Classes as usual. I have the impression that more students than normal are suffering from diarrhea.

I sat in today on a class for someone outside our group. Nadya is a grad student from Illinois. Quite bright. Her teacher was competent.

The class I sat in on was a grammar class where they were going over complex sentences with subordinate clauses. And here I observed something that I have observed more than once. The exercises themselves were not particularly complex, but the sample sentences on which the exercises were based has fairly complex vocabulary, so much so that Nadya had difficulty understanding them. To be frank, that also precisely describes my third-year Russian grammar class. It was the 3rd-4th-5th year when the acquisition of vocabulary became the major issue.

If we use Russian produced textbooks, I'm not sure that is avoidable. The Russians forget that the educated vocabulary they have was developed through years of high school and college, and the higher level vocabulary for these exercises that they have put together is uncommon in a fourth year student. To overcome this, though, you have to produce a textbook where the grammar exercises use only previously introduced vocabulary. That's kind of tricky.

It may be the case that we just have to accept that there are years where the student has to do a massive vocabulary infusion and experience the frustration of doing all that catch-up.

Classes as usual. A student asked me if constipation was a normal side effect of anti-diarrhea medicine. Um, yes... that's its purpose.

"The less you know, the stupider..."

"Legal vodka has killed more people than illegal grafitti."

In blue: "Smile more often!"

In red: "Be unique: follow a cop!"

I think the idea behind the latter is that normally policemen follow you, so be unique and follow one of them.

"I love you"

"Hail, Billy!"

"Homophobia to the museum"

I think they mean that homophobia is so old-school that it belongs in a museum.

Some of our boys the other day wanted to learn pick-up lines in Russian, and language coach Nur was only too happy to oblige. Here is a sample: "Are your parents bread? Because you are a crumb."

In Russian крошка literally means ‘crumb,’ but it also means ‘cute little thing.’

Of course, English is in no way inferior to Russian. We also have bread-based English pick-up lines: “Is your daddy a baker? 'Cuz you've got some nice buns.”

Classes as usual.

One of our guys, Darren, went to the doctor because he feared a sore on top of his foot was infected. He got some anti-bacterial cream to treat it with. The doctor's visit was at a local clinic. When all was said and done, they asked how much to pay. The doctor said, "How much do you want to pay?" Huh? It turns out that if you want a professional receipt for the visit, then he'll fill out all the paperwork and it'll cost you 650 soms ($11), but if you don't feel the need for a receipt, he'll skip the paperwork and you can just pay 500 soms ($8.50). Presumably he doesn't report the income that way.

It is time to put the ‘doctor’ into ‘Dr. Livingston.’ I picked up some metronidazole today. I've used it in the past when I had giardia-like symptoms. I'm gonna dose myself with it again, and then we'll see if all my other symptoms clear up. The last time I bought this stuff was several summers ago in Kazan. I could buy the Russian, Polish or French version. I bought the French version, which I think cost me 200 rubles, which was about $6.50 back then. Today I bought the only version the pharmacy had, which cost me 5 soms (about 8 cents). Let's see if it has an effect.