I guess I should explain who 'we' is and why I'm here.
The 'we' is the students in the Duke in Russia program, a two-month study abroad program run by Duke. It's a great program. I've participated in it as a student and then later as a chaperone/assistant to the director. And that's what I'm doing this year. Through machinations not entirely clear to me, the director of the summer program came up short one assistant and since she knew I had experience with her program she asked me.
I've known about this trip for the past 6 months. That's not just good planning, it's absolutely necessary. Russia continues to make it difficult for foreigners (let's just say Americans, okay) to visit the country. In order to freely walk the streets of Saint Petersburg, you have to be invited (by a person, a business, or a hotel). Then you send your invitation, along with an obscene pile of money, and an invasive application to the consulate and you get a visa. The whole process takes no less than 12 weeks, but 6 months is a safer bet.
Since i'm not a political scientist, I can't accurately explain why Russia puts up all the obstacles, but I'm happy to speculate. I'd say that it's a combination of Cold War thinking -- back when out countries distrusted each other so profoundly that any contact with the enemy was suspect -- and unfounded rhetoric about Western Decadence. After all, according to the popular press, America gave Russia drug addiction, AIDS, and violent crime. We tried to give them Justin Bieber, which certainly would have brought the Krelim to its knees, but we were rebuffed.
This is an amazingly exciting time to be in Russia and I'm really happy to have this chance to help out with the program again. Russia has just "elected" Vladimir Putin for another term and the jails are rapidly filling up with people who voted against him.
In St. Petersburg there is a new law that says that you also get a free trip to jail if you say that same sex families are just as okay as opposite sex families. For example, if a lesbian couple tells their child that their family is just as worthy as a family with a mother and father, that's considered propaganda in favor of pedophilia (yes, they are equating sex with minors with sex between consenting, same-sex adults) and the lesbian parents are subject to arrest. How's that going to twist a kid's brain?
So, in any event, it's an interesting time to be here.
If you are wondering what's happened to my life back in SF, here's the deal. Richard and the dog, Bogart, are keeping one another company during my absence. As for my job teaching ESL, I'm doing that from Russia. It's really no different from being in SF.
Okay, that's a lie. there's an 11 hour time difference and whereas California specializes in all sorts of agriculture, delicious wine, interesting foods, and so on, it's sort of a cabbage and potato scene here. Nonetheless, I rarely work face-to-face with students, so it doesn't matter where I'm living. For dinner tonight while I was logged in doing my SF job, I enjoyed a steaming plate of dumplings and broccoli (something from the more interesting branch of the brassica family).
Doing my SF job from here is a piece of cake. It took all of 15 minutes today for me to buy a cell phone and a USB modem for my computer. Now I've got stellar internet speeds wherever I want them.
It's interesting how well-developed cell technology is here. Back in the 90s when I first started coming to Russia, there were no cell phones and landline phones were awful. You spent most of your time screaming "hello!" into the receiver trying to see if you had a connection. The line would go dead all the time and when it was working, you'd hear other people's conversations bleeding through. Dreadful. No one lingered on the phone.
So, when cell technology came along, there was no interest in fixing the decrepit landline system. People just switched wholesale to cell phones. In fact the hotel I'm staying in took out all of the landlines because they, apparently, were being forced to pay for a trunk line that no one used anyways.
Today I paid just over $80 for a brand new cell phone (nothing flashy) and a cell modem for my computer. I should get about a month or so of use from each of them before I'll need to top up my account with more minutes (a trivial expense). Take that, Verizon!
Tomorrow I hope to have interesting snapshots from the Victory Day celebrations to share.
