school's out

this was the last week of conversational russian. our teacher came into class from the final for her russian 3 course like a prom queen with big bouquets of flowers in her arms. we listened to 14 final presentations about what we were each going to do for the holidays. during the presentations i noticed that all the non-armenians (the latvian woman, the tajikistani woman, the russians, etc.) all have these piercing electric blue eyes - something i never noticed this until they were actually standing in front of me. and then we were freed. firecracker nelly reported that her cat (she's a breeder "бридер" of scottish folds) had had kittens and one of them is a hermaphrodite. i am blown away by how fast the semester has gone by. and i can't believe that i drove almost 25 miles each way to get to and from class every week. i remember how terrifying the first class was to be in a room full of eastern european adults - in the end, willik and i stuck it out as the only non-heritage speakers and it was all good fun. the women in the class are all very warm people and i'll miss them. my goal was to become a better listener - which i definitely have. speaking is still very poor, as expected.