My favorite person in N--

Apparently some of these big beautiful Soviet apartments come equipped with a conceirge of sorts. Typically an older woman who guards who comes in and out of the place. She sits in some small little room adjacent the main doorway watching traffic and saying "zdrastchutye" to everyone. I was formally introduced to one such woman my first day, and so now we communicate basically everyday. There are actually more than one lady who holds this postions and one grabbed me on my way up the stairs to scold me about something. All I understood coming from her dark, thick, and fake eyebrows and a pile of matted hair was the word "narcoman" which if you thought about long enough you could figure out the translation. I gleefully point to my key and say "ya ne narcoman" and go on my way.

But seriously, this one woman is infatuated with me and I love it, because honestly, she is the one person that I understand here. In K- I had my host mom, my language teacher, my TCF, other people's host mom's, etc. They were used to talking to Americans with crappy Russian. This woman knows the deal without me having to tell her. She speaks slowly asking me questions I've practiced the responses to 90+ times, like, "What is your name?", "Where are you from?" and "how old are you?" and gives me compliments luike "you look young!" and "look at your hands, mine are old!" Okay. So neither of our sentences are that complicated, but most of the tiem I get it. And I love it. She lets me talk endlessly about the three or four things I can takl about and then she'll correct my Russian (with her Ukrainian accent, I should point out!) and start schooling me about the CCCP. I have no idea what about the CCCP, but off she goes. She wants to know if there are children without homes in America and wants me to know about unemployment in Ukraine. If it wasn't such an odd place to hold a conversation, I'd probably hang out with her all the time. I'm always careful to Bbl her, which is the polite thing to do and she motivates me to want to master this language that I often times want to give up on.

I know that every sentence I speak to her is full of grammar mistakes and wrong (or no) case endings, but crap, I'm communicating, and sometimes, when you've hada kid yell something at you, or had the dude at the internet cafe tell you off because you are speaking Russian in Ukraine*, it's nice to have someone take the time and just listen.

*After this happened, at the end of my session he told me how much it cost. I gave him the money and said in Ukrainian "thank you" when he handed me the change. As I did this so poigantly, he responded in kind with the Ukrainian "please," which is used as a response in this situation. Our eyes met and a smile appeared across both of our faces. Maybe that day he won't think that all Americans are asses.