Babushkas

As another teacher observed last night, babushkas rule this country. You see them everywhere, stomping resolutely down the street in their sturdy black shoes, heads covered with floral-patterned headscarves in the Russian Orthodox style. Most of them stand 5' 0 or less, but don't let this fool you: babushkas are battleaxes. If you're poky getting off the train you're liable to get shoved, hard; tracing the shove back to its source you find a small shapeless bundle that on further inspection reveals itself to be an elderly woman wearing approximately 27 layers of clothing, none of which hinders her mobility in the slightest. Yesterday I saw a very tiny, very old woman dash across Gogol Street against the light. Buses were bearing down, but she hiked up her skirts, tucked up her parachute-sized handbag and stuck her head straight out in a dead run. She was grinning at herself as she did. I really liked that woman.
They sell things on the street, all kinds of things, in all weather. The ones who gather by my train station favor roses, nylons, and live animals. They sit on boxes by the hour, with whole litters of kittens buttoned into their overcoats. Or along certain stretches of the road from Zelenograd to Moscow, spaced every fifty feet. I always wonder what these women think of each other. Do they get along? Are they comrades in capitalism? Or do they sneak around when the others aren't looking and dump bleach in their rivals' watering cans?

When I first moved here, I didn't understand my front door, and the babushka who lives behind the entrance window of my building used to shout at me (when I tackled the complicated problem of unlocking it), "otkritye, otkritye!' meaning 'open it, open it!', gesturing to the same. Realizing that it was already unlocked, I would quickly forge through to the hall, but she stood up and followed me, saying 'otkritye, otkritye!' to drive it home until I said, Yes, yes, I know now, in a heavy accent, whereupon she threw up her hands at my helplessness and went back to watching dubbed soaps.
[As a side note, that's how my babushka introduced herself to me: What is your name? -Lily - How nice, Lily, I am babushka.]
Now we're friends, and she greets me in English with "Hello childrens! How are you! Goodbye!" when I come in. But being a foreigner I often do things that strike her as strange and alarming, like walk around in shirtsleeves when the temperature is 50 F or less. So I get a lot of, 'Aren't you cold?! Don't you know it's winter? Do you wish to die?' from her and from the flock of ladies who sun themselves outside my apartment in the mornings when I'm going to work. One bawls me out when I put the trash down the trash pipe the wrong way, and another when I take the stairs instead of the elevator. Silly foreigner! They know I'll change my ways in the end.

How to be a Successful Expat English Teacher

1) Get the job
2) Tell everybody you know about it, as casually as possible
3) Go abroad, etc
4) Go to an internet cafe downtown, update your Facebook status to note that you're sitting in an internet cafe downtown. Don't mention that the cafe is actually a McDonald's
4a) extra points if you can convincingly argue that where you are, there is no downtown, or even coherent infrastructure, and that in order to scrape up enough electricity to power your laptop, you had to go without food and hot water for 3 days
5) Start a blog
6) Work on the blog
7) Hang out in bars with other expats
8) Teach some classes

On Latkes

Last night I came home from teaching and made latkes. I've had a 3-lb sack of potatoes sitting on the counter all week, getting hoary around the edges, so I decided to finish them all off in a single burst of culinary efficiency. The chief appeal of latkes (besides their deliciousness, of course) is that making them is such an involved, untidy project. Very pleasant, on a certain kind of evening. It was raining and the wind was howling around, but inside my blue kitchen with the art-deco lamp, everything was cozy and bright.
I launched into the job with a single bowl and a hand-grater, but by the time I was halfway through, pretty much every dish in the kitchen was involved, as I had bowls full of potato shavings ready to be mixed up, cutting boards, milk, flour, sour cream, bits of diced onions clinging to everything, sunflower grease, hot latkes airing on paper towels, raw cakes ready to go on, my hands covered in potato, and the whole kitchen just a spectacular disaster zone. A huge dramatic delicious mess. I felt like a 7-old with a bucket of Playdough.
Then I ate the crispiest, most golden ones with a smatter of salt, and life was good.