More monastery pictures

 The first picture is still in the Temple of All Religions. The other two are at the monastery.

The day trip

The Temple of All Religions, Sviarsk Monastery, Innopolis.

Karen and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day (Sorry, Judith Viorst.)

I have twins my class. They are young, spoiled, have personnel coming out the wazoo, and don’t belong in my class. They’ll show up one week (ugh) and not the next ( hooray). Neither knows how to behave, but the boy kicks, hits, screams and spits when he doesn’t get his own way. Not the other kids, but the staff. He is rotten. It took two of us to get his snowsuit on yesterday after he had removed it once after we dressed him and he screamed for an entire hour afterwards. My complaints to the kid’s nannies and the administration have no effect (because the parents are “important” people). The kid did the same thing again today. But today the psychologist came to observe his behavior. He doesn’t need a shrink, he needs a swift kick in the ass. I’m just waiting for him to break my glasses or crack my head open with a chair. He doesn’t need playthings. He needs a straight jacket. When the mother came to pick the kids up, she didn’t even bother to introduce herself, I had to go to her. I had never seen her before because the nannies always bring the kids. She spoke some English so I told her he had had a bad day. And what did she do? She tweaked his little nose. I felt like giving her a few good tweaks. This is the child from hell. I hope I can get rid of him soon.
At least the day ended well yesterday. I went back to university for a lecture about sustainably and urban planning. I gathered some new information. Today I went to the post office to mail a birthday card and pick up a package. The package was a nice surprise.
Tomorrow night, Elizabeth, Claudia, Sabine, Ravil and maybe Paul and Jake and I are going to head out to that bar down the street for those great chicken wings. Saturday I’ll be doing a road trip with Claudia and Sabine. Sabine has to fly back to Germany soon so Claudia wants to show her a few things. It will be interesting to travel in a car again! Sunday Paul, Anna and I want to see if the history exhibit is open. But this time we’ll call first!
Oh sweet Jesus, tomorrow is Friday!

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.

Ken Burns’ Prohibition

I’ve started watching Ken Burns’ series Prohibition on Netflix. I only mention this now because I ended up at the vodka museum today!  Paul and I had originally planned to go back to the Russian history exhibit to catch things that we had overlooked before. Paul bailed because he wasn’t feeling well so I headed out to catch the bus and meet Anna there. I get there first and the guard tells me that the building containing the first half of the exhibit which is, of course, the half we want to see, is closed for a week. Oh crap, what to do? I waited for Anna and when she arrived, I suggested we head back into town and check out the vodka museum. It’s relatively new and Sonia and I had been talking for awhile now about seeing it. Since Anna and I couldn’t think of anything else we wanted to see, we just said let’s go!
We first stopped at the House of Tea in the pedestrian zone and enjoyed a piece of Russian cheesecake before we trundled out into the cold and walked another few hundred feet through the pedestrian zone to the museum.
We get there and there are two entrance fees; one with a vodka tasting and one without. I knew I wasn’t going to touch the stuff and Anna didn’t want any either. We get inside and are told that our guide will be with us in a moment and we are welcome to look around and take pictures until she comes. We hang up our coats and start walking around. They had a lot of great antiques and some really inventive stills. One was made out of a trombone!
After waiting and looking around for about 5 minutes, a very pleasant lady comes and starts explaining everything to us and waited patiently while Anna translated. I caught some of what she was saying and Anna filled me in on the rest. This place was only a relatively tiny room , but they had everything divided nicely into time periods with excellent explanations of the development of vodka and government policies about alcohol throughout Russian history from before Ivan the Terrible. And I had no idea that the process of distilling was invented in India and alcohol was used originally for medicinal purposes. The tour guide was very gracious with her time and answered all my questions. When we were finished with the tour, the lady at the gift counter tried to convince me to by a bar of soap in the shape of a cucumber. No thank you. Anna had enjoyed the museum as much as I did because she could relate many stories that her grandmother had told her to the artifacts she saw in the museum.
We both left in a good mood and walked back through the pedestrian zone. We wanted to stop for a cup of coffee so I suggested we go into the great cafeteria at the youth hostel. Anna ended up having a tasty fish stew and my cup of coffee cost $.25. And the place has one of the nicest interiors I’ve seen in a Kazan restaurant/cafeteria. The inner walls are brick and it just makes the place look so warm and friendly. And, at the silverware counter, they also offer chopsticks because I’m sure they have a lot of guests from the Far East.
When we got done, I quickly ran into the store to buy a birthday card for a colleague and then headed home. Tomorrow’s the seminar on teaching kids about the environment and Tuesday I’ll go go my first Kazan bike club meeting. I’m looking forward to that.
There’s still not much snow here. This has given people a chance to clear parts of the sidewalks but they are still overwhelmingly covered with a layer of ice.

The overweight kid

I forgot to mention that, while shopping yesterday, it was the first time I noticed a Russian kid who was obviously overweight. And what did she have in her hand? A can of soda pop.

A nice week

The whole week, the most I had was 7 kids in a day. It was so nice because we could take them for a walk in the woods without worrying about half of them running away. We are having a problem with one kid’s aggressive behavior, but I notice that he is being mobbed by the girls, so I’ve called in the psychologist (I specifically asked for the good one!) to observe and help me deal with the situation. But I had a lot of time to give individual attention this week and it was nice.
Today is going to be a shopping day. We’re going to do the story The Mitten this week and I have to find a stuffed badger, mole and hedgehog. I might just have to look in the cat toys department! Also want to finally get to the Museum of Alcohol and Drugs.
Tomorrow I’m headed back to the Russian history exhibit with Anna and Paul. Will study a lot this weekend. Then Monday I’m headed for the seminar concerning teaching kids about the environment. Looking forward to that.