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anywhere in moscow for a nominal charge this also speaks to another aspect of assimilation if you are going to be in a different country semi long term say a year or more it s worth it to invest in things that make your space genuinely feel like home whether that s nice sheets or cooking supplies or frames for family photos you need to do things that psychologically reinforce the fact that you are here to stay and do your best to make it a place that you will want to stay electric tea kettle lucky for me a coffee hater russians are tea fanatics there are gourmet tea shops all over the place an electric tea kettle is considered a standard appliance whereas toasters and microwaves are not and comes in every furnished apartment i bought another one for the office brita pitcher i can t get a straight up or down answer on whether or not the tap water is safe to drink many say it s fine but a little googling will quickly tell you that like most substances on earth moscow water will give you cancer a couple of weeks ago they were repaving the parking area outside my building and cut the hot water line hot water is centrally provided not heated on site with a boiler when it came back it came back brown it s normal now it was probably just sediment that got into the line but it spooked me but good i have never been a germaphobe and roll my eyes at people who panic about this sort of stuff in the us but contamination phobias are apparently a normal part of culture shock most muscovites only drink bottled but i ve also been told that you have no way of knowing where the bottled stuff actually comes from the filter is more eco friendly anyway hma hide my ass vpn subscription for when i want to change my ip address for reasons like let s say netflix reasons view all 3 comments the past is with us september 24 2013 russia customer service expat life john mccain modernity moscow russia soviet union travel united states vladimir putin ashley squires the ceiling of the taganskaya metro station depicting the soviet flag on a blue background during my summer in boston i came across a couple of op eds by mary baker eddy on the goings on in russia at the close of the nineteenth century and i realized for just how long russia has served as a kind of foil for the united states even before the rise of the soviet union and the beginning of the cold war even before we became rivals americans looked to russia as the incarnation of old world tyranny standing in stark contrast to america s beacon of freedom and in the highly self serving op eds that putin and mccain each served up recently we see that that this condition persists to a certain degree when americans think about moscow i think the image they typically conjure up is the moscow of the 90s in much the same way that people who have never left the south or the midwest picture times square in the 80s when they think of new york city it s difficult to shake the stark imagery and manichean drama of the cold war when that defined our view of russia for so long but when i m standing in a subway car surrounded by people swiping away at iphones with ads for audi dealerships on the wall the only thing that really reminds me that i m not in the us is the fact that the ad is in cyrillic so dramatic has the change in this city been in just a couple of decades that i m repeatedly stunned by the fact that people exactly my age remember standing in lines with their mothers for bread and toilet paper russia is still a complicated place beset by inefficiency and corruption but it has also made some stunningly rapid strides in the direction of what many americans would call progress at least in terms of adopting western consumer culture stalin era apartment buildings viewed from my office window vestiges of the soviet era and of an even older russia exist everywhere there are the few remaining statues of lenin for example and the utilitarian apartment buildings but the remnants that stand out to me are the ones that more directly impact everyday life you can tell for example that customer service is a recent concept here both because of it s absence in some places and its almost aggressive presence in others russian service workers vacillate between the almost overwhelming enthusiasm of the japanese and the hostile aloofness of the french the employees at one grocery store chain all wear crisp green and white uniforms and they take your fruits and vegetables from you and weigh them on the spot before you go to the checkout counter many gas stations are full service and if you decide to browse the selection of mugs in starbucks chances are a very cheerful employee will be right there to tell you all about them within seconds elsewhere you will have to physically grab a customer service representative to get them to take your money one time after finishing a restaurant meal i asked for my check and watched my waitress nod and then walk off to take a smoke break waitstaff for whom a 10 tip is considered highly generous routinely ignore you which means you can sit and socialize for hours without feeling like anyone is trying to turn the table around but also means that you may sit there forever before you get your credit card back of course that s if they take credit card cash is the standard here even for very large transactions many cashiers will ask you to provide exact change and a few will still get very irritated with you if you don t have it an attitude left over from a time when currency was scarce in fact my most hostile encounters with russians have involved quibbles over change the worst was at the food court of a mega mall and then there is the paperwork every transaction that involves the russian government requires everything besides a blood sample actually you need one of those to get a work visa and a letter from your first grade teacher things that seem like they should be simple turn out to be really complicated and vice versa to get an apartment you need to have a lot of cash in your hand and the ability to sign your name there is no credit check or tax return requirement the landlord just needs to like the look of you i just assume this means that they get to break your thumbs if you re late on the rent however getting a bank account getting a bank to allow you to give them your money requires two forms of id a notarized translation of your passport verification of employment and a bunch of other stuff i can t remember right now we are trying to get our belongings through russian customs which requires a letter from my employer i need to prove i m employed to bring my stuff in the country why exactly and a notarized power of attorney to allow the moving company to pay the customs officials for me to get this document notarized i waited in a notary s office for an hour and a half while it was passed around to three different people and while they found a translator who could make sure i understood what i was signing even though i prepared the document in the first place aside i should note that bureaucratic nonsense is alive and well in the us as well and can appear just as irrational judging by the letter i had to sign in order to prove that l ashley squires and laura ashley squires are the same person a step that was apparently essential to the sale of my car in the state of texas also the us also puts foreigners through an unbelievable amount of bullshit but this is my little complaint corner right now the way to cope with it in either country is to be patient have a sense of humor and pray but the secret of this kafkaesque nightmare is that very little of it actually matters all these papers you need are merely boxes that someone in some office needs to check and it s unlikely that they actually pay attention to what s in them but you need to do them correctly because one day someone might and that will of course be at the moment when the consequences are the worst for you but elsewhere the lingering evidence of the old russia is simply puzzling and amusing occasionally it s delightfully so the building i work in is a soviet era office building one of those structures that was built quickly and has quickly fallen into disrepair as is typical in moscow the public areas lobbies hallways etc are dilapidated while offices and classrooms are fully renovated in the modern style it still has a stolovaya a cafeteria where lunch would have been provided to employees but where you can now buy a very inexpensive meal at the entrance are two security guards who stop no one from walking in the building and a woman whose ostensible job is to issue passes that no one bothers to ask for anymore she sits all day looking at an empty visitor notebook like a character from a pynchon novel there used to be guards on every floor who would give you your office key and take it from you when you left for the day this still exists but only on the nineteenth floor which incidentally is where my office is every day i ask for the key from a man who has probably been working there for 40 years and whose job it is to take it off a hook on the wall and hand it to me when he s not handing out keys he watches internet videos this is actually a russian workplace custom that pre dates the soviet union in dostoevskiy s crime and punishment there is a floor guard who fails to notice anything when raskolnikov is murdering the landlady while it can occasionally feel like evidence of backwardness this litany of customs and procedures and personnel that probably had a point that expired some time ago is really evidence of just how rapidly russia has and is still changing this country s national literary tradition didn t take off in earnest until pushkin in the nineteenth century and in just a couple of generations it produced tolstoy and in less than a generation it has gone from bread lines to starbucks this makes it often frustrating and even frightening but it also makes it rich and exciting and dynamic one of my russian colleagues said that she left the us to return to moscow because the stability and samey ness of life in america just got boring and i can see what she s talking about but truthfulness this historical dynamism this pursuit of chance at a breakneck pace and all the messiness that comes with it is something that russians and americans share 0 000000 0 000000 one comment so far the us model writing center in russia september 17 2013 pedagogy tales from the writing center uncategorized educational models efl elf esl new economic school pedagogy russia russian faculty teaching writing center ashley squires the new economic school in moscow is a rather unique place created in 1991 by a group that included a russian technocrat an israeli economist and george soros its ideals are fundamentally internationalist designed to train the best and brightest from russia and other cis nations in economic theory send some of them to the us or western europe for advanced degrees and bring them back to become the business and academic elite here in their home country for that reason by the time they graduate students are expected to be fluent in english and fully acculturated to academic norms in the west for that reason nes has deliberately sought out foreign faculty and foreign educational models even the russian faculty tend to carry phds from places like cambridge and mit and when the school decided to start offering a liberal arts model ba in addition to its two master s programs the idea of importing the us writing center wac model followed almost immediately because most of the economics faculty are not equipped for writing instruction in english this program has been staffed with faculty with humanities degrees from overseas right now the english department is roughly half russian half american three of the last four writing center administrators have been american including myself obviously and all four have had experience working in american writing centers so in a number of important ways our writing center resembles the one i was trained in we train consultants to use the non directive process oriented pedagogy advocated by foundational scholars like stephen north in addition to providing consultations we provide resources to faculty to support the integration of writing into their curriculum we encounter similar issues of misunderstanding and resistance from students and faculty when it comes to our socratic non directive pedagogical model though these are perhaps a bit more pronounced given the authoritarian model of russian secondary education but in some very huge and perhaps rather obvious ways our writing center will probably never look exactly like a us one nes isn t the first non us institution to adopt this model though it is the first in russia which is becoming more popular worldwide indeed recent humanities phds with a sense of adventure ought to seriously consider exploring the international market which often offers more attractive opportunities than the us market and for that reason the specific challenges we have here are worth discussing naturally this is a subject that i will continue to reflect on as my time in russia progresses but here are a few broad points that have come to the forefront as i ve begun working here for starters ours is a bi lingual writing center offering consultations in both russian and english and when it comes to english we have to assist students with widely varying levels of proficiency which means that we are involved not only in teaching writing in english but in teaching the language of english itself students can come in not only to get help with their writing assignments but to practice their pronunciation or conversation skills we offer workshops in oral presentation skills in addition to writing skills for that reason we call ourselves the writing and communications center literal translation from russian the center for written and oral communication and while the difference appears subtle consulting on oral vs written communication for efl students requires a different set of competencies for consultants simply being a native english speaker helps but isn t quite enough on its own some linguistics training and a basic understanding of english vs russian morphology makes a gigantic difference the differences between english and russian extend beyond the mere mechanics of language however in the past few weeks at nes we have come to think of essay writing in english as a completely different genre than essay writing in russian where the argument often appears at the end and the writing tends more toward circularity than toward the pyramidal model we teach in freshman comp in the us it s not that the russian way of writing is incorrect it s just that audiences in each language have different expectations when it comes to the structure of an argument and students must be taught to tailor their papers and presentations to fit each therefore this is a writing c...
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