Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Hmm, my holiday starts on Thursday.

Monday, April 21, 2003

I made it through the stint at work on Saturday. Over the course of six hours, five people came in to be tested, of whom I tested a grand total of one. Which took me five minutes.

Saturday, April 19, 2003

Have I mentioned the sudden and dramatic improvement in the weather? All the snow has melted, and it's getting up to about +15 in the day. Even at night it is only hovering around freezing.

This past winter in Russia was the most severe for a decade, according to the papers. As evidence of that, despite the recent sun, the riverboats are not running yet and the lakes are *still* frozen over. I wouldn't risk walking across them now, though Anthony said that the fishermen are still sitting out there on the ice, eskimo-stylee. Wonder if they ever catch anything in the Moscow waters?
My furby-loving 8 year-old brought a scooter to the lesson on Friday. I was quite tempted to mug him then sell it on at the Mitino dodgy goods market. But then, I thought, maybe he's carrying a blade.

Talking of 8 year-olds, the young learners workshop I mentioned earlier never happened. A good job really, as this week has been a bit mental. The only other full-time teacher at my centre, at least since the departure of Trevor the Canadian, has had to go back to the States for a couple of weeks because of a death in the family. It was all very sudden and sad.

As a result we are now seriously understaffed. Language Link have, however, quite helpfully been sending us some other random teachers to cover all the lessons that Anthony and I were unable to take on. My personal favourite random teacher is Ian the stereotypical northerner from Bridlington.

And Bridlington Ian had a great story to tell:

One of Ian's regular groups contains a very racist skinhead. After months of putting up with his small-mindedness and bigotry, Ian decided to take a little revenge. He told the student, quite innocently, that the verb 'to beat off' was a cool way to say 'to beat up'. Now the skinhead goes around telling anyone who understands, and I quote: "At weekends I like to go into the woods and beat off niggers." What a mental picture eh? Well, it made me laugh.
It's Saturday morning... and I'm at work! Yes! Our rota system has decreed that it is my turn to sit here in the central school at the weekend doing nothing. Someone has to be here in case any prospective students want to have their language level assessed.

I am 51 minutes into my six-hour stint so far and no-one has shown up. So this is thrilling. At least the internet is working, and there is one other teacher here with me. We also have a list of menial tasks to do, such as:
- clean the whiteboard
- put away the resource books
Er, actually, that's it. So we'll be hard-pushed to get it all done in time!

Tuesday, April 15, 2003

Briefly, went to a new church last Sunday. It was a New Frontiers International church - so like Bracknell Family Church, if you know it - in the far North East of Moscow, called Rosa. A bit of a trek from the metro but now the weather has suddenly and radically improved, it's not too much of a problem.

Someone from Bracknell Family Church came to preach here recently, which is how I found out about it, through a very pro-active friend.

Anyway, to help you get a picture. It's in a modern building with a large congregation. Russian language service. It even has an evening service which is quite handy... it might help my Russian improve anyway. The church seems quite active locally, and also friendly, so I think I will go here more often.
My knife-wielding 8 year-old has not yet brought any more weapons to the classroom, but we have had a singing furby, four laser-pens and something called a Bok-Rok. I'm not sure what it is or what it does, but we never had them when I was a kid.

Thursday, April 10, 2003

I have just been co-erced into attending a Language Link 'young learners' workshop next week... should be barrels of fun. Actually, speaking of young learners, one of mine brought a stanley knife to the lesson yesterday. It went something a little like this:

8 year-old Nikita: James! I have knife!
Me: That's nice, Nikita. (he often makes outlandish claims - 'I have elephant! I am pink panther!')
Nikita: Look! (brandishes knife above head)
Me: Aargh!
Other students: Let's play game...
Me: Give me the knife, Nikita... (Nikita waves knife in my direction) No, no, the other end... (I disarm small child)

So, another potentially life-and-death situation brought under control by the cool-headed, quick-witted English teacher that I am. Workshops? I shouldn't be attending them, I should be running them.

Tuesday, April 08, 2003

As I write this, it's snowing. I'm really fed up with snow now, especially as it's well above freezing and shouldn't be snowing at all, it being April and everything. I even unsealed the balcony yesterday in the hope that it would persuade the weather to buck up, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

Anyway. Went to Obninsk at the weekend, as a friend from last year, Eugene, had his birthday. In true Russian style it was celebrated round his flat where his parents prepared a three-course meal for twenty-five people. And I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen for the best part of a year, so that was really great.

Thursday, April 03, 2003

An interesting bit of war-related trivia. Chechnyan representatives (they don't have a government as such), have actually come out strongly in favour of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. They're probably the only Muslim state to have done so, at least so enthusiastically.

Why, you may ask... simple. The Russian government are 'anti' the war, so the Chechnyans are just being contrary to irritate them. This seems to be how they decide all their policies. It's pretty understandable.
Sorry I haven't posted for a long time, but the internet connection at our central school has been down and I couldn't be bothered to go to an internet cafe. Actually, central Moscow has the largest internet cafe in the whole of Europe, it's more like an internet warehouse. But I still couldn't be bothered.

So I only had myself to blame, then, when I was confronted today with the message: 'You have 28 new e-mails'. Pah. Lesson learnt.

Waeather still unpleasant here. We had a couple more hours of snow yesterday, and it's fairly windy as well. Incidentally, I have decided that the town of Mitino, where I teach some of the time, was actually a secret Soviet experiment to build the world's biggest wind tunnel. I can confidently report that the experiment was a success.