The first month (or so).

You'll have to pardon this entry, it may drift towards being a bit of a rant.

I've been here in Petersburg for three weeks now. I'm settled in as much as I can be; I've got something like a routine of class and home time. It makes as good a time to sit down and reflect a little bit on things as any.

The initial panic is gone. This may not be exactly what I hoped for, and it may wind up being the loneliest nine months of my life, but, barring any emergencies, I'm here for the duration. Even if I don't get everything that I want out of it in terms of language acquisition, it'll still have been an experience, and I'll still have learned lessons.

It's not exactly what I hoped for, though. Not that I had terrible concrete expectations; I usually don't. But I didn't really appreciate just how hard it would be to be alone in a country where you don't really speak or understand the language. From ordering a meal to figuring out why the babushka doesn't like your student card, everything is a challenge at best; at worst, it's impossible. (Example: I still don't know how I'm going to get a haircut. And yeah, I'm starting to need one.) This also contributes to the loneliness: if you can't even eavesdrop on random conversations, you start to feel completely isolated in your own head.

I think I imagined that there'd be a natural peer group with the other students at my school. What I failed to understand, however, is that almost every other person there would be Chinese, that they'd all be much younger than me, and that they'd all be studying with the hopes of entering the University proper next year. Really, the key there is that they're all Chinese. They all speak the same language, they all have the same culture, and they all very naturally tend to stick together. And the language--they speak it a lot, and loudly. I sometimes think that on any given weekday I hear more Chinese than I do Russian. (The concept of putting your phone on vibrate seems also to elude them; I get treated to snippets of three or four extremely loud presumably Chinese pop songs per class, not counting when they just play music--loudly--during breaks.) If I had this to do over again, I'd have went to Robin's school, or one of the private schools here in Petersburg. But it's too late now.

Where does this leave me? More or less on my own. Somehow I've got to find folks here to talk to. The people feeding the ducks on the canals, waitresses, random strangers in shopping malls, whoever, whenever possible. I'd like to find some sort of more or less natural way to talk to folks, but I can't see what that would be right now. I may start trying to figure out when football or hockey matches are and going to hang out in bars. Bad for my liver and lungs, and maybe all I'd be able to talk about is football and hockey. But it's something. Classes, while they have their place, ultimately can't really be the central focus of my experience here. They're more like an excuse to have a visa that lasts nine months.

One of the things this whole off year was potentially offered as an opportunity for was pro bono work. For good or ill, I didn't take that path. But being here has made me appreciate a few things. First, the US. It's not perfect, and we've definitely got a lot of assholes hanging around. And we've got a political system that seems to turn our brains off and make us into football hooligans, more concerned with loyalty to our little tribe and making sure the other guy doesn't get any of the credit than with discovering rational solutions to our problems. But it's still a great place. I miss it daily. Second, I've got a new respect for people who come to another country not knowing the language--I'm thinking of recent immigrants to the States here, of course. I'm in something like their place--except that I'm basically a fairly affluent dilettante; they're actually struggling to survive in a place that's strange and hostile and isolating. Third, and this is related to the second, I've had a bit of a chance to experience what it means to be illiterate--to be surrounded all the time by symbols that you can't understand.

So I'll go on record here and say: If I can, when I get back, I'd like to get involved with helping recent immigrants learn English, or fighting adult illiteracy, or both. Hopefully the former won't require learning Spanish--if Russians can teach me Russian in Russian, surely I can teach Spanish-speakers English in English, right?

Anyway, that's it for the first month of this thing, or close enough to the first month not to make any difference. This post has been a lot of big talk; hopefully I'll be able to live up to it. It's a lot harder to actually go up to random Russians and start chatting them up than to write about it on a blog, especially when you're shy and a bit socially awkward even in your own language. (Or am I abrasive, or just a lousy conversationalist? Не знаю точно.) But that's what I think I have to do. Wish me luck--hopefully the future will be better than the past.