Anyway, back to school.

Russians start school when they are seven years old. Or six. I was seven, since my birthday had been in Canada a few months before. Unlike Australia, they have a specific date that school starts. Different states start on different days in Australia, in the end of January. I don’t know why the cant start on the 1^st of February. It would be so much neater. Although some days that would end up a weekend.

Since Russia is in the Northern Hemisphere, their seasons are different times, and the school year starts in September. They obviously couldn’t have the long holidays in the winter, it would be too cold. We wouldn’t be able to paly outside as much if the holidays had been in the winter. Even in spring and autumn, you can only play so long outside before you get cold. So, they gave us the whole summer off. Three months. Because we lived in apartments, we would share a courtyard. The courtyard had a playground and grass and trees. Benches. Laundry racks. Kids from the apartments would paly outside in the summer, all day. We would know each other so well. It wasn’t too hot in the summer       like it is here. It was pleasantly warm. Just a few hot days.  We learnt mow than what you could learn in school. To us, playing outside was a second nature. In Australia though the summer holidays are much shorter, but still longer in another sense. Because kids here don’t socialise as much with their neighbours. Actually, here neighbours and community are a lot less related than they are supposed to be.

School started on the 1^st of September. No matter what, even if it was a Saturday. Well, we didn’t really have school. We had a flamboyant assemble at the start of the year. It would last bout an hour. In Russia tradition you just can’t sit on the floor, because its cold and people think you’d get sick. Well, you have to blame sickness form cold on something. I think the floor is an undeserving target, since during the summer it is actually quite hot. But this unspoken- wait, spoken by Бабушки – resulted in hundreds of kids standing for over an hour in the gym at the start of the school year. We would stay with our classes, and our teachers keep with our classes. We would have the same classroom for four years, with the same teacher. We really got to know each other.

My teacher, Вера Васильевна, was young and we were her first lot of children. Sometimes I would feel sorry for her because I reckon that we were a pretty tough first lot of kids. Particularly the boys, always managing to get into scrapes. Just why? She had blonde hair and she was Russian Orthodox. A lot of teachers in Russia were women. It just was like that stereotypically. Her last name was Якубович, Yakubovich(Russian people go by the first name then their father’s name. The sir name comes first but we didn’t call our teachers by the sir names, just by their first name and their father’s names. But when my teacher got married we called her by her first name and then her sir name). Якубович is probably related to Kube, which would make us very very distant relatives .Which would be pretty cool. We didn’t discover that there was a Russian variant of our last name until my last name was properly Кьюб. But our name relating was fascinating for my teacher.

The yearly assembly was called the Линейка, lineyka- which meant ruler. I think they probably called it this because we all neatly lined up against the painted lines on the gym floor.

This would be a very big celebration. They would have the Russian national anthem which is far more complicated than the Australian one and they didn’t sing it as often so I actually never ended up memorising it although I can recognise the anthem by the tune of it in like three seconds.

The principal would give an over enthusiastic over something boring speech. Some of the older grades did performances. It was very impressive, but at that time it seemed unimaginable to have that much attention. Eventually my feet would get sore as would everyone else’s.

Russian tradition has it that at the beginning of each year we would give the teacher flowers. Soon enough it became at bit of a competition. I don’t know what happened first, the competition because there were more flowers to give, or more flowers because there was more competition, but now they seem to affect one another in an endless circle. The teacher would smile as you give them the flowers.

Gary our friend told us that we would need to get flowers or fruit for the teacher. He was wrong about the fruit and luckily we had chosen to get her flowers.

Although the teacher don’t say it, they pick out the flowers from their favourite bouquets and throw out the rest. It is inconvenient for the teachers and who can blame the for not wanting to sneeze hysterically, but tradition hold firm and mean that there are a lot of  flowers at the new school year.

I will tell you more later.