(no subject)
latest spraff update summary:
1. weekend away in the country
2. pushkin day
3. teaching in a school
so here goes
1. a bit of background - me and Ailleann "work with" or more correctly "hang out" with these teenage boys in a shelter run by the orphanage people "Bridge of Love" or something horrificly cheesy like that; its where the boys live and they go out each day from there to work or study or whatever , and they also get like lessons on how to build families and structure their lives and stuff like that at the centre. so theyre all from homless or disadvantaged families etc. theres 7 boys at the shelter. so last weekend there were soem renovations at the centre so they all had to stay in other places for the weekend, so we took 3 of them to this house in the country. i wasnt realy in the mood to go away anywhere but they had gone there on the friday and weer waiting there for us, and theyd only been persuaded to go cos they thougt we were going, so we went anyway. theyre absolotely great kids and they love us because they can teach us to swear in russian and make fart jokes and other teenage boy things. i had originally thought it was just an afternoon of walking in the woods or platying football in the park or something. but after 3 or 4 hours on the train i realised it was too far to go back that night. when we got off the train it was the tiniest most desolate place ever - 2 wooden houses by the side of the track, and a crazy looking dog following us. to make ourselves feel better we pretended we were exiled decembrists or something. then the woman said it was another 6km through the forest, and were like waaaaaaaaaahhh, so just got on with it, but it was very wet and muddy and noone had told us to bring wellies so we got kinda soggy, but the walk in the forest was great. strarted to really enjoy it. was very cold and misty.
then after a long time of falling over in the mud we got to a river, which was wide and very calm and covered in thick mist, with reeds and stuff, entirely like the underworld or something. then to top it all off, Charon the boatman appeared to take us in a little leaky rowboat across the river! talk about life imitating art or whatever way round its meant to be. So we went across and on the oter side there was the house we were going to, where entirely the nicest man in the world lived, with his mum, he had braces and a green shirt, it was a proper peasant house and everything, apparebtly they quite often have the boys to visit, and he was all smily and dimply and i christened him The Woodcutter. so we sat next to the stove and played cards and sang songs and all things like that, it was great. the mum said that we must find it very different here to america and when we did our usual "well im from scotland, she's from ireland and we have another girlfriend from england" as we always do as if its the beginning of a joke, she said dismisively "oh well its all the same" which i thought was great. they were quite hard to understand beause they speak fast and different dialects from in perm. so we all had a good weekend and the boys did too.
2. pushkin day!
well, actually its Lycee Day, but its when everyone pays homage to the Deity and everything connected with him, so when we got in to uni the pushkin bust on the stairs was adorned with flowers. also everyone was reading poems on the stage in the hall and generally acting and stuff, and we were performers of honour obviously because we are CELEBRITIES. we had been tearing our hair out over what to do but luckily a few nights ago we came up with a comedy sketch where we dressed Aillean up as pushkin then we all acted out The queen of Spades, then we did it in half the time, then half the time again, and so on and so on speeded up each time til eventually we had to do the whole play in 1 second, and by that time everyone was howling with laughter and falling off their seats. so phew it was a success. we had aillean in a top hat and sideburns, and i was the Pikovaya dama herself, in a apricot nightie and showercap, with blue eyeshadow and pearls etc, and i haunted Richard all round the stage going "wooooooooo ooooooo" ghostlily but speeded up each time, and it was kinda irreverant but they loved it. so phew. then after that we all trooped to the statue of pushkin on the street and it was all beer and punch and poetry recitals and laying flowers on the statue, in the sleet, and genral toasts to freindship etc etc. then the sleet changed to snow and it started to snow heavily, so all stood there with beer round the statue in the snow, it was all very merry and surreal.
oh and i forgot to say that after we sat down after our stage triumph, a note landed in the boys' laps from some 1st year girls behind us, written in english, it said
"to fanny gays from england, we think you very fanny and find you nice with us"
so i presume they meant "funny guys" but who can tell.
i didnt get any notes at all. humph.
oh yeah and i forgot, the day before was a poetry day where richard did "All the Worlds a stage" and "captain my captain" which was great but the whole thing was just a bit too weighty and too serious in general so i did the owl and the Pussycat. as i sat down one of the teachers nodded appreciately and said "Robert Burns, yes?" so i had to burst his bubble, and it transpired that EVERYONE had thought it was robert burns. weird. anyway, im working on a translation of it to russian. runcible has me stumped though.
actually, all i wanted was to use the phrase "im working on a translation" cos it sounds lovely and pompous. im not really. id have to know russian to do that. :)
anyway, moving on
3. school!
today we were visiting a school, a class of 9 and 10 year olds who learn english, and teaching some english sayings, so i did "Its raining cats and dogs!" and the inevitable reply "dont step in a poodle!" and showed my photos, and they said that Grandpa looks like a real artist because of the pipe and white beard ensemble, and they were tickled pink to see the picture of Harry in a kilt. then we played games wth them all, we played "Whats the time mister wolf?" and Duck Duck Goose and british bulldogs and other rowdy playground games and it all got a bit silly. it was great
so anyway, thats what ive been up to
more later no doubt
steph
latest spraff bulletin of whats been happening in Perm:
firstly, the Cat. Marcel. he's a spoilt lump of vacuousness and eats fish and cream and sleeps on anything of mine he can find, pouncing on it as soon as i put it down. Nadya and Alina adore him and go on about how jealous Marcel is when i go out anywhere with my russian freinds, especially if there BOYS in the group, heaven forbid. so he's a kinda of standing joke among us.
well last week he had a slightly dodgy dirty eye, and so nadya was all flustered and worried and insisted that me and Alina take him to the vet. at night, in the snow and cold. so we warpped him in a sheet and carried him in our arms to the vet, who of course said there was nothing wrong. the absolutely black as very black blackness comedy element of irony now happens: the cat, who had never been out the overheated flat before, was so terified of the cars and snow and the big bad world that he started gasping and wheezing, had kind of spasms and then went totally rigid in my arms, while pissing all over me. when we got him home and lay him down he still didnt move but ust wheezed and looked even more glassy and vacant, if thast possible. so they 2 took him back out on the street in the snow etc, back to the vet. and they returned hours later crying, without the cat. turns out he'd had a heart attack.
but he wasnt dead - the vet kept him in to operate or whateverb they do to striciken cats and we got him back next day. but all ngiht we hadnt known if he was gonna be alright, and they were awake all night crying and looking in zodiac calendars for favourable omens andf saying things like 'well marcel is watching over us now'. next day i went in to uni and said "guys. listen. its marcel' and people went 'oh what is he dead?' in a joking way, then realised i was serious. so then we had arranged to get flowers and candles and all turn up at the flat trying very hard to look sad and hold a kinda farcical postmodernism funeral wake for the cat. but it turned out he wasnt dead at all. and now he's totally back to normal. maybe even a little bit more vacant. oh well.
last weekend, the one before the one just passed, which i'll get on to in a second. one of our teachers had arranged for us all to go with her to visit some people in an armpit-of-the-universe town on that weekend. but i dont like her very much, and id already been to this town, and i felt that all my time with my lovely new freinds is too short to be wasted doing something i didnt want to do. but i needed a pretty damn good excuse to get out of going. so it became necessary to keep up the pretence that i was going to yekaterinburg for the weekend with Slava and Aleksei, which was our original plan. the weather was manky so we didnt feel like going, so we just camped out in this girl's flat for the whole weekend. but then, when it came to it and everyone asked how was my trip, i was too lazy to make up some elaborate lie so i just said i hadnt gone. and as it turned out, i was soooooooo glad i ddint go with the teacher and the others from edinburgh, because they stayed with a woman who made them make pelmeni all evening so they could learn how to be a good wife, and the boys drank and looked on, and the girls wernt allowed to drink. ha.
so, this weekend. went to Kungur with the 4 others from edinurgh, which is a town 3 hours away, where there is absolitely nothng of interest apart from some ice caves . i went to that town with slava and aleksei a few weeks ago just because, just for the sake of it, and we cooked sausages on a fire in the woods and listned to rocks to see if we could hear the sea in them, and generally mucked about. the crowning highlight of that trip was the Funeral of the Pink Cap. the Pink Cap was a ridiculusly fashionable baby-pink baseball cap that sarah found on a bus once and gave to me as a present, and it had become a kind of much-abused mascot. in kungur there was a largish car bridge over a largish but utterly boring river, so to liven the place up we thre it off the side and ran to the other side to watch it float away, very slowly and poignantly, tiny spot of pink in that drab grey town, us saluting it as it floated to a better place.
well THIS time in kungur was a bit different. it was evening and wet when we arrived so we found the hotel that was on the edge of town, near the caves, a big concrete monstrosity that was dead cheap, with the same sort of damp walls and perfect shabby balcony looking out on snowy factories, the sort of room where you HAVE to drink vodka, so we had a little hotelroom pissup . next day we visited the caves which were interesting . the only other people in the caves were a dutch couple with a russian family so we started talking to them and they offered us a lift back in the car which i accepted cos i was tired and bored, but the others ddint accept because they said they hadnt yet 'seen the town' despite me telling them that yeah actually, that was it, we have seen it, there isnt anything else. so yeah, i got a lift home in the car, for the pleasure of my company and use of my translating skills. when we got back they took me out for beer and so i could mediate between them, the most random conversation topic i have come across for a long time: namely, teddy bears.
what had happened was this: the dutch woman is a master teddy bear maker, as a hobby not as a business. she had come with her husband to teach a teddy bear making class in perm, and see round here at the same time. the russian woman is starting out on this particular hobby and was at the class, and was taking the couple round some sightseeing. the dutch didnt speak russian but they did speak english, and the russian lady spoke russian obviously (along with some random german which she kept interjecting into sentences, thinking it might help). so i mediated this most utterly random discussion about different companies dealing in mohair and how to set up contracts to import it to Perm and different business strategies and different techniques of bear making, and different trends, and who is big in the bear world and who's bears have got real soul, and mascot novelty bears, and who has worked too hard and burned out.
crazy huh? so today i was gonna meet them again, they were really nice, but i had classes all day so didnt.
well thats far too much spraff for now anyway, i bet nobody's even read this far.
whats been going on with you guys then?
tattybye
steph
so after all that, just to say that I loved the place and it's very weird to be home. I love and miss my new friends and it's sad that i wont be living there anymore. cos next term i go to moscow. which im sure will be good too, in a different way.