Altaiskoye

July 30th

On Tuesday night I ended up going to Altaiskoye to see Ted and help him with his lessons on Wednesday. I was just so bored here, I really wanted to actually do what I came here to do and teach English. So, I arrived and we watched Arrested Development (which he had the foresight to bring). Firstly, Ted has kind of a special living situation. He lives in a dormitory and his host mother lives across the street in a one-bedroom apartment. Her name is Natalya Mikhailovna and she is like a very strict, overprotective mother to Ted (who, by the way, is 22 and seems to be able to fend for himself in the world).

In the morning we went to Natalya Mikhailovna’s for breakfast and she was actually fairly nice. She says “to my mind” a lot, instead of “in my opinion,” which made me want to laugh. Then we went to school and met the younger kids. Ted teaches a group of younger kids for 3 hours and then a group of older kids for 3 hours. The young ones were so much fun and so adorable. It was good treatment for my feelings of uselessness here in Belokurikha because the kids were so excited to have me there. Ted does a really great job with them and they uniformly adore him. All of the little girls held my hands/arms when we walked anywhere (minus one, who held Ted’s hand). We mostly just drew pictures and they asked me questions like, “Do you like raspberries?” One little boy, Alyosha, whose birthday was that day, was adorable and carried my camera bag everywhere.

We then ate 3 different lunches and I really started to feel sorry for Ted who has to eat like this every day. We ate with the younger kids, then for some reason the kitchen prepared lunch just for Ted and I (though I think he usually goes to Natalya Mikhailovna’s for lunch), and then again with the older kids. We had about 20 minutes before the next lesson started and so we just sprawled on the bed and rested. The older kids were really great as well. They were slightly harder to keep entertained, but there were a lot of really sweet kids in the group. We started by having them ask me questions, which then turned into a dating game which Ted had played with them before. A “host” asked me different questions and then asked the same questions to four boys, and if our answer matched up they got a point.

The contestants were Ted, a boy named Alyosha who I had met before when I visited Altaiskoye, Misha and Dima. Kind of embarrassingly and hilariously, Ted got pretty much all of the points and his answers were usually exactly like mine. To be fair, we are both American, so that helps, but we also like the same type of music, both play the Mandolin (though I don’t really anymore), etc. I started to suggest questions that we would be less likely to give the same answer to in order to avoid the awkwardness of the students telling Ted and I that we should date, but then we matched on a lot of those too, like favorite flower. Anyway, I managed to put Alyosha in a close second behind Ted by some generous point giving, but Ted won despite my best efforts. The highlight of the game for me was when someone asked me my cup size and then the breast size that the different contestants preferred. If someone asked that question to a female teacher/camp counselor/almost anyone in any position of authority they would be in a lot of trouble.
So, after camp we went to the bus stop to catch my bus. Unfortunately, it turned out that we had misheard the time “shest sorok” instead of “shestnatsit sorok.” The first is 6:40 and the second is 16:40, aka 4:40. Natalya Mikhailovna was very unhappy and said that she knew I had stayed the night before and that she couldn’t see a solution to the problem (cabs are 100 rubles when the buses are running and about 600 when they are not). She seems to have a very weird thing about Ted and I staying together, alone, at night. Anyway, I was under the impression that she knew that I was coming for the night. However, Ted just sort of avoided the subject because of the way she reacted when he visited me in Belokurikha. So, needless to say, she was pissed. I just ended up staying another night, but Natalya Mikhailovna made me take a cab back at 5:40 in the morning for pretty much no reason at all, other than to be vindictive.

I am actually really glad I got to stay another night though, because one of Ted’s students/friends invited him over for his birthday party. His student’s name is David and he just turned 20. He is Armenian and has a huge Armenian family that all live together in one house and are just the nicest people you could hope to meet. I spent most of the evening talking to David who is really an amazing guy. He is a student in Novosibirsk, the capital of this region, and is just amazingly thoughtful and funny. When we started talking he asked his cousin to hand him the computer so that he could use a translation program he had. He said, “I already like you and I want to be able to communicate with you.” Ted, on the other hand, had been over before and they were very happy to see him. They asked him if he wanted wine, champagne, or vodka. He said champagne but they made him be “manly” and drink vodka even though he had to teach the next day.

They kept asking us why we weren’t eating as soon as we stopped for more than a minute, which was especially funny because none of them seemed to be eating. David’s cousin kept telling Ted to ask me why I wasn’t eating my cake and then made me try some of his mother’s pizza. I had a bite and he told me that I had to eat more and that if I was worried about my figure, my figure is fine and this wouldn’t make me gain weight anyway (it was dough, potatoes, and cheese). I started laughing and he quickly told Ted to tell me that he wasn’t hitting on me or anything. Then, as we were trying to leave in order to get back to the dormitory before it closed, they managed to get us to stay for some tea. Tea meant more vodka for Ted and another piece of cake for me. Then, when Ted tried to help me eat my cake, they gave him his own piece.

Oh, this place is so strange.