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Exams and Saying Goodbye
So the object of much anxiety arrives. Up until about two weeks before it had always felt like they were miles away and then suddenly they were right on top of us. Exams two weeks away! Ahhh! Mostly everyone in my class needed to pass in order to take classes in Russian the next year (which I couldn’t imagine being able to do after only 6 months–they were college classes, in Russian. How?!?!?!), but I didn’t so my fear wasn’t entirely as founded as it was for them, though I wanted to make sure that I at least passed so that the course would transfer and count as credit at my college in the US. I don’t know how important it was for that to happen, considering that I had all the credits I needed to graduate. But I was also concerned for my scholarships and things; it’s always better when you pass your classes, right?
We had an exam in each class, so five altogether. The Phonetics class’ exam was just that we had to write a letter to a friend about a certain topic. There were 9 (actually 10 but they said one wasn’t going to be on because it was too hard–about our home country) topics, and on the day of the exam we would pick a slip of paper at random and have to write about whatever topic was on the slip. Topics included: My Family, My Hometown, My University, My Dormitory, My Weekday, My Weekend, Holidays of My Home Country, Russian Holidays, and Yekaterinburg. Every week throughout the course we’d get a different topic to write a practice letter about. It was really great though cause the teacher (remember, she was the great pictionary one) would go through it with us in class and help us to write it. We’d write it sentence by sentence as a class. With topics like My Hometown and Holidays of My Home Country, where the letters would be different for each person, she would help us individually too. It was great because the repetitions of the introductions (greetings) and the ends of the letters each week made them easy to remember and it was really just the middle part about the topic that you had to change for each letter. When time came closer for exams I just made sure to memorize the beginning and end of the letter and study certain phrases that would help for the different topics. I got Russian Holidays on the day of the exam, which most people thought was one of the the hardest ones, but it was relatively easy because we lived through all the holidays and there was plenty to write about.
Another good thing was that a lot of the writing ones overlapped with the speaking exam topics. Speaking, for me, was the scariest exam (though most people thought of it as one of the easiest) because you had to talk with the teacher about whatever topic you picked in front of the whole class. Now, we were totally used to messing up in front of each other by that point, but still there is a level of embarrassment when it’s for an exam and you know everybody’s listening. The topics of Speaking were: Russian Cooking, My Future Profession, Transport, The Doctor, Cultural Activities, and a bunch that overlapped with the Phonetics ones; My Hometown, Yekaterinburg, Russian Holidays, My Dormitory, My Weekday, and My Weekend. So, 11 altogether. The ones from Writing I didn’t have to worry about because they were all set, I just neede to make sure I could remember key vocab for the other topics. On the day of the actual exam, it was actually pretty good because we could use a dictionary at first to make some notes and also my favorite teacher was there before the speaking teacher and the head of the department (who would also be listening in on the exam) got there and she let us pick a few times in order to get topics we were better prepared for. I ended up with My Weekday and it was pretty good. The department head asked me a few questions (mostly stuff about the kids) and I was super nervous and it was totally obvious in my voice, but since I sat in the front of the class, I actually went first and didn’t have to talk super loud because of that so only the teachers really had to hear me and I could feel more like I was just talking with them and not the whole class. Also it was good because we practiced twice in class a few days before and that made it easier.
The two easiest exams were Reading and Listening. The listening exam was my total favorite because we practiced a whole bunch of times and by the time the real one came around it felt comfortable. The listening exam was a single sheet of paper that had some questions, broken into two sections–probably about 6-8 questions for each. The two sections were read to us, twice each (once slow then once normal speed), and then we had to answer the questions. While they were being read we could take notes on a paper. The first was a dialogue between two people and the second was a notice about an event on a college campus. The questions were about the time the people in the dialogue would meet, why, who they talked about bringing, things like that. The second section had questions about what the event was, when, where, what you needed to bring to attend, ect. A lot of people found this one hard because they thought they talked too fast but I really liked it because we had had so many opportunities to prepare. The Reading exam was also modeled on stuff we did regularly in class. It was four or five pages of multiple choice and matching and things based on certain reading sections. I also liked this one mostly because we had done so much that was similar to it in class.
The final one was Grammar. This was the one I ended up doing the worst on (because Russian grammar=HARD) but since I kind of knew I was going to pass but not exceptionally well, and cause we had done a few practice runs in class, I wasn’t overly worried about it. It was kind of like I knew the dragon well enough to understand the kind of beating I should be expecting from it. It was a little over a hundred multiple choice questions, mostly where you had to choose the best option to finish the sentence and stuff. So to do that you had to know what case was needed and what cases were presented in the choices and pick the right one. Some were with plurals and other things we had to know, like prepositions and other types of agreement, but cases were the hardest. On the practice exams I got 60 out of 75 (80%, or a 3, which is a C) and 132 out of 160 (83%, or a 4, which is a B). I was pretty happy with those numbers, considering, so it was okay with me.
I ended up passing all my exams, with my lowest being a 3 in Grammar (the didn’t give us the final breakdown on how many we got right or wrong, just the numerical grade). I actually got a 5 in Listening, which was awesome (an A). The rest, even Speaking, I got 4s on. Overall I was really happy that my first-day fears didn’t come to fruition; I not only passed, but did really really well on most of them, and it wasn’t as traumatic as I had feared.
Come Take a Walk with Me!
It was a beautiful city. The very best part of going to Russia was that when all the white stuff went away it was green as anything all over the place. Everything went from narrow little icy paths to wide green walkways. Flowers in the trees and in gardens all over the place. The river in the middle of the city went from icy blur as I went by on the bus to large, gorgeous place where older men play chess and large fountains make rainbows. Only lacking in puppies and kittens, right? Well, it was my favorite place in the city. 
I wasn’t wrong about the rainbows, was I? There’s a bridge over the river that has a dam in it and forms a bit of a lake, seen in the last pic. It’s called Plotinka. If you follow the river down a little bit, you come here:
This is the circus. We were going there once but then there was this Alice in Wonderland play that, from the flyer, looked really good. But it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; we should have gone to the circus.
Let’s go back to Plotinka. The other way this time. Movie theater:
The church on the blood, where Tsar Nicolas and his family were killed (think: Anastasia):
A cute outdoor theater:
Plotinka again. One of those really big churches near the Town Hall:
Farther down towards my apartment:
Something to do with the military, according to my husband. Continuing on:
That last place was a monument for veterans and always had a fire going in front of it. Walking to Raduga Park from my apartment:
Small detour to see some domiki (small wooden houses):
Walking back home:
One last point before we get there, if you’ve been walking in summertime down a beautiful sidewalk like this…
…you’re going to see a bunch of stuff like this…
It’s a bunch of fluffy stuff between cotton and dandelion fuzz. It falls from the trees like snow. It’s cool. So now that we’ve walked a few miles through the city, maybe you get an idea of how pretty it is when it’s warm. I had about a week after my classes were over (more on that soon) and got to go for long walks during the day while the kids were in school.
Russian Holidays
We’ve been trying to go to Russian for New Year for a while. Both times, though, we just missed it because of visa complications. This time we got there in the beginning of January and everything was still decorated and fun. New Years is the main Russian holiday, akin to a secular version of Christmas in the US. Christmas is called Pождество and is celebrated on January 6th. It’s not a very widely celebrated holiday; it’s only religious. My family doesn’t celebrate it, but those who do have a meal with their family and go to church, I’ve been told. On New Years, Дед Мороз (Santa) comes and brings presents to children. There are Christmas trees and lots of tinsel. The best thing about New Year, though, is the winter festival. It is awesome.
That last one is the most beautiful town hall I’ve ever seen. New Years is fun.
Russian seasons last for three months each, and end on the last day of the month. So winter ends on the last day of February. Maslenitsa (Мaсленица) is the holiday that celebrates the last day of winter, which you can assume is a big deal that far north. In class they had a little celebration that was completely unexpected. I don’t think that any of us knew that it was a holiday or that a celebration was coming, because after one class the teachers were all excited-looking and telling us that we were going to do something, but we didn’t understand enough to know what was coming. They brought us all in the other classroom that we used and had a a table set up and some students from the foreign language department who had put together the celebration. They showed us a short cartoon about Maslenitsa (this one, actually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTlwV2Yj1RI) and a slide show. You know that movie The Wicker Man? The whole burning a straw guy and, oops, a person is inside? Yea, that is a Maslenitsa festival. We ate some Russian pancakes, which are really thin like crepes and are made with sour milk so that they have a very specific taste. You dip them in jelly or sour cream (my favorite) or, there was also some other kind of savory thing that was there to put on them and it was icky. I forgot what it was. After we ate the pancakes we played some games and danced a line dance. It was pretty fun overall, though really unexpected.
My birthday came in April and my mother in law bought me some flowers and my father in law bought a cake. I’ve made lots of Russian cakes in my day, for my husband’s sweet tooth and his birthdays. The cake his father bought me was this cheesecake-y bottom layer and a cherry-jelly-ish top layer, like the stuff you put in Cherry pie. In the cherry layer there were pie type cherries too. Not a big cherry person myself, I didn’t eat them, but the cake was yummy and I ate that. It was in the shape of a heart and another had been in the fridge for valentines day and then appeared again when it was Women’s Day on March 8th. Women’s Day is a big one in Europe and we had the day off school and everything.
Easter came on April 20th, and it was pretty cool because my mother in law colored some tiny quail eggs and they were adorable. Apparently, eating quail eggs is a thing in Russia, totally normal. My daughter like them and ate them.
Those things behind the plate in the last pic are loaves of Easter bread. It’s kind of like a cinnamon raisin bread that has icing on top. It was store bought and was kind of dry for my taste. I bet homemade is much better.
The next big holiday was День Победы, which is Victory Day, a celebration about the end of WWII. Day off for that one too. There were a lot of minor holidays that had days off school and work and things. День Победы had a parade and fireworks and it was a pretty big deal. They had some kind of celebration in the town center, and some kind of concert.
I don’t think you understand how cool that setup is. The building is huge. I didn’t take the kids to the parade and stuff, unfortunately, because I kept on getting emails about not going to public gatherings just in case. The stuff in Ukraine didn’t seem to be much of a problem–literally no one mentioned it at all. The only thing I ever heard of it was some mention of it on the radio in the car with my father in law. I didn’t fully understand everything they were talking about but there was mention of Obama. I had watched some videos of this girl from Nizhny Novogorod who had been an exchange student in Ohio and was talking about Ukraine, saying it was a very good thing they were over there and stuff. Now, I’ll admit that I don’t know much about this stuff, but from conversations with my husband about my father in law’s opinion and listening to my teachers, it seems as if the opinion there is overly positive about the situation in Ukraine. The emails I kept getting were about Americans going to large gatherings just in case there might be bad feelings towards us. I’m not sure how well founded that opinion was, but even so I wasn’t about to go with my kids. If I had been by myself, I would have done more stuff like that because I could go out in public without talking so no one would even know Ii was a foreigner. But going with the kids, it wasn’t possible to go places without speaking English with them. Or, if I would have tried to speak Russian it would have been obvious that I wasn’t a native.
But what did you eat?
Nobody actually asked me this one verbatim, but food is always a big one when you go abroad. I’m pretty sure I already went into the foods I brought with us, like a bunch of peanut butter and Parmesan cheese. I figured that at least I’d be able to give the kids PB&J if they didn’t like anything else.
For breakfast, the kids would normally have cereal. Cereal was pretty much the same there as here–different brands, of course, but mostly the same type of stuff. The milk was kind of weird though, which makes sense because we were, well, on a different continent. Russians don’t really drink milk much; they like to use spoiled (our idea of spoiled–sour) milk in their cooking. They really like yogurts and cheese and things, but they don’t really drink milk like we do in the US. So even though I was able to buy milk, it often went bad in a day or two. Once it was already sour before I even opened it. The little store by where I lived had it in the refrigerated section, but the one in Raduga Park didn’t. I’m sure it wasn’t always refrigerated on the way to the store; I don’t think it was a major priority. Since I love milk I bought some chocolate milk mix and that was that.
We’d also eat fruit like apples, bananas, kiwis, and things like that. Check out this huge pomegranate:
Fruit juice was also a big one since I wasn’t big on the milk (the kids drank it but I’m a bit picky). I hate apple juice normally but there’s this brand in Russia that I love. Also a mixed berry one and this gem, which became my ultimate favorite:
It was orange and heavenly. I drank it all the time. Did I mention the water situation yet? I feel like I couldn’t have come this far and not mention the water. It was icky and so drinking water got delivered to the apartment and we boiled that before we drank it. Yup. So juice was easier, though I mostly just gave the kids the cooled down boiled water that got delivered and the milk that I thought was sour and sometimes I shared my juice.
Normal Russian breakfast is called бутерброд, its just a piece of bread with salami or bologna and cheese. An open sandwich. We eat those all the time in the US and they had them for breakfast in Russia too. Lunch the kids ate at school, usually soup with bread I think. They also had this thing for snack which was grated apples and carrots mixed together–they loved that. While they were at school, I’d often each lunch at the apartment. Usually I’d have this kind of soup like Ramen but much more delicious. Also, Pizza.
Pizza in Russia is interesting. It tends to have very little sauce and sometimes, pickles. The little store by my house had that kind in spades. Pizza with pickles and cheese and cubes of bologna. At Raduga Park I once bought a pizza that had chicken under the cheese that I didn’t know about until I bit into it. There were bones. It was not exactly what I expected. The vast majority of pizza I bought there was great; I just skipped the really thick varieties that might be hiding something below the cheese. The kinds they had at Raduga Park were more similar to American kinds, and had garlic and things, it was great.
We also ate a lot of pasta there, with my new favorite type of sauce:
It has green olives in it. Yum. My mother in law also made a bunch of Russian dishes that we also eat in the US with my husband. Fish soup and pirogi and pelemeni. Very yummy. Shredded carrots are pretty much in everything she cooks and you eat everything with mayo. In fact, my city holds the world record for most mayo eaten per person. My husband puts it in soup and mixes it with everything.
Another great thing that we found was this:
It’s this awesome banana ice cream pop which has a jello peel. You can peel the banana and eat the whole thing. The kids loved them and they were the coolest things I’ve ever seen. So neat.
But what do you do all day?
This was a serious question I got from one of my friends. I guess it was a reasonable question. Of course, I had classes for about four and a half hours a day (two two hour classes and, depending on the day, a fifteen minute to a half hour break), and an hour each way on the bus. But maybe you want an idea of what our days were like.
On a weekday I’d wake up with the kids around 7, and then I’d get them dressed and fed, and then my father in law would take us to drop off the kids at school. Then he’d drop me back off at the apartment and I’d eat breakfast, do any leftover homework, and go to the bus stop. I’d take an hour to get to school, drop off my coat, and learn some Russian. Then take a bus back home and, depending on the day, I’d have just enough time to go drop by the little grocery store by my house, eat something, and then either walk to get the kids or go with my father in law to pick them up. Then in the afternoon I’d play with them a bit and do homework, feed them and go to bed. That was the winter schedule, because in winter the days were super short, like sunrise was at 10:30ish and sundown was around 5 or 6. By 8pm it felt much later, but the thing was that since we were all sharing a tiny room together, if I wanted them to sleep, I had to “sleep” too. So around 8pm I’d get us all ready for bed and I’d have to lie down and shut off all the lights and either go to sleep or play on a kindle, trying to hide it from the kids if I could. At the time, I thought it was really annoying. But, as all annoying things do, that time came to an end, and things got much worse, from a bedtime perspective. Guess what time it is in this picture:
11am? 3pm? Maybe even 6pm? Nope, that picture was taken at 9:30pm on May 1st. Bright as day, kids laughing and playing on the playground outside our window. Try getting kids to sleep when it doesn’t get dark till almost midnight in summer. Towards the end of our trip it wasn’t even a thing to hear kids at the playground at 10 or 11pm. Luckily, my summer classes were changed to a later schedule and I could take the kids to school around 9 or 10 depending on the day because they’d be up so late at night.
That one was taken at 10pm. In April.
On a weekend, we’d spend at least one day at the mall, Mega, and one day cleaning and doing laundry. We went to the mall because the poor kids were cooped up in the apartment all the time and Mega had two indoor playgrounds that they could run and play with other kids on.
They also have this great double-decker bus thing that we rode on a time or two:
Also, they had more food there, in a big walmart-type grocery store. One or two days a week I would have a few extra hours to take the tram to the other Mall, Raduga (Rainbow) Park, which had another large grocery/department store I liked better. It had great pizza (more on that later) and Reese’s, and Pringles, and a relatively cheap toy section.
I never really took the kids with me to Raduga Park at first, although it was really family friendly and had one of those great trains for kids to ride around the mall in. But Mega was where the indoor playgrounds were and, besides, my kid loves trains so much that we’d have to be riding that thing every time. So, I’d go there for grocery shopping on my own until spring came and we realized that the whole Park part of Raduga Park was quite literal and there was this amazing park behind the mall. I had always known that there was an area in the back where there was a ferris wheel, and a huge snow slide in the winter (too big for kids like mine, though). But I had thought that that was all there was, and so didn’t really give it much thought. But when it all got green I took them to check out that area because they had a couple big blow up slides and some fun ride on toys.
Then, we realized that there was also this big lake and waterfall, and a bunch of hiking trails.
There was also this really great playground that the kids loved, horse rides (literal, living horses this time), a roller skating rink, and the most amazingly cool in-the-trees playground called Mowgli.
So, that’s where we spent most of our time when it got warmer (though not in that awesome Mowgli thing, since the kids were too young). Like I said before, when we weren’t mall-ing I was home with them doing laundry and cleaning up the room. The laundry was quite a chore, though (did I mention this already?). They had a tiny washing machine but no dryer and the washing machine was only big enough for a small load and so the rest had to be done by hand. Everything got hung up after and in summer when the heaters got turned off it took a little over a day to dry out. It took a while.
We also took a trip to the line between Europe and Asia, which was cool. “Trip” mostly means here that my father in law drove us about 20 min.
We also went to the zoo.
Tiny swimming pool for a polar bear, huh? And how awesome is that peacock?
So, what did we do all day? We went to school, did homework, and tried to go places as much as we could.
Transportation
So, obviously, I didn’t bring my car with me. And, I would have been, well, terrified to be driving around a big Russian city in the middle of Russian winter. Let me enlighten you with a story from my previous trip, though I’m sure you’ve already seen enough Russian dash cam vids to fully understand my initial sense of fear about traveling to and fro in the city. So, story time. We were going to go to the winter festival (a really cool event they have every year in the town center, across from the amazingly beautiful town hall building, that has ice sculptures everywhere, ice skating, slides and bridges made of ice, tons of stuff. I’m going to go in more detail about it later, though, since it’s not really a part of this story), and we had just gotten into the car, 15 month old baby, myself, husband, and father, mother and sister in law (yea, it was packed and unpleasant–all dressed up in layers and jackets and me, six moths prego at the time), when I realized that I had forgotten the camera. I told my husband, and, a few Russian words later, my father in law had popped a U turn and was driving on the opposite side of the road looking for an opening to get into the lane he needed to get back home for the camera. It was one of those I’m-facing-a-truck-right-now-going-who-knows-how-many-KM-per-hour movie moments. Scary, it was. This time around, we didn’t really have any heart attack moments, though my kids loved yelling Быстро! Быстро! (Fast! Fast!) when we were in the car with my father in law because he would often oblige.
So, as you may have noticed, my father in law has a car. He works as some kind of personal driver for a rich dentist, or something like that, so he has a very flexible schedule and gets to use the car as his own whenever he’s not working. From what I understand, it is relatively uncommon to own a car, but also mostly unnecessary because public transport is (in my opinion) really good there. My mother and sister in law both walk to work or use public transportation to go places. The daycare that we got the kids into was very close and we could have walked there, but during the winter months where being outside too long was dangerous, especially for young children, my father in law would take us to drop off and pick up the kids from school. Once the weather warmed up, we walked there and it was very pleasant–maybe about 15-20 minutes each way.
Pics of walking to daycare:
Decorations someone hung on a bush outside our building; frozen shapes with food coloring.
I would often stop on the way home to take the kids to one of the many parks we passed on our walk (another great thing, every apartment building had its own park for the kids to play on). A playground near the kids’ school:
So, that was half of it. I also had to make my way to school every (week)day. My university was about an hour away from our apartment, so there was no way I could walk there. I took the bus everyday, and it was actually a lot more convenient than I thought it would be, judging from the way my husband had talked about it. He spoke of sometimes having to wait a half an hour for a bus in -35 degree weather and about them being very unreliable and sometimes unheated. You can imagine, therefore, that I was a bit worried about how well I’d do going back and forth over such a large distance depending only on such apparently unpredictable public transport. But my biggest fear, really, was that I’d get lost. The thing is that if it ever happened that I got lost, I would be in big trouble because I wasn’t at the level where I could ask people for directions, and even if I called my father in law on the little crappy phone I had (first I’d have to figure out how to do that, since the menu on the phone was in Russian), I’d still be unable to tell him where I was to come and get me. But overall, my fears were unfounded. The buses were actually really reliable; even if I missed a bus by a few seconds and watched it leave without me, I’d still only have to wait about 10-15 minutes until the next one came. There was only one time where I was seriously getting cold while waiting for the bus, and that was because I was waiting for a specific one. Of course, there were many different buses that would come by, and there were two specific routes that I could take to my university, numbers 27 and 28. The only problem was that the buses on number 28 were older and often had broken heating systems (it was also usually pretty moldy smelling–sometimes I would feel like I’d be sick breathing in the mold smell for so long; I tollay felt for the poor conductor and driver on there all day). When it was really really cold and I went on number 28 my feet would sometimes get so cold I felt like my toes would freeze, so I tried to avoid that one when it was more than 15-20 degrees below. Once I was waiting for a number 27 and a few 28s had already gone by, but it was 35 below so I knew better than to get on, but I was really really cold because I only had one very thin pair of leggings on under my jeans. My thighs were freezing and I was rubbing them, but wanted to keep my hands in my pockets, and I was worried. I was only at the stop for about 15-20 minutes but it wasn’t very pleasant. I never had another day like that, and it actually wasn’t all that bad in retrospect, but it was one of my first days where it was that cold and all I could hear was my husband telling me about the cold and having to wait so long.
The getting lost fear wasn’t entirely unfounded, either. The buses were really really crowded in the winter (and, to be honest, in the summer too) because it was so cold (and, later, hot). So sometimes it would be difficult to get out of your seat (if you were lucky enough to get one) and to the door in time to get off the bus before it left the stop. Also, because at first I didn’t really know the route, and because the windows would freeze over so completely that only the people who had window seats and were able to make a tiny hole in the frost with the warmth from their fingers or breath were able to see out, I was really worried I would miss my stop. It never actually happened because they had an intercom which called out the stops, and I knew what my stops were called, but still it was a bit nerve wracking at first. Once I got a hang of the order of the stops and was able to see out the windows and recognize landmarks along the way, I didn’t haven any difficulty.
One interesting thing about taking the bus is that there is a conductor who you buy tickets from after getting on the bus. In the US (at least in my experience) you get on at a single door in the front, pay at a little kiosk thing, then sit. But there, to make it faster, there were multiple doors on the side of the bus, and once it started moving the conductor came around to sell tickets to all the people who just got on. Every once in a while a controller would come on the bus and ask to see everyone’s tickets. I was worried once because the conductor missed me when she was selling tickets (I was way in the back of a packed bus) and, though I could have ridden for free, I was loathe to have the controller come and ask me where my ticket was, and so motioned for the conductor the next stop. Sure enough, the controller came by and asked for our tickets just a little bit later. It obviously wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but I’m a nervous perfectionist about things like that.
I actually really liked the city because everything was really close; we had a grocery store right under us on the first floor of an adjoining building, a pharmacy next door to that, and there were daycares every block or so to really allow working parents an easy time finding one nearby. I’m not a city girl myself, so that seemed really great to me, and the buses were just one part of what I think is a really great transport system. So, there were buses (автобусы), vans (фургоны), trolleys (троллейбусы-buses that were attached to power lines above as a source of power), trams (трамваи-a type of bus/train that runs on rails but the driver can stop and go at will and stops at red lights and is pretty similar to a bus), and a subway (метро).
The metro in my city is really tiny, though, only 6 stops total. I didn’t end up using it on this trip because it didn’t really go anywhere I needed and I was too busy to take it just because, but I did go on my first time in Russia a long time ago. I most often took the bus, obviously, both for school and to go to one of the malls. I took a tram to go to my favorite mall, too. Overall, once I got used to everything, it was really simple and easy to get around.
Learning Russian!
So, on to the fun part–academics! As I have said, I was starting my program a few months after everyone else, and though I had taken a college-level course in the language and had previous experience with it at home, I wasn’t sure where my peers would be and that worried me a bit. My husband came with me for the first week, and I have to say, I was still really really intimidated.
The first day we went I didn’t go to classes because I was just getting things settled and finding where I would be going–but the most terrible thing happened. I saw the white board at the front of the class and guess what–cursive scribbles were all over the place! And you have no idea how hard it is to read a foreign language in a native speaker’s cursive until your grade depends upon it. I had learned a bit of Russian before, and was familiar with Cyrillic letters, but I had never spent time learning them in script, even in my college Russian course.
The thing is that Cyrillic has some letters (A, K, M, O, T) that are written and sound the same in English and in Russian. Then it has letters that are written the same as letters in English, but have different pronunciation (B=[v], E=[ye], H=[n], P=[r], C=[s], Y=[oo], X=[h]). It also has letters that are not found in English, but have familiar sounds (Ч=[ch], Б=[b], Г=[g], Д=[d], Ё=[yo], З=[z], И=[ee], Й=[oy], Л=[l], П=[p], Ф=[f], Э=[eh], Ю=[yoo], Я=[ya], Ш=[sh]). Finally, there are some letters which don’t really have English counterparts (Ж=[zh], Ц=[ts], Щ=[shsh], Ъ=hard sign, short pause, Ы=[i], Ь=soft sign, [y]).***
So that was the part that I had down before going to Russia. The problem is that in cursive, some of the the letters are completely different. Let me give you an idea:
So, some of them look the same, like A, E, Y, Ы, O, B, ect. And some look like English cursive letters, like Д and З. But take a look at T–the lower case looks like a M, but M is differentiated from T in that T has rounded tops. And when you get a lot of letters together, they all start to run together.
This example is much more neatly written than what was written on the white board, let me tell you. It was not a simple task to get on the Russian-in-cursive train. My classmates had just spent three months learning to write properly, and I knew that I would not be able to catch up and keep up with lessons, so I decided to just stay with my own style of Russian print and do my best to learn to read it when it was written. Luckily, most of the classwork was verbal and my grammar teacher wrote in print rather than script.
Okay, so no big deal, I couldn’t read what was going on very well unless it was on a handout (and not in italics), at least at first. My first class ever was a Reading class and I was worried because it sounded–at first–like everyone was doing a pretty good job and since we were taking turns I knew I’d have to do it too. But as I was reading along, I realized that maybe they weren’t doing it as perfectly as I had assumed at the start. And when it was my turn, I did moderately well. The thing was that I was the new kid and everyone was looking at me and it was very I’m-on-display-right-now, which I hate. After we read what we read, there were questions and this is where the horror started. I had not given thought to the meaning of the words, only the pronunciation, and now I had to answer questions I did not understand about a who-knows-what-it-was-about reading from a very fast speaking native of the language. My husband did his best to tell me what it was about and to tell me the meaning of the questions in English, but I was just in a state of perfectionist shock and I felt way overwhelmed and wanted to go home. When she asked me a question (and I’m sure it was a super easy one) I had no idea, and it just turned into a huge embarrassing moment for me where I told her I didn’t know and I wasn’t going to answer in a flurry of red faced, hands up English nonsense and just pretty much checked out. I was mortified. Mortified.
The thing is, though, that in a language class, you can’t be afraid of getting things wrong, because you’re totally going to, and everyone else is going to too. You just have to have fun with it and do the best you can. I soon got to this point, once I had made a place for myself in the class. It turned out that most of the class was at my level or below and I actually became one of the top students (since English is a heck of a lot closer to Russian than Chinese or Arabic). A few days later, my first day without my husband came and I had my Speaking class. Since it was a speaking class, she had everyone in the class ask me a question, which I not only had to understand, but also answer. It was a bit pulling-teeth-ish, but overall it was pretty fun. I could tell that it wasn’t super easy for them to come up with questions, which made my embarrassment over not being able to answer very well lessen. Overall, we had a bit of fun laughing together in an attempt to understand each other and it made me feel a lot more included. And without Anton with me as a translator (but also a barrier to my doing it myself) I was forced to really try on my own.
***The site I usually use for typing in Russian in http://russian.typeit.org/
My University: Setting and Characters
The university I took classes at was a large, well-known institution which more than 50,000 students attend annually. There are a few campuses within the city, with over 120 undergraduate degrees available. This is the view from the front:
A little bit imposing, right? Its actually really beautiful in the spring/summer (in the winter you’re just trying not to freeze because the bus stop that you get off at–if you’re me–is quite far away). So, you walk in the tiny brown things at the bottom of the picture which are actually pretty large I-Can-Withstand-Russian-Winter wooden doors. On the top of the middle one is a tiny black rectangle which is really pretty big and is a clock/thermometer which you can see from far away and was one of my favorite things cause almost as important as a watch is a thermometer; I would often look down at my watch to see how cold it was and then facepalm because such a thing either hasn’t been invented yet or I haven’t run into it (but I waaaant it).
Inside is a a set of double doors (the whole building is so sturdy and solid to fend off the cold) and a big foyer space with big I’m-in-a-mansion type stairways on either side. It’s a mess of interconnected buildings and hallways and underground tunnels. From the foyer I had to walk through a hallway, where I could give my coat in the winter, then up some stairs, more stairs to the right, turn a 180 to the left, down a hall, up two flights, down another hall, then up four more flights and I’m in the hall where my classes took place in two different classrooms. Fun, right? Lose weight much, did I? If only!
My first impression was that we were totally in Russia. One of the things about the US is that things are a bit more preplanned, or, maybe a better way to say it is that they’re standardized. Russia is not like this (as one can tell from the above description). It seems to an American to be very haphazard and thrown together, but also in a way very well put together in the sense that, well, just look at the columns on that building! It’s well constructed and sturdy, but literally every door is a different size. Like you walk down one of the many hallways and there are big doors here and tiny (I mean, literally so small you’d have to stoop) doors over here and then narrow doors so skinny that some Americans might have difficulty passing through them. All in one hallway! And the funny thing is that all the doors were doubled, so that you walk through one into a little room that has another (probably different) door you have to pass through to enter the room you wanted. And all of them were locked. I’m sorry, did I just spend an entire paragraph on doors? I could go on, but I’ll stop myself here. Actually, I’ll take a minute here to mention the fact that if you felt the need to use the bathroom, as an American, you may be somewhat surprised at what you’d find in there (if you want a better idea of what I mean, check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG9S9vfUmqo I’m pretty sure the bathrooms had some other way of flushing–so says my husband–but I couldn’t find any).
So after passing through the hallways and doors and climbing the chipped concrete stairs (no working elevators stop at the 6th floor), I got to go to class. Out side in the hallway the schedule was posted in Russian for the week, and it often changed and got switched around (to the point where some nights I wouldn’t get home till 8pm and my father in law would have to pick up the kids–which he loved. No, really, he did, no sarcasm). The class was relatively large, with long tables in maybe four or five rows and a isle down the middle, about enough room for four students on each side. In the back was an organized mess of bookshelves and extra tables and a hook where we could hang our coats, if we hadn’t dropped them off in the coat room (I was often the only person to have done so, but I couldn’t stand walking up so many flights of stairs wearing my super warm coat in a heated-to-ninety-degrees building). The teacher’s table was up at the front of the room and had a lectern, which was used by some teachers, though some just sat or stood. There was a whiteboard and a pull-down projector screen. All pretty normal. There were two classrooms that we had classes in, and they were pretty much the same, though one didn’t have bookshelves and stuff in the back because it was smaller. They each had a wall full of windows on one side, where we could see a pretty nice view from the city.
(not my classroom or class specifically, but similar)
So, I am naturally a bookworm who can’t see very well since I lost my glasses in, like, fifth grade, so I always try for the front row, and eventually settled in a certain spot. The majority of other students were from China, one of whom spoke fluent English and became my closest friend and usually sat next to me. On the other side of the isle in the front row were two guys, one from Jordan (super friendly and outgoing, and everybody’s friend) and one from Tunisia (also really friendly and great, but less outspoken). Later a guy from Turkey came and sat with them. The front row was the most vocal in class and we had quite a bit of fun. In the other rows sat all the other students, who were all from China. They were mostly very quiet (class-wise–during breaks they spoke quite a bit, but mostly only to each other), with some exceptions, and a great majority of them didn’t come to class regularly (sometimes we would only have 5-10 people show up in a class of about 30–3 of which were female). Mostly, it seemed that the Chinese students (including my close friend) didn’t like Russia and didn’t much effort (if at all) into learning the language. Some of the Chinese students spoke some English (about as well as I speak Spanish from learning it in school), but other than that, my friend and I were the only ones who could speak English. But overall, class was really fun and we could understand each other well enough to form some close friendships.
(this one is my class, and that’s me in the blue stripes)
There were 5 professors; Grammar, who turned out to be the really helpful person who spoke English and had been emailing me with help getting enrolled–about my age; Speaking, a very friendly woman who understood more English than she spoke and had a daughter the same age as mine–we went to the zoo once with the Grammar teacher and our children; Listening, a tall and skinny woman with stereotypical Russian bleach-blond hair who was very difficult for me to understand initially, but was incredibly kind and a great teacher; Reading, a very nice woman who I really liked, though she was, perhaps, the most strict (if I can even say that of her) professor–we would often laugh together about little things in class, she was very nice as well; and Phonetics/Writing, probably the nicest of them all, she would pictionary the words we didn’t know, and put so much detail and was just very cute. Overall, they were really great and my experiences wouldn’t have been what it was without the peer group I had (fooling around all the time as we were) and the fun professors that tried to keep up in line, though they were laughing right along with us.
One of the best things I took away from study abroad were the great memories and friendships with people who had lives so different from my own, and didn’t even speak the same language.
Getting Settled
This is the one step that I was most worried about and proved to be the most I-wouldn’t-have-been-able-to-do-it-without-my-husband-ish (where husband here pretty much means the ability to speak the native language). This is where the kid difficulties were most prominent, because I didn’t have a daycare set up and once one was found they had to go to a doctor to get a wellness check and make sure their vaccinations were sufficient (I brought their records with us).
**An important side note–I wouldn’t have let my kids get shots in Russia cause, well, duh, but especially because of TB issues; my husband grew up in Russia and got vaccinated for tuberculosis and so always tests positive for TB tests in the US (they come up a lot when it comes to immigration and joining the military). I don’t know about older kids and real school, but for preschool daycare the shots they had gotten in the US were just fine.
(Pictures of the school the kids went to)
The school was not going to help me with setting things up with the kids, so without someone to help me find a doctor and talk for me in the appointment (let alone know what was necessary to get from the appointment paperwork-wise since the daycare people don’t speak English) things would have been significantly more difficult. Once everything was all set, daycare was great and things went well, but it did take some knowledge of Russian for us to get there.
With regard to college, that was a bit of work, too, and the international department at my school was *cough* no help at all with anything. Now, they do have a person who speaks English there (which would have made it easier for me than the many Chinese students who were in my class and had no such Chinese-speaking person available to them) so I should have had some help, but she ended up leaving literally the moment we entered the office. Luckily my husband was there so I was able to get some help through him, but we had to go around to other parts of the college to pay for my courses and find the place where my classes would be (and believe me that place is a mess of hallways and doors and–this is true because, well, Russia–underground tunnels).
Also, we ended up having to go to get a Russian HIV test cause my US version was in English and a whole mess of craziness ensued. I know already that I cannot fully replicate the experience in words, so lets just say that there are no lines for these things in Russia, and when it is -25 degrees outside, a small waiting room becomes a sardine can. If I hadn’t been so completely amused with the situation I was in and enmeshed in the plot of these two guys trying to catch this really pretty girl (it was like watching a telenovela, and I could understand just enough for it to be hilarious), then I’d have been more than a lot claustrophobic and miserable. This was repeated a few days later when we went to get the results and without the entertainment it was only half as fun. I only wish I could have gotten a picture.
Overall, it took me about two weeks to get things settled before I was able to start classes, which really irritated me at the time because I was already arriving later than everyone else to the program, but in retrospect doesn’t seem like that long at all when it comes to setting up a life for oneself and two small children in a foreign country. I’m glad I took the time to get everything settled, because once my classes and the kids’ daycare was set up, everything went relatively smoothly.
Two Kids, Ten Hours, Time Differences, and Tiny Seats.
So, only the longest flight was ten hours, but I simplified things for the sake of alliteration. The start of our trip was a four hour drive to JFK, then we took a ten hour flight to Moscow, and after a four hour layover took a two and a half hour flight to our final destination. Overall, it was around twenty hours of traveling, but we made it. I was mostly afraid of the possibility of having to transfer our luggage myself in Moscow, which we had had to do on our previous trip, and which would most likely have killed me if it had actually happened this time. Luckily, our luggage made its own way across the Atlantic, and I was only responsible for roughly ninety pounds of children, one carry on bag, and a backpack full of toys.
Lists are great for this type of thing, so I am going to provide one here on the best methods I’ve devised on flying over the ocean with a few small children:
- I swear by the fact that the best time to make the long international flight is late, so that the kids fall asleep for at least some portion of it. For us, this flight left New York just shy of 8pm, and ended up being exactly what I wanted. The excitement of leaving stayed with us long enough to board and eat the dinner they gave us before the kids fell asleep. Since I like to sit in the middle so I can help each of the kids if they need me, it ended up locking me in place for most of the trip, but I hadn’t anticipated much freedom anyway, so things went well.
- An important thing to remember (which I forgot) when you are planning a trip, is just how tiny the seat space you are allotted is. I had a moment of panic when I came to the seats. Especially after passing through first class.
- The food comes twice on a long trip like this one, so that eats up a bit of time. But, every mom knows that kids don’t always eat on schedule, so packing snacks is always a good idea. I usually pack small granola bars and fruit snacks, a pack of tic tacs as an extra reward incentive if needed, and a few bottles of water bought at the airport after security. This trip I skipped the water, like an idiot, and the overwhelming feeling I had for the duration of our trip was thirst, thirst, thirst. The thing about traveling with children is that you don’t get the good parts of what you’re given by the flight attendants, and that especially includes drinks. The other good use for snacks is the fact that kids (and you) may be slightly underwhelmed at the idea of airplane food (especially if on a plane flown by an international carrier, like Aeroflot, and you get things that aren’t exactly what you might expect). “Breakfast” came at around 4am EST, while the kids were sleeping, and I was given some type of cold fish that turned my stomach at that hour. Instead, I ended up eating a granola bar and trying to rest my head a little longer, despite the fact that a bright beam of Moscow daylight was attacking me from the bit of window that someone across the way had opened.
- A corollary to the snack packing suggestion is that one should never use food as the primary please-just-be-quiet device while on a plane. We found this out on our first trip to Russia when our son was only 15 months old, and greeted Moscow with a regurgitation of everything that he had been bribed with up until that point. It got everywhere, and I don’t think I need to tell you just how unpleasant it was, nor how much I did not want to experience it again. On this trip, snack amounts were minimized and there was no unfortunate reenactments of the previous episode.
- One place where mommyguilt over electronics and video game usage should not exist is on a transatlantic flight. Needless to say, it is a lot less embarrassing and there is a lot less guilt when you are sitting next to a quiet, entertained little child instead of a screaming, mucus covered, kicking-you-and-the-person-next-to-you ball of hellfire. I bought each of my kids a kindle for this trip for this very reason (and for the coming winter which would mostly be spent house-bound). I also made sure to bring some kid’s headphones, which ended up being a good thing, because the earbuds they hand out to you aren’t meant for children and, as my kids complained, hurt their ears. The other convenient thing is that there are monitors in the back of each chair and you can play (corny, not so fun but still there) games and watch movies and tv shows on them.
- The toy bag is the most important part of traveling with kids. I like to layer the options and put in secret toy surprises and maybe a candy or two, some art sets that don’t require many parts or space, small dolls with bitty clothes, Hangman sets and other travel games, ect. Our hands-down favorite this trip were Melissa and Doug Color Blast sets where the one marker can make all the different colors, and the water blast sets where you just use water to color everything and they’re reusable.
StudyAbroadRussiaWithKids 