If you wanna fly, come and take a ride Take a space ride with the cowboy, baby

I've finished my second week of training, which means I'm halfway through already. We started teaching real Russians this week. It's been great to get some real experience, and the idea of teaching more Russians is a lot less intimidating now that I've done it a couple of times. Plus, although we're not actually practicing teaching kids, we've been talking a lot about techniques for teaching language to Young Learners, and it's getting me very excited to start teaching in October! I don't know who my classes are going to be, but it's likely that I'll have some kids which I think could be a lot of fun.

One of my co-teachers taught a lesson where she used Yuri Gagarin as an example. I was struck by the fact that the students could tell me the exact date of when he went to space. It's interesting that this huge historic moment is something that Russians know by heart but we mostly don't learn in the States.

Yesterday I explored the Cosmonaut Memorial park which has a memorial to the first man in Space.

Monument to the Conquerors of Space

 

 

Side of the monument.

I then explored the area and found a beautiful Orthodox church.

After this, I met some of my co-workers at this big open-air market, which was clearly designed for tourists, but had some cool things. Unfortunately, it was almost closing, so I'll have to go back at some point. The structure of the market was designed to look like the Russian Kremlin fortress, but the buildings were made of wood, not brick.

Some Equadorian musicians outside of the market, talk about a small world!

Imitation church inside the market

Woman singing inside the marketplace

 Within the marketplace, I found this tree with locks all over it. After some Googling, I learned that putting a lock on a tree is a tradition for newlyweds who inscribe their vows on them.

Locks on a tree

Today will probably be spent doing some more domestic things, grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry, all those other adult things that I'm still kind of getting the hang of. I'll be going back to another week of studying and practicing teaching tomorrow. The days are long, but I'm learning lots!