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ene used to be, used to be ith blake tite, subject o, the same entropes everywhere. And

a, one of the things the soviet system was good at, right? And im m,

you needn't say there was sential is control some things. Ma, ther weren't a lot there. They weren't. They were bad at a lot of things, but math was not one of them. Ha, that was, that was a cool thing about or school. Even when i was there, you know, we had these olympics. And even though thet the quality of the schooling in general was kind of shiddyow, post transition, post communism style, the olympics were really hard, cor cause the teachers would kind of take you apart and said, al, your oure high potential oka, you're going to the olyp so they you used esentially have parallel class, and you're going to teach you whatever you wanted to learn. So, yoave, i don't, i don't knowif

wo won on where you aen where you are on the olympi we where

youi was on onsevel or several olympics, but i have to say, i wasn't on the, on the really cool on arosic and mathons yet. No, i was at the biology olympicsi, i was the national violat olymphic girlyye,

yt yet. Ye. But that, i mean, you must have grown up with sort of all of these kind of remnants of the soviet system around you, even though you never, sort of experienced them as as, you know, kind of directly a but

you must, yes, like a hauntent. It was a haunted place. It was haunted by this whole, this idea of communism. No one really knew exactly what communism was. We just called communism old stuff, like the department bock communist. Old teachers that were like, you know, wearing a weird looking, ill fitted suit, theyare communist. So it was a thing. But in a way, your everything was kind of communist, cause you were learning from my communist material. Like, i went to a an school, and it had like, all, like, it was all about the grain quota. And, you know that, you know, of stephan's mother is tha heroine mother, because she's, like, she brought in yrd the quota from the from the grain field and all the stuff. So it was just like, kind of strane. And

they just hadn't cleared all that stuff out yet, which i'm sure they have now. And yam yet. No, no, it' its, it's, it's, when i was in that school in cypruss we got this mix, it was this strange mix of like, old, you know, pre war english tradition, you know, where you memorize, you know, a poem by shelley or whatever. And then you had these books that were like, um, you know, 19 seventies fabian red brick university british text books, you know, were um which were like, pure, pure new left and um u. It was sort of strange encountering this, you know, like, these are very different things, like, what's going on here, you know, and appen? I mean, this like l harry potter, there are houses, you know, we're organized into houses

o, it was so liket.