A Great Place To Get Lost In

A few nights ago I had a date with my ex here in Moscow, Nadya.

She had a couple of hours free, and we hadn't seen each other in over a month, so we agreed to meet.

In Moscow, that's easier said than done.

She told me to meet her at the Arbatskaya Metro station. That's down near the Kremlin.

YOU just try to find somebody in this mess.

But when you're dealing with the Moscow Metro, you have to factor in some variables. (1) Sometimes there are two stations with the same name, and (2) Just about every Metro station has more than one entrance and more than one exit.

Factor in a daily patronage of 10 million or so, and you have a formula for....well, not meeting.

In fairness to me, I was dubious about this arrangement. If I'm going to meet someone in Moscow, I prefer to take the guesswork out of it and meet them in a definite place whose location I know. Hence, I suggested that we meet on Kuznetski Most, specifically at a cafe called Kamchatka, which is right across the street from Цум (pronounced "Tsum") one of Moscow's largest and most well-known department stores.

But Nadya felt that meeting me there would be too time-consuming; she only had a couple of hours and Arbatskaya was closer to where she was working.

So she said, "Meet me at the Arbatskaya Metro. The one on the dark blue line." (There is another Arbatskaya Metro on the light blue line.) Well, okay. I know the difference between light blue and dark blue, and I can read a map, so I duly got myself to the dark blue Arbatskaya station, around 7:30 in the evening, as per our arrangement.

Then I had to negotiate the labyrinth of passageways that gets you to the sign reading Выход в город, "Exit to the city."

Well, if you give me any kind of choice of directions, I'll always go the wrong way. That's a given. Next thing I knew I was standing just outside the Kremlin wall, on a large square, with the ticket office for the Kremlin museums in front of me. No sign of Nadya anywhere. I got out my cellphone, but there was no point in trying to call her. Nadya is the most technology-challenged person I know. Worse than me even. She has a cellphone, but never carries it and refuses to use it. She also has a notebook computer, but again, never uses it. Never even powers it up. It just sits in her apartment collecting dust. If I want to get in touch with her, I have to call her old-fashioned land-line, and I knew she wasn't home. She was somewhere on the streets of Moscow, looking for me. But since she refuses to carry her cellphone, she could not call me up on mine and ask the $4 question "Where are you?"

Well, we never found each other. I walked around for about 30 minutes, then went back to my apartment. A couple of nights later, on the telephone, Nadya claimed testily that she had waited 45 minutes for me, then she, too, went home.

The lonely crowd. City of 12 million strangers. At least two of them lost. Unable to find each other. At least I had the excuse of being a relative newcomer; Nadya has lived here all her life.

Turn on your cellphone, girl. It's 2013.

And next time, we meet at Kamchatka, like I suggested.



 

You Ain't Lived Until You've Been Messed With By A Four-Year-Old

I've been teaching English to kids in Moscow now for slightly more than a month. My pupils have ranged in age from 18 months to eight years so far. Next week we plan to participate in a summer camp teaching program just south of the city where my students will range in age from 10 to 14.

One of our regular pupils is a little girl named Masha. Masha is four, and a very pretty little thing, which you understand immediately when you meet her mom, Oksana. Oksana is quite lovely, and actually her husband Roman, Masha's dad, is a good-looking chap as well. Masha got lucky in her gene pool. They're also very nice people. I don't know what business Masha's dad is in, but her mother runs an art gallery. My boss Robert and I attended an exhibition at her gallery last week. Robert's wife Irina joined us. We looked at the pictures, mingled, sipped wine and listened to the speechifying, which was lost on me because I don't understand Russian, but that's all right.

Robert has tutorial sessions with Masha four times a week, and he usually brings me along for two of them. I'm the unofficial "arts and crafts" guy among our group of teachers owing to nothing more than the fact that I've done a little bit of painting in my time. Masha and I paint watercolors together. Today we painted a pink castle and made a complete, total mess of it. But when I asked Masha what she wanted to paint, she said "a castle," so a castle it was. And any time you ask Masha what color she wants something to be, she'll always say "pink." So a pink castle it was, and as I say, a mess.

My teaching tools.

So the idea is partly to have me do watercolor painting with Masha and encourage her to discuss her painting in English. The other half of the equation is, I don't speak Russian. Robert does,so Masha knows she can talk to him in Russian, and she does. But the idea is to get her to speak English, so Robert brings me along in the hope that Masha will realize I don't speak Russian and talk to me in English.

So far it hasn't worked very well. Masha has found a compromise: not talking at all. Well, let's just say that getting her to talk English is like trying to coax a cat out of a tree. This is kind of a shame because she actually knows quite a lot, and her brother Kolya, a few years older, speaks English quite well. Robert has been working with both of them for about a year.

Masha and I are getting used to each other. She likes Robert a lot because she has fun with him. They laugh and play and watch videos. I'm the art teacher, and I think until now Masha has regarded me as too serious, and besides, she's four and has a four year-old's attention span. She is going to find painting entertaining for about five minutes, then want to go do something else.

But our lessons are two hours long, and I've been charged with filling up the first half of the lesson. So Masha and I have been devoting a full hour to painting, which doesn't really work too well. After a conference with Robert, I decided to try a different plan of action today. When Masha and I were done making our pink castle mess, instead of asking if she wanted to do another painting, I asked if she wanted to watch a video on her iPad.

I didn't have to ask twice: she LOVES watching videos on her iPad, as do all kids and a dismaying number of adults I've seen lately, including one guy who was in a rowboat in a park with his girlfriend. She was rowing the boat and he was sitting in the stern playing with his iPad. Tell me chivalry isn't dead.

This thing's not a tool,
it's a life saver.

So Masha got her wish. We put the paints and brushes aside and she watched some videos: "Gogo," the little cartoon character who teaches English in a somewhat annoying (if you ask me) British accent; a Disney video about the weather; a couple of phonics programs and a game or two, including one in which Masha has to place each animal she sees in its proper place in the picture. If she puts it in the wrong place, a rabbit pops up and says "Uh-uh." If she puts it in the right place, another rabbit pops up and blows a trumpet.

In one of our early lessons I was painting geometric shapes in watercolor and teaching Masha their names and colors: "yellow square," "pink square," "green square," "purple triangle."

That last turned out to be a tactical error on my part. Masha decided that she really likes the sound of these two English words together: "purple triangle." She likes to say it: "Purple triangle!" In fact she likes to say it SO much that when she starts to get tired, or wants to let me know that she's done painting for the day and wants to watch Gogo, she resorts to the "purple triangle" defense.

I'll point to the yellow sun. "What is it, Masha?"

Well, at least it isn't purple.

"Purple triangle!"

I'll point to the green grass. "What is it, Masha?"

"Purple triangle!" she laughs

I'll point to the blue sky. "Masha, what is it?"

"PURPLE TRIANGLE!" by now she's in hysterics, she thinks this is so funny.

That's when it's time to get Robert back in the room. He knows what Masha likes. They skip rope, they play ball; Masha talks Russian to Robert despite repeated reminders that these lessons are for speaking English.

I guess I'll just stay over here in my corner and paint ... an orange triangle.

Masha likes orange almost as much as she likes pink. She only likes to SAY "purple."