Anyway, annoyingly I got ill again last week (this time with a fever and possibly tonsillitis…), and Lois was also ill, so we didn’t leave our room for three days (though we still did ironing!). On the Tuesday and Wednesday before this, we had the 4th form for two lessons. On the Wednesday, they refused to have a lesson and wanted games instead; luckily we had flashcards with the vocab they were learning, so we could play a matching game, which was actually educational as well. We then played ‘krokodil’ (charades), which was hilarious, since they decided to act out Lois, and made me act as Katya. And also led to us being told off for being too loud by Yura.. oops…!
When we’d sort of recovered, on Saturday, there were lots of visitors from a Moscow school, which meant that there wasn’t much to do. I went to Masha and Anton’s house to do some ironing, and Lois did the same at Katya’s house. At first it was pretty dull ironing. Tamara was there looking after little Sasha, and she told me to put on slippers to protect my feet, so, predictably, I managed to drop the iron power cord onto my toe, the only part of my foot not covered by slipper… After a while, some of the visitors came and started talking to me. One asked me questions, and then took photos of me. While I was ironing. I have no explanation for this, and I am slightly worried about what exactly she’s planning to do with those photos… The other woman, when she found out I was English, switched to English and spoke to me about how nice it was to be in Orion. Apparently it was the first time they’d visited, and they’d had to really convince the parents of the school children to allow them to visit, as they were really suspicious about Orion. I’m not really sure why, but perhaps they didn’t understand this village and what it does? She also said that because of this suspicion, a lot of the parents wouldn’t let their kids visit, which pushed the price of the coach up to much higher than what it should have been. After I finished ironing, Tamara made me some tea, which was lovely, and I got talking to a girl, Nellie, who was visiting from Kitezh. The man, Andrew, who teaches English in Kitezh must be amazing because her English was fluent, and didn’t even have a Russian accent or anything. She was very interesting; it turns out that she’s the dancing teacher in Kitezh – she knows ballet, ballroom, and belly dancing (she could teach us!) After that, I was rewarded with more of these sweets that Han had brought from Vietnam. They are jelly-like, and come in different flavours, and it also turns out that they are illegal in the UK and the US due to people choking on them and dying…! Woops! But they taste really nice. I also had some fruit, which was good, as fresh fruit is not always available in the village.
The illegal sweets…
We’ve been doing a lot of puzzles lately, starting at 500 pieces and graduating to 1000 pieces. After we completed this, we thought we’d be able to tackle the 2000 piece one. We may have been mistaken. It’s even too large for our kitchen table…! We worked on it whilst sharing our new strange drinks, orange and grapefruit beer, which is pretty good, although kind of strong!
After Katya saw the results of our craft workshops with the older kids, she asked us to do one with the kindergarten. I was a little apprehensive, after our previous experiences with them, but it actually went reasonably well, and it was only an hour, so that was okay.
As part of the healthy week they’ve been having, the kids all had to make presentations on different health topics, and we watched a few more today. It always surprises me how confident almost all of them are at speaking, even when surrounded by people asking loads of questions all at once! Plus it’s good listening practice for us!
Today we had a lesson with the first form, which went well. We made flashcards of the vocab we’ve been learning, and played the match game with them, which took a while for them to pick up – we were surprised that they didn’t know how to play!
We are planning a potential further drinking evening on Sunday, being the day before we leave. Lois has accepted my dare to kiss the ground once we land in the UK (in just 6 days!!), so I’ll be ready with a camera to make sure she does!
This will probably be my last post from Orion, as there are only 6 days left, but I will update once I get home with a post about our final days here, and with a whole load of photos!
Thanks for reading!
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