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Everything is broken. I had hoped to make this post a little bit sooner, but my internet has ceased to work. I’m hoping it’s because of the construction going on in my building and not something wrong with my computer. I’ve been in Siberia for 8 months, and by this time, I’ve gotten used to minor inconveniences (what some people would dub “white people problems”). These inconveniences include: no hot water, no water at all, no internet, jackhammers going in the hallway, jackhammers in the room next door, having only one television channel, the elevator sporadically not working, food not at all resembling the picture on the menu, the list goes on and on. Really the only one of these things that actually bothers me is when the water gets shut off. I at least think it would be polite if they would let us know about it. Supposedly in the summer the hot water will be shut off for anywhere between 2 weeks to 2 months, depending on who you ask. For me this is terrible, because I like to be clean, and showering in cold water is awful. The water isn’t even just cold, it’s fucking. Freezing. My attempts at boiling water for bucket showers have proved relatively unsuccessful, but I’m sure practice makes perfect. This rich Russian tradition of shutting off the hot water during the summer seems antiquated, and many argue that they don’t actually do anything to the pipes as promised, it’s just a way for people to suffer more. And while I’m whining, my headphones also stopped working. I have a hard time existing without music, and unfortunately due to finances, buying new ones looks way off in the future.

Finances have been really, really tight the entire time I’ve been here. April has been the most difficult month because a lot of my students who studied with me at the private school left to go to various countries and won’t be returning for quite some time, if at all. Despite the fact that I make a lot more than many Russians, the salaries here are extremely low compared the cost of living. All of my end of the month income goes straight to rent, so I am forced to live off of the money I get from my private students. This is about $40 dollars a week, which is very hard to live on when you need to buy food, pay for transportation, and any other incidentals. There are many times when I have to choose between eating or something else. Most of the time, I choose eating. When dealing with such small amounts of money, the difference between something that costs 50 cents and 75 cents becomes a very big difference in the long run. I don’t think my mother would be very happy to know that there are spans of days when I have absolutely no money in my wallet, or in my bank account. Luckily, I don’t think she reads this. But despite all of this, Russia makes me thankful for what I do have, and I still wouldn’t ever consider myself poor, because I know that I can always ask for help. Some people unfortunately don’t have this option, and I am not sure how they survive here on such small salaries. I’ve certainly learned a lot about budgeting.

But moving on, my Easter turned out to be much better than I had anticipated. Despite my prior pessimism, the whole weekend was one of my better weekends on memory, especially in Russia. I unfortunately worked until 9pm on Friday, but after that, one of my coworkers and I engaged in my new favourite activity, which is drinking on playgrounds after dark. This is a popular activity among disenchanted youth, especially gopniki (the stereotypical track suit clad white trash gangster wannabe’s, look them up on Wikipedia). Saturday was more of the same, this time at a café instead of on a playground. Easter morning I actually worked. I thought both sets of my private students would cancel, but they didn’t. This was good for me, seeing as I need money, and had not much else to do. The two children I taught in the morning were surprisingly well behaved, and they and gave me a “kulich,” which is a traditional Russian Easter cake. After teaching in the morning, I went to a soccer game with previously mentioned coworker. We attempted to meet up with my Italian friends but there were some technological problems that prevented this. However, it turned out to be a great time anyways, despite having to avoid another one of our coworkers. After the soccer game I taught another private lesson, and that was Easter.

Hanging out with a small group of my coworkers has turned out to be a much better idea than hanging out with students. I only hung out with my own students a few times, but even hanging out with other students can sometimes be annoying because I still have to deal with their dorm gossip bullshit. Some of my groups have recently taken advantage of my past casual approach by being just plain rude and arguing with me, which I’m going to have to put a stop to. Marina’s (I’m assuming Pashkova?) comment on my last post is pretty spot on. I have unfortunately achieved a minor celebrity status at our university, and in town in general. There are extremely few native speakers of English in town, so when people hear English being spoken, they turn and stare. I guess I’m used to the United States where everyone is speaking a different language, so being stared at was at first quite strange. It’s very difficult to carry on a conversation with a friend when 20 people are staring at you. I’ve gotten used to it, but it still bothers me from time to time, and sometimes the attention isn’t always positive (drunks wanting to bother me or fight on the bus, for instance). Men especially have quite an angry look on their face when they stare at me, as if they suspect I’m here to steal their women-folk.

In other news, my past prediction about it becoming cold and snowing was accurate. It has been overcast and rainy all week, and on Thursday night it snowed an inch or two. It has since all melted. Thursday night was especially nasty because it had rained all day, and then the snow covered up the slushy puddles, making spotting them impossible. While walking my friend back to her house at 2am, I several times fell victim to these camouflaged slushy traps. It’s interesting that despite surviving a winter where temperatures reached -40F, 30F feels really cold after experiencing summer like weather. That’s all for today. I’ll update with another soon about a tragic event on campus and some photos of my apartment. For now you can enjoy these photos of the view from my balcony:

Plants and Students

This week has been rather uneventful, save for my aforementioned trip to the botanical gardens. On Tuesday, I accompanied a group of first year students on a field trip to the university's greenhouse, and I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. Lena, their teacher, told me that I shouldn't have high expectations, and I certainly didn't. The botanical museum is just a short 5 minute walk from the main building, and as you're walking to the greenhouse, there is a gate and a small building labeled "Botanical Gardens." Since Lena told me not to have high expectations, I was sure that this would be the gardens themselves. Luckily, I was wrong. The botanical garden was housed in a rather large building, and was much nicer than Ohio State's greenhouse because they could actually grow plants and trees in the ground itself (really OSU, whose idea was it to put the greenhouse on top of a parking garage?!). I love plants and am greatly affected by colours (Siberia isn't very colourful), so after a long, gray winter, being in a room with a lot of colourful tropical plants really lifted my mood.

I brought along my camera because I don't often get a chance to take pictures of my life here. Our guide was very enthusiastic about her job and gave us the full tour....twice. We took the second tour after she saw that Lena and I had brought cameras, and so she insisted that we go through again so that she could take pictures of our group next to all the various plants. I'll post a few below, and those of you that are my friend on Facebook can see the rest. Most of the students were a bit too timid to talk to me, so I've noticed that in all of the photos I'm standing with the only girl who made the effort to speak to me. I would have spoken to them in Russian, but I don't think they knew that I know Russian. Strangely though, after our trip, about half the group added me on vkontakte, even though I have never spoken with them.

Like I mentioned before, working at the university has provided me with the opportunity to make a lot of new friends, however, I feel that as of late some of them have been invading my space a little bit too much. If I could back up time, I might not have made the choice to hang out with students that I specifically teach, but that in itself is problematic because I switch groups and there is the potential for anyone to end up becoming my student for a few weeks. I don't give grades so there is no conflict of interest, but I feel as though sometimes they don't take me as seriously as they should.

Really what has gotten to me the most though is the gossip. The fact that I am young and their teacher is then compounded with the fact that I am a foreigner. This is a label that I can never shed, no matter how long I stay here. All of the foreigners here (from Western countries) are strange. All of them. That includes myself I guess, but I just haven't figured out what brand of strange I am. After all, we all chose to come to Siberia for some reason or another, and this is not exactly someplace that is at the top of people's "places to go" list. Anyways, the students loveeee to gossip, and it's unavoidable. The international languages department is seriously comprised of about 80-90% females, and most of them live in the dormitories together. This obviously causes rumors to bound about. Some students who are not my actual students have told me a few of the things that are said about me in the dormitory, and while they aren't bad, I still don't like being talked about, and it makes trusting my other friends harder. Anytime I hang out with one or a group of them, it gets around, and that's just annoying. People like to invent their own version of what events transpired, when really, nothing happens. The whole thing causes me to be wary of hanging out with students anymore. I already transferred out of one group after an inadvertent trip to a club with them caused the end of a two year friendship, which I really miss.

The weather the past few days has become dark and rainy, which has been making me feel a bit down. Also Easter is tomorrow and I don't have anything to do. I kind of wanted to go to church, since Easter is the one day when every Russian goes to church, but I'd feel a bit strange going by myself since I don't know the traditions. Ordinarily I'd always be invited to Lyubov's house (the old lady I lived with), but she is going to her son's to celebrate Easter, his birthday, and his daughter's bday, so I would feel out of place.
But anyways, here are some pictures from the botanical garden:

Getting better, a little better all the time

So I guess my return to blogging only lasted one post, but I figured I would update again because maybe my friends or family that I don’t get a chance to talk to might be interested in what it is I’ve been doing here in Siberia. I’m going to try to blog a bit more to keep people in the loop, but to keep my posts shorter and less rambling. I’m not really even sure where to begin. For starters, I’ve finally graduated to my own apartment. Finding an apartment was by no means easy, and definitely put a heavy strain on the relationship between me and my friends who helped me search. Decent apartments in good parts of town are hard to come by and get taken quickly, and this is made even more complicated by the fact that several real estate agencies were trying to rent out the same apartments and there was a lack of communication between them. When I found an appealing listing, I had to call a friend, who then called the agency, who then called the owner, who they could never seem to get ahold of. Then we all played phone tag. It’s quite a frustrating process and more than once I showed up to look at an apartment only to find out that it had been given away 20 minutes beforehand. The Russians abide by more of a “take what you can get” sort of attitude, which made things even more difficult between my friends and I. Ultimately they got mad at me and I found my apartment by myself. I don’t blame them though, I would have been annoyed as well. On the bright side though, I now live in a nice apartment in the very center of town, and it’s only a 20 minute walk from all of the various places that I work.

Living in my own place has made a huge difference in my life here and improved my mood by an exponential amount. It’s nice to be able to come home to my own space and do whatever I’d like. A lot of people really hate living alone, but conversely I feel that living alone makes me want to hang out with people even more because I don’t have a roommate around to talk to. I also like living alone because it means I can do what I want, when I want, without having to worry about what someone else is doing. This seems fairly obvious but for some reason people here really seem to hate living completely alone.

Anyways, my apartment itself is fairly nice, at least for a one person apartment at the price I pay (apartments here are for whatever reason are either the same price more expensive than apartments in a normal city such as Columbus. The fact that the salaries are only about 25% of what I would make in the US makes them even more expensive), however the apartment building itself is absolute shit. It is a roughhhh place that is comparable with inner city projects. The building is full of drug addicts and because the building really isn’t owned by anyone, no one takes care of the entrance, halls, or stairs. There is (literally) shit, piss, vomit, etc., everywhere. The aforementioned drug addicts hang out in the stairwells and can sometimes be found there passed out with a syringe next to them. Dodging syringes outside, and inside, the building has become second nature. Because heroin is too expensive for the drug addicts here, they shoot up on “Krokodil” (crocodile), which is made from a mix of various pharmaceuticals in someone’s wooden house. I haven’t gotten a chance to take pictures of my apartment/building, but when I do, I’ll post them.

Other than having an apartment, the other thing that has improved my life here has been working at the university. My official position at the university is something along the lines of guest lecturer, but I serve several functions at the university. My primary function is obviously teaching. I am assigned to different 3rd and 4th year groups and conduct their oral practice classes once a week. My secondary function involves just being an American. Because the foreign language departments here are severely lacking in native speakers of English (our university is in the lead with two, most have none), I am often asked to come to classes that I don’t teach, in order to talk with the students. This generally just involves me standing at the front of the classroom for two hours while 18 year old girls bombard me with questions about America, and more often, personal questions about myself (am I married?). Some groups turn these guest lecturers into a party and bring tea and cake. This coming Tuesday I’ll be going on a field trip to the university’s botanical gardens with a group of first year students. My job of “being an American” also involves going to events that I don’t want to go to just so that the university can show off that they have a native speaker. Sitting through presentations, films, and talent shows is not my forte.

Being at the university has provided me with the opportunity to make a lot of friends, because obviously the students are more or less the same age as me. I know, I know. Those of you coming from the American frame of reference are thinking “Noooo, you can’t hang out with your students, that’s in direct breach of the barrier between teacher and student.” At least in my case it’s not. Because I work with so many different groups, and don’t appear on any “official” list of university employees, I can’t give grades. Plus, it’s Russia and no one cares anyways. Anyways, making friends has been great, although sometimes I have a hard time trusting people who want to hang out with me (or their intentions at least). I know this is a somewhat pessimistic viewpoint to take, but when you are one of less than 10 native speakers in a city of 500,000 people, you have to be wary of people using you, even unintentionally, to practice their English. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve been in a café with friends and a group of attractive girls approaches purely because we are foreign. I also really try to stay away from hanging out with foreigners here because there seems to be this satellite group of girls who hang around them purely because they are foreign, and I’m not into that. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like it when my friends like me because of who I am, not because of what my passport says. That being said, I’ve met a lot of really great people here that I enjoy hanging out with. The weather here has been getting much nicer, and it’s really wonderful to just walk around and talk to people. I feel like because there isn’t as much stuff to do here, Russian’s really value conversation, and enjoy just sitting around talking (and drinking of course), which is something I think is a definitely plus about their culture. Anyways, I’ll stop here for today and in the future will try to update more, but with less text. Hopefully because the weather is nice, I will be participating in all sorts of interesting activities (anyone want to take me to their Dacha?) that I can write about.