A letter home from study abroad
Today, I was awakened by a knock on my door at the ungodly hour of
10:45 am. It was Jeff, the Canadian from next door who'd been having
trouble getting his Win95 notebook to talk to GlasNet. More exactly, he'd
been having trouble following the step by step instructions glasnet gave
him. They left off the first step: "Make sure you have installed the
Dialup Networking Software before attempting to use dialup networking."
Unfortunately, at about 1 am last night I suggested that I might be able
to help him if he brought his machine by at a bit before 11 today. Well,
I accidentally stayed up till about 4:30 and was none too pleased to see
him. After having him place his computer at my bedside, I read the
instructions he recieved and decided that Dialup Networking software would
make a good addition to the silly video games he keeps on his machine. By
11:15 I had roused myself enough to swig back a bit of coca-cola and
stumble into the bathroom for a nice hot shower. Unfortunately, the hot
water has not yet decided to grace us with its presence. I gave in and
washed my hair...damn that was cold.
After getting dressed, I wandered down the hall to find Jocelyn.
Yesterday, she and I decided to go to the market at "Sportivnaya" metro.
Jocelyn politely informed me that her host family had warned her that the
market was "full of theives" and that "the lower classes shop there" -- in
short, that she was bailing on me. However, I convinced george and adrian
that they wanted to come with me. The market cost about $.60 to get into
and was really neat and really crowded...we only saw about a sixth of it.
It's mainly clothes with a bunch of other random things thrown in for good
measure. Adrian and I got fried-dough filled with meat for lunch, while
george opted to stick with a sprite. I had a coke in a glass bottle to
drink....I'd forgotten that it really does taste better.
We came home and I hung out and programmed for a while. Several
people in the group were going to see Giselle at the Bolshoi tonight and
made me take their pictures....they were really quite overdressed.
At some point in the afternoon, olga alexandrovna karp (the
russian teacher from my highschool exchange) called me. She wanted to
know whether I'd be willing to talk to a class of 10th graders about the
american educational system...so i'm doing that sometime next week. She
also wanted to know whether i'd be interested in giving some lessons on
American English to teachers at her school. According to her, the latter
would be a paying gig. I said yes to the former and told her I'd think
about the latter. The only real problem is that I don't know the first
thing about teaching english. It could be amusing though.
At about 6:30 I took off to meet my new "Contact Family." A
contact family is a family that ACTR pays a small sum of money to be
friends with you. You meet with them once a week and either hang out and
talk or go out or some such thing. The family consists of a mother, a
father, a 14 year old daughter, a tiny dog and one of the largest cats
I've ever seen. The 14 year old spent the evening whining at her parents
(as any self-respecting teenager is obligated to do when there's company)
and flying around the apartment on roller-blades.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that the parents are rocket
scientists. Ok, so I am...but just a little. They're mathemeticians who
work for the Academy of Sciences and worked on stuff for the soviet space
program when there was a soviet space program to work on. When he found
out I work with computers, the father spent about an hour telling me about
the computers they used to have....all the homebrew stuff they built
before the iron curtain fell. Apparently, he also works as a delivery
truck driver in the evenings to earn extra cash. All in all, they're
really nice people.
Dinner was great...it started off as meat and potatos, but,
mushrooms were quickly brought out...then homemade pickles and tomatos and
then pasta. Once I couldn't eat anything else, desert was brought
out....chocolate, cookies and a really good homemade apple pie. After we
had tea, they asked me what I wanted to do next week. We agreed on the
circus, so I'm supposed to call them on monday to see what the plan is.
Then, I got a ride home in the delivery truck.
Tonight, I was treated to the very amusing scene of Carrie and
Jeff each slowly working a bottle of champagne. It wouldn't have been
quite so funny if we hadn't started to argue about: Western Society,
linguistic theory, the nature of ideas, whether language is a tool or an
end in itself, multiculturalism and whether the Queen's English or
American English is more correct. Eventually, I couldn't take it any more
and retreated to my room to write in my journal (type in my
journal...whatever) and read the Hunter S Thompson collection that my
roommate Jerry loaned me.