Yesterday was mine and Olivia’s first trip to the language
and social science department of the university in a very very red building not
too far from us. We had our first ride on a bus, which I definitely think is
some guy driving his minibus around the streets and charging people for it
because there was definitely a bit of a family affair going on at the front and
no-one seemed to know the actual route it was supposed to say. The price is
different for each bus, but normally about 20rubles (40p) and you pay the
driver when you get off saying один clearly and conscisely otherwise you won’t
get any change.
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| The people who run public transport wherever it is I am |
We ended up being in a class with 4 students about our age.
They’re doing their masters in social-work-type stuff and they have to do their
dissertation in English for some reason so this is why they’re taking the
class. We had 2 students each and had to speak to them in English about
themselves and us and then they’d have to repeat back what we said in English.
Katya (the teacher) made us do the same but in Russian so it was a slight
impromptu lesson. The levels of English varied greatly. One of the guys I had
could speak pretty well and understand, but the girl didn’t really have a clue
what was going on. It made me think that teaching in a different country could
be quite a good job actually; it was really sweet to see the words and phrases
they’d obviously learnt from a young age, and so repeated insecently.
The class topic was jobs and money and it’s an American book
they learn from so one of the examples was having a wage of $60,000 a year.
Apparently they recieve more along the lines of 60,000r a year (£1,200). I said
you’d probably make close to that in a month in a full time retail job and they
were pretty shocked. Katya told us that the only thing she can do is tell her
students to leave the country if they want to make any form of money because
there’s not a lot to be earnt here. I’m not quite sure how they manage to live
with that sort of wage because the prices here are pretty similar to England,
maybe cafes and restaurants are marginally cheaper.....
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| We got paid with chocolate, типичный русский шоколад |
After the lesson we met a Russian boy called Ruslan (first
Russian friend yaaay) and his English is brilliant. Katya said he’s one of the
best students they have and he tries to meet all the Brits every year. We had a
general chit chat on the bus home about life in Russia and England and we
mentioned the post because it definitely doesn’t seem to be a thing here and he
said you could order an i-pad online, but you’d probably just receive a bag of
rocks. Sometimes you might get a letter 2 months later, but it’ll probably have
been opened. For no reason of course other than ты живёшь только раз.
When I got home Valentina was doing one of her usual cute
crazy babushka things. She always wears 2 necklaces and they’d got tangled so
they were choking her pretty badly as she was fiddling with them. She
approached me and started saying something. I couldn’t really understand so I
threw out my standard даs and decided to make the risky decision to help her
untaggle it. I have pretty nimble fingers so managed it in a minute and she was
so grateful she was blowing me kisses all evening. Turns out she’d done the
same scenario to Clara but Clara didn’t offer to help with the untangling
because she wasn’t really sure what was being said also. So I’m the hero and
probably the favourite surrogate daughter right now yaaay!
This next bit is more of just a vent than any useful
information; we were meant to have a guided tour of the city from Sasha (our
teacher) today, but he instead decided that the weather wasn’t good enough so
we had to have our stupid poopy grammar lesson. The weather was fine okay, just
a little overcast but no rain and perfectly warm. He’s just a pooper and never
had any intention of letting us have a skive.
Bought myself a cheeky Lenta card today. It’s like a
clubcard but tenfold better because you actually get money taken off at the
till. For some, no doubt communist reason, the discount changes for the same
item day to day but I accept this as normal now. Anyways it turns out none of
the discounts in store apply without a card and you can’t always guarantee that
someone will lend you theirs so I see this as a very good desij. Now I have a
loyalty card, I’m clearly the most local of locals.
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