Moscow through rose tinted glasses?

Of course, before I arrived back in Moscow, I was anticipating it. I romanticized the city. I recalled memories of imposing architecture and good times with friends. I imagined a Moscow covered in fresh, clean snow, magical in its quiet embrace. I put on my rose-tinted glasses and prepared to protect them from the brisk, unfriendliness that I knew Moscow to be.

I walked out of customs and into the airport prepared to fight off ten taxi drivers at once. To my surprise, there were only a handful of taxi drivers and only two asked me if I needed a taxi. The storm I had anticipated, was merely two drops. I’m sure the security measures put in place after January’s airport atrocity probably hampered the plans of many freelance taxis. Completely underwhelmed, I navigated my way through the Sheremetovo airport to the train station.

My second encounter, buying a train ticket. While I stood behind an arguing couple, obviously unfit to travel together, I prepared to not even get a “Hello” or any eye contact. Instead, the woman greeted me quite warmly. She even smiled at my obvious American accent. I assumed it was a fluke, an anomaly, that soon, I would be back in harsh Moscow with pushing Babushkas and dissatisfied service people.

Previously I had the impression that Russians tended to be like me, a bit cold on the surface but once you get to know us, warm and inviting. I also had the impression that this attitude in a city the size of Moscow leads to a harsh reality. Yet this visit proved me wrong.

Rather than having my rose-tinted glasses smashed to a thousand pieces while being jostled in the crowded metro, I ventured to take them off, only to find that Moscow looked the same without them. Actually, Moscow looked better without them. My romanticism of Moscow did not include fairly good customer service, which happened the whole second day I was there and surprisingly continued. I had several waiters stop by to ask how the meal was. Waiters who smiled and said my friend and I were beautiful (in a city like Moscow I will take this as a very high compliment) …

Things in Moscow are changing, customer service is getting better, or perhaps, Moscow, in February, as an informed, bright-eyed “tourist,” is different than as a disenchanted English teacher waiting for vacation and spring.

Contemplating Moscow: what should have been posted February 1st

I’m not sure when or how it happened, but Moscow captured my heart. I know it wasn’t love at first sight. At first sight, I was too exhausted to noticed and too bewildered to understand. At first sight, I was overwhelmed and intimidated. I was amazed and challenged. Unsuspecting and homesick.

I had an inkling that Moscow changed things when I left that first summer. I missed Moscow, not just my friends.

Upon my first return in August 2009, I couldn’t contain my excitement and smiled like a madman in the airport while being accosted by taxi drivers (in Russian). I enjoyed being expected to know Russian. Many Muscovites, while they may know some English are unapologetic in their presumptions that I know Russian. I take it as a compliment and a challenge, even though my Russian remains horrible.

When I heard about the January bombing in the airport, my throat seized, my stomach lurched and my heart stopped.

Oh, Moscow.

My heart belongs to you.

Author's note: It would not be completely honest of me to say that my heart belongs fully and completely to Moscow ... but it sounds nice, doesn't it?

I have considered that perhaps it’s the challenge that Moscow presents. It’s by no means an easy life. Oh sure, the metro makes travel convenient, but there's also the cold and the stores and the challenge of paying rent and buying groceries. The language barrier and the disorientation that occurs when you walk out of the metro into a new area. The first impression “coldness” of people and the harsh reality. Lack of modesty. Lack of customer service. Lack of “common” business sense, perhaps due to the 90 years of not needing it.

There is a saying that Russians have about marriage. Women get bored. So, men, you should keep something about yourself to reveal every 5 years.

Change, challenge, and enigmas …

That’s what makes up Moscow. Every time I thought I had something figured out, life would prove that I was wrong. Each time I thought I could easily walk over that patch of ice, I fell down. Each time I thought I could say something coherently in Russian, an older lady at the shop would look confused or glare at me for my misunderstanding of grammar.

Yet, there was beauty in the mystery as well. In the midst of winter, when it’s been overcast for months, old snow is on the ground, and everything looks gray, suddenly the sun will come out and reveal how beautiful Moscow can be. I would stumble off the beaten path, onto a new park, into a new art gallery, or meet someone new. The Soviet Architecture that previously helped weigh my spirits down would suddenly lift them up. A fresh snow would put a sparkle in my eye ...

These thoughts filled my heart and head before I headed out for my brief, one week vacation, in Moscow.

Repost: A Silent Laugh with Strangers

Perhaps it's too soon to be reposting, but as a tribute to appreciating the small things in life, I'm doing it anyway.

Originally posted November 21, 2009.

A quick note to the reader ... all dialog in this post in merely my impression of what was said. The metro is noisy and my Russian is not THAT good.

Usually, everyone in the Moscow metro wears their serious, worn out, or sad faces. They look through each other. They scrutinize the way others are dressed, and they definitely DON'T talk to strangers.

But tonight was different.

In a good mood and feeling confident and a little talkative, I got on the metro with a sparkle in my eye. I watched others get on, and I noticed a group of three people who sat down across from me - a couple and their friend.

After the train left the station, the woman asked for a piece of gum. Her boyfriend didn't have any, so the friend looked in his bag and pulled out a piece. It was a little crumpled, yet overall, it looked all right.

The girl took it and stared at it like it was something alien, "What is this? What's wrong with it? Why is it all crumpled up?" she accusingly asked the friend.

He sort of shrugged in response. As if to say, "What's the big deal?"

Rather than refusing it, she opened the wrapper, shrugged in about the same way, and stuck the gum in her mouth.

In this midst of this, I couldn't help thinking about a parallel situation from high school. A good friend of mine often had "random snacks" in her sweater pockets and would offer them to people, regardless of the state. Maybe you'd like a Sour Patch Kid? or a saltine? Needless to say, I couldn't hide the smirk on my face, which quickly turned into a giggle when the boyfriend and friend noticed my smirk.

The boyfriend turned to the woman and told her that I thought the situation was funny. We all exchanged entertained smiles and shaking of heads.

Then the friend rooted around in his bag a bit more and pulled out a piece of candy for himself. Further amused, the boyfriend asked, "What else do you have in there?!", looked at me and sort of shook his head.

I couldn't stop giggling. Maybe he had a Sour Patch Kid ...

At this point, the four of us were openly having a silent conversation.

Reaching in his back again, the friend took out another piece of candy and offered it to me.

"Thanks."

What was I supposed to do? refuse?!

The whole situation was ridiculous.

Finally, the boyfriend looked at his friend, who had continued to rummage around in his bag ... "What? Do you have more?"

"Nothing. That's it."

The friend turned his bag upside down to show that there was nothing else and shared his last piece of candy with the boyfriend.

Comparing attitudes toward cheating in Korea and Russia

When I first arrived in Moscow, one of the things that stuck out the most was my students' attitude toward cheating. In Ulsan, Korea I am surprised by the lack of cheating and the amount of tattle-telling that goes on.

In Moscow cheating was all around, not only in the English classroom, but I heard stories about cheating at University. I met students who had no problem with plagiarism and were perplexed when I confronted them. At first I was shocked. Then as I came to understand Russian culture a bit, and discovered the pressure put on students, especially at University, I became more lax myself. I still discouraged cheating but no longer saw it as fundamentally wrong. I encouraged my students to do their own work, if only to see how well they knew English. My goal was not to punish them if they didn’t know the English we had gone over, but to assess how well I had taught the subject matter. In order to understand this, an honest test, with no cheating was necessary. Yet, I also discovered that sometimes by “cheating” students are actually helping each other out and possibly learning something, as long as it’s not the blind cheating that happens under the intense pressure of the Russian University system. (Please see the recent comment on my previous post on cheating, Kimberly in Russian: Китберли)

Like Russians, Korean children are under insane pressure to do well. They go to school in the morning, and when they are done with school, they go to a private academy for one subject, then another, then another and hardly have time for a proper night’s sleep, let alone homework. Yet, when it comes to cheating, in Korea the opposite of Russia seems to be true.

Given the stress Korean students face, they seem overly sensitive about cheating, especially after my experience in Moscow. Many students cover their tests with books or papers as they complete them to hide them from other students, and they don’t hesitate to tell on each other for the smallest amounts of cheating. I have been blown away by how serious Korean students take cheating. Even during a game my students will complain, “Teacher, he’s cheating!” Additionally, I have had students come tell me, in the teacher’s room, before class has even started, that another student didn’t finish their homework. I try to discourage this kind of peer pressure. While the Korean teachers push these students to the max, as their culture expects, as the foreign teacher, I have the flexibility to be more lenient and more forgiving. Also, I do not see any value in tattle-telling.

Of course, my personal philosophy on cheating has also changed since the first time I walked into a classroom in Moscow. At first I refused to accept any cheating. I had constant conversations with my students about it. I talked to them about the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I cheated and was confounded that they did not have this same gut reaction. Now, I nearly participate in cheating. As long as homework is done by the time I walk around to check it, I accept it. I usually ignore if a student is hurriedly copying homework from someone else for another teacher. When the students are taking a test, while I discourage them from copying off of each other, I walk around and point to areas that need work and freely answer questions about spelling and grammar. Rather than being strict and feeling like cheating is morally wrong, I want to give students confidence and create a relaxed environment, where they can enjoy learning English, even if it means accepting cheating now and then.

Music enables a comparison of apartments and cultures

It’s nowhere near the first of September, the first day of school for Russian children, and I’m in Ulsan, Korea miles away from Moscow. Yet, from somewhere outside, there is music emanating into my apartment, dredging up memories of those early days in September 2009 when I awoke to children’s speeches and patriotic Russian hymns.

At the beginning of the school year, Russian schools hold ceremonies to welcome the students back. The music at these first of September events usually was performed live by children, but the music in this case feels like it’s coming from a record being proudly played into the streets. While I have no idea what they are singing about, and wouldn’t even if it was in English, because it is not quite that clear, the orchestral background to the singing makes me think of patriotic anthems.

It’s early morning, the sun is shining in my window, and while it’s two months later and 10 degrees colder, the memory-pulling this music is causing is a bit unreal.

Suddenly, I can remember very clearly my dingy little apartment in a rundown part of Moscow, where the vacuum cleaner put more dust on the floor than it picked up, and where my room was basically a small partitioned off part of my roommate’s giant room – an afterthought. While we had separate entrances, the wall separating our rooms was paper thin. The entire apartment smelt old and very well used. The floor in the kitchen hadn’t been cleaned for years, so any attempt left the water dingy and the floor still dirty with caked on grim.

Because I lived in this apartment for nearly six months but never had people over because of my embarrassment, it is relegated to a different memory box, which isn’t negative, but is deemed as a “cultural” experience. It was a true, Soviet style apartment. It had not undergone any European remodel or facelift but was probably exactly the way it had been nearly 40 years before I lived there. The electric wiring had issues. The security to get into the apartment was insane. A key code on the outside of the building, which seems fairly standard around the world, a giant double steel plate door with a skeleton key to get into our hallway, and finally a double door into our apartment. The itty-bitty kitchen held our washer, refrigerator, stove, and a dining room table which barely constituted a table. It was a rickety, makeshift thing about a meter squared, covered in a nappy, old, plastic tablecloth and two wobbly stools. Because I lived there, I made feeble attempts to clean or make the apartment not feel as grungy and worn out, but many things, like the worn-out porcelain in the bathtub which absorbed the strange color of the water, were just old. It was a true, post-Stalin era, Soviet apartment building and felt like it was going to collapse.

It’s difficult to even compare the apartment I am currently sitting in with this older apartment, and the two cultures which created them are two entirely different beasts. The Soviet era apartment was rough, old, ragged, but served its purpose. Like the attitudes in Moscow, it did not mince words or attempt to sugar coat the reality of it. It was what it was, a small little abode on the top floor of a rundown building in a rundown section of Moscow. My Korean apartment is brand new, streamlined and efficient with niceties I never would have dreamed of at my old apartment in Moscow, heated floors, control of the hot water temperature, but it’s in an industrial section of the city, with no green space. Like my first encounters with Korean people, first impressions of my apartment were wonderful. It’s only when the weather gets colder and wear starts to show that the bugs are forced out, but even then, they remain shy and elusive.

Speaking Russian in Korea: A cure for homesickness

Sunday when I woke up it was rainy, dreary, and the leaves were beginning to change colors and drop from the trees onto the damp ground, creating a soggy mess of what should be fall. Homesickness began to bud, so I decided to dwell in it and make pancakes. By early afternoon this nurtured bud had flowered into a lump. Everywhere else but here, it seemed, fall is crisp with red and green and gold leaves. Recently, I saw pictures of Muscovites at the park with huge, dry, crisp, colored maple leaves. Imagining the smell of dry autumn leaves, the feel of the sun, warm on my face, and a slight chill in the air, I put on a sweater and almost heard the crunch of leaves underfoot. As I delved deeper into my memories and imagination and further away from Ulsan, I imagined hot chocolate, a fireplace in the evening, maybe a bit of vodka and some Russian. I was in heaven. When I walked outside into the mild, wet weather, reality hit.

My heart dropped.

This is not the fall I love. Missing Russia and Idaho, I sulked.

After my day of fighting homesickness and missing Russia I had an interestingly serendipitous moment.

As if I had stumbled into a dream.

It began with a search for material for my Halloween costume. I ventured over to Ulsan’s old downtown via bus. While on the bus, I derived brief satisfaction from understanding the Korean announcement of my stop, and I briefly compared it to understanding the metro in Moscow. I know I’m finally making progress with language skills when small battles like these are won. I hopped off the bus at my stop and began walking in the general direction of where I remembered seeing a fabric shop. I hadn’t walked ten steps from the bus stop, when I noticed a group of foreign guys. They stuck out, as we non-Asians always do. A bit nervous about the seemingly inevitable encounter, I momentarily entertained the idea of darting across the street to avoid talking to them. Again, this is the Kim that is shy and sometimes doesn’t make an effort to say hello to people she knows. My hesitation to make a run for it meant that suddenly they were in front of me.

With a heartwarmingly genuine smile on his face, a man I would later know as Dima said, «Ты русская?» “You’re Russian?” In shock, but on my game with the Russian that is always swimming in my head, I laughed and answered in Russian, «Ниет. Я американка.» “No, I’m American.” They gaffed and laughed and insisted that I was Russian. I laughed more and was so relieved after my day of homesickness to run into a group of Russians that felt so familiar and friendly that I felt in a dream. They were equally blown away and confused to find an American girl in Korea that spoke some Russian. Even after I told them I had spent two years in Moscow teaching English, they continued to follow the regular Russian line, which is that I cannot be American, I must be Russian because of my style and weight and my language skills.

As our conversation continued, I couldn’t stop laughing at how fortuitous the whole situation was. What are the chances? I enjoyed the familiar Russian accent of Yuri’s and Dima’s English, and while the two younger guys talked to me, the older men stood back and watched. Occasionally interjecting something amiable but generally indecipherable.

Due to our limited knowledge of each other’s language, my broken Russian and their broken English, our conversation was not as poetic as I would like to imagine, but the overall feeling was one of genuine relief and happiness. I could not believe that I was speaking Russian to people who understood it, and they seemed to feel the same way.

A great cure for homesickness, I only hope that I will run into Russians again, though hopefully they will be longer stayed than one day.

How being in Korea has made me miss Moscow

While some things were expected, missing the metro, it's efficiency, the ease of transportation as well as extremely affordable cost, there are some things I didn't expect to miss about Moscow. Number one being the weather. While I like winter, it often seemed to drag on and on, but now that fall and the leaves changing still hasn't even close to hit Ulsan, I'm starting to realize that I miss putting on layer upon layer and walking out into the brisk Moscow air, pollution or no.

Of course, I miss students. I miss the level of proficiency and how many of my teens had already adjusted to me and my teaching style. A new school, let alone a new culture and country would have been a bit difficult. While I really can't compare too much because I taught mainly teens and adults in Russia and in Korea I teach children and teens, if I dare make the comparison, Russians seem more adventuresome. More willing to make fools of themselves. Of course, there were occasional classes of shy students. Students who were scared to make mistakes, and perhaps it's the classroom set up or the different sense of humor or the different levels, but Koreans on the whole seem shier. They are not as willing to just pull me aside and ask a hundred questions about where I'm from or why I'm here. They just accept that I'm a foreigner, move on, and leave it at that.

While Koreans on the whole seem friendlier, I think Russians on the whole were more interested in getting to know me, establishing a friendship or comradery, while in Korea, because of the culture and the hierarchy, I assume, many students put a distance between teacher and student. I would like to break this down, but it seems as soon as I think I'm establishing a friendship, where I can rely on the student to back me up in class because we are "friendly" they turn. Peer pressure or shyness or culture or something takes over, and they revert back to refusing to speak English and refusing to work with other students. While Russians may not have liked it, they nearly always followed directions. They put an effort into the mingle activities I organized, were willing to make fools of themselves and so was I, but Koreans sometimes won't even give it a try, which in turn makes me more reserved at times. They are used to being allowed to "opt out" perhaps ... whatever the case, it makes things frustrating because as soon as one student "opts out" the rest of the group feels uncomfortable.

I need to just have a talk with them. When speaking a new language, you are going to feel like a fool at times ...