Final Days…
Well, as I am writing this blog, I am sitting in a Burger King in the airport in St. Petersburg. We flew out of Ufa at 6:00 this morning and we are now in the middle of a 5 hour layover in St. Pete. I believe I blogged about our first experience in this airport back in August, but for those of you who don’t remember, it was definitely not a good highlight of this trip! We had serious communication problems and were incredibly confused. So far, we have had some confusion, but not nearly as bad as the first time. We still haven’t been able to check in yet though, so who knows what will happen.
So, since I haven’t updated in a while, I better get yall caught up on our last days in Ufa…
Last Monday was our last English club at the Carr’s apartment. It was a lot of fun! We made gingerbread cookies and we were able to talk with several of our good friends. When the advanced group finished, we had them come into the kitchen and Shannon, Kelly, Eileen, Heather, Nathan and I all performed a skit for everyone. You may have seen this skit before… Setting- Doctor’s office waiting room… Plot- a guy(Nathan) comes to the doctor’s office with the sniffles, other people (everyone else) come in to the waiting room with various symptoms(cough, sneezing, headache, itching… etc) and as they sit in the waiting room the guy “catches” their symptoms and the other people’s symptoms go away. Eventually, Nathan was coughing, sneezing, itching, barfing, and moaning from a headache all at the same time. At this point Eileen waddled in like a pregnant lady…. Nathan sees her and, not wanting to “catch” this “symptom,” he takes off running out the door. It was SO much fun, and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it (Side Note: we are currently trying to get ahold of one of the copies of the video, so it might be up on facebook eventually) we had to say our final good byes to a couple of people that night, but it really didn’t seem real to us at that point.
Wednesday we performed a short skit about American Christmas traditions(almost completely in Russian btw) at the university as a part of a presentation/competition for all the internationals at BSU. There were at least 100 people at this presentation (from 7 different countries) the people from each different country did some sort of presentation about how their country celebrates New Years, but, since Christmas is a much bigger holiday in America, we were allowed to do ours on Christmas. It went pretty well. We were able to remember our lines (and hopefully pronounce them decently) and we had fun. It was very interesting to see all the other countries presentations as well. We, as Team America, even received an award for “Artistry.” During our presentation, Kelly even read the story of Jesus’ birth from Luke 2 in Russian, so over 100 people heard that story that night!
That was our next to last day of school. On Friday, we had a test in class. This was the equivalent of a final exam, and would show if we learned anything through the semester. We weren’t expecting to have to take this test, because we are actually leaving in the middle of their school term. But it went well. Shannon and I both feel like we did well on it. Because we left today, we were unable to get our stamped certificates showing that we completed the course yet, but they should be mailed to us or something in the near future. We had to say good bye to our classmates after class Friday. This was a bit of an emotional experience. We have really enjoyed our class. We have a special bond with our classmates since we are all internationals living here and can all barely understand the language. There is a certain bond between people who can empathize with each other like that. And besides that we spend at least 14 hours a week with these people. We were able to give a Vietnamese Bible to 2 of our Vietnamese classmates and they seemed really grateful and interested.
We also had our “good bye” party that night. Nearly all of our closest friends showed up. We played some games and ate some snacks and hung out. Side Note: We had thought that we were not going to see one of our really good friends again (who just happened to be the first Russian friend we met when we got here) because he was out of town and we didn’t know when he would be getting back. He surprised us by showing up at the party (with his luggage from his trip and everything) This completely made our day! There was some sad goodbyes at the end of this party, but still, it didn’t seem like we were really leaving in a day and half…
I had been packing for almost a week at this point. And I still don’t know how I managed to get everything to fit in my suitcase… Somehow, I managed to buy 5 coffee mugs in 3 and a half months! I think I might have gone a bit overboard on the coffee mug obsession… but one way or another it all fit (and was actually under the weight limit! J)
Saturday, we spent the morning at the Carr’s for a brunch with our whole team. We turned in our apartment keys and said goodbye to our landlady and her grandmother (our Russian grandmother!) and then went back to the Carr’s. We were able to go slide down an ice slide with almost all the Carr kids for a while (Shannon and I have been really hoping we would be able to do this!!)
Shannon and I said our final goodbyes to the rest of our friends and Kelly Saturday night at English Club. For some reason, neither one of us had realized that we were not going to see Kelly again. As we were walking out the door it hit both of us. That was a very difficult goodbye! Kelly has been such a good friend to us!
We spent the night at the Carr’s apartment so that we could leave from there at 4:50 AM. There were some very difficult goodbyes that night and early this morning also! The Carrs have become so much like my second family. They have made us feel so at home and we have loved spending time with them!
We made it to the Ufa airport with very little time to spare before our flight, but we made on and have now made it safely to St. Pete. Soon we will be heading down to the check in desk and hopefully make it smoothly to London.
I’ll probably post more later about some more details about all that went on this last week and such, but right now I need to get ready to head to the check in desks….Aparrently blogging is a good way to pass the time, because these last 2 hours flew by! I’ll try to update more later!
