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.
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.
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!
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
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
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!
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