Schooling Putin Sample

To make the deadlines I have I'm going to upload excerpts from my book. Any and all feedback is welcome!

Welcome to Russia

St. Petersburg, Peter the Great’s masterpiece. Founded in 1703, as Russia’s gateway to Europe and now she’s more Russian than her cosmopolitan counterpart Moscow.

My flight landed in Moscow at 2 PM the next day. After I disembarked from the plane into Domodedovo airport I found a payphone and made a collect call home.

“I'm in Moscow."

"James? It's five o'clock in the morning. Are you ok, son? Are you in Russia?”

"Yes, Mom. I'm OK.  I'm sorry I had to call collect, but my Blackberry is on the fritz.”

"So, are you ready to come home yet?”

“I have to go find the gate for my flight to St. Petersburg. It’s really difficult because all of these signs are in Russian,” I joked.

"Call me when you get to St. Petersburg. Love you.”

With a couple of hours to spare before my flight I grabbed a Russian language newspaper and ordered coffee and blini at a café in the airport. As I looked around, I did not feel as if I was in Russia. There were people from all over the world speaking different languages. I expected to be an oddity, but I had seen three other black people since I arrived. I assumed they were African students and then realized they probably made the same assumption about me. I was not an oddity. Here in this airport I was like anyone else. Just a traveler en route to his final destination.

But this was my final destination. After so much hard work you finally made it to Russia!

I could barely contain my excitement. I felt as if I had climbed Mount Everest. Yesterday I was in a small town in East Texas, and now I’m sitting in a café in the capital city of the world’s largest country. In my moment of rapture I paid the bill and over-tipped the waitress.

My connecting flight to St. Petersburg was a Russian airline, and it certainly had all of the infamous traits of a Russian airline. On the seat in front of me I could see the previous owner of the plane was Continental and the overhead bin where I put my carry-on refused to close. As the plane started down the runway it shook and rattled. I closed my eyes and prayed. After the most turbulent hour and thirty minutes I had ever spent in the air we gracefully crash landed at Pulkovo 2 Airport in St. Petersburg.

Relieved to be alive and in a familiar place I thanked God and went to find my luggage.

I breezed through passport control and at baggage claim my suitcase was the first out of the chute. Now all I had to do was find Anna.

I looked around and moved toward the exit. Anna was not the type of person to go unnoticed. I expected her to bounce up on me any second, her red hair waving, and wide smile like a Russian Pippi Longstocking. Guessing she was late, I started to hail a cab but quickly remembered I did not know where I was going.

Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and there was a young woman with dark hair and blue eyes staring at me. She had typical Russian features and was attractive but her emotionless face was cold. “James?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Welcome back to St. Petersburg. Anna left for Moscow a few days ago but she told me to meet you. I’m her sister Sasha.”

Confused, I told her I was happy to meet her. She asked if I brought the laptop.

I started to unzip my bag and get it but she stopped me and said, “Not here.”

I looked up and there were eyes of official-looking Russian airport employees locked in on us from every angle. Customs crisis narrowly averted.

I followed her outside and she introduced me to her “brother” Pavel. Pavel looked like a military veteran who had been discharged for drinking too much. His face was clean shaven and he was probably in his late twenties but looked forty. He offered to help with my large suitcase and I reluctantly handed it over. We walked to the parking lot, and I got in the backseat of a black Lada.

Sasha sat in the front and asked to see the laptop. I pulled it from my suitcase, still freshly sealed in the original packaging from the Apple Store, she opened it and confirmed the contents.

“Super,” she said in a heavy Russian accent.

On that cue, Pavel put the car into drive and we pulled out of the parking lot.

“When will Anna be back from Moscow?”

“Anna is not coming back any time soon,” she said.

I gulped. Am I going to end up dead and missing within 24 hours of being here?

Sasha spoke with Pavel in Russian about what sounded like work at the airport but I could not make it out. I sat silent in the backseat of the car, heart pounding, and many thoughts swirling. Why didn’t Anna tell me? Had she sent me a message on my BlackBerry?

We drove down Pulkovskoe highway passing large shopping centers, supermarkets, and apartment buildings spread out over a vast plain on either side of the road. If it were not for the Cyrillic lettering on the signs the outskirts of Petersburg could have been mistaken for a small city in Alabama—developed but still surprisingly desolate. Outside the sky was overcast, and it looked like nightfall. After driving past the large Heroic Defenders of Leningrad monument in Victory Square, I knew we were close to the city.

We arrived directly in the same neighborhood where I lived the previous summer and pulled up to an apartment building.

Pavel and Sasha stepped out, and I followed behind. Inside it was the all too familiar cold, prehistoric stone stairwell I had seen in so many other St. Petersburg apartment buildings. We went up one flight of stairs and she opened the first door we came to. The large red door opened slowly, revealing a narrow break and then another door behind it.

I wanted to ask what was going on, where we were, and how could I be sure she was Anna’s sister.

After she turned on the lights, I set my bags down inside and started to enter but stepped back when I saw her and Pavel removing their shoes. I took mine off and looked around.

Everything looked brand new. Directly in front of me was some sort of seating area and a long hallway with two doors on each end. Next to me was a bathroom covered in blue tile. There were boxes and clutter scattered about but for the most part everything was incredibly clean. I never expected to experience that new house smell in Russia.

Sasha left me standing with Pavel and went into one of the rooms to make a phone call. Nervous, but with nowhere else to go, I waited. I studied Pavel closely and wondered if he was carrying a weapon. I was sure I could overpower him before he could reach it. But then what would I do?

Who are these people?

Moments later she came back and told me it was ok for me to stay in this apartment until I found my own place to live.

I was almost at a complete loss for words. She motioned for Pavel and me to follow her down the hall into the kitchen, which was relatively small compared to the rest of the apartment. She sat down backward on a bar stool at a high glass table that extended from the wall. On a shelf in the kitchen I saw a hilarious photo of Anna smiling into the camera and I was relieved that this was the right place.

Sasha explained that Anna was leaving for France to work as an au pair. She had just completed a background check and was in Moscow getting an EU work visa. From there she would travel to Annecy and be a nanny for a year.

“If you need anything I will help you. I will be staying in Anna’s room.”

Jet-lagged and emotionally exhausted, I agreed to what she was saying. She handed me an original iPhone from 2007 and told me I could use it until I got my own.

She transferred the MacBook laptop to Pavel and he assured her he would get it to Anna before she left Moscow for France.

“Your room is back here,” she said. I followed her to the end of the hallway opposite the kitchen. She opened a blue-gray door with a large semi-translucent window and stepped inside.

The room was enormous, and I thought it was the living room. It had recently been completed, and the shiny hardwood floors still smelled new. In the corner there was an old dusty grand piano. There were four large windows that overlooked the street and opposite the piano was an artificial fireplace. Above the fireplace on the mantle was a large mirror. Capped off with decorative molding in the corners and a demi-chandelier. My bed was some sort of bench that had been modified to look like a couch and in the middle of the room there was a garment rack for my clothes.

I unpacked some of my things and hung up my suit. Sasha came back and took me to the bathroom. “When you take a shower you have to mop after you finish. Sometimes there is a leak and you have to get the water before it drips out onto the wood floor.”

The tub was fairly large and there was a retractable showerhead next to the knobs—no shower curtain so water would undoubtedly hit the floor. She picked up a towel and showed me how to use it to mop the floor. After showing me the bathroom we went into the kitchen and she taught me how to work the washing machine. It was under the counter next to the sink. To my surprise there was also a dishwasher.

This is amazing. I expected the place to reek of cigarette smoke and to be furnished with decrepit, Soviet-era furniture. Yet everything around me looked like it was from the expensive section of Ikea.

On the refrigerator there were dozens of magnets from the handful of places Russians can travel in the world without a visa—Egypt, Turkey, Cuba, and Maldives, to name a few.

She asked if I was hungry and offered to cook.

“Thanks but I’ve been craving shaverma since I left last summer. Would you like anything?”

She shook her head, “I don’t trust what kind of meat they put into those things.”

After she handed me a house key she said, “Always remember to lock the door. When you leave and when you return.”

Growing up in the country I never made a conscious effort to lock the doors. The front was usually locked but the back doors were almost always open. And at Brown I could set my door to lock automatically. I had also heard rumors about dog meat being used in the shaverma but paid it no mind. I figured it was just hysteria hangover from the Blockade of Leningrad when dogs, cats, rats, pigeons, and on occasion humans were food.

Relieved to have found temporary housing I went outside to get shaverma from one of my favorite vendors. As I approached Haymaker Square, all the familiar sights and sounds from last summer came back to me at once. Nothing had changed. The scarred and peeling exteriors of the old buildings looming over the broad streets. Three metro stations surrounded by kiosks, small shops, and benches bracketed by oversized wagon wheels—a tribute to the original purpose of the square. Years ago, this was the first place travelers from Moscow arrived in St. Petersburg. They would repair their carriages and refuel their horses—hence the name Hay Square.

The only thing missing was the 17.5-meter high glass “Peace Column,” a gift from France. As if to directly defy modernization attempts by the universe, it had been removed from the center of the square a few months earlier.

I popped into an electronics store to price an iPhone. The young man working smiled at me and asked, “White or black?” I said black. The silly grin on his face read, “Of course you wanted the black phone,” as he showed me my options. I looked at a 3GS model and almost choked when I saw the thousand-dollar price tag. And for only 16GB! No wonder Anna wanted me to bring iPhone 4’s with me.

I walked past the McDonalds I frequented last summer. I was confident enough in my Russian that I could order a chicken shaverma with tomatoes, cucumber sauce, and red pepper. I no longer needed to settle for ordering foods I was comfortable pronouncing. I ordered at a small, greasy restaurant and sat there, savoring each bite, and thought if this is dog meat it’s delicious.

Back at the apartment, I took a shower and made sure to mop up the floor. In my room the WIFI signal did not pick up so I moved my laptop to the kitchen and used Skype to call home. My mother was skeptical about everything and reiterated that I could come home if I wanted to. I told her I was fine and that I was living in a really great place. Around 10 PM, Sasha emerged from her room fully dressed, wearing makeup and perfume, getting ready to leave. She said she would be back in the morning and asked if I would be ok. I told her I would be fine and I was about to go to sleep because I had a meeting at my school early the next day. Satisfied with my answer she left.

I went back to my room and put my head in the neck pillow I had bought at the airport in Houston and slept the most comfortable sleep I had in a long time.

The next morning, I woke up around 9am. Panicked, I quickly threw on my suit and tied a sloppy knot in my tie. To get to the school I’d have to take the metro to the other side of the Neva—the river separating my section of the city from the mainland.

After getting lost twice, I found what I was looking for, Peterschule. The building was peach colored with four floors and painted on the side was a large coat of arms of an eagle inside of a shield on an open book and the words “Du Bist Petrus.”