Odgar & Hare

Today has been as changeable as the weather: it's rained, snowed, hailed, been incredibly windy and been bright and sunny.

Both Vicky and I woke up in bad moods, partially due to the rain. At breakfast I felt unseasonably homesick and gloomy, despite a very encouraging conversation yesterday to the effect of 'keep your chin up, you'll be home and with your friends in a month'. Part of what keeps me going is knowing that quitting would mean binning my entire degree, and that is not appealing in the slightest seeing as I've worked so hard to get here.

Things didn't improve when Galya had a go at Vicky for not mopping and sweeping the kitchen last night - the bane of our lives isn't aware that as volunteers who don't know how to do all of the kitchen duties, when we're on evening duty we only do the washing up (which takes an hour). We're always paired with another adult who does the sweeping and mopping and putting away the food, which is really nice as it's lonely and creepy in the kitchen at night. Vicky left after doing the washing up, fairly assuming the guy on duty with her would be along later to finish off. Turned out he hadn't showed up, and Vicky got blamed for the results. Because I am a coward, I conveyed this last sentence loudly in Russian to nobody in particular in order to put Galya to right. She heard, and then claimed she hadn't been telling Vicky off, while still moaning about it all. Yeah right. She slammed the door in our faces while we were discussing Shakespeare, then she told us to shut up while cleaning the tables because Vicky and I were having an amusing conversation, which made me want to cut off her remaining fingers and feed them to her, disguised in a disgusting cabbage-filled pilaf.

We had to set 6th form an end-of-module test today, which felt mean but is mainly to help us - we need to know what to go over and where the gaps in their knowledge lie. Shockingly enough, it seems they didn't know the present tense of the verb 'to be' before we arrived! 5th form also had a test, but we did it as whole class rather than a sit-down-be-quiet thing as we know that's asking a but much of 4 rowdy 11-year-olds. Also worryingly, they didn't know how to spell 'one' :S.

After lunch we peeled potatoes (Galya told us she'd do it herself, but we insisted as Arina had asked us to. Don't want to give G any more fuel to her fire, as we can imagine her calling us lazy and unhelpful if we'd accepted her offer). Once we were done with potato mountain we had a spontaneous dance party to Call Me Maybe which was playing on the kitchen radio (because we can
, and because everyone already thinks we're crazy), then we cleaned Sergey's house, which is always alright because we get to listen to the awesome rock radio station. It was even more pleasant this time as Han, another volunteer (think he's from Vietnam) had made us special delicious sweet instant cappuccino stuff. He's really nice - we totally owe him for spontaneously doing our breakfast washing up duty the other day while we were at a lesson. He nearly did the same today but the dreaded G prevented him from doing us such a generous and pleasant favour.


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On balance though, the past few days have been great:
- we've had decent lessons, although I still get nervous when I realise I'm just a student and have only a 140-hour TEFL certificate and no previous classroom experience before Orion.
- we got to make soap on Wednesday! Seriously, soap-making is really great fun - we made a 'friendship soap' by everyone mixing up colours and glitter with soap and chucking it all in one container (me and Vicky muffed it and added smell when we shouldn't have, so the whole batch stinks of peach and biscuits). Then we made our own individual soaps - I made a 'coffee cake' by mixing cappuccino and biscuit scents in a brown, bronze and gold-glittery soap, and a beautiful fruity rose with layers of red strawberry, yellow peach and green watermelon. Afterwards there was gold glitter everywhere!
- On Wednesday night we had another two-person-party for being here 8 weeks out of our 12 and a bit. Today it is officially a month until we come home on the 26th, which should also warrant partying but tomorrow is a work day, so we'll have another party tomorrow. Vicky is amazingly good at the 50 Shades of Grey drinking game, and really got into the spirit of enhancing the characters with silly accents - chavvy Anastasia Steele has to be heard to be believed.
- I've got quite into Anna Karenina now, though I'm only 23% of the way through. It's like reading a really tawdry soap opera where everyone's in love with someone who isn't their spouse.
- Yesterday we got pizza for dinner. 'Nuff said.

Toodle pip old beans!