New Friends

The girl in the picture with Emma comes to our English Club and today her parents invited us to come over to their place for dinner.  They are a great family and I'm sure we'll be spending more time with them in the future.  We had a great time and loved the food...though they apologized that they didn't serve sheep (which we aren't too fond of)   They promised us that next time we come we'll have sheep intestines.  I tried my best to hint to them that I'm quite ok with potatoes and salads :)

David and I went for a long walk today and I was just struck with how dirty it is.  the ice and snow are so black from all the coal.  but we still really enjoyed wandering around town together and amazingly enough, neither of us wiped out on the ice :)  Looking forward to the dirty spring to be over and summer to come..won't be long now!

Spring..

Because the majority of the roofs (I really want to spell that as rooves) are like these ones, the icicles are pretty cool (good pun eh) around town.  I'll try to find some really long ones next time I'm out.  These ones are quite average.  They are pretty dangerous when they fall of course which will be happening a few weeks from now. 

Emma hasn't had ballet classes for almost a month because they were under quarantine (all schools were for varying lengths of time because of flu season).  Emma (yes, the one in the back with excellent form) was so glad when it reopened! 

And mom...thanks soooo much for the tights..they are perfect!

Japanese Concert

Last Wednesday night, I (Erin) had the opportunity to go see a few japanese musicians who are visiting our area.  The concert was a little disappointing (not so organized and really short for the $$$) but it was still interesting and I just really enjoyed being out for the evening with my friend Saglana.

David and I go to a weight gym two or three times a week.  We are always the only ones there except for the employee.  He finds us very interesting...asks lots of questions about Canada...(why do they always ask us about things that we don't know anything about...like Hockey!?!?!)  He saw that I had a camera with me today and asked us to take some photos of/with him.

on March 8th (Ladies' Day) we went bowling with a few of our lady friends.  It was REALLY fun.  The kids (and most of us adults) started off really bad... all gutter balls...  but by the end all of us had at least a few decent shots:)   We went out to eat at a nearby cafe for lunch afterwards. 

This past week I made up a game to help the English Club students learn more about compound words. Even though they knew most of the nouns they had a really hard time figuring out what compound words could be made up out of the 16 cards I gave them...it was really funny... in the end the only one they got right was Championship. We really enjoyed watching them work together as a team and coming up with words like Washercross:)

We got a big wardrobe to hang all our jackets etc. in..but it takes up the whole wall so our mirror has no home now. A mirror is VERY important to have by the door, traditionally Russians believe you must look in a mirror before you leave...long story... but basically of course the girls need it to fix their hats/hair/makeup before heading out the door. So last English Club, we called David over to the door each time a new group of girls were headed out the door to hold up the mirror for them. We'll have to think of a more long term solution.

Josiah