Halloween/Elections

Hello all you Americans,

It's Friday here and I thought I'd update you on some of the latest developments here in Tomsk. Let's see, last Friday, after a few phoney Halloween celebrations with my English clubs (in which many of the students were too bashful to dress up), Dima and I threw a real Halloween party at our apartment. It was a lot of fun, and most of my foreign and Russian friends did manage to come up with costumes. Unfortunately, they also managed to break a lot of our glassware and prevent me from sleeping until 6 in the morning. I was worried about disturbing our neighbors, since we had so many noisy guests, and not surprisingly, on Sunday one lady came to complain about us disturbing her sleep and insisted on my cleaning the entire stairway with a broom and rag. I can understand the horror of being an old Russian woman and having strange, masked Europeans parading around in your stairwell, so I agreed to do so.

The pure chaos that is national holidays in Russia further disturbed my attempts to live a somewhat normal life. This Tuesday we had "The Day of People's Unity and Coming-Together", or something like that. This meant that even on Monday, everything important was closed, even though nobody even really knows what this holiday is (it's supposed to replace an old Soviet holiday on November 7th celebrating the revolution). So I couldn't use the internet, and half the town left for Kazakstan, Altai, Kemerevo, or wherever everyone here is from. It was nice to get a little extra sleep though.

Then came election day. The results were announced when I was in my morning class, so I only heard the news afterwards on the internet. Not really a surprise, even to us living so far away from America. What was most remarkable about election day for me, however, was that a television company called my boss and asked to interview me about the election, about Obama, and about myself as an American living in Tomsk. At first they insisted on conducting this interview in my apartment, and I, of course, said, "No, that won't quite be convenient for me". They agreed to take me to a cafe or a bar. At first I didn't know why it was important that they interview me in a place with a TV, but I soon figured it out. It was pretty funny, how artificial everything is. They had me pretend to walk into the bar (which was almost empty, and they didn't even treat me to dinner), they had me pretend to talk about the elections with the anchorwoman (we were really talking about Petersburg), and they had me pretend to be watching Obama on television (really at this point they were showing Medvedev's speech with Putin looking on).

When I watched the interview on TV, I learned that they had assembled all of this into some hilarious narrative about me, a poor American teacher, not having a TV and desperately making for the bar to learn the results of my country's elections. It sounded really funny on TV in Russian. Anyway, they interviewed me about what kind of president I thought Obama would be and how I felt his election would affect American-Russian relations. It was kind of an interesting conversation, except I had to wince as I watched myself make mistakes in Russian in front of the entire city. All in all, regardless of the fact that they didn't feed me, it was an adventure.

So now it's the weekend, and I am exhausted. I'm about to head home and take a nap, before I go to see Madagascar 2. I think on Saturday we're going to the second house-warming in a row at our friends place. A Swiss and a French friend of mine moved into an apartment and had a novosel'e last weekend. Since then, I hooked them up with a third roommate, a Canadian who recently arrived in Tomsk. Oh! Also a British guy moved to the city last week and is living with this professor of oil-drilling technology. He has never studied Russian before and so is going to get his first earful of it here in Siberia. Both of them are working as English teachers, and so now I have a whole host of English-speaking peers. It's refreshing to speak English every now and again!

Miss you all,
Jason