Never give up!

Hello! My name is Mohammed Bashir and I am originally from Sudan, Africa. Now I live in Kirov and study at Vyatka State University.

What brought you to Russia?

Well, my higher education, of course. Having finished school I started thinking where to go. At first I chose a university in India, but I spent only more than one year there as I didn’t like it. Then I came back home and started thinking what to do next. To tell the truth, at that very moment I was thinking about going to the Ukraine, not Russia. It was my mother who advised me to study the Russian language in Russia.

Your first impression about Kirov…

Very cold climate and very cold people even difficult to deal with. The most amazing thing is when you ask a person if he speaks English, the answer is always positive. And then … a long pause…. Ok, let’s speak Russian then I have to say.

What do the majority of people here study English for, I wonder? I study it to communicate with different people from around the world and to learn something new every day to make your brain work. I mean international relationship, learning and discovering various customs and traditions.

How many languages do you speak?

I speak Arabic, English, Hindi, Russian and French, a little bit. It took me about four months to learn the Russian language. I passed my exam successfully. Besides, the lectures at the University are in Russian and I have no problems understanding them. Now I realize that it’s high time for me to begin learning Spanish as it’s the second popular language in the world according to the latest statistics.

Education is your passport to the future for tomorrow, it belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

What is the most unusual thing for you here?

To tell the truth, talking to guys there I was very much surprised to find out that the majority of them cannot cook at all. They say that this work for their girlfriends and future wives. I do not agree with them. I myself like the process of cooking very much. Besides, there are not many things that give us energy for living and staying healthy. One of them is food. So, it must bring you as more delight as possible. Being a schoolboy I asked a girl from my neighborhood to teach me how to cook tradition African dishes. And she helped me a lot with it. Now I prefer to watch TV shows to study this art, but I never use recipes taken from the net and without any commentaries as I find them useless.

Besides, it’s really marvelous to make a day off for your wife even if she doesn’t work. All you need is to wake up a bit earlier on Sunday and cook everything yourself. Your wife will be thankful to you and this will help to strengthen the relations inside your family and you will respect each other even more.

Your advice to a newcomer 😉

Never give up. It’s always not the same as from the first sight.