How old is old?

Russia is not the place to come if you are a single women above the age of twenty-five and are anything other than supremely comfortable with that. Or at least that's been my experience. Whilst travelling from Vladivostock to Moscow this summer, the most common question I was asked was about my age. The conversation usually went something like this:

Local: How old are you?
Me: Thirty
Local: Thirty??!!! What do your children think about you leaving them to go travelling?
Me: I don't have any children
Local: No children? What does your husband say about that?
Me: I'm not married

At this point, several people basically told me to get a move on, one man asked me, quite seriously, if I realised that no one would marry me now, and one woman recommended a particular shrine in Siberia to me, where women went to pray to God to send them a husband and children. The point of this is that ideas about age are slightly different here, partly because life expectancy is lower. In 2009 CNN reported that the chance of a 18-year-old man reaching retirement age in Russia was only 50%, vs. 90% in the West. In this context, leaving it till past thirty to get married and have children is leaving it a bit late.

Yesterday I had a conversation about mid-life crises with my english conversation class. I explained that this was something people might go through around the age of forty-five or so, to which one man pointed out to me that in Russia that was a bit late to be having a mid-life crisis, when you might well only live for another ten years (he was slightly on the pessimistic side here - life expectancy at birth is 62.8 for men and 74.7 for women. Still, the figure for men is more than fifteen years lower than the comparable figure for men in the UK).

Paying for language school

Today I needed to pay for the next couple of months of language school. "Oh, ok," you say, "so you went into the school and paid by credit card", at which point I fall off my chair and roll around on the floor laughing. Hellllooooo?! [knocks on computer screen]. We are talking about a country where I need to get a form filled out and signed in order to take a suitcase out my apartment building. Let me explain to you the ways of paying for language school.

Task 1: Find the director of the school
You might think this would be easy, that he would be in his office, between the hours of, oh, say, ten and three in the afternoon, but in thinking this way you would be completely wrong. In fact, on any particular day, he might not come in at all, or he might spend the entire day in the cafeteria. When you have found him, you tell him that you want to extend your stay in Russia, and then he tells you approximately how much this is going to cost you in roubles.

Task 2: Collect the money
Since almost everything is done in cash here, you now need to assemble $1,500, using cash machines. This will almost certainly take up a couple of days, unless you feel like risking your debit card being stopped by the bank and causing you the mother of all hassles.

Task 3: Get first lot of forms
Now you have so much cash you can't close your wallet, go and find the director again. At this point he will then fill out and give you your first two forms and two copies of your contract, which you will need when you try to extend your stay in the общежитие (this is a whole other story).

Task 4: Swap one form for another
Take one of the forms, go downstairs to a different office, and swap it there for another form.

Task 5: Go to bank
Take both forms, and then take a tram for 20 minutes and find the bank. There is only one bank you can use, so don't bother trying anywhere else. When you get there, you will be required to stand in a queue for at least half and hour, at which point the lady behind the counter (it always is a lady) will take both of your forms, and use the information on them to fill out two more forms. She will also stamp your existing forms. She will then give you all four forms back, and you will need to stand in another queue in order to give someone else your massive wads of cash. This person may well then tell you that all the computers in the bank are currently broken so they can't take your money, at which point you must resist the urge to tear your hair out. Eventually they will start working again, at which point she will take the two forms the first lady gave you, stamp them, tear bits off, staple receipts to them, and give them back to you.

Task 6: Back to the director
Go back to the school, taking with you the four forms you have collected, and show them to the director. He will take two of the forms back, photocopy them, and give you the photocopies. He will then update your student card. Then take your two remaining forms to another room and give them to the people there, along with two passport photos of yourself, a copy of your contract, and your passport. They will in turn give you a piece of paper that you can show the police if they stop you, explaining that they [the school] have your passport.

Task 7: Wait ten days
After ten days, go back to the final room and collect your passport and a photocopy of your new visa indicating that you are going to be a student for another two months. Congratulations! Now you must go back to the общежитие and do the same thing there.

Total number of forms/ miscellaneous pieces of paper: 6. Affect on blood pressure: terrible. As to why this is all necessary, I have no idea. There must be a small mountain of paperwork on me scattered around Moscow, or there would be, if I wasn't convinced that as soon as I have left the room they just tip it all in the bin. But, as one librarian said, after my friend exploded on hearing how many forms she would need to fill out to get a library card, "bureaucracy makes life interesting."

Spring in Russia

Today the temperature went up to 4 degrees Celsius. Spring is here and the snow is beginning to melt, which means it is time to un-sellotape the windows in my room. In January when the temperature first went down to -20, my roommate and I duct-taped all round the windows. This didn't stop the cold air getting in, so we then tried to insulate all round the windows using foam sticks they sell here for that purpose. That didn't work either, so we papered over the worst-offending window with newspaper, again without much success, except to deepen the already permanent gloom in the place. Finally, facing a choice between light and warmth (I was already sleeping under 13 layers at this point, and it was still getting colder), we sellotaped the curtains together and to the wall. We unstuck the curtains sometime in February, and today, we opened the window for the first time since December. This may sound gross, but you have no idea how cold it gets here - it went down to -35, which is the coldest I have ever experienced. Anyway, all the Russians do it too (probably without the curtains bit), so it wasn't just us being pathetic.

The authorities here have been preparing for the melt as well. People have been breaking up the top layers of snow (presumably to increase the surface area), and for some reason they have also been slicing off the front part of the snow blocks that cover all the flower beds, so there is a gap between the snow and the metal railings that delineate the flower beds from the pavement. I have seen people do this so I know it is happening, but I am not sure why. Trying to allow air to get to the soil? Trying to ensure when everything melts it goes into the soil and not all over the pavement?

British scientists discover...

This is something that came up in my English conversation group a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about "what women want" or something, and for some reason one of the students asked me if I knew any jokes about British scientists (I didn't). Apparently here in Russia there are lots of jokes about British scientists doing bizarre or pointless research. So if someone has done some research to show that alcohol makes you drunk or something similarly self-evident, they will say that it was probably done by a British scientist. I am not sure what to make of this, especially because it is not only in Russia - another student said there are lots of Czech jokes about British scientists as well. Not really complementary, but definitely interesting.

The joys of В Контакте

Russians don't really use Facebook that much, instead they have В Контакте. I have no idea if this is better for keeping in touch with your friends, but it is a lot more useful for learning languages. On В Контакте you can watch films, TV shows, music videos etc etc, in Russian, for free. This is probably illegal but people seem quite relaxed about copyright here. Currently I am watching the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast in Russian whilst trying to read Lermontov. The songs are pretty distracting, because since I know all the words in English (and why not?), I keep trying to predict how they will translate them whilst trying to keep the rhymes (like "large" and "barge" when Gaston is singing about how many eggs he eats).

But the best thing so far about В Контакте is a Russian soap opera set at the beginning of the 19th century called Бедная Настя. It's weirdly addictive, a bit like Sunset Beach (with similar production values and believability of story lines). I think it was made for the hard-of-thinking, because everyone speaks really slowly, so I can actually understand what they are saying. Plus, like Sunset Beach, nothing ever happens. You can skip four or five episodes and the same people will still be in the same room talking about the same thing, which means lots of repetition of vocabulary. One girl spent three episodes complaining about being locked in her room, trying to pick the lock with a variety of knitting needles, combs, hair pins etc, before it occurred to her that she could just climb out the window. Another scene involved a serf theatre rehearsing Romeo and Juliet in Russian, with the барин yelling at some poor serf girl about how could she not know the balcony scene - EVERYONE knows the balcony scene. I can't think of any British soap operas where people quote Shakespeare (although to be fair, this may be because I don't watch any British soap operas). Yes, so Бедная Настя is fantastic, even if they do dance to pop music at their balls.

Is the basement infested with asbestos?

On the whole, I think it is. I looked online at some photos of asbestos cladding around pipes, and it looks like what is in the basement of the общежитие by the washing machine room. The pipes that have fibres flaking off them continuously. Since I have been walking by these pipes four times a week for the last six months, this is less than ideal. It also means I should probably do the rest of my washing by hand in my room. I tried this last week and it made me very grateful for washing machines - it takes an age, the soap is a pain to get out of the clothes, and then you have to wait two days for everything to dry. On the other hand, it is a lot better than lung cancer.

There is a possibility that the whole building is, in fact, made of asbestos.

Maslenitsa!

This was three weeks ago, but I’ve only just managed to borrow a cable to transfer my photos from my camera to my computer. Maslenitsa is a week long religious and folk festival before the start of Orthodox lent. It may have originally been a festival to celebrate the Sun and the end of winter. Nowadays it is the last week in which Christians are allowed to eat milk, cheese and other dairy products before Lent, so people make pancakes all week long.

I went with my roommate to Suzdal, a town on the Golden Ring. Suzdal is the Russian version of Lacock, in that it has been protected from development and hence is used in all period dramas, with the locals often roped in as extras.

We got there on the Friday night, after an epic journey from Moscow bus station that took us 6 hours and involved passing three car crashes, all to cover the same distance as from London to Nottingham. I suppose this is why the oligarchs have helicopters. On the Saturday morning though, the horrendous journey seemed worth it. Suzdal was covered in snow, and not the way Moscow is where it looks like someone has spray painted the snow deep brown, but snow like in movies, which somehow never gets dirty or slushy.

Nativity of the Virgin Cathedral

Believe it or not there a river in this picture

We traipsed down to the open air architecture museum, where the day began with a parade that involved some people in traditional costume and other people dressed as geese, followed by Round 1 in the Goose Fighting competition. Unfortunately, these geese were lovers not fighters, so it took a lot of coaxing from their keepers before they started biting each other. As I understand it, technically it is supposed to go to First Blood, but the audience got bored way before that and started yelling, so the organisers ended the fight and determined the winner based on points (I have no idea how that works). 

Next came climbing up a pole to grab a prize stuck at the top. Presumably for reasons of increased grip, most participants seemed to think this was best done wearing as few clothes as possible. I should note that it was pretty cold, probably twelve below zero or something, with a biting wind, and it snowed pretty much non-stop. If you made it to the top, apart from the adoration of the crowd, you got a roast goose. 

How to get hypothermia in pursuit of a goose

 

Throughout the day there was traditional music and dancing, sledging, rides in horse-drawn sleighs, a game which involved hitting your opponent with a pillow until they fell off a log, and a never-ending tug-of-war. There were no teams, passers by just piled in on whichever side looked like losing, and then left when they had had enough, to be replaced immediately by others. And whenever it all got too cold, you could buy hot pancakes and tea, spiced wine or sbiten, a honey-based drink. Alternatively you could go and sit in the wooden church, which was warm (this option was very popular).

Trying to knock your friend off a log with a pillow

Jingle bells

Not sure why there was a sword fight but hey...

Massive snowball fight which resulted in the total destruction of the snowhouse (this was the aim)

The following day was pretty much the same but in a different location, and ended at around 4pm with the burning of the baba, a figure of a woman who personifies winter.  After that, everyone rapidly disappeared, and we were left with another mammoth journey back to Moscow, during which we left one person behind after stopping for a toilet break in the middle of nowhere.  Travelling in Russia is not without risk.

Goodbye, Winter!

Why are the English bad at learning languages?

One of the first things I noticed when I started at my language school here was that 60% of the student body was from East Asia (China, Japan and Korea).  I hadn’t given much thought to what nationalities would be in the school, but if you’d asked me to guess, I wouldn’t have come up with there being twice as many South Koreans as British people. Why were the Koreans studying Russian? The answer I got from everyone was that it would be useful for a career in business. Russia (along with Brazil, India and China) is one of the BRIC countries, a group of key emerging market countries that are expected to be at the forefront of the shift in global economic power away from G7 countries to the developing world.

If Russia is going to become increasingly important, why aren’t more British students studying Russian? If we are all going to be competing for a piece of the economic growth here, a big advantage will accrue to countries that can field workers familiar with both the language and the culture.

Russkiy Mir, a foundation set up to promote Russian language and culture around the world, estimates that 300,000 Chinese and 150,000 German school children are studying Russian. In England and Wales I estimate the number is more like 12,000-15,000, i.e. Germany has more than ten times the number of children studying Russian than England and Wales.

Russian is a minority language in the UK, and is probably only offered by a small number of schools, but these low numbers are part of the wider problem of language tuition in English schools. There has been a fair amount of comment on language learning in the press (well, in the Guardian anyway), but sometimes it seems to me that people just accept that English people are bad at languages, as though it were some law of nature we couldn’t change if we wanted to. There is often an unspoken feeling that foreign countries superior to us in language skills have an “unfair” advantage, because they watch US films, listen to US music and play US video games.

But there is a simpler explanation as to why so few English people speak a foreign language: we don’t study them for very long. England requires children to study a foreign language for 3 years (ages 11-14), compared with an average of 8.2 years across a group of other nations investigated by INCA, an organisation that compares education policies across countries [I added in Germany and the US, using Texas as a stand-in for the latter].  Note that Welsh and Scottish children seem much better off [Figure 1]

Figure 1. Source: INCA, Texas Department of Education

English children also study languages for fewer hours per school year than in other countries. At age 14, the government recommends that children in England study a foreign language for 72 hours across the school year, compared with 126 hours in France, and 114 in Germany. [Figure 2] The combination of fewer years of language teaching, and fewer hours in those years, means that at the end of compulsory education, an English child will have had 70% fewer hours of language teaching than their equivalents in France or Germany. [Figure 3] Ta-da! There’s no magic stopping us from learning languages, we just don’t put the hours in.

Figure 2. Source: INCA, own estimates

Figure 3. Source: INCA, own estimates

All this suggests a fairly simple route for improving the foreign language skills of the average school child – teach them for longer. According to a Eurobarometer survey from 2005, 78% of people in the UK agree with the statement “everyone in the European Union should be able to speak one language in addition to their mother tongue”. If we are serious about this we have to make a longer period of language tuition compulsory.

There are three main objections I can see to this. Firstly, it is difficult to learn languages, so it’s not fair to force less academic children to study them; secondly, we don’t have enough language teachers to pull this off; and thirdly, there isn’t enough space on the timetable to double the number of hours a week children spend on languages.

As I sit here, taking a break from trying to stuff Russian verbs into my head, I can’t honestly say that languages are easy. In fact, I often complain to myself that if only I had started learning Russian at six rather than sixteen, I wouldn’t have to bother with any of this. And that is the answer – start teaching languages at primary school. It makes no sense to only begin teaching languages to someone when their natural ability to learn them has already fallen off dramatically. Of course, you could argue that there are too many children with English as a second language to worry about teaching children anything other than English in primary school. But obviously, since I brought it up, I don’t think this a good argument. Less than 10% of British people speak a language other than English as their mother tongue. Even allowing for some skew towards young people, this doesn’t seem prohibitively high to me, since Germany has a similar proportion of its population with a mother tongue other than German, and they manage to teach languages just fine.

I don’t think finding language teachers should be an insurmountable problem either. Primary schools could have one language teacher each, who would teach all the classes in that school, or language teachers could be peripatetic and teach at several schools in one area. If there aren’t enough qualified people in England, hire qualified foreigners.

The third obstacle, that there isn’t enough space in the timetable, is the most difficult. It depends on what our priorities are. What do children need to learn?  How do we compare the importance of a foreign language with the importance of drama, or history, or design? It should at least give us pause that other countries almost uniformly give languages a much higher priority than we do.  Which brings me back to my own situation, sitting in a tiny box room in Moscow, trying to learn Russian. I am doing this because if I want to work in an international organisation, from the UN to the EU to the World Bank, I need to speak another language. Speaking a foreign language is an advantage in many companies, and this will only become more true, if the economic prosperity of the UK comes to depend more and more on the BRICs and other emerging markets. An ability to cut shapes out of MDF is not, however, likely to be required.