A refreshing view on life...

I was teaching a class yeterday and opposite me there was a native speaker teaching a young boy, who was probably about 7 or 8. Most of the lesson was conducted in Russian, with the occasional 'khello and gooodbye' but about 15 minutes in the boy turned to his teacher and asked in Russian "Do you think in English?", and his teacher replied (in Russian too) "Yes, always, and sometimes in Russian". The little boys face was priceless! You could see him trying to understand how a person could think in a language where he only knew a few words... and it reminded me of the first time I heard French people talking to each other. I remember turning to my Mum and asking how they understood each other?! Such a refreshing view on life.

A video from the Last Shadow Puppets, filmed in Russia. Some of the comments about this video are that it shows a stereotyped image of Russia, which it does, but I quite like the video, thoughts?

I should also mention, my 's' key is being very temperamental at the moment, so apologies if there are typos. "It not my fault, orry. I can pell and type honet!!!"

A good way to begin procrastinating is starting a blog! I am currently applying to job after job (and receiving rejection after rejection) and a blog is a welcome form of distraction, and it feels like you are doing something constructive, which is always my number one rule for procrastinating: it has to appear to be productive (whether it is is another matter completely)!! I'll let you know how this particular form of procrastination goes... so far I'm having fun and feeling as though I am contributing something useful to society (self-delusion is a wonderful thing).

A walk to the metro, which usually takes two mintues took about ten today because the pavements have turned into rivers of dirty slush, snow is falling in very large chunks from the buildings- which makes going anywhere sporting to say the least, and I passed about three men who fell (not at the same time and in different locations) over because they were all blind drunk. A great advert for never drinking again. Well at least until next weekend...

I went to a great bar/restaurant on Wednesday night, called Кантри-бар (Kantri bar, which is the Russian way to say the English word 'country') and was very tempted by the top dish 'language of the lamb'!! The word for language and toungue in Russian 'язык' (yazik) is the same. This seemed to be a common mistake, but a very funny one, and some of the menus I have read over the past year or so have been very entertaining!

Remember this next time you're at the zoo!!

Isn't the English language wonderful. I think badger, irk, vex, bother etc. are all great but much underused words. I shall try and incoporate them in my posts, points for those that notice them.

Banksy - Manifesto

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Source: Imperial War museum

Not something particularly nice to read, it is just a story that I read and have never forgotten, not that lipstick could in any way solve any problems of make people forget but a touching story.

I saw this picture the other day and it did make me giggle. From my experience many Russian people do not think very much of greenpeace. I was trying to buy a winter hat for my brother in December and said to the guy selling hats, I didn't want any fur. The man looked at me and said (in a very think Russian accent) 'Grinpeeas' and thought this was the most hysterical joke ever!!! All because I wanted a hat with no fur- that is obviously the measure of a good environmentalist these days... I probably shouldn't add that I went on to buy a fur hat! (which I cannot wear, but more about that later).

Also there seem to have been a few protests in Moscow recently (the picture is from last week)- and I have not seen any of them, I wonder where they happen and why I don't know about them?!

Finally....

After 16 months of living in Moscow and talking about writing down some of my experiences and general musings, I am finally doing it (thanks Dot), so here goes...