The first week of classes has come and gone, and I'm really feeling quite at home here in Moscow. The schedule's a bit rigorous, but it's nice to have a schedule to stick to. Our classes are four days a week from 9-3, with an hour for lunch and coffee breaks throughout. The classrooms are only a 10 minute walk from the dorm, which is quite nice.
We start the day with phonetics classes, which I've actually never had before. I've already learned so much! Did you know that speakers of English hold the tip of the tongue at top of their teeth when not speaking. Where is your tongue? Russians hold it at the bottom. Not only do we speak differently, but we keep quiet differently too. There's also a special room with headsets that record everyone simultaneously and then we get to hear our own speech. It's really helpful.
Then we have "practical lessons" that for me involve reading aloud from newspaper articles about movies and music, then discussing various aspects of the readings. I've heard stories about hours and hours of homework, but so far I haven't had anything. Fingers crossed for some grammar exercises to help refresh those skills! After lunch we have seminars that meet 3 times in total, for 2 hours each time, discussing various topics in depth. This week was about particular sentence structures for me, and next week is about one of the most problematic grammatical topics for English speakers: verbal aspect. (If you think of tense --past, present, future -- as putting the verb in time, aspect is the internal time reference of the verb: completed action, result of an action, ongoing action, etc. Yeah, our language doesn't work that way at all!!)
We usually have lunch down in the cafeteria. Well, actually we used to. The semester here is ending, so everything is shutting down. Anyways, it's a real shame because I can get the standard three courses for less than $4. We're hoping there's a cafeteria nearby that will stay open for the summer. The bigger problem than lunch has become dinner. The cafeteria in the main building conveniently located near our dorms has closed down for a month. No other cafeteria is open for dinner (past 6), and the cafe with internet access is too expensive. We came up with a rather Russian solution: a collective! I gathered $10 from people who wanted to cook and use dishes, and got pots, pans, plates, knives, silverware, cooking oil and salt and pepper. We take turn cooking and doing dishes in pairs, and paying for the groceries. So far it's been a huge success: for the price of a single meal in a restaurant one can cook for the entire group of 10 people in our collective. One remaining problem is the lack of a refrigerator, so we have had to throw out extra food. That will hopefully change quite soon, which will make eating even more affordable. We're also getting a television, so we can enjoy modern Russian television programming, which also includes a fair number of classic (read: Soviet) films.
After four days of courses and collective dinners, I'm pretty tired. But no rest for the weary: we had an excursion to the Russian State Library (named after Lenin). We got a real behind-the-scenes look at how the library works. Oh, it's not what you may think. This is a non-circulating library, and readers are not allowed in the stacks. So you first look in the card catalog (our tourguide informed us of the "sad" situation of getting rid of the card catalog for an electronic one), write out the information about the book, and give it to a consultant. It goes via a system of vacuum powered tubes (like at the bank drive-thru) to someone in the stacks. They get the book, and put it on a conveyor-elevator type thing (it reminded me of the system of moving doors in the movies Monsters, Inc.). You wait two hours for this to happen. Your book comes, and you go to the reading room you're assigned to. I took pictures of the room we saw; coming soon! And this is how research happens in Russia. Yikes! It's kind of astonishing that people write dissertations and books under these conditions. We also saw the Museum of the Book, where I got to practice my Old Russian reading skills. :)
After the library we went to one of the cemeteries where several famous Russians are buried: Yeltsin, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Shostokovich, Prokofiev, Krushchev, and Gogol, to name a few. Or to name the ones I've heard of. I also saw the gravestone of a man named Fyodor Fyodorovich Fyodorovski. Hmm. I also had a meeting with my assigned conversation partner / tutor. She's a sweet girl named Lena who's studying physics at one of the most challenging institutes in Moscow. We bought some books at the big bookstore Dom Knigi (House of Book), and chatted about the economy, differences in culture, and our families.
Alright, this is getting long enough, and it's after midnight here. I'm looking forward to my first day of truly getting to sleep in as long as I want since June 14th.
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