Kazan — summer 2010

In three words, today was awesome. Started off the morning observing the third-year Russian class taught by Gulnaz. She is a good teacher. One of her skills is that she actually listens to her students and observes where they have misunderstandings, and then she adjusts the flow of the class to deal with those items. That's a skill many instructors don't have.

In the afternoon we had a tour of the Kazan Kremlin, which houses the Qol-Şärif mosque, which opened on June 24, 2005. At the time it was the largest mosque in Europe. The place is very beautiful. Nearby, also inside the Kremlin, is the Church of the Assumption, the interior of which is lovely in a more austere and somber way. Our tour guide spoke almost entirely in Russian, inserting a phrase here and there in English for clarification of obscure terms, like words for the holes in the fortress walls through which one shoots at the enemy.

After that we had a meeting with grantees of American Exchange programs in the American Center, located in the National Library of the Republic of Tatarstan, most of whom gather at this location to speak English. Frankly, I was not looking forward to this. This kind of "peace and friendship" meeting just sticks in my craw. You gather two sets of people who have never met each other before and expect them to have some meaningful cultural exchange. It's ridiculous. But I'm here to make things work well, so of course I went first in having a little chat so that our students could see how to start a conversation in this very uncomfortable environment. Then all our students spoke in Russian, and then all the Russians spoke. To my surprise, the event went great. For the first hour we spoke only Russian, and every CLI student participated. Even the student who has had only 12 months of Russian made me proud. It's particularly impressive since there is a great contrast in language experience with the Russians at this event, most of whom had studied English for at least ten years and half of whom had spent extensive time in the States. For our third-year Russian students to do so well is frankly awesome. (Clarification: this is a third-year Russian program, which means the students have theoretically had two academic years of Russian language. The 12-month student started a year ago by doing intensive first-year Russian over the summer--his first college course ever--and then doing second-year Russian during his first actual academic year. That's why he has only studied Russian for 12 months, but is now in third-year Russian.)

After that we headed homewards, sort of. I took five students to Bauman Street, which is a very neat pedestrian street, lined with shops and bars and tourist shops and churches, ending at the Kremlin. BTW, McDonald's here has two nicknames: "MakDak" and "besplatnyy tualet," the latter of which means "free toilet"; we dropped in so some of the guys could take a leak. McDonald's is also famed here for free wi-fi. Glory to capitalism! Just those two things right there, I'm sure, have won the company the undying love of Russians everywhere.

After I got home, I napped only to be awakend by a ringing emanating from my computer. It was my brother calling on Skype. He's currently in the Bahamas. I'm in Russia. I sent him a link to a Google map to show him where I was living, where our students study, and where we toured today. He could then look and we could discuss it while sharing info he previously couldn't visualize. He is going to be heading to Rhode Island soon, then the Seychelles. I could look on Google to see all the places he is going while we were talking. I could never have imagined that we would have phone calls where we both could actually show each other things as we talked and learn new things and learn more world context. How awesome is that? We talked for 45 minutes, which is entirely astonishing since I hate the phone. In fact, this is the longest conversation my brother and I have ever had on the phone.

That's the happy summary. Picky details are below. Click "read more" below if you would like some of the picky detail.