From 9/16

Wow, I guess it really has been four days or so since I wrote my last blog. I have been so busy lately, but no excuses. Just to put things in perspective, I am one of only two people able to keep a consistent blog based on site and internet availability. So we should all consider ourselves lucky I am even able to do this. I am spoiled here and in turn I am able to spoil you with blog entries. This will probably dwindle to one a week in a month and a half, and I may have found out some information about site… but I can’t bury the lead just yet.
Quick update on the weekend. Saturday about 20 of us went to the city to see a philharmonic orchestra and it was amazing. There was a cello soloist who was incredible and made me nostalgic for the day I played that sexy instrument. Before the show some of us walked around the main street and I bought a Goosebumps book in Russian (The Cuckoo Clock of Doom in case you were wondering which one) and my goal is to be able to read it by the end of PST. They bombard us with acronyms in case you haven’t noticed and PST means Pre-Service Training. Sadly I am only a trainee at this point, and won’t be a full-blown volunteer until early Nov. providing I survive all this work. After I bought the book I went to the American coffee shop again and got real coffee (people mostly drink instant here) and it was worth it even if it cost an entire day’s allowance (about three dollars).
I was so excited for Sunday because I got to sleep in until 9am and then woke up to talk to my friends online. I talked to Oli, Jeff, Kara, and Amanda for about 10-15 minutes before there was a power outage. I was so bummed, but I would have been even more bummed if I had known then that the power would remain off for 36 hours. It was wonderful to talk to everyone though, and maybe we can do it again sometime soon. I waited in the dark for about 4 hours until my friends from the neighboring city came up and we grabbed a couple of drinks. All in all the day was pretty resplendent, and these Sundays need to be to make the work of the week bearable. Monday I had little bit of a breakdown. I had a tough day in class and came home to no power and had to write a lesson plan for my class. I am still new at writing these things and it is hard to think of ways to teach/entertain kids for 45 minutes, especially when it is technically another teacher’s class and she is watching and judging all the time. There is usually a day a week where the loneliness/homesickness/workload seems overwhelming and I fantasize about calling up the director and catching a plane back home. It’s always just thinking it though, I am really too stubborn to call it quits and admit that a situation can get the best of me, it usually just helps to visualize coming home. However, it didn’t help that I cleaned my room to de-stress and found a nice turd pile that our cat Mike had left on my medical bag. His leg is completely fine now, and I guess he celebrated by adding a nice “accent” to my cluttered room. But it’s all over now, and I learned that these weeks I am going through “initial culture shock” in which I will be irritable and frustrated at times. Luckily I am on my way upward to “Initial adjustment” where I will feel accomplished and sort of at home. They love to give us terms too.
Today we had hub day and I got to see the PCT’s from the Organizational and Community Advancement Projects (OCAP for short, but I redubbed them O’CRAP… we all get a laugh out of that one, especially since it’s harder to nickname us TEFL kids). We never get to see those guys because they are far, far away and we have different training sessions. It was from 9-5:30 but it really flew by because I was around so many people. I have learned that you really just need to put me in a room with 20+ people and I will be so busy trying to crack jokes and talk to everyone that it won’t matter what you make me to do, I will be happy. I also had my interview for site and it is looking like I will be up north and may even be near my best friend here, AC.
This is all tentative of course, and not exactly top secret information, but it would basically be the best scenario I could think of for the next two years. AC’s family is from GA and he went to school in Cali, pre-med and we have become fast friends. I am assuming we will both be placed up north, so I am mentally preparing for the “Dirty Negative Thirty” as I have affectionately named it. I won’t get my hopes up until it is all official, but my fingers are indeed crossed.
That’s about all I’ve got for tonight, I want to thank whomever introduced me to Albert Hammond Jr.’s music and Alanis Morissette for getting pissed off again and releasing a great latest cd Flavors of Entanglement. Oh and on a humorous note, the Kazakh words for “sugar” and “grapes” and the Russian word for “sewing” are all dirty words in English. It makes conversation fun.
Drew