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.