Russian Language and "The Quest"

“Ruski Izzihk” (That’s Russian Language)

My language training starts each day at 9am when Irina rings the “doma-phone” (the intercom at the front door of our building) with her usual cheery greeting of “Dobre Utra!” I spend the next three hours tied to a medieval torture device as she shoves a red-hot poker in my face screaming, “No! You got it wrong again! Why can’t you be more like Kellye!” OK, maybe that isn’t what really happens every morning, but some days it sure feels like it! Needless to say, language learning is not my gift and more often than not my tutor is tortured much more than I am. If you want an idea of what I look like when I finish my daily “exercises” click here and then click on the pig’s nose. OK, if you did that then you get some sense of what the past two weeks has been like for me. Two down…only 10 more to go!!!

And let me add here that we have WAYYYY too many friends and family members that are teachers. Why do I say this? Because the word for teacher in Russian is nearly impossible for me to say. “Pre-pa-da-va-teal” Yep, looks easy when you do it like that, but try saying it over and over again. My tongue just won’t do it. I always get the syllables mixed up and in the wrong order. And, if I do get it right, it is always slow and sounded out syllable by syllable. If I ever need to use it in actual conversation people will think I am “a very special boy.” So many of my lessons over the past two weeks have been done sitting in front of a stack of photographs with Irina asking me who people are and what they do for a living. Again I say…too many teachers. So, I thought I would be clever. When I got to Kellye I said “missionaire.” “And….,” Irina said, before forcing me to say it. When I got to Mikey I thought I would try “video producer”. “E” (that’s the Russian word for ‘and’) so I thought I would try “universitit professor”. “Neyt. Eeeee?” Prepadavateal. Dang! Got me again. And if the word does not sound scary enough, this is the way that it looks in Russian: преподаватель. That's right, kids. Don't try that at home!

So what have I learned over the past two weeks? Well, I have learned to introduce my family and friends and tell what they do for a living, which will be important if you come to visit. Today I learned a handful of adjectives, which will be important because now I can describe you to other people when you come for a visit. (Though I am not sure that hot/cold, heavy/light, short/long, etc. will be very helpful during an introduction. For example: “This is Kellye’s good, long, light, sister Kay.” But probably the most important thing that I have learned to say is, “I am studying the Russian language and speak Russian very poorly. Do you speak English?” There are usually three responses that come after that question. The first is the least common, but it does happen more often than I would like. It is when the person hears the question and rolls here eyes and turns away in disgust. (That happened yesterday when a girl asked to borrow my cell phone and I told her that I didn’t understand her and asked if she spoke English. The girl at the table next to mine gave me a similar look as she handed the first her cell phone to borrow.) The second response is most common. It is a smile accompanied by much giggling. Even the men giggle a little when they hear me. And the third response has come from probably more than 99-percent of the Russians that I have talked to. “Angleski? Nyet.” I cannot tell you how few people I have found in Moscow that speak English. It is a little surprising, especially considering that our building is right next to the dorm of a college campus and there are young people all over the place. Yet, very few speak English. However, they are almost always more than willing to help and they almost always do so while speaking Russian about a hundred miles an hour in the hopes that if they keep talking the words will magically be translated and I will understand what they are saying.

Well, while all of this is terribly amusing (if you are not me), I tell you these stories to tell you another one. So, here goes…

They said there would be days like these!

For all of my FPO buddies: “So there I was…”

Do you know how when you are being trained to do something new people always tell you stories about things that happen and you think to yourself, “That won’t happen to me. I am much more competent than that!” Wrong again, my friend. Wrong again. Well, anybody that knows me even a little bit knows that I have to constantly be “wired” to the world. The Internet has become has important to me as getting three meals a day. It is how I get information (in English) and, most importantly, it is how I stay connected to my family and friends and all of you who take the time to read this blog. Since we arrived we have been stuck using dial-up Internet, which in it self is bad enough. But the worst part about dial-up here is that you have to pay for it by purchasing an Internet card which are usually available at one of the kiosks outside of the Metro stations. That is not too bad, but the speed is not fast enough to download anything of any significance and as a result that burns your Internet minutes. And you ALWAYS seem to run out of minutes at a time when you want to be online the most and/or you are not planning on going to the Metro.

Now, Moscow has high-speed Internet. As a matter of a fact, every other missionary in Moscow has some form of high-speed Internet in their apartment, but for some reason we could not find a single company that would service my building. Needless to say I was getting frustrated. We have a college dormitory on one side of us and a Mercedes dealership on the other and we cannot find a company that will put a high-speed line into our apartment. I was nearly at my wits end when I discovered that there is a company that has a high-speed wireless network in the city, but as luck would have it, their service area ends on the other side of my street. I discovered that if I put my laptop out on the balcony of the kids’ room I could pick up their signal, but that was the only place in the house. However, I found that if you purchased three months of service they would give you an antenna booster that would improve your reception. Frankly, that should have been my first clue, but you have to remember that after two weeks in the city, I have become a desperate man.

At this point let me add that I realize that missionaries have survived on the field or decades without Internet access and that I sound like a whiney baby. This I realize, but even all IMB communication comes via email and/or web pages.

So last Saturday I had determined that I would go to the center of the city where their offices were so I could pick up one of these antennas and finally get a decent Internet signal in the house. As I was leaving my apartment I met my next-door-neighbor for the first time. She and her boyfriend spoke English (two of the one-percent in Moscow) but unfortunately I met them as they were moving out of the building, so I am hoping that when I get a new neighbor he/she/they will speak English too, but I am not counting on it. Well, during the conversation I found out that there was indeed an Internet company that would service the building and she gave me their name and phone number. So, I decided to stay home and have our team leader help me speak with the company on Monday.

I finished my lesson at noon on Monday and had determined that I was going to have my Internet issues resolved by the end of the day. Jeff had called the company and told me that I had to go down there in person to get my account set up. He had a full day of meetings, so would not be able to go with me, but I figured I was a big boy and could do this all on my own. And, I was pleased to find that the office was located on the street perpendicular to mine – Ulitisa Mikukho-Maklaja. (Nope. I am not making that one up.) I have been walking the neighborhood on a fairly regular basis, so I know my way around and figured that it would be easy to find. So I got the address from the web site, wrote it on a piece of paper in Russian just in case I would need it, and with Hannah in tow, headed out the door. According to Jeff, the office was located on the 4th floor of building 23A. I pulled out my map and could not find building 23A listed, but building 23 was one of the large buildings that is a part of Pushkin Institute, the university in our neighborhood. I thought this was a strange place for the office of an Internet company, but I figured that maybe since our building is located on campus that they service only the university. When I got the fourth floor all I found there were classrooms. That took me back down to the main floor where I asked several people if they had heard of NetFort. Nobody had ever heard of the company. One nice guy tried to give me some help in Russian and wound up pointing me to one of the building’s security guards. He didn’t speak English either, nor had he ever heard of NetFort, nor did he know where building 23A was. So he pointed me to another guard. Same story. I then went outside and started walking back to the intersection of my street, Ulitisa Akademika Volgina, when I ran into the first guy who helped me. He pointed me back toward my apartment, which I knew was wrong because the address was Mikukho-Maklaja and not Akademika Volgina. So, I ventured up the street in the opposite direction. After asking three or four more very amused non-English-speaking Russians for directions I headed the other direction with much the same results. I again ran into the first guy who didn’t know where I was going, but was willing to help me guess. Looking at my map I discovered that Akademika Volgina has a 23A that is across the street on the other side, so we went off to find that building. We stopped into a women’s clothing store where a couple of young women proceed to giggle at me. They also pulled out a map to discover that 23A was not on the map, but they did point me in the other direction. (It is a good thing that Jeff had taught me the Russian word for crosswalk just two days before.) So, it was back to the area around the Institute. I found a couple of guys in the parking lot and decided to ask one more time, pulling the piece of paper out of my pocket, pointing to it and shrugging my shoulders. They pointed me to a small building behind where we were standing and said they thought that was the one. Hannah and I went traipsing through the mud, through a construction site on the way to this building, asking a couple of construction workers for help along they way and they confirmed that we were finally on the right track. We finally got to the building, which was surrounded by an iron fence and guard shack. “NetFort?,” I asked the guard. “Da,” he said as he activated the gate for us. Finally. Now we are getting somewhere.

We took the stairs up to the fourth floor because we couldn’t find the elevator and buzzed the intercom at the front door. They let us in and I went through my usual speech about not knowing Russian and asked if they spoke English. And then I heard music to my ears…English. However, what she said was, “Can you come back in about 15 minutes, it is lunch time.” It was around 2:15pm. So, I agreed and Hannah and I left the building. As we rounded the corner we discovered that we knew exactly where we were. We were standing on the back side of our own apartment building! The office was located right behind the dormitory that is next door to us!

Well, we had some time to kill and Kellye had given me a grocery list, so we headed up to the grocery store to pick up a few things. By the time we got back to the office, 45 minutes later and with hands full of groceries, we had walked no less than three miles that afternoon. We finally found the elevator and headed upstairs where there was someone who spoke English waiting for us. Once in her office she explained that it would be at least 10 days before they could get an installer out to our apartment. I said that was fine and she told me I would have to sign a contract…that was all in Russian. By that time I think I would have signed almost anything. I told her that was fine and that if she would give me a copy I would have a friend read it for me and I could come back the next day. So far, so good. She then asks what kind of computer I have. When I told her that I have a Macintosh she looked at me funny and said, “Only work on Windows XP.” This didn’t make much sense to me, so she called her tech support guy (who didn’t speak English) and he came up with the same conclusion. I thought that we were finally getting somewhere when she pulled out a piece of paper and began writing, but what she wrote for me was the name and number of the wi-fi company that I had planned to go to on Saturday!

Dejected, but determined Hannah and I walked the 50 yards back to our building and headed upstairs where Kellye was just finishing her lessons for the day (3pm). By this time I had decided that I was not giving up and not going to bed until I had some form of high-speed Internet in the house. So I traded children and Sarah Beth and I caught the bus to the metro and headed for the center of the city. The street the office was located on was just a couple of blocks from the Kremlin and I sort-of knew where I was going since we had been there just a couple of days before. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Russian addresses are a little funny. The address of this particular office was 9 Gazetny side-street Building 2, Office 5. So, I set out in search of Building 2. We got to the end of the street and on one side were buildings 1, 3, 5 & 7 and on the other side of the street were buildings 4, 6, & 8. Back to my map and broken Russian as I approach a police officer who motions to the end of the street where building two wasn’t. Well, we finally find that the office is located in building 9, which is divided into two sections. The girl at the counter spoke English and I was on the way home after sending a one-word text message to Kellye… “Success!”

After eight hours of trekking my way around the city on a wild goose chase I was able to connect my computers to the Internet at a speed just slightly faster and less dependable than dial-up. The good news is that I don’t have any time limits and that I am supposed to be able to connect most anywhere in the city…except for my building, which I am nicknaming “The Cone of Silence.” So, the quest for decent Internet service continues.

Assuming that I can get connected for long enough to post this blog, more updates are on the way. Thanks again for praying.

Blessings,
Marc