The first bite of winter

This morning winter fired its first warning shots across my bows when I woke up and faced the early morning tram journey with the cold weather having it's first bite. It is incredible how quickly the weather has gone from being so hot that sleeping was an issue, to waking up and feeling that it is just a bit too cold to get out of bed, in only a few weeks. It certainly shows signs of what is to come in the ensuing winter months.

Having spoken to one of the Ukrainian people here I have, however, been informed that there is actually a relatively short period when there is snow here in Dnipro and so my hope of enjoying a long snowey winter may have to wait for a bit longer. On the plus side I am practically guaranteed some snow this winter!

I had another Russian lesson this morning where we covered the alphabet. All 33 letters! there are so many different variants around our E and O sounds (where as in English we have several A sounds and our wonderful diphones). At times It was quite challenging (this being despite my attempts over the last year or so to use cyrillic in my day to day life and adjust to it) especially the sounds we just don't have in English and the ь, and ы for soft sounds and the very strange "iy" type sound (this really doesn't tell you the name of it though).

At last it does appear that we are going to move premises (considering we were suppose to do this before the start of the school term some ten days ago and we have told students we would have moved twice before, it is a pleasant surprise to be surrounded by bin bags with Vocabulary and text books lining their insides, preparing for their trip to the new premises. As such there is a strong chance (see near certain) that we will be helping to move all the material and furniture over to the new premises and could mean the relaxing weekend is nothing of the sort.

As for the rest of the day, well we aren't having our input sessions yet (training session for teacher that should happen every Friday) and so I have it off! I'm planning on searching Dnipro for a music shop and checking out the guitars there as I am having serious guitar withdrawal symptoms (it may have been responsible for me waking up at four this morning with a splitting headache)