Blogs from Siberia, Russia, Europe - page 48

Hahaha. Right. Not that I want to mock the sentiment. Generally, I think believing in something, striving towards a goal, and being open-hearted are good things. But when these ideas come in the form of company mantras, I find them significantly more difficult to swallow. February 16th and 17th, there was an Amway conference in Barnaul. My boss and her daughter both sell Amway products and are very involved with the company, and so they organized a bus trip to Barnaul to attend the conference, and I was able to tag along to explore Barnaul a bit. I will add here that generally Amway business tends to disrupt our classes because people come in and talk and look at catalogs or samples while we are having a lesson. As such, I am not a big fan ... read more

I must say that The addition of school age children dramatically improves my general opinion of Valentine's Day. The kids were very excited to get and give valentines, and it's the most fun I've had on on Valentine's Day in a long time. I am no longer have a humbug attitude towards this holiday. The pictures here are an assortment of things that happened at our Valentine's Day party. The party was at the 3 Oranges Cafe, and we had German, English, and Russian presentations. One of my groups sang "For the Longest Time," and several different students from various classes read poems or performed scenes from plays (Othello, Pride and Predjudice). A different class of mine was supposed to sing "The Rose," but we were running short on time and so they chickened out. We ... read more

…because I’m still sneezing out dust covered boogers. This weekend (Feb 2nd and 3rd) I went on an expedition to an ice cave in the mountains around Chemal with a club of extreme tourists. Prior to the expedition, I learned (only two days, less than 3 hours really) how to use climbing equipment, mostly in Russian. The trek was 8 km up a mountain to Кульдюкская Пещера, Kol’dioskaya Cave. Kol’diokskaya literally means “ice cave” in the Altai language. I am in the Altai region of Russia, but Russians were not the first people to live here. There are ancient remains and a prehistoric tribe of people who used to (and perhaps still do because I think there are people who still speak the language) live in these mountains. Certain caves have cave drawings similar to the ... read more

January 31, 2008 10,000 Miles !!!!! We are in a small town on the northern edge of Lake Baikal. With a depth of 5,371 ft. it is the deepest freshwater lake in the world, and it is frozen solid. Not quite solid enough the locals say to get across it by jeep to a set of hot springs on the other side but if we stayed a few more weeks it would be - maybe next time. Lake Baikal is not only the deepest freshwater lake in the world but also the largest, holding about 20% of the world’s total supply of freshwater! It is very cold here - 28 below at night here, Celsius (that’s about -19 Fahrenheit). Of course in the sun during the day it warms up to a balmy 8-10 below Celsius. ... read more

So what have I learned so far? I am without inspiration at this current moment. It is a sunny but cold Sunday. We had rice porridge and jam filled pirozhki (yum) for lunch. I’ve read 50 pages of Harry Potter in Russian, and while my reading speed and general comprehension of Russian has dramatically improved since I got here, I don’t feel that I am making as much progress with my speech. The problem is probably that I need to spend more time preparing things to say so that I use the correct verbs/tenses/grammatical constructions instead of using Anglicized Russian. Yesterday’s English club lesson was probably the best one I’ve had so far. We started by playing Bibbity Bibbity Bop, an old Comedy Sportz game I learned in high school. Then we corrected the homework, talked ... read more