Today I went with my roommate downtown. We got on the metro at Kon'kovo: КОНЬКОВО (near our apartment), got off at Teatralnaya (next to Red Square) and wandered down Tverskaya Street to the school. I should have taken pictures of the cars parked all over the edges of sidewalks and all over in the street! Aside from their driving and parking, Muscovites on the whole don't seem half bad. While I had heard stories that no one smiles here, after wandering around downtown, I realized this feels like any other large city - most people don't smile at strangers or just because you bought water from them. I would argue that not smiling really isn't as big of a deal as it was made out to be.
I start teaching on Tuesday - while it would be nice to just bum around, I am glad I will be teaching soon. The philosophy of the school I will be teaching at is that native speakers should be teaching more high-intermediate to advanced students, which makes sense ... but because I trained teaching beginners and then pre-intermediate/intermediate, I definitely would feel better teaching beginners. Anyway, hopefully it's a quick learning curve!
Dasvidanya!
More pictures!!! please!
ReplyDeleteYeah--Folks in Izmir, Turkey (city of 2.6 million) don't smile, either. It's been hard for me to get used to it since it's such a habit to smile. But whatever. Life goes on even without all the extra tooth-flashing.
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