Russian Language Refresher

I've been the laziest person ever today (literally: eating, reading, and watching tv shows.  kind of embarrassing).  BUT, everyone needs a day like that now and then in my opinion.  I chose today.

part of my lunch today: a modified version of this recipe 

That recipe called for Italian seasoning and parmesan cheese, neither of which I had.  Instead, I used lemon pepper spices, garlic salt, and regular salt.  Pretty delish.  And simple!

Back to the topic at hand: Russian Language Refresher.  A week ago, I was in the snowy city of Chernigov with 50-some Peace Corps Volunteers.  The goal?  To practice, improve, and motivate our Russian at site.  I enjoy speaking Russian in Kirovograd.  Well, in Ukraine for that matter {sidenote: if someone had told me 15 years ago that I would be studying Russian and enjoying it, I would have laughed in their face.}.  So, I was very excited to get to go to language refresher.  It's a great time to see your friends who lives far, far away, and I was hoping that it would be motivation for me to actually study Russian at site.

Every day consisted of a few lessons of your choosing.  I chose a class on perfect/imperfect verbs (very helpful), gerunds and verbal adverbs (horribly unhelpful to me because I can't even tell you what those are in English...), and verbs of motion (incredibly helpful and needed!).  OH!! And one of my favorite classes: Russian cursive.

Russian (and Ukrainian) cursive is truly an art.  Students learn cursive starting in the first form and study is for SIX MONTHS.   Generally, it is incredibly uniform (for boys and girls alike!) and simply beautiful.

The reason it is hard for us to learn is because many of the cursive letters look the same with a crazy amount of loops.

This picture floated around facebook for a while and made most PCVs here in Ukraine laugh and shake their head.  The first word says Militsia (police).  I can't tell you what the second word says.  Maybe something about listening?

This is my attempt at writing some words in cursive.  As my sweet teacher told me, "Your letters are dancing..."

Every letter is supposed to be at the same height and at the same slant.  And then you have to remember "connectors" which separate similar looking letters.  Sigh...in time :)

During the evenings at language refresher, you could choose different "fun" classes to attend.  Arts and crafts, jewelry making, chess, dancing, etc...and all of these lessons were taught in Russian.  I chose to remember how to do knitting and re-learn the art of cross-stitch.

My turtle! 

The last morning of language refresher, Catharine (a fellow K-grad oblast volunteer!), Jenny, and myself were working on our cross-stitch projects.  One of the PC staff members came over and asked Catharine if she had just started hers the night before.  In all actuality, Catharine had started hers three days before but hadn't had time to work on it outside of class.  It gave us all quite a good laugh :)  This picture was taken moments after that minor slip-up :)

Catharine, Jenny, and Lydia

Courtney and Anne in the back 

much better!  Anne is working on her knitting as you an see...

Also offered as one of the "fun" classes was a basket-weaving class.  One of my sweet friends Theo took the class and worked on her basket on the marshrutka ride back to Kiev...

The inside of a nice marshrutka {note: this is not what the city marshrutkas look like in K-grad)!  Meredith (with the brown curly hair) is also working on her basket :)

The last night of refresher a small talent show was held.  I'll let these videos speak for themselves.  On the video below, if you click on the red part that says "youtube" you can watch a larger version of the video. Enjoy!

 I honestly can't tell you what they're saying in this video, but this is a very common Ukrainian song :)

As a joke, someone signed up Nathan and Richard to count to 1000 in Russian.  They were pretty good sports about it...

Word of the day:
turtle--черепаха