It's so great to be back! I've been in the US for about ten days, and a lot of things have been surprising me. Here's a quick list:

-Friendly people. Americans have a reputation for being a friendly lot, and we are known for asking complete strangers how they're doing (this confuses Russians). Some Americans who've traveled to Russia return and find our smiley, neighborly way to be disingenuous and annoying, but I've been loving that fact that the cashier in the grocery store smiles and asks if you found everything, that strangers in parks stop and chat about coyote sightings, that airport security workers greet you with a "how are you."  I don't find it fake; it's just people being nice to each other. I've seen the alternative, and I much prefer the American way.

-Teeth. I haven't seen a single gold tooth since I've been back. I also haven't been bowled over by anyone's breath of death. Thank you American dental care.

-Flavorful food. Russian food is hearty and can be very good. It, however, is not bursting with vivid flavors. I've been savoring the rich variety of cuisine that we Americans have at our disposal. I had a burrito the other day from Ohio City Burrito--one of my favorite lunch places in Cleveland--and my taste buds were rejoicing at combinations of piquant flavors they hadn't experienced in almost two years. I've got to go to an Indian restaurant soon--it's been far too long.

--Roads and driving. I was a bit worried that I would forgot how to drive, but my fears were unfounded. Driving came right back, and I've done plenty of city and highway driving (I put 450 miles on the car in the last week). Even after one of the harshest winters in recent memory, Ohio's roads are in excellent shape compared to what Russia calls roads, and our drivers are so much better behaved. I've been tempted to pull Russian driving moves and squeeze around cars at intersections or overtake slow-movers on curves, but I've held back. And that's probably for the best.

The one thing I do miss right now is tvorog (farmer's cheese). It is high in protein and was my normal bedtime snack. You can find it in every Russian grocery store, but it's nowhere to be found here. I guess I could make my own, but that's a hassle. I'm trying to convince myself to like cottage cheese instead. We'll see how this goes.   

The busy teacher is busily at work. When these last exams are graded, my work as a teacher here in Vladimir is pretty much complete. Time has flown!

I found this ancient mineral-water vending machine in the basement of the business institute we use to hold some of our overflow classes. I have a feeling this hasn't served anyone since the Soviet Union.

Yesterday, one of my students invited another teacher and me to his dacha outside of town. We were lucky enough to get a warm, sunny day (around 70F yesterday), and so we hung out outside and grilled. My student has a gorgeous, large property, and he has built several log-cabin-style buildings. He's got a big garden, chickens, and beehives--it's a regular country estate. In the evening, we went to the banya, where we got the full--or, as my student called it, the textbook--banya experience, complete with whipping with branches and lots of aromatic herbs. Russians take the banya very seriously, and it is believed that steaming regularly in a banya is a cure for allsorts of ailments. I can't attest to the banya's long-term health benefits, but I sure felt great afterward. Here are a few pictures:

The chicken coop

They're building a new banya using some very old-school techniques. This is flax and moss used as chinking between the logs. 

The new banya will be really nice. 

Lunchtime 

That's a bottle of homemade vodka--it tasted a lot better than the stuff they sell in stores.

 A very Russian scene 

Having some tea from a wood-fired samovar 

Getting my banya on

Summer is approaching (or at least it should be), and summer in Russia is a special time. It's light from 4am to midnight, and people take full advantage of the brief respite from the cold and snow. Everyone wants to be outside as much as possible, and people go to their dachas or just hang out in parks in the cities. Summer here is really unique, and I'm sad that I'll miss it.

Here's a song that really reminds me of summer in Russia. It's called Жить в Кайф (roughly "Live in Bliss") by the Belorussian artist Max Korzh. Max is a year older than me, and he makes a lot of pop hip-hop songs that relate to life for average young Russians. This song tells Max's own story of choosing to drop out of university to chase his dream of making music, and I really like the song's themes of freedom and dreams. Dreams are very important to Russians--I've been asked many times by students and just people I meet, "What is your dream?" which is not an easy question to answer on the spot. I remember the professor in a Russian culture class at Ohio State saying that Americans have plans; Russians have dreams. When I listen to this song, I feel the unbridled thrill of throwing caution to the wind and chasing a dream. See what you think.

I've been in Vladimir for almost two years, and last night was the first time someone gave me flak for not being Russian. We had a party for our adult students at an event hall near the American Home, and then most of the teachers and about ten students went to a nice restaurant with a karaoke bar in the center of town. We ordered some food and drinks and sang a few songs (no mastery from me this time) and were just hanging out. We had been there for a while when the lady at the table in front of us turned around and gave us the one-finger salute. We looked at her incredulously, and I said, "Same to you." She did this a few more times. Her complaint was that we were talking while her husband was singing, but everyone in the place was talking--it's a bar, after all. 

Things escalated pretty fast. Her husband finished his song, threw down the microphone, and stormed over to our table. He said that he shouldn't have to listen to people speaking a foreign language in his country and demanded that we leave. His wife chimed in and claimed that we were being discourteous and exclaimed that our parents didn't raise us right. Well, that was about as much as I was going to listen to. I stayed sitting down, but I challenged them to say what we had done wrong exactly ("Объясните мне--что мы здесь делаем неправильно") and told them if they wanted a quiet concert they should have gone to a theater ("хотели концерт сходили бы в театр"). 

By this time the whole bar was watching us. It looked like things might turn ugly in a hurry: The guy was obviously gearing up for a fight, and he was saying incendiary things like "Россия для русских" (Russia is for Russians). We were sitting at a different table from the main bulk of our group, and so it looked like there were only three of us. Pretty soon, however, the guys--Russian and American--from the other table came up and made their presence known. The two rabble-rousers now saw how outnumbered they were, and the bouncer made it clear that it was time for them to leave. The situation ended without a fight, and we stayed at the bar for a little while longer. 

But that made me so mad. I'm normally a calm person, but there are some things I won't tolerate, and listening to some primped-up 30-something lady say "get the hell out of here Yankees" while her water-heater-build husband spews nationalist garbage is one of those things. The support my Russian friends gave me made me feel better--they said they were embarrassed by those people and that they were with me one hundred percent--but I was still all tense and angry for the rest of the night. 

The situation bothered me so much because it was the first time in my life that I've been accosted not for something I did but simply for who I am. Once I got home, I did some reflecting and realized that last night was an important lesson--it showed another side of the immigrant experience. Immigrants aren't always welcomed with open arms and smiles like we usually are here in Vladimir, and the experience of being a foreigner would be incomplete without seeing the other side of the coin. Also, I reflected on the fact that the Uzbek cabby who drove us home or the Angolan university student who attends the American Home probably face this sort of situation with regularity. As a tall, white male from the United States, I'm not the recipient of much discrimination, and so it's instructive to feel how lousy and aggravating it is. Most people who face discrimination also don't have a whole bar to back them up and usually have to shut up and take it, which must feel incredibly dehumanizing. 

This situation further reinforced my feeling that it's time to go back home. We haven't had any problems related to the situation in Ukraine, but there's been a general upswing in Russian patriotism verging on nationalism, and that has produced an equal and opposite reaction in me. I've been much more on edge and defensive lately, ready to call anyone out on the smallest slight against America. I shouldn't let that sort of stuff affect me, but it does, and for my own sanity and well-being I need to remove myself from the situation. Last night was instructive, and I'm glad that it happened with only a little more than two weeks left in my time here in Russia.    

I try to stay up-to-date on news in the world of urban planning, and I came across an interesting article this morning. It's in The Atlantic Cities blog--one of my favorite sources for planning news--and the article looks at a recent analysis of walkability and access to food in American cities. The analysis considered how many Americans live within a five-minute walk of a store selling quality food. It isn't surprising that very few Americans can take a quick stroll to a store, and those Americans mostly live in major urban centers like New York and San Francisco. The worst major cities included such towns as Indianapolis and Charlotte, where only five percent of residents live within a walkable distance from a grocery store. I fear my native Cleveland wouldn't score much better. Here's the article: In the U.S., a Quick Walk to the Store Is a Rare Thing Indeed

Vladimir, on the other hand, would actually score very well. There's a store right next to my apartment building, and there are many stores and two bus stops within a five-minute walk. That's compact urbanism at work. That said, many Americans would be disappointed at what they'd find at those stores. I remember the first time I went into a Russian grocery store--I realized that there isn't much of anything appealing on all those shelves. At the nearest grocery store--a place called Pyatyorichka--you'll find an isle devoted to little candies, an isle with bleach-white pasta and other cheap grains, a huge alcohol section, and a freezer full of pelmeni and other frozen foods. There's a small case of meat (often dangerously close to the expiration date), a larger case full of sausages (probably a safer, if less healthy, bet), and a section with vegetables. Those vegetables are really hit-or-miss: The only safe options are potatoes, onions, and carrots; the peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes are often all mushy and shriveled. My roommate have invented a new slogan for that grocery store: "Pyatyorichka--where we couldn't care less."

Griping aside, it is really nice to have a place close by when I need some milk or eggs or something else basic. At my house in America, the nearest store is a five-minute drive away, and, while I love driving, it's nicer and healthier to be able to take a little walk and get what I need instead of burning fossil fuel and risking getting hit by a truck out on the roads.    

I've always loved running, and, although I've taken a break from long-distance running in the past few years to focus more on bodybuilding, long runs hold a special place in my heart. Lately distance running has been calling my name, so I decided to train for the Blossom Time run, a five-mile run in my hometown on Memorial Day. I've been running a few times a week to build up my base again, and that means I've been running around my neighborhood, which can be a funny experience. 

Running for fitness is a lot common in Russia than in the US, although you do occasionally see runners out pounding the pavement (there's a small cadre of runners in my neighborhood). The sidewalks in my neighborhood are very wide (maybe about ten feet in width), so there's plenty of room for runners and walkers to mix, but people are often surprised to see someone out running, and I've definitely gotten some strange looks. Also, Russians are, on the whole, deathly afraid of cold, so people wear winter coats and hats on 55-degree, sunny days, and I got some really disapproving glares from old ladies when I went running on one of the few warm days we've had. In fact, one lady clucked at me and muttered, "Не холодно, что ли?" (not cold, is it?), and another looked at my short sleeves and athletic pants and said, "Рано еще" (it's too early). 

I love to have music when I'm running, and I feel like Russian rock is ideal for running around my neighborhood of Soviet apartment blocks. Here's a song from my running playlist by the legendary rock group Ariya. It's called Раскачаем этот мир (we rock this world), and it definitely is a great pump-up song. See what you think. 

 

The penny gets a bad rap. People say the little copper coin is worthless, a drag on the economy, and a waste of time and effort. Admittedly, the penny is pretty worthless, but there are far more worthless coins in the world. The Russian kopeck is a great example.

At current exchange rates, the kopeck is worth .02 cents, which is pretty much nothing. Russia stopped making 1-kopeck and 5-kopeck coins a few years ago, but they still make 10- and 50-kopeck coins. Prices at stores are rounded off to the nearest 10 kopecks, and so you can build up a pretty good collection of worthless coins pretty quickly.

This leads to the kopeck economy. No one wants kopecks, so everyone tries to unload them whenever possible. The most obvious target is the bus conductor, and I usually make at least one of my 16 rubles for the bus fare out of kopecks. But bus conductors grumble a lot when you give them a big handful of kopecks, and, although they technically have to take them, sometimes they refuse. So the big kopeck shuffle continues.

And so begins my last month in Vladimir. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to get back to the USA. I'm ready to get back--actually, let me restate that--every fiber of my body is longing to go back home and see the people and places that I love. This has been like a great and very long vacation, and one sign of a successful vacation is being ready to get back to real life by the end of the trip.

But I did get a little pang of emotion when I flipped over the page of my calendar last night. I've been in Russia for quite a while--this is my twentieth month here--and I've gotten pretty used to the pace, rhythm, and customs of life here. I know that a lot of things about America will surprise me when I get back; I'll look at my own culture through a new lens. For example, a group of American college kids came to Vladimir a few weeks ago on an alternative spring break program, and I couldn't help noticing how sloppily they were dressed--baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirts, and beat-up tennis shoes. Vladimir isn't exactly Rome, but people here care about how they dress and always want to put their best foot forward. It will be strange to go back to the land of hoodies and white tennis shoes.

Before I go, though, I have a lot of people I need to say goodbye to. Russians are very keen on gift-giving, dramatic partings, and well-wishing, so I've been making a list of people to visit and gifts to buy. I looks like my April will involve a lot of parties and pictures, and that is definitely the most по-русски way to leave. 

Here's another one for the Lada taxi playlist. It's called Корабли (ships), and it's a pretty standard Russian pop love song. The chorus goes (it sounds more poetic in Russian): 

Ship depart toward the sunset

Give me your hand to touch

I'll stay here to wait for you

Ship leave in order to come back

Russians are rather tough to surprise about a lot of things. I realized this when I was riding a packed bus back to my neighborhood on a Saturday night with another one of the teachers, who was holding a toilet plunger. He was having some problems with the plumbing in his apartment and needed to borrow the American Home plunger. We though about getting a taxi so as not to been seen carrying such a thing on a crowded bus, but then his Russian girlfriend assured us that no one would find that overly strange.

That got me reflecting on all the strange things I've seen people carrying here in Vladimir. Building materials and car parts are the most commonly carried weird things. People get onto the bus with all sorts of wallpapers, moldings, and tools. The other day, a guy got onto the bus with two windshield wipers in his hands, and I saw someone lugging an exhaust manifold and a big muffler down the street just yesterday. The other day, a guy jammed up next to me on the bus had a big, grimy, black rubber o-ring seal for something that I really hoped wasn't plumbing-related.

Another strange thing you'll see is all kinds of food items. I remember seeing an old woman struggling to get off a trolleybus drop a massive fish (at least two feet long), completely unwrapped, onto the bus floor. Or I've seen many people carrying big jars of all sorts of pickled things on the bus. And, come to think of it, I've been part of this weird phenomenon--I lugged two cooked turkeys into the city center by bus when we had our Thanksgiving celebration.

As a middle class slowly arises in Russia, people are buying cars, but still a large percentage of Russians don't have access to a car, so people make due using public transportation. That results in seeing strange things like someone carrying a vacuum cleaner on a bus (seen it) or my favorite--gruff-looking old guys decked out in winter gear carrying all the tools for ice fishing on the bus (those guys usually smell terrible, too). And the cool thing is that people here are surprisingly nonchalant about it; they understand your situation.   

When you study a foreign language, you develop a mental list of favorite words. Maybe these words sound cool, or they have unique, difficult-to-capture meanings. One of my favorite Russian words is кстати (kstati). First of all, it's fun to say--that instantaneous transition from a "k" to an "st" forces my English-speaker tongue to do things it just wasn't designed to do. And кстати has a cool meaning: It's a parenthesis, meaning that it is used to lead in to a new topic of conversation. It's roughly translated as "by the way."

I love this word because something interesting always follows it--some new turn of conversation, some unexpected question, perhaps an invitation. It's a bright word that promises change and spontaneity. It's quick and fun to say--what a cool word.  

Just when we though winter was over, Vladimir got hit with a big snow storm yesterday and today. We went from brown and muddy to winter wonderland in no time, and, hey, I can't complain. It might be my last Russian snow. And it brings out what is so endearing about Russian winter--people love it, and they're calm about it. We got about three inches, which is kind of a paltry amount for a snowbelter like me, but it's enough for folks to break out the sleigh-strollers (they're like strollers, only they have runners instead of wheels). Also, a saw a group of teenage guys writing words in the snow near the Golden Gates. Whereas in the U.S. a group of guys would probably make some lewd shapes in the snow, these guys had made a giant heart and were working on writing in giant letters "Я люблю тебя" (I love you). How nice. Oh, and the Golden Gates looked stunning in the sifting snow.  

Spring has brought with it a lot of potholes and mud on Vladimir's roads and sidewalks. This one opened up the other day near my apartment. It's about three feet deep, so watch your step. 

We just had a little spring break because of International Women's Day (March 8), which is not really a very international holiday but is a really big deal in Russia. On Monday two other teachers and I went to help a friend of our director on his farm not far from Vladimir. This guy clearly has a lot of money and bought 170 acres of land to use as an area to to train hunting dogs (his hobby/business) and to relax. He has a lot of animals out there, including sheep, chickens, geese, and wild boars. The boars are in two giant enclosures and are used to train dogs. He also has a really nice guesthouse and is building a sauna and another guest house. Nice place.

We didn't really do much work--in his words, "Why would I have you guys work--today is a holiday!" We got a tour of his property and even got to go into the enclosure with the wild boars--he told us to climb a tree if they charged at us. He has a guy from Uzbekistan who works as a groundskeeper there, and this Uzbek guy made us some amazing lamb plov over an open fire. It was the best I've ever had. Also we had some awesome grilled sashlyk (kebabs). Of course, going "into nature," as the Russians would say, doesn't happen without vodka, so we had some of that too.

It was great to get out of the city for a little bit, and spring is beginning to spring here, so all the snow is melting and the birds are singing. Here are a few pictures from out day in the forest:

The sign says "Danger! Wild animals. Don't jump the fence" 

  

Americans always get a bad rap for being uninformed. And, to be honest, we often deserve it: The average American is woefully clueless about current events. Staying informed has become shorthand for checking CNN's top stories on your Iphone while waiting at a red light. That's bad--democracy demands an informed citizenry. We need to do better, America.

But the average Russian isn't any more informed. Now, Russians generally know more about world events (especially European), but that is understandable, given that those events often directly impact Russia. How does the average Russian get his or her news? Newspapers and radio exist, but by and far the most popular news source is television. There are three or four national news channels, and they all are to some degree state-controlled. For an American, at first these news programs seem to be a breath of fresh air: They are much more like The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer than CNN. These programs feature a host and short segments by reporters; there isn't any arguing or competition to bring you the latest. It's just the news.

But then you start to realize that the content, the whole way of doing news is totally different. The news takes on an almost didactic tone--this is what you should know, should believe. Also, the reporting can be almost laughable: Biases are extremely evident; stories aren't followed up on; offhand statements by loosely affiliated people are taken as official fact; and all sorts of cheap, 19-Action-News-at-11-style gimmicks are used (following people to bathroom, chasing down people in their cars to get an interview). More alarming, no attempt is made to show both sides of a story in an even light. If both sides are shown, one side is presented as correct while the other is openly criticized, leaving no doubt what the viewer is supposed to think. This tactic is employed for local stories and for national--and international--ones.

So your average Russian, who watches state TV news every evening in his or her little Soviet apartment kitchen, gets a very distilled version of current events with all the necessary conclusions already drawn. This is what is so scary to me about the Ukraine crisis. Americans and people in western European countries have a smorgasbord of news sources available, most all of which abide by high standards of journalism and present the facts in a more-or-less unbiased manner, allowing the individual to make his or her own decisions.

That doesn't exist in Russia. There is a small independent media, but the vast majority of the country doesn't use it, drawing information from just one or two state-controlled sources. People here in Russia are being fed a very biased, very alarming version of events that has fomented a lot of ill will toward the West. People are angry and aren't going to sit by and watch Ukraine leave Russia's sphere of influence. They have been whipped into a frenzy by news media that doubles as a mouthpiece of state politics. They know--and believe--what they're supposed to. It's still a very Soviet system of information delivery, and now we get to witness first-hand where this will lead. Let's hope cooler heads prevail. 

You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that some really big things are happening in Ukraine right now. The US media is giving the situation good coverage, but Ukraine is pretty much the only topic of discussion on the news here in Russia. People are obsessed with the events in Ukraine, and it's understandable why: Russia and Ukraine have a long history together, and most people in Russia have friends and family in Ukraine. This is a mini-revolution happening right at Russia's doorstep. 

The difference between Russian and Western news coverage of Ukraine is striking. Western sources report that demonstrators seized Maidan after Yanukovich snubbed the EU in favor of closer ties with Russia and that those demonstrators were killed by Yanukovich's police, proving that Yanukovich and his policies didn't represent the interests of the Ukrainian people. To Western eyes, Yanukovich's ouster was a victory for the Ukrainian people and a chance for Ukraine's nascent democracy to flower. Russia's aggression and seizure of the Crimea is portrayed as a violation of international law and proof of Russia's malicious desire to maintain its Soviet sphere of influence. 

Russian media shows a very different picture. Those demonstrators on Maidan were hired by the EU and US and in no way represented what Ukrainians want. The demonstrators were mostly criminals and hooligans who ruthlessly murdered defenseless policemen who were prevented by cowardly Yanukovich (who was afraid of what the West would say if he allowed the police to use force against the demonstrators) from taking steps to defend themselves and restore order in the center of Kiev. The protests themselves were criminal and should have been broken up immediately, allowing the government and the people of Ukraine to work. Any grievances should have been solved through political channels, not demonstration. 

The Russian media has far harsher words for what has happened in the past two weeks. According to Russia, the Ukrainian parliament had no right to fire the democratically elected president--that's not democracy. The people of real Ukraine (the eastern, Russian-speaking part of the country) don't want this change that has forcefully imposed on them by the West. Bring up the fact that western Ukraine strongly supports these new developments and you'll hear that western Ukraine, and the city of Lviv especially, has always been against Russia and is mostly made of rebels and traitors (parts of western Ukraine collaborated with the Nazis during WWII). As for the developments in the Crimea, Russians believe that territory is really part of Russia and was mistakenly given away during the Soviet Union, so Russia has a right--a duty really--to protect the ethnic Russians who live there. 

The long and the short of it is that Russians are hearing a totally different version of events than people in the West hear. As with everything, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Also, having been to Ukraine, I can appreciate how complex that country is. Lviv is a totally different city than Odessa: Lviv is solidly European, whereas Odessa is Russian. The next few weeks will be very interesting, to say the least. 

Here's a picture of me in Lviv during my trip to Ukraine last year. 

Recently we had a little electrical problem in our Soviet apartment. The kitchen light, which had been flickering for months, finally quit working altogether. I tried changing the bulb, but that didn't help the situation. I could see that one of the contacts in the socket was loose, but my roommate and I couldn't remember whether the light switch was in the on position when it was up or down (all the switches in the apartment are different), and I wasn't willing to stick a screwdriver into the socket until I knew for sure whether I would survive the experience. We decided it was time to call the landlady. In the meantime, I took a sconce off the wall in the hallway and used a piece of wire to fix it to the gas pipe in the kitchen, giving us some very classy bare-bulb illumination.

Our landlady, who is a friend of one of the security guards at my work, and her husband came and tried to fix the light fixture, but they also couldn't get it to work. They left us a nice little table lamp and called an electrician. Our landlady called me and said she had prepaid the electrician and that he would arrive sometime between nine and eleven on Wednesday morning.

At 8:30 on Wednesday morning the doorbell rang--the electrician had showed up early. I tried to let him in, but the button to open the main stairwell door often doesn't work, and so the electrician couldn't get in. Within a few minutes, our landlady called, saying the electrician was waiting outside. I managed to get the door open on the third attempt, and, after chiding me for not letting him in, the electrician, an older guy in camouflage gear, shuffled in. I showed him our non-working light fixture. I was still half asleep, and so when he asked me if we had changed the bulb, I responded that I didn't know, to which he gave me a look of disapproval. Oops. After deducing that we had, in fact, tried to change the bulb, he asked whether the switch worked, and then, without waiting for me to rely, decided to test it himself. Good decision--I hadn't had any coffee yet, and so I wasn't really up to the task of dealing with an electrician in Russian.

In about five minutes he fixed the light (the contact was loose) and left after demonstrating that I owed him no money (he probably thought I spoke no Russian). The cost for this whole affair? 50 rubles, which converts to the whopping total of $1.38. Not bad.

Last night we watched the USA-Canada hockey game after work. The result was unfortunate, but we decided not to let that spoil our night and went to a karaoke bar. Karaoke is hugely popular in Russia, and the crowd at the place we went to consists mostly of a bunch of 30-somethings who get rather drunk, so it doesn't really matter how well you sing; someone will always sing worse than you. I sang a Russian song called Пора домой (time to go home) and collaborated with another teacher to do a ridiculous rendition of "Call me Maybe." Here's the Russian song I sang:

Teaching in Russia has several distinct advantages, and one of them is that students love to give their teacher gifts. I got a really crazy gift earlier this week from one of my students. In a previous class, we did an exercise that asked students whether they preferred snakes or spiders. Typical second-semester ESL stuff. One of my students asked whether I like snakes, to which I relied that I think snakes are cool. He told me that he would bring something in for me next class.

The next class he gives me one of the strangest/coolest gifts I've ever gotten. He presented me with a bottle of vodka that has a snake inside. It's from China, and so the description of exactly what's in the bottle is almost incomprehensible (terrible translation), but I gather that there's a snake a bunch of herbs and berries steeping in vodka. Yummy. I'll definitely have to try it out.

This Olympic season has had me thinking about goals and achievement, and I got to thinking about my goals with the Russian language. People have often asked me why I study Russian, and, honestly, I have only rarely articulated my goals--mainly because I wasn't exactly sure of them. I've always enjoyed studying Russian, and that was enough. I'm not one to set a numerical or time goal on something like the study of a language. As long as it's fun, I'll keep at it. That's been my story with Russian. I can confidently call myself fluent in Russian; of course there are words I don't know, and I make mistakes from time to time, but I'm at a level where I can freely converse with anyone about any topic.

I've been having a bit of angst lately about my study of Russian. I get three hours of Russian language classes each week. Those hours, however, are the worst hours of my week. I get virtually nothing of benefit from my classes, and there are a number of reasons for that, the biggest of which being a mismatch in goals between my teacher and I. My teacher is a very nice lady who is passionate about Russian literature and lives in a world where Pushkin-style language is still used. She is totally out of touch with modern slang and cringes at the very notion of a swear word. I, on the other hand, love the slangy recesses of the Russian language and don't have much interest in 150-year-old literature. That mismatch makes for some pretty painfully boring lessons.

I've been beating myself up for my lack of interest in doing my Russian homework (my teacher has just given up expecting me to read any poetry), and I've been feeling a bit melancholy about leaving behind Russia and the possibility to improve my Russian.

But then today I had a realization. I've reached my goal. Today I went ice skating with my teenage class. We spoke exclusively Russian, peppered with slang and swearing. We talked about everything for music to sports to school to girls. That was what I wanted. I was always most interested in being about to communicate with regular Russians my age--my peers. I have always had the most fun listening to Russian rap, rock, and pop songs and trying to understand them; that's how I learned Russian. I've never been much interested in Russian literature (I can understand English perfectly--why would I torture myself reading some dry text in a foreign language and be unable to appreciate the true intricacies of the word choice, double meaning, and poetry? Besides, Russian punctuation bothers me on a deep level). I'm not planning to work in Russia--it's not my home country, and while being a foreigner is an intensely rewarding and challenging experience, it's not a lifestyle for me. Home is calling, and I'm excited to get back and start a new chapter in my life. I've always just wanted to speak with young Russians, to take a glimpse into the life of my peers who were born on the other side of the world. That's all.

And now, as I stand in my Soviet apartment and chat on Vkontake (the Russian Facebook) with my students, I realize that I've completed the journey I began 11 years ago when Mrs. Subbotin wrote Здравствуйте on the board of a classroom at Kenston Middle School. I've reached my goal. Sure, there is always room for improvement, and I'll continue to strive to learn more words and phrases that will help me do what I love--talk to Russians--but I'm not going to stress about not being interested in Derzhavin's poetry or Dovlatov's short stories (not to mention my complete disinterest in reading War and Peace). Now, there is a time and a place for literature, and I see myself getting interested in that later, but that time isn't now. Pushkin's been dead for a long time, and his stuff will be there for much longer, but my chance to meet and talk with young Russians is approaching its end. I've got a great non-fiction book--in English, thank you very much--about the Vietnam war, and, when I have spare time, that's what I'm going to read. Maybe I'll even get back to reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (that book has been sitting half read for quite some time now). And I'm going to revel in the fact that I've reached--and even exceeded--my goals with Russian.   

It's almost time for the 2014 Olympics, and Russia is beaming with pride. These games are a big source of enthusiasm and national pride for Russians, and the games are being drummed up with near-Soviet vigor. Politicians evoke the Olympics in speeches; street banners promote the games; and the games are invoked at all sporting events. Last weekend, I went with a few of my students to a cross-country skiing competition at a Vladimir park. Everything had an Olympic theme.

I watched most of the opening ceremony (I was teaching for the first hour of the ceremony), and it was certainly impressive. With all the controversy and negativity surrounding the games, here's to hoping that everything goes well and that the right people--the athletes--make the news.

Here are a few pictures of the skiing event from last weekend. It was called Лыжнья Россия (Skiing Russia), and the event in Vladimir was one of hundreds around the country. It was pretty cold that day, so we didn't stay long, but it was fun to watch some really good skiers do their thing.

On my very last day in Rome, I decided to go to Trastevere. My guide in the Forum recommended it as Rome's most authentic neighborhood--the place where Romans go to stroll. Unfortunately it was raining that day, which made for somewhat unpleasant strolling, but I enjoyed Trastevere's winding streets nonetheless. I got lunch at a pizzeria that could very well have been in Cleveland--it was decorated with rock posters and had a bare-florescent-bulb charm that would fit in well in the Forest City. The broccoli-cheese pizza I got was spectacular.

I then crossed the Tiber and entered the area near Rome's former Jewish ghetto, which today is full of expensive shops and cafes. I found an open-air market, and I bought some insanely potent truffle-infused olive oil. Then I made my way back to the Pantheon and got an espresso at a street cafe and just took in the scene. The rain-glazed square was bustling with tourists, and I was reflecting on a great trip. It was a good way to end.

My flights back to Moscow were uneventful, and the plane from Vienna to Moscow was only maybe a third full. There was a little complication with my visa--I wasn't let on the plane initially and had to wait while a security officer entered my information into his computer to verify that I was legally allowed to return to Russia--and all the while I was thinking how much I didn't want to go back. Cold, grey, unfriendly, bland Russia just didn't seem very appealing after the feast that was Rome.

But I'm very happy that I got on that plane. I have some great classes; a teacher from last year is back for this semester, which has made for a lot more fun in and out of the office; and I'm enjoying my last few months here in Vladimir. It's amazing how the time has flown. And, pitiful salary notwithstanding, my job here has enriched me so much; my trip to Rome is just the icing on the cake.

  

My next day in Rome was my last full day. I started off with a tour of the Roman Forum. Now, this wasn't just any tour. My Christmas present was a private tour with a guide arranged through the site Tours by Locals. When my family visited Russia last summer, we had a Tours-by-Locals guide in Peterhoff, and it was an incredibly valuable experience. The Roman Forum is an impressive site, but you really need a guide to make sense of the millennia of history scattered about. The guide was a very knowledgeable Italian woman who specializes in archaeology, and she was in her element. The most impressive thing I saw in the Forum was the building that housed the Roman senate. The things that building has seen!

After my tour, I headed to the little port town of Ostia Antica. The guide gave me directions and told me about a good place to eat along the way, so I took the subway a few stops out to where I could catch the suburban train to Ostia Antica. When I got there, I stopped at a food emporium called Eatly, which was somewhat overpowering for my senses, dulled by 16 months in Russia. Talk about a grocery store--this place was three floors of groceries mixed with stations that served all sorts of prepared food. It was also packed, and it was fun watching Italians do their grocery shopping--they get very into it. I then headed to the suburban train station, where I looked for the platform for Ostia Antica, which was supposedly impossible to miss. Well, I couldn't find it. After searching high and low, I broke down and decided to ask someone. I figured the ticket counter would be best, so I approached and asked my question (in English). The man behind the counter was a cultured-looking older gentleman smoking a thin cigar, and he answered in perfect English and told me where to find my train (I was so close!). I was a little shocked: He didn't snap a snarky answer at me or look like I was greatly inconveniencing him. I guess I'm too used to Russia.

After a half-hour train ride, I arrived in Ostia Antica, which was Rome's port town two thousand years ago. It's quite well preserved, and you really get a sense of how the town felt. It's also quite large, and I didn't even get to see the whole place because it started to get dark not long after I arrived. Needless to say, I had already gotten my fill of ruins by this point on the trip, so I wasn't too upset about not seeing the whole place.

On my very last night, I decided to get pizza at the pizzeria I had been frequenting and then walk back to Piazza del Popolo, which is one of my favorite spots in Rome. I wandered along the streets and then just sat on a bench at the piazza and reflected on my trip. It was a great last evening to an excellent trip.