January in Tyumen

January went by surprisingly fast. I was free of my teaching duties for the month, but my schedule filled up quickly. I spent only two weeks in Tyumen before travelling for about a week and a half. After a few days in Moscow, I arrived back in Tyumen on the 5th and finally let my body rest and readjust to the 10-hour time change – just in time for Russian Christmas.

Most Russians are Orthodox and Orthodox Christmas is on January 7th. Christmas in Russia is largely a religious holiday, and people do not exchange gifts (they do that on New Years Eve), they just attend church – which has a different meaning for them than for me. I didn’t attend a ceremony, but instead joined Grunya and Sergey in one of the oldest churches in Tyumen “Trinity Monastery”. I more just observed than anything. In Orthodox Churches women must cover their heads, there are no pews and you walk around, light candles, and pray by icons – no statues in the Orthodox religion.

A few days later I got to partake in another Russian "tradition" with Grunya and Sergey: sledding in the forest. This was really fun! There is a hill in a nearby forest - cleared of trees of course – and sort of a sledding park. There were 3 slides and three different icy tracks. We climbed to the top of the slides, sat on our improv cardboard sleds, and flewwww down the track. It was great and we stayed until we couldn’t take the cold anymore!

Over the next week or so I spent my time in a few different ways. I lead a teacher roundtable, gave presentations at a couple global classrooms, celebrated journalists’ day complete with Russian karaoke, went to Yekaterinburg, visited a new discussion club, and went to a greco-roman wrestling competition.

I’m not sure if I’ve written about Global Classrooms (there are 2 kinds), but in this case I went to one of the high schools in Tyumen and gave a few presentations about different aspects about life in America. Pavel, the Russian Fulbrighter, coordinates these presentations. I mentioned to Pavel that I had wanted to visit Yekaterinburg, a city that is about 5 hours away from Tyumen by train. He was leading a delegation of students to NYC for two weeks and in order to get visas, they needed to take a trip to the US Consulate in Yekaterinburg. He invited me to tag along for the day, and said one of the students would be able to show me around in the evening. It was rough making it to the train station by 6:30am because the night before was “Journalists’ Day”, and Grunya, who is a journalist, invited me to the celebration. I wasn’t there too long, but stayed long enough to sing Russian karaoke! Anyway, the next day, we took the train to Yekaterinburg and had a quick lunch before heading to the Consulate. While the group was waiting for interviews, I decided to ask to see the English language office. I felt a bit bad about showing up without warning, but all of the employees were really friendly and let me stock up on some additional teaching materials. The rest of the group went back to Tyumen, but Sofia and I stayed behind. She showed me around Yekaterinburg for a few hours which was nice and then we took an overnight train back to Tyumen. On the way to Yekaterinburg, I made a new friend, who invited me to a discussion club where I could meet some Americans. I had only met two in my 5 months here and really briefly, so it was a nice opportunity for me to meet some new Americans and English speakers.

Below are some photos from Yekaterinburg!