A letter home from study abroad
So, on wednesday, I got up at about 7 am. you see, I was going to talk
to 5th and 10th graders at a moscow school about the american way of
life. It was way to early for me. I had to be there at about 9 and it
took an hour to get there....but it was worth it.
I started off talking to a classroom full of 5th graders...the
deal was that they asked me questions..here are the first several...in
order:
"What's your name?"
jesse
"Do you have any pets?"
a dog and a cat
"How old are you?"
twenty
"Do you have any children?"
no
"Are you married?"
no
I'll chalk it up to cultural differences or the fact that I
didn't shave that morning or something. They were really sweet over all.
I told them to ask me strange questions....and one kid took me up on it
"What do you know about aliens?" "Real aliens or movie aliens?" i asked.
"Real aliens." and then I tried to explain the mars rock to them. Then
two of them read stories about their imaginary friends to me. One of
them had gone so far as to make a model of his imaginary friend. (one of
those pompom dolls) He presented me with it as a gift after class...it's
sitting on my desk.
The second class asked more normal questions. Several of them
were excited about the fact that I was into computers....One asked me if
I'm a "hecker" (russian pronunciation of hacker.) I was somewhat taken
aback....but said yes. He said that he was too. After class, one kid
brought a notebook up to me and asked for my autograph. Before I knew
what was happening, I was being mobbed by fifth graders who wanted my
autograph. so I gave it to them. Then several wanted my email
address...I'll see if any of them actually write me. (Could one of you
wes people look to see if my homepage has any hits from .ru?) One
of the girls asked me if I had any russian money. When I said yes,
she tried to offer me 300 rubles (about 5 cents)...I refused....i
just couldn't take money from a little kid. After that, it was off to
the 10th grade. The 10th graders weren't nearly as interested or
interesting.
Afterwards, olga fed me and then I got payed for october (150 000
rubles.) Then I went on my merry way home....where I immediately
collapsed for a 2 hour nap. After that, I did some homework and headed
out to meet Sara for dinner at Baku Livan, a middle-eastern
cafeteria....
On my way out of the dorm, I walked past a number of soilders
unloading wooden crates and coils of wire in the lobby. I have no idea
why they were there or what's in the crates....and i'm not about to open
one of them up. Who knows, maybe my dorm's a new artillery dump.
it was really good and cheap... .although it appears that
the restaurant was being renovated and that we were eating in what was
normally the restaurant's kitchen.
Once I got home, I studied for my Chekov test (it got postponed
till thursday) and napped for a bit and hung out in cath's room....
At about 11:30, the lights went out, but only in the rooms on my
side of the hall. We decided that there wasn't any point in even
_TRYING_ to get it fixed then.
ps the vote on russian domains (gu vs kanga) was pretty much neck and
neck...so I've decided to go ahead and register them both once secondary
dns gets set up. Most "programmer types" seemed to prefer kanga while
almost everybody else seemed to go for guru.