потография

Picture link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/ZannaMMM/lETcMK

More pictures to follow.

Also, I have been convinced to go by Соня (Sonya) here.

Off to breakfast. I hope the translated-to-English labels on the serving dishes are as cool as they were at dinner: "The Pork," "The Cabbage with the sauce" etc.

And

I am taking advantage of free wireless as long as possible.

Went downtown after dinner, with Denis and the other Midd kids- we bought metro tickets, which was our first interaction with a Russian-speaker that was practically necessary and not in a school, at least for me. I was pretty pleased. We went to Red Square, saw various amazing things, were amazed that we were walking around in Moscow. I think Denis was sort of freaked out that we were there, actually- it must have been a lot weirder for him to see us there than it was for me when I walked a long way through the Frankfurt airport and was just observing all the crazy Europeans and then all of a sudden Natasha was running toward me. And that was pretty wierd. Also, I must record here that Natasha had, as a carry-on, a stuffed Sponge-Bob Squarepants, and that this thing was wearing her coat. As Mr. Squarepants, is, well, square, no head protruded- it was just a coat with yellow legs sticking out, sitting in its own chair. We all (Abby and Ivan and I) made fun of her until we looked across the terminal and saw a much larger yellow head sticking up out of its own chair next to a German girl.

Moscow is so awesome. For one thing, everything is really, really well lit, so even at night nothing is dark- the ground is well lit, and then the buildings have really cool lights, so you see where you're going, the sky is dark, and these amazing buildings are just rising up in dramatically-lit awesomeness. Bad for the environment and light pollution and the city budget, but really nice for walking around. It made taking pictures sort of frustrating though, as the clear, amazing views didn't show up well at all. I think the building I was most surprised at was GUM, the Soviet-era department store collossus. I always thought of it as a modern shopping mall, but it's actually a beautiful old building, bigger than I could have imagined, christmas-style lights lining all it's cool arches and trim and corners, with mosaic icons over the big entrances. It was as very odd sight, giant Rolex ads next to a beauiful image of the Annunciation. This is an odd country.

And the metro was much more pleasant and prettier than I'd imagined- the stations are so open and impressive and cool-ly decorated, and then the old painted trains are rather pretty too.

I can't believe I will be spending the next night on an airplane. I will never sleep again.

I am in Russia

after traveling for approximately 8 years. And, as always, there were lots of interesting people and situations on the various planes and in the airports and such, but I'm too tired to remember any of them. In the hotel now, about to go sleep until dinner. Tomorrow we have meetings and such all day and then we leave at 7:something in the evening for the airport and then we have an 11:30 6-hour flight to Irkutsk and I'll just be in another timezone with no sleep again. Going out after dinner, perhaps, when we get our passport back and DENIS IS HERE, YAY! Hope everyone is doing well.

Final Americanskiye thoughts

In language school this summer, we had a big picnic at Lake Dunmore one day, and after a while of sitting about picnicing a Western Swing band showed up and started playing for the mainly old people sitting about on their folding chairs in the state park, in a little pavilion facing the water. They were a very Vermont-y Western, they were all over 50, and they arrived in the most amazing old tour bus I have ever seen. But they played great songs- Patsy Kline and Bob Wills and such, and it was very hard not to sing along, so we tried to sing along quietly in simultaneous Russian translation. I turned to the side and said to the person who happened to be standing next to me and started speaking very passionately about how wonderful America was and how I didn't know why I was choosing to leave such a wonderful country, and watching this band was the perfect American experience, out in the state park in the cool Vermont summer. The person to whom I addressed these remarks happened to be Nina Alexandrovna, my... well, I can't think of an appropriate adjective for Nina Alexandrovna... grammer teacher. And she looked sort of taken aback, and said something like, "Oh, yes, that gentleman's hawaiian shirt really looks good on him." Anyway, I did go through a stage for about a week of just walking around in wonder about how great everything in America was. And in the past 2 days I had flashes of this again, when I went to the dentist and to the hairdressers and the people working there knew me well and did their jobs with pride and committment and did their best to help me, when I subjected the people at my church to a fairly hastily-prepared presentation about icons, with half the slides on my powerpoint not working, and they spent the next two hours coming up to me and wishing me luck and acting interested (and blessing my suitcase at the "blesssing of the backpacks," during which only great diligence saved me from mowing over several first-graders with the 36-pound thing). One man gave me a little paper icon that a visiting Russian had once given him. People here are nice. Most people and institutions have a goal to make life more pleasant for other people (I don't necessarily think that Russians are not nice, and I love all the ones I know, but I think their concern extends only to people they know well, and businesses and institutions don't seem to be designed for helpfullness).

And today, in the Frederick News Post, there is an article, with a tie-in on the front page, about how PB&J is served in school cafeterias. THAT is the big news in Frederick County. Man. Oh the FNP, it's the one for me, as they they say. They being those hip young professionals on the TV commercials.

And my address will be

Russia 664003
Irkutsk
ul. Karla Marxa, 1
Irkutskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet (IGU)
Susanna Merrill
Middlebury College School in Russia

Or, if you are a cyrillic-preferring person:

Россия 664003
Иркутск
Ул. Карла Маркса, 1
Иркутский Государственный Университет (ИГУ)
Сузанна Мэррилл
Middlebury College School in Russia

So, this is now my Russia blog

Maybe I should have made a new blog for this, as the intended readership will now increase from about 4 to... well, to some larger number. But I have not, because I don't feel like it. I would have had to come up with a clever Irkutsk/Siberia/Russian related title. Wait, I already have a perfect title for a year in Siberia. So that's my excuse for not creating a new blog.

My suitcase is sitting next to my bed, though I don't leave until Wednesday. It's zipped up and standing on its side, the better to constantly weigh it on the bathroom scale lying beside it. It's 38 pounds right now. That is not good. The limit is 44 pounds, carry-on included, and I have a 5 pound computer and I have not packed any socks and I need to take enough contact solution to last me 10 months. I'm already going to wear my winter coat on the plane, and I've already put all the small, heavy things I can find in the coat pockets so as not to count as luggage, and snapped my winter hat into the hood of the coat. Luckily, this weight limit applies only to the flight from Moscow to Irkutsk- maybe I can just put on 6 layers of clothing before that flight. That's not nearly as awful as wearing 6 layers of clothing and a winter coat at Dulles- we are having here what is approximately the hottest, most humid weather in the history of the world.

I think I should be reflecting, about now, on my motivations for spending this academic year in Irkutsk; I should be articulating goals for the year, or thinking about where I am in life before I begin this experience. But the piles of papers and clothes and other sundry items, some half-unpacked from Language School, some half-unpacked from the end of the school-year, some recent, some ancient in their disorder, drive all such responsible and mature thoughts from my head.

nostayashii loon

This is a blog entry about how I feel totally uninclined to post any blog entries. I'm tired of communication. I got sort of used to the low communication demands of Russian school, and my current level of interpersonal interaction is requiring all the enthusiasm for it I can muster. I'm sort of concerned about this, but maybe I should be glad- I'll be back to a maximum of Russian-school levels as soon as I get to Russia, I guess. Still, if you are a person that I usually talk to more than I am now, sorry. Also, maybe a strong desire to talk to people would be a good motivation to make friends and improve my speaking skills in Russia. I'll have to try to find a medium.

Also, I saw loons today, and no one else was impressed.

I'm breaking the Language Pledge

Why can you see clouds at night? If it's by starlight or moonlight, aren't the clouds usually covering the moon and the stars? And if there's lots of light from the moon and stars, there probably aren't clouds. But you do see clouds at night, or course, like last night, when Aiko and Laurel and Abby and I were getting eaten by mosquitos and gradually slipping down a hill in our sleeping bags and looking up at a skimpy little tree that looked very geometrically impressive when you lie under it in the dark. The answer's rather boring, I guess- you see stars at night when there are only some of them, and not all the sky is covered, or when there's enough light coming from, say, Bi Hall to show them. Still, it seems like a funny sight to me, a strange study in gray-on-black. Speaking of light at night, is there really such thing as starlight? I don't understand how those tiny little pricks of light could possibly produce light on the ground. I suspect that starlight is a romantic construction and all light at night comes from cities or the moon.
Once a man in Mexico who grew up in a tiny village in the Sierra Gorda of Queretaro, a village to which they only built a road maybe 10 years ago, where everyone worked and sang all day and grew and drank strong coffee that he still drives far out to the mountains to buy (or makes the Americans in his house go out to the mountains and buy), told me that when he was a little boy his father once sent him to the next village for some reason (either I don't remember the reason or I never understood it, as this was my first summer studying Spanish) on a horse. And it was the darkest night there could ever be, with not one star and not one house with a light in the window, just miles and miles of black. And Adan couldn't see the horse's head, let alone the road, and he just sat there on that horse and trusted that it knew the way. I wonder if you would start doubting that there was really a horse beneath you, and when you would stop looking for a light, even at the back of your mind.