Back to the bdiary…

I’m no longer at longitude 83. I don’t know what longitude I’m at now, because I have no internet connection as I’m writing this in my room at 6:00 AM (the signal’s off and on here). But I don’t need to tell people my coordinates anymore, because everyone knows where St. Petersburg is.

Yes, readers, I am now writing from that glorious city where I spent my fabled Smolny semester, where I posted my first post on a bjournal, where I first honed my Russian in extensive conversation with native speakers and decided once and for all that this language would be a part of my future, where I discovered anew the daily excitements that life could give me… I have returned to the banks of the Neva.

That is, half an hour from the bank by tram (or bus) (19 rubles), then metro (22 rubles). But why nitpick?

There is still very little to relate about what I’ve been doing in the city itself, but I suppose I need to fill the gaping hole of information that I left by neglecting this bjournal for over a year.

To anyone who doesn’t know, I got through my Fulbright grant period in Novosibirsk, with brief but spectacular trips to other Fulbrighters’ Siberian host cities: Tomsk (where Brendan Mulvihill was teaching), Krasnoyarsk (Helen Stuhr-Rommereim), and Kyzyl (Riley Witte). Of which more in later posts (“flashbacks”).

Not having finished grad school applications on time, I decided to teach some more English in Russia. I went to St. Petersburg in June 2010 to see Riley and Helen one more time and pass around my resume to different language schools. I didn’t hear back from them so, after a restful summer at home, I went back to Novosibirsk, where the wonderful host of the International Department had already secured employment for me in another university as well as SibAGS.

Zhenya, who had quit at SibAGS and was working on postgraduate research, knew I would rather work in St. Petersburg, so she polished up my resume and sent it to different universities. I got one reply back from the Гуманитарный Университет Профсоюзов (Trade Unions’ University of the Humanities) saying they could hire me if I arrived on December 15.

It’s in the Kupchino district, farther from Nevsky Prospekt than I ever ventured during my previous stays in the city (except on day trips to Peterhof and Pushkin).

But it’s St. Petersburg. Come on. How could I have turned this down?

Zhenya, I am forever in your debt.

More to come.