairs has a habit of dropping ball bearings on the floor late at night, and maybe playing basketball...anyway, it's late, and I need to turn in, so I'd better put an end to this blog. Plus at this point it's so long it's not even easy to read! I'm sorry not to have any really relevant pictures for this one - but here's one of Lena and Ilya and I skating at the ice rink, and one of another rainbow outside our apartment! :) :) :)
Say a prayer for me that my first real classes will go well this week!!!

 Lena, Ilya, and me - proof that I can actually remain vertical on ice, at least long enough to take a picture!

It's hard to see, but I'm posting it anyway because rainbows make me happy :)

Lesson Planning and Unintentional Lasagna

     Well, I guess you can get an idea of how intense last week must have been since I'm not writing about it until three days into the next one! I had my first real class last week (and as I write have also had my second, third, and fourth, and will teach my fifth tomorrow), and I really enjoyed it. It is so cool to be able to see people learning and to have a part in helping them to learn. But it's also (and experienced teachers of all sorts here have room to laugh at me) extremely exhausting! I get an adrenaline high that carries me through the class, but about an hour after it is over I have a dramatic crash, and any chance at reasonable thought pretty much flies out the window. Of course, I think this stems in part from the fact that we interns attend our own training classes all day from 11 to 4:30, and then we teach from 7 until 9:20 in the evening. We are not allowed/ do not have time to go home in between, so we are pretty much stuck at the school all day. On days like that, I really have to say that the highlight of my day is the teaching, despite the fact that it is so late at night - it's the one time of day that I feel like I'm doing something real, something that really affects other people. But like I said, after teaching a class until 9:20 and then riding home on the metro for an hour, my brain is totally fried. This can lead to some rather amusing cooking incidents, since I don't usually eat much of a dinner until I get home at night. I know it's not really healthy to eat that late at night, but there is no microwave at the school, and cheese sandwiches and apples will only get you so far! So anyway, I stumbled into the apartment Friday night after a full day of classes and teaching with the firm intention of making veggie stir fry. I hadn't had a dish with a lot of vegetables for a couple of days and my body was feeling the lack. Somehow, I ended up making lasagna instead. I still don't know how this happened. I think I went to open the fridge, and I saw a block of cheese sitting there and thought, "Oh, cheese. I need to use that up before it gets moldy." Which somehow translated to, "I need to use that up right now" which somehow translated to "lasagna." It wasn't until I was sitting at the kitchen table in a daze watching the lasagna cook that I realized that a) That wasn't stir fry that I'd just made and b) by the time the lasagna finished baking it was going to be 11:30 and I really didn't want anything to eat after all. It took me about four days to finish it off, since I still haven't learned how to cook for just one person. But I finally made stir fry the other night, and it turned out really yummy, if I do say so myself!
     Last week was also worth mentioning because we got a new flatmate. At first, Laura and I were upset because we heard we were going to get a guy, and of course we immediately imagined the loudest, biggest, beeriest guy you can imagine, one who would stumble in at all hours of the night and party all the time...you get the picture. However, we seem to have gotten lucky, as our actual flatmate is quiet, friendly, and doesn't seem to be a big partier. He does fill the kitchen with tea leaves (I guess it's a British thing to drink loose tea?), but that's better than filling the kitchen with girls from the pub. So I think I've definitely scored lucky twice in the flatmate lottery - and thank goodness we have no more rooms to fill, so that should be our flatmate limit! (knock wood!)

 

my church - how cool is that?!

     Oh, and he's also Catholic, so it was nice to have company on the hour-long metro ride to church on Sunday. This is my second time to go, and I actually understood a lot more this time - but I really do need to get a book and learn the proper responses in Russian! It is quite beautiful, with lots of singing and a real choir with an organ - very traditional and with very good sermons so far (insofar as I can understand them!).

 garden outside the church

     The weather was quite rainy and cool this past weekend, but Lena and Ilya and I did make it out to the largest ice skating rink in all of Europe (and possibly the world?). It was huge, about the size of a football field, and we had so much fun! Of course, yours truly had not skated in seven years, so I took two tentative glides out onto the ice and fell flat on my rear (graceful ballerina that I am!). But in the course of the next two hours, I only had two more spills and even learned how to skate backwards (slowly, but with steady speed nonetheless). I think this is pretty good for only the third time in my life ice skating (thank you for being so patient Lena!!!). Anyway, we had a blast, and it was nice to do something that had nothing to do with teaching, lesson planning, or being taught. And I've even had time to do some drawing the past couple of weeks, which has been enjoyable. Only one and a half weeks of intern training to go!!!

"Willow Catkins on a Windowsill" :)

First Week of Training - Check!

     Yay! Made it through the first week of intern training! It has been intense and intensely boring by turns - there are only two of us in our training session (while the first session had thirty-two people), and coincidentally the other girl is also named Hannah. So the two Hannahs have been having a rough time of it, since they really can't fob off answering questions to someone else in class, since there isn't anyone else in class (that's the intense part), but they're also having trouble staying awake because the grammar review is quite basic (can you give me a past perfect continuous verb? I'm sure you can. But can you tell me why you used it where you did? - and English professors reading this blog don't count!- :) so that's the intensely boring part). But I have my first real class this Monday, so I'm excited about that.
     Last Sunday my flatmate Laura and I went out with some friends to see some of the city. One of them is a native of Moscow, so she showed us all the sights at Red Square, and then we all went to the Zamoskvoreche district for lunch and spent the rest of the day in the beautiful Kolomenskoye Park, sitting in an apple orchard playing cards. It was a great, relaxing way to spend the day. Red Square is quite impressive - it was neat seeing in person all those buildings I'm used to seeing in pictures. They were setting up an outdoor stadium in the middle of Red Square for a military display the next day, and as we walked past we could hear a huge choir practicing. It sounded like recorded music because it was so loud and grand, but then you'd hear it stop and the repetiteur would say over the mike, "Ok, this part one more time: la, la, laaaa," and they'd be off again. I think I enjoyed Zamoskvereche and Kolomenskoe better though - I like quiet places and green places better than the middle of the city.

                                          the inside of GUM - why can't our malls look like this???

 

   I didn't have much time during the week because our intern training lasts a good bit of the day, and there's an hour commute by metro to get to the central school, but this Saturday I made it to the large forest-park next to Mitino. It was pretty, though wet and cool, and I enjoyed wandering around through the trees for an hour or so. It was neat at first, because although it was raining up above the trees, I didn't feel it. It was romantic to walk through all that quiet green space and feel the cool rush of air from the rain and hear it pattering on the leaves above you but still stay quite dry. Eventually, though, the leaves got wet through and started dripping generously on the path beneath, and at that point I opted for my rather unromantic umbrella! I saw a birch grove at one point, and the trees are beautiful; I can see why so much of Russian poetry and music speaks of birch trees.

 

     I also came home and saw a rainbow, and that was a wonderful end to my day. Rainbows always make me so happy - they're such reminders that God's watching out for me and everybody.
     I know that this is a rambling blog, and I apologize - I'm a bit tired, but I'm teaching all day tomorrow so I know if I don't write now I'll get swept up in the week and will have to do two week's worth of writing next week! Hopefully the pictures make up for it!

Wish me luck on my teaching this Monday! :)