Mrrr

Full of blah today. However, we had a rousing Russian Songs class, with the awesome news that we get an extra Russian Songs instead of a lecture next week. Woo! It was awesome, even if we had to sing the song from the russian cartoon version of the Bremen Town Musicians. The donkey in that cartoon freaks me the heck out.

I forgot to mention yesterday that we got to watch through the classroom window as a procession paraded an icon through the streets, complete with robed priests and censers and a little crowd following behind. Our teacher said it was the second time in his life he'd seen such a thing in Kazan- religious repression was exceptionally effective.

I slept late instead of going to mass media today, and I think it was a good thing. I feel really tired and cruddy, and I did not have to fake a cough when I ran into our organizers. Plenty of coughs to go around. Coughs for everyone! I'm going to go home, make some soup disappear from the refrigerator, and then sleep some more.

It's really freaky to think about, but in just two weeks, I'm going to be home! The math continues to evolve on my flights- I now suspect that I'm going to spend more than a day in transit. I leave St. Petersburg for the states at 6 AM, Thursday, which is 7 PM, Wednesday west coast time. I arrive in Portland at 11PM, on Thursday. So that means... 28 hours en route? Good god. Please, someone tell me my math is wrong!

Only four more days of classes. Jeez! I still speak like a child who is a little funny in the head! Noooooo!

I can't believe how hard and complicated Russian is. Just to give you an idea, here are a few tiny particles of Russian grammar:

The word for dog is 'sobaka'
If you do something to a dog, like feed it, it is 'sobaku'
If someone does something with a dog, it's 'sobakai'
If there is NO DOG at all, then it is 'sobaki'

Of course, if you do something to, say, a chair, doesn't change at all, it's just 'stol.' All words that end in a consonant don't change in that instance... UNLESS THEY ARE ALIVE. But plants don't count.

Last year on a test I said that a bunch of children dispersed and went home. Or, I thought I did. I wrote something like 'razbegali' on the test. This apparently meant that someone rounded up the children, forcibly divided them, and took each one home.

What was the word I should have written?

"razbegalis"

Yeah. So multiply that by about a million, and then weep for me, my friends. Weep.