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.”