Moscow (Москва), Russia September 15 2011

Well, it has obviously been a very long time since my last entry in this Blog. And, a lot has happened since the last entry. I’ve left Seton Hall University after a brief 3 year stay. Counting the 32 years I spent at NYU I decided 35 years in the university business was enough. So, as of June, 2011 I guess I have retired from university life. Nancy retired from public school teaching (Tenafly, NJ) a year before I left Seton Hall having put 36 years in and spent her first year in “retirement” planning what we’d be doing in Chapter III of our lives.

The big change for us is that we are now living in downtown Moscow, Russia for at least the next 2 years. Nancy was still interested in teaching; not so for me, so she landed a teaching job at the Anglo-American School of Moscow (www.aas.ru). AAS is affiliated with the US Embassy and many students are children of diplomats and business people working in Moscow. Children from the Canadian and British Embassies also attend AAS. The school goes from pre-K 3 years olds (this is Nancy’s program) all the way through high school which offers an international baccalaureate program. The school is an amazingly well endowed complex. I’ve posted some photos of the school if you’re interested on my Web site: http://www.andrewmcdonoughphotography.com, then click on the “Russia” link.

Nancy was hired to resurrect a pre-K 3 year olds program which has been dormant for several years. She’s been developing the entire program with 2 teaching assistants. Tomorrow (Friday) will be the second full week where her kids are in school for the entire day (8:30-15:30 – note the time format). She’s already done a remarkable job although 3 years tend to wear her out more so than her 2nd graders ever did. She comes home beat every night. If you know Nancy she rarely goes to sleep before 12:30 until now – by 23:00 she’s in bed and out like a light.

As for me I’m “working” at AAS in the after-school programs. I am (will be – I start next week) teaching photography to middle and high school students (2 separate groups) and a high school woodworking class.. If you know me I’m an ardent photographer (URL above) and I’ve been a woodworker since I was in grammar school. I was, at one time a long time ago, a carpenter foreman building houses. So, I’ve pretty much got it made “teaching”. Nancy has the real job and I’ll be “teaching” what I like to do most having NOTHING to do with human anatomy or college/university kids. Because Nancy is the bread-winner of the family I have taken on the roll of Natasha the house (apartment) keeper and Boris the chauffer and all around handyman – more about this is future posts.

So here we are living in Moscow for the next 2 years. AAS has some rather liberal holidays so we plan to use Moscow as a travel hub. And, we’ll be back in the US occasionally as well.

My plan for this blog is to write about US people (us) living in Russia where very few people other than our colleagues at AAS speak English And as I think you’ll come to see the Russian culture is very different from our own making for some major (and minor) challenges. For the first few weeks we’ve been here I averaged being lost about twice a day – sometimes on the street and sometimes on the Metro (subway). Not knowing the language sure makes things exciting when you’re trying to get oriented to a new city and country

Russian is based on the Cyrillic alphabet with some letters that have English equivalents and a bunch that do not – 39 letters in all. More on the Russian language in future posts but let me give you one common example. In Cyrillic “Cnachбo” (pronounced ‘spa-see-ba”) means “thank you or thanks”. While many of the letters look like they are in English they aren’t so reading and speaking words and phrases is very tough. At the moment I have about half a dozen words/phrases that I can say/read and this includes “yes’ and “no”. The whole alphabet looks like this: А, Б, В, Г, Д, Е, Ё, Ж, З, И, Й, К, Л, М, Н, О, П, Р, С, Т, У, Ф, Х, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ъ, Ы, Ь, Э, Ю, Я so you can see I’ll be needing more than a few lessons in Russian – we start classes next Tuesday – wish us luck.

Some of the things I plan on writing about include: the Russian language, our apartment, getting a driver’s license, buying a car, parking, traveling on the Metro, getting lost, security guards, high-heels and more. Hopefully, I’ll have a lot more material to post this time around. I hope you find it interesting – we sure do and notwithstanding a lot of challenges we’re having a great time here – stay tuned…

Cnachбo,

Andy