Back in America

So I got back to the States at around 2 am on the 25th (well, 26th I guess). The original plan was to leave the dorm in Moscow at around 8:00 am, head to the SVO airport, leave at 12:05, get to New York at around 2:00ish (yeah, really fast plane - like 5600 miles in around 2 hours), leave New York at around 4:30, and finally get back to the Sunshine State at around 7:30ish.

Things did not go according to plan, to say the least.

I woke up at around 7 am Moscow time, got dressed, put my computer away and got my luggage all together. The other two people leaving and I got downstairs and such without incident (though we had to give back our electronic passes, so my idea to come back in 30 years and infiltrate the university was thwarted.

We set off for the airport and got there without much trouble - it only took about 45 minutes.

Nathan and I decided to go ahead and get something to eat at the TGI Fridays in the airport since we were both on the same flight and we had about 3 hours to kill. I guess he didn't realize what time it was because he decided to start the morning off with a half-liter of Heineken. Once they brought it out, he wondered aloud why in the world he did that, but drank some so the whole situation didn't look awkward.

After we ate we headed to our gate and started to wait. I guess we because of those bombings a few weeks back, security was ramped up. I think there were three different significant security checkpoints. Unfortunately, the soviet lighter I was bringing as a gift was found and thrown out (I don't know why I thought it would be ok to bring that in my carry-on). And so we started waiting. This is where things started to get irritating.

We got our new boarding passes (our guy at the baggage check place didn't know what the hell he was doing). Since this flight was getting delayed, I was worried that I wouldn't make my connection in New York (I was only going to have an hour and a half layover), and I guess Delta agreed, since my second boarding pass now had a departure time of 8:00 pm. Yep...so not only was my first flight going to leave an hour late, but my layover in NYC went from an hour and change to 4 hours. Great.

So we eventually board and head across the world. Actually, this time around, the flight wasn't nearly as bad as the first time.

We arrived and got our baggage. It was surreal being able to make small talk again with guards and stuff. Good people, dem New Yokas.

Anyway, we went to eat some pizza and then recharge our computers. I bought a copy of ESPN the magazine and we started to wait. Nathan headed to his gate at around 7:20, so we said our goodbyes. And I waited. And waited. They began boarding at around 8:20-30, but that sure as hell didn't mean we were leaving at 9ish. OH NO IT MOST CERTAINLY DIDN'T.

I managed to get some sleep despite a screaming baby - about an hour's worth. I wake up...and we're still sitting there. We didn't actually take off until like...11:00. I kid you not. This is why I didn't get back until the wee hours of the morning. So what should have been me arriving at 7:30 to have dinner with the family turned out to be me being up for 26 hours, with bloodshot eyes and no dinner. Fun stuff.

It's good to be back.

TORFL Pt. 2 - Success! I think.

Today was the second half of the TORFL. Since I took the reading, listening, and grammar sections yesterday, I took the writing and conversation parts of the exam today. I wasn't too worried about the writing section, but the conversation section had me pretty darn worried - though I later learned that it wouldn't be administered by the unknown lady who took care of the first three parts of the test.

Anyway, first was writing. To prepare for this part of the test, Zoya had given us various prompts (like 3 or 4 over the course of the year) on both formal and informal topics. For example, in the case of a formal letter, we might have to write a short explanatory letter to our professor or to the head of the program explaining why we missed/will miss class. Or for a formal letter we might just have to tell our friend about our home and invite them to visit during the summer or something. Turns out the prep was sort of useful - we wound up having both (or some variant of both) of those topics in the real test.

One of the two sections was a 20-25 sentence letter to our friend talking about where we are vacationing, what we're doing there and whether I would advise said friend to vacation there as well. I talked about being in the mountains or something and meeting some businessman hiking or something. It was a stupid letter.

The second letter (the formal one) required me to write letter explaining to my professor why I would not be able to come to class the next day. The problem with this kind of letter is that Zoya explained to us the general format that such a letter should take (in terms of where stuff should actually be written) but I never got an actually physical copy of the instructions, so I was kind of sitting there trying to remember the form from memory. It was not fun and I think it didn't come out well.

Later I learned that I was right in my disappointment with the results - I got a 73% for that part of the test (I'm pretty sure that's still a passing grade; you need to do pretty darn poorly to fail a section).

Anyway, after that we had to go take care of the most terrifying part of the exam - conversation. Even though it was with two of the nice ladies who teach in our program, I was incredibly nervous. I stuttered over my words, looked all over the place, and generally gave the impression that I was about to crap my pants. They found it amusing though, and I answered relatively well. I get nervous right before any test, but at least with written tests I can focus on what's in front of me and lose the nervousness quickly. I can't really do that with an oral test

Anyway, we started off with simple questions about random situations - it was more to make sure that we understood what they asked/what we read more than anything. After that we had to read a story about the Russian painter Isaac Levitan and retell the important parts to the testers. Finally, we had to present a tour/trip to some place of our choice as a travel agent. Of course I picked Florida, came up with pretty crazy low prices and said that we would take them to Gatorland and stuff. It went over fairly well.

What I liked most is that, even though I was super nervous, I didn't lose my self-correcting MO. In everyday conversation I correct my own grammar mistakes as they happen or just after as I replay the conversation in my head. And I can do it, too! I got a 94% on the grammar section!

From what I saw on Natasha's computer, (this is before the conversation part was graded - I guess I'll find out about that tomorrow) these were my scores on the various parts of the test.

Grammar - 94%

Writing - 73%

Reading - 89%

Listening - 83%

Conversation - 87%

I passed

The TORFL (Day 1)

So, the last big hurdle to get over this semester is the TORFL - the language proficiency test for foreigners. There are various levels, starting with Elementary level, then Basic, then First, Second, Third and Fourth. As the level you take increases, the difficulty goes up dramatically (or so I'm told). I'm taking the level 1 test, which indicates something like an intermediate level of language skill. There are three other students taking the level 1 test, with the others taking either the basic or elementary level test.

There are five parts to the test - reading (which entails reading various texts and answering questions about them), writing (which involves writing letters, both formal and informal), grammar (this is the most important one - if you fail it, then you fail the test), listening (in which you listen to various dialogues and the questions that follow), and conversation (self-explanatory - it's the one I'm most worried about).

Today we had the grammar, reading, and listening parts of the first level test.

I honestly didn't study much at all (as always). Though in this case, it's really difficult to study much at this level - once you've got a pretty good grasp of most grammar there's only so much studying and cramming will do for something like this, when you don't really know what to expect from the test itself. So I didn't study. If I'm going to pass this test, it'll be due to the work I've done up to this point, not because of studying some flashcards or something.

So the first part of the test was, of course, the grammar section. I was fairly confident in my ability to pass this part of the test, since we'd done several practice grammar tests and I handled those fairly easily. The test itself turned out to be somewhat harder than I expected (who the hell cares about participles anyway!?), but I still did pretty well. In fact, everyone passed the grammar section (actually, its interesting how low the standards for passing are for these tests.

On the subject of failing, beyond the requirement that each student pass the grammar section of the test, there are more failure rules for the other four parts. According to what we were told in our information session, if we fail one sections, it's ok. If we fail two, we like, sort of pass but have to retake those two sections to really complete it. If we fail three parts, we're done.

Next came the listening section, which I was also pretty worried about. The first part was some discourse about Tolstoy and his first works. Though I understood the questions (sort of) I didn't think I got like, any of the answers right. The next part was also pretty difficult, but I don't remember what it was about at the moment. Then we got to the dialogues, which were a piece of cake. Which is kind of ironic, I think. I can't participate for crap in actually dialogues with people, yet these dialogues are super easy (though I imagine it might be the same for everyone). Anyway, after about 30 minutes, that part was over (to the surprise of our tester ["только 24 вопросА? - only 24 questions?]).

Finally, we had the reading section, which I was confident in my ability to pass. I'm proud of my improvement when it comes to reading from the beginning of the semester to now. Last semester in Olga's class, I had trouble reading even relatively simple texts, and if I had to read out loud or read quickly, I was up a certain creek without a certain necessary item for movement. As I expected, that part wasn't too hard, though there were a few questions that had several very possible answers.

Afterwards, we were told that everyone passed the grammar test, J asked Natasha (one of the important administrators in the program) about the reading test and apparently found out that I did really well on the listening part, which was extremely surprising. After further investigation, I have learned that did not read the spreadsheet correctly, and I actually did just "ok" on the listening part.

In all, day one wasn't too bad. I have the writing and (gulp) conversation parts tomorrow, so hopefully all goes well there.

ВДНХ (Vuh Duh En Hah)

As the semester winds down (I've only got one full week left before I leave next Sunday) I've begun to realize just how much I still haven't seen in Moscow (though, I also realize that many of the things I haven't seen are museums, so I'm kind of OK with that). One of our most recent excursions was to one of those very important places that I'd yet to see - the place with that really famous Soviet statue of the guy and girl with the hammer and sickle (Stalin's Amusement park place).

The Soviet-statue-of-the-guy-and-the-girl-with-the-hammer-and-sickle.

Anyway, so we actually left early, hoping to go to Ismailovo again to get some more souvenir shopping out of the way. Turned out that we left way too late for that, given the meeting time for the excursion, so we decided to just go straight to ВДНХ and see what was up there and meet Lena when she got there.

The place is big. Like, really effing big. Just walking to the entrance (which is huge) is a task, requiring you to walk from the metro across a big park area to a giant arch-gate-thing, behind which I could see the biggest ferris wheel I'd ever seen in my life.

*shiver*

Anyway, we got inside and made our way down a really long road with small rides on either side and a little train that worked as a marshrutka, letting people plop themselves down on it and avoid having to walk that oh-so-terrible 5 minutes to the actual building.

After 10 minutes of walking we got to the main exhibition center (that's what all of the buildings in this area were originally - now they all just have markets inside). The building was impressive...

Impressive, huh?

...but I particularly liked the statue of Lenin in front of it, which I did my best to impersonate.

V.I. Radenhausen.

After about an hour, Lena and a little boy, who I recognized as the son of the director of our program at GRINT, arrived. It turned out that Aleksei (the kid - I'm pretty sure that was his name) would be our guide and Lena would translate. Wow, that kid knows his history. He explained all kinds of history of the buildings, like how each of the buildings surrounding this one golden fountain represented one of the major Soviet republics.

The golden fountain. Each girl represents a different republic. The girl holding something like the Statue of Liberty in the middle-left represents Russia.

We made our way then to the mechanical square, where there was a life-sized airplane as well as a smaller-than-life-sized (I think) rocket.

Rocket.

Aleksei led us farther and farther into the park, giving us interesting tidbits along the way. For example, he explained that the building next to the Ukrainian building (I think it was Belarus or something) has a star on top, which according to legend comes from the Kremlin because they made more stars than the Kremlin had towers.

The Ukraine building. Definitely the coolest-looking.

That's the star he was talking about.

This was all interesting, and since we were winding down, we decided to stop at the bathroom. I really had to go. The woman's bathroom was easy enough to find, since its entrance was at the front of a building. There was an M with an arrow next to it, signaling to the men that their area of relief is just around the corner.

Or not. There was no bathroom around the corner, so I wound up not going to the bathroom for another hour. If there's one thing you learn about in Russia, it's just how much your bladder can take. Though it was nice to learn that Russians appreciate good music, even if it replaced a nice WC.

Weeeeeeww! Beatles!!

The Master and Margarita

One thing I decided to do early on in my preparation for this trip was to read Mikhail Bulgakov's magnum opus - The Master and Margarita. It's a book that is mired in satire and social commentary. The only problem - you won't understand most of it if you aren't Russian. That's not to say that it isn't a great book, but it's difficult to see why it's such an important book without the historical Soviet background.

In any case, I read the book earlier in the semester and from there my friend recommended that I go ahead and visit some of the landmarks from the book, specifically the "bad apartment" that is the main setting in the story. Every week I said I was going to go check it out, but as with so many such things, I never did. Until this past week.

Thankfully, we were to have an excursion to the Mikhail Bulgakov museum, specifically to the part of the museum that is in Apartment #50 - the Bad Apartment. When we got there, Lena found out that our tour guide and his translator were not yet there, so for the time being, this eager guy in a suit and with gratuitous amounts of hair was going to translate for another guide. He decided that he would go ahead and translate as the other guy talked, which led to a little too much noise to really pick up everything that he said. But as luck would have it, our real translator showed up with his translator.

Our guide. I understood about 50-60% of what he said. Woo.

We started off learning about the incredible amounts of graffiti outside of the apartment door. Everything from pictures of Behemoth (a vodka-drinking giant black cat in the story) to naked pictures of a woman (i.e. Margarita) to big thank yous, to the most common "_____ was here." Almost every inch of the walls leading up to the museum was covered in such messages.

An example of Behemoth graffiti

Examples of older graffiti that has been removed.

From there we moved on to rooms that showed important parts of Bulgakov's life as he lived at apartment number 50. We got to see his study, which contained his own desk complete with a picture of Gogol, whom Bulgakov considered to be his inspiration.

That's a picture of Gogol in the middle there. Sorry 'bout the strong reflections.

Among the most interesting tidbits were that the "real" bad apartment actually belonged to an artist who lived in the building across from Bulgakov's communal flat. Our guide explained that people often saw women of questionable motives going in to the flat, and they would notice that the lights wouldn't go off all night. Thus the building got its bad reputation, which Bulgakov decided to turn upon his own home.

And finally, my favorite piece of trivia was learning that in the apartment next to Bulkagov's lived a prostitute, and because ofthe close vicinity between the two apartments, the woman's clients would often bang on Bulgakov's door while he worked, demanding that he open the door so that they might make use of his (her) services. I imagine that this was a little annoying, though I would have embraced the situation and pulled some pranks - it would have made for a good chapter in the book, I think.

The Moscow Zoopark

On Saturday, my friends and I decided, based on Nathan's advice, to go to the Moscow zoo since the weather has gotten much warmer recently (basically all of the snow is melted - probably around 45-50 or so degrees out). So we decided to meet at around 1:30 at the entrance. I left early and so I got to the metro station about 45 minutes early. I was hungry since I hadn't eaten breakfast before leaving, so I started to just wander down the road to try and find a McDonald's or something. After about 25 minutes I found the Russian equivalent of KFC, where I sat, ate and finished with about enough time to get back to the zoo entrance (which I passed on the way to the KFC).

So I walk back and get there at around 1:20, but don't see anyone I know. I call my friend and she says that they are literally 10 feet from the entrance. Huh.

I decided to just go in and try and find them when they do get in, since they must be at another entrance. She told me that they were near a frozen lake and some rides. Turned out that there were like 4 different lakes in the zoo, so after a few mistakes I found a big building that looked like an exit/entrance. I went up the ramp and found a bridge leading to a whole new half of the zoo. On the complete other side of the biggest frozen lake thing yet was a building with turnstiles, meaning that I literally had to walk across the entire zoo to find my group. So I did.

It was pretty cool, though they didn't really have anything that I'd never seen before. The lions, tigers, and bears were all inside eating or sleeping or something, so we didn't see any of them. And in addition to your typical animals, they also had some rarer North American animals, like the exceptionally exotic Raccoon, and the Red Squirrel. Yep, squirrels and raccoons.

Anyway, here are some pictures:

I waited for like 5 minutes for this guy to yawn again.

Funny story. You can't see it in this picture, but I almost got my hair eaten by this dude. I usually take this solo pictures, and my "friends" pushed me closer, then all of a sudden they get really excited for some reason. I turn around and the horse's head is RIGHT BEHIND ME with it's mouth open. Terrifying.

Now that's scary.

This is pretty much how every big cat looked. Really effing tired.

Pssh, I've seen better at Sea World.

And finally, as we were leaving, we walked by the pen that contained a mama polar bear and her cubs. Adorableness followed.

Space City

Last Friday we had another big excursion, this time to space city - the place where the Russian cosmonauts are trained. We got on this green bus at 12:30 with the SRAS students who are attending MGU and Lisa Horner, our coordinator in Moscow. Anyway, we set off and drove through some somewhat run-down neighborhoods/villages outside of Moscow until we got to a heavily wooded area, where we found the training place.

Lena got out to try and find out tour guide to see if we could start the excursion early because traffic wasn't quite as bad as anticipated and so we got to the site about 20 minutes early. She found him and he agreed to start early, so we drove through a gate and up to a mini-city area. We got out and met our tour guide, who was a retired engineer and cosmonaut (I presume). We set off towards a large circular building, in which he explained to us is the largest centrifuge in the world.

We went in and climbed to the third floor, entered a room and saw this humongous, green machine that is intended to simulate conditions that the cosmonauts would experience as they journey space, namely the feeling on 6x their own weight.

Looks like fun, right?

Our guide led us to a TV sitting in the middle of the room, which showed a video describing the condition and facts about the centrifuge. It was vaguely interesting (apparently it takes 27 megawatts to power the thing, which seems like a lot. I mean, "mega," right? Come on), but it wasn't a particularly well-made video. We moved on to another building, where there is a giant pool (12 meters deep) which is supposed to help the cosmonauts get used to that weightless feeling. The model station that can be lowered into the pool is called Звезда (star), apparently so that the cosmonauts can say "Hell no, I didn't train in some crappy normal station, I actually lived in a f***ing star, man!".

I lived in a f***ing star, man!!!

After that the tour started to wind down a little bit, with us moving to one last building, where there was a statue of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

I like to think that Yuri was a big fan of high fives, the love of which is captured forever here.

Anyway, we got to the last area of the tour, where we saw all kinds of neat little gadgets and tools used by the cosmonauts in their training and in their actual missions. For example, they went equipped with a gun that looked like a plastic toy gun that carried three bullets, just in case something nasty came upon them after they landed.

The gold outer layer is designed to protect their eyes from the sun.

Santa. In Space. With Russians. That'd be an awesome movie.

"World"

Overall, it was yet another really cool excursion that let us learn a little more about Russian tradition and history (one tradition - cosmonauts always watch the movie "White Sun of the Desert" before a flight. Our guide said that one time an officer left the viewing to smoke, and the commander shortened his mission from the original 8 months to 3. No one leaves the viewings anymore).