Andrey is the only student in my Tuesday-Thursday noon class who shows up consistently and on time. (Olga trickles in at about 12:20; Sergey comes in a few minutes later, out of breath, putting away his iPod, saying he overslept--now he's in LA, I haven't seen him for a few weeks; Nastia's always away on business; Natasha's still honeymooning in Spain; Daria's university schedule is always changing; no idea what happened to Roman).

Andrey's about 40 years old, a couple inches shorter than me, kind of stocky, ruddy complexion...I'm trying to find a way to help you picture him, but all I can come up with is the Bob's Big Boy sign. Not that he looks like that at all (except I haven't seen the sign in forever, so the longer I think about it now, the more my memory of it looks like Andrey).

He's a Ph.D. economist with a high-up job in a company that sells wooden doors. When he joined the class he was really serious, but he's loosened up a lot. Everyone else is in their mid-twenties and all on a similar wavelength, so sometimes it's hard to rope him in when the group gets talking, but he's always a good sport.

A couple weekends ago (hours after that party with Blueberry), he, Olga, and I went fishing. Another teacher, who had covered their class when I was in Tibet, was supposed to come too (I think Andrey had originally suggested it to him as a sort of guy thing), but it ended up being just the three of us.

Russian fishing trips, conventional wisdom says, consist of sitting around and drinking and talking and eating barbecue (pork shashlik on skewers, which is really good). There's a joke that you don't even need to get out of the car. Our fishing trip pretty much followed suit. After a couple hours of sitting in a little shelter out of the rain, talking, eating, and glancing occasionally at the fishing pole propped up at the pond's edge, we went back to his house and had a conversation that I'm kicking myself for not writing about at the time, because now all I remember is that it was about politics and what he said was interesting.

I mentioned to him a few days ago that I was interested in energy policy, and he emailed me a couple articles on the subject from the Russian newspaper Коммерсант. I recognize words like "Wednesday morning," "important," "problems," "spoke with," and other words that tell you nothing of what the article's actually about (maybe I'll sit down with the dictionary this weekend). He asked me to send him links to the science policy grad programs I'm looking at, so I sent him my 3 current favorites: Georgia Tech, RAND, and Cornell (What's it like to live in Atlanta, does anyone know?)

I've enjoyed getting to know him, but I suspect that him getting to know me is only hurting my credibility as a teacher. (Russian teachers of English, after they're fluent, spend about six years getting a degree, and it's sometimes a rude shock to our students when somebody lets slip how little training we've had.) When Andrey asks about my past education and future plans, teaching is pretty noticeably absent. We have substantive other stuff to talk about though. I wonder how much it matters to him.