It's been a month...

Man, it’s been quite a week. After Hub day on Tuesday, I spent most of my time in class and preparing for my class on Fri. Around Wednesday some of my friends in my town got invited to a mansion to have a huge feast to celebrate breaking Ramadan . I was briefly upset that I didn’t get to go (it was a family affair), until I learned that they all had to eat sheep brains. Evidently one of my friends almost puked on the table when he found a piece of skull in his mouthful. Wish I could have seen it.
After a week of class, I was all prepared to deliver my 45 minute lesson to my class of sixth graders. I had made a lesson plan, including games and everything, when my teacher tells me (two minutes before class) that she had not gotten as far as planned and asked me to teach past tense to the class to my class who couldn’t understand anything I was saying. I pretty much freaked out and almost left class, but I got through it in what seemed like the longest 45 minutes of my life. I have never been so intimidated by a group of kids half my age. Luckily my technical training coordinator realized that I had gotten screwed over and didn’t hold it against me too much. That day was also a friend’s birthday so we took him out for a beer afterwards and I got to let off steam. It seems like everyone in PC has had a birthday this week and I thought why and realized it meant they were probably all conceived on Valentine’s Day (real original guys), but I can’t complain because it has been an excuse to have parties and eat a lot of cake. Saturday we celebrated another PC person’s birthday by going to his house and having jambalaya and it was amazing. It was the first spicy food I have had since being here and it pretty much burnt his host family’s tongues off. At his semi-party I got to try kumis which is fermented horse milk. It was carbonated from fermentation and tasted like bile. I almost puked in my cup (a-wink Athens folk). Kumis is the worst thing I’ve tasted since I’ve been here.
Today was my day off and I slept in until 9:30 and went to a nearby city to hang out with some friends for another birthday party (I wasn’t joking about the birthdays). It was so much fun. About 10 of us went to a café and hung out and I came home to a delicious assortment of fried food that my host mom had made. I’m talking the Russian equivalent of hash browns and doughnuts. There was also some amazing baursak and French toast-like stuff. Think salty French toast. Right as I was finishing dinner, my parents called and told me UGA had won. So it was the perfect day and will get me through the next week when I will teach Tues and Fri and will be visiting two colleges tomorrow to be an English guest. So, busy week, but I will hopefully get a package at some point with American goodies. Hope everything is well in America. I am listening to Why? and thinking of you.