Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Happy Halloween

This year for Halloween some of my friends and i went all out! We were joking a few weeks before about being Vikings, so well the joke moved forward and became a real costume. We bought some fabric to make dresses and some yards of fur to go all out with. As you can see it was pretty enjoyable! hehe









We even had a BOAT!!!! :)



Saturday, October 27, 2007

Where do you come from?

Central Ohio supposedly has a neutral accent (that newscasters study), i guess it is right...according to this quiz!

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Neutral. Not Northern, Southern, or Western, just American. Your national American identity is more important to you than your local identity, because you don't really have a local identity to begin with.

Take this quiz now - it's easy!
We're going to start with "cot" and "caught." When you say those words do they sound the same or different?



Monday, October 8, 2007

Happy St. Patrick's Day?...Russian Boyfriends...ok

Here is another Russian story, but i will give an update on the Education conference from last weekend, sometime this week. Enjoy!


So this is pretty much the only picture I have for this story; but it is a good one so i think it deserves a full post all about it!

March 17th one of my favorite days of the year, why i don't know; but St. Patrick's Day is just such a fun holiday; hello it is an excuse to wear green and pinch people who aren't, what more could you want from a holiday (and yes i know that isn't what st. patty's day is to everyone else in the world but it is to me). So St. Patty's day comes and us girls decide we are going to celebrate the holiday by making a green dinner. So we prepped to make Green bilinis (Russian creps), with green apples and broccoli and other green food or food we could dye green. Well I got home from school before most of the other teachers and was getting things set up to start making dinner. One of the other teachers, Jenny came home 10 mins or so later and is all in a huff telling me there is something crazy going on outside. She asks me if i heard any screaming or anything, I didn't and she continues to tell me the following story: "There is a guy crawling along the (snow/ice covered)road outside and is screaming like he is in pain or something like that." I then proceed to go outside b/c i have to see this for my own eyes...hello a guy crawling down the main street of sosny screaming and no one is helping this is kind of crazy and a little communist sounding; so i peek my head out the apt building door to find at the end of the street an "ambulance" pushing a couple of guys into the vehicle and 2 or 3 other guys trying to pull him out of the vehicle and there being a huge struggle back and forth so i continue staring trying to figure out what is happening. As i watch the guys pulling one of the people out of the vehicle and is successful and then seeing them try and get the other guy out of the vehicle (i will continue to call it a vehicle b/c it wasn't a car, truck, van or suv...it was a mix of all, very efficient :)) i think to myself this can't actually be an ambulance or why would they be trying to get them out of it?! Oh through out this whole struggle the guys are scream and there is one voice that squeals as high pitch as a mans voice can get; but i am the only one watching this...so i decide if the Russian's aren't watching; it obviously isn't anything worthy of watching or just not a big deal, so i head back inside to get back to preparing the fantastic green food.

Jenny then has to go catch a bus to go into Moscow. She leaves and gets back about 15 mins later, explaining that the babuskas pushed her to the back of the line and she didn't feel like standing for the whole 30 min ride and that she would catch the next bus in. But then she proceeds to ask me if i knew who the guy was lying outside our door. I of course didn't and didn't even know there was a man lying outside our door. So i go to the peep hole to check it out, to find not only a man lying on the floor, but 2 other guys as well (these ones are mobile). They must of heard me or seen my shadow under the door, or my eye in the peephole b/c almost immdietly there was a knock at the door. I wasn't quite sure what to do and i believe i shrilled (like any girl would do) and ran away from the door. Jenny went to the door and i followed, she opened it and they immediatly start going off in Russian; we of course use our most common Russian phrase "i don't speak Russian" and get our english russian dictionary to have him translate to us what he is trying to say. He pushes the book away (not sure if it is b/c of the complicated orders or if the wording was too small for his very bloodshot eyes to focus on). He keeps pointing at his friend on the floor and doing all these motions (no clue what he was trying to guesture at (if there is anything i learned about in russia it was that getures are not a universal language ) so i go for the phone to have our Russian contact to talk with him so she can tell us what they are asking us. I get Julia on the phone and explain the situation; her response is like don't open the door. I say too late we already did; will you talk with them and tell us what they are trying to say. We give him our oh so new phone (not, it was a rotary phone from like 1982)and it didn't quite reach to outside the front door so he had to kind of come into our apt a little.

I get the phone back and Julia is laughing on the other end, they were asking us not to call the police on their buddy; that he was just really drunk and needed a place to sleep for a little while and that they would be back for him in a couple of hours. We tell them we wont call the the police and then the bolder looks at me and (points at me) says, "you girl (points at himself) me boy" at this i push him out the door and close it as i am saying "nyet". So we monitor the peephole through out the rest of the night; finding an interesting show of him taking his pants off peeing in the corner (mind you it is about 10 degrees out), really sanatary don't you think.

A couple of hours later the guy in our group (who lived upstairs) came over and saw that we had a box of chocolates and a Bunny shaped key holder outside our door and the guy was gone. So we decided we had Russian boyfriends, i mean they did buy us presents. hehehe

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Angry Sosny Bunnies

So here is a randomness from my time in Russia. And when I say randomness i mean it; it has very little to do with Russia, except to show how excited we got to be able to be outside without snow and freezing to death! Being trapped up in our little, funky smelling, russian apartments; which i was so greatful for despite the terrible bed that almost broke my back.
Anyway there was a badmitten (spelling) (the Russian kids loved badmitten and would beg me to play with them as i would walk home from school, so every once in awhile i would play with them, i must say i was a natural ;) but that is another story) net set up one building over from ours that we took our volleyball to and would play. We had two apartments one for the Sosny school teachers (me) and one for the Kaptain school teachers; so that is why we played Sosny vs Kaptain. We challenged them to the game and little did they know we were going to bring it, we picked gray as our color (mainly b/c that was the only color all of us had to wear), our name was the Angry Sosny Bunnies b/c we were given a bunny key holder by some strange Russian men (but again story to be told at a later time.) and decided to put our hair in high pigtails So here are some pictures from our little games we played! hehe Enjoy



of course we lost the ball under the cars and why I (with my short arms) was retrieving it I will never know; but how could you resist taking a picture of a butt sticking straight up in the air! boom baby! :)

This is the Kaptain team, they were just happy to get a point :) (hey it is my blog)

After the games we would do as any other sport teams would do; run along the center of the "court" and high five the other team...

And here are the CHAMPIONS...the Angry Sosny Bunnies... pretty angry if i do say so myself; oh and we won every match; so I guess you could say we were the best! ;)

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Russia Love

I was looking at "friend's" pictures on facebook (they are friends it is just funny using that term in conjunction with facebook) today and found some pictures of our time in Russia on a girls profile and started to think about my being there and wanted to share some stories and pictures. So for the next few blogs i am going to be reminiscing of Russia and my time spent there with all the crazies, cute kids and mind opening experiences. Hopefully you enjoy!

Monday, October 1, 2007

The big E

So last weekend I got to relive a part of my childhood...well sort of! Growing up every august there was a carnival/fair. I always wanted to go and it was so the cool place to be; hello there were rides, food, and people from other schools that you could "meet". Well this past weekend I went to a bigger and better fair than our little town ever put together it is called the BIG E. I really didn't know what i was getting into; all i knew was it sounded like a fair/carnival and i was stoked. This "fair" was enormous! It is pretty much a fair for the entire New England area and it has replicas of the state houses from all the different states. Inside these replicas they have different things that represent their state; but i think it is still all about the food, part of the "things" that represent their state are the choice treats of desire! SO good; although i don't recommend starting off with the Claim cakes they sit a little heavy and well lets just say you need a little time to digest especially when they hit an empty stomach.

Aside from these very cool state house replicas and representation of state pride, they had are you ready for this.... SHARKS!!! Random, but oh so lovely! They had Lemon sharks and Nurse Sharks, it was really cool to see Nurse sharks considering they are one of the species marine biologist are still exploring and know very little, thanks to technology this is changing but it was really neat to see them. Yes it was incredibly bizzar to see them at a fair, but as far as i am concerned you can't see sharks in a wrong place (except maybe when you are injured and swimming in the middle of the deep blue ocean without any form of a boat and you're bleeding from at least 2 limbs and you see one next to you, ok so maybe that is a bad place to see a shark :))

They also had all sorts of farm animals, plants (namely giant pumkins (Dad)) and produce Ohio could be proud of, oh and 4H and FFA were both represented in case you are wondering ;). All in all it was really fun and some place kind of "new"; but the people are still really fun to watch -there are some serious crazy out there, but they only keep things exciting!