Speaking slowly and drinking tea.

It is incredible how long I've been here. Literally. I've been in Russia for one month and twenty days, but it doesn't feel that long at all. Still, I've gotten used to so many things here. It seems pretty normal to spend most of my time talking to people who only sort of understand me, so much so that when I talk to other native English speakers I often find myself speaking more slowly and using lots of hand gestures. They do the same thing, though, so it isn't particularly insulting to anyone. My classes are starting to fall into a routine. The days that I thought were long have gotten longer, but at the same time they are now easier for me, so it's no problem. I do still drink lots of tea, especially on Thursdays. Since I don't like coffee it is very nice for me to be in a place where they drink hot tea to get caffeine.
The children's class I have on Thursdays went much better yesterday than it had the week before. It was very heartening that things improved so much. The class is difficult for a number of reasons: The kids have a very low level of English; I have a very low level of Russian; the kids are fairly undisciplined; and the textbook encourages a more free-flowing rather than structured lesson. This week, however, it all worked well. The lesson objective was to learn "Is it a ...?" and I think that 6 or 7 out of the 8 kids learned it. That's the other odd thing about this class. The textbook doesn't expect them to actually learn much in a given lesson. It is amazing what you can do to stretch learning this simple 4 word sentence into an entire hour.
Tonight I made chili and we had honeydew melon (or something like it) and bread with it. There wasn't any cheddar cheese to put on it, but sour cream made it really good. We watched an episode of the West Wing on DVD while we drank our tea. In a few minutes I'm going to head to bed. Tomorrow I have an individual lesson at 11 and my conversation class at 1.