My Birthday and Everything After

Thursday was my birthday, and it was weird. The staff had a sweet party for me, and they gave me flowers and a scarf and an early-afternoon toast to my health and happiness. That was the best part of the day. Then I had two really bad classes. I'm not sure why. Maybe I wasn't fully prepared - though I thought I had some fun activities - but my teenagers were totally out of control and obnoxious. We didn't even make it to the day's grammar point, so I left class angry with them. I was too exhausted to do a good job with my beginners in the evening, not to mention the fact that I was introducing articles - something that is already completely illogical and bizarre to the non-native English speaker, and extremely difficult to explain in Russian. (That's actually something I should work on - I think I speak too much Russian with them. It's just hard to stop once I get going. And yet I am proud of myself for being able to do it...) Anyway, I was sort of miserable by the time I got home. But Irina gave me a copy of Master and Margarita, in Russian, since we'd had a good little debate over its greatness versus Anna Karenina's. And I got a great package from home, so all in all, I guess it could have been worse. Well, actually, it did get worse. I woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat after reliving my terrible classes in my dreams, and I realized I'd (in real life) assigned homework that was totally irrelevant and un-doable.

I decided that I would do my birthday over again on Friday. After classes, the teachers took me out to our favorite restaurant, Shesh Besh, for an amazing meal: red wine, harcho soup, shashlik, khachapuri, and tea. And we snuck in the brownies they'd made, which resembled shrapnel more than desserts. And yet they were fantastic.

Saturday was our long-delayed trip to the dacha. We ate a ton, played football in waste-high grass, learned the game of Kartoshka (Potato), and slept deeply.

Which is what I'm going to do right now.