15. Final (or not?)

So, the time came to write the final post for this semester. It will be again (see #7) devoted to the evaluation of my progress and hopes for the next semester.

The most remarkable for the whole semester thing is that David wrote me in 2d draft of my final essay that I had finally understood the importance of clear paragraph's structure and the topic sentences in particular. That really made me more confident in my abilities to learn, as I thought I could never learn these important things, and to write, as now I understand how to make my writings readable. Though, I still prefer more unrestricted and free structure to formal, but I realaise, that in some cases only formal structure could be acceptable.

Also, after this demester I filnally feel sure about my punctuation. I know that there're a lot of other rules to learn, and I made a lot of mistakes even in this blog, but now I just feel the ground under my feet when reread my writings, trying to find punctuation errors.

The other thing that I appreciate is that now I can understant standard american speech wighout any difficulty. Thanks to our great lecturer. However, I wonder whether he uses some special strategies to be inderstood better?

And the last thing is that I learnt that American and British English do have a lot of differences in spelling, and I should be careful about it when I write papers.

Thing that I'ven't learnt is about the complex sentences which I tend to write. I actually have no idea how it occurrs because when I proofread my paper I hardly can find even one of them. All seems normal to me until David returns my drafts. And I even don't do it to show off; I just do it because I do it. There is a lot of work to be done!

Now I have to talk about my next semester... I realaise that David is a great lecturer, and his syllabus for English 202 looks very attractive, but, unfortunately, I have to choose between David Atteberry course and the course of Stephen Hoyt who is also a great lecturer as I've heard it. I wanted to take his 202 course because he is leaving NES next year, and I wanted to use my last opportunity to listen to his course. Then I planned to take Davis's 300 course. But as far as I know now, David is also leaving Russia next year, so I'm in the face of a tough dilemma, and this situation makes me very sad(

Last time this year I say thank you for reading.

14. waiting for London

I've already posted some information about my previous New Year holidays in blog #10. This time I'm not going to spent my New Year in Russia again. With my family we've found an opportunity to visit one of the most fascinating cities all over the world - London. I admire it for many reasons: for beautiful inimitable architechture, bright cultural and entertaining life including thaters and cinemas, museums and shoping malls, and of course, it's famous transport - first underground system in the world and famous double-deckers.

I have a lot of things that I want to do there. I want to take a ride on a London eye, visit royal palaces, cathedrals and houses of Parliament, watch the royal guards and famous ravens, see a couple of original british and american films that will not appear in russian cimemas, explore the very complicated underground system, visit some shopping centres and many other things. And of course I will make pictures at every step. When I come back to Moscow I will definitely post some of them here and upgrade this post.

Now when I watch London photographs, I can only guess how it all looks like in real life. And I looking forward to seeing it with my eyes. If you have some advices to give or experinces from London to share, please, leave them in the commets below.

Thank you for reading. Pictures to be posted later :)

13. The last essay for the course.

I feel a bit sad about this post because recently I've ended my final homework assignment for this class. It means that our course has come to its end. Evrything seems sad when you realise that it's over... Well, now I go back to my essay that is dedicated to public and private transportation.

The main difference between this essay and all previous ones is that this time I had to use my knowldge and factual information provided in different sources more than my own experiences. That's why you should be more careful with essay's logic than you always are. It requires much more efforts! I managed to finish the assignment only because of my dedication to the topic which I've chosen. Special attention should be given not only to your essay, but also to the sources you're working with.

The best thing in my essay, I think, is that I included many specific information which could not be obtained by simple reasoning and thus accessible to everyone. I hope that readers (David...) will learn something new form my essay. While working with the sources I discovered that we've already tried to learn some useful mathematical applications to talk about my topic professionally (such as Brauer Theorem), although I still cannot understand most of articles covering my topic because of lack of mathematical knowledge.

I realise that my essay has plenty of weaknesses. Some of them are due to the reason of lack of skills I mentioned before. But most of them, I suppose, are again connected with explicity of my thoughts (thesis,  topic and concluding sentences!) and wandering away from the topic I discuss. Also, I'm afraid I used too mechanical arguments that cannot convince people to believe what I wrote about.

Unfortunately, only David, I think, could understand what I discussed here because he is the only reader of my essay by now. Maybe, when I get 3d draft returned, I post it here, so you can read it and share my opinions about it. Thank you for reading.

12. Public transportation

A couple of my course-mates (and even our lecturer David) have already posted blogs about traffic jams and things related to them. Main *heroes* of such stories are usually suburban trains (*electrichka's*) and metro carriages, large green or blue snakes jam-packed by people. Though I also experience a lot of discomfort while commuting to HSE/NES and back, I cannot tell you that something very extraordinary or terrible happened to me during my short trips which usually take 20-30 min. But as I'm a big fan of public transport, I have always dreamt about organizing some perfect transit system here in Moscow.

When I stuck in a traffic jam or riding in stuffy and gloomy carriage deep under the ground, I usually think what if we could travel not under or on the ground but above it. I think of "flying buses" or helicopters on sky routes above the city, sadly knowing that it impossible at least for now. But yesterday I came upon one interesting article in Russian Forbes which discussed another type of aerial transportation - aerial cableway. As it turned out, it has a lot of advantages: moderate construction cost, accessibility for passengers, and breathtaking views, which attract lots of tourists. Here is an amazing example of such transport system: a cableway in New York to Roosevelt island. As said in the article I mentioned dwellers of the island enjoy it and still use it despite opening a metro station there some time ago. More examples of such systems could be found in mountainous countries such as Venezuela or Switzerland.



Another beautiful, but too complex to construct example of underground system you can find in Wuppertal, Germany. I saw this picture more than 5 years ago and since that time I've imagined how things like this one could be developed in Moscow. But soon I received an evidence how such systems fail in Russian conditions: Moscow monorail system costed and still cost so lot to Moscow tax payers that government discusses now whether it could be closed and demolished. Well, maybe monorail is not the best option for transportation in Moscow, but I think that the main problem is that government (like adventurists) made a lot mistakes while planning this system and corruption strengthened its effect. So, I believe that new type of transportation could be introduces to Moscow to solve its transportation problems. The main point is that government must really do rigorous transportation planning if it doesn't want Moscow to stop in a transport collapse.

11. internship

Well, my opinion about this issue is somewhat confused because I do not actually know much about this topic, and because in Russia the situation with internship is quite different: I don't think that we have unpaid internships at all, but at the same time salaries that are paid for the work made are too low even to call it *salary* (it's better to say *pittance*); internship is compulsory part of education, and it doesn't free you from your diploma work. Now I'm going back to American system of inernship. I agree with the first writer more because, first of all, I also tend to think that unpaid internship brings mess to  the labour market, and, secondly, unpaid jobs always create wrong stimuli for empoyers and employees as well. I think all work that you've done must be paid appropriately.

I also share concerns of the second author: *caveat emptor* situation is really woth considering. At the same time author's overall positive attitude towards unpaid internship seems to me too optimistic and unsupported. The quots of happy students sounds a bit insincerely. Indeed, if your parents and you cannot afford to pay all the costs of unpaid internship without any payoff, you actually cannot apply to this vacancies. This point creates undesirable situation when only wealthy students can acquire the needed experience, and therefore get the higher position than their less provided for coursemates who can be actually more suitable for the vacancies they cannot get due to lack of experience.

Sorry for my confused argumentation. Thank you for reading.

10. Paradiso

The greyish view from 17th floor, NES building

A week of neither cold nor warm, neither sunny nor rainy wheather can lead anyone to depression. During the dark november evenings the only way to escape from the dreariness is to remember sometheing bright and colourful that happily hapenned in your life with a cup of hot milk and honey.

I usually dream of my visit to Sri Lanka last year, when from such "greyishness" we arrived at sunny and warm cost of the ocean. It really looks like a picture from paradise: coconut trees, vast sandy beach, and the huge wavy ocean, in which I could swim for more than 3 hours at a time.

My typical day began with waking up early in the morning and having a breakfast which consisted of dairy products (though I suppose Indians do not drank any milk due to their religion) with some local jam. Than I went swimming and swam all the morning to the dinner, which could not be refused because you desperately want eating because of the sea climate. Than my parents and I had nap, played some games such as table tennis, and went back to the beach. It got dark very fast, and beautiful equinoctial night sky with thousands of stars with the moon which beautifully highlighted clouds appeared. We went to have another meal, and I ended my day with browsing the net, talking on Skype or chatting in facebook with my dearest friends.

One day we went for some excursion to feel the local atmosphere. We saw elephant farm, drank pure Ceylon tea, and visited its former capital Kandy where British governor used to live. At the evening our group visited the beautiful gardens of the Cenral park where we discovered many amazing trees and plants and even found a tree planted by Yuri Gagarin :)

After swimming or eating nothing could be better than lying on the beach reading something interesting. Due to my school programme I had to read *Master and Margarita* there. It was very interesting reading, and the thing that amazed me most was that on our way back during the night flight somewhere in the sky over the Indian Ocean I read an end scene where Woland with main heroes also fly through the night sky! So under the moon and over the night ocean I could lively imagine how these events could occur. Mystic. That's how I ended my trip to paradise)

Thank you for reading.

9. two countries, one hope.

Most Russians think about America (namely, America - this title's used more often than the U.S.) as such a mythic country in which they never will be and never have been to, but about which they hear practically every day in the media. They listen to American pop-stars, watch American moovies, and some time ago they learnt the history of cold war at school. So, there a lot of stereotypes and prejudices raised by both our media and Hollywood. What is America? I think that the most popular answers would be: sheriffs, copps and Wild West, Chuck Norris and terminator, New York and skyscrapers, capitalists and the CIA... I tried to invent the most typical answers, still I realise that it's my own choice based on my way of thinking. Nevertheless, in my opinion, people see only these exotic things and don't see the main point. We are both the nations of dreamers, and here I want to present you my evidence:

These statues are symbols of the future where we'd like to live in: The Statue of Liberty, whose lamp illuminates the way to the American Dream, symbolises Freedom and Liberty, the sweet American Dream itself, and

Worker and Farmer (or "Kolkhoz") Woman, who are walking up to the skies of sunny communistic tomorrow, shows permanent dreaming of bright future in Russia whether we believed in God and Tsar or in Communism.

You can see that the Dream is indeed one for both countries: it's a Dream of hapinnes; it's an ideal towards which we are moving. Moreover, it is visualised similarly! both statues hold in raised hands items related to the future: a torch which enlights the world and shows the right way and a sickle and a hummer - working tools by which the bright future will be created.

Time goes by; epoches come one after another,  bringing new ideas and new idols, but our hopes and dreams are stay the same as they have always been for our people. It's a thing to think about. We are close in the way we dream. So, why don't we join our efforts in making the better future?

Thank you for reading.