The good things

Since I pretty much went off on all the bad things that happened to me. Those shouldn't be what I remember of my time in Russia. There are good things that happened that came in the form of people and the places I've been to.

First of all the people. I've met a mix of both expats and locals, even if the locals come from the far east of the country and moved to the western parts. Heck I've met Russian-born Canadians too. I can pretty much divide the Krasnodar people into two groups: My friendly co-workers and the wild bunch. Yekaterinburg I pretty much didn't venture out to make connections. There was one guy I knew from the internet that took me places outside the city. Had I stayed longer we might have met up some more. There was also my roommate/co-worker at the Yekaterinburg school who was awesome (in the sense that both of us pretty much keep to ourselves. It was cool said roommate was into Turkic stuff).

My co-workers were a friendly bunch, however it was sad when two of them had to leave when I just started working there. On the plus side they run their own school now so no annoying directors (that's their role now :p). One of them stayed on but at the same time wanted to leave because of the bad environment. Those three were supportive during my stay at the school in Krasnodar and when I was let go from it. They helped in making sure I wasn't let go early when I hardly started and helped out in making sure I didn't leave too early so if and when I found a new job I had a place to stay (pay a monthly rent instead of a daily rent). I should also mention the 4th co-worker. I ended up replacing said co-worker but this one showed me around the city and knows how to get to places (even if giving directions is not her forte). All and all they knew when to call bullshit on something (especially of what went on at the administrative level). A lot of it happened, trust me. The knew the teaching method professed by the school wasn't ideal, they knew the set-up of the classrooms weren't ideal, and they knew what orders that came from the top were not really justified. I miss hanging out with them.

Other people I miss hanging out with are people form one of the largest (maybe only) expat/conversation club in the city. I saw them biweekly at the club (because it met every two weeks) but there was the random occasion in which I'd join up with them when it wasn't the club weekend. It was eventually later during my stay/close to my leaving that I'd participate in post convo club activities. Through them I rediscovered my love for karaoke. I'll say this: I am not a world class singer, let alone one for karaoke. But it's something I enjoy. I don't care if I sing bad as long as I have fun doing it. These people who came from various parts of Russia and other countries such as the UK, Ireland and Australia. (There were also people from Nigeria and Brazil I believe, and at least one person from Taiwan showed up and the club was run by an American). I brought my set of Cards Against Humanity with me to Russia and I'd play the game with them at times. It did attract large crowds to the game but irritated this one guy who acted a bit like a dad towards the teenage (17-19 y.o.) attendees. He was most likely a dad though if he didn't want people to play, joke or not. If not for the job loss and the move to Yekaterinburg in hopes of keeping the job alive, I'd do karaoke nights more often and maybe explore more Russia with them. Maybe we should gather one evening and play Cards Against Humanity online?

And then onwards to Yekaterinburg. While my time was short the staff there was one of the friendliest I've worked with. Everyone was quite supportive, even if it takes a million kicks to my head to go with their advice for certain things (mainly from one of them I'd say). Compared to the school in Krasnodar the private language school itself was more organized and had better resources (except for Monopoly. Had I survived the trial period for that school and got a renewal contract, I'd bring my version of the game with me. Had things not go sour in Krasnodar I'd bring it as well). No one was required to dress like they're leading a board meeting and the administrators and senior teachers made sure people had something to do. Well there was still the air of  "If you're not needed around you don't have to be around" but they know how to take care of their employees. Can't really say much more since I was only there for a few weeks.

There were also a couple of other people worth mentioning. One was my roommate and co-worker. I'm not one to approach people directly to get to know people (as I mainly go to someone because I need something from them) but I think a common thing we had was we were both learning Turkish (not at the same time and I need to brush up on my beginner stuff) but that's one thing we had in common at least. Said roommate has been to Azerbaijan, I almost went there (and the roommate knew it wasn't easy to get in there). Second was a guy I knew from an internet penpal site. The guy used to be a taxi driver and apparently knew where I lived and how to get there from a picture I posted. I also contacted this same guy and was able to get to the Europe and Asia border as well as the monumental resting place of the Romanovs. The meet was a bit awkward as while in my mind I had hope for some conversation, I couldn't bring myself to ask question and stuff.

So far that what I can remember. If I had miss any reference or mention to you, I miss you guys too.
What's for me in the future? One of things I'm looking to get is a driver's license. If there is a situation in which I can't travel there, but you guys come to visit, I'll be able to drive you to places. If I do make my way back there one day, I'll have some experience driving a car. If I can't repay the kindness by returning the favour there, maybe I can pay it forward and help others here. Or maybe I can send you guys some maple candies (provided postal workers are cooperating). Here's hoping to meet you in the future again some time.

Thus this blog has come to an end. Maybe I'll start a new project some day.

The giant cheesestring

Each time I pass by the cheese section in the supermarkets I come across two types of braided cheese. One is called чечил (Chechil) and the other is called коса (kosa meaning braid). A bit of a note before I continue and before you Google: Chechil is a bit of an umbrella word for the cheese as there are many variants. The first ones you'll see are the brown braids but it's more than just that. I'm just covering two here.

Back home in Canada there's something called cheestrings which is a sub-brand name of string cheese usually marketed for what to put in your kids' lunch packs. The cheese is usually mozzarella but there are cheddar and marble variants of it. The fun part about cheese strings is you can string them to make fun characters like a person or an octopus then eat it. Or you can be just plain old boring and string the cheese and eat it (even worse if you just eat the stick without stringing it).

Chechil is sort of like that, the first one I'm mentioning here. It's white and it has a mozzarella-like taste and consistency but it's one giant string that's coiled into a tube-like shape.

Chechil

You can slice it and when you do you can push out the middle or you can uncoil the thing. You can also pull apart the cheese and it's almost like pulling apart a cheestring.

you can unwind it and string it apart

The other type of chechil I've tried is labelled as kosa in the stores in Krasnodar. basically its strings of cheese that are smoked, soaked in a brine of some sort, and of course braided.

This cheese is quite salty and it's good to have at parties. Personally the best way to eat it is to cut it into bits along where the bindings are. It's quite salty so pair it up with your favourite live beer (разливное пиво) and maybe some croutons (гренки) or some hunter's sausage

And an honorable mention goes out to Adygean cheese. Not a stringable cheese but someone in a chat group mentioned I should try some by frying it. It's good in my opinion.

Where the streets have names

Okay, it's not a post on experiences but more a commentary on streets and how there named.

The word for street in Russian is улица (compare with ulica in many other Slavic languages). Yes there are other street types here like проспект (avenue), шоссе (highway) and проезд (lane) but I'll be using улица in my examples.

Now улица is a feminine noun and names of streets are adjectives and  Russian is one of those languages where adjectives have to agree in grammatical gender and number. So if you want to name something "Apple Street" in Russian it would be "улица яблочная" or "яблочная улица". (Note Russian word for apple is яблоко, яблочн- is used for adjective uses).

There are, however, some exceptions to the rule and that is if the street is named after a person or a date. Let's say you want to name your street after good old Vladimir Lenin. There are a couple of ways to go about it but the only difference is whether to include Vladimir in the street name or not. The full name of the street would be "улица имени Ленина" or "улица имени Владимира Ленина" which basically translates to "the street of the name of [Vladimir] Lenin". Russian names do decline and we have the use of the genitive here. What escapes this declension is Ukranian surnames ending in -enko for example (and those indeclinable foreign names). There is a street in Krasnodar named after pilot Polina Osipenko which is rendered as "улица Полины Осипенко". The first name is put into the genitive while the family name remains untouched.

And yes, there are street named after certain dates or achievements. Using ones found here in Krasnodar as examples there's 40 лет победы (named after the 40 years since WWII ended), 70 лет Октября (70 years since the October revolution I believe) 1-го Мая and 9-го Мая. The last two I've mentioned are named after the May holidays in Russia (May 1 is Labour Day and May 9 is Victory Day).

A bit of a story to go along with the two streets named after the May holidays. It was my first time getting a taxi on my own. I decided to download a taxi app (which I believe a friend of mine uses) since it was easier than making an order on the phone. It was close to midnight when I was leaving and the people I was hanging out with advised me to get a taxi since public transport was most likely on their last trip. The app was easy to use (and it came with an English interface even though it wouldn't translate поиск такси (searching for taxi) or however it was spelled). So I input where to be picked up and where to be dropped off and 15-20 minutes later I got a taxi.
Now the way taxi seem to work is that the driver knows where you are going because you either told dispatch or they received it from the app. My destination was 9-го Мая but I ended up going to 1-го Мая at first. I guess my driver got confused (and I at first thought he was taking a short cut). I think the driver realized the error after I showed him my phone and he looked at his. It was an interesting experience though (and there were no additional charges since it was a fixed rate and not a metred rate for the trip).

And as for the street names I think I'm just fascinated with the way Russian works. English doesn't have a lot of adjectives that agree with the gender of a noun since not all nouns in English carry gender. (blond man, blonde woman, red house)

The complex apartment complex

I guess it's safe to say that the majority of people live in an apartment. There are houses too but I'd say the apartment is the most common form of residence.

While this has been explain before by probably many people on the internet this is my take on it. Most apartment complexes have some sort of business at the ground level. It can be a grocery store to a bakery or even a store that sells shoes. Heck you can have some sort of educational institution or office on that first level. Above those businesses are where people live.

So how does one get into the apartment? Through the main entrance of course! But there's no main entrance to the whole building -- you got many entrances and not all of them lead to the same place.

One type of apartment building. The entrances to the apartments are on the other side of the building.

Apartments in North America, well in Canada at least, usually have a main entrance that leads into the whole building and a couple entrances that can only be accessed by the residents of the same building. In Russia there are many entrances and they only lead to one part of the building. You'd think that there would be some secret passageway that would take you from one part of the building to the other? You're looking at drilling holes into the next apartment if you want to build something like that. Even my apartment style-dorms back in my uni years, which had separate entrances for certain parts of the building, had a balcony on the second floor in which people can go from stairwell to stairwell.

The term used for these entrances is called a подъезд. If your friends are coming to visit you for the first time (or maybe they've been there before but forgot) you tell them your house/building number, you're apartment number, and the entrance (подъезд) number. The reason why you tell this is because if your building is 200 with 8 подъездов  apartments and you're in apartment 32, you can't go through подъезд 1 because that only serves as an entrance for apartments 1-25. Even if you're in an apartment building that has 2 entrances to your stairwell, that still won't let you get to the other blocks in the same building.

Then there are the elevators. A building will have one depending on the number of floors. If the building is only 3-4 stories plus the ground level (I believe) the building won't have one and if you have heavy luggage make sure that there's someone there to help you or by a stroke of luck you live on the first level. If the building does have an elevator then here's hoping it doesn't go out when you need it.

As for what's inside an apartment? I'll cover that in a separate post.

Public Transportation

There are 5 forms of public transportation in Krasnodar: the trolley (троллейбус), the tram (трамвай), the bus (автобус), the shared taxi (маршрутка) and the regular taxi (такси). While I've been in all of them at least once I mainly use the first 4 depending on where I have to go.

A shot of 3/5 forms of public transportation found in Krasnodar: The tram with two cars, the trolleybus in blue, and a minibus (which could be a marshrutka (shared taxi, though technically means routed taxi) or a bus) in front of the trolleybus.

So for those not familiar with public transportation a trolleybus is a bus that is connected to some overhead wires and a tram (or a streetcar) goes on tracks. Trolleybuses uses the roads like the shared taxis and the buses.

So you may be thinking what is a shared taxi? I still have no idea even though I've used them many times. The thing is the shared taxi (маршрутка which is short for маршрутное такси which means routed taxi) either comes in the form of some van looking thing or a minibus. One way you can tell is the fare as shared taxis cost a couple rubles more than the bus, the trolley, or the tram (as of this posting, 17 rubles for the tram/trolley/bus, shared taxi is 19 rubles though there is the rare route that has 17 rubles). Another thing about the shared taxi is you have to let the diver know when and where you want to get off. Trams, trolleys and buses stop at every stop. If you want to get off at some point you either yell "на остановке!" or if you're going to get off at the next stop "на следующее". The first one is a bit easier to say if у-ю-щ is hard to say. You can also add a пожалуйсте to be polite. (Edit January 2016: The prices for public transport went up some time mid-December 2015. Prices as of this update are 20 rubles for the tram, trolleybus and bus, 20 rubles for marshrutki that were19 rubles, and 18 for marshrutki that were 17 rubles)

One thing I like about public transportation here is how to pay for your ride. There is a person called кондуктор (it translates to conductor but the person who drives the trolley/tram/bus is called водитель) who collects your money and gives you a ticket in exchange. The best part is you don't need exact change. Got 20 rubles? No problem, you'll get 3 rubles in change to save up for your next trip. Got 50 rubles? No problem, you can cover a friend (even if your friend happens to be luggage) or you can pay for yourself so you can get change for your next trip. If you think that's old school there is a tap card system but that doesn't work with the shared taxis (you pay the driver in this case). Also another drawback to this system is you have to pay for each leg of your trip. Need to change from one tram/trolley/bus/taxi route to another? You gotta pay. Going from tram to marshrutka? You gotta pay. Still it's cheaper than regular bus fare back home for me (at this posting $3.55 which lasts for 1h30 minutes along the bus and O-Train routes).

Not sure what else I can say about public transportation in Krasnodar but if you got a question then feel free to ask. Enjoy this video of a guy who got on to play his guitar:

Krasnodar

So what is so special about this place? Why the heck did I end up in Krasnodar and not some place like Moscow or Saint Petersburg? Why Russia and not a common place most foreign language teacher starters go like South Korea, Japan, or China?

People who know me in real life and in the places I hang out online know that I have expressed my interests in Russia and Turkey. I have tried to apply for JET but failed to get an interview with them. I almost went to Azerbaijan, which would have combined my interest of both countries and languages (Azerbaijani is a Turkic language retaining some Persian and Russian influences) but document issues (migration would not allow more foreign teachers). As for choosing Krasnodar over other places like Moscow and Saint Petersburg, I like some adventure in my life and even though I would still get an adventurous experience in those places the opportunity showed up for Krasnodar and I took it.

So where the heck is Krasnodar? Not sure how many people out there know this place exists or where it's located. I remember someone in the Vienna airport though it was located in Croatia. One of my buddies in Moscow I had to tell him it's south of where he is (way south) but I don't blame anyone for being bad in geography (I may know all provinces and territories in Canada as well as their capitals but ask me to pinpoint them on a map I'll probably be way off by a lot). Krasnodar is the capital city of Krasodar Krai which is basically like a state or a province. The nearby largest body of water is the Black Sea and it's quite close to Crimea. The most recent (2014) Winter Olympics were held in Sochi and that same city will host some FIFA games in 2018 (2017 if you count the confederation's cup). The city of Krasnodar is nowhere near these places but still accessible by train or some bus of some sort. Still have no clue where the heck I am? take a look here:

from here via google images

and here:

from here via google images

Note: I found these map images on google images which have appeared to come from some news/reporting sites so if you don't like the use of these images on this blog let me know. They're for educational purposes by the way.

Anyway from my impressions of the city before I got here I made some comparisons with my home city of Ottawa: Both are small but big (in terms of population), no metro (Ottawa, however will be getting a light rail system whereas Krasnodar has many modes of public transportation), and there is another region of the country across a river: Adygea.

Considering how long I've been here and the time between the intro post and this one is a lot, I still haven't seen much of the city. So far one of the coolest places I've been to in the city is Чистяковская роща which роща (roshcha) translates to grove, a park full of trees (and some monuments to things). I'll post about individual places and things that I've come across as I go along. For now enjoy this pretty picture of the park.

Чистяковская роща (Chistyakovskaya Grove) in Krasnodar

Mandatory introductory post

I'm not good with keeping things up to date or to completion so why start a new blog? I guess it's a way to communicate to the wide world without having people pry into my Facebook account in order to hear about things. What I hope to aim to post on here is things I have learned about living in Russia, specifically living in the city of Krasnodar with some comparisons to the time I've stayed in Saint Petersburg from mid July to mid August 2011. There won't be any deep, political discussions or topics in here as I don't follow them much and it's basically my life experiences here. I'm actually here in Krasnodar for a job so anything devoted to that should come first before here.

Here's a picture of me having a drink with the Cossacks