The weekend

Someone came to my door this evening to explain where I should go to vote in the coming election. Nope, I wouldn’t get away with that here! The weekend was busy again. Saturday Sonia and I walked to the subway station and went down to the tourist bureau. We have a 3-day weekend coming up.at first we wanted to go out of town, but the place we wanted to go was a 9-hour train ride and I didn’t want to fly again. So it didn’t make sense for a long weekend. So we decided to take a bus excursion out to a monastery on an island in the Volga River. We booked that for Sunday morning. Saturday we will probably visit the two museums we still have to see on our multi-museum ticket. And Friday we might go ice skating at the promenade down by the river. So there won’t be a lot of traveling stress. I got back home in time for a Skype call to Germany and then the bosses took me out to dinner at a really great Indian restaurant. The decor was fabulous and the food was good and spicy. Actually, they are trying to convince me to renew my contract for another year. On the one hand, i would like a break from 8-hour work days; on the other hand, these kids are making so much progress, I’d like to see how they develop before they enter kindergarten. I’m thinking it over. Yesterday morning, I met Adil for breakfast. Adil was born here in Kazan but the family moved to Denmark when she was very young. Her English is impeccable. She still has lots of relatives here so she is trying to acclimatize herself to Tatarstan again. If she can find a job, she would like to stay. She’s found a part time position teaching English to little kids. I suggested she check out our school. After breakfast I ran over to the mall and bought a bunch of Hot Wheels cars for the kids. We are talking about comparisons now, so they are perfect to compare to the bigger cars we have in class. Plus, I built a parking garage out of (What else?) toilet paper rolls. The he kids played with it and the cars all afternoon and my TA was going to help them paint it when I left. But back to Sunday. Afterwards I met Anna and we walked to the orangerie and the zoo. The orangerie was in some crumbling old buildings but the plants were nice, and a pleasant contrast to the snow outside. The zoo was very depressing. It was like something out of the 50s. The cages were small and the animals just didn’t have any room. I don’t want to go there again. Later we ate at a great Chinese place. I. Finding restaurants that serve spicy foods. Hooray. Tomorrow I’m head d for the bank again with the boss. I filled out forms to transfer money back to my American account at the end of January and it still hasn’t happened. This is getting annoying. But the boss volunteered to come along and give them hell. And since he’s got more influence and better Russian skills than I do, I’m going to let him.