Today in Fonetika we discussed clothes, among other things. My teacher noticed I was wearing a skirt and made me stand up in front of class to demonstrate what the word for it is. Upon noticing the rather abbreviated length of it, she went on a rant about the way the girls of today dress, and taught us how to say "You have to suffer to be beautiful." She then went on a ramble that somehow managed to touch upon AIDS and the Romanovs in the span of two sentences. She teared up when she spoke of the Romanovs. Apparently Russia was never so glorious as at that time. And then she declaimed Akmatova poems to us.

We rounded off the lesson by singing a folk song.

I think I may have to marry this woman. She's hilarious. She must be somewhere in her sixties, with librarian glasses and a penchant for floral prints gone bad. She's rather on the large side, but she carries herself with such utter utter grace that she somehow manages to flit, and then she teaches us words like "hunchback", in between wanderings off into monologues about the state of Russian culture.

In other news, I accidentally gave my sketchy Italian neighbour a black eye last night. More on him at a later date. He's truly a character. I think I may have to invent mental instability to get him off my back.