On Wednesdays both Billie Jo and I have class. Her day bookends mine as she starts an hour earlier and finish an hour later - which is an extremely long six hour day for her - only four for me.
We travel together on Wednesday - save me some worrying about the Metro or running into any language snafus and I spend the extra few hours either studying, catching up on email or ahem in the Kafe.
I spent my early extra hour going over some notes in the Kafe, Vladimir - my teacher from Wednesday spots me and ask me what I am doing there. He says I don't have class for another hour and then he says - "You have Class Today With the Old Woman" - I hold back a chuckle and explain to him my situation. Vladimir will use the term Old Woman to describe this teacher any time he refers to her. At some point I will probably explain to him that in American English this is not customarily said, but I am enjoying it to much.
Ludmilla
The Old Woman's name is Ludmilla and she is somewhat Old School - although, thankfully she does not have an affection for cursive writing. Our class is more conversational as she rehashes the classes I had with my first two teachers. She pays particular attention to phonetics.
She encourages me to build entire sentences. We go over some of the "Dialogs" in the text and use real world examples.
At some point we discuss work and she asks me my US salary - I explain to her that this is not a topic discussed by American's. She explains that this is often an important part of Russian Conversation. Fortunately I knew this was true - and this is something about Russian Culture that I picked up not from Billie Jo but from my early SMS days (1991) they were hiring a lot of Russians.
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