Becoming a local

I’ve lived in Vladimir for about a year and a half now, and there are signs that I might be starting to fit in. Not in the way I dress or the way I look, of course. That will never happen. But in some categories I’m doing alright.

Giving directions – People here aren’t shy about asking for directions on the street. If you are a foreigner and you are asked for directions by a Russian person, there are three steps to successfully answering them:

1. Understanding the question

2. Knowing the answer

3. Being able to express the answer in Russian

I can’t always do this, but there have been several occasions in which I’ve directed people to the bus stop, or a certain street, or a supermarket. Whether they understand me well enough to make it to their destination or not, I don’t know, but I always just imagine that they do.

Showing someone around the city – Last week my friend Ilya came to visit me on his way from Moscow to Nizhni Novgorod, where he’s from. Even though Nizhni isn’t far from here (2-3 hours by train), Ilya had never been to our beautiful and historic city. We spent a cold but sunny day wandering around the city and seeing my favorite sites (ok, they’re the only sites, but I do like them) – Cathedral Square, the Golden Gates, the history museum housed in an old water tower, and the best Azerbaijani restaurant around, Shesh-Besh. It felt good to know more about a Russian city than my Russian friend did, although he had to buy entrance tickets to everything so we wouldn’t get charged the extravagant foreigner price. I still can’t pass for Russian in my appearance and accent, unfortunately.

Touring with Russians – Yesterday six of us teachers joined an excursion to Moscow to see a ballet at a theater inside the Kremlin. Our tour bus was full of Russians, and we had a guide who filled us on the history of Russian ballet on the road. Man, did he fill us in. He started out in the 14^th century and took us up to the present time. In the 19^th century, when things really started to get “interesting” in the world of Russian ballet, he provided us with a year-by-year run down of ballet happenings. I tried to listen and enrich my knowledge at first, but the fuzzy microphone voice and the sheer longevity of the presentation got the better of me. I think that even our Russian comrades, who could understand a little better, lost interest by the time he had talked for two hours. When we got to Moscow, we rushed to the underground mall near the Kremlin for a quick lunch (McDonalds, yes, but it’s not my fault, it’s all we had time for). Then we got into a huge line and eventually made it inside the Kremlin and inside a huge, communist-era theater for the ballet. It was called “Esmeralda”, and was the story of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The dancing was beautiful and we could follow the story to some extent. For a hunchback, Quasimodo was a very skilled dancer, and once even danced with Esmeralda when she was dead (which makes her a talented dancer too, even post-mortem). All in all it was a great show, and we headed back to the bus satisfied. I imagine that when Muscovites see all the people going to their tour busses they probably think, “Look at those hicks going back to their provincial villages outside of Moscow.” But if that is indeed what they are thinking, I don’t mind. At least I’m not on a bus with foreign tourists, I’m a Russian provincial hick.

Nicene Creed Karaoke

In addition to handball on Eurosport 2 and Belorussian news, I've discovered more quality programming, on Православный Телеканал Благовест (Orthodox Channel "Good News"). Earlier, when I saw a priest on the screen, I just flipped past, but a few days ago I decided to give the priest a chance. And I discovered that Благовест is great going-to-bed TV.

Usually around midnight they have a kind of televised church service. A priest stands in front of some icons and chants passages from the Bible. Then the choir sings a song, and usually the priest chants again. At the end, they have the congregation chanting the Nicene Creed. I've experienced a similar procedure at actual services in church, but the difference is that on TV, all the words are on the screen. In church, the Nicene Creed is extremely hard to follow along with. I want to sing it with everyone, and I'm pretty familiar with it in English, but there's no way I can sing it in Russian, or maybe it's Old Church Slavonic. That's why the TV version is so awesome.

But the sing-along Nicene Creed isn't the only great thing about Orthodox TV. They have other interesting shows, like "Вечные Вопросы" (Eternal Questions). You can text message your spiritual questions and a priest will answer them. They answer questions like, "Is it ok to work on Sundays?", the answer to which, ironically, I missed because I was grading homework assignments (on a Sunday). Maybe I would send in my own questions, if I had a cell phone. Sometimes they show orchestra and choir music, and sometimes even a rock band, rocking out in front of a big banner with an icon-like face of Jesus on it.

While we don't get stars like Jack Van Impe or Benny Hinn on Russian religious television, I'll take chanted prayers while I'm going to sleep any day.

We're just finishing up the first week of a new semester here at the American Home. I came back to Vladimir last Saturday, a tiring but less trying trip than the one to America (although on my Delta flight from New York to Moscow they didn't show any movies or give us a mid-flight snack, as was promised).

I've got a pretty good schedule this semester, with three BI classes (a level I taught last semester too). But then there's my one group of AII, a level I taught six times last year and was doing my best to avoid this year. The students aren't the problem, the problem is that AII is the level from the depths of hell. Maybe you think that's an overstatement, but if you had to teach past and future perfect tenses, the passive with present perfect and present continuous, and modal verbs for unreal situations in the past, among other things, to low-intermediate students who say things like, "Yesterday I working", you might understand. Then there's the movie. Most levels have a standard movie that is shown in small segments for the duration of the semester. The AII movie is Father of the Bride. Not such a bad movie, maybe, if you haven't already seen it over six times. I don't know how many more of Steve Martin's extremely annoyed and angry facial expressions I can take before I pull a George Banks move myself and start tearing hot dog buns out of the package at the store. Let's hope I can restrain myself.

Well, I think I'll be able to survive the semester despite AII. I have mostly new students I haven't taught before, but they seem like good groups. And now we have three new desk calenders in the teacher's office, which means triple the joyous anticipation of coming to the American Home every day and reading a new Far Side comic (today -- "Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full."), English word of the day (today -- "kudzu"), and French word of the day (today -- "les epinards", or "spinach"). Don't you wish you worked here?