Zoo

So, the art girl group has decreased, but the book lending group has increased. The book lending group also has 700% more boys. Pretty cool.

A solid chunk of them come everyday. They look at books, read me the titles, predict the contents etc. and manage to do about half of it in English. This group comes with hangers on. While the kids who want to take books home are all the A and B students, a couple of the chronically illiterate (I read Romanian better than they do) trundle into my office with the book borrowers too. It's pretty cool since they seem to like me regardless of how many times I have to yell at them, confiscate their toys, notes, food, projectiles...

They asked me yesterday if I was going to the zoo. "no" seemed like the only obvious answer. I have no idea where the nearest zoo is. Surely Ukraine has one. They laughed and slapped their little knees, and said "no!"

"The zoo that will come tomorrow! To school! There will even be a cobra!"

Yes, we had a zoo visit our school today. It was exactly the riot you might expect. Hundreds of children milling in the entrance of the school, teachers not caring, letting the last three classes go home, tiny children arriving from the kindergartens, big smoking men carrying crates, big smoking 11th and 12th grade boys guiding the crate carriers... screaming children carrying desks three sizes too big for them through the halls--crates gotta rest on something in the sports hall.

I needed the loo, so I was traipsing off outside (windy days make the veceu runs three times worse than usual, imagine all that air wooshing through your septic tank and up the hole under --- you get it). On the way there, I got mired in that list I just wrote. I was walking against them. Dodging a parrot cage, three snake boxes and, no shit, a mongrel monkey, I popped out the back door and confronted the smoking men handing the crates and cages out of the back of a mini van with its windows painted white to match the rest of the vehicle.

Dima, a particularly hard headed 12th grade boy who is endlessly swayed by the other boys around him, smiled waved and pointed. So happy he was! Look at the weird stuff! He took a drag on his Doina and shook his head like he were a character in a particularly sweet hearted movie staring Angelina Jolie while she tries to convince middle america to adopt starving kids.

That is, Dima was paying little attention to me. I got one wave from a third grader on my way out, and the hall was deserted by the time I got back, so quick was the flood into the sports hall.

I have finally been upstaged. I don't want to be an egoista here, but, seriously, that was the first time I walked through that hall and NOT been bombarded with waves and "hello!"s and sly looks, and hand shakes from Dima/Vadim and co.

It kinda rocked.

Then I walked out the front door to leave for home, and there was a knot of fourth graders huddled around something. Fearing a lemur may have escaped I clacked over. As I neared it sounded like they were speaking English. Yes. They were in fact poring over my copy of Go Dog Go. They started at my approach and stammered that they were reading! Thank you for this great book! Look how funny the hats are!

It makes up for the bullying I had to deal with on the way home day before yesterday.