I AM THAT LITTLE CHRISTMAS TREE!!!!

Black Gold, Texas Tea (Or: Die Global Yuppie Scum)

Oil went down to like $35 a barrel yesterday, from summertime highs of nearly $150.

Russians typically blame America for the whole financial crisis; never mind their own matchless unmitigated greed and careless borrowing and lending.

(Towards the beginning of the year, one of my individual students said, "All of the new construction in town is being done by companies with nothing but borrowed money and being sold to people with nothing but borrowed money. Is that normal in America?" I just smiled and said, "Pretty much.")

If the CIA, or the World Bank, or the Trilateral Commision, actually DID plan this out, it was a good fucking plan. It wouldn't be too hard to manipulate the price of oil with unregulated speculation by both individuals and large investment firms, and to influence the "experts" (directly or indirectly) to predict that it would continue going up and hit $200 a barrel by the end of the year.

Therefore everybody in Iran, Venezuela and Russia go out and buy apartments in Cyprus and Malta, private jets and Hummers -- with bank credit (established in only the last few years in Russia), because all of their hard cash goes for overpriced clothes and nightclubs and keeping their mistresses fed and watered, and hey, profits by the end of the year should be even bigger.

Hah hah, surprise, heathen scum!

Hats off to you, then, CIA. . .

Every ESL Teacher's Nightmare

. . . or at least every middle-aged drunken ESL teacher's nightmare:

Teaching little kids.

You'd think that parents and administrations would be horrified at the thought of putting unsightly washed-up old guys in close quarters with little children, but it happens surprisingly often. (Insert Gary Glitter joke of your choice here.)

One reason for this, I suppose, is that the number of young female ESL teachers is considerably less than needed for the tremendous number of children who are being forced to study by overzealous parents.

I'm teaching a 4-year-old girl twice a week now, in individual classes (although the nanny or the bleach-blonde trophy wife-mama always sit in.) That sounds horrifying until I reveal to you that I taught kids as young as 2 and 3 in Thailand, in groups of up to twenty. (This kind of hyper-parenting is extremely common in Asia.)

Bad enough, that, but the worst are the 11 - 13 year olds, who are too old to be cowed much by the authority of a scruffy English teacher. Little kids you can at least make cry easily, and they spend half the time in the toilet anyway.

More bad news -- it's undoubtedly the wave of the future for this kind of English teaching. It'll only be a decade or so before primary and secondary school education is given pretty much completely in English, the world over. I don't know any statistics but even here in Nowheresville, Russia there are some schools that have all courses conducted in English.

(People will still speak Chinese or Urdu whatever at home, of course, but we'll see a global situation like India or Africa, where English is the language of business, politics and education.)

The good news? The world might end in 2012 anyway.

Desolation City, The Capital of Bleakland

This is the first December since 2000 I can remember in which there has been no snow. (And I can remember only one other November in which there was no snow.)

You'd think we might dread the onslaught of the five or six feet of snow the falls here every year, but in fact it brightens things up considerable.

Now there's just a depressing and pervasive greyness. The sun creeps up a bit above the horizon at about 9:00am or so, generally just turning the thick cloud layer a bit less black, the dark grey buildings into light grey buildings, and then is pretty much gone by 4:00pm.

The only spot of color is the fucking billboards and advertisements, which are like every twenty feet these days.

Asshole

I was out with one of the last surviving English groupies last night. As we were leaving the ubiquitous sushi restaurant, she pointed out the dirty, raggedy grey Vans sports shoes I was wearing.

"Yeah, I know, they're a bit old and ratty, but they're very comfortable, and I like them."

"A Russian person wouldn't do this," she said scoldingly.

I sighed, and said, "And that's just one of many reasons we're better than you."

Honk If You Hate Americans

I was coming home from a nightclub a few weeks ago and the driver, hearing my terrible, bizarrely-accented Russian, asked me where I was from.

I said the Czech Republic, as I often do, and that I was an engineer working at the chocolate factory.

The driver said (in Russian): "That's cool. At least you aren't American. I hate those guys."

Then he bitched about the anti-missile defense shield for awhile.

The Mayan Apocalypse

We were discussing future tense in class the other day, and the subject of the world ending in 2012 (as per the Mayan calendar) came up.

What would I do if I knew the world were going to end in 4 years?

I'd sit around more and watch THE SHIELD and old horror movies, and read comic books I've downloaded from BitTorrent.

I mean, come on. Enough of this drunken floundering around. Die with some dignity.

More Viewer Mail

Email from old college friend, Petits Choux:

October 20 at 7:12pm
Like your blog. It's surprisingly...tame. Not sure what I was expecting...

Talk soon.


Reply:
English Teacher X

October 20 at 10:16pm

The more insane stories are in the older entires, 2005 - 2006, and on the older blog. Those years were pretty much a blur of absinthe. . . and there are more lengthy and detailed stories on the website. The last year I've had to watch my mouth very carefully, after one former teacher wanted to fight me over something I wrote.

Crazy shit still happens, but too many people have found out about this blog now and I often can't write about them.

Just as an example: two girls I know went to America to work as strippers in Atlantic City -- one of the girls I know here, former girlfriend and occasional fuck-buddy, revealed to me she recently started fucking one of their boyfriend here, an American basketball player on loan to a Russian team.

I sent this girl a text message the next morning reading, "I had nightmares last night about your fucking (Natasha)'s ghetto boyfriend!"

Through some quirk of the Russian mobile phone networks, this message was accidentally delivered to one of the secretaries at the school. And coincidentally, there is a girl named (Natasha) who works in the office. . .

I might still write about that, actually, it's so funny. . .

Pussies Looking For Pussy

It's no secret that there are pretty much only two kinds of people who come to Russia to teach -- gap-year kids who have studied Russian language or history or politics, and (usually middle-aged, but not always) guys looking for Russian babes.

The problem with the latter bunch is they've gone from being the insane two-fisted drinking adventurers to cloistered 40-year-old virgin types.

Just today I got a letter from one of our Lonely Hearts Club of applicants for January that he was reconsidering his application because he had heard that (Vodkaberg) is "dangerous for foreigners."

Ooooh! Look at the baby bawl! Bawl, baby! Bawl!

Whatever happened to the good old days when telling an English teacher a place was dangerous was a good way to pique their interest in the place. . . Having your ass kicked is an important part of the real Russian cultural experience!

A Prostitute's Tale

So we were hanging around on the embankment during the summer; my occasional half-girlfriend and two of my younger colleagues. A few beers into the evening, she decides to good naturedly find us some additional female company and approaches a few likely prospects with the lure of speaking to some foreigners.

One of them really looks familiar to me - they join us and it takes me a good twenty minutes to figure out that one of them is a prostitute, who another friend of ours had sex with at a banya (a Russian sauna) a few months previously.

Of course she's not about to say, "Hey, remember me, I'm that prostitute your friend had sex with at the sauna a few months ago!" But I finally said something like, "It's nice to see you again," and she sheepishly asked if the other guys remembered her. I said I didn't think so.

But of course they did, after I told them. . .

We drank beer all night; at about five in the morning we talked them into going to a banya with us.

The half girlfriend had gone home by this time; I got somewhat cozy with the prostitute's cousin, while the prostitute herself developed a (free of charge)liking for one of my colleagues. . . the one guy who thought he had some moral qualms about the whole deal.

Beautiful story eh?

He went away for a holiday, and it took him a few weeks of grappling with it to get over the qualms and call her to go out, by which time the summer was over and she soon left to go back up north to get married.

And they all lived happily ever after.

When Hell Is Full, The Dead Will Walk The Earth

Just finished watching the original DAWN OF THE DEAD for the first time in about fifteen years. I like it better than the remake; it illustrates a bit more vividly the fun of running amok in a shopping mall in the post-apocalyptic world.

A couple of years ago a married colleague asked to borrow a zombie movie; I was surprised, as he had expressed no previous interest in them.

He explained that his wife didn't ordinarily let him watch zombie movies but she had gone back to the village for a few days.

If being able to watch zombie movies means being single forever, I'm dying a bachelor. Happily.



(You zombie fans out there who play Urban Dead -- www.urbandead.com -- can look for English Teacher X in and around Bale Mall.)

Goin' For The Gold

Last class of the day: Level Seven. The topic: second conditional. The question: What would you do if you had $1,000,000?

The blonde girl spoke up. "I'd buy a house in Spain. I'd live there and spend all my money going to clubs and buying clothes. And I'd find a husband and get married there."

"But if you spent all your money now, then you wouldn't have any when you're old. You'd have to dig through dumpsters for food," I pointed out.

"I'd have my husband for money, after that. . . what?"

I'm smirking. "A typical Russian girl answer."

"Not only Russian girls! I think all girls, or girls from many countries. . ." Another student mentions The Coen brothers film Intolerable Cruelty.

"Well, maybe, but let's put it this way: if looking for rich husbands was an Olympic sport, Russia would be the undisputed world champions. . ."

Karma Chamelion

Interesting little article I saw on Yahoo:

Suddenly, it may be cool to be an American again

I spent most of the 90's travelling around Europe and Asia, and everyone, male and female alike, made adoring puppy eyes at me when I told them I was from America and deluged me with questions about the place.

I haven't, of course, done much traveling beyond Russia post 9-11, but I certainly know that after about 2003 the puppy eyes turned into sudden vicious sneers when you tell people you're American.

Saying you're Canadian is always good, as the guy says. Or somewhere nobody has heard of, like Lichtenstein. We used to say South Africa, but most Russians are too stupid to know that there are a lot of white people living in South Africa.

The Dark Olive Garden of The Soul

Excerpt from instant messenger conversation with old college friend:

11:36pm Petits Choux

how's the food?

11:37pm English Teacher X

in Moscow? or in Russia?

11:38pm Petits Choux

where you are, in general.

11:38pm English Teacher X

pretty awful, although there's good local fresh produce

restaurants are divided between bad pizza places and sushi restaurants that aren't too bad

not too much fast food yet, surprisingly

http://www.ilpatio.ru/

this is a popular place -- sort of a Russian version of the Olive Garden

11:40pm Petits Choux

your hangout?

11:40pm English Teacher X

The same company runs a chain sushi place, the Russian TGIFridays, and a Starbucks knock off.

Cheerful, eh?

11:40pm Petits Choux

do you drink lots of tea?

11:41pm English Teacher X

sadly, yeah, it's got some of the cheaper beer prices in town

i do, actually, now

but mostly green

and camomille in the evening to sooth my shattered soul

11:42pm Petits Choux

you need a little sugar in your bowl...

11:42pm English Teacher X

i need a lot of things, baby

mainly, some inspiration

11:43pm Petits Choux

are you interested in marriage, kids etc?

11:43pm English Teacher X

why I was making out with two 20 year old girls in a sauna the other morning, and I was hardly even aroused by it. . .

well to have marriage and kids, first you need somebody you want to marry

i've pretty much decided Russians are out of the question for that

11:44pm Petits Choux

definitely sounds like burnout...

11:45pm English Teacher X

of course, it wasn't like I was made unhappy by it, it just wasn't any more fun then watching THE SHIELD

and then of course the age thing is getting to be a problem, I get older and older and the 20 year olds stay the same.

11:46pm Petits Choux

you're approaching dirty old mandom..

11:46pm English Teacher X

i think I've only gone out with two girls more than 30 in my entire life. . .

11:47pm Petits Choux

when you were in high school?

11:48pm English Teacher X

my life is so immature I have nothing in common with older women

student life, now that I can dig.

11:49pm Petits Choux

well, I guess the green tea will keep you young so what the hell..

11:50pm English Teacher X

kind of stopped drinking vodka and absinthe, too

after an event in which I tried to choke one of my colleagues into unconsciousness. . .

a good start, right?

What You Like Do In You Free Time?

One of my goals, upon becoming Director of Studies, was to set up a good library of novels and DVDs for the use of the teachers. I've spent enough time in foreign countries wishing for some good books or films that I considered it a real priority in helping new teachers get settled.

So of course, when I tell the new teachers, "And here's our library of 100-something novels, which run the gamut from detective novels and thrillers to classics of all sorts, along with plenty of historical stuff about Russia" they generally just look at me like:

"What the hell am I supposed to do with a book?"

As for the DVDs, I'm surprised how many people come here without a laptop computer. (And then in some cases, are too shy or broke to go out and get a TV and a DVD player.)

Perhaps people thought they were coming here to get away from staring at screens in their free time. Noble sentiment, but believe me, staring at the wall isn't much better.

Especially when you've got a hangover or a bad cold or something. . .

Viewer Mail

I think a lot of people don't really read this shit; they just see some pictures of cleavage and think, "Whoa! English teaching looks awesome!"

Got this email the other day:

Hello englishteacherx.
You sound like a very happy guy!
Can you please give me more info about ESL:
-RESOURCES
-countries that are most suitable for a man eg in Latin America.
etc
-whatever a man should know to have fun, do well, meet girls there etc, when he is older than you are.
Thanks


My response was this:

The primary bit of advice is to have a lot of money already. The starting salary as an English teacher won't allow you much luxury, and your standard of living is likely to be low. Women aren't going to be impressed with a middle-aged guy who doesn't have a car or a house or much in the way of career prospects, even if he's a foreigner, because there are probably plenty of those around them already.

Speaking the language helps a lot. Visiting a country before you take a job there is a good idea. As for resources, I assume if you found my website, you already know about Dave's ESL Cafe www.eslcafe.com

Good luck,
X

The guy responded immediately with this:

Mr X,
I really appreciate your time.
wILL your forum (or another?) cover topics like "dating students(over 18), without risking looking silly, due to your job "?
I hope your happy.
Thanks


I offered up the following safe advice:

ah, it happens, quite a bit actually, but again, you're back to the issue of English teachers not being very good catches -- these girls are mostly studying English because they're already rich and they travel a lot, or because they're trying to get good jobs where they can make a lot of money. The days of students slavering after their English teachers probably ended about 5 years ago, but it's still within the realm of the possible.

I think I'd suggest getting qualified and trying to get a job in America teaching immigrants, first. Those women are probably even a bit more likely to be looking for a man, as they'll be wanting to stay in America . . .

Just assuming you're American, but same is true of England.

Anyway. Check out this cleavage.

Director of Studies F. Kafka

Three teachers gone in a month, none of whom gave "proper notice," protesting the horrendous schedules and snappy treatment at the hands of management.

"Don't you think that means something?" I ask the Administration Girl.

"They were bad teachers and bad people, obviously. Why should we change any policies to accommodate people who are just going to leave in the middle of the night?"

"But what about the teachers who are staying? You could change things for them. .."

"They are staying, obviously they are happy enough the way things are."

"Yeah, until they leave in the middle of the night."

"If they leave in the middle of the night, they don't deserve anything."

"What about the teachers who DO give proper notice, when they leave?"

"If they give proper notice, they were obviously happy enough the way things were, and there's no reason to change anything."

"What about all the complaining they do to me?"

"They can complain all they want, but the scheduling system is obviously described in the contract. If they don't like it, they can go."

"So they only thing they can do to protest is to leave in the middle of the night?"

"Yes."

"And if they do that, they we shouldn't consider it a proper complaint because they weren't good employees anyway?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to go kill myself now."

"Good luck."

And the vicious cycle continues. . .

Travelling Hopefully Is Better Than Starving To Death

"You gotta get out there in the world, man."

--Christopher McCandless, American "wanderer" who died alone of starvation in the Alaskan wilderness at age 24.

"The journey is the destination."

-- Dan Eldon, British "traveler" and photojournalist who was beaten to death at the hands of an angry mob in Africa at age 22.

Amazing to me that many are inspired to be "travelers" by these two guys. They're both real monuments to staying home and playing computer games and reading comic books until you die at a ripe old age, in my opinion.

I suppose there's still Jack Kerouac as an example, who died a miserable drunk living with his mother and third wife at age 47, and Jack London, who died at 40 of kidney problems he'd picked up traveling around the tropics.

Eleanor Rigby

Yet ANOTHER shy, quiet late 40's/ early 50's guy arrives in Russia to work as an English teacher -- a vast change from whatever boring yet comfortable and well-paid job he was doing before -- and wanders around confused and lonely for a few weeks before giving up and going back home.

What ARE these people thinking? Huh? That the water in Russia will instill them with charisma and joie de vivre? Even the vodka won't do that.

And now with the fucking economic collapse, we'll get even more of them, I bet. . .

Can't Win For Losing

When I arrived in Russia in 2000, the country was in ruins -- the currency crash of 1998 had completed wrecked the country's economy. There were quite a few government offices that didn't stay open past 4:00pm in the winter because they couldn't afford lightbulbs.

We got paid in rubles, then, but pegged to a dollar rate. I think it was 29 to the dollar or something like that when I arrived, reaching a high of 32 in 2003.

Then came George Bush's invasion of Iraq, and oil prices began to go through the roof. Russia suddenly found itself wealthy with oil money. Huge office complexes, towering modern apartment blocks, and shopping malls by the score opened in Moscow and St. Petersberg, and this trickled down to the provinces by 2004.

The dollar fell and fell against the ruble. Our salaries went up a bit, but couldn't even remotely keep up with inflation or the falling dollar.

Fortunately in 2006, becoming Director of Studies saw my salary go up quite a bit; and here they stopped referring to a dollar rate and simply started giving me a set sum in rubles. Naturally private lessons on the side continued to pay well.

Merely a couple of months ago, the dollar rate stood at 23.8 rubles.

Until now, of course, when it has shot up over the course of a couple months to 26.5.

(For example, if you have 25,000 rubles in savings, it has gone from $1050 to $943 -- more than a hundred bucks, or ten percent, gone.)

Of couse, most people don't save anything here anyway -- there is something to be said for blowing all your money on alcohol, I suppose.

Wise Words

The late Paul Newman, on getting older:

"I'm not mellower, I'm not less angry, I'm not less self-critical, I'm not less tenacious," he said. "Maybe the best part is that your liver can't handle those beers at noon anymore."

Word up, Hud.

Doll Parts

Saw this near the supermarket the other day.

Russia is cool.

реальная русская душа

From allheadlinenews.com --

Moscow, Russia (AHN) - Eight members of a satanic gang have been arrested in Russia for stabbing to death four teenagers and then roasting and eating parts of the victims' body in a diabolical ritual.

Russian police said gang leader Nikolai Ogolobyak led the murders of Anya Gorokhova, Olga Pukhova, Varya Kuzmina and Andrei Sorokin, who were aged between 16 and 17, inside a rural cottage near his apartment in the Yaroslavl region of Russia, 300 miles northeast of Moscow.

The victims were killed in June but police only found their remains last month in a pit marked with an upside down cross, a satanic symbol. Each victim was stabbed 666 times, which is a biblical sign of the devil, and their limbs, breasts, genitals and hearts cut off.

Police were able to trace the location of the victims' bodies and their killers through a call each made in the house of Ogolobyak before they were murdered. The victims, who knew their killers, were lured one by one to the cottage and made drunk before getting butchered in two consecutive days.

Accentuate the Postive

Have to admit, I was kind of hoping the table would tip over.

The one in white is the girl from THIS STORY, by the way.

Peeflation

It was my own stupid fucking fault, but the cops nabbed me last week for peeing in the bushes down on the embankment. I pee outside in the dank tree-lined streets so often that I just got overconfident, like Steve Irwin with the stingray.

They charged me 1000 rubles, which is like more than $40. This compared to the fine of 150 rubles I got on the second day here, eight years ago, for peeing in the bushes.

That's some damn inflation right there.

I probably could have bartered them down, but I was just glad that didn't beat me up for being American.

The Bucket List

From the Associated Press:

LOS ANGELES - Dave Freeman, co-author of "100 Things to Do Before You Die," a travel guide and ode to odd adventures that inspired readers and imitators, died after hitting his head in a fall at his home. He was 47.

He apparently had done about fifty things on his list of things to do.

I myself had a rather more modest list -- I think I had about ten things that I wanted to do before I died -- although that got expanded and built upon as I got out in the world and did more things and met more people and took more LSD. Let's say I ended up with about twenty-five things.

It wasn't, perhaps, even a very imaginative list -- mostly just to see a good swath of famous monuments and cities and beaches, that sort of thing. And a few big festivals, although again not a very imaginative selection of them. (I lived through seven Mardi Gras and eight full moon parties in Thailand, and, like every good English major, nearly got trampled by bulls in Pamplona, Spain.)

I'd pretty much accomplished everything on my list by the time I was thirty. But the problem with this as a life philosophy is: what do you do once you've done all the things on your list? By that time, you're probably pretty burnt out on travelling and partying and such. Also, you realize that doing everything you've ever dreamed of leaves you without any fucking dreams at all, and that sort of just leaves you bitter and world-weary. . .

Maybe I just needed a more creative and difficult list. Or some normal ambitions like money, family, etc.

It's a problem. Although, I guess, one worth having.

The Bear

From MSN.com, or America providing "humanitarian aid" to Georgia:

Janusz Bugajski, director of the new democracies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Bush's actions should "persuade Russia from any further aggression."

"I wouldn't stake a lot of money on it, but I wouldn't think Russia would want to provoke something with the United States," Bugajski said.

Ohhh my God in Heaven. . . do you people have any IDEA how much they still hate America here? It's like one of those Van Damme or Seagal movies where they kill the hero's family and take him out and shoot him in the brain and leave him in the desert, but he doesn't die. . . he survives and recovers and redoubles his effort to get revenge.

That's Russia. America destroyed the Soviet Union, then turned them into a country of gangsters, drunks and prostitutes, and now George Bush's wrongheaded invasions have pushed the price of oil up so high, that they have way the fuck more money than America now.

From the cia.gov website:

Oil export earnings have allowed Russia to increase its foreign reserves from $12 billion in 1999 to some $470 billion at year end 2007, the third largest reserves in the world.

compared to America:

Budget:
revenues: $2.568 trillion
expenditures: $2.73 trillion (2007 est.)

reserves of foreign exchange and gold:
$70.57 billion (31 December 2007 est.)

So yeah, sleep well, world. . .

Another Vague Moment of Clarity

A while back one of the other teachers was telling us about one of her students who dreamed of moving to Indianapolis, Indiana.

We were laughing. Why the hell would somebody want to move to some small backwards city in the middle of Bumfuck?

Then I thought: wait a second. . .

ICQ Conversation With A Russian Girl 20 Years My Junior Studying in Switzerland

ананаска ‎(12:43 AM):
we have here everyday sun.

English Teacher X ‎(12:43 AM):
it is sunny this week but not very warm, only about 20 - 23

ананаска ‎(12:43 AM):
24 here.
always.

English Teacher X ‎(12:44 AM):
yeah, I remember Switzerland summer weather. . . always need a sweater

ананаска ‎(12:45 AM):
But now is good

ананаска ‎(12:50 AM):
this is very cool university.

English Teacher X ‎(12:50 AM):
yeah, I guess, many noble maidens. . .
do you actually learn any English, or just how to cook?

ананаска ‎(12:51 AM):
And english of course
All cours -english.

ананаска ‎(12:52 AM):
yes a lot of.

English Teacher X ‎(12:52 AM):
teachers from Switzerland or where?

ананаска ‎(12:53 AM):
england france

ананаска ‎(12:55 AM):
And here a lot of boys from arabia.

English Teacher X ‎(12:55 AM):
at your school?
i thought it was only for girls. . .

ананаска ‎(12:55 AM):
not in my school just girls.
ананаска ‎(12:55 AM):
but in town..

English Teacher X ‎(12:56 AM):
I miss the old days, when Switzerland was just full of Swiss people. . .

it was a simpler time then.

ананаска ‎(12:57 AM):
why you miss?
i like when a lot nationals.

English Teacher X ‎(12:57 AM):
there is no such thing as a "foreign country" anymore
every country is just full of people from every country

ананаска ‎(1:20 AM):
And this is cool.

English Teacher X ‎(1:21 AM):
cool or not, it is a fact. . .

ананаска ‎(1:25 AM):
yes

English Teacher X ‎(1:26 AM):
the new world, 21st century. . .

ананаска ‎(1:26 AM):
:)

I Would Like To Feed Your Fingertips To The Wolverines

One of the new guys in town showed me his Lonely Planet Russian phrasebook recently.

My Russian is pretty shitty, but even I knew that the phrase "I won't have sex without protection" had in the book been rendered into Russian as "I won't have sex without a security guard."

Wasn't there a scene like that in SHOWGIRLS, by the way?

Dear Diary. . .

Women in high heels race down the streets of Moscow.

And who says life in Russia is getting boring?

Auschlander, Raus!!

Wow. The Exile, the long-standing Moscow-based alternative newspaper, has taken off and moved to Panama, in the face of an "unplanned audit" from the Russian government.

They feared prosecution regarding articles critical of the government, but I suspect their reason is more simply summarized in this quote from the first article on the new server:

"Fact is, Russia just ain’t fun anymore. We’re bored of all the overpriced low-quality nonsense that governs every aspect of that birch-infested bog."

The whole raison detre of expatriate life in Russia -- cheap booze and hookers, and local women who slavishly worship foreigners -- pretty much don't exist anymore.

Well, not that hookers are THAT expensive, but, you know. No bargain.

The Three H's of Life in Russia, 2008

Another Instant Message Conversation:

[7/7/2008 1:53:48 PM] English Teacher X says: (English Teacher M) got beat up again, on Saturday night

[7/7/2008 1:55:39 PM] Ksenia says: poor (English Teacher M)
[7/7/2008 1:55:47 PM] Ksenia says: what is the reason this time?

[7/7/2008 1:56:02 PM] English Teacher X says: they were just walking down the street, going home
[7/7/2008 1:56:05 PM] English Teacher X says: 1:30am or so
[7/7/2008 1:56:13 PM] English Teacher X says: in the dark side street on Sovietsky army where they live

[7/7/2008 1:56:15 PM] Ksenia says: and speaking English loudly

[7/7/2008 1:56:19 PM] English Teacher X says: yep
[7/7/2008 1:56:28 PM] English Teacher X says: and two guys came up and asked them if they were American
[7/7/2008 1:56:51 PM] English Teacher X says: and they answered they were from Canada, as I taught them, and one guy then punched (English Teacher M) in the mouth twice
[7/7/2008 1:57:10 PM] English Teacher X says: and he gave them the bag with two frozen pizzas and two beers he was carrying and they ran away.

[7/7/2008 1:57:34 PM] Ksenia says: ..speechless...

[7/7/2008 1:58:11 PM] English Teacher X says: between the hostile men and the heartless women and the high cost of living, it's getting harder and harder to justify my presence here.

[7/7/2008 2:00:18 PM] Ksenia says: I decided not to mention that although my first desire was to write smth like - and why do you still stay at this place

[7/7/2008 2:00:45 PM] English Teacher X says: mostly professional reasons, strangely enough
[7/7/2008 2:01:57 PM] English Teacher X says: and of course, the cat. . .
[7/7/2008 2:03:53 PM] English Teacher X says: and of least it isn't dull. "Against boredom even the gods contend in vain." -- Freidrich Neitzsche

[7/7/2008 2:06:46 PM] Ksenia says: )))

What If. . .

"If you could have any super-power, such as flight, invisibility or super-strength, which super-power would it be?"

This is a question which came from a list of them on a second conditional grammar activity I saw in some book years ago.

I've found it to be a useful psychological test. Most Russian girls say "the power to read people's thoughts." This indicates a conniving and dishonest personality.

I personally would choose to fly, mostly because it would be the most fun for its own sake. I suggest this indicates an escapist type personality, although some have suggested it might indicate extreme arrogance.

Teleportation indicates a practical personality, while invisibility indicates either extreme shyness or nosiness. Wishing for super strength indicates aggression and the underlying insecurity which births it. The ability to travel through time indicates a regretful personality who wishes to go back and undo their past fuckups.

Then there are the wild card entries.

My last girlfriend said, "a machine that prints money."

You wouldn't even make a joke with so obvious a punchline. I guess that's why she isn't my girlfriend anymore.

The girl who I was talking with in the last post on ICQ -- friend of my last girlfriend -- wished for the power to burn things with her eyes.

In which case I would have been seared to ashes last year sometime, along with much of the rest of the city.

Strangely, I've never heard anyone wish for a non-stop erection or the ability to communicate with animals.

On Russia Blowing The Semi-Finals In The European Football Cup

Excerpt from Instant Message Conversation:

1:53:05 AM] English Teacher X says: My condolences on your humiliating defeat as a nation

[1:54:31 AM] Supernatasha says: havent you learnt in these 7+ years that joking about defeats is possible only the next morning the earliest... No wonder you get beaten up so often

[1:54:50 AM] English Teacher X says: yeah, but it's already the next morning, sweetheart
[1:54:56 AM] English Teacher X says: that's why I get beaten up so often

[1:55:37 AM] English Teacher X says: and when we get beaten, we joke about it immediately.

As English Teacher Q once said: God only gives people any taste of success so that it will be that much more painful when they eventually fail.

Prosperity = Fat Chicks

Went to our former favorite cheap nightclub the other week, which in years past was always like an explosion at the Blonde Slut factory.

That time it was about 70 percent metrosexual males in striped t-shirts and 30 percent fat chicks.

For this I left Bugtussle?

(Photo is of vomit on the floor outside the toilet stall.)

T.a.t.u you

Yeah, there was a time -- hell, quite a while ago now, 2002 and 2003 -- when my kitchen on any givn Saturday night was full of drunk teenage Russian girls drinking vodka and making out with each other while we listened to Tatu.

(All those girls are like married to Turkish guys now, though.)

'Round about that time, I went back to America and was trying to tell one of my friends in America about Tatu; while Googling them, I saw they were about to release an album in English for international distribution. A couple of fake lesbian 16 year olds who sing like a couple of cats in a sack? Obviously a license to print money!

My friend thought it was the stupidest thing he'd ever seen in his life. I bet him a bottle of vodka that they'd be in heavy rotation on MTV by the end of the year -- as it happened, the video for "All The Things She Said" started playing heavily on MTV the very first week of the next year, so I lost the bet.

They quickly fizzled out, though, even in Russia -- they lost Eurovision a few years ago, failed to sell any seats at a Wembley concert, and quickly went the reality show route.

But take a look at THIS abomination.

The book upon which it is based as written by a Russian politician, interestingly...

High Heels: A Retrospective

Things are changing fast, in a lot of ways in Russia. It's a rich country now, with loads of generic shopping malls and streets full of Toyotas. Drinking vodka on trains and in the street is illegal now; people work their 12 hours a day and go home and watch reality shows, just like everywhere else.

But so far one thing remains constant: ridiculously high heels, ALL THE TIME.

This was a girl I gave a private lesson to at the school the other day. Those are my dirty Caterpillar boots in the foreground; I snapped this surreptitiously with my phone.

This is just some random girl on the bus -- and remember -- this is NOTHING UNUSUAL. Most girls wear similar footwear.

At a shoe shop. You'd need to go to a S & M specialty boutique to find shoes like this in America.

AThen I saw this laying in the snow one night in March. The symbolism was profound. . .

On Russia Winning Eurovision: Revenge of the Mullet

Excerpt from ICQ conversation:

ананаска ‎(3:26 AM):
we win.
i dont have money on phone,sorry
English Teacher X ‎(3:27 AM):
why was Dima Bilan doing it again???!! He did it last year
you can't do it twice!!
ананаска ‎(3:28 AM):
we can.
we win.
we super.
English Teacher X ‎(3:29 AM):
oh, no, wait, Dima Bilan did NOT do it last year
last year was Cerebro
Dima Bilan was the year before that
ананаска ‎(3:29 AM):
Yes.
and we win.
English Teacher X ‎(3:29 AM):
Well, congratulations. . .
ананаска ‎(3:29 AM):
Oh ,im happy
ананаска ‎(3:30 AM):
Football ,xokej we win and now too...We best.
English Teacher X ‎(3:36 AM):
People wore their hair like Dima Bilan when I was thirteen years old!

If you don't know who Dima Bilan is, click the wikipedia link immediately.

He is single handedly responsible for the first reaction of foreigners coming to Russian changing from "Wow, look at all the hot chicks!!!" to "What the fuck is up with all these guys with mullets and big sunglasses??!!"

All The Hard Work Finally Pays Off

englishteacherx.com is the 22,673,267 most popular website on the Internet, according to Alexa Rankings.


Yeah!

Gulag-bait

Not many English groupies left in Russia, or the world, but every once in a while one emerges -- in this case the gang suddenly finds we have our own Russian version of a Paris Hilton-like young socialite hanging around with us occasionally, a former student of one of the teachers. She's blonde, cute, brightly dressed and perky, been to Italy 12 times and studied in London, and to top it all off, she's Barely Legal -- her father is the same age as I am.

(I'll leave it to your own research to discover just how young "barely legal" is in Russia. And no, I haven't done anything untoward with her, although a colleague says that's because of my laziness rather than my morality.)

Just to let you know what we're dealing with here:

I was talking to her on ICQ recently, and she just revealed that she had some problems at school, that the Director requested to see her parents.

So she had a 38 year old male "friend" go to the school and impersonate her father, so that her real parents wouldn't know about it.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Russians. . . or English Teachers. . .

(Edit May 29th -- picture of her with a small dog in an Italian restaurant.)

Russian Whore Shortage

Is there some kind of Russian whore shortage going on in America now?

I only ask because several of the worst Russian whores that I know were recently given American visas without, seemingly, a second thought from the American government that these girls are. . . well, that they're whores. They all speak no English and their only ambition in America is to be lap dancers, and the American embassy is seemingly dispensing visas like breath mints.

I read that the low dollar and high inflation in America is driving a lot of immigrants out; obviously the lap-dancing industry has been affected as well.

Rest assured; relief is on her way. The girl from the picture above is working somewhere in Atlantic City, if she hasn't been murdered yet.

Fun Inflationary Facts

Found out something interesting regarding property prices today.

I live in a smallish one-bedroom apartment, comfortable enough, but just a bit shy of being shabby. It's in a big ugly square gray building with an only marginally-vandalized entrance foyer, in a reasonably central part of town, near some trendy bars, modern supermarkets and restaurants, about a twenty minute walk from the riverside embankment.

I could have purchased this apartment, or a comparable one, for approximately $18,000 - $20,000 back in like 2001, 2002.

It's worth upwards of $150,000 now.

Now of course buying an apartment, back then, would have entailed putting $20,000 into a bag (no such thing as mortgages back then) and giving it to a Russian, which didn't exactly seem like the wisest idea in the world. . .

Clocked In the Snot Locker

No, that's not the result of excessive drinking -- I got punched in the nose (and mouth, and side of the head, etc) last Saturday at a nightclub.

This wasn't even at a nightclub considered one of the more dangerous ones in town, but I came out of the toilet and one of my esteemed colleagues said, "That guy is angry because English Groupie A bumped into him."

I remember going up to the guy and offering to buy him a vodka, and then fists crashing into my nose and mouth, and then picking myself dazedly up off the floor.

I'd describe what happened as a sucker punch, I suppose, although as somebody pointed out, what was he supposed to have done, announced that he was about to hit me?

Things have changed since the school yard of my youth, though, I seem to recall a lot of shoving and shouting usually prefaced the punching.

The general deterioration of good manners, right enough. . .

Return of Drunk Georgian Girl

Sitting at a cafe last Sunday with one of the guys -- got a text message from the drunk Georgian girl saying she was at a crappy old-school Mafia thug hangout down the road a piece. (Real old school -- still has leopard-skin pattern sofas.)

"Would that amuse you," I asked my colleage, "to see the girl from that story?"

He thought about it. "Yeah."

When we got there she was drunkenly sprawled in the lap of a black-sweatered bull-necked gold-chined thug. Her little blonde friend who looks like Jodie Foster from TAXI DRIVER greeted me cheerfully, however, and she was looking good. She said she'd join us as soon as possible.

She did soon, and the durnken Georgian girl came over eventually and sprawled in my lap. "Ya c'taboy?" she asked, which generally means something like "Am I going home with you?" Then she got up and went to the toilet, pulling her skirt out of her asscrack as she did so, showing the whole bar her flourescent pink thong.

The one who looked like Jodie Foster was nice enough and apoogized and suggested it wouldn't be the best idea to take her home in the condition she was in. I agreed wholeheartedly.

When she came back, she flopped down on me again and knocked over a glass, breaking it and spilling beer. My colleague said something with the word "fuck" in it -- like "That's our fucking luck" or "No big fucking deal" and they both got up and left, angry, as "fuck" was about the only word of English either of them understood.

I got the blonde who looks like Jodie Foster in TAXI DRIVER's phone number before they left, however. . .

Penis Chicken

After work.

"How was your weekend?"

"Well, Friday was kind of quiet, but Saturday we had a party to celebrate English Teacher M's birthday. . . "

"What happened?"

"After the girls left at 3:00am or so, we started getting more drunk and bored, and I was treated to the horrific sight of seeing (two of the younger teachers) playing Penis Chicken."

"What the hell is Penis Chicken?"

"Well, you know how, if you play chicken in cars. . ."

"They took out their cocks and . . ."

"Yeah, kind of ran at each other, and the first guy to turn away was the loser."

"Who lost?"

I told him.

"Man, things are just getting worse and worse around here, aren't they?"

Backhanded

I had lunch the other day with a girl I haven't seen for about seven months or so.

"Everything changes so much around here. . . except you," she enthused.

She meant it as a compliment, it seems.

Piss On The Sun

Piss on the sun
My love is dead

-- Charles Bukowski, "To Jane"

Seven years is a long time; it's not surprising that things have changed a lot. I supposed one of the things I liked about this place, however, was that it seemed so far off the map -- a city in bumfuck Russia that nobody had even heard of.

It took the 21st century a while to catch up to it, but catch up it did -- hypermarkets, massive pre-fab furniture warehouses, shopping malls, yuppie sushi restaurants, chain Italian places -- all the bland, serviceable detrius of modern life.

There are, by one account TWICE as many cars on the road now as there were three years ago, and pleasant four lane tree-lined streets are now mini-highways.

I'm willing to allow all this.

UNTIL THEY CLOSED DOWN THE PIRATE DISC MARKET. Well, it's not exactly closed yet, but it's dying -- it's operating about 10 percent capacity, the lot having been sold for YET ANOTHER SHOPPING CENTER. (One of fourteen scheduled for construction THIS YEAR.)


My haven for $1 DVDs and $2 computer games and $3 MP3 collections with 9 hours of music on them -- all gone, gone, gone.

You go searching for something exotic, unique and beautiful, and find the whole world just kind of turning into Muncie, Indiana.

Except From ICQ Conversation I Am Having With A Russian Girl (Via Some Translation Program)

In Russia it is good to live. Yes here not as in other countries. Not so it is beautiful. But all native and close on a shower. Laws are, but they can be not carried out the some people, it not England. Here to live easier. It is possible to receive much from this country.

Word up, baby. . .

Grammatical-political joke

We were going through the difference between "will" and "going to" in class the other day. "Going to" for plans, and (in this case) "will" for predictions.

I asked some questions with "going to" and then some prediction questions.

"Do you think it will rain tomorrow?"

"Yes, I think it will."

"Do you think Medvedev will be the next President of Russia?"

They laughed. "That is not a prediction. It is a plan."

Ba-DUMP-bump. Rim shot. But seriously folks. . .

Glass Houses

5:30am, Saturday morning. Another toxin-laden night at the nightclub.

Dancing with a blonde with big breasts. Dipping her and spinning her, trying to impress. They always want to spin counter-clockwise, however, and I prefer clockwise, which causes some friction.

The music stops, the lights go up, the few desperate stragglers running for cover like cockroaches in the kitchen.

"Could I have your phone number?" I slur.

"You know, I've given you my number twice before over the past couple of years."

"Really? I . . ." I think of all the unidentified "Natasha"s and "Irina"s and "Svyeta"s that I eventually delete from my phone with no real memory of who they were or what they looked like.

"I'll just see you here tomorrow."

"I don't think I'll be here tomorrow."

She smiles. "Oh yes you will."

A Slightly Less Horrific Russian Girl Story

Okay, here's another one:

A few Fridays ago I went to a night club chasing after a busty, raven-tressed, only lightly-mustached Georgian girl that I've known for a while; she was drunk when I got there and we had a few dances and some kissy-face in the corner. Eventually she kind of wandered off and I went home alone.

The next day at about 3:00 or 4:00pm, I got a call from her, telling me to buy some vodka, some martini vermouth, and some apple juice and come over to her place, which was way the hell away from where I live.

Now as I mentioned there was an enormous snowstorm a few weeks ago; in this particular region, the streets were still far from clear. I found an aged Armenian taxi-driver in a white Lada (is there any other kind?) and he drove me around for nearly an hour trying to find her place; the backstreets were piled so high with snow that I had to get out and walk for the last fifteen minutes of so, taking directions on my cell phone.

Now it had struck me that the person giving me directions on my cell phone was not the same person I was trying to meet; when I heard a guy in the background, I got a sinking (though not yet completely hopeless) feeling.

I finally found the apartment; one of the worst Russian apartments I've ever seen, actually, with bare concrete walls and air-mattresses on the floor.

Inside were a teenage prostitute and a track-suited thug.

When I say she was a teenage prostitute, I mean mainly her appearance -- she looked like Jodie Foster in TAXI DRIVER. Skinny, looked about fourteen, loads of eye make-up, short-shorts, and a hoody.

When I say he was a thug, I probably mean his appearance as well as his character, but all things considered he was pretty nice to me.

The girl I had come there to visit was in the shower, so I sat with the thug and the prostitute drinking vodka for thirty minutes or so; I politely answered all the usual questions about why I was in Russia and what I thought of Russian winters, etc.

Finally the girl I had come to visit came out; she was clearly shitfaced, and the prostitute informed me that the girl had been drinking non-stop since she arrived at the apartment at around 5:00am. The girl admitted to a few hours of sleep around 9:00am to 1:00pm.

She jumped into my lap and began kissing me; her conversation quickly devolved to "Davaj vipim!" (Let's drink!) She finished off about five shots of vodka in twenty minutes and then almost immediately collapsed unconscious on one of the air mattresses.

This didn't upset me -- I feel fortunate we were spared any vomitting.

I finished off the last of the vodka with the thug and the prostitute (who seemed very much in love, incidentally) and took my leave, explaining I had an appointment to eat pizza with my colleagues.

"You could go lie down with her," suggested the teenage prostitute.

I declined to make any moves on the drooling crash-test dummy that she had become, luckily caught a bus going right to where my colleagues were having pizza, and sauntered in.

"And how was YOUR day?" I began.

The Worst Russian Female Story I've Ever Heard

Every time I think I've seen the bottom, new depths of human (Russian?) depravity are revealed to me.

One of our teachers has been married to a Russian woman for over twenty years. They have several children, and after living abroad for many years, moved back here to Vodkaberg several years ago.

His wife is expecting another child.

The other day he's home from work because of the heavy snow and there's a knock on the door. It's a middle-aged male Russian, inquiring after his wife by her first name. (We'll call her Natasha.)

He politely invites the guy in. "And how do you know Natasha?" he asks.

"I'm her boyfriend, I guess. . . we're going to have a baby soon," says the guy, completely unaware that Natasha is married to the man standing in front of him.

Natasha, who was at the shop, arrived shortly after to find, unsurprisingly, her husband planning divorce proceedings. (I myself would probably have been planning on locating a shallow grave, but that's just me.)

I'm flabbergasted. I now understand what that word means.

More Fun With Split Eyebrows

We'd just finished drinking a whole bottle of Gorilka pepper-honey vodka; it was already 1:30am, so English Teacher M and I were pretty much ready to go to bed.

"Let's go to the House of Pain, we haven't been there in a while," said S.

"I'll go if M goes," I allowed.

"I don't want to go there," said M. "The last time I was there I got punched in the face."

Generally speaking it doesn't take much power of persuasion to get somebody who has drunk a third of a bottle of vodka to do what you want them to do. We made it to the House of Pain before 2:00am.

I think we'd been there about twenty minutes when English Teacher M got punched in the face.

(By the way, this is the same guy that got mugged a few days ago.)

It was all my fault really; I was propelling him towards the dance floor and he knocked into a guy and spilled beer all over him. Then he was being shoved around and swung at in a circle of flatheads; I rushed forward and somehow immediately ended up on the floor. (I think I slipped in the spilled beer, actually.)

But it died out as soon as it started; the guys weren't especially looking for a fight. Nevertheless, M's eyebrow was already split open and was bleeding a bit. Surprisingly little, actually. He's got a nice black eye, too.

Other than that it was a pretty rocking night. Hell, because of that, it was a pretty rocking night.

More Annoying, Than Anything Else

The end of the world turns out to be not as much fun as I was expecting. More annoying, than anything else. It finally stopped snowing, but the mountains of snow on the edge of the road have choked the flow of traffic considerably -- it takes hours to get anywhere.

And you can't really walk, because then you have to tromp through waist-deep snow in some places, and climb over the snow mountains. There are some paths carved out, but they're slicker than owl shit. (I'm reliably informed that owl shit is very slick indeed.)

The looting and general anarchy seems to be beginning though -- one of our teachers got mugged -- punched in the stomach, though not hurt seriously -- and relieved of $40 or so in rubles, right up the street from the school.

And damn it, I accidentally left my pepper spray in a security locker at a nightclub last weekend.

The Day Before The Day After Tomorrow

Cock-first Into A Nest of Scorpions

So it finally snowed enough -- about 40 hours straight, I think -- to close the city down. I'm home catching up on my reading -- Neil Strauss's THE GAME, which I bought on sale (hardback) for 5.99 at a Barnes and Noble back in the States -- I figured sitting and reading THAT in the Starbucks while drinking a Caramel Machiatto would be a real American experience.

It's much better than I thought, it turns out, as the writer comes to the eventual conclusion that devoting all your time and energy into picking up random babes will probably turn you into a creepy, shallow, lecherous, manipulative doofus.

And what really made me crap myself laughing -- the girl that wrecks their little pick-up artist community and turns the main alpha-dogs against each other -- is a RUSSIAN.

He seems to gloss right over this fact, laying the blame for the disintegration of their community on infighting and internal rivalries, but I have no doubt the Russian girl engineered the whole thing. . .

We've got like three middle-aged guys working at the school now who came here looking for wives -- might as well leap cock-first into a nest of scorpions.

Just Another Day With Three Feet Of Snow

Three classes today, in two different locations; also had to come out to the school this morning to observe a teacher's class.

This during a snow storm that, if it happened in America, would be called "The Worst Blizzard in 200 Years" and be accompanied by complete closures of schools and workplaces, deaths and utility failures, National Guard tanks blocking off the streets, and large interactive displays on MSN.com with headings like "KILLER SNOWSTORM AND POINTS OF GREATEST DESTRUCTION."

Here, they don't even send out snowplows. Just another day. . .

English Teacher X : The Movie

FADE IN:INTERIOR:CHEAP BAR WITH CONCRETE FLOOR.

Rain falls heavily outside the one open window. Cockroaches scurry among the cigarette butts. A forlorn thirty-something figure with self-cut hair sits at a plastic table, wearily staring at the label of one of the four empty beer bottles in front of him. The labels are written in some kind of foreign gibberish. Some kind of disgusting meat dish, half eaten, lies on the table next to the beer.

We slowly pan in.

VOICE OVER: Damn, my balls itch.

Sigh, okay. . .

All right, everyone can relax, it looks like for the time being I will continue to work at my current workplace.

I suppose I should write the whole story down; however I'm not sure if I want to, there's such pathos involved . . . including a ten-year anniversary party for the school with a bad, balding magician. Like something out of NAPOLEON DYNAMITE.

Suffice it to say the main point of conflict involved schedules. The fact that I was walking out about my OWN schedule doesn't mean that I wasn't thinking of others, however -- kind of like Christopher Reeve with spinal column stem-cell research -- he wanted to help himself, sure, but everybody else was more than welcome to come along, too.

The other point was related to student complaints and how they are dealt with.

On their side, they said as a DOS I don't keep much in the way of records about what I'm doing or not doing, which I guess was true.

Anyway, we came to an agreement. And I'm not working on Saturday or Sunday.

Things are back to abnormal.

More New Lows Than A Limbo Dancer

AMAZING! I tell you, it's almost heartening to see that life holds a few surprises for even a hardened campaigner such as myself.

I just gave one month's notice of my intention to resign from my job.

On the way back from the airport, I was told that in my January schedule I would have to work 6 hour days on both Saturday and Sunday, and have my days off during the week. (I would still be working split shifts during the week, by the way.)

Needless to say, I considered this unacceptable, and informed them of this.

It kind of snowballed from there.

Out of principal, I resigned -- if after working in this godforsaken frozen chunk of nowhere for over SEVEN years I can't get enough respect that they might at least ASK ME NICELY before doing something like this, it's time to walk.

The shitty part, of course, is that I resigned because of my awful schedule for January, but I still have to work my January schedule anyway with the month's notice.

The American Dream

Back in America for the holidays. . . I'm really trying to fit in this time, as I was considering coming back to America to get a Master's Degree.

I've done a shitload of shopping. I've bought lots of stuff I wouldn't have bought otherwise because it was on sale. I've eaten at WHITE CASTLE and TACO BELL. I broke a long-standing vow and went to a STARBUCK'S for the first time, and had a Caramel Macchiato. I went to HOOTERS and had 8 chicken wings and curly frees with a Mexican beer. I watched nearly an entire episode of I LOVE NEW YORK. I read James Frey's MY FRIEND LEONARD.

God, I'm fucking alienated.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go eat some bacon.