I made it to China after hours in the air, in airports and on the runway in Guangzhou (delays to the last leg of the journey).  It’s humid, but not too hot yet…although I’m sweating like there’s no tomorrow.  I hope my body gets used to it.  The university campus where I’ve been staying is beautiful (pictures to come soon).  Very well groomed and clean.  Being the subtropical climate here, everything’s alive and green and nice.

People stare, but they’ve never seen such a big man.  I don’t feel threatened by it, but I know I’m a novelty to the people here.  More later when I have some pics.

Living here in Arizona the past few months has been rather boring.  I’m very grateful that my father and his wife are allowing me to stay here, but due to the horrible state of the economy is this area, I only got one interview from all of the applications and resumes I submitted.  Kind of scary actually.  If I was going to stay in the US long-term, I don’t think I’d stay here.  Not only is the weather way to hot for a guy like me, but this place is seriously devoid of culture and LCD.

But enough about Arizona…I have to admit that some days I really miss Russia.  When I left, I was pretty pissed off, but now that I’ve been away, I kind of wish I was still there.  At the same time, I must move on.

In moving on, I am leaving for China next week.  I have a good friend there who can hook me up with a teaching job.  I’ve spent the past few weeks preparing and packing and I’m pretty much ready to go.  Unlike Russia, I’m not very familiar with China, so this is going to be quite the adventure.

Maybe I should have thought a little harder about the URL for this site, but keep posted…stories and pics to come.

I am rather sad that I had to leave Tol’yatti this weekend, but I had no choice.  The school decided that because of the “economic crisis”, they needed to change my contract.  The only significant change was that they would cut my pay by 20% and my summer pay be even more.  This means that I wouldn’t make enough to be worth it for me to stay there, so I had to go.

To my students and friends in Tol’yatti, I’m sincerely sorry about this.  I am more sorry that I couldn’t say goodbye to you, but that’s part of being an ESL teacher in Russia.  If I would have given proper notice, it means the school would have NOT paid me.  I know this because of what happened to other teachers at my school who tried to quit the honorable way.

Because of this, I quietly left for Moscow by train on Sunday afternoon.  My original plan was to go to China where a good friend of mine had a flat lined up, but I wasn’t able to get 24 visa service from the Chinese embassy, so I cashed in my ticket to China and bought a ticket to the US.  I just got to Phoenix today…this is where I plan to stay until I decide what to do next.

I did enjoy my students and friends in Tol’yatti and didn’t want to go.  I liked the city and felt like I was just starting to get used to being there.  I felt like I was becoming more than just the novelty “American” guy and was making some real friendships.  I enjoyed the job, but not the sleazy owner of the school.  I feel sorry for the employees I left behind because I’m sure he treats them the same way he treated me…probably worse.

Either way, I learned a lot going there and will not soon forget.  Maybe I should have given this website a different name as I plan to go to China in a few months now.  I’ll keep you posted on my plans.

I’ve been slacking with the pics I know.  Here are a few pics I took last week…with the camera on my phone.  The blurry one is of my Saturday class…they are good kids and I enjoyed teaching them.  I’ll see if I can get a less blurry pic…sometimes the camera on my phone is weird.  My last classs with this group was last Saturday and I hope to get them again.  I was terrified of teaching teens, but they turned out to be a lot of fun.

The little chappel and bell tower are in the park about a block from my house.  The pics of the cars are examples of the Russian-made Lada.  The blue one is a “Classica” and I think the one next to it (gray) is a “Samara”.  Both are cheap little death traps that would never pass US safety or emissions standards.  Both are the most common taxis here, so I get plenty of rides in them.  The “Classica” is kind of cool in a way.

“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.”

—Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s, 1988

Happy New Year

When I decided to come to Russia to teach, I knew the winters would be much worse than winters in Colorado hands down.  It’s part of the experience of Russia and what makes these people who they are.  It’s now a sea of knee-high leather boots and fur-lined coats all around the place and the snow just makes everything so pretty…not the usual gloomy grays of the streets and apartment blocks.  Sometimes this place could use brightening up…a little color wouldn’t hurt sometimes as well.

Now it’s tranquil.  A friend and I went to get a beer after work at some bar named Texas in New City district.  When we came outside, it was snowing and everything had that fresh layer on it.  It was late enough so that the streets were not all tracked up.  I took a taxi home and when I got out, I just had to stand there as the cab drove off.  I love how when it’s snowing at night, everything is so quiet.  Unlike rain, snow makes no noise as it falls and the snow in the air seems to muffle the usual background noise of the random car driving down some nearby street.  I took a few minutes to take it in…it was so peaceful and quiet outside and I really appreciated that moment.

I’ve been taking the bus here a lot more lately. I work across down 4 days a week at our Europa Center office. It’s 300 rubles by taxi round trip or 20 rubles round trip by bus…a dollar is 27 rubles for reference.

Today, the bus was packed more than normal…and smelled like sardines as well. When this lady got on with a child and stroller, we all shuffled around to give her room. When this happened, I felt a hand go into my pocket…this little shrimpy guy was trying to pickpocket me. I put my hand in to remove his and said some horrible things to him in English…I think he got the idea. Then I twisted his hand and felt a popping and held on until the next stop. Once the bus doors opened, I shoved him out (we were right next to the door). Kind of got my blood pumping a bit. First time I’ve broken a finger (mine or someone else’s) and the first time I’ve had any problems of this sort here. Lesson learned: Put your valuables in your inside coat pocket.

This isn’t my normal behavior, but then again, I’ve never had someone try to pickpocket me. I have to wonder if he knew I was a foreigner or if I just happened to be the guy he chose that day. I try not to talk on the bus and it is usually packed something fierce at 5pm when I get on to go to work. I am considering taking an earlier bus tomorrow to see if it isn’t pack. The ride home rocks. Less traffic means a shorter trip and there’s usually no more than a dozen people on the bus, so you can just grab a seat and look out the window.

The bus I take is a normal sized city bus. There are also these small mini-buses, but they are worse. They have 11 seats and 14 people in them…also, the drivers are usually Formula One rejects and I’ve seen more than one of the drivers buying beer or vodka with the engine running…no thanks.

…to quote that Charlton Heston. I wonder if this is what he meant? I went to the Technology Museum Sunday. It’s a graveyard of old Russian military technology. More pics to come from that as soon as I edit them down a bit.

Below is the snow that fell 2 weeks ago…a dusting really. It did make the streets into skating rinks, so I got some serious boots and am ready for the next round, but in no hurry to see it. People say it’s unusually warm and we should have snow on the ground by now, but we don’t. I don’t mind a bit.

Work at the school is going alright. I have to go to some university next week and give a 90 minute lecture on American slang and idioms…you know, I could just make the whole thing up and they probably wouldn’t know the difference. “In America, we call money snot…as in ‘can you give me a handful of snot’”….too funny.

This is the slacker’s dream in a way. I don’t go to work until 6 or 7pm and it’s for 2 hours a night. It changes from week to week depending on what they want. Sometimes they want me to be a real teacher and give grammar lessons, then I’m told the Russian teachers explain grammar and my job is to get them to talk (be an entertainer). The book sucks, so I try to avoid it whenever possible. I’ve been mostly trying to drill vocabulary into them. There are word lists in the back of the teacher’s guide, so I photocopy it and we go through it word for word, then I make them use the words in a sentence or we play a game where they have to ask questions using a word from the list. It’s great for wasting time when I have nothing really prepared that day or if we can’t keep a conversation going.

People here are really nice. Glad to see me and interested in talking…whether they speak English or not. I talked with a girl the other day and I only really understood her hand gestures, but apparently I told her a lot about myself…I have no idea. Met an old man recently who toured the US and Canada with some orchestra from Moscow. He was pretty cool actually…kind of looked like Albert Einstein, but taller.

More later and more pics soon! Thanks for checking this out….

out my window

During the fiasco that I call my trip to Toly’atti, I had to take a train through Germany, Poland, and Belarus to get to Moscow. I was stopped for not having a “transit visa” at the Belorussian border city of Brest. They put me on a Civil War Era train back to Poland after holding me in customs for a few hours back to a town called Terespol. From there, I had to drag all my shit onto a bus and go to Bela Podlaska where the Belorussian consulate was so I could get this transit visa…after which I had to take a bus back to Terespol so I could bribe my way onto a train going to Moscow.

So I get to Bela Podlaska, (a city of maybe 30,000 people), find a taxi to take me to the consulate in order to find a house with a crowd of people speaking all kinds of foreign languages standing next to this gate. I find out I have to wait 30 minutes until the place opens up and then only 2 can go in at a time (and there’s about 20 people standing there). I am standing there wait when this guy comes up and asks for a light…then he realizes I don’t speak Polish. He asks where I’m from and I tell him when this other guy overhears. This guy speaks pretty good English, so I explain my situation. He tells me that I can come in with him, so I do. We get in there and he explains things to the girl at the desk. She gets me an English application and he helps me fill it out. He turns in both of our applications and she tells us to come back in about 4 hours and tells him what else I need to get (passport photos, insurance and $170 cash). He gets in the taxi (which was waiting for me) and we go and get all these things, plus a money order for himself. Then we get dropped off at some cafeteria and he buys me lunch. After that, we get our visas and are on the next bus to Terespol to get on the next train. Unlike me, he actually arranged for another train that was coming in about an hour, but I never did that (I didn’t know or even think to do that when I was dropped off earlier that day). Because of this, we just went up to the tracks. When the train came, he got on and I stood just outside the train where he entered…he put his things away and then talked to the conductors (he spoke Russian as well). Soon, I was told to walk over to another car. The conductor for this car let me on as soon as I flashed a $100 bill. With that, I was back on track and was in Moscow. When we got off the train, we both got some rubles and headed through the Moscow metro system with our bags to separate train stations and were on our way.

This guy just happened to be at the consulate and in earshot. He had the same problem I did…he was going to visit his wife and kid who lived in Russia…he lived in Poland and worked as one of those guys who gets on a scaffolding and cleans skyscraper windows. This guy had 4 bags of his own to deal with and was as stressed as I was.

David pretty much saved my ass upon finding me in a small town in rural Poland. He could have just heard me and went his way, but he didn’t. He saw someone that obviously needed help…and he helped me. If not for him, I would have been stuck in Poland for a day or two easily and would have probably spent quite a bit more money on a hotel and new train tickets, but his help got me through the visa ordeal and back on a train. I was truly lost.

I have to admit that through all of this bullshit and problems, I never really got upset or freaked out. I was confused, stressed and unsure of how to solve the situation, but I never lost my cool throughout it….in fact, I giggled quite a bit as all this shit was happening. I felt a calm excitement through all of this as if I knew there was something more to this situation than was apparent at the time.

I’m telling this story because of the impact it’s had on me. I often profess to having little faith in humanity due to some of the things I’ve seen and experienced in life. Meeting David restored a lot of this faith in my fellow human within me. It’s really easy to expect the worst in people and then be pleasantly surprised when something good happens, but this goes beyond that. What he did was above and beyond…an act of kindness that I must share with everyone. I don’t consider this a religious experience or anything like that, but it’s something I will never forget and will be a reminder when I get in one of those bitter, cynical moods like I do every now and then. It has helped me in dealing with my new environment in a lot of ways…just going with the flow can have positive outcomes when you least expect it.

I’ve told you this story because I will be telling another one soon I hope…that is all I can say right now.

I got my first pay today. While I had little doubt it would happen, it just makes it official to me in a weird sort of way. Now we see if I can live on what I make when all is said and done.

Love the job and the students. On average, they’re younger than I thought they would be, but that’s fine. Sometimes they are shy, but they are slowly coming out of their shells. I had one student who did little more than blush and smile, but last night, she was the only one who showed up…and to my surprise, she talked my ear off. I guess not having the classmates around helped for her…that’s great.

Also, my sleeping situation has improved. I sleep on an old pull-out sofa which should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. There’s a wooden bar that has been digging into my ribs, so I had to put the sofa back together and just sleep on that. Last weekend, however, I found a roll-up mattress. Placing that on top of the pull-out bed is just what the doctor ordered. I’ve slept like a baby ever since. Problem solved.

More to come soon. Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, but I’ve been staying busy with work and exploring the city.