From Russia, Pt. 2

It is Sunday, early afternoon.

Some obs.

1. A full week of English language camp has gone by. I am teaching a class called American issues. Here is a brief run-down of my daily schedule...

6:30 am-- Wake, shower, make tea, read the Bible.

Yes, I am drinking tea, mainly English Breakfast. I bought a box of Twinings yesterday. Good stuff. Just yesterday, we were set up with hot showers, which makes the mornings a little more pleasant. Although, I am thinking of sticking with the ice cold ones out of solidarity, and for the cultural experience.

The girls in the dorms are very inventive. Hot water (a generous definition) comes only twice a week. So the girls in our dorm will heat up giant buckets of hot water on the stove. The water is seriously cold. But we were given keys to a special room with its own boiler, that none of the other students can use.

8:30 am-- Walk into school

This is about a twenty minute walk, and takes us next to an incredible church with a gilded onion dome.

9:00 am-- Breakfast at school and a team meeting.

Breakfast is usually of the porridge variety.

10:00 am-- Class.

There are about 15 students in our class, whose English skills range from quite low to nearly fluent. Our class is supposed to be more advanced, because we mainly discuss issues. The other classes are American Sports, American Film, and American music. Class consists of reading and discussing an article with the whole class, and then breaking into small groups to talk about issues coming out of the article. It is pretty fun, but not my favorite part.

12:00 pm-- Break

Most of the classes are repeated twice, but issues just has one session. This is kind of a luxury, although our time usually ends up going to help with various crises. This week, I will be helping out with the second session of American Music so that one of the Russian assistants in it can read the Bible with my teammate Robin.

2:20 pm-- Lunch

Russian cafeteria food, I believe should not be considered as representative of the country's cuisine as a whole. However, the food is quite good, in my opinion. The problem is that there are no good restaurants in Pushkin to compare it to.

3:00 pm-- Excursions

This is the heart of why we are here. It is at our excursions that things get exciting, because we get to spend a lot of relational time with the Russian students. The students are a lot of fun. Maybe some other time I'll write about some of them.

So far, we have gone on excursions to Peterhov, which is a palace with an incredible amount of gravity-powered foundtains, Pavlosk park, another palace which is also the largest man-made park in the world, and also St. Petersburg, where we participated in a ping-pong tournament, which incidentally I won. I have a gold medal to prove it actually.

St. Petersburg is ridic, but we will be visiting it more this week, including a Hermitage excursion on Saturday. Pretty excited for that. The Russian Tsars did not seem to be content to live out their reign without building unbelievable monuments to themselves. Every other corner up in this neck of Russia seems to have some palace on it. Also, the Russians like statues.

6:00 pm (approx.)-- PBDs

These are Personal Belief Discussions. They are another opportunity to engage the students on a deeper level.


Well, that's a look at my schedule. Hopefully, I can talk more about what God is doing sometime soon. Because some exciting things have happened!