Dispatches from the Far East Side Minyan

Girdle Power

2010-09-12T06:27:00.002+04:00

"How's this?" the man in the black velvet yarmulke said to me as he held a long strip of nylon and spandex around my middle. I had sucked my chest in, expecting to have difficulty breathing. To my surprise, I had none, though it was a little tight, and I told him so. He told me not to worry and pulled something else out of one of the bevy of boxes that stood on the shelf behind his counter. A wisp of a woman I presumed to be his wife looked on as he unfurled a slightly looser strip of nylon and spandex and spread it around my waist.

This one felt remarkably comfortable, as though a child had just run up to me and hugged me around the waist.

"I'll take it," I said.

"Thirty-five dollars!" The cash register sounded. I paid the man and went on my merry way to a nearby McDonald's, where I could don my purchase in peace.

The whole scene had felt like something out of a bad gross-out comedy. That morning, I had telephoned Orchard Corsets, one of the few survivors from what I am told was once a a bustling business on New York's Lower East Side, to inquire about a garment I hoped would improve my looks and my posture, and possibly help me lose weight by putting pressure on my stomach and thus making it uncomfortable to overindulge.

"Do you sell girdles for men?" I had asked, tentatively, on the phone. In a culture that regularly puts every sort of freak on television to talk about how much sex he's having with his ex-girlfriend's mother, it's still embarrassing for a man to admit he wants and needs something to shape his middle. Not knowing who exactly ran the shop or what its clientele was, I worried the question might seem odd.

"Yes, we sell cintures and girdles for men," a masculine voice on the other end of the line reassured me.

"Great," I said. "I'll stop by later today."

I grabbed my wallet and headed for the subway. As my train made its way to Delancey Street, I tried to steel myself for walking through racks and racks of lacy nothings into whatever little corner of this shop might be reserved for men's shaping garments. I pictured the gentleman on the phone gently taking me behind a curtain to measure me, away from the glares of women who were there looking for a bridal bustier or just a better-fitting brassiere.

Instead, I arrived to find the store empty except for the man in the black velvet kippah. It had not occurred to me that this was a business likely to be operated by Orthodox Jews--or at least, by an Orthodox Jewish man. Halacha (traditional Jewish law) is greatly concerned with the concept of tznius (modesty) and generally goes out of its way to avoid putting men into physical contact with women who are not their wives. I had assumed the man who answered my call was a stock clerk or someone who was kept out of the way of the store's female customers.

Besides lacking the crowds of women I had imagined, the store was also bereft of any display items. Whatever the store sold was kept out of sight in boxes that had to be requested from and taken out by people who worked there. This did not bode well for me.

Though jarred to discover how different the shop was from what I had imagined, I explained to the man that I had called earlier and told him I was looking for a girdle. Yes, I used that word--girdle. Not a compression tee. Not a tamer. Not "shapewear". A girdle. I believe in calling things by their right names. If something smooths lumps and bumps and holds you in like a girdle, I'm going to call it a girdle, whether it comes with bows and satin panels or not.

To my equal surprise and consternation, the man did not lead me into some mysterious back room where the store's limited stock of male unmentionables lay in wait for that rare male customer who dared enter this den of females. Instead, he took something black with a floral pattern out from the stacks of boxes and put it around my waist, right there where God and everyone could see, and proceeded to whittle away my middle with it. The rest of the story I have already told you.

I have been wearing this girdle--the man called it a "waist cincher" but I still think of it as my girdle--for about two weeks now. When I bought it, I had expected something that delivered dollops of pain up and down my midsection; this is how my mother, and every woman I know old enough to remember wearing girdles on a daily basis, had led me to view girdles. What I have found instead quite surprised me. After I learned how to do up the hook-and-eye fasteners on it, and even more so after I realized I could just step into the thing each day instead of doing up the fasteners each time I wanted to put it on, I have had no problems with my girdle, either in terms of getting it on or in terms of its comfort. Although I feel it around my stomach and waist as I go about my day, it has never once caused me difficulty breathing, even on its tightest setting (it comes with three rows of "eyes"--I presume so that the wearer can adjust it to the tightness of her dress). My clothes look better on me. I stand up straighter and feel much more confident walking down the street.

And I've never once had problems walking, sitting, bending over, or doing any of the 1,001 other things I need to do while wearing my girdle every day. Those ads from 1950s magazines showing women dancing and jumping around in their girdles, which I had assumed were the product of some real-life Don Draper's overactive imagination, now seem infinitely plausible.

What, then, accounts for the image problem girdles and other foundation garments have in the minds of so many people? The best I can figure is that women laden them with unrealistic expectations or outright delusions that enough Lycra and nylon can magically make their size 8 body fit into a size 2 dress. I have no such unrealistic expectations; I wore pants with a 46-inch waist before I bought my girdle, and I wear pants with a 46-inch waist now. The difference is that I no longer suffer from unloved love handles and the sensation that my waist is shifting down.

Girdles cannot make you look thirty pounds lighter. At most, they will give you a little wiggle room in tight-fitting garments. But they can improve your overall look, posture, and confidence. And to that I say: Girdle Power!

A Dispatch from the Not-So-Dead

2010-09-02T00:09:00.003+04:00

To all of my regular readers, I owe an immense apology. It has been several months since you last received a dispatch from the Far East Side Minyan. I ought to say that the stresses of graduate school have precluded me from corresponding, but in fact I have had opportunity to blog. I have simply felt as though I had very little of interest to say. In school, my life has not extended much further than the campus library. While this library is located east of my apartment, this fact alone did not create much material worthy of publication.

Well, things have changed over the summer. I had the great privilege this summer of attending an immersion program in Portuguese at Middlebury College. Middlebury is famous for summer language programs that involve what is known as the Language Pledge--a pledge each student in the program takes to use the language he is trying to learn as his only means of communication (exceptions are made for keeping in touch with your family or in the event of a genuine emergency). Besides gaining leaps and bounds in my knowledge of Portuguese, I feel I've learned a few things about myself, and about language teaching. I would even say that this program has reinvigorated my love of and interest in language teaching, to the point that I could imagine myself doing it professionally again. I've also gained a better sense of what was going on in the mind of my students as they struggled to speak in English.

More on my experience at Middlebury will follow, probably on La Lingua Frankly.

From Normandy to Dunkirk

2010-02-14T22:49:00.002+03:00

As far as I can tell from what she has told me about her child, my mother never left her home state of Missouri until she went away to college in New Jersey at the age of nineteen. But at the same time, she grew up in Normandy.

Normandy (or, properly, NOrmandy, to indicate the dialed letters) was the telephone exchange given to Nevada, Missouri, the little town where she grew up. To give you a sense of the very different telecommunications environment she lived in, my mother tells me that, as a child of six or seven in the late 1950s, she once picked up the telephone receiver in her parents' home and told the operator she wanted to speak to "Grandma." My great-grandmother, who ran a small restaurant on the outskirts of town, was sufficiently well-known that the operator was able to complete the call without any further information.

Telephone exchange names, which existed from roughly 1910 until the late 1960s in the United States (and apparently appeared in some local phone directories as late as the early 1980s), were designed to solve a problem that never really existed. As more and more telephones were installed in the 1920s, an era before most homes had dial phones, telephone numbers extended in some areas to have first five digits, then six, then seven. Phone company executives felt that six- and seven-digit numbers were too long for operators to remember when connecting calls, so they decreed that phone numbers would begin with a mnemonic word that corresponded to the first two (in Britain and some larger American cities, three) digits. Thus, 736-5000 became PEnnsylvania 6-5000.

As a fan of all things retro, I decided to use one when I set up an answering machine on the landline phone in my apartment (why I choose to have a landline will be the subject of another blog post). This led to a problem: I didn't actually know what exchange my number had been part of before all-digit dialing came to Philadelphia. Searching the internet, however, I was able to find a list of recommended exchange names the Bell Telephone Company put out in the mid-1950s, when telephone numbers across the country were being standardized to two letters, five digits. For exchanges beginning with 38 (as does my phone number), Ma Bell listed five choices: DUdley, DUnkirk, DUpont, EVergreen, and FUlton. So I guess that in addition to living in Pennsylvania, I now also live in Dunkirk.

Why bother with this practice, aside from retrophilia or shock value? I think a good reason for using telephone exchange names is the one the phone companies came up for almost a century ago: they make phone numbers easier to remember. As cell phones have become ubiquitous, people seem to know and remember fewer and fewer phone numbers. I've even met people who hadn't bothered to memorize their own and can only give out their phone number by dialing you from their cell. Bringing words back into phone numbers might be an aid to children who at the very least need to remember Mommy and Daddy's cell and/or work numbers.

The Free Jewish School--Now Really Free

2009-11-09T03:40:00.003+03:00

After a while, a person can only take so many "Who is a Jew?" stories. Especially if that person is one of those likely to be affected by the whole question, and especially since so many of them these days seem to involve some right-wing cleric somewhere who doesn't understand that he does not represent or speak for a Jewish community that is increasingly diverse, and that that diversity is a strength, not a weakness. So it was with great relish today that I stumbled upon this story in the New York Times regarding a court fracas over one school's definition of "Who is a Jew?"

Britain, unlike America, apparently allows state funding for religious schools reflecting persuasions from the Church of England to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and everything in between. Most of the time, it seems, schools accepting this funding cannot use religious criteria in selecting students for admission, but when there are more applicants than slots, denominations can favor their own members. Such has been the case at the Free Jewish School, a Jewish high school in London. Faced with more applicants than slots, the school decided to invoke an Orthodox definition of Jewishness to deny admission to a boy known only in the article, and in the court case, as "M". M's mother bad converted before his birth, but her conversion was overseen by a Progressive rabbi (Progressive being the British equivalent of Reform), and the school chose to follow the dictates of Britain's Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks--which is to say, it only considers Orthodox conversions valid. Hence, in the eyes of the school, neither M's mother nor M is considered Jewish.

The matter might have ended there, but M's family chose to sue the school, charging discrimination. And a court in Britain has agreed, ruling that whether the "traditional" definition of a Jew is "benign or malignant, theological or supremacist," the school cannot enforce it in light of Britain's Race Relations Act.

On the one hand, it's easy to look at this, from the other side of the Pond, and abhor the decision as a violation of the principle of separation of church and state, as it is understood and applied in America. Public funding for religious schools does not and cannot exist in America, and a similar case on our side of the Atlantic would doubtless result in a declaration that such funding is unconstitutional. There are also good reasons for Jews not to get the secular courts involved in what are purely internal Jewish affairs; it causes nothing but rancor and only further divides a divided community.

On the other hand, it's hard not to be supremely happy about a ruling that will, hopefully, make certain parts of the Jewish community grow up on "who is a Jew" issues. Far too many Jewish institutions allow the Orthodox to force exclusionary practices upon them. It is high time the rest of the community started forcing the Orthodox to distinguish between Orthodox space and communal space--and our Jewish schools are as good a place to start as any.

I am also heartened that this rulings means that the 1,900 or so students at London's Free Jewish School will be forced to meet an actual patrilineal child and start to deal with patrilineality as something other than an abstraction. In their hearts, I've discovered, the majority of Jews comprehend that, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, Jewish is as Jewish does. If a patrilineal child is allowed to sit down and study Torah and Mishnah alongside Orthodox Jews, the latter will find it more and more difficult to deny his Jewishness. For too long, people who don't fit into a narrow, Orthodox definition of "who is a Jew" have ended up in a double bind when it comes to Jewish education--first being denied that education on the grounds that they "aren't Jewish," and then, hypocritically, having it held against them that they didn't receive it.

Even in America, policies of this kind exist. The Solomon Schechter schools, the day schools of the Conservative Movement, denied children of non-Jewish mothers admission their classrooms for many years. I recall seeing a responsa on the Movement's website at one point describing what a school should do if it was ever forced to merge with a Reform or community day school, which might have patrilineal children in it. The responsa made clear that patrilineal children must be kept out of leadership roles in Conservative services, but that there should "be no segregation of any kind."

Translation: the school should practice segregation. It just shouldn't call it that.

This is the kind of nonsense the British court said "no" to in its ruling. And this is the kind of nonsense the liberal (and Liberal) majority of Jews here, in England, and in Israel should be saying no to as well. The Orthodox community needs to be put on notice that its narrow definition of "who is a Jew" is just that--the Orthodox community's definition, not the whole community's definition. The Orthodox can do whatever they like in their own shuls.

But everywhere else--in our community's schools, in our institutional charities, and in the policies of the Israeli government--we are going to be inclusive.

Strike Two

2009-11-08T23:44:00.003+03:00

For the past week, Philadelphia has been in the midst of a transit strike. Workers at SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority) walked off the job in the early morning on November 3rd, over a wide range of grievances but primarily over issues pertaining to their pension and health benefits. All city bus service is suspended, as is service on the city's two subway lines and the "Subway-Surface" lines that connect West Philadelphia to our downtown, Center City. Regional rail, however, is running. From what I gather, Philadelphia is really in a snarl.

I say, "from what I gather," because I've been fortunate to have little need to move about the city. I live only a block from the edge of Penn's campus, and a scant four blocks from the Graduate School of Education building. I am able to accomplish all of my shopping and dining in the immediate neighborhood as well. So for me personally, the strike might as well be happening in Paris.

Nonetheless, like most of the city, I have little sympathy for the strikers. The average wage of a SEPTA employee is $52,000 a year. While this doesn't go as far in Philadelphia as it would in, say, the middle of Iowa, it's hardly a starvation wage--and let's remember that a lot of SEPTA workers earn a lot more, since this is only an average. Workers pay only 1% of wages toward their health care and have a pretty generous pension package.

This is not my first experience living through a major transit strike. In December 2005, New York was crippled by a three-day strike that forced me to stay home from work as there was no viable means of getting from where I lived in Brooklyn to where I worked in Rockefeller Center. A friend of mine who then lived in Queens but worked at a school in Brooklyn spent the first night of the strike with me. She had intended to stay until the strike ended, but after getting horribly lost on her walk to school the first morning, decided to go home for the duration. I can't recall whether she went in to work after that or not, but given her lack of transit options, I suspect she didn't.

When the transit strike hit New York, it galled me that the transit union could hold the whole city hostage in this way, with the complicity of the law. It turned out that the law was, in fact, not complicit in the strike; under New York's Taylor Law, public workers are given access to binding arbitration, supposedly in exchange for giving up the right to strike. The law fines public-employee unions that strike a million dollars a day. Apparently, the transit workers' union in NewYork somehow ponied up the fine.

The biggest difference I see between this strike and the New York transit strike of four years ago is the degree of reliance on the system. In New York, virtually everyone takes the subway at least some of the time, and over sixty percent use it for their daily commute to work. Even billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg is a straphanger. Philadelphians, however, are able to use their cars much more. Only one in three Philadelphians relies on SEPTA to get to work every day.

These Philadelphians are disproprotionately the poor. I realized this the other day when I walked into a Boston Market in our neighborhood to grab lunch. A sign in the window indicated that the store was opening on a delayed schedule because of the SEPTA strike. No doubt the restaurant's employees--many of whom likely earn minimum wage or not much more--cannot get to work on time during the strike. Workers earning an hourly wage are doubtless losing a lot of pay in this strike.

The strike's effect on Philadelphia's poor came home to me even more later in the week, when I called my new boss to discuss my work schedule. I will be starting work soon in the community relations department of a local charter school. Though located in Center City, the school's mostly black and mostly poor students commute in from all over Philadelphia. My boss told me that, for the duration of the strike, the school has managed to remain open but is operating on an 11-6 schedule. It strikes me as crazy that high school students should have to endure a three-hour-plus commute to school, remain at school until six o'clock in the evening, and then endure a three-hour-plus commute home.

Over the past few days, Pennsylvania Governor and former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell has gotten involved in the strike negotiations. He quickly gave up in response to the union's recalcitrance, which he described as something he had not seen the likes of in his 32-year political career. Personally, I think the best thing he could do would be to call out the state national guard to run the trains and buses until the union comes to its senses.

Perhaps then Philadelphia's transit workers would realize how much their workers' campaign is hurting other working people in the city.

St. Michael Jackson of Topeka and Brooklyn

2009-10-21T02:49:00.002+04:00

For the past few weeks, I've had a running joke with my mother about getting a Michael Jackson statue put up in front of Kansas's state capitol building in Topeka. My mother was briefly considering running for the state legislature, though she has now decided against it. One day when she was starved for something to write about on a political blog, I recommended that she write about what she as a state legislator would do about the death of Michael Jackson. She shot back that she would have a gold-plated statue of him erected in front of the statehouse.

All summer long, it seemed there was no escaping Michael Jackson. He was on the cover of endless magazines and took over what passes for programming on the TV Guide channel. But now it seems he may be about to take over a subway station in Brooklyn I remember well from my days as a straphanger.

The New York Times reported today that an offhand remark by one city official to a reporter "on a slow newsday" has spawned petitions to rename Hoyt-Schermerhorn Station in Brooklyn Michael Jackson Station and to put up some kind of plaque or memorial therein. Apparently, the now-deceased King of Pop filmed one of his music videos there, and some locals think that honoring Jackson in some way there might boost tourism to the area.

Now, I've been at this particular station countless times switching from the A/C to the G train. I know the surroundings well, and I honestly don't see how an ugly statue of Michael Jackson would do anything to improve either the station's looks or the prospect of tourists flocking into the immediate vicinity. The area around Hoyt-Schermerhorn is Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn--a decidedly run-down shopping area that seems to sell nothing except pirate DVDs and polyester hair extensions. Already the third-largest shopping district in metro New York (after Midtown and Lower Manhattan), Fulton Street is already heavily crowded and the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop even more so, as it houses a vital link between the F and A/C lines. The last thing it needs are people coming to gawk at an ugly statue.

Why do I assume the statue would be ugly? Because I've seen other examples of what the MTA considers subway "art." While I was at Columbia, my subway stop was 116th Street, on the 1/9 line. Frequently, when I went downtown from there, I sat on a hideous monstrosity called the "subway rider's throne". This was, literally, a giant throne someone had put next to the downtown benches, with a plaque on the wall. I knew of nobody who respected the throne's pretentions of being "art".

Moreover, I'm not really keen on the idea of New York doing anything to honor an artist who did nothing to further the life of the city except to film a music video there. In my view, art should honor people who've made a substantial contribution to the life of the city, in some way. Michael Jackson doesn't remotely fall into this category. And of course, there were all those creepy incidents involving small children.

On the other hand, the article raises the possibility of some group or other donating large amounts of money to refurbish the station as well as place Jackson-themed art in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station. Hoyt-Schermerhorn could definitely use the makeover--so much so that I'd even be happy to have Ty Pennington come in and supervise it (and there are certainly New Yorkers for whom this would constitute an "Extreme Makeover" of their home).

So what am I to do when two deeply held desires--not to see New York honor someone who was likely a child molester, and to see Hoyt-Schermerhorn turn into someplace halfway pleasant to be--collide?

What position would you take?

Bus Lanes

2009-10-20T21:18:00.003+04:00

Despite my relocation to Philadelphia, I still occasionally take a few moments to glance at the New York Times web page. New York doesn't seem so far or so long ago, and I continue to have an interest in the affairs of the city where so many of my friends live, and where I may return some day.

This morning, the Times features a piece about efforts by the MTA's new chief to make the city's bus lanes into...well, real bus lanes, as opposed to the traffic-clogged strips on the right-hand side of the street they usually are now. Every driver in the city seems to think the words "bus lanes" don't mean anything. As the Times notes, Londoners similarly regarded their own bus lanes this way until cameras started to be installed at intersections and fines for violations were raised substantially. The new MTA chief wants to try a similar approach but is hampered from doing so by the need to get Albany to allow intersection cameras.

All New Yorkers know that the City That Never Sleeps often doubles as the City That Never Moves, and buses are decidedly the worst part of New York's transit system. The Times article notes that the proportion of bus riders to subway riders in New York is the exact flip of what it is in London. In London, it seems, the buses have higher total ridership than the Underground; in New York, the subway has the upper hand.

Some of this, I suspect, may have to do with the layouts and age of the respective systems. Never having been to London, I can't speak for the layout of its system, but in New York there are so many subway stops (at least, everywhere except the far parts of the Outer Boroughs) that you don't have to go very far to get to the subway. London's system may not be quite so convenient.

But the problems the new head of the MTA is facing are very real. Bus service in New York doesn't just border on atrocious; it crossed the line a long time ago. Most lines stop every couple of blocks (much more frequently than transit experts say is ideal for the smooth operating of a bus system) and are snarled in traffic when they are in motion. For distances under 20 blocks, you are often better off walking; for greater distances, you're usually better off taking the subway. I tended only to take the bus when there was a lack of good alternatives (something that occurred frequently when I depended on the G train) or on lazy Sunday afternoons, when I didn't really care how long I took to get somewhere.

The failure of drivers to observe bus lane rules contributes to the problem. And it's been hard not to notice that the vehicles that violate these rules seem to fall into the categories I call the Two Ys:

1) Yellow cabs--though to be fair, yellow cab drivers seem to think most of New York's traffic regulations don't apply to them; maybe the city should make fare increases conditional on increased observance of the regulations.

2) Yuppies. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched a Lincoln Navigator weave into a bus lane, directly in front of a bus I was riding on, to make its turn that fraction of a second faster. I sometimes think New York would benefit tremendously from simply banning Lincoln Navigators from its streets.

But even here in Philadelphia, I notice a substantial number of drivers acting as if the words "Bus Lane" don't mean anything. There aren't as many of these lanes here as there are in New York, but they do exist. I think all of this bus-lane violation is indicative of a wider problem in our society--that substantial numbers of people think "the rules," whatever they are, somehow don't apply to them, and that the rest of us do nothing to disabuse them of this notion.

So I am all in favor of New York cracking down on bus-lane violation. The majority of New Yorkers who rely on the buses and subways shouldn't be inconvenienced this way by the wealthy few who can take cabs to work or drive their Lincoln Navigators in from Long Island.

I would also favor adopting, on a permanent basis, the regulations instituted during the transit strike prohibiting private vehicles with fewer than 4 occupants south of 96th Street in Manhattan, but one has to stick within the realm of the achievable.

A Clarification

2009-09-30T20:46:00.002+04:00

In my last post, when I mentioned my hesitation about telling my students "the unvarnished truth" about American sexual practices, I was referring specifically to our attitudes toward fornication--or, in more modern, less theological language, premarital sex. On the one hand, these students have to live here for a while (some have been here for over a year already) and will need to understand what American mores are, even if they make other choices because of their religious convictions. On the other hand, I don't really want these students to go back to Turkey or Saudi Arabia with the impression that all (or even most) Americans have no sense of sexual morality.

I was not referring specifically to Roman Polanski's horrifying rape of a 13-year-old girl in the 1970s. These students seemed sensible enough to know that such terrible crimes happen in every country and that Polanski's crime does not reflect anything about the character of the American people.

Given thes conflicting goals I described above, I told my students that while premarital sex has become more common in America in the last 40 years, not everyone engages in it or approves of it, and that the Christian churches (about which they had expressed some curiosity) varied in their opinions on the issue.

Love, Saudi Style

2009-09-30T04:54:00.002+04:00

As part of my course in Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, I am required to engage in a service learning project. For those of my readers who aren't currently enrolled in an academic institution, a service learning project is a project in which you go out and perform some type of community service or engagement and report your findings to your instructor, your classmates, or both. My service learning project is to run biweekly conversation hours as part of Penn's English Language Program (ELP). The ELP brings students from all over the world (though mainly not from Europe, which tends to send its English Language Learners to Britain) to the United States to learn English in eight-to-sixteen week courses. Students in this program often complain that they don't get enough opportunity to meet and interact with native students. To remedy this situation, the program has created a system of partnered exchanges with native English speakers who want to learn one or another of the ELP students' languages. Some students cannot find a partner, however, because they speak a langauge that isn't in high demand (I gather not many Penn students are jumping to learn Turkish) or because there are just too many of their nationality in the program (currently, I'm told, the situation with ever-popular Mandarin). And so I and a classmate come to fill in this gap by running conversation hours with a native speaker for those students unable to find a conversation partner.

Last Thursday, I had a somewhat inauspicious beginning to my conversation hours. The time for the hours turned out to be inconvenient, and I ended up hosting them later in the day than I had originally planned. Despite this concession, only three students, all from Turkey, turned up. Today worked out a bit better: about eight students came, and we went off in search of a good conversation spot. This search proved more difficult than I had expected; two or three of my students didn't want to go into Starbucks "because it supports the war against Palestine" (a charge I had never heard before). We eventually ended up at the main Penn library and were able to find one of the rooms there reserved for large study groups.

My first conversation hour having been a fairly basic, getting-to-know-you hour, I decided we should have a more concrete topic today. So I brought up the recent arrest of Roman Polanski (more on my feelings about this later). Most of my students had not heard of Roman Polanski, so I got to flesh out the sordid tale of his acto f rape, conviction, flight, and now arrest in Switzerland, in the process defining such crucial words as convict and trial. As there has been some brouhaha in Europe about Polanski's arrest on a thirty-year-old crime, I mentioned this fact, as well as his victim's decision to forgive him. I then turned the discussion over to them, asking what they made of the case.

My students today hailed from two countries: Turkey and Saudi Arabia. While there was no disagreement between the natives of these two countries about what should be done with Mr. Polanski--they all agreed he should return to the United States and face punishment for his crime--they had some remarkably different questions about the circumstances of what happened. The Saudi students were particularly interested in whether the girl had consented to the act. I explained that in the American legal system, a 13-year-old girl is not capable of giving consent to sex, and any sex act between an adult man and a 13-year-old girl is considered a crime, however willing the girl.

Shar'iah (Islamic religious) law, I soon discovered, has quite a different point of view. Under Shar'iah law, at least as it is interpreted and practiced in Saudi Arabia, a girl this age can be considered an adult for the charge of fornication, though she would not likely receive as severe a punishment at this tender age as an older woman committing the same offense. Usually, however, fornication goes unpunished, because the Shar'iah requiresr four witnesses to the act to convict; as one of my students put it, the main thing is for people "not to do it in the street". Without four witnesses, fornication is considered a sin, but the matter is left to God's justice, not society's.

In Turkey's more secular society, however, matters stand closer to where they do in the States. Turkey considers people to be adults at the age of eighteen. Fornication is not a crime punishable under Turkish law, though it is widely frowned upon and regarded as a serious sin.

My students asked me what Americans thought about these kinds of things. This was a bit of an awkward moment (even more awkward than having to explain the difference between adultery and fornication a moment before). It's hard to know at such times whether to tell the unvarnished truth, and risk giving your students a highly negative view of the country, or to fudge a bit, and have them come away with an incorrect though more positive view. In the end, I half-fudged; I told them that various Christian groups had differing views about the sinfulness of fornication, but that the law did not generally attempt to punish it.

Naked Girls and Their Naked Mothers

2009-09-22T09:12:00.006+04:00

It's hard to believe orientation at Penn was only two weeks ago. Life is starting to gell into some kind of routine, though I imagine the gell won't completely set until after Yom Kippur next Monday. My class schedule is finally complete, and I can begin looking for some kind of work-study job to bring in some needed spare cash. But for the time being, I see only calm waters on the horizon.

As I've noted before, my classmates in Intercultural Communication are approximately twenty, mostly Asian women. These mostly Asian women are mostly Chinese nationals who will likely return to the Middle Kingdom once they have completed their studies. But in the meantime, I expect I'll get to witness a lot of people struggling to make sense of a new culture.

My first opportunity to witness this struggle came at the first meeting of one of our required courses. All students in the Intercultural Communication program are required to take a class called Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, which focuses on analysis of discourse, both in individuals' interactions and at the level of institutions. At the first class meeting, one of the Chinese students started talking about an event she had witnessed the previous weekend, in which an environmental group of one kind of another decided to raise awareness for its cause by bicycling nude through the streets of Philadelphia.

Now, even before this class, I would have imagined that nude bicyclists would attract just as much attention in China as in America. And I would have imagined right, because my fellow student used this nude bike ride to draw attention to Chinese-American cultural differences, as she saw them. She found it fascinating that so many young people had chosen to participate in such a ride, because in China, parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went through the streets naked. She was utterly amazed that American parents apparently took this display of nudity so nonchalantly.

As an act of intercultural misinterpretation, I think this pretty much takes the cake. I explained as gently as I could that almost all American parents would be shocked and outraged if their children went around in public naked. To which this woman replied, with real astonishment, "Really?"

Although the moment was one of great hilarity, I think it raises a few questions:

1) What kinds of pre-conceived stereotypes and misconceptions did this woman have of Americans that led her to believe Americans would be sanguine about their children's being naked in public? I can't really speak with any authority about Chinese stereotypes of Americans, but there were definitely some stereotypes of Taiwanese people I had before I had my misadventure in Tao Yuan.

2) Are we more likely to understand a particular culture's norms and values in the breach than in the observance? I tend to think the answer is yes, at least with respect to the kinds of norms we call "etiquette". I think most people have had the experience of not realizing a particular rule of etiquette even existed until they saw someone violate it. For instance, when you turn to a stranger at a bus stop and say, "Can you tell me what time it is?", you do not expect this person to respond, "Yes, I can." You expect him to say something like, "it's four-thirty." If someone actually did respond, "Yes, I can," this response might come across as quite rude. But most of us would not be able to formulate a rule of this kind of interaction until we had actually seen the rule violated.

3) Did this woman actually have a point? A lot of commentators, both on the left and the right, have noted how guilt and shame have come to be less and less effective motivators in American society over the past century. I half-suspect that what this woman was trying to express was that Chinese students would be unwilling to participate in a bike ride like this because their parents would die of shame, yet these American students apparently did not consider their parents' shame a reason not to participate. So there may be something real to what this woman perceived as a cultural difference, given the traditional Chinese emphasis on filial piety.

4) A couple weeks before I left home, I recall seeing a rerun of Roseanne, an American sitcom about a blue-collar, Midwestern family. In this episode, the title character was sitting in her husband's motorcycle shop, looking through magazines for bikers that, apparently, featured naked women, since she said:

"You know, every one of these girls has a mother out there somewhere who's dying of shame."

Then, three seconds later, she said:

"I stand corrected--here's one with a naked girl and her naked mother in the sidecar!"

In light of my fellow students' comments, and somewhat in light of this one-liner on Roseanne, I'm forced to wonder if shame has any meaning in American cultural these days. I cannot recall one instance of someone saying he decided not to do something he wanted to do because of how someone important in his life would be shamed by his actions. Kind of weird that it took someone from China to make me realize this.

Orientation and Disorientation

2009-09-10T07:46:00.002+04:00

Orientation at GSE (the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where I will be studying for the forseeable future) was held yesterday, in the conference and ball rooms of West Philadelphia's glamorous Inn and Penn hotel.

Now, I've only been to two school orientations in my life--this one and my undergraduate one, ten years ago, at Columbia. What I mostly remember about my undergraduate orientation at Columbia was dancing back-to-back with total strangers on the lawn outside Butler Library and having to listen to Dean Austin Quigley give what I could tell, even as a naive freshman and newcomer to New York City, was the same canned speech he gave every year.

Let's just say that, despite some amusing technical glitches, compared favorably.

For starters, it was only one day--not the week or more universities sometimes spend on orientation programs. A speech was given by the dean and by the head of admissions. Neither said anything controversial, but neither said anything useless, either. I half-suspected, however, that someone was paying the dean to do his best Lena Lamont impersonation, because he kept swaying his head side to side as talked, never seeming to get his words into the microphone. I was seated close enough to the front that I could hear him, but I doubt anyone at the back of the room understood a word he said.

The real verbal pyrotechnics, however, started when the head librarian came to the microphone. About midway through her speech, gremlins got at the audio equipment, and her voice kept going in and out, but rather than ask one of the technicians in the room to come up and fix the thing, she kept going on and on about rather technical things that sounded better suited to a library tour than a half-hour speech and PowerPoint presentation.

Thereafter, we took a break for a spot of lunch. I got to meet a lot of students, in various programs at GSE, both new and returning. It was interesting to find out that a lot of the returning students had changed paths within the school, and that's not uncommon for people to end up graduating in a different program or getting a different degree than they originally intended when they first came here.

Late in the day, I finally got to meet all of the other people in my specific program, which is called Intercultural Communication. Here, orientation gave way to disorientation as I found myself the only man in a group of twenty, mostly Asian women. Graduate education programs tend to have lopsided gender imbalances in favor of women, but I had not expected to be literally the only man in my program. It's not really an issue for me, but it will be an interesting experience.

Yesterday, I Went to the Furniture Store, And...

2009-09-04T08:29:00.002+04:00

One of my fondest memories of teaching EFL in Russia is of doing what I call a chain-chant with my class of Tajik ladies (whom a good friend and fellow teacher irreverently called my "Tajiki babes"). A chain-chant works as follows.

You start with a simple sentence in your target language. With my Tajik ladies, I started with:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store.

Your students say this, first in chorus, than as invididuals.

Then you go around and have each student add something into the sentence. So your first student might say:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed.

The class goes around the room practicing this sentence. Then the third student adds something in, so that you might get:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp.

This process repeats itself until you are either out of students, your students make it clear they're tired of the exercise, or everyone is so hoarse they can hardly speak. In the end you can end up with something like:

Yesterday, I went to the furniture store, and I bought a bed and a lamp and a DVD player and a television and a sofa and a chair and a refrigerator and a desk and a table and now I don't have any money!

The idea here to make students recall the relevant vocabulary, to practice using it, and gain the confidence that comes with being able to say even very long sentences in English.

I thought about this exercise today while surfing the IKEA website, especially the part about and now I don't have any money! When I awoke this morning, one of my feet was so sore that I decided it would be best to avoid going any long distances--especially after yesterday, when I ended up walking 15 very long blocks down Christopher Columbus Boulevard because I was mistaken about where the IKEA store actually was.

Now, I've seen some bad websites in my time, but I really have to marvel at IKEA's. About half of what IKEA "sells" on its website, it turns out, is only available in stores. And, it turns out that while IKEA charges only a finger or two to deliver your purchases if you buy them in the store ($70 for up to 500 pounds of merchandise), they demand not just an arm and a leg but all of your appendanges if you try to order anything for home delivery through the website. Sigh!

So I decided to look at some of IKEA's competitors, like Target, Amazon, and Home Decorators. I ended up buying a desk, a bookcase, and a banker's chair from Home Decorator's. There are still a couple of items I want from IKEA, but I can wait a bit until my leg feels better and I'm able to get out the store and beg someone there to help me get the items off the shelf and into a cart.

I also got to learn the hard way just why mattresses become so cheap around Labor Day. The answer, it turns out, is that they can't deliver them to you on time. As I was expecting delivery of a mattress for today (Friday), I called the store to see what the delivery time frame would be. The woman on the phone told me that I had scheduled the mattress . I told her as gently as I could that, no, I had definitely scheduled it for Friday--that as I had come into the store an hour after the cut-off time for next-day delivery, and as the last 10 of the mattress I wanted had just been purchased by what sounded like a group of frat boys, the manager had assured me I could take delivery on Friday. The woman told me she would have to check with her boss and call me back.

When she said this, of course, I expected I would never hear from her again. But amazingly, 15 minutes later, she actually did call me back--with a profuse apology. She said the trucks were already full for Friday's deliveries, but promised me I could have the mattress on Monday--and agreed to knock $50 off my purchase price for the trouble. Wow--it turns out customer service isn't dead. It's just been waiting for a really bad recession to reappear.

The Lower West Side Minyan

2009-09-03T08:56:00.003+04:00

I haven't written on this blog in some time. After starting La Lingua Frankly, I was unsure whether the Far East Side Minyan would continue, and if so, in what form. But as the possibility of sometimes having news not related to learning Portuguese has crossed my mind, I feel it's only right that the Far East Side Minyan should continue, at least for now.

Well, I am finally home. Yesterday, I moved into my new apartment, a stone's throw from the main drag at the University of Pennsylvania, known as Locust Walk. The apartment makes your average shoe box look positively garangtuan. But after a year spent sharing a Moscow flat with a man whose idea of amusement was coming home at 3:00 in the morning, thoroughly soused, and shouting insults at me through my bedroom door, I at least can revel in its being mine, all mine. I can also say that, in sharp contrast to my last apartment hunt in Brooklyn, I did an excellent job of remembering the Three Ls in looking for this place. And I wasn't disappointed. Within an easy walk (less than 5 minutes) of me are my bank, a 24-hour supermarket, a decent used bookstore, a cinema (albeit one that only seems to show schlocky Blockbusters), and more restaurants than you can shake the proverbial stick at.

Because of the excellent location, I was able to accomplish a lot my first afternoon in Philly. After obtaining my keys and leaving off my belongings, I managed to set up a bank account, buy a couple items I needed at the Penn student bookstore, and find my way to a mattress store. A mattress is being delivered on Friday, and I can get off of the Aero bed my parents lent me for these first few days. This will be a major event, since I haven't slept on a comfortable mattress since before leaving for Taiwan.

I am only barely beginning to find my way around the Penn campus. By complete accident tonight, I was able to find an open computer lab in one of the undergraduate dorms and hence was able to check e-mail and blog.

Tomorrow, my main goals are to purchase furniture and a new computer. IKEA and Best Buy here I come!

Julie and Julia and J.R.

2009-08-09T07:06:00.003+04:00

To all of my regular readers, an apology. I have been home with my family in Kansas for about two weeks now. Other than being in the midst of getting my financing together for graduate school, I have had little on my plate, and little worth blogging about. But aside from feeling that an update was in order, I decided to write tonight to announce a new project I hope to work on in the coming year or two.

Today, my family and I met up with some old friends to see Julie & Julia, a new film about one woman's quest to cook her way through Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. Played to perfection by versatile actress Amy Adams, Julie Powell sets off on this quest after a horror of a reunion with frenemies from her college days. Julie is stuck in a job I can only describe as the tenth circle of hell--handling complaints from 9/11 families in the aftermath of that great tragedy. Once upon a time, Julie had dreams of being a writer, but she gave it up after half-completing a novel that, needless to say, never came close to being published. When one of her frenemies, a central-casting workaholic yuppie type, announces that she is now writing a blog about her work in the heady world of New York real estate, Julie decides to write one of her own about her own favorite topic, cooking. She settles on trying to cook her way through Julia Child's cookbook because she fears she has never completed anything she has started and needs to give herself deadlines.

As you might expect from the title, Julie & Julia deals equally with the lives of Julie Powell and of Mrs. Childs herself (expertly portrayed by Meryl Streep). The film's portrays the period in Julia Childs' life from her arrival in France with her husband, an American diplomat stationed in Paris, to the publication of her aforementioned 1961 bestselling cookbook. It turns out that Julie and Julia share a number of things in common. Both women embark on major projects when they find themselves needing a project to fill their lives. Both have to staunch the snarks of friends and relatives who cannot understand why on earth they have chosen these projects. And both, in the end, not only beat the tests they have set for themselves but proving to others the value of being absolutely fearless.

In many ways, I find myself in a similar situation to these ladies. I have been casting about forever for some project to occupy my life. Although I am entering Penn in the fall, I know that my studies there will not consume all of my time; moreover, I am still a little uncertain in what direction I hope my studies may lead me. My original plan with this program, as my regular readers know, was to become a foreign students' advisor in a university, but I have also given some thought to using my degree to go on into applied linguistics--briefly, the branch of linguistics concerned with enhancing standards of language teaching.

Which leads me, at last, to the substance of my project. Having recently decided to take up studying Portuguese (more on my motivation for this later), I am settling myself a goal of achieving a reasonable fluency in the language within 18 months. I have yet to work out exactly what standards I will set for assessing this fluency; most likely I will base my assessment on the criteria set by the Common European Framework for Languages, a project of the European Union. As I work my way through Portuguese, I will try to write frequently--weekly, if time permits--about my project in this regard, on a new blog, the link to which will be sent to you as soon as I settle on a name for it.

More to follow swiftly.

Black as Peach

2009-07-23T08:38:00.003+04:00

Four days spent in Georgia's largest city have me wondering which city is more confusing: Moscow or Atlanta. Moscow was intensely difficult to find my way around in, especially at first. But at least Moscow did not show the total lack of creativity with which Atlanta invests its street names. For those of my readers who are not American, an old joke has it that in Atlanta, all directions start "First, go to Peachtree." I can now say from personal experience that this joke is firmly based in fact.

The first and most important Peachtree in Atlanta is called, simply, Peachtree Street. Strangely, since Georgia is the Peach State, the street is not named for any particular peach tree that played a role in Atlanta's history. Rather, the story goes, it was a trail named after the locally plentiful pitch tree by the Native Americans who lived in the area before white settlers arrived in the 1830s, but because the settlers didn't like the idea of a street named for such a foul-smelling tree, they changed it to Peachtree. Peachtree Street has become what Broadway is to New York or Market Street is to Philadelphia--the main spine around which the body of the city finds its structure. The street has also given its name to dozens of other thoroughfares in the city.

A block west of Peachtree is, not surprisingly, West Peachtree. Far to the north, near a wealthy district Buckhead, the original Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road. To the south, it becomes Peachtree Boulevard. Somewhere along the way, Peachstree Street crosses Peachtree Avenue. The map my hostel gave me also showed a Peachtree Creek, a Peachtree Battle, and a Peachtree Terrace. The Atlanta visitor's center, located close to the original Peachtree near the Underground Atlanta mall, has an intersection road sign with a good twenty Peachtrees.

I got to see a lot of the main Peachtree Street during my stay in Atlanta. My first day, I walked north along it, in 80 degree heat (maybe 25 Celsius, for my British readers), to the Margaret Mitchell House. Later in the day, I took a bus and did a lot more walking to reach The Temple. No, not the original temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon, rebuilt by Herod, and levelled by the Romans, but Atlanta's main Reform temple, which bears that name. I was eager to go there for a Friday night service because of the Temple's role in the Civil Rights Movement. As portrayed in the film Driving Miss Daisy, the Temple was bombed in 1958 because its rabbi at the time was an active proponent of integration.

The following two days found me back on Peachtree as I searched for the Atlanta Civic Center, where I went to see an exhibit on "the African-American experience"--so called, I gathered, because its organizers wanted to emphasize not merely African-American history but the African-American contribution to America. As you might imagine, Atlanta is chock full of black history. It is also chock full of black people; at one point, a few years ago, two-thirds of Atlanta's citizens were black. This percentage has declined slightly as formerly fleeing whites have returned from the suburbs and whites from other parts of the country have come to share in the city's flourishing economy.

Nonetheless, walking through Atlanta, it is easy to forget that you live in a country where whites, not blacks, are the majority. When I visited Underground Atlanta, a downtown mall fashioned from some streets covered over by railroad viaducts and later rediscovered, I was the only non-black face in sight. Even the mall's Chinese restaurant was staffed by black people. Visiting the African-American exhibit described above, I had the same experience.

When I lived in Brooklyn, I made my home on the border between two neighborhoods, Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Frequently portrayed in Spike Lee films, "Do or die" Bed-Stuy has been an important African-American community since before the Civil War, when it was one of the few areas in then-independent Brooklyn where black people could own land. Though situated between Bed-Stuy and the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill was more racially mixed, mostly because Pratt Institute, a major school for the arts, was located there and thus brought in a more diverse community. So it is not as though I have no experience being in largely black areas.

Nonetheless, my visit to Atlanta was the first time I can recall being the only white person in large crowds of black people. Although I was, naturally, around a lot of black people when I took the busses in my neighborhood or when I went shopping in Downtown Brooklyn, I cannot recall having ever previously been in places in America where there were literally no white people present.

I guess this is a privilege white Americans have and don't usually realize: we are almost never in situations where we are the only one who looks like us. I imagine that, for non-whites, this experience must come more often and at times be much more frightening than my forays through Atlanta were for me.

Moving Africans (and Others) Rapidly Through Atlanta

2009-07-17T18:45:00.006+04:00

I am staying in Atlanta's own International Hostel, having arrived yesterday evening after a day of airline travel. I had hoped to avoid the airlines on my trip across the East Coast, but to get to Atlanta I found there simply was no practical alternative. The bus from Washington would have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen hours; Amtrak's Crescent service was similar. I would have preferred to take the Crescent, but it was, believe it or not, sold out. Maybe the romance of the rails is making a comeback in America. So in the end, I hopped on a plane.

Down south, they quip that if you want to go to heaven, you have to change planes in Atlanta. The city's massive Hartsfield Airport is one of the main hubs in America's hub-and-spoke system of airline travel, and it does seem at times as though everything passes through Atlanta on the way somewhere else. The exception to this appears to be trips actually to Atlanta, for to get to the city of Margaret Mitchell and Martin Luther King, I was forced to go by way of O'Hare in Chicago.

I touched down in Atlanta at 7:30 last night, grabbed my bags, and headed to my hostel. Although Atlanta has a reputation as a driving city, I was easily able to reach my hostel on MARTA, Atlanta's subway and bus system. Since the 1970s, Atlanta has been what in America is known as a majority-minority city--meaning that a majority of its residents are now people of color. MARTA is underfunded, some suspect because its users are overwhelmingly African-African. A local joke has it that MARTA, which actually stands for Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, stands for Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.

Oddly, then, on my trip in, I noticed that the other passengers were a diverse racial mix. I sat next to a couple of men from India, and there were several white passengers in my car. I guess I'll have to take more trips on MARTA to see if the joke really reflects reality.

I don't know how much use I'll make of MARTA, though, since my hostel is conveniently located within an easy walk of most of the major attractions in Atlanta. So far, I am more pleased with this hostel than the others I've had the pleasure of staying at, for the simple reason that my room is on the first floor and I was not forced to drag my gargantuan suitcase up three flights of stairs to my room.

Today, I am off to the Varsity, to the sacred site where Margaret Mitchell's mind first conceived Scarlett O'Hara, and eventually the Temple, the synagogue bombed in 1958 due to is involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

Good Evening, Baltimore

2009-07-12T20:36:00.003+04:00

I can't recall just why, when I cogitated plans for this trip, I felt compelled to come to Baltimore. I suppose because Boston and Baltimore were the two cities in the Bos-Wash (Boston to Washington) corridor I had never visited, and because I had illusions that Baltimore's harbor would prove quaint and charming, as people always imagine harbors will. Nonetheless, the city has turned out to be remarkably dull.

Baltimore's famed inner harbor is pleasant enough, but what's around it is, essentially, another d****d mall, meant to serve businessmen attending the local convention center. I had a chance to wander through Federal Hill, a neighborhood I was told was filled with charming, 18th-century row houses. Charming enough it is, though not really worth a long visit. Mostly, it reminded me of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn--a gentrifying (perhaps gentrified) neighborhood trying too hard to imagine that it's something more interesting than what it is. On the other hand, I did manage to find a used bookstore where I was able to trade my book about the Evelyn Nesbit tragedy for a cheap copy of Anne Tyler's Accidental Tourist. Having seen the movie version of it on iTunes, I had wanted for some time to read the actual novel, and as it's set mainly in Baltimore, I figured this was as appropriate a time--and place--to begin.

For lunch my first day here, I managed to make it up to Baltimore's Lexington Market. I had expected to find something similar in conception to Quincy Market in Boston or Reading Terminal in Philadelphia--a well-executed food court made out of a historic-looking venue. What I found instead was very downmarket. At Reading Terminal, virtually all of the stalls were selling meals and food. At Lexington Market, I would guess that at least half the vendors were offering uncooked meat and other staples. Seating was inadequate. I eventually managed to buy a meatball sub and an iced tea, but was not, sadly, able to find any local specialties. Baltimore is famous for its seafood, and online guides had told me I had to experience a coddie (a kind of cod-and-potato cake) and something called pit beef while I was here. Neither was I able to find at Lexington Market.

Yesterday, I went to the local library to make my onward travel plans. My plan had been to take Amtrak down to Savannah, but I found out quickly that the hostel I had intended to stay in down there was closed for repairs, and today I finally made other travel plans. I will instead be going to Washington for three days--but not tomorrow, as I had hoped, but on Tuesday--there being no hostel vacancies in Washington for Monday night. So I will have another full day in Baltimore, with nothing in particular to fill it.

Don't get me wrong. Baltimore is pleasant enough, and I could imagine living and working here if the opportunity arose; it's just very light on real attractions. Nonetheless, I look forward to Tuesday, when I can finally say, "Good Evening, Baltimore."

The Harvard Hoar House

2009-07-12T20:08:00.004+04:00

My apologies for not blogging sooner, but I've rarely had access to a computer since my return to the States. I shall devote this post to Boston. The next will be devoted to Baltimore and to the change in travel plans I have been forced to take.

My stay in Boston was not everything I had hoped it would be. I arrived in Boston on a Sunday night, after 7 hours on Greyhound, and got a cab to my hostel. This hostel proved to be only a stone's throw from Commonwealth Avenue and Newbury Street, the main streets of Boston's fabled Back Bay. Planned as Boston's Champs Elysee, Commonwealth Avenue is indeed quite pretty, though not so grand as I imagine the Champs Elysee to be. Newbury Street had quite a nice selection of restaurants, and I eventually settled down for an Indian meal of chicken tikka masala, nan, and iced tea, before heading back to the hostel for a good night's sleep.

The first day I went on Boston's famous Freedom Trail. Briefly, the Freedom Trail is a network of 14 famous sites involved mostly in the Revolutionary War (though a couple are linked more to the abolitionist movement and the Civil War). To take the trail, you start out in Boston's famous Boston Common and follow a red brick line that eventually takes you through the winding and narrow streets of Boston's downtown all the way to the Bunker Hill Monument across the harbor in Charlestown.

I spent almost a full day on the trail, stopping off at Quincy Market for lunch and at the Paul Revere house for a tour. Quincy Market is a prime example of a 30-odd-year trend in America of taking unused historic or "historic" sites in central business districts and turning them into--you guessed it--upscale shopping venues. The market at Quincy Market, located just behind Boston's famous Fanueil Hall, has functioned as a market in one way or another for over 150 years. In its current incarnation, it houses a food court and is surrounded by such stores as Ann Taylor and Sunglass Hut.

Paul Revere's house was interesting less for the site itself than for what I was able to learn about his life. The man had no fewer than sixteen children, by two different wives. Even by the standards of the 18th century, this was quite a prodigious amount of offspring. I was also surprised to learn that, in addition to his work as a silversmith, Paul River was known for his printing and engraving.

My second day in Boston, I decided to venture up to Harvard. The weather was a tourist's worst nightmare--pounding rain. Wandering into Harvard Yard from the Cambridge T stop, I managed to hook onto the tail end of a campus tour. I got to see the famous statue of John Harvard--who, it turns out, did not actually found the university but merely bequeathed it a shipload of money early in its history. I was surprised to learn that the statue is not a genuine likeness of John Harvard, all images of the man having been destroyed in a 1730s fire. No one knows exactly who served as the model for this statue, but rumor has it that the statue is a likeness of a Harvard president by the name of Hoar. At the time Hoar served as Harvard's president, the campus was expanding, and a tradition had developed of naming new undergraduate houses after retiring presidents. For understandable reasons, the story goes, Harvard was none too keen about having a Hoar House (whorehouse...get it...get it) on its campus, and so they agreed to honor President Hoard by making this statue in a likeness either of him or of his nephew, depending on which version of the story you believe.

Sadly, I was unable to get the full tour of Harvard. The tour guide was kind enough to tell me where to go to get the start of the tour, but as I was walking there, the rain, which had temporarily abated, started to come down so fast and furious that I was forced to seek refuge in the Harvard Co-op, the main bookstore for Harvard. Started as an independent store, the Co-op now so thoroughly resembles a Barnes & Noble that it even serves Tazo Chai tea lattes. By the time I ventured out again into the rain and over to where the tour began, the last one of the day had already ended.

The third day, the weather improved enough that I decided to venture out to Salem and see what I could of sites relating to the famous witch trials. I shouldn't have bothered. Salem is a classic tourist trap. Were it not for the history of the 1690s witch hysteria, Salem would be a perfectly ordinary bedroom community for Boston. I saw three witch-realted museums. The first turned out to be almost entirely child-oriented, with a light-and-tableaux show giving the general history of the witch trials. The second, in the basement of a store on Salem's pedestrian mall (what is with America's fascination with pedestrian malls?), took me down into a basement to see more lights and tableaux.

The third museum, the famous Witch House, belonged to one of the judges in the witch trials. While it was pleasant enough to see a restored 17th-century home, I didn't really feel I knew any more about the witch hysteria after touring it than I had before.

There is quite a lot more to see in Boston, and I hope to go back and see it at some point during my time at Penn, but I felt oddly compelled to move on to Baltimore after three days. As my next post will reveal, I needn't have.

Boston or Bus

2009-07-06T06:29:00.003+04:00

Despite all of the hoopla Philadelphia attempts to generate surrounding its Independence Day celebrations--the official website of which is called "America's Birthday"--I ended up having a rather lackluster Fourth. As the day was Shabbat, I went to synagogue in the morning and was pleased to be able to find a Conservative/Reconstructionist shul in Society Hill I had remembered visiting a few years back when I had a job interview in Philly. The job didn't pan out, but I had liked the congregation and wanted to make sure to come back there if I was ever in town.

Following synagogue, I came back to my hostel, to find that my alarm clock, which I had not used since leaving Russia, was broken in such a way that the battery kept coming out. As I needed to go up to Boston the following day, I was forced to go out in search of a new battery (the old one having apparently rolled into some crevice in the floor my oh-so-nimble hands couldn't find) and some masking tape, to keep the new battery in.

The actual evening of the Fourth, I walked down (up? west?) to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway with some other hostel guests to see the concert and fireworks. I wanted to go the concert because Sheryl Crow was the advertised headliner. It took more than an hour for them to bring her on; by the time her face flashed across the jumbotrons on the Parkway, it was past ten. Knowing that I had to get up and travel in the morning--my bus was to leave at 11:00 AM, but I wanted to get there early as I knew crowds were likely on a holiday weekend--I decided to walk back to the hostel before the fireworks began. I did manage to see a couple of fireworks flashes as I passed City Hall, roughly the center of Center City.

When I booked my bus ticket on Thursday night, I had carefully weighed all the options for coming up by train and bus. By train, of course, there was really only one option: Amtrak. The only remotely affordable trains between Philadelphia and Boston left at ridiculous hours of the morning, so I chose to abandon my plans of taking the train up and instead resorted to the bus. Through a site called busjunction.com, it is now possible to compare the various choices for bus travel in what has become a highly competitive market on the East Coast.

For those of my readers who do not have the good fortune of living on the East Coast of the United States, the bus situation at present is this: about 10 years ago, your choices in bus service were limited to Greyhound and various regional operators that had ties to Greyhound. Then, suddenly, a lot of busses running between Chinatowns of various East Coast cities started to appear. These "Chinatown buses" are able to undercut Greyhound's prices because they do not use central bus stations (except in Boston, where they are now forced to by a law heavily lobbied for by--you guessed it--Greyhound). Even more recently, Greyhound and some of the established bus services have started fighting fire with fire, offering streetside pickups and drop-offs on newly branded buses called Bolt and MegaBus. These new services are currently runnings deals for as little as one dollar--yes, you read that right, one dollar--between New York and Philadelphia (though to get the dollar fare you have to book pretty far in advance).

Busjunction.com and some other websites now allow East Coast bus passengers to compare available bus options and find the best fare and time of day for their travels. My search for a ticket to Boston yielded an interesting result. I ended up paying $14.00 for a Philadelphia-New York trip and $20.00 for New York to Boston--so a total of $34.00--to ride on Greyhound and Peter Pan (a smaller, regional bus company affiliated with and partly owned by Greyhound). This compared to $66.00 to book a full through-ticket from Philly to Boston, even though a through-ticket would likewise have involved a transfer at the Port Authority in Manhattan. Go figure.

On reaching the Greyhound counter in Philadelphia, I was issued a ticket for Philadelphia to New York but not a ticket from New York to Boston. I was told I had selected an e-ticket from New York and would have to print the ticket at a Kinko's when I got there. Ah, the wonders of Greyhound customer service.

The ride up to New York from Philly was short (less than two hours) and pleasant. I was pleased to be riding in one of Greyhound's newer buses, which the company advertises as having more leg room. On reaching New York, I ended up having to scramble to get to a Burger King (yes, a Burger King) where I could print my ticket to Boston. But I somehow managed to find said Burger King, print the ticket, return to the Port Authority, grab a sandwich, and find out which gate my Boston bus was leaving from, all in under an hour. I had scheduled a two-hour layover just in case there were problems on the road up from Philly. Not knowing what to do with my second hour, I went to where my bus was eventually to leave and fortuitously found out that, as there were open seats on the Boston bus just then leaving, I could travel an hour sooner. And so I did.

Though long (over hour hours), the trip to Boston was also quite pleasant. The day was sunny, and I was able to pass the ride reading a book about the Harry Thaw-Stanford White murder at the turn of the century (more on this later). The ride was "direct", meaning there were to be no stops. So at one point I got the thrill of trying to go to the bathroom as the bus rounded a curve at 65 miles an hour.

Finally arriving at Boston's South Station a little after 6:30, I got a taxi to my hostel, deposited my bags, and went for a walk in the immediate neighborhood, an upscale area known as the Back Bay. I eventually went as far as the southern edge of Boston's Public Garden before heading back to the hostel.

Tomorrow, I'm returning to the Public Garden to ride the famous swan boats before heading off on the Freedom Trail. But first, off to bed.

Gone in a Phlash

2009-07-03T06:45:00.002+04:00

Having secured an apartment very near the Penn campus yesterday--the ideal little studio I mentioned in my last post--I spent a little time today exploring Philadelphia further. I started out the day by walking to Reading Terminal Market, a giant food court inside the old Philadelphia terminus of the Reading Railroad (yes, the one of Monopoly fame). Reading Terminal Market really is something to see. Food of every nationality and description is on offer, in addition to such sundries as Amish crafts and cookbooks (yes, there's a whole stall devoted to nothing but cookbooks). After wandering up and down the aisle, I decided to have a turkey dinner at a place that sold nothing but gobblers. Having missed Thanksgiving two years running, I can say the tender turkey on sale there all but brought tears to my eyes.

Once I had sated myself on turkey, I set off along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. A giant city beautification project of the 1920s and 1930s, Benjamin Franklin Parkway aspires to be Philadelphia's Champs Elysees. It goes in a diagonal from near City Hall to the Philadelphia Zoo. Festooned along either side of it, I discovered, are flags of many nations. The flags fly either from flagpoles or from strings suspended over the roadway, but are in either case marked out so that viewers know which country's flag they are looking at. I was delighted to spot the flags of both Russia and Ukraine along the Parkway.

One site reachable from the Parkway is the central branch of the Free Public Library in Philadelphia. The building easily rivals the central branch of the New York Public Library in beauty and grandiosity--though it has no lions out front to guard the books. I went in just long enough to use the Internet and book onward bus and hostel reservations for my trip to Boston on Sunday. But I got to go up the library's giant main staircase on the way to the computers, which was quite a treat.

During the warmer months, Philadelphia runs a system of tourist buses called Phlash Buses. These only go up and down Market Street--one of the main axes of the city, the other being Broad Street--and the Parkway. After leaving the library, I took a Phlash bus to one of its ends--a riverside walk called Penn's Landing--and back up to the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Fairmount Waterworks. Built in the early 19th century to supply the water needs of the growing city, the Waterworks are a neoclassical masterpiece and, during their years of operation, were a major tourist destination in the city. Though closed for their original purpose for a full century, the Waterworks now house a museum devoted to how water and sewage system in general, and Philadelphia's in particular, work. I could tell the museum was geared mainly to schoolchildren, but it was nevertheless interesting to walk around in it and see some of the 19th-century gearing on display.

You might say today has gone in a Phlash. I can't wait to see how tomorrow goes.

The Philadelphia Story

2009-07-01T07:05:00.002+04:00

It's been a while since I've posted, so for those of my regular readers who don't know, I am back safe and sound, in the United States.

I arrived in America a week ago after a relatively uneventful flight home. Before I left, I had expected some hassles leaving the country, since I had lost my declaration form over the course of my stay, but oddly I was quickly waved through by the Russian bureaucrat at customs. On my flight, I had the good fortune to sit next to a man from Kiev who claimed he had never flown before. I quickly offered him my window seat so that he could see the ground below.

On reaching Washington, I had to go through American customs, which proved simple enough. In line, I overheard a flight attendant trying to ask one of my fellow passengers whether she had any liquids or other materials that might keep her from entering the country. The flight attendant had the mistaken impression this woman spoke Spanish. I chimed in in my halting Russian and managed to explain to this woman what she could and could not bring into the United States.

After five days in New York getting reaquainted with, well, old acquaintances (and several very good friends), I came down to Philadelphia on Sunday. I will admit I've had little chance to scope out the city, having spent the bulk of my time near Penn looking at apartments and reading in the Penn bookstore (man, how I missed Barnes & Noble when I was in Russia). But here is what I can report about Philadelphia so far:

1) The housing market is much saner than in New York, by orders of magnitude. By this I mean not only that housing is more abundant and cheaper, but that the process of obtaining it is infinitely saner. I have not spoken to a single broker but have been dealing directly with landlords who have apartments in and around Penn. I may have found the perfect one today, not enormous but barely a stone's throw from campus, from a cinema, and from a grocery store. But all of the small studios I've sen have been lovely and infinitely liveable. What's more, all of the landlords I've spoken to are only too happy to rent to a future Penn student and seem uninterested in my income statement, by credit score, or in having me sign over my firstborn child.

2) Transportation is also pretty good. The subway system is not nearly as extensive as in New York or Moscow, consisting of only two lines, plus a "subway-surface" line that is a vestige of Philadelphia's formerly extensive streetcar network, but it's nonetheless quick and reliable. I've found a bus that takes me directly into the Penn area from the hostel where I'm currently staying. The bus is reasonably quick and not terribly crowded. I have yet to encounter anything that resembles a major traffic jam.

3) People seem much more chill here than in New York. A case in point: tonight, as I was getting on a bus, I realized I didn't have any singles to pay for my ride (the bus costs $2.00). I asked if anyone had change for a ten. The driver suggested I go into a nearby restaurant and get change there. I figured that by the time I did this, he would have driven off. But no. He actually kept the bus waiting for me. And no one on the bus complained about it.

4) Philadelphia is also a reasonable "walking city". I haven't been to the Liberty Bell or any of the major tourist destinations yet, as this is not the main purpose of my trip, and as I've seen them on previous visits. But they're all an easy walking distance from my hostel.

Free the Shively Volvo

2009-06-20T21:10:00.005+04:00

Jews aren't really big on Satan. Actually, since nobody is really big on Satan, let me rephrase that. Satan does not loom large in the Jewish consciousness. In the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament), Satan is actually called HaSatan (rhymes with Anne) and is usually seen as something akin to a district attorney who lays out the charges against you before God, not as the horned man with a pitchfork of later Christian imagination. Many Jews, myself included, really don't believe in Satan at all, seeing him largely as an allegorical figure.

I tend to be pretty staunch in that theological position except at times like today when my computer suddenly goes on the fritz. Then I feel compelled to believe it must be the work of demonic spirits or even of Ole Lucifer himself. How else can I explain my computer's propensity to encounter these problems at such amazingly bad times?

Or is it amazingly good times? I'm returning to America in two days, after all, which means I won't need to repeat the scene I described in a December post (see: http://fareastsideminyan.blogspot.com/2008/12/remont-strating.html). As luck has it, I'll be staying at the home of a couple of very close friends, one of whom, I suspect, would run her own computer repair shop if God had not called on her to run a non-profit assisting the Jews of Uganda (yes, Virginia, there are Jews in Uganda). I can probably get her to take a look at it and at least tell me what is wrong.

On the other hand, since I turned in my company-provided cell phone a couple days ago, and the phone in our flat is not working, I am temporarily completely incommunicado. If anyone needs to reach me over the next couple of days, do send an e-mail: I will be checking my e-mail at my school starting Monday. Until then, there's nothing I can really do.

More to the point, as readers of my December post will recall, this is not the first computer-related drama I've had in Russia. I've bought a total of not one, not two, but FOUR power cords since I've been here. Two of them spontaneously died--one after it fried the insides of my machine. The third worked fine but had a socket attachment that eventually started to wobble and wiggle and generally refuse to stay in place. After that, I was forced to go back to the incompetent computer chain that sold me the first two, wrong power cords and buy my fourth one, which I suspect has something to do with this latest computer "issue".

All of this started last night, when my computer started rebooting itself for no apparent reason. At first I thought I had hit something somewhere, but after the second or third time it happened I got messages telling me to run some kind of automatic screening system before loading Windows. Then today, it wouldn't come on properly at all--similar to what happened when my processor got fried the last time.

Dealing with computer repairs--or car repairs, or any other kind of repair--tends to make most people feel incompetent and helpless even when they're in their own country and can communicate about repairs in their own language. Doing it abroad tends to triple or quadruple the chances of being fleeced, flim-flammed, or being just-plain-wrong advice. I'm glad I'm not going to have to go through this one more time.

It's sort of fitting that this is happening to me just as I'm gearing up to go home and am starting to think of various things--necessities and otherwise--I intend to purchase once I'm back. Close to the top of my list is Designing Women, which is finally being released in DVD season-sets after years of apparently ugly wrangling over music rights. In one memorable episode, I recall the Sugarbaker gals deciding, after seeing the sweatshop where their curtains are sewn by women paid by the piece, to strike a blow for all women everywhere by picketing the garage where Mary Jo Shively's car is being held hostage by price-gouging mechanics. As the lights fade out and the ending credits appear onscreen, we hear the women screaming, "Free the Shively Volvo! Free the Shively Volvo!"

Will someone please free my Volvo?

We Shall Overcome

2009-06-16T01:55:00.005+04:00

Two days ago, I had my last class ever at my school. This was with the group I usually refer to as "My Tajik Ladies"--a group of twentysomething and thirtysomething women from Tajikistan I had been teaching since January. It was a sweeter occasion than I had expected. All of these women professed that they would miss me and said it was "very bad" that they were to have another teacher when they liked me so much.

This is quite a change from the situation I had with these ladies after our first class together. My Tajik ladies are a somewhat unusual group in that they straddle a fence that exists in the way my school (and most other language schools) handle instruction. Our school usually divides teachers and students into two groups: school-based and in-company. School-based classes usually consist of students who pay for their own lessons and attend them in a classroom at the language school. In-company groups, on the other hand, usually consist of students whose lessons are paid for by their employer and take place at their worksite. My Tajik ladies were unusual because, though they were classified as an "in-company" group, their lessons took place at our school's central branch.

Before my first lesson with them, I was told that these women were the wives of executives at some sort of investment company. I was told that the class would be Elementary (usually the first level of EFL instruction, though some schools offer Beginner or Starter courses for those rare students who come in without a knowledge of the English alphabet or phonemic symbols) but that I should give them our standard written and speaking tests anyhow, because some might be what are known in our trade as "false beginners" (students who claim not to know any English but have in fact studied a little bit of it at some point and forgotten it).

Standard procedure with new classes is to start with a shorter "test lesson" where students have a short conversation with the teacher, followed by the written and speaking tests. A typical lesson is usually 90 minutes to 2 hours and 15 minutes long. Test lessons are under an hour. With higher-level groups, this can be explained fairly simply, but as my Tajik ladies proved, with only one exception, to be near-total beginners, I was unable to get them to understand why the lesson was shorter. Apparently, they afterward went and complained, demanding a new teacher. My administrative director must have done some pretty fancy footwork to get them to accept me as their teacher, but somehow she did. But she also warned me to tread carefully with them.

Somehow, despite this rocky start, I managed to win over these ladies. While I never felt I was especially great and teaching Elementary level English, I did get to have some fun with them, and in the process even learn a little bit about Tajikistan.

And also, a little about myself and about the teaching of English.

Our final lesson was a case in point. The central grammar point of this lesson was the going to future for plans and intentions, and the theme was vacation. Our textbook built this lesson around a fake reality TV program in which two couples each choose a vacation but are then forced to go on the vacation chosen by the other couple. By way of leading into the topic, I asked my students to interview each other about their last vacations.

Most of the students who take English lessons with our school are quite privileged. I've gotten used to students telling me about exotic vacation in the Bahamas and the Swiss Alps, and I expected the same from these ladies. Instead, one student told me that she had never taken a vacation. Two others described vacations a couple of years back to visit relations in Tajikistan. On these vacations, the women had stayed not in five-star accomodations but with relatives who, it was clear, didn't have much room to accomodate them: in a previous lesson, when I asked these ladies to draw their family trees, I was told in all earnestness that this would be very difficult, because they all came from families with more than ten siblings, had parents with more than ten siblings, and had brothers and sisters whose own families were shaping up to be of similar size. I doubt that any of these women's relatives have a spare room for out-of-town guests.

I am amazed at what these women seem to have overcome to be where they are today. Tajikistan, I gather, is still a very conservative country. Except in the capital, women are generally expected to wear hijab (traditional Muslim head coverings for women). More than one of these women said they had come to Moscow at least in part because they did not want to abide by this custom. All seem to have escaped the traditional women's lot of being constantly pregnant; some of these women had no children at all, and the others had only one or two.

There are two things, I've found, that can lead an EFL teacher to doubt the value of what he does. The first is the sense that, since his students are generally pretty wealthy people, he is just in the business of helping rich people get even richer. The second is the nagging worry that he is an agent of cultural imperialism and globalization. When a teacher, such as your roving reporter, has eaten at McDonalds on three continents and seen signs in English directing him to the toilets of three continents' airports, it's hard for him not to wonder if he isn't a small water drop in the seemingly unstoppable tsunami of American cultural dominance.

My Tajik ladies have turned that idea on its head. English isn't making them less Tajik. It's opening up the world for them--literally. I know that eventually, all of these ladies will use English, whether in business or on their travels, to speak to people from all over the world. That point was reinforced for me at the end of my lesson, when I had my students work in pairs to plan their dream vacations. Two of my students decided to plan a pilgrimage to Mecca. I can easily see these women, dressed in the plain white clothing required of hajji (pilgrims to Mecca), conversing with fellow believers from every corner of the globe--in English they learned from me.

But EFL teachers provide their students with so much more than the opportunity to make chit-chat on holidays abroad. I realized this last night, as I sat watching a documentary on my computer. Through the magic of the Internet, I've managed to find Eyes on the Prize, a landmark PBS documentary about the Civil Rights Movement. I've been working my way through the long (14 hours) series, and last night I got to the final hour, which deals with the lasting legacy of the movement. At one point, footage is shown of Chinese protesters in Tianamen Square, holding up makeshift banners with words that once echoed from every mound and molehill of Mississippi:

We shall overcome.

And, I realized, those words didn't get on that banner by magic. No. Some intrepid adventurer went off to China to teach English, and taught those words to whoever made that banner. And in the process, he taught them so much more.

Your Steady Boy Says Ship Ahoy

2009-06-10T22:28:00.002+04:00

Okay, maybe it's a tad premature for that title, though I'm unable to think of a better one. With less than two weeks until I leave, I suppose this is the point at which I am supposed to start summing up my time in Moscow and delve into the great insights I now have into Russia her people after having lived here for over a year.

I suppose the greatest insight I can offer is how much the Russians seem just like us. I recall, about a year ago, noting that Russians shared with Americans a haziness about geography, a fascination with Paris (the one with the sex tape, not the one on the Seine), and political apathy (ah, how quickly some observations date). At the time, this was a joke. But after a year here, I have seen that Russian people are like us in other, more meaningful ways. They want good government--even if they don't know how to get it. They want to build wealth and acquire real estate, even if there is as yet no "Russian Dream" to correspond to the American Dream. And they share our concern as the world's economy continues to crumble.

In other ways, being here has made me appreciate how good Americans have it--in many ways. Having to live without an American-style washer, capable of handling a week's worth of whites, colors, or delicates at a go, may have been my first inkling of this. But I came to realize it in more profound ways as well. We Americans are fortunate to have a government we can trust most of the time--and, when we can't, can work to change. Our economy may need an overhaul, but our nation's prosperity does not rest solely on the price of a single asset, however much some people may bitch and moan about what they pay at the pump.

Most of all, we still have a banking system we can rely on. This fact really came home to me the other night, when I was watching a 60 Minutes segment online about the FDIC's takeover of a small bank that had finally failed. It turns out that, these days, FDIC bank takeovers are a surgical operation. The FDIC never comes in during regular bank hours, when apprehensive customers might start a bank run. Instead, they come after the bank has closed and the customers have gone home. When the bank reopens under FDIC management, of course, bank customers have the option of removing their money from the bank (subject to the $250,000 ceiling of FDIC protection). Almost none do, because they are given quick--and accurate--assurances that their money is safe.

Spending a year in a country that has had so much economic upheaval not just in the past year, but for the past twenty years, has made my own country's problems seem minor. I really have no more patience for the people on Wall Street and the "fears of inflation" that seem to be wreaking havoc on the stock market at present--the fear being that inflation may go from almost nothing to almost nothing plus three percent. Not once in living memory has the United States had to devalue its currency, let alone issue a completely new one. Russia has done both, more than once, since the fall of Communism.

Gratitude for what America has--that's what Russia has given me. Now let's see how long I can keep it.

Carrie Bradshaw in Paris

2009-06-03T00:54:00.003+04:00

For the moment, things are quiet here in Moscow. No, scratch that. Things have been quiet for quite a while for me. But with only twenty days to go until I board an airplane for New York, I am definitely in wind-down mode.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to say goodbye--or rather, didn't get a chance to say goodbye--to Gulia, my banker student. I had known for some time that she would be going on maternity leave and thus ending her lessons, but her actual cancellation of them was rather abrupt. At our last meeting, she brought me up to her office, then proceeded to leave me there while she went off to attend the birthday party of someone I gathered was a bigwig in her bank. Forty-five minutes into what would have been an hour-and-a-half lesson, I figured she wasn't likely to return and that, even if she did, there wasn't much I could teach her in so little time. So I left her a polite note saying that I was going home.

The day of what would have been our next lesson, I got a text message from my school's office that she had cancelled her remaining lessons with me, because of her maternity leave. I really can't blame her for doing so--I'm sure a bank executive must have a million things to do in the week before she goes on a maternity leave--but I do wish I'd had a real chance to say goodbye. It may sound bitter to say so, but after having worked with her for over four months, I felt I deserved at least that much.

The whole episode has made me realize something about my inillustrious (unillustrious?) career to date. And that is, namely, how typical this is of what I've done--or more aptly, not done--again and again in my working life. If I had to compare the situation to anything I've read or seen in films or on television, the closest thing I could compare it to is the finale of the show I love to hate.

Yes, I would be forced to compare myself to Carrie Bradshaw. There, I said it. And now, having said it, I can go vomit into my toilet at the thought that I am anything like this woman.

For those of you who have not (yet) suffered through six seasons of Sarah Jessica Parker and the schnoz that ate Staten Island, what happens in the finale of Sex and the City is this:

Having fallen in love with a Russian artist (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, of all people), Carrie Bradshaw decides to accept his offer to go and live with him in Paris. Not surprisingly, Little Miss Charge Card expects her life there to be a perfect fairy tale. Instead, it becomes a perfect nightmare at her "perfect" boyfriend turns into a perfect heel, leaving her alone in hotel rooms while he goes out and hobnobs with his art crowd and, in one instance, takes her with him to some kind of gala opening only to deposit her on a sofa near the entrance and promptly forget about her.

Again and again in six years of what has passed for my professional life, I have found myself in just this kind of situation, and I've never known what to do about it. In both of my stints as a legal assistant, I worked for people who couldn't quite figure out what to do with me and so just left me to dangle. I've had more than my share of prospective employers who did the same thing, post-interview. And then here in Russia there have been the business client students here in Russia who, almost without exception, have done the same thing at one time or another. Even the ones I've liked, and who seemed to like me, have at times left me alone for half an hour or more while they attended to early-morning phone calls and e-mails, walked out of class early because of an urgent incoming text message, or interrupted our lesson to talk to their wife.

Whatever else comes of this program at the University of Pennsylvania, I at least hope it will get me off of that sofa and into the gala of life.

Man in Motion

2009-05-04T01:02:00.003+04:00

Two days from now will mark a year since I arrive in Russia. It's hard to believe all that has happened since. Although I came here with a vague plan to apply to graduate schoolsl while I was here, I had no idea that, at this point, I would be looking forward to entering a master's program in Intercultural Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Or that the world would be in the throes of economic crisis. Or that I would have taught English to a group of women from Tajikistan--a country I had hardly heard of before coming to Moscow.

At the same time, I find myself ready to leave. I've battled homesickness most of the time I've been here--not always very successfully. It's hard to believe that in just 50 days--seven weeks and a day--I will be flying back to New York. I will be there for a few days before I head on to Philadelphia to look for housing. After that, my plans are less clear. I have determined on doing some travel, by Greyhound and Amtrak (or even possibly by plane, since domestic fares are so low right now) within the United States and possibly Canada.

My exact itinerary, however, is still unsettled. I will definitely start in Boston and move south and/or west. Right now, I am trying to weigh the relative merits of Montreal, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco; my mind is quite literally all over the map. Eventually, I will probably head home to Kansas to see my family for a week or two. And then in late August, I will head back to New York to spend some more serious time with good, old friends there.

Naturally, I am very eager to get moving. For a long time, I've had a certain kind of restlessness. That restlessness propelled me on to Taiwan and ultimately on to Moscow. Now I am ready for the final bang that, I hope, will enable me finally to settle down.

I am ready, in other words, to be a man in motion.

The Thaw

2009-04-12T23:32:00.002+04:00

The whole time I've been in Moscow, I've had a hard time getting a grasp of what normal weather for the city actually is. In the autumn, I recall Volodya telling me a joke that circulates in Russia, to the effect that the country has only two seasons: the one where you go around bundled up from head to toe, and the one where you go around bundled up from head to toe except for the very top button of your coat. To Volodya's mind, this October was apparently unseasonably warm, which for him meant that there was as yet no frost on the ground.

Winter too, variously people told me, was warmer than usual in Moscow this year. Too busy avoiding the black ice I seemed to encounter everywhere, I failed to notice--though in retrospect, it says something about my time in Russia that I never felt compelled to buy the thermal underwear I was told was an absolutely necessity in the Russian winter.

On the other hand, my banker, Gulia, lamented the snow that was falling as we had our lesson about a week ago. Snow in April, she told me, is not usual, and she suspected some sort of climate change was responsible. I told her my mother had once had her thirtieth birthday party ruined by a sudden blizzard, in the comparatively balmier United States. Whether she believed me, I could not tell.

Right at the moment, however, we have just gotten through the period Russians call The Thaw--the time when winter comes to a messy end. For about three weeks, the streets in Moscow were awash in mud and melting snow. The thaw comes on abruptly and goes away just as abruptly, but while it's in full swing, it's impossible to miss. Piles of snow that seemed permanent features of the landscape suddenly vanish. Green grass appears in places you would never have guessed it could be. Life begins to resume.

And then, all of a sudden, there comes a day that's actually, well, almost warm. That day came today. A couple of months ago, when the zipper came off on my nice, thick winter coat, I couldn't find another coat equally thick--the season for them must have been over in the minds of store managers, even if it clearly wasn't in mine--and settled for something resembling a spring jacket with a removable lining. The day I first put that jacket on, it was barely warm enough. Then for a long time, it was as "just right" as Baby Bear's porridge. Today, suddenly, I had an urge to unzip it.

The Thaw is a common metaphor in Russian literature and, indeed, in Russian life. Most famously in the West, the term is used for a period of de-Stalinization that occurred in Krushchev's time. But it is also used extensively to describe sudden periods when anything gets better.

Lately, I've been in the midst of my own Thaw. Having resolved on attending Penn in the fall, I am more hopeful about my future than I have been in a long time. Oddly, I don't find myself agonizing over this decision, the way I agonized about going abroad in the first place. I know I will find a way to make Penn work for me. The degree I intend to puruse will open up a lot of avenues in my career and, I hope, in my wider life.

I also can look back on the past eleven months--my goodness, I've really been here eleven months!--with a certain satisfaction. I've built up a solid base of friends here. I have students who really seem to like me. I've learned that I have the ability to establish rapport with people and win them over--something I would not have thought myself capable of until I came to Russia and had to do it in my work, again and again.

For whatever comes next, I am ready.

Pennding No More

2009-04-03T21:06:00.002+04:00

Well, it looks as though my grad school dilemma is over. I have finally made an executive decision to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Master of Science in Education program in Intercultural Communication.

A big part of that decision, as regular readers of this blog know, has been financial. Penn has shown me the money; no other school has. But the more I've thought about it, the more I've realized that Penn's program has some strengths beyond affordability. The faculty is small, the Graduate School of Education's reputation both generally and in this specific field are excellent, and internship and graduate associate opportunities abound.

There remains only the paperwork to be dealt with, but that will not be a major hassle. I need to send in only a couple of forms--an acceptance form and some forms officially accepting the scholarship Penn has given me--and I will officially be a Penn student.

In fact, as of last night, the other decisions I've been struggling with lately ceased to be pending. I managed to score a ticket back to the States for a mere 500 dollars, so at least I now have a definite date of departure. On the 23rd of June, I leave Moscow behind and head back to America. I will be staying with one (or more) of various friends in New York for a while before I set off on some travels in my native country. Boston is first on the list--followed, I think, by Chicago and San Francisco. Now that I've made a decision to go to Penn, however, I don't see a real reason to spend a lot of time playing tourist in Philadelphia.

For that I'll have two years.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

2009-04-03T02:17:00.002+04:00

In the short time that I have been in Russia, I have been blessed with students who gave me interesting glimpses into many parts of Russian society. From Volodya, I learned quite a bit about the Russian legal system. Another class described for me "Soviet-style management" in state enterprises and their successor privately-held companies. And from Gulia, I am learning quite a bit about the Russian banking system.

Gulia and I got into a discussion about Russian and American banking practices tonight after she asked me what I understood about the current economic crisis. While I did not attempt to explain to her the intricacies of mortgage-backed securities or credit default swaps, I did tell her my overall impression of what has causes this mess--namely, total recklessness on the part of the banks. To try to make clear to her what had happened, I asked her how one goes about getting a credit card in Russia. What she had to say was surprising.

First, it would seem, Russians are not inundated, as Americans are, by a never-ending stream of credit card solicitations. The would-be credit card holder has to request a card from a bank (often in person, but increasingly an application can be filled out online). The bank will then obtain what information it can about the person's income and creditworthiness. Within the last three years, this step has become somewhat easier, because credit bureaus on the American model have been established in Russia. Prior to that time, however, the banks had to request information directly from other banks.

According to Gulia, the retail (consumer) credit market in Russia has been, until recently, a rather small business. In fact, lending to nearly everything except the government, large businesses, and quasi-private enterprises like Gazprom and Lukoil (Russia's largest natural gas and oil producers, respectively, in which the government has more than a 70% stake), is small potatoes in the credit market. But the ersatz wealth Russia acquired through rising oil prices the last few years has caused this market to expand.

Gulia's job within her bank is to assess the riskiness of would-be retail loans and lenders. From what I gathered, the president of her bank, to whom she reports, actually listens to her. And what she tells him, at the moment, is to be cautious. Recently, for instance, she recommended that her bank stop giving credit cards to people under age 24. Her recomendation was based on statistical analysis showing that 80 percent of university students who were granted credit cards defaulted on them at some point.

But the really shocking thing is, the bank actually listened to her. As a result, one of the largest banks in Russia no longer lets university students obtain credit cards, with or without a co-signer.

I cannot imagine any bank making a similar decision in America. Or at least, I couldn't imagine it until the current financial crisis hit. I told Gulia my own story of getting my first credit card: at the tender age of eighteen, I applied for one with a vendor on my college campus who was giving out free t-shirts. Gulia was aghast that American banks would give out credit so freely.

The strange thing is: I am too.

In banking, as in many other things, then, Russia seems a land frozen in time as well as in temperature. Once upon a time in America, we used to joke that a bank was a place that would give you a loan if you could prove you didn't need it. Now, we see to give credit to anyone and everyone, whether they have any real chance of repaying or not. We've let cashiers at Home Depot get mortages to buy $500,000 houses. We raise spending limits, so that people who have maxed out their cards can keep right on charging. And when they're done, we let them consolidate their debts as "home equity loans" ("second mortgage sounds so passe) and charge even more.

But in Russia, it would seem, the banks only give credit where credit is due.

Buying a Chicken in Guadalajara

2009-03-31T00:33:00.006+04:00

Well, I suppose I oughtn't to have been so quick to crow about the possibility of getting good financial aid money out of NYU. Ed McMahon may yet come to my door, but he won't be delivering anything from New York University.

Today, I finally spoke to someone at NYU--three someones, in fact. The first was what I am beginning to suspect is the run-of-the-mill bureaucrat in Greenwich Village--uninterested and unhelpful. I explained to her that, having received a notice that an "admissions packet" with financial aid information had been sent to me, I needed to obtain the amounts of my financial aid awards (if any), because NYU had given me a deadline of April 15th to accept or decline my offer of admission. I explained as nicely as I could that making such a decision was impossible without this information, and that, as an actual letter from NYU would likely take a month or more to reach me in Russia, I needed the letter e-mailed to me.

This woman told me rather pitiliessly that NYU had a policy of not sending out such information by e-mail or giving it out over the phone. She told me that I might--emphasis on might--be able to retrieve it through an online system, but she couldn't absolutely guarantee it.

After several vain attempts at logging into this system, I decided to try contacting someone in my program, thinking I would likely encounter greater sympathy for my plight. Indeed, I did manage to get a sympathetic soul, who put me in touch with someone else in the financial aid office. This person told me the information would not be available online until May, but she offered to tell me what I needed to know over the phone.

It turns out that I have received some grant money from NYU, but not very much. In fact, I've received about $10,000 less than at Penn, and the estimated cost of attendance (factoring in tuition, housing, books, and various miscellany) is $7,000 more in Manhattan than in West Philly. This at least is what I gathered from the official numbers both schools have given me in their "sample budgets," though I suspect some of the numbers from both schools are inflated ($20,000 for nine months' room and board in New York? Please--I've managed to stay fed and housed in New York for much less). I am at a total loss as to what either school chooses to lump under "miscellaneous expenses". And I am at an even greater loss as to just what some of the "fees" mentioned actually pay for.

The whole experience of dealing with financial aid reminds me of nothing so much as my favorite episode of Designing Women. In the episode, the anything-but-business-minded Suzanne promises one of the decorating firm's clients that if her furniture is not delivered by midnight, her entire job is free--an idea she admits to having gotten from pizza delivery. Unfortunately, that night, the firm's delivery van breaks down, forcing Charlene and Julia to have to buy a new van with a gun to their head. The women prove unequal to the task of dealing with a rapacious car salesman who turns even more rapacious when he learns how desperately they need a new van.

At the eleventh hour, however, spunky Mary Jo Shively comes into the car dealership and saves the day. She takes a look at the salesman's offer and starts crossing off all the padding he has tacked onto to cost of a simple delivery van--up to and including a $200 "gasoline charge" she claims even her 10-year-old son could tell was illegitimate.

As she is doing this, Mary Jo asks the salesman if he has ever bought a chicken in Guadalajara. Mary Jo apparently has, while supporting her ex-husband in medical school. As she describes it, the process of buying a chicken in guadalajara is as follows:

First, the seller quotes a price for the chicken, which seems perfectly modest and reasonable. Then, however, it turns out there is a separate charge to kill the chicken. And a separate charge to pluck the chicken. And on, and on, and on.

Graduate financial planning offices, as near as I can tell, have managed to do the chicken sellers of Guadalajara one better. First, they quote a price for tuition which seems, if not exactly cheap, at least in line with what undergraduate tuition is these days. Then they tack on what seem like outrageous amounts of money for room, board (mind you, you find your own room and board in graduate school these days), and health insurance. And after all this, they make it impossible to know the real price--partly because such matters as housing and travel costs are declared to be within the student's control.

It's enough to get Frank Purdue to roll over in his grave.

I May Already Be a Winner...

2009-03-30T01:40:00.003+04:00

in the NYU financial aid sweepsakes. Ed McMahon may knock on my door in Moscow any day now.

This is what I learned on Friday, when I received an e-mail from NYU inviting me to an open house with the head of the program to which I have been accepted. The e-mail indicated that I "may have already received" an acceptance packet with, among other things, information about financial aid. As of this moment, I have not.

As I've mentioned before, NYU wants me to send in my candidate reply form and (if I choose to attend) tuition deposit by the 15th of April. This is rather difficult to do, when I don't yet know what NYU is likely to cost. But this e-mail at least suggests that financial aid awards may have been finalized, and that the financial aid office may be able to tell me what my award, if any, is--something they were unable to do when I called them shortly after receiving my admissions notification.

Tomorrow, I will call and try to sort this out.

Tell Us About the Boy From New York City

2009-03-30T00:29:00.002+04:00

One interesting aspect of teaching EFL is that you get to play many different roles. Literally. In the past month alone, I have, with various students, played a real estate broker, a shop assistant at Bloomie's, a hotel clerk at both the Hotel Pennsylvania and the Hotel California, a ticket agent at Penn Station, and a bedraggled husband who insists on moving out of his mother-in-law's apartment. But the role I play with the greatest frequency--indeed, the role I am likely playing while I play any of the dozens of other roles EFL teaching demands of me, as you can see from my description of roles played in the past month--is my personal favorite: the role of The Boy from New York City.

You see, I happen to be one of those people for whom the question "Where are you from?" has no simple answer. Born in Michigan, raised in New Jersey and Missouri, with parents currently living in Kansas and a long stint of living in the City That Never Sleeps, I often find, Stateside, that I have difficulty saying which of these places I am really from. But in Moscow, I feel little guilt about glossing over all of this tortuous personal history and saying unambiguously that I'm from New York.

Part of that, of course, is that my students don't care that much where I am from in America. To many of them, American geography is about as hazy as the Moscow air on a midwinter morning. I have been asked--more than once, and on each occasion in all seriousness--where in New York Hollywood is located. I feel I owe my students an answer they're likely to have heard of.

There is also a more devious reason for me to tell students I'm from New York. In a weird way, this makes me an authority. If students have fantasized about going to America, they have fantasized about seeing New York. By telling my students this fiction, I suspect, I make New York more real for them--in the same way that, for a West Village native, meeting someone from Russia make it easier to believe that you don't actually fall off the earth if you go east from LaGuardia. Being from New York, I get to tell them that such fabulous places as Penn Station, Bloomie's, and, yes, even the offices of Corcoran Realty do indeed exist--and invite my students to pretend they're there.

I also tell my students I'm from New York because it quickly establishes me as an American--and, in my students' mind, the most authentically American kind of American. When I tell them New York is the Big Apple, that our airlines tickets are not single but one-way, and that they should ask for the restroom, not the toilet, at Bloomie's, they believe me. It's nice to be believed--even if the price you pay is having to play a role rather than be completely yourself.

But the most important reason I tell this lie is that in my heart, I really am the Boy from New York City. When I think about going home--a thought that occurs pretty often these days, as the summer approaches and I contemplate that I have less than two months left in Moscow--it isn't my parents' three-bedroom house in Wichita, Kansas that my thoughts turn to. For one thing, my parents moved into that house when I was out of college; the house is really their home, their little haven from the cares of their world. For me, it's a place to go to see them, or a refueling stop on the way somewhere else.

No--when I think of home, I think of the hearty flavor of brisket sandwiches at Fine & Schapiro's, the calming feel of undulating waves (are there any other kind?) on the Staten Island Ferry, the sheer terror of crossing Queens Boulevard on foot. I think of a subway that, filled with rats and winos though it may be, at least calls itself a subway, and not a metro, a tube, or an underground. I think of the fabulous views you can see for the price of subway fare--New Jersey from Riverside Park, Manhattan from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the Brooklyn (not Manhattan) skyline from the Smith and 9th Street station on the F and G lines.

Scarlett O'Hara can keep the red earth of Tara. I'll take the Fairway in Red Hook any day.

G, I Really Love You...

2009-03-26T01:01:00.003+03:00

Okay, my regular readers in New York, I admit it: that title may be taking things a bit far. But after ten months in Moscow, I can definitely say that the boundless love I once felt for Moscow's transit system has abated, and my perceptions of New York's has improved. More on that in a minute.

For those non-New York readers wondering what the heck that title was about, the G train was my line when I lived in Brooklyn. The G is a crosstown local train running between Brooklyn and Queens (due to service cutbacks, it now only just barely makes it into the latter borough). It is also the only line on the New York subway that never enters Manhattan. And because many of the neighborhoods it traverses are poor, blighted, and predominantly black and Hispanic, the line tends to get treated as the redheaded orphan stepchild of the system. Late at night, service tends to be particularly appalling. I can remember countless nights coming home from Manhattan when I had to wait 40 minutes or more to make a transfer from the A or C train to the G train. Some nights in the summer, when subway platforms become absolutely sweltering, I thought I would do well to bring a beach train with me on my travels through the city, just to prepare for this transfer.

Having written on another occasion about all that makes Moscow's metro glorious, I feel I ought to point out a few drawbacks of Moscow's system:

1) There's no distinction between local and express service. This is not an entirely fair point to bring up, because no city in the world, aside from New York, allows passengers to transfer between local and express trains. But there it is.

2) There flat-out aren't enough stations. New Yorkers like to pride themselves on how much walking they do, in comparison with car-bound denizens of other American cities. If New York had a campaign for an official city emblem, my nomination would be a Wall-Street bound woman wearing a suit and sneakers, with her dress shoes slung over her back. But Muscovites clearly have New Yorkers beat in this category, for the simple reason that they often have to walk 20 minutes or more just to get to the Metro station.

Case in point: I went out to meet a new student today, at her home. I was told her apartment was "not far" from the Metro--"only" 15 minutes. I can't imagine most New Yorkers tolerating a 15-minute walk just to get to the subway station.

3) Line names are confusing and often inaccurate. I recall very dinstinctly the first time I took the F train somewhere very far out in Brooklyn and found myself puzzling over references to a mysterious "Culver Line" on station signage (the Culver Line, it turns out, is the name the F train's line had back in the day when it was still a privately-owned elevated railroad in Brooklyn). But on the whole, New York has done an excellent job of naming its lines with either numbers or letters.

In Moscow, however, line names can be confusing. Moscow maps color code all of the city's lines, and foreigners often refer to the lines as red, orange, green, or what have you. Oddly, however, Metro officialdom and Muscovites alike insist on calling many lines by the names they had when they were first opened (in most cases, the 1950s). The problem with this is that these names is that they were all created using the two end stations on a particular line, and the ends of the lines have since been extended. The line names have not, however, been changed to keep up with these extensions.

4) Wheelchair access is virtually nill. Hard as it is for the handicapped to navigate New York's transit system, I absolutely cannot imagine anyone attempting to go through Moscow's system in a wheelchair. Every transfer in the system requires walking up and down flights of stairs, as do almost all station entrances and exits.

5) Metro entrances and exits feel as if they are in the middle of nowhere. Because so much of Moscow consists of ramshackle, identical housing developments from the Krushchev and Brezhnev eras, and because the designers of Metro entrances and exits seem to have had a need for them to be grandiose, you often have no idea where you really are when you first get out of the Metro. Nearly every Metro station is surrounded by a maze of kiosks, schwarma stands, and tiny retail outlets selling everything from gum to toilet paper. But they all look the same! In New York, I at least instantly knew if I got out at the wrong stop. Not so in Moscow.

3.21 Miles, 41 Minutes, One Bus, Two Subway Lines, and Two Years

2009-03-23T20:45:00.003+03:00

In my battle for graduate admissions, I am now, officially, three for three. And if I take the option that has opened up for me today, I will have spent two years only to get the 3.21 miles, 41 minutes, one bus, and two subway lines from my former abode on Willoughby Avenue in Brooklyn to New York University's Steinhardt School of Education in historic Greenwich Village.

Yes, you understood that right. I have officially been admitted to NYU.

Finding this out, however, has required a bit of arm-twisting. For whatever reason--okay, most likely because the world is now mired in the Great Recession--NYU has been very slow about sending out admissions letters this year. After receiving notice from the University of Pennsylvania last week, I phoned NYU to tell them Penn had made me an offer of admission and that I was eager to know what decision had been made at NYU, as Penn had given me a 45-day deadline to receive proffered financial aid. It took some wranging to get an actual human being, but someone did tell me that admissions letters would be going out on Friday.

I asked, in all innocence, if this meant I would know the decision then.

"No, sir," I was told, in a voice that might have been more appropriate when someone asks whether two plus two equals five. "You won't. That's just when the letter goes out."

I reminded this woman that, as I currently reside in a country where postal service is spotty at best and a punchline at worst, I had requested notification by e-mail.

"Then that's probably what they'll do," I was told, in a tone that telegraphed the speaker's total boredom with the conversation.

Friday, I checked my in-box. No notification had come. So I made a note to call back on Monday. At 5:00 this afternoon, I recalled that note, and, realizing it was then 10:00 AM in New York, phoned the admissions office again.

Another bored admssions assistant told me peremptorily that the letter had gone out. But I managed to blurt out my situation, and she told me, with as little enthusiasm as human beings can possibly muster, that I had been accepted.

As yet, I have no information regarding financial aid at NYU, but the financial aid office told me awards should be finalized and sent out in a couple of weeks. At that point, I'll be able to compare all of my options and make an informed choice.

Fortuitously, when I rang up an old friend in New York to give him my news, he mentioned that he had recently met, completely by chance, someone who works in NYU's Global Campus program. This program coordinates NYU study abroad campuses in a range of locations, from Paris to Shanghai to (next fall) Tel Aviv. He suggested I contact this person to get more information on the International Education master's program to which I have been accepted. NYU Global Campus also employs a number of graduates of this program, both in America and abroad. So NYU may keep me grounded in my own country, or open the door to France, Germany, or China.

Or, possibly, even Israel.

Into Penn's Woods

2009-03-12T23:17:00.002+03:00

It looks as if the Waiting Game is slowly but surely coming to an end.

This evening, I came home from teaching Gulia and took a look in my in-box, asI do every evening when I come home. In it I found an e-mail marked "Financial Aid Award". As I had spoken to someone at American Jewish University (U Jew) earlier this week about when I might expect to receive my aid award, I assumed this was it and immediately opened it, only to find it was not from U Jew.

It was from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Attached to the e-mail were PDFs indicating that I had been awarded $18,500 in outright scholarships from Penn for the program to which I had applied. From this I naturally inferred that I had been admitted to the program, but given some problems I have had dealing with Penn bureaucracy, I felt it was best to find out for certain, so I called Penn to see if this was in fact the case. Indeed it was, and so I am proud to announce that I have been admitted to the Master of Arts in Intercultural Communication program at the University of Pennsylvania.

I have had some difficulty determining whether my aid award will be enough to enable me to attend Penn, however, because I have not yet gotten any information about loans or work-study, and because I am unsure what the actual tuition for a year at Penn is. Penn's website gives this information in terms of "course credits", and I am unsure how many course credits constitute one year of study. The person I would need to speak to in the financial aid office is, unfortunately, out of the office until Monday, so I will not be able to resolve this issue until then.

With this information in hand, I called the Admissions Office at NYU to find out when I might expect to hear anything regarding my application there. Penn needs a decision within 45 days (not an unreasonable amount of time), so I needed to know whether NYU would have an answer for me by then. The woman to whom I spoke at NYU said admissions letters should go out next week.

So I now have options on both coasts--in the Jewish world and outside of it. The Far East Side Minyan may become the West Coast Minyan. Or it may return to the West Side Minyan.

Or, then again, it may venture into Penn's woods.

The West Coast Minyan?

2009-03-09T18:13:00.002+03:00

Sometimes, I can be my own harshest critic. This tends to be doubly true for anything involving an interview. I cannot recall one instance of coming out of a job interview feeling as if I had done well. But a few weeks ago, when I finally had my much-delayed interview for a master's program in Jewish Education at American Jewish University (formerly the University of Judaism, or "U Jew") in Los Angeles, I was certain I had come across--as I noted on my Facebook status bar--as something akin to a lunatic.

It didn't help that I hadn't prepared for the interview much. Nor did it help that I couldn't get across that working in Jewish Education is something I was sure to do for the rest of your life (it's just plain hard to come across as somethng you in fact are not). When I submitted some follow-up questions about the program a few days later and received no response, I was certain I had bombed the interview completely and that the woman to whom I sent the questions did not think it worth her while to reply.

So it came as a shock when, over the weekend, I received an e-mail from her, not only answering my questions, but stating that U Jew was delighted to offer me admission to the program. Rather than thinking me a lunatic, the admissions committee apparently "appreciated my candor" and thought I would be an asset to the program. Wonders really do never cease.

At the moment, I still have three other programs I am waiting to here from--at Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), NYU, and Penn. At the moment, I am most interested in the program at NYU. I think it would give me the best chance to make connections in a field that is growing and prepare me for a variety of related careers in international education, international exchange, and international business. Not that I really see myself advising executives on how to behave in Japan. But there could be meaningful work as a researcher in the field, as well as in international student advising or study abroad. Despite my homesickness, I have learned a lot from my time here in Russia, and I would enjoy helping other people go off on similar journeys of discovery.

There is also a nagging part of me that still wonders if it would be a good idea to study Judaism full time. When I left university, I didn't go into a Jewish studies program straight off because I thought I was too religiously obsessed--that I had lost myself. But having become similarly obsessed with my finances in the intervening few years, I have realized that my obsession is my issue, and one I can handle with proper medication. I think there are definite ways I could contribute to the field of Jewish education. What I don't know is whether I really want to devote my life to it.

At least I have time to decide. The Admissions Office at U Jew doesn't need a decision until May, so I have time to see where else I get in. That may ultimately determine whether The Far East Side Minyan becomes the West Coast Minyan.

Manhattan on the Moskva

2009-03-05T22:46:00.002+03:00

Every New Yorker eventually gets fed up with New York. Not just fed up, but major league fed up. A few us even become so major league fed up that we do crazy things, like go teach English in Taiwan or Russia. We get fed up for about 1,001 reasons, but at or close to the top of the list is always the unofficial sport of the city. No, not stoop sitting. Not jaywalking.

I'm talking about the competitive, blood sport that is New York real estate.

One thing I hoped would happen when I left New York was that I would find a spot on the globe where real estate is not the all-consuming passion it is east of New Jersey and west of Nassau County. I did not stay in Taiwan long enough to know what the Taiwanese attitude to real estate is. If I had any notion that Muscovites would differ from Manhattanites in their obsession with square feet and brokers' fees, that expectation has been cruelly dashed. Nonetheless, some aspects of the real estate game in Moscow differ significantly from the game in Manhattan--though I gather that one encounters just as much drama, heartache, and even outright duplicity trying to acquire property in Moscow as in Murray Hill.

Twice or thrice now, I have had to give lessons about house types. It's an unfortunate fact of the EFL world that textbooks insist on students' learning about terraced houses (the high-falutin' British word for a row house), detached houses, and semidetached houses, even if these terms have limited relevance to the cultures of students. I have yet to see anything resembling any of these types of buildings in Moscow; detached houses no doubt exist in the countryside, as people's dachas, but not even in the parts of Moscow commonly thought of as "the suburbs." Teaching this kind of language may involve a lot of cultural explanation of how people live in the affluent West.

Then there is the difference in how real estate is described in Moscow. Because Communist-era apartments were rarely built with an identifable living room, Muscovites do not describe house sizes in terms of bedrooms, as in America, but simply in terms of rooms, period. A fairly typical Moscow apartment has two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a toilet--though separate living rooms are becoming more common in new constructions or renovations of older buildings. The two rooms serve many different functions, depending on the time of day. Lack of spaces forces Muscovites to forgo traditional beds in favor of convertible sofas. Shelves are organized in ways that would provoke the envy of any West Village studio dweller.

The drama of buying or renting real estate, from what I gather, is quite intense. Like Manhattanites, Muscovites rely on brokers to find housing in a tight market. Unlike Manhattanites, however, they do not pay as much as 15% of a year's rent for a broker's service. I gather that 5% is more common, though I have no hard and fast statistics.

Educated Russians are aware that they often lack choices available in the Democratic West. One of the few areas where a lack of choices actually helps them, however, is in mortgages. According to Gulia, the banker of whom I spoke in my last post, Muscovites do not have the exotic options in mortgages that have fueled the credit crisis in America. There are no adjustable-rate mortgages, no balloon loans, no no-docs, no hybrids. The system is very much not geared toward gambling. Essentially, there are only two kinds of loans available: one for apartments in new constructions and one for apartments in existing buildings. For an existing building, a 5% down payment is generally required by banks. But to obtain a mortage in a new development, a Muscovite must pay a 30% down payment--a requirement caused, no doubt, by the high number of fraudulent building developers in recent years who have managed to swindle people out of money for apartments never built.

One requirement for buying property in Moscow, however, truly baffles me. According to Gulia, you cannot obtain a mortgage in Russia without going to a doctor for a physical. The purpose of this? To get life insurance that will pay your mortgage in the event of your death. Additionally, banks tend to favor younger buyers who are less likely to die before paying off their mortgage. I have heard of any such requirements in America and explained that in America, life insurance policies pay the family of the deceased, not his or her banker.

Gulia seems quite interested in understanding the American system, and I have promised to tell her more about in on Monday--by which time, I hope to have figured out more about it myself.

It Doesn't Register

2009-03-04T23:56:00.003+03:00

Last night, I went to teach a woman whom I'll call Gulia, an individual student I have been teaching now for about six weeks. Gulia is a former schoolteacher turned bank executive (not uncommon to find in Russia, where teachers are paid an absolute pittance). Most of the lesson focused on common verbs used with transportation (catch a train, drop off someone, etc.), but in the end we got onto the topic of whether Moscow or New York had more people.

Gulia first asked me how many people live in New York, and I told her eight million. She asked me if this was the "official statistic". I explained, as best I could, that this was the figure from the last census. She then proceeded to ask me what the "real" population was. I was a bit baffled until she asked me about "registration."

Registration is one of the many minor bureaucratic annoyances of Russian life. A system first devised in tsarist times and maintained under Soviet rule requires citizens to register in a city if they are there for more than three days. This is required of both Russian citizens and foreigners staying in Russia; many hotels offer registration services in the price of accomodation. Indeed, one of the first things my school did when I arrived was take my passport for registration purposes, and a clause in my contract requires me to pay any fines that might be levied on the school due to my failure to comply with the registration laws.

I have been told different things about the rationale and purpose of registration. Volodya told me once that it was a combination zoning and population control measure, designed to prevent masses of people from living crammed into hovels (how well this system functioned in Stalin's time, when both the population and average number of people per apartment doubled in fifteen years, I know not). Other Russians seem to see registration as a necessity to keep out undesirable foreign workers--Russia having its own problems with illegal immigration, mainly from Central Asian republics formerly part of the Soviet Union. Indeed, some estimates suggest that, when all of the unregistered people living illegal in Moscow is factored in, the city's population is close to twenty million--more than double the official statistic given by the government.

One oddity of the registration laws both Volodya and Gulia have told me about is that renters have to obtain registration through their landlord, whereas owner receive registration automatically. This can put a burden on Moscow's poor, whose landlords sometimes refuse to provide registration and who must seek it out from various agencies that advertise, among other places, on the Metro.

Gulia, Volodya and other Russians seem to regard registration procedures as just a fact of life, and have expressed shock when I explained that there is no equivalent in America. When I told this to Gulia last night, she asked me a lot of questions about how, without registration, parents put their children into school or ill people go to the hospital. I gather that registration is somewhat like your social security number in America, in that you can do almost nothing involving the government without it. After some explaining, Gulia at last grasped that, in America, where you school does not always correspond to geography and that the main thing a hospital wants is your insurance card, not your registration documents. At last she let out a sigh:

"Ah, Democracy!" she said.

Registration illustrates the central paradox of Russian life over the centuries: that it has been, and continues to be, both relentlessly authoritarian and relentlessly lawless. Registration seldom seems to serve the public good, and often seems to frustrate it. Guidebooks to Russia often advise foreigners to steer clear of the militsiya (police), because, among other things, they have been known to demand bribes for phoney violations of the registration laws. On the books, the fine for foreigners' failing to register properly is only the equivalent of about $2, but the militsiya are often able to take advantage of foreigners' lack of knowledge, lack of Russian, and consequent lack of power to demand much more. Despite all of the effort put into enforcing them, the laws are wideless flouted, as evidenced by the large "unofficial" population of Moscow.

Willie Lincoln's Obsession

2009-03-02T02:55:00.002+03:00

My grandmother is a very religious woman, and yet she always tells me that, when she gets to heaven, she intends to ask the Lord a few sharp questions and point out a few clear flaws in His plan of creation. When she says this, I know that she is talking mostly about the many marvelous ways the human body manages to malfunction. She has seen more than her share of disease in her eighty years of life, and buried a husband, a son, and her own mother after long and debilitating illnesses.

I sometimes share my grandmother's desire ask questions about God's plan for creation. But the questions I would ask are of rather a different stripe. Standing before the Infinite One, I would probably be more likely to ask about why the human memory functions--or, often, doesn't function--the way it does.

My mother and maternal grandmother both have difficulty remembering to take things with them, and I seem to have inherited this trait. Five days out of six, I get to the elevator in my building only to realize I have forgotten my passport, a book I need for class, or some similarly essential item, and am forced to go back for it. Yet I am able to remember a vast amount of totally useless information: the words to Manic Monday, the last line of Styron's novel Sophie's Choice, the exact crossing street of a now defunct Circuit City on Broadway in Manhattan.

And I recall with crystal clarity something I once heard about Abraham Lincoln's son, Willie. At least, I think his name was Willie--the one who died of typhoid fever while Lincoln was in the White House. Willie apparently had a fascination with railroad timetables. He would pore over them for hours, even at his tender age (I can only surmise from this that, in a time before the Disney Channel, children had rather less to amuse themselves with, and rather longer attention spans).

I think of Willie Lincoln occasionally these days, because I have developed a bit of the same obsession. I have decided that, whatever comes of my graduate school applications, I am going to leave Russia at the end of June and do a little travelling in my own country. Either this will be a prelude to school or a much-needed chance to recharge before I settle on another place in the world to go and teach the Third Conditional. But one way or another, I am determined to see some sights in my own country I always used to tell myself I couldn't afford to go see.

When I come home at night, I often sit down at my computer and start looking at Greyhound and Amtrak routes and schedules, trying to decide what I can afford and piece together where I actually want to go. I am pretty well settled on doing a lap up and down the East Coast. Most likely, I will be returning to America by way of New York, so the first question for me is whether to head north or south first. I want to see Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore at the very least, but I also have hopes of making it on to Washington and, possibly even on to Richmond or Charleston. I'm also giving some strong consideration to heading out to Chicago and, in my wilder moments, I indulge in thoughts of going as far as San Francisco.

All of this leads to questions about how best to get about. I had always known that service on Greyhound and Amtrak was often unbelievably slow, but until I started delving into the timetables in earnest, I had not realized just how slow. New York to Boston is a full four hours; New York to Philadelphia, two. But what really amazes me is how long it would take to get from either Boston to Chicago or from Chicago to San Francisco, without resorting to an airplane. I was delighted to discover that a one-way ticket on Amtrak from Boston to Chicago is only $83--but the trip is nineteen hours and involves a two-hour layover in Albany. Oy.

Chicago to San Francisco is even harder to believe. The trip aboard the California Zephyr (apparently one of Amtrak's more popular routes, since it passes through amazing scenery not easily accessible by car), is a full 53 hours. By my calculations, this is an average speed of a little over 30 miles an hour, if that. Moreover, the trip doesn't even get you all of the way to San Francisco, but only to a town near it called Emeryville. From there you need to transfer to the BART or a local bus to get into San Francisco proper.

All of this makes me hope that the Obama administration will put some serious money into developing high-speed rail. Having had the delightful experience of an overnight train to Moscow, I find it hard to believe there is no comparable service between any two major cities in America. I can easily imagine a Los Angeles-Seattle line, or a at least a New York-Chicago line, catering to weary business travelers. Get on in the Windy City at midnight, catch a few Zs, and wake up in Penn Station.

Greyhound seems, if anything, worse than Amtrak. Aside from the Bos-Wash corridor, there seem to be few trips on Greyhound that don't involve numerous transfers and layovers. Greyhound has apparently cut back on its service to small towns--no more stops in the middle of nowhere to pick up a single passenger--but still the service looks deplorable.

And To Think That I Saw It on Montague Street

2009-03-02T02:21:00.002+03:00

I was the first person in my family to grow up with computers. When I was four or five, my mother bought the first computer owned by anyone on either side of my family, for an amount of money no doubt only slightly shy of the current Pentagon budget. She had developed an interest in computers that, a few years later, would briefly see her employed in the now-vanished career of computer consultant, and I expect buying this behemoth was probably part of a career exploration.

Educational software was probably in its infancy then (this was 1985 or 1986), but my mother bought a few computer games, on floppy disks the size of pancakes, and I played them as constantly as she would allow me. Personal computers may have been a new technological marvel of the age, but in my youthful view of the world, I assumed they had always existed. One day, when my father came home from work, I asked him in all innocence what computer games he played when he was a little boy.

"When I was your age, computers were the size of this house, and nobody had one," he told me.

Stunned by this revelation, I asked him what tapes he had watched on his VCR. A few months earlier, my parents had decided to commemorate my first day of kindergarten by buying a copy of Walt Disney's Pinnochio and laying out construction-paper feet leading from our front door to the VCR, where the tape was ready to pushed in and played. At this time, apparently, videotapes of pre-recorded movies were so expensive that you couldn't just walk into a store and buy them; my parents had had to pay through the nose for this tape, and for a few others they had subsequently purchased, but I knew nothing of this. I must have believed that every little boy since Cain and Abel had come home the first day of kindergarten to find a videotape sticking out of the VCR.

"When I was your age," my father explained, with a mix of patience and bemusement, "there were no VCRs, and television was black-and-white."

I had no idea what this word black-and-white meant, so I cogitated for a few moments and asked my father, without any guile whatsoever:

"Did you have a car or a horse?"

I suppose that someday, my children will make me feel similarly old when I have to explain to them that, when I was their age, there was no Internet. And because there was no Internet, there was no Facebook, no blogosphere, and no place to go to watch streaming video of programs recently broadcast half the world away. Yes, that's right, kids: you had to wait for the movies to come out on video, and sometimes the one you wanted to see wasn't out yet, so you couldn't see it.

And--yes, I know it's hard to believe, Vankele, but there was no Google Maps! That's right--if you wanted directions somewhere, you had to call the place up on the phone and ask for them. And sometimes--gasp!--they were wrong and you got lost! And you couldn't put the little man down on the map and get a real-life moving image of the street it was on!

That little man on Google Maps may spell the end of tourism as we know it. With just a click of a mouse, you can now virtually "walk" any street or road anywhere in the world. You need never leave home again to get that feeling of really being at the Kremlin, the Sears Tower, or--as I did today--Montague Street in Brooklyn.

There's nothing particularly fascinating about Montague Street. It's the main shopping and restaurant street in upscale Brooklyn Heights, one of the first neighborhoods you come to after crossing the Manhattan Bridge into the Borough of Homes and Churches. The street has a lot of lovely little places to grab a bite to eat, including a little cafe called Teresa's where I used to go every Sunday for Lox Benedict before strolling over to the Brooklyn Heights promenade to grab a glimpse of the Lower Manhattan skyline before I headed off to a nearby Barnes & Noble. But today I went for a virtual "walk" along Montague Street, courtesy of Google Maps, and got to have my first glance at Teresa's since more than a year and a half ago, before I left New York for Taiwan.

It's amazing how much I remembered, and how much I had forgotten, about Montague Street. In my mind, I had placed the grocery store a block closer to the Promenade than it actually is, and I had completely forgotten about a Connecticut Muffin (Starbuck's local competition), where I used to get together with a good friend and drink iced chai while we discussed Jewish community politics. I had also forgotten a large storefront that seemed, incongruously in such a nice neighborhood, to be perpetually empty.

And to think that, today, I saw it on Montague Street.

The Rhythm of the Falling Ruble

2009-03-01T21:28:00.002+03:00

Before I set out on my journeys abroad, few things seemed so mystifying to me, and yet so dull, as discussions of international currency fluctuations. For one thing, I could never keep track of just what a "rise" or "fall" in a currency meant; for another, it was hard to see just what effect all of tihs could have on anyone's day-to-day life. To me, a dollar was a dollar was a dollar. The landlord might want a few more greenbacks this year than last, but whether the dollar was "rising" or "falling" at any given moment seemed about as relevant to my life as assignations at the court of some long-forgotten Duke of Saxony.

In this respect, as in so much else, Russia has been a real eye-opener.

For one thing, I now know what it means for a currency to fall against another currency. It means, pure and simple, that that currency is losing value when measured against the other currency. So when the ruble falls (as it has over the past few months) from 23 to the dollar to 36 to the dollar, it means the ruble is becoming worth less and less, in dollar terms.

As Americans rarely hold significant amounts of money in anything other than the Almighty Dollar, we tend not to be aware of what this means. The President and the economic wonks on television might prate on about how a rising or falling dollar is or is not good for the country's economy, but to Joe Six-Pack, these conversations might as well be in Sanskrit, for all he understands of them. But for Russians, it's quite another story.

One of the inescapable sights in Moscow--as inescapable as the perekhods across large roads and the blini stands outside the Metro--is what is called the obmen balyuti--the currency exchange kiosk. In New York, you can't go five feet down the sidewalk without running into a Duane Reade pharmacy or a Starbucks; in Moscow, you can't go five feet without seeing someplace to change money. This is true not just in the main tourist centers of the city, but everywhere. A few weeks ago, I went to a major mall on the northern outskirts of town to buy a reading lamp, and even there I saw no end of places to change money.

Russians have good reason to need so many places to change money, and to keep an eagle eye on what the ruble is doing against the dollar and the euro (changing rubles for sterling seems to be of less interest to Russians; every obmen balyuti displays the price for dollars and euros, but only a few advertise the price of a British pound). Although the ruble enjoyed a period of stability in the 2000s, due mostly to Russia's ability to sell oil at inflated prices, the ruble has been devalued multiple times since the fall of communism, and Russians do not trust it as a long-term store of value.

For the past few months, ever since the start of the current financial crisis in September, the ruble has been on a slide. When I came to Russia last May, the ruble was at about 26 to the dollar at obmen balyuti all over the city. In August, it reached a peak of 23.5 to the dollar. By New Year's, I was horrified to see the ruble hovering at thirty. But for a couple of weeks now it has stayed put at around thirty-six. Stories in the Moscow Times, Moscow's largest English-language newspaper, indicate that the government has taken steps to halt the slide, but many fellow teachers are skeptical about the government's ability to solve the problem. As oil prices have collapsed, rubles are flowing back into Russia, a situation that can only result in devaluation, or so I am led to believe.

The effect of all this on me has been to make it harder to save money, in dollar terms. My salary is worth less in dollars than it was a few months ago. At the same time, however, the ruble's slide has made me feel less guilty about the amount I spent eating out. Since I've been here, the price of a meal at McDonald's, in dollar terms, has slid from about $10 to about $7. It's hard to tell yourself you can't afford those fries when they are, suddenly, not much more than they would be in Missouri.

Here's To You, Mrs. Robinson

2009-02-28T19:02:00.002+03:00

If I needed any actual evidence that America has a new president (we do, in case you've been in Ulan Bator and somehow missed the coverage), I get the sense that we are now awash in stories telling us more than we ever wanted to know about Barack Obama and all his kith and kin. No detail of the Obama's private lives seems too trivial to merit a story about it. We get to hear about the First Dog. We get to hear about what kind of White House china Michelle intends to pick out--not the official White House china every First Lady picks out, but what kind of china she intends to use in the White House's private areas. And a few weeks ago, we got to hear all about the First Mother-in-Law's taking up temporarily residence in the White House, to help smooth over her granddaughters' transition into Washington.

According to a New York Times article of January 10th, Marian Robinson's arrival in the White House has produced some trifling amount of friction in the First Family. She approves neither of the rules Barack and Michelle set about watching television (the Obama girls apparently watch less than an hour a day), nor of the Obamas' penchant for preparing healthier versions of unhealthy foods. Bless the woman's heart! She actually said, "if you're going to have fried chicken, have fried chicken." (Sadly, the Times left to readers' imaginations Mrs. Robinson's opinions on black-eyed peas, fatback, and watermelon).

If the First Mother-in-Law still has qualms about moving to Washington, however, I might suggest another home, one she has already visited: my EFL classroom.

Mrs. Robinson made her appearance today in an elementary group I have been teaching now for about a month. My students in this class are a group of corporate wives from Tajikistan whose studies are, apparently, financed by their husbands' firm, a major Russian investment company. Today, I had the privilege of teaching them English vocabulary about the family as well as the use of the possessive 's. Looking for an interesting hook, I decided to use the Obama-Robinson clan.

In retrospect, I should have done my homework a little more thoroughly for this. I couldn't for the life of me remember either Marian's name and had to put Barack and Michelle's parents up on the board simply as Mr. and Mrs. (even more inaccurate, since Barack Obama's parents are no longer married). A group of Tajik ladies now also believes that Michelle Obama has a brother named Eugene, because I hadn't remembered to look up his real name. Apparently, it's Craig, and he's a professional basketball coach. Go figure.

On the other hand, I did get to correct one of my students' misimpressions that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Yep, that story has apparently made it as far as Tajikistan. I managed to explain, in halting Russian, that many people in America think this, but it's not actually true. Ah well. At least nobody asked me if our Commander-in-Chief is a magic Negro.

So here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. Whether Jesus loves you more than you will know, I will not fathom to guess. But my ladies from Tajikistan think you're pretty cool.

The Waiting Game

2009-02-25T20:55:00.002+03:00

Just in case you thought I had fallen off a cliff somewhere in the vast expanse of Russia, I haven't.

I apologize to all of my regular readers for not having blogged in, now, more than a month. The simple truth is that there has been little of interest to blog about. My applications to grad school are all complete, though my confidence that I have applied to the right programs, or that this is the right time to go to school, are not. Last week, I had telephone interviews with deans at American Jewish University and Jewish Theological Seminary, the two Jewish programs to which I had applied. I can't say that either of them went especially well. I am honestly not sure whether I came across as an interesting but very strange person, an outright lunatic, or both. What I definitely did not come across as was someone who was well prepared for these interviews and was certain this was what he wanted to do with his life. It's just plain hard to come across as something you in fact are not.

Right at the moment, I am more interested in the programs at Penn and NYU to which I applied in early January. These are programs in Intercultural Communication (Penn) and International Education (NYU), both of which could potentially take me in multiple directions but both of which I would most likely use as a springboard to finding work as a university international students' advisor, director of study abroad programs, or similar. The idea of working in academia suits me well and, to tell the truth, always has. At times I think I might even be better to give up thinking of these programs, continue teaching abroad for another year, and work toward applying to a PhD program in history.

For the time being, however, all I can really do is play the Waiting Game--wait and see where I do in fact get in and how that narrows my choices of where to go. I am at the moment evenly divided about whether I would prefer the program at Penn or at NYU. Perhaps the admissions decisions will settle the matter, perhaps not.

Even if they don't, however, this need not be the end of it. I could always reapply next year. And even if I get in an decide to attend, neither of these programs would necessarily rule out the possibility of getting a PhD later on. I have learned recently that more than a third of PhD candidates begin their programs at least 7 years out of college--a milestone I will reach next year. Recently, I asked someone I know in New York who is knowledgeable about the academic life if there is ever a point when it's "too late" to begin a PhD program, and he said absolutely not. In fact, he knew of someone who had nearly but not actually completed not one but three PhD programs in his life (basically, this person had just failed to complete three different dissertations). Opportunity still abounds.

Whither Your Reporter?

2009-01-23T23:38:00.005+03:00

In Russia, all roads may lead to Moscow. But at the moment, all roads forward in my life seem to lead from there.

For three months now, I have been trying to get the head of my school to sit down with me and discuss seriously the renewal or extension of my contract. In November, he brushed me off, saying it was far too early to be dealing with the matter (he was more than likely right). In December, he was too preoccupied with the current financial crisis and told me to come back in January. But January at last rolled round, and this week, the meeting finally came.

At present, he told me, he could commit to my contract only through the end of June. This was not because of any deficiency in my teaching but because of the current economic climate, which made it impossible to make any longer-term promises. More experienced teachers than I have been told the same thing.

There is some possibility of my having full employment here over the summer, but if I were to stay, I might have to accept working on a pro rata basis. Essentially, this would mean the company would provide me with accomodation and would pay me on a per-hour basis, not a standard monthly salary as at present.

Whether or not this puts me in a quandary is something of a pickle. Having my plans currently up in the air makes it hard to assess the situation completely. I may be heading back to graduate school in the autumn, and if so, the end of June might not be such a horrible time to leave Russia. Most likely, I would spend the summer on the East Coast, taking a short-term sublet in New York or Philadelphia and using the time to find more permanent housing for my graduate career, and possibly to travel along the East Coast of the United States.

I have long had fantasies of taking Dinah Shore's advice and seeing the USA in a Chevrolet (preferably a two-tone Bel Air convertible with white walls). Or at least, of seeing the East Coast of the USA in a series of bus trips. My aim in these travels, besides seeing more of my own country, would be to get some sense of where I might like to live--to find out whether there are places other than Brooklyn where I have a strong chance of having a contented existence. I suspect strongly there are; Brooklyn does not have a monopoly on nice neighborhoods of stately old row houses, and it would be nice to get a real feel for Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and maybe even Washington. When I was in New York, I always fancied myself too poor to venture out on such an excursion, and I now regret not having taken it. Had I done so, perhaps I would have been happier.

Other possibilities exist, however. Before coming home to America, I might take some time and see Vilnius. Contradictory stories exist about how exactly our family came to be the Wilheims, but at least one of them is that the name means "home on the Vilnius River". Indeed, I feel hard-pressed to find a good reason not to go to Vilnius, while I am over here--though as usual, my feelings about money cloud my judgment. Only 20 hours of train travel now separate me from my ancestral homeland, and it would be a great pity indeed not to bridge that gap at some point. Summer might be the ideal time to go.

If I am not destined for graduate school in the autumn, however, the possibility of moving on from Moscow also seems great. A friend and former colleague at my school is now, apparently, considering a short-term teaching stint in Japan. I have frequently seen advertisements for the program to which she is applying advertised on EFL teaching boards, and the thought has crossed my mind that this might be a good situation for me as well. The work is largely in universities, has more regular hours than my current position, and would offer, I think, the chance to save money at a good clip before entering graduate school the following fall.

Naturally, money factors into these considerations. This week, I was delighted to realize that, once I remit some money back home at the end of the month, I shall have under me almost exactly as much money as I had when I came to Russia. That might not seem like much of an accomplishment for eight months of work, but it does reflect a fair amount of sacrifice in time and effort. Additionally, I have managed to reduce my credit card debt by nearly a third in that time, and would have earned an actual profit on my time here had it not been for my trip to St. Petersburg, my computer problems last month, and a couple of other minor financial mishaps along the way. And then there is the knowledge that whatever I manage to remit home over the next five months will be pure profit.

So if travelling lies in my future, I feel I have the resources for it. Whither your reporter? God only knows. But it bodes to be somewhere interesting.

Going Postal

2009-01-07T22:14:00.003+03:00

One things that happens when you go into teaching is that you end up hearing a lot of jokes about having summers off. In language schools, this of course does not happen (although I will be the first to admit that our workload is considerably reduced during the summer); reports I have received from people have taught in regular public and private schools indicate that it doesn't either--summer being the time when teachers work at improving their credentials, preparing or revamping lesson plans for the fall, attending educational seminars, or engaging in summer-school teaching or house painting to earn a few extra dollars.

But I will say that vacation time can be plentiful in the TEFL field. Our school has been in vacation mode since the 22nd of December and does not return to its normal schedule until this coming Sunday (yes, you read that right--Sunday...in Russia, Sunday occasionally becomes a make-up day for a weekday holiday, in this case Orthodox Christmas). And so I have had some free time on my hands.

What have I done with it? In one sense, not a lot. The weather having turned to somewhere between frigid and freezing, I have been reluctant to go out. Many days I have simply run out for food, then returned home to use my Internet connection and watch videos all day. Recently, a class of mine got into a discussion about whether people who don't possess a television set, but watch videos online, can really claim to be "living without TV." At the moment, I might be Exhibit 1 in that debate.

But in another sense, I've accomplished some very important things. My New Year's present to myself was to get the clothing pile on my bedroom floor down to zero. And close to zero it has remained. I think that, from now on, if I can manage to do just a couple loads of wash every other day, the Pile will not reconstruct itself.

More importantly, though, I've been a busy little beaver working away on graduate school applications. Two important ones, to education programs at Penn and NYU, are complete. Or will be as soon as the schools have received my transcripts. Making this possible has required my sending a $72 (Seventy-Two Dollars!) DHL package to dear old Alma Mater, because Alma Mater's registrar huffily informed me that it could not release my transcripts to anyone without an original, signed transcript request from me.

Getting this sent out required a bit of a goose chase. A fellow teacher who stayed in Moscow over the holidays took me to a post office where he had managed to send EMS (express mail) packages in the past. When we arrived, however, the granny behind the desk informed us that this police office no longer handled EMS as of the 1st of January, and told me to go to the Central Telegraph Office. Yes, you read that right. In large swatches of Russia, the telegraph is still a viable means of communication. And so off to Central Telegraph I went.

Central Telegraph lies on Tver Street, one of Moscow's main drags. The building itself features a globe above the front door that shows telegraph line radiating out from Moscow. Though I mentioned above that telegraphy is still practiced in Russia, it is no longer the main purpose of the Central Telegraph Building. Where rows of telegraphers once kept the nation's communication lines going, shoppers now hunt for bargains. All that is really left of the old telegraph operations is the city's "main" post office--now indistinguishable from any other post office in the city. It is tucked away in a corner near the entrance, rather like a duchess trying to avoid offending the paying guests who have now taken over her castle.

Into the old duchess went I, documents in hand. Tidy lines had formed at the couple of windows that appeared to be open--one marked "Telegrams" and the other marked, as near as I could guess, "Stamps." I decided to join the "Stamps" line, figuring it nearer reflected my purpose than "Telegrams." In America, it's voice mail trees that never quite correspond to your need; in Russia, it's lines.

I no sooner got to the end of the line and inquired about sending an express when someone informed me, in good English, that no express mail would be going out until the 11th, because of the New Years' and Christmas holidays. This was too late for me; even an "express" to America takes a minimum of 7 days, as I know from prior experience. And given Columbia's general apathy about handling even something as simple as a transcript request promptly, I decided to seek out DHL. On an ordinary day, I could have sent a DHL from the Central Telegraph post office, but the window was closed. I asked when it would be open again. Not until the 11th, I was told. But someone did kindly give me a list of other DHL offices around the city and pointed out the one closest to Central Telegraph. I thanked him profusely and headed out into the cold to find it.

The address for the DHL office turned out to be a Marriott Hotel. The guard at the door did not initially understand what I wanted. I was wearing tatty jeans and the kind of black wool hat that a New Yorker would most identify with muggers, hardly the attire of the Marriott's usual guests. But the guard did at least allow me to go in and speak to a receptionist who spoke English. He told me to go upstairs to the hotel's Business Center.

There, I was at last able to get my documents sent. They will leave Moscow on the 8th, the day after Orthodox Christmas, and arrive in New York the following day. My transcripts will certainly be dispatched to NYU by its deadline on the 1st of February. What an age we live in--to get a transcript from 116th and Broadway down to the Village only takes four days and a lot of running around Moscow.

This adventure aside, however, I am happy to have a real feeling of progress in my life. My graduate applications have gone remarkably smoothly. Through the online systems at Penn and NYU, I can be sure that the people writing recommendations for me have actually submitted them--something I never could have found out in pre-internet times. I can look with real satisfaction at having actually done something to find an appropriate direction for myself in life and to take the steps that will get me there.

My transcript request has gone postal. I, however, no longer am.

A Job Hunter's Bill of Rights

2009-01-01T14:43:00.002+03:00

As a corollary to my last post, about the idiotic things that get said to you when you have the misfortune of being a job hunter, I feel it is time job hunters formed a union. If employers and other well-meaning and "well-meaning" people are going to insist that job hunting be treated as full-time job, I think job hunters should unionize and insist on better conditions within that job. Here is my modest proposal for a Bill of Rights job hunters should demand:

1) Job Hunters Have the Right to Have Their Resumes Read. By an Actual Person.

One of the most unbelievable aspects of modern job hunting is the emphasis on putting exact keywords into a resume or cover letter, for the reason that, if it does not contain these exact keywords, your resume or cover letter will not be found by the software employers use to find online resumes.

It's hard to think of anything more impersonal and depersonalized than this. We as job hunters are expected to put major amounts of time, thought, and effort into our job hunts. The least employers can do in return is read the resumes and cover letters that come in.

If we are prepared, potentially, to give years of our lives to your company, the least we can expect in return is that you take the time actually to read the resumes that come floating through your e-mail. If doing do requires hiring additional staff in your HR department, so be it.

2) Job Hunters Have the Right to Expect That Employers Will Prepare for Job Interviews and Least as Much as Interviewees.

I cannot count the number of times I have diligently gone through a prospective employer's website and learned all I could about that employer, only to come in and be interviewed by someone who had clearly not taken fifteen seconds to read my resume. The worst instance of this occurred one time when I was interviewed at an office of Merrill Lynch in New Jersey. The first question I was asked was whether I had any accounting experience. Um...no. If I'd had, it would have been on my resume. It turned out I had been brought in for this interview on the basis of my cover letter alone, and the interviewers had not bothered to check my resume to see if I had any qualifications for the position. Three hours of my life was wasted by this experience.

3) Job Hunters Have the Right to the Same Basic Courtesy as Other Human Beings.

First and foremost, this includes the right not to be asked inappropriately personal questions. While I have never been asked any question in a job interview that might be considered discriminatory and therefore illegal, I have been asked all kinds of questions about my personal dreams and aspirations that have nothing to do with my quaifications for the job in question.

It also covers such matters as not having employment decisions based on whether we accept water or tea during an interview, whether we need to use the toilet during the interview process (by this I do no advocate leaving an interview to go to the toilet...only that job hunters have the right to stop and use the toilet between meeting with different people), or whether our necktie happens to be a "rep tie" or some other kind of conservative pattern.

4) Job Hunters Have the Right to Expect Employers to Know the Difference Between Job Interviews and Counselling Sessions.

I remember distinctly an interview I had at a small public relations firm in New York. After being asked about my hobbies, I replied that I like to watch films and read. In fact, I have no real hobbies, but I needed to answer something.

The interviewer decided to give me a long line of advice about how I should go to Hollywood and work at getting a screenplay turned into a film. I tried to be as polite as possible, but a line had clearly been crossed. I think I quoted Doctor Zhivago at him, and told him that writing was no more a profession than good health.

Job interviewers, you are not our shrinks. Act accordingly.

5) Interviews for Jobs Should Not Be Cancelled Unless the Job Itself Disappears.

Even if employers think they have found the perfect candidate, they have an obligation actually to meet with every person they have invited in for an interview. Every candidate should have an equal opportunity to make his or her pitch. There is nothing more dispiriting than being uninvited for a job interview you have previously been invited for.

6) "Bait and Switch" is Under No Circumstances an Acceptable Interview Tactic.

Job hunters have the right to know what position they are interviewing for and, upon arrival at the interview, to be interviewed for that position, not another one.

Similarly, job hunters have the right to be told honestly whether they are coming in to interview for a position that actually exists or for a more general, informational interview. If you want us to come in for an informational interview, we are glad to do that. But don't pull a "bait and switch" on us.

The Bankrupt and the Squirrel

2008-12-31T12:56:00.003+03:00

With all of the economic turmoil going on nowadays, it's become commonplace in the media to make references to the Great Depression. We are constantly hearing predictions that, within a year, there will be apple sellers on Broadway and people throwing themsleves out of window. No doubt bank night at the movies will make a comeback, too.

Of all the things I have seen or read about the Depression, perhaps my favorite is a cartoon I once saw about the bank failures so common in those days. It shows a probably unemployed and certainly dispirited man sitting on a park bench, talking to a squirrel. If memory

serves, the squirrel is labeled "economist". The squirrel asks the man why he didn't save some of his earnings and put it in the bank when times were good.

The man replies curtly that he did.

I've always thought this cartoon was not just about the victims of Depression-era bank failures but about misfortune in general. The past few years, I have been "privileged" to learn the hard way that there is nothing like misfortune to bring out other people's moralism. There is something about encountering the unfortunate that makes some people respond not with compassion or kind words but an almost instinctive need to find some explanation as to why this unfortunate soul deserves his misfortune.

One of the worst aspects of being out of work, or of being stuck in the wrong kind of work, is having to endure such people. I recall a woman I met in Hillel telling me that, having failed to find a job for nine months out of college, my failure must be due to having been "super picky" about what I wanted in a job. Never mind that, in the recession of 2003, thousands of other recent graduates were meeting the same fate.

But even this pales in comparison to what I like to call proponents of the One Big Flaw. When you are out of work, people seem to love searching for the One Big Flaw that is preventing you from being a success. Your One Big Flaw is then revealed to you--always in a tone of voice that suggests the speaker wants to be helpful and has no idea that his assessment of your One Big Flaw is actually an insult.

Here is a brief list of One Big Flaw theories I have encountered, or have heard from other people that they have encountered. All of them are things I really ought to say to the squirrels in my life who want to find some explanation for why I am where I am right now:

1) "You interview poorly." Because failure in job interviews can never be attributed to the unprofessionalism and sometimes outright duplicity of people who conduct job interviews. I had this said to me once by a good friend who had gotten reports back from people he had sent me to for informational interviews. It could not have been more off the mark. I had actually had more than one person who didn't hire me make a point of contacting me to say how well I interviewed.

2) "You haven't figured out who you really are and what you really want." I really don't understand what it is that makes some people unable to tell the difference between a job hunt and a spiritual quest. One of the better career-related sites I've stumbled on recently makes wonderful hash of the idea that if you just "do what you love", the money will follow. Doing what you love, this veteran career counselor notes, often leads to volunteer work. For goodness sakes, people, stop giving the unemployed advice on how to have a career when what they need is a job--you know, one of those things you rely on to provide money for such non-essential items as food, clothing, and shelter.

3) "You're not putting enough time into it." It's a cliche of job hunting that, when you're out of work, you should treat your job hunt as a full time job. I have yet to meet anyone actually capable of doing this, and the one report I have heard of someone who actually did turned out to be a single mother of three facing eviction. There are not enough hours in the day to do all the things people tell you you absolutely must do if you want to find a job.

4) "You aren't networking enough." Networking is not the be-all and end-all of job hunting, and I've learned, over the past few years, that I'm not especially good at it. Many people aren't. More to the point, many people flat-out don't have much of a network to rely on. We don't all belong to three country clubs. Even more to the point, I have had an awful lot of my time wasted over the years trying to network with people who seemed to have no idea what I was trying to do--no idea that I was looking for referrals to colleagues in their fields who might have a job or know of someone who did. I recall in particular one Madison Avenue lawyer who took me to lunch, forced me to listen to his entire career trajectory since his days running a lemonade stand as a kid, and then said to me, "Well, I won't give you any contacts, because I'm sure you have enough of those." Umm...no. That's kind of why I'm here.

5) "You're not going on enough interviews." Always said with an implication that the job seeker can just magically pull interviews out of his or her you-know-where, this is probably the most condescending piece of advice you will get. And the one that shows the person in question hasn't the faintest idea what it's like to look for work these days.

A friend of mine in New York recently chatted with me online about an interview that wasn't--an experience I'm sure I had at one point or another job hunting. She was scheduled to have an interview but was phoned beforehand and told the company had already chosen another candidate. Subsequently, though, she kept seeing the same position advertised on a major job site, and she called up to see if perhaps she might interview for this position after all. She was curtly told that, yes, the first person who had accepted the job had backed out but that, again, another candidate had been chosen and was about to start.

6) "You need to read more career-related books and take their advice." Umm...I have. And the advice they give is either obvious or contradictory. One of the few infuriating parts of my TEFL training was a section on resume writing in which my trainers gave instructions from a book called The Resume Bible on how to format a resume. I tried meekly to object that I had seen similar books on the subject and that they all gave different advice. Believe it or not, employers have different ideas about what makes for a brilliant cover letter or a perfect resume.

7) "You want too much money." Always a favorite. There's nothing like listening to a gainfully employed person tell you that your unemployment is due to greed. I, on the other hand, have had the experience of doing temp assignments for $8 an hour in New York City and having temp agencies send me to interview for jobs paying less than $30,000 a year--not a living wage in a city where even a studio apartment costs a minimum of $1000 a month.

What a Difference a Year Makes

2008-12-30T23:34:00.002+03:00

One advantage of keeping a blog is that, at the time of year everyone starts looking back on the past year and discovers he can't remember where he was or what he was doing a year ago, I have a clear record of where I was and what I was doing.

Man, what a difference a year makes! A year ago, I was dreading the most official "unofficial" observation in the history of EFL teaching: an observation that was to determine whether I was to be transferred to another branch of Shane in Taiwan or go home with my tail between my legs.

Well, regular readers of my blog already know how that turned out. On reflection, I know I shouldn't be surprised. Taiwan was a stupid move in a career that, until Russia, was studded with stupid moves. My decision to go to Taiwan was made in haste and desperation. Visions of dollar signs were dancing in my eyes, and I gave little thought to what it would be like to be alone, so far from home and anyone who really spoke my language. I handled my loneliness and misery poorly, and in the end found myself on a flight back to the States.

Now, a year later, I can look at some real progress. I am starting to send money home. Not the fortune I had hoped for when I started out in TEFL, but still, actual American dollars that I will someday actually use to set myself up in graduate school and, beyond that, I hope in a nice row house in a city yet to be determined. I may not love my job all the time, but I can still say it is much better than anything I had in the States before I left, or the disaster of a job I had in Taiwan.

I have learned to look before I leap. Wherever I go next in my career, it will be something I have thoroughly examined. No more going into new territory without getting the lay of the land first. And whatever degree I end up getting will take me into a career that actually brings me not only a steady paycheck but actual satisfaction. Of this I am sure.

So right now, I see only good things ahead.

The Bristol Stomp

2008-12-30T13:08:00.003+03:00

Well, the greatest non-story of the 2008 presidential race is finally over:

Bristol Palin finally gave birth to a baby boy. The media were duly alerted.

I always felt genuinely sorry for this young woman. First, she has had the misfortune of having Sarah Palin as a mother--a grave misfortune indeed. Last night, I began working my way through Dickens' Bleak House, which features a minor character named Mrs. Jellyby. This woman devotes all of her energies to helping settle unemployed British people on African coffee plantations but neglects her own family scandalously. It is hard not to see something of Sarah Palin in Mrs. Jellyby.

Second, she had to have her private decision to marry her boyfriend subjected to all kinds of scrutiny by a hostile media. Perhaps the most disgusting thing I have seen in a long while was Bill Maher getting up on his program and creating a "Free Levi" website--dedicated to freeing Levi Johnston, father of Bristol Palin's baby, whom he dubbed a "political prisoner." I'm sorry--I just don't see humor in encouraging a man to abandon his fiancee and unborn child. Watching this spectacle made me feel that the cultural left had just gone off the deep end.

Most of all, however, I felt Bristol Palin did not deserve the level of attention she got. There just was no story there, and I think the media, to its credit, realized this quickly. It's hard to think of any aspect of life that is made easier by being the focus of a media circus. For about a minute there, Bristol was no doubt a distraction from whoever the latest missing blonde college girl was.

Congratulations, Levi and Bristol. We will now finally stop doing the Bristol Stomp.

Flying to Moscow (or Leningrad)

2008-12-23T23:24:00.003+03:00

One of the things you learn pretty quickly when you work in foreign language teaching is that direct translation from one language into another is not always possible. One book about teaching in my school's resource library about teaching vocabulary (sadly, I forget which one) even argues that you shouldn't try to teach basic words like table and chair as though they have direct, exact translations into the student's native language. A German who goes to England and brings back a table, it is said, will only decide after much examination that this thing the English call a "table" fits into the German conceptual category of a "Tisch".

Personally, I think this example may be taking things a little too far--though in my own limited study of Russian, I have encountered the same kind of problem dealing with the way Russian conceptualizes furniture. Specifically, there is this thing Russians have in their home called a shkaff. English speakers have cupboards, pantries, wardrobes, and hampers to put their belongings in; Russian speakers seem to have only shkaff. As best I can understand the concept, its meaning really is something like "big thing you put things in."

But there are certainly plenty of other concepts that really, really don't translate between cultures. The suburbs, I'm finding, is one of them. As they are now fed a nearly constant diet of American films and television programs, Russians have some inkling of what American suburbs are like. But when they talk about the suburbs of their own cities, it's clear they think of a very different environment.

For one thing, the sheer wastefulness of culs-de-sac, eight-lane highways, and having to drive even to purchase a carton of milk is just not a lifestyle Russia can embrace. Even in Moscow, where something like 80 percent of the country's wealth is concentrated, there aren't enough people who can afford cars to make this kind of lifestyle feasible. Moreover, anyplace where that kind of suburbia might potentially be built has long since been developed in accordance with the dictates of Soviet architecture and urban planning, which, as near as I can tell, tended to favor monstrously ugly and shoddily constructed "tower in the park" development.

As we are now in the middle of the holiday season, I have gotten to learn that Russians have their own version of It's a Wonderful Life--a film that get played and replayed so often during the holidays that most Russians know it word for word. Not surprisingly, the plot of this film is set in motion by drunkenness. On New Year's Eve, a group of men living in Leningrad (or Moscow--I've had Russians tell me the plot of this story several times, but different people have told me differently about where the story is actually set, for reasons that will become apparent) pay a visit to a banya (a traditional kind of Russian sauna), where one of them proceeds to get rolicking drunk. His friends decide to take advantage of his inebriated state and play a trick on him. They convince him that he is really in Moscow (or Leningrad) and must now fly home to Leningrad (or Moscow). They quickly get him into a taxi and to the airport, where he flies "back" to his home city.

When the man arrives in Moscow (or Leningrad), thinking it is Leningrad (or Moscow), he gets in a taxi and tells the man to take him to his address. And behold, it turns out that in Moscow (or Leningrad), there is a street with the exact same name, with a building bearing the exact same number, and having the exact same appearance as the man's really apartment building back in Leningrad (or Moscow). And even stranger--when the drunkard goes up to his apartment, his key opens this other apartment--which looks exactly the same as his real apartment back in Leningrad (or Moscow). The drunkard goes to lie down in what he believes to be his bedroom and soon falls fast asleep.

Well, it turns out that this copycat apartment belongs to a young lady, who soon returns home to find this strange man in her bad. At first she is outraged, but, as can only happen in the movies, the two eventually fall in love and live happily ever after--or, in this case, until a sequel involving their children from subsequent marriages meeting under similar circumstances, involving this exact same apartment in Moscow (or Leningrad).

The entire story is plausible only because there really was that degree of uniformity in architecture and urban planning in the Soviet period. To a lesser extent, this is true even today. Volodya told me once about how new apartment complexes get built in Moscow. They tend to all end up having a very limited number of designs because there is actually a small number of pre-approved designs accepted by the city building and planning authorities. It's not that no other design can be built; it's just that the approval process is faster and cheaper if you're building one of the pre-approved designs. And so developers tend to save themselves the time and cost of doing anything outside the mold.

I find it's not all that hard to accept that the story of this film actually could happen. Outside of its very center, Moscow does take on an extremely cookie-cutter feel. Russian students sometimes ask me which part of Moscow I like best, and I can only reply, sheepishly, that I like the area around the Kremlin best. This is not a lie, and is probably the canned response they expect. But it says a lot that I really can't name my favorite part of Moscow. No matter where I get sent out to teach in-company, I tend to end up feeling like the hapless film hero who ended up in Moscow (or Leningrad). Almost everywhere outside the city center, the cityscape is as follows: a warren of kiosks selling everything from sausages to sandals, some Krushchevkovas (hideous five-story apartment buildings built during the Krushchev era), then some taller, already-dilapidated monstrosities of the Brezhnev era.

None of the neighborhoods really feel like a neighborhood. Unlike in New York, the apartment buildings usually lack ground-level retail space--which is consigned to kiosks and a very few main streets. In the Soviet era, when there was little available for consumers to buy, this kind of planning made a curious kind of sense; now it just makes the city seem that much more dreary and inhopsitable to people.

Remont-strating

2008-12-19T19:40:00.002+03:00

I have commented before on how essential a laptop computer is to the modern EFL teacher. And so I shall not belabor that point here. I shall say only that, in the past week, I have learned just how essential it is, and how difficult it is to make any adjustment to life without it.

Sunday night, I was happily surfing the web when, suddenly, my laptop went black. This had happened in the past, but the problem had always been due to the tenuous nature of my power cords. Two or three months back, my computer battery failed, and I was thereafter forced to keep my laptop plugged in whenever I used it. Not knowing that all laptops are now 110/220 v adaptable, I had purchased a new electric system not long after I came to Russia. It involved one cord that led into a big black box, and another that led out of it into my computer. Not infrequently, these two cords would become deplugged from one another, and my computer would swiftly lose power.

I thought this was what was happening Sunday night, so I didn't panic. Indeed, panic did not begin in earnest until I had reassembled the electric supply chain three times and my computer steadfastly refused to power on. The blue lights on the keyboard indicated I was receiving power, but the computer would not turn on and maintain power for more than a few seconds. Clearly something was wrong.

The next day, I showed it to a fellow teacher who, in addition to having a near-encyclopedic knowledge of British bands, is also well-versed in the ways of man's best electrical friend. She looked at my machine and told me I most likely had a virus. Repair would be possible, but probably less economical than buying a whole new laptop. This struck fear into my heart. The kind of fear that only the thought of an impossible-to-pay $1000 price tag can bring. Nonetheless, my friend said I would need to bring my computer to a repair shop to be certain.

Not being so foolhardy as to try to accomplish this repair in my limited Russian, I asked my Director of Studies to assist me. And so, the following afternoon, we went to a repair shop in the same building as my school's central offices. As he was unable to locate the problem quickly, the repairman insisted on keeping the machine overnight for observation.

I spent an uneasy night wodering how on earth I might raise the money for a new laptop. Visions of organ donation danced in my head (organ donations being close relations of sugar plums).

The next morning, however, to my infinite relief, my Director of Studies called me. She said the repairman had called her. My computer's malfunctioning was due to a faulty power supply--a computer shop had sold me the wrong kind of power cords for my computer--that had fried part of my memory. The memory repair and and new, correct power supply would cost only about $150--about what I had available in cash at the moment. I did a little dance. Then I realized how silly I looked doing a little dance alone in my room, got dressed, and went off to school.

I am most grateful my DOS was able to help in all of this. I know I would have been unequal to the task of making sense of the repairman's assessment of what was wrong with my computer, or of bargaining for a reasonable price for service. Remont (Russian for repair) is not known on either side of the Baltic for being either comprehensible or fair.

I am only too glad I needed to do no remont-strating.

A Philly Who is Ready for the Race

2008-12-19T19:10:00.002+03:00

The weather in Moscow is only now beginning to grow really cold. And by really cold, I mean that we are now experiencing weather similar to that of--you'll never believe this--Texas.

A good friend of mine, a fellow teacher from Texas, tells me that he has been communicating with his family about the weather. Yes, Virginia, that's right--Brits aren't the only ones who have dull conversations about the weather; Americans do it, too. It seems that a cold snap is now in effect over much of the United States, and the temperatures in Odessa, Ukraine and Odessa, Texas are now quite similar. Maybe my observations about how much America and Russia have in common are not so far off, after all.

It is fitting that cold weather is starting to pommel Moscow, for our winter vacation begins in earnest this coming week. Most of the teachers at my school are return home to Britain or America for the break, but I shall be stuck here, lack of money keeping me, literally, grounded. But I shall have three weeks to myself to watch YouTube videos, eat at hours closer to my own preference, and maybe get caught up with a little reading.

I shall also be spending this time getting caught up on graduate school applications. I have completed two so far--for programs in Jewish education in New York and Los Angeles. But my most recent conversation with my career counselor has suggested some other paths to me. I have given some thought to looking for university jobs other than actual teaching, and my test suggested to Brenda that I might do well as a career counselor, university administrator, or international student advisor. The latter path is the most appealing to me, since it would involve counseling work as well as the opportunity to meet and work with people from, literally, all over the world.

At the same time, however, it looks as though this path may also bring me closer to fulfilling a longstanding fantasy of mine. Not long after I started really working in New York, I began to have serious fantasies of relocating to Philadelphia. A co-worker I had at the time, who hailed from Philly, told me the best description of the city he could give me was as follows: imagine Brooklyn without Manhattan next to it.

Well, to my mind at the time, that idea sounded like heaven itself. I had just moved from a cramped apartment on West 172nd Street in Washington Heights to a large bedroom in an off-the-beaten-path (I had not yet figured out yet just how off-the-beaten-path) loft-style building in Brooklyn. I found myself quite enjoying my new borough. What I liked most was the one thing Manhattanites tend to put down Brooklyn for--its smaller scale. Manhattan is a borough of skycrapers, screeching taxicabs, and stratospheric incomes; Brooklyn is a borough of row houses, rousing games of . While Brooklyn might not have fit well with my ideas of what it would be like to live in New York, it fit well with dreams I had once had of living in a city.

Imagine no Manhattan. It was easy, and I did try. No Upper East Side snobbiness. No hustle into "the City" (I quickly came to hate this moniker for the borough beyond the East River, but just as quickly came to use it as effortlessly as native Brooklynites) every morning to earn your daily bread. No need for newspapers that told you no news of your own borough. No transit system that could get you to Broadway and 34th in an hour (I soon learned that almost any Brooklyn-Manhattan commute took an hour) but could get you to Bay Ridge only in two. If Philadelphia was Brooklyn without Manhattan, that was a dream I could embrace. And in many ways, I still do.

A few months later, finding myself between jobs again, I ended up in Philadelphia for an interview with a local law firm. I took the opportunity to explore the city a bit--admittedly, mostly the historic district and the area around Penn, which has been rechristened University City. What I found was very much to my liking. While I didn't get the job, I held onto the idea that Philadelphia might be the place for me.

Looking for programs that might lead me toward being an international student advisor, I found a good program at, of all places, the University of Pennsylvania. I had been looking into education programs at Penn before this, but it was amazing to find a program that so clearly fit this new goal, a master's program in something called Intercultural Communication. The degree prepares graduates to work in a variety of settings involving cultural exchange and international endeavor--not just in university international student offices and study abroad programs, but also in corporate settings. I seem to have stumbled upon something that uses my talents and interests while giving me marketability and versatility. And, to boot, will give the opportunity to go live in Philly for a year, possibly longer.

I find myself chomping at the bit thinking of the kinds of graduate programs I might be in next fall. They all seem like things that will take me to the kind of destination in life I've been seeking for a long time--satisfying work, dependable middle-class status, and residence in a city that fits me well. But when I look at this program, I find myself truly a filly who is ready for the race (no, I have not seen The Flower Drum Song too many times!). I feel ready to go back and fight--not in desperation, not in fear, but with resolve and intelligence--for the life I really want.

A few more months and I'll be able to do just that.

The Type? Writer.

2008-12-13T03:15:00.003+03:00

Theoretically, computers are machines like any others. I've heard all my life that their only real ability, when you get right down to it, is to process an endless series of ones and zeros in what is known as binary code. But I've never been able to believe it. Deep down, I know computers are just like people. They have unresolved issues from their childhoods. They have mother-in-laws who come to visit. And they have off-days.

I guess that, when my laptop started acting up during my observation, it was just having a bad hair day. Because, when I got it home and plugged it into my own power supply and hooked it up to my own internet connection, whatever problem the touch-pad mouse replacement had been having suddenly disappeared. Very strange. Maybe my computer was just picking out the homesickness vibes I've been sending out lately.

Whatever the actual cause of my computer's bizarre behavior, I was relieved to have the mouse pad working again, because on that particular night, I was to take a career test my career counselor had arranged for me. It would have been difficult to take the test elsewhere, because my school has recently imposed a draconian usage policy designed to lower its internet bill. Briefly, the three computers available to teachers now have a combined daily bandwidth limit, and once this bandwidth limit is reached on any given day, there is no more internet for anyone, for any purpose. A couple of days ago, this limit was reached before two in the afternoon (our school's offices are open from about 9:00 in the morning to about 9:30 at night). I can easily envision fights ensuing over bandwidth issues in the near future, and I prefer not to be a cause of these fights.

In any event, I dutifully took my assigned career test, which proved to be shorter than I had expected. The result is that I am apparently something called an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs personality scale. From looking around a bit on the net, I have found out that INFJs are "future-oriented" (my shrink in New York frequently accuses me, not always unjustly, of living in the future instead of enjoying my present); naturally idealistic (Check); and prefer work that enables them to help people and use their creative talents (Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Any more checks and I could found a republic in Central Europe).

At least one site I looked at indicated that INFJs often struggle with figuring out exactly what to do with themselves. It's good to know I'm neither alone nor crazy because this has been true for me; roughly one in ever 60 or 70 people is an INFJ. The even better news is that this assessment seems to indicate I'm finally barking up the right trees when it comes to what to do with my life. INFJs tend to do well working in educational, counseling, and creative roles.

They also tend to make good writers. Amazing, isn't it, that a personality test could get me so well. People have been telling me I write well as long as I can remember. A major challenge and difficulty for me has been figuring out where to put that writing talent to some kind of productive use. But I have a sense I'm getting closer.

I asked my former shrink in New York, a man in whom I have a great deal of trust and confidence, what he makes of Myers-Briggs and similar kinds of personality assessments. He told me they are not gospel but not worthless either; he also seemed to agree with what this assessment had determined about me. Indeed, I can say it fits in well with what has been true of my life thus far. Every career decision I have made was, at least initially, motivated by a desire to do something where I got to be creative and help others. What I now home my counselor can do for me is help me find the most suitable path like that.

I may not be where I want to be, but I am further along than I was. I know I will reach my destination. And this assessment has given me that knowledge.

Of Mouses and Men

2008-12-10T20:28:00.002+03:00

To the modern EFL teacher stationed abroad, a laptop computer ends up serving as many things. First of all, it's your poor man's post and telegraph office, since virtually all your communication home ends up being my e-mail. In this age of Skype, it's your long-distance telephone, too; today's EFL teacher can stay in constant contact with the world back home, so long as he has a working laptop and a reliable internet connection. Now that CDs are going the way of the Milly Vanilly, your laptop becomes your jukebox and stereo, too--as well as an invaluable resource for lesson planning. Thanks to YouTube, your laptop becomes your television; I've been able to watch everything from obscure documentaries on the Crusades to Sarah Palin's latest gaffe. And, now that iTunes and a million similar services are starting to offer video sales and rental, it can even be your cinema. Take away an EFL teacher's laptop, and you take away his whole access to the world back home.

I may have the joy of undergoing such a discovery--albeit for a short time. Tonight, I had a class observed by my director of studies for the second time. I have an evening class that would strike most teachers back home as somewhat unusual but that I am told is fairly typical for in-company work. This class has a rotating cast of characters. When I came to teach it for the first time, I was told I would have ten students. So far, I have met five, and of these, only one comes almost every time (he has missed class a couple of times because of business trips abroad but is otherwise a very committed and diligent student). The others come only when they really have nothing better to do--or at least, that what's their spotty attendance seems to indicate.

This leaves me in something of a quandary when it comes to planning lessons for this class. Often, the class ends up being a one-on-one, as only my regular (whom I shall call Roman) shows up. But since I never know in advance when this will be the case, I feel compelled to plan two different lessons: a one-on-one lesson in case only Roman is there, and a group-oriented lesson in case other people come. When only Roman is there, I try to avoid introducing major new topics or grammar, so that the other students don't miss anything essential.

Tonight was a Roman-only lesson. I had a lesson prepared to work on indirect discourse and what might be called future-in-the-past situations. In case you missed it in freshman English, indirect discourse (also known as reported speech) occurs whenever we tell what someone else said, but don't give a direct quote with quotation marks. The sentence John said, "I'll do it" is direct discourse; if we write instead John said he would do it, we have shifted to indirect discourse. Future-in-the-past situations are such gems as would in the sentence He realized he would never see her again.

For Russian speakers, indirect discourse and future-in-the-past situations can be challenging, because Russian does not shift tenses when moving from direct to indirect discourse or when dealing with a future-in-the-past situation. In Russian, you can actually say John said he will go to the store, even if the going to the store occurred in the past; in English, of course, this is not possible unless the going to the store will happen sometime in the future. Russian also does not have a tense shift for future-in-the past; in Russia, He realized he would never see her again would be rendered as He realized he will never see her again. Doing this backshifting with tenses is not intuitive to Russian speakers and requires careful explanation and practice.

I chose to focus on these topics for a one-on-one lesson because, in an earlier one-on-one lesson, Roman had specifically requested it. He has been to Canada before and will be going to America shortly and has found difficulty dealing with these situations before. I had a fairly creative lesson prepared using a song by the Andrew Sisters that had a lot of indirect discourse. I knew it would be a hit.

Unfortunately, when I booted up my computer, the touch-pad it has in lieu of a mouse chose tonight to fail. I couldn't move my cursor enough to get the song playing. After about a minute of fumbling, I was forced to shift gears and give Roman the lesson I had prepared for a whole group.

A broken touch-pad shouldn't cause major problems, but it will be damned inconvenient for me. Because of the way my room is arranged, I am pretty much forced to use my computer lying in bed; I have gotten very used to watching films with my laptop lying on my chest, the screen a few scant inches from my face. I have a table on which I could rest my laptop while using the Internet, but I lack a chair to sit on while I browse--hence, my modus operandi of leaving my laptop my chest.

All of this means that, until I can find some way to reconoiter, or can get my school to give me a chair for my room (a process I expect to take a while given how long it took for the school to get me a wardrobe), my laptop will be essentially useless. I am hoping I can buy a new, optical mouse and figure out a way to manipulate it with my fingers so that it works, but doing this is likely to be unbelievably inconvenient.

I Don't Understand the Parisians

2008-12-04T22:22:00.002+03:00

This will not be the first time I have noted that I began this blog with no intention of providing social or political commentary. Until this year, I had a general lack of interest in politics, a lack of interest I developed in college. My time at Columbia was in many ways a time of turning inward; I was so consumed with trying to figure out who I was that I largely lost interest in the wider world around me. Politics seemed incapable of providing any wisdom that would guide my life on a day-to-day level, and so I felt it wasn't worth the time to worry about.

All of that has changed. I guess this election campaign has made me see that more was at stake than I had thought, for my country and for the world. I am genuinely glad that Barack Obama will become president of the United States on January 20th. Whether he will work any great wonderwork for the country remains to be seen. But change is in the air, not just for me but for my country.

The bailouts--the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street and the proposed bailout of the auto industry--have recently attracted my interest. Both are quite vexing to me, not for any particular ideological reason but because of what they reveal about what has happened to the American character in recent years. I am angry that so much has been given to the country's largest banks, on the assumption they would use it to make loans and end the credit crisis, without any oversight whatsoever. I'm sorry, but $350 billion is not the price of a lemonade at a child's lemonade stand. It represents upwards of $1000 for every man, woman, and child in the country, and it ought not to have been handed out without clear instructions as to how it was to be used.

But the proposed bailout of the auto industry makes me angrier, and for reasons that defy clear political or ideological classification. I am not the hardcore conservative I once was. My own checkered career since graduation has made me more aware of how easy it is for people to fall through the cracks, for reasons having nothing to do with their moral fibre. So my objections to this bailout are not the objections of a conservative objecting to welfare.

No, my objections are deeper than that. My feeling is that this bailout will only serve to reward the stewards of the Big Three (a good friend of mind now calls them "The Little Three") who got us into this mess, and who undertook no sacrifices to avoid the catastrophe they are now asking Washington to help them avert.

There is so much more these men could have done. They could have refused stock options, given up their seven-figure salaries, and sold off the corporate jets long before they became the object of national ridicule. Having so done, they could have gone to the unions and the workers and asked everyone to work together in a spirit of shared sacrifice--not merely told, but also shown, their workers that everyone in the company was in the same boat. But they did none of that.

Commentators have noted that the Big Three are "too big to fail". Maybe. But if they are, they are also too big to have been run so incompetently for so long. The CEOs of Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford continued for years to receive hefty compensation as their factories turned out crap no one wanted to buy.

This is not the first time of late that Americans have watched people in high places act as though they were entitled to reward not for a job well done, not merely for showing up to work each day, but just for being who they are. The spectacle of Enron was shocking, to say the least. But in a way, all Americans have been living the life of the Big Three executives, the life not merely of Riley but of Ken Lay.

Americans have long crowed about their national prosperity. For many years, however, that crowing was based on something. Americans had the world's highest standard of living, we understood, because we had worked for it. American ingenuity had given the world the phonograph and the cinema and the Tin Lizzie. We worked hard to produce things the world wanted to buy. The chicken in every pot and the two cars in every garage were our reward for that hard work.

Somewhere along the line, something changed. We started to think we were entitled to this wealth not because our factories were the most efficient or our products the best. We started to think we were entitled to it simply because we were Americans. We treated wealth not as a reward for hard work but as a birthright. We deserved SUVs the size of woolly mammoths and $2.00 gasoline just because we were us.

At the same time, our images of the wealthy elite changed. Once, we had admired the Henry Fords and Thomas Edisons who had given us our cars and electric lights and had reaped the rewards of their inventiveness and hard word; now, those Americans who admire the very rich admire a very different creature, a woman whose claim to fame consists solely in having been born an heiress and having put up a pornographic tape of herself on the internet. It's no wonder Americans are so obsessed with Paris Hilton. In a thousand ways, we have all become Parisians.

Because of these changes, I don't recognize my country any more. To quote Leslie Caron, I don't understand the Parisians. Who are these strange creatures? Not the people I was taught Americans were supposed to be.

I hope for all our sakes, we say no to this bailout of the auto industry. I feel for the people in Michigan and other rustbelt states who will lose their jobs and have to make a difficult transition. As a more progressive person than I once was, I hope that our government will provide them with the aid they need to make it through until either the Japanese automakers pick up the pieces of the Big Three or new industry develops in these regions. In a civilized country, everyone is entitled to food, clothing, and a decent roof over their heads.

But what everyone is not entitled to is a life in the lap of luxury--the good life without the good effort and hard work that make it possible. America can no longer persist in that delusion. The costs over the long term are far too great.

Let us hope our nation's leaders have the sense to pull the plug on the American auto industry, as swiftly as General Motors pulled the plug on the electric car.

Glass Out of Masonry

2008-12-04T06:36:00.004+03:00

Intellectually, I know that only eight time zones separate Moscow and New York. In an age of jet travel and broadband, this really isn't so far. If I am willing to stay up (and I am almost always willing), I can chat up friends back home. But at times, the distance between Moscow and New York can seem overwhelming.

One of those times came today, when I spoke to a career counselor I had worked with briefly before I left America over a year ago. I met this woman in the oddest way. At some point in what seemed like an interminable and fruitless job search, someone suggested I look into professional organizations in the public relations field. One of the organizations he suggested was a group called Women in Communications. Naturally, I had misgivings about going to what I presumed would be a women-only organization. But after I was assured that men were welcome to, and often did, attend the group for networking purposes, I resolved to go.

The event I went to was held in the Hearst Building. For those of you who don't live in New York, the Hearst Building is about the oddest bit of architecture to be found in the city. When construction originally began on the building in the 1920s, it was intended to be a large skyscraper, like the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building. But then the Depression struck, and work on the building stopped with only four stories complete.

Fast forward seventy years, and work again resumed on the Hearst Building--but not to build the structure originally planned in the Jazz Age. A new group of architects decided instead to have a massive glass-and-steal monstrosity emerge from the existing masonry building--the new coming out of the old, if you will. For a while, when I worked in a law firm whose offices were located near the construction site, I could watch its progress. But until this meeting, I had never had a reason to go into it. I tended to avert my eyes when I walked by the Hearst Building, because it was truly ugly. I loathe to use a cliche, but on a street of more coherent and consistent buildings, it really did stick out like a sore thumb.

Well, that day, going to the event for Women in Communications, so did I. Looking around, I saw no other males in sight. By this I do not mean that I saw very few males. I mean, I saw not one. Not a husband or boyfriend of an attendee. And certainly not, as I had been told, men in the industry looking to network.

I was beginning to contemplate going home and burying my head in embarassment when this woman, whom I shall call Brenda, walked over to me. We spoke briefly, and I found out she was a career counselor. She apologized for not having any more business cards--I imagined she had given out quite a few that evening--but she wrote down her contact information for me and told me she might be able to help me out.

I met with Brenda only twice before leaving New York. I think that by the time I met her, I had already decided it was time to give up on trying to hold onto my New York life. A person can only bang his head against brick walls so many times before a concussion--or worse--ensues, and I was nearing that point. But nonetheless, Brenda was striking in her helpfulness and professionalism.

Thinking about my graduate school applications and general career aimlessness a few days ago, I bethought myself that it might be a good idea to contact Brenda again and try to get her take on things. Education isn't the field she knows best, but I thought at the very least I could get her to refer me to a colleague who could help me sort out some of my current dilemmas about what to apply to and where to go. And so I e-mailed her.

To my surprise, Brenda indicated that she had several clients who worked in education, including some who, like me, were teaching abroad. I agreed to set up a telephone meeting with her, and tonight we had it.

Mostly, in this meeting, I caught her up on what had happened in my career since I saw her last--which is to say, everything that has happened during the time this blog has been in existence. I told her a bit about my frustrations with being an in-company teacher--mainly, the sense that I am more of an entertainer than a real teacher, that my students don't really have the time, energy, or inclination to study English in a serious way, and that, when all is said and done, I am probably better suited to teaching something else. She suggested a deeper analysis of what type of career I might be suited for, a kind of analysis I wish I had undertaken before I left college. Ah, well. Regret is an emotion I am trying to banish, and so I shall not dwell on this point.

What I hope for most, out of wherever these discussions with Brenda go, is to become a glass building rising out of a masonry foundation. I know I will likely end up taking a direction I had not originally planned or hoped for, but it will be, at last, a real direction--a plan that will result in completion. I think that, for too long, I have treated job hunting as just reaching out and grabbing at anything that looked like a life preserver. Now, I want to treat it as looking for what I really am suited for, so that wherever I go next, it will be something that is well thought out. No more knocking about blindly for me.

I told Brenda that I was mainly looking for a way to establish a normal, middle-class life back home. Though I am glad I have had a chance to come to Russia and see a way of life I would never have seen in Brooklyn, I know that living abroad is not a long-term path for me. I am not jingoistic, but ultimately, my country is home in a way Russia never will be, and I hope to go back to it next year--wiser, more experienced, and ready to resume construction on the Hearst Building that is my life.

Thankful But Anxious

2008-11-28T01:47:00.002+03:00

Last week, I telephoned a career counselor whom I had seen a couple times in New York to set up a time to speak again. Having been floundering--I might even say foundering--in my career since college, I decided it was time to seek advice from a competent and, I hoped, objective professional. Mostly, I wanted help sorting out the various options I am presently considering for What To Do With the Rest of My Life--the question that nags at me persistently and almost constantly.

We had exchanged a couple of e-mails, and the counselor had asked me to call to discuss when we could have a fuller conversation. I suggested today, forgetting completely that it would be Thanksgiving in America. So far am I from life back home that Turkey Day had totally slipped my mind.

I do have a lot to be thankful for this year. I know this because, when I find myself anxious (which is fairly often), I try to think of things for which I grateful as a way of calming down. At the head of the list is having a job that gives me the appreciation of my students and, occasionally, the opportunity to learn interesting things myself. I am grateful to be in a far better situation than I was in Taiwan. And I am grateful for the insight that so many of my problems since graduation have been caused by needless fear and anxiety.

Nonetheless, there is still a lot to be anxious about. The current economic crisis has everyone anxious, and I am no exception. My job may not be as secure as I had hoped, not because of any failure on my part in the classroom--I actually got good marks on my first and so far only classroom observation--but because of the economic storm engulfing the world. Someone high up in my school's administration has told me not to worry, that during Russia's last crisis in the late 1990s, the school had kept every one of its teachers and simply divided the reduced teaching load amongst them. But having had so many things go belly-up or just fail to come together over the last few years, it's hard to avoid the thought that this too many not last.

There's also the matter of my graduate school admissions--though here I also have some cause for cheer. I have completed applications to two programs in Jewish education and am finally close to having an admissions interview at one of them, to which I sent my application before leaving home this spring. My chances of getting into this program are pretty good. But whether this is really the best field for me, I am less certain than I was in April.s

I had hoped that my time in Russia would enable me to sort out graduate programs and find a clear direction. So far, this has not happened. I have looked into Jewish education, teacher training programs, library science programs, and, more recently, master's programs in higher education. But I still feel unable to make up my mind--a major reason for my decision to seek the advice of a professional. My indecision has been due partly to my recurrent anxiety, partly to having to adjust to life in Russia, and partly to knowing that all of these options are major commitments.

But on the thankful side, I can at least be thankful that, unlike during my time in New York, I am not going head-on into something for which I am neither qualified nor suited, and that I have learned at least to seek out and even occasionally take the advice of people older and wiser--or at least wiser--than I. And I am blessed to have so many such people in my life.

To all of them, I say thank you, and wish a joyous and happy Thanksgiving.

Das Vadanya, Volodya

2008-11-28T01:38:00.003+03:00

Yesterday, I was waiting for my evening class to begin when I received a text message from someone in my school's in-company department. She wanted to know how many times I have taught Volodya in the past months and whether there had been any cancellations.

I immediately called her, wanting to know why she needed this information so urgently. She said the person in charge of English instruction at Volodya's company needed to settle the bill. Apparently, my lessons with Volodya are now a casualty of the world economic crisis; the company has to retrench, and lessons like these are the first thing to go. My last lesson with Volodya will be next Tuesday.

I have learned so much from him, about not just how this country works, but how it worked in the recent, Communist past. I got to hear about strategies for obtaining "deficit" goods (goods the government could not or would not produce in sufficient quantities), dealing with interminable lines to buy basic groceries (which apparently existed as recently as the mid-1990s), and protecting your savings in a country that lacks a sound banking system and that, for several years after Communism's downfall, lacked a stable currency.

Alas, my Tuesday and Thursday mornings with Volodya are to be no more. Das Vadanya, Volodya. From me, you got practice with the third conditional and discussions of Jennifer Wilbanks and Andrea Yates. From you, I got a peek into another world.

The Wardrobe

2008-11-28T01:09:00.003+03:00

To all the regular readers of my blog, I must offer an apology. I have been a very infrequent blogger of late, largely because my schedule has become hectic and busy, and my adventures have been few and far between. Winter is really the busy season for EFL teachers in Russia; my school has had me teaching close to the maximum number of hours my contract allows, and between teaching, lesson preparation, and travel, I have had little time to sit and blog.

Nonetheless, I do have some news to report from Moscow. We have had snow most of this week, a fact which, in my opinion, marks the beginning in earnest of the Russian winter. The temperature has been at about the freezing point, and I go out each day in a warm coat and scarf, but I cannot say I have been much colder than I would be at home this time of year.

I suppose I ought to feel some marvel at being in Russia in the snow, and indeed, last weekend, when a fellow teacher and I ended up walking through Red Square while flurries came down, there was a certain magic about it. But I cannot help knowing that the winter in Russia is long and likely to get far colder. A British administrator at my school who studied in Russia during her time at university remarked that it's not uncommon for the temperature to reach -20 Celsius in January. I dread that extremity of cold, but I imagine I will find some way to make do, as I managed for several months to make do without a washing machine and as I managed, until very recently, to make do without a proper wardrobe for my clothes.

Regarding the lack of a wardrobe: it was corrected last weekend. Sunday afternoon, I was sitting at home when the doorbell rang. As I was not expecting anyone, I had no idea who it could be.

It turned out to be too men delivering a wardrobe my school had promised me. And, it turned out, not just any wardrobe, but a big honking thing that takes up an amazing amount of space in my room. One thing I have learned, having had several experiences teaching Russians in their homes, is that Russians seem to take the same philosophy toward furniture that many New Yorkers take toward their dogs: the smaller the apartment, the bigger the furniture.

My school had been promising me a wardrobe ever since September, when, a new roommate having moved into my flat, the administrator in charge of housing came round for an inspection. When she expressed how appalled she was at seeing my dirty clothes in a massive pile on my bedroom floor (I fully expect to find Jimmy Hoffa in this pile any day now), I explained with a fair amount of exasperation that, lacking both a washing machine and a proper wardrobe, I had not much choice but to have a never-disappearing pile of clothes on the floor. The administrator promised me a washer and a wardrobe.

As I have already recounted, the washer was delivered in short order. Getting the wardrobe, however, became a much more dragged-out affair. Every time I came into my school's central office, I made inquiries about it and was told that negotations with my landlady over this wardrobe were in progress. I had expressed a wish to have one of the two massive bookcases in my room removed. This the landlady apparently proved unwilling to agree to. And so I assumed that the wardrobe was never to come.

I was quite surprised, then, when the men with the wardrobe showed up last Sunday. With all deliberate speed--and by this I do mean speed worthy of a court desegregation order--they brought in the wardrobe. I tried to explain to them, with my limited Russian, that I thought they were to remove a bookcase, and that they should probably do this before they brought in the wardrobe, but I failed to get this idea across. The wardrobe was dumped in what passes for our front hall, as there was no room for it in my bedroom.

Monday evening, I returned home from my evening class to find the wardrobe had been installed in my bedroom, but no furniture had been removed.

Ah, well. At least I have space enough to hang all of my wet clothes after I have taken them out of the washer. With any luck, the pile on my bedroom floor will finally disappear.

The World Turned Right Side Up

2008-11-09T17:58:00.003+03:00

When I began this blog, a bit more than a year ago, I made a vow that, come what may, the one thing I was not going to talk about was politics. There are already far too many political blogs out there. I myself am generally not horribly interested in the topic, preferring to focus my energies on smaller-scale things than who becomes president of the United States. But in the aftermath of last Tuesday's national election, I suppose I cannot help adding my two cents to the political conversation.

An African-American man has been elected president of the United States. For the past week, as I have called up family and old friends in the United States, I have repeatedly quipped that there must be pigs flying past their windows. But the more I think about that joke, the more I realize how wrong that joke is. For in fact, it does not surprise me that such a thing could happen--has now happened--in America.

In my heart, I have never believed that most white Americans are racists. Were they at one time? Definitely. But not any more. I never felt any need to examine the "Bradley effect"--the supposed propensity of white voters to tell pollsters they would vote for a black candidate, but then not do it in the actual voting booth. I had faith in the goodness of the American people, and that faith has proven justified.

Even more so, I had faith in my generation--the generation raised on Sesame Street and Bill Cosby, a generation of unparalleled ethnic and racial diversity. By all accounts, my generation voted overwhelmingly for Obama. And this does not, in fact, surprise me. We have sat side by side in college lecture halls, worked together in the same companies, and never once thought this was anything remarkable, anything other than the way things ought to be.

Maybe now we can all grow up. Maybe race finally is truly a thing of the past in America. White people in urban America can stop being afraid of people whose skin happens to be the same shade as the president-elect; black people can stop feeling as though the deck is stacked against them.

Like Michelle Obama, I am now really proud of my country; unlike her, I can only wish I were there to see firsthand where her husband will us.

Homesick...But Still Here

2008-11-09T17:39:00.002+03:00

I suppose I ought to have some really good excuse for failing to blog much in the past month. The frequency of my blogging has gone down quite a bit; in Taiwan, I would blog so frequently in part because there just was nothing else to do where I was, and my class load did not consume as much of my time as it does here. In Moscow, however, my class load has increased, my social life is fuller, and I find I have less time to report everything of even minor interest said by my students.

Moreover, I have had more than a touch of homesickness of late. The realization, early last month, that I had been away from New York a full year sparked off a bit of depression. To think of it, a full year had passed since I had last wandered through Park Slope at sunset, eaten an oversized sandwich at Fine & Shapiro's, or approached Brooklyn from the pedestrian promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge. And ever since, my mind has turned back there, again and again, wondering if I would ever make it home.

This weekend, however, I spoke to someone who gave me the verbal kick in the pants I needed to get out of this. I've come to see some advantages to my situation here I had not noticed before in my sea of homesickness.

For one, I actually have a job where I seem to be appreciated for my mind, not just as a warm body. This week, I won my school's recently-inaugurated lesson planning contest after I submitted my Charleston Contest lesson plan (I was, however, disappointed to learn that the prize was the equivalent of $50 in rubles, and not one genuine loving cup). I may not have as many students as a "real teacher" back home, but the students who are able to come regularly to my classes seem to like me, and have no complaints about me as their teacher. In short, I feel as if I am actually succeeding here, in a way I never succeeded at any job back home.

So with that more positive attitude, I will attempt to be in more regular correspondence.

Twenty-Three Redo

2008-10-20T23:45:00.003+04:00

Well, I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later:

Tonight, George Bailey, Mary Hatch, and the rest of the 1928 graduating class at Bedford Falls High School did the Charleston right into the gym swimming pool, in my EFL class.

When I came to Russia, I hoped that I would eventually have a chance to bring the big Charleston contest back into my classroom. And that opportunity finally came today, in an Intermediate class I teach at a company that manufactures automotive parts.

The last time I used the Charleston contest scene, I really had done it for no real purpose than my own desire to show video in class. I had learned about the video dictation technique (briefly, in a video dictation, half the class sees the video and describes it to the other half, who cannot see) in CELTA training and wanted a chance to try it out. But I had not really thought through what I could use it for, and the lesson that came out if it was highly botched.

Tonight's replay was totally different--probably a sign that my teaching skills are improving. I chose to use the scene with a class that I know has trouble figuring out when and how to use the past simple (I went), the past continuous (I was going), and the past perfect (I had gone). Giving it some thought this weekend, I decided the best way to clear up this confusing was with a bit of video. And so I started planning a way to exploit It's a Wonderful Life to clarify distinctions among these verb tenses.

This time around, I prepared slips of paper with everything that happens in the four minutes of video I showed and had my student (only one actually showed up tonight) put them in the proper order. Then I asked questions geared to getting him to understand a need for the past continuous or past perfect, as required.

All in all, I was quite satisifed with how this lesson progressed tonight. And this despite a couple of embarassing technical glitches: at one point, my laptop's cord came unplugged, and at another, my video player froze, requiring me to reboot the computer. At least my student is a good-natured guy who took it in stride. While I fiddled with my laptop, I had him chat with me about his work, which requires him to go on weekly business trips to Rostov-on-Don, Nizhnii Novgorod, and various other cities in Russia.

But I think this lesson really helped him. He said he will be doing some review of these tenses on his own, but I had the satisfying feeling, walking home tonight, that I had actually accomplished something. There is no feeling like it in the world.

Time, Tide, and Trolley Wait for Every Man

2008-10-11T22:34:00.002+04:00

If I saw Meet Me in St. Louis once as a child, I must have seen it a thousand times. My favorite scene--probably everyone's--is the one of Judy Garland singing her heart out on the trolley. I think that scene is permanently etched on my brain, beyond forgetting, like the look of Park Slope. The trolley itself is a perfect picture of nostalgia and whimsy, the kind of thing only Hollywood could produce. The people on it seem honestly to believe there is no better mode of travel.

I think about this scene every so often as I move about in Moscow. Having already described the wonders of the Moscow Metro, I won't bother to comment on it. Rather, I will confine myself in this post to describing the other forms of transit available in Moscow: the marshutka, the trolley, and the trolleybus, and the bus. These ways of getting about are indespensible to the city, yet differ widely in the level of comfort and convenience they offer travellers.

First, the marshutka. A marshutka is a vehicle somewhat larger than an American cargo van. It seats somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen passengers and usually makes relatively short runs. Recently, I discovered that a marshutka route exists that will take from practically in front of my building to the nearest Metro station--a real boon in the mornings, since it spares me the 15 minutes or so I would otherwise have to spend walking to the Metro, and thus enables me to sleep 15 minutes longer. You get into the Metro, pay the driver (or don't--I've sometimes gotten into the Metro only to realize I never paid the marshutka driver), and the marshutka starts moving as soon as the driver deems there to be a sufficient number of passengers--or, in some cases, as soon as another marshutka behind him starts honking its horn loudly enough to goad him into motion. It then rattles along the street, hitting every trolley track hard enough to jolt you close enough to the moon to see Alice Kramden. But at least the run is short, and you soon arrive at wherever you needed the marshutka to take you.

After the marshutka, the form of surface transit I use the most is probably the trolley or the trolleybus (a trolleybus is a trolley without any actual tracks--it gets its power from an overhead wire but has regular rubber wheels and can weave in traffic a bit more). In Moscow, neither of these forms of transit is very comfortable; indeed, I find it hard to imagine any means of travelling more different from the trolley Judy Garland took to the Fair Grounds.

You get onto the trolley or trolleybus after shoving your way through a tremendous crowd. Trolleys and trolleybuses require a different kind of ticket from the one used on the Metro, which I am often forced to purchase from the driver (there are places to purchase a ticket in advance, but there never seems to be one near or open when I need to get on a trolley or trolleybus). Moreover, trolleys and trolleybuses are invariably overcrowded.

Between the trolley and the trolleybus, I have a decided preference for the latter. Like many Americans, I came to Russia with a whistful and nostalgic view of trolleys. But after riding on them in Moscow, I have come to detest them. The main reason for my newfound hatred of trolleys is that, due to some sort of traffic accident ahead of them, they often get quite literally stuck in their tracks. I see with some regularity five or six trolleys lined up behind an auto accident, completely unable to move because the cars involved in the accident cannot be moved until the police have arrived and taken pictures. Just before Judy Garland got on the trolley, someone told her that time, tide, and trolley wait for no man; in Moscow, time and tide have a similar impatience, but the trolley waits for every man.

I suppose the problem of trolleys stopped dead because of an automobile accident could be solved by having a designated trolley lane in which cars would not be permitted to drive (though this would still cause problems at turns). This is how some light rail systems operate. But I doubt Moscow could ever fully implement such a system, because it would require too many changes to the street.

Another irritating aspect of trolleys and trolleybuses is that it is often necessary to board them in the middle of the street (a major reason, I've since found out, that they were phased out in most American cities by the end of the 1950s). In a few places, this can be a real safety concern, as cars don't necessarily obey laws that prohibit them from driving right in front of a trolley or trolleybus stop. Still another problem is that trolley and trolleybuses stops are not always sufficently clear or noticeable; often, the only indication of a stop is a small sign with a "T" (trolley) or "TB" (trolleybus) market on it, hanging from the trolley's electrical line.

Finally, there's the regular bus, the only form of Moscow surface transit with parallels in American cities. I have little to remark about them; I cannot even say clearly whether busses in Moscow are better or worse than in New York. On the one hand, Moscow busses do not stop every two blocks as New York (especially Manhattan) busses seem to. Nor have I had as many experiences as I had in New York of waiting a half-hour for a bus and then having three of them come at once. On the other hand, the busses in Moscow are every bit as overcrowded as in New York. The worst busses are the ones on the outskirts of Moscow that take people to major shopping centers. But all of them are pretty bad.

Trolleys, trolleybuses, and busses all have a few inconveniences in common. The worst, in my view, is the payment system. As I have noted, it is possible to buy a ticket for all of them from small booths on the streets, but these are neither sufficient in number nor available near many stops. The vehicles themselves all have an annoying turnstile through which you have to put a ticket that can be bought from the driver. But as you attempt to buy this ticket, all of the other passengers (who seem somehow to have a ticket already) shove right into you to pass.

525,600 Minutes

2008-09-24T22:17:00.002+04:00

Yes, you understood the title right: the Far East Side Minyan has been delivering the finest in commentary on Taoyuan, Taiwan; then Wichita, Kansas; and now Moscow, Russia there is to offer, for almost one solid year. On September 30th, 2007, I sat down at my laptop, in the home of a couple of good friends on the Upper West Side with whom I was then staying, and set to create the blog I had promised various friends I would keep during what I expected to be a stint of a year or two in Taiwan. Before I even left New York, I had already written five posts.

Well, things have been topsy-turvy since then, as those of you who have been following this blog for a solid year already know. Taiwan aggressively did not work out. The Far East Side Minyan became, temporarily, the Midwest Side Minyan, then (albeit without a formal change of name) the East Side of Europe Minyan.

But in a way, it was the beginning of the end--the end of dealing with life in a spirit of desperation, clutching at any straw that floated into my field of vision instead of figuring out what I really wanted out of life and how to go about getting it. Bit by bit, I know I am getting to where I belong in the world. Moscow is an important step--but just a step--in that direction. But things are working out here better than I expected or even hoped when I accepted the position in January. I know I have a long-term future in teaching (though probably not in teaching EFL), and I am taking steps to prepare for that future. My application to an education program at American Jewish University remains pending, but I have most of my materials together for an application to an education program at Jewish Theological Seminary, which I will dispatch in a couple of months.

So progress has happened the past year, even if not in the ways I had hoped for when I left for Taiwan. I am doing something amazing, each and every day, and am on the cusp (if being a year away from something can be called the cusp) of something even more amazing. It's hard not to look on all of that with a great measure of gratitude.

The realization that my life in New York is almost 525,600 minutes behind me has had some effects. I suppose homesickness was bound to set in sooner or later; it's an evitable side effect of deciding (or in my case, feeling forced) to roam the world. But I find my thoughts turning toward the mess of a city between the East River and Nassau County more and more these days. Part of the reason for that, I know, is that I am nearing the anniversary of my departure. I timed leaving New York to make sure it happened after the cycle of the Jewish holidays in the fall that begins with Rosh Hashannah and ends with Simchat Torah. And behold, Rosh Hashannah is upon us once again. This year, my body will spend the High Holidays at a synagogue two blocks from my apartment building (to think I had to go halfway around the world to end up within walking distance of a shul), but my heart will spend it where it spends it every year: at 100th Street and West End Avenue, among cherished friends I have seen in almost a year.

Today, peering through the New York Times website to find information on Wall Street's financial meltdown, I noticed a story about a new Google service that will give subway directions in New York. There have been services like this before; I got a lot of cheers three years ago when I introduced my friends to a site called hopstop.com that did much the same thing (previously, only driving directions had been available online, which are pretty much worthless in a city where even the billionaire mayor is a straphanger). The big difference in Google's service is that it coordinates with other regional transit authorities, like the PATH trains between Manhattan and New Jersey and the Long Island Rail Road. Curious to see how well it compared to what I remembered of hopstop.com, I clicked on a link and set about investigating Google's service.

Here's what I found out: the service failed to give the best directions between my last address in New York and my last place of employment. In twenty minutes of trying different addresses, not once did I get directions involving a bus line--something I regularly pulled up on hopstop.com when I lived in New York. But I did get to see, on the now all-too-familar Google maps (they appear on television news these days, for goodness sake), a red line snaking up from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side, the route I cursed every Saturday morning for two years as I rode the G train, then the A/C, then the 2/3 (often at a snail's pace, since far more weekends than not, the 2/3 express became the 1 local because of track work).

And that somehow brought back a host of other memories--afternoons browsing at the Strand bookstore near Union Square, the cozy look Park Slope had at sunset in autumn, the annual announcement from my rabbi that "Manhattanhenge" (a day in the summer when the sun perfectly aligns with the Manhattan street grid) was nearing. All afternoon, as I prepared for a new class I started teaching tonight, home flooded back to me.

It's weird to think I've now been in Moscow almost five months, a fact I let my students discover tonight during a getting-to-know-you activity. And it's weirder still to think that the chance are good of my being back in New York, and in New York's Jewish community, only 525,600 minutes from now.

The Fanta Menace

2008-09-21T23:22:00.002+04:00

I ended up having a rather dull weekend for two main reasons. The first is that I was stuck in the apartment much of Saturday while a repairman came and installed our new washing machine. Installed the machine is at last, but it is not quite ready for prime time; apparently, in order to get it to work, I need to turn some kind of tap under the sink, and the tap in question absolutely refuses to budge. The repairman tried to show me how to get it to work, but the language barrier inevitably got in our way. I will have to try to sort this out in my school's Central Office tomorrow.

The other reason I had a dull weekend was that I signed up to proctor mock examinations at my school. Preparation classes for the First Certificate Exam (FCE) and Certificate in Advanced English (CAE) are a big part of our business, it seems, and a few Sundays a year, we run mock examinations to help our students get used to real exam conditions. My part in this was to proctor two young women taking a practice FCE exam--that is to say, reading a travel guide to Ukraine while the young women in question worked away. Later, I got to be part of the listening section of the test, which involves getting two test-takers to try to have fairly mundane conversations with the "interlocutor" (as we are called...the name makes me wonder where Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones are hiding), and with each other.

In the midst of all this tedium, however, I got to spend a bit of time watching YouTube videos. I have discovered lately that, because of lax enforcement of copyright laws, YouTube is a gold mine of film and television treasures and "treasures" from years past. So far, I have seen History Channel documentaries on the Ku Klux Klan, the Reformation, and religious conceptions of Hell; the entire ouevre of James Burke, famous for Connections and The Day the Universe Changed; and a couple of recent Jane Austen adaptations (including a version of Sense and Sensibility that actually managed to get the book damn near spot-on). But having little better to do this weekend, I ended up tackling Michael Moore, in his own Bowling for Columbine and in an indy documentary from five years ago called The Corporation.

When it first appeared, The Corporation was the kind of movie I would have rather died tha go see. I was far more politically conservative then, and the last thing I felt a need to watch was what I presumed would be a three-hour diatribe on the evils of the capitalist system. But, my views having mellowed a bit since then, I thought it might be time to give The Corporation a fairer hearing.

The main thesis of The Corporation is that the modern corporation, which not only claims but has been given many of the legal rights of a person, is an essentially psychopathic person: devoid of ethical standards, remorseless, and willing to do anything and everything to achieve its malevolent ends. At best, the film contends, corporations are amoral, and worst actively evil. The film traces the rise of corporations all the way back to the enclosures of the commons in England that ultimately led to the industrial revolution.

Naturally, the film trots out numerous instances of corporate wrongdoing over the years, from Bechtel's attempts to corner the Bolivian water supply in 2000 to the "business plot" to depose Franklin Roosevelt by force. Allegations that IBM was involved in the running of the Nazi death camps are given ample screen time.

While I am more sympathetic to discussions of this kind of corporate wrongdoing than I was a few years ago, I found myself largely unconvinced that the existence of the corporation per se was the ultimate cause of all these horrors. In the absence of limited liability corporations, wealthy businessmen acting alone might have committed many of the same injustices the film lays at the feet of corporations. In some instances, the film clearly chose to ignore inconvenient counter evidence (ignoring, for instance, that IBM lost control of its German subsidiaries in 1941 and also manufactured weapons for the Allies during the Second World War, all of which would indicate that IBM was not simply a villain with respect to the Nazi regime).

Moreover, the film frequently faults corporations for blind indifference to what economists call "externalities" (effects of a transaction that are borne by people who are not parties to the transaction). But the film ignores that, as economists use the term, an externality is not simply a euphemism for evils like pollution but a term that encompasses positive as well as negative effects borne by the general public. For instance, when the owner of a seed store sells someone seeds he uses to plant a garden in front of his house, this may have a positive impact on both property values and perceived quality of life in a neighborhood. But by only discussing negative externalities, the film in many ways distorts the record of corporations.

At other times, the film simply failed to prove that the evils it discussed were caused specifically by the existence of corporations as such. A case in point is its discussion of how a Fox television station chose to squelch a news story about how a hormone Monsanto manufactured to be used on cows was linked to cancer in humans. It is clear that the story was squelched largely because Fox became concerned that Monsanto would pull its advertising. But this kind of manipulation of the news occurred long before the modern corporation (look at how biased reporting was in the days of Adams and Jefferson).

But what I found hardest to stomach were the times The Corporation veered completely off the deep end. The biggest example of this came in a discussion of how Coca-Cola reacted to the beginning of the Second World War. As the film presents it, Coke's biggest concern was that it would not able to keep its bottling plants in Germany churning out Coca-Cola during the war. This ultimately proved to be the case as the war interrupted supplies of the kola nut to Germany. Coke's solution to this was to start producing an orange drink called Fanta (still marketed and popular in many countries, including the United States).

My big reaction to this was a big "So What?" It's hard to see any way in which selling or not selling Coca-Cola in Hitler's Germany would have had any effect on the Nazi regime. Selling sweetened and flavored carbonated water is a morally neutral act. Unlike in the case of South Africa, it's unclear that divestment in Nazi Germany would have produced any results, particularly with a madman like Hitler at the helm. The film made no allegation that Coca-Cola benefitted in any way from concentration camp or other unfree labor during the Nazi years, nor even that it sought to do so. Calling Fanta "the Nazi drink" (as Michael Moore did at one point in the film) is a bit like saying that, because people in Communist Russia ate bread, eating bread is somehow immoral.

In another instance, the film failed because it failed to differentiate between a real solution and mere grandstanding. Showing scenes in which a group of California attorneys called for the state attorney general to revoke Unocal's charter because of its "many crimes against humanity," the film seemed to argue that goverment can reign in corporate power by using existing powers to disband corporations that are acting against the public interest. What this argument ignores, however, is taht Unocal and myriad firms like it can just re-establish themselves in places where the law is more lax (like Delaware or South Dakota).

To The Corporation's credit, however, it at least did not devolve into calls for a communist revolution; indeed, the film did acknowledge (however briefly) that injustice has been committed in the service of proletarian revolution as well as in the service of profit. But in a way, this failure actually worked against the film, insofar as it presents no real alternative to the existence of corporations. Especially in the modern world, there does not seem to really be one. There are whole industries (automobiles, computers, airlines) that not only could not operate with their present efficiency, but could not operate at all, if they were not operated by corporations. No individual--not even a Bill Gates--has the capital to maintain and run Motorola or General Motors. In these instances, the only viable alternative to the corporation is government ownership.

I am not saying that government management of a field of human endeavor is inherently a bad thing; clearly, we are better off having municipal fire departments than we were in the days when fire protection was a private business and a fire company would just pass you buy if you weren't one of its customers. But living in a country that is still suffering the after-effects of far too much direct government management of industry, I know that having the government produce our automobiles and our toothpaste is not really a solution, either.

Life's Grand on the Collective Farm

2008-09-15T21:31:00.003+04:00

I ended up staying home sick today (I'll spare you any graphic details of illness; let's just say this was all due to a bad plate of Hungarian ghoulash and leave it at that). Whatever I had, I knew was not serious enough to warrant a trip to the doctor, so I self-medicated with Sprite and plenty of Web browsing until, in the late afternoon, I felt well enough to venture outside in search of something to eat.

In retrospect, though, it was a good thing I did stay home, because it meant I was home when a woman in my school's central office rang about 4:00 to ask if I would be home at six. I told her I would and asked why she needed to know. And then I heard words I have been longing to hear ever since I arrived in Moscow four months ago:

"Alexei [the school driver and sometime handyman] is delivering a washing machine to your flat."

For the past four months, I have managed my laundry situation (if you can call it managing) through a method I call Ignoring the Massive Pile of Dirty Clothes on Your Bedroom Floor. Basically, I wash clothes every two to three days, on an as-needed basis, but always planning ahead to be sure I won't run out of clothes faster than air-drying can get anything dry enough to wear. I assume this to be about two days for a pair of slacks hung on a hanger in the hall closet, a bit less if I can get a bit of steam pipe in the bathroom free to clean them (trickier now that a new roommate has moved in and I must now share the steam pipe with him).

I guess that, in the modern age, we don't get much chance to be rhapsodically joyful about technology. The latest in digital television may get a few oohs and ahs at a trade show, but it doesn't seem magical the way television must have when it was introduced to the world at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Even the Internet we take for granted. I finally have a great Internet connection that doesn't cut out every two minutes, and what do I use it for? Mostly, online Scrabble (and the occasional Blog post, of course).

But after living without a washer for four months, finally having one gives me a feeling I can only explain by describing, fittingly, a piece of retro Soviet art. All over Moscow, there are souvenir vendors selling reproductions of Soviet propaganda posters, I assume mostly to foreign tourists. One of them shows two figures in the foreground: a man in overalls and a cap and a woman with her hair in a kerchief, obviously farmers. In the background is a tractor, probably the first these people have ever had or seen. The woman has her hand cupped up to her mouth and is shouting, presumably, at the people of the 1930s who would have seen this picture. Underneath this scene is something in Russian that, while I can't translate it, probably means something like, "Ain't life grand on the collective farm?"

Okay, obviously this is a propaganda poster and a total distortion of life in Stalinist Russia (a more realistic poster would say something like, "ain't life grand now that Pop's been shot for having five kopecks more than our neighbor down the road"). But something like that excitement over a new piece of technology is what I briefly got to experience today. This machine will mean no more massive pile of clothes on my floor. It will mean no more having to hope to God that a pair of socks dries in time for me to wear it tomorrow, when I realize I didn't have quite as many clean pairs saved up on my dresser as I thought I had.

And so, for one shining moment at least, life is grand here on the collective farm.

Mapping Out a Future, Part Two

2008-09-14T11:38:00.004+04:00

From Palace Square, I proceeded to the main entrance of the Hermitage (not on Palace Square but very close to it). The Hermitage is actually situated in two main buildings that have been connected, the Old Hermitage and the Winter Palace, the latter having served as the official residence of the tsars before the October Revolution. The building is a giant confectionary work, a masterpiece of baroque architecture. Currently it is painted sage green, but when it was first built, it was a kind of turquoise blue. During the nineteenth century, apparently, it was painted Venetian red (I am rather astonished the Bolsheviks did not retain this color after the Revolution).

When I reached the entrance, a line was already stretching, in anticipation of the museum's opening at half past ten. Though not at long as my guidebook indicated it would be on a warmer day (at the height of the tourist season in August, the line can stretch as far as the arch of the General Staff Building), it was still fairly long, and I resigned myself to a long wait. A stroke of luck, however, made the wait unnecessary. No sooner had I entered into the line than a guide approached me and offered to let me join her group for a two-hour tour of the Hermitage State rooms. She said that if I did, I could skip the line and would not have to buy a ticket, as she already had several tickets purchased for this group. I felt the price was reasonable and followed her to her group.

At precisely half past ten, the museum opened, and we all went inside. The first marvel to be seen in the Hermitage is called the Jordan Staircase. Above the staircase is an opulent baroque painting that, I was amazed to find out, was not a fresco but rather a work on canvas held into the plaster. The climate of St. Petersburg being extremely moist, fresco was not really a practical form of art. So where palaces in other cities would have frescos, the Winter Palace stretched canvases and suspended them in plaster.

It was not the only trick of the eye I was to see in the Hermitage. Virtually all of the "marble" in the building, it turned out, was not really marble but rather plasted coated to look like marble. This is due not to the cheapness of the tsars but rather, once again, to the St. Petersburg climate. Though elegant, marble apparently prevents blocks heat from entering a building. In an age before modern climate control systems, building in marble would have made for an intensely cold palace.

It would take several blog posts to describe all of the wonders I saw on my tour through the Hermitage State Rooms, so I will be brief and relate only a couple that made a real impression on me. One long room, painted a deep red, contains portraits of all of the generals and commanders of the War of 1812 (known in Russia as the Patriotic War, and, I suspect, as the Great Patriotic War before World War II took that title). My guide indicated that, at the time, there were only a quarter as many generals in the Russian army as there are today.

The room is narrow but very long; the effect is that it seems to stretch on interminably. I doubt there could be a better way of making a visitor aware of the importance of this war in Russian history. But in an altogether different part of the museum, I found something rather incongruous with this gallery: large portraits of Napoleon and Josephine.

All in all, I can say the Hermitage completely overwhelms in its opulence. If I ever needed a primer on why there was a revolution in Russia, the Hermitage provided it. What was most amazing, from what the guide told me, was how often rooms were redone in the Hermitage. It seemed that every czarina from Catherine the Great on felt a need to have completely new drawng room done up. By this, I mean not that the czarinas redecorated the old drawing rooms, but that they had completely new ones made within the Winter Palace.

The day following my jaunt to the Hermitage, I made my way to another of St. Petersburg's great palaces, Peterhof. Situated a bit out of the city center, Peterhof was the summer residence of the czars for many centuries and is most famous for its Grand Cascade, a series of water fountains and gilt statues one sees upon reaching the palace by boat (as I did, enjoying a short trip over the Gulf of Finland in a hydrofoil). The cascades themselves are breathtakingly beautiful, and I look forward to adding my photos of them to the blog whenever I find the cord to my digital camera, or figure out some other way of transferring them. While I did not go in the palace itself, I spent a splendid, albeit cold, afternoon exploring the Peterhof grounds.

My last day in St. Petersburg was, unfortunately, a bit of a disappointment. My leg began to hurt tremendously--I half-suspected I had twisted my ankle at Peterhof--but I forced myself to go to the Russian Museum, for a glimpse of the famous icons there. The Hermitage contains few works by Russian artists, these being instead held in the Russian Museum. I was hoping for a glance at the treasures of Russia's medieval past.

When I got to the museum, however, I found that the medieval section of the museum was closed for renovations. I did, howver, get a good look at various works from the 18th and 19th centuries in Russia, including Repin's famous painting of the barge haulers on the Volga that seems to be in every European History textbook's section on 19th-century Russia. Largely unknown outside of Russia, Repin enjoys great popularity in his native country. I feel I lack a sufficient knowledge of art to say one way or the other whether he is a great artist, but the paintings I saw of his I enjoyed quite a bit.

Overall, as I have said, my time in St. Petersburg has given me a bit of the travel bug. All kinds of destinations in Europe are floating through my head: Kiev, Vilnius, even London (a British teacher at my school has told me cheap flights to England can be had out of Riga, the capital of Estonia). The big question for me becomes whether I will stay in Russia long enough to let this bug run its course. I imagine it would take a couple of years here to earn enough money and have enough free time to see everything I want to see on the Continent.

The map is spread out before me. Which way I will go, I know not yet.

Mapping Out a Future, Part One

2008-09-14T01:38:00.002+04:00

The past few weeks, I have definitely been bitten by the travel bug, in a big way. Most of the other teachers in my school--the Brits especially--have done quite a bit of travelling around in Europe. I find myself pressing them for information about every aspect of their travels: what it cost to take the train to Kiev, whether Paris affords any reasonably priced hostels, how one can get to Talinn, Latvia (where cheap flights can be had all over the continent) without going through Belarus (a country that seems to have designed its visa regime with no other end in mind than ripping off people who need to cross it).

It's hard to say when exactly all of this began. One answer is that's been going on, in a low-level way, for five years, ever since I graduated from college. At the time, I think that, despite my conscious desire to remain in the New York Jewish community I had grown to love, and to which I hope one day to return, part of me had real wanderlust, even then. It took chronic unemployment and financial ruin to give in to it, but looking back now, I realize it had been there for a long time. I just tried to repress it, because I didn't think traveling was a real possibility. I know better than that now.

But the more immediate answer is that the travel bug bit me in a big way a few weeks ago, when I had my last Russian lesson through my school. As part of that lesson, my teacher, a wonderful woman named Ludmilla, brought in a map of the Russian Federation, to help us practice the Russian words for north, south, east, and west. Somehow, looking at that map, it suddenly dawned on me what an enormous country Russia is. I had known this intellectually for some time--every office I've been in here seems to have a map of the country on a wall somewhere, and quite a few have clocks showing the time in various Russian and world cities--but I guess Ludmilla's spreading out that map really made me realize the vastness of Russia in a new way, especially when she pointed out for us the island near Vladivostok where she had been born and raised. Something sort of clicked inside of me, saying, "Stay here, see all of this!"

Then, of course, there was my foray to St. Petersburg. I have promised you more on that foray. The city, I found, can be summed up in one simple word: exquisite. There really is no other word that does Russia's northern capital justice. And in three days there, I know I barely scratched the surface of what there is to see and do there.

I arrived in St. Petersburg early on a cold, cloudy Thursday morning. My train pulled into Moscow Station (major train stations in Russia are generally named after the city at the far end of the line they serve, in this case Moscow on the Moscow-St. Petersburg line) a little before seven in the morning. At first, I did not fully understand we were there, and ended up having to dress rather hurriedly after a provodnitsa (train stewardess) started to scold me for not being off the train. But eventually I got my clothes on and scuttled off into the St. Petersburg dawn.

The first thing I needed to do was find a way to get to my hostel, which was situated under an archway leading into Palace Square. With this in mind, I looked for a taxi. Identifying a taxi, even at a train station, poses some difficulty in Russia, because taxis are not all painted yellow, as in New York, and because informal gypsy cabs abound everywhere. But my luck was good, and it turned out I had no need to identify a taxi at all, because several different drivers approached me as I started to walk off the station platform. Taxis seem not to be regulated in Russia (or if they are, the regulations are poorly enforced), and you end up paying for a taxi whatever you and the driver agree upon. Being unsure just how far the station was from my hostel, I was fully prepared to be overcharged.

What I was not prepared for was to be taken for an absolute fool. The first driver who approached me wanted 2000 rubles (around $80) to take me to my hostel. Having paid 4500 rubles for my tickets to and from St. Petersburg, I knew at once this was an outrageous price and flatly refused. I decided to set my maximum at 500 rubles (around $20); I reason that, as this was about enough to get me from LaGuardia into Manhattan, it could almost certainly get me from Moscow Station to the center of St. Petersburg. The driver tried to get me up to 1000 rubles, but I held firm, and in the end, he was forced to agree to the 500 ruble price.

Incidentally, when I left my hostel at the end of my stay and inquired as to the best way to get back to Moscow Station, I was told it was a short ride down St. Petersburg's main thoroughfare of Nevsky Prospekt and that almost any of the busses serving Nevsky could get me there for 20 rubles--a tiny fraction of what I had paid coming from the Station, and a mere one percent of what this cabby wanted. Ah well...at least I will know this if I ever make it to St. Petersburg again.

Once I had reached my hostel and dropped off my bag, I set off for the Hermitage. I had intended to reserve the Hermitage for the final day of my trip, but realizing it was so close to my hostel--through the aforementioned archway and across Palace Square--I thought this might be the ideal way to spend my first day there. The weather was chilly with occasional bouts of rain (in general, the weather in Russia has often made me wonder if I have not somehow ended up in England by mistake), and I thought an indoor activity nearby might be the best choice. And so, off to the Hermitage I set.

I had first to cross Palace Square. A sight more beautiful than Palace Square I believe I have yet to see. On one side, containing and framing the archway above mentioned, is the General Staff Building, a hauntingly lovely neoclassical building in a cool shade of yellow. I honestly believe I could have stood there all day admiring it, had I not been bound for the wonders of the Hermitage. And indeed, had I done so, I doubt I would have had to duck an oncoming car even once. Despite being a congregating place for tour busses going to and from St Petersburg, Palace Square has absolutely none of the hustle and bustle of Red Square--not a single seller of matrushka dolls was to be seen anywhere in or near it--and certainly none of the shameless gaudiness of Times Square. Its sheer quiet and serenity might have prompted me to stay there for hours, but I remembered quickly that 2000 years of Western Art awaited me in the Hermitage Museum, located in the Catherine Palace, which forms the other side of the Square. Remembering this, I snapped a few photos of it, and of the Alexander Column, and headed on.

More on St. Petersburg, and my affliction with the travel bug, tomorrow.

The Estates of the Union

2008-09-11T21:38:00.003+04:00

Business English, I am finding, presents a few special challenges to the EFL teacher. One is the apathetic nature of many of the students. Particularly when they reach what we call the Intermediate Slump--the point at which they have had most of the grammatical structures of the language and turn to work that can often feel like fine-tuning--motivation tends to decrease. But the heavier weights pulling down on business students' motivation, I find, are lack of time and lack of what a psychology professor at my university called the "sunk-cost effect" (basically, what happens when you decide you need to go to the gym more to justify money spent on the membership that you can't get back). Business students are seldom paying for the course themselves and can sometimes take a very lackadaisical attitude toward class attendance, homework, or anything else the course requiring commitments of time.

It is because of these factors that I find Volodya such a joy to teach. From the first time I met him, I knew things would be different with him. He told me he had asked for me as his teacher after seeing my resume and realizing I had a legal background and therefore some knowledge of legal English (and if he needs someone to explain promissory estoppel to him, I am probably one of the few EFL teachers in Russia able to do it). He is conscientious about doing his homework; in two months of working together, he has failed to do his homework only once, just before he went on holiday to South Africa. Only rarely does he interrupt our sessions together to take a phone call or do anything else directly related to his work.

While I like teaching Volodya very much, he does present a few challenges--the biggest one being that his reasons for wanting to improve his English are different from those of most other Business English students. Sometime next year, the company for which Volodya works will be shifted to an English-only e-mail policy, and this is Volodya's biggest reason for needing to upgrade his English skills. For other business students, the focus is on speaking for travel and communication with clients abroad. But Volodya is unlikely to have to communicate with clients abroad, since his work focuses largely on the domestic end of his company's business.

For me, all of this creates a major challenge. Finding materials that have any direct bearing on his work is difficult. I have given him some Supreme Court cases to read up on, but as my knowledge of taxation and tax law is virtually non-existent, it's hard to give him the kind of materials he probably needs most. Today, however, I managed to overcome that challenge, for a short time.

At our class on Tuesday, I decided to give him, for homework, the Wikipedia article on the estate tax in the United States. For my non-American readers (who seem to be rapidly multiplying), the estate tax meant to prevent extremely wealthy individuals from passing money on to their children in ways that would create a permanent aristocracy. This at least is what political liberals say it is; conservatives say it is abomination and indignantly insist on calling it the "death tax". My personal view is that there is nothing immoral about such a tax, but that, as matters currently stand in America, it tends to serve more as a subsidy for the life insurance industry than as a viable means of limiting wealth accumulation.

My point in giving this reading was to get Volodya to understand and talk about the difference between the words "estate tax" and "death tax" and thereby get him into the whole concept of loaded language. It took a while to get him to understand how the terms are really used in America, but eventually he got it. In the process, he gave me some interesting ideas on why we have such a tax. The first is that the estate tax exists because it is somehow easier for the government to know the exact value of estates than to know your income. The second is that America does not want wealthy families accumulating too much political power and becoming essentially states within the state (this is partly true, but not the main rationale behind the estate tax). But he was just as puzzled as I am, and as most Americans are, as to why the estate tax will likely disappear in 2010, only to reappear a year later (the result of squabbles over it in Congress).

Nonetheless, the exercise seems to have worked, and in the process, I got to learn a bit about the Russian tax system. In many ways, the system would look very familiar to Americans rushing to fill out their 1040s in April. Like Americans, Russians deal with withholdings and deductions (Volodya knew these terms without my having to teach them). Also like Americans, they get a credit for each child they have and regarding the taxman with a mix of hostility, hatred, and loathing.

Unlike Americans, however, Russians have a relatively regressive tax system; everyone pays 13 percent, far lower than in other industrialized countries. From what I gather, little effort is made to make the rich pay more (I suspect the Soviet Union has given Russians a distate for efforts at income redistribution). And even stranger, you can pay many of your taxes in cash.

Parties Are Advised to Chill

2008-09-04T20:58:00.002+04:00

As far as my students go, I really consider myself blessed. There is not, at the moment, a single student I do not like. But of all of my students, probably my favorite is Volodya, the mild-mannered tax attorney to whom I have referred in previous posts.

For two weeks in August, Volodya was on vacation in South Africa and Zambia, but when he returned, he regaled me not merely with photos of Victoria Falls and of exotic African wildlife, but with a story of having been nearly eaten by a lion while he was staying at a lodge near the Zambia-South Africa border. Like virtually every EFL student I have ever met or heard about, he feels the occasional strong need to tell me how poor his English is, but when he is able to tell such stories, I feel hard-pressed to find anything in his English to criticize.

Nonetheless, Volodya has chosen me as a teacher because he needs a heavy dose of legal and business English, and this I do my best to supply him with, even if my knowledge of Russian tax law is non-existent. One major benefit of working with him is that I end up learning a lot about the differences between the American and Russian legal systems.

Today, I had a lesson plan for Volodya built around the case of Mattel v. Aqua. Briefly, this case involved a song made by the Danish group Aqua that not only poked fun at Barbie but even depicted the doll in sexual situations (as you would guess, Mattel ultimately lost the case on free speech grounds). I had planned the lesson as a way of teaching concepts like trademark, copyright, and infringement, and had hoped that the song, which was all but inescapable around the time I was sixteen, would be new and fresh for him. No such luck; as soon as he heard the song, he recognized it, and said he had heard it in discos about the time I used to hear it non-stop on Z-107.7 in St. Louis.

This is one of my few disappointments in being an EFL teacher--the sheer difficulty of finding songs, films, or television programs that my students will not have seen already. When I studied French in high school, and now that I am studying Russian, one of the joys of learning the language was the chance to hear real songs and see real films in the language of study (I can still sing a bawdy French song called Fernande that my high school French teacher had us listen to one Friday afternoon in language lab). Now that English is becoming so much a world language, however, and now that American and British films and television programs are so widely shown abroad--I recall reading at one point that something like 80 percent of the entertainment programming on Dutch television consisted of dubbed or even non-dubbed versions of American and British comedy and drama series--it's hard to find any genuinely new material. For me, the only solution is to look back into the deep past; the Andrews Sisters and Bobby Darin may be old hat in America, but I can at least depend on my students' not having heard them.

The other reason I gave Volodya the Mattel case was because of a much-quoted line from it. Apparently, after Mattel sued Aqua for trademark infringement, Aqua turned around and countersued for defamation. Somehow, the two cases became combined, and the judge in the case ruled against both complainants. In issuing his ruling, he said these immortal words:

Parties are advised to chill.

This was a good way to talk a little more about degrees of formality in English. Volodya has a good grasp of the difference between slang, casual English, and formal or official English, but this was an opportunity to review some of that and extend it a little bit further.

Perhaps second only to "we hold that, in the sphere of education, separate but equal has no place," this has got to be one of my favorite lines from any legal case. After the case was decided, I remember reading "parties are advised to chill" and thinking, "Man, this is just the kind of man we need to be a judge." How many legal cases are there where the judge should say that, in exactly those words?

Apparently, in Russia, not very many. The topic got us onto the concepts of vexatious litigants and frivolous suits. I actually had to explain to Volodya that, in America, there are people who will file lawsuits they know are without merit, with the sole aim of forcing the other side to incur the legal expenses of defending the suit. Volodya was appalled; somewhere in the Russian legal code, he said, there is a law against using the law for "illegal purposes," and this is the kind of activity which the code sought to enjoin. I have not yet gotten to teach him about the $3 million coffee spill (which, it turns out, was actually far from a frivolous suit), but I imagine he will be as stunned by that verdict as many Americans were.

The Tsar's Thumb

2008-09-01T21:30:00.002+04:00

I had a truly amazing time in St. Petersburg. More on that (possibly with photos) in a later post. But first, an anecdote. And then, an anecdote following that anecdote.

For more than a century and a half in Russia, a curious fact existed concerning the railroad line linking Moscow and St. Petersburg. The line linking the two cities was completely straight except for a tiny stretch near St. Petersburg, where it curved and then became straight again. A legend emerged to explain this curve, which ran as follows:

When the engineers came to the tsar to discuss the creation of the rail link between Russia's former and current capitals, a line was drawn on the map, but during the drawing of the line, the tsar had his thumb on the map, causing a small curve in the line. When the engineers later had to build the line, they were unsure whether to point out this error to the tsar, or not. And so the line was built with the curve where the tsar's thumb had been.

Judging by the experience I had today, trying to find my passport after losing it on my return journey home, I suspect that the competence of people working for the Russian railroad system has not improved much since tsarist times. After several hours, I was, fortunately, able to find my passport--to my great relief, since losing my passport and visa would have necessitated a trip home, a new passport application, a new Letter of Invitation from my school, and a new application at the Russian embassy. Probably all on my nickel. I consider retrieving my passport to be a small miracle, perhaps even a sign that, for some reason, God wants me in Russia for the time being. But before I turn to theology, the story of how I lost my passport, my mind, and my innocence where Russian bureaucracy is concerned, all in one day.

My train from St. Petersburg arrived at Leningrad Station about 6:00 in the morning. Dawn had not yet completely broken in Moscow, and I was forced to dress hurriedly--I knew this because, on my arrival in St. Petersburg three days previous, the provodnitsa had scolded me for not getting off the train quickly enough--and in dim light. It was absolutely essential that I change shirts, however, because I needed to go straight from the train station to my first class, and the shirt I was wearing had gotten a stain on it the night before.

During the night, I had kept my passport in my shirt pocket. In the act of changing shirts, I removed my passprt and placed it on my train compartment's table--and apparently, never picked it up again. So I discovered an hour later when, sitting in Leningrad Station, I put something else in my pocket and realized my passport was not there.

In a tizzy, I ransacked my bag to see if by chance I had left the passport in the dirty shirt from the day before. No such luck; I knew I had left it on the train.

Near panic at this point, I went in search of the information desk. I soon discovered there is no information desk as such in Leningrad Station--there is a sign marked "information", but it leads only to a display of train arrivals and departures--but I did find a window marked "administrator". The administrator on duty sent me to a second office which she said would be able to tell me how to retrieve my passport. The second office send me to a third office, where a lady behind a desk shouted at me a mile a minute in Russian, before realizing that trying to communicate with me was hopeless and found a colleague who spoke halting English.

Her colleague told me that there is no lost and found department as such in Moscow, or at least, not one that serves the train I had taken. I was told I had two choices. I could go and try to find the train I had arrived on in a train yard, or I could come back at night, when the train was next to leave for St. Petersburg, and try to get a hold of someone then who could locate my passport.

Without hesitation, I chose to go off in search of my passport then. I was told my train was now in a place call Kyookovo, which could be reached by an elektrishka (the Russian equivalent of a commuter rail line). After finding a phone and placing a call to my school to cancel my morning class, I bought a ticket for the elektrishka and set off for Kyookovo.

I reached Kyookovo over an hour later and explained my situation in halting Russian to a rail worker there. He contacted someone via walkie-talkie and then took me off in search of my train. It turned out, however, that my train was not in Kyookovo; the woman at the third counter in Leningrad Station had give me the details for train number 63, not my train, which was number sixty-five. No doubt she was looking at the wrong line on a computer system of some kind. The rail worker called someone on his mobile phone and was able to establish that my train was at the next stop on the line, going toward Moscow. He told me to go the Kyookovo's first platform and wait for the next train, which was to arrive five minutes later.

After twenty-five minutes on the platform, and seeing three trains pass by on the middle of the station's three platforms, I began to suspect I had been directed to the wrong place. My suspicion was confirmed when I heard a station announcement that a Moscow-bound train would be leaving from that middle platform in twelve minutes. I went to the ticket window and inquired where the next train going to my destination would leave from, and was told to go to the middle platform. So I had clearly been given the wrong platform.

Once the Moscow-bound elektrishka arrived--half an hour later--I took it where I had been directed. My faith in directions was wearing thin at this point, and I resolved that, if it turned out I had been misdirected yet again, to give up the search and return to Moscow.

Luck, however, at last intervened. The woman behind the ticket window at this station told me to go out of the station, turn right, and then keep walking straight. Eventually I would see a place where trains were kept between runs. I did so and found a train that looked like my train. I told a railroad worker my tale of woe. He took me, in turn, to a train he said was number 65, just in from St. Petersburg. He knocked on the door of the first compartment, and a cleaning woman opened it.

I told my story once more to the cleaning woman, who asked me for the number of my compartment and berth. These I gave to her. She said the providnitsa for my car was asleep, but that she would do what she could to get my passport back for me and directed me to walk until I found the car I had taken on my return journey from St. Petersburg. I was to wait there while she scoured the train.

About fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the appointed car, and after about twenty, the door to the car swung open, to reveal the cleaning woman. In her hands was, by some miracle, my passport. I thanked her profusely--or at least as profusely as my limited Russian made possible--and headed back to where I could take the elektrishka back into Moscow.

Intellectually, I know I ought to be very grateful to have retrieved my passport, despite all the problems and misidrectins I encountered. And on one level, I am. But I am also stunned that, in the course of looking for it, I was misdirected not once, but five times, and I am very much aware that these misdirections might well have prevented my getting the passport back in the end.

I was also astounded to find out there was no railroad lost-and-found department serving a place as large and important as Moscow. Another teacher at my school has noted in Russians a general lack of foresight, and my discovery that Leningrad Station had no lost-and-found pretty much confirmed what he told me. It is foreseeable that people will lose things--even valuable and important things--on trains. It completely flabbergasted me to realize there was nowhere I could go and fill out a form to declare I had lost something and have someone contact me in case it was found--that my only recourse was to hope I could find the actual train I had come in on.

The tsars themselves may be gone, but the kind of thinking that created a railroad bend out of the tsar's thumb seems to thrive in Russia.

To the Neva on a Sleeper (There's No Holiday That's Cheaper)...

2008-08-29T08:35:00.003+04:00

And the train does indeed go slow...whoa, whoa, whoa!

I have just arrived at my hostel in St. Petersburg, where I will be staying tonight and tomorrow night while I see what Russians call their Northern Capital, and what my guidebook refers to as the Venice of the North. Having about an hour until I can formally check into my hostel, I felt now was as good a time as any to catch up on some blogging.

Yesterday, after quite a bit of running around Moscow teaching and taking care of a few loose ends, I collected my ticket, my bags, and my mind and headed out to Leningrad Station to catch the train north. I came the station at 8:30, almost two full hours before my train was to leave, thinking that boarding might be a hassle (ah, the habits we develop flying in the United States!). I needn't have bothered; when I arrived, the platform number for my train had not even been posted, so I was forced to find some way of filling the time. I went into a restaurant in the station and had some beef about the texture and toughness of shoe leather, with mashed potatoes that could have passed for spackle. For this I paid the princely sum of 200 rubles (about $8 American). That may not seem like much, but it is high for that kind of food in Russia.

I had hoped a meal and a quick read-through of my St. Petersburg guide might kill the full two hours, but it didn't. I was forced to go sit in the main hall--or rather stand, as there was not a seat to be found for love or money--until my train's platform number appeared on a big screen. Eventually it did so, however, and I was at last able to proceed to my train.

I have noticed a couple of differences between Leningrad Station and, say, Grand Central. The first is that long-distance passengers are much more in evidence in Leningrad Station; there are far more suitcases around and far fewer men in Armani suits. Largely, this has to do with the popularity of night train service in Russia. In Russia, many cities are located at distances from each other that make a night's journey on a train the most pleasant way to travel between them. The other major difference is on the platforms. In Leningrad Station, the platforms are littered with little kiosks where every kind of food and drink imaginable is on sale. I managed to buy a Pepsi and a bag of chips before boarding my train.

Russian train service come in four main classes. The highest class ticket gets one a berth in a two-person compartment; the lowest gets one literally a seat. I had chosen a second-class ticket, which got me a berth in a cramped but still quite comfortable four-person compartment with a door. Luck was on my side, as my berth turned out to be a lower berth, more convenient than an upper berth because it affords the space under it for storage.

My fellow traveling companions were nice enough, but not especially talkative. That was just as well, because they and I were all quite tired. As soon as the train had departed and the provodnitsa (train stewardess) had come around with light refreshments and bottled water, we all turned in.

I can't say that my bed was the most luxurious I've ever slept in, but it was comfortable enough, and even compared favorably with the convertible bed in my Moscow apartment. Far from disturbing my sleep, the rolling of the train actually seemed to help, as did the light noise from the wheels gliding over the track. I slept quite pleasantly until about 6:00 in the morning, when the provodnitsa awakened us all and told us we were approaching St. Petersburg. I hurriedly gathered my things together and dressed.

More later...a line is forming for the hostel computer.

A Defector for 100 Percent Americanism

2008-08-26T22:40:00.008+04:00

Long ago in a life far, far away (4,676 miles away, to be precise), I spent an hour and a quarter every Tuesday and Thursday seated in a Barnard Hall classroom, avidly following the lectures of a woman I now think of as my favorite college professor. Celia Deutsch was not one of the "star" professors at Columbia who develops a cult following among Columbia students, or who ends up appearing in every PBS documentary about her field (her field being Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, there are few such documentaries for her to appear in). A devout but liberal Catholic--I used to describe her to college friends as a plainclothes nun--she was simply a woman who had a deep passion for her subject and an ability to pass that passion on to the right kind of student. And in the autumn of 1999, I was just that kind of student--intrigued by religion but knowing very little about it, just the kind of student who would not only take but excel in her Introduction to Western Religion class.

I have described Professor Deutsch as liberal, because, though she never devoted class time to tirading against it, she plainly had no sympathy for fundamentalist religion. But if she had no sympathy for fundamentalism, she was not the kind of academic fool who thinks that any viewpoint must be treated as "valid" or "true" simply because someone, somewhere happens to hold it. Words for her actually did have meanings (an idea I did not often hear expressed during my Columbia days).

I remember wel when I realized this fact of Professor Deutsch's character. It was during one particularly pitched battle with another student in class, who insisted that someone could be a theologian in a religious tradition without being a believer in that tradition. Professor Deutsch, no doubt thinking of Thomas Aquinas's definition of theology as faith seeking understanding, insisted that the world theologian had never been used this way, inside of any known religion or by scholars of religion. She explained carefully but firmly that a person can be a scholar of religion without being a believer, but to be a theologian, one must be an adherent.

Several years have passed since I had any cause to think about what properly makes someone a theologian. But my memory of this day in Professor Deutsch's class came flooding back to me this weekend, when I had the chance to watch online a documentary called The God Who Wasn't There.

Briefly, The God Who Wasn't There is a vitriolic film that, I had read, advocated what scholars of religion call the Jesus Myth Hypothesis--a theory held by a tiny minority of scholars that there was, in fact, no historical Jesus. I had read a little about the Jesus Myth Hypothesis when I was in college and had not been particularly impressed by it. Though I am not a Christian and do not consider Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God, or anything else that Christians generally consider him to be, I had never felt a need to question whether a man called Jesus had ever lived and preached in Israel. But I was open-minded enough to be interested to see if The God Who Wasn't There would make an interesting case.

The film I actually saw on my computer was nothing like what I had read it would be. Although the film did spend some time discussing the Jesus Myth Hypothesis, it was, in the end, more a diatribe against what I would call a caricature of Christianity in general and of fundamentalist Christianity in particular. I suppose it's asking too much for an hour-long film not to boil down incredibly complex scholarly and theological issues into rhetoric, but The God Who Wasn't There did this to an extent I found shocking.

The worst of this boiling down came when filmmaker Brian Flemming, having presented his case that there was no historical Jesus and having made a number of scriptural and moral arguments about fundamentalist Christianity, set his sites on liberal Christians. His entire thesis about liberal Christianity amounted to this: liberal Christianity makes even less sense than the fundamentalist version, because it claims that the Bible is God's word but then decide it will only "sort of" follow it.

There are two main problems with this assertion. The first is that it does not accurately state the claim liberal religious movements make about the nature of scripture, Christian or otherwise. Fundamentalist religion takes the view that scripture is God's direct dictation; liberal religion takes a view that it is God's word as understood by people in a particular time, place, and context. For a religious liberal like myself, then, the Bible, though written by fallible human beings, is nonetheless a reflection on a real experience of God. But Flemming leaves this important distinction completely out of his film.

The other problem with this assertion is that it assumes there is agreement about what the Bible "actually says" when in fact there is not. In the film, Flemming commits this error most greviously when he condemns "Christianity"--he does not say "fundamentalist Christianity", just "Christianity"--for its treatment of homosexuality. Not surprisingly, he quotes Leviticus 18:22 and just assumes the most literal reading of this verse is "what the Bible actually says."

Coming from a religious denomination--Conservative Judaism--that has been wrestling particularly hard with this verse in the past few years, but which has nonetheless liberalized its position on homosexuality, I know that the more traditional, literal reading of this verse is not what the Bible inherently says. In fact, the verse in Leviticus is situated between two sets of laws--the first dealing with family relationships, the second dealing with idolatry. As evidence has come to light that homosexuality is likely genetic, liberal religious movements, Jewish and Christian, have tended to reexamine their assumption that this verse is an unbendable, unchangeable law regarding the family, akin to the Bible's prohibitions on incest. Instead, liberal readers of this text tend to see it as a historically contextualized condemnation of a type of ritualized homosexual sex that took place in the ancient Near East, and which is referred to elsewhere in the Bible. So the most literal reading of this text is not inherently "what the Bible actually says".

Flemming is not the first atheist I've encountered who has made clear his belief that a fundamentalist version of a particular religion is that religion in its purest form. He will probably not be the last. But to me, people like Flemming are not even really part of the discussion, because they have taken themselves out of it. They are like the student Professor Deutsch challenged that day long ago and far away, in my Introduction to Western Religion class--people who think they can be theologians without being believers.

To me, people like Flemming are like defectors from American citizenship. A person who renounces his American citizenship can, of course, express any opinion he wants about the American presidential election, or about what is best for America, but his opinion is no longer meaningful. Once you give up your membership in a community--as Flemming has done by declaring himself no longer a Christian--you don't get to say what the truest or best form of that community is. Once you defect, your opinion about what constitutes 100 Percent Americanism is not one anyone can or should listen to.

Not only do I not accept the claim, made by fundamentalists and by atheists like Flemming alike, that liberal religion "makes even less sense"; I do not understand it. As near as I can tell, there is nothing that makes extremely conservative interpretations of a religious tradition more authentic than liberal ones (indeed, I would argue that, in the case of homosexuality at least, the conservative interpretation of the tradition is less authentic, since it denies the religious values of compassion and intellectual honesty). The claim of fundamentalists and other religious conservatives that they are is only that--a claim.

It often frustrates me that we religious liberals seem unable to say this often enough or loudly enough--that we don't expose The Man Behind the Curtain for who he really is. Perhaps we don't because a liberal understanding of religion is one that, by its nature, admits that infallibility is neither achieavable nor even desirable.

But far too much is at stake for us to remain silent.

Bulls and Flower Guardians

2008-08-15T01:02:00.004+04:00

One of my favorite movie scenes of all time is in a minor Meg Ryan romantic comedy from the mid-1990s called French Kiss. The film is a fairly conventional story about a timorous wallflower of a woman who finally comes into her own when, on a journey to France to recapture the heart of a fiance with a wandering eye, has a series of adventures with a French con-man with whom she ultimately falls in love. The con-man, played to perfection by Kevin Kline, is everything the heroine is not: he is rough around the edges, adventurous, and uninhibited about nearly everything. When the first meet, seated next to each other on a flight to Paris, he shocks her by asking very personal questions about how she lost her virginity.

Naturally, Meg Ryan replies that this is none of his business. Kline tells her that people fall into two categories with respect to losing their virginity: those who guard it like a delicate flower and those who rush to lose it "like a bull". Naturally, he insists on telling her that he lost his virginity "like a bull," at the age of twelve.

When it comes to language study, I am like a bull; I want to charge right into speaking a language. Having had experiences learning Latin, Classical Greek, and French in high school, and having taken Hebrew and a smidgin of Russian in college, I feel I have a good idea what to expect in learning a language. Some linguists have compared the world's languages to a giant machine, with a multiplicity of switches; the trick to mastering the grammar of a language is know which switches have been turned on and which have been turned off in that particular language.

My background has given me an idea of what the switches are. I may know that Russian does not have the second conditional as we have it in English, but I know that Russian must have a way of making contrary-to-fact statements in the present, and I am curious as to how Russian chooses to deal with these situations. Grammar seems like the easy part of a language to pick up; it's the slogging through dictionaries of vocabulary that becomes more tiresome, where I becomes less of a bull and more of a flower guardian.

It is thus a source of great frustration that my study of Russian is progressing rather slowly. The biggest reason I find I make little progress is that opportunities to use what I am learning are few and far between. I have found two language exchange partners with whom I have met, and with whom I hope I will eventually have many opportunities to speak in Russian. But as both of them have a much higher level of English than I have of Russian, I tend to think they get more out of our conversation sessions than I do. People who are not paid language teachers seldom want to spend their free time going over basic language tasks like practicing clothing vocabulary or ordering tickets at the train station. These, however, are the kinds of things I really need to be doing with my Russian.

My efforts to learn Russian may get harder. For about six weeks, I have been taking Russian lessons with another teacher at my school. Today, however, he told me that he wishes to end our joint class and start taking lessons on his own, as he feels he needs to go slower and consolidate what he knows. In truth, we were not truly at the same level when we signed up for a class together. He had had no previous formal instruction in Russian, although he has picked up an impressive vocabulary living with his Russian girlfriend. I think he has chosen to stop taking lessons with me because he is a bit of a flower guardian, but has sensed that I am, at heart, a bull.

For the next two weeks, my Russian teacher will unfortunately be on vacation. I cannot really blame her for going away this time of year--I am making plans to go away myself at the end of the month--but her departure has dashed my hopes of using the next two weeks to consolidate some more Russian before the hustle and bustle of the autumn EFL season begins. So I will likely not be able to begin charging head-first, like a bull, until September arrives.

None of the other teachers taking Russian lessons is at quite my level; what this means is that I may be forced to take private lessons less often, and work more on my own, instead of being in a class. To me, this is a shame, because I feel I actually benefit more when I am not the only student. Learning to speak a language, as I am realizing from my own teaching, requires a lot of practice speaking, and I find I have more motivation to do that speaking when there are multiple people to whom I can speak.

Motion Sickness

2008-08-14T00:24:00.004+04:00

"They always departed in that school," Willa Cather once wrote about a group of writers of whose work she disapproved. "They never went anywhere."

I think of that quote often, now that I am studying Russian again. I have written a bit before about Russian's infamous verbs of motion. In Russian, you do not simply go anywhere; you walk, ride, fly, or sail, but you do not simply go. But until today, I was not prepared for just how complicated these verbs are going to get.

Verbs of motion are actually a ways away in the Russian course I am currently taking through my school, but the subject of them came up today when I told my teacher, in Russian, that I had gone to the train station to buy tickets for St. Petersburg, and that I was going to St. Petersburg the last weekend in August. My teacher wisely seizedthis opportunity to begin verbs of motion and, after I thanked her, told me we would do more of them in our lesson tomorrow.

Well, here's the score from what I learned today:

1) There is one main verb, Идти ("eed-tee") that refers to motion on foot. When one is going within town, however, Russians don't much care whether the action was on foot or by transport, so it was possible to use this verb for my trip to buy tickets, even though I went to Leningradskiy Station not on foot but by Metro.

2) There is another main verb, Ехать ("eh-khat", similar pronounciation to the Hebrew word for "one") that refers to motion by means of transport, whether a plane, a train, or an automobile (there are also verbs corresponding to the English "to fly" and "to sail", but that's for another time). This is the verb I have to use for my going to St. Petersburg, because one does not walk from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

3) These verbs both refer only to movement one time in one direction. For repeated movement (like one's daily commute), each of these verbs has another corresponding verb.

4) Concepts like arriving, departing, and passing through can be expressed by adding prefixes to the various verbs of motion. In Russian, an airplane does not take off; it leaves by flying.

At first, this all seems quite complicated, but I have come to realize that English also has many different verbs of motion: go, walk, ride, transfer, fly, sail, arrive, depart, and return are just a few of the more common ones. Russian's system also builds on itself and allows for more information to be conveyed succinctly than is possible in English. When we say, My friend went to London, we are saying nothing about whether the friend went there by train, plane, steamer, or kayak. But in Russian, this information can be conveyed with more brevity and less awkwardness.

My teacher has also told me that, when dealing with verbs of motion, it is better to think of them in terms of specific situations rather than abstractly in terms of grammar. I think this is likely to improve my retention of them, and help me avoid a major case of motion sickness.

Georgia, Georgia, No Peace Do I Find

2008-08-13T23:21:00.004+04:00

Teaching is a profession full of surprises. You can be surprised when a diligent student fails to do an assignment. You can be surprised when a child student insists on demonstrating her new blowable marker pen and in the process gets red ink all over your clean, white shirt.

But on Monday, I got a very different surprise when the students in my adult business class (actually, my only class at the moment--my other students are on holiday and no new classes have been assigned to me) somehow got onto the topic of the war in Georgia and wouldn't get off of it. And ever since then, though I am thousands of miles from the Peach States (don't grimace--you knew this article would contain at least one U.S. Georgia-country of Georgia joke), I have had Georgia on my mind.

In case you haven't heard yet (you probably have, since apparently Washington is very interested in the matter), war broke out between Russia and Georgia over the weekend. I learned of this Saturday night, while having dinner with some of the other teachers at my school. Knowing nothing of the conflict, and assuming it was likely to be a small-scale military action, I was greatly surprised when my students told me 2,000 people had already died. My students were deeply concerned about the conflict because they all knew people who had sons the right age to be serving compulsory military service in the Russian army.

As near as I can tell, from having looked at what the BBC, the New York Times, and the all-reliable source of Wikipedia have to say about it, the dispute between Russia and Georgia concerns two breakaway provinces called South Ossetia and Abkhazia. These regions wish, for some reason, to secede from Georgia and become part of Russia. Georgia naturally doesn't wish to cede territory to Russia. Over the weekend, Russia went into Georgia on the pretext of aiding Russian citizens; I say pretext, because a teacher at my school who has studied Russia's foreign relations for years tells me that Russia has been issuing Russian citizenship and Russian passports to people in these regions solely to be able to justify military action on the grounds that these are Russian citizens.

My students had quite a lot to say about Russia's actions with respect to the crisis, none of it good. One student who had spent much of her youth in the Caucusus region said that the region has always been volatile, that virtually every man in the region totes a gun, and that at the tender age of twelve, boys are considered men (I knew not how to suggest to her that the people in the Caucusus might emulate Jews and wait until the ripe old age of thirteen, and confer manhood by gift of a fountain pen, but I digress).

Other students told me just about everything they could about military service in Russia. As I have already noted, Russia compels all male citizens to serve in the army for a period of two years unless they fall into various exempt categories. At one time, exemptions were given for males entering higher education, and, as higher education was free, this policy enabled many men to avoid military service. In recent years, however, the higher education exemption has been lifted, and so many men end up in the army who would not have a few years ago.

All three of my students were interested in contrasting Russia's military recrutiment with that of the United States. I explained that, in America, we do not currently have a draft but have had one in the past and may have one again if circumstances make it necessary. I explained further that, because college costs so much in America, many people enter the military in order to gain money toward their schooling. In America, many people think of this system as grossly inequitable and hypocritical, but to my Russian students, it seemed more enlightened than the egalitarian system Russia uses to supply troops to her armed forces.

The most surprising fact my students apprised me of is that the Russian army is considered a dangerous place to be even in peacetime. More seasoned officers are ruthless to younger, newer recruits, and I was told that the suicide rate in the army is quite high. This is undoubtedly another reason my Russian students are so enamored of the way America's military functions with respect to enlistment.

Looking at the conflict, I find myself uncertain who and what to believe. My own government says it is determined to support Georgia's efforts to maintain her territorial sovereignty because Georgia is now a free and democratic republic. Russia claims that it is acting to protect Russian citizens and that Georgia's actions provoked the conflict. Both sides insist they are acting in the interests of justice, not for geopolitical gain.

I find it difficult to accept either side's claims about the morality of the conflict because American history offers no real parallels for this kind of situation. Like any American, I know my country has dealt with a secession crisis that led to Civil War. I know full well that the Union had to fight the war; the alternative would have been the total unravelling of the fabric of the American nation.

But when the South seceded from the Union, it did so in a bid to establish itself as a separate country. Had the South seceded with the intention of, say, joining itself to Mexico instead, I don't know that, slavery or no slavery, the Union would have been as justified in fighting to prevent its departure. And that, as I understand it, is what Russia claims is happening in Georgia.

On the other hand, I cannot take at face value Russia's claim that it is acting only to protect Russian citizens. Certainly a nation is justified in using its military to get citizens residing abroad out of harm. But the "citizens" Russia is claiming to protect were made citizens solely to enable military intervention. The immorality of such actions is plain as day.

Today, peace broke out. Or, I should say, may have broken out--major news outlets disagree about whether Russia is honoring a cease-fire agreement. It remains to be seen what Russia and Georgia will do over the next few days. For the time being, like an old sweet song, Georgia will be on my mind.