(upbeat music)
(speaking Russian)
- Hello, everyone, good morning.
My name is Kristen, and I am teaching English
in one of the greatest cities in the world, Moscow, Russia.
I am originally from Biloxi, Mississippi
in the United States.
This is my first year traveling abroad.
Hopefully, it won't be my last,
but I have been here since August and I absolutely love it.
So, today's one of my work days.
I do have a very busy day at work,
but I will have some time this morning,
since I don't have to go into work until noon,
to tell you a little bit about my flat and my life here.
I'll plug in some videos while I'm at work here and there,
and then, this evening, I'm gonna show you a little bit more
of the city around where I live,
as well as the Moscow Metro, which is amazing.
So, this morning it is, right now, it's about 10:30 a.m.
It's about 34 degrees outside,
34 degrees Fahrenheit, about one degree Celsius.
It's been an unusually warm fall here in Russia,
in Moscow anyways.
It's only dropped below 30 a few times,
but it will get very, very cold pretty soon,
but for right now, it's not too bad.
As for why I'm here in Russia
and why I decided to get my TEFL certification,
while I was on my last semester of my undergraduate degree
and I was studying history, obviously I focused a lot
on Russian history, but I wanted to decide
what I wanted to do next.
I really wanted to go into graduate school for history,
but I also really needed
and wanted to learn the Russian language,
and so I enrolled with the International TEFL Academy,
got my certification, and before I graduated
with my bachelor's degree and my certification,
I already had job offers here in Russia,
I had several job offers here in Russia.
So, if you would've told me a year ago
that I would be here in Russia teaching English,
I would've thought you were crazy.
So, I decided to take a leap of faith.
I talked to a lot of people at the academy,
and let me tell you, it is the best thing,
best decision I have ever made.
So, sometimes, it just takes that leap of faith
to do something that you think that
you would never be brave enough to do.
So, before I show you around the flat,
I wanted to go ahead and include the questions option.
So please feel free to shoot in any questions that you have.
I will definitely answer them throughout the day
whenever I have a few moments.
Also, if you wanted to see some more around Moscow,
you can follow my normal Instagram.
Okay, so I'm gonna show you around my flat
while my lunch is cooking, but this is the entrance to our,
it's a really smaller flat, it's a much older one,
but I kinda like it.
It has that old Soviet apartment feel to it.
This is our little hallway.
This is my roommate's room, and then this is my bedroom.
So, all the furniture was here when we got here.
I have lots and lots of closet space.
I have lots of places to store clothes.
I have a really nice view.
When I first got here, it was really warm,
it was like surprisingly warm.
So I actually slept with the window open a lot.
It's really cold, so I'm not gonna open
the window right now, but this is the view from my flat.
So I live more in a residential area
more than like in the city center, which is nice.
There's more stores, more family-friendly kinda stuff.
This is bathroom.
So you have where the toilet is and where the shower is.
The weird, I guess, no, no, not the weird thing,
just something I'm not used to, is that the shower
does not hang and that you have
to hold it whenever you're in the shower,
and that it's the same faucet
for both the shower and the sink.
Just something different.
I don't know if other people have had that in other places.
This is my kitchen, my nice little kitchen.
We have a washer, no dryer.
We do have to hang up our clothes.
Excuse all the dishes in the sink.
I just got finished cooking something last night.
We do have a stove and an oven.
It is gas, so I had to learn how to use a gas oven,
which was interesting.
It came with a microwave.
My teapot, which is like my most favorite thing,
'cause tea has become so important to me here in Russia.
But, yeah.
Here's a better look at everything.
So I'm on my way to work now.
This is kinda the area I live in.
It's one of the state schools.
But, yeah, it's a nice residential area.
There's lots of parks, schools, lots of stores.
It's really peaceful.
I never really have any problems.
I never feel scared going home.
I never feel like my life is in danger, stuff like that.
So, nice little area.
So this is kind of main area by my house.
I walk down this road to go to work.
Really good clothing store.
Over there is where I go grocery shopping.
There's lots of grocery stores, lots of super markets,
and if you don't know Russian, it's okay.
Supermarket is supermarket in Russian, so that's easy.
Lots of pharmacies. (speaks Russian)
So you should have no problem finding what you need
if you do live here in Moscow.
Okay, so just had to withdraw some money from the bank,
'cause I do have to pay rent today.
Yay, that's always a fun day.
But I am on my way to work.
So just to tell you a little bit about my job and what I do,
I work at a company called English First,
it's one of the biggest English schools in Moscow.
It is a private school.
So students will go to their state school
and then come to kinda, it's kinda like
an afterschool program where they will be
in a complete immersive environment of English.
So I teach students of different ages
ranging from like five and six year old
all the way up to 17 and 18 year old.
So it's different levels, different skills, different ages.
I work five days a week full-time.
I usually teach three, six, nine,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 classes a week.
Today, I have three classes.
I usually teach between about 2:40 until about 8:30
on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
and then on Saturday I teach from
about 9:40 until about 5:00 to 10:00.
So, about to show you this park.
It's my favorite pat of my walk to work.
It takes about 20 minutes to walk to my school, so.
Just a little bit more of the area,
and this park is one of my favorites.
It's such a beautiful park, especially when it
was in the fall and all the leaves were falling.
Obviously, it's time for the end of fall
and the beginning of winter, so all the leaves are gone,
but it's still really beautiful, and it's not too bad today.
It's very foggy, but definitely could be a lot worse.
So my contract with EF is for one year,
so I will be here until August of 2020.
I got here in August, I think August 15th.
16th is when I landed here in Moscow.
So it's, it's been a crazy ride here,
but I have loved every single minute of it.
I definitely have gotten to do a lot of sightseeing
and exploring on my days off, which is always really fun.
I've made some friends here in Russia
that I really enjoy being around.
So that'll be like the best thing
is if you can make some friends with some Russians.
They will show you all the cool things
and they will show you the most unique places in Moscow.
Last weekend, I went to a really unique movie theater
that is about to get torn down, unfortunately,
but it was really cool to be able to see that
and see that little piece of like local cultural history,
things that you wouldn't really
learn about like in a textbook, you know? (laughs)
So this is the mall that I work at.
My school is on the fourth floor of this mall.
So let's go inside.
So this is inside the mall.
I'm actually gonna go and grab something to eat later.
I don't usually have a lot of time in between my lessons,
so I try to grab something before I go into work,
that way I can eat it really quickly,
something that I can microwave.
So I always get it from this little booth right here.
It's called Mealty.
I go here so much that she actually
will always know exactly what I want, so.
All right, and right in here is the school that I work at.
Okay, so while I have a little bit of time,
I just wanted to share with you
how I keep organized in my EFL class.
So the way things work here at EF is, as a native teacher,
I have about 23 groups of students that I meet over a month.
Some I will see once a week, some I will see about once
every two weeks, some I will see once a month.
So each class is co-taught by a Russian local teacher,
so a Russian who has learned English and is teaching it,
and an English native speaker,
so someone whose English is their primary language.
So students get exposure to both, which is great.
My classes vary in skill, and level, and age.
So obviously, it can get a little bit difficult
to keep up with all of these classes.
So I have three different journals that kinda help me out.
So one is very specifically, it's my Van Gogh,
one is very specifically for my lesson plans
where I actually write out what I'm going to do,
how I'm going to say it, what we're going to say,
what we're going to use.
One is very specifically the time of the classes,
what class it is, where the class is going to be,
and what lesson we are going to be doing,
and then the last one, kind of like
a most important one, is one where I make,
it's almost like a journal of each class
where I write down how the class went,
were there any behavior problems,
what do I need to look out for, what do they do really well,
what do they need a little more attention on,
what they thought was really fun,
and what they thought was really boring,
because each student is very different.
What works for one class, even if it's the same age
and the same skill level, is not gonna work for each
of the classes at that same skill level.
So this has helped me out a lot,
and I highly recommend keeping a journal
after each of your classes to kind of help you keep up
with the little details that you won't remember
when you're doing another lesson a week ahead of time.
So, really sorry for the lack of posts today,
or this afternoon.
It's been a really, really busy day here at work.
We've had a lot of open lessons
where parents have been invited into the lessons,
but everything went really well.
So now, I'm about to head to a friend's house
to pick up some books, and I'm going to get
to show you guys the Moscow Metro.
One thing that kinda surprises people about Russia,
especially, I mean, Moscow, in general,
it's very westernized, there's a lot of American stores,
there's a lot of places to shop, there's lots of malls,
so you definitely will not be missing anything.
So I just left my friend's house.
So now I am going into the metro.
So I'm on the metro in the metro station right now.
I am about to get onto the metro
and take a trip down to Ploschad Revolutsii,
which is one of the coolest metro stations in Moscow,
so that you will get a chance to see it.
(intercom speaking Russian)
So this is Ploschad Revolutsii.
It is one of the more famous metro stations in Moscow.
This is just one example of how incredibly beautiful
the metro stations are in Moscow.
So we are going to go here
and give the dog nose a good rub for good luck.
So every time you pass this dog,
you should give it a rub for good luck.
So again, just one of the more beautiful stations in Moscow.
Always give the dog nose a good rub.
It means good luck, and you will see
all Russians do this, see? (laughs)
It's really amazing.
I love the metros.
They're always so cool to go into,
and a lot of them are really beautiful,
especially on the brown lines.
Okay, so I just made it back home.
Usually, at the end of the day whenever I come home,
I just kinda chill out, make my dinner,
sit down with some nice, hot tea, play some video games,
or talk to some of my family and friends back home
in the United States since it is a nine hour time difference
from where I am originally from, but now that I am home,
I can finally answer some questions.
So I'm going to answer some of the questions
that have been sent to me so far.
So first question, who meets me upon arrival?
All of this was arranged by the company that hired me.
They had somebody there waiting for me with the little sign.
They took me to my flat, they helped me set up my cellphone,
they took care of everything for me, so the company did.
So even before I finished my TEFL certification,
I was already online applying to a bunch of jobs.
Russia's pretty desperate for English teachers,
so it was pretty easy for me to find
a lot of places that were hiring.
I had five job interviews, three offers.
I decided on EF because it had the best package,
it paid the most, and it was in Moscow,
which was specifically where I wanted to go.
So just do a lot of research on what package they offer.
The visa process wasn't really that difficult.
It mostly, to get into Russia as an American citizen,
you have to have an invitation letter.
So that has to be supported by a company in Russia.
So obviously, the company that hired me
took care of that part.
Once I got the invitation letter,
the only thing I really had to do was
just do some background checks
and do an HIV test showing that I did not have HIV,
and then I got all of that stuff together
and submitted it to the Russian Consulate
for my visa approval,
which was done through this application.
So it wasn't that the application process
was necessarily difficult, it just took a lot of time
and there was just a lot of waiting,
but I didn't have to do any kind of
like interviews or anything like that.
So everything went really well,
and I didn't have any problems getting a work visa.
I will say one more thing about the visa process though.
So going into Russia, I had a single entry three month visa,
because my contract was actually on kind of like
a trial period for three months,
but once I got the approval to continue my contract
for the entire year, I had to go through
another visa application process here in Russia
in order to get a multi-entry extended visa,
but my company took care of all that.
Like all I did was just give them my passport
and they took care of that.
My landlord, which was arranged by my company,
also had to register me here in Russia as a foreigner,
but all of that was kinda taken care of for me.
So I didn't really have to
be too hands-on with that process.
So, it worked out really well,
and I haven't had any problems with it.
Okay, so I do have student loans.
I have really, really low payments
since my loans don't have any interest,
but even if I did have to make higher payments,
it is still doable with my salary.
You just have to kind of budget that in
and maybe not spend so much on just other stuff.
Okay, so I'm going to eat dinner,
and then I actually have a Russian lesson tonight at 11:30,
kind of the only time I have available
to do Russian lessons.
So real quick about the language,
coming into Russia, I didn't really know a lot of Russian.
I knew really basic stuff.
So you can make your way around Moscow
without really knowing Russian,
but don't expect people to know English.
The only places where you're really
gonna find people who speak English are gonna be
like in the city center, like where the touristy areas are,
like around the Red Square and the Kremlin
and maybe some teenagers will know some English,
but for the most part, there isn't really
a lot of English here, at least English speakers.
So you can kind of rely on like Google Translate
or Yandex.Translate would be the better option,
and the Russian language isn't super necessary
but it definitely makes your life a lot easier
if you at least know like food
and some basic conversational pieces in Russian.
So I can answer this one really quick.
So I finished my TEFL in May.
I had job interviews in May.
I was hired in May, and by the end of July,
I had my visa and everything taken care of,
and then August 15th, I was in Russia, so. (laughs)
(speaking Russian)
So, I am learning Russian, but right now,
I only speak a little bit really, but it is coming along.
It's definitely improved a lot in the last couple months,
but it's a very difficult language.
I live close to Sevastopolskaya,
which is a metro station on the gray line.
As for my friends, I made friends at work,
and then through those friends I have made new friends.
So really, it's who you work with.
All right, guys, it is the end of my day,
and I am about to go to sleep so that I can get up
and do it all over again tomorrow.
Thank you so much for joining in on my takeover.
Hopefully you enjoyed this little glimpse,
very, very small glimpse, into my life here in Russia.
If you wanted to see more, if you have any questions,
feel free to follow me on Instagram
and shoot me a direct message,
and I will be more than happy
to answer any questions that you have.
(speaking Russian)
Everyone, have a wonderful night, and thank you.
Much love from Russia.
(upbeat music)