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.
No comments:
Post a Comment