Let’s get physical!

I forgot to mention that my movie ticket only cost $2.58. Eat your heart out, Regal Cinema!

Fun fact: when you go to a restaurant here with other people, it doesn’t matter how many people are in the party, the waiter serves the first dish that comes out of the kitchen. They never wait until the food for the entire party is ready, so someone always ends up watching another person eating for 10 minutes until his food arrives. Weird system. In general, the food’s not spicy enought for me.

Fun fact: The kids love croutons in their soup at lunchtime. It’s just the old, stale bread that hasn’t been finished up from the previous week that’s cut up in small chunks. But the kids will ask for it by the handful.

It’s snowing like crazy at the moment. I think I’m about to experience a Russian winter. I just did my homework and checked the latitude of Rochester and Kazan. Kazan is 12 degrees of latitude further north than Rochester. Holy crap. I just went out and bought a warmer hat. Now I’ve got my eye on a long winter coat. I will be walking to school soon. I don’t want to ride if the roads aren’t cleared and my impression so far is that that will never be the case in Kazan. Although I shouldn’t rush to judgement. I’ve seen street sweepers out there. They don’t seem to be very effective, however. Every car in Kazan is covered in mud. It’s also illegal to wash your car in your apartment parking lot. Only if you own a place out in the country, can you wash it yourself.

I learned something else interesting. The Russian Duma (legislative body) just declared that it’s no longer mandatory to teach the Tatar language in schools in Tatarstan. If a kid wants to voluntarily take Tatar lessons, he can sign up for a class after hours. This has some people worried. They see it as an attack on the culture and are afraid the language and their heritage will be lost. It sounds like it might be the first step to insert more Russian influence into Tatarstan. This only applies to public schools. Private schools can teach it if they want.

So, now on to the physical. Every school teacher in Russia has to get a physical once a year. It includes a chest x-ray for TB and for the women, a pelvic exam. Yup, you heard me right. What the hell do they expect teachers to be doing in school?! And they expect you to bring a passport picture. In any case, our school contracts with the cheapest clinic it can find and the clinic only does the exams on Wednesdays. So, according to our nurses at school, they had sent all of the paperwork for us foreigners on ahead to the clinic so that we could be processed in a reasonable amount of time and not have to translate everything there.

We show up at the clinic, with Valeriya, Matthew’s Russian wife as a translator. This clinic looked like something an American woman would go to to get an illegal abortion. We got there shortly after 8 and there were already about 20 people milling around. Then we find out that the guy at the clinic who supposedly processed our paperwork in advance had quit his job. So, Valeriya’s standing there filling out all the paperwork in Russian for us and about 30 more people come into the clinic. You don’t take a number, you don’t wait in line, you push and shove. Finally we get to go to the back and stand by the first doctor’s door where they draw blood. What the hell for? As we are waiting, about 8 people just simply push ahead and jump the line. Some of them were even from the other branch of our school! Damn.

After about an hour of this crap, we just said screw it, got our documents back and went back to school. Matthew was smart enough to take a video of the entire scene to show the boss how impossible is was. So now we will have to find another solution. We actually already have but I’m not going to put it in print. I’ll let you know when I get the official documents.

Boy, I thought getting Medicaid for my dad was a pain in the ass, but this bureaucracy tops them all.

On a calmer topic,  Mothers’ Day here is in November. We will have to prepare a present for the moms and they come in on one afternoon and put on a program for the kids. Can’t wait to see what this will be like.

We’re headed for the mexican restaurant again tomorrow. Saturday I want to finally get to the big bookstore and Sunday is going to be cleaning and Skyping day. The landlady comes Monday to read the meters so I’ve got to be ready for her.