Things the guide books don't tell you.

I'm flying home for Christmas tomorrow so i guess that's why my mind has been turning to the things that i have learned since coming here. Obviously it's been a huge adjustment but i think that I'm rolling with it now.When I'm I don't read the signs in the Metro anywhere as slowly as i used to. I no longer have to constantly consult my Metro map. Listening to the announcements telling me which station I'm at certainly doesn't cause me the stress it used to in the beginning. Having said that there are still things that get to me.Here are some of the things on my list :

• I hate spitting . I think it's a thoroughly vile habit .Men over here spit like its a national sport. Apparently hauling back and blowing is considered 'cool' so a young man told me.Gobs of spit everywhere you walk is an everyday occurrence.Thank god I'm going home before the flu season really kicks in.

• Russians don't have any discretion. Men and women alike will stand /sit and stare at you like it's their right and it's their business to examine you from head to toe

• People drinking alcohol in the morning .

• Drunks and on the Metro at anytime of day.

• Many of the beggars on the Metro have some mind-blowing physical disabilities . Sometimes the things that you see them using to mobilise with are so crude.When i was going home yesterday i saw a man who had what looked like whole leg amputations. The leg-stumps he had looked like they'd been made of plaster of paris.The stumps were covered in cling-film. He pushed himself along the platform floor on a square of well worn MDF with 4 castors screwed onto it.

• The women here in the beginning seem incredibly over-dressed. Sequins and spangles are de rigeur. Skin tight jeans and pole-dancer platform are acceptable.This also the home of the disco-bra and thigh high boots.

• 4" inch heels in the snow and ice is not seen as a problem. As a young girl here told me when i asked her if she was frightened of falling and seriously hurting herself '' At least I'll look good !"

• The very traditional view of women and mens roles now.Women over here dress deliberately for mens pleasure.

• Men and women of all ages tying tongues and swapping spit ( we're talking hard core here) in public places seems to be considered normal behaviour.

• When the weathers warm and the Metro is crowded (nearly always) there will be a time when a certain Eau de Frowsy Crotch & Unwashed Armpits hits and it will be more than you can bear. Back home I'm a 3 jumper minimum woman and everybody knows that i hate the cold. Let me tell you , over here , i give thanks all day long for the cold weather!

These are just some of the physical adjustments.The language adjustments ? Oooh.. i need to get myself in the zone to write about that :)

Looking at both sides

Before i left England to come here we were given notes on our various study centres. I attended a couple of question and answer sessions given by students who'd been out here the year before.
My main concern before coming here- given the press reports that everybody reads- was the welcome to expect from the host community when it's obvious that you're not one of them.

My first journey on the Moscow Metro had me quietly freaking out. At the time i didn't know that the Peoples Friendship University was close by where i lived. So, when i walked onto the metro platform and saw two young black guys i got a little more anxious. When we were joined by an Indian guy and somehow we all managed to get on the same carriage .Imagine my thought processes... every bad newspaper article and every piece of video footage came flooding into my head. One of the black guys was smaller than me, i.e minuscule. Bizarrely i went into 'Mother & Director General the Armed Forces' mode.Army, yep all FOUR of us! I immediately went to work thinking about who would do what and protect whom. Completely and utterly ridiculous. As if when anything kicked off I'd have the time to tell them about my eloquent yet effective strategy !

Anyway, there i was , quietly working my way to a heart attack , watching over 'my boys', watching the Russians in the carriage and trying to count out for my Metro stops as i had yet to be accustomed to the sound of this great language. The train was getting more and more crowded , i lost sight of 'my boys' . I didn't realise that while i was trying to remember i whether i was at stop 5 or 6 and trying also to keep myself upright and stand my ground against aggressive babushkas trying to bounce me out of the way, my boys had got off.So, when another young black guy in his Tims and his MTV hip hop ( or is it rap?!) video style got on. I was nearly clutching my chest ! My man hopped and dropped onto the carriage, then swung non-chalantly into a free chair close to where i was standing. It was the i noticed that 'army 'had gone. No fuss ,no hassle. I couldn't help but notice that there hadn't been any burning crosses to greet me at each station. Nor had there been a mass mob chanting 'Sig Heil' at any period in my journey. I decided that it was the better part of commonsense to relax instead of collapse.

Yes, i sometimes wonder why I'm studying this language especially when you read about the latest pretty gruesome attack on a youngTajik migrant worker earlier this month.However, last week when i read a front page large lead article about the murder in an English language newspaper, inside the same newspaper was the smallest paragraph reporting that the fact that Medvedev has just signed a bill that now that allows for DNA testing ( and thus the creation of a database) for crimes like murder and rape. In a country like this that this is huge news. The implications of such a law and its enactment in a country where the President has made fighting corruption one of the fundamental pillars of his tenure is a story to watch. Medvedev is a by lawyer by education and by training .So, setting aside all that is wrong with this country it IS interesting to see what Medvedevs legal brain has focused on in the first months of his tenure.
It will also be interesting to see how his legal brain deals deals with that other legal brain across the Pond.There are some seriously interesting times ahead in world politics... be prepared for the political vague-speak to get even vaguer.

Moscow Life

It's 2 a.m . I can't sleep ..Ganna has the TV on stadium loud as per and in the flat above my room he's beating her again. She cries and she screams , she moves from room to room to avoid him. For short while there's silence and then it all starts again. It eventually it all stops ,daylight breaks and it's just another Moscow day.

Having never ever lived in apartments before the sounds of others so disturbingly close is totally unfamiliar to me. Although having said that,at home when a next door neighbour had her man around i christened her Orca. I was going to complain but thankfully the relationship was a short one. My 'babies' bedrooms were next to hers and they were old enough to know what she was doing. Whilst her lover delighted in her trick pelvis , my kids didn't (and shouldn't) have had have their sleep interrupted when Mr &MS WeWannaBePornStars got busy.

Anyway,the sounds of daily goings on in apartments here are sometimes make uncomfortable listening. Where i lived previously there was a women who sobbed enough to make you heartbreak the first time you heard her and her complaints about her money-grabbing family.The you come to realise that this woman is a harridan ( whose vicious tongue could earn her a gold medal in the Nasty Mouth Olympics) , is house-bound and her family have the patience of Job.

The wife-beater and his wife are still together . A truce will be had for a couple of weeks and his fists will be out again.

Of, course I'm conflicted. I'm not at home where i have full command of the host language and I wouldn't worry about calling the police. I know the system there . Over here the police are a different kettle of fish and 'trust' is not a word that springs to mind when people speak to me about them. So, you listen to the screams , the sobbing and pleading.... helpless.Shocked into the realisation, that all you can do is wait and hope that the beating that you're hearing this time won't be as long as the last.

As a woman to hear another woman cry like that at the hands of a bully is unpleasant to say the least . I lived with a bully once. 'Fortunately' he only physically assaulted me once .... the rest was psychological torment at which he aimed ( and still does) to make himself the master. I got out of the situation but i remember the years i spent thinking hoping things would get better. They never did no matter what i did, so i spent the last years of my marriage in a quiet rage until i used that energy to save myself and my kids. As a consequence i have had some amazing journeys and blessings and so have the kids.I hope that one day the woman upstairs realises someday soon that there is more to life than a fists and tears.

A slug of vodka and half a tomato

...... that's what he had for breakfast.Of course i was surprised, yet in true Russian style nobody else batted an eyelid. The train was packed as usual and i sat opposite him. He opened the bottle of vodka so tenderly it was if he had been seduced.I have come to learn that over here slug of alcohol for breakfast is as normal as the way you and i would eat toast. Drunks and the homeless are part of the landscape. I have yet to become hardened to the beggars on the Metro .You will see people with the most staggering disability getting on the train and asking for help. They get few rubles from one or two people but in the main they are ignored. I've been told by more than one person here that begging here is a 'business' that doesn't benefit the people that you think it does.


One very jaded view that i heard was that these businessmen' go to country villages looking for seriously disabled people to bring to this Metropolis .They make alot of promises but as soon the new arrivals get here they are put to work .I've seen some people here that we'd rush to help at home. Men in soldiers uniforms without legs .Someone else who could hardly speak and whose only limb a horribly twisted arm and a forefinger and thumb. I am trying to harden myself because my big soft heart is costing me a small fortune ! I tell myself 'Do not give anything to anyone today, you need to feed yourself much less everybody else' then someone gets on the train and your first thought is 'Ooooh good God...am i really seeing whats in front of me?'


Yesterday it was a woman bent doubled , with limbs so twisted i thought that she was going to topple over and get trapped between the train doors. The drivers here are not blessed with patience. As the train rocketed through the tunnel she managed (just) to stay upright and deliver her speech. She asked that we( the 'kind' people on the train) spare a few rubles because life is hard for her and her medication that she needs is costly .She carried what must have been her treatment card with her. She moved with such difficulty i was sure that people would respond to her better than I've seen at other times. It didn't happen .Apart from what she got from me and a couple of people she was ignored.I acknowledge that I've only been here 3 months and Moscovites have been seeing people like the woman yesterday for years.


I've been fortunate enough to meet some wonderfully generous native Russians , although to look at their hardened exteriors you wouldn't think that they wouldn't give you the air that they breathe. Yet this generosity is tempered by an ability to ignore things that make you want to run up to them , shake the and say 'Didn't you see that?' . They will probably tell you 'Yes', and , with that fantastically blunt logic of theirs they'll tell you that everybody suffers and everyone is responsible for their own struggle.That's life.

Words

Finally,I've got this blog show on the road. I've been in this Internet cafe so long they're getting twitchy ... you may not have heard that i have a role in a new Russian reality TV show called 'Dread In the City' ! Apart from a few hours when the city sleeps the producers call me back all the time. Once in a while there other black folks in the show, the majority of them seem to be African . I've decided that i must have superpowers because i seem to be invisible to them.


You know how we do when we're some place where you don't see a black face for an eternity .Then you see somebody ,you can't help yourself but you smile, you look to make eye-contact, you acknowledge.For a while there is blessed relief at not being the 'only'one.My experiences so far has been here,if the 'one(s)' you see are African in the main you can forget the sister-brother thing. I have yet to understand why. One thing is for sure my body language is very different from most of the black people that i have seen so far.It's almost like they want to make themselves invisible.


There's no denying times were and are tough here.The Russian body language is very very assertive and you have to meet it.This isn't a city for the faint hearted.It doesn't welcome you with open arms, it doesn't put on a show for you the way that say Paris does.It doesn't do gentle,it makes no attempt to seduce you. So when there is aggression here it is full on. Last week a Moscow court handed guilty verdicts on 7 members of a skin head gang.Messrs Ryno and Skachevsky erstwhile 'leaders ' of this gang are 17 years old .Along with other members of the gang they have been found guilty of killing 20 migrant workers and attempted to murder 12 more between August 2006 and October 2007 -yep , these 'children' meant business. They now await sentencing by the judge.


Now before, you think that every Russian is a fascist bastard and what the hell am i doing here as I'm such an obvious target. The prosecution argued that no mercy be shown . InterFax reported that the jury ( we must assume 12 'good' men and women) handed down their verdicts and 'ruled that Ryno and Skachevsky did not deserve leniency ' . It is an unfortunate fact that in Russia that are people to take up where Ryno and Skachevsky left off ,but ,we must hold onto the fact that 12 men and women from their community have not shied away from their duty nor have they shirked the responsibility placed upon them. The pain of the loss suffered by the loved ones of the murdered and the damage done to those whom these 'people' attempted to kill is beyond what language can adequately describe. Right now 'GUILTY' must be the sweetest sound that they've heard in the longest time.



It was my plan to have this blog up and running so that when i hit these Moscow streets it would be a way of keeping family up to date on what I'm up to here. I've been here 3 months now but it's never too late as they say.My first month it has to be said was hellish. For someone who rarely leaves their kids the reality of studying a language where it is a given that you will have to live abroad for a while came as a bang to the solar plexus when i actually got here. Me being me i.e EveryWoman ergo SuperWoman thought' i can handle this it will be tough but hey we have a dream right ?'


The first month i lived in a thoroughly unpleasant situation. The situation came to ' head' quite literally when one evening to cheer myself up I'd bought a DVD . I had to watch it through a laptop. I put it in and there was sound but no picture. So, as you do , i went on the desktop and pressed the icon with a clapper board and the word 'Movies' beside it. I pressed the icon and what should pop up .. pictures of my 'hostess' giving somebody a blow job. There weren't any pictures of his face just a thoroughly unfortunate exhibition of a parts of him that i had no wish to see. The fact that my 'hostess' didn't respect me enough to remove those pictures when she gave me the lap-top further added to my unhappiness in her apartment.

I made up my mind to leave... fuck putting things down to 'cultural differences'. Staying with her was making me ill ... quite literally. I felt like i had a 1000lb rock on my chest and i was losing weight. Leaving that apartment was the best thing i could have done.I live with a wonderful old school babushka who takes such good care of me .. she is so like mum it's untrue. The other day we sat in the kitchen together chatting and listening to Ella Fitzgerald on the radio while she chewed on chicken bones..... chewing on chicken bones .. now that's truly old school y'all !