Friday 17 October 2008

The next installment

So, I've been here almost a month now, which in some ways feels like its gone incredibly quickly and in other ways has been endlessly slow (usually during class on fridays when my brain has completely turned to mush and I cant even remember how to conjugate a regular verb nevermind which ending to use for the plural prepositional case). I'm still having a good time though, the weather is pretty much like england in october, not very warm but not cold either, just rainy a lot of the time...

Languagewise everything is going ok, I'm starting to be able to have small conversations with people, even if it takes me ages to find the words and make a million mistakes. I've lost the fear of talking that I always had with german so I've found myself being the spokesperson in restaurants and at the train station. The pinnacle of my achievements was last week when I went to this outdoor statue museum type thing and managed to persuade the woman at the ticket booth not only that we deserved to pay the russian price rather than the foreigners price but also that we were students which meant that instead of paying 100rbls we only had to pay 10. Its one of my massive pet hates here that everyone is so obvious about the fact that theres one price for foreigners and a different one for russians, the one for foreigners usually being at least 5 times higher. While we were there, incidentally, we passed one of the most revolting buildings Ive seen since I got here, an enormous block of concrete which resembled a warehouse or a hypermarket more than anything else but turned out to be the gallery of russian modern art, irony of ironies.

Living in the host family has gotten infinitely more bearable now that the mother has come back from visiting her parents all last week. There was a highly traumatic porn incident the week before while she was away and I was seriously considering taking up Nastia's offer of staying at her place but it's all been much better with the mother around. She makes a massive effort to talk to me so I've been practicing speaking in the evenings for at least an hour every day which is completely knackering but really helpful. She also corrects all my mistakes so I'm not just wittering away nonsensically and I'm learning new words and phrases outside of class as well. Food has been surprisingly edible (though I'm still having to resist being force fed everything in the house) and I've had none of the issues other people have had with no fruit or vegetables and inedible meat covered in grease so all of that's going ok...

Last weekend was pretty fun. I went out for drinks with a really cool australian, an argumentative brazillian (somehow me managed to get into a discussion about richard dawkins of all things), verena the german girl from my class and a swiss guy who had just arrived. After spending hours wandering around trying to find a bar with a table free and rejecting an irish pub for being too full of boring british men, a restaraunt with a sauna in it, and an armenian bar where they walked off in the middle of taking our order and refusing to come back, we ended up in a bar underneath the ministry of foreign affairs where we managed to befriend a policeman who wanted to practice his english and he kicked some people off a table for us. Then the next evening Kathryn and Denis invited me out for drinks with some people they'd met in a bar the week before. We went to dinner in a restaurant round the corner from their apartment which had really good food but an absolutely hilarious menu. The english translations were so tragically bad that you couldnt even guess what the dishes were supposed to be, the highlight being in the fish section where there was one thing call 'assortment of exterminating gifts'. It wasnt even on the russian menu so we couldnt compare what it was supposed to be, so I'm still none the wiser. Gift means poison in german and swedish, but even then thats clearly not anything you want to see on a menu...After that we went to this really cool private bar underneath the museum of modern art (a different one that had actually gone through some kind of design process to build it) and drank muchos cocktails for free...the catch was that we had to mingle with a collection of very dull investment bankers who were all sitting around talking about work and discussing the financial crisis and how it was just like 1998 all over again, but we managed to mostly avoid them...

I ended up spending the night at Kathryn's because the metro closes at 1 and I've not quite plucked up the courage to attempt the moscow taxi system by myself yet. There are a few actual taxis here but theyre strictly only used by dumb foreigners and they cost an absolute fortune. The russian system is to stand by the side of the road with your arm out until a random car pulls over. You then explain to the driver where you want to go and argue about the price and then they take you there. The concept of getting into a random stranger's car late at night and then telling them exactly where I live just goes completely against everything I've ever been taught and its proving quite difficult to get over but I'm sure I'll manage it eventually...

Sunday I went round to Nastia's and she cooked me dinner and we had giggles and cake and stuff. Was really nice.. she lives like 15mins walk from my host family through a park so its a pretty walk (when its not raining). Also met one of her cousins who came over later in the evening which was nice. They babbled away in russian and I tried to understand...we got a bizarre system going where I would speak in english and the cousin would speak in russian and we would both more or less understand each other and Nastia translated the bits in between where we didnt get something.

This weeks challenge has been arranging the trip to st petersburg. I got as far as having booked a hostel and Nastia came with me and helped me buy my train ticket, but Verena managed to forget her passport (dont as me why you need your passport to buy a train ticket travelling entirely within russia, its just one of those 'its russia' things) so couldnt buy one for herself. The next day when we went back to get her one, all the tickets were gone so we've postponed til next weekend. This has involved 3 separate trips to the train station and many hours of standing in line. You get there and there's only 3 people in front of you in the line to buy tickets but everything takes forever in russia so it takes at least an hour for the queue to move forward (obviously through all this time youre being constantly vigilant against the people behind you edging their way forward and trying to cut in front of you). Once we got to the front I explained in as much russian as I could muster that we wanted another ticket next to mine, and the woman in the ticket office understood, but made no effort whatsover to dumb down either the speed or the language she was using to get me to understand. Eventually I worked out that we would have to take different trains to get there and back, at which point I gave up and rang Nastia to get her to help me change the tickets to next weekend since its clearly not fated to be this weekend. The tickets themselves are hilariously official, with holograms and stamps and printed on paper with designs all over it so you cant forge it. Its more elaborate even than the bank notes.

What else have I done? A couple days ago I finally made it to the patriarch's pond on a dog walk with Kathryn and this russian woman who she met (also dog walking). While we were there we bumped into two massively stereotypical expat housewives (one from america and the other from banbury so she waffled on to me about oxford for a while) walking their own dogs who immediately tried to recruit me into teaching at the american school and both me and Kathryn into joining the international (read bored housewives) groups here which we made noncommittal noises about and then decided later that we would go and check it out once and just make shit up about ourselves (having bonded with each other before about creating entirely new identities when being chatted up by irritating guys) and generally mock it later.

Last night we had another run in with tragic soviet service at a cuban restaurant where we ordered a bunch of tapas and the waitress proceeded to bring out a collection of dishes which were either completely different from what they were supposed to be or the wrong dish entirely. We had a bit of a fight with her about one of them, which we sent back and she took an hour to bring the right one out again, but by that point we'd moved on to laughing at a group of russian women who were dancing the two steps of salsa they'd learned in front of the live band, trying desperately to impress them in a space the size of a postcard, but there were good mojitoes so it was all amusing rather than irritating..

More stuff what I have been doing

So, second (and most of the 3rd) week gone and I've moved house again (I know, I know, I really need to work on staying put somewhere longer than 5 seconds) its all gone by pretty fast, mostly filled with being tired after class/going to a café and drinking 15000 cappuccinos with either Kathryn or Verena from my class. Did manage to get out and go to the Kremlin – pretty impressive but horrendously expensive so we only went to see the various churches dotted around rather than go to the armoury or the diamond collection. The churches were pretty cool though (the architecture geek in me is having a field day here) but I noticed that inside the domes they always have a painting of christ looking down on you, and not with a particularly benevolent expression. It's quite unnerving as a grown up, and I bet if you get used to that as a kid going to church it puts the fear of god into you quite effectively.
Also went round to kathryn's house. She has one of those really irritating little yappy dogs but apart from that it was nice. She has a really lovely apartment with the biggest flat screen I've ever seen, so I think I'm gonna take some of my dvds round there to have a movie night sometime. We had ikea meatballs as a change from all the russian food and i met her fiancé and he seems pretty cool.
Next evening the 3 of us went to a movie, burn after reading. Pretty crap film, but it was good to get out of the flat in the evening and also find a cinema that doesn't dub movies into Russian which is a bit of a rarity

Went shopping to a mall with Verena to get a bag for her laptop. Was slightly staggered by the number of british shops (amongst others) including a boots which I've never ever seen before outside of Britain, got lots of odd looks taking photos of the logo. Further proof if I needed any that Moscow isn't the city I was warned about, with no shops and no home comforts.

Saturday night was fun, but a little sad. Went for drinks with the germans and introduced them all to the wonders of vodka and cranberry (although cranberry juice is really sweet here so I might have to find a new drink, shock horror) but they were mostly leaving on the Sunday so had to say goodbye before I'd really got to know any of them. Oh well, new people will come.

Sunday was spent freaking out about moving to living with a family. Having been told it was a father, mother and 30 year old daughter I was a bit shocked to arrive and find a father and 30 year old son instead. The apartment is in a pretty scummy area of town and is on the 17th floor which totally freaked me out to begin with, but I'm working on getting used to it. Spent most of Sunday hiding in my room feeling awkward and not knowing what to say. The father seems nice enough but the son is kinda weird and the only thing he seemed to have to say for himself was repeating 'chelsea, abramovitch' over and over when he found out I was from Britain before presenting me with a Chelsea baseball cap. Apart from that he doesn't really talk to me and just seems to watch tv all evening. They've got a really really cute Siamese kitten though so when I run out of things to say (very rapidly) I can just resort to petting the cat.

Also went to the pushkin art museum yesterday, in a vague attempt to do some more cultural stuff. lots of impressionist art, including some very famous stuff, but only a few by Chagall, so the hunt continues for more stuff by my favourite. there was a special exhibition on of an artist (forgotten his name) which seemed to consist of 3 rooms of exactly the same painting done in slightly different colours, it wasnt even an interesting painting to start with, almost totally blank canvases and then a sort of shrouded entrance way in one corner. seemed highly overrated but the russian woman we went with seemed to be impressed..

Classes are still going ok, although we've got the teacher who doesn't speak any english back for some of the lessons which is really dull, she doesnt make a lot of effort and we end up just monotonously going through the textbook. My english is suffering from talking to germans all day, not that im speaking in german, but ive noticed my sentence constructions getting weirder and weirder and my accent has completely reverted back to a random mush of british/american/speaking to foreigners. I also keep typing B when i mean V so i presume this means the russian is sinking in somewhere as well.
We got some new students on monday, 2 koreans, another german and a french guy... the koreans hardly speak any english and one of them is clearly way behind the rest of us in russian as well so im not sure why they didnt put him in the total beginners class. The german looks like hes about to have a heart attack at any minute, but seems ok, hes working on decommissioning nuclear submarines for the russian navy in murmansk so hes quite interesting to talk to... the french guy fulfills almost every single stereotype you can have about french people.. dismissive of everything russian (with the exception of his girlfriend, god knows how she puts up with it) and complains about the quality of the architecture, the theatre, the cinema, the food..etc etc... hes also got incredibly bad BO so me and kathryn have been making lots of hiding things from frenchmen under bars of soap jokes.. hes quite friendly to me though since he found out that i went to oxford and am therefore culturally acceptable...

Week 1

Apologies for the length of the first few posts, I wrote them as newsletter type emails to friends and family before Bran (sister) persuaded me to blog them as well.

So, survived my first week in Moscow. Currently have horrible cold that went round my whole class which involved a very embarrassing collapsing in supermarket episode during which everyone was convinced i was pregnant and obviously i didnt know enough russian to tell them otherwise, but apart from that I'm actually having a pretty cool time. The weather's been loads nicer and warmer than in England so have done lots of wandering round exploring.

Got to the apartment with only a couple of minor hiccups. Rapidly rediscovered my eastern European queuing skills (shove through wherever possible, regardless of how many people are in front of you) at passport control, then got a swift induction into insane Russian driving:
1. You must overtake (and undertake) in the smallest gap possible, to show off both your machismo and your car's acceleration ability. I majorly regretted the decision to sit in the back of the car at this point.
2. As in Greece, if there is traffic, the hard shoulder is an entirely acceptable extra lane
3. A new rule for me: if the hard shoulder has also ground to a halt and you are in an SUV, you may also drive off the tarmac and up/down the embankment to dodge around cars selfishly hogging hard shoulder
4. When sitting in traffic it is also acceptable (when in an SUV) to get out, open the boot and take stuff out, before getting back in and driving on again
Also amusing along the way was driving past an ancient lada, mysteriously leaking water from the back seat door, with a woman in the passenger seat playing with an extremely fat cat

But yeah, got to the flat and then discovered that my flatmate was out and the driver didn't know where my set of keys were so I sat outside for ages till flatmate thankfully showed up. Apart from that it was all pretty easy and straightforward. Flat is nice and full of ikea furniture. Flatmate is a total deadloss though, he speaks almost no English and seems to spend most of his time in his room on the phone to Japanese friends. Hopefully I'll be going out a bit more next week though so it won't feel so lonely stuck in here in the evenings. All the shops and stuff round here seem to be open 24/7 and the metro station is 2 minutes away as well. (also 1 minute away from a pirate dvd shop if anyone has any requests)

The classes have been pretty good. On the first day i got there early and as i waited german after german arrived and I got terrified that i was the only nongerman in the class. They all speak English though and eventually an American woman showed up as well. I've got two teachers, one who speaks only Russian (who we had for the very first lesson) which is a bit terrifying and we spend a lot of those classes with blank expressions on our faces as she tries to explain grammar to us. The other one speaks lots of English though and is really friendly, we have lots of giggles in those classes. It's been pretty hard work, but I feel like I've learnt a lot already so it's all good.

On the first day we got given a tour round part of the centre. Started with a metro ride and got a 3 month metro card for the same price as a 28 day bus pass in oxford so at least one thing here is cheap. The metro stations are amazing, insanely deep (with crazy fast escalators) and really ornate with statues and mosaics and stuff all over the place and each one is different so looking forward to getting to see some more of them. The trains also arrive every 45 seconds so you never have to leg it to get on one and they're never crowded, even at rush hour, TfL could clearly learn something from the Russians. Amusingly the tour guide/teacher felt it necessary to point out the TNK-BP offices as well as more usual tourist spots like Pushkin's house (trivia which is probably meaningless to most of you). After that she showed us where the fans of the Russian equivalent of Nirvana hold vigil every night and the first Russian Starbucks (logo disappointingly in English, but Cyrillic version is also on the wall)

I've also been to red square and done a little bit of sightseeing. Was really surprised how beautiful and colourful a lot of the centre is. I'd kind of had Moscow down in my head as one of those big grey concrete cities but actually there's been so much reconstruction and renovation around the centre that everything looks really nice. The streets are all really wide (to make way for the insane amount of traffic) so everything feels quite open.

Met up with my friend Nastia from Vilnius as well. We didn't get on when we were being teenagers in middle school, but 9 years has obviously done a lot for our ability to find stuff in common. She's been really helpful and told me how to get a mobile number set up and we spent most of Saturday sitting in cafés talking and generally catching up. She offered to let me stay at her apartment if the living with a family thing is too much to take. I don't think it'll be necessary, but nice to know I've got that to fall back on if it's awful.

So yeah, all in all its been pretty good. I think I've been having a much better time than one of my classmates who is from a really small town in germany and has never really travelled before, she's busy being terrified of the traffic and the number of people and how big everything is and at not understanding anything, but so far the culture shock I was expecting doesn't seem to have appeared for me so I'm busy trying to be encouraging to her and going places with her so it's less scary for both of us. Spent most of this afternoon sitting in a cafe chatting with her as well...

More sightseeing tomorrow I think. According to the map I live just down the road from Patriarch's Pond (setting for the opeing of the Master and Margarita for those who have read it. for those who haven't, you should, it's one of my favourite books) so I'm gonna go check that out, and then do some more wandering round the centre so more pictures to follow shortly.

Beginning at the beginning

So, having spent most of my life moving around I found myself coming to the end of 4 years of living in Oxford and decided it was time to move on. Don't get me wrong, various friends have been exasperated with me never staying still even during this time, at last count I've been to 15 different countries during the last 4 years, it's just not in my nature to stay in one place.

But I was tired of living in Britain, partly because of the dullness of it all, partly because I feel more at home when I can't understand anything that's being said around me, and partly just because I like making life difficult for myself.

I've been trying to learn Russian on and off since I was about 14. Being monoglot after having lived all over Europe was just getting too embarrassing but I never seemed to be able to make time to learn a language properly. Having given up German after high school, I decided that the only way I was ever going to learn was to just go to Russia, have hours and hours of classes every day, and live with a Russian family (remember I said I like to make things difficult for myself?)