I realized yesterday that I've never spent as much time in a big city as I have the past few weeks, if you add Moscow and Petersburg together. Actually just the week in Moscow would be the most time I've ever spent in a big city, I think. Which explains why I'm in such a constant state of... well, I don't know - sensory overstimulation? There's just too much stuff. I have, I think, finally stopped thinking constantly and accusingly "this would never happen in Irkutsk," but I'm still sort of overwhelmed. There are, of course, benefits to large cities. For instance, though shopping malls and department stores seem very odd to me at the moment, there's something to be said for always being able to find high-quality goods when you want them. And I guess it's more interesting and perhaps more culturally healthy for there to be variety in the areas of fashion and culture and food and such. And there are things like the Russian Museum, which was awesome. It's the St. Petersburg museum that houses only Russian art, as opposed to the Hermitage, which has non-Russian art. It's in an old and very pretty palace, and it feels more like strolling through someone's beautiful house than like walking through a museum. The experience was much more pleasant than that of the Tretokovskaya in Moscow, I thought, except that the icon collection isn't as good and there's not as much Vrubel, with whom I am still obsessed. Now I want to take a Russian art history class. I would write more about the museum but I don't think my uninformed impressions of Russian art will be very interesting to the reading public.
St. Petersburg is pretty, with icy canals and iron bridges and lots of old palaces. Saw the Peter the Great statue, the square where the Decembrists assembled, the church built on the spot where Alexander II was shot, huge crowds of people doing New Year's shopping on Nevsky Prospect, probably other things as well. Today Abby and I went with some very nice Ukrainians from our hostel to the village of Pushkin and saw a huge palace of some kind. The palace was closed, but we walked around the grounds for a long time, and it was a nice day, and very nice to be away from the noise of the city. I love how the Ukrainians speak Russian- they say 'h' for all the normally 'g' sounds. Like when some police officers walked by and they joked that they were the 'KXB.' It was, however, quite exhausting answering the endless questions of the Ukrainians about America. I apparently don't really know anything about America, especially about how much things costs, which Russians are always asking about too. I answered more cheerfully, however, after we stopped in this odd Pagoda thing and drank some hot, very spicy homemade Ukrainian wine (or something) that they had brought in a thermos. It was very good. We were given numerous explanations of this beverage and its production, but I still don't really understand it.
There are a lot of bookstores here. And people. And ridiculous mechanical toys being sold at metro stations. I can't think of anything else to report. Going to boil some pilmyeni for dinner soon. Happy New Year to everyone!
Monday, December 31, 2007
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Novgorod
Well, the leaving of Yaroslavl and the train ride to St. Petersburg and the 5 hours after our arrival in Petersburg all occurred. But they are better left unmentioned. So, at 4:45 Thursday afternoon we left on the electrichka from St. Petersburg to Novgorod. I think we were the only people in the electrichka station who did not scream at the ticket sellers for not selling them tickets at special discounts of one kind or another. Both we and the ticket sellers seemed satisfied with the half price we received for our student IDs. The elecrichka ride was mainly notable for being very long (5 hours) and including many, many drunken Russians. And a babushka who talked to me for a long time in a muttered monologue, most of which I could not hear or understand. But the tale seemed to be fairly tragic, involving all sorts of relatives abandoning their children and being left by their husbands and preparing for careers that were useless as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. I think every woman in Russia over the age of 30 has been left by at least one husband. Or left by the father of her unborn child without ever being married.
Novgorod is pretty, in an austere way. The churches are white and tall, and if they have domes they are pale silver and gold. The streets are wide with birch trees on the sides and very few people. It still seems to carry some of the sadness of being sacked by Muscovite princes and Swedish armies so often and then torn apart by the Germans in WWII, after its early glory days- founded by Rurik himself, the first Russian city, ruled by Alexander Nevsky, the northern capital of Kievan Rus’, then the proud, independent republic ruled by that governing body whose name I’ve forgotten but whose bell was so important.
This morning Abby and I had a delicious breakfast from our lavishly appointed larder, transported here from Yaroslavl- bread and spreadable cheese, to be precise. Then we went to the Kremlin, which is called Detinyets, as we all know from the audio files included with that king among textbooks, Russian Now! For Students and Instructors. Actually anyone having listened to the appropriate Russian Now! audio files will already feel familiar enough with Novgorod not to need to be reading this blog post right now. We have seen, I am almost certain, the very lake on which Kostya and Vova said hello to Lara and on which they went ice skating with so little success, the very museum that Nadezhda Alexandrovna pointed out to the clueless tourist on her tour, the very bench on which that one old guy read in the paper about that one babushka advertising to change apartments, the very school in which Svetya asked Kostya if he loved Group Avia and in which Vova was scolded for drawing noses in class instead of listening to a lecture about Gogol, etc. It’s pretty exciting.
So, yeah, Detinyets. We saw Sofiski Sobor (Church of the Holy Wisdom), of which my main impression was that it was very dark inside. But it was mentioned in Russian Now! so I was happy. It was fairly impressive, actually, and there was a stern gold-robed batushka striding about looking like a priest in the service of an ancient sun cult of some kind. Then we went to the Detinyets’ museum, which had the most militant guard babushkas ever. Downstairs, in the history section, I learned that medieval Novgorodian soldiers had really funny pointed helmets, that I would have had as much trouble opening ancient Novgorodian locks as I do with modern Russian ones, and that standing too close to the glass in an attempt to read the informational plaques behind it will get you yelled at by the guard babushkas. Upstairs were the icons. I felt bad for spending so long looking at the icons, of which I’m sure Abby tired after about 3, but later she told me that she had entertained herself by trying to find places to stand where the guard babushkas couldn’t see both of us at once. I agree that this would be a very fun activity. These babushkas were very, very concerned if one of us was out of sight, and would constantly shift positions as to gain the optimal vantage point. The icons were stern and simple, as unlike as possible from the Yaroslavl ones I thought. Even in the ‘descent into Hades’ icons, in which people generally look pretty cheerful to be being pulled out of Hell by Christ surfing down on it broken gates, shattered locks and keys raining down before him, everyone looked like they had a stomachache. There was also the most angry-looking Old Testament Trinity ever. The angels were distantly unpleased with whatever Abraham had just placed before them. The icons weren’t really all angry, though, of course, and the severity of style is often very pleasing.
When we left a blizzard of sorts had begun. We walked out past the 1000th Birthday of Russian memorial, out the Detinyets gates, and over the long bridge over the icy Volkov River. It was very, very cold and snowy, with wind whipping all around. It made for a very dramatic approach to the old church a few blocks away on the other side of the river, where the only surviving frescoes by Theophanes the Greek cover the walls. This was really the best part of the day, by far. The entrance to the church involved opening many huge, wooden doors with big iron rings. And then the old woman at the ticket desk was very friendly, and didn’t act like it was annoying that they had to go turn on the lights in the sanctuary for us. And then we were the only people in the huge, cavernous sanctuary, with the alter and everything removed, just the ancient, faded, partially destroyed frescoes covering the walls and the numerous arches and domes. It was so awesome. I especially liked the little, enigmatic six-winged cherubim at the top of the arch over every window. Every one was different.
The rest of the afternoon we walked around looking for a cafe that served both tea and cheap food (ended up eating bread and cheese (I know, the variety of our diet is amazing, but we try to vary it with Snickers bars) as the only customers other than a wedding party), going to the train station to see about getting home tomorrow, buying some apples and a huge bag of crackers for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow. We needed something to put our condensed milk on. My attempts last night to eat canned corn with condensed milk were not that successful, especially as we don’t have spoons.
Dec. 29
Arrived back in St. Petersburg. The big news is that our hostel (“Crazy Duck”) has free cheese. Cheese other than the soft spreadable kind is beyond our budget, so this is exciting. There is also free yoghurt. This means that, taking into account the condensed milk and spreadable cheese on which we lived in Novgorod, we live entirely on dairy products and crackers. At least there’s a chainik here; we were in a state of constant discomfort in Novgorod due to absence of tea. Our Russian-trained tea radars were in overdrive. About to go walk about on Nevski Prospect. Oorah.
Novgorod is pretty, in an austere way. The churches are white and tall, and if they have domes they are pale silver and gold. The streets are wide with birch trees on the sides and very few people. It still seems to carry some of the sadness of being sacked by Muscovite princes and Swedish armies so often and then torn apart by the Germans in WWII, after its early glory days- founded by Rurik himself, the first Russian city, ruled by Alexander Nevsky, the northern capital of Kievan Rus’, then the proud, independent republic ruled by that governing body whose name I’ve forgotten but whose bell was so important.
This morning Abby and I had a delicious breakfast from our lavishly appointed larder, transported here from Yaroslavl- bread and spreadable cheese, to be precise. Then we went to the Kremlin, which is called Detinyets, as we all know from the audio files included with that king among textbooks, Russian Now! For Students and Instructors. Actually anyone having listened to the appropriate Russian Now! audio files will already feel familiar enough with Novgorod not to need to be reading this blog post right now. We have seen, I am almost certain, the very lake on which Kostya and Vova said hello to Lara and on which they went ice skating with so little success, the very museum that Nadezhda Alexandrovna pointed out to the clueless tourist on her tour, the very bench on which that one old guy read in the paper about that one babushka advertising to change apartments, the very school in which Svetya asked Kostya if he loved Group Avia and in which Vova was scolded for drawing noses in class instead of listening to a lecture about Gogol, etc. It’s pretty exciting.
So, yeah, Detinyets. We saw Sofiski Sobor (Church of the Holy Wisdom), of which my main impression was that it was very dark inside. But it was mentioned in Russian Now! so I was happy. It was fairly impressive, actually, and there was a stern gold-robed batushka striding about looking like a priest in the service of an ancient sun cult of some kind. Then we went to the Detinyets’ museum, which had the most militant guard babushkas ever. Downstairs, in the history section, I learned that medieval Novgorodian soldiers had really funny pointed helmets, that I would have had as much trouble opening ancient Novgorodian locks as I do with modern Russian ones, and that standing too close to the glass in an attempt to read the informational plaques behind it will get you yelled at by the guard babushkas. Upstairs were the icons. I felt bad for spending so long looking at the icons, of which I’m sure Abby tired after about 3, but later she told me that she had entertained herself by trying to find places to stand where the guard babushkas couldn’t see both of us at once. I agree that this would be a very fun activity. These babushkas were very, very concerned if one of us was out of sight, and would constantly shift positions as to gain the optimal vantage point. The icons were stern and simple, as unlike as possible from the Yaroslavl ones I thought. Even in the ‘descent into Hades’ icons, in which people generally look pretty cheerful to be being pulled out of Hell by Christ surfing down on it broken gates, shattered locks and keys raining down before him, everyone looked like they had a stomachache. There was also the most angry-looking Old Testament Trinity ever. The angels were distantly unpleased with whatever Abraham had just placed before them. The icons weren’t really all angry, though, of course, and the severity of style is often very pleasing.
When we left a blizzard of sorts had begun. We walked out past the 1000th Birthday of Russian memorial, out the Detinyets gates, and over the long bridge over the icy Volkov River. It was very, very cold and snowy, with wind whipping all around. It made for a very dramatic approach to the old church a few blocks away on the other side of the river, where the only surviving frescoes by Theophanes the Greek cover the walls. This was really the best part of the day, by far. The entrance to the church involved opening many huge, wooden doors with big iron rings. And then the old woman at the ticket desk was very friendly, and didn’t act like it was annoying that they had to go turn on the lights in the sanctuary for us. And then we were the only people in the huge, cavernous sanctuary, with the alter and everything removed, just the ancient, faded, partially destroyed frescoes covering the walls and the numerous arches and domes. It was so awesome. I especially liked the little, enigmatic six-winged cherubim at the top of the arch over every window. Every one was different.
The rest of the afternoon we walked around looking for a cafe that served both tea and cheap food (ended up eating bread and cheese (I know, the variety of our diet is amazing, but we try to vary it with Snickers bars) as the only customers other than a wedding party), going to the train station to see about getting home tomorrow, buying some apples and a huge bag of crackers for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow. We needed something to put our condensed milk on. My attempts last night to eat canned corn with condensed milk were not that successful, especially as we don’t have spoons.
Dec. 29
Arrived back in St. Petersburg. The big news is that our hostel (“Crazy Duck”) has free cheese. Cheese other than the soft spreadable kind is beyond our budget, so this is exciting. There is also free yoghurt. This means that, taking into account the condensed milk and spreadable cheese on which we lived in Novgorod, we live entirely on dairy products and crackers. At least there’s a chainik here; we were in a state of constant discomfort in Novgorod due to absence of tea. Our Russian-trained tea radars were in overdrive. About to go walk about on Nevski Prospect. Oorah.
The Question has Become: Where is the Chinese Sportsman?
Abby keeps telling me that I have to write about this show we saw the other day with Margarita called “Big Races.” It really was quite amazing. It was an international competition of some kind, with teams from Russia, the US, China, and Kazakhstan. The Russian team, at least, took the whole thing very seriously- the team members were mainly Olympic athletes, and they frequently told the camera how they knew that the nation was counting on their success, and they were doing it all for Russia. In the first round of competition... well, we don’t remember. Oh, they dressed up like frogs and had to hop about on giant lilypads, but they usually fell in the water. These competitions are difficult to describe, actually; I think you had to see them to understand the full ridiculousness. There was this one excellent segment in which they dressed up as ostriches, with huge necks protruding from their heads, and rode bicicles over hills. Between segments there were earnest interviews with the trainers about the likelihood of the competitors breaking all their bones. Or interesting attempts by representatives of the Russian team to have international encounters with the American team (“Vell... I think Rossia!). But the best part were the segments with a “wild bull.” The wild bull was only about a year old and had protective bulbs on his horns, but he still managed to maul the competitors fairly painfully. In the second wild bull segment, in which the competitors dressed up as mice and ran about through foam cheese wedges, tragedy struck. For reasons known only to the young bull himself, the raging beast took an especial dislike to the Chinese competitor, and just chased him around everywhere. The poor man would attempt to take refuge in the cheese wedges, but to no avail: the foam constructions were no match for the crafty animal, whose just charged the whole structure and either knocked it over or chased the guy out the other side of the hole. It was so out of control. At one point the guy was huddled in a corner of the cheese, trying to hide from the bull, and the earnest Russian announcer stopped commenting on the successes of the Kazak mouse to comment: “But at this point the question has become: WHERE is the Chinese sportsman?” We probably should not have found this so funny, as I think the poor guy was later hospitalized. Even more amusing than the actual show may have been the reaction of Margarita to it all. She was very serious about it all. Once when I was almost falling over laughing and asked “Who thought up these things?” she yelled “The French! This is all in France!” She was especially upset at the end, when it was clear that Russia would win and one cocky Russian announced that this victory “shows that Russians are the most capable people!” “It shows no such thing! It’s all luck! Someone slips on the ‘human ocean’ section, someone doesn’t! Last week China won!”
Hope everyone had a merry Christmas. Abby and I spent Christmas Eve at a hockey game, which was very fun, though I admit that my attention span for hockey is sort of limited to two periods, generally the first and last. But I was amused by the crowd, and by the antics of the OOC cheerleaders, and by Abby’s obsession with it all. And by the skating teddy bear mascot. After the game we took one of the famous Yaroslavl marshrutkas and then walked home along the Volga, with lots of pretty lit church spires/ onion domes and new years trees and lights, and was a very nice Christmas Eve activity. We made a very nice Christmas Table in Abby’s room, with the little metal tree Margarita put in here, and every Christmas-themed item we could find. Margarita made us a cake.
Yaroslavl is very pretty indeed. And we did several things worthy of note but I have to go walk around it some more, or sit in a bus and look at it, or something, or otherwise try to think of a way to burn enough calories to be prepared for dinner. We eat a lot here.
Cont.
Well the Yaroslavl internet cafe didn’t feel like admitting the existence of my flash drive, so this was not posted. So now I can think of more interesting things to say...
I get really annoyed when I have to pay the ‘foreigner’ price at museums and things. But I can’t reasonably claim to be Russian, seeing as I don’t really speak Russian. So I’ve decided that I have to come up with a non-Russian ethnic identity for myself that is still a member of the Russian Federation. Unfortunately most of said ethnic groups bear no resemblance to me. Like I can’t really pretend to be a Buryat. All the more European groups left Russia when the USSR broke up. Curses upon you, Estonian separatists. It’s not really that big a deal, I guess, since places will usually accept my Russian student ID. But the clock museum in Yaroslavl didn’t. The icon museum, however, did, and it was an excellent museum, with very busy, imaginative icons with 100 or so narrative events on one panel. It was, however, typical of Russian museums in that about 5 guard-babushkas followed us about the tiny museum as we looked at the icons. They didn’t offer any information or anything, they just positioned themselves in chairs and watched us. We were the only people there, so when we left there was this alarming mass exodus of babushkas, who all suddenly started laughing and talking as they went out the door.
Margarita, Abby’s babushka, has a very awesome cat. His name is Vasya, and he is big and striped and attacks people. It seems that he and Abby had a well-established relationship of mutually ignoring each other, but then I arrived and ruined it all. It’s a good thing Margarita finds this cat to be the most interesting creature on earth, aside from her revolutionary, communist grandson, because anyone else would be alarmed instead of entertained that I spend a lot of time growling at the cat and wrestling with him. And Vasya can apparently open the door to our room, which he never did before I arrived. So now he runs about the room in the middle of the night and jumps on my bed and tries to get me to wrestle with him. And Abby refused to go to sleep before he is caught and removed, so have spent a ridiculous time chasing him out from under the bed. Man, this cat is so awesome. And his front claws are out, so he is very fun to wrestle with.
Abby and I are currently trying to figure out when to leave for the train station. There is one normal time, and one time for if Margarita tries to feed us dinner and we claim we are already late for the train. I cannot believe how much food we eat. Oh man, I’m so excited we’ll be on the train soon, I love trains. Though actually I have yet to be in platscart rather then kupe. That mean... in an open compartment with 6 beds rather than a closed compartment with 4 beds. If you think the 4 bed option is necessarily better, read Natasha’s blog from a few days ago. Then try to figure out what it means that Natasha thinks that she is the same person as her cat.
Hope everyone had a merry Christmas. Abby and I spent Christmas Eve at a hockey game, which was very fun, though I admit that my attention span for hockey is sort of limited to two periods, generally the first and last. But I was amused by the crowd, and by the antics of the OOC cheerleaders, and by Abby’s obsession with it all. And by the skating teddy bear mascot. After the game we took one of the famous Yaroslavl marshrutkas and then walked home along the Volga, with lots of pretty lit church spires/ onion domes and new years trees and lights, and was a very nice Christmas Eve activity. We made a very nice Christmas Table in Abby’s room, with the little metal tree Margarita put in here, and every Christmas-themed item we could find. Margarita made us a cake.
Yaroslavl is very pretty indeed. And we did several things worthy of note but I have to go walk around it some more, or sit in a bus and look at it, or something, or otherwise try to think of a way to burn enough calories to be prepared for dinner. We eat a lot here.
Cont.
Well the Yaroslavl internet cafe didn’t feel like admitting the existence of my flash drive, so this was not posted. So now I can think of more interesting things to say...
I get really annoyed when I have to pay the ‘foreigner’ price at museums and things. But I can’t reasonably claim to be Russian, seeing as I don’t really speak Russian. So I’ve decided that I have to come up with a non-Russian ethnic identity for myself that is still a member of the Russian Federation. Unfortunately most of said ethnic groups bear no resemblance to me. Like I can’t really pretend to be a Buryat. All the more European groups left Russia when the USSR broke up. Curses upon you, Estonian separatists. It’s not really that big a deal, I guess, since places will usually accept my Russian student ID. But the clock museum in Yaroslavl didn’t. The icon museum, however, did, and it was an excellent museum, with very busy, imaginative icons with 100 or so narrative events on one panel. It was, however, typical of Russian museums in that about 5 guard-babushkas followed us about the tiny museum as we looked at the icons. They didn’t offer any information or anything, they just positioned themselves in chairs and watched us. We were the only people there, so when we left there was this alarming mass exodus of babushkas, who all suddenly started laughing and talking as they went out the door.
Margarita, Abby’s babushka, has a very awesome cat. His name is Vasya, and he is big and striped and attacks people. It seems that he and Abby had a well-established relationship of mutually ignoring each other, but then I arrived and ruined it all. It’s a good thing Margarita finds this cat to be the most interesting creature on earth, aside from her revolutionary, communist grandson, because anyone else would be alarmed instead of entertained that I spend a lot of time growling at the cat and wrestling with him. And Vasya can apparently open the door to our room, which he never did before I arrived. So now he runs about the room in the middle of the night and jumps on my bed and tries to get me to wrestle with him. And Abby refused to go to sleep before he is caught and removed, so have spent a ridiculous time chasing him out from under the bed. Man, this cat is so awesome. And his front claws are out, so he is very fun to wrestle with.
Abby and I are currently trying to figure out when to leave for the train station. There is one normal time, and one time for if Margarita tries to feed us dinner and we claim we are already late for the train. I cannot believe how much food we eat. Oh man, I’m so excited we’ll be on the train soon, I love trains. Though actually I have yet to be in platscart rather then kupe. That mean... in an open compartment with 6 beds rather than a closed compartment with 4 beds. If you think the 4 bed option is necessarily better, read Natasha’s blog from a few days ago. Then try to figure out what it means that Natasha thinks that she is the same person as her cat.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Moscow Part III
Friday night
I think we’ve done the absolutely required things in Moscow, and we’ve moved on to the part where we’re actually on vacation and relaxing instead of exhaustingly rushing about the
Saturday night
My attempt at blogging last night was interrupted by entrance into our hotel room of a disgustingly well-informed Russian girl who told us the history of every single building in Moscow and St. Petersburg, along with directions from the nearest metro stop. I thought I would just fall over asleep in the middle of her narration, but luckily I did not.
Today we: walked about while this Georgian restaurant we wanted to eat in was closed, saw lots of alarming upscale Moscow grocery stores, ate in the alarmingly up-scale restaurant and listened to cool Georgian music, went into the huge and unattractive Church of Christ the Redeemer, rebuilt by the crazed Moscow mayor in record time with robotic icon-painters in time for some anniversary of the city, went to “Victory Park,” where we saw a huge and menacing WWII memorial, lots of cold rain, lots of brides being photographed next to the previous two items, and a little, modernistic chapel with icons of all the more martial saints- Alexander Nevsky, George, Dmitry Donskoy, etc. There was also an icon, right in from on the alter in a place of honor, of Nicolas II and his family, Anastasia and all. Walked around Arbat St., came home, cooked pasta with boiling water from the chai-nik and ate it with canned peas and white beans. Oh, at some point we were in a puzzling Tolstoy museum. Why can’t it snow and not rain?
Leaving tomorrow morning. Greatly looking forward to meeting Margarita, of whom I have heard so much.
I think we’ve done the absolutely required things in Moscow, and we’ve moved on to the part where we’re actually on vacation and relaxing instead of exhaustingly rushing about the
Saturday night
My attempt at blogging last night was interrupted by entrance into our hotel room of a disgustingly well-informed Russian girl who told us the history of every single building in Moscow and St. Petersburg, along with directions from the nearest metro stop. I thought I would just fall over asleep in the middle of her narration, but luckily I did not.
Today we: walked about while this Georgian restaurant we wanted to eat in was closed, saw lots of alarming upscale Moscow grocery stores, ate in the alarmingly up-scale restaurant and listened to cool Georgian music, went into the huge and unattractive Church of Christ the Redeemer, rebuilt by the crazed Moscow mayor in record time with robotic icon-painters in time for some anniversary of the city, went to “Victory Park,” where we saw a huge and menacing WWII memorial, lots of cold rain, lots of brides being photographed next to the previous two items, and a little, modernistic chapel with icons of all the more martial saints- Alexander Nevsky, George, Dmitry Donskoy, etc. There was also an icon, right in from on the alter in a place of honor, of Nicolas II and his family, Anastasia and all. Walked around Arbat St., came home, cooked pasta with boiling water from the chai-nik and ate it with canned peas and white beans. Oh, at some point we were in a puzzling Tolstoy museum. Why can’t it snow and not rain?
Leaving tomorrow morning. Greatly looking forward to meeting Margarita, of whom I have heard so much.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Live from McDonalds
There are still marshrutki here, like in Irkutsk, but they don’t make up 50% of the traffic. That would be a lot of marshrutki- there is a lot of traffic in Moscow. I wonder how much the marshrutkas cost, and who rides them, and where they go. There’s something incompatible between the neat little marshrutka system and the hugeness of Moscow. Or maybe just between my familiarity with the marshrutka system and the impossibility of being comfortable or familiar with Moscow.
Our stay in this hostel includes breakfast in the most amazing “cafe” ever, on the other side of this apartment building. They are pretty surprised at people showing up there at 9:15 in the morning; I think most of their business comes closer to midnight. It has a fabric ceiling, and hookah pipes in the window sills, and around the tables those kinds of sofas that you’re supposed to lounge on like at a Roman banquet, and trendy square dishware, and television monitors permanently playing some modern art compilation of shifting images and bizarre photographs. I am very glad we will be going back there often. Such as today, whenever my loud typing finally wakes Abby up. After our awesome breakfast we’re planning to go to the Tretyakovkaya Gallery, about which I am excited.
Someone in the hostel playing Tatu. Awesomeness. Nas ne dogonyat.
Other Middlebury Irkutsk people now having moved west: do we agree that we’ve answered the recent question of our Siberian History class, whether there is a separate culture in Siberia, as differentiated from that of European Russia? That there most certainly is?
Cont.
Went to the Tretyakovskaya Gallery yesterday. There’s something disconcerting about seeing in real life paintings you’ve seen reproductions and photographs of many times. They’re so much different with actual brushstrokes. I saw most of the paintings discussed in my Russian history class at Middlebury, and they were as huge and dramatic as expected.
I also saw lots of the icons I’ve written papers about for Hatjig, and, while I suppose I should be indignant about them all having been stolen from the churches where they should be, it’s certainly easier to be icons in a museum. And it was cool having them arranged by school and time period; I think I actually understand what people are talking about when they talk about different schools of medieval icon painting now. But all of them, all the pre-18th-century icons, were so expressive in their simple, deep colors and in some fuzziness of the edges of the forms from the way the paint was laid on the wood, and the economy of form, that going into the room with more recent icons was rather an unpleasant shock; they all seemed cheesy and garishly colored and gaudy.
But my favorite part of the museum was the Vrubel rooms. The paintings were all much more fantastical and crazed than they seemed on a computer screen, and being surrounded by all the centaurs and seraphim and prophets and Fausts and Margarets and demons was very cool. There were big, towering panels and an amazing tile fireplace from a “Gothic Study” he designed for some person of odd tastes, and two of the famous demons, but the most striking of all was this little head of Christ that was possibly the most frightening painting I’ve ever seen.
In the afternoon Abby and I went to Sparrow Hills, across the Moscow River, and walking around this “monument to nature” or something and looked out over the city. There was this amazing ski-jump structure that we looked at in disbelief for a long, long time; I still don’t know how a person would ever agree to climb onto that thing, or why the flying skiers don’t just shoot out into the river, or into the Olympic Stadium on the other side. Then we met Dennis, after a long period of confusion regarding what the heck he was talking about when he said to meet him on “the terrace,” and we walked around downtown with him. We saw people ice-skating on Patriarch Pond, where Woland (the Devil) first appears in The Master and Margarita. The wintery mix that was occurring covered the ground in what looked exactly like dippin’ dots.
Then today we went to the Kremlin. There were lots of large churches with famous icons, and the tsar cannon and the tsar bell, both very large, and the tomb of lots of tsars and tsareviches and metropolitans and patriarchs. I have decided that a good career goal would be Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. We saw an exhibit of their ecclesiastical robes, and they are the coolest things ever, all covered with embroidered and beaded icons and flowers and such. And the hat things are awesome, with metal icon things hanging down in front sometimes, and sometimes just more embroidered awesomeness, and all just very elaborate and heavy. I was very impressed, actually, to see the actual staffs and robes and things used personally by Filaret and Nikon and other patriarchs who I think of as being legendary figures of the impossibly distant past. Especially Filaret- he just belongs in operas and things. It was the same with seeing the tomb of the tsarevich Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, who died in childhood and then had his identity assumed by every crazy Pole who pretended to the throne.
Our stay in this hostel includes breakfast in the most amazing “cafe” ever, on the other side of this apartment building. They are pretty surprised at people showing up there at 9:15 in the morning; I think most of their business comes closer to midnight. It has a fabric ceiling, and hookah pipes in the window sills, and around the tables those kinds of sofas that you’re supposed to lounge on like at a Roman banquet, and trendy square dishware, and television monitors permanently playing some modern art compilation of shifting images and bizarre photographs. I am very glad we will be going back there often. Such as today, whenever my loud typing finally wakes Abby up. After our awesome breakfast we’re planning to go to the Tretyakovkaya Gallery, about which I am excited.
Someone in the hostel playing Tatu. Awesomeness. Nas ne dogonyat.
Other Middlebury Irkutsk people now having moved west: do we agree that we’ve answered the recent question of our Siberian History class, whether there is a separate culture in Siberia, as differentiated from that of European Russia? That there most certainly is?
Cont.
Went to the Tretyakovskaya Gallery yesterday. There’s something disconcerting about seeing in real life paintings you’ve seen reproductions and photographs of many times. They’re so much different with actual brushstrokes. I saw most of the paintings discussed in my Russian history class at Middlebury, and they were as huge and dramatic as expected.
I also saw lots of the icons I’ve written papers about for Hatjig, and, while I suppose I should be indignant about them all having been stolen from the churches where they should be, it’s certainly easier to be icons in a museum. And it was cool having them arranged by school and time period; I think I actually understand what people are talking about when they talk about different schools of medieval icon painting now. But all of them, all the pre-18th-century icons, were so expressive in their simple, deep colors and in some fuzziness of the edges of the forms from the way the paint was laid on the wood, and the economy of form, that going into the room with more recent icons was rather an unpleasant shock; they all seemed cheesy and garishly colored and gaudy.
But my favorite part of the museum was the Vrubel rooms. The paintings were all much more fantastical and crazed than they seemed on a computer screen, and being surrounded by all the centaurs and seraphim and prophets and Fausts and Margarets and demons was very cool. There were big, towering panels and an amazing tile fireplace from a “Gothic Study” he designed for some person of odd tastes, and two of the famous demons, but the most striking of all was this little head of Christ that was possibly the most frightening painting I’ve ever seen.
In the afternoon Abby and I went to Sparrow Hills, across the Moscow River, and walking around this “monument to nature” or something and looked out over the city. There was this amazing ski-jump structure that we looked at in disbelief for a long, long time; I still don’t know how a person would ever agree to climb onto that thing, or why the flying skiers don’t just shoot out into the river, or into the Olympic Stadium on the other side. Then we met Dennis, after a long period of confusion regarding what the heck he was talking about when he said to meet him on “the terrace,” and we walked around downtown with him. We saw people ice-skating on Patriarch Pond, where Woland (the Devil) first appears in The Master and Margarita. The wintery mix that was occurring covered the ground in what looked exactly like dippin’ dots.
Then today we went to the Kremlin. There were lots of large churches with famous icons, and the tsar cannon and the tsar bell, both very large, and the tomb of lots of tsars and tsareviches and metropolitans and patriarchs. I have decided that a good career goal would be Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia. We saw an exhibit of their ecclesiastical robes, and they are the coolest things ever, all covered with embroidered and beaded icons and flowers and such. And the hat things are awesome, with metal icon things hanging down in front sometimes, and sometimes just more embroidered awesomeness, and all just very elaborate and heavy. I was very impressed, actually, to see the actual staffs and robes and things used personally by Filaret and Nikon and other patriarchs who I think of as being legendary figures of the impossibly distant past. Especially Filaret- he just belongs in operas and things. It was the same with seeing the tomb of the tsarevich Dmitri, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, who died in childhood and then had his identity assumed by every crazy Pole who pretended to the throne.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Moskva
I think I must have lots of news, and have seen many interesting things, but as my main activity in Moscow has been being jetlagged, I don’t really remember what they are. Abby and I have been in Moscow for 2 days- walked around Red Square, walked around lots of amazing malls, generally walked around a lot in our awesome leather boots. Moscow is a very, very big city. I had forgotten that Irkutsk isn’t actually a big city, and that it’s sort of far from centers of fashion and such. Moscow is rather overwhelming, actually, but it’s fun. And there are very pretty, very old churches and monasteries and towers and things, much prettier and older than in Irkutsk. Anything else of especial note? Met Eddie and Sarah in Red Square our first night here and walked around with them, and Eddie and I probably bored Abby and Sarah by our constant “This would never happen in Irkutsk” comments. This comment applies to most of Moscow, but was especially appropriate to the hip cocktail lounge where we were at the time. There are McDonalds here everywhere- none of those in Irkutsk. And less fur, especially on men, and more tennis shoes, and more beggars, and fewer ice cream kiosks, and much more variety in fashion, and I don’t know what else. Hopefully I am currently posting this using the wireless connection in a McDonalds (the fanciest McDonalds I’ve every seen).
Ok, I’m trying again to write something informative. We went to a cemetery this morning (Novodevichy) where Moscow has buried all its famous people- Chekhov, Gogol, Lenin’s wife, all sorts of Veterans of Labor and military heroes I’ve never heard of. It was a very, very impressive place, next to a very impressive walled monastery with big shining onion domes sticking out everywhere. It was quiet and snow-covered and full of trees and brick walkways, and every tombstone was a sculpture of some impressive, generally modernistic kind. I was most impressed.
Ok, that’s all I can think of.
Oh, I want to add that in the airport in Irkutsk everyone plastic-wrapped their luggage. I guess the airport authorities don’t have rules about locks like in America. So I had mine plastic-wrapped too, as I was afraid everyone knew something I didn’t. And I was very amused that the plastic-wrapping cost over twice as much as the actual bag. It also condensed it to the density of a brick, which made it more interesting to carry about. I’ve discovered why people pack in suitcases and not just in plastic bags.
Ok, I’m trying again to write something informative. We went to a cemetery this morning (Novodevichy) where Moscow has buried all its famous people- Chekhov, Gogol, Lenin’s wife, all sorts of Veterans of Labor and military heroes I’ve never heard of. It was a very, very impressive place, next to a very impressive walled monastery with big shining onion domes sticking out everywhere. It was quiet and snow-covered and full of trees and brick walkways, and every tombstone was a sculpture of some impressive, generally modernistic kind. I was most impressed.
Ok, that’s all I can think of.
Oh, I want to add that in the airport in Irkutsk everyone plastic-wrapped their luggage. I guess the airport authorities don’t have rules about locks like in America. So I had mine plastic-wrapped too, as I was afraid everyone knew something I didn’t. And I was very amused that the plastic-wrapping cost over twice as much as the actual bag. It also condensed it to the density of a brick, which made it more interesting to carry about. I’ve discovered why people pack in suitcases and not just in plastic bags.
Informal Economy
Had fun walking around Irkutsk today, watching people selling things. I bought some things- a big square plastic bag-thing to use instead of a suitcase on my trip (I have no idea what to call this item- it’s the kind of bag street peddlers carry their wares in, and it’s sort of like the bag I use for laundry at Middlebury, but not nearly as big), and Mongolian leather, fleece-lined gloves in the Chinese market, and tapochki, finally, from this Chinese guy with whom I talked about how neither of us really speak Russian, and some Christmas presents. It was fun bargaining for things, but mainly it was fun watching everything: the pretty glass jars of bright red berries and frost set out on tables near the Central Market, the old Chinese men yelling at people to buy their leather coats, the interesting section of sidewalk lined with women giving away dogs and cats, the huge section of the square outside the market now covered with tables of venders of garishly-colored stuffed animals for New-Years-presents season, all the old women selling their knitted knee-socks, etc. After that I ran into Natasha and Joseph and some Russian acquaintances of Natasha’s, and we went to the square and looked at the ice sculptures and slid down the huge awesome ice slide. Then we, minus the Russian acquaintances, went to the Posnaya (Posi restaurant) and met Ivan and Eddie and Leonya and Anya. Sat there for a long time. Came home and ate cabbage dishes and drank tea with V.P.
Walking around the ice-sculpture-covered square, just having slid down the awesome unregulated ice slide a few times, among the laughing Russian kids and teenagers splayed out everywhere in the snow at the bottom, I was feeling great love for the city of Irkutsk, when right in front of me a little girl of about five accidentally tripped some man walking through the square. He didn’t fall, or even almost fall, she just cut him off, I guess- anyway, he yelled at her and asked if she was drunk or something. And then my appreciation for Irkutsk was brought back to a realistic level. I think the culture of alcoholism in Russia is enough to keep me from ever loving this country in anything more than a very qualified way. It doesn’t even have character- these are no honky-tonk heroes, they’re just blank-faced, lanky young men hanging around the city drinking beer from paper bags. Many of them wear the exact same hat- light gray, with a thick dark gray strip around the bottom, and their short, thin, dirty-blond, hair is the same, and they have the same smooth, round faces. They remind me of the little rocks at the bottom of creeks, ground to a perfect, glossy, impersonal smoothness. These kids’ fathers have lost that look, and instead of the tight cotton caps of the lanky boys wear shaggy-looking fur hats that better match their weathered faces.
Spent a lot of time in KnigoMir, or whatever that second-floor bookstore near the Centralniy Rinok in called. First I looked at Spanish textbooks for a while, until I realized that nostalgia for subjunctive mood was not all that rational. Then I looked through the sizable collection of English literature, mostly annotated for Russian English-learners. I had read a very small proportion of the books on the shelf. I felt very uneducated. I don’t get it: I have spent a fairly large portion of my life reading literature in English. Why have I read about 2 out of 40 of the books judged worthy for cultural and linguistic export? I can’t decide to buy some of these books or not. On one hand, I should be reading in Russian. On the other, I have a lot of time to read, and it seems like I’m wasting an opportunity to read up a bunch of classics of English literature, I rather like English, and I’m afraid I’m forgetting how to speak it.
Dec. 16
I decided to go to Subway today, on my last day in Irktusk for a while. It was pretty awesome listening to Russians approaching the counter and having the concept of Subway explained to them. There were multiple vegetables, none of which were cabbage or cucumber and only one of which was tomato, and they could put as many as they wanted on their subs. For free. I assume they already understand the concept of a sandwich with more than one piece of bread when they arrive, but maybe they just hide their surprise.
Was commanded to go to another play today, in the same Electrical College as the battling-wives play but by another theater company. I was not very happy about the whole thing, as I was stressed out about getting everything done I had to for my trip, and in general I don’t like being told how to spend my time and money, but it was a good play- a Vampilov (Soviet playwright of whom only residents of Irkutsk have heard as far as I can tell) play that isn’t performed too much because, according to the director, it’s too hard. It was one of those artsy affairs beginning with the death of the main character and from then on following a very confused chronology and interspersed with odd metaphoric choreographed scenes outside the plot entirely, but I eventually forgave it. The basic plot line: young handsome man has charmed life, very nice wife, good job, friends with whom to do a lot of drinking and singing and joking, his own apartment (a big deal 50 years ago when the play was written), multiple affairs with beautiful women. And it’s all very funny and like one of those beer commercials playing to male fantasies. And then his wife is increasingly miserable and has an abortion and all the women leave him except this 17-year-old girl who is in love with him, but by then he’s a big mess and involves her in a drunken scandal in front of all his friends, and his jovial male friendships aren’t that helpful and he jumps off the balcony of his all-important apartment. Very cheery, all in all.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned how small children are pulled about in sleds here. Like instead of pushed in strollers. They’re these little tiny padded sleds, and when the parents get to a place with no ice they just pick them up and carry them like it was just a kid wrapped up in a blanket. There are also larger sleds for pulling around boxes of merchandise of various kinds.
Walking around the ice-sculpture-covered square, just having slid down the awesome unregulated ice slide a few times, among the laughing Russian kids and teenagers splayed out everywhere in the snow at the bottom, I was feeling great love for the city of Irkutsk, when right in front of me a little girl of about five accidentally tripped some man walking through the square. He didn’t fall, or even almost fall, she just cut him off, I guess- anyway, he yelled at her and asked if she was drunk or something. And then my appreciation for Irkutsk was brought back to a realistic level. I think the culture of alcoholism in Russia is enough to keep me from ever loving this country in anything more than a very qualified way. It doesn’t even have character- these are no honky-tonk heroes, they’re just blank-faced, lanky young men hanging around the city drinking beer from paper bags. Many of them wear the exact same hat- light gray, with a thick dark gray strip around the bottom, and their short, thin, dirty-blond, hair is the same, and they have the same smooth, round faces. They remind me of the little rocks at the bottom of creeks, ground to a perfect, glossy, impersonal smoothness. These kids’ fathers have lost that look, and instead of the tight cotton caps of the lanky boys wear shaggy-looking fur hats that better match their weathered faces.
Spent a lot of time in KnigoMir, or whatever that second-floor bookstore near the Centralniy Rinok in called. First I looked at Spanish textbooks for a while, until I realized that nostalgia for subjunctive mood was not all that rational. Then I looked through the sizable collection of English literature, mostly annotated for Russian English-learners. I had read a very small proportion of the books on the shelf. I felt very uneducated. I don’t get it: I have spent a fairly large portion of my life reading literature in English. Why have I read about 2 out of 40 of the books judged worthy for cultural and linguistic export? I can’t decide to buy some of these books or not. On one hand, I should be reading in Russian. On the other, I have a lot of time to read, and it seems like I’m wasting an opportunity to read up a bunch of classics of English literature, I rather like English, and I’m afraid I’m forgetting how to speak it.
Dec. 16
I decided to go to Subway today, on my last day in Irktusk for a while. It was pretty awesome listening to Russians approaching the counter and having the concept of Subway explained to them. There were multiple vegetables, none of which were cabbage or cucumber and only one of which was tomato, and they could put as many as they wanted on their subs. For free. I assume they already understand the concept of a sandwich with more than one piece of bread when they arrive, but maybe they just hide their surprise.
Was commanded to go to another play today, in the same Electrical College as the battling-wives play but by another theater company. I was not very happy about the whole thing, as I was stressed out about getting everything done I had to for my trip, and in general I don’t like being told how to spend my time and money, but it was a good play- a Vampilov (Soviet playwright of whom only residents of Irkutsk have heard as far as I can tell) play that isn’t performed too much because, according to the director, it’s too hard. It was one of those artsy affairs beginning with the death of the main character and from then on following a very confused chronology and interspersed with odd metaphoric choreographed scenes outside the plot entirely, but I eventually forgave it. The basic plot line: young handsome man has charmed life, very nice wife, good job, friends with whom to do a lot of drinking and singing and joking, his own apartment (a big deal 50 years ago when the play was written), multiple affairs with beautiful women. And it’s all very funny and like one of those beer commercials playing to male fantasies. And then his wife is increasingly miserable and has an abortion and all the women leave him except this 17-year-old girl who is in love with him, but by then he’s a big mess and involves her in a drunken scandal in front of all his friends, and his jovial male friendships aren’t that helpful and he jumps off the balcony of his all-important apartment. Very cheery, all in all.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned how small children are pulled about in sleds here. Like instead of pushed in strollers. They’re these little tiny padded sleds, and when the parents get to a place with no ice they just pick them up and carry them like it was just a kid wrapped up in a blanket. There are also larger sleds for pulling around boxes of merchandise of various kinds.
Last day of class
Electricity just went out. The electricity goes out a lot. It’s never been out for more than 12 hours, though.
Today was the last day of class. I don’t know what to say about the semester ending. I wish I had learned more Russian in it- I’m going to have to do better at that next semester- but I enjoyed my classes as a whole, and I’m sort of sorry for them to be over. It doesn’t quite feel like the end of a semester though... before, ends of semesters involved everyone going home, and the feeling was much different. This just feels like the end of a fall semester in high school, where your classes will be different soon, but it’s not that exciting or important. But it is sort of important; I just didn’t notice, maybe; I don’t really remember the point of this, but I guess what I want to say is that today being the last day of class was fairly important, but with no special final exam schedule and people not packing up all around me, the normal end-of-semester feeling was not present. Classes just went on in their usual way and then today just ended. And we had sort of a tedious end-of-semester lunch, where various university officials who we had never seen before gave speeches about how it was nice that we had come, and our teachers gave speeches about how they liked having us in class and we were all special in our own ways (or in Alexandra Vladimirovna’s case how we should have been less lazy and worked harder and spoken Russian better) and no one knew if they were allowed to eat while speeches were being given.
For the last day of class, I agreed to let Elissa “paint my eyes,” as the Russians say, as a special gift for Elena Miletevna, who often yells at me for my lack of make-up use, and tells me that I will never find a husband. Somehow this make-up application ended up including the application of bright pink sparkly nail polish. But when presented with my compliant-to-her-demands self, Elena Miletevna just asked why I couldn’t have dressed nicely yesterday, when we had the ridiculous event-for-foreigners, to which I very offensively wore a t-shirt. Had I dressed nicely yesterday, as I had today, I would have found a husband at the tea-drinking. She had, in fact, announced at the beginning of the event that one of the traditional purposes of tea-drinkings was the finding of brides and grooms. Apparently after I left, the spin-the-bottle game was followed by a game in which a person just has to walk around and choose the person he or she wishes to kiss. All semblance of organization has been lost in this paragraph.
Had a nice evening- observed another class at ABC language school, taught by this ridiculous Irishman named Sean Hennessey (“the Hennessey family of the famous cognac,” as he informed me and Joseph at least twice), then Joseph and I ate some posi (Buryat dumplings) at a Posaria, then we met everyone else at the Tex Mex restaurant and drank coffee. Leonya and Anya were there, and it was very pleasant. That’s when it started really feeling like the end of something, with everyone together for the last time. Walked around the city for a while after that, many of us ended up in Pizza Domino, got home around 1. It’s going to be very strange to be here without the people who are leaving.
Lights are back on. Rather a waste, as I’m going to bed now.
Today was the last day of class. I don’t know what to say about the semester ending. I wish I had learned more Russian in it- I’m going to have to do better at that next semester- but I enjoyed my classes as a whole, and I’m sort of sorry for them to be over. It doesn’t quite feel like the end of a semester though... before, ends of semesters involved everyone going home, and the feeling was much different. This just feels like the end of a fall semester in high school, where your classes will be different soon, but it’s not that exciting or important. But it is sort of important; I just didn’t notice, maybe; I don’t really remember the point of this, but I guess what I want to say is that today being the last day of class was fairly important, but with no special final exam schedule and people not packing up all around me, the normal end-of-semester feeling was not present. Classes just went on in their usual way and then today just ended. And we had sort of a tedious end-of-semester lunch, where various university officials who we had never seen before gave speeches about how it was nice that we had come, and our teachers gave speeches about how they liked having us in class and we were all special in our own ways (or in Alexandra Vladimirovna’s case how we should have been less lazy and worked harder and spoken Russian better) and no one knew if they were allowed to eat while speeches were being given.
For the last day of class, I agreed to let Elissa “paint my eyes,” as the Russians say, as a special gift for Elena Miletevna, who often yells at me for my lack of make-up use, and tells me that I will never find a husband. Somehow this make-up application ended up including the application of bright pink sparkly nail polish. But when presented with my compliant-to-her-demands self, Elena Miletevna just asked why I couldn’t have dressed nicely yesterday, when we had the ridiculous event-for-foreigners, to which I very offensively wore a t-shirt. Had I dressed nicely yesterday, as I had today, I would have found a husband at the tea-drinking. She had, in fact, announced at the beginning of the event that one of the traditional purposes of tea-drinkings was the finding of brides and grooms. Apparently after I left, the spin-the-bottle game was followed by a game in which a person just has to walk around and choose the person he or she wishes to kiss. All semblance of organization has been lost in this paragraph.
Had a nice evening- observed another class at ABC language school, taught by this ridiculous Irishman named Sean Hennessey (“the Hennessey family of the famous cognac,” as he informed me and Joseph at least twice), then Joseph and I ate some posi (Buryat dumplings) at a Posaria, then we met everyone else at the Tex Mex restaurant and drank coffee. Leonya and Anya were there, and it was very pleasant. That’s when it started really feeling like the end of something, with everyone together for the last time. Walked around the city for a while after that, many of us ended up in Pizza Domino, got home around 1. It’s going to be very strange to be here without the people who are leaving.
Lights are back on. Rather a waste, as I’m going to bed now.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
For those of you who have complained that you soon won't have Natasha's blog to read
I've added a link to Joseph's. He'll be here all year.
and a continuation, in which I sit around and listen to music (Dec. 13)
We had a chaipitia (tea-drinking) with all the foreign students and some Russian students and most of the teachers today. It was sort of silly- we all at tables in a huge circle and drank tea from plastic cups- but nice enough, and the Korean students put on a skit and sang a song, and other people performed things, and such. But then at one point we started playing spin the bottle. And that is wholly unacceptable for people who have graduated from middle school. That’s about when I left...
To go to the printing-copy center tent thing at the marshrutka stop to print out a picture for our group thank-you card for Elizabeth. I am becoming good friends with the copy-machine tent. It is one of the most OOC places in Irkutsk. There are always 800 million college students crammed in there, demanding copies of 100-page notebooks. I don’t really understand why- do they have some sort of system where only one students out of every two takes notes, and then they just make copies at the end of the semester? In any case, I have a new addition to my list of jobs I don’t want.
Then I came home, because V.P. called to say she had forgotten her keys. This was the first time I had actually seen her since Sunday or something, so we drank tea and discussed the loss of my wallet and other subjects. Then she left for work, apparently taking both her keys and mine, perhaps feeling that having no sets of keys for the first half of the day and two for the second average out to the normal amount of key-possession. So I can’t leave the house now.
later:
Katya went to English class today, for about the 2nd time this semester I think. She just home and told me she raised her hand and answered every question, or something, thanks to our intensive translating sessions, and was told she didn’t have to take the exam or something. I wonder if she discussed dead ends. I like Katya a lot when she’s in a good mood.
If you are a person who wishes to read a very interesting discussion of the relationship of liturgical music and icons, the relationship of language and music, the art of musical composition in general, and about liturgy in general, you should buy the cd “Lay Aside All Earthly Cares” by the choir “Cappella Romana” and read the liner notes, particularly the article “Some Personal Thoughts of the Composition of Liturgical Music.” The cd itself is also pretty, a collection of Orthodox chants in very good English translations and musical arrangements. It is especially interesting if you are listening to it on your headphones as Katya is playing very loud disco music in the other room. Disco music aside, it reminds me of when Mama told me she considers Handel’s Messiah to be a proof of God’s existence. The Pan-Orthodox Society for the Advancement of Liturgical Music agrees, at least with the principle that religious music should be iconic, and icons necessarily correspond to “hyper-icons.” This is really very pretty. You should all buy this cd. Especially if you are a person in my family, and you want to give it to me when I get home.
Я сейчас слушаю песню «Российский Дед Мороз». It has a disco beat, a heartwarming children's chorus, and patriotic lyrics. Если ты сейчас в России, наверно тебе бы очень понравилась эта песьна.
Oh, and now in the neighboring apartment, where the piano is against my wall, the piano-playing member of the family has taken a break from playing songs from Cats (the usual occupation of that individual) and is playing that song about the New Years tree. Very festive.
I'm excited about my upcoming travels. When I started thinking seriously about this trip, and about how Abby would be seeing Siberia, I think I realized for the first time that living here is totally different than it would be living in, say, Yaroslavl. Like, we don't have «the neighboring cities with beautiful 15th century churches, founded by some tzar with an awesome name and an air of bold and romantic antiquity», (um, those quotes aren't because someone other than me was loony enough to say that, I just wanted to signify that it was one term), we have «the neighboring cities that were hastily built with no attention to aesthetics by Stalin and his army of chipper Komsomol youth when he decided there was entirely too great an expanse of space there with no cities to fill it, now facing major demographic and economic crises because the economically-illogical state-suppored factories that employed all the residents have closed.» Oo, maybe when Abby's here we'll go see Seyernno-Baikalsk. That's supposed to be one of the most poorly-planned and unattractive cities in Siberia. We talk about it in Baikal Studies on occasion, but I've never been there. Apparently it's a big deal that they built the apartment buildings without balconies, so everyone's depressed and demoralized. I don't quite understand this logic- who hangs out on a balcony in Siberia? All we use ours for is freezing the cabbage. But anyway, I sort of want to go see these balcony-less homes. Or we could just take the electrichka out to the middle of nowhere and walk around in the woods. We have a lot of woods in Siberia.
To go to the printing-copy center tent thing at the marshrutka stop to print out a picture for our group thank-you card for Elizabeth. I am becoming good friends with the copy-machine tent. It is one of the most OOC places in Irkutsk. There are always 800 million college students crammed in there, demanding copies of 100-page notebooks. I don’t really understand why- do they have some sort of system where only one students out of every two takes notes, and then they just make copies at the end of the semester? In any case, I have a new addition to my list of jobs I don’t want.
Then I came home, because V.P. called to say she had forgotten her keys. This was the first time I had actually seen her since Sunday or something, so we drank tea and discussed the loss of my wallet and other subjects. Then she left for work, apparently taking both her keys and mine, perhaps feeling that having no sets of keys for the first half of the day and two for the second average out to the normal amount of key-possession. So I can’t leave the house now.
later:
Katya went to English class today, for about the 2nd time this semester I think. She just home and told me she raised her hand and answered every question, or something, thanks to our intensive translating sessions, and was told she didn’t have to take the exam or something. I wonder if she discussed dead ends. I like Katya a lot when she’s in a good mood.
If you are a person who wishes to read a very interesting discussion of the relationship of liturgical music and icons, the relationship of language and music, the art of musical composition in general, and about liturgy in general, you should buy the cd “Lay Aside All Earthly Cares” by the choir “Cappella Romana” and read the liner notes, particularly the article “Some Personal Thoughts of the Composition of Liturgical Music.” The cd itself is also pretty, a collection of Orthodox chants in very good English translations and musical arrangements. It is especially interesting if you are listening to it on your headphones as Katya is playing very loud disco music in the other room. Disco music aside, it reminds me of when Mama told me she considers Handel’s Messiah to be a proof of God’s existence. The Pan-Orthodox Society for the Advancement of Liturgical Music agrees, at least with the principle that religious music should be iconic, and icons necessarily correspond to “hyper-icons.” This is really very pretty. You should all buy this cd. Especially if you are a person in my family, and you want to give it to me when I get home.
Я сейчас слушаю песню «Российский Дед Мороз». It has a disco beat, a heartwarming children's chorus, and patriotic lyrics. Если ты сейчас в России, наверно тебе бы очень понравилась эта песьна.
Oh, and now in the neighboring apartment, where the piano is against my wall, the piano-playing member of the family has taken a break from playing songs from Cats (the usual occupation of that individual) and is playing that song about the New Years tree. Very festive.
I'm excited about my upcoming travels. When I started thinking seriously about this trip, and about how Abby would be seeing Siberia, I think I realized for the first time that living here is totally different than it would be living in, say, Yaroslavl. Like, we don't have «the neighboring cities with beautiful 15th century churches, founded by some tzar with an awesome name and an air of bold and romantic antiquity», (um, those quotes aren't because someone other than me was loony enough to say that, I just wanted to signify that it was one term), we have «the neighboring cities that were hastily built with no attention to aesthetics by Stalin and his army of chipper Komsomol youth when he decided there was entirely too great an expanse of space there with no cities to fill it, now facing major demographic and economic crises because the economically-illogical state-suppored factories that employed all the residents have closed.» Oo, maybe when Abby's here we'll go see Seyernno-Baikalsk. That's supposed to be one of the most poorly-planned and unattractive cities in Siberia. We talk about it in Baikal Studies on occasion, but I've never been there. Apparently it's a big deal that they built the apartment buildings without balconies, so everyone's depressed and demoralized. I don't quite understand this logic- who hangs out on a balcony in Siberia? All we use ours for is freezing the cabbage. But anyway, I sort of want to go see these balcony-less homes. Or we could just take the electrichka out to the middle of nowhere and walk around in the woods. We have a lot of woods in Siberia.
Literary Theory (Dec. 12)
Yesterday I decided that it would be a good idea to make a BTL, but the only one of those ingredients we had was T. The place of L was taken by cabbage, and the place of B by Jolly Milkman speadable cheese with little pieces of bacon in it. It was, as a culinary venture... well, better than the time I tried to eat the raw onion. But cabbage is not meant to be put on sandwiches.
evening edit, not having posted this yet due to technical difficulties:
I went downtown to the ABC Language School today to observe an English class, sort of training for my future employment there. And I was going to relate some amusing episodes from the class. But then I came home and helped Katya with her English homework, and all other English-related anecdotes were driven from my mind.
We’re reading this same social-economic theory articles, or course, and there was some discussion of dead-end jobs. I asked Katya if she knew what ‘dead-end’ meant. She said yes, like there are happy ends and dead ends. Happy ends are like in Cinderella, and dead ends are like in Romeo and Juliet.
I just discovered that I have an atlas on my computer that tells me how far cities are apart from each other. I realize that most of you can just look this up on the computer, but I am now delighted when I find something to do on the computer without internet. Anyway, I now know that it is 6,100.8 miles between Frederick, Maryland, USA and Irkutsk, Russia. And 5,781.8 miles between Middlebury, Vermont, USA and Irkutsk, Russia. I’m mostly impressed that Middlebury made it to the world atlas. San Francisco is a mere 5611.4 miles from Irkutsk.
evening edit, not having posted this yet due to technical difficulties:
I went downtown to the ABC Language School today to observe an English class, sort of training for my future employment there. And I was going to relate some amusing episodes from the class. But then I came home and helped Katya with her English homework, and all other English-related anecdotes were driven from my mind.
We’re reading this same social-economic theory articles, or course, and there was some discussion of dead-end jobs. I asked Katya if she knew what ‘dead-end’ meant. She said yes, like there are happy ends and dead ends. Happy ends are like in Cinderella, and dead ends are like in Romeo and Juliet.
I just discovered that I have an atlas on my computer that tells me how far cities are apart from each other. I realize that most of you can just look this up on the computer, but I am now delighted when I find something to do on the computer without internet. Anyway, I now know that it is 6,100.8 miles between Frederick, Maryland, USA and Irkutsk, Russia. And 5,781.8 miles between Middlebury, Vermont, USA and Irkutsk, Russia. I’m mostly impressed that Middlebury made it to the world atlas. San Francisco is a mere 5611.4 miles from Irkutsk.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Title
Went to Listvianka today, on the 11 am marshrutka. Telling V.P. on Saturday that I was going to Listvianka on Monday was enough to keep her happy the whole weekend: she didn’t ever look disapproving when I spent hours in my room working on my Baikal studies paper, as she saw it all as getting things out of the way so I could go to Listvianka. The ride was very pretty; now that there’s snow the white birches don’t show up much, and instead it’s the pines (and I guess cedars) that stand out. It was very foggy, as it so often is, but in a way that enhanced the scenicness rather than hid it.
Misfortune, however, struck when we got out of the marshrutka. I took out my wallet, as one so often does when wishing to pay for things, and gave the driver 100 rubles. I got change and put it in my pocket. We all (Ivan, Eddie, Elissa, me) went into a cafe, about 30 seconds from the bus stop. I looked for my wallet. It was no longer in my possession.
I have no idea how this happened. There were hardly any people around, and it’s hard to see how the wallet could have been stolen. It’s also hard to see how I would just casually toss a wallet away and not notice. I guess I could have dropped it in the marshrutka. In any case, my life is now greatly complicated. And a pall was sort of cast over the rest of my day.
Which is a shame, because the day was really a lot of fun, other than wallet-losing. We ate in the cafe (actually the food there was quite awful), we walked around the village, Eddie threw lots of rocks at the frozen creek but failed to break it, I drank very cold and very good water from a hole someone had made in the creek, and we went to a very nice banya. The banya was what was really fun about the day. It was in this wooden lodge on a hill over Baikal, and while we waited for the oven to be heated up we sat in a sunny, hunting-lodge-like room with a big window overlooking Baikal and watched some awful American movie made worse by Russian dubbing. After sitting in the banya for long enough not to be able to stand it anymore we would run outside in our bathing suits, screaming, and roll around and throw snow at each other. Why don’t we have banyas in the US? They are so amazing- I don’t know how to begin to describe the feeling of every grain of dirt and drop of cold coming streaming out of your body, and the bitter smell and taste of the steam coming off the stones and metal pipe. And after being in a banya you can’t be cold for the next several hours- I think the temperature-sensing faculties of your body are just so confused by the extremes of hot and cold of the experience that they just stop bothering registering. Which is very nice if the rest of your day will involve walking around in Siberia. It’s really rather incredible- you walk down a road on which you remember being freezing cold a couple hours before, pre-banya, and your body is a perfectly comfortable temperature.
The other item of note is my recent capitulation to the Russian practice of putting mayonnaise on everything. It’s sort of alarming. Yesterday I decided I wanted some salad of some kind, so made one from shredded cabbage and tomato. And that didn’t look like it would taste all that good without dressing of some kind, and of course all there was was mayonnaise- and then it was really good. My excuse is that this is especially good mayonnaise, very refreshing and light. The tub says “mayonnaise provencale,” so it must be very sophisticated. And it’s from the Irkutsk Fatty Products Factory or something, so I’m eating local foods, just as the Second Vermont Republic folks advise. Today this mayonnaise made several appearances in my dinner.
Tuesday update:
Went to bus station, spent a long time standing in lines and asking people where things were and being yelled at. No wallets were turned in. I didn’t really think it would have been. I would call and cancel credit cards now but 1) I don’t know numbers to call, 2) my phone doesn’t have any money on it, as I apparently did something wrong when I thought I put money on it yesterday; I guess some Irkutsk resident unexpectedly got some money added to his or her phone, and 3) I’m just going to wait for Mama to call tonight and make her do it. Because I am such an irresponsible person.
Got two packages today, from Gammie and from Mama. So that was nice. I can live on chocolate in the train station now, in my penniless state. I think this wallet loss is judgment for my Scrooge-like miserliness. Oh, and the arrival of Mama’s package means I now have a flashdrive, so at least I can continue to complain and post my complaints on the internet! I know you’re all glad to hear that. As our good friend Julieta Venegas (or whatever her name is) says, “Yo no voy a llorar y decir, que no merezco eso, porque es probable que lo merezco pero no lo quiero.”
And as Lady Catherine De Berg says, I am most seriously displeased.
Misfortune, however, struck when we got out of the marshrutka. I took out my wallet, as one so often does when wishing to pay for things, and gave the driver 100 rubles. I got change and put it in my pocket. We all (Ivan, Eddie, Elissa, me) went into a cafe, about 30 seconds from the bus stop. I looked for my wallet. It was no longer in my possession.
I have no idea how this happened. There were hardly any people around, and it’s hard to see how the wallet could have been stolen. It’s also hard to see how I would just casually toss a wallet away and not notice. I guess I could have dropped it in the marshrutka. In any case, my life is now greatly complicated. And a pall was sort of cast over the rest of my day.
Which is a shame, because the day was really a lot of fun, other than wallet-losing. We ate in the cafe (actually the food there was quite awful), we walked around the village, Eddie threw lots of rocks at the frozen creek but failed to break it, I drank very cold and very good water from a hole someone had made in the creek, and we went to a very nice banya. The banya was what was really fun about the day. It was in this wooden lodge on a hill over Baikal, and while we waited for the oven to be heated up we sat in a sunny, hunting-lodge-like room with a big window overlooking Baikal and watched some awful American movie made worse by Russian dubbing. After sitting in the banya for long enough not to be able to stand it anymore we would run outside in our bathing suits, screaming, and roll around and throw snow at each other. Why don’t we have banyas in the US? They are so amazing- I don’t know how to begin to describe the feeling of every grain of dirt and drop of cold coming streaming out of your body, and the bitter smell and taste of the steam coming off the stones and metal pipe. And after being in a banya you can’t be cold for the next several hours- I think the temperature-sensing faculties of your body are just so confused by the extremes of hot and cold of the experience that they just stop bothering registering. Which is very nice if the rest of your day will involve walking around in Siberia. It’s really rather incredible- you walk down a road on which you remember being freezing cold a couple hours before, pre-banya, and your body is a perfectly comfortable temperature.
The other item of note is my recent capitulation to the Russian practice of putting mayonnaise on everything. It’s sort of alarming. Yesterday I decided I wanted some salad of some kind, so made one from shredded cabbage and tomato. And that didn’t look like it would taste all that good without dressing of some kind, and of course all there was was mayonnaise- and then it was really good. My excuse is that this is especially good mayonnaise, very refreshing and light. The tub says “mayonnaise provencale,” so it must be very sophisticated. And it’s from the Irkutsk Fatty Products Factory or something, so I’m eating local foods, just as the Second Vermont Republic folks advise. Today this mayonnaise made several appearances in my dinner.
Tuesday update:
Went to bus station, spent a long time standing in lines and asking people where things were and being yelled at. No wallets were turned in. I didn’t really think it would have been. I would call and cancel credit cards now but 1) I don’t know numbers to call, 2) my phone doesn’t have any money on it, as I apparently did something wrong when I thought I put money on it yesterday; I guess some Irkutsk resident unexpectedly got some money added to his or her phone, and 3) I’m just going to wait for Mama to call tonight and make her do it. Because I am such an irresponsible person.
Got two packages today, from Gammie and from Mama. So that was nice. I can live on chocolate in the train station now, in my penniless state. I think this wallet loss is judgment for my Scrooge-like miserliness. Oh, and the arrival of Mama’s package means I now have a flashdrive, so at least I can continue to complain and post my complaints on the internet! I know you’re all glad to hear that. As our good friend Julieta Venegas (or whatever her name is) says, “Yo no voy a llorar y decir, que no merezco eso, porque es probable que lo merezco pero no lo quiero.”
And as Lady Catherine De Berg says, I am most seriously displeased.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Someone send me some cheese to go with my whine
I spent a significant portion of the day being very, very tired of being incompetent, and of being a foreigner in general, and of being an incompetent foreigner in Russia in specific. I am tired of everything I do at best being funny and at worst getting me yelled at. Usually just an awkward middle level. And not only with Russians- I feel like in my social interactions with everyone I have just become rather obnoxious. I had this period when I felt like I had found this attractive, simple, honest quality to the values and activities of Russian life, and I rode about on marshrutkas looking with great appreciation at the... well now I can’t remember what I appreciated about it all. Because this week has not really done much for my overall appreciation of Russia. I would try to explain the horrible mood that this week has put me in, but a) my own failures are not my favorite topics of discussion and b) none of it’s really very interesting.
Learned in Baikal Studies that the mink is a “killing machine.” Who knew. They eat squirrels, which are approximately the size of minks, themselves. I would like to appreciate the mink for their control of the squirrel population, but I am more grossed out by dead squirrels than live ones. We probably learned other interesting things in Baikal Studies as well- we usually do- but I don’t remember them.
In History of Siberia we learned various things that I thought were very interesting at the time, but then I realized were only interesting if you live in Irkutsk. Like were the statue of Alexander III came from, and which group of Polish prisoners built the church that is now the Organ Hall, and that the 1912 demonstrations on the Lena river in which 250 peacefully demonstrating workers were shot and killed by their employers (whence Lenin’s name) occurred in the Irkutsk oblast.
Have train tickets from Petersburg to Kazan, from Kazan to Novosibirsk, from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk. Woo hoo. Now that I’ve partially gotten over the nightmare of buying the tickets, I’m excited. What I am most excited about, though, is going to Helsinki. I will be a tourist, making not even the barest attempt at cultural assimilation, I will be speaking English, there will not be the Irkutsk train station, I will be with Abby and Laurel... Abby and Laurel, I’m afraid you’re about tied on my list with “speaking English.” Sorry. “Being in Helsink,” in specific, doesn’t seem to have made it to the list; I haven’t really distinguished it in my mind as a specific destination, it’s just “not Russia.” I told V.P. Abby’s prize fact about Helsinki, that it is the most northern city with a metro. I don’t think she showed the required level of impressedness. But then V.P. is hard to impress. The fact that she didn’t throw up her hands and say “normal!” as she often does is a good sign; maybe interiorly she was seized with jealousy that I will soon be seeing this Great Metro of the North.
Agh, I keep being annoyed about the horrible train station again. I shouldn’t complain too much about it, because I personally didn’t have to do that much, I just sort of pretended to be involved when Elizabeth did the majority of the dealing with the unhelpful railroad employees (she’ll be on the train with us from Kazan to Irkutsk). My only real contribution was failing to write Abby’s name down in the accepted last name- first name- patronymic order, and this failure cost me over $20. Abby, this is all your fault for not being named “Elena” or “Natalia” or “Alexandra” like everyone else in the country. 511 rubles... as our good friend Guy Clark says,
“I wish I had a dime... for every baaaaaad tiiiiiiiiime,
but the bad times always seem to keep the change.”
Learned in Baikal Studies that the mink is a “killing machine.” Who knew. They eat squirrels, which are approximately the size of minks, themselves. I would like to appreciate the mink for their control of the squirrel population, but I am more grossed out by dead squirrels than live ones. We probably learned other interesting things in Baikal Studies as well- we usually do- but I don’t remember them.
In History of Siberia we learned various things that I thought were very interesting at the time, but then I realized were only interesting if you live in Irkutsk. Like were the statue of Alexander III came from, and which group of Polish prisoners built the church that is now the Organ Hall, and that the 1912 demonstrations on the Lena river in which 250 peacefully demonstrating workers were shot and killed by their employers (whence Lenin’s name) occurred in the Irkutsk oblast.
Have train tickets from Petersburg to Kazan, from Kazan to Novosibirsk, from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk. Woo hoo. Now that I’ve partially gotten over the nightmare of buying the tickets, I’m excited. What I am most excited about, though, is going to Helsinki. I will be a tourist, making not even the barest attempt at cultural assimilation, I will be speaking English, there will not be the Irkutsk train station, I will be with Abby and Laurel... Abby and Laurel, I’m afraid you’re about tied on my list with “speaking English.” Sorry. “Being in Helsink,” in specific, doesn’t seem to have made it to the list; I haven’t really distinguished it in my mind as a specific destination, it’s just “not Russia.” I told V.P. Abby’s prize fact about Helsinki, that it is the most northern city with a metro. I don’t think she showed the required level of impressedness. But then V.P. is hard to impress. The fact that she didn’t throw up her hands and say “normal!” as she often does is a good sign; maybe interiorly she was seized with jealousy that I will soon be seeing this Great Metro of the North.
Agh, I keep being annoyed about the horrible train station again. I shouldn’t complain too much about it, because I personally didn’t have to do that much, I just sort of pretended to be involved when Elizabeth did the majority of the dealing with the unhelpful railroad employees (she’ll be on the train with us from Kazan to Irkutsk). My only real contribution was failing to write Abby’s name down in the accepted last name- first name- patronymic order, and this failure cost me over $20. Abby, this is all your fault for not being named “Elena” or “Natalia” or “Alexandra” like everyone else in the country. 511 rubles... as our good friend Guy Clark says,
“I wish I had a dime... for every baaaaaad tiiiiiiiiime,
but the bad times always seem to keep the change.”
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Items of Note:
Dec. 4
1) Kiosks are decorated for New Years. This combines two of my favorite things: holiday decorations, especially on an overdone, tasteless, and colorful scale; and kiosks. The prize for the best decorated kiosk goes to the ice cream kiosk on Lenin St., near Pizza Domino. It has a whole window covered in pictures of ornaments and flashing lights, and is quite festive-looking indeed. However, I must admit that I am prejudiced in favor of this particular kiosk, as the nicest woman in Irkutsk works there, so any other Irkutskians reading this can feel free to conduct their own research and get back to me.
2) Speaking of ice cream. When Sasha, V.P.’s 10-year-old granddaughter, came to the house this evening, she brought with her an ice-cream cone she had bought for me. I personally consider this to be on the list of sweetest things ever done. Even if it was probably really to bribe me to play Marble Blast Gold on my laptop with her.
3) I’m watching the news, more to improve my feel for the rhythm of spoken Russian than from any real hope for gathering any information about the events of the day. They just showed this huge police raid in Krasnoyarsk, where the camo-clad police officers knocked down a huge door, rushed in with automatic weapons, and found... a bunch of backgammon tables set out for playing. What?! Is backgammon illegal in Krasnoyarsk? Is backgammon a well-known leisure activity of narcotic rings? I am quite confused. Unfortunately, I understood this story better than pretty much any of the others broadcast today. Now some soldiers are wandering about an airport in bright red camo. This seems a bit paradoxical to me, but I guess the Russians know their own military business. Hah! Now they’re talking about Живой Журнал! That means Live Journal. And I understand that. Wait... I didn't really know what Live Journal was in English. Damn. Well, they're saying that in Russia more people use «ЖЖ» than in any European country, and almost more than in the US. This is silly. I'm turning off the news, Putin's already killed all the real journalists.
4) I think I have developed a racial prejudice against Russians. When I see a person clearly not of Russian birth, I automatically assume that that person will be more friendly, polite, and generally superior the Russians around him or her. Today on my marshrutka-ride home, a Chinese girl got in beside me in the front seat (marshrutkas generally seat two people next to the driver, and if you are the person in the middle, as I always end up being, you spend the whole time feeling that you are seriously impeding the working of the stickshift) and in the process knocked her head on the door frame. Now, if this girl had been a Russian, she would have either: a) cursed loudly at the driver for installing such an inconvenient doorframe of b) proudly pretended that nothing had happened and not acknowledged the existence of anyone else in the marshrutka. But this girl was of the genetically superior Chinese race, so instead she caught my eye and we laughed at the amusing incident.
5) I just remembered: a few days ago, when Sasha saw that I was working on a paper, she asked me, «Where are you copying it from?» I don't think she actually meant to imply that I was cheating, that's just her conception of schoolwork, that you find information somewhere and then rewrite it. My appreciation for institutions encouraging original thought is now considerably higher than when I was actually surrounded by those institutions.
6) Why can't I have short, stately and magestic blog posts like Laurel? Maybe because Laurel actually does her schoolwork instead of procrastinating by pretending to have cultural insights and then making her friends and relations read about them.
7) I just attempted an actual productive, academic activity: looking up the spelling of the Russian word for 'felt' for my Buryat paper. But I was immediately distracted by the fact that the Russian word for 'felt-tip pen' is 'flo-master.' With the stress on the second syllable.
8) The lucky ducks (I mean, unfortunate students who will miss out on another semester of language development and increased cultural appreciation) who are doing home after this semester got informational handouts from Middlebury about «reverse culture shock». My favorite advice involved supermarkets; apparently Middlebury fears that our shock at well-stocked grocery store isles will put us in danger of being locked up in a mental ward, or, alternately, make us fat. Especially odd was the advice not to use «controlled susbstances, especially beginning with 'm' and ending with 'a' before going to the grocery store for the first time. Has there been a specific instance of this, forcing Middlebury to take preventative action by warning us now? I don't know whether I'm more curious about the desire to smoke pot to enhance one's grocery-buying experience or about the typical results when high, fresh-from-Russia youths hit the bread aisle. I am considering e-mailing the Moscow office and asking- saying that if I don't hear about the results second-hand, I'm in danger of my curiousity forcing me to try the experiment myself. Wait. I just figured it out. People who are high are very hungry. In a horrible combination of the munchies and hyper-active, long-repressed consumarism, the army of 21-year-olds will buy up every carton of ice cream in Hanniford's, leaving a community devestated and thirsting for revenge.
It occurs to me that some of you may now fear, based on the long-winded and scattered quality of my blogging, that I have in fact taken to the use of controlled subtances myself. I haven't. But if Katya and Nastya sing that song whose chorus includes the words «чем виже любовь, тем ниже поцелуем» (hopefully not the real words) one more time, I may have to resort to chemical means. It's that or the chainsaw.
Dec. 5
9) I'm sort of depressed that the semester is over and I still can't speak Russian. I'm sort of depressed about my lack of knowledge in general, really. We went over our answers from our test in Baikal Studies today. And we had an unannounced test thing in our mainstream.
10) I'm going to attempt to mail New Years cards. If you get an alarming, brightly colored envelope in the mail, and it looks like it will contain coupons to a department store sale, it may be from me. Or maybe the Russian postal service will consider these envelopes too ridiculous to mail. We'll have to see.
11) I have never spent so much time in a post office. But the platinum-blond postal workers were very calm about spending 15 minutes putting stamps on my letters. They didn't yell at anyone, either, the whole time I was there. It was sort of amazing.
1) Kiosks are decorated for New Years. This combines two of my favorite things: holiday decorations, especially on an overdone, tasteless, and colorful scale; and kiosks. The prize for the best decorated kiosk goes to the ice cream kiosk on Lenin St., near Pizza Domino. It has a whole window covered in pictures of ornaments and flashing lights, and is quite festive-looking indeed. However, I must admit that I am prejudiced in favor of this particular kiosk, as the nicest woman in Irkutsk works there, so any other Irkutskians reading this can feel free to conduct their own research and get back to me.
2) Speaking of ice cream. When Sasha, V.P.’s 10-year-old granddaughter, came to the house this evening, she brought with her an ice-cream cone she had bought for me. I personally consider this to be on the list of sweetest things ever done. Even if it was probably really to bribe me to play Marble Blast Gold on my laptop with her.
3) I’m watching the news, more to improve my feel for the rhythm of spoken Russian than from any real hope for gathering any information about the events of the day. They just showed this huge police raid in Krasnoyarsk, where the camo-clad police officers knocked down a huge door, rushed in with automatic weapons, and found... a bunch of backgammon tables set out for playing. What?! Is backgammon illegal in Krasnoyarsk? Is backgammon a well-known leisure activity of narcotic rings? I am quite confused. Unfortunately, I understood this story better than pretty much any of the others broadcast today. Now some soldiers are wandering about an airport in bright red camo. This seems a bit paradoxical to me, but I guess the Russians know their own military business. Hah! Now they’re talking about Живой Журнал! That means Live Journal. And I understand that. Wait... I didn't really know what Live Journal was in English. Damn. Well, they're saying that in Russia more people use «ЖЖ» than in any European country, and almost more than in the US. This is silly. I'm turning off the news, Putin's already killed all the real journalists.
4) I think I have developed a racial prejudice against Russians. When I see a person clearly not of Russian birth, I automatically assume that that person will be more friendly, polite, and generally superior the Russians around him or her. Today on my marshrutka-ride home, a Chinese girl got in beside me in the front seat (marshrutkas generally seat two people next to the driver, and if you are the person in the middle, as I always end up being, you spend the whole time feeling that you are seriously impeding the working of the stickshift) and in the process knocked her head on the door frame. Now, if this girl had been a Russian, she would have either: a) cursed loudly at the driver for installing such an inconvenient doorframe of b) proudly pretended that nothing had happened and not acknowledged the existence of anyone else in the marshrutka. But this girl was of the genetically superior Chinese race, so instead she caught my eye and we laughed at the amusing incident.
5) I just remembered: a few days ago, when Sasha saw that I was working on a paper, she asked me, «Where are you copying it from?» I don't think she actually meant to imply that I was cheating, that's just her conception of schoolwork, that you find information somewhere and then rewrite it. My appreciation for institutions encouraging original thought is now considerably higher than when I was actually surrounded by those institutions.
6) Why can't I have short, stately and magestic blog posts like Laurel? Maybe because Laurel actually does her schoolwork instead of procrastinating by pretending to have cultural insights and then making her friends and relations read about them.
7) I just attempted an actual productive, academic activity: looking up the spelling of the Russian word for 'felt' for my Buryat paper. But I was immediately distracted by the fact that the Russian word for 'felt-tip pen' is 'flo-master.' With the stress on the second syllable.
8) The lucky ducks (I mean, unfortunate students who will miss out on another semester of language development and increased cultural appreciation) who are doing home after this semester got informational handouts from Middlebury about «reverse culture shock». My favorite advice involved supermarkets; apparently Middlebury fears that our shock at well-stocked grocery store isles will put us in danger of being locked up in a mental ward, or, alternately, make us fat. Especially odd was the advice not to use «controlled susbstances, especially beginning with 'm' and ending with 'a' before going to the grocery store for the first time. Has there been a specific instance of this, forcing Middlebury to take preventative action by warning us now? I don't know whether I'm more curious about the desire to smoke pot to enhance one's grocery-buying experience or about the typical results when high, fresh-from-Russia youths hit the bread aisle. I am considering e-mailing the Moscow office and asking- saying that if I don't hear about the results second-hand, I'm in danger of my curiousity forcing me to try the experiment myself. Wait. I just figured it out. People who are high are very hungry. In a horrible combination of the munchies and hyper-active, long-repressed consumarism, the army of 21-year-olds will buy up every carton of ice cream in Hanniford's, leaving a community devestated and thirsting for revenge.
It occurs to me that some of you may now fear, based on the long-winded and scattered quality of my blogging, that I have in fact taken to the use of controlled subtances myself. I haven't. But if Katya and Nastya sing that song whose chorus includes the words «чем виже любовь, тем ниже поцелуем» (hopefully not the real words) one more time, I may have to resort to chemical means. It's that or the chainsaw.
Dec. 5
9) I'm sort of depressed that the semester is over and I still can't speak Russian. I'm sort of depressed about my lack of knowledge in general, really. We went over our answers from our test in Baikal Studies today. And we had an unannounced test thing in our mainstream.
10) I'm going to attempt to mail New Years cards. If you get an alarming, brightly colored envelope in the mail, and it looks like it will contain coupons to a department store sale, it may be from me. Or maybe the Russian postal service will consider these envelopes too ridiculous to mail. We'll have to see.
11) I have never spent so much time in a post office. But the platinum-blond postal workers were very calm about spending 15 minutes putting stamps on my letters. They didn't yell at anyone, either, the whole time I was there. It was sort of amazing.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
What you've all been waiting for
This is ridiculously long, so I divided it into parts and pretended that solved the problem. You still shouldn’t attempt it in one sitting.
Part 1, in which my disjointed thoughts generally involve winter
Reading public, I think you will be hearing a lot from me in the next week or so, because I have 3 papers due soon. And that means procrastination time. As I have no flash drive anymore, however, you may be waiting awhile to actually read this.
Outside the window of our usual classroom in the International Department is a blacktop, where some middle school (I think) has gym class sometimes, while we sit through less interesting classes. Usually they play soccer. Sometimes they try to play basketball in the snow, which is very entertaining. This week, however, they skied. Seriously, they just skied around in circles around the blacktop. It looked very challenging.
I’m having a very hard time figuring out what I’m supposed to cite and what not, in the writing of these papers. As I mentioned earlier, Russians don’t seem too big on the whole idea of intellectual property. Never having read or written a Russian student paper, however, I can’t figure out the level at which it is acceptable to just recopy what one reads. I fear that I will return to the United States and have forgotten American academic standards and try to tell my professors that I, you know, changed a few words from what I copied, so it wasn’t really plagiarism. And then I will be expelled and, as Laurel would say, grow old with cats.
My other academic complaint of the moment is that Russian books don’t seem to usually have indexes.
It’s after Thanksgiving, which means I may listen to Christmas music. I thought this was much more exciting before I realized that I don’t have any Christmas music, other than “Christmastime’s a-comin’.” I do have various winter-themed songs, but they are almost all depressing. I guess this is sort of fitting for a Siberian winter. Maybe by the end of this winter I will figure out what the heck the song “Humidity Built the Snowman” means. You won’t find me walkin’ around your part of town; humidity build the snowman, sunshine brought him down.
New Year’s decorations are gradually appearing in Irkutsk, in the form of the giant plastic banners of the type used to congratulate the citizenry on all public holidays. I wonder if the city will get any more decorated. Private citizens do not decorate, apparently, just government agencies and businesses. I suggested to Nastya that it would be pretty if everyone decorated their balconies; she told me that that would be very silly, because no one does that. Can’t argue with that logic. I heard some New Year’s music on the omnipresent kitchen radio last night. I can’t believe these people think that Santa Claus comes on Dec. 31. By that time he’s already given all the good presents to children in countries with less of a history of repression of religion. Actually I don’t know whether Grandfather Frost came to Russia before 1917, and if he did for what holiday. I guess if he did pre-date the Communists he may have come on Orthodox Christmas, whose date I don’t remember but which I gather is in January. So, if they would have had the foresight to have a government with a less atheistic agenda, coupled with a church with a less stubborn insistence on the Julian calendar...
Part 2, in which my disjointed thoughts turn to more abstract cultural issues, plus Blues Clues and the fashion choices of drunks on the bus
Were you to have been a person involved in religious politics of 16th century Russia, would you have been a Possessor or a Nonpossessor? Think carefully before answering. It is much cooler to be a Nonpossessor, but perhaps more easily said than done. Plus you lose, in the end. Unless you are Nil Sorsky, in which case you get canonized, finally, in the 20th century, but by that time Joseph Volokolansky has been lording it over you for 4 centuries. And it’s too bad of the Possessors to burn people at the stake, really, and their emphasis on the externals of worship and conduct probably brought about the schism of the next century, but don’t you agree that the Church should take some part in the social and political life of the country, instead of encouraging everyone to go be a hermit? Double-space your answer.
I made very good mashed potatoes last night. At least I think they are very good. But I’m having doubts, now, as to the reliability of my taste. I’m so accustomed to the fat/sweet taste divide, to those being the only two available flavors, that I am afraid that I either 1) put way too much garlic and black pepper in these potatoes to compensate for the usual flavorlessness of food or 2) hardly put any garlic and pepper in them and only think that the resulting dish is flavorful. This is a matter of great concern to me. What will happen when I go back home- what if I don’t like the food anymore? Or become one of those weird people who dump hot sauce on everything? This is tied to my more general concern about the reverse culture shock that I can already tell will be intense when I get home. It seems a little early to be worrying about this, but as each day goes by I am more and more accustomed to the basic realities of Irkutsk life. It’s not that I can identify concrete things that I will miss, or that I can think of any reason to be attached to these streets and skies and snows; it’s just the basic shapes that form this world, the tones and textures, are every moment further internalized, in a way that has nothing to do with whether I like them or not. And I remember what a stressful jolt it was to be wrenched from the American shapes and tones to the Russian ones in the first place. ‘Jolt’ isn’t a good word- it is what the Russians would refer to as an однократный глалол- unsuggestive of length of process.
I saw a few minutes of Blues Clues the other day, dubbed into Russian by a less-than-enthusiastic voice-over. It was pretty silly (I mean aside from any endemic silliness of Blue’s Clues) – most of the point of the show is the little jingles and songs and such, and unimaginative, direct translation did little for the rhythm. Most objectionable, however, is that the offstage children’s voices that yell the right answers to various questions to Steve address him with the formal ‘you.’ No, unacceptable. Steve routinely requires the help of 4-year-olds to aid him in the solving of riddles posed to him by his two-dimensional puppy. He does not get to be вы.
Do any men in America wear fur jackets or coats? Probably not. I no longer find it at all ridiculous here- today on the bus I was much admiring the beautiful black fur jacket (mink?) of the man standing in front of me, but when I tried to imagine such a jacket being worn in Middlebury, or Frederick, I just couldn't. I don't understand fashion. I also really like those brown leather jackets, when they're all old and broken in, and look like the guy is wearing a bunch of old footballs around. An old drunk on this same bus was wearing such a jacket. I was very entertained listening to him annoy the self-important middle-aged women behind me.
Part 3, on academic subjects
11/29, or as the Russians would say, 29/11
morning
I can't believe I ever complained about writing papers in America. There was a library within walking distance, and it was open 'til 1 in the morning, and there were books there, and the books were in a comprehensible language. And I had 24-hour internet access; that was pretty key. And I could actually communicate in the language that the papers were to be written in. This is a disaster. What happens if I just fail all my classes? It's not really a propitoius time of year to run away into the taiga.
evening
Test in Baikal Studies today. I apparently don't know much about Baikal. It was a pretty funny test though. For one thing it was written in exactly the style in which Pavel Alexandrovich speaks- an overly-scientific, official diction and grammer that for some reason I find very amusing. And then he had tried to put in funny options on the multiple choice, which were often just bizarre. Where does permanently frozen material occur? a) at the bottommost depths of Lake Baikal b) under the ground of the northern taiga in Siberia c) at the top of the Sayana mountains, south of Baikal d) in the expanses of outerspace.
Part 4, in which holidays are revisited
I asked today about the history of D'yed Moroz (Grandfather Frost, looks and behaves like Santa Claus). I was told that 1) New Years became a holiday under Peter the Great, and he was the one who started the Yolka (like Christmas tree but for New Years) thing; before Peter the Russians considered the New Year to begin in September, which sort of makes sense actually 2) D'yed Moroz didn't show up until the eras of Soviets and of cartoons, so he was never a Christmas character 3) the Orthodox Church doesn't really have any desire to link this ridiculous character, or the pagan character of Snyegurachka (the Snow Maiden) to church holidays of any kind 4) St. Nicolaus would be hard to link to any winter holiday, because he is already too closely associated with the water to pick up double duty as a reindeer handler.
I went to Web Ugol today (despite my residing anger at their stealing of my flash drive) and spent vast sums of money printing out articles about Buryats (Siberian history) and about the activities of the Orthodox Church, in relation to the Russian government, in the 16th century (Russian history, or, as the course is actually titled, Fatherland history). [I had been thinking, all through the process of the history paper, how much I wished I had brough Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church, and what should I find today, but that some excellent person has put said book on the internet. So I read the appropriate pages. And now I feel informed.] The fact that I paid for these pages of text is making me feel like I should read them. Plus, of course, the fact that I now have less than a week to write about them.
I was asked recently whether Americans celebrate New Years. I wasn't sure how to explain the relationship between New Years and Americans. I guess it's a nice reason for a party, and it provides a sense of new beginnings, but we don't send each other cards, and we are not that upset if we don't get around to celebrating it; it seems like an optional holiday. The only New Years I remember are 1) that totally ridiculous time Jack and I stayed up to see what happened on Animal Crossing at midnight (not much- some confetti fell) 2) one time at Gammie's house when Hailey came over and we watched movies and ate popcorn until the ball fell in New York; then Hailey and I stayed up and read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe until the arrival of midnight in the time zone in which we actually were 3) babysitting one year, for some fairly large group of girls; we made «New Year's sundays» and ate them on the stroke of midnight 4) the year 2000 when there was a First Night thing in Frederick, and it seemed like they hadn't quite come up with enough activities for the residents dutifully roaming the downtown streets for 4 hours, but everyone still seems to have the buttons (or pins? what do we call those things that you pin onto your clothing?) 5) that was all, but I just heard the song «Rollin' and a Ramblin' (the death of Hank Williams)» and I remembered that last year Mama and I watched a Prairie Home Companion special on PBS and somone sang that song. And Emmylou Harris sang also, in silver cowboy boots. And Brad Paisley or someone like that had to show Garrison Keeler around Nashville, and his practiced TV charm somehow just didn't work at all when it ran up against G.K., and he was clearly very confused.
I'm very excited about New Years this year. Abby and I will probably be in St. Petersburg. I have no idea what we'll do, but I hope we get to watch Ironia Sud'by on tv.
Part 5, on identity
Today in History of Siberia we discussed the words used to describe members of national groups and of citizens of governments. They are often different words in Russian; the word 'rooskii,' for example means 'relating the the Russian nationality;' it is used for the Russian language, and for ethnic Russians. Then there is the word 'rossiski'; it means 'relating to the Russian Federation,' and can be used for members of non-Russian national groups with Russian citizenship. Real people (not in government) don't use this word very often, but I notice that Radio Rossiya is making a big push for it; every day there is this segment called «Ya- Rocciyanin» in which someone tells a touching story about how Russia is so happily multinational. So, I had known about this Rooski-Rossiski division, but I only found out a couple of days ago that the word that I considered to mean «German» as in «relating to Germany» actually means «relating to the German ethnic group, whatever that means, and including most Swiss and Austrians». I found this out when my host sister used a totally different word to refer to beer from Germany (I'm not sure why she didn't consider the beer to be ethnically German). I asked about this is class, and we began a confusing discussion of these terms. Finally Elena Nicholaevna said «Yes, no matter where we live, I am a Russian, of the Russian people, and you will be...» She looked at us in confusion. «Well, what are you?»
We told her that Americans are a country without nation. This makes very little sense in English; what we said is that we didn't have «narod,» this very key but somewhat untranslatable Russian word that means something like 'ethnic group' but is often used to mean 'people' in general, or 'the populace. Is this true, that we don't have a narod? Russians, I don't think, would consider 'American' to be narod, as we demonstratably came from various other narodi, and you can't just change narod. But we do lots of things that narodi do: we make up theories about our 'national character,' we eat sort of similar food, we dress pretty much alike (actually not, but our differences in food and dress are not deliniated along distinguishable nationalistic lines, just social and economic ones), and, most importantly, we speak the same language (ignore the fact that this isn't quite true; people who can be easily grouped into a narod other than 'American' are irrelevant to this discussion).
This language point is obviously very interesting to me at the moment. Is language the only truly important determanent of cultural affinity? Nastya, my host sister, told me that the word I thought meant 'resident of England' actually includes me and is the name of a narod. I don't think everyone agrees with this, or Elena Nicholaevna wouldn't have been so confused about coming up with a label for us. But it's still interesting. I noticed, while I was here, that when I hear about the involvement of England or Great Brittain in world history, I feel like England is «my side.» I'm affronted when they get cheated, and mildly triumphant when they win things. I don't remember whether I felt like this in America, and this is a result of some cultural transference through the American educational system, or whether this affiinity with people who speak my language is new, a result of being thrown among all these Russian-speakers. I remember Dadda telling me one time that the wonderful thing about learning a language is that you automatically inherit its linguistic tradition: anyone who learns English has just as much connection to Shakespeare as an Englishman. Or maybe he said something completely different, but that's what I got out of it. Anyway, I think that it's pretty much true; being able to read the words written by another person is a very, very important link with that person's world and self. But does this translate to the entire culture connected to the learned language? If I learn Russian well enough, will I turn into a Russian? I'm not sure how I feel about that.
I've sort of read everything I have to read for this history paper. The actual writing of the first sentence, however, is proving to be a problem.
Dec. 30
Addendum to narod story. Today we sat down in grammer class, and the first thing Elena Miletovna said was «Sonya, what kind of blood do you have, English or German?» I said I didn't know, and great incredulity was expressed; apparently it is totally impossible that I am wholly unware of where my family is from, everyone knows that. Is that true? I know that many of the students in my middle school and high school were very proud of being «50% Irish, 10% German, 10% Latvian, 12% Brazillian, and .2% Cherokee» or some such ridiculous thing, but I am fairly sure that these students were in the distinct minority, and I assumed that they would grow out of caring in a few years. It still seems rather silly to me; national identity seems like a totally self-invented designation to me, and I refuse to believe that cultural traits are transmitted by blood, or by any process but cultural assimilation. I think all recent scientific findings are completley against me on this, but no matter. It just seems to me that people's connection to the history of any group is totally deturmined by identification with that history, and maybe by the fact of living in a world created by that history, not by genetic link. But maybe my lack of interest in geneology is unusual? I'm starting to think that maybe it is. Anyway, I eventually told Elena Miletovna that my grandmother's family was originally from Scotland, which made her happy, and then she told us that it was a good thing I wasn't from Germany, because German girls are not very pretty. Um, thanks? Later in the class we had our usual discussion about how much better it would be if I «painted my eyes.»
Part 6, in which I pedantically discuss the events occuring in my room at the time it was written; entirely in order to avoid doing work
later
Arg. Katya just asked if I wanted her to wash my clothes. I had to say I had done laundry 2 days ago, so no. I couldn't very well go pulling all my supposedly clean clothes off the shelf. But here is why this is very annoying: of course I didn't really wash them, I somehow just ran much of the color out of them in boiling water, with little actual contact with soap. I have no idea how I am so incompetent at washing-machine use, but this washing machine is evil. More importantly, this means that Katya now thinks I know how to use the washing machine, and I have no hope of clean clothing, ever.
In other news, I have written a paragraph of paper. This is going to take a while. Even though I am using 14 font and double spacing and have also slightly increased margin size. How is Abby writing a 20-page paper? I guess she started at a much more responsibly early date. But I have two 10-page papers, plus a 4-page one, so I might win, because I had to research 3 different topics. I guess this is why American professors demand word rather than page production. I don't think «word production» counts as idiomatic English. Will you all still speak to me if I come home having forgotten my native tongue (but not really developed fluency in any other one)?
Also, do you think this can be my job? Sitting around writing whatever I'm already thinking about? It seems like there are some people who get away with getting paid for that sort of thing, but they have generally earned some sort of legitimacy by doing something more useful in earlier life, like writing works of best-selling fiction or being an investigative journalist or famous sports figure. Those things all sound like too much work. Know what I don't want to be my job? Writting 10-page papers in Russian about church-state relations is 16th-century Russia. My lack of actual information is leading to a very ridiculous stretching of what I have into sentences as long as possible. The one I just wrote, for instance, translates to: «Metropolitan Peter at the beginning of the 14th century preparted for the transferrence of the metropolitan office from Vladimir to Moscow, and under Metropolitan Pheogtost [I know the name sounds impossible, but that's what the book said] in 1326 Moscow became the center of Russian Orthodox administrative affairs and of dogmatic normalization.» Except that it's probably all spelled wrong.
Part 7, in which it is December first
Wow, it's December. I must have been here for a long time. Also, the elections are tomorrow, which is sort of too bad, because it will mean that campaign season will be over; the fascist youths striding fresh-faced through the city with their Putin flags are a very cheerying element among the bleak snows. Okay, I guess Putin doesn't count as a fascist, and I guess that's not very funny, since the real fascists in St. Petersburg tend to do un-funny things like kill foreigners. But seriously, I do like all the colorful political campaigners all over the city, and they're all very friendly and cheerful and colorful. And they give you amusing newspapers to read. The real tragedy of the end of election season, is that the LDPR ads will be gone from radio and television. The LDPR is the communist party, but I don't know what it stands for, or why it's running and not the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation). The LDPR ads are very, very awesome. The chief candidate, whose name escapes me, just yells things, basically, in very short, almost grammerless sentences, in a gruff, frightening bark. «Power back to the people! Life was better! More money for bread! Vote LDPR! Number 7! 7! Lucky Number! 7 days in the week! Sunday! The future of your family! LDPR! LDPR! LDPR!» I guess it would be alarming except that the rest of the country has also noticed that he is crazy, and the party is currently poling at 16% or something. Surprisingly, Djoros Alfyodor (I am positive I didn't translate that right), this Nobel-Prize-winning physicist of whom I have only heard spoken with great admiration, as he builds all sorts of admirable schools for the nation's youth and whatnot, is also on the Communist ticket. I mean, he must be somewhat smart. And I have read the material distributed to me by the Communist campaigners, and a smart person would not read it and say, «Yeah! This makes total sense! Listing lots of unfulfilled economic goals from 1950 as if they were the actual economic situation of the country at that tiime, and then comparing them with the current economic reality, is a great way to make conclusions about the effectiveness of different economic policies! Also, I am totally convinced by this cartoon of a capitalist who looks like the guy in monopoly trying to drag that upstanding worker into a pit of repression, despite the fact that I have never seen a single Russian who looks like either of those figures!» I can only assume that Alfyodor is so apalled by the Putin administration that he threw in his lot with the only party he thought had a chance of beating them. I can't totally blame him; I know that Abby is now a Putin fan, but I am very creeped out by the omni-present United Russia raging bear. We will have to read Abby's 20-page paper about the party to find any real information about them, because I have not bothered to be informed; all I know is that I find it very suspitious that their campaign posters are all over what I would consider to be public and governmental space, such as above all the water fountains in the state university's library. And how much of their campaign centers around that message that «this is a democracy! It's very important that we all vote! Every voice is important!» when we know that Putin considers some voices to be so important that he has them killed or locked away in jail. Also, having almost all one's campaign posters be on the «go out and vote!» theme shows a sort of startling confidence that everyone who votes will vote for you. But whenever I start wishing that United Russia would somehow lose, the LDPR starts yelling like a crazy person, and I just give up on Russian politics as all the Russians seem to have done.
later
I'm being very productive right now, so I will not tell you the story of my afternoon, but only say before I forg: this evening Sasha, V.P.'s granddaughter, was sitting in the kitchen while Katya was frying some meat, as she asked «кто это?» when she wanted to know what kind of meat it is. This translates to «who is that?» It was so awesome. It makes sense, because in Russian everything living is 'who' and not 'what,' but when the 'who' was sitting in a frying pan it was very funny, but I think only to me. No one knew the answer, by the way, to her question. Who knows what we ate.
Part 8, in which it is still December first but I felt like I had to break it up; cabbages make an appearance
even later
In the middle of the afternoon today I was called away from my pained paper-writing for various cabbage-related activities in the kitchen; then V.P. decided that there was no way we could salt all the cabbage, because we didn't have enough buckets. We had already made Tatiana take one bag away, but now we decided to take another bag to V.P.'s sister, who lives in an old wooden house in the old wooden house district. The mesh bags that these cabbages are transported in are pretty useless, being made more of holes (not the ones meant to be in the mesh but larger-than-cabbage holes) that of material, so there were cabbages rolling all over the apartment building, and then I had to crouch on the curb holding the bag together and then several stray cabbages in my hands while V.P. fetched the new red car so she could make everyone mad by parking in the middle of the street while we loaded cabbages into it. Lots of people stared at me in the crouching-on-the-curb stage of the operation. Driving to Ludmilla's house was even more interesting. I don't think V.P. understands that you can look in your mirrors as you drive, or that backing up often requires looking behind you, and we would often have conversations such as «Susanna, can I turn around here?» «Can you turn around in the middle of an intersection? No.» «Can I turn left?» «No, there's a red light.» But we eventually got there all in one piece. I really liked Ludmilla's apartment in the wooden house; I think wooden houses are lower on the housing hierarchy than «modern» apartments, as they have no running water or indoor plumbing, but it was very comfortable and clean and classy-looking inside. I think I would take wooden floorboards over running water, but I guess it would be rather a lot of trouble in the winter to fetch the buckets of water from the street.
After the cabbage was delivered we went to a preschool Advent party. It was the first time I had been to a preschool Advent party. It was pretty awesome. Apparently there's some cheesy German fable about a priest or monk or something out in a remote village, and a snowstorm, and a little snake with lights all over its back who tells him that if little children do good deeds Christmas will be brighter... I was not paying that much attention to the story-telling phase of the event, as it was in that insufferable tone that made childrens' sermans such a humiliating experience. Anyway, then we sang solemn Advent songs (there's even a specific song about preschoolers waiting for Christmas, it seems) as the children one by one walked through an evergreen arch and into this big, pretty spiral on the floor made of evergreen boughs and such, a apple-with-a-candle-in-it in hand. They lit their candles in the center of the maze and placed them at various points along the evergreen «snake». It sort of took forever, and I was positive that at any moment a preschooler would kick over a candle and we would all go up in flame, but it really was all very pretty, and it was sweet how solemnly they processed, and watched their classmates. I was told that this was a holiday celebrated only in preschools.
Part 9, in which it is: Dec. 2 (my half-birthday) (Chelsea Powell's birthday) (the half-birthays of that kid Jeffery Huggins from KinderKare and of Miss Mary the Jamaican cook) (Election day in Russia)
I'm afraid the history professor is going to be insulted by this paper. I realized that I'm basically saying that the Russian Orthodox Church spent the first half of the 16th century buying the priviledge of owning huge tracts of land and entire villages and thousands of peasants and such at the cost of being shameless flattering snakes and giving up all real independence. Huh. Maybe the grammer will be so bad she won't notice.
Oh man. Katya and Nastya are loudly singing various pop songs in the other song, mostly awful, but they just started singing.... черный кот! If only they knew that they were joining the illustrious company of historical Chorniy Kot singers, and what a great honor it was to be singing the same song that was once sung on the McCoullough stage by none other than Tatiana Eduardovna Smorodenskaya, with accompanying dance. Oh, how I wish I could be at Middlebury International Karioke (sp?) again. No one will ever be as cool as Tatiana.
I have various questions about the cedar. Last year I decided that one of my goals in life is to be able to identify trees, and so far I have made no progress. And it is because of confusing things like the so-called cedar- who can keep up with these things? Irkutskians are always talking about how they're so cool because they have so many cedars, and cedars are useful for everything, and poor families can survive the winter on the cedar (burning the wood and eating the nuts), but I have yet to identify one. All the trees just look like pines to me. I have done limited research on the cedar, and have discovered: there is no cedar! Cedars are complete posers, as far as I can tell! I feel deceived. It seems that there are two kinds of cedars: ones who are actually pines, and ones who are actually cypress. And not all cypress are cypress: the bald cypress is actually a sequoia. What?! I assume that the 'cedars' here are of the pine variety, since they look exactly like pines, but who started calling all these trees the same thing? I am now looking at a picture from World Book Encyclopedia of a cypress swamp in Delaware, and those trees look nothing like the ones here. But now I'm even more confused, because people here talk about «pine» too. Are those different?
Part 10, last and I would say least
Dec. 3
Monday, so no class- but I was at the Mezhfak anyway, from a combination of a great need to escape the apartment and the need for further research for my remaining papers. Joseph was there, typing his History of Siberia paper; the highpoint of the day was when he silently pointed out to me that the girl at the computer next to him was in the process of buying a paper online. Even if I were to be dishonest enough to buy a paper, there is no way my teachers would ever believe I wrote a paper with even the most elemental grammatical cohesiveness.
discovery: The «soothing, cooling, refreshing» quality of Burt's Bees lip balm advertised on the container is less than enjoyable when accidently applied to one's eye. Avoid this. Actually it could sort of a good idea if you're falling asleep in class. Well, maybe not. You would be very awake, but possibly unable to see any visual materials- chalkboard, powerpoint, etc.- presented by the teacher, due to your hopefully-temporary blindness. Back to reading about the repression of Buryat Buddhism. Now I wish I were a student in a secret lamanist school of the 1950s. I bet students in secret schools pay a lot of attention and highly value their education. Not like me in my studies at the Mezhkak. Certainly not like the Russian students, well, anywhere, as far as I can tell. Maybe they should tell the little twirps in my history class that they are now forbidden from studying history, but anyone who really wants to [whisper] can join the new underground university being organized by the political opposition. Then the mp3 players might go away.
Did you know that Bandito-hambo-lami is a word, in Russian at least? It is. It means 'Bandito-hambo lamas.' I don't actually know what that means. Or what the plural of 'lama' is in English.
As much as a pain as these papers are, and as bad as the actual product is, I'm glad I have to do them. In the course of my rather-limited research I have read some actual academic articles, intended for an informed and interested audience, with arguable theses and well-organized arguments. Even though they are a lot of work to understand, they are much, much more fun to read than my History of Siberia for 7th Graders textbook, or the awful Let's Compare Cultural Stereotypes!-type thing we always read for speach practice. I actually feel like a college student, reading them, and I don't mean in an I'm-too-good-for-7th-grade-textbooks sense; I mean, this is the reason we're supposed to be interested in the academic process, I assume, because the pursuit of knowledge is challenging and polemical and inspires many intelligent people to produce the best work they can in its service. I think this is the real reason the kids in my Russian history class are totally uninterested in comparison to my classmates at Middlebury. The Russian students are given nothing to be interested in. It's not just the lack of real academic articles; they also never seem to read primary sources, as we do, as much as possible, at Middlebury. My appreciation of the liberal arts educational system is renewed.
Part 1, in which my disjointed thoughts generally involve winter
Reading public, I think you will be hearing a lot from me in the next week or so, because I have 3 papers due soon. And that means procrastination time. As I have no flash drive anymore, however, you may be waiting awhile to actually read this.
Outside the window of our usual classroom in the International Department is a blacktop, where some middle school (I think) has gym class sometimes, while we sit through less interesting classes. Usually they play soccer. Sometimes they try to play basketball in the snow, which is very entertaining. This week, however, they skied. Seriously, they just skied around in circles around the blacktop. It looked very challenging.
I’m having a very hard time figuring out what I’m supposed to cite and what not, in the writing of these papers. As I mentioned earlier, Russians don’t seem too big on the whole idea of intellectual property. Never having read or written a Russian student paper, however, I can’t figure out the level at which it is acceptable to just recopy what one reads. I fear that I will return to the United States and have forgotten American academic standards and try to tell my professors that I, you know, changed a few words from what I copied, so it wasn’t really plagiarism. And then I will be expelled and, as Laurel would say, grow old with cats.
My other academic complaint of the moment is that Russian books don’t seem to usually have indexes.
It’s after Thanksgiving, which means I may listen to Christmas music. I thought this was much more exciting before I realized that I don’t have any Christmas music, other than “Christmastime’s a-comin’.” I do have various winter-themed songs, but they are almost all depressing. I guess this is sort of fitting for a Siberian winter. Maybe by the end of this winter I will figure out what the heck the song “Humidity Built the Snowman” means. You won’t find me walkin’ around your part of town; humidity build the snowman, sunshine brought him down.
New Year’s decorations are gradually appearing in Irkutsk, in the form of the giant plastic banners of the type used to congratulate the citizenry on all public holidays. I wonder if the city will get any more decorated. Private citizens do not decorate, apparently, just government agencies and businesses. I suggested to Nastya that it would be pretty if everyone decorated their balconies; she told me that that would be very silly, because no one does that. Can’t argue with that logic. I heard some New Year’s music on the omnipresent kitchen radio last night. I can’t believe these people think that Santa Claus comes on Dec. 31. By that time he’s already given all the good presents to children in countries with less of a history of repression of religion. Actually I don’t know whether Grandfather Frost came to Russia before 1917, and if he did for what holiday. I guess if he did pre-date the Communists he may have come on Orthodox Christmas, whose date I don’t remember but which I gather is in January. So, if they would have had the foresight to have a government with a less atheistic agenda, coupled with a church with a less stubborn insistence on the Julian calendar...
Part 2, in which my disjointed thoughts turn to more abstract cultural issues, plus Blues Clues and the fashion choices of drunks on the bus
Were you to have been a person involved in religious politics of 16th century Russia, would you have been a Possessor or a Nonpossessor? Think carefully before answering. It is much cooler to be a Nonpossessor, but perhaps more easily said than done. Plus you lose, in the end. Unless you are Nil Sorsky, in which case you get canonized, finally, in the 20th century, but by that time Joseph Volokolansky has been lording it over you for 4 centuries. And it’s too bad of the Possessors to burn people at the stake, really, and their emphasis on the externals of worship and conduct probably brought about the schism of the next century, but don’t you agree that the Church should take some part in the social and political life of the country, instead of encouraging everyone to go be a hermit? Double-space your answer.
I made very good mashed potatoes last night. At least I think they are very good. But I’m having doubts, now, as to the reliability of my taste. I’m so accustomed to the fat/sweet taste divide, to those being the only two available flavors, that I am afraid that I either 1) put way too much garlic and black pepper in these potatoes to compensate for the usual flavorlessness of food or 2) hardly put any garlic and pepper in them and only think that the resulting dish is flavorful. This is a matter of great concern to me. What will happen when I go back home- what if I don’t like the food anymore? Or become one of those weird people who dump hot sauce on everything? This is tied to my more general concern about the reverse culture shock that I can already tell will be intense when I get home. It seems a little early to be worrying about this, but as each day goes by I am more and more accustomed to the basic realities of Irkutsk life. It’s not that I can identify concrete things that I will miss, or that I can think of any reason to be attached to these streets and skies and snows; it’s just the basic shapes that form this world, the tones and textures, are every moment further internalized, in a way that has nothing to do with whether I like them or not. And I remember what a stressful jolt it was to be wrenched from the American shapes and tones to the Russian ones in the first place. ‘Jolt’ isn’t a good word- it is what the Russians would refer to as an однократный глалол- unsuggestive of length of process.
I saw a few minutes of Blues Clues the other day, dubbed into Russian by a less-than-enthusiastic voice-over. It was pretty silly (I mean aside from any endemic silliness of Blue’s Clues) – most of the point of the show is the little jingles and songs and such, and unimaginative, direct translation did little for the rhythm. Most objectionable, however, is that the offstage children’s voices that yell the right answers to various questions to Steve address him with the formal ‘you.’ No, unacceptable. Steve routinely requires the help of 4-year-olds to aid him in the solving of riddles posed to him by his two-dimensional puppy. He does not get to be вы.
Do any men in America wear fur jackets or coats? Probably not. I no longer find it at all ridiculous here- today on the bus I was much admiring the beautiful black fur jacket (mink?) of the man standing in front of me, but when I tried to imagine such a jacket being worn in Middlebury, or Frederick, I just couldn't. I don't understand fashion. I also really like those brown leather jackets, when they're all old and broken in, and look like the guy is wearing a bunch of old footballs around. An old drunk on this same bus was wearing such a jacket. I was very entertained listening to him annoy the self-important middle-aged women behind me.
Part 3, on academic subjects
11/29, or as the Russians would say, 29/11
morning
I can't believe I ever complained about writing papers in America. There was a library within walking distance, and it was open 'til 1 in the morning, and there were books there, and the books were in a comprehensible language. And I had 24-hour internet access; that was pretty key. And I could actually communicate in the language that the papers were to be written in. This is a disaster. What happens if I just fail all my classes? It's not really a propitoius time of year to run away into the taiga.
evening
Test in Baikal Studies today. I apparently don't know much about Baikal. It was a pretty funny test though. For one thing it was written in exactly the style in which Pavel Alexandrovich speaks- an overly-scientific, official diction and grammer that for some reason I find very amusing. And then he had tried to put in funny options on the multiple choice, which were often just bizarre. Where does permanently frozen material occur? a) at the bottommost depths of Lake Baikal b) under the ground of the northern taiga in Siberia c) at the top of the Sayana mountains, south of Baikal d) in the expanses of outerspace.
Part 4, in which holidays are revisited
I asked today about the history of D'yed Moroz (Grandfather Frost, looks and behaves like Santa Claus). I was told that 1) New Years became a holiday under Peter the Great, and he was the one who started the Yolka (like Christmas tree but for New Years) thing; before Peter the Russians considered the New Year to begin in September, which sort of makes sense actually 2) D'yed Moroz didn't show up until the eras of Soviets and of cartoons, so he was never a Christmas character 3) the Orthodox Church doesn't really have any desire to link this ridiculous character, or the pagan character of Snyegurachka (the Snow Maiden) to church holidays of any kind 4) St. Nicolaus would be hard to link to any winter holiday, because he is already too closely associated with the water to pick up double duty as a reindeer handler.
I went to Web Ugol today (despite my residing anger at their stealing of my flash drive) and spent vast sums of money printing out articles about Buryats (Siberian history) and about the activities of the Orthodox Church, in relation to the Russian government, in the 16th century (Russian history, or, as the course is actually titled, Fatherland history). [I had been thinking, all through the process of the history paper, how much I wished I had brough Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church, and what should I find today, but that some excellent person has put said book on the internet. So I read the appropriate pages. And now I feel informed.] The fact that I paid for these pages of text is making me feel like I should read them. Plus, of course, the fact that I now have less than a week to write about them.
I was asked recently whether Americans celebrate New Years. I wasn't sure how to explain the relationship between New Years and Americans. I guess it's a nice reason for a party, and it provides a sense of new beginnings, but we don't send each other cards, and we are not that upset if we don't get around to celebrating it; it seems like an optional holiday. The only New Years I remember are 1) that totally ridiculous time Jack and I stayed up to see what happened on Animal Crossing at midnight (not much- some confetti fell) 2) one time at Gammie's house when Hailey came over and we watched movies and ate popcorn until the ball fell in New York; then Hailey and I stayed up and read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe until the arrival of midnight in the time zone in which we actually were 3) babysitting one year, for some fairly large group of girls; we made «New Year's sundays» and ate them on the stroke of midnight 4) the year 2000 when there was a First Night thing in Frederick, and it seemed like they hadn't quite come up with enough activities for the residents dutifully roaming the downtown streets for 4 hours, but everyone still seems to have the buttons (or pins? what do we call those things that you pin onto your clothing?) 5) that was all, but I just heard the song «Rollin' and a Ramblin' (the death of Hank Williams)» and I remembered that last year Mama and I watched a Prairie Home Companion special on PBS and somone sang that song. And Emmylou Harris sang also, in silver cowboy boots. And Brad Paisley or someone like that had to show Garrison Keeler around Nashville, and his practiced TV charm somehow just didn't work at all when it ran up against G.K., and he was clearly very confused.
I'm very excited about New Years this year. Abby and I will probably be in St. Petersburg. I have no idea what we'll do, but I hope we get to watch Ironia Sud'by on tv.
Part 5, on identity
Today in History of Siberia we discussed the words used to describe members of national groups and of citizens of governments. They are often different words in Russian; the word 'rooskii,' for example means 'relating the the Russian nationality;' it is used for the Russian language, and for ethnic Russians. Then there is the word 'rossiski'; it means 'relating to the Russian Federation,' and can be used for members of non-Russian national groups with Russian citizenship. Real people (not in government) don't use this word very often, but I notice that Radio Rossiya is making a big push for it; every day there is this segment called «Ya- Rocciyanin» in which someone tells a touching story about how Russia is so happily multinational. So, I had known about this Rooski-Rossiski division, but I only found out a couple of days ago that the word that I considered to mean «German» as in «relating to Germany» actually means «relating to the German ethnic group, whatever that means, and including most Swiss and Austrians». I found this out when my host sister used a totally different word to refer to beer from Germany (I'm not sure why she didn't consider the beer to be ethnically German). I asked about this is class, and we began a confusing discussion of these terms. Finally Elena Nicholaevna said «Yes, no matter where we live, I am a Russian, of the Russian people, and you will be...» She looked at us in confusion. «Well, what are you?»
We told her that Americans are a country without nation. This makes very little sense in English; what we said is that we didn't have «narod,» this very key but somewhat untranslatable Russian word that means something like 'ethnic group' but is often used to mean 'people' in general, or 'the populace. Is this true, that we don't have a narod? Russians, I don't think, would consider 'American' to be narod, as we demonstratably came from various other narodi, and you can't just change narod. But we do lots of things that narodi do: we make up theories about our 'national character,' we eat sort of similar food, we dress pretty much alike (actually not, but our differences in food and dress are not deliniated along distinguishable nationalistic lines, just social and economic ones), and, most importantly, we speak the same language (ignore the fact that this isn't quite true; people who can be easily grouped into a narod other than 'American' are irrelevant to this discussion).
This language point is obviously very interesting to me at the moment. Is language the only truly important determanent of cultural affinity? Nastya, my host sister, told me that the word I thought meant 'resident of England' actually includes me and is the name of a narod. I don't think everyone agrees with this, or Elena Nicholaevna wouldn't have been so confused about coming up with a label for us. But it's still interesting. I noticed, while I was here, that when I hear about the involvement of England or Great Brittain in world history, I feel like England is «my side.» I'm affronted when they get cheated, and mildly triumphant when they win things. I don't remember whether I felt like this in America, and this is a result of some cultural transference through the American educational system, or whether this affiinity with people who speak my language is new, a result of being thrown among all these Russian-speakers. I remember Dadda telling me one time that the wonderful thing about learning a language is that you automatically inherit its linguistic tradition: anyone who learns English has just as much connection to Shakespeare as an Englishman. Or maybe he said something completely different, but that's what I got out of it. Anyway, I think that it's pretty much true; being able to read the words written by another person is a very, very important link with that person's world and self. But does this translate to the entire culture connected to the learned language? If I learn Russian well enough, will I turn into a Russian? I'm not sure how I feel about that.
I've sort of read everything I have to read for this history paper. The actual writing of the first sentence, however, is proving to be a problem.
Dec. 30
Addendum to narod story. Today we sat down in grammer class, and the first thing Elena Miletovna said was «Sonya, what kind of blood do you have, English or German?» I said I didn't know, and great incredulity was expressed; apparently it is totally impossible that I am wholly unware of where my family is from, everyone knows that. Is that true? I know that many of the students in my middle school and high school were very proud of being «50% Irish, 10% German, 10% Latvian, 12% Brazillian, and .2% Cherokee» or some such ridiculous thing, but I am fairly sure that these students were in the distinct minority, and I assumed that they would grow out of caring in a few years. It still seems rather silly to me; national identity seems like a totally self-invented designation to me, and I refuse to believe that cultural traits are transmitted by blood, or by any process but cultural assimilation. I think all recent scientific findings are completley against me on this, but no matter. It just seems to me that people's connection to the history of any group is totally deturmined by identification with that history, and maybe by the fact of living in a world created by that history, not by genetic link. But maybe my lack of interest in geneology is unusual? I'm starting to think that maybe it is. Anyway, I eventually told Elena Miletovna that my grandmother's family was originally from Scotland, which made her happy, and then she told us that it was a good thing I wasn't from Germany, because German girls are not very pretty. Um, thanks? Later in the class we had our usual discussion about how much better it would be if I «painted my eyes.»
Part 6, in which I pedantically discuss the events occuring in my room at the time it was written; entirely in order to avoid doing work
later
Arg. Katya just asked if I wanted her to wash my clothes. I had to say I had done laundry 2 days ago, so no. I couldn't very well go pulling all my supposedly clean clothes off the shelf. But here is why this is very annoying: of course I didn't really wash them, I somehow just ran much of the color out of them in boiling water, with little actual contact with soap. I have no idea how I am so incompetent at washing-machine use, but this washing machine is evil. More importantly, this means that Katya now thinks I know how to use the washing machine, and I have no hope of clean clothing, ever.
In other news, I have written a paragraph of paper. This is going to take a while. Even though I am using 14 font and double spacing and have also slightly increased margin size. How is Abby writing a 20-page paper? I guess she started at a much more responsibly early date. But I have two 10-page papers, plus a 4-page one, so I might win, because I had to research 3 different topics. I guess this is why American professors demand word rather than page production. I don't think «word production» counts as idiomatic English. Will you all still speak to me if I come home having forgotten my native tongue (but not really developed fluency in any other one)?
Also, do you think this can be my job? Sitting around writing whatever I'm already thinking about? It seems like there are some people who get away with getting paid for that sort of thing, but they have generally earned some sort of legitimacy by doing something more useful in earlier life, like writing works of best-selling fiction or being an investigative journalist or famous sports figure. Those things all sound like too much work. Know what I don't want to be my job? Writting 10-page papers in Russian about church-state relations is 16th-century Russia. My lack of actual information is leading to a very ridiculous stretching of what I have into sentences as long as possible. The one I just wrote, for instance, translates to: «Metropolitan Peter at the beginning of the 14th century preparted for the transferrence of the metropolitan office from Vladimir to Moscow, and under Metropolitan Pheogtost [I know the name sounds impossible, but that's what the book said] in 1326 Moscow became the center of Russian Orthodox administrative affairs and of dogmatic normalization.» Except that it's probably all spelled wrong.
Part 7, in which it is December first
Wow, it's December. I must have been here for a long time. Also, the elections are tomorrow, which is sort of too bad, because it will mean that campaign season will be over; the fascist youths striding fresh-faced through the city with their Putin flags are a very cheerying element among the bleak snows. Okay, I guess Putin doesn't count as a fascist, and I guess that's not very funny, since the real fascists in St. Petersburg tend to do un-funny things like kill foreigners. But seriously, I do like all the colorful political campaigners all over the city, and they're all very friendly and cheerful and colorful. And they give you amusing newspapers to read. The real tragedy of the end of election season, is that the LDPR ads will be gone from radio and television. The LDPR is the communist party, but I don't know what it stands for, or why it's running and not the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation). The LDPR ads are very, very awesome. The chief candidate, whose name escapes me, just yells things, basically, in very short, almost grammerless sentences, in a gruff, frightening bark. «Power back to the people! Life was better! More money for bread! Vote LDPR! Number 7! 7! Lucky Number! 7 days in the week! Sunday! The future of your family! LDPR! LDPR! LDPR!» I guess it would be alarming except that the rest of the country has also noticed that he is crazy, and the party is currently poling at 16% or something. Surprisingly, Djoros Alfyodor (I am positive I didn't translate that right), this Nobel-Prize-winning physicist of whom I have only heard spoken with great admiration, as he builds all sorts of admirable schools for the nation's youth and whatnot, is also on the Communist ticket. I mean, he must be somewhat smart. And I have read the material distributed to me by the Communist campaigners, and a smart person would not read it and say, «Yeah! This makes total sense! Listing lots of unfulfilled economic goals from 1950 as if they were the actual economic situation of the country at that tiime, and then comparing them with the current economic reality, is a great way to make conclusions about the effectiveness of different economic policies! Also, I am totally convinced by this cartoon of a capitalist who looks like the guy in monopoly trying to drag that upstanding worker into a pit of repression, despite the fact that I have never seen a single Russian who looks like either of those figures!» I can only assume that Alfyodor is so apalled by the Putin administration that he threw in his lot with the only party he thought had a chance of beating them. I can't totally blame him; I know that Abby is now a Putin fan, but I am very creeped out by the omni-present United Russia raging bear. We will have to read Abby's 20-page paper about the party to find any real information about them, because I have not bothered to be informed; all I know is that I find it very suspitious that their campaign posters are all over what I would consider to be public and governmental space, such as above all the water fountains in the state university's library. And how much of their campaign centers around that message that «this is a democracy! It's very important that we all vote! Every voice is important!» when we know that Putin considers some voices to be so important that he has them killed or locked away in jail. Also, having almost all one's campaign posters be on the «go out and vote!» theme shows a sort of startling confidence that everyone who votes will vote for you. But whenever I start wishing that United Russia would somehow lose, the LDPR starts yelling like a crazy person, and I just give up on Russian politics as all the Russians seem to have done.
later
I'm being very productive right now, so I will not tell you the story of my afternoon, but only say before I forg: this evening Sasha, V.P.'s granddaughter, was sitting in the kitchen while Katya was frying some meat, as she asked «кто это?» when she wanted to know what kind of meat it is. This translates to «who is that?» It was so awesome. It makes sense, because in Russian everything living is 'who' and not 'what,' but when the 'who' was sitting in a frying pan it was very funny, but I think only to me. No one knew the answer, by the way, to her question. Who knows what we ate.
Part 8, in which it is still December first but I felt like I had to break it up; cabbages make an appearance
even later
In the middle of the afternoon today I was called away from my pained paper-writing for various cabbage-related activities in the kitchen; then V.P. decided that there was no way we could salt all the cabbage, because we didn't have enough buckets. We had already made Tatiana take one bag away, but now we decided to take another bag to V.P.'s sister, who lives in an old wooden house in the old wooden house district. The mesh bags that these cabbages are transported in are pretty useless, being made more of holes (not the ones meant to be in the mesh but larger-than-cabbage holes) that of material, so there were cabbages rolling all over the apartment building, and then I had to crouch on the curb holding the bag together and then several stray cabbages in my hands while V.P. fetched the new red car so she could make everyone mad by parking in the middle of the street while we loaded cabbages into it. Lots of people stared at me in the crouching-on-the-curb stage of the operation. Driving to Ludmilla's house was even more interesting. I don't think V.P. understands that you can look in your mirrors as you drive, or that backing up often requires looking behind you, and we would often have conversations such as «Susanna, can I turn around here?» «Can you turn around in the middle of an intersection? No.» «Can I turn left?» «No, there's a red light.» But we eventually got there all in one piece. I really liked Ludmilla's apartment in the wooden house; I think wooden houses are lower on the housing hierarchy than «modern» apartments, as they have no running water or indoor plumbing, but it was very comfortable and clean and classy-looking inside. I think I would take wooden floorboards over running water, but I guess it would be rather a lot of trouble in the winter to fetch the buckets of water from the street.
After the cabbage was delivered we went to a preschool Advent party. It was the first time I had been to a preschool Advent party. It was pretty awesome. Apparently there's some cheesy German fable about a priest or monk or something out in a remote village, and a snowstorm, and a little snake with lights all over its back who tells him that if little children do good deeds Christmas will be brighter... I was not paying that much attention to the story-telling phase of the event, as it was in that insufferable tone that made childrens' sermans such a humiliating experience. Anyway, then we sang solemn Advent songs (there's even a specific song about preschoolers waiting for Christmas, it seems) as the children one by one walked through an evergreen arch and into this big, pretty spiral on the floor made of evergreen boughs and such, a apple-with-a-candle-in-it in hand. They lit their candles in the center of the maze and placed them at various points along the evergreen «snake». It sort of took forever, and I was positive that at any moment a preschooler would kick over a candle and we would all go up in flame, but it really was all very pretty, and it was sweet how solemnly they processed, and watched their classmates. I was told that this was a holiday celebrated only in preschools.
Part 9, in which it is: Dec. 2 (my half-birthday) (Chelsea Powell's birthday) (the half-birthays of that kid Jeffery Huggins from KinderKare and of Miss Mary the Jamaican cook) (Election day in Russia)
I'm afraid the history professor is going to be insulted by this paper. I realized that I'm basically saying that the Russian Orthodox Church spent the first half of the 16th century buying the priviledge of owning huge tracts of land and entire villages and thousands of peasants and such at the cost of being shameless flattering snakes and giving up all real independence. Huh. Maybe the grammer will be so bad she won't notice.
Oh man. Katya and Nastya are loudly singing various pop songs in the other song, mostly awful, but they just started singing.... черный кот! If only they knew that they were joining the illustrious company of historical Chorniy Kot singers, and what a great honor it was to be singing the same song that was once sung on the McCoullough stage by none other than Tatiana Eduardovna Smorodenskaya, with accompanying dance. Oh, how I wish I could be at Middlebury International Karioke (sp?) again. No one will ever be as cool as Tatiana.
I have various questions about the cedar. Last year I decided that one of my goals in life is to be able to identify trees, and so far I have made no progress. And it is because of confusing things like the so-called cedar- who can keep up with these things? Irkutskians are always talking about how they're so cool because they have so many cedars, and cedars are useful for everything, and poor families can survive the winter on the cedar (burning the wood and eating the nuts), but I have yet to identify one. All the trees just look like pines to me. I have done limited research on the cedar, and have discovered: there is no cedar! Cedars are complete posers, as far as I can tell! I feel deceived. It seems that there are two kinds of cedars: ones who are actually pines, and ones who are actually cypress. And not all cypress are cypress: the bald cypress is actually a sequoia. What?! I assume that the 'cedars' here are of the pine variety, since they look exactly like pines, but who started calling all these trees the same thing? I am now looking at a picture from World Book Encyclopedia of a cypress swamp in Delaware, and those trees look nothing like the ones here. But now I'm even more confused, because people here talk about «pine» too. Are those different?
Part 10, last and I would say least
Dec. 3
Monday, so no class- but I was at the Mezhfak anyway, from a combination of a great need to escape the apartment and the need for further research for my remaining papers. Joseph was there, typing his History of Siberia paper; the highpoint of the day was when he silently pointed out to me that the girl at the computer next to him was in the process of buying a paper online. Even if I were to be dishonest enough to buy a paper, there is no way my teachers would ever believe I wrote a paper with even the most elemental grammatical cohesiveness.
discovery: The «soothing, cooling, refreshing» quality of Burt's Bees lip balm advertised on the container is less than enjoyable when accidently applied to one's eye. Avoid this. Actually it could sort of a good idea if you're falling asleep in class. Well, maybe not. You would be very awake, but possibly unable to see any visual materials- chalkboard, powerpoint, etc.- presented by the teacher, due to your hopefully-temporary blindness. Back to reading about the repression of Buryat Buddhism. Now I wish I were a student in a secret lamanist school of the 1950s. I bet students in secret schools pay a lot of attention and highly value their education. Not like me in my studies at the Mezhkak. Certainly not like the Russian students, well, anywhere, as far as I can tell. Maybe they should tell the little twirps in my history class that they are now forbidden from studying history, but anyone who really wants to [whisper] can join the new underground university being organized by the political opposition. Then the mp3 players might go away.
Did you know that Bandito-hambo-lami is a word, in Russian at least? It is. It means 'Bandito-hambo lamas.' I don't actually know what that means. Or what the plural of 'lama' is in English.
As much as a pain as these papers are, and as bad as the actual product is, I'm glad I have to do them. In the course of my rather-limited research I have read some actual academic articles, intended for an informed and interested audience, with arguable theses and well-organized arguments. Even though they are a lot of work to understand, they are much, much more fun to read than my History of Siberia for 7th Graders textbook, or the awful Let's Compare Cultural Stereotypes!-type thing we always read for speach practice. I actually feel like a college student, reading them, and I don't mean in an I'm-too-good-for-7th-grade-textbooks sense; I mean, this is the reason we're supposed to be interested in the academic process, I assume, because the pursuit of knowledge is challenging and polemical and inspires many intelligent people to produce the best work they can in its service. I think this is the real reason the kids in my Russian history class are totally uninterested in comparison to my classmates at Middlebury. The Russian students are given nothing to be interested in. It's not just the lack of real academic articles; they also never seem to read primary sources, as we do, as much as possible, at Middlebury. My appreciation of the liberal arts educational system is renewed.
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