Christmas Eve

The sun is now setting on the first day of nearly three weeks of vacation from teaching. (Of course, it being winter, that doesn't mean the day is over.) The last few days of teaching went really well. We did a lot of Christmas-sy kinds of things, like little parties for the children and teenagers and Christmas discussions and communications games for the adults. Maybe it shouldn't have, but it surprised me how unimportant Christmas is to Russians. I had already found it impossible to buy actual Christmas cards (which means many of you will be receiving New Years cards eventually), but it hadn't really sunk in. All of the commercial and secular aspects of our Christmas have been transfered to New Years, leaving Christmas as a religous holiday. Since not too many people are religious, it is apparently a pretty quiet day. I'll comment more on that after I see the Russian Christmas in January.
Several of my students did give me presents. The business men I teach gave me a matrushka nesting doll, and my upper-intermediate adult class chipped in to give me a linen tablecloth with matching napkins. The best part of that present was the accompanying card with an original "rap" in English inside. The words are as follows: "Droppin' this line at the time when Christmas & New Year is around the corner we sorry 4 our actin' up & wich U 2 be full of beans all 2009 year. We back on your teachin' us next year. What's more U're our neat teacher! We honestly try 2 rack our brain but we couldn't create more words ;))) !!! Happy 2009!!!"
I'm glad to be their "neat teacher."

Tomorrow will be my first, and likely only, white Christmas. Volgograd was very nice looking during the end of summer when we arrived, but after the leaves all fell, it looked dreary for a long time. Now, it looks really beautiful under a layer of snow. I'll be going to Christmas dinner and then to church in the evening, so I'll get to celebrate the holiday properly, if not traditionally. Aunt Karla's card even arrived yesterday, so I even have something to open!
Since it has been a while since I've posted there is much more I could say, but I'll save it for a later post.
Merry Christmas, everyone
!

Red light, green light

As I walked out of school tonight, I looked up and saw the light change from red to green at the large intersection near my apartment. Now, this would be unremarkable in America, but this particular intersection has lacked traffic lights since we arrived at the beginning of September. For the three months we've been here, cars have treated this intersection as a giant four way almost-stop-unless-you-are-in-a-hurry. I didn't mention it before because I cross this intersection on a more than daily basis and I didn't want to provoke any undue, or even very due, concern. But now it is all better and I can cross when the little man is green. Before my method had often been to wait until a Russian also needed to cross and cross with him or her, with myself on the side away from the traffic.
That's just one little oddity of Russian life I had started to feel was normal. Another was the proclivity of Russians to put meat in pastries. This isn't unheard of in America, of course, but here it is the expected norm. Mike, the short-term missionary here, learned of this the hard way, biting into what he thought was going to be a huge roll but which turned out to be full of greasy and no longer heated meat. My lesson came a little differently when I expected normal meat and was surprised to find tongue. At the Thanksgiving dinner at our flat, the Russians kept expecting to see meat in all our bread. They were suspicious when I told them that the dinner rolls were just bread, and they even asked if the pumpkin pie had meat in it!
By the time June comes, I think I will have a lot of surprises waiting for me when I get home and have to re-define normal. The other day we were reminiscing about having clothes driers when I suddenly realized I had been picturing them in bathrooms and I had to remind myself that that is a Russian assumption, that it is different in America. Don't worry, though, I'm very much looking forward to getting to re-define my normality back to American standards.