Einstein was right

When I landed in Russia on December 13, I had steeled myself for the hardship ahead. Three assumptions consumed my mental preparations:

1) The plane would be late.
2) It would dark, no matter what time the plane arrived.
3) It would be cold like a cold that I had never experienced before.

All of the above were based on the following, exceptionally well-reasoned consideration:

1) This was Russia.

So, imagine my shock when when the captain announced that we would be arriving 10 minutes early (I reasoned this away by thinking, well, it was British Airways) and it was reasonably light outside (I rationalized that there would be a precipitous drop in daylight as December moved, inexorably and deeply unfortunately, into January). When it turned out to be above freezing (above freezing! in December! what, did I not notice when the plane made an emergency landing in Fiji?), I was forced, in a fit of deliriously exceeded expectations, to acknowledge that Russia was a land of beauty, light, and punctuality and permanently suffused with a warm glow.

Of course, then darkness fell about 15 minutes later, I sat for ages in traffic, ended up 2 hours late or so to my ultimate destination, and froze my buns off walking home to the metro later that night.

The first conclusion that I have drawn in Russia, therefore, is that time is yet another one of those once-concrete truths that I have been forced to acknowledge as a bourgeois social construct. Since arriving here, I have failed, utterly and spectacularly, to time my life in any way that makes sense. I haven't really gotten on a schedule, so I'm not entirely sure how jet-lagged I may or may not be. This leads to the interesting sensation every day of waking up and having no idea if I've made it to the next morning, woken up in the middle of the night, or wildly overshot my goal and am now clean into evening, or perhaps another day entirely. All I know is that all time looks like pre-dawn or soon-to-be-dusk, and I am permanently filled with a vague sense of being late to everything.

How long will it take me to get to the metro? Ten minutes? Twenty-five? I don't know, is it snowing? How hard? How many people have trampled the slush before me into a navigably hard surface? Or has the slush mysteriously vanished? How long will it take me to plan my lessons when I get to work? Two hours? Four? I don't know, have they told me what I'm teaching before I get there? How much new information will I unexpectedly uncover between the time that I arrive and the time I have to teach? How close to classtime will this information surface? If I continue pushing my arrival time back incrementally everyday to try and compensate for the irregularity, will I ever manage to get dinner before I teach? Or will lunch fall next? Will I soon eat only chocolate from the receptionist's desk? How long until they run out of chocolate? OH MY GOD, WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY RUN OUT OF CHOCOLATE?

These are just some of the questions that consume my day.

Perhaps I should back up. I am a newly-minted English teacher for a company called Orange Language Centre in St. Petersburg. I believe that I have been in Russia for about 12 days, but understand that I am trusting the word of a computer that operates with assumptions about the standardization of time that do not necessarily hold for the rest of the country. (Most of the time, I do not know what day it is. Seriously. I mean, there are no calendars in my apartment, my phone is out of batteries, the amount of daylight varies wildly every day, and I'm working on Christmas. I'd like to see you try.) I plan to live in Russia until at least August, when my contract with Orange comes up for renewal. Should motivation and opportunity hold, I'll be using this blog as a way to chronicle my experience for the folks back home, charm and amuse cyberspace passersby (hi there! leave me comments!), and keep up my writing.

To kick things off, since by now we've established that time has no meaning in Russia, here are some other, more useful numbers to give you some sense of how things are going:

In general:
Number of degrees outside in Fahrenheit: 17.6
Number of degrees outside in Celsius: -8
Number of letters by which I misspelled Fahrenheit and Celsius when I first typed this entry: 2 (words are hard)
Amount of snow on the ground in non-walking areas: maybe 5 inches
Percentage of snow on the ground in walking areas that is not disgusting slush: 0
Number of rubles it takes to buy an eggplant: 280
Number of eggplants I have purchased: 0

At work:
Percentage of native-Russian English teachers at my school who are women: 100
Percentage of such teachers named Olga: 50
Percentage of receptionists at my school who are women: 66.6
Percentage of such receptionists named Marsha: 50
Percentage of native-English English teachers at my school who are women (excepting me): 0
Number of Belgians: 1 (I think he is lost.)

Personal:
Number of minutes from my apartment to the nearest metro: too many
Number of minutes from my apartment to the nearest metro if it's especially slushy: 1.75 x too many
Number of locks on my door: 2
Number of locks on my door that are unnecessarily tricky: 2
Number of minutes in the shower I get with one boiler's worth of hot water: 15, give or take
Number of times I've gone outside with my hair wet: about 10
Number of times this has been a good idea: 0
Number of weapons shops within a half-mile radius of my apartment: 2
Number of times this was mentioned to me before I signed the lease: 0
Number of times I've taken my life into my hands when crossing the street: all of them

Will I ever learn to operate the locks on my door with a respectable success rate? Will I ever bring myself to purchase an eggplant? Will I ever manage to get myself online for a lengthy enough period of time to update my blog again? Stay tuned!