Last day of class

Electricity just went out. The electricity goes out a lot. It’s never been out for more than 12 hours, though.

Today was the last day of class. I don’t know what to say about the semester ending. I wish I had learned more Russian in it- I’m going to have to do better at that next semester- but I enjoyed my classes as a whole, and I’m sort of sorry for them to be over. It doesn’t quite feel like the end of a semester though... before, ends of semesters involved everyone going home, and the feeling was much different. This just feels like the end of a fall semester in high school, where your classes will be different soon, but it’s not that exciting or important. But it is sort of important; I just didn’t notice, maybe; I don’t really remember the point of this, but I guess what I want to say is that today being the last day of class was fairly important, but with no special final exam schedule and people not packing up all around me, the normal end-of-semester feeling was not present. Classes just went on in their usual way and then today just ended. And we had sort of a tedious end-of-semester lunch, where various university officials who we had never seen before gave speeches about how it was nice that we had come, and our teachers gave speeches about how they liked having us in class and we were all special in our own ways (or in Alexandra Vladimirovna’s case how we should have been less lazy and worked harder and spoken Russian better) and no one knew if they were allowed to eat while speeches were being given.

For the last day of class, I agreed to let Elissa “paint my eyes,” as the Russians say, as a special gift for Elena Miletevna, who often yells at me for my lack of make-up use, and tells me that I will never find a husband. Somehow this make-up application ended up including the application of bright pink sparkly nail polish. But when presented with my compliant-to-her-demands self, Elena Miletevna just asked why I couldn’t have dressed nicely yesterday, when we had the ridiculous event-for-foreigners, to which I very offensively wore a t-shirt. Had I dressed nicely yesterday, as I had today, I would have found a husband at the tea-drinking. She had, in fact, announced at the beginning of the event that one of the traditional purposes of tea-drinkings was the finding of brides and grooms. Apparently after I left, the spin-the-bottle game was followed by a game in which a person just has to walk around and choose the person he or she wishes to kiss. All semblance of organization has been lost in this paragraph.

Had a nice evening- observed another class at ABC language school, taught by this ridiculous Irishman named Sean Hennessey (“the Hennessey family of the famous cognac,” as he informed me and Joseph at least twice), then Joseph and I ate some posi (Buryat dumplings) at a Posaria, then we met everyone else at the Tex Mex restaurant and drank coffee. Leonya and Anya were there, and it was very pleasant. That’s when it started really feeling like the end of something, with everyone together for the last time. Walked around the city for a while after that, many of us ended up in Pizza Domino, got home around 1. It’s going to be very strange to be here without the people who are leaving.

Lights are back on. Rather a waste, as I’m going to bed now.