Teaching in Russia has several distinct advantages, and one of them is that students love to give their teacher gifts. I got a really crazy gift earlier this week from one of my students. In a previous class, we did an exercise that asked students whether they preferred snakes or spiders. Typical second-semester ESL stuff. One of my students asked whether I like snakes, to which I relied that I think snakes are cool. He told me that he would bring something in for me next class.

The next class he gives me one of the strangest/coolest gifts I've ever gotten. He presented me with a bottle of vodka that has a snake inside. It's from China, and so the description of exactly what's in the bottle is almost incomprehensible (terrible translation), but I gather that there's a snake a bunch of herbs and berries steeping in vodka. Yummy. I'll definitely have to try it out.