Guard nr 2

Some days ago I was going to visit Josefina, the Swedish girl, in her student house. But nope! New rules! Because of the new flu they don't allow any visitors. The guard just shaked his head, no no! She tried to convince him for a while, but no. Then after some minutes of thinking she said: "Listen, I'm a teacher in Swedish and this is my colleague from Finland, will you let us in or do you want me to call somebody?!" Then I gave him my passport and he let me in. So it seams that after 5 years of experience of different guards in Russia, you know how to deal with them! I have to learn! Ehh... or to start with learn the language at least...

At the university

This week I have had two presentations about the Nordic countries at the university. These students are studying English, so there were no problem with the language :) It was quite fun. They seemed interested and they had many questions. It was so nice to "teach" to a little bit older students compared to primary school where the children are climbing at the walls instead of listening. The students are though much younger than at the universities in Finland and Sweden. Here the students are between 17 and 21 years old.

There is a Swedish girl from Gothenburg here in Ekaterinburg. She studies russian literature at an other university and she has been living in Russia since 2004. It was my teacher in Russian at Gothenburg university who told me about her. She has been teaching Swedish here for 3 years now. Yesterday I went to her course, with her students who studying Swedish for the third year now. It was really fun! Interesting to find people that learn Swedish here in the middle of Russia. I was telling them about Finnishswedish. My favourite subject! :) I was impressed of their Swedish considering that they have only had one class per week. Two of the students will help me with Russian and I will help them with Swedish. Good deal!

Now it's snowing and it seems to snow a lot!

Have a nice weekend!

My room

I like my room. It's warm and I can sit there drinking tea and watching TV and pretend that I understand what they say. There is nobody asking me questions in Russian that I don't understand. I live in a student house about 10 minutes from the university. I live at a "special floor" in a "special room" for guests. So there are no students. There are some empty rooms there, but nobody is living there yet. There are a common toilet, shower and kitchen, but as I said I'm the only one so far. The building is old but it is better than I expected, since my supervisor wrote me several times that the facilities are not the best. There are some guards always standing at the entrance and you have to show a paper that you live there. On Saturday the guard didn't want to let me in and just said something in Russian that I didn't understand. He sounded very upset. I couldn't say more than that I don't understand and after some more angry sentences he finally throwed the paper at me and let me in... I must say I felt quite helpless then, saw me self homeless sleeping in the street. I still don't know what the problem was, because the next day there was no problem to enter with an other guard...

Soo, now this text was supposed to be followed by tadaaa... some photos from my room... but I have OF COURSE forgot something at home. And this thing is the cable to connect the camera to the computer. So, I have to check what I can do about this. So no photos yet, sorry about that!

Opera

Yesterday I went to the Opera and saw a performance called Snow maid. I went together with a teacher from the university and her 9-years old daughter. They didn't speak any English. Hard to communicate then :) The funny thing is that I thought "If I REALLY concentrate I'll understand what she says!". Well, I didn't. If you don't know the words, you don't know them. The girl was so nice and tried to speak so slowly and learn me some Russian.

The opera was good. I didn't understand anything but the decors, clothes and the music was nice. :)

Have a nice weekend!

Finnish delegation

I just have to tell about the Finnish delegation who was supposed to come here the same day as me. They were supposed to stay for some days for discussing possibilities for an exchange between their school and this university. Their flight arrived 15 minutes after mine, so my supervisor was going to pick up all of us at the same time. We were waiting and waiting for them in the arrival hall. After 40 minutes my supervisor called them. Then they still were in the passport control, since on of the them had not applied for a visa. This person had just brought the invitation. So after a while they called us and said that they had to take the next flight back to Finland... You can say that that was a short visit in Ekaterinburg :) How they had managed to get on the plane in Helsinki without visa is a mystery. Instead they sent their power point presentation by e-mail :)

Gaaahh!

There is no real coffee at the university!!! Only Nescafé! How will I survive? No more happy- flying- high-moments?

What am I doing here?

Yes, sometimes I wonder myself :) In August I applied for this internship within the organization CIMO. They accepted me even if I told them I that I don't know any Russian. To get a VISA to Russia you need an invitation from the host organization and it took about one month for it to arrive. So during that time I started a course in Russian at the university in Gothenburg. I will be here in Ekaterinburg for almost three months. The name of the city is in Russian Ekatrinburg, in Swedish Jekatrinburg and in English Yekaterinburg. It's situated close to the Ural mountains and it's in the Asian part of Russia. The map that I have on the blog isn't the best, but there it's written Yekatrinburg and it's quite close to the border of Kazakhstan.

I'm working in a univeristy in the office for international relation and my tasks are for example to promote opportunities of international education among the students, development cooperation with Finnish universities, promote Finnish/Swedish language and Finnish/Swedish culture and I will also give a course in cross-cultural communication. I should also participate in the daily work in the office, but that's a little bit difficult with my level of Russian.

So that's in short what brought me here and what I'm doing.

From Russia with love

I have successfully arrived to Ekaterinburg. The flight here was a long trip with many hours of waiting at the airport in Moscow. This is my third day here and I'm totally lost, because my Russian sucks... but my supervisor Anna is an angel helping me a lot. Today I got internet at my computer at work, so I'll try to update you a little bit more in the future.

A comment to the video below is that I in Moscow paid overweight for my luggage for the first time in my life... even if I have had overweight a lot of times.

Excuse my russian-canadian mix at the blog, I'll fix it soon. Or maybe my super-blog-secretary Jenna, who is authorized to make changes on my blog, will do it?

I'll be back.

Mot Jekaterinburg