what can I do with free time?

*sniff* Ne Rodis Krasevoy ended last night, with the wedding of the two main characters and a peek ahead to the birth of their first child. I was amused...after watching the show for 7 months and seeing how everything was drawn out as loooong as possible, Katya and Andrey got engaged 10 minutes into Wednesday's episode and got married on Thursday's. But I have to admit, I felt a little sad seeing the show end. As I said, I've watched it generally five nights a week since late December. It was how Marina and I bonded; it was one of the ways I've studied language; it was a link between my students and me; and I have to face it, I just liked watching it. What am I gonna do now with my evenings?

I have my ticket for Germany, and God was good...I didn't buy it Monday, due to trying to figure out whether to have my paper ticket shipped to me or to my parents (Czech Air doesn't do e-tickets), but when I went back to Travelocity's website on Tuesday, the KLM e-ticket that I'd wanted originally was once again available. So I'm paying $30 less just on ticket prices alone, not to mention not having to pay for ticket shipping. So I'm off to Germany in less than a month!

This week has been a rough one in some ways...it's the first time I've really been able to completely slow down since...well, since last October! Which is nice as far as staying in bed until 11 am, reading, and making a raspberry coffeecake (coffee cake? coffee-cake?) that, while it isn't that great, still tastes okay, but it means that I've had more time to think about stuff. Like the fact that my students don't seem to want to learn English and that I talk to them too much in Ukrainian and that Tif's permanently going to be in the US rather than coming back to Ukraine and that there is a very tiny list of people back home that I keep in touch with. All of which is Not Fun to think about and fills up too much of my free time.

I need to write a novel or something to fill my free time. But I don't have a plot. Feel free to suggest plot topics.

My downstairs neighbor Oleh (the jazz pianist) got married last Friday to Lesia, a piano teacher from the music school in town. They had some friends over Wednesday night, and invited me down as well. It was fun...a group of musically inclined, rather intoxicated people in their mid-20s who knew a few words in English (them being intoxicated wasn't "fun", but it meant that they were joking around a lot and trying to use English). We talked about music, the preponderance of alcohol in Ukrainian society (phrased as "Drink is part of our culture", to which I merely said, "I know"), and one of the guys wanted to know what swear words I knew in Ukrainian. I actually do know a few, as we had a lesson on them back in training for the purpose of identifying them when our students use them in class, but I declined to tell him which ones.