woolly mammoth in the crosswalk

For a while, I was afraid that my life was becoming nothing but routine - that I was being lulled into a existence too ordinary - when, really, a year abroad should be anything but dull. Wake up late, run to the bus, teach, eat, read the news, use too much bandwidth, idly plan a lesson, photocopy, scan song lyrics for grammar points, photocopy, idly pick up a grammar reference book, photocopy, teach, teach again, clean up, go to Joanna's, get a bus or taxi home, drink tea, go to bed, wake up late, run to the bus...

For a while we had the TV serial "Tikhii Don" (Quiet Flows the Don) to look forward to every night. For two weeks, an hour a day, we had a glimpse of southern Russia circa WWI. The novel traces the life of a Cossack family and their fate in the civil wars; this recent film adaptation was a loosely-strung together collection of love affairs and deaths, interspersed with wide-angle EPIC cinematography. We couldn' t tell who was married to whom, who was fighting whom, and who had died. The only character we could ever positively identify was Rupert Everett in the main role. (He should really stick to the gay Englishman, and not attempt the brooding warrior.) Every other Russian man had the same pink face and blond mustache; all the women were wrapped up in shawls and always in the process of having children or dying. It was truly awful, but we couldn't look away. Yet even the Don has ceased its quiet flowing, thus leaving a void in our evenings.

But somehow plenty of odd things manage to happen in tiny Vladimir. People have been shooting off fireworks in the middle of the night in front of my apartment. An artist has been painting at our humble bus stop on Bolshaya Moskovskaya. And today, a woolly mammoth was sighted crossing the street.