Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Now it's summer

It snowed three weeks ago, but last week summer started all of a sudden. The temperature has been 32-34 C, or 90-93 in REAL degrees, as I delight in saying to Europeans and Canadians. (recently I had a slight fever. I bought a thermometer and then had to figure out what normal body temperature is in Celsius. 37 C, in case you're wondering)

The walk to work in the morning has been fine but the walk home is grueling so I've been taking one of the many marshrutkas. They're packed and sweltering. This is the "hottest May in a hundred years" the local staff members keep saying. I feel as if I've been cheated out of a genuine Ukrainian winter. I brought all these winter clothes: long underwear, my mom's fur coat, wool tights--and needed to wear them for only a couple of months, not from October to April as I expected.

The school isn't air-conditioned so it's sweltering as well. By afternoon the kids are subdued, limp, and dragging around, which is nice for me, with my hyper grade 5 kids during period 7. "Oh, please, it so hot, can we something easy? we watch movie? " Me: "It IS so hot, can we DO something easy, CAN we watch A movie---okay! Let's watch "Thumbtanic"! It has a glacier in it! That will make us all feel cool!" No worries about SOLs here.

1 comment:

Cheryl said...

Now I see why one of my co-workers, who is Hungarian, says to all her clients, "How you?"