Babushka Land

Hi,

I have some small things I've been meaning to share.  Just random thoughts I try to write down when I have them (the ones I forget to write down are always much cooler and more interesting than the ones I remember)

Anyway, here, in no particular order (including, thanks to the vagaries of entering some thoughts on my phone and some on the computer, the order I actually had the thoughts) are some random thoughts.

McDonald's and KFC are best companies on earth...unless you actually,you know, eat their food.  It is actually less important to me now that I kind of have a full schedule and lots of places to be, but before, when I was often wandering around the city, I would sometimes find myself in need of a bathroom.  Now there are often places near the metro stops where you can pay about $1, but McDonalds seems to have a policy of trying to take over the world but making sure it offers clean and free bathrooms in compensation.  That might not seem like a good trade, but believe me, it depends on how long you've been ... waiting.  I have also have had good luck in a KFC in this regard.  Anyway, when I travel I try to eat local food.  Not in a save the planet kind of way, in a try the local cuisine kind of way, but I feel no need to sample local waste disposal alternatives when there are free modern choices.

So, I try to keep up with the local news.  I recently read an article about how San Francisco was considering reducing it's regulations on how small an apartment could be so some company could make a fortune selling these little 220 square foot mini apartments.  Well, the politicians say they are trying to ease the housing shortage, but ... well you know.  Anyway, russians already live this way.  Their apartments are small and they get by on what they can.  My apartment here is giant for one person and usually would be occupied by 2 people ... well, with a real kitchen.  I do think these little mini apartments are overkill, but if the world is going to be a fair place, some people are going to need to reduce their needs a bit.  Oh, wait, life isn't fair. ... never mind.

People get their shoes repaired here.  Like they don't throw them away and buy new ones (I mean they do if they can), they just pay someone to fix them.  And there are people who can fix them.  I even got my jacket fixed when I tore the pocket.  Thank god or my right hand would either have been cold for the rest of the winter or I would have received some strange looks.

Ok, everyone here is like my grandmother.  And not in a good way.  "Ray zip up your jacket or you will catch cold." "Here, do want some bread? No? Some fish? no? Ok, here, have some potatoes... and some bread ... and some fish.  Well, you have to eat."  It's like they think I am unaware of my own body temperature and level of hunger (ok this one is sometimes true, but always in the opposite direction, making me eat too much and never too little).  It's amazing,  after one english class I was walking to the metro with one of my students.  It was only the second time I met her and she looked at me as we were walking and asked, "don't you have a scarf?  you're going to get sick."  She doesn't know it yet, but she is not going to pass my class.

Speaking of zipping up your coat, russians have amazing temperature regulation.  The minute I enter, for example, the metro, I need to take off my hat and gloves, unzip my jacket, and try to get some cool air inside my clothes because inside here, even the metro usually, is kept comfortable ... for shorts.  But russians don't notice.  I guess they just don't want to be bothered to take off all their carefully arranged winter clothes, but they just ride the metro all bundled up.  I'd be a dripping ball of sweat in minutes.  I really don't know how they do it.

Actually I can sympathize.  While I am not really a winter person, it's not the cold that bothers me as much as the long process involved in constantly having to take off and put on outside clothes.  It's annoying and tedious.

Old cities like St. Petersburg become more modern the further away you get from the old center of the city.  In the US we just modernize everything, but they don't exactly seem to do that here, so in the center, where I live, there are no large supermarkets, or movie theaters or other trappings of modern life. Actually the theaters are no big loss to me, as, while they show lots of american films here, they dub them all, so I can't watch them anyway.

I'll finish with this joke I keep telling by an '80 russian comedian named Yakov Smirnoff who defected from the Soviet Union:

"... Don't feel bad that you are from Cleveland.  In every country around the world they have a city that they make fun of.  In America it is Cleveland, in Soviet Union ... it is Cleveland"

Stop making sense, making sense

Hello Faithful readers,

uh, let's just dive right in ...

The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in the culture
As you all know, or maybe you don't, in addition to teaching english, I was coming here with the intention of learning some language skills of my own.  Of course, it's quite useful, especially if you want to buy anything or talk to anyone, but I also like the feeling of learning a new way to communicate.  It can also help you understand the way people think as it has been postulated that the way we speak is related to the way we think.  (Shrug) Maybe.  Anyway, when I arrived here, I was only able to say a few words, but lately I have had a lot of opportunity to practice and things are starting to stick in my head  little better now than they did before.  I'd sure like to be able to spend more time practicing, but even so, I am pretty proud to say that my spanish is coming along nicely! No, really.  Read on.

Mixed messages

In my last post I mentioned that I had an interesting gathering in my new apartment (Ha, you thought I forgot about that when actually, it ties right in).  Here's the story.  My friend Vera, who speaks english and spanish, as well as russian, has been inviting me to various places when she can.  I went to a cool party for a friend of hers names Daria who just completed her doctorate in linguistics. She speaks many languages (including spanish) and can read sanscrit (she tells me the sanscrit version of Harry Potter is lame because the sanscrit phrase for "he who must not be named" is about 2 pages long so the book just becomes to large and unwieldy to read).

Anyway, Vera and Daria invited me to meet them and some of their friends in a cafe.  What the hell, I said, it sounds cooler than writing a blog entry.  The other friends included Eduard and Dennis, brothers who have a cuban father and russian mother so that they both speak spanish but Eduard was raised here so he speaks russian, while Dennis just moved here recently but does speak some english.  Also there was Cristina, who is Spanish but has been living and teaching here for 5 years so she speaks russian but understand a fair amount of portuguese (helpful to me) and even some english.  Last but not least were Lyuba and her husband Raman who both only speak russian with smatterings of english (actually, it would later turn out that Lyuba understands quite a bit of english but is mostly too shy to speak).

If you have been counting, that's 8 people, 6 speak russian (excepting me and Dennis), 4 speak spanish, 3 speak english, 2 speak some portuguese, and 1 reads sanscrit.  Do the math.  The second most used language was spanish.  I don't really speak spanish, but I know some from trying to learn it long ago.

Vera and Daria were working to help everyone communicate, but I didn't like to make them work all the time (it was a social occasion after all).  So I tried to communicate with Lyuba and Raman in my russian and their english (about a 500 word shared vocabulary - actually amazing what can be conveyed within that limitation) and with Dennis, Eduard and Cristina in spanish.  I totally failed to talk to the guys because they have a cuban accent and I literally couldn't follow it at all.  We ended up using more english because Dennis knew more than he admitted (a common theme).  Speaking with Cristina was the funniest (in a ha ha kind of way) because when I try to speak spanish, I actually speak more portuguese, which only works if, you know, the listener actually understands portuguese.  Turns out that she is from a part of spain that is north west where the dialect is even closer to portuguese than normal spanish and is also close to the northern border with Portugal so she understands quite a bit of portuguese.  Also, she is a spanish teacher, so she is used to people mangling her language and also used to speaking clearly to us.  To add  to the confusion, the brain is a funny thing and sometimes mine would come up with the russian word for something I was trying to say.  The result is that more than once I started a sentence in spanish, took a short detour though russian, found my way to portuguese, and finally resorted to english to get to the period at the end.  That's not what was amazing.  What was amazing was that this mish mash was intelligible to her more often than not.

Oops, I forgot to mention, my brain has some high school french still stuck in there somewhere and all these latin languages are obviously stored near each other in my brain.  Cristina happens to be studying french at the moment so occasionally we resorted to that as well, although I don't remember any 5 language phrases at the moment.  Actually I'm pretty proud of how well I managed to communicate considering I only speak one of those languages well (if you're reading this, and wondering exactly wish language that is, I don't blame you)

In these situations a phone with internet access so you can get to google translate is extremely helpful, and of course all of had Vera and Daria to help if we really got stuck.  Fun fact:  Daria is a pretty common name here in Russia, and the nick name for Daria is Dasha - yes, it saves one easy syllable and no letters - and that's only if you consider the dupthong 'ia' to be 2 syllables.

The upshot was that the next weekend, I invited everyone over to my new apartment to recreate the fun (and get a lot of free food).  Now I have this strange international band of friends and I can't seem to learn any russian.

Oh, by the way ...
A meteor hit this country recently (I didn't even hear it).  More about that next  time ...

Wintertime, and the living is ... normal

It's been a while since I have written.  No excuse except lack of dedication.  What can I say, you are getting your money's worth (the time spent reading, you will never get back). Anyway, here I am.

About 2 weeks ago, I had a serious crisis of intention.  As in what am I doing?  Not really so much what am I doing here in Russia, but what am I doing overall.  Is this what I want to be doing (teaching english, living in strange cities)?  Even if it is should I be doing it somewhere warm with better fruit selections (hello Brasil)?  I was on the verge of packing up and returning home to think about it.  I finally decided that I could think about it just as well here and that by actually doing it for a while longer, I might actually answer some of those questions.  At least if the answer is no, I will have eliminated one possibility.

So, here I am, living in Saint Petersburg, Russia.  I work as an english teacher.  Damn is this glamourous.  One reason I haven't written is because life here is the same as it is anywhere.  Get up, go to work. Go home. Shop for food. Cook. Eat. Do laundry.  If you are reading this and you are alive, I expect you know the drill.

Ok, so I have an apartment in the middle of the city.  The apartment is fine although the kitchen is ridiculously small.  Here are some pictures:

This is the main room.  All the pictures except this one are taken from that door over there on the far left.

This is the same room with a picture taken from that door.  Those windows look out on Fontanki canal (see the map I will link after the pictures) and the entrance to the building is on Kryukova canal, the little canal that meets it at my corner.

Here is the "kitchen".  It's actually something like an entrance hallway.  The front door, which you can't see, is to the right of the door you can see which leads to the bathroom.  Yes, this is the whole kitchen.  The small fridge with the microwave on top is just inside the door.  Just behind the butter you can almost see my stove.  Ok, it's a plug in electrical burner.  It's a damn good thing I can't cook.

The bathroom is just fine.  It has a nice shower and even a washing machine.  You can't really tell, but the washing machine can only be called cute.  It's about 20" deep and has room for about 1.5 changes of clothes. I didn't think you would miss seeing the toilet which is around the corner to the right.  It works.  There is no dryer.  You can kind of see the lines strung from the wall above the washing machine to over the toilet for drying clothes.

Here is a link to a google map showing where it is located:

My place in SPb

If you look at the street view, you should see the corner of the building and you will see the entrance down the right side.  My place actually looks at the big canal.  My windows are down the left side just above and past the door you can see there.  Of course all these pictures were taken in summer.  At the moment there is ice and snow all over the place and the canal is frozen over.

I had an interesting international gathering of friends here last sunday.  I will write about it in the next post.