Cat Exhibition

Yesterday I went with some of my new friends to this place called VDtset. It used to be called VDNK back in Soviet times, but they changed that and sort of look at you like you are crazy if you call it by its old name now. Oddly enough, the decided not to change the name of the Metro station serving it. I suppose some things are just too hard to change. I was pretty excited about going because this place was built to showcase the grandeur of the Soviet Union. There were exhibition halls for all the territories and nations that made up the Soviet Union as well as places to showcase agricultural, metallurgical, electrical, etc achievements. I really wanted to see what they had told their people.
Sadly, none of this neat stuff remained. The buildings were still huge and impressive, but that's it. Inside it was like a street bazaar with vendors selling all sorts of goods, from camcorders to fur coats to blenders. Very strange. There still were exhibitions, but they were random museums. We almost went into something called the "Cat exhibition" because it was only about 2 dollars and it was called the cat exhibition. We figured, however, that it was just a place to buy cats. Judging from the number of people we saw carrying kittens, I think our guess was correct.
The other thing we learned, besides the fact that the glory days of the Soviet Union seem to be completely over, was that a meal can become pretty expensive if you don't realize that they quote a price for one amount, but the default portion is three times as big. We got a lot of food, but none of us had planned to spend 18 dollars on that meal.

The cold: it's not just propaganda

August 31, 2008

Well, it’s the last day of August and the thermometer reads 9 degrees. For all those, like me, for whom that information means little more than “it’s not freezing and it’s a long way from boiling,” 10 degrees Celsius is 50 degrees Farenheit (which it was when I got in yesterday evening), so 9 degrees is between 47 and 48. So, it’s very cold. As I’m bundling up in long sleeves, sweater, scarf, and jacket, I’m imagining everyone back home feeling rather warm in short sleeves and flip flops. The first few days I was here were in the 80’s, so I was feeling good. It was the ideal summer temperature for me and I could be comfortable while all the Russians, Brits, and Midwesterners sweltered. For a little while there I even thought the whole “Russia is really cold” thing might even have been exaggerated in films, maybe a subtle form of Cold War propaganda or something. But it wasn’t. It is going to be cold here. Very, very cold. That’s why I’m glad that I’ll be heading south in six days. I think it is supposed to be, on average, about 20 of our degrees warmer there. One warm place here is the metro. So even though it smells funny, I always like stepping through those doors.

As I type this I am sitting in my room of the apartment I’m staying in. There is someone in the building with wireless, so I keep trying various passwords hoping I’ll somehow hit upon one that works. This is mostly just to fill my time. The odds of me hitting upon a password that a Russian would use are very small, especially since we don’t really share a language. It would be really nice if I could get it, though. Then I could sit here in relative warmth and post this. As it is, I’ll probably do it tomorrow on the way to school.

Today I’m going to meet with some of my fellow interns, and maybe a work-study person or two, to go sight-seeing. We plan on going to VDNK, which is an old Soviet amusement park. There is supposed to be a Ferris wheel there, but we were told yesterday that they’ve already stopped running it for the summer. That may be just as well as I’m not sure whether I really want to get on a piece of Soviet machinery, especially that is that old. Of course, I do so every day when I get on the metro, but oh well. I don’t know if anyone else will want to, but I may do just a bit of metro sightseeing, going around and looking at various stations. Not only is that virtually free entertainment as a lot of them are very elaborately decorated, it has the added benefit of being warm.

The whole training thing continues to go as well as could be expected. Yesterday we talked about test-prep classes. For about 5 hours. It just reinforced in me a hatred of teaching to the test. I hope I don’t get assigned one of those.

After about a week

August 29, 2008

Well, I’ve had five days of training now. I’ve taught twice and I’ve observed an experienced teacher once. I’ve gotten up the nerve to get real Russian food at a food stand near the Metro, even ordering in Russian. I’ve gotten the hang of the Metro. It feels like everything is flowing a little better now.

That being said, I’ve started to miss home more. I suppose when things become more automatic, one gets more time to think and become a little homesick. While it is fun and exciting to see all these new things and meet all these new people, I want to hear the voices and see the faces of my people, the ones that I know.

Still, I distract myself from these thoughts when I start having them. There are plenty of distractions here. It is so crowded here that there is always a lot to see in every direction. I don’t know the square mileage (or meterage, here), but it feels like the city of Moscow takes up about as much space, maybe a little more, than Atlanta, but there are about 5 times as many people here. When I get on the Metro at about 10 in the morning, it is amazing to see the hordes of people filling the whole station. Half the room is moving one direction, the other half the opposite. It looks like those diagrams of ocean currents. I think that I see more people in 5 minutes than I did in a semester at Erskine. The apartment building where I’m staying right now has 17 floors. It is divided into about 6 vertical sections. In my section each floor seems to have about 3 apartments. Some have 4 and at least 1 looks like it is just 1 large apartment. That works out to be 6-9 bedrooms to each floor in my section. I could do the arithmetic, but that works out to be a lot of floors. And this is just one of about 4 identical buildings within a five minute’s walk. Plus there are other older and smaller buildings around.

I had been warned before coming about how big a problem alcoholism is here, but I really hadn’t seen it until today. Of course I had seen a few people with bottles in the streets and once seen a very pathetic looking man get on the Metro in the morning while clearly drunk, but that seemed rare. Tonight, however, it seemed like half the city was drunk when I was in the Metro station at 9:30. People were reeling around, barely able to walk. Keeping in mind how late everything tends to happen here, that seems ridiculously and pathetically early.

This will be a short post as I am writing it on the spot. It had been quite warm in Russia, but today came rain and cooler weather. I am guessing it will last for a while, at least the coolness. I also taught Russian students for the first time today. It was only for half the time and it was with people observing, but it was still difficult but kind of fun. It is hard to give instructions to people who think they know more than they do. The people I observed said I did well but that i would have to be a little meaner and get the students to stay on the same page. Well, that's all for now. I'm sitting outside McDonalds and the wind is really starting to pick up. I'd rather not get numb fingers in August.

Trying to get to church, getting a slight blister instead

August 24

This morning I got up intending to go to church. I had seen an advertisement in the English language paper “The Moscow Times” for an English-speaking Anglican church on the metro line, and that seemed like my best bet. My host, however, was surprised that I was up so early and so breakfast was a little later than I had hoped, though it was good. The other days she had given me cucumber with my breakfast, but today it was tomato. As I also had a banana I feel it is fairly easy here to get in five fruits and vegetables each day. We also had a nice chat about church. It turns out that my host normally goes to church as well and that she had been baptized as a child thanks to a grandmother who felt baptism to be more important than soviet law.

After this I was kind of running late, and misreading the metro map meant that I was impossibly late. At first I didn’t realize I had gone to the wrong stop and so walked around, hoping to see the church and slip in the back. After I realized my mistake, I decided that while I was out, I might as well see more of the city. This decision led to my walking around, somewhat aimlessly, for about two and a half hours. It would have been better if I had been wearing walking shoes, but I did enjoy it. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was looking at a lot of the time, but I did see a traditional-looking market, a market that looked as though it catered to immigrants from the south of Russia, a monument to Lenin, some parks, a really big, Soviet-looking building, and the river. I also took a break in the middle to enjoy a Coke at McDonalds. Partly this was so I could see if it was true that McDonalds has wireless. According to a sign inside, it does. There is one right near my apartment that has the same sign, so I think I’m going to go there tonight and try to post this. I may also get something to eat. One of the interns who has spent time in Russia before says that McDonalds has higher quality food here than it does in America. Still, I haven’t had much of an appetite since getting here. I keep eating breakfast and then either drinking milk or eating bread and cheese or a salad or something like that throughout the day at regular-seeming meal times. The milk seems to do well, but it tastes strange, kind of goat-y. I suppose the cows eat something different here.

The difference in milk is just one of the small strange things here in Russia. The coke was also way sweeter. One strange thing is that though not that many people speak English, there are lots of random things written in English. Like the electronic lock to get into the apartment building reads “open” when the fob is pressed to it and it unlocks. Likewise, the toilet seat cover has a warning that it is not a stepstool. This is written first in English, then in German and French, but nowhere is it written in Russian. Another little oddity is scented toilet paper. Maybe we have that in America, too, but I’ve never experienced it before and it took me awhile to figure out why my hands smelled like soap before I’d even washed them.

Tomorrow I’ll begin my training, and then my days will have far more structure and less free time. While I enjoy being able to relax, it feels very odd not having anything to do and not really just wanting to sit around the house of a woman I do not know. I look forward to being able to get to know people during training. While I met people at the getting-to-know-you supper, it was a pretty awkward evening for everyone. I have now met the two girls who are going to Volgograd with me and both seem very nice. We’ve decided to look into splitting the cost of internet when we get there, which would be very much more convenient than carting my computer around in hopes of a signal. Hopefully I will be successful in that endeavor when I go out this evening to get one.

In Moscow

August 22, 2008

I don’t know when I will get wireless access or for how long, so I will type this up now and send it when I get the chance. For a while I was scared to even turn on my computer because I didn’t yet have an adapter, but now I’ve purchased one so I don’t have to worry about how to use my two and a half hours of battery life.

Things do seem to be going well here. I am in a homestay with a woman named Karina. I decided not to tell her that was one of my gerbil’s names. One of the plusses of a homestay is that breakfast is provided. The apartment is currently being renovated, so there is a bathtub in the hallway (thankfully also one in the bathroom) and there is no bathroom sink. She does have a refrigerator/freezer almost the size of ours, plus one in the hallway. I don’t know if it is also part of the renovation or if she just has two. My room is fairly large with plenty of hanger space. Today I just wore whatever was unwrinkled, but there is an iron here, so I don’t have to go to work rumpled.

I met the boss who will be going down with us to Volgograd. Well, I don’t know if he will actually be riding the train at the same time, but he is here now and will be there as our boss then. His name is Ivor and he’s from Scotland. He seems really nice as he helped us with all of our paperwork and gave us suggestions on where to get food, calling cards, etc. It helps that the DOS people (the bosses of interns) seem to have all been interns themselves at one point or another.

I also met a girl named Sarah who just graduated from Tulsa State and will be with me in Volgograd. That makes three of us that I know of. The other girl won’t be getting in until tomorrow (Saturday) evening. Sarah speaks more Russian than I do as she had two years of it in college. She studied Russian history with an English minor.

Sarah and I went down to Red Square together after we were done with paperwork. We saw a lot of impressive things, like St Basil’s cathedral and the Kremlin, from the outside, (Lenin’s tomb seemed closed today), but mostly we proved to ourselves that we could figure out how to get places on the Metro all by ourselves. It is very nice to be in a place with a good Metro system. The stations are all over the place, so it isn’t hard to find one and automatically know how to get back. The lines look very complicated, but they are color-coded and fairly straightforward.

Oh, I did want to tell you about the drive from the airport to the apartment. The man, Alexei, who picked me up spoke no English but was very nice and helpful anyway, even carrying all those bags down a flight of stairs at the airport. On the road, though, he was a little scary. Normally in the fast lane, at least in America, a person might ride the tail a little of a slow car if he wants to be obnoxious, but here Alexei would just flash his lights and speed up, giving no choice. Other people were doing the same thing, so I guess they know to expect it. The airport is a ways out of the city, but that gave me a chance to confirm that there is corn growing here, too. The problem came when there was highway construction. Apparently they don’t announce it here in advance, and it made the trip take about two hours. Still, I’m settled in now, at least until I have to move after two weeks. I’ll meet most of the rest of the interns tomorrow at 5 when there is a get together in a restaurant right by the school. Mostly my plan is that tomorrow I will sleep as late as I can to try to catch up on sleep and get into this time zone, go grocery shopping, and see if I can find the internet somewhere.

PS I will add more later, but figuring out the system took too much time and now I'm late to supper.