Diet

         Someone asked a couple weeks ago about my diet.  I have been thinking about my answer, but haven’t gotten to it until now.  Last night, I came back from work at 10:45 to find the air in the apt thick with cigarette smoke an extra 5 tattooed, drunk people drinking and smoking and stumbling around.  One was slumped on the couch storing loudly.
 This morning, there were several strew around the floor and in the hallway.  All is basically OK, though, because I have my own door with a key.  I can go straight across the room, between the two mattresses on the floor, and into my room.  I usually have a few bananas and maybe some cabbage to eat.  As long as I have an empty, used mushroom jar, I don’t need to visit the toilet until the next morning.  I often feel like a mouse scurrying around in the walls.

I guess that’s God’s way of giving me a sign that I really need to find a new place.

Anyway, this morning’s breakfast was typical.  I woke at 5:55.  I boiled some buckwheat and added black olives, tomatoes, and a can of fish.  I broke an egg in it, too.  I don’t use frying pans because the pans in this apartment are covered with grit and grime from the Brezhnev era.  Also in the ‘fridge, I usually have a few apples and some yogurt.  In addition to apples, I usually carry some cabbage with me to work.  I eat the cabbage throughout the day; I also use give it away as a prize to my students.  The one that makes the most matches in a memory game gets a piece of cabbage.  Someone who calls out the most correct answers gets a piece of cabbage.  The winner of ‘one potato, two potato, three potato four’ gets a piece of cabbage.  When I decided that I needed some kind of prize I bought some chocolate covered almonds and peanuts.  Fantastically, I haven’t used them.
A nearby store sells some delicious brown bread.  In the evening, if I didn’t take the extra buckwheat concoction with me, I will eat that.  If there are no leftovers, I will make a tomato sandwich which consists of bread and tomato.  The other day, I was in a HUGE Sam’s Club-type store and found some olive butter that has no cholesterol.  I’m trying to figure out how to make it taste good—maybe added salt.  I also bought an umbrella there since the first one I bought broke after a week.

At 6:55, I left the house for my first lesson from 7:30-9:00 at a young man’s house.  From there, I go to one of the schools to meet with the mother of my 2-year-old student from 10:30-12:00.  Then I teach the kid from 2:00-2:45, then a 5-year-old from 4:00-4:45, then three 8-year-olds from 4:45-5:45, then four adults from 7:00-9:15.
The same person who asked about my diet, asked about the diet of the other people in my apartment.  They seem to eat pretty well—buckwheat, pasta and more.  I know this because every morning there is at least one frying pan on the stove full of crusted whatever it was from the night before.  The first thing I have to do when I get into the kitchen is move the full ash tray, the packs of cigarettes, and tea cups to the other side of the table.  Then I use a somewhat slimy rag to wipe off the table, including the cigarette that has burned down on the plastic table cover where it had burned a hole.  Last week, they bought a new plastic table cloth.  Oleg told me sternly that I should not cut my tomato on the table cloth (something I had never done), because they don’t want to buy a new table cloth every week.