Teaching English in Russia
Holidays III: New Year
To a Russian, the celebration of the new year is the biggest holiday of each year – sort of our New Year’s Day and Christmas celebrations rolled together. Most of the traditions are familiar to us, from one or the other: decorated trees, present giving, the coming of Grandfather Frost (Russian Santa), crowds in public at midnight, lots of drinking, fireworks, the traditional meat salad, and lots of mandarin oranges. The last one surprised me too, but I like mandarins, so I say it is very well. Never tried the meat salad, though it sounded interesting, from all the ingredients listed by... Read more
Holidays II: Christmas
For Americans, Christmas is the centerpiece of the holiday season, and overall the single most-celebrated holiday. For Russians, there is a vague awareness that December twenty-fifth is a holiday of some sort, and the “Russian Christmas” which falls on January sixth is pretty much only observed by those who are at least nominally Orthodox. But that doesn’t mean my teammates and I were about to forget Christmas. It was going to be different, I knew that – my first Christmas away from home, and I got pretty well away. And it was different, but not too different, just enough to remind me how... Read more
Holidays I: Thanksgiving
Yeah, it’s safe to say the last month-plus has been a busy and interesting time, while this medium for sharing about busily interesting things I experience has been unfortunately neglected. Oops. But now I’m on break, and I can tell any of you who read this about it. So, late November to the beginning of January is what we call ‘the holiday season,’ because, well, there are holidays then. None of them went unappreciated by my teammates or me, no matter their relative weight to Russians. The first big one in line is Thanksgiving, which is simply not a thing to Russians, though they’ve heard... Read more
Showing Up
Three months into living here, I no longer experience the excitement and novelty of my situation on a daily basis anymore. There are whole worlds still to learn and new experiences regularly, and I do still love what I’m doing, but it isn’t still in that first feeling of absolute novelty. Yet, I’m still only starting to have a clue about how life here is going to work and what possibilities it holds. It was so new, a month ago, walking away from the apartment at sunrise to go to school and figure out a lesson that was either going to be very good or very bad. Now, it’s just daily life,... Read more