I’m beginning to understand why most of the NSLIY blogs I read had few new posts after arrival. I’d need a couple of hours every day to try to write out everything that happened. Since the matryoshka factory we visited a children’s summer camp and sang American folk songs badly, went to an outdoor adventure place for group bonding activities, about half of us met our host families, we went to the historical museum and saw a huge diorama of a protest at the beginning of the Russian revolution, and I learned how to order ice cream in Russian. We also went to an outdoor museum in the childhood home of a famous Russian heart surgeon, taught our Russian peers about the 4th of July, and toured a kvass factory. Kvass, by the way, is a sort of ‘bread soda’. There’s almost no alcohol, but it kind of tastes like carbonated beer. It’s not...good, but I keep drinking it for some reason. I think it’s growing on me. We’ve also done a lot of homework. In less than three weeks we have (in theory, at least) learned to conjugate verbs in all three tenses, and today we started learning about aspects. Aspects are sort of similar to the preterit and the imperfect in Spanish. Every verb starts off in the imperfective, and has a perfective pair. Sometimes the change is a suffix, sometimes a prefix, and sometimes just a completely different verb. The imperfective aspect refers to a process, and the perfective to a completed action. Which sounds fairly simple, but in fact is not. Russian grammar is tough, and there aren’t enough hours in the day, so I’m signing off for now.
PICTURED ABOVE AND BELOW: kvass at a local kvass factory
PICTURED BELOW: loom from a nearby historical society