beginning of the end

I somewhat abruptly taught my last classes on Friday.  I was under the impression that we had one more week of classes, but found out on Tuesday that this week is a short week, so by Friday (when I teach my own classes) the semester would already be over.  It felt a bit anticlimactic, but I suppose that's to be expected.  The only students I really made a connection with were my second-years, which meant they were the only ones it was hard to say goodbye to.  Afterward one of the students from that group posted on my Kontakte (Russian version of Facebook) profile "Super Dastin, you are cool!" with a picture he'd made of my face crudely pasted over Superman's body.  So that was endearing.  And weird.

Brief digression: I don't know if I've covered this on the blog before, but the Russian language doesn't have a short "u" sound as in "pub" or "mug."  Instead it's transliterated as "a," meaning my name is not Dustin but Dastin (sounds like "Daaastin").  It's quite humorous and everyone (including me) still gets a kick out of it.  But anyway, a consequence of this is that all of my students and nearly all of my colleagues think that my name is spelled with an "a" in English.  Hence, Super Dastin.

I'm quickly coming to the end of things here.  I've got an official return date of June 19--booked the ticket today--so now it's just about enjoying my time here as much as possible before I leave.  I'd like to do a bit of traveling in that time, but Karelia's northern location is working against me in that regard.  Many of the cities I'd like to visit--Kazan, Volgograd, Rostov, etc.--entail more than 24 hours on a train.  Given that I've made some actual friends here that I may never see again after I leave, I'm not really looking to go on a three-week tour of central/southern Russia.  Maybe I'll take a trip to Veliky Novgorod or Arkhangelsk.  We'll see.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for another guest post!