new year

I spent New Year's Eve with my host family, minus one sister, and had a nice time. We watched a film, the former soviet republics' Miracle on 34th street, about a man who goes to the wrong city to the wrong apartment, thinking it's his home, and falls in love with the woman who lives there. This plot was plausible because every building and floor plan was the same in Russia. So, I helped make the food, we set the table, ate at 10, set off firecrackers outside at midnight, and went to bed at two. There was a kid in a bunny costume, and my host mother spent the night wearing either the bunny ear cap or my elf hat.

The next day, Tim, Amber, and I went by train to Almaty, a trip that lasted three nights and two days. There was a conference for the new volunteers, which was scheduled so that we were inside during daylight hours (in fact, for three whole days, but I woke up early and took a walk one of them) and busy during most of the swimming pool hours. I was twitching violently by the third day of meetings in a windowless room.

I came back by plane on the 10th, and suddenly everything at my school is okay: the seventh graders did their homework and answered questions appropriately, the vice-principal asked me to split my youngest classes so that they would be easier to teach, I found both a Kazakh and a Russian language tutor in my school (no more going to the city for a tutor!), my unit lesson plans are falling into place nicely, my director was relatively friendly to me, my computer stopped freezing so often, and 15 students came to the first English club meeting yesterday. We'll be learning line dancing next week.

However, hotmail has been making the little windows logo spin in futility for twenty minutes, bless its pathetic little heart. So, all of you for whom I have emails, wait maybe a week until it works again. My apologies. And I also speak for hotmail, which cannot speak for itself, bless its little heart.