Teaching English near Moscow. It's none of your business but I will be truthful for once (Moscow)

Member Name: Cammij

Product:	Moscow
Date:	30/06/01 (130 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun, Esteemful

Disadvantages: no pay, have to be sober

Generally I try to be rather guarded about my personal life but I want to share an extraordinary experience that I had in Moscow that has altered how my future vacations will be handled.

First off I married a sweet beautiful Russian girl who I love very much. I was a comrade of her brother in the defense of Servian culture in Bosnia a few years back and romance blossomed when I ended up in Russia for several months and so on. Her family still lives outside of Moscow so it is more or less a given that we visit there at least once a year now that we have a life approaching normalacy.

The purpose of the vacations is family of course, and this is her primary priority. I saw all the stuff the first few times, Basilis, the Bolshoi, GUM and the Kremlin and Kitay Gorod and the circus and metro and all the other stuff the moscovites are so proud of. Now considering that none of that stuff changed much in 500 years it doesn't change much in three years so I am invariably stuck at home while all these other Russians come and go. If you ever manage to go to red square do eat at the siberian buffet that faces the East Side of Gum (I think). Ten dollars for all you can eat Central european delicacies.

Of course we have nice "tables" and plenty of Vodka (I prefer Schrinofsky vodka) but I am limited in my Russian and only about half the visiting Russkies speak German and her family is always talking Finnish anyways so I am somewhat isolated. And it isn't like I expect these people to have to break pace and deal with my illiterate ass either. So I get online, drink and play video games.

This year I wanted something different. So I announced to myself and anyone else that I was going to teach school this year in Russia. Of course I had no idea how I would pull this off when I started talking this smack but I have been pretty resouceful and creative in my endeavors to amuse myself. I tell my wife's nephew that I was
going to his school to teach and he responded that they had no need for a tattooed drunk railroader there.

He comes home from school the next day and tells me that the teacher said I could come to the class. I thought "Cool" and slept on it. The next day the little punk is dragging me out of bed at some awful hour, like 8am. I get dressed and follow him to school. I guess it is important to note that my wife's family lives on some type of closed town full of military personel so they don't get too many Americans, as far as I am concerned about my typical countryman, one is too damn many. So I am like the featured attraction of public school number whatever. They greated me with all these cute little presents like that stuff that comes from Khokloma (I think just as the SSR had a Georgia like the USA, Khokloma must be like their Oklahoma, a place full of drunk indigenous people, tornados, and oil wells). So they just fire away with all their questions. Mundane stuff about thes states, how to pronounce Seqouia and Ukiah, what is a couch potato (if you don't know this yourself ask marlboromax, who has a fridge right in his easy chair) and then they asked all about race relations and incomes and all that. It was kind of cool, basically I am pretty far right wing, sort of like a National Front type guy, and here these people are accepting everything I have to say like it is the gospel. I have a carte blanche with a room full of impressionable 15 and 16 year olds, that was fun. They kept referring to me as their "esteemed expert" on America, meanwhile no one bothers to ask my credentials or education or even occupation. (If it matters none, MBA, and Railroad Supervision) That was really cool.
So they asked me to come back the next day. I did and they had me read along with them through these obsolete readers that said things like "The American Breakfast table is centered around the morning newspaper" or "W
hen an American attends the Cinema he expects to see not only the feature film but several newsreels and a puppet show" and then this one was funny "The most popular american radio programs are ones where the audience quizzes a panel of experts on trivia questions"

When we had a free forum to discuss stuff the adults (principal and teachers) were all hung up on gun violence and gun control and education issues. My mom is a teacher so I had a lot of answers for them and being a gun nut myself I had all sorts of fuel for fire. The Russians were greatly pleased that my favorite Assualt rifle in my collection is a Tula AKM with a milled receiver, that made them happy. Then on one day they had me put on an impromptu musical performance with some piece of crap old guitar. I felt like an idiot as I don't have too many camp fire singalongs in my repetoire, I am mostly a Helloween, Mistreat, Skrewdriver, and Metalicca type of guy, but it worked out.

One day I didn't bother to show up and the teacher sent the students to fetch me from bed. Then she got real presumptive and started showing up at the house with lesson plans everyday. She would find me passed out on the couch and rouse me enough to give me some books. They got hung up on Robert Burns poems and had me read them over and over before they decided to tape record them, so I read these "My love is like a red red rose" poems in a very bad Irish Brogue (I know he was Scottish but South Buffalo doesn't exactly have a very visible Pict crowd to imitate). I also had to read along with them some O Henry stories and try to write some sonnets and Haiku. I preferred the geography classes to the English though and I also got to help out in some "career enrichment" course where I got to teach the kids how to make resumes (CV for you Brits).

So this is how I spent 3 weeks. All these 16 year old girls bringing me boxes of chocolate and cards. That wa
s distracting. Then the last few days we had to take so many pictures and then I had to sign all these autograph books and pictures. One girl, beautiful Marina, wanted me to autograph her arm, I told her next year I would bring my tattoo gear and tattoo her arm, she laughed and smacked her buttock and said "How about here instead". I blushed so red and she apologized for "Russian Humor", I was more concerned about the concept of Russian justice as I heard more than enough about Russian prisons and her whole request sounded like an inviataion to a big legal hassle.

So what did I like so much? Being called the esteemed expert, acting like I mattered and my life was interesting with some value. But best of all I loved seeing their bright optomistic eyes in a land otherwise so devoid of hope. They were so alive and eager to hear about the place I call my home. I was so happy to be amongst people that wanted to hear what I had to say (without having me have to revenge rate them like certain other forums)

I am so much looking forward to going back this Fall. I am accumulating all sorts of coins, stamps, magazines and stuff for them. I advise evryone who travels to try to pull off a similar stunt. Moscow is a wonderous place and a beautiful city, but none of my other trips affected me as much as becomming part of these young peoples lives. They all still e-mail me and write letters and I really do miss them. I have travelled a lot in my life and I have always felt like a detached tourist, just an outside observer, for once I really got to be part of a cultural exchange and that was a neat feeling. These people tried to pay me money and all and I wouldn't take it (if it had been a lot of money I would have) and next year I am going to set up private English lessons (my wife looked at my souvenier photos and doesn't like this idea, in particular the hot little Uzbekistani girl)

Part of my appeal in Russia is I am
the only American to go there who doesn't see any purpose in prostelyzing and trying to get the Russians to change anything about themselves. I accept them for who they are and appreciate their way of life. I like the Russians better than any other people in the world (BTW My mom is a German but her father was Danish and my dad is like the true American mismosh of Dutch, Irish, and German)
So I am not Slavonic in the least yet I adore their culture and their fierce defense of it. These are a proud people but also the most compassonate, generous, open and giving people on the planet if you have given them no reason to suspect your intentions. If a person goes to Moscow to stir up trouble and try to be a missionary to a country with a established religion of 1000 years they ought to be turned back at the border. If someone goes there with the intention of stirring up Samoyed unrest, then they deserve to be detained. The Rodina has no perogative to allow outsiders in to create problems. If you hear other visitors to Russia complain about their treatment there, most likely the did something to deserve it. Russia does not tolerate Blacks, gays, or Jehovahs Witnesses and us Anglos on our protected isolated shores can not begin to empathize with the Russian psyche on xenophobia until we spend 300 years under the golden horde and see invasion after invasion strike for a millenia. So if you want to go there and be a nice visitor you will have a beautiful time and if you wish to go there and be judgemental and hostile to a beautiful (all the women are gorgeous and there are no fat people) and unique people I hope you get what you deserve. I don't mean to be so defensive about Slavonic culture but I feel that need tugging at me, for whatever reason at 20 years of age I spent 2 years running around Yugoslavia defending Slavonic culture with a far more powerful tool of persuasion than what my writing on Dooyoo is considered by my opponents. Now to validate the way
I spent my life, two important years when I should have been at college drinking beer and playing ping pong instead of sitting around a bombed out apartment building burning newspapers to keep warm, listening to Danijela, eating stank Kielbas and singing WW2 songs with a bunch of Russians. People wonder why I am so messed up and full of hate, well I will for once explain the truth. I walk down the street and see normal people, people whose eyes can brighten and fill with happiness when they think about the crap they want to buy or bars they want to visit. I read these peoples Ops about wasting a week on the Beach in Ibiza and I envy them so much, not their luxury and ease, but the fact that someone can walk away from problems and their "stress". I guess I am pretty jealous of people who can just relax and not see nightmare images of stupid crap they did as a kid. My point is I need to defend and protect Russia against all detractors since Russia more or less defines Slavicness (Dokic, Hingis Kournikouva, yum yum eat em up), I do this because I somehow have to absolve the fact that 22 months of my life were spent doing so in the forests of Bosnia, and If it isn't worth my words now, it wasn't worth my blood then. I don't make excuses. I love the Russians and the slavonic peoples but what happened is I got wrenched out of a basic drab all American life of college classes and working at a burger joint to go sit in the Desert for 6 months because I made the mistake of joining the reserve "For one weekend each month and two weeks in the summer". Well I suddenly felt like a big shot and a superstar when I had a gun that I was actually allowed to shoot. I go from facing the 5th most powerful army in the world back to some sorry ass college classroom where I am supposed to learn about World History from some puke that had dodged the draft by going to college and missed out on Vietnam. Here he is talking about Economy of Power and all this cr
ap when I just watched it in 4-D weeks earlier. Profs all of a sudden telling you that getting your paper written is a "big responsibility" when a month earlier your CO is telling you that if you don't hold the line 236 men will die. I go from having my life run by men who earned their stripes in the Mekong Delta to having a boss at Pizza Hut who earned her credentials through Job Corp. So I flipped out and when I heard about Bosnia and all that it did not take me long to find a crew to run with. And now almost ten years later I find my life still wrapped up as a big apology for what I did. So I just want to say I am forced to see Russia and the slavonic world through different eyes, if they are wrong than I am wrong for defending their world. One other thing, I wish I could write an Op on "One good night's sleep". That is all I want at this point. I dunno, I know my biggest detractors on here are a bunch of punk college kids thinking they have all the answers. Sometimes I just go over to a local campus to listen to the kids talk about how pretty their world is, like I said, that is what I enjoyed about these Russian kids, their life is still a clean open slate and it will be a good 6 years before they are broken down and used up. But I see these college kids talking their smack, pushing their play on everyone, "Can you believe that man, I nailed me a Beta Phi", I hear some punk ass kid say, all gloating he nailed a girl from a soroiety that was off limits to his frat, I wonder what he thinks of systimatically employing rape as a tool of policy. I wonder if he would like it or puke his guts out the first time he sees his 'brothers' {(his brothers are a bunch of other stupid bastards whose parents find it worthy to pay big bucks for his right to have particular friends. "Maya Bratan" were men who would die and kill for me, not swat me in the ass with a canoe paddle.} brutally rape and beat a Sigma MU Pi or what
ever girl in the middle of campus to teach the locals not to cut phone lines. I hear these other kids boasting about their skill in playing frisbee golf "I hit that at 60 yard", well at his age I was hitting guys from 600 yards (Russians might not be able to make a decent car but the Dragunov is the finest good ever produced) I just wish my life was so damn silly and meaningless as to call a crisis not having something to wear to a rave. I guess the funny thing is that I saw this same crap go down before. Like I said my Mom is German and her father Danish, do the math on that one and figure it out. I know I am rambling on and all that but i know people want to know why I am so mean and angry and uneducated and why I defend Russia no matter what. I guess this is the answer.

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