Happy Thanksgiving!!!

     Or С днем благодарения!!! ... whichever you prefer. Although Russia doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving in any form or fashion (duh). In fact, their knowledge of our good old pilgrim tradition is startlingly inaccurate. I gave two of my adult students a Thanksgiving quiz for fun at the start of class, and they determined that the pilgrims celebrated their first day of thanks in 1830 after landing on their ship the Santa Maria. Not even joking. Of course, I don't know how well I would score on a quiz about a Russian holiday, but anyway after that class I immediately set about remedying the problem of Russian ignorance of Thanksgiving in the younger generations: my eight-year-old learned how to say "turkey," "Happy Thanksgiving," and how to make a hand-turkey during her lesson yesterday!
     But anyway...on to what I'm thankful for. Because yep, you guessed it, this is going to be one of those blog posts in list format. But it will also tell you what's been going on recently, so if you can stand overuse of the word "thankful" and a dose of determined optimism, then grit your teeth and read on! Otherwise, I would just stop here.

     Ok, for starters, I'm thankful that freezing temperatures don't feel as cold as I feared they would. I have yet to experience -25 Celsius, but these past two weeks Celsius has danced around from about 3 below to 12 below, and it hasn't felt that bad. If anything, I think the temperatures just above freezing feel colder - then the damp really seeps into your bones, whereas below freezing temps are much drier and not so pervasive.

     I'm also thankful that even though I have to walk to work  in the freezing cold at 9:00 in the morning, I get to watch the sun rise. Yes, the sun rises at 9:30. It's really hard to drag yourself out of bed when it's 7:45 or even 8 and it's still pitch-black outside, but it's nice to watch the sun rise without having to get up at 5 or 6 in the morning. Also, the sunrises and sunsets last a lot longer here, almost an hour each, since the sun stays close to the horizon for longer before it actually rises or sets. I can't wait until we have some real snow on the ground - we've just had a little so far, and because the temps are below freezing all the time it gets blown around like really white sand, so right now it looks more like grassy beaches around here than snowy fields. The pond in the park has almost completely frozen over - I saw a man walking on the water the other day and totally did a double take. Even the Volga is freezing over. I know for a Russian this sounds really dumb - like one of my students said the other day, "Snow - it's not a big thing for us. We have it every year." - but for a newcomer from Nawth Carolaina, it's all exciting.

     I'm thankful that I like all of my students and don't dread any of my classes. All of my students seem to want to learn...well, at least most of the time. The other day, my six-year-old, Yeva, decided about fifteen minutes before the end of the lesson that it was time for me to leave. She kept asking, "Goodbye Hannah? Homework?" in such hopeful tones that it was really hard to let her down and tell her that we still had to play some more English games before I could leave! And I might kill my FCE student (a sixteen-year-old boy) because he didn't do his homework this past week...but otherwise, everyone seems to be making a conscious effort and I think they are all making progress, which is a relief (I actually CAN teach, at least a little! Phew!).
     I'm grateful that there is a wealth of books in my room that the landlady left behind. I'm currently working on "The Old Man and the Sea," with interspersed breaks of The Lord of the Rings in English when my brain gets all Russianed out. I've even dragged my Russian grammar exercise book out of its place of concealment and have been reviewing my cases. Not that it seems to make much difference when I'm speaking; the cases come out every which way anyway, but at least I feel like I'm making an effort. And I must be improving a little - I convinced one of the ticket ladies at the Tretyakov Gallery today that I was Russian. Ha!

 definitely thankful for the Tretyakov Gallery - beautiful artwork!

Although I'm pretty sure it had more to do with my accent and less to do with any complicated grammatical construction. Yeva's mom told me the other day that I should get a Russian boyfriend, "because then you can talk to him about everything! The weather, how you're feeling, the price of groceries..." But at the moment I think I'll just stick with my Чистая Грамматика (Pure Grammar) and Старик и море (The Old Man and the Sea), thank you very much!
     I'm also thankful that I get to go and see a dance performance on Sunday night. It's by an amateur folk and modern dance ensemble that I'm considering joining, and I'm really hoping that it will be the right fit for me, because at the moment I'm not dancing at all and I'm really missing it ("really missing it" as in I sometimes dance around the flat after midnight because I can't sleep for missing it). However, I'm also grateful for this time of not dancing, because it's proved to me that I'm stronger than I thought I was - I always assumed that I wouldn't be able to exist if I wasn't dancing. But I can exist - I can go to work and cook and buy groceries and read and sleep and do everything else normally without suddenly self-combusting out of dance-deprivation-induced frustration. However, it's not a comfortable situation - I feel like one of the most alive parts of me has gone to sleep when I'm not dancing, so I really hope that this company will be the right fit for me to at least start back with...and maybe it will lead to something more full-time later on.
     I'm also thankful that I have such a wonderful, strong family...they've really been through it lately. Dad lost his job this past week, and Mom came down with a mild case of pneumonia and had to go the ER with a kidney stone, so it's a pretty stressful time right now. Mom is ok - she has a lithotripsy scheduled on Monday to break up the kidney stone, and pneumonia-wise she's doing better now. I'm really proud of my dad because he's really being optimistic about looking for a new job, and in a way I'm grateful that he's out of his old job because he was working for a perfect WITCH (and I would use stronger language but this is a G-rated blog) who decided arbitrarily that she wanted to fire him, and hopefully he will find a much better job now than the one he had before. So it's been a hard time for them, and it's been hard for me too - not nearly as hard, since I haven't been on the front lines of the events, but at the same time it is infuriating to be an entire ocean away when the thing you want most in the world is to hug your mom and dad. But again, I'm grateful for being so far away, because it's really made me realize how little I am in control, and how much I just have to trust God to take care of my family. That's not an easy realization for me - it involved/still involves lots of angry glances skyward and grumbling and muttering occasionally - thank goodness God is all-merciful because otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have grumbled and muttered myself into a nice warm spot in Hell by now!
     And I'm grateful for my friends, here and back home. I've met some really wonderful people here, and I've had some really wonderful emails, messages, and skype calls with people back home that have really helped me (especially an email suggesting a Pollyanna outlook on life's problems that gave me the idea to write this blog).  I'm so grateful that I have the opportunity to live in an entirely different place in the world - I think it is teaching me a lot about other people and something about myself, too.

 And I'm grateful for all the beautiful art, music, dance, and every other beautiful thing like snowflakes and the black etching of tree branches against the sky at dawn and the fact that a random garbage collector was singing for me yesterday on the way through the park and the excitement on my six-year-old student's face when she comes to meet me at the door dresse up in her mom's dress with a fan and her red heeled shoes on. All of that makes life good. 
So Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone else has as many good things to be thankful for as I have.

    
    

It's the Little Things in Life...

     Little things like books, and snowflakes, and figuring out how to fold out your futon bed. This hasn't been the best of weeks, but little things like those make it better. I had a lovely weekend last week - one of my classes on Saturday cancelled, so I had an almost three-day weekend, since I only had one class on Saturday. Teya (one of the other teachers at the Mitino school) and I went on a search for an English-language bookstore. She has a great sense of humor and we get along really well, so even though it took the usual hour on the metro to get to the center it didn't feel like an hour at all. We got off the metro and headed for the "Moskva" bookstore. She appreciates literature as much as I do, though, so we both had to pause at Pushkin Square to get a picture with the Russian Shakespeare.

     Since Teya hadn't eaten lunch yet, we both decided to stop in at the Pushkin Cafe before we headed to the bookstore. Talk about posh! I knew it was expensive before going in, but it was ridiculous! I paid five dollars for a chocolate ice-cream, and instead of trying to describe it I'm just going to post a picture so you can compare the size of the spoon to the size of the scoop...and I promise it's not a giant spoon - it's just normal-sized. So it was a rip-off, but it was so tastefully done and we sort of knew what we were doing going in to eat there that we could just laugh at it. Besides, it was a neat experience to try just once.

 Like I said...POSH

 

After eating, we ventured back onto the street to find the bookstore. I placed my confidence in Teya since I'm terrible with directions, but it tuns out she's worse than I am - I was the one who figured out we were walking away from the bookstore rather than towards it! But find it we eventually did - there was a strange layout because the store was long but narrow, so you had to dive into these little corners to find each kind of book. The English section was smaller than we'd expected, and once I actually started looking at the books I realized how ridiculous it felt to buy an English book when I'm here trying to improve my Russian. So I browsed through the Russian sections for a while, but I didn't want to buy any classics because our flat came with a bunch of Russian literature in the cabinet in my room. I felt a bit disappointed - I didn't want to have made the trek and not actually have bought anything, but I didn't want to buy something just because I felt obliged to do it, either. But then, just as we were walking out of the store, we stumbled upon the music and ballet books. I found the memoirs of Matilde Kshessinskaya! This was really exciting for me, because I like to collect the memoirs of famous Russian ballerinas - it's so interesting to learn about who they were as people. But it's difficult to find them online, especially if they haven't been translated into English. So that was my special treat for the day - I'm saving it to read once I've gotten a bit better at Russian.

     At the moment I've finished reading the Harry Potter books that were lying around our flat and am working on 451 по фаренгейту - Farenheit 451. This is proving a lot harder than Harry Potter - I think I'm going to need to read it twice through, because I know I'm missing a lot of details! But then, it's a strange enough book to try to read in English, so it might not have been the best choice. Today, though, I'm being blissfully lazy and reading my good old Lord of the Rings. There is so much more savour in reading a book in your native language - you can understand all the nuances of language that you lose when you're reading in a language you're not fluent in.
     I also bought winter clothes this weekend. The temperatures, which had been hovering around freezing, suddenly plummeted to -10 on the weekend. I had been putting off buying boots and a hat and gloves and long underwear...but there is nothing like 20 degrees Farenheit to make you realize that winter in Moscow is going to be COLD! So after church on Sunday I took the metro to Ashan, a huge supermarket at the Strogino stop. And when I say huge, I mean HUGE. Picture a Kroger and a Target put together, with an organizational system in which vandals are allowed to run amok through the store and pick up and drop things wherever they want as they please every morning before the store opens. I managed to find what I wanted - a bargain pair of boots, gloves, hat, and woollen hose. Of course, the boots turned out to a bit more of a bargain than I planned - the metal triangles for the laces were not soldered together, but were simply bent into triangles, so as soon as I tried them on at home and pulled the laces tight the triangles simply pulled apart. So I spent the rest of the day sewing loops to put the laces through instead... I haven't actually tried them outside yet, so I hope nothing else catastrophic happens when I do...
     Anyway, I had a good weekend, but the week proved to be a hard one. Even with the long weekend, I was completely exhausted, both physically and mentally, and I was feeling really stressed for a couple of different reasons. Part of it was that I've been realizing the impossibility of trying to work full-time and dance full-time - physically and mentally I just don't have the strength for it. So I've decided to try to find a place where I can dance part-time - I think I will enjoy that much more than tearing myself apart trying to dance and teach every minute of every day. Also, my family has had some stress at home, and it's hard not being there with them.
     But praying has brought me a lot of peace - isn't it great how God is always there - and like I said, little things have been making life bright. Little things such as...SNOW!!! It finally snowed here for real a couple of days ago! It's all melted now, but it was really beautiful a couple of days ago. I know I looked like a complete idiot walking through the park - I kept craning my neck to look up at the snowflakes, and big slushy flakes kept falling down my neck inside my scarf. I was more excited about it than my six-year-old student - when I pointed out the window and said, "Look, it's snowing!" thinking she would be really excited and we could take that opportunity to learn some winter weather words, she looked and said calmly, "snoooo-wing," then went back to coloring her butterfly. I guess if you've had snowy winters the previous five years of your life it's not such a big deal. Piffle - right now in my naivete I feel as if I'll always be excited by snow! I suppose in the course of this winter we'll see.

 SNOW!!!

     I also figured out how to open my futon bed, which was supremely exciting. I tried the first night I arrived, but I couldn't figure out how to do it, so I've just been sleeping on one side of it. It's not uncomfortable, but it is a bit cramped. So finally last night I decided I was going to find out how to do it. It's too bad I couldn't get it on film, because I'm pretty sure it looked like a Charlie Chaplin episode. First I opened it out by accident - I was really excited - I'd done it! Then I started to wonder if I could close it again, since I wasn't sure how I'd opened it in the first place. So I lifted up one half of it, and then it locked in perpendicular position again, but somehow the sitting part and the back part had flipped, so now instead of a couch facing out into the room it was a couch facing the wall. Then I couldn't get it to flip back again - for a while it was looking as if I'd have to climb over the couch back to get to the seat part so that I could sleep - it was worse than before! Finally, I managed to get it to flip back again so it was facing out, and after about ten more minutes of heaving, huffing, and puffing, I managed to get it to open again. Which was a lot of trouble to go to at 1 in the morning, but it was worth it to be able to flop back luxuriantly and fling my arms and legs out without  a) hitting the couch back or b) falling over the edge and onto the floor. I slept sooo well last night!
     Today, I've done absolutely nothing - well, okay, I did go on a cleaning spree around the flat and I baked banana bread, which turned out deliciously if I do say so myself. But it has been so nice not to have to go anywhere or do anything. However, I'm planning a sight-seeing expedition for Sunday after mass - I haven't decided just where I'm going yet, but maybe the Tretyakov Gallery. For now, I think I'm going to sign off and go make dinner. I hope everyone has a good weekend!

The Sky is...Blue?

     Well, my apologies...I've fallen terribly behind with this blog. To be fair, the last few weeks have been really hectic, though, so I think I have a bit of an excuse. Where to begin, where to begin...
     Winter has set in with a vengeance - it hasn't started snowing yet, so I'm sure the season will become progressively more vengeful as time goes on - but for now the weather hovers just above or at freezing, and the sky is perpetually grey. This is a bit of a mental adjustment for the small-town Southerner from sunny-skied North Carolina, where clouds actually mean rain. Here, the one doesn't necessarily follow the other - it is entirely possible to simply have leaden skies without precipitation for days on end. This gave me cause to question myself in one of my classes the other day, when I was teaching uses of the present simple. To illustrate present simple usage for "something that is always true," I gave them the sentence, "The sky is blue." After that class, I was walking home through the park and looked up at the sky and realized why they seemed confused with my example! It makes you really appreciate the sunny days when they come - even the sunlight is different here, though - the sun never crosses the midpoint of the sky - it performs a low arc on one end of the horizon, so even at midday the light is on a slant and casts shadows.
     Teaching is falling into a routine now, which is both a good and a bad thing. It's good because I'm feeling more confident in my classes, and I'm starting to see my students making progress, which is always reassuring - at least they are learning something when I'm standing up in front of them for two hours! I'm quite enjoying some of my classes - I have an upper intermediate adult class which is almost downright fun - they are really interested in different shades of meaning in words, and I'm having them read Nevil Shute's "A Town Like Alice" and Calvin and Hobbes comics, which for me is one of the coolest parts of teaching - being able to introduce people to new things to read! And I teach a six-year-old girl who is adorable, and I have Sasha whom I mentioned earlier...and I don't have any classes I dislike, either, which is nice.
     The bad side of falling into a routine is that my routine fills almost my whole day. Readers, you have permission to roll your eyes - it's a full time job, so obviously it should take almost my whole day. This will sound like a complaint, but really it is a fact that's been becoming more and more obvious to me the longer I've been here: I didn't come to Russia to spend my whole time teaching English. I like it, but it is not my passion - it's naive, probably, but I want to wake up every morning and be so excited about the things I'm going to do during the day that I just can't wait to start work...and for me, teaching doesn't spark that kind of excitement.
     So, onto things that do spark that kind of excitement...specifically, one thing, namely, dancing. I've actually made some progress in the past couple of weeks towards joining a dance company. The teacher at my dance studio gave me the name of his friend who is the director of a small company here in Moscow. He told me that they do folk dance as well as other types of dance, and that I should go and take a company class to try it out. So last Friday I mustered up my courage, my dance shoes, and my google map directions, and I set out to take a class. The journey was quite comical - I've been trying for almost a year to join a dance company, and never once before had I even come close to the actual "taking a class" stage, so I was convinced that something would happen to prevent me from actually getting to class. When I left the house a few minutes later than I'd planned, I thought, "Oh, so that's what will stop me - I'll be late." When I got off the metro at the station, I tried to figure out which street exit to take and thought, "No, this is what will stop me - I'll take the wrong exit onto the street and get completely turned around and not know where to go." But somehow I came out onto the right street with the first try. I walked down the street looking for the building number, and realized that something was wrong - the building numbers were decreasing rather than increasing. Then I knew, "Of course, I won't be able to find the building - that's what will keep me from taking the class." But I asked for directions and managed to set out in the right direction after wandering up and down for a few minutes. When I found the building - an old, nondescript building used as a Dom Kultury - a house of culture, literally, sort of the equivalent to our YMCAs, the hallways were apparently deserted. "This is what will stop me - I won't be able to find the studio in this building." When I found a lady in the coat check room and asked for the company class, I knew she would forbid me from taking class since I obviously was a newcomer. When I was waiting outside the studio where she told me to sit until the director came, and the minutes were slipping away before the beginning of class, I knew that the director wouldn't come until the last minute and I would be late to go in because I hadn't had time to change. When one of the company members kindly pointed me to the dressing room, I knew that the director would come while I was changing and I wouldn't get a chance to introduce myself and he would summarily refuse to let me take class...Ok, ok, I'll put you out of your suspense...I did actually take the class. I won't say it was a brilliant success, but the director didn't kick me out on my rear, so I didn't stink. And honestly, just taking the class was such a huge step for me - like I said, it's the closest I've come to joining a company after almost a year of trying.
     Of course, the question of whether I want to join this particular company is another issue entirely - it depends a lot on their repertoire. I really believe that dance companies have a moral responsibility towards their audience with the choreography they show. Also, joining any kind of company would entail major changes in my teaching schedule to enable me to take company class and attend rehearsals. Sooo...we'll see. I'm excited that I've come a lot closer than I've ever been before to joining a company, but at the same time I'm acutely aware that I have a loonng waaaayy to goooooo...
     In other news, I got to attend a play at the Moscow Art Theatre a couple of weekends ago - we went to celebrate Tom's birthday. We saw the play "Vassa Zheleznova" by Gorky. It was very interesting - probably not the play I would have chosen if I'd had a number to choose from, but the effects were quite good and I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it was for me to follow the dialogue than the time before, when I tried to see "The Inspector General" in St. Petersburg - I was so tired and understood so little that I just left in the middle of the play! Plus, it was neat just to go to the Moscow Art Theatre - it is quite historic, and I actually did a paper on it in college, so it was really cool to go and see a play there. 

 inside the theatre

 closeup of the seagull - from Chekhov's play

Sara, Tom, Laura, and me outside the theatre

    I haven't had much time for other things - I did attend a lovely party at another Mitino teacher's house - we had delicious food and played Russian Monopoly (Park Place is the Arbat!), and we did a Halloween party for the kids this past Sunday at the school - but teaching is keeping me pretty busy. However, I'm planning to go see the Bolshoi and the Moiseyev soon, and to visit some art galleries, and churches...I really need to make a list! November's arrival has made me realize how fast time is slipping away...
But anyway, tomorrow is a bank holiday, so most places will be closed, and I don't have work, so I'm planning, for the first time in a couple of weeks, to just laze around and do absolutely NOTHING....aaaaahhh, what bliss!
    Oh, yes, and Happy belated Halloween! There was a derth of pumpkins in Mitino grocery stores, so we got creative at the school party and carved a melon instead - the insides of which, I must say, are a good bit tastier raw than the insides of a pumpkin. Our theme was Harry Potter, and yours truly was Ron Weasley. I should have a good Ron Weasley-ish quote to end this blog, but at the moment my mind is drawing a blank, no doubt in part because of the fact that I'm currently reading the books in Russian so anything I remember from the first time I read them - in English - is getting jumbled up with the Russian version (where Snape is Severus Snegg; Voldemort is Volan de Mort, and Hermione is Germiona) so I'll just fall back on my usual - I hope everyone is doing well, and I hope you all have a good weekend!