Are These Rosemary’s Babies? Or Am I Just a Horrible Teacher? …Definitely Both.

Evil is two syllables: Masha. Yes, a child of 5 who is my own personal Damien. Honestly, I am not going to pretend that I am a natural at teaching, because most of the time I am boring myself to tears (which these children are bringing me to on a regular basis…jk, but seriously).  However, these children, I believe, have been sent here to suck the life out of me.  After my first day I was pretty much ready to call it quits. Book me a ticket and get me out of this crazy place.  Fortunately, things have been coming around and I have learned to use my stern-Russian-teacher face.  This I assure is well responded to, but it still is a pretty exhausting effort each day.

(After my first day of teaching I went to the store to get some toothpaste. I was feeling pretty down and discouraged, and then I caught a little twinkle of wrapper out of the corner of my eye. There it was. A snickers bar. I realize what a fat-kid comment this is, but it really perked up my day. Then I went home and talked to my mommy and I felt totally better. Her creative genius ideas are really saving the day with my teaching.)

Besides the teaching, I love Russia. I am sorry I have been a bad blogger.  I have been spending close to 11 hours a day either training, teaching, or preparing to teach. They claim it is a four-hour-a-day commitment. Not so my friends. They have an excellent system setup for free labor. As my wise father the accountant pointed out, it is the best business model available. I pay to get myself here and work for free. Truly though, I know it will become a routine and will not be so time consuming.  For now, I have traveled all around Saint Petersburg, but only underground on my way to one of our schools. I am crazy about the metro. I think it is one of the greatest things I have ever seen, and it is so simple to use. For once, I feel like I know what I am doing here.

I wish I could post pictures of the stations, but you get into some serious trouble if you are caught. And you will be caught. There are armed security guards, complete with the square fur hats, at the entrance of each station. They stop people when they come into the station “at random”, but every time I have seen a person stopped it was a guy in his 20’s. Typical bomber/miscreant? I guess so.  As well, you see cameras in the hallways and attendants that literally appear from nowhere when a train reaches the end of its line. Talk about a little creepy at times. These stations are beautiful though: so clean and enormous.  You take a nearly 120 second escalator dive down just to reach the platforms. I get some major vertigo when I look down and don’t see an end. It’s the strangest thing, but the architecture even on the way down is really cool.  They have tile mosaics in some stations and huge archways of granite. It’s beautiful.

Still, I have not had a chance to see much of the city.  The few pictures I have tried to take have failed because apparently my brand new camera has a bogus battery.  I am really frustrated and not exactly sure what I can do about it now.  Luckily, I brought my big camera, but it is heavy and stressful to carry it around so I haven’t taken many pictures. I thought I would share with some more day-to-day information.

Meals:

 Julia makes delicious dinners and we eat at the kindergarten for lunch every day.  Below are some sample meals I have been enjoying:

• Breakfast: I eat cornflakes or yogurt almost every morning. Pretty American and I am OK with that. However, their milk is absolutely delicious. It’s really creamy and just so good.

• Lunch: These people are incapable of not having soup for lunch. It’s apparently against the health code or something. So I have partaken of some fabulous Borche almost every day, which is great because I love it.  We also always have bread and some sort of meat. I am not going to go into a lot of detail with the meat.  It’s always some sort of mystery loaf, and I am afraid if I look into it too much I am going to have a Soylent Green moment. So I will move on from there. On occasion we have some buckwheat, which is also great. I haven’t determined yet what it is. Does someone know if it’s a grain of sorts?

• Dinner: We have “sausages” quite often.  What Russian's deem sausages, we Americans deem hot dogs. The only difference is they make fancy cuts in them so they look prettier. One morning my friend was served “sausages” for breakfast. She’s like, “Yeah it’s weird to eat something for breakfast I usually have at a baseball game.” This is true.  However, we eat ours for dinner with homemade sauerkraut. Definitely a favorite dinner of mine.  One night we had noodles with just butter on them and baby dill pickles. The combinations are hilarious. My favorite part is that we always have something sweet after words. The problem is, I now require something sweet. I am becoming like Elaine and need my 8 o’clock sugar rush.

Weather:

It really has not been that cold, but it has been really snowy. Snow banks over my head on both sides of the path.  I didn’t even know I was walking on sidewalks until a couple days ago when things started to melt. FYI Death Star black ice is way easier to walk on than knee deep slush. It turns out I prefer the weather to stay at 0 so the snow doesn’t melt.  I didn’t realize my frozen pathway was actually 2 feet above the real sidewalk until my foot sank into it when the weather warmed up. Slush is so deceiving. With ice you know what you’re getting and you adjust your walking accordingly. With slush you are trying to hop from puddle to puddle. When I say puddle I mean lakes that go across the entire road.  Fortunately, or not so fortunately the wind usually nips those in the bud so the lakes don’t last long. I thought I was leaving the wind when I left Wyoming. Not so.

Well, this has become a very long post very quickly so I will stop here.  I will be better about doing more frequent posts with more pictures. Nika is taking me around tomorrow so hopefully I will have some good stuff then. Thanks for all the nice comments and I hope everyone is doing well!

Below are some pictures of the apartment and Nika! Enjoy.