It Was a Very Good Year

Snow is falling fast here and Uralmash looks so peaceful, you would never believe it was once the seat of the Russian mafia.  Incidentally, Irving Berlin was born in the relatively nearby city of Tiumen, hence the lyric, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.”  American Christmas has come and gone, but the Eastern Orthodox church doesn’t celebrate it till January 7th.  Still, I’m all set for New Years, which is the big Russian gift-giving holiday.

But first the bad news: today I walked away from an ATM, forgetting to wait for my card.  I only realized it hours later when I tried to buy tickets from Moscow online.  I ran back to the bank, but they’d closed half an hour earlier.  Yikes!  So tomorrow I’ll be there as soon as they open with my passport, receipt and phone number of the consulate just in case.  Wish me luck, but in English, because the Russian response is “To the devil!”

My week has been quite relaxing, as my students are writing their zachyoti, pre-exam pass/fail tests.  So while they stress out, I get time off.  On Monday I went to a local kindergarden to see the kids’ Christmas pageant.  Part of the “school of tomorrow” movement, this kindergarden is conducted half in Russian, half in English.  The kids were painfully cute, singing made-up songs about Chreestmas.  I only wonder if they actually understood what they were saying.

Yesterday I went with an American friend to the Tchaikovsky opera “Queen of Spades,” based on a story by Pushkin.  I love going to the theater here in general and opera in particular.  Since operas are usually not in English, I’m used to not understanding what the hell they’re saying.  This time, I was pleased to get about 50% of the lyrics, and the rest I easily pieced together.  The production was, as always, gorgeous.  There was some weirdness after the first movement of the third act; curtains closed, houselights came on and the musicians started filing out, soon followed by many audience members.  Far be it for the Russian theater to announce what on earth is going on, but after about ten minutes, a mysterious voice proclaimed that a principal singer would be replaced by another performer.  The understudy was great, maybe even better, but died after one only scene, which makes me wonder what could have happened to the other performer?  Anyway the show was amazing and only six cell phones went off during the three-act performance.  Good job Ekaterinburg!

After the opera, my friend (his name is Mitch Richards, and anyone who knows my former speech impediment will appreciate the hilarity of that name) and I wanted to get a drink.  We came upon a Beatles-themed Yellow Submarine Bar.  Mitch was sure it was “hard-core Russian,” which sounded good to me.  But in fact, as we descended into the basement pub, we heard a live band playing “Blue Suede Shoes,” followed by a bunch of early Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd and the like.  Sitting at the bar, our English conversation attracted a great deal of attention, and we befriended a bunch of young bilingual Russians.  There was even another American there, a kid who incomprehensibly left South Carolina to come to Russia in late December.  So, not exactly “hard-core Russian,” but we had a great time.

Now I’m gearing up for New Years.  All my presents are bought and bagged, and half are already delivered.  This week I’m looking forward to a consulate holiday party, then heading to a nearby village to spend New Years with my friend’s family.  Apparently, the mother already asks about me every day, even though we’ve yet to meet.  Then, a few days into 2009, fellow Fulbrightniks Matt and Jason are coming up to begin our travels.  I’m so excited to sally forth!  So, in these last days of 2008, I wish all my friends, family and unknown readers the very best of health and happiness.  Here’s hoping the coming year will be full of peace, joy and love.   And remember, you, blog-readers, are the real heroes!

Where the Bands Are

I’ll write all about my weekend, but I’m sleepy so I can’t promise it’ll all come out in complete sentences.  Pretty exciting Friday night: I went down to the train station and finally bought my tickets to St. Petersburg.  It turned out to be much easier and even cheaper to do it in person, rather than online.  Now I just have to figure out how I’m getting from Prague to Moscow and from Moscow back here at the end of the month.  But, you know, baby steps...

Saturday I went with my new friend Irina to temple.  She’s Christian but studies Hebrew (at the synagogue in fact) and is very interested in Judaism.  She was lucky to have come on that day because we had special guest singers at the service, but more on them later.  That afternoon I went to see 4 Christmases, a totally generic, predictable holiday movie with one redeeming feature: a scene of Reese Witherspoon beating the shit out of a roomful of kids.  I sure do like to see those youngsters spill.  Then at night I went with a couple students to an arthouse/bar called 2KY (KY is pronounced “coo” in Russian, although to me it looks like KY Jelly).  It was really hip yet comfortable there, more Columbus than Cleveland if that helps, and the band was great.  Unfortunately, we stayed there way too long.  I didn’t want to get wasted, but everyone else did, especially the girls’ 15-year old friend.  (On the one hand, I was very annoyed by the young girl’s inability to hold her liquor.  I’m 23 and have no business with a drunk-ass 15 year-old.  On the other hand, I remembered going out with Alyse Shafran when I was, indeed, even younger than that...)  Luckily, since we arrived 8, I had time to get drunk, get bored, get annoyed and still get home by midnight.

Today I went to work with the high schoolers who are preparing for their college entrance exam.  For me it’s terribly uninteresting, but they really appreciate the chance to practice the spoken English component with a native speaker.  Strangely, today they practiced doing monologues, which they could’ve done with anyone.  Then in the afternoon I went with three friends, including the aforementioned Irina, to a local Chanukah concert.  It took place at a huge stadium, curiously named the Palace of Youth.  The bill included the Israeli two singers who wowed me at the synagogue last week, a couple dance groups from the JCC and Klara Novosomethingkina, a singing Russian comedy legend.  Because I couldn’t understand any of her jokes, although I did know when she was making fun of Bush, I didn’t get much out of Klara’s performance.  Actually, all I got was low self-esteem, because everybody except me was laughing hysterically.  The two Israeli singers were wonderful and I teared up when they sang a medley of songs from Fiddler on the Roof.  Lucky they didn’t do Hatikvah or I’d have been a wreck.  But what stole the show for me was a steadily growing group of bored little children in front of the stage.  At first it was one curly headed girl, dancing and reminding me of my younger self.  Then she was joined by another, then many more, until the kids were literally running all over the stage.  Klara had a lot to say to and about children, so nobody stopped them when they went as far as sitting in a clump center-stage.  Adorable.

About my low self-esteem: it’s not as bad as all that.  A couple days ago a shopgirl who’d overheard me conversing with someone else about my origins came up to express her shock that I was a foreigner.  Speaking with me, she said, she thought I was “one of our girls.”  Also at the concert I ran into a few people I met when I first arrived.  I said two or three words to them tonight before they said my accent was much better.  So, I’m improving, despite all the time I spend watching American tv. 

Now I’ll go take a bath because I smell like the roasted chicken I ate with my bare hands.  Merry Christmas or Happy Jewish Christmas (eat an extra eggroll for me).

Obscene odes on the windows of the skull

Hit a record high in the classroom today: I taught Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”  My fourth-year students are studying law, so I introduced the historically divine origin of justice and the idea of legislating morality.  Then I gave out part I of Ginsberg’s iconic poem.  I taught them all about the Beat writers and warned them that this poem was very racy, if not downright dirty.  So we started reading it out loud, and that’s no easy task even for a native speaker.  The kids were plowing through, and it was so cute hearing their accented pronunciation, saying things like ee-DA-ho for Idaho.  About 1/3 of the way through, I gave them the option to stop, but they wanted to continue.  So we read the whole 3-page section, theoretically in order to talk about the obscenity trial.  We did in fact discuss the trial, but it was an incredible thrill for me to share the poem with these students.  I was genuinely proud of them for working through the whole thing, and some of them even enjoyed it (though none asked for, say, other Beat titles...).  Of course they didn’t know all the words Ginsberg uses, and I wonder if they even realize how explicit some of those lines are, but they definitely got the point.  And, amazingly, they even got the rhythm.  By the time we got to the last line, my student pronounced the words “good to eat a thousand years” like a regular Beat(nik).  It was somewhat daring for me to give out this literature, but they got it, and got into it.  I don’t know if it affected their souls, but my experience was nothing less than spiritual.  Talk about the best minds of my generation...

Good Times (and Great Oldies)

I am pleasantly exhausted after a great weekend.  Wanna hear everything I did?  If not, then you’re on the wrong site.  Incidentally, we’ve finally started to get some snow here, though not much.  I can’t help but think of Jessie, and how during the winter in the Hudson Valley she so disdained the time-intensive processes of bundling and unbundling, to the point where she would sometimes just stay in.  This is my first Russian winter and I don’t intend to hibernate.  Hope Yuss knows it will still be cold when she comes to visit in March...

Friday night, my friend Yulia invited me to go to a student theater festival at the Ural State University in the center of the city.  After navigating through the labyrinthine campus for about forty minutes, we found the performance hall.  By now we were about an hour late, pretty bad even by Russian standards of punctuality, but I didn’t think it warranted what happened: some jerk student slammed the door in our faces.  It was humiliating!  We stood around for a while longer, weighing our options of sneaking in at intermission or saying to hell with it all.  Ultimately we chose the latter.  Bummersville, but I had to go home and bake cookies (more on which follows) anyway.  So instead of student theater, I started watching The Sopranos from the very beginning.  Can’t say I regret my choice.  (“It’s not about mistakes Mother.  It’s about choices.  And I’ve chosen to make a mistake.”)

Saturday I went to temple as usual.  After a few weeks of really sad and gruesome Torah portions, we finally had a happy one this week: the reunion of Jacob and Esau.  I’m learning so much Russian from these weekly services.  Not the kind of language I use in everyday conversation, but beautiful nonetheless.  I had lunch with the Israelis and Chaia told a very cute anecdote (in the Russian sense, meaning jokey story).  Two beggars, a Jew and a gentile, are invited to a Passover Seder.  The Jew tells his colleague that it will be a great feast, so the gentile arrives at dinnertime, hungry as the dickens.  First they wash their hands, then tell the story of the exodus, drink four glasses of wine and eat everything off the Seder plate.  When they get up to wash their hands again, the starving gentile stalks out of the house.  Later, he meets his Jewish friend, full to bursting, who explains that if he had waited just a little longer, he would’ve had the best meal of his life.  The moral of the story is to be patient in waiting for the Messiah.  But I, always ready with a glib response, said, “That man should’ve come to my family’s Seder, because we always start with soup and gefilte fish!”

I came home and baked more cookies (explanation forthcoming, I promise).  Then was the highlight of my weekend: I got to video-chat with my precious 5-year old cousin/best friend Molly.  She looks the same, gorgeous, and it was so amazing to hear her sweet voice.  At first she was shy, but then she warmed up and even tried to squeeze herself through the computer, saying, “You forgot to bring me to Russia!”  I wonder what she pictures when she says “Russia.”  We did a little call-and-response with her favorite Springsteen and Beatles songs; that girl’s repertoire is astonishing.  When it was time for me to go, I had such a hard time saying goodbye.  How could I close the screen when it was full of her beautiful face?  And I guess she felt the same way, because my mom tried to get her out of the room, but she wanted to “stay with Abbie.”  Awww.  Warmed the very cockles of my heart, whatever those are...

Saturday night I went out with my friend Veronika to a couple bars.  She works at the American Center and is studying to be a journalist.  So of course she is super-smart and interesting, and one of the friendliest people I’ve met in Russia.  Being so cool, she also has really cool friends.  So we went to a couple different places, and by the end of the night, I was totally ripped.  It felt so good, not to get drunk but to go out and dance.  The “DJ” played mostly cheesy American pop, which was fine by me (except for one thing: I love Queen, but I really don’t need to hear “We are the Champions” three times in one night).  Technically this place is a pub, not a club, but there was a lot of action on the dance floor, kind of like the Black Swan.  The biggest difference between this place and American bars was that the DJ regularly played slow songs, at which point gentlemen ask ladies to dance.  They even dance properly, not like we do at Bar Mitzvah parties.  I danced with only one boy who I thought was pretty cute, but it might have just been his tie-cardigan combo making him look like a mod.  At the end of the night, my cabdriver couldn’t make quite enough change from my 500 ruble note, but I was too drunk and tired to fight.  Besides I’ve taken a few rabbit (free) rides, so it’s just karma.  I got into bed, ate a bowl of popcorn, watched the first 10 minutes of Big Lebowski and passed the fuck out.

So, what’s up with all those cookies?  The vice-consulate’s wife Melody invited me to a Christmas cookie exchange.  Being a big Jewface, this was new to me, but here’s the deal: you bake a ton of cookies, bring them over and then get to take a bunch from everyone else.  Melody is a regular Martha Stewart, except glamorous, beautiful and sweet instead of pure evil.  She made the most delicious enchiladas for lunch and served hot apple cider.  Most of the other guests were her friends from church (including a missionary who brought her little daughter, probably the only other Abbie in Russia) or the consulate.  The whole event was absolutely lovely and elegant.  I only made one indiscretion.  We were talking about vinegar (more interesting than it sounds) and I told a story of how I once reached for a bottle of beer and wound up with a mouthful of balsamic.  The missionary looked uncomfortable, but I got a laugh out of the consulate IT specialist.  Much better received was the story of Luke’s double-life.  Here’s the cookie list: my lemon drop butter, or as Lucia calls them, sun cookies, chocolate chip, double ginger snaps, chocolate crinkles, chocolate rum balls, snickerdoodles and some incredibly elegant South American caramel sandwich cookies.  Not too shabby!  I thought about bringing them to my class pot-luck on Friday, but we’ll see how many survive until then.  The prognosis for those double ginger snaps is grim...  As I was walking out, a truck driver leaned out his window and asked what I was carrying, something delicious, could he try it?  I finally experienced the full meaning of the Russian phrase Да нет, “Yes, NO!”

Now I’ve got to relax, rehydrate and build up my strength for work tomorrow.  I feel I’ve had a weekend like those lyrics of the only band that matters, the Clash, “48 hours means 48 thrills!”

Notes from Underground

Ok ok, nothing to report, but I felt some pressure from one particularly rage-a-holic reader to write a new post.  So here's what I've been doing:

I read The Call of the Wild.  It's one of the most beautiful little books I've ever read, and certain images will be forever in my mind and in my heart.  However, I can't quite picture what the protagonist would look like.  Buck is 1/2 St. Bernard, 1/2 Scotch shepherd.

I’m preparing for my travels, looking into attractions in Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague.  If anyone knows any must-see sights there, give ‘em here.  I’m also teaching myself German from a book called German Through Pictures.  Ich habe ein Buch!  Er ist auf dem Tisch! 

I’m looking for warm sneakers for my trip, but women’s shoe stores here only seem to sell hooker boots.  Is it me, or is this gender discrimination?

Teaching, or conducting classes anyway.  My second-year students are doing a unit on “Meals and Food” so we’re having class pot-lucks.  My fourth-year students are doing law, so I tried to do a Roger Berkowitz lesson on the historically divine origin of morality versus the atheistic modern age.  This somehow turned into a lesson on how the only English word that can be any part of speech is “fuck.”  Sorry, Senator Fulbright.

Meanwhile, I’ve been supervising the third-year students’ “methodology projects.”  These are basically research projects culminating in presentations, the kind of thing American students start doing in sixth grade.  I’ve realized that in Russian education there’s no focus on critical thinking, so the kids don’t see a problem with printing out a page from Wikipedia and reading it out loud as a presentation.  I’m trying to break my kids of that habit.  It’s particularly difficult when they don’t bother to come to our meetings.  Tonight I told my JCC students how much more I like working with them.  Nuts to the Pedagogical Institute!

Looking ahead a couple days, I’m going to try to make latkes.  I have all these potatoes and some really good sour cream.  I’ll let y’all know how that goes.  The vice-consulate’s wife also invited me to a Christmas cookie exchange, so I’ll be making Jessie and my patented Monkey Cookies.  Except since I’m baking without Jessie, I’m gonna put in some pecans too.  Mama’s cuttin’ loose!

So you can see what a thrilling and noteworthy life I lead here.  Eh, Rachel?

PS--My blood brother and brother-from-another-mother are going to Israel tomorrow on Birthright.  Have fun boys and make good decisions!

She loves the lovin' things

My but I feel accomplished!  Here’s what I did today:

Class with the first-year advertising students.  Now they’re starting their exams, so I’m done with them, and not a minute too soon.

Then I went downtown to meet with the director of Studio Lukie-More.  They’re actually an architectural firm, but for some reason, they’ve also started an art studio.  So they make these gorgeous cartoons with Russian fairy tale characters, some as commercials, some as education.  But here’s why I was there: they’re doing this project to record Pushkin’s “Prelude to Ruslan and Liudmila” in as many languages as possible.  And guess who got to do the English translation!  Actually, they provided the translation, but wanted my voice.  Little did they know, I’ve had a celebrated career in community theater.  It was so much fun, and they really seemed to appreciate it.  Hopefully it will be ready soon, and I’ll post it for all my fans to hear my Cleveland accent butchering Pushkin.

Next I made my way down to the synagogue.  Last week there were two participants who really stole my heart.  Their language was well below the level of the rest of the class, and they were sincerely bummed not to be able to join in.  So we agreed that I’d come an hour early and do English for Beginners.  This week, one of the two was sick, but the other came and we had a great time.  Teaching from square one isn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but only because we have Russian as a common language.  That is, I can’t imagine how my Israeli friends manage in the Jewish day school.  Anyway, Vadim and I worked for about forty minutes before he made some weird hand signal, started laughing and said, “Enough!”  I couldn’t have agreed more.  Soon the other group came in, and we practiced the conditional mood using the Barenaked Ladies’ classic “If I had $1,000,000.”  There’s one from the Jennifer Day school of language-teaching: get their attention using pop music.

Finally, I came home and booked my flights for my January travels.  Fellow ETAs Jason, Matt and I are heading up to Petersburg for a few days, thence to Amsterdam and Berlin.  From Berlin we’ll take the train into Prague and end up back in Moscow just in time for the mid-year conference.  Jealous yet?  As if that all weren’t enough, I even did laundry!  Now I’m ready to relax with some free streaming American television.  Oh internet, did you ever get those love-letters I sent you?

Full of love in Ekaterinburg, this is me signing off.  Goodnight friends.