WEEKEND !!!!!!

I love weekends.
This has been a very relaxing one so far.
I would give anything for it not to end.
...except for my hair.
The reason I say hair is because I had a nightmare that one of my "precious and angelic" 1st graders cut my hair off when I let them use scissors in a craft lesson.  I now will never let them even look at scissors, and I'm considering purchasing straight jackets.

One of the non-English speaking 2nd grade teachers that I work with gave me this chocolate bar after I taught a lesson. I was happy because Mr. security guard who has been supplying me with apples, has been MIA with my produce lately. Someone has to feed me! But in all seriousness, that was very sweet of her and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I feel like I need to start shelling out the treats to my co-workers too! Suggestions on what to share....? Halloween candy? Candy corn? Something American? Turkey and stuffing? Hamburgers and hotdogs? Red solo cups? A Fourth of July cook out?  I don't know, I don't know! 

I discovered a food that I like here. Russians eat it when they drink tea or coffee. Basically, I think it is compacted sunflower seeds...and sugar. It looks like this:

Friday night I went to Gorky Park with some fellow English teachers to see a laser light show. (Gorky Park is named after a soviet writer; Maxim Gorky.) Here are some photos (photo credit goes to my friend, Jamie, whose camera is cooler than mine.)

As soon as we got there...it began to rain. I forgot an umbrella.

After the show on the way home, Jamie and I stopped at a street Turkish food stand.  We tried to get kabobs...but ended up accidentally ordering some sort of wrap. It was delicious! Since I have been in Russia, I never know the nutrition facts of what I am eating...well because...they are in Russian!  Though I knew that there was a huge chance that the man working at the Turkish stand did not speak English, I decided to inquire about the sodium, calories and carbohydrates in this wrap he was creating. My jibberish questions just made him laugh at me...especially since I was soaking wet and looked like this:

Yesterday (Saturday)...besides grocery shopping, researching flights home for Christmas, booking a hostel in St. Petersburg, creating a budget, eating that sunflower stuff with tea, and Skyping with my family...I literally did nothing. It was beautiful.
Toilet paper is weird in Russia. Most of it in the grocery store is scented.  I found it difficult finding the unscented TP yesterday (labels in Russian...remember?) I wonder what passer-bys were thinking when they saw me trying to smell all the toilet paper.  I had to use my best judgement by looking at the pictures on the TP packages.  Most had pictures of flowers, strawberries, butterflies, etc. I steered clear of those ones...as obviously they would have those scents. I came upon this pack of TP.....

....and I thought "This HAS to be unscented. What in the world would a squirrel smell like?" After contemplating for a ridiculously long time of 15 minutes in the TP aisle...I took the gamble and bought the above TP. When I got home and opened the pack, I learned that apparently squirrels smell like pine.
Trial and ERROR.

  I will start private tutoring a 6 year old boy this evening. According to his mom, he knows very little English. For my lesson with him today, we will create paper people puppets. As we create/color them, we will have an oh so very interesting conversation about the colors we are using, then once our paper people are complete...they will have a deep conversation that will go something like this:

puppet 1 (me): Hello!
puppet 2 (child): Hello!
1: How are you?
2: I am fine, thank you. How are you?
1: I am fine!

 We'll probably repeat this dialogue about a million times in different silly voices...until its stuck in the kids head. Then I'll read a simple book about colors. I will see how this goes!

-Gina

Legos

   On Wednesday morning, I put on a pair of pants that I wore the previous week, and found this in my pocket:

   I do not remember exactly when I confiscated this toy from a 1st grader during a lesson, but I'm not sure what in the world to do with it now...or who it belongs too! Maybe mystery child should've thought twice before he decided it'd be entirely appropriate to play lego starwars while we were discovering what sound the letter "h"makes. (If you've ever worked with young children...you understand that collecting toys throughout the day can be a regular thing).  Last thing I want to do is announce during a lesson in what is jibberish to my 1st graders "Hey little angels, whose toy is this!?" Something as small as that would cause mad chaos with my 1st graders. You know how in America if you would ask that to a group of 6/7 year olds they would ALL be spouting out responses at once and claiming it to be their own? Same thing would happen here...only all in Russian, more physical fighting, and would end with children in tears...tattling to me..not in English. So I think I've decided that if my 1st graders are good this week (.....?..) I'll just slip this lego man on a bench or something during playtime. By the way...children fighting each other seems way more acceptable here than in the states, and makes me feel completely uncomfortable and sad. Being that the children do not listen when I say "Stop" (and in Russian, the word for stop...is stop...so I know they understand)...on a daily basis I am physically prying 1st grade children off of each other before someone gets hurt. They may just be "playing"...but I do not like it, and even a "play" fight can lead to a real fight.

    I am not joking when I tell you how challenging and difficult my 1st graders are. Some of the English teachers who have been here longer, have told me that it takes the kids time to warm up and listen better to their English teacher (especially the little ones with minimal knowledge of English). And I am (very) slowly seeing progress.  When I walk them through the hallway, I'm lucky if I can get them to be mostly quiet without fighting each other for literally 1 second. I often feel like I am leading a zoo parade  throughout the school. I found what sometimes works is if I act like we are tiptoeing and on some sort of secret mission..the kids will copy in the hallway (for like 30 seconds). On Friday, I had two little girls viciously fighting each other over who got to hold my hand in the hallway. Maybe there are still scratch marks on my poor little arm/hand. I ended up just prying my arm free and holding it high in the air out of harms way..as the girls then tried jumping to grab it. It's every 1st grade teacher for themselves out there.  I've never experienced this kind of behavior before.  I swear, after I make it through this year with the 1st graders, I can make it ANYWHERE. Mr. Sinatra had it wrong. I'll be superwoman.

    With that said...my 2nd and 3rd graders are a totally different story! For the most part, they try hard, know more English, listen, are pleasant, and are a lot of fun to teach!  

    My 2nd graders are learning about the difference between a public place, and a home. I created small houses out of old boxes and colored paper, and had the kids use clay to furnish the house:

Here is a before:

  

Here is an after:

I think they did a great job! I mean, it looks better in person...but these kids are very creative, and I enjoy that so much! They surprise me! I particularity like the ladder and fireman's pole just to the left. I want to live in this house.  

Here is an after with some sweet students (you can see the fireman's pole better):

...before they started the furnishing, I asked them to tell me names of rooms in a house. The girl who is pointing in the back said "Swimming room!" It seems I forgot to build that one into this house...

Here is a photo of the house furnished by my other group of 2nd graders:

I enjoy the lighting fixtures...and the "cheese couch". Yes, it has been officially named by it's child builder as the "cheese couch". Can you find what I am talking about? 

You can't really tell...but one little rascal decided to put a toilet in the study. I let it happen because it was funny, and they obviously knew a toilet did not belong in the study (they were just being silly children).  It is the purple clump of clay in the right corner upstairs...and yes, it is facing a television. What a convenient study room. 

     The word for glue in Russian sounds something like "clay". So I told the 2nd grade Russian teacher days before this lesson that I will need "clay"...and I meant actual clay.  When I arrived for this lesson...she handed me a box of glue sticks. WIN. 

    In 3rd grade I had my students create family trees. We used real twigs...they were pretty excited about that. Here is my model I made as an example for the kids:

     Some Russian teachers I work with saw the photos of me with Cecile...and said things like "Wow, she look a copy you!" They think we look like twins. 

      I like the weekends here, because I feel like I'm a tourist on vacation.  Friday night I went to a Japanese restaurant. I do not really like sushi, so I ordered a dish just based on what the picture of it looked like.  I like surprises. It was mostly in Russian, so I don't remember what it was called..but my risk was worth it! The dish tasted good. 

    While venturing with a few others afterwards...we ran into the Bolshoi Theatre. It is so pretty at night! 

   Yesterday (Saturday) I went to the Moscow State History Museum in Red Square. It was interesting...it had artifacts from the paleolithic times...up until I think the 1800s. Almost more interesting than all of the artifacts were the beautifully decorated rooms holding all of these artifacts. While wandering around, I liked to pretend that one day my house will look like this:

Right in the middle here, I'd put a huge red velvet chair. That is where I would sit and sip afternoon cocktails. 

 This would be the room where I'd plan cruises around the world on old sailboats.

This would be my wardrobe room.

 In this room, I'd take out the glass boxes and use it to host champagne parties.

OK. That's enough daydreaming....

After the museum, we wandered through the Alexander Gardens:

The Alexander Gardens lie west of the Kremlin wall, and were laid out in the 1820s in the time of Alexander I. 

     Just before this photo was taken I think I was almost attacked by a pack of pirates. One was holding a snake, and I was startled when I saw it and accidentally exclaimed loudly "Oh my God...A SNAKE!" That accidentally got their attention. Next thing I knew, I was totally surrounded by all these huge pirates with a plethora of reptiles...trying to make me hold them! I was overwhelmed, and not a fan of snakes/iguanas/other creepy slimy creatures. I found a gap in the circle of pirates and escaped quickly. Phew. I'm actually not sure if they were pirates, but they were very creepy "Pirates of the Caribbean"-esque. I'm talking gold teeth, no teeth, dreadlocks, dirty, smelly, glass eyes, peg legs, ending everything with "arrrrrrrrrr" (ok, maybe not exactly the last 3...but you get it.)

   Hmmmm..what else happened this week..? OH, I sliced my finger while cutting an onion. I won't go into much more detail because I know some of you (like my sister) have weak stomachs. It was bad..but I still have my finger. This also happened on the hand that my piranha-like 1st graders were fighting over. Made the experience all the more traumatizing. 

   I'm getting really good at lighting my stove with a match, and pickles here are really good. 

-Gina  

красный площадь

...sounds like "khrass-nee blosh-odd" (I think..).  This means "Red Square".  There is a whole lot of history in Red Square...I certainly do not know all of it! But I will share things that I have learned that I found interesting! Here are some photos of my day at Red Square on Saturday:

This is what you see as you approach Red Square, you enter under the two pointy tower things on the left. This building is a museum of Russian history.  

This is the Lenin Mausoleum, in front of the Kremlin wall.  Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 1900s, which started communism after the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family (Anastasia's dad). So they have Lenin's body embalmed in there, and the public can walk through to see it.  It looked closed yesterday, but one day (as creepy as it may be) I want to walk through.  I hear the rules are super strict for viewing Lenin...no pictures, laughing, talking, breathing, etc. 

  

This is St. Basil's Cathedral.  Ivan the Terrible ordered it to be built in the 1500s after his victory over the Mongol khans at Kazan on October 1, 1552.  Rumor has it that the two architects hired to build this thing, were made blind afterwards because Ivan didn't want them to build anything as beautiful again. I suppose a simple contract of agreement would not suffice.

Here are some photos of the inside of St. Basil's:

Pictures do not really do it justice.  I was very intrigued, and probably could've spent a couple more hours wandering around this building. Some rooms were really dark, some were really bright with lots windows, some had super high ceilings with beautiful chandeliers...there just was a lot to look at. 

I'm not the best videographer, but took this video:

The echoing hymns really made me feel like I time traveled (ok.. until I ran into a middle-aged couple inside who were both wearing Penn State hoodies. I can't tell you how exciting it is to run into English speakers...let alone from my home state!)

Here are more photos of Red Square during the day:

...and the area around Red Square:

This is inside of a mall nearby called GUM. It's expensive, and used to be for the Soviet elite and privileged foreigners. 

This is the Bolshoi Theatre. I feel like this theatre has been through a lot in its day. It has been caught on fire a couple times, one being during a French invasion in 1812.  The Bolshoi was closed from 2005-October of last year for restorations.  I can't wait to see a show here sometime!

After exploring for a while, I went to an Irish pub with a couple friends for a dinner break...until it was dark enough outside for nighttime views of Red Square:

And a video:

Here is a view of the Moscow River (I myself am a fan of this photo):

And this is just some fountain we found and sat in front of on our way back to the metro :)