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.
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