Aghghghghg I am so tired. After spending pretty much the entire morning in the computer lab of the Mezhfak, in the afternoon I went downtown; V.P. had given me the number of some school she had called and told that I wanted to visit them, and they said I should come “after 2,” so until I figured it was close enough to 2 to call and ask again, I decided to walk around. I walked down Marat street (is that a cool name or what), which is my new favorite street in Irkutsk- it has lots of pretty wooden houses that are not falling down as so many are, and some pretty public buildings, as is generally very cheery looking in the snow. At about 1:30 I saw a sign for a foreign language school; I first walked into some sort of industrial packaging center, but a woman there very nicely showed me where I should have gone, and I eventually got to the language center and asked it they needed anyone to teach English. The woman at the desk looked hesitant; then some other woman in the office immediately gave me her card and took my number and said that her language school needed teachers. This apparently made the woman at the desk decide that they needed me too, and she called the “main campus,” and I was sent off there for a job interview. I thought this was rather exciting, as it was only the second job interview I’ve ever had, and the first was at Mary Johnson’s Children’s Center where they just hire anyone from Middlebury College who walks in the door, and the job interview is just being shown around a preschool. Anyway, my first task was to find this main campus, which involved my following a completely different church dome than I though I was and therefore being very surprised when I ended up not at Square Kirova but at the Church of the Holy Trinity by the History Department. But I did eventually find the building, which was cool and business-y and fancy, and I took the first reputable-looking elevator of my stay in Irkutsk up the 5th floor, to the offices of the ABC Language Center. There I tried to convince this guy named Alexander that my total lack of actual teaching experience was made up for by the fact that I worked in a preschool, where I routinely had to command the attention of people who would rather not have their attention commanded, and three-year-olds are clearly comparable to people who take evening language classes after a long day of work. So I’m being called as soon as Alan, the American working there now, leaves for St. Petersburg, which I think is in a few months. I also think that this is the same Alan that all the Middlebury students, and apparently half the city of Irkutsk, has met at one time or another on the street. Anyway, that was good. But then it was 2:30, and I had to call this mysterious school; I was under the impression that it was connected to an orphanage, but apparently this was a translation error on my part. In any case, I called this number, which if you are a foreigner living in Irkutsk you will understand is terrifying. For one thing I actually had no idea whose number I was calling, all I had was the name of the director of the school, and for another all Russian skills which I may have ever acquired totally dissolve upon picking up a telephone. So I had various stuttering conversations with various secretaries until I eventually convinced them to let me talk to the director, who was very nice, and then I set out for the school. I had already found this school once (which I though was very impressive really considering that my directions were “the second floor of a pink building on the corner of Marat, with no sign”), but apparently I was disoriented from my previous circuitous trek around the city, because I though it was at totally the wrong end of Marat. So my total number of treks of the whole of Marat street was at 4 by the time I finally got to the school, rather later than I said I would. I still didn’t really know where I was exactly, but after various other adventures in direction asking I found the director’s office. I sat down. “All right, I’m listening,” she said. And then I fortunately made no mention of orphans, and she quickly translated my vague comments into “I am ready to be exploited as slave labor,” and when some kids walked into the office to find costumes, among them was Sasha, V.P.’s granddaughter, and I understood where I was. This is a very fashionable school where they study English and German from the first grade, and have fancy invited lecturers, and whatnot, not in any way connected to orphanages. I was sent off to drink tea until the second-graders had their English class, at 4:00. I talked to a nice German teacher. I drank Earl Grey tea, which made me very happy. At 4:00 I went and sat at the back of a bunch of the most chaotic 2nd grade classroom I have ever seen, which isn’t saying much because the only one I really remember seeing was my own. I though I must have just forgotten what 2nd grade was like, but then I though about it more, and I remember 2nd grade fairly well. We never ran around the room kicking each other. I remember the atmosphere being one of, basically, sitting and listening to our teacher, who was very charismatic and entertaining, but did demand that we wrote things down that she wrote on the board, and have orderly discussions of the books we read, and so on. So, this particular class entirely involved the singing of songs (have you ever heard “Bingo” sung with an exaggerated English accent? It’s very entertaining.) and the yelling at Yaroslav and Vlad to sit down, please. I seem to have agreed to go back and meet with this teacher on Friday about helping in her classes. Then I went and talked to an 11th grade class. Their teacher asked me questions like “Do you study the present perfect tense in your schools?” and was rather triumphant when I said that Americans don’t actually study English grammar all that much. I was also asked what I though of the conduct of Paris Hilton and what I hated about Irkutsk. Then, for some reason, the 11th graders danced a minuet for me. The teacher had told me before the class that the students weren’t very enthusiastic about the English-speaking world, and preferred the culture of Germany. Little brats. Then I thought I was done, and I reported back to the director’s office. She told me to go to the 5th grade classroom now. So I got there, and this old teacher was standing in the midst of a group of students whose behavior had clearly not changed much from the 2nd grade, and she looked rather relieved to see me, and said, “are you going to teach this class now?” I said I would like to help, or watch, or whatever she wanted me to do, and she said, “Oh no, my class just ended,” and left. So apparently I was supposed to teach the class. I would not say it was one of the more successful English classes in history. When I ran out of ideas I would just make them dance the hokie pokie. Sasha, V.P.’s granddaughter was in the class, and she was very excited to know the teacher. She also turned out to be one of those students who are shocked by departure from classroom routine; every once in a while she would frown and show me the homework they had done (they had apparently transliterated the poem “whether the weather” into the phonetic alphabet. Who would ever want to do such a thing? Especially as they clearly had no idea what any of the words meant.), and once she called me over and said I should write the day of the week and the date on the board. As they seemed to be studying weather, I tried to make them stand up and give weather reports. But they were handicapped by not knowing a word of English, despite now having studied it 3 times a week for 5 years. So then we acted out weather events, which was more successful. Thunder was especially fun. The last 20 minutes of class we spend writing in our notebooks “Today is [weather word]. Yesterday was [weather word]. I was surprised how wonderfully long this took. It was apparently a very complicated assignment. Anyway, eventually the class ended, and I waited forever for a bus, and the bus was as usual heated to oven temperatures, and when I got home I wanted to sit down and never move again. But instead Katya decided that it was the one day of the year in which she would do her English homework, as Thursday she was actually going to go to class. So we spent a very long time working at the awful 1980s “the poor are their own fault” article, and it went worse and worse as it went, and by the time we finished 2 pages my head hurt so much I wanted to stab out my eyeballs, and I went to bed. This morning my throat hurts and I am not enthusiastic about the prospect of being sick. But we had blini this morning, so life has its compensations.