Dear Friends (an apology for poor blogging)
Dear Friends,
I promise that one day I will once again post my current Russian adventures on this site. These tales will have the following themes:
1. What I did in Krasnoyarsk (long overdue)
2. Going to the Banya (public bathhouse)
3. Moscow and hanging out there with other Fulbright folks
4. Something silly about Russia I have written down somewhere (I can’t find the list at the moment)
These are the things currently keeping me from telling you of these adventures:
1. Writing a plenary speech for an upcoming linguistics conference (aka my university showing me off in front of a bunch of ‘experts’ who ‘really care’ about what I have to say. They told me it’s normal to speak for half and hour. Yeah right, I can only imagine how much I’d hate watching someone like me babble for half an hour about the prestige of the Fulbright program
2. Putting together a seminar for foreign language teachers on current innovations in foreign language pedagogy (while trying not to draw attention to the fact that technology is heavily stressed in this field and there’s an extreme lack of it here)
3. Correcting articles to be submitted to a journal. These were written by Russians in English and sometimes it takes me about 40 minutes to decode a single run-on fragmented crazy sentence littered with fancy academic words. Sigh.
4. Renewing my Visa so I don’t get deported. I think this will actually be the easiest of all my tasks (although I wish the woman at the university in charge of talking to me about this didn’t insist on speaking Russian like a kalashnikov fires off volleys of bullets.)
