My hump my hump...

Sorry for the atrocious Black Eyed Peas reference, if I even got their name right, but I have officially hit The Hump.

Some of you may remember last time, in Petersburg, my reporting that I was in a terrible mood and sick to boot. As I glowered at the kitchen table, dabbing at my flowing nose and feeling like something that had been scraped off the bottom of a boot, my host mother told me that the end of the second week and beginning of the third is always the hardest for foreign students; things aren't shiny and new, but you're resoundingly not at home, and you're tired, and that's when you start hating the food, or you get sick, or everything just seems to SUCK.

Well, that's where I am right now, yet again. Almost everyone else is too. I've been in a gloweringly horrible mood for the last two days, and no amount of cookies and English language books has quite cured me of it. I've finally decided that I don't need any more babying, since that's just getting me behind in my homework. So I'm taking the long way home today to try and buy a yoga mat, and I'm going to buy some handwashing detergent so I don't use all my shampoo on clothes (our washer is now busted) and I'm going to go home and do all the dishes that I left out this morning, as I fled late to class. So there.

Saturday we went to the biggest Sabantui in Tatarstan. Sabantui is a 1000 ish year old festival held at the end of the planting season. In a lot of ways, it's like the Bizarro version of a county fair- same weird tchochkes for sale, same smarmy singers in bad suits, same beating-each-other-with-sacks-while-sitting-on-a-log.... wait. no.

Anyway, you can look at a bunch of photos here. They're out of order and one may be upside down, but they're there.

Then that evening we went to see Carmen at the Kazan opera. YAY! I love the opera, and I don't think I've been since I was last in Russia. Carmen was amazing, despite slightly horrible costuming, choreography and set design- the musicians and dancers were all fantastic, so as long as you only looked at what was important, it was awesome. I almost cried. Twice.

Then Sunday I spent at the dacha. It was beautiful and peaceful there, and I took a few pictures- which you can see here- but I was descending into the funk, and my hostess was not helping. In the end, she stayed at the dacha overnight, and I narrowly escaped having to make my way home alone for the first time at ten at night by the fact that our neighbors were just leaving, heading back to the big city. They kindly agreed to drop me off, and so I spent forty minutes making vaguely grammatical small talk with a very nice older Russian couple. They drove like sane people, too. It was rather pleasant, if a bit stressful, and I arrived home feeling triumphant at having made my way through the trial.

And now computers are in great demand, so I'll be getting going. I also added several photos to the Kazan in general set, which is here. Enjoy!