Entry 10 -September 30, 2011
If reading the title of this entry brought you alarm, fear not. The title has nothing to do with any individuals I have come into contact with. It is the result of three things: 1) a desire to break away from the alliteration train I have been riding, 2) it was my favorite idiom for the club this week, and 3) I couldn't think of anything clever or catchy.
Naturally, now that I have selected this title and wrote the above paragraph I thought up the new title “Skipbo! Cats! And Cheesecake!” but I feel that to change this now would be a waste of time. Therefore, for those of you who were brave enough to read into “A loose cannon” you can be pacified with the knowledge that you are in fact reading “Skipbo! Cats!
Wednesday morning began with me and my netbook, sitting at one of the American Center tables writing up the previous entry and facebook chatting with my wonderful mother. Ludmila brought over two plates of sliced melon, and I said good evening to my mother as Nadia and Yuliya came to join in our early morning melon feast. We don't have this type of melon back home. It's sort of like honeydew, but it's white and, in my opinion, much tastier. I remember having it in Kazakhstan and being very sad that our continent is lacking it that particular variety of melon.
Ludmila mentioned that one of their students went to America to work for the summer, and was supposed to have come back to Nizhny Novgorod a few weeks ago, but has yet to return. That led to a conversation of the talent Russian women seem to possess in quickly finding husbands in America. Apparently it is not at all uncommon for young women to go to American for three months or less and not come back. Ludmila said that the record was a three week conference she attended with some colleagues in Florida. Often these women remarry numerous times. There is something to be said in getting to know someone before you marry them. I think it's good to date someone for 2-3 years before getting married, but I doubt you want a sermon on my personal beliefs about dating and courtship so I'll change the subject here.
After we finished our delicious melon Ludmila brought ought a game, wondering if I knew how to play. The game, which if you paid attention and can put two and two together then you have probably guessed...was skipbo. I remember playing it a long time ago in Texas, but I couldn't remember off the top of my head. Luckily the instructions were included. We decided to play a mock game, and had a blast. After 10 minutes or so, we realized that we hadn't shuffled the cards, which made our game not quite fair. However, I had to go speak at a class, so we didn't have a chance to finish it.
The topic I was supposed to speak on in the class was “Big Cities.” They had been talking about New York City in particular. Every student I meet here either wants to go to NYC or L.A. We talked about various issues in big cities and how Russia deals with things versus America's way of dealing with things. Then, after we had exhausted our topic, we just talked about anything they were interested in. I gave them some of my perspectives on things that are difficult for me here in Russian (most going to the store and dealing with trying to give proper change and not having it), and they seemed pretty amused. I had originally thought that this was a class I had already spoken with, and as such I hadn't brought my pictures this time. They did ask about my hobbies and my family, so we talked some about that. Some of the girls in the class are hoping to go to America next summer on a work and travel program, and they both hope to go to NYC. One of the girls really wants to see Broadway shows, with which I completely sympathize, and specifically Cats. Apparently she knows all of the songs and choreography. I told her I knew it was still on a touring cast, but didn't know if it was still on the mainstage and promised to look it up for her. The rest of the day went relatively uneventfully. I had a serious date with my grammar workbook.
Thursday morning passed with more grammar homework, chatting with Katya, and do final preparations for the idioms club. The list of idioms for this week was as follows:
1. Don't bank on it/I wouldn't bank on it
2. To ring a bell
3. A little bird told me
4. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth
5. Cat got your tongue?
6. To have a bone to pick with someone
7. Bite the bullet
8. (To open up) a can of worms
9. A loose cannon
10. To play your cards right
11. Get carried away
12. I rest my case
13. Pull someone's leg/yank someone's chain
My favorite, as previously mentioned, is “a loose cannon,” and the idiom comes from maritime terminology. As you probably know, when a cannon is fired, it jerks backwards from the explosion. Thus, during a battle, cannons are free to move. However, as they are very heavy and on wheels, it is imperative to successfully tie down a cannon when not in battle. A loose cannon will roll and can cause substantial harm to crew and the ship.
The group this time was about half the size of last weeks, but luckily we had some new people. For review, I wanted to play charades with the previous weeks idioms. It didn't go as well as I had hoped however. I had hoped the students would act out the direct meaning of the words, and then we could go over the implied meaning from the idiom. For the most part though, they tried to act out the meaning, and it wasn't always as clear. Oh well. That was bad planning on my part I guess, as I assumed they would do the task a certain way when there were multiple options open to them.
I think that the meaning matching went fairly well though. I gave them five-ish minutes to try to match the meanings to the idioms. The catch was there were two more definitions than there were idioms. However, they were definitions from the previous week, so I hoped that they might figure that out. They did pretty well with the matching, and the top score was tied between Katya and one other student at 11 out of 13. Their reward was getting to pick out a postcard from my stack of AK postcards I had brought with me. By the time we were finished with that it was four o'clock, so I decided to end the day there.
After the club, Veronika and I made plans for Friday after school. We were originally going to try to find shashlik (like shish-kabob), but you have to be careful where you get it. As there isn't a festival going on, it's sort of hard to find. Therefore, she asked if I wanted to do sushi. I said I'd be game, but mentioned that there was one place I'd already been to for sushi, which was apparently where she was thinking of. Therefore we're going to go to Fonoteka, which several people have recommended to me. Apparently there are two main rooms there, and Veronika really likes the Tibetan hall, so that's where we're going.
One of the new attendees, Zhenya, stayed and talked with me for a while after the club. The club got over at four, and I don't think he left until 5:30. He is pretty much self-taught (though I'm sure he had English somewhat in school), and is very interested in America. He really wants to go to “Cali.” He didn't think that I knew any American slang though and was telling me he knew more than I did. He was very insistent that urban dictionary was a pure slang dictionary, and I had a hard time convincing him that a lot of urban dictionary is a joke. The one word he kept insisting every American used when playing basketball was something he kept pronouncing as “bweeyuh.” I finally figure out he meant “booyah.” I tried to convince him that that was old slang and isn't really frequently used anymore, but I'm not sure he believed me. I would be the first to admit that I'm not super up on American slang, but my most prominent memory of the word “booyah” is from The Emperor's New Groove which came out when I was in 4th grade...so I'm pretty sure I'm correct on this one.
Zhenya is very fascinated with America. He said the thing he loves about America is that everything is big. Big houses. Big cars. Skyscrapers. He said it's his dream to see skyscrapers, which, for the life of me, I don't really understand. I tend to dislike them. His dream vehicle is a Cadillac Escalade, to which I just shook my head. I told him I'd much rather have a Corvette. We spent some time helping each other with each others accents.
While we were talking, at the other table in the library, there was a meeting of American exchange program alumni led by Katya. She had made cheesecake for it, and she said that she made quite a mess at home in the process wherein her mother wished she had never entered the kitchen. She had saved a piece for me, and I thought it was delicious. Yuliya (who works in the American Center) was also in attendance as she was in Portland on a Fulbright for a year. I had met one of the other girls, who goes to a high school here, and of the two others, one did her exchange...guess where? Anchorage Alaska. Small world, eh? It gets better. She went to high school at...West High, my alma mater, and she worked with...guess who? Michele Whaley, my first Russian teacher. I don't believe in the 7 degrees of separation. There seems to never be much more than 3.
The alumni are going to try to plan some sort of event or series of events, and one of Katya's ideas was to have me teach folk dancing. She also had an idea to do something like a living library where you would come and meet with people who were experts on a certain topic and speak with them. The other idea I remember was to do a sort of photo scavenger hunt. Long story short, Katya's awesome.
I left the university somewhere after 6, went home to drop off my computer and get my smaller purse for a trip to the store. I managed to find some strawberry jam this time. Last time I was there there was no jam to be seen, and I wasn't just blind because I remember looking at that shelf in particular. I also bought some more cheese, yogurt, bread, and smetana. I find my favorite meal is just bread and cheese. It's my fallback. Every once in a while for breakfast I make cream-o-wheat or an egg, but usually I just have bread with cheese and a cup of yogurt. Yum. :)
I expect that my next entry will be rather lengthy, so I may have to split it up over two entries. I'm going on an excursion with some of the teachers from the university on Sunday, which I think I mentioned previously. I've now come to the end of my third week here. It's hard to believe that ¼ of my time has already past here. It's definitely getting colder here. This morning was quite chilly when I stepped outside, and I find my room gets pretty cold at night. I'm hoping the heaters in the dorm will turn on and start working somewhere in the next week...but I'm not going to get my hopes up. Luckily I have a hoodie sweatshirt and a flannel blanket, thanks to my dear relatives the Powell family in Washington.
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