Recounting Rus: Novospaskii Monastery

15.09.07: I stayed around the flat most of the day as I wanted to look over the books for my classes. Monday I teach an elementary group of children who are supposed to be around 12 yrs. old. Now that we have finished training I don’t really feel that much better about being in charge of a class for several hours and teaching them something... I’m planning on going in to the resource center early on Monday to plan. My intermediate class Monday night is actually at the same lesson that we taught on Friday so hopefully that will go well, however, I only taught one third of the lesson so we’ll see how the other two thirds go. In the afternoon I went for a walk around our neighbourhood and in a park that goes along a small river. I met a friend at Novospaskii monastery for the vigil at 5 pm. So that was the first service where I’ve seen someone pass out... I’m actually not sure what happened but some guy fell down several rows of people in front of us and was dragged out, however, he returned after a few minutes. After the service we stopped in at a cafe for some tea. When we got to the metro I misheard where my friend told me to go so ended up getting on the train going South instead of North and didn’t realize it for about 3 or 4 stops...

The park near my flat.

16.09.07: My friend John from Chicago, who is going to Alatyr’-a city a days journey southeast of Moscow, was in town so I met him and his girlfriend at St. Katherine’s for liturgy. Afterwards we searched for a good place to go for lunch and ended up at Yolki-Palki, a chain restaurant that serves traditional Russian food. I met some friend and my roommate Doug in the afternoon to go to the Kreml. We ended up waiting for another friend of theirs by which time it had thankfully quit raining. The Kreml was quite busy as it was a weekend and there were lots of tour groups. Nonetheless it was great to finally see the complete picture of churches I had only seen over the walls. Several buildings were closed but we were able to see Uspenskii and Arkhangelsii Cathedrals. The last few weeks there has been some sort exhibition of armed forces from different countries so we saw a Russian military band perform for military that appeared to be from Scotland, Georgia and somewhere in the East. After the Kremlin we had a bite to eat in a nearby cafe.