So you might be wondering what I meant earlier about having just returned to the United States. The thing is, I actually haven't been living in the States for quite a while. Almost ten years to be exact. So where have I been living then? Canada? The UK? Nowhere like that actually. I was living in Russia.
That's right. For nearly ten years of my life, I was an American-Russian. An American-born man with Russian citizenship. Definitely not something you see everyday.
Why did I move to Russia? Well, let's go back to my high school years. I needed a foreign language credit in order to graduate. The only foreign languages that my school offered were Spanish and French, both of which I was not really interested in learning. Ever since I was a kid, I had thought it would be cool to learn a foreign language someday. But I was interested in learning a more complex and different language. Something not many people in America would ever learn. Spanish and French just seemed like too common and generic of a second language to learn. I mean, when people tell you about other languages they know, it always seems to be Spanish and French. What about Japanese? How many Americans know Italian? Danish? Swedish? What's so special about Spanish and French?
Towards the end of my freshman year, I talked to my counselor about the possibility of finding some sort of alternative. I knew that the school wouldn't go out of their way to find another foreign language teacher just for me (especially since the principal hated me), but I did ask about perhaps taking an online course that I could use for my foreign language credit. At the time, I didn't have a lot of hope that this would work, as I assumed the school would be too lazy to bother with anything like this. However, the counselor was actually willing to hear me out and even understood how I felt. All she said at the time was "I'll see what I can do." Boy, was I feeling excited at the time. I could already see myself speaking either Japanese or Danish fluently while everyone around me stared at me scratching their heads.
That excitement eventually died down, as the counselor didn't contact me again for the rest of the year and throughout most of the summer. I assumed that she had never bothered to look for anything and had told me that she would help me just to be nice. Up until a week before my first day of sophomore year, I was planning on taking French that year. At least that gave me the chance of visiting France and eating some actual French food. I really love garlic bread.
However, things turned out much differently than I expected. That week, my dad got a call from my counselor that she had found an online course where I could take either German, Mandarin, or Russian. Needless to say, I was completely thrilled. Of course, this meant I now had to drop the French class, and I ended up taking two home economics courses that year. Oh well, at least I had now had two easy 'A's.'
So I ended up deciding to take Russian, as I felt it was the most unique language for an American to learn, as well as the most challenging. Boy oh boy, was it challenging. I was beyond confused and stumped within the first couple of weeks. I'm pretty sure I bombed my first two exams. But damn, learning this language was fun. I had never seen or heard a word of Russian before then, and it was just turned out to be an exciting and new challenge for me. It sort of felt like trying to crack a code. I ended getting a "B" during the first semester of the Russian course and an "A" during the second. That right there would've been enough to earn me the credit, but I didn't want to stop. Much like with my working out, I wanted to keep going. I wanted to be as great as I possibly could be. In addition to taking more semesters of the online course, I also began buying several Russian textbooks online to help me master the language even better. And I just kept getting better and better at it. It felt too good to be true.
By the end of my junior year, I was completely fluent in Russian. This, of course, meant I got to annoy my parents and older sister by constantly speaking Russian to them and them staring at me awkwardly. Even then, I could hardly believe that I had completely mastered another language. It was a dream come true.
So now that I was fluent in Russian, why not go start a life in Russia? Like I said before, my friends were pretty much deserting me at this point, so I already knew that I would have to practically start my life over once I graduated. And midway during my senior year, I decided that I would do so in Russia.
Not unlike I expected, my parents were not too crazy about this idea. I still remember my dad giving me lectures practically every single day about all the "better options" out there. But I was already eighteen at this point, so there wasn't really anything that my parents could do about my choices. I wanted to go to Russia and I refused to let anything stop me.
Though it was a long and pretty frustrating process, I did manage to get into Moscow State University. Thankfully, my grandparents (particularly my Papa Alex), were very supportive of my plan and were willing to pay for a majority of the costs. With the currency differences between United States and Russia, I was quite shocked that they would do this. To this day, I'm still trying to find a way to pay them back.
And It all worked out. In the fall of 2006, just a few months after my high school graduation, I was living in Russia and ready to begin my first semester at Moscow State University. I was ready to begin my new life.
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