By The Sea, and Random Pictures

Yesterday, I took a dip in the Baltic Sea. How was your Friday?

I'm just teasing. Well, I mean, I did take a dip in the Baltic Sea, but that doesn't mean that whatever you did for Friday wasn't completely awesome. Because I'm sure it was.

A lot of the girls really wanted to go to the beach, and though I'm not particularly fond of beaches I decided to join them. When would I have a chance to see the Sea again? (It also so happens that once someone had mentioned "Baltic Sea" I had the Sweeny Todd song stuck in my head -

By the sea, Mr. Todd, that's the life I covet. 

By the sea, Mr. T. Ooh, I know you'd love it. 

You and me, Mr. T, we could be alone 

In a house what we'd almost own. 

Down by the sea...

- and I knew I'd never be free of it until I could sing it on the seashore. So I did.)

The Sea was pretty great, but it didn't last very long. We spent all of Saturday on another cultural excursion, but I'll save that for another post. Today, how about some random pictures from the last week?

This one below is (top to bottom) Leslie and Jodi, dutifully planning lessons for their Elementary classes. 

This was our first full week of teaching, and it was exhausting. Primary is a lot easier to plan for, so my lesson planning didn't take quite as long. However, the school has decided they want to add another Elementary class, and guess who's probably going to be teaching it? Me! (*half-sighs*) Well, who knows? Maybe I'll like teaching Elementary even better than Primary.

This next one is a picture of one of our lunchtimes.

The school we teach at is responsible for providing us with lunch every day. We have had some kind of soup/stew/broth every day, which sometimes some of the girls find delicious and others find hard to swallow. Our salvation is that we are also always given fresh bread, which makes any broth palatable and gives us the strength we need to try their strange foods. (We had meatballs yesterday that tasted like fishsticks. We've made it a point to stop asking what the meat is. We're worried that we really don't want to know.)

This next picture is of our head teacher, Allison.

That's a bag of milk she's holding. It's plastic, and designed to look like a jug, but it is most definitely a plastic sack of milk. They put milk in the weirdest containers over here...

Oh! Now it's time to look at some pirated movies. In our time here, we've found many different shops where you can buy DVDs for cheap - sometimes while the movie is still in theaters in America! I haven't bought any of these, but I did see a few in the store that I thought certain members of my family might appreciate. Thus, we have Alice in Wonderland:

...and Coraline, for my sister:

But what I liked best about the questionable movie store was what I found on the outside. Painted on the wall, in all his red-and-blue glory, was . . .

SPIDER-MAN! Oh yes. They love him here, too. As well they should. It's really too bad that I don't speak Russian, because every time I see a little kid running around in a Spider-man shirt, I want to talk to him. "You like Spider-man? I LOVE Spider-man! We're getting married someday. Tell me, who's your favorite Spidey-villian?"

(*comes back to senses*) Ahem. Yes. Well, on to more practical things. Like the Metro.

The Metro is a very crowded place sometimes. It's really nice when I can get a seat. When I'm out of luck, forced to stand, I just take it as an opportunity to practice my skills of not-falling-over-when-the-train-starts. It's actually pretty fun to ride standing up if you close your eyes and pretend to be hoverboarding. (See the Uglies series by Scott Westerfield.)

And, that's all my pictures for today. There are a lot more to come, thanks to our cultural excursion on Saturday, so I hope this is enough to sate your appetite until then. I leave you with one last picture of myself, posed against some rather beautiful graffiti we found walking along the river yesterday.

All of my love,

Jessica Grosland