Today is a good day because I found a nice cafe that sells chickpea burgers and the cashier actually understood me without asking me to repeat my order. I celebrated by adding a pineapple/ginger/jasmine lemonade to my order. A good day.
In other news, today I am grateful for:
David’s visit.
David took an overnight train to arrive in Novosibirsk not-so-bright and early at 7 am on a Saturday morning (the sun doesn’t rise until almost 9am here). David is a fellow Fulbright ETA who is working at a pedagogical university in Omsk. He majored in political science and Russian but also knows a lot about finance. He is not - and this is an important and valuable characteristic - the kind of finance guy who will make you feel bad when you have to ask what it means when a company goes public or what do venture capitalists even do.
Just look at this big birdy boi and tell me you don’t get at least a little nervous.
David’s visit meant that Siobhan and I got to play tourist again. We made an encore trip to the zoo to show David the freakin’ massive birds that are somehow simultaneously both glamorous and chilling. We also got to see the two baby polar bears and their mama playing together, which I think really warmed all our little hearts in the subfreezing temperatures.
We also made a trip down to the riverbank, and I need to make a point of heading out there again soon. The river Ob moves slowly, so it freezes where it’s shallow close to the shore, and it’s extremely satisfying to throw rocks and see the perfect little rock-shaped holes they leave in the icy sheets. There’s an enormous Ferris wheel right there on the bank, and Siobhan (with her impressively good sense of geography) pointed out to David where our respective universities are located. From way up there in the clear cold dusk, Novosibirsk was really looking her best.
We wrapped up by getting dinner at what we thought was a Mexican place but was really just a bar that had fajitas on it’s menu. There was no salsa, but the ketchup they served with our fajitas was a little extra tangy, so that was something.
I am very grateful for these two wonderful humans and just the Fulbright community in general.
My new library card.
A few weeks ago, Siobhan went on a trip with some of her students to the local library, and excitedly reported back that they have an entire little room dedicated to books written in English. She got her library card right then and there, and a week later helped me get one too. There’s a pretty good selection and the two librarians who work there are so nice (but really aren’t all librarians just the loveliest people? Thinking about it now I’m really so grateful for every librarian I’ve ever met, like please keep up the stellar work.).
Last week I read a couple dozen short stories from Hemingway — I really liked “The End of Something,” really didn’t like “Up In Michigan,” and “Big Two-Hearted River” was okay. This week I checked out Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.” I think it’s kind of funny that I had to plant myself in Siberia before getting the motivation and interest to read some American classics. Besides the library card and new books, I’m so grateful to have the time to sit and read and not feel bad about it. I can’t think of a single book I read in full while I was at Syracuse. And not only do I have time to read these books, but I also have time to read about things like the beat generation and the iceberg theory and fall down all sorts of internet rabbit holes.
A rather glorious and patriotic portrait of myself.
I taught a class about how students prepare for college in the U.S., and one of the professors asked her students to create summaries and feedback for the lesson. I don’t have much to write about it, it’s just rad as hell but also really sweet. Again, so very grateful to be working with brilliant students.
Watching non-American films in a nice theater.
I love where I grew up and no matter where I am I will rave about central New Hampshire. I think our neck of the woods is so beautiful, just being there makes me excited to be alive and I think that’s an important quality in a landscape. But here’s my gripe with the Lakes Region — no good movie theaters. Well, maybe there are a few, but not within a reasonable driving distance of our home. The movie theater we went to growing up always showed movies long after their release dates and everything was always a little bit sticky and we would never go unless mom had reminded us nine times to wear a lot of layers because it’s always freezing inside.
There’s a movie theater in the center of Novosibirsk called Pobeda, which translates to “Victory.” I’s beautiful. It’s got a coat check. You have snack options like candy-coated popcorn or organic dried watermelon (I’m still not sure how that even works??). A week ago I found myself with no plans on a Friday night and absolutely no motivation to work on lesson plans. So, for the first time in my life, I went to see a movie by myself. I gotta say, that’s the way to do it. I suppose I just liked the freedom of being able to leave whenever I wanted without consulting anyone, in the case that I found the movie boring or I couldn’t understand it. I saw “The Frenchman,” which is a new Russian film directed by Andrei Smirnov. It’s his first film in three decades, is all black-and-white, and he used his retirement savings to finance the film. The film was, of course, all in Russian, so a lot of the details were lost on me. But I was able to more or less follow the story and stayed until the very end, which felt good.
And then just a few days ago I went to see and Xavier Dolan film called “Matthias and Maxime” (this time with friends). It’s a French film that ran with Russian subtitles but took place in Canada so there was also a lot of English. And the main character was moving to Australia. So, in short, this was the epitome of an international film, I think. It’s beautifully filmed, and if you get a chance to see it you should.
The thing about “Mathias and Maxime” is that several scenes in the beginning are set somewhere outside Montreal. “Somewhere outside Montreal,” if used quite generously, can describe the place I call home. Watching Matthias and Maxime drive through what looked like Franconia Notch to a place that could’ve been Squam Lake made me homesick. But I’m grateful for that too, to have a place I love so much that living 5,000 miles away from it is no thoughtless or easy thing (I know, what a cliché! But it’s true).