A sobering encounter

Hello you loyal readers. I had a bit of a bad experience here in this Siberian wonderland. I decided against posting a full account of the event online, but if you're really curious, I can forward you a full account. The long and short of it is I was almost mugged by "gopniki", common cap-wearing, street thugs who stick people up for there cell phones and cash, usually in the more distant neighborhoods. Basically, they demanded my cell phone and cash, I chatted them up a bit, and then, on a split-second jolt of adrenaline, I sprinted after cab. It didn't stop for me, because the driver didn't want a run in with the thugs, and so we ran. We ran and ran. I've never run so quickly. I was on a pretty isolated street, and so I was pretty hard up, but finally I turned down a different street and found a corner store, where the security guard took me in, only to turn me back out onto the street when he suddenly got scared, maybe that the thugs would come give him a hard time for sheltering me. So I ran some more, althought it's possible that the thugs had already run off, fearing that we had called the police. Eventually I landed myself a cab and made it back to my apartment, literally sick with fear and exhaustion. I consoled myself with watermelon, and wheezed all night long from the exertion. So, yes, a pretty bad experience, but it happens everywhere. These criminals seemed particularly inept and unprofessional. Morever, in America, they probably would have had guns. My Russian friends scolded me for walking alone at night, and now I know better. One of my friends was even stuck up for a bunch of balloons she was carrying. She was tough and refused to hand them over, made it away unscathed and without losing a single balloon.

In other news, my financial problems seem to be over. Also, I went to see the Tomsk Tom' play the St. Petersburg Zenit (best team in Russia, featuring international allstar Arshavin), and much to our surprise, it ended in a tie! Hooray!

We've been celebrating Halloween this week, and it's been a lot of fun. I've been realizing just how great this holiday is. I asked the students at the English club to dress up, but most of them were too nervous. Only a couple came in costume. I also had the hardest time tracking down a pumpkin. Finally, after a 3-hour search, I found one, but it is sort of green. When we tried to carve it at the club, it turned out that this pumpkin was in fact a strong, Russian pumpkin, well prepared to weather the Siberian winter. It took fifteen minutes just to get it open, and I still have yet to sufficiently scrape it out. So I will finish the jack-o-lantern at the other English club on Friday. Luckily another girl brought a pumpkin that she had already hollowed out, so she carved it and the students were amazed by it's beauty (once we stuck the candle in). I showed pictures from Halloween at college, and they were pretty impressed by our costumes, especially by Arden's Edward Scissorhands costume.

Also, in the last few days I have become a celebrity. There was a feature about me and the Enghlish club on the Tomsk news site. A photographer was at the club yesterday taking pictures of my stabbing a pumpkin in a surgeon's costume. Evidently these pictures will be a part of an article about me and the club in the newspaper. Then, this morning I received a text saying they were talking about me on the radio. Finally, an hour ago I learned that they want to interview me for Russian television. I am terrified. This interview will, of course, be in Russian, so I will be broadcasted to the entire city, speaking in broken Russian about the English club and maybe Halloween. Great. Just as long as they don't ask me about Georgia, WWII, or Russian girls (the third most common question you get as an American male in Russia is "So what do you think about our girls, eh? Pretty? Prettier than American girls? Eh? Eh?").

So yes, that's what's happening here. A Canadian girl just moved to Tomsk to teach, and I'm excited to meet another representative of the North-American continent. We (myself and the Russians) are all anxiously awaiting the elections, as I'm sure you all are. We'll see what happens!

Tschuss,
Jason