I arrived back in Vladimir yesterday evening from my big trip to Ukraine. It was a wonderful trip, and we--the teacher I traveled with and I--saw three very different and very beautiful Ukrainian cities: Kiev, Lviv, and Odessa. I must say I liked Lviv the best, although all the cities were interesting and beautiful in their own way. The trip went pretty much without any problems, and we had a great time. Tonight is New Year's Eve, so I don't have much time to write a lot (guests have already arrived at my apartment), so I'll just post a few pictures of the trains we rode on. I have many more pictures and stories to come! 

We spent 5 nights on trains, and mostly they were nice enough. I didn't sleep all that well on most of the train trips because the trains were very hot, and I am too tall for the beds, and my legs stick out into the isle, so whenever someone walked by in the night, they ran into my feet. All but one of those trips we took in platskart, which is an open train car that is somewhat separated into areas that each have 6 beds (three on the bottom, three on top). So I think there are somewhere around 50 people in each car. The other trip we took in kupe, which is four beds in a compartment with a door that shuts. The beds are bigger, and, because the tickets in kupe cost more, the fellow travelers tend to be a bit more cultured (platskart can turn into a big beer-and-vodka bash sometimes). Anyway here are some pictures: 

1: Leaving Moscow for Kiev

2. Arriving in Lviv

3. Our train to Odessa

4. Leaving Odessa for Moscow (23 hours in that train car!) 

5. The inside of the Odessa-Moscow train

Чемоданное настроение (chemodannoye nastroeniye)--this is a cool Russian phrase that literally means "suitcase mood." This kind of mood happens before a big trip, and it is an mix of excitement and anticipation and maybe a little worry. Tomorrow I'm going to Ukraine with another one of the teachers, and I would say that--as I pack my suitcase--I'm in a suitcase mood. I've been looking forward to this trip; it's been the light at the end of the tunnel. The last two weeks of the semester were tough, with lots of preparation for exams, writing exams, grading exams, and finalizing grades, deciding who passed and failed, and tutoring students who missed a lot of class. Yesterday I didn't even have time to eat a proper lunch, and I don't skip lunch. Ever. 

So I'll be in Ukraine for the next 9 days. I return to Vladimir on December 30th--just in time to celebrate the New Year. I'll be sure to take lots of pictures on my trip! 

I'm worn out from a long week of exam grading and journal reading, so here is a video of driving in Russia. Russian drivers are, to say it nicely, creative and crazy. Russia has a very underdeveloped road system compared to most of the industrialized world, and there are way more cars than the poorly maintained roads can handle. Throw in some Russian fatalism and a whole lot of old cars and junky trucks and you have a recipe for lots of accidents. Check out this video (for Russian speakers, pardon the swearing--it isn't edited) The nasty accident at 4:00 when a car gets caught in a downed trolleybus wire happened in my neighborhood in Vladimir this fall; I remember going by it on the bus, and one of the other teachers witnessed it happen. Fortunately the driver walked away unharmed.

One of my classes gave me some great gifts today as an almost-last-day-of-class present. After everyone finished their written exams (which they hopefully passed), the group called me over and presented me with their gifts. They gave me a beautifully decorated bottle of vodka with a scene of Vladimir's Golden Gates, a big block of salo (I amused them several times in class with references to my like for the stuff), a bomber hat made out of rabbit fur and leather, and wool gloves and socks. They joked that their job was to outfit the American for winter. I really enjoyed this group of adults, and they always had great--and tricky--questions that made class interesting and tested my ability to explain our idiosyncratic language. Here is a picture of their gifts (the salo is in the freezer, so it's not in the picture).

Here are the promised Lenin statues and a few pictures of wintry Vladimir. We only made it to one of the Lenins because it was getting dark (the sun sets at about 4:30pm, and it's dark by 5:15), but we also found the first and maybe only statue of a dvornik in Russia. A dvornik is someone who cleans a dvor, which is a courtyard or the area around a building. The sweep the sidewalks, collect up beer and vodka bottles and other trash that accumulates in the dvor, and clean the podezd--the entry hall of an apartment building. They're out early in the morning with their twig brooms sprucing the place up, and mostly they are an unappreciated lot. So the statue to the dvornik is an interesting and rare find. Here are my pictures. The first is my street. The second is a view of one of Vladimir's main streets. The third is old Lenin himself on Lenin Square. The fourth and fifth are of one of the buildings of Vladimir State University, and the last is the dvornik statue. 

We had our Christmas party today at the American Home; it was a lot of fun. About 40 students showed up,  and the party lasted for over two hours. One of our teachers dressed up as Santa Claus, and we put on a skit (Russians love skits), danced, played games, sang Christmas carols, and decorated cookies. It was a little slice of America, and everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves. Here is a pictures of the whole teacher group at the end of our skit:

Tomorrow, I'm planning to go on an excursion around Vladimir to find and take pictures of Lenin statues with one of the other teachers. There are at least statues of the old guy scattered throughout the city, and he even still has a major avenue and a square named after him. Hopefully I'll get some good pictures.

I'll definitely have to dress warmly for this excursion because the high tomorrow is -1F, and the low is -11F. I went to the gym the other morning, and, when the trainer asked how I was, I answered cold and tired: I hadn't had my coffee yet, and I had just slipped and slip across the icy, unplowed parking lot to the gym. He chuckled and said that he's from Siberia that this kind of weather (it was probably like 10F that morning) is still warm. He told me to wait until it gets to be -40 (fun fact: the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales converge at -40)--then I can say it's cold.  

The semester here at the American Home is wrapping up, and it's hard to believe how fast it has gone by. It feels like I just started! We are doing final speaking tests today and tomorrow, and the final written exam is on Monday and Tuesday. I have definitely seen a lot of progress with my students, and there are some students now who know vastly more English than they did 4 months ago (although, when you start from almost nothing, it isn't too hard to make a big jump forward).

Every teacher, of course, has some bad students and--my least favorite--students who clearly have potential but who just don't put in the effort. I will definitely have some students fail, and I feel bad for them because, unlike other students who quit when it was obvious that they didn't have the time or the aptitude (I started with 63 students, and now I have 51), they have stuck it out until the end, and, unless they manage to pull off a miracle of last-minute exam preparation, there is little chance that they will pass the final. I'd like to give them an A for effort, but that won't get them very far in the next level, especially when they pose questions such as "Is drugstores on your neighborhood?" (asked during my speaking exam today).  

I has been below freezing for most all of the past few weeks, and it is really pretty and snowy here in Vladimir. Tonight a meteorologist was on the nightly news and said that central Russia--the middle of the European part of the country--should expect a cold, "Russian" winter with temperatures hovering around -20C (0F) through January.

That is great news for me; I really wanted to experience a real Russian winter, and it looks like I will get to. Actually, it is much better if the temperatures don't rise above freezing for a long time because everything gets really messy and muddy when the ground thaws out. And, to make things even worse, we had a mini-thaw last week, and it caused the whole city to turn into a giant puddle that then quickly froze into a solid sheet of ice. Walking anywhere became very dangerous because no one made any attempt to do anything about the ice that still covers every sidewalk and parking lot--salt is rarely used in Vladimir, and sidewalks, parking lots, and minor roads are not plowed or cleared in any way. Pretty much every one of my students has a story about falling, and one of our staff fell outside her apartment building and gave herself concussion. I haven't hit the ground yet, but there's plenty of winter left for that. Although, last weekend it finally snowed, so now the deadly ice is covered with a nice layer of snow, so it isn't so dangerous anymore.

I mentioned to a guy at the gym last week that it was cold outside, and he chuckled and said that it was just -8C (17F), and that cold is -40C (-40F)--something that he said usually happens in Vladimir at least for a day or two most winters. I'll have to bundle up! It could be worse though; in the Siberian city of Norilsk, it is already a balmy -33C (-27F), and the sun hasn't appeared for a few days.  

The train ride back to Vladimir from Moscow yesterday was one of the stranger experiences I have had in Russia. I boarded the 14:29 local train from Moscow's Kursk Station to Vladimir and found a bank of seats all to myself. This was an electrichka--a Russian suburban train. These are considered short-distance trains, although you can travel on them for several hours, and they are an uncomfortable, sometimes smelly, and not-very-pleasant way to get from place to place. You buy a ticket simply to get on the train; you don't get a reserved seat, and the train can be so packed that there aren't enough seats (I once traveled from Lukovitsi to Moscow--almost a three-hour trip--standing up because there were no seats). These trains are usually old and are pretty clunky and drafty, and a normal local train makes stops every few miles. 

Fortunately the train yesterday wasn't crowded, and I didn't have to share my bank of seats with anyone for very long. But there was a very drunk guy sitting a few rows ahead of me, and everyone in the car was giving him sidelong glances as he alternated between drunkenly cursing at the public service announcements and lying down on the bench seat. I didn't really pay him much attention and just listened to my music and looked out the window. 

But soon the conductors came around to check tickets. You have to keep your little receipt-like ticket until the end of your trip because conductors come around periodically to check and sell tickets. Some smaller train stations don't have ticket offices, so people who get on at those stations buy their tickets from the conductors. Also, it is very easy to jump fences or walk off the end of the platform to get around paying the fare at stations with ticket offices, so there is a always a whole crowd of people who try not to get caught by the conductors so they don't have to pay the fare. Anyway, when the conductors got to this drunk guy, he refused to show his ticket and started to curse out the conductors, who at first were being pretty nice. But soon they had had enough, and the train guards--big, burly guys who didn't look like someone I would want to mess with--sat the drunkard up and started to get firm with him. Then, one of the conductors lost her patience and grabbed the guy and dragged him into the area where the train doors are. 

The guy continued to be obstinate and was yelling all sorts of nasty words and daring the guards to do something, and pretty soon one of the guards lost his patience and punched the guy in the face. The guy was so drunk that he didn't seem to notice, and he shoved the guard back, which prompted the other guards to tackle him to start beating him into submission. 

At this point, the whole car's attention was focused on what was happening. An old woman started imploring the guards to stop, and several guys jumped up and helped get the situation under control. In the midst of all this chaos, someone paid the drunkard's fare, and, once he calmed down and the guards let him go, the conductors told him to sit back down, quietly finish his beer, and ride out the rest of his journey in peace, which is what he did. 

Maybe an hour later, a group a gypsies came into the car. I don't know if I have ever seen a gypsy in real life before, but this time it was obvious. I put my arm around my traveling bag and noticed that everyone else also grabbed hold of their belongings. No one made eye contact with the gypsies, and one lady firmly told a young gypsy boy to get away from her. They rode in our car for a few stops and then moved on, and, as far as I could tell, didn't steal anything or bother anyone. But I have been told many times by Russians to be extremely careful around gypsies and not under any circumstance to allow them to start a conversation with you. Russians claim that gypsies have the power to quickly hypnotize you and steal your things before you can think about it, and that certainly wasn't something I wanted to have happen. 

The rest of the ride was uneventful, although my feet froze from the frigid draft that was blowing across the floor during the whole trip. The heater on the train was very weak, and it was maybe 15F outside, so after three and a half hours of that, I was very happy to get back into a warm place. Here are a few pictures of electrichki: 

I had a really big weekend of traveling, and now I'm totally exhausted. My friend Slava had his birthday party in the little town of Zaraisk on Saturday night, and I headed there for the evening. The trouble is that it takes basically a full day to get to Zaraisk from Vladimir and basically a full day to get back. I left my apartment at 7:00am on Saturday morning, went to the bus station in Vladimir, and caught the 7:45 bus to Ryazan. I would normally travel through Moscow to get to Zaraisk, but I figured I would try something new and go a different way. The bus to Ryazan was a big old rattling thing, and it was packed when we left Vladimir. We stopped at pretty much every little bus stop along the 150-mile road between the two cities, and I did a lot of sleeping, but actually it was kind of a cool trip. Most of the country between these two cities is deep, dark forest with not a house or town anywhere around, and it was snowing the whole time. The forest was amazingly beautiful, and I was imagining what it was like to travel that road a hundred or two hundred years ago when, in place of a rusty old bus, people made the journey on a sleigh.

I arrived in Ryazan around 12:30, and I had a few hours to kill before my bus to Zaraisk left. So I found the historic kremlin in Ryazan and wandered around inside it and went to an exhibit about role that Ryazan played in the history of ancient Rus and how that role changed through the centuries (Ryazan was a much more important city than Moscow until about the 13th Century).

After my kremlin excursion, I caught the bus to Zaraisk and arrived around 6pm. The birthday celebration was already under way when I showed up, and it was a full-out Russian affair with a magnanimous spread of food, jovial company, singing and dancing, and lots of toasts, which of course were followed by shots of vodka.

After all that revelry, however, I had to hit the road early in order to get back to Vladimir at a reasonable time. I took the 9:00am bus to Moscow (I slept quite a bit on that bus), and then I wandered around some historic neighborhoods of central Moscow and got lunch before catching my train to Vladimir at 2:30pm. I finally got back to my apartment at 6:30pm. What a trip!

I have lots of funny stories about things that happened on my travels, but I'll save those for another day. Here are some pictures:

    

Winter break is coming up pretty soon, and I finally firmed up my travel plans for my vacation. I'm going with another teacher to Ukraine from December 23rd to December 30th. We'll head from Vladimir to Moscow on the 23rd, spend the afternoon in Moscow, and then board a train to Kiev at 4:46pm. We'll arrive in Kiev bright and early (4:18am), and spend Christmas Eve day there. Then we'll get on a train that evening at 10:20pm and go to Lviv, which is a city in western Ukraine. I can definitely say that I never expected that I would spend a Christmas Eve on a Ukrainian train, but life is funny like that.

We'll arrive in Lviv at 6:30am on Christmas (no presents waiting for us there). We'll spend the 25th and 26th in Lviv and then go back to Kiev late at night on the 26th. We'll spend the 27th in Kiev and then board a train at 10:05 that evening and go to Odessa. We'll arrive in Odessa at 7am and spend the whole day on the 28th and the morning of the 29th there. Then, we'll hop on a train in Odessa at 2:08pm and head back to Moscow. This last train ride will be quite long--23 hours--and we'll arrive in Moscow at 3:15pm on the 30th. Then we'll get on the express train back to Vladimir and be back in our quiet little city before midnight.

We originally planned to get back to Moscow a day earlier, and we didn't plan to go to Odessa, but the Russian Federal Migration Service (FMS) decided that we needed to spend another day traveling. The law says that all foreigners need to get registered with the FMS within seven days of arriving in Russia. The 29th is the last working day before the long winter holidays (the whole country is on holiday until January 6th or 7th), but we would arrive in Vladimir too late to get in line at the FMS office and get our registration completed. In short, it is mandatory to get registered on the 29th, but it is impossible to do so. So, to get around the bureaucratic mess, we decided to extend our trip by one day so that we will arrive on the 30th--a holiday--and we won't have to get registered until after the winter holidays. That extra day seemed like a perfect time to go see Odessa, which is supposed to be like a country within itself: They have a diverse culture and their own very distinct accent (some people would call it their own language).

I'm excited for this trip! We'll really get to see a lot of Ukraine in the span of just couple days. Although I have been told that Ukrainian trains are not pleasant to travel on, and my tickets for all the train travel in Ukraine cost less than $60. So we'll see how that turns out.... 

Here is a good Russian rock song by the legendary group Piknik. It's called "Purplish-Black".

On Saturday I gave a lecture at the American Home. Each teacher is supposed to give one lecture during the school year about some topic connected with American culture. I decided to indulge my city planning interests and gave my lecture about American suburbia. Russia just doesn't have the same kind of suburban sprawl that America does, and the suburbs are a huge part of the modern American experience (the majority of us call the suburbs home).

I started off my lecture by giving a simple definition of a suburb, and then I briefly talked about the history of suburbanization (a bunch of people in Vladimir, Russia, now know about Shaker Heights, Ohio, which I used as an example of early suburbs). After I gave my little description of what an American suburb looks like (complete with lots of pictures), I talked about what it is like to live in suburbia. This I boiled down to three things: cars, schools, and shopping. Everything depends on the car; schools are often the most important places in the community; and big-box and chain retail dominates. I then showed a lovely shot of some bland suburban strip and asked the other American teachers to guess where it was, underlining the point that the suburbs really are Anywhere, USA. I wrapped up by talking about the future of suburbia, which includes more diversity, minority-majority suburbs, increasing density, and less demand for energy-and -space hogging housing types.

I really had fun with the lecture, and I got a lot of good feedback from my students who were there, and that was my goal. I wanted to avoid a dry lecture, and I knew I had to keep my language understandable and not use jargon that would be incomprehensible even to the most advanced student. So I'm very happy with how it went. Here are a few pictures from my lecture. 

I also played this music video in the very beginning of the presentation to show a little slice of suburban life (and also because it's a great song): 

Riding the bus to and from work takes up about an hour of my day, and most of the time I don't really think about it and just look out the window or people watch or just zone out and listen to music. But sometimes it is very obvious that I'm riding a bus in a small, provincial Russian city. Tonight, I had one of the those experiences.

After a long and hectic day at work (journal and quiz grading, placement testing, a line of students coming to my office hours with all sorts of tricky questions) I walked out into the snowy night and caught the #25 bus back to lovely Dobroe (my not-so-pretty neighborhood). Even at 10pm the bus was pretty crowded, and I got one of the last--and least desirable--seats: a seat facing backwards and directly across from some seats facing forward. When there aren't many people on the bus, this group of four seats facing each other is a good choice for a tall guy like me because there is more leg room--as long as nobody sits in the seat across from me, that is. So tonight I plopped down in this uncomfortable seat, and at the next stop, two guys carrying a take-out bag from McDonalds and passing a canned gin and tonic among themselves sat across from me. My legs were jammed right up into the other guy's lap. Russians have a much less demanding concept of personal space than Americans, and even that understanding disappears when you're on a bus or a train.

So here I am with my legs intertwined with some guy's legs, getting whiffs of canned G&T, eavesdropping on other people's conversations, and looking aimlessly out the window when I notice that the bus hasn't moved in a while. We were sitting at a stoplight, but the light had probably gone through two or three cycles by that point. Then, the bus engine turned off, and that got everyone's attention. Apparently some lady couldn't produce her bus ticket for the conductor to check that she had paid her fare, and the conductor decided to take a stand and insist that the bus wasn't going anywhere until the woman paid her 14 rubles. Well, let me tell you, that got the whole rest of the packed bus pretty riled up. The two guys sipping on the G&T started coming up with all sorts of great names for the woman who wouldn't pay, and two drunks in the back of the bus started yelling at the driver, reminding him that Russian law prohibits parking near a traffic light and calling him insulting names for barnyard animals and female dogs. Other passengers shook their heads, told off the name callers, and told the woman to cough up her 45 cents. Someone else sardonically commented, "And this is Russia;" I'm assuming he didn't have any clue that there was an American on the bus.

After about two minutes of this, the cheap woman paid her fare, and we got back on our way. The two guys polished off their G&T and got off a few stops later, and I moved to a better seat when one opened up (my stop is at the end of the line). That was quite a bus ride. Oh, and I got a lucky ticket this morning; I haven't eaten it yet though....

Yesterday we finally had a good snow that covered the ground. It's about time: It's been cold and dreary for a while, and winter is so much better with a nice blanket of snow. The weather forecast is for more snow and temperatures in the 20s, so it seems like winter has really set in. Time to break out the boots! Here are two pictures from my walk to work yesterday morning. The first picture shows the landmark Golden Gates, which were built in 1146 (or something like that) and used to be the entrance to the city. The second picture is of the road leading up an old earth mound toward a water tower near the American Home.

We had a unique Thanksgiving celebration at the American Home on Saturday. We couldn't do any observation of the holiday last Thursday; it was a regular working day for us, and I made sure to jokingly remind my classes that I had never before worked on Thanksgiving. We celebrated instead on Saturday, and we did it big. We teachers made a Thanksgiving feast for 25, and it turned out amazing well, especially considering that none of us had ever cooked any Thanksgiving meal before. 

Some of the dishes were already prepared, and we had already done most of our shopping by the time Saturday rolled around. Speaking of shopping, we had to make some interesting improvisations because certain ingredients just don't exist here. It was impossible to find corn on the cob, and there is no such thing as cream of mushroom soup here in Russia. I looked long and hard for pimentos for my poor imitation of my mom's famous cream-cheese stuffed bread, and the closest thing I could find was a can of pretty hot pickled peppers. Also, boxed stuffing and canned pumpkin pie filling also don't exist here, so we had to make everything from scratch. 

Cooking began before 9:00am on Saturday, and we were working non-stop until the start of dinner at 4:30pm. It was worth it though; the meal was excellent. Our turkeys turned out perfectly--not tough and not undercooked. It must have been beginners' luck. Here are some pictures from our hectic day of cooking: 

Happy Thanksgiving! I have never worked on Thanksgiving before (and I guess I have never been anywhere besides northwest Ohio on this day either), but I'm thankful to have the opportunity to work here in Russia. I told my students today about the three Fs of Thanksgiving--food, family, and football. To commemorate the last F and to celebrate Michigan Week, I told my students about the big OSU-Michigan rivalry, and, to top it all off, they sang "We don't give a damn for the whole state of Michigan." It was a good way to mark the holiday, but, of course, I miss home a lot today. Eat an extra helping of turkey and cranberries for me! 

Peanut butter! I can't sum up in words how much I miss it; I will try anyway. One of the other teachers expressed to her students her dissatisfaction with the fact that you simply can't buy decent (or really any) peanut butter in Russia. This student happened to go to America a few weeks ago and remembered our frustration with the unavailability of this byproduct of George Washington Carver's best invention. We cracked into one of the jars today, and my mouth started watering uncontrollably when I smelled that fabulously peanuty aroma. There just isn't peanut butter or really any other peanut products in Russia, and, for someone who plowed through about a jar a week of PB in college (if I ever need triple bypass surgery you will know why), that is a huge problem. So, if anyone out there wants to pick me up a jar, I love the Simply Jiff crunchy peanut butter (little bit less far, one gram more protein per serving--ya I know that off the top of my head). Let me know, and I'll send you my mailing address. Maybe I'll send you back a jar of pickles; that's one thing where Russia has the US beat.  

The big dark is setting in. Vladimir is pretty far north; its latitude is 56N, whereas Cleveland, Ohio, is at 41N.  This means that we get a lot less daylight during the winter, and the sun is always at a strange slanting angle; even high noon isn't very bright. According to the weather forecast, right now sunrise is at 9:04am, and sunset is at 5:04pm. I got up today at 8:15, and it was still pitch black outside. The scary thing is that we still have over a month of decreasing daylight hours before we start heading toward spring. It doesn't help that it has been cloudy and grey and rainy for the past few weeks, and there is no sun in the forecast for the next week. Temperatures are hovering around freezing. 

It could be much worse though. I looked at the weather forecast for Norilsk, Russia, which is located far above the Arctic Circle in central Siberia. The high temperatures for the next week are around -5F, and the sun rises at noon and sets at 3:15pm. And the city looks like this: 

For more pictures of this far-northern city, check out this website (it's in Russian, but a picture is worth a thousand words). 

We teachers were invited today to give a talk (in English) at the Regional Library in Vladimir about the American college and university system. Three of us went, and we represented three very different universities (Ohio State University, Bates College, and the University of South Alabama). We gave an overview of each institution and talked about student life, athletics, cost (a big surprise to Russians was that state universities cost money--they're basically free in Russia), and what it is generally like to be a student at an American university. About 20 people showed up for this talk, and I think most of them understood most of what we said. There were a few people who know English very well, and they asked some good questions. 

Russian universities generally don't allow students to choose their own classes, so our listeners were interested to know that we basically have the freedom to take whatever courses interest us. I can't imagine myself enjoying being told what courses I had to take, and perusing the course catalog and scheduling classes was one of my favorite parts of college. If I had been told that I had to take this class, this class, and that class, I would never have stumbled across city and regional planning--which became my major--,and I most certainly wouldn't have had time to take all the Russian classes that I did. Academics and armchair quarterbacks can argue about the merits and pitfalls of our system of higher education, but the freedom it gives students to indulge in weird classes (boxing is without a doubt in my top five favorite classes I took in college) and to follow their interests is certainly one of its best features. 

One thing that I find fascinating from a city planning and sociology standpoint is the Russian attitude toward sidewalks. Russians--like most Europeans--are much more inclined to walk than Americans, and a 15 or 20 minute walk to get to work or school is considered perfectly normal. By contrast, American urban planning considers 1/4 mile--about a five-minute walk--the maximum distance people can be expected to walk to get from place to place. Russians also love to gulat (walk without a destination, stroll), and a real progulka can last an hour or two.

But, by US standards, the pedestrian infrastructure in many places in Russia is awful. My neighborhood has very few sidewalks, and the sidewalks that do exist frequently dead end or are built in such a way that they flood when it rains. So, there are many "unofficial" paths that have been cut into the grass, and these are fine when the ground is dry or frozen. But when it rains, these paths turn into giant mud mires. These paths are clearly very well worn, and they are used by thousands of people of day, but they remain unpaved and unimproved year after year. Now I understand why everyone stressed how important a good pair of sturdy shoes is in Russia--everything gets filthy and wet and muddy very quickly just from the walk to the bus stop.

Here is a song that I have been listening to lately. It's by the Russian singer Zemfira, and it's called "Spasibo," which means "thanks."

Here is the text (in Russian and English)

За песни и за то,что я не сплю 
спасибо...
За меня и за мою семью 
спасибо...

Этот голос улетает в небо...
В небо...

За эти слезы чистые,как снег 
спасибо...
За миллиарды человек 
спасибо...

Этот голос улетает в небо...
в небо...

Сегодня был неважный день,
завтра будет хороший...
спасибо...
спасибо...
спасибо...

For songs and for the fact that I'm not sleeping
Thank you
For me and for my family
Thank you

This voice will fly up to heaven 
to heaven

For those tears, clean as snow
Thank you
For billions of people
Thank you

This voice will fly up to heaven
to heaven 

Today was an inconsequential day
Tomorrow will be great
Thank you
Thank you
Thank you 

Wow I had a great, and very busy, weekend. I was all tired out from my trip to Moscow and Zaraisk, and so the two working days this past week were tough. After that little break, it was hard to get back into the rhythm of teaching again. But I had a big responsibility: teach the past simple tense (yes! now my students can talk about more than just habits and what is going on right now!).

On Friday, one of the other teachers and I made dinner for still another of the teachers and her host. The joke was that it was time for the men to cook and the women to watch. Dinner turned out really well--fish with onions and mushrooms cooked in a red wine reduction over pasta. In Russian tradition, we stayed up until the wee hours of the night talking in the kitchen. Then, on Saturday, after sleeping in until almost noon and putting in an hour and a half at the gym, I went with all the teachers and staff of the American Home to a concert by a folk dancing ensemble. It was really great, and it is hard to imagine the athleticism it takes to do some of those dances.

Today a guy I know from the gym invited me play rugby with a group of guys that gets together and plays every Sunday at a field in my neighborhood. I've never played rugby, and the temperature was somewhere in the 20s (Fahrenheit), but I decided it would make a good story at the very least. So I went, and actually I had a great time. Rugby is a rough game, but fortunately most of the time we did drills and practiced plays. This group is actually some sort of club, and the trainer who was overseeing the whole thing normally trains the championship team for Moscow Region, so he is quite good. I was the biggest guy there, so, despite my cluelessness (something that I could at least attribute to being a foreigner), everyone wanted me on their team. I, therefore, was part of second line in the scrums, which means that my head was shoved between two guys' legs, and my shoulders were pushing against their butts, moving the whole group forward into the opposing team. It's kind of strange when you think about it. But the whole thing was a lot of fun, and I'm sure I'll go play again.

When I got home, my host family had guests over, and so I immediately sat down, had a big bowl of steaming meaty soup (solyanka), some stuffed peppers, cheese, sausage, and--of course--vodka. That was a pleasant time, and it was fun to talk to their family's friends. After the party broke up (around 5pm), I headed to downtown Vladimir to get something from the American Home, and, once I got downtown, I called up one of my students to see what he was up to. It turns out he was only about a block away, so we quickly stopped by the AH and then went to play pool for a little bit. What a day! Now it's time to plan my lesson for tomorrow, do my Russian homework, and go to sleep. I'm beat! 

I just realized that it is now 11-11-12, which means that it is veterans' day in the USA. Today was militsia day here in Russia, which was a decently big holiday. My host dad is retired from the militsia (police), so people were calling him all day wishing him a good holiday. The relationship between the police and the people here in Russia differs considerably from the situation in the US. I wouldn't say that Americans love police, but we generally respect them and trust them to handle our problems. If someone stole my car or if I had a problem with someone, I wouldn't hesitate to call the police. Here in Russia, people often consider police to be mean or bad people, and they don't trust them to take care of their problems.

People, therefore, don't have much respect for the police. Maybe that lack of respect is warranted -there certainly is corruption and abuse of power among the police--but a lot of it is rooted in a long history of repression and the use of the police by the government to keep the people from exercising their will. And don't think that that is just a Soviet tradition--the police in tsarist Russia were the model for the Soviet police. Because of this long history, the police here aren't viewed as law enforcers but rather as oppressors who try to make life tough for regular people. Is this preconception accurate? Are the police in Russia worse than the police in America? That is hard to say, and there certainly are a lot of good people who serve in the Russian police. Regardless, I try to stay out of their way.

So here are some pictures of my trip this weekend. It was a great trip, but I didn't actually take that many pictures. The weather was pretty lousy--rainy, grey, and muddy--so we didn't do much walking around outside. The first few pictures of are Izmailovskii Park in Moscow, which is not far from where I lived in the Summer of 2011. I walked around in the park while I waited for the other Americans on Sunday. The green bottle is tarkhun, which is a Georgian drink made from licorice. I love the stuff. The next picture is the Elektrozavodskaya metro station--my favorite metro station in Moscow. The next two pictures are of my time in Zaraisk. In the first, I'm doing the Soviet pioneer salute, and the second is the view from the balcony of my friend's apartment. The next pictures are of Moscow. The last series of pictures are some of the pieces of art I saw at the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Enjoy.