colors

Today, at 11:25, Alla showed up at our building. Blond and tall, as the director of the International Language School had predicted, she also sported a shiny gold star on her incisor. Trés hip-hop. She had been sent by the director to accompany me to the school; a kindness I thought unnecessary, until I realized that despite being less than 2 miles away, there was no direct form of transport there. As she and I walked downtown to catch a marshrutka (a van which operates like a bus), she told me she had just returned to work two weeks ago after having given birth.

I was a little surprised. Actually, I was shocked: leaving a two-week old to return to work didn't sound customary to me. When I asked her, she assured me it wasn't normal; here, a woman gets three years after birth before she returns to work. Now it was Alla's turn to be shocked when I described the six-weeks unpaid leave we get in the good ol' USA. Later, as the green van #60 wound its way up a hill towards what looked like a nice green forest (on a street conveniently named "Zelena," or green), Alla revealed that, in fact, her child was one and a half and that she was only returning part-time because the other office girl was about to give birth any minute.

The van stopped just outside a huge, rectangular, soviet-style apartment building. We walked in, headed up two flights of stairs and found the school, where we were met by the director, maroon beehive and all. The director ushered me into a darkened room where my tutor, tiny, all in black, sat behind a tiny black desk. She invited me to sit down, and there we sat, six inches apart for the next two hours. It was all terribly useful and terribly exhausting. I'm not very good at sitting for two hours straight, and fairly abysmal at talking for that long. Luckily, after we'd covered all the basics (where am I from, who's in my family, what do I do for fun, where did I study, what does Axel eat, who keeps house, what does my husband do?), she asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. Yes! Even if, as she pointed out, it's not really coffee.

There was no clock in our dimly lit classroom, and I kept trying to sneak peeks at my watch attached to my bag at my feet. The minutes crawled by as she reviewed all nine forms of movement verbs. My mind balked when she asked me to provide examples; all I could come up with was "Everyday I go to the swimming pool." Which reminded her of a Canadian she'd worked with recently, who told her: "I go to the gym three times a week." Imagine!

Anyway, after two hours she brightly promised me that tomorrow we would review directional prepositions for movement and off I went to talk to the director about payment. Here, we switched to English, and, thusly, dollars; under the maroon beehive, the director's eyelid twitched. Even though we're in Ukraine, the policy seems to be payment in one's national currency. It's not the best deal for us, given daily vacillation in value, but, we're guests here. What to do?