Toto, I'm pretty sure we're not in NC anymore...

     So, it snowed this week. I still can't get over it. I mean, it wasn't REAL snow, in that it didn't stay on the ground, and it was only a few flakes, but STILL. This is the middle of October. In NC, we don't get snow til January, if then. I must have looked like a total dork walking through the park...I kept gawking up at the sky. But I literally couldn't believe my eyes - those little white floaty things in the air just couldn't be snow! But apparently they can...although even some of the Russians I've spoken with say it's a bit early for snow - just "a bit" early - can you imagine?!?
     OK, weather rant over now. Although I get the feeling it won't be the last... This was a really busy week. ...Oh, wow, my radiator just made a sound like a rocket taking off...that's a new one to add to the list of apartment sound effects. OK. Hope it doesn't blow up.
     Anyway, as I was saying, this was a really busy week. I didn't get any new classes assigned, but all this extra stuff seemed to appear to fill up my spare time. Not that that's a bad thing...most of the extra stuff was a lot of fun. On Sunday, I had my thirteen-year-old neighbor Lilya over for tea. She's this really sweet girl who really wants to learn English - and she speaks it surprisingly well for her age - so we had a nice chat in English and Russian for several hours. It was fun - and it was also fun to play hostess - she was my first guest!
    On Tuesday - which will no longer be my day off; now I will have Fridays off instead, hooray! (because Tuesday is just a weird day to have off) - I went walking in the forest park again, the one I posted pictures of several blogs ago. The weather was yet again wet, but instead of being cool this time it was downright cold. It was still beautiful, though - all the trees have turned to gold, and the birch grove was absolutely beautiful. The wind was blowing, and the sound of the rain pattering and the breeze shooshing through the branches and feeling the cold wind against my face and seeing the branches waving so gracefully - it was a wonderful peaceful moment. I might seem to be waxing ridiculously poetical in saying it, but birch trees are beautiful in the wind - maybe because they have such straight, striking white trunks but such gracefully drooping branches...anyway, I took a video of it, and even though it didn't turn out great the link is here so you can sort of get an idea if you want. I also had the idea of taking parallel pictures in all the different seasons of the same birch grove - it will be interesting to see how it changes.

I also had dance class on Tuesday and Friday night. Tuesday was hard - I'm only just starting to get back into shape now, and I have some corrections to work on...since I've been giving myself class all summer, there are some things I've let slip since there was no one to see and correct them, so now I have some catching up to do. It's all good, though. And Friday night was great - class was really enjoyable, and even better, I got to make friends with one of the ladies from the class. I wasn't sure if it would be possible to get to know anyone from the class very easily, because I was pretty sure they were all convinced I didn't speak Russian at all, since they know I'm a foreigner, and I'm not very confident about starting conversations in Russian yet. But Polina started a conversation with me in English, and it was so nice to get to know someone from the class! Now that I know one person, maybe it will be easier to get to know everyone else, too.
     Last night was interesting because I went to a contact improv class with Lena. I had never heard of contact improv before coming here, but apparently it actually started in the States. It's a kind of dance that is all about the contact, both mental and physical, between two people as they improvise to music. Last night's class was focused on martial arts and tumbling techniques that can be used in contact improv, and Lena and I ended up being the only two people there - so we basically got a three-hour private! It was very interesting, but I'm not sure if it's my kind of dance. I'm so used to the idea of dance as being all about giving something of yourself to your audience - making them feel some sort of emotion and taking them out of the everyday world for a little while. But contact improv is not about your audience at all - it's all about the connection between you and your partner. It's a very unusual idea for me.
    Today was eventful in that it is the day before Tom's birthday, so Laura, Sara, and I were all conspiring on how to get presents and such for him without him noticing. I volunteered to make a cake while the three of them went to a hockey game this afternoon, a mission which involved several deep dives into my Russian-English dictionary to figure out how to translate cake terms for an expedition to the grocery store - "baking soda" and "baking powder" were particularly crucial terms. Well, baking soda proved easy to find, but baking powder presented more of a challenge. I found two words for baking powder - "пекарский порошок" (peKARskii poROSHok) and разрыхлитель (razruiHLEETyel') (both of which I'm probably misspelling but I'm too tired from baking all day to look up). Anyway, the bottom line is that I found these two complicated words, AND remembered them, AND pronounced them correctly enough when I asked for baking powder in the store (after staring for fifteen minutes at the baking shelves without it suddenly appearing) that the lady understood me and was able to tell me that they didn't carry baking powder. So I loaded up on everything else, including three bags of powdered sugar, and marched home to look up a recipe for a cake that didn't require baking powder. Thankfully, my search was a success, and after a whispered consultation with my mom the cake queen via skype to check that the recipe sounded like a good one (whispered since Tom was in the next room), I waited until they had left for the hockey game, set out my ingredients, and started to bake.
     Thankfully, the cake came out successfully, even sans baking powder, and I set out to make the chocolate frosting. I was using my mom's killer-good recipe: condensed milk, butter, chocolate chips, and powdered sugar. After I melted the first three on the stove, I opened up a bag of powdered sugar to pour in. But it looked weird in the bag...a bit grey rather than the bright white color I'm used to. So I stuck my finger in and put a bit on my tongue...and it definitely WASN'T powdered sugar. Apparently there is a third term for baking powder - кукурузный крахмал (kukuRUzni KRAHmal) - which is absolutely ridiculous - who needs three different ways to say "baking powder"?!? So there I was, with my chocolate all melted on the stove and no powdered sugar... did you know that you can make really good icing with half a tub of Nesquick powder, a tub of cream cheese, and some melted butter, chocolate, and condensed milk? I found that out today. So the cake is iced and decorated, and I even took a picture because I must admit I'm rather proud of my culinary creation, even though it didn't all go exactly as I'd planned. Now I just hope Tom likes it...and I hope I can find some use for the THREE BAGS of baking powder (not small bags, either!) that are currently sitting in my cupboard...

    Well, that's all I have to report for now. Hope everyone has a good week!

Stating the Obvious

 We foreigners may be dumb, but we're not THAT dumb...

"Swimming [in the bushes???] is forbidden [and also impossible]"

     I got the idea for my blog title from the second of these pictures; it's a sign I walk past every day on my way to work. There's a lake nearby, but there really is no water to swim in where that sign is posted. It makes me laugh every time I see it.

    Well, I have been working for two weeks now, and I even got my first paycheck on Friday. That should have been a moment of euphoria - for the first time in my life, I was getting a REAL paycheck for a REAL job (not counting summer jobs and such). However, I was only getting paid for one week's work, and that shimmering bubble of happiness rather abruptly burst when I signed up for some dance classes at a studio later that night and found that the cost was exactly equal to the wage I had just received...not a ruble more or less! So I'm back to being a poor teacher with no money again...

     BUT it's totally worth it - I'm very excited about the studio where I am taking classes. The teacher is really cool; he is also a teacher at the Bolshoi Ballet School (which is a big deal, take my word for it if you don't know already) AND he seems to really love teaching AND he offered to help me out in my search for character dance companies. As you can imagine, I'm most excited about the last bit; I've been working and praying and trying so hard for such a long time to join a character dance company, but once I got to Moscow I was rather at loose ends as to where to start. Of course, it might be that it still won't work out, but it is so encouraging even for someone to just offer to help. So I'm hopeful, and still praying, and we'll see. 

     In other news, the teaching is going well - I'm still getting to know my students, and since I'm teaching ages from 8 up to somewhere around 40, there's a lot to get used to. I have a very bright eight-year-old, Sasha, who comes into the classroom and starts telling me this detailed story about a shark eating a sailor out at sea on a little boat, and I'm standing there thinking, "I'm supposed to teach this kid names of household furniture today and he's telling a story using vocab I had no idea he knew..." And then there is the couple I teach every day. For the past few classes I've been struggling to find conversation topics that would interest them - even when I think I've found something interesting it tends to fall flat in the classroom. But then the other day one of my five-minute word-association games somehow expanded to fill the entire forty-five-minute-class because we started discussing the differences between the Catholic and Orthodox churches...go figure. And I have an upper-intermediate adult class that I'm pretty sure I'm going to love - they actually ASKED me for homework the other day. And I'm still really enjoying the walk to work - the autumn colors are so beautiful, although the predominant fall weather for Moscow seems to be rain, wind, and temperatures around 4 degrees Celsius (which I think is about 39 degrees Fahrenheit). But it was really pretty in the park a couple of days ago, which seemed a good excuse to take more pictures...

     This past weekend was great fun because we did a company boat cruise down the Volga to celebrate Language Link's seventeenth birthday. There was music, dancing, a really lame karaoke bar, and wonderful opportunities to take pictures, and I got to see some of the interns I haven't seen in a while because they are teaching in other places, so I really enjoyed it. There was also quite a lot of free alcohol, but by the time I got to the point where I had eaten and might have enjoyed a glass of champagne, there was nothing left but beer, so I didn't actually end up drinking anything. The nice part is that my flatmate Laura is not much of a drinking partier either, so I had company home on the metro ride when I opted to leave after the boat party rather than going clubbing with most of the interns. Of course, Laura DID insist on carrying a huge bunch of blue Language Link balloons on the ride home on the metro, so we got some funny looks, but it was still good to have company, albeit weird company (just kidding, Laura!).

 I think this is the Novodevichy Convent, but I might be mistaken...

 MGU???

 Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer

 Duh... :)

Well, I need to get ready for work, so I'd better finish up for now. I realize that this is a rather picture-heavy blog, but I'm just trying to make up for my long-windedness last time. I hope everyone has a great week!

One Hundred Different Ways to Get Lost

     Извините, пожалуйста, вы знаете где...?
This is one of the most useful phrases you can learn if you want to come to Russia. It means, "Excuse me, please, do you know where ...?" (eezveenEEtye, pozhAlzta, vui znAIyetye gdye...) I have been finding out how useful it is this past week, which I have devoted to exploring all the wonderful and interesting ways there are to get lost in Moscow...getting lost on the street, getting lost in a market, getting lost in a park, getting lost in the supermarket while looking for bread... (OK, that last one didn't happen, not quite, but the others all did). And I, master at getting lost that I am, don't only get turned around once. Oh, no. While trying to figure out how to walk to my building from the Mitino school, even though it only involved two roads, I managed to go the wrong way four times. Yep. You would think that where the first road intersected the other road I would manage to only go the wrong way three times, but then once I got on the second road (named Generala Belaborodova, try sticking THAT into the handy "do you know where" phrase and not completely messing up somewhere) I tried to be smart and take a detour through a park, despite the fact that invariably when I try to be smart in geographical matters I get more lost. Anyway, it was a good way to practice my Russian.
     My second experience with getting lost happened the very next day, when Tom and I decided to ride out to Izmailovskoye to check out a honey festival and an old kremlin. The teaching schedule I was so excited about in my last post turned out to be completely incorrect, as it all depended on getting a contract with a school which ended up falling through. So I was actually given an entirely different schedule, the upside to which was that I had almost the whole week off and didn't start teaching until Saturday. So, as I said, Tom and I headed out to Izmailovskoye. It was a REALLY LOOOOONNNGG ride on the metro, about an hour and a half, so once we got there, we were really excited to start exploring this amazing trans-Russia honey festival and the kremlin with the beautiful church we'd seen in our guidebooks.
     You can imagine our surprise, then, when we emerged from the metro station to see a conglomeration of buildings that didn't at all resemble the pictures in our guidebooks. Yes, it was a kremlin...but saying it was a kremlin is like saying the Disney World Palace is an authentic castle.

However, we saw some stalls set up, so believing we must be at the entrance to the honey festival, we forged ahead. But the great honey festival, with honey from all the regions of Russia, was obviously missing some regions, as there were only about 8 stalls total. Also, the day was rainy and cold, with overcast skies, which didn't make for very enthusiastic buyers or sellers. We figured that couldn't be the sum total of the festival, so we continued on into the huge, funny, kremlin-looking building. Inside, we found all manner of stalls selling traditional Russian tourist stuff...matrioshkas, hair clips, shawls, etc. Apparently we had stumbled on the famous market at Izmailovskoye. However, we clearly had not come on one of the peak days of the season: most of the stalls after the first few were empty, and in our efforts to find the park, Tom and I wandered out the back of the fair into a maze of empty stalls, muddy alleys, and sketchy-looking buildings. The whole atmosphere was strikingly similar to the NC State Fair when you arrive too early or stay too late, and everyone takes off his show face and everything takes on an eerie, dirty, unmagical sort of feel to it. Needless to say, we didn't buy anything, but we did manage to get lost trying to find our way back out. More practice with asking for directions!
     However, by sheer force of will, after going the wrong way once more and crossing a street the likes of which I swear I'm never crossing again while in Russia because it was so busy and there was no pedestrian crossing at the light and it was absolutely terrifying, we finally found the right park. And it was totally worth it. The church was beautiful, and so was everything else.

Because of the weather, there was hardly anyone there, so Tom and I had it almost to ourselves. It's a park where Peter the Great spent time as a child, hence the huge statue of him at the entrance to the park - I think it would have been more effective in this case to have a statue of him as a child, but he always seems to be portrayed as huge and domineering - and the kremlin was built in 1683, I think by Catherine the Great. At any rate, it was quiet and peaceful, and we had a nice wander round.

 view from the park

view from the park as it must have looked when it was a tsarist hunting lodge

different parts of the Kremlin

     We also went into the city center and found the oldest Catholic church in Moscow (built in 1830) (and the only other one besides the one I usually attend). We actually didn't get lost in the process, and it was neat to see it and to go inside for a few minutes. We walked past Lublanka on the way to the metro station - it was my first time to see it. It's strange, because it doesn't really look like anything other than an ordinary, even rather pretty old building - it's hard to believe so many terrible things happened there.
     The next day, I decided to explore the park out behind my apartment. There was a cool little wooden church there, again with a very beautiful interior - dim, with the altar wall completely covered with paintings of different saints, and lots of little old icons with flickering candles in front of them tucked away in the corners.

The park itself was huge, open and full of delightfully winding trails. The beauty of it is somewhat disrupted by the fact that some of those huge metal power-line towers run right through the center of it - you can hear them buzzing as you walk underneath - but you can always just ignore them. Fall has definitely arrived in Moscow - the weather was quite chilly and rainy on my walk through the park, but it is even nicer in beautiful weather. All of my pictures are from the first day, though, so you will have to imagine crisp blue skies and clear, cool air like I had on my walk home from the school today. That's maybe one of the neatest things - the Mitino school is just across the park from where I live - about a 20-minute walk if you walk briskly. Of course, I probably will not appreciate the distance when it gets cold and snowy, but hey, that's what marshrutkas are for, right? (Oh, and marshrutkas are like little buses - sort of a cross between a bus and taxi but cheap.) That first day in the park, though, I didn't have to go in to the school, so I just meandered...and ended up getting lost again. Of course, this time I wasn't aware I was lost until I happened to run into one of the other Mitino teachers on her way to the school. She asked me where I was going, and I told her I was headed home and confidently pointed in a direction that was about 50 degrees to the right of the direction I actually needed to be heading in. At this point Teya kindly pointed out that I was going in the wrong direction and that I should head back toward the lake, clearly visible through the trees. I responded that I had thought it was a different lake. But, in my defense, I then walked with her to the school and managed to find my back again without any further need to ask directions. This is probably a good thing, because it would have been rather embarrassing to explain that yes, I was trying to get out of the park, and no, I hadn't the slightest idea where I was going.

 the entrance to the park - the building where I work is the one closest to the more distant of the two electrical towers

     Whew, this is turning into a long blog, so I will try to finish up. I had my first two lessons on Saturday, both with kids. I really like my first student, a bright eight-year-old who seems to wholeheartedly enjoy learning English. But I have to come up with something for my second lesson - I'm teaching two brothers, an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old who come straight from school and are completely exhausted and don't speak all that much English. It doesn't help that the ten-year-old immediately translates everything I say into Russian for the eight-year-old, or that they were half and hour late for a forty-five minute lesson. Anyway, I need to come up with something to help them out - maybe an easy start to the lesson to give their poor brains a break, or something - any suggestions would be welcome! I had another class today with a husband and wife. They both seem very nice, but I didn't strike the right balance with their lesson - too much grammar and not enough conversation, I think. I hope they will be patient with me while I figure out how to get the mixture right - oh, lovely, someone is shooting off firecrackers out their window again - I think I failed to mention that in the last blog about things that go thump in the night - and because the echoes bounce around all the buildings, it's more like things that rumble like thunder and gunshots in the night...
   Anyway, the teaching is not going too badly, and everyone at the school seems really nice. I'm so thankful, because from what I've seen so much of what makes a good or bad teaching experience depends on the other people in your school - not surprising really, but I'm just glad all of my colleagues seem to be friendly and motivated about teaching. I'm also extremely excited because I'M GOING TO START DANCING AGAIN THIS WEEK - maybe even tomorrow! I've found a studio that's about an hour away and pretty expensive, but I think it's probably worth it because their teacher also teaches at the Bolshoi Ballet School, so I think he'd be a pretty valuable connection to make. Of course, now I have to take the metro down and attempt to sign up for classes...this should make for some more fun Russian practice - but hey, I bought a cell phone a couple of days ago and it was a fairly complicated transaction and I didn't even make any grammatical errors! (At least - none that I was aware of.) I have rather a funny problem, as one of my friends pointed out to me - I speak Russian with barely a trace of an accent, and a lot of the time I can fool native speakers if they go by accent alone. But my grammar is still sadly lacking, which can lead to some funny situations - as my friend put it, "They think you're a stupid Russian instead of a stupid foreigner," therefore, they don't have much patience with me. Oh, well - good incentive to work on my grammar.
     Well, I'll put an end to this blog now, because it is rather torturously long - a phenomenon I'm sure my mom and any professors reading this blog will be familiar with - I don't know how to write anything short. So, my apologies, and good night/good afternoon/ good morning to everyone in all those different time zones!