Monday, April 18, 2011

The Birthday Cost Benefit Analysis

This past weekend was my birthday, and one of the best in adult-Kiddo history. Reasons: I did exactly what I wanted, and at minimal expense.

The minimal expense is due to the decision to stay home, and where that home is. Of course, Moldova is a beautifully cheap date, and village life even more so. Though I complain for real coffee, art museums, poet circles, variety in everything run thick and fast from myself and my friends, when it comes right down to it, once you're in the village habit, village life can be pretty sweet.

I've gotten so used, in fact, to eating plain potatoes and plain spagetti with half a drumstick for garnish, that a pita with some ketchup and half a handful of ricotta cheese truly does pass for delicious pizza. Also, the $3 bottles of champagne from southern Moldova, I'm convinced, are of better quality than anything moet and chandon can bottle. Wine no. Champagne yes.

So I offered to take Renata and Natalia to Sarm, our local pizzeria, after school on friday. They were worried about me spending too much money. I told them a good pizza date with champagne would be priceless, please just arrange the transport. So we went. And got tipsy--R and N too! A never before seen feat! It was glorious. Over the past two years we have made real friendships that I value, so time away from school to talk about anything else was beautiful.

Total cost: 300 lei: 100 lei for transport, 200 lei for food (2 large pizzas, three ice cream sundaes, 1 bottle champagne, 2 cups of fresh juice, 1 cappucino)

I got home and in preparation for the next day, my actual birthday, I bought a second bottle of champagne and a bottle of high end Belii Aist cognac. The champers was for me and Maria and Laurentiu for lunch, but, Maria doesn't drink and Laurentiu has recently quit (remember that? Yea, he's following through!). So, it was just me for breakfast.

The Belii Aist was to split with Grigore and Roma at the bar in the evening a la Roma's party a week ago. It was also the personal favorite of Martin, my old volunteer neighbor, and Billy when he came. I must say, mixing it is almost a shame it's so smooth and rich. But! Mixing with coke comes out tasting like a cherry coke.

At the bar I bought the coke to cut the cognac, a bag of peanuts and a bag of sour cream and onion crunchy bits of dried bread (like chips but tiny and not fried) . We started at 8 and closed the bar at 2 am, quite sauced, for G decided we would drink beer after. We each bought a single, then R sprung for a 2 litre bottle of Polar Bear's finest alcoholic drivel. G's girlfriend and several other people at various points joined us. Overall a brilliant evening akin to some of the best I ever had in Shepherdstown playing darts... IE, Melissa, Steffie, Emily... You would have fit right in and I missed you.

Total cost - 165 : 100 lei for Belii Aist, 30 lei for champagne, 10 lei for peanuts, 10 lei for crunchy things, 15 lei for a Starii Melnic.

Total for both days - 465 lei

Now, if I had gone to Chisinau to hang out with my American peeps, I would also have had fun, but, and this is not a slight to them as people, but it would not have been as fun. I would have had to travel a total of 8 hours on a tiny bus. I would have lost sleep catching them. I would have wasted time pottering around the PC lounge where a bunch of people I'd rather NOT interact with would have forced themselves on me.

Total cost would have been - 830 lei : 130 lei for travel, 130 lei for a room, 570 lei for food/drink for me alone(30 lei per beer, 60 lei per meal) plus tips for various waiters... at 10%...

Over all. A better time for half the price? Absolutely.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

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.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

God Bless Rian Johnson

If you have not rent and watch the following movies:

Brick
The Brothers Bloom

Then learn something about Joyce's Ulysses.

Then, realize that Rian Johnson is a genius.

Stephen.
Bloom.
Penelope.

God dammit.

What are movies in movies, plays in plays, stories in stories. I think Shakespeare was the first to popularize this. Well, Rian Johnson wrote stories in stories in stories in The Brothers Bloom, and then didn't even tell me it was all a metafiction until just now.

Talk about the other penny dropping. When I grow up I want to write like him.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Thank Domneaziu for Maria

Fair Warning: Personal Bitching Ahead.

This weather, and its schmekery, helps nothing but bad feelings. I have recorded which days I can wake up easily with the alarm and which days I can't. Comparing these with a corresponding list the weather each morning reveals a quantifiable depression experienced by The Erika on days it is cold. Cloudiness contributes. Rain does not, but mud does.

Today commenced cloudy and very cold. Freezing, in fact. The electricity in our office has been turned off without explanation: heater and light no longer work. It snowed yesterday, and just made mud. Today thought to copy Yesterday, that badass.

Things I saw on my way to school today:
- 3 dead kittens
- 1 squashed frog
- a newly full sewage duct (man hole cover no longer covers it because the hole is so full)

Things that happened at school today:
- Pretty well taught 6th grade review for Thursday's test class
- Chased off a 6th grade boy from my flock of glitter marker girls
- Had to make the first announcement of "If you lose or destroy the book, you owe the library 20 lei"

Things that happened on the way home today:
- Covered in mud
- Laughed at by hoard of 6th grade boys
- Broke up an incident of bullying (1st grade boy by 5th grade boys)
- Found the hind legs and an eyeball once belonging to one of the kittens

Things that happened with Maria at lunch:
- Found out I clean more than the last volunteer
- Discussed ideal cup and ass size (apparently I have them)
- Cursed the mud.

Domneaziu = Romanian for "God"

Monday, April 11, 2011

Open Lessons

I may have mentioned these before. Open Lessons are when a teacher is asked by the administration to show them a typical lesson. Admin schedules these a week ahead of time, typically. With a time gap like this, teachers are expected to prepare this lesson to actually not be a typical lesson, but a prepared super-special lesson.

Typical of the Open Lesson are the following traits:
- costumes
- visuals, posters
- plays
- interactive, physical activities
- music

The things that we volunteers are trained to make all our lessons include. This makes introducing ourselves and our purpose pretty easy: Partners, with my help, we will have an Open Lesson EVERY lesson, and therefore, the stress and panic of Open Lessons will no longer occur!

Which they think super-cool and jump right on immediately, but the idea of planning incessantly is not ingrained, not accepted. The materials, even if I plan on using them, and plan with my partner to use them, will not get used.

I know this is my fault. I must be more aggressive, should have been this whole time, should have been forcing things more... Change doesn't happen by suggesting and expecting things to happen from a suggestion and quick explanation. However, the ground work was already in place -- these Open Lessons prove it. And over time... should have become easier?

It is now possible to do more than 50% of English lessons as Open Lessons... technically.

And so we come to the fatal flaw of the Open Lesson.

The teacher hosting will take the class out of their other classes to practice, to prepare, to gather supplies. The children are informed ahead of time who will answer which questions. Who will match which definitions. Seating gets reassigned. Bags and jackets are stored in other rooms. The rooms themselves will be rearranged so the host teacher can have the most beautiful room possible for their purposes. All these things disarrange other teachers in other rooms in other lessons. Everyone's schedule gets fucked if one teacher has big cheese teachers from other schools coming to observe a lesson.

It's a theatre. I have three partners. 1 refuses to play ball. She teaches normal lessons, be damned what the ministry says. Her lessons normally shoot for higher than average teaching and interaction anyway, so that's cool.

1 gets the importance of both and tries for both, and almost makes both.

1 wins. This one kicks so much Open Lesson ass that she is exhausted for the other 4 lessons on the day, can't concentrate on the 24 lessons in the days leading up to the OL and sleeps through the 18 in the following days.

Overall, it's a waste of time and energy. I refuse to teach them. I'll help my partners prepare for them, but it's a moral imperative of mine to try for each day to have one or two OL-friendly activities. Which means half my time AT school is spent writing, cutting and laminating materials which no one finds particularly normal no matter how many times they see it.

Whatever. They have them. If they want to use them, they know where they are and how to do so.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Strange Things are Afoot in Spring

Blooming from continuing arguments with Laurentiu about my view of the world vs his view of the world, is a new verbal, and tomorrow written, contract.

Arguments have consisted of:

L: Of course you want to be married!
E: I don't want to be married. Besides, I don't have time to get married.

L: Of course you want a baby! It's a little Erika running around!
E: Babies are time consuming, expensive and dirty. I like none of these things.

L: Men like spicy food, women like bland food.
E: Not in my experience.

Though, of course each one takes 10 minutes, goes in circles and involves a lot of Maria intervening.

Overall, I'm always surprised by how much he lets me say. I guess it's one of the reasons this family was chosen to host an American.

Today however, it steered to:

E: I'm glad you don't smoke a lot.
L: I smoke maybe one pack in a week...more like two.
E: I know! and I'm glad for it! It means your body does not smell like smoke!
L: ...mumble mumble...
M: Smoking makes your clothes and skin smell terrible!
E: Exactly! When I sit next to a man on a ruteria he almost always smells terrible because every time we stop he has to go have a cigarette.
L: I don't smoke -- wait! I've seen you smoke!
E: I smoke maybe one cigarette in two months.
L: Good. Women should not smoke.
E: People who want to smell good should not smoke.
M: People who want to smell good should not drink alcohol either. A drinker can enter a room and you can be two rooms away and know a drinker just entered! Foo!
E: Foo!
L: ...mumble mumble...

...

L: When do you leave Erika?
E: August.
L: I will not smoke or drink until you leave. You must see how strong I am.
E: whoa... really?
M: He did it once. He won a competition! Starting at New Years and going for 3 months... was it 4... a set amount of time--very long-- There were 6 men all decided not to drink and each gave so much wood to the prize -- it was 10 metres of wood! And Laurentiu won!
E: Whoa. Very cool! High five!
L: *high fives, nods his head
E: And you will do it again?
L: Until you leave.
M: What about Easter? I can't just serve alcohol to our guests and you will want some!
L: oh!
E: After Easter!
L: After Easter!
M: You will forget this tomorrow.
E: I will bring paper tomorrow. We will write on it. We will have Laurentiu's signiture.
L: Yes! Very just!
E: You could have been a lawyer.
L: I am very strong and just.
E: very just.
M: After Easter...
L: Until Easter!
E: No. After.

We shall see. I'm excited.