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A month in, and I have now had some vodka. Admittedly only one shot, by myself, to accompany my imitation caviar, but it has been done. Continuing along the alcoholic theme, as I write I am drinking a mug of medovukha, which is basically mead. I bought it at the honey fair last Sunday (more of which later on), and this is it's first outing. My friend Ti was meant to come over this evening to drink it with me, but her schedule was changed at the last minute and she couldn't make it, so I thought I'd have some anyway. Very tasty - a bit like cold mulled wine with a strong flavour of honey, quite powerful and spicy - there are some lumps of ginger floating in the bottle. No idea how strong it is. Can use this blog entry as an experiment - if it's still coherent at the end, it's of average beer-y strength.
In no particular order, because I have no idea what order things happened in, or even when the last entry on here was (and the internet is currently down so I can't check - am typing this in a word document to upload from the office tomorrow). Here are some things that have happened to me, or that I have happened upon Moscow.
Last weekend, David and I moved house! Hurrah! It was all a bit last-minute and unexpected, but very welcome. I'd been told we'd be in the previous flat until at least the first week of October, but then last Thursday afternoon I had a phone call from the office saying they'd found us a flat, I had to go on Friday evening to meet the landlady, and we'd be moving on Saturday. So David and I went along dutifully on Friday evening, and dutifully pretended to be married for the landlady's sake (that was another last-minute surprise, but so far nothing has been said by anyone which has required either of us to lie and say actually we're not married). The flat is very nice! Considerably nicer than the last one, and I feel a lot safer in it, as it's on the 8th floor. My room has enough space to swing about 10 cats - I got first choice of rooms, and David got what's clearly designed as a sitting room and has 2 sofa beds (1 single 1 double), but he does also get the balcony. But as he's planning on moving out when he can anyway, I don't feel too guilty. The location suits me down to the ground - 5 minutes' walk from the monorail station, which I use several times a week to get to my classes at Bosch, and only 15 minutes' walk from the same metro station as before, just the other side of it. David however works largely in different parts of the city, leaving him with a fair number of 2-hour commutes, so moving out makes sense. I had to get the landlady over yesterday to explain the washing machine to me - which made me feel very stupid because I'm supposed to be able to do washing machines, and normally I can, but this one really foxed me. I'd tried a few different things and just couldn't persuade it to spin or even drain the water out, and I spent most of Tuesday with a drum full of water which I couldn't shift, and then suddenly the door popped open and the water went all over the kitchen floor. David assured me there was no need to mop up the water as it would dry by itself. No sir, I told him, this water is a centimetre deep, it'll flood the people downstairs before it dries up by itself. So I paddled, and didn't tell the landlady. Got the mechanics of the washing machine sorted now, the next battle is getting a clothes horse out of the school - there's a washing line strung up on the balcony, but it's already too cold for anything to dry there, and there's very limited hanging space in the rest of the flat. This could be a bloody battle, but I shall persevere. I've been told: hang your clothes in the bathroom. No, they'd never dry. Hang your clothes in the kitchen: no, they'd end up smelling of anything I ever cooked and anyway where would you put up a string in there so that there weren't clothes forever in your face? Hang them in your bedroom: there's nowhere to hang them. I will win eventually.
When we first arrived in the flat, it turned out there was no cutlery, and no saucepans. We survived on plastic cutlery and no saucepans until yesterday, at which point I used the 1000roubles the office had given me for the purpose (about £20, and also 400roubles of my own money) to get a set of 3 saucepans, 2 knives, 3 spoons, 3 teaspoons, 2 forks and a plastic sieve. The office weren't happy when I told them that was what it cost, but they gave me back the extra I'd spent. This is why I suspect the clothes horse could be tricky. Getting hold of an ironing board is requiring a lot of my best smile, but it's being done. David has an iron. A big serious heavy metal one. Who brings an iron with them from America? Anyway. I'll have more fun battles with the office when he moves out and takes it with him.
Moving day was entertaining. I was scheduled to have a class from 1-4, so a "car" was booked for 6 o'clock and Denis (one of the admin guys from the office) was coming over at 5 to help - what with, I'm not quite sure. In the end my lesson was cancelled, so I got a nice lie and and packed at a reasonably leisurely pace. 5 o'clock and Denis arrived as promised, I was all done by this stage so we sat in the kitchen and drank tea and discussed British and American TV programmes, while David finished packing. He hadn't done anything all day, and at 6 o'clock he still wasn't packed. Panic ensued. I remained calm. I do that quite well. He decided to stay on at the old flat for another few days as he was planning on moving on soon anyway - Denis and I talked him out of it and we got everything into the "car", which was half an hour late and a small lorry from the 70s. There wasn't space for all 3 of us in the cab, Denis said he'd walk and I told him that was a stupid idea because neither David nor I knew how to drive to the new flat, and the driver clearly couldn't deal with maps or directions (half an hour late because he'd been driving around the area looking for the right building), so David walked and Denis and I went in the cab. It smelled like a farm, but we had an enlightening conversation about the death penalty (it had come up earlier in the day but this is not the place to rant about other people's opinions).
The monorail, which I mentioned near the start, is loads of fun. A shiny train up in the air! A ticket costs the same as a ticket on the metro (28r - about 60p) but whereas the metro has season tickets and multi-ticket discounts and the like, the monorail has a ticket for 28r, or 10 tickets for 28r each, and that's that. Each carriage has 8 little seats facing each other, a bit like a modern version of an old-fashioned train (it's very sleek, I'm quite in love with it). The only problem is that sometimes you have to wait quite a long time for a train - I have waited up to 15 minutes - and the platforms are covered but outdoors, so in time, waiting for trains could be a chilly business. Today a man asked me which stop he needed for the metro station at the far end of it, I was very proud to be taken for a native, but realised after I'd got off the train that my answer could have been a lot clearer and he probably had to ask again.
The monorail, while taking me to Bosch 3 or 4 times a week, also takes me to Church. One of my students, a very nice woman called Anastasia who is about 28 I think, took me 3 weeks ago to a Protestant Church with her, and we went again last week - planning to go this week too. It's fairly charismatic, and not quite my cup of tea, but not too over the top so I can deal with it, and it's more familiar than an Orthodox service would be, for example. Also, there are several young people there, so it could be a good way to meet people. The building looks nothing like a Church from the outside - I would have said it was a concert hall from the 70s, or something. And inside it also resembles a concert hall - to get into the main part you go through a bookshop (ok a Christian bookshop but still), upstairs, through a café, and finally the main part. The seats are much higher at the back, and there's essentially a big stage at the front, but the wall behind the stage has an enormous cross on it, which is a bit of a give-away really. I think they could have disguised it better. Despite the outside looking a bit grotty, the inside has clearly been done up quite recently - all shiny and new and clean, and the seats are very comfy fold-down cushioned affairs, with plenty of leg room, and space for large coats etc, which will be useful when it gets cold. They've got things sorted, these Russians. Anastasia and I have a good arrangement whereby we speak only English in her lessons, and only Russian the rest of the time, so we're both doing ok. I would guess we're both at about the same level, which is encouraging given that she's about a B2 in English (look it up - Common European Framework - I'm investigating Russian exams in it as I wouldn't mind having an official bit of paper saying I was a B2 or C1 or whatever. Ok C1 might be wishful thinking).
I promised to talk about the honey fair. Pardon me. The All-Russia Honey Fair. I'd seen adverts for it on the metro, but hadn't given it any more thought than just idly translating the poster, when Carrie (we have 2 mutual connections but only met for the first time in Moscow - also an English teacher, but for a different school and has spent considerably longer here than I have) said she was getting a group together to go to it, and I was invited. Along we went. For anyone who knows Moscow - it was at Tsaritsyno, which is a stop on the metro but also a large and lovely park, which is the grounds of Catherine the Great's (summer? winter?) palace, which she never lived in because it was never finished in her lifetime because no one could agree on the finalities of the design, and it was only finished very recently. I mean, within the last 20 years or something. Less than that, even. We wandered around the fair for a bit - rows and rows and rows of little stalls with yellow awnings (seriously hundreds of stalls, at least 500, probably more, I reckon), each from different parts of Russia and the Russian-speaking world, with all their different kinds of honey available to try and buy. I've never eaten so much honey. I wasn't aware that I could really appreciate the differences in flavour from different plants etc, but it turns out I can, and I have a better idea now of what I like and what I don't. I don't like Linden honey, which gives me away as a foreigner but it's the Russian favourite, but I do like chestnut, buckwheat, mint, sunflower, and many, many other things.
We decided to go to the park for a bit and then return before buying anything - largely because we'd just sampled a delicious but very cheap cherry liqueur but alcohol isn't allowed in parks and we wanted to walk around the park. The park is wonderful - I'll be going there again when it's all snowy, just for fun. They play relaxing, happy classical music at you out of discreet speakers around the enormous fountain, and there's a little river running through it, and some nice little hills with trees and stuff, and then a massive palace, which looks quite ridiculous really but is certainly impressive. I think the palace is used for arty things like sculpture exhibitions - certainly it seems you can't go in as an ordinary tourist. But then if it was never lived in, perhaps there's not much to see inside anyway. There were a number of follies and pavilions and stuff in the grounds, one of which had a good view over the river from quite high up, and 2 sphinxes either side of the archway. Emily sat on one of them and lassoed her bright pink scarf so that Carrie and I could take stupid pictures. This was a very un-Russian thing to do (the looking stupid on purpose part, not taking pictures), and would have been quite funny even in open-minded England, so we were all laughing quite a lot, but none of the Russians walking past so much as cracked a smirk, which just made us laugh more.
Back to the fair - and we all bought cherry liqueur. £5 (ish) for half a litre - not bad at all, and it's in a fantastically rustic-looking re-used water bottle with no label or anything. Similarly the medovukha - aforementioned alcoholic honey drink - which I bought from a different stall. I also bought a pot of sunflower honey from the Krasnodar region (I'm afraid I didn't notice where the drinks were from) largely because it was the cheapest on offer and it tasted perfectly reasonable, rather than it being a particular favourite of mine - some of them were really quite pricey but the sunflower one was pretty reasonable.
I've lost my first student, and through no fault of my own - I haven't even met him. When I had my handover meeting with Matt, he told me that this particular student cancels 80% of his lessons at the last minute, but Inlingua have a policy of still charging the client if the student cancels less than 6 hours before the lesson, so that the teacher at least still gets paid even if they've been messed around. Well I had 3 late cancellations from this guy - 2 of them once I'd already arrived at his company's reception and they were scanning in my passport, leaving me with no option but to sit in an expensive café for an hour and a half until my next class in the same area. It's an affluent business area so cheap cafés don't really exist. Yesterday I was told that his company has decided to discontinue his English lessons because he's had too many late cancellations recently. On the plus side (depending on how you look at it) my classes at Merril Lynch are starting next Thursday - 7 hours back-to-back twice a week, it's going to be tough, but it'll pay. And it's pretty close to the office so I won't have a long commute (can get from office to flat in under an hour).
I think my favourite class at the moment is the Estee Lauder class, but then it's my only group so far, and I get along really well with the 3 women I teach there (although I haven't yet met a student I don't get along well with). No free samples yet. However, I feel most part of the Bosch family - I'm on speaking terms with the security guards, and spend so much of my life there that I've now been given a permanent security pass, which has yet to happen anywhere else. I still have to show my passport every time I go to Estee Lauder, and I suspect it'll stay that way, largely because their premises are just one part of a large business park, and a pass to EL would be a pass to all of the other business there too, and I'm clearly untrustworthy.
The majority of my students are Russian, but there is one Italian guy, who is (or appears to be) the CEO of a chain called Metro Cash And Carry, which I think is a multi-national chain - although maybe he's just head of his branch. Not sure. He speaks no Russian - no idea how he manages to live here. I've had 2 classes with him so far, the first in the Inlingua office, the second, last Tuesday evening, in his office building behind the store. It's a long way out of the centre, and involves taking first the metro then a bus once you're beyond the reach of the metro, and I was quite nervous that I'd get lost on my way, as I'm not very good with buses (as my family will tell you...). Luckily, David was going up there for a couple of classes on Tuesday afternoon, so I went with him a couple of hours early for my lesson with Pascuale, so he could show me the way. And I'm very glad he did, but I found myself with a lot of time to kill by myself once we were there. I had a decent and decently-priced meal in the canteen there, smashed a glass bottle by accident, and spent about an hour wandering around the store. Ooo I'm turning American. I'd never been in a cash and carry before, so I don't know how it would compare with one in England, but I was pretty blown away by it. It was HUGE. You could have fitted a good 2 or 3 Cathedrals in there, and it sold literally everything. Not all in bulk, although clearly they catered to wholesale buyers. The dairy section alone was the size of a small supermarket. A lot of stuff was the same kind of prices as most shops around the city, some stuff was considerably cheaper - I toyed with the idea of buying an entire cheese for a fiver, but then remembered I'd have to take it to my lesson, and home, and fit it in the fridge, and eat it. So I didn't. Might look up where their other branches in Moscow are though, see if there's one that doesn't take an hour and a half to get to... Anyway. Once I'd exhausted the possibilities of the shop, I went to a rather uninspiring Italian restaurant on the edge of the motorway and drank overpriced tea and ate overpriced ice-cream and made the waiter think I was a complete idiot by not understanding his (admittedly very understandable) question about how many scoops of ice cream I wanted. And sat there for an hour reading a book, and doing a tiny bit of work. Tootled over to the office block round the back of the shop, and was blown away again - much smarter and slicker than I was expecting, it could have been a bank's HQ from the appearance of it. The receptionist was very nice to me, rang Pascuale and told him in English (remember he speaks no Russian …) that I was there, and beeped me through the turn styles and I sat in a very comfy leather armchair by a glass and chrome coffee table for 5 minutes waiting. The lesson passed, and I braved the journey home, without David as he had finished some time ago. Had a massive panic that I'd accidentally got on the wrong bus, as I didn't recognise anything and there were far more stops than there had been on the way - was beginning to wonder what on earth I'd do about this, as I had very little idea where I actually was, when suddenly the metro station appeared and I hopped, relieved, off the bus. Turns out it just goes a different route on the way back. In total it took me an hour and a half to get home. And it was late. Have to do the same thing again this coming Tuesday, but hopefully that'll be the last one as we both think he'd get along better in a group, and he's so busy with work he barely has time for English lessons.
On my way home this evening I finally got around to doing something I've been meaning to do for a few days - I bought a hot corn on the cob on a stick from a woman selling them for 50r each (about £1) outside the metro station. Very tasty, and no hint of food poisoning yet.
One of my students, a middle-aged woman called Marina who works for Bosch, ended up today telling me her views on Russian politics, unprompted. Well, it was what you'd hope to hear from an educated, caring person, so that was reassuring (in the sense that she's not a raving loony) but it was unsettling hearing how openly corrupt the system here is, and how little people can do about it.
I've broken the back of what was my least-favourite textbook here, and worked out how to turn it into a pretty useful resource and get a good lesson out of it. Took me a couple of weeks (in my defence, I only use it for one lesson a week at the moment, so it only really took me 2 lessons), but I've fought with it and turned it into my friend. The only lingering problem with it is I need to be a lot more inventive with homework for that book, as it's not very student-on-their-own friendly and definitely needs an accompanying teacher, and has no supplementary workbook or anything.
Still delighted that Matt left behind a copy of Jim Scrivener's book Learning Teaching, which I wanted to get a copy of anyway but was put-off by the price. Matt has moved on from teaching to greater things and isn't responding to anyone's attempts at contact anyway so I don't feel I'm doing him too great a dis-service. NB: none of the above means that I have actually used the book yet. But it's sitting purposefully on my desk. If I read it on the metro, I might get some requests for private tuition. I'm told I could get away with charging a pretty extortionate amount - I'm mulling this over.
How am I doing with coherence? Have just about finished my mug of medovukha. Am drinking it quite slowly though. It's tasty, I recommend it, although I'm not sure what food it would work well with. One observation I have made, however, is that I have just typed nearly 4000 words. I wish I'd known about this drink in the days of writing essays.
- comments
Izzi Keep bloggling. Its marvellous. You are a brave and honest traveller and you make me laugh.
Mummy I love your blogs - very factual but so funny as well. I like your wry observations on another culture - keep them coming! What are Russian women wearing at the moment? Are shopkeepers etc as inscrutable and surly as you found them in Krasnoyarsk - need to have another "make them smile" campaign? Also want to know more about this Protestant church - what's it doing there? who set it up and when?