I went to Berdiechiev today, a small town about an hour south of Zhytomyr, to judge a Spanish Olympiad. Why? I don't know. I've told them repeatedly that I'm not fluent in Spanish, but they asked me to come anyway. I've been watching Invader Zim with the Spanish dubbing for a week now to get my brain back into gear.
When I arrived, I was immedietly snatched by two teachers from another school that had attended one of my seminars last week. Apparently they had arranged for me to come teach at their school, but no one had informed me. They took me to their school, showed me around and then had me conduct two classes. With nothing better to do, I just did a Q&A with the kids, letting them practice their English and telling them about America and my experiences in Ukraine. Those kids treated me like a rock star. One class asked me no less than three times if I liked Ukrainian girls. Then, after class, they all asked for my autograph.
Later, after I "judged" at the Spanish olympiad, which was no more than me asking questions in Spanish while other teachers joted down scores for the responses, I was taken off to eat lunch by the Spanish department. In the room were people that spoke Ukranian, English, Russian and Spanish, but only two actually spoke all fluently. I was not one of them. In the onslaught of tongues, I actually just switched of my mental monitor and--I shit you not--was conversing in four different languages. Now, this sounds impressive, but it's not and I'll explain why.
If languages are lanes on a road, these teachers could switch smoothly from one to the next, speaking gramatically perfect in each without effort. My language was more like driving a cobbled together gremlin through traffic snarled by a 42 car pile up. Every fifth word out of my mouth was in a different language. I don't know what I was speaking, but the conversations were moving too fast for me to pay attention and somehow my brain kept filling in the slots with whatever word was available.
For whatever reason, it put me back in gear to work on my Ukranian again and start working on my Russian hardcore instead of what I have been doing: watching movies in Russian and calling it studying.