10.9.11
I arrived in Moscow yesterday. My flight got in at one p.m., and it only took me about a half an hour to get through passport control and find my luggage. The weather was cloudy with light rain. I walked up to the blob of people in front of the passport control booths (I say 'blob' because people don't form lines very well in this country), looked out the window and took in the grey view and thought to myself, welcome back. I mean, I had wanted to see a few clouds, right? I always say that sunshine every day gets to be boring as hell, right? That's all true, but yesterday the sky couldn't have looked much drearier, and going from one meteorologic extreme too another wasn't going to ease the shock of returning to another life. Fortunately, I found my way into one of the smaller subblobs of people, got through control without any hassle, and as I walked through the gate, found my luggage right away on the carousel before me.
I got through customs, which was a much more steadily moving blob through another entryway, but couldn't find my ride right away. There were people holding up signs of all sorts, some with names of people on them, others with names of companies. There were also plenty of taxi drivers there, floating around like parasites waiting for their next victim. They weren't very tenacious though, you just had to say no, and they left you alone. So I followed the blob between two crowds of people holding signs and taxi drivers, but nobody had a Language Link sign out, nor a sign with my name. I stepped aside and found a place with a better view. It didn't take long before I found my guy. I think he hadn't been standing there before, when I first came through, but I was about a half and hour early, so I didn't blame him. I followed him to a Language Link eurowagon - one of those cars that looks like a box on wheels. He helped me put my things in the back, and we were off.
The traffic was horrible. The driver said that Friday afternoons are especially bad, I guess because people are coming into the city for the weekend. Had there been no traffic, we could've reached my flat in half an hour, as it was it took two. When we got there, the driver helped me bring my suitcases up to the apartment, handed me my keys and took off.
My room is not as impressive as the one I had in Rostov two years ago, but it has everything I need: a place to sleep and a place to cook. Right now I'm sitting at a desk of sorts. It's more like a cabinet with three large shelves. The middle one has one door which opens downwards, and, when fully open and parallel to the floor, makes for a good surface to write on. There's a large window to my left, but the view doesn't compare with what I had last year in Vladimir, which doesn't say much, because the view there was really nice. I'm only on the second floor here. I can see a narrow street below with two cars parked within my view. Someone just walked by with their dog. Across the street there's a row of tall trees that greatly obstruct my view, but behind them I can see the top of another apartment building, so I'm glad the trees are there. It looks like there might be some sort of park between the trees and the building behind. I see benches.
When I arrived yesterday, I wasn't sure whom I should contact about my arrival. I'm such an idiot that I forgot the slip of paper with a secratary's number on it which I was to call in case anything happened, like if they didn't let me on the plane in Houston because they didn't like the way my passport looked (this happened to me once in Frankfurt when I was carrying a pretty shabby passport), or if I couldn't find the driver at the airport, which could have happened had I not been a little patient. When I realized that I had left the number on a desk at home, I figured that in the worst case I'd stay at a hostel I know in Moscow, find an internet connection and contact my employer.
Come to think of it, staying in the hostel wouldn't have been the worst case. I couldn't help but think as I walked through customs and began to flow through two crowds of people on both sides, that that was the very spot of a suicide bombing attack last March. A few people had been killed and many had been injured at that spot where I walked yesterday. Some people were at the wrong place at the wrong time, and I was at the very same place at a much better time. Incidentally, tomorrow is the tenth aniversary of the attacks on the twin towers. For some reason, I felt that if there were going to be an attack of any sort around this time of year, it probably wouldn't be in Moscow, and hell, even if something bad were to happen, it's best not to think about it beforehand. You go through customs like you board a plane or get into a car. What am I suggesting? Ah hell, it's best not to think about it.

16.9.11
It's Friday. The first week of work is over, now I have my first three day weekend. It sounded too good to be true when I heard that I'd be working only four days a week. Now I understand how hard earned my three-day weekends are going to be. I have five groups of students so far, of them only one group of adults, three groups of teenagers, and one group of little devils. It looks like I'll get another group of adults sometime before November.
Teaching adults has been fun in the past, but the group I have now is at such a low level that the course won't be the most interesting for me. My most advanced group has eight teenagers. We reviewed seven verb tenses on the very first day, and it seems nobody had any serious problems. That's intimidating for me. What do I do with such an advanced group? We have a textbook to go by; it would be too easy to toss the schedule and breeze through it quickly, which is a big no no.
This situation calls for supplementary materials, which a teacher can find in other books, or, what I prefer, come up with their own. Implementing your own ideas is what makes teaching a creative activity. I suppose after a few years of going over the same textbook and the same topics over and over again teaching could become a routine job eventually, but even after two years of teaching English, and especially after a year off from the profession, the job is still extremely challenging. How do I explain a certain idea to my students who don't speak or understand English all that well? How do you present the concept, what examples are expecially illustrative, how can they be practiced effectively, so that it's understandable and interesting at the same time?
This is all the more challenging the lower the level of English proficiency and the younger the students. These two factors, proficiency and age, are brought to bear in my class of little devils. They're not that little, I'd say eleven years old on average. Lucky for me there is only one class of them, and my personal classroom doesn't fit many more than eight students. Of the eight, five or six are at the level I would expect, only one seems to neither know much English nor care much about learning, and he hasn't been as much of a disturbance as a student with little knowledge and motivation can potentially be. Many of them seem to like drawing. I'll have to use this...
I still would like to take advantage of the fact that I'm in Russia. I don't expect to learn much more Russian, escpecially in comparison to last year, when I had the luxury of not having to work and wasn't obligated to speak and think in English so much of the time, but this year I should at least practice all the stuff I have learned. One thing I really like about Russian culture is that people love reading. I've ridden the metro almost every day since my arrival, and it's uncanny how many passangers you find there reading. They read novels, textbooks, newspapers. They read paperback, hardback, or these new Amazon electronic readers, which spares a bookworm from having to lug books around with them; some of them don't read on the specialized electronic readers, but read stuff off their cell-phones just as well. I've become a metro reader myself, with my copy of Dostoevski's "Igrok" (The gambler(?)).
The love for reading is also reflected in the number of places books are sold and the average price of books. I've mentioned unfortunate things about Russia, things I've come to sarcastically call "Welcome to Russia" moments, such as the unability to form a line of people, the lack of drinking fountains, or even the danger of drinking tap water. But it's the bookstores that really do make me feel welcome. I have to say, going into Copperfields in Napa, California, seemingly the only bookstore left in a city of about one hundred thousand people, where I find that the books on sale sell for fifteen dollars and up, and a decent audio book costs thirty dollars, that is a classic "Welcome to America" moment. Maybe the prices are so high there because the bookstore has to compete with people buying books over the internet, which is possible because there's such an effective postal system, which can't be said about every other country (Welcome to Russia), but still I wonder if demand plays a factor in the price. And it's not the classic curve where higher demand means higher price. If books were too expensive over here, the government knows that there would be trouble, so they see to it that the prices stay low.
I studied some Spanish over the summer, and am interested in not dropping it entirely, so I went down to the House of Books on the New Arbat street, and found a one copy each in Spanish and Russian of "Alive in Wonderland." I haven't read so much yet. If I can finish it by Christmas, that would be success. More likely is that I won't get anywhere, but that's not the end of the world. I'll bring the books home in either case, and if I do get nowhere, I can pick up the project at a later time. I also bought a book by a Russian mystery writer, Akunin, the first in his series of novels featuring Erast Petrovic, a young detective. His books were much more difficult to read in the past. Now I feel as if some of my studies have finally sunk in. In a sense, the summer break from Russian may have done me some good.

17.9.11
OK, I think I've written my first entry of a new blog. Regarding the title, in lieu of something simpler like "Life in Moscow" I chose something more metaphoric. After all, it has been said that life is a marathon. For me, a new place or occupation often entails almost a new life entirely, whereby elements of previous lives come along for the ride. So here I am, at the beginning of the next competition with myself. How well can I run it? Will I be stronger at the end of the year, or will I have torn my teaching muscles to shreds? Slow and steady may not always win the race, but it will get you to the finish line in one piece, and may first impression of this leg in life is daunting enough that I feel I should refrain from pushing myself too much.
Incidentally, the Moscow marathon took place today. I looked into registering a few days ago. I had a good long run in the week before I left Napa, I thought I might take it easy on a half marathon if there were spots left, but it was already too late. I wonder if that's a bad omen?