I am now 7 days in to my 88-day stay in Russia (not that I'm counting), and I can honestly say they have been some of the most bewildering days of my entire life.
My khozyaika (the woman I'm staying with), Elya, and her husband, whose name I think is Valerya, are really nice but absolutely mental. I don't speak to the husband very often, but when I do, it's usually about ice hockey or football. I speak to Elya quite a lot. Or at least I try to. My Russian is pretty crap at this stage. Elya is fully aware of this, so she is employing the time-honoured method of speaking slowly, loudly and with lots of ridiculous and unhelpful mimes in an effort to make me understand. I'm employing the far more successful method of using a dictionary. This makes conversations far longer than necessary and probably a lot less entertaining to the neutral observer, but it works. Regardless, it's still been very frustrating. My target is to be able to conduct reasonable conversations with Elya (and indeed any Russian) by the time I leave.
My room is better than I thought it'd be. It's reasonably big and very warm. I have one of the fabled sofa beds, a desk and a TV. I can't understand most of what goes on, but I enjoy it simply for the fact that one of the channels seems to carry a lot of English football. Last week, I saw Arsenal v Stoke (well, I saw the first half and fell asleep at half time), I'm watching Chelsea v Man United as I type, and I've just seen an advert for Arsenal v Leyton Orient tomorrow. They were supposed to have the Carling Cup Final on Sunday, but they had ice hockey instead. I was annoyed at first, but I've since decided it was probably a blessing.
The food has been... different. It's been nice, for sure. One of my favourite dishes so far has been blini - or pancakes. Just amazing. I also like them because the word on its own can also be an exclamation similar to 'OH SHugar!' Russian food will definitely take some getting used to, though. I'm already looking forward to a bacon sandwich on 20th May.
So, one thing I was asked a lot before I left was "where exactly is it you're going?" Well, I'm in a city called Yaroslavl. It was founded in 1010 by a prince named Yaroslav who killed a bear with a poleaxe. True story. I wanted to publish a map with this, but my МТС dongle is arsing around and won't let me zoom the map out far enough for it to mean anything to anyone. So you'll have to do a Google Maps search yourselves. So, what's it like? It's nice. It's very cold but it's nice. My concern is what will happen when the ice starts melting - more specifically, my concern is that it will freeze again and I'll be forced to attempt to walk on sheet ice. That will not go down well. Those of you who have experienced my sense of direction will not be surprised to hear that I have very little idea of where anything is. I'll probably have it all figured out in approximately 82 days.
The course has been pretty good so far. The oral lessons have been great so far because the teacher has been fun to talk to - whereas Liudmila extracts information from you, Larissa gives you a topic and just lets you talk. I'm not so keen on translation or mass media at the moment, as both lessons just seem to involve being spoken at and attempting to digest the information thrown at me. Critical reading seems like it will be fun. We haven't had a grammar lesson yet, but I imagine they'll be a right bundle of laughs.
Finally, how am I doing? Well, I'm fluctuating between being completely at peace with the world and feeling totally and utterly overwhelmed. I've lost count of the number of times I've considered hopping on the next train to Moscow and flying home. But I'm going to stick it out because I know I'll regret it if I don't, and I figure it'll be a right arseache to sort out anyway.
So yeah, that's my two kopecks for now. There will doubtless be future updates.
Poka!
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