it feels like home to me...
Words cannot express how pleased and edified I feel after class this morning. Out of the excess of my quiet joy I determined to share this with you. Something weird happened that made me feel like i was back in London. In Reader's Theatre today (8 in the morning, bleh) we were inundated with Russians. Not even the professor knew that there was a group of middle-aged Russian ladies who taught Russians to speak English and had come to visit the school. And they were going to sit in on our class. And they brought cameras and videocameras, which they used to excess. And then there were more. And more cameras. We did vocal exercises, which meant lying on the floor with a book on our stomach (Hava remember doing that in East Park for Theatre Camp?!?!?! :-D) making sounds, and chanting as much as we could with one breath. They must've thought that they had accidentally gone to Abnormal Psych and were getting a demonstration of a particularly debilitating illness. Then we got one lady in each of our groups to read our Shel Silverstein adaptations with us, which was hysterical when the lady with us, Galina, came to words like "slishity-slosh." Hearing all those Russian accents was so refreshing. AT LAST, someone from a different culture than you, who speaks a different language!!! Can i get an amen?! Then after class Galina was talking to me and was very nice. She told me about her 24-year-old daughter and said that i should arrange sometime with my teacher for me personally to come down to where they were staying so that she could show me pictures of her daughter's wedding and chat. Of course I would love to do this, except I've noticed that when there's the possibility an imperfect understanding as a result of language, both parties end up smiling as wide as they are physically able to til their face freezes that way. Yih. I don't know if I could keep that up for very long. I'm not sure if it's possible for most of you to understand why this reminded me of Europe--it's just the contact with a non-english speaking culture with the uber-friendly interaction, and the complete randomness and unexpectedness of it. I've expanded my contacts to Perm, Russia. Most of all, the sheer absurdity of the situation itself when put into words: us lying on the floor making blowing noises while they crowd around videotaping, to study later to improve their classes where they teach English. I'll be incredibly famous to a lot of Russian people, who are the more to be pitied. I didn't even get to dress nice. Oh well. The moral of this story is: going with the flow is ridiculously fun!!! Your life is better in proportion to the encounters that you have like these. Rock it, LondON!