More climbing

So, today progressed without incident before lessons. Not all of us were there, but that is normal, and I can't remember the last time that all of us went to class! Today, however, the Chinese student was back and was being his usual depressing self at the back of the classroom, so Cristine and I decided to go and talk to him and see if he wanted some help with learning Russian (I'm not sure if he even knows the alphabet yet!). So, in one of the breaks, we went over to him and asked him if he speaks English, which he said he did. I then started talking to him fairly slowly, asking him if he would like help with learning Russian, and that we could help him catch up with the first few chapters. Needless to say, he was clearly lying when he told me that he spoke English - I got a blank stare from him. I then tried to explain slowly in Russian, with help from the koreans and the teacher, to no avail, so I gave up on that front!

The climbing wall at ISTU

After classes, went climbing again - the bus driver was either mad or drunk, and seemed to have a crazy desire to overtake the bus ahead of us, almost killing everyone in the bus by near misses with marshrutkas and  abrupt stops at zebra crossings. Fortunately, I managed to get off safe and sound. For the first time so far, there was nobody at the climbing wall whom I already knew, so I hung around for a while, made light-work of a few boulder-problems and such like, before I finally managed to draw a couple of people into a conversation (this being my first attempt to make friends there) - I managed to befriend a guy called Andrei and a girl, Maria, who both told me that I look very foreign and that this is the reason why everyone is staring at me all the time. This kind of makes sense in retrospect. I tried to get people to stop back-clipping, by pointing out the dangers of it, but they just told me that the person who was climbing was quite good so I needn't worry. If anything, though, this makes me worry even more about the safety there! Also spoke to one of the more talented boulderers there, although that conversation was more related to where a certain route went and how to do it. I impressed myself with how much Russian I managed to speak.

I left not long after, as I needed to get back to the residence before closing, get some food, and its quite far away from the climbing wall. The 7 bus seemed to have stopped, which meant I had to wait for ages before giving up and getting two buses back home in order to get here before the residence closes for the night! Once back here, Katrien told us that a girl whom they met today has asked us if we're free to go to Olkhon this weekend, which would be really nice, especially if we could get there before the weather turns. However, the marshrutkas only leave for Olkhon at 9am, and take eight hours to get there, which means that if we want to go and see it, the best idea would be to skip the Friday lessons in order to travel there.