Two Elenas, an Olga and a Vlad

Growing up in the Midwest, I had experienced my share of gargantuan ear-cracking thunderstorms, howling wind and horizontal rain included, with or without tornado warnings. I nearly got washed down the streets of hot humid Siberia last night when the skies opened up and pounded the city of Novosibirsk with rain, lightning and superscary thunder. I'm sure everyone can relate to the awful feeling of stepping ankle deep into muddy brown urban rapids and having to walk -- make that squeak --back to the hotel almost a mile away. My flimsy umbrella was laughably beaten by the elements but the cooling was welcome, if a little wet-rat making.

Last night Gary, the white Zimbabwean, and I went to the New York Times restaurant and bar. He speaks English like a British person would and its kinda quaint. His profession is very strange -- although a militant and avid non-smoker, he works for the British-American Tobacco Company, supposedly one of the oldest companies in the West, peddling tobacco products to new Russia. The cognitive dissonance he carries is amazing and he sees his job purely from a marketing strategy. This is the kind of capitalistic disconnect I would have only expected from an American!

While drinking some Siberian Coronas we noticed some Russians at the table next door speaking alternatively good and awful English. One of them, Elena (a name that 1 out of 5 Russian females seems to be given) asked in Russian why we were laughing. We tried to back out of it, that we weren't laughing so much as enjoying the mauling of our mother tongue, and she explained that she was an English teacher and they were having class. At the bar! What a country! Soon, Vladimir, Olga and, yep, Elena II, joined us and we were asked if we wouldn't mind conversing with them. All of them lawyers (jurists as they would say here), all of them learning English to advance in New Russia.

They weren't too bad actually, as long as we talked slowly. They could understand Gary much easier because the flavor of English taught in schools here is UK English, not the American kind that I am cursed with. I might add that all of them agreed that American English was prettier and all of them hailed my accent, one of the girls going so far as holding her nose as she spoke (Americans speak through their nose, according to the Russians).

I must admit that Novosibirsk has grown on me greatly. The people here in Siberia are far friendlier than what you see in the western side of Russia. I have even been daydreaming what it would be like for me to move here for a year, perhaps for a sabbatical at the prestigious university in town (the Yale of Russia), and seeing what a real Siberian winter is like...