VEMZ, Fems and Astronauts

Part I: VEMZ

I know I have not written in a while, but I see no point in giving you all a blow by blow account of things which most of you will find really boring, and all week we have essentially just been doing teacher training seminars. (Useful, but hardly prime blogging material!) The main thing of note that I have to share is this: I will be teaching one of my classes at VEMZ, the Vladimir Electric Motor Factory (the Russian word for factory is zavod, thus VEMZ not VEMF). This is a small international company, and they are looking to train their employees in business English in order to make the company more competitive in the global sector. I will (most likely) be teaching VEMZ employees with very, very low levels of English, although these will be adults who are all interested in learning English for the purpose of furthering their careers. I find the fact that I will be teaching at VEMZ to be very exciting for some reason. Plus I think it is interesting how I was selected for this task. K taught one class at VEMZ last year, so she is going back to teach there again this year (we are offering two classes at VEMZ), and they needed to pick one other teacher to do the other class. Other than K, only Male B, B and I have actually worked before, other than things like summer and part time jobs. The others have all just graduated from college. And Male B and B have worked as teachers, so I’m the closest we have to someone with experience in the business world. So, twice a week I will be teaching VEMZ employees business English. 

Part II: My Feminist Attitude

I was walking down Bolshaya Moskovskaya (the main street) today at lunch time with my American coworkers, and we were discussing the clothing habits of Russian women. Russian women generally tend to dress nicer than American women. I suppose I should qualify what I mean. Today, I was wearing a nice pair of jeans, and a cute little top under a fitted black cotton sweater (for warmth when I was outside). I was also wearing sneakers. Everything I was wearing was clean, and nothing was wrinkled or ripped or in any way sloppy. This would be a perfectly acceptable and rather average outfit for a woman in her mid twenties in America. Over here, that outfit is definitely a little too casual for leaving the house. If I chose to replace my very comfortable sneakers with pointy toed heels (currently very popular here), I would definitely stand a chance of being mistaken for a Russian. If I exchanged the jeans for skin tight pants or a short skirt, and perhaps a diaphanous top, then I would fit right in. Additionally, If I were to dress more like I were, say, going to the theater on a daily basis, I might also fit in a little better. In addition to more clothing, the average woman (under 40) on the street here definitely has a lot more of the sexpot look going than the average American woman. I do not think that this is a sign of Russian women necessarily taking better care of their appearance, it simply has a lot to do with style and with what is accepted. (Ex: In the US if you are planning to wear a skin tight white top made of a thin material, you wear a white bra under it. I have seen a lot skin tight white (or simply see through) tops without any bras underneath. Think of the typical reaction people in the US would have to a woman wearing this getup and going to the grocery store, or to work, or to visit friends. No one here has that reaction; it is simply the style. They probably wonder why we are all so covered up. (I dressed a lot more like a typical young Russian woman the last time I was here, although even then I never got into displaying my nipples in public. I definitely have a culture induced impediment to that built into my brain.)

But back to my walk down Bolshaya Moscovskaya. We were walking along, commenting on how the Russian women all dress very nicely and obviously put a lot of care into their appearance, and talking about how uncomfortable it must be to walk for long distances in those pointy toed high heeled shoes, when one of the guys (this is a group of Americans, remember), made a comment that it is generally a lot harder for women all over the world, because we are in general expected to put a lot more into our appearance than men are. I agree, women all over the world are expected to put a lot of time and effort into clothing, hair and makeup, whereas men are generally not held to any standard of appearance. Anyhow, at this point, one of the other American dudes (who is a very nice guy; I’m not trying to bash him online or anything) stated very matter of factly that it is not just in clothing; women have it a lot harder in general. I was wondering where he was going with this, but unfortunately he did not take the conversation in a turn I particularly liked. He said something along the lines of: I mean, if a woman works, she has two shifts. When she comes home from work, then she has to cook and clean and do all that stuff. I gave him one of my looks. I could not help it. (I have never been a recipient of one of my looks, obviously, but I have been told that I can make some very telling facial expressions.)

I decided not to comment. Did I really want to end up getting into what could very well become a heated argument in English while walking down a provincial Russian street? No. (Some of the group had a small anti-American incident the other day, so we have been trying to be as unobtrusively American as possible.) However, later in the afternoon, while we were in the teachers office, working on lesson plans, he brought it up: So I checked, just to make sure I understood him. Did he really mean that if husband and wife were both working full time, when they came home at the end of the day, the dude could plop down in front of the TV while the woman had to make him dinner and clean the house? At this point, two of the other American (female) teachers joined in, and we asked him if he were married, and he and his wife worked, would HE sit on the couch and watch TV while she waited on him hand and foot. At this point he began to waffle. Like I said, he is a nice guy. I do not think he wanted to piss us off. And I also do not really think he had ever thought about it too much before. (He did not know how to use the AH washer/dryer because when he was in college, he was one of those people who brought dirty laundry home to mom.) He never did give a straight answer on whether or not he would help in the housework if he were married.

Part III: Welcome to Cape Canaveral

The AH has five classrooms. Each year, the teachers decide on themes for each of the classrooms, and then decorate them in accordance with the theme. Each room then gets a kitschy name, and everyone then refers to the classroom by its name instead of by a number or something. Anyhow, we were told to come up with ideas for names/themes. I decided to think about the attic classroom. Last year they named it the treehouse, because it is up high. What else is up high? Well, you know I’m a bit of a space nut. Space is up there. Anyhow, we decided that the attic would be Cape Canaveral, and that I would decorate it. I am having way too much fun with this. The reason why I made that sitcom promo thing yesterday, was that I was working on Cape Canaveral decorations. I have actually made each headshot into a head inside a helmet on a space suit, to go all over the ceiling. I am way too proud of this; I am such a geek. I totally will post photos when the project is finished. (And for anyone who might be interested, the other rooms are: Haight-Ashbury, Hollywood Blvd, Pennsylvania Ave, and Main St. We could not come up with a space related street, so we simply used Cape Canaveral.)