The start of the week

Here’s something interesting. Some of the shopping malls are staying open until midnight during the holiday season. It just shows you how well consumerism has taken hold in the former Soviet Union.
The seminar about teaching kids about the environment turned out to be very interesting yesterday. There were 16 participants. One of them was another American who had visited my school, but whom I didn’t meet because I was out sick that day. Another lady turned out to be the mother of a students in one of the other classes at our school. There was the usual “getting to know you” exercise and then lots of experiments and discussions. The people in the room were all German teachers in schools in Kazan. (Except the American. She teaches English at the university but understands German.) It turns out that concerns about recycling and hazardous waste separation were universal among the participants. Russian has passed a law which takes effect on Jan. 1, that says that hazardous waste must be properly disposed of. The problem is, they law doesn’t specify where or what agency is responsible for the waste. But anyone who doesn’t separate will face a huge fine. This sounds like the usual Russian bureaucracy. We had two coffee breaks and a nice lunch with all this. It was over promptly at 4, I hopped on the bus and was back home at 5.
Today I went to school and had a substitute assistant in the morning because the daughter of my usual assistant is home sick. And my afternoon assistant was at the doctor’s and came in late because she is sick. She will be out tomorrow. But all the kids were back. Oh, geez. It’s like starting over at zero with some of them. When they’ve been home for two weeks, they forgot the whole routine. Some of them were real little poop heads today.
This evening I went to my first bike club meeting here in Kazan. We met in the neat little clubhouse behind the bike repair shop. I understood almost  everything but just couldn’t respond. So I wrote down all my thoughts and will email them To the guy who speaks English. I also understood that I got nominated to work on the school bike program committee. Damir, another guy who speaks English, will be working with me. I wonder how much we can accomplish before next June!
Tomorrow’s anything evening seminar in German. This time it’s more on the order of urban planning and liveable cities. I’m up for that one.