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.
31 March 2009
30 March 2009
I May Already Be a Winner...
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.
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
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.
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.
26 March 2009
G, I Really Love You...
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.
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.
23 March 2009
3.21 Miles, 41 Minutes, One Bus, Two Subway Lines, and Two Years
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.
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.
12 March 2009
Into Penn's Woods
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.
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.
09 March 2009
The West Coast Minyan?
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.
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.
05 March 2009
Manhattan on the Moskva
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.
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.
04 March 2009
It Doesn't Register
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.
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.
02 March 2009
Willie Lincoln's Obsession
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.
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
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.
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.
01 March 2009
The Rhythm of the Falling Ruble
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.
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.
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