Rotary Interview #2 (District)

Okay so the District Rotary interviews were today. It was a really interesting experience. It involved a lot of sitting, some more comfortable than others. lol. Seriously though the actual interview wasn't nearly as extensive as the first interview, which I'm very grateful for. What happened first?

When we (My parents and I) first got there, I had my application checked over. I had to fix and fill in some things, that sort of cleanup. After that, it was time for the informational meeting. That informational meeting was just that, informational. Though we did learn the money time line and the dates for the overnighters I have to go to.

After the info session, it was interview time. I did have a break in between because the interviewers had to read through my application because they hadn't seen it before. I was interviewed first and actually the questions weren't nearly as tough as at the first interview. They asked me things like. "What is the biggest challenge you've faced in the past couple of years and how did you handle it?" and they asked me some questions that I'd been asked at the first interview. It was pretty straightforward. After they got done with me, they interviewed mom and dad seperately. Then they interviewed us together.

After the interview, we had to fill out more papers. That was irritating but I got over it. They were a neccesary evil. I had to have my top three country choices. I knew that number one was Russia, but I didn't really have two others. Mom said "Go with your gut" and so I randomly wrote down the Czech Republic second and Norway third. Don't ask me why I picked the Czech Republic because it was a pretty random choice. The ironic thing about it is that after we filled out the paperwork, we met some inbound rotary students, one of whom, Ondrej, was from the Czech Republic. He was kind enough to sit down with us and tell us all about his country. We talked for like an hour. That was fun.

The main thing I came away with, whether I get to go overseas or not, was how nice everyone was. Most of the people I met were extremely friendly and just great people in general. I get the impression that they will try to help me go to my first choice country if they can. Before the interviews or the information session, we met the man in charge of outbound training. He found out I wanted to go to Russia. While I was waiting to join mom and dad with the interviewers, he came by where I was sitting and told me that he had already spoken to someone and they were going to try to get ahold of contacts in Saint Petersbourg. That really impressed me. If nothing else I came away richer for having gotten to go through the experience. I'm hoping I'll get to go on. Rotary will tell the canidates the first week of December.

The Six Russian Cases, Easy Chart

The moment you've been waiting for has finally arrived. I decided to get my rear in gear and do something productive. So here it is. Note that this is a chart to aide those who already know how the cases work. It is designed as a quick and easy reference for the case endings (Note that at this time I only have the noun endings. Adjectives will be coming soon.) ****NOTE***DUE TO TECHNICAL PROBLEMS WITH BLOGGER AND TABLES, THIS POST IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION. PLEASE CHECK BACK SOON!

Prepositional Case(Gender, Hard ending, Soft Ending)

Masc.	Fem.	Neuter	Plural(M)	Plural(F)
-е	-е	-е	-ах	-ах
-и	-и	-и	-ях	-ях

An Odd Occurence

So the other day I was sitting in Spanish class. We were doing speaking activities, and were filling in sentence blanks with question words (Don't ask me why we were doing this in a spanish 3/4 class.) anyway I looked at one of the sentences and it said "_ esta la bicicleta" Or something like that. (It means _ is the bicycle) So I looked at it and the first word that popped into my head was где. Which is the Russian word for "Where" Right after I thought of that word I thought Ou which is the French word for where. Then I thought "so what's the Spanish word?" Anyway it was bizarre because I didn't think of it in english first, or even French, I thought Russian first and I don't know why. Okay, that's my weird story of the day, or week, or whatever.

I failed a Russian test wednesday. It was really depressing because I knew pretty much all of the answers and was hoping I could get my grade up, but I'm pretty sure I failed because I didn't correctly do the genative feminine endings. The endings I put on are actually the endings for adjectives in the genitive case, but on nouns they are the endings for the instrumental case, which means that I probably failed. I'll know for sure tomorrow. Expect a little case chart to pop up here soon because I really need to make one to keep it straight. I'll tell you one thing, I'll never forget what the ending of feminine singular nouns in the genitive case are!