As I write this, there is a hat sitting on my lap. It is not just any hat. I HAVE A MONGOLIAN HAT! I am excited. I think there is other interesting news from this country (none of it involves chainsaws I promise) but I have to go to bed and be rested for chainsaws tomorrow. Actually I have to note, first, that when we were in the crazy market place and I was trying on various ridiculous fur hats I tried on one especially ridiculous one and was promptly informed by Natalie that I "looked like an zhivotnoye" (animal- but saying this in English gives it entirely the wrong meaning), and sales guy heard us and got really mad. This was funny. Ok. That is all.
WAIT! That is not all. Along with various other interesting things about our train ride, our compartment was full of Australians. And we wanted to know what they were doing, so Joseph and I decided a good way to avoid having a long conversation with them in English was to speak to them in English with a heavy Russian accent and pretend to be Russians. And it worked, and it was hilarious. Eventually they figured out that somethign was wrong with our story. But I don't think they were ever sure what.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Friday, October 26, 2007
Personal Goals
I just got back from an evening of sitting in an overpriced German-themed bar-thing (Beir Haus), with various other American students and some Russian friends of theirs, and listening to a “jazz band” basically play elevator music. It was not the world’s best entertainment except that there was this Russian girl there who told me, very seriously, that her life’s work is demonstrating to people that the music of Queen is serious poetry with deep spiritual meaning, only dismissed as silly or eccentric for its own sake by those who have not done enough research, listened carefully enough, or met this girl to have it explained to them. She is currently engaged in some earnest, ambitious project to create singable Russian translations of all Queen’s songs; she pulled out various liner notes in protective plastic sleeves, as well as print-outs of various inferior translations found on the internet, and asked us to help her translate various enigmatic phrases such as “they turned the milk into sour like the blue in the blood in my veins.” She was never happy with a direct translation and a “well, this doesn’t really make sense in English either,” and it was hard to disappoint her entreating eyes, begging for a cultural or linguistic insight into the genius of “Frank,” so I can safely say that have never before in my life spent so much time trying to come up with a cultural history of the word “ogre.” Or listened to such an enthusiastic account of the cosmology of Zoroastrianism: this girl had apparently spent hours reading about Zoroastrianism and Christianity, so as to better understand Frank’s two main religious influences. This whole venture of placating her need to find meaning in the plastic-sleeved liner notes became much easier when it became clear that she is one of those people who think of the Bible on the same level of hip-ness as recording rural oral history and meditating with Tibetan lamas. I highly approve of this particular result of post-modernism; my interestingness-level is instantly increased. It wasn’t even necessary, very often, to break my recent pledge to desist from intellectual posing; I didn’t really have to be more informed or original than I am, I just had to say things like “um, yeah, that’s in the book of Isaiah.” Which would lead Yulia rushing off on some rapturous tangent about Frank’s genius in employing cultural prototypes or something, as well as highly dubious transformations of the song verse into coherent philosophical comment. Here is an interesting fact for you: did you know that the location of Mozart’s body is unknown, and the burial-place of this Queen singer whom I spent the evening discussion but whose name I don’t actually know other that ‘Frank’ is also unknown? Coincidence? Yulia thinks not. This experience has led me to rethink slightly my desire to have a firmly held, clearly formulated goal in life. True, it would make various life decisions easier, and I would feel like a more useful member of society if I felt that I was going to contribute to it at some point, but what if my firmly held, clearly formulated goal were “convincing the world to take Queen seriously”?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Zemfira-Worship and Other Tales, in Reverse Chronological Order
Photographic Tragedy
Valentina Petrovna just looked at my pictures of Olkhon, and told me with great dismay that I had not taken nearly enough of them, what had I been thinking, hopefully other people in my group had been more wise and I could get pictures from them, I had for instance taken a picture of this very boring little hotel when I could have been taking pictures of the ‘tourbases,’ etc. In vain were my protests that my pictures were basically representative of the experience and that most of the island looked about the same; she was equally unimpressed by my attempt to demonstrate to her that I already had too many pictures in my life, scrolling through the hundreds of pictures of everyone I know making funny faces, buying sausage, wearing funny hats, cramming food in their mouths, looking at the camera in exhaustion as they walk across muddy fields in Vermont, etc. My failure has no apology. I guess you’re all just going to have to do your best to look past it. Having a mother who sent me a CD of ridiculous hippies singing Oh Happy Day earned me considerably more points, but I don’t think it quite outweighed the photo failure.
As Ivan wrote in his notes, “Trouble Understanding the Time of Troubles”
For some reason our mainstream class was especially impossible to understand today. Which eventually led to my abandonment of the attempt to pay attention. I comfort myself with the fact that I never understood the Time of Troubles in English either. Anyway, I had plenty of time to contemplate the footwear of the boy sitting across the aisle from me. The shoes were the usual super-pointy, black, dressy Russian variety, with the only unusual quality being that they had both laces in the front and zippers on the instep. I would have thought that this dual removal capacity was more unusual had I not just spent a lot of time looking at shoes of all kinds, which leads me to:
My Boot Expedition
From the recollection of Natasha that the Boot Market was near Skveer (Square) Kirova, and from the instruction of Valentina Petrovna that there was such a market near where she worked, I had a basic idea of where to look for these boots. But the process still involved a lot of wandering around the city asking people where I could find “a market with lots of shoes, and boots.” I think I stressed the word boot incorrectly, because usually people did not understand me. On my search, I found the city’s synagogue, which oddly enough looks exactly like the Palace of Children and Youth Creativity. I don’t know why I find this resemblance so odd, but they’re the only two buildings in the city that look like this, and it seems like there must be some explanation; were they formerly the mansions of twin brothers? Anyway, I finally found the shoe market. And there were many, many, many boots there. Usually there was a wall of autumn boots and a wall of winter boots. And then some table or something of men’s footwear, upon which I will comment before I forget. Apparently men, in the winter, wear fur-lined dress-shoes. I mean, I guess this makes sense; Russian men have the same need as Russian women to be both stylish and warm in the winter. But a boot looks like it’s supposed to be warm, it’s part of the idea of a boot, while a man’s dress shoe looks like it’s supposed to be thin and cold. It seems sort of cheating to have secret fur on the inside. At one point I thought of Kurt’s giant rubber boots, and how they would go over in Russia, and I couldn’t help laughing. So all the people in that store think I’m crazy. But that’s only about 2 people, so it doesn’t really matter. These stores are all about the size of a walk-in closet. Eventually I gave up trying to act like I knew what I was doing, and I also decided that finding the absolute cheapest pair of boots in the complex might not be the best strategy considering the fact that I would have to wear the things for many, many months and it would be sad if they weren’t warm or I couldn’t walk in them or I didn’t like them. So eventually I just found a store that looked like the correct medium level of stylishness and told the women working there that I was from America and had no idea what I was doing. They were highly entertained by me. And they sold me boots. The prices were all posted and I don’t think it was the kind of place you could bargain, so they didn’t cheat me, and these boots are not among the most expensive in the store. They are brown, suede, lined with fur though I never understood the name of the kind of animal it’s from (the word does not mean rat, or dog, so that’s something), are only very minimally heeled, and have some embroidery with sequins at the top. I’m pretty excited to break out the capri-and-boot look, which has long fascinated me, but as these are winter rather that autumn boots I think I have to wait until November. That seems to be the basic rule for fur-bearing clothing items here. I guess you have to give the rest of your wardrobe a chance.
Charismatic Macrofauna
In Baikal Studies we discusses the practical difficulties of the domestication of reindeer (you have to put the saddle on their shoulders, rather than on their back like a horse, so riding one is very painful and difficult if you aren’t good at it), various types of bear and moose traps (the best bear trap is one where they climb a tree in pursuit of some rotting meat you’ve hung up there, are unable to climb past a platform thing you’re build to impede their path, fall back down onto some sharpened stakes surrounding the tree), and the superior skills of native Siberians as WWII snipers. This class is so fascinatingly non-theoretical. We don’t consider various theories of the development of history, or the nature of tribal and national identity, we just get straight to the proper distance from which to shoot a fat German on a dark riverbank.
Do You Believe in Rock-n-Roll, Can Music will Save your Mortal Soul?
Went to the Zemfira concert. It was so awesome. It was in a fairly crowded club near my apartment, Megopolis; I’m not sure how many people were there, I’m not good at estimating numbers. But I was standing near the back and was still within ... dang, I’m not good at distance either... 25 yards, maybe, of the stage. The stage was always covered in smoke of various colors, and making Zemfira herself more an ephemeral, monochrome form than a typically embodied mortal; the hardest-rocking monochrome form ever born. It seemed like her body would catch fire from the energy pulsing around her like an aura, and that only severe restraint kept flames from shooting from her fingertips; she danced like she... I can’t even begin to describe it, like she was pulling the pain and the grief and the splendor of the world out of her soul and dancing it around the stage, and it was as heartbreaking and beautiful as truth. I am aware that this paragraph is absolutely ridiculous, but it is a good representation of the ridiculous degree of my worshipfulness; I had never before experienced that pull that seems so common to humanity, to treat a celebrity with the reverence due a god. This is probably not good.
Valentina Petrovna just looked at my pictures of Olkhon, and told me with great dismay that I had not taken nearly enough of them, what had I been thinking, hopefully other people in my group had been more wise and I could get pictures from them, I had for instance taken a picture of this very boring little hotel when I could have been taking pictures of the ‘tourbases,’ etc. In vain were my protests that my pictures were basically representative of the experience and that most of the island looked about the same; she was equally unimpressed by my attempt to demonstrate to her that I already had too many pictures in my life, scrolling through the hundreds of pictures of everyone I know making funny faces, buying sausage, wearing funny hats, cramming food in their mouths, looking at the camera in exhaustion as they walk across muddy fields in Vermont, etc. My failure has no apology. I guess you’re all just going to have to do your best to look past it. Having a mother who sent me a CD of ridiculous hippies singing Oh Happy Day earned me considerably more points, but I don’t think it quite outweighed the photo failure.
As Ivan wrote in his notes, “Trouble Understanding the Time of Troubles”
For some reason our mainstream class was especially impossible to understand today. Which eventually led to my abandonment of the attempt to pay attention. I comfort myself with the fact that I never understood the Time of Troubles in English either. Anyway, I had plenty of time to contemplate the footwear of the boy sitting across the aisle from me. The shoes were the usual super-pointy, black, dressy Russian variety, with the only unusual quality being that they had both laces in the front and zippers on the instep. I would have thought that this dual removal capacity was more unusual had I not just spent a lot of time looking at shoes of all kinds, which leads me to:
My Boot Expedition
From the recollection of Natasha that the Boot Market was near Skveer (Square) Kirova, and from the instruction of Valentina Petrovna that there was such a market near where she worked, I had a basic idea of where to look for these boots. But the process still involved a lot of wandering around the city asking people where I could find “a market with lots of shoes, and boots.” I think I stressed the word boot incorrectly, because usually people did not understand me. On my search, I found the city’s synagogue, which oddly enough looks exactly like the Palace of Children and Youth Creativity. I don’t know why I find this resemblance so odd, but they’re the only two buildings in the city that look like this, and it seems like there must be some explanation; were they formerly the mansions of twin brothers? Anyway, I finally found the shoe market. And there were many, many, many boots there. Usually there was a wall of autumn boots and a wall of winter boots. And then some table or something of men’s footwear, upon which I will comment before I forget. Apparently men, in the winter, wear fur-lined dress-shoes. I mean, I guess this makes sense; Russian men have the same need as Russian women to be both stylish and warm in the winter. But a boot looks like it’s supposed to be warm, it’s part of the idea of a boot, while a man’s dress shoe looks like it’s supposed to be thin and cold. It seems sort of cheating to have secret fur on the inside. At one point I thought of Kurt’s giant rubber boots, and how they would go over in Russia, and I couldn’t help laughing. So all the people in that store think I’m crazy. But that’s only about 2 people, so it doesn’t really matter. These stores are all about the size of a walk-in closet. Eventually I gave up trying to act like I knew what I was doing, and I also decided that finding the absolute cheapest pair of boots in the complex might not be the best strategy considering the fact that I would have to wear the things for many, many months and it would be sad if they weren’t warm or I couldn’t walk in them or I didn’t like them. So eventually I just found a store that looked like the correct medium level of stylishness and told the women working there that I was from America and had no idea what I was doing. They were highly entertained by me. And they sold me boots. The prices were all posted and I don’t think it was the kind of place you could bargain, so they didn’t cheat me, and these boots are not among the most expensive in the store. They are brown, suede, lined with fur though I never understood the name of the kind of animal it’s from (the word does not mean rat, or dog, so that’s something), are only very minimally heeled, and have some embroidery with sequins at the top. I’m pretty excited to break out the capri-and-boot look, which has long fascinated me, but as these are winter rather that autumn boots I think I have to wait until November. That seems to be the basic rule for fur-bearing clothing items here. I guess you have to give the rest of your wardrobe a chance.
Charismatic Macrofauna
In Baikal Studies we discusses the practical difficulties of the domestication of reindeer (you have to put the saddle on their shoulders, rather than on their back like a horse, so riding one is very painful and difficult if you aren’t good at it), various types of bear and moose traps (the best bear trap is one where they climb a tree in pursuit of some rotting meat you’ve hung up there, are unable to climb past a platform thing you’re build to impede their path, fall back down onto some sharpened stakes surrounding the tree), and the superior skills of native Siberians as WWII snipers. This class is so fascinatingly non-theoretical. We don’t consider various theories of the development of history, or the nature of tribal and national identity, we just get straight to the proper distance from which to shoot a fat German on a dark riverbank.
Do You Believe in Rock-n-Roll, Can Music will Save your Mortal Soul?
Went to the Zemfira concert. It was so awesome. It was in a fairly crowded club near my apartment, Megopolis; I’m not sure how many people were there, I’m not good at estimating numbers. But I was standing near the back and was still within ... dang, I’m not good at distance either... 25 yards, maybe, of the stage. The stage was always covered in smoke of various colors, and making Zemfira herself more an ephemeral, monochrome form than a typically embodied mortal; the hardest-rocking monochrome form ever born. It seemed like her body would catch fire from the energy pulsing around her like an aura, and that only severe restraint kept flames from shooting from her fingertips; she danced like she... I can’t even begin to describe it, like she was pulling the pain and the grief and the splendor of the world out of her soul and dancing it around the stage, and it was as heartbreaking and beautiful as truth. I am aware that this paragraph is absolutely ridiculous, but it is a good representation of the ridiculous degree of my worshipfulness; I had never before experienced that pull that seems so common to humanity, to treat a celebrity with the reverence due a god. This is probably not good.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Olkhon
Before Leaving for Olhon:
Much can be said about the latest hiking club meeting, which once again was completely unpredictable and unlike all the others, and involved 9-year-old boys running around being really bad at tying knots and getting yelled at for playing with people’s cellphones, and various people repelling about the room, and whatnot, but my favorite part was when Mikhail Nicholaevich, the director, finally arrived, and yelled at everyone for not clearing the table for tea in a timely fashion as he always does, as we sat around and ate cake and tried to figure out why the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia had sent the club a certificate for dedicated work for the furthering of the cause of Orthodoxy. No one ever came up with an answer to this question, nor to the question of how Alexei II had heard of the hiking club of Shelehov. But it was certainly the prettiest certificate I had ever seen. And it came with bouquet of flowers.
I also have to mention the ride home, when Mikhail Nicholaevich found out that people in America don’t go to banyas. His consternation was unfeigned and deep. “But how do they clean themselves?” They take showers. “That’s all? That doesn’t get you clean.”
After Returning from Olhon:
There were really pretty white cliffs, called “the teeth of the predator.” And others called “the Cape of Wishes and the Rock of Love”- they were two cliff things jutting out beside each other, and men had to go to the one on the left and women to the one on the right and throw rocks off them and make wishes. There was some reason, I think, that men were supposed to go to the left, signified by winks from our driver, but whatever vulgar meaning it might have had was lost on us. There were also other cliffs, or large rocks, or whatever these formations would be termed, but I don’t know the names of them all. These cliffs all had really pretty red moss growing on it, and Baikal was its usual blue, and when the sun was out the steppe on the non-Baikal side of the rocks showed some green among the brown, so the cliffs were all colorful scenes. And then there were a few sandy beaches, and a few areas that looked like the desert, with dunes, and a lot of rolling steppe, and then forest, which was almost all larch, at least on the north of the island where we were. I am told that we have larch in America, but I was previously unaware of its existence. It looks like a pine tree but the needles (well Encarta World English Dictionary is telling me that actually it has “clusters of leaves resembling needles”) all turn bright yellow in the fall and fall off. When there are entire forests of the same color yellow, and when the sun shines on the trees, the effect is striking. Also the golden carpeted roads through the forest are nice. Yeah. Pretty place, Olhon. I wonder how I’m supposed to be spelling it. I think Olkhon, actually. But I don’t really understand why we translate gutteral ‘h’ as ‘kh.’ It sounds much more like an ‘h’ than like a ‘k.’ One of our professors here has on occasion spoken of Olkhon with a certain scorn, as a place “that you foreigners always love so much”- actually I have gotten this impression from multiple people - but I defy their anti-tourist rhetoric and like it anyway. Maybe not as much as the hidden, empty beaches we drove around in Buryatia though.
In other news “I wish my baby was born” is a pretty dang sad song. That’s someone’s blood there on his wings; that’s someone’s blood there on his feathers. Also, why does Bob Dylan think of Achilles as being temporary? Oh, I guess Achilles is temporary as in being mortal. Most people are temporary, if Achilles is.
Tuesday morning update:
It’s snowing, and sticking. It snowed some on Olkhon, but really just flakes blowing around, and it’s supposed to be a lot colder there than here. And it’s snowed here before but only lightly between periods of rain or at night. Now the sun’s out, and there’s a real снегопад and the little grove of trees between here and the universtiy are all frosted-looking and the roofs of the houses and cars are white. Only on the actual roads is it still not sticking. This may mean I have to go buy boots today.
Much can be said about the latest hiking club meeting, which once again was completely unpredictable and unlike all the others, and involved 9-year-old boys running around being really bad at tying knots and getting yelled at for playing with people’s cellphones, and various people repelling about the room, and whatnot, but my favorite part was when Mikhail Nicholaevich, the director, finally arrived, and yelled at everyone for not clearing the table for tea in a timely fashion as he always does, as we sat around and ate cake and tried to figure out why the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia had sent the club a certificate for dedicated work for the furthering of the cause of Orthodoxy. No one ever came up with an answer to this question, nor to the question of how Alexei II had heard of the hiking club of Shelehov. But it was certainly the prettiest certificate I had ever seen. And it came with bouquet of flowers.
I also have to mention the ride home, when Mikhail Nicholaevich found out that people in America don’t go to banyas. His consternation was unfeigned and deep. “But how do they clean themselves?” They take showers. “That’s all? That doesn’t get you clean.”
After Returning from Olhon:
There were really pretty white cliffs, called “the teeth of the predator.” And others called “the Cape of Wishes and the Rock of Love”- they were two cliff things jutting out beside each other, and men had to go to the one on the left and women to the one on the right and throw rocks off them and make wishes. There was some reason, I think, that men were supposed to go to the left, signified by winks from our driver, but whatever vulgar meaning it might have had was lost on us. There were also other cliffs, or large rocks, or whatever these formations would be termed, but I don’t know the names of them all. These cliffs all had really pretty red moss growing on it, and Baikal was its usual blue, and when the sun was out the steppe on the non-Baikal side of the rocks showed some green among the brown, so the cliffs were all colorful scenes. And then there were a few sandy beaches, and a few areas that looked like the desert, with dunes, and a lot of rolling steppe, and then forest, which was almost all larch, at least on the north of the island where we were. I am told that we have larch in America, but I was previously unaware of its existence. It looks like a pine tree but the needles (well Encarta World English Dictionary is telling me that actually it has “clusters of leaves resembling needles”) all turn bright yellow in the fall and fall off. When there are entire forests of the same color yellow, and when the sun shines on the trees, the effect is striking. Also the golden carpeted roads through the forest are nice. Yeah. Pretty place, Olhon. I wonder how I’m supposed to be spelling it. I think Olkhon, actually. But I don’t really understand why we translate gutteral ‘h’ as ‘kh.’ It sounds much more like an ‘h’ than like a ‘k.’ One of our professors here has on occasion spoken of Olkhon with a certain scorn, as a place “that you foreigners always love so much”- actually I have gotten this impression from multiple people - but I defy their anti-tourist rhetoric and like it anyway. Maybe not as much as the hidden, empty beaches we drove around in Buryatia though.
In other news “I wish my baby was born” is a pretty dang sad song. That’s someone’s blood there on his wings; that’s someone’s blood there on his feathers. Also, why does Bob Dylan think of Achilles as being temporary? Oh, I guess Achilles is temporary as in being mortal. Most people are temporary, if Achilles is.
Tuesday morning update:
It’s snowing, and sticking. It snowed some on Olkhon, but really just flakes blowing around, and it’s supposed to be a lot colder there than here. And it’s snowed here before but only lightly between periods of rain or at night. Now the sun’s out, and there’s a real снегопад and the little grove of trees between here and the universtiy are all frosted-looking and the roofs of the houses and cars are white. Only on the actual roads is it still not sticking. This may mean I have to go buy boots today.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Я только говорю по-русски сейчас. Русские книги, русская музыка, т.д. Я всегда хочу рассказывать всё по-английски, и думаю потому-что я пишу здесь все время, между другими причинами. Так что, несколько дней я не говорю или думаю по-английск, кроме когда я отвечу е-майл сегодня. Если мы ездим на Ольхон на выходные, наверно я вернусь к ангийкому тогда. Это не очень долго.
So, I wrote that this morning. And I'm breaking my russian-only vow because I feel that I've earned it. I spent an hour and 40 minutes this evening listening to crackly old records of carefully-dressed women with tall hair playing accordians of various kinds. Actually the experience was very interesting for the first hour. Joseph, it seems, does not have time to practice the balalaika between his Tuesday and Thursday lessons, so his Thursday lesson has turned into a music history lesson, and today Ivan and I went with him. So... we looked at lots of diagrams of different kinds of accordians, and at actual accordians of various kinds, and learned how to construct accordians that would sound more smooth or more sharp (in theory; no actual construction look place) and listened to Joseph's enthusiastic 60-something teacher walk around the apartment-turned-music-lesson-place blowing into some accordian part, claiming we could hear the difference when he closed various doors to change the accoustics. And I though about how nice it was to listen to someone talk about what interested him, even when it was not really comprehensible, and about how much I like the equipment associated with music- the old intruments, the sheet music, the record covers, the calloused fingers, the music stands, everything with the slight grime of people's fingers and lips and over many hours, and all slightly too practical to be able to be truly pretty – concerts don't quite count, they are in a way a false front. I don't really mean too practical, lots of very practical things are very pretty, like gardening tools, but musical equipment just somehow isn't quite. And then music seems to me rather like an exclusive club, which increases its allure - people who can actually discuss all those keys and clefts and things seem to belong to some kind of gnostic club, able to mix with ordinary society in most circumstances but still in some way aloof from it and accessable only to each other. So, back to our bare room with the accordians: we listened to a lot of records. And I liked these records, and I liked that we all had to sit together in a room to listen to them and couldn't just put the music on our i-pods, and I liked that the music was linked to a physical object that I could see bumpily spinning around the record player, which looked like something made in a high-school shop class. But there is a limit to how many accordians one non-accordian-enthusiast can listen to. Or maybe just to how long I can sit still.
Anything else interesting to relate as long as I'm speaking English anyway? In our history of Siberia class today we discussed far northern tribes, up in the tundra where you can wander for years and never meet another person. Apparently when running into another person is such a big deal, they make a big deal of guests, for whom all possible must be done. For instance, the host must offer the guest his wife for the night. And if the guest refuses it means he does not respect the host. So children brought up in a man's house hold are fairly often not all his, but some random guest's. I see great soap opera potential. Like, what if the wife likes the guest better? Or what if the guest hangs around for more than one night? Also, our teacher was very impressed by the toilet-building abilities of far-northern tribes, so we talked about that for sort a disproportionate amount of time. She several times pointed out that tribes in the frozen north are much better at building sanitary toilets than tourists and residents around Baikal. We also learned that babies in the tundra would freeze if they wore diapers, so they're put in cribs with rotten, absorbent wood in the bottom. This is if they survive being tossed out into the snow for a while, as is done with them after they're first born. If it's spring, they have to settle for cold water. Back to Russian.
So, I wrote that this morning. And I'm breaking my russian-only vow because I feel that I've earned it. I spent an hour and 40 minutes this evening listening to crackly old records of carefully-dressed women with tall hair playing accordians of various kinds. Actually the experience was very interesting for the first hour. Joseph, it seems, does not have time to practice the balalaika between his Tuesday and Thursday lessons, so his Thursday lesson has turned into a music history lesson, and today Ivan and I went with him. So... we looked at lots of diagrams of different kinds of accordians, and at actual accordians of various kinds, and learned how to construct accordians that would sound more smooth or more sharp (in theory; no actual construction look place) and listened to Joseph's enthusiastic 60-something teacher walk around the apartment-turned-music-lesson-place blowing into some accordian part, claiming we could hear the difference when he closed various doors to change the accoustics. And I though about how nice it was to listen to someone talk about what interested him, even when it was not really comprehensible, and about how much I like the equipment associated with music- the old intruments, the sheet music, the record covers, the calloused fingers, the music stands, everything with the slight grime of people's fingers and lips and over many hours, and all slightly too practical to be able to be truly pretty – concerts don't quite count, they are in a way a false front. I don't really mean too practical, lots of very practical things are very pretty, like gardening tools, but musical equipment just somehow isn't quite. And then music seems to me rather like an exclusive club, which increases its allure - people who can actually discuss all those keys and clefts and things seem to belong to some kind of gnostic club, able to mix with ordinary society in most circumstances but still in some way aloof from it and accessable only to each other. So, back to our bare room with the accordians: we listened to a lot of records. And I liked these records, and I liked that we all had to sit together in a room to listen to them and couldn't just put the music on our i-pods, and I liked that the music was linked to a physical object that I could see bumpily spinning around the record player, which looked like something made in a high-school shop class. But there is a limit to how many accordians one non-accordian-enthusiast can listen to. Or maybe just to how long I can sit still.
Anything else interesting to relate as long as I'm speaking English anyway? In our history of Siberia class today we discussed far northern tribes, up in the tundra where you can wander for years and never meet another person. Apparently when running into another person is such a big deal, they make a big deal of guests, for whom all possible must be done. For instance, the host must offer the guest his wife for the night. And if the guest refuses it means he does not respect the host. So children brought up in a man's house hold are fairly often not all his, but some random guest's. I see great soap opera potential. Like, what if the wife likes the guest better? Or what if the guest hangs around for more than one night? Also, our teacher was very impressed by the toilet-building abilities of far-northern tribes, so we talked about that for sort a disproportionate amount of time. She several times pointed out that tribes in the frozen north are much better at building sanitary toilets than tourists and residents around Baikal. We also learned that babies in the tundra would freeze if they wore diapers, so they're put in cribs with rotten, absorbent wood in the bottom. This is if they survive being tossed out into the snow for a while, as is done with them after they're first born. If it's spring, they have to settle for cold water. Back to Russian.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Another post compiled by having a word document open in my room for a long time
More Stuff
A song came up on my i-pod the other day, by the Red Clay Ramblers: “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room.” It was one of those yearning-prediction-of-the-joys-of-heaven type songs. It occurred to me that the song would make very little sense in very few countries but America. It’s really a very strange thing upon which to base a construction of a paradise; I wonder how strange I would have though it was 4 months ago.
There’s a series of knock-off Harry Potter books here called “Tanya Trotter.” The covers are in the same colorful style, with the same lightning font for the title.
They like seaweed salads here, imported from China or Korea. We ate them a lot on our group trip. And we had it for dinner here on University Street tonight, and I was told once again how good for the health are all sea products. No seaweed consumption, though, can beat the first time any of us ate it here, when Joseph’s babushka gave him a can of it to bring on our trip to Arshan. It was set out with the rest of the food for several meals, and we all just looked at it distrustfully; eventually, when we were sitting around in the cement ice-rink, boredom defeated caution, and Joseph smashed the can open with a stone. Not a lot of it was ever eaten, I don’t think.
I went back to Fiesta today, because I couldn’t begin my boycott without first using up some unused minutes on a couple receipts. And, by stealthy avoidance of the waitress who told me I had to spend 100 ruples, I got another receipt-thing. It only had 10 minutes on it though. Curses upon you, stingy internet providers.
I asked Valentina Petrovna (host mother) today whether she thought things were better now or before, back in the USSR. She thought for a minute and then said that she used to be able to fly to Moscow for much cheaper, which is a shame because she likes Moscow, and likes looking around there and talking to people. I wonder if it was frustrating for those underground book publishers and other various dissidents that most of the country didn’t seem to think there was anything worth protesting against. Valentina Petrovna did admit that it is now much easier to buy sausage, and that it’s nice to be able to leave the country.
I am pretty much writing this only to avoid doing my homework. Well I don’t really have any homework. I did my only written homework, which was to list problems of modern Russia. My list: alcoholism, demographic crisis, small pensions, political apathy of the population, too few fruits and vegetables in the diet, price of food in relation to salary, not enough living space, AIDs. But, anyway, to avoid studying. Somehow this apartment sucks out any responsible study habits I might ever have possessed. I need togo back to the mysterious reading room I found that one time. But right now I’m going back to searching Katya’s cd collection for interesting songs.
I don’t know why I like Russian rock so much. Maybe I should try, when I get home, to like American rock. Maybe it’s just that the words are cooler why I have to try harder to figure out what they mean, or that I think words are automatically cool when they are in Russian? But I think I really do like the music. Do we still have rock music in America, come to think of it? I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone answer the question “what kind of music do you like” with “rock.” People listen to “alternative” or “indie” or “punk” or... well, I’m not really sure, because the answers don’t usually mean much to me. Anyway, I increasingly like, in case you are interested, the groups ДД“, Агата ристи, Чиж, and Чайф. Another question: how did a genre of music get named 'heavy metal'? Is it in contrast to 'aluminum' music? Wait, isn't some row of the periodic table the heavy metals? I was sort of sad when I discovered that there is no cyrillic periodic table.
Wait, I remebered I have more homework, for grammer class: I have to write a paragraph about what a person in love should not do. There's some important grammatical concept involved, but unfortunately I don't really know what it is. Hmm. Why do we always get such odd assignments, anyway? How am I supposed to know what a person in love should not do, even if I knew how to say it grammatically? Probably the person who knew could make a lot of money, if they marketed this remarkable knowledge correctly.
I should try expressing myself in Russian only in rock lyrics. I would be much more grammatical. Unfortunately the range of subjects of my conversation would be sort of limited to tortured love, early death, and teenage rebellion. And Uma Thurman, I could talk about her rather a lot, she has an entire band named for her.
next day:
I wonder what would happen to a Russian who didn't eat bread at a meal. It's very funny- sometimes we have a very good meal, and people are fairly full, and then you see them look around uneasily for bread, because we haven't had any yet; this morning this happened after the macaroni-milk-porridge disk we had. It was followed by the every-present bread-cheese-sausage course. Actually I guess Svetlana, our summer school teacher, often didn't eat bread at meals, when she had her interesting 100% watermelon lunches.
I am currently in a very bad mood because I just bought a train ticket to Mongolia and it cost a lot more than I thought it would. And this is not only annoying in itself but reminds me of how much money I spend in general here, and how I don't make any, and then how in my non-Russian life I pretty much just spend my life wracking up debt to my parents and the federal government, and I don't really know what to do about it. This is hardly a new train of thought, I am just newly depressed about it by this stupid train ticket. Argggggg. I should have just gone to Frederick Community College and studied some lucrative subject like landscape design and become financially independent. Or been one of those child-entreprenuers who makes her first million by age 15. As it is, I am just going to have to never spend any money again. I already walked a long way home because I am too cheap to spend money on more than one marshrutka for one trip, and it was sort of cold because I am too cheap to buy a hat to replace the one I lost. And you are not reading this right now because I am too cheap to go to an internet cafe. I predict this budget to continue for approximately a week.
Actually I did try to go to the goth computer game internet cafe, but there were no free computers. I'm just too cheap to go downtown and use an internet cafe. Aiko, if you read this, I am currently wishing that I could call you and wish you a happy birthday. But I don't have your cellphone number, or your room number, and I can't get on the internet to find them. And I just tried to call Abby to ask her, but I am only told by a static-y British voice that the subscriber is not available right now. She is probably in class. All I can do is give you a late shout-out on my non-posted blog. When this gets posted, and if you are a person who has not yet congratulated Aiko Weverka on the completion of her 20th year of life, you should do so.
Katya told me tonight that she had a test for History of Culturology or some other horrid-sounding subject today, and I was referenced in one of her answers- it was some question about international cultural post-soviet relations or something? and she said that she had an American girl staying with her now, that many foreign students come to Irkutsk, and that Russia is a very welcoming country. I think she has a poor understanding of culturology, whatever that is. Russia has many positive qualities, but being especially welcoming of foreigners is not one.
This was just posted in the punk-video-game cafe by a very complex file transfer from the attendent's computer to this one.
Snow here today. Valentina Petrovna told me I'm not allowed to consider it winter yet though.
A song came up on my i-pod the other day, by the Red Clay Ramblers: “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room.” It was one of those yearning-prediction-of-the-joys-of-heaven type songs. It occurred to me that the song would make very little sense in very few countries but America. It’s really a very strange thing upon which to base a construction of a paradise; I wonder how strange I would have though it was 4 months ago.
There’s a series of knock-off Harry Potter books here called “Tanya Trotter.” The covers are in the same colorful style, with the same lightning font for the title.
They like seaweed salads here, imported from China or Korea. We ate them a lot on our group trip. And we had it for dinner here on University Street tonight, and I was told once again how good for the health are all sea products. No seaweed consumption, though, can beat the first time any of us ate it here, when Joseph’s babushka gave him a can of it to bring on our trip to Arshan. It was set out with the rest of the food for several meals, and we all just looked at it distrustfully; eventually, when we were sitting around in the cement ice-rink, boredom defeated caution, and Joseph smashed the can open with a stone. Not a lot of it was ever eaten, I don’t think.
I went back to Fiesta today, because I couldn’t begin my boycott without first using up some unused minutes on a couple receipts. And, by stealthy avoidance of the waitress who told me I had to spend 100 ruples, I got another receipt-thing. It only had 10 minutes on it though. Curses upon you, stingy internet providers.
I asked Valentina Petrovna (host mother) today whether she thought things were better now or before, back in the USSR. She thought for a minute and then said that she used to be able to fly to Moscow for much cheaper, which is a shame because she likes Moscow, and likes looking around there and talking to people. I wonder if it was frustrating for those underground book publishers and other various dissidents that most of the country didn’t seem to think there was anything worth protesting against. Valentina Petrovna did admit that it is now much easier to buy sausage, and that it’s nice to be able to leave the country.
I am pretty much writing this only to avoid doing my homework. Well I don’t really have any homework. I did my only written homework, which was to list problems of modern Russia. My list: alcoholism, demographic crisis, small pensions, political apathy of the population, too few fruits and vegetables in the diet, price of food in relation to salary, not enough living space, AIDs. But, anyway, to avoid studying. Somehow this apartment sucks out any responsible study habits I might ever have possessed. I need togo back to the mysterious reading room I found that one time. But right now I’m going back to searching Katya’s cd collection for interesting songs.
I don’t know why I like Russian rock so much. Maybe I should try, when I get home, to like American rock. Maybe it’s just that the words are cooler why I have to try harder to figure out what they mean, or that I think words are automatically cool when they are in Russian? But I think I really do like the music. Do we still have rock music in America, come to think of it? I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone answer the question “what kind of music do you like” with “rock.” People listen to “alternative” or “indie” or “punk” or... well, I’m not really sure, because the answers don’t usually mean much to me. Anyway, I increasingly like, in case you are interested, the groups ДД“, Агата ристи, Чиж, and Чайф. Another question: how did a genre of music get named 'heavy metal'? Is it in contrast to 'aluminum' music? Wait, isn't some row of the periodic table the heavy metals? I was sort of sad when I discovered that there is no cyrillic periodic table.
Wait, I remebered I have more homework, for grammer class: I have to write a paragraph about what a person in love should not do. There's some important grammatical concept involved, but unfortunately I don't really know what it is. Hmm. Why do we always get such odd assignments, anyway? How am I supposed to know what a person in love should not do, even if I knew how to say it grammatically? Probably the person who knew could make a lot of money, if they marketed this remarkable knowledge correctly.
I should try expressing myself in Russian only in rock lyrics. I would be much more grammatical. Unfortunately the range of subjects of my conversation would be sort of limited to tortured love, early death, and teenage rebellion. And Uma Thurman, I could talk about her rather a lot, she has an entire band named for her.
next day:
I wonder what would happen to a Russian who didn't eat bread at a meal. It's very funny- sometimes we have a very good meal, and people are fairly full, and then you see them look around uneasily for bread, because we haven't had any yet; this morning this happened after the macaroni-milk-porridge disk we had. It was followed by the every-present bread-cheese-sausage course. Actually I guess Svetlana, our summer school teacher, often didn't eat bread at meals, when she had her interesting 100% watermelon lunches.
I am currently in a very bad mood because I just bought a train ticket to Mongolia and it cost a lot more than I thought it would. And this is not only annoying in itself but reminds me of how much money I spend in general here, and how I don't make any, and then how in my non-Russian life I pretty much just spend my life wracking up debt to my parents and the federal government, and I don't really know what to do about it. This is hardly a new train of thought, I am just newly depressed about it by this stupid train ticket. Argggggg. I should have just gone to Frederick Community College and studied some lucrative subject like landscape design and become financially independent. Or been one of those child-entreprenuers who makes her first million by age 15. As it is, I am just going to have to never spend any money again. I already walked a long way home because I am too cheap to spend money on more than one marshrutka for one trip, and it was sort of cold because I am too cheap to buy a hat to replace the one I lost. And you are not reading this right now because I am too cheap to go to an internet cafe. I predict this budget to continue for approximately a week.
Actually I did try to go to the goth computer game internet cafe, but there were no free computers. I'm just too cheap to go downtown and use an internet cafe. Aiko, if you read this, I am currently wishing that I could call you and wish you a happy birthday. But I don't have your cellphone number, or your room number, and I can't get on the internet to find them. And I just tried to call Abby to ask her, but I am only told by a static-y British voice that the subscriber is not available right now. She is probably in class. All I can do is give you a late shout-out on my non-posted blog. When this gets posted, and if you are a person who has not yet congratulated Aiko Weverka on the completion of her 20th year of life, you should do so.
Katya told me tonight that she had a test for History of Culturology or some other horrid-sounding subject today, and I was referenced in one of her answers- it was some question about international cultural post-soviet relations or something? and she said that she had an American girl staying with her now, that many foreign students come to Irkutsk, and that Russia is a very welcoming country. I think she has a poor understanding of culturology, whatever that is. Russia has many positive qualities, but being especially welcoming of foreigners is not one.
This was just posted in the punk-video-game cafe by a very complex file transfer from the attendent's computer to this one.
Snow here today. Valentina Petrovna told me I'm not allowed to consider it winter yet though.
Monday, October 15, 2007
This Country is Ridiculous but Sort of Interesting
On Saturday sometime after 3:00, when I was at the Cafe Fiesta posting my previous post, actually, one of the 3-muscateer math majors from the hiking club called me and said if I wanted to go to Skazka (the cabin where the club often camps, and which is, incidentally, owned by one of our guides on our group trip to Buryatia), I should meet him at the fountain at 5:00. This was highly inconvenient in many ways: I had to sprint about the city and anxiously wait for irregular marshrutkas to get home, pack (in a plastic bag, as I have no backpack- I picked one up from the club in Shelekov, the town where they meet), and get back downtown; I had long looked forward to shopping for boots with Natasha and her host mother on Sunday; who the heck leaves for a camping trip at 5:00 pm?; my host mother had told me she would take me to a concert Sunday night, and I am sorry to miss any of the time members of my host family are not at work; and, I had no time to fill out a travel form for Elizabeth, which I think we’re supposed to do two days ahead of time every time we leave the city. Despite all these things, I feel like I have to spend time with this hiking club whenever I have an opportunity - it’s my only chance to hear conversational, informal Russian spoken for long periods of time. Plus I want to see more of Siberia than the no. 4 marshrutka. So I SMSed (how I now say “text message,” since I’m so hip and European) Elizabeth, who very nicely was merely disapproving rather than actually forbidding me to go, sprinted about, and met Max and one of the Alyosha’s at the fountain.
It was an interesting trip. We didn’t even get on the electirchka out of Shelekov until after 9:30 - first we sat in a middle school art room- or something, I actually have no idea where we were- in Shelekov for a long time and watched a conference about a trip the club had made to the Far East (I don’t know how to translate this into English, actually- it doesn’t mean China and Japan, it means the very eastern part of Russian, where hardly anyone lives) in the summer. The schoolkids who went gave presentations, which were judged, and lots of people gave out lots of certificates and flowers and things. Anyway, the hike to Skazka in the dark was sort of amazing. Only half the group had flashlights, and the trail is very rocky has a lot of fallen trees and rivers across it and sometimes just unexpectedly falls away completely; so the way was fraught with danger and adventure. It was rather exhausting- think of how mental tiring driving on unknown country roads in the dark is, and then add to that the actual physical exhaustion of hiking, plus the fact that living in Russian is fairly tiring anyway, so by midnight I am not especially functional. There was no moon, but it was a clear night and the stars were beautiful. We didn’t actually see them very often, because we were staring intently at the ground trying to see around our own shadows to any rocks and roots and trees the flashlight of the person behind us might be illuminating; every once in a while though, when we stopped, the view really was a amazing, through the tall pines. The best was on top of hills, when the stars shone not only above the trees but among the trunks, out in all directions. We stopped for a few minutes to eat piroshki on one such hill, all squatting in a circle in the road.
When we got to Skazka (we went the last couple of minutes completely without flashlights, which was challenging but fun), we found an already crowded cabin with a cheerfully burning woodstove. We drank some tea and went almost straight to bed, crammed close together, such that no one could figure out what to do with their arms, under the shelf-bunk thing characteristic of Russian cabins (or so I judge from the 3 I’ve been in). Those who had not just been hiking about in the dark sat up with a guitar and sang. I really like Russian campfire songs.
The next day was devoted to the continuation of the construction of a banya near the cabins – the condition, I think, on which the actual owner of Skazka is letting these hooligans stay there all the time. After a brief cold breakfast I set out through the woods with a few other people to find some boards for the roof that had been dropped off somewhere. I thought, as I half-ran along after my long-legged tovarishi like a little dog, about how much more comfortable I was than the first time I had been camping, and I wondered how much of it I could reasonably attribute to improved language abilities. After walking over hill and over dale, through woods and down narrow paths with tall grasses poking you in the eye all the time, and over a small river, we found the boards, clearly torn off some other surface, very long, and very heavy. For future reference, it is almost impossible to defend against thousands of little sticks poking you in the eye when your hands are full of board. It was difficult enough, actually, to be fun and interesting rather than just hard. Unfortunately, it was the only work I did all day; women aren’t really supposed to work in the presence of men, apparently, and whenever I would try to do something several people would shout at me in alarm to stop. It was fairly frustrating, and meant that I just sat around for many hours watching other people dig holes and carry dirt and carry big tree trunks around. Every once in a while I would manage to do something while the boy who was supposed to be doing it whined about it; then people would ask him if he were not ashamed that a girl had performed the task, and he would be, and would rush about working for a while. After this happening about twice I gave up. As I sat watching Alyosha and Max dig a hole, they attempted to explain why it just too embarrassing for Russian men for a woman to do physical work other than cooking and cleaning; their various explanations were sort of amusing but not really helpful. At one point Max referenced the Domostroi, in complete seriousness, as evidence of why in Russia women should not work outside the home. I made a vague protest that the Domostroi was written in the middle ages, and that it was written not as a legitimate civil code but as an impossible collection of spiritual advice by fanatic priests, but I could not really argue with people who think that the Domostroi is an acceptable source of social policy. I couldn’t decide whether my overwhelming reaction was “this country is out of control” or “boys are stupid.” Of course, I don’t really want equal treatment: what I want is a system where men do all the work when I don’t feel like doing it or don’t know how, but I get to work when I want to. I want a higher, more sophisticated level of chivalry in which men work harder than I do but pretend that they don’t. Come on, males of Russia, get with the double standard.
I really like the meals and tea breaks associated with camping. There is interesting, sort of rough-hewn seeming tea, made in an long, skinny iron pot thing hung over the stove, bitter and with bits of tea-leaf everywhere, and there is an endless variety of dried bread and cookie, and there is dogs-dinner-like soup, and then, my favorite, there is condensed milk. I don’t know why we don’t eat more condensed milk in America. It is my new favorite thing. You can put in it your tea, you can dip cookies and crackers in it, you can pour it over bread, you can pour it into your mouth from the can; it is sweet and thick and perfect.
When we left Skazka, instead of hiking back to the electrichka stop, we hiked to where some guy had parked his mini-bus (well, it was pretty much a mini-van with all the seats taken out) and he drove us to Shelehov. This was an interesting ride, with seven people and their backpacks and some odd metal objects crammed in the back, and roads designed for tanks, maybe, rather than old mini-vans, and much getting in and out so that the van could drive though lakes, and much flying of people out of their seats (seat meaning “where we were sitting on our backpacks), and at one point the guy in the passenger seat, in a baseball cap with earflaps, riding for about 5 minutes with a rifle pointed out the window. I still have no idea why, but everyone in the van seemed to think it a reasonable possibility that he would shoot it, because they covered their ears. When we finally got to Shelehov Max, Alyosha, Vitalya and I walked to the bus station, where we waited a long time to elbow lots of people out of the way and get on a bus going back to Irkutsk. Apparently people on buses who need to get around you in the aisle so they can get off hate you lot more than usual if you have a large backpack. Anyway, eventually Vitalya and I got off at our stop, and found a marshrutka, and I got home. It’s amusing being in public with Vitalya, who for some reason is always in full camo and a cargo vest and looks very official.
For dinner I had a plate of some sort of crawfish animal. And Katya told me that if I buy boots now they will be fall boots, and I will eventually need winter boots. I am not allowed to wear winter boots yet. She asked me if my feet are cold now, and I said no, I was just the only person in Russia without boots. She told me that foreigners are supposed to look different.
It was an interesting trip. We didn’t even get on the electirchka out of Shelekov until after 9:30 - first we sat in a middle school art room- or something, I actually have no idea where we were- in Shelekov for a long time and watched a conference about a trip the club had made to the Far East (I don’t know how to translate this into English, actually- it doesn’t mean China and Japan, it means the very eastern part of Russian, where hardly anyone lives) in the summer. The schoolkids who went gave presentations, which were judged, and lots of people gave out lots of certificates and flowers and things. Anyway, the hike to Skazka in the dark was sort of amazing. Only half the group had flashlights, and the trail is very rocky has a lot of fallen trees and rivers across it and sometimes just unexpectedly falls away completely; so the way was fraught with danger and adventure. It was rather exhausting- think of how mental tiring driving on unknown country roads in the dark is, and then add to that the actual physical exhaustion of hiking, plus the fact that living in Russian is fairly tiring anyway, so by midnight I am not especially functional. There was no moon, but it was a clear night and the stars were beautiful. We didn’t actually see them very often, because we were staring intently at the ground trying to see around our own shadows to any rocks and roots and trees the flashlight of the person behind us might be illuminating; every once in a while though, when we stopped, the view really was a amazing, through the tall pines. The best was on top of hills, when the stars shone not only above the trees but among the trunks, out in all directions. We stopped for a few minutes to eat piroshki on one such hill, all squatting in a circle in the road.
When we got to Skazka (we went the last couple of minutes completely without flashlights, which was challenging but fun), we found an already crowded cabin with a cheerfully burning woodstove. We drank some tea and went almost straight to bed, crammed close together, such that no one could figure out what to do with their arms, under the shelf-bunk thing characteristic of Russian cabins (or so I judge from the 3 I’ve been in). Those who had not just been hiking about in the dark sat up with a guitar and sang. I really like Russian campfire songs.
The next day was devoted to the continuation of the construction of a banya near the cabins – the condition, I think, on which the actual owner of Skazka is letting these hooligans stay there all the time. After a brief cold breakfast I set out through the woods with a few other people to find some boards for the roof that had been dropped off somewhere. I thought, as I half-ran along after my long-legged tovarishi like a little dog, about how much more comfortable I was than the first time I had been camping, and I wondered how much of it I could reasonably attribute to improved language abilities. After walking over hill and over dale, through woods and down narrow paths with tall grasses poking you in the eye all the time, and over a small river, we found the boards, clearly torn off some other surface, very long, and very heavy. For future reference, it is almost impossible to defend against thousands of little sticks poking you in the eye when your hands are full of board. It was difficult enough, actually, to be fun and interesting rather than just hard. Unfortunately, it was the only work I did all day; women aren’t really supposed to work in the presence of men, apparently, and whenever I would try to do something several people would shout at me in alarm to stop. It was fairly frustrating, and meant that I just sat around for many hours watching other people dig holes and carry dirt and carry big tree trunks around. Every once in a while I would manage to do something while the boy who was supposed to be doing it whined about it; then people would ask him if he were not ashamed that a girl had performed the task, and he would be, and would rush about working for a while. After this happening about twice I gave up. As I sat watching Alyosha and Max dig a hole, they attempted to explain why it just too embarrassing for Russian men for a woman to do physical work other than cooking and cleaning; their various explanations were sort of amusing but not really helpful. At one point Max referenced the Domostroi, in complete seriousness, as evidence of why in Russia women should not work outside the home. I made a vague protest that the Domostroi was written in the middle ages, and that it was written not as a legitimate civil code but as an impossible collection of spiritual advice by fanatic priests, but I could not really argue with people who think that the Domostroi is an acceptable source of social policy. I couldn’t decide whether my overwhelming reaction was “this country is out of control” or “boys are stupid.” Of course, I don’t really want equal treatment: what I want is a system where men do all the work when I don’t feel like doing it or don’t know how, but I get to work when I want to. I want a higher, more sophisticated level of chivalry in which men work harder than I do but pretend that they don’t. Come on, males of Russia, get with the double standard.
I really like the meals and tea breaks associated with camping. There is interesting, sort of rough-hewn seeming tea, made in an long, skinny iron pot thing hung over the stove, bitter and with bits of tea-leaf everywhere, and there is an endless variety of dried bread and cookie, and there is dogs-dinner-like soup, and then, my favorite, there is condensed milk. I don’t know why we don’t eat more condensed milk in America. It is my new favorite thing. You can put in it your tea, you can dip cookies and crackers in it, you can pour it over bread, you can pour it into your mouth from the can; it is sweet and thick and perfect.
When we left Skazka, instead of hiking back to the electrichka stop, we hiked to where some guy had parked his mini-bus (well, it was pretty much a mini-van with all the seats taken out) and he drove us to Shelehov. This was an interesting ride, with seven people and their backpacks and some odd metal objects crammed in the back, and roads designed for tanks, maybe, rather than old mini-vans, and much getting in and out so that the van could drive though lakes, and much flying of people out of their seats (seat meaning “where we were sitting on our backpacks), and at one point the guy in the passenger seat, in a baseball cap with earflaps, riding for about 5 minutes with a rifle pointed out the window. I still have no idea why, but everyone in the van seemed to think it a reasonable possibility that he would shoot it, because they covered their ears. When we finally got to Shelehov Max, Alyosha, Vitalya and I walked to the bus station, where we waited a long time to elbow lots of people out of the way and get on a bus going back to Irkutsk. Apparently people on buses who need to get around you in the aisle so they can get off hate you lot more than usual if you have a large backpack. Anyway, eventually Vitalya and I got off at our stop, and found a marshrutka, and I got home. It’s amusing being in public with Vitalya, who for some reason is always in full camo and a cargo vest and looks very official.
For dinner I had a plate of some sort of crawfish animal. And Katya told me that if I buy boots now they will be fall boots, and I will eventually need winter boots. I am not allowed to wear winter boots yet. She asked me if my feet are cold now, and I said no, I was just the only person in Russia without boots. She told me that foreigners are supposed to look different.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Notes as I think of them
Today I was in the Central Shopping Center on my way home, because I thought I’d look for a Zemfira cd to buy – she’s playing here soon (I have as yet not figured out how to buy tickets but I’m working on it) and I want to know as many songs as possible if I go to the concert. The store I though I remembered being a music store, however, actually sold dvds, and there was a very large collection of probably-pirated (though maybe not- there weren’t prices, and there was only one movie per disk, so it could have been the only legitimate movie store in Irkutsk, who knows) films, divided into the categories “Russian” and “foreign.” I was very happy, for some reason, to see low-quality American movies a foreign-film section of a store, alongside some classics of Mexican film and artsy French movies and such. I think this (my happiness, not the movie arrangement, which was fairly logical) is a result of an odd cultural-inferiority complex, probably created by the fact that most of my experience of Russian culture, pre-Russia, was classical music and artsy or classic movies and famous literature, while the majority of American artistic output that I have seen in my lifetime, in terms of quantity, is awful music and trashy movies and general mediocrity. Of course, actually Russian culture contains fully as much trashiness and mediocrity as American culture, they just aren’t very anxious to export this segment of culture across national borders. And then probably my impression of cultural inferiority was not helped by the reminders of various Russian professors of how much more Russians read than Americans, and how I can probably name many more 18-th century Russian writers than American, and how Russians really taught Americans how to dance ballet and act, and so forth.
I went running this morning, and took a different turn after the creepy graveyard in the woods- instead of going up the hill to the ugly Catholic Church I came out of the woods along the train tracks, on a dirt path that included interesting gangway over huge hot-water pipes and that eventually ended in an iron door in a wall across the tracks from a little train platform. Upon further examination of this door I found that 1) it led to the University Botanical Gardens and that 2) it was unlocked. So I ran in the botanical gardens for a while, sure I was going to be chased out by Mr. MacGregor at any moment. Mr. MacGreggor must have been engrossed in some indoor activity, however, because while there were a couple of parked cars at what looked like the main building, I didn’t see anyone. What I did see were lots of frost-covered grassy paths along some garden patches and some woodsy patches, and lot of identifying plaques, and lots of fog on the ground, and my own breath, and the first live squirrels I’ve seen in Irkutsk. I think I already described the stuffed squirrel we saw in the Baikal museum, but I was not prepared for the complete ridiculousness of these animals in real life. Their ears look like they belong to a rabbit, due to the huge tufts of black hair on them, and their tails are black too, which makes them look like they were just stuck on there by accident- this sort of increases their rabbit-resemblance as well. Their movements are oddly jerky and frantic and demented- these things seriously look like little aliens. At one point my eyes were drawn by unearthly squeaks one was making up in a tree. I looked at him; he, a little runty thing, stopped working on the nut he was cracking for a moment and looked at me. We considered each other. Then he went back to his demented nut cracking. I briefly entertained the notion that I had in that moment come to some sort of terms with the squirrel, that we had accepted each other’s existence in the world (for those of you fortunate enough never to have come across a squirrel in my presence in America- I am not fond of squirrels). Then I remembered his weird little squeaks and his crazed little eyes, and I knew that such a thing was never to be. I may leave the botanical garden to the squirrels for a few months – in the fall, most of the plants just look like bare sticks, though the signs beside them assured me that these were dried sticks found only in the Baikal region and Mongolia. It was pretty in the fog this morning though, and I like the look of long furrowed plots with frost on them.
I like the way no one likes to take the last chocolate in a box. There’s currently a box of chocolate on the kitchen table, given to Valentina Petrovna for “National Day of the Teacher,” with very good hazelnut centers. This chocolate went very fast until we got down to the last one - it’s been several days now, and no one has eaten it.
OH MAN I JUST FOUND A SONG CALLED ‘FACE CONTROL’ THIS IS SO AWESOME. It’s on an album of Katya’s called ‘New Years Superhits,’ which is much funnier in Russian. Anyway, this song is so amazing. Face Control is what they call bouncers in Russia- just say “face control” with a Russian accent and you will know how amazing this is. The lyrics are basically:
Hello. My name is Pasha. Face Control! You are not getting into the club today. Pa-pa-pa-pa-pasha. Hello everyone. I am Pasha, Face Control! Face control-trol-trol.
“Pasha! Let me into the club! Do you want to have sex?”
“No! Do not offer sex! I love Nastya! Do not offer sex”
Face control!
Repeat this many times.
Um. I am in Cafe Fiesta. And they now say that you have to spend $100 rubles for them to give you the internet password. I highly disapprove. This may be the end of my Fiesta days.
I went running this morning, and took a different turn after the creepy graveyard in the woods- instead of going up the hill to the ugly Catholic Church I came out of the woods along the train tracks, on a dirt path that included interesting gangway over huge hot-water pipes and that eventually ended in an iron door in a wall across the tracks from a little train platform. Upon further examination of this door I found that 1) it led to the University Botanical Gardens and that 2) it was unlocked. So I ran in the botanical gardens for a while, sure I was going to be chased out by Mr. MacGregor at any moment. Mr. MacGreggor must have been engrossed in some indoor activity, however, because while there were a couple of parked cars at what looked like the main building, I didn’t see anyone. What I did see were lots of frost-covered grassy paths along some garden patches and some woodsy patches, and lot of identifying plaques, and lots of fog on the ground, and my own breath, and the first live squirrels I’ve seen in Irkutsk. I think I already described the stuffed squirrel we saw in the Baikal museum, but I was not prepared for the complete ridiculousness of these animals in real life. Their ears look like they belong to a rabbit, due to the huge tufts of black hair on them, and their tails are black too, which makes them look like they were just stuck on there by accident- this sort of increases their rabbit-resemblance as well. Their movements are oddly jerky and frantic and demented- these things seriously look like little aliens. At one point my eyes were drawn by unearthly squeaks one was making up in a tree. I looked at him; he, a little runty thing, stopped working on the nut he was cracking for a moment and looked at me. We considered each other. Then he went back to his demented nut cracking. I briefly entertained the notion that I had in that moment come to some sort of terms with the squirrel, that we had accepted each other’s existence in the world (for those of you fortunate enough never to have come across a squirrel in my presence in America- I am not fond of squirrels). Then I remembered his weird little squeaks and his crazed little eyes, and I knew that such a thing was never to be. I may leave the botanical garden to the squirrels for a few months – in the fall, most of the plants just look like bare sticks, though the signs beside them assured me that these were dried sticks found only in the Baikal region and Mongolia. It was pretty in the fog this morning though, and I like the look of long furrowed plots with frost on them.
I like the way no one likes to take the last chocolate in a box. There’s currently a box of chocolate on the kitchen table, given to Valentina Petrovna for “National Day of the Teacher,” with very good hazelnut centers. This chocolate went very fast until we got down to the last one - it’s been several days now, and no one has eaten it.
OH MAN I JUST FOUND A SONG CALLED ‘FACE CONTROL’ THIS IS SO AWESOME. It’s on an album of Katya’s called ‘New Years Superhits,’ which is much funnier in Russian. Anyway, this song is so amazing. Face Control is what they call bouncers in Russia- just say “face control” with a Russian accent and you will know how amazing this is. The lyrics are basically:
Hello. My name is Pasha. Face Control! You are not getting into the club today. Pa-pa-pa-pa-pasha. Hello everyone. I am Pasha, Face Control! Face control-trol-trol.
“Pasha! Let me into the club! Do you want to have sex?”
“No! Do not offer sex! I love Nastya! Do not offer sex”
Face control!
Repeat this many times.
Um. I am in Cafe Fiesta. And they now say that you have to spend $100 rubles for them to give you the internet password. I highly disapprove. This may be the end of my Fiesta days.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Trying to think if I have anything interesting to relate
Hmm. Went to the theater Tuesday night, saw a Vampilov play, "Elder Son." It was amazingly understandable, so all the Americans loved it. I think it probably would have been good even if I hadn’t been impressed with myself for knowing what was going on, but hard to say. Good as in “basically entertaining due to Shakespearean-comedy-like comedic mix-ups,” not really good as in “I am impressed by the ability of theater to capture aspects of the nature of the human experience or by the unusual talent of these actors.” After the play Adriane and I ran around looking for a bus stop for a while, then waited for a correct marshrutka or bus that was not full for a while (the fullness requirement applies only to marshrutki, it is by definition impossible for a bus to be considered full), then, because it was very cold and we were afraid marshrutki would stop running soon, we just got on one going to a stop sort of near where we live, and then we had a sort of long walk/run through the beginning of a snowfall home. It was fun, really, I thought.
Wednesday tried to get books from the history department library, failed miserably, walked around looking at people’s boots until the mainstream started, went to mainstream and heard about lots of people named Ivan, then went to dinner with the whole group and Nana, the head Middlebury director in Moscow. ‘Twas good, and I had ‘fish under a hat,’ which is exciting because that’s what the people in the instructional video we watched in summer school made for their grandmother’s birthday. Further excitement resulted from the fact that Adriane and I found a marshrutka that actaully went to our stop.
Today in History of Siberia we looked at lots of charts of the hunting and fishing traps of western Siberian tribes. They are good at thinking up clever traps, those western Siberians. It was a pretty awesome class. In Baikal studies we learned that Old Believer women were cooler than their Buryat counterparts because an Old Believer woman had prepared lunch already by the time the Buryat woman finally got out of bed. Well.
Wednesday tried to get books from the history department library, failed miserably, walked around looking at people’s boots until the mainstream started, went to mainstream and heard about lots of people named Ivan, then went to dinner with the whole group and Nana, the head Middlebury director in Moscow. ‘Twas good, and I had ‘fish under a hat,’ which is exciting because that’s what the people in the instructional video we watched in summer school made for their grandmother’s birthday. Further excitement resulted from the fact that Adriane and I found a marshrutka that actaully went to our stop.
Today in History of Siberia we looked at lots of charts of the hunting and fishing traps of western Siberian tribes. They are good at thinking up clever traps, those western Siberians. It was a pretty awesome class. In Baikal studies we learned that Old Believer women were cooler than their Buryat counterparts because an Old Believer woman had prepared lunch already by the time the Buryat woman finally got out of bed. Well.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Insert clever title relating to spending a day by myself at Baikal
I went to Listvianka, the nearest village on Baikal, today. It was very nice. I didn’t really do anything there, but then I never do anything here either, and it’s much more pleasant doing nothing while looking at a large lake and mountains than when looking at sophisticated urbanites stride about in their leather boots. And then, no one knows, when you’re not in a city, that you aren’t doing anything, and there aren’t any busy people around to make you feel guilty. So, I left Irkutsk on the marshrutka from the bus station, and even the marshrutka was superior to intra-city marshrutki, in that it wasn’t a route people take all the time so no one else knew what was going on either. Near Listvianka, about 5 of us realized that none of us had any idea when we were supposed to be getting off, so that was an amusing conversation. The driver was slightly rough-mannered but actually very helpful, so everyone ended up where they needed to be (“What? You want the Baikal Sanatorium? Of course you should get off here! What did you think? I’ll go show you where it is.” And the wealthy-looking middle-aged couple with leather Gucci bags with giraffes printed all over them hurried off.). Once I got to Listvianka I found, as I expected, that there wasn’t much to do there; you should not be imagining a cute little tourist town with shops and such, I don’t know that Russia has those, Listvianka is a few big hotels, some garish dachas of very rich Russians, and then the wooden cottages that have been there since before the village became a tourist destination. So I walked around the few streets and looked at wooden houses for a while, and got barked at by lots of dogs, and was amused when I picked out a group of people walking down the street as Americans in considerably less than a second (probably recently-retired women, no make-up, backpacks, no fur, a few with that interesting gray-hair-afro look), then found a way into the woods behind the houses and had fun climbing this large steep hill overlooking Baikal. It was challenging because of the pinecones everywhere- sort of like trying to run on one of those roller conveyor belts. I sat in the woods and hung out for a while, and then ran down the hill again and fell down a lot, then walked along the road where lots of Russian families were picnicking, complete with guitars and fur coats and tea cups. I headed back into town and bought an omul- I think I was supposed to haggle over the price, but I couldn’t bring myself to argue with $1.20 for a meal-sized fish. And I was busy being sort of taken aback by the fish-selling woman letting me taste the fish before I bought it. What would she have done with the fish had I decided I didn’t want it? Anyway, I tried to sit on the little beach and eat, but apparently that cost money, so my fish and I trekked back out of town and ate in the woods at a picnic table, which was prettier anyway and had a nice view of the lake, and I gave the omul head to a very patient stray dog. For some reason this particular omul seemed to be the most delicious fish ever in the world, and the dog seemed to agree. After that I went to the world’s tiniest grocery store, back where the dachas are and not where the hotels are, and bought a very good and very cheap ice cream bar, and then wandered around the woods for a few hours and read Paradise Lost and then went back on the marshrutka. I admit that I was rather counting down the hours to when the marshrutka would go back, and I like the idea of sitting around my myself in the woods looking at a lake slightly more than I really like doing it, but I would have been a lot more bored in Irkutsk. And it really was nice looking out at Baikal from the trees, though not nearly as the more remote places we visited on our group trip.
When I was dropped of in Irkutsk it was at the Central Market, and I looked around at the interesting fruit and things being sold for a while, and then I bought a kilogram of grapes, and then I started looking for a marshrutka home. For some reason, while it is incredibly easy to take a marshrutka to the central market, I have enormous trouble getting home from there, though I have now done it about 5 days a week for a month. Anyway, I got on a marshrutka that goes to Universitetski, where I live, and that was going in the same direction that other marshrutki go that are going to Universtitetski, but apparently this was not enough to ensure that this particular marshrutka was going in that direction. Then I figured, oh well, I have nothing else to do and I’ve never seen this part of town, and I can just take this marshrutka back the other direction. So we drove through some large segment of city filled with car shops and smoke stacks and inflatable clowns, but then instead of the result being that I turned around and went back, the result was that I got yelled at a lot by the driver and kicked out along a highway. Anyway, after a certain amount of trudging around morosely eating grapes (which by the way are incredibly good, almost black and very juicy and full of seeds that can be moodily spit out), and the taking of several more marshrutki and standing in long lines, I finally got home, fully appreciative of not having spent the day in Irkutsk. Curses upon you, marshrutka number 84.
Side note: I went to Natasha’s house for lunch yesterday, and I now believe her many statements about the stress connected with food. The meal had a definite tone of challenge, with eating of more kinds of food and the completion of more helpings praiseworthy accomplishments and the failure to do these things a source of shame. I was happy enough to enter into the spirit of competition, and it was great fun as a guest, but I can see how it would get sort of stressful after a few days. On the other hand, it was pretty much the best food ever. I had never had borscht, and I had rather thought of it as a dish to be put up with while in Russia but in general avoided, but apparently it’s extremely good. As are these meat pies of some kind that we had. At the moment I’m sort of jealous of people who are having food cooked for them, as my host mother’s oldest daughter is currently on vacation in Spain or something, so the mother is house/ small-children sitting. I am more and more aware that I am very bad at cooking. I tried to make scrambled eggs this morning, which I assumed was a very simple task, but something went rather wrong... I think they were too scrambled, or I put in too much cheese, or both. So, would someone like to explain to me how to, say, bake a potato? Or do anything else to a potato? Or rice or pasta, other than just boil it and eat it?
Sorry these posts are becoming so dull and overly narrative. I’m inordinately proud when I fill my time with something narratable.
When I was dropped of in Irkutsk it was at the Central Market, and I looked around at the interesting fruit and things being sold for a while, and then I bought a kilogram of grapes, and then I started looking for a marshrutka home. For some reason, while it is incredibly easy to take a marshrutka to the central market, I have enormous trouble getting home from there, though I have now done it about 5 days a week for a month. Anyway, I got on a marshrutka that goes to Universitetski, where I live, and that was going in the same direction that other marshrutki go that are going to Universtitetski, but apparently this was not enough to ensure that this particular marshrutka was going in that direction. Then I figured, oh well, I have nothing else to do and I’ve never seen this part of town, and I can just take this marshrutka back the other direction. So we drove through some large segment of city filled with car shops and smoke stacks and inflatable clowns, but then instead of the result being that I turned around and went back, the result was that I got yelled at a lot by the driver and kicked out along a highway. Anyway, after a certain amount of trudging around morosely eating grapes (which by the way are incredibly good, almost black and very juicy and full of seeds that can be moodily spit out), and the taking of several more marshrutki and standing in long lines, I finally got home, fully appreciative of not having spent the day in Irkutsk. Curses upon you, marshrutka number 84.
Side note: I went to Natasha’s house for lunch yesterday, and I now believe her many statements about the stress connected with food. The meal had a definite tone of challenge, with eating of more kinds of food and the completion of more helpings praiseworthy accomplishments and the failure to do these things a source of shame. I was happy enough to enter into the spirit of competition, and it was great fun as a guest, but I can see how it would get sort of stressful after a few days. On the other hand, it was pretty much the best food ever. I had never had borscht, and I had rather thought of it as a dish to be put up with while in Russia but in general avoided, but apparently it’s extremely good. As are these meat pies of some kind that we had. At the moment I’m sort of jealous of people who are having food cooked for them, as my host mother’s oldest daughter is currently on vacation in Spain or something, so the mother is house/ small-children sitting. I am more and more aware that I am very bad at cooking. I tried to make scrambled eggs this morning, which I assumed was a very simple task, but something went rather wrong... I think they were too scrambled, or I put in too much cheese, or both. So, would someone like to explain to me how to, say, bake a potato? Or do anything else to a potato? Or rice or pasta, other than just boil it and eat it?
Sorry these posts are becoming so dull and overly narrative. I’m inordinately proud when I fill my time with something narratable.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
pictures
Some pictures of our trip are here:
http://middlebury.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022408&l=ab356&id=4403857
Because the picture site isn't working very well right now. This also means you're all spared lots of pictures of Baikal with no people in them, and similar boring things.
http://middlebury.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022408&l=ab356&id=4403857
Because the picture site isn't working very well right now. This also means you're all spared lots of pictures of Baikal with no people in them, and similar boring things.
Sunday Morning update
I went to the Holy Trinity Cathedral/ Church/ whatever it is that the word hram means exactly this morning. My strategy of randomly showing up without knowing what time services are didn’t work very well, but it was good because the library was empty so I could go talk to the babushkas working there for a long time. I really have absolutely no idea what they said. But they talked a lot. I think they gave me directions to every church in the city, all based on a system of public transportation codewords of which I am wholly ignorant. We also discussed many saints I had never heard of and the choirs of various churches. I looked at lots of photographs. The only things I fully understood was that the church was only re-opened 10 years ago and that the white walls that I like so much are soon to be covered in very expensive paint ordered from France, and the consultation to determine which saints and angels and things to paint where was very expensive. The expensive paint was sitting in oval-shaped cans in the library. I may go back at some point and get a membership to this library. They have a copy of “What Will the Batushka Advise?”
Mickey and Minnie Mouse walked through the Cafe Fiesta a few minutes ago. It was alarming. Also, a girl at another table is wearing knee-length leather boots from Adidas. It’s very depressing that even sporting goods stores here are really boutiques. A Donald Duck cartoon is playing on the big-screen TVs, and it combines interestingly with the Russian pop over the sound system.
Mickey and Minnie Mouse walked through the Cafe Fiesta a few minutes ago. It was alarming. Also, a girl at another table is wearing knee-length leather boots from Adidas. It’s very depressing that even sporting goods stores here are really boutiques. A Donald Duck cartoon is playing on the big-screen TVs, and it combines interestingly with the Russian pop over the sound system.
Another Saturday Night and I ain't got nobody
Despite the whininess of the title, I didn’t have such a bad Saturday. After a couple of days of extreme... I don’t know, sitting around being depressed about being in Irkutsk with no purpose in life and not doing anything... I was determined to go find good things to do despite being “tired of these dirty old sidewalks.” It was rather a stretch, but it worked out pretty well.
I ran in the morning, through these interesting woods I found yesterday, with trails leading by the creepiest cemeteries (not sure about the plural- probably all the same one- but in groups with considerable tree-age between them) known to man. I don’t know how to impart the creepiness of these grave plots; there’s nothing at all calm or stately about them. It’s partly being in the woods instead of on a sun-drenched hill, or wherever it is that we seek cemetery real estate on the East Coast, it’s partially the lack of orderly rows, it’s partly the replacement of the two-barred Orthodox cross on many of the gravestones with red Soviet stars, but it’s mainly, I think, the use of iron: most plots have falling down, unattractively-painted iron fences around them, for some reason, which gives the whole thing the look of a rusting carnival. And then many of the gravestones themselves are not stones, but iron pyramid-things, with photos at the top. In a few instances, there are normal-looking stone markers that have been stuck on iron posts, so as to allow them to fall over at the correct jaunty angle. Some of the fenced-off plots have little benches inside them, and most of them have mounds where the body is. When these woods are free of creepy graves, though, they are very nice, and the path interestingly leads to the hideous Catholic church that is very far away by the marshrutka on which I pass it twice a day. I’m very curious about the interior of this church, so I’ll have to make use of this path to visit it sometime. This is a seriously ugly church. It’s cement, and very huge, and rounded- I guess it’s in a general cut-off cone shape, one of the ones that yields one of those geometrical shapes I briefly knew the names of when I did a report of Hypatia in forth grade, but this shape is more suggested than fully developed by the architecture. At the top there is this odd suspended bishop-hat thing, also cement, and above that a big metal cross that looks like it’s being shot up there in a fire-works display, with the other metal bars connecting it to the roof.
Then I lifted weights and generally pretended to be busy in Alex’s Gym for an amazingly long amount of time. The skinny boys with funny shoes were there again, spinning their arms about in their odd calisthenics. One of them was wearing argyle socks today. A very hip young woman in expensive, matching exercise/ runway clothes was being given what was clearly her first training session by an equally hip Alex’s Gym employee. The poor trainee had a hard time with the treadmill of death.
I got back to the apartment slightly after noon, and found to my delight that Katya had made blini. Katya and Nastya left just as I was entering, leaving me alone with a very huge stack of flat pancake things, that I ate with apricot jam.
After blini-gorging and showering, I headed out to purchase a cell phone to replace the one I lost on our group trip. Unfortunately, however, the ATM near us was out of service, so I was unable to complete this mission. I did decide to investigate this jutting-out addition to our apartment building with pictures of Russians in traditional dress in the windows. I still don’t know what it is, actually, but it had a reading room, and I sat in it and read for Siberian History. Oh, I left out the part of the morning before my run where I actually did my homework for conversation class. Being motivated enough to do my homework is fairly unusual. Anyway, I’m still rather curious about where exactly I was. Some sort of cultural library? It had lots of rooms and hallways and newspapers and official-looking desks with official-looking people. And I was sort of embarrassed every time someone saw that I was reading a 7th grade history book. Especially considering I gave up trying very hard to understand it after about 2 pages; apparently the vocabulary used by seventh-graders to discuss Cossacks making perilous sea-voyages through ice-and-walrus rich waters and is not that with which I am most familiar. There are apparently a lot of ways to say “some icy land-formation you’ve never heard of,” “skirmish with fierce natives averse to having all their walrus hunted,” “obsolete term for tsarist functionary” and “bad thing to happen to your boat.”
Then I went downtown, and spent what seemed to me to be huge amounts of time pretending to be really interested in the two old churches I decided to visit. They’re the most oft-visited, I believe, being very old and very downtown and on all the PR material of the city. So there were lots of other tourists there, though I think all Russian. I didn’t really like either as much as I like the little Holy Trinity church near the history department, and over half the interiors were taken up by tables selling paper icons, and I didn’t really know what I was looking at anyway. I bought a Bible; I figure it’s a pretty good way to practice reading since, you know, I already know what happens and all.
After leaving the church district I found an ATM and then bought a cell phone, the cheapest possible and very annoying to use, it now turns out. If any of you are desirous of my new number for any reason it is: 8 914 955 6871. Unless you aren’t in Russia- then I think it’s +7 instead of 8 at the beginning. Oh before this I walked around a random grocery store for a while.
Soon after leaving the site of my cheapo phone purchase, a most amazing thing happened- I saw a bunch of folding tables set out on the sidewalk, and what should be on them but used books! I had never seen used books being sold in Russia, and I was nearly run over by a bus in enthusiasm crossing the street to examine them. The old guys selling the books were very nice, and they tried to speak English to me, and I tried to speak Russian to them, and no one really understood each other but I bought a lot of pretty, old books of poetry that I was assured everyone who speaks Russian has to read. And a book of Vampilov plays, because I often walk by a monument to him. I am never going to read these books, because all my reading energy is devoted to 7th grade history textbooks, but it’s nice to own them.
As I wished to know the phone numbers of the other Americans, my next stop was the Cafe Fiesta, where one is almost guaranteed to find one of us at all times, and sure enough there was Adriane, who had magically received 3 HOURS of internet time on her receipt, a new record. So I copied lots of numbers from her phone, and talked briefly to this Russian guy I had met one time before in the good ol’ Cafe Fiesta, then went to the internet cafe, as I had not brought my computer, which was a good thing because by this time I was carrying around 8 tons of books.
Found Ivan in the internet cafe, and he told me that we can’t go to Listvianka tomorrow because apparently our turning-in-travel-forms-every-time-we-go-somewhere requirement now extends even to when we aren’t spending the night outside of Irkutsk, and we have to turn in forms two days ahead of time or something. So I look travel forms for me and Ivan to Elizabeth’s apartment for Monday and began to dread the morrow.
Stood around in the cold and dark waiting for a marshrutka for a very long time, but it wasn’t cold enough to be painful, just enough to be invigorating, and I was concerned that I was going home too early anyway. Eventually, however, I gave up on the correct marshrutka ever coming and just got on one that was going to the correct region of the city, which meant I had to figure out where to get off, which I did rather badly. After I walked to where I should have gotten off, this babushka asked me where Universitetski was, and I was very proud to be able to direct her. I told her I was walking there right now, but then I felt sort of bad when she and her grandson decided to walk with me, as it was sort of far away and non-cheap people would have taken another marshrutka, but I was glad enough of their company anyway, though they didn’t talk to me; the grandmother spent the whole time trying to convince her small grandson that she knew where she was going the whole time. He was having none of it.
I don’t really understand how Cossacks ever had children. They seem to go on 10-year expeditions all the time. It seems like this would cause a demographic problem. But then, maybe their numbers were considerably supplemented by runaway peasants and things. I know if I had a choice between being a peasant and being a bold Cossack I would go for the bold Cossack. They have cool stripes on their pants and know no master.
If you live or study in the northeast United States, you should start looking out for opportunities to see performances of the Dartmouth Aires, the oldest and probably coolest Dartmouth a cappella group, now better than ever with the addition of the one and only John Thomas Mayfield Merrill.
And if you are a person who wishes to hear the stirring tale of a feral child’s encounter with the founder’s staff at Middlebury convocation, as written by Greg Fulchino and Adam Irish, you should either listen to the Middlebury College Radio Theater(re?) of Chills and Suspense, or get the podcast of that episode, or something, I gave a very fuzzy notion of time as regard the other side of the Atlantic. Anyway, Ronny Lieb stars as himself.
And if you are a person who knows Aiko Weverka, you should start making plans to bake her a cake. I think you have less than a week. And do not let her blow out the candles under smoke detectors, as piteously as she might beg, because Officer Sandy is impervious to bribes no matter how delicious the cake, and she is also very bad at turning off fire alarms.
Okay, I have to go to bed before anyone comes home and I have to have an awkward social interaction. It’s after midnight, so maybe no one will come home. They often don’t. Actually I was sort of disappointed no one was here to witness my late arrival home- I felt like I had spent lots of time in the dark and cold for nothing.
Man, this is long. But I haven’t written in a while.
I ran in the morning, through these interesting woods I found yesterday, with trails leading by the creepiest cemeteries (not sure about the plural- probably all the same one- but in groups with considerable tree-age between them) known to man. I don’t know how to impart the creepiness of these grave plots; there’s nothing at all calm or stately about them. It’s partly being in the woods instead of on a sun-drenched hill, or wherever it is that we seek cemetery real estate on the East Coast, it’s partially the lack of orderly rows, it’s partly the replacement of the two-barred Orthodox cross on many of the gravestones with red Soviet stars, but it’s mainly, I think, the use of iron: most plots have falling down, unattractively-painted iron fences around them, for some reason, which gives the whole thing the look of a rusting carnival. And then many of the gravestones themselves are not stones, but iron pyramid-things, with photos at the top. In a few instances, there are normal-looking stone markers that have been stuck on iron posts, so as to allow them to fall over at the correct jaunty angle. Some of the fenced-off plots have little benches inside them, and most of them have mounds where the body is. When these woods are free of creepy graves, though, they are very nice, and the path interestingly leads to the hideous Catholic church that is very far away by the marshrutka on which I pass it twice a day. I’m very curious about the interior of this church, so I’ll have to make use of this path to visit it sometime. This is a seriously ugly church. It’s cement, and very huge, and rounded- I guess it’s in a general cut-off cone shape, one of the ones that yields one of those geometrical shapes I briefly knew the names of when I did a report of Hypatia in forth grade, but this shape is more suggested than fully developed by the architecture. At the top there is this odd suspended bishop-hat thing, also cement, and above that a big metal cross that looks like it’s being shot up there in a fire-works display, with the other metal bars connecting it to the roof.
Then I lifted weights and generally pretended to be busy in Alex’s Gym for an amazingly long amount of time. The skinny boys with funny shoes were there again, spinning their arms about in their odd calisthenics. One of them was wearing argyle socks today. A very hip young woman in expensive, matching exercise/ runway clothes was being given what was clearly her first training session by an equally hip Alex’s Gym employee. The poor trainee had a hard time with the treadmill of death.
I got back to the apartment slightly after noon, and found to my delight that Katya had made blini. Katya and Nastya left just as I was entering, leaving me alone with a very huge stack of flat pancake things, that I ate with apricot jam.
After blini-gorging and showering, I headed out to purchase a cell phone to replace the one I lost on our group trip. Unfortunately, however, the ATM near us was out of service, so I was unable to complete this mission. I did decide to investigate this jutting-out addition to our apartment building with pictures of Russians in traditional dress in the windows. I still don’t know what it is, actually, but it had a reading room, and I sat in it and read for Siberian History. Oh, I left out the part of the morning before my run where I actually did my homework for conversation class. Being motivated enough to do my homework is fairly unusual. Anyway, I’m still rather curious about where exactly I was. Some sort of cultural library? It had lots of rooms and hallways and newspapers and official-looking desks with official-looking people. And I was sort of embarrassed every time someone saw that I was reading a 7th grade history book. Especially considering I gave up trying very hard to understand it after about 2 pages; apparently the vocabulary used by seventh-graders to discuss Cossacks making perilous sea-voyages through ice-and-walrus rich waters and is not that with which I am most familiar. There are apparently a lot of ways to say “some icy land-formation you’ve never heard of,” “skirmish with fierce natives averse to having all their walrus hunted,” “obsolete term for tsarist functionary” and “bad thing to happen to your boat.”
Then I went downtown, and spent what seemed to me to be huge amounts of time pretending to be really interested in the two old churches I decided to visit. They’re the most oft-visited, I believe, being very old and very downtown and on all the PR material of the city. So there were lots of other tourists there, though I think all Russian. I didn’t really like either as much as I like the little Holy Trinity church near the history department, and over half the interiors were taken up by tables selling paper icons, and I didn’t really know what I was looking at anyway. I bought a Bible; I figure it’s a pretty good way to practice reading since, you know, I already know what happens and all.
After leaving the church district I found an ATM and then bought a cell phone, the cheapest possible and very annoying to use, it now turns out. If any of you are desirous of my new number for any reason it is: 8 914 955 6871. Unless you aren’t in Russia- then I think it’s +7 instead of 8 at the beginning. Oh before this I walked around a random grocery store for a while.
Soon after leaving the site of my cheapo phone purchase, a most amazing thing happened- I saw a bunch of folding tables set out on the sidewalk, and what should be on them but used books! I had never seen used books being sold in Russia, and I was nearly run over by a bus in enthusiasm crossing the street to examine them. The old guys selling the books were very nice, and they tried to speak English to me, and I tried to speak Russian to them, and no one really understood each other but I bought a lot of pretty, old books of poetry that I was assured everyone who speaks Russian has to read. And a book of Vampilov plays, because I often walk by a monument to him. I am never going to read these books, because all my reading energy is devoted to 7th grade history textbooks, but it’s nice to own them.
As I wished to know the phone numbers of the other Americans, my next stop was the Cafe Fiesta, where one is almost guaranteed to find one of us at all times, and sure enough there was Adriane, who had magically received 3 HOURS of internet time on her receipt, a new record. So I copied lots of numbers from her phone, and talked briefly to this Russian guy I had met one time before in the good ol’ Cafe Fiesta, then went to the internet cafe, as I had not brought my computer, which was a good thing because by this time I was carrying around 8 tons of books.
Found Ivan in the internet cafe, and he told me that we can’t go to Listvianka tomorrow because apparently our turning-in-travel-forms-every-time-we-go-somewhere requirement now extends even to when we aren’t spending the night outside of Irkutsk, and we have to turn in forms two days ahead of time or something. So I look travel forms for me and Ivan to Elizabeth’s apartment for Monday and began to dread the morrow.
Stood around in the cold and dark waiting for a marshrutka for a very long time, but it wasn’t cold enough to be painful, just enough to be invigorating, and I was concerned that I was going home too early anyway. Eventually, however, I gave up on the correct marshrutka ever coming and just got on one that was going to the correct region of the city, which meant I had to figure out where to get off, which I did rather badly. After I walked to where I should have gotten off, this babushka asked me where Universitetski was, and I was very proud to be able to direct her. I told her I was walking there right now, but then I felt sort of bad when she and her grandson decided to walk with me, as it was sort of far away and non-cheap people would have taken another marshrutka, but I was glad enough of their company anyway, though they didn’t talk to me; the grandmother spent the whole time trying to convince her small grandson that she knew where she was going the whole time. He was having none of it.
I don’t really understand how Cossacks ever had children. They seem to go on 10-year expeditions all the time. It seems like this would cause a demographic problem. But then, maybe their numbers were considerably supplemented by runaway peasants and things. I know if I had a choice between being a peasant and being a bold Cossack I would go for the bold Cossack. They have cool stripes on their pants and know no master.
If you live or study in the northeast United States, you should start looking out for opportunities to see performances of the Dartmouth Aires, the oldest and probably coolest Dartmouth a cappella group, now better than ever with the addition of the one and only John Thomas Mayfield Merrill.
And if you are a person who wishes to hear the stirring tale of a feral child’s encounter with the founder’s staff at Middlebury convocation, as written by Greg Fulchino and Adam Irish, you should either listen to the Middlebury College Radio Theater(re?) of Chills and Suspense, or get the podcast of that episode, or something, I gave a very fuzzy notion of time as regard the other side of the Atlantic. Anyway, Ronny Lieb stars as himself.
And if you are a person who knows Aiko Weverka, you should start making plans to bake her a cake. I think you have less than a week. And do not let her blow out the candles under smoke detectors, as piteously as she might beg, because Officer Sandy is impervious to bribes no matter how delicious the cake, and she is also very bad at turning off fire alarms.
Okay, I have to go to bed before anyone comes home and I have to have an awkward social interaction. It’s after midnight, so maybe no one will come home. They often don’t. Actually I was sort of disappointed no one was here to witness my late arrival home- I felt like I had spent lots of time in the dark and cold for nothing.
Man, this is long. But I haven’t written in a while.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Big City Turn me Loose, Set me Free
So, that last entry was rather inadequate in describing the fact that I really, really liked not being in Irkutsk. I had sort of forgotten that in my normal life, not in Irkutsk, there is natural beauty and things to do other than spend money and get yelled at by marshrutka drivers and one can smile and laugh and such. And now I am not very enthusiastic about being back in the city. Also, Baikal, is really, really pretty. One day I'll post pictures. Sometimes it's very tranquil, and sometimes it looks like the Atlantic Ocean, almost, like Holden Beach, and I couldn't believe that the water wouldn't be salty until I scooped a handful of water off the top of a white-capped wave and drank it.
Snow today.
In Baikal Studies today we learned that at one point when they wanted to further populate Eastern Siberia, around Irkutsk actually, and couldn't get anyone to move out there fast enough, they rounded up all the old soldiers (well, ones who had completed their terms of service) and all the prostitutes and paired them off and marched them off to the church and then gave them farms and made them move there. For some reason I was the only person in the class who asked lots of questions about this. Seriously, this would be the best reality tv show ever. Old soldiers and prostitues who know nothing about farming are plopped down on Siberian farms? Excellent!
Snow today.
In Baikal Studies today we learned that at one point when they wanted to further populate Eastern Siberia, around Irkutsk actually, and couldn't get anyone to move out there fast enough, they rounded up all the old soldiers (well, ones who had completed their terms of service) and all the prostitutes and paired them off and marched them off to the church and then gave them farms and made them move there. For some reason I was the only person in the class who asked lots of questions about this. Seriously, this would be the best reality tv show ever. Old soldiers and prostitues who know nothing about farming are plopped down on Siberian farms? Excellent!
Things about trip
I have given up on ever writing a full account of our group trip, and it would mainly involve over-enthusiastic descriptions of trees and hills that would probably not be very interesting anyway, so just a few things that come to mind right now:
1) Russian trains are really pretty, and Irkutsk is pretty at night from a train window with a full moon over the Angara River, and the Irkutsk train station is also pretty. And the cups, glass in decorative metal holders, that they give you on the train are also pretty. I loved our little sleeping car, and turning out all the lights in it and sitting in the dark and looking out at the moon-lit world. Elizabeth (our coordinator) made us peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which was very, very nice of her; I have no idea how she got the peanut butter.
2) We saw an Old Believer church, and the museum across the street that is the private collection of this one Old Believer dude, and both were very cool. The museum consists basically of stuff this old guy picked up around the village, from the trash, or when people got rid of stuff or found something interesting and didn’t know what to do with it, so the collection was amazingly varied. There was a beautiful 17th century iconostasis, and old hand-written books about the appropriate construction of churches, and lots of old farm implements, and old clothes and quilts, and a piece of petrified wood, and some mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones (!), and a bunch of old hinges, and this amazing huge old wooden hanging balance that very dramatically registered the weight of the plastic cigarette-lighter our long-bearded host put on one side. There was pre-revolutionary money, and old Chinese coins, and for some reason an American dollar.
3) Driving around the woods in the fall is very nice.
4) Singing along to Aqua in a van is very fun.
5) Old vans break down and get stuck in sand a lot. One should not attempt to use them as beach buggies.
6) We climbed a large mountain with snow on top, and it was very pretty. Then for some reason we ran down it.
7) We ate a lot of... cedar nuts, I guess? Like pine nuts but from cedar. We got them straight from the cedar cones, and cracked the shells with our teeth, and there was the delicious meat. Unlike the pine nuts Jack and I bought in the Sierra Gorda one time, these shells one could crack without breaking one’s teeth, and keeping a bunch in one’s pocket provided a good activity for when one was standing around on ferries or waiting for ferries or waiting for one’s van driver to come back from randomly pulling over and going swimming in Lake Baikal, which happened a lot.
8) Lots of other fun and interesting and memorable things happened.
Now I have a quiz for you all. It is called Полезьно для здоровы? or Useful for the Health? This is a phrase we heard a lot. So, these are yes or no questions- are these things good for you or not? You might wish, before taking this quiz, to research the life expectancy in Irkutsk. Ok, here goes:
1) On a cold day, running into a freezing cold lake.
2) Drinking beer, on any occasion.
3) Drinking homemade hard liquer offered to you by unknown persons.
4) Eating sausage consisting of 60% fat at every meal.
5) Drinking tea with large amounts of sugar and 6% milk at every meal
6) Covering all food in mayonaise or sour cream.
7) On a hike, drinking water.
8) When with large groups, having everyone drink from the same mugs, and occasionally all eat from the same spoon, passing the dish in question around in a circle.
9) On a hike, eating trail mix along the way.
10) When climbing a mountain, choosing as an eating location the snow-covered peak.
11) Eating large handfuls of raw cranberries.
12) Sitting on a rock.
13) Eating snow on a remote mountain.
14) Sitting on a folded-up pair of jeans, and a sweatshirt, with a rock under these.
15) Not having any shock-absorbers in one's van.
16) Running very quickly from freezing lakes to boiling hot springs, many times in succession.
I think there were more amuzing things than these, when we were on our trip, but now I don't remember them. Anyway, here are the answers:
1) Obviously healthy, especially if said lake is Baikal, which for some reason seems to be especially healthy
2) Especially healthy after swimming in Baikal, and when one is driving a van.
3) Alcohol is almost always medicinal, the higher the concentration the better. Homemade liquer is probably more natural, and therefore probably more medicinal.
4) Meat is natural and healthy.
5) Tea is also very healthy.
6) Dairy products are very healthy.
7) Very bad. Weighs down your body, slows you down. Does various other bad things that I don't understand. Carrying metal thermoses of tea with sugar in one's backpack, on the other hand, does not weigh one down.
8) Not distinctly polyesna dlya zdoroza, but there is no question of it being nipolezna either.
9) Bad. Still don't know why.
10) Good. Where else would you eat?
11) I guess it's true that this is healthy. But it still seems like an odd thing to do. Actually the cranberries we ate were pretty good, if still requiring a certain stoicism.
12) This is the worst thing you can possibly do, especially for women but for men too. People who do this will never bear children. Refer to the birth rate in Russia. Also to the answer to number 1. Our attempts to bring these things up to our guides were uncomprehensible to them. But, for serious, for all Russians, this is very, very bad.
13) Bad. It will make you urinate too quickly or something. I'm not sure why this is bad.
14) Refer to number 12. Bad. One's childbearing potential is still sucked through the clothing into the cold rock.
15) Apparently not a problem. We started referring to one of the vans as the marshrutka of death.
16) Despite the concern over the cold involved in number 12, same as answer as number 1.
1) Russian trains are really pretty, and Irkutsk is pretty at night from a train window with a full moon over the Angara River, and the Irkutsk train station is also pretty. And the cups, glass in decorative metal holders, that they give you on the train are also pretty. I loved our little sleeping car, and turning out all the lights in it and sitting in the dark and looking out at the moon-lit world. Elizabeth (our coordinator) made us peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, which was very, very nice of her; I have no idea how she got the peanut butter.
2) We saw an Old Believer church, and the museum across the street that is the private collection of this one Old Believer dude, and both were very cool. The museum consists basically of stuff this old guy picked up around the village, from the trash, or when people got rid of stuff or found something interesting and didn’t know what to do with it, so the collection was amazingly varied. There was a beautiful 17th century iconostasis, and old hand-written books about the appropriate construction of churches, and lots of old farm implements, and old clothes and quilts, and a piece of petrified wood, and some mammoth and woolly rhinoceros bones (!), and a bunch of old hinges, and this amazing huge old wooden hanging balance that very dramatically registered the weight of the plastic cigarette-lighter our long-bearded host put on one side. There was pre-revolutionary money, and old Chinese coins, and for some reason an American dollar.
3) Driving around the woods in the fall is very nice.
4) Singing along to Aqua in a van is very fun.
5) Old vans break down and get stuck in sand a lot. One should not attempt to use them as beach buggies.
6) We climbed a large mountain with snow on top, and it was very pretty. Then for some reason we ran down it.
7) We ate a lot of... cedar nuts, I guess? Like pine nuts but from cedar. We got them straight from the cedar cones, and cracked the shells with our teeth, and there was the delicious meat. Unlike the pine nuts Jack and I bought in the Sierra Gorda one time, these shells one could crack without breaking one’s teeth, and keeping a bunch in one’s pocket provided a good activity for when one was standing around on ferries or waiting for ferries or waiting for one’s van driver to come back from randomly pulling over and going swimming in Lake Baikal, which happened a lot.
8) Lots of other fun and interesting and memorable things happened.
Now I have a quiz for you all. It is called Полезьно для здоровы? or Useful for the Health? This is a phrase we heard a lot. So, these are yes or no questions- are these things good for you or not? You might wish, before taking this quiz, to research the life expectancy in Irkutsk. Ok, here goes:
1) On a cold day, running into a freezing cold lake.
2) Drinking beer, on any occasion.
3) Drinking homemade hard liquer offered to you by unknown persons.
4) Eating sausage consisting of 60% fat at every meal.
5) Drinking tea with large amounts of sugar and 6% milk at every meal
6) Covering all food in mayonaise or sour cream.
7) On a hike, drinking water.
8) When with large groups, having everyone drink from the same mugs, and occasionally all eat from the same spoon, passing the dish in question around in a circle.
9) On a hike, eating trail mix along the way.
10) When climbing a mountain, choosing as an eating location the snow-covered peak.
11) Eating large handfuls of raw cranberries.
12) Sitting on a rock.
13) Eating snow on a remote mountain.
14) Sitting on a folded-up pair of jeans, and a sweatshirt, with a rock under these.
15) Not having any shock-absorbers in one's van.
16) Running very quickly from freezing lakes to boiling hot springs, many times in succession.
I think there were more amuzing things than these, when we were on our trip, but now I don't remember them. Anyway, here are the answers:
1) Obviously healthy, especially if said lake is Baikal, which for some reason seems to be especially healthy
2) Especially healthy after swimming in Baikal, and when one is driving a van.
3) Alcohol is almost always medicinal, the higher the concentration the better. Homemade liquer is probably more natural, and therefore probably more medicinal.
4) Meat is natural and healthy.
5) Tea is also very healthy.
6) Dairy products are very healthy.
7) Very bad. Weighs down your body, slows you down. Does various other bad things that I don't understand. Carrying metal thermoses of tea with sugar in one's backpack, on the other hand, does not weigh one down.
8) Not distinctly polyesna dlya zdoroza, but there is no question of it being nipolezna either.
9) Bad. Still don't know why.
10) Good. Where else would you eat?
11) I guess it's true that this is healthy. But it still seems like an odd thing to do. Actually the cranberries we ate were pretty good, if still requiring a certain stoicism.
12) This is the worst thing you can possibly do, especially for women but for men too. People who do this will never bear children. Refer to the birth rate in Russia. Also to the answer to number 1. Our attempts to bring these things up to our guides were uncomprehensible to them. But, for serious, for all Russians, this is very, very bad.
13) Bad. It will make you urinate too quickly or something. I'm not sure why this is bad.
14) Refer to number 12. Bad. One's childbearing potential is still sucked through the clothing into the cold rock.
15) Apparently not a problem. We started referring to one of the vans as the marshrutka of death.
16) Despite the concern over the cold involved in number 12, same as answer as number 1.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Scattered notes accompanying my packing for our group trip
I have returned to good old apartment 56 (I think that’s our number) somewhat earlier than is my wont today as 1) we’re to meet at the train/bus station at 8:00 this evening and I don’t want to go downtown and back in the afternoon, only to return in the evening, 2) there’s not much to do on this side of the river, and I already went to the Всё Будет ОК Гипермаркет (Everything will be OK hypermarket) with Natasha, Ivan, and Joseph, where I bought deturgent (in our last attempt Natasha and I actually bought fabric softener, so this time we carefully matched the box with the one Natasha's hostmother uses) and a chocolate bar for the train journey and an ice-cream bar for lunch; and then walked around numerous very small stores looking in vain for a hat and gloves to purchase; and put money on my cellphone in one of the between-kiosk-and-stores along where the marshrutkas stop; and bought a pair of running pants, as it is officially too cold to run in shorts; and I tried to go to the hole-in-the-wall small-boy-infested internet cafe, but all the computers were taken by small boys, 3) since I'm leaving this evening I just don't feel as guilty as I usually do about coming home to sit around, and 4) I want to be sure to be the first one home around the dinner hour, so I can make dinner myself, a major event in life if one has pretty much absolutely nothing else useful to do in life. I was going to make dinner yesterday, but then I was downtown at the History Department until 4:00, and went to the Cafe Fiesta while in was in the area (actually fairly far away, but not technically requiring paying for a marshrutka), so didn't get home in time to be the first one here, as I usually am. I am planning to make potatoe soup, which seemed like a pretty good idea yesterday when there was a little bag in the kitchen with 10 potatoes in it, and seems like an even better idea today, when all of a sudden there are two of the BIGGEST BAGS OF POTATO EVER sitting in our hallway. I guess the special potato delivery man brought them? I have a hard time imagining anyone carrying them, so maybe there is a special potato cart. I like how I am spelling potatoe differently every time. So, anyway, these bags are about as big as I am. This is important, because I no longer have to fear using the last of the potatoes, because you know what happens then: the last potato leaps out of the oven and runs out the door, singing some sort of rhyme about the «magic sack» one can procure at his capture, and you are forced to pursue him, weeping, crying «Potato, Potatoe, come back, come back, or my mother will beat me, alas, alack!» And it is an open question whether the magic, bottomless potato sack that you do indeed procure at his capture makes up for the psychological trauma of the afternoon. I hope I can buy a hat and gloves in Ulan Ude, before our mountain climbing, or I will be very cold. I do have a scarf, I think. Off to start some packing.
I just looked through the Lonely Planet guide for the Baikal region. I have a lot of 3-day weekends to spend. I feel like I should be going off and seeing things, but I'm not sure what I should do when I get there. Also, I have not seen anything in Irktusk that I am supposed to. I guess I should get started... but apparently this guidebook's Siberia section hasn't been updated for many years, so I don't know what's still true.
Packed, I think. Got my tapochki. And Chekhov, in my continued campaign to like him. And long underwear but no hat or gloves. And lots of Siberian history to read and not really understand, and the course description of the mainstream Russian History class to attempt to read without freaking out about how much work I have to do and how I have no idea what is said in class. And... I forgot my scarf. Ok, got that. I just got concerned that the sweater I packed will not fit under my jacket- I'll wear another one to the bus station. And I have a lot of packyeti, as they are always needed.
Note to all fans of Caps for Sale: a girl in Baikal Studies class asked today if there were any monkeys in Russia. There are not. It seems like something you shouldn't ask: if you never ask, you can just go on thinking that maybe, somewhere, you will come across a monkey, you just haven't happened to hear about the Great Siberian Ice-chimp yet. Baikal Studies class continues to be amazing. The fact that I understand about 8% of it, both because of it being in Russian and because it's usually about ancient metal-working or prehistoric geology, or geography, or biology, or some other subject that I don't understand in English, makes that information a highly-prized store of wonderfully disconnected statements. They don't seem quite so important in English, and out of the context of the long periods of complete incomprehensibility that preceeded them... my notes, actually, show a remarkable, rather admirable, I think, delight with the mere existence of things. What, by the way, does 'existentialism' mean, exactly? I think it's one of the many words that I have pretended to understand for many years now without actually having any idea. Living in complete language-confusion in Russian has given rise to great irritation when I can't think of the English word I want, or realize I don't know what English words mean, or in general that English is not a perfect haven of absolute linguistic confort. Anyway, back to my notes – they're mainly things like:
«Exoskeletons!!!!»
«Lots of volcanoes!!!!»
«Mammoths, retreating to northern island, turning into mammoth graveyard, running toward the south, nowhere to go now; were they hunted, or just eaten as soon as they died?»
«The Transgression of the Sea!!!»
«The northern sea, in Jurassic Period, had long tongue.»
Actually the mammoth facscination is fairly ongoing. I am almost as entrigued by mammoth as by wooly rhinosauroses. I think it's part of my odd new enthusiasm over things that are Big and Dramatic and just Happened, if that makes sense. Perhaps this is what it's like to be 3 years old. I don't understand the intricacies of anything, I haven't really formulated any connection between historical events or cultural realities and and any grand narrative significant to me in any way (I don't know if that's true for 3-year-olds or not), and as far as I can tell most of what I see has no purpose or explanation: so, I'm just impressed by the Large. And the idea of hundreds of people racing through dense pine forests with stone weapons after huge hairy beasts, fighting to survive the very ice that is necessary for the life of their prey and is shrinking every minute in a huge, global weather shift that takes no account of human or animal life, seems like the coolest thing ever. And the mammoth bones piling up at the very north, when they had all, the mammoths and the people, run as far as they could, with the people maybe just waiting across the channel from the island for the too-dense mammoths to starve to death, is endlessly fascinating in its awfulness.
Running out to see if the small boys are still in control of the internet cafe.
Returned. Not a place to be had. My correspondents will have to just hold their horses, or reindeer, or moose, or whatever it is that they use to pull their buggies or sleighs, until Wednesday, when I return, at 7 in the a.m. Tuesday evening, for you east coast types, late afternoon for those of you living further into our nation's heartland. I walked past the potatoes again as I came back. They aren't really as big as me (as I) (as I am); that was apparently wishful thinking stemming from my love of the large. They are half as big as I am, which means that, if you put them together, my initial estimate was correct. Other events of my return for the internet cave: trying to kill the flies in the elevator with my huge brass key that makes me look like a robber, trying to open the big iron door opening to our and our neighbors' doors, with said key, quickly enough that the neighbor did not once again come out and annoyedly open it for me.
What reflections can I offer as I wait around for 6:00, a reasonable hour for dinner preparation? So, the university. It is pretty much like high school, or like a movie about high school that you're glad isn't really quite true. Since students only study in one department (scattered about in completely different parts of the city), they're all in the same building all day, and classes are usually all in a row and always with the same students as in all your other classes, and there are bells between periods, and in this between-periods interval the hallways are too crowded to squeeze through. The students sort or have the same air as high-school students too, a sort of flouncing confidence that sizes up everyone's outfit as they pass by, and they gather in the same gossipy bunches, and the atmosphere of the bathroom is the same, with the girls all fixing their hair and reapplying make-up. Unlike high school, the toilets have no seats and the stalls have no toilet paper, and, on the second floor, the stall doors are only waist-height. Judging by my one mainstream class, which perhaps isn't fair because it's for freshman and for all I know they improve with age, the students are about as attentive and respectful in class as in high school too, with the difference being that they are never disciplined. They play with their cellphones, they pass notes, they sleep, they whisper to each other – it's sort of amazing. In our last class in the history department, my slight offense at this behavior was entirely overshadowed by my excitement when Eddie and I, who were at the same table-thing, got a note passed to us. It said, in English, «We have to write an essay about gender discrimination. Do you know anything about it?» We replied that we did, in fact know something, and in our opinion it was, in general, bad; maybe we were supposed to offer to write the essay for them? We have heard that Russian students take a rather collective approach to the grading process.
Would it make sense to describe my enthusiasm in Baikal studies class by saying that I have a new delight in the 'ontology' of things? For some reason this word was before me constantly in the past academic year, like 'hegemony' the year before, and I always found it a little odd that such a word existed, let alone that so great a use was made of it in everything I read. But maybe this is an appropriate time for it? I don't know... I don't really care about the nature of being, which I think may be the actual definition of the word, but whenever I read it it seemed to just mean something like 'existing in state its name suggests that it would,' or 'by the nature of its existence as itself.' Hmm, I just searched my hard drive for instances of the word 'ontological' and I have apparently used it myself, in the sentence «While every icon is ontologically an invitation to transcend the visible world for the invisible, “a road we must travel on in order to transcend it” (Evdikimov 235), Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity uniquely embodies this invitation by the appeal of the summons at the icon’s narrative level and by its success in convincing viewers of the existence of its Hyper-icon.” I wonder what the heck that means. Oh, man, I just did a search for ‘hegemon,’ with depression results. At least, I am glad to find, I have never (at least in a document saved on this computer) used the word ‘suasion.’ That may be my least favorite made-up-for-some-academic-article-and-then-copied-by-the-entire-academic-world-but-perfectly-useless word.
Edit: I have returned, and the trip was most excellent, but I don’t have time to recount it right now. I’ll just say, so as not to leave you all in suspense, that when I went back to the internet place after dinner, with 40 minutes until I had to leave for the train station, the small boys had been replaced by ‘nagers. It was sort of unsettling, like the boys had aged 10 years in the two hours I had been away. But anyway, I still couldn’t use a computer, and I was annoyed. On the other hand, the expedition was most fruitful, as the Central Asians selling jars of things they had pickled had been replaced, at some magical evening hour, by Central Asians selling hats and gloves. It was amazing. I bought some.
I just looked through the Lonely Planet guide for the Baikal region. I have a lot of 3-day weekends to spend. I feel like I should be going off and seeing things, but I'm not sure what I should do when I get there. Also, I have not seen anything in Irktusk that I am supposed to. I guess I should get started... but apparently this guidebook's Siberia section hasn't been updated for many years, so I don't know what's still true.
Packed, I think. Got my tapochki. And Chekhov, in my continued campaign to like him. And long underwear but no hat or gloves. And lots of Siberian history to read and not really understand, and the course description of the mainstream Russian History class to attempt to read without freaking out about how much work I have to do and how I have no idea what is said in class. And... I forgot my scarf. Ok, got that. I just got concerned that the sweater I packed will not fit under my jacket- I'll wear another one to the bus station. And I have a lot of packyeti, as they are always needed.
Note to all fans of Caps for Sale: a girl in Baikal Studies class asked today if there were any monkeys in Russia. There are not. It seems like something you shouldn't ask: if you never ask, you can just go on thinking that maybe, somewhere, you will come across a monkey, you just haven't happened to hear about the Great Siberian Ice-chimp yet. Baikal Studies class continues to be amazing. The fact that I understand about 8% of it, both because of it being in Russian and because it's usually about ancient metal-working or prehistoric geology, or geography, or biology, or some other subject that I don't understand in English, makes that information a highly-prized store of wonderfully disconnected statements. They don't seem quite so important in English, and out of the context of the long periods of complete incomprehensibility that preceeded them... my notes, actually, show a remarkable, rather admirable, I think, delight with the mere existence of things. What, by the way, does 'existentialism' mean, exactly? I think it's one of the many words that I have pretended to understand for many years now without actually having any idea. Living in complete language-confusion in Russian has given rise to great irritation when I can't think of the English word I want, or realize I don't know what English words mean, or in general that English is not a perfect haven of absolute linguistic confort. Anyway, back to my notes – they're mainly things like:
«Exoskeletons!!!!»
«Lots of volcanoes!!!!»
«Mammoths, retreating to northern island, turning into mammoth graveyard, running toward the south, nowhere to go now; were they hunted, or just eaten as soon as they died?»
«The Transgression of the Sea!!!»
«The northern sea, in Jurassic Period, had long tongue.»
Actually the mammoth facscination is fairly ongoing. I am almost as entrigued by mammoth as by wooly rhinosauroses. I think it's part of my odd new enthusiasm over things that are Big and Dramatic and just Happened, if that makes sense. Perhaps this is what it's like to be 3 years old. I don't understand the intricacies of anything, I haven't really formulated any connection between historical events or cultural realities and and any grand narrative significant to me in any way (I don't know if that's true for 3-year-olds or not), and as far as I can tell most of what I see has no purpose or explanation: so, I'm just impressed by the Large. And the idea of hundreds of people racing through dense pine forests with stone weapons after huge hairy beasts, fighting to survive the very ice that is necessary for the life of their prey and is shrinking every minute in a huge, global weather shift that takes no account of human or animal life, seems like the coolest thing ever. And the mammoth bones piling up at the very north, when they had all, the mammoths and the people, run as far as they could, with the people maybe just waiting across the channel from the island for the too-dense mammoths to starve to death, is endlessly fascinating in its awfulness.
Running out to see if the small boys are still in control of the internet cafe.
Returned. Not a place to be had. My correspondents will have to just hold their horses, or reindeer, or moose, or whatever it is that they use to pull their buggies or sleighs, until Wednesday, when I return, at 7 in the a.m. Tuesday evening, for you east coast types, late afternoon for those of you living further into our nation's heartland. I walked past the potatoes again as I came back. They aren't really as big as me (as I) (as I am); that was apparently wishful thinking stemming from my love of the large. They are half as big as I am, which means that, if you put them together, my initial estimate was correct. Other events of my return for the internet cave: trying to kill the flies in the elevator with my huge brass key that makes me look like a robber, trying to open the big iron door opening to our and our neighbors' doors, with said key, quickly enough that the neighbor did not once again come out and annoyedly open it for me.
What reflections can I offer as I wait around for 6:00, a reasonable hour for dinner preparation? So, the university. It is pretty much like high school, or like a movie about high school that you're glad isn't really quite true. Since students only study in one department (scattered about in completely different parts of the city), they're all in the same building all day, and classes are usually all in a row and always with the same students as in all your other classes, and there are bells between periods, and in this between-periods interval the hallways are too crowded to squeeze through. The students sort or have the same air as high-school students too, a sort of flouncing confidence that sizes up everyone's outfit as they pass by, and they gather in the same gossipy bunches, and the atmosphere of the bathroom is the same, with the girls all fixing their hair and reapplying make-up. Unlike high school, the toilets have no seats and the stalls have no toilet paper, and, on the second floor, the stall doors are only waist-height. Judging by my one mainstream class, which perhaps isn't fair because it's for freshman and for all I know they improve with age, the students are about as attentive and respectful in class as in high school too, with the difference being that they are never disciplined. They play with their cellphones, they pass notes, they sleep, they whisper to each other – it's sort of amazing. In our last class in the history department, my slight offense at this behavior was entirely overshadowed by my excitement when Eddie and I, who were at the same table-thing, got a note passed to us. It said, in English, «We have to write an essay about gender discrimination. Do you know anything about it?» We replied that we did, in fact know something, and in our opinion it was, in general, bad; maybe we were supposed to offer to write the essay for them? We have heard that Russian students take a rather collective approach to the grading process.
Would it make sense to describe my enthusiasm in Baikal studies class by saying that I have a new delight in the 'ontology' of things? For some reason this word was before me constantly in the past academic year, like 'hegemony' the year before, and I always found it a little odd that such a word existed, let alone that so great a use was made of it in everything I read. But maybe this is an appropriate time for it? I don't know... I don't really care about the nature of being, which I think may be the actual definition of the word, but whenever I read it it seemed to just mean something like 'existing in state its name suggests that it would,' or 'by the nature of its existence as itself.' Hmm, I just searched my hard drive for instances of the word 'ontological' and I have apparently used it myself, in the sentence «While every icon is ontologically an invitation to transcend the visible world for the invisible, “a road we must travel on in order to transcend it” (Evdikimov 235), Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity uniquely embodies this invitation by the appeal of the summons at the icon’s narrative level and by its success in convincing viewers of the existence of its Hyper-icon.” I wonder what the heck that means. Oh, man, I just did a search for ‘hegemon,’ with depression results. At least, I am glad to find, I have never (at least in a document saved on this computer) used the word ‘suasion.’ That may be my least favorite made-up-for-some-academic-article-and-then-copied-by-the-entire-academic-world-but-perfectly-useless word.
Edit: I have returned, and the trip was most excellent, but I don’t have time to recount it right now. I’ll just say, so as not to leave you all in suspense, that when I went back to the internet place after dinner, with 40 minutes until I had to leave for the train station, the small boys had been replaced by ‘nagers. It was sort of unsettling, like the boys had aged 10 years in the two hours I had been away. But anyway, I still couldn’t use a computer, and I was annoyed. On the other hand, the expedition was most fruitful, as the Central Asians selling jars of things they had pickled had been replaced, at some magical evening hour, by Central Asians selling hats and gloves. It was amazing. I bought some.
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