Change Is In the Air

I remember when I was younger and I used to live for the weekends… no school, no work, just fun. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but sometime in the last year, my weekends have become even busier than my weekdays, hence why I have taken to declaring Tuesdays as my “weekend”. I don’t have school and I try not to leave my house on that one day… but I digress.

This weekend’s insanity started on Friday morning. Ieva had been invited to a regional English competition. “Olympiads” are held often for each subject that the study, but since she had placed in the top 10 in her “county” (for 11-12th grade), she was invited to a regional competition. I ended up driving her to the competition in Tukums, around an hour away. She went in the test room and I went in the teacher’s room. This was a completely new experience for me. I had NO CLUE what to expect. I thought that since the room was full of English teachers, there may be some English conversation going on. That was mistake #1.

But then I stood up, and I looked around and I said, “I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Lydia. Yes, I’m an American and I volunteer teach the 12th grade English class at Talsi Christian school. I’m kinda nervous because I’ve never been to anything like this, so I’d really appreciate your help.” And then everyone smiled and were so polite and bent over backwards to help me!

Oh, no, wait, that’s right… that’s what happened in my extremely active imagination, when I become the bold confident person that I am not, though long to have the courage to be. What actually happened was… (pause) nothing. No one asked me anything, not who I was or anything. Chris could have walked in there and sat down and pretended he knew what was going on and no one would have been the wiser. Weird. They did ask us to grade the tests as each section was finished. I finally sat down next to another younger teacher and told her, quietly, that I had no idea what I was doing. She said, “We’re grading these tests.” Ok… I knew that much. After we finished that section, I decided to try to start a conversation with her. “So, where do you teach?” She responded, “I teach at a small school in Liepaja.” Silence. Nothing. My expectation would be that she would say, “And where do you teach?” Nope. Nothing. *sigh* I killed some time on my cell phone with Chris. Before too long Ieva was done and we had to leave before the results were finished. I figured since no one really knew I was there anyway, I wouldn’t be missed. So we kicked out of there. We did find out later that out of the 54 12-graders there, she got 13th place, which is really awesome! I was very proud of her!

So we jumped in the car, got some food at the grocery store (ever try eating something like potato salad with no utensils? I tried my little rolls, but that didn’t work. Ieva tried using potato chips but that didn’t work either. I ended up eating it with my fingers… while in a nice skirt outfit… while driving… a standard drive car. Oh the fun.)

We got back to Talsi and came home and crashed for an hour. Ieva actually fell asleep on my couch. Then I took her back to town for practice for the evening school event: Žetonvakars.

Žetonvakars is a traditional Latvian event in high school. It’s when the seniors get their class rings, kind of “inducting” them into the alumni of the school. It also a time when they thank their teachers, do some skits or music depicting school life and such, as well as receive some sort of “gift” from the 11th grade. (This year it was a song and “awards” for each of the seniors.) Afterwards there’s food and a million pictures to be taken. This started at 5pm and went to about 8:30pm. Chris took Ieva home and then brought me home to change clothes.

Then we went to Musician’s night at the Christian Fellowship. We often go to this event which is every other Friday. It started at 9pm and would be considered a flop if it ended before midnight. It was no flop. We left before everyone else, and got home at 12:30am.

Saturday dawned much earlier than I had hoped it would. But that’s in Part 2. :)