Anyway, firstly the cook, Galina, who is apparently from Ukraine (we had no idea) doesn’t seem to understand that we are not Russian, and therefore when she suddenly launches at us with a jumble of words that are often colloquial, we have no clue what she’s talking about! And once she’s said it, and she can see we don’t understand, she just gives up attempting to explain, even when we ask her to speak more slowly. For example, a few days ago she said something, and gave up and asked one of the adults, Arina, to explain to us what she was saying. Arina didn’t use English, but spoke slowly, and when we didn’t understand a word, she found a way round it until we did. And it turned out all Galina wanted to tell us was that there is a washing line behind the White House and that we should put our washing there to dry. It was such a random thing to say that we would never have been able to guess what she meant!
Also, she said that I hadn’t diced some vegetables into small enough pieces, but since, on closer inspection, not only has she chopped half her thumb off, but also the tips of two of her fingers, I decided not to completely follow her idea of chopping.
However, she did cheer me up when I needed it by bringing one of the many kittens into the White House. He was very cute and very playful and a great distraction for an hour (although we later found out that he wasn’t the one she’d meant to bring in – she’d wanted the ‘more fluffy’ one instead, who is also a tortoise shell). Also, Katya had a word with her on our behalf and she is making much more of an effort now to help us understand her – she even checked if we knew the word ‘koshka’ (cat), before telling us that one of the cats was currently eating a watermelon.
We got told off by Katya for giving the kids a copy of the Top of the Pops magazine, as it included a picture of a half naked guy (which we didn’t realise as the magazine had been wrapped up, otherwise obviously we wouldn’t have given it to them), and she just wanted to remind us that they want to shield the kids from things like that here. However, it turned out that the half naked guy was actually Tom Daly in what is essentially his work clothes, since he is a diver…
We also got told off by one of the kids when she came into our English lesson with the 4th form. However, she came in just at the point when our two pupils were fighting over an English magazine. Before that, they’d both been doing really well in the shop role play we created, and had been speaking English. She told us that we shouldn’t be playing with them, and that they should be speaking English, so we had to explain to her what had happened. But even though we knew the lesson had gone well, she knocked our confidence a bit.
The reason that we had the 4th form for three double lessons was that an English guy called David Dean was staying in Orion for the week. He used to run a special school in the UK, and now spends his time visiting places like Orion and giving advice, so the adults had meetings with him everyday, meaning that Sasha couldn’t teach that class. The first lesson, we planned thoroughly, with games, a shop role play, and making friendship bracelets. However, when we arrived, Vika was already making a bracelet! Luckily, everything else took longer than we’d anticipated, so it was fine in the end. Sasha said it would be fine to just watch English films with them for the other two lessons, so we watched The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast (which I haven’t seen in forever!). We did start watching Mary Poppins, after they chose it, but they decided it was too boring so we changed it.
Because we had lots of visitors last week, Sunday and Monday were swapped around. Sunday is usually a rest day, but that wasn’t possible, so it led to quite a lot of confusion. We also had the kindergarten on Thursday, to cover for Tamara. It’s been a bit difficult with them recently, because what’s starts of as a bit of play fighting soon becomes a full blown fight, and usually culminates in at least one kid crying. The first time this happened, it was Nastiya, and I managed to calm her down by asking her what she wanted, which was a sweet. The next time, it was Sonya, and she was much less easy to pacify – she went back to her mum, Katya. I thought I’d done something really terrible, but later Katya said it was fine that Sonya had gone home, and that we should keep her informed about them. She also had a chat with the kindergarten about their behaviour, so we should hopefully see an improvement tomorrow! We babysat them last night whilst the adults were in a meeting, and they were okay then, so it should be fine. The main difficulty is that we don’t know the right words to stop them fighting, and even when we learnt the word for stop, they don’t listen. However, Katya told us some ways we can control their fighting, but I hope it doesn’t come to that again.
Today is Sunday, which is a much needed rest day. We had breakfast at Katya’s, a community meeting, followed by an hour of karate (yes I do karate now, it’s pretty fun! And good exercise..!), then a barbeque in the rain, then clearing up after, and then an amazing dinner of lots of blinis and condensed milk and this amazing jam that you eat with a teaspoon. Plus lots of tea. I read lots of articles that people had written about their stays here and in Kitezh, and they kept mentioning the amount of tea they’d drunk. One even said that they’d drunk more tea than they’d ever drunk in their entire life, which obviously coming from a British person sounds ridiculous, and I thought they were exaggerating, but they genuinely weren’t! Also, I love the variety of tea there is here, at home it would be PG Tips, or Tetley or something, whereas here, it’s either breakfast tea, or Earl Grey, or Redbush, or peppermint tea, or Sergei’s amazing Egyptian tea, etc etc. And I don’t even miss having milk with it.
One of the reasons for doing karate, other than the fact that it’s good fun and helps show the kids that we’re parts of the community, is that we are training to do a 5k run in Santa suits once we get back to the UK, through Greenwich Park, to raise money for Orion and Kitezh. We’ve also been running laps round the village.
We do have ups and downs here, but I never have a bad day – something bad might happen, but then something or someone will make the whole day much better again. I can’t believe we’ve been here for almost a whole month – I think the time’s been passing so quickly because we’re so busy, which is good.
Today Yura asked us what we liked most about Orion. We thought about it for a while, before finally answering with “all the kittens!!”, thereby firmly cementing our status here as the crazy cat ladies…..
But it is really hard to pinpoint the one thing that I like most about being here. I think that everything combined is what makes it good.
Also we are hopefully visiting Moscow next Monday, which is very exciting!
No comments:
Post a Comment