An Unfamiliar Adventure

St. Peter's Church

It's been a bit over a week now! I've officially gotten to know my roomies, Tiffany and Shannon. This week we have all had brand new experiences, but one thing we've all learned: jet-lag is real. From day one, we've had trouble sleeping. Anxiety, of course, plays a factor. I've had restless nights worrying about being away from family and friends. On the other hand, we've had to completely change our sleep schedule. For whatever reason, that means falling asleep between 4pm and 6pm, then waking up at 3am. Which is all fun and good, except guess who adjusted to an 11pm-8am sleep schedule within two days? Yep. It's me. And in our 2-room apartment, guess who's bed is in the kitchen? If you guessed mine, you are right again!

The good news is, we're just about on the same schedule now. So mornings of Shannon and Tiffany waking up at 3am and waiting hours for me to wake up so they can come in the kitchen are almost over!!

That's one adjustment. Another is adjusting to our classes. Tiffany has never taken a Russian language course, and she started that this week. She was exhausted after 3 hours of Russian class, feeling like she could never learn the language. Our language classes have likewise been difficult. 3 hours of any class is difficult, but when it's all taught in a foreign language to students who are lacking sleep, it's worse.

It's clear that we've got to work hard if we want to make these classes work for us. Our professor, Vlada, is incredibly nice, and she's really letting us take charge of the course. I think there's going to be more adjustments as we figure out what we really need from this class.

Our other course is history! Now this is the fun part of the week. We had an excursion around the city with our history professor, Aldous. It was all in English, though he is Latvian. He pronounces all his v's as w's, so we learned all about how the wikings woyaged to wisit Riga in olden days. It was very cold, but luckily we got a hot chocolate break in between! I look forward to learning more from him in our history class, which will be Wednesdays.

My favorite adjustment has been learning dental assisting in my clinic. (Its hard for me to remember that clinic is spelled with c's in English, because it's with k's in Russian.) My first day interning was Tuesday, and by my second day (Thursday), they already let me stand in as an assistant with the dentist. Of course, I still need the other assistant nearby, and sometimes the doctor has to explain things a couple times before I get it. I watched a wisdom tooth extraction on Thursday and had to sit down because of all the blood. It was a scary moment! I thought maybe I wasn't cut out for dental hygiene after all. But I eventually recovered, and I got to watch another extraction with the next patient. I look forward to learning a lot more in the coming week, especially to start writing down and memorizing the names of all the tools we use in the clinic.

So the adventure continues! Over one week down, and I'm not going to count how many left. Latvia is cold, but beautiful, and I think I've only begun to unfold all its glory!