I don’t remember anymore how I felt about leaving America for Russia. I would look for my journal and try to remember but a) it’s packed at the bottom of a box of letters and stuff that is going to cost me a lot of money in overweight luggage and b) I’m fairly sure my journal entries are never true. Anyway, the point is, I can’t figure out how I feel about going home in two weeks (and two days), and I can’t remember my one applicable point of reference.
[assume a long period of time in which I stared alternately at the computer screen and my weird zodiac comforter-cover trying to thing of something appropriate to type]
This is lame-- I just lived for 9 months is a foreign country, saw history, culture, and humanity from new and unfamiliar perspectives, peeled countless carrots and potatoes, and I can’t think of anything at all to say whenever someone asks me things like what my impressions of Russia have been, what I’ve learned, what Russians are like in comparison to Americans, etc. It sort of kills conversations, and essays on final exams. You know that movie whose name I’ve forgotten, with the boxer? Raging Bull. Where the guy is a hopeless lump of inarticulateness and therefore leads a life of violence and eventually tragedy? I think I’ll skip the life of violence and tragedy part, but I am more and more annoyed at how unable I am to say what I want to, in any language or form. Being forced to speak a foreign language for 9 months-- well, like 12 if you count summer school—has brought my annoyance with the situation rather forcibly to my attention.
Here’s a translation of a nice Bunin poem, so I can take advantage of someone else’s artistic use of language by pretending to participate in it:
The flowers, the wasps, the grasses, the grain,
The azure, and the noonday swelter...
The time will come—God will ask the prodigal son:
“Were you happy in your earthly life?”
And I’ll forget everything—I’ll remember only these
paths in the fields between the grain and the grass—
and from sweet tears I won’t manage to answer,
fallen at the merciful Knees.
Ok, it seemed less corny in Russian. Also, anyone who can think of a way to avoid the internal rhyme in the third line, let me know. Mainly I like how the capitalization of ‘Knees’ brings out the funniness of that word. Also, I do sort of miss that sweltering summer feeling, when the heat is so far beyond uncomfortable that the discomfort isn’t worth noticing, and you’re just crushed between the heat from above and the humidity rising off the ground. I mean, I like it in the way you like the freezing cold—I’m glad it exists, to make the universe seem a little less under control and boring, but I don’t consciously decide to be out in it for more than seconds at a time.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Post Written Some Time Ago
There’s a Morse code for Cyrillic. Of course there would have to be, but it never occured to me.
Victory Day was really cool. I’ve never seen so many people in Square Kirova, and they all had balloons or flowers or ice cream. The weather was nice, and the parade was jolly, and the military salute was fairly cool (the announcer-person would say, “Comrade pilots! I congratulate you on the 63rd anniversary of the glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War!” and the pilots would say “oorah!” in a gruff chorus, and then the military jeep would carry the announcer on to the corrections officers, or the navy (why is the navy even in Irkutsk? There’s not really anyone to fight on Baikal), or one of the other numerous uniformed groups), and the veterans all had lots and lots of metals, such that there was barely room for shirt, and the crowd pushing to put their flowers around the eternal flame was more courteous than your typical pushing crowd, and overall the impression was of great civic festivity. I like how in Russia you are considered a veteran not only if you served in the military during the war, but also if you worked in a factory, or were generally helpful in some other capacity (a “veteran of labor”). This means, as far as I can tell, that everyone who was of working age during World War II is a veteran, including women, and there was many a babushka proudly sporting her metal-covered dress jacket. The only detractions to the prideful but joyful solemnity were a) this weird, long performance by a special operations group of some kind at the end of the military salute, choreographed to “It’s the Final Countdown,” involving breaking beer bottles against their heads, pretending to shoot each other, pretending to kill each other with shovels, some slow shadow-boxing segments, jumping through burning hoops, etc., and b) the sort of retro, campy feel to some part imparted by all the communist symbols. I mean, it makes sense to have the communist symbols, as the war was after all fought by the USSR, and I’m really arguing that they be removed, but I’ve gotten pretty used to seeing that hammer and sickle on teenagers’ t-shirts, an alternate to rhinestone-covered Che Guevara’s, and it was sort of hard to take the same symbol seriously as a political and military rallying point.
Joseph has a pretty picture of the eternal flame with flowers all around it, but I think you will have to wait until we’re both back in America and I can steal it from wherever he posts it on the internet before you see it. Danya has a video of the beer bottles being broken on foreheads.
In the tail dive of my Russian experience, I have entered a period of being completely enamored with the country and everything in it. Before this, there was a brief period of being happy with everything I was doing and seeing but being fully aware that this happiness was tied to the fact that I was leaving in about a month. But now, while I am rationally aware of such a connection, I don’t really feel it.
I went with Valentina Petrovna and Nastya to Listvianka in the silly little red car today. I have long been curious about V.P.’s activities in Listvianka- she goes there all the time, and seems to like it a lot, but I’ve never been able to figure out what she finds to do there. Apparently the answer is that she drives around and drops in on all the eccentric artists who live there. So Nastya and I did that too, and it was pretty cool. I wish I were an eccentric artist. I think I could do the eccentric, but unfortunately, I think that for people to put up with you, you have to demonstrate actual artistic talent. But anyway, it was a sunny day on Baikal, and, what’s actually most important here: Baikal has turned back into a real lake, with water, at least at its southern tip. It was a pretty startling contrast from two weeks ago, when it was a vast expanse of mushy ice.
Other news: did you know that you can eat blini with lettuce and ketchup? You can. If you have lettuce, which is unlikely; I’d never seen it in our apartment until today.
I’m about to break my vow never to eat posi again. There’s a batch cooking in the kitchen in this odd device that V.P. got at the 40th anniversary concert as a present from the alumni; I’ve stalled as long as I could- running, showering- but I think I’m about to be summoned. Yep, there was the summon. It will be the sixth meal of the day.
Victory Day was really cool. I’ve never seen so many people in Square Kirova, and they all had balloons or flowers or ice cream. The weather was nice, and the parade was jolly, and the military salute was fairly cool (the announcer-person would say, “Comrade pilots! I congratulate you on the 63rd anniversary of the glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War!” and the pilots would say “oorah!” in a gruff chorus, and then the military jeep would carry the announcer on to the corrections officers, or the navy (why is the navy even in Irkutsk? There’s not really anyone to fight on Baikal), or one of the other numerous uniformed groups), and the veterans all had lots and lots of metals, such that there was barely room for shirt, and the crowd pushing to put their flowers around the eternal flame was more courteous than your typical pushing crowd, and overall the impression was of great civic festivity. I like how in Russia you are considered a veteran not only if you served in the military during the war, but also if you worked in a factory, or were generally helpful in some other capacity (a “veteran of labor”). This means, as far as I can tell, that everyone who was of working age during World War II is a veteran, including women, and there was many a babushka proudly sporting her metal-covered dress jacket. The only detractions to the prideful but joyful solemnity were a) this weird, long performance by a special operations group of some kind at the end of the military salute, choreographed to “It’s the Final Countdown,” involving breaking beer bottles against their heads, pretending to shoot each other, pretending to kill each other with shovels, some slow shadow-boxing segments, jumping through burning hoops, etc., and b) the sort of retro, campy feel to some part imparted by all the communist symbols. I mean, it makes sense to have the communist symbols, as the war was after all fought by the USSR, and I’m really arguing that they be removed, but I’ve gotten pretty used to seeing that hammer and sickle on teenagers’ t-shirts, an alternate to rhinestone-covered Che Guevara’s, and it was sort of hard to take the same symbol seriously as a political and military rallying point.
Joseph has a pretty picture of the eternal flame with flowers all around it, but I think you will have to wait until we’re both back in America and I can steal it from wherever he posts it on the internet before you see it. Danya has a video of the beer bottles being broken on foreheads.
In the tail dive of my Russian experience, I have entered a period of being completely enamored with the country and everything in it. Before this, there was a brief period of being happy with everything I was doing and seeing but being fully aware that this happiness was tied to the fact that I was leaving in about a month. But now, while I am rationally aware of such a connection, I don’t really feel it.
I went with Valentina Petrovna and Nastya to Listvianka in the silly little red car today. I have long been curious about V.P.’s activities in Listvianka- she goes there all the time, and seems to like it a lot, but I’ve never been able to figure out what she finds to do there. Apparently the answer is that she drives around and drops in on all the eccentric artists who live there. So Nastya and I did that too, and it was pretty cool. I wish I were an eccentric artist. I think I could do the eccentric, but unfortunately, I think that for people to put up with you, you have to demonstrate actual artistic talent. But anyway, it was a sunny day on Baikal, and, what’s actually most important here: Baikal has turned back into a real lake, with water, at least at its southern tip. It was a pretty startling contrast from two weeks ago, when it was a vast expanse of mushy ice.
Other news: did you know that you can eat blini with lettuce and ketchup? You can. If you have lettuce, which is unlikely; I’d never seen it in our apartment until today.
I’m about to break my vow never to eat posi again. There’s a batch cooking in the kitchen in this odd device that V.P. got at the 40th anniversary concert as a present from the alumni; I’ve stalled as long as I could- running, showering- but I think I’m about to be summoned. Yep, there was the summon. It will be the sixth meal of the day.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Patience is a Virtue
I'm not posting any more blogs or pictures until I get home. I need all my money to mail my books to America. You can contact me by carrier pigeon.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Leaving woes
Yesterday I used the can-opener in our apartment correctly for the first time ever. And I'm only here for another three weeks. I may never be called upon to open another can.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Update
In case you are concerned, I think I am over the food poisoining. Even my period of caution was ended this morning: Katya was too proud of having made blini for me to refuse to eat them.
without title
A week ago the Orthodox Church celebrated Easter. I went to the midnight service in the church near the train station. I would give you further information, but it doesn’t seem very respectful to make flippant comments about what for everyone there was the highest religious event of the year, and I’m not very good at non-flippancy. There were many candles involved, and standing for many hours. It was sort of odd to celebrate Easter twice, actually. My favorite part of the day was how instead of saying “Happy Easter,” people greet each other on Easter by saying “Christ is risen!” to which the other person responds “He is risen indeed!” After reading this in my first-year Russian textbook, I had been waiting to get to be involved in this exchange ever since. Even people I didn’t know who called the house informed me that Christ was risen, not to mention the persons from whom I bought groceries. I bought an Easter cake at the bread kiosk and Adrienne and I ate it here at the Shulga compound.
The next day, Monday, was the big 40-th anniversary concert of my host family’s choir. This concert, held in the big Dram-Teatr, had been looming over the household for at least the past month. It all went off successfully, as far as I could tell. Only one choir member fainted on stage, the small children from the youngest choir who ran about the theater did so with as little noise as could be expected, the congratulatory speeches were much shorter than they could have been, and everyone got lots of flowers. It was all very grand and sequin-covered. Katya and some dignified older gentleman very theatrically led the ceremonies, complete with poems written for the occasion, solemn introductions, and those earnest assurances to the audience of the undying love of the performers that for some reason so fill Russian theaters and concert halls, and Katya’s gown (blue) had more sequins than anyone’s. Nastya directed the younger choir, sang with a choir of graduates, and gave her always-stellar performance of “O Happy Day.” Valentina Petrovna, oh course, was the big star, with costume changes, congratulations via video-clip from professors of local universities, celebration in the aforementioned poems, etc. I wondered more than ever how I ended up in this house. I feel like my presence is bringin down the house-hold glamour factor several points.
May 1 is Labor Day here. Nothing interesting happened. Apparently in the socialist past this was a huge deal and everyone went to big demonstrations and waved flags and yelled cool slogans, but no more. It was, however, a day off school and work, and since it was a Thursday, the school and work that would have been on Friday was moved to Sunday (can we do things like that in America, on a national level? I am impressed.). On Thursday night Sara, Julia, Ben, Joseph, and I left on the train for Ulan Ude, and we arrived at 6 in the morning after a very small amount of sleep. Heroically ignoring our exhaustion, we headed straight for the Giant Head of Lenin, tied with Baikal as the most important object in Siberia. In case you are unaware of this wonder of the modern world, the Giant Head of Lenin is a giant head of Lenin. It is the largest metal head in the world. The location of the corresponding body is unknown. This giant bald head rules over a giant, fairly empty square in the middle of Ulan Ude, and its grandeur and beauty are beyond description. Other activities of the day were a long quest to find these Buddhist temples several miles from the city, walking around said Buddhist temples, eating posi in the Central Market (in a cafe chosen on the basic of asking a passer-by where her favorite posi were), and going to the coolest concert ever in the world. It was called “Nomads,” and I think it was organized as a celebration of Buryat nationalism. Well not nationalism in a political sense, but pride in nation. Aside from the five of us, I think there were 3 other non-Buryats in the big, way-over-seating-capacity theater. We had bought the last 5 tickets early that morning, standing-room-only (we actually sat in the aisle in chairs taken from the cafe), and immediately after buying them the phone in the ticket office rang three times with people begging for tickets. I felt a little bad that we had taken tickets from actual dedicated fans of the performing artists, actually; these were truly dedicated fans. The first half of the concert was all traditional music, with an orchestra of folk instruments, throat singing, awesome clothing, etc. The enthusiastic, beaming little announcer would say things between all the songs like “I’m sure this music returns you to your childhood, and makes you and to get on a horse and ride far out across the plain and just listen, listen, listen to the steppe.” There were a bunch of visiting musicians from Mongolia. Though the announcer generally spoke Russian, he spoke Mongolian when speaking to the Mongolians, and the musicians always spoke Buryat or Mongolian to the audience, which seemed to understand the three languages equally. In the second half the orchestra of folk instruments had been removed, and it all came to resemble an odd karaoke bar. It was still pretty cool though. Mixed with Mongolian pop, a tango, a belly-dance, and lots of flute-playing was a rendition of “the American folk song” Amazing Grace on various traditional instruments and accompanied by ballet dancers. The announcer said that the melody made you want to fly out over the plain, over the steppe, across wide expanses, toward the mountains.” He has clearly never heard it played on an organ. There was a fairly long period of stirring speeches on the part of various representatives of various organizations on the subject of the conservation of Buryat culture and the celebration of the talent of all nations of the Mongolian language family, thanking the organizers of the concert, etc. In one of my favorite parts of Buryat/Mongolian culture, instead of flowers they would give silk scarves in one of the five colors of Tibetan Buddhism. When we were in Ulan Batar we were told that people usually gave blue there, as the national color of Mongolia, the nation of the sky; at this concert mainly white was given, and some yellow. One of the speech-givers, who cried with emotion, wished us all that our children would not forget their native language of Buryat, and that they would always propagandize Buryat culture. I think any future children of mine might have trouble with especially the first of those directives.
The only obstacle to my complete enjoyment of the concert was a rapidly-developing case of food-poisoning. Joseph and I were the only ones to get sick; we still haven’t figured out anything that we ate that everyone else didn’t. Lots of food was eaten that day. The obvious culprit is the posi; even if it was not, in fact, the posi, I am never eating posi again. The results were simply too miserable. We had to check out of our hotel at 7:00 am the next morning, and our train wasn’t until 2:40. We spent the intervening 7 and a half hours sitting still in various places. Luckily, it was a sunny day, and we were able to spend a lot of time sitting on bench in the main square, gazing at the Head.
The train ride home, on the express electrichka, was very pretty. The first few hours were through the forest-steppe, with wooden villages and goats and things out the window. Then we spent several hours along Baikal, on which the ice is breaking up very picturesquely. Luckily, all the tickets had been sold out except for first class, we we had a fairly comfortable place for sitting still in our sickness. Joseph and I were both better enough by dinnertime to eat yoghurt and bread.
I’m glad we went back to Ulan Ude, despite its merciless attack of my digestive system. It’s a nice little city, with snow-covered mountains visible, and a big head of Lenin, and lots of wooden houses, and just a general pleasant atmosphere. The cars stop for pedestrians. We never did get over that. I’m trying to think of more reasons why I liked Ulan Ude so much, but I can’t come up with anything better than pretty and pleasant. And even if I still don’t remember why anyone would ever want to eat food other than white bread, I’ve had my share of ice-cream and cookies in this life
The next day, Monday, was the big 40-th anniversary concert of my host family’s choir. This concert, held in the big Dram-Teatr, had been looming over the household for at least the past month. It all went off successfully, as far as I could tell. Only one choir member fainted on stage, the small children from the youngest choir who ran about the theater did so with as little noise as could be expected, the congratulatory speeches were much shorter than they could have been, and everyone got lots of flowers. It was all very grand and sequin-covered. Katya and some dignified older gentleman very theatrically led the ceremonies, complete with poems written for the occasion, solemn introductions, and those earnest assurances to the audience of the undying love of the performers that for some reason so fill Russian theaters and concert halls, and Katya’s gown (blue) had more sequins than anyone’s. Nastya directed the younger choir, sang with a choir of graduates, and gave her always-stellar performance of “O Happy Day.” Valentina Petrovna, oh course, was the big star, with costume changes, congratulations via video-clip from professors of local universities, celebration in the aforementioned poems, etc. I wondered more than ever how I ended up in this house. I feel like my presence is bringin down the house-hold glamour factor several points.
May 1 is Labor Day here. Nothing interesting happened. Apparently in the socialist past this was a huge deal and everyone went to big demonstrations and waved flags and yelled cool slogans, but no more. It was, however, a day off school and work, and since it was a Thursday, the school and work that would have been on Friday was moved to Sunday (can we do things like that in America, on a national level? I am impressed.). On Thursday night Sara, Julia, Ben, Joseph, and I left on the train for Ulan Ude, and we arrived at 6 in the morning after a very small amount of sleep. Heroically ignoring our exhaustion, we headed straight for the Giant Head of Lenin, tied with Baikal as the most important object in Siberia. In case you are unaware of this wonder of the modern world, the Giant Head of Lenin is a giant head of Lenin. It is the largest metal head in the world. The location of the corresponding body is unknown. This giant bald head rules over a giant, fairly empty square in the middle of Ulan Ude, and its grandeur and beauty are beyond description. Other activities of the day were a long quest to find these Buddhist temples several miles from the city, walking around said Buddhist temples, eating posi in the Central Market (in a cafe chosen on the basic of asking a passer-by where her favorite posi were), and going to the coolest concert ever in the world. It was called “Nomads,” and I think it was organized as a celebration of Buryat nationalism. Well not nationalism in a political sense, but pride in nation. Aside from the five of us, I think there were 3 other non-Buryats in the big, way-over-seating-capacity theater. We had bought the last 5 tickets early that morning, standing-room-only (we actually sat in the aisle in chairs taken from the cafe), and immediately after buying them the phone in the ticket office rang three times with people begging for tickets. I felt a little bad that we had taken tickets from actual dedicated fans of the performing artists, actually; these were truly dedicated fans. The first half of the concert was all traditional music, with an orchestra of folk instruments, throat singing, awesome clothing, etc. The enthusiastic, beaming little announcer would say things between all the songs like “I’m sure this music returns you to your childhood, and makes you and to get on a horse and ride far out across the plain and just listen, listen, listen to the steppe.” There were a bunch of visiting musicians from Mongolia. Though the announcer generally spoke Russian, he spoke Mongolian when speaking to the Mongolians, and the musicians always spoke Buryat or Mongolian to the audience, which seemed to understand the three languages equally. In the second half the orchestra of folk instruments had been removed, and it all came to resemble an odd karaoke bar. It was still pretty cool though. Mixed with Mongolian pop, a tango, a belly-dance, and lots of flute-playing was a rendition of “the American folk song” Amazing Grace on various traditional instruments and accompanied by ballet dancers. The announcer said that the melody made you want to fly out over the plain, over the steppe, across wide expanses, toward the mountains.” He has clearly never heard it played on an organ. There was a fairly long period of stirring speeches on the part of various representatives of various organizations on the subject of the conservation of Buryat culture and the celebration of the talent of all nations of the Mongolian language family, thanking the organizers of the concert, etc. In one of my favorite parts of Buryat/Mongolian culture, instead of flowers they would give silk scarves in one of the five colors of Tibetan Buddhism. When we were in Ulan Batar we were told that people usually gave blue there, as the national color of Mongolia, the nation of the sky; at this concert mainly white was given, and some yellow. One of the speech-givers, who cried with emotion, wished us all that our children would not forget their native language of Buryat, and that they would always propagandize Buryat culture. I think any future children of mine might have trouble with especially the first of those directives.
The only obstacle to my complete enjoyment of the concert was a rapidly-developing case of food-poisoning. Joseph and I were the only ones to get sick; we still haven’t figured out anything that we ate that everyone else didn’t. Lots of food was eaten that day. The obvious culprit is the posi; even if it was not, in fact, the posi, I am never eating posi again. The results were simply too miserable. We had to check out of our hotel at 7:00 am the next morning, and our train wasn’t until 2:40. We spent the intervening 7 and a half hours sitting still in various places. Luckily, it was a sunny day, and we were able to spend a lot of time sitting on bench in the main square, gazing at the Head.
The train ride home, on the express electrichka, was very pretty. The first few hours were through the forest-steppe, with wooden villages and goats and things out the window. Then we spent several hours along Baikal, on which the ice is breaking up very picturesquely. Luckily, all the tickets had been sold out except for first class, we we had a fairly comfortable place for sitting still in our sickness. Joseph and I were both better enough by dinnertime to eat yoghurt and bread.
I’m glad we went back to Ulan Ude, despite its merciless attack of my digestive system. It’s a nice little city, with snow-covered mountains visible, and a big head of Lenin, and lots of wooden houses, and just a general pleasant atmosphere. The cars stop for pedestrians. We never did get over that. I’m trying to think of more reasons why I liked Ulan Ude so much, but I can’t come up with anything better than pretty and pleasant. And even if I still don’t remember why anyone would ever want to eat food other than white bread, I’ve had my share of ice-cream and cookies in this life
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
This Segment was Recorded Earlier
Sorry I haven’t been updating you on my doings lately. They just haven’t been all that interesting to me. I must have been here long enough for things to seem normal, or at least the things that seem interesting to me are not of the culturally-comparative type and would not be good blog material.
I’ll try to think of some things I’ve done recently though.
I just got back from English class (the college-aged group), where I made the students sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” we discussed the extended meanings of baseball phrases such as “bush league,” “pinch hit,” “cover your bases,” “screwball,” etc., and I showed part of a Simpsons episode that takes place at a ballpark. Most of the class was taken up by discussion of the rules of baseball, though.
In my recent drive to see all possible theatrical productions in the city, I saw a French play on Friday, a Turgenev play on Sunday (both in the big, handsome Dram-teatr), and Oliver (along with millions of kids on fieldtrips) on Sunday. Tomorrow I’m going to see The Cherry Orchard, also in the Dram Teatr.
I haven’t fallen in my high heels yet.
I forgot to mention a few weeks ago that the high point of the movie Donkey Xote was that the hero’s name, in Russian, was ‘Don Kihot Lamanchaskii.’
Warning: this part is sort of cheesy and belongs on a brochure for the benefits of making spoiled middle-class students study abroad or something.
I’ve recently been feeling a deep sympathy for all who are displaced. I think I have a hard time living in a state of constant incompetence and cultural irrelevance, but really I carry at least some aura of exotic interest, and then people congratulate me at every turn for how great it is that I came here, for how impressive it is that I traveled so far, for how well I am dealing with a foreign culture; no one congratulates the central Asian marshrutka drivers, shouting through static on their cell phones in harsh-sounding languages as passengers snap at them for not hearing their requests to stop the van; no one praises the Mongolian women selling leather gloves near the central market for their resourcefulness; the Chinese venders in Shanghai market get only distrustful glances and unceremonious demands. As an American I will always be part of a privileged class, everywhere; even where I am hated there will be an especial status to the hate. And aside from that I’m not a seller of leather gloves but a college student, middle-class and educated and economically non-threatening. And I know when I’m going home: as alien as I ever feel, I am always aware that it is temporary. I can only catch at the edges of the terror of losing one’s country, of the dehumanization of living permanently outside of one’s context. This weekend I sat in a marshrutka across from a smallish but solid-looking man in jeans and denim jacket, middle-aged, working-class, with sandy hair low on his forehead. He seemed so pleased with his world, to fit so well into it; everything about him, the way he moved, his voice when he called his son on his cellphone about what stop to meet at, the expectation with which he watched out the window, but mainly the way he wore his jacket, was just right for him, fit him. I was unreasonably concerned that he would leave Russia, and that his ease, so utterly un-cosmopolitan, would break against an incomprehensible world. And nothing about the incomprehensibility would be a cultural experience to reflect upon later in a study-abroad forum, or an adventure of youth to store up to remember in later years in a boring, well-paying job, it would just be lonely and humiliating.
It’s supposed to be cold and snowy here for the rest of the week.
I’ll try to think of some things I’ve done recently though.
I just got back from English class (the college-aged group), where I made the students sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” we discussed the extended meanings of baseball phrases such as “bush league,” “pinch hit,” “cover your bases,” “screwball,” etc., and I showed part of a Simpsons episode that takes place at a ballpark. Most of the class was taken up by discussion of the rules of baseball, though.
In my recent drive to see all possible theatrical productions in the city, I saw a French play on Friday, a Turgenev play on Sunday (both in the big, handsome Dram-teatr), and Oliver (along with millions of kids on fieldtrips) on Sunday. Tomorrow I’m going to see The Cherry Orchard, also in the Dram Teatr.
I haven’t fallen in my high heels yet.
I forgot to mention a few weeks ago that the high point of the movie Donkey Xote was that the hero’s name, in Russian, was ‘Don Kihot Lamanchaskii.’
Warning: this part is sort of cheesy and belongs on a brochure for the benefits of making spoiled middle-class students study abroad or something.
I’ve recently been feeling a deep sympathy for all who are displaced. I think I have a hard time living in a state of constant incompetence and cultural irrelevance, but really I carry at least some aura of exotic interest, and then people congratulate me at every turn for how great it is that I came here, for how impressive it is that I traveled so far, for how well I am dealing with a foreign culture; no one congratulates the central Asian marshrutka drivers, shouting through static on their cell phones in harsh-sounding languages as passengers snap at them for not hearing their requests to stop the van; no one praises the Mongolian women selling leather gloves near the central market for their resourcefulness; the Chinese venders in Shanghai market get only distrustful glances and unceremonious demands. As an American I will always be part of a privileged class, everywhere; even where I am hated there will be an especial status to the hate. And aside from that I’m not a seller of leather gloves but a college student, middle-class and educated and economically non-threatening. And I know when I’m going home: as alien as I ever feel, I am always aware that it is temporary. I can only catch at the edges of the terror of losing one’s country, of the dehumanization of living permanently outside of one’s context. This weekend I sat in a marshrutka across from a smallish but solid-looking man in jeans and denim jacket, middle-aged, working-class, with sandy hair low on his forehead. He seemed so pleased with his world, to fit so well into it; everything about him, the way he moved, his voice when he called his son on his cellphone about what stop to meet at, the expectation with which he watched out the window, but mainly the way he wore his jacket, was just right for him, fit him. I was unreasonably concerned that he would leave Russia, and that his ease, so utterly un-cosmopolitan, would break against an incomprehensible world. And nothing about the incomprehensibility would be a cultural experience to reflect upon later in a study-abroad forum, or an adventure of youth to store up to remember in later years in a boring, well-paying job, it would just be lonely and humiliating.
It’s supposed to be cold and snowy here for the rest of the week.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Pictures
I've just spent a lot of time on a slow computer putting captions on all the pictures on the album "Irkutsk Semester II" for you people, so you'd better appreciate it. I'm working on finishing up the winter break one.
In other news, I spent most of yesterday eating cabbage to combat "spring weakness."
In other news, I spent most of yesterday eating cabbage to combat "spring weakness."
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Things I Haven't Written
A while ago, I guess at the end of spring break, Ilana and I went to a concert in the Organ Hall, despite the fact that I had vowed never to do such a thing again. But this time there were vocalist and violists in addition to organ music, and the aires of vocalists are always entertaining. They find more variations on the bow than one would think possible. And then, the second half of the concert consisted of Bach’s Coffee Cantata, which is not only very entertaining in itself, but was performed by the same singers who had spent the first half of the concert establishing their ridiculousness, plus it was translated into Russian which made it even funnier, PLUS during intermission they gave out free plastic cups of coffee, and it was fun watching all the serious concert-going babushkas standing in a pack and sipping from identical brown cups with pointless little handles. The concert organizers seemed a little nervous about introducing this element of playfulness to the serious realm of classical music, and actually, all irony aside, I rather like the earnestness of the Russian relationship to the arts, free of some level of self-consciousness that that relationship has picked up in America. Ignore the last two sentences: I completely failed to explain what I mean.
Donkey Xote doesn’t make any sense in the Russian translation, or perhaps it was just all lost on me, or perhaps it didn’t make any sense in English either. I don’t know which.
The two days of spring were nice, but there was a snowstorm last evening and we’ve skipped over summer and fall, I think, and are back to winter.
I’m flying home 8 weeks from yesterday.
I bought some amazingly awesome red high-heeled cowboy-ish boots, and also a red leather belt with various rhinestones all over it. I am going to be so Russian by the time I get home, you are not even going to know what to do with me.
There were a bunch of butterflies around Baikal yesterday.
The rest is still unwritten.
Donkey Xote doesn’t make any sense in the Russian translation, or perhaps it was just all lost on me, or perhaps it didn’t make any sense in English either. I don’t know which.
The two days of spring were nice, but there was a snowstorm last evening and we’ve skipped over summer and fall, I think, and are back to winter.
I’m flying home 8 weeks from yesterday.
I bought some amazingly awesome red high-heeled cowboy-ish boots, and also a red leather belt with various rhinestones all over it. I am going to be so Russian by the time I get home, you are not even going to know what to do with me.
There were a bunch of butterflies around Baikal yesterday.
The rest is still unwritten.
Signs of Spring
I think it is spring here now. You can tell because everyone in Irktusk has come out of winter hibernation and is walking around near the river with beer bottles in their hands. Like, every single person in Irkutsk. If they were all drinking the same brand of beer, it would look like a beer commercial: these hordes of young people, dressed like they’re going to a club, stream down the streets from different directions toward some common point, the sun streaming through the glass of the bottles in their hands and making the beer inside shine golden and translucent. The mangy old men are also out drinking beer, of course, but they are huddled on the same benches they always were, further from the main street down to the river; spring does not seem to have affected them much.
This all happened at once, as far as I can tell, Friday afternoon, the first truly warm day of the year. When I went into the movie theater at 4:00 or so, the world was as it always was, and when I left the theater around 5:00 or so, in disgust at the dumbness and ugliness of the movie, all had been transformed. The area around the theater seems to be the new place to be; in a two-hundred yard radius of that historic building, dozens of groups of drinkers are milling about, soaking in the sunlight like I hope the trees are doing, preparing to put out some dang leaves already.
This all happened at once, as far as I can tell, Friday afternoon, the first truly warm day of the year. When I went into the movie theater at 4:00 or so, the world was as it always was, and when I left the theater around 5:00 or so, in disgust at the dumbness and ugliness of the movie, all had been transformed. The area around the theater seems to be the new place to be; in a two-hundred yard radius of that historic building, dozens of groups of drinkers are milling about, soaking in the sunlight like I hope the trees are doing, preparing to put out some dang leaves already.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Um
The link to the Black Panther organization was not added to the blog by me. Fie upon for logger-headed knave. You know who you are.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Aimless Indignation
I am tired of cultural philosophizing. I mean about the unfathomable Russian soul, about the great cultural truths we can glean from “the American smile,” about how Germans are logical and French are emotional and Russians suffer as a hobby, etc. It’s just lame. People just pick up these ideas and then bend all reality with which they come into contact to fit them. The source of my especial annoyance today is our literature class, in which all we do is listen to the same unquestioned statements rehashed again and again to fit every poem we read.
Issue number 1: The American Smile
Everyone talks about how Americans smile all the time, and these smile-commenters are very damn smug about the whole thing. If Americans were not so hypocritical, or so naive, or so rich, or so unable to understand suffering (whatever trait the speaker wants to impute to America at the moment), we would stop all our stupid smiling. The most charitable interpretation of the American smile is that it is a cultural unwillingness to discuss unpleasantness, a cultural expectation that everyone should be happy and cheerful and that everything should be great all the time. Whether or not it is true that we feel that we must live up to a high expectation of success in life, I resent the classification of smiling as a form of hypocrisy. Here is my own sweeping cultural theory, based not on ethnic character traits but on the actually cultural basis of forms of nonverbal communication: while Russians think of a smile as communicating only happiness, for Americans the smile serves a double function, communicating either happiness or goodwill (or both, of course). In America, when people smile at each other on the street, they are not saying “I wish you to know that I at this moment am especially happy,” they are saying “I wish you well, and our relationship, even if it is only a relationship of short standing and based only on our sharing the same sidewalk, is positive and friendly.” There is nothing hypocritical about smiling in such a situation, even if each smiler is harboring grief and sorrow. The smile is not, in this situation, an expression of emotion but a social gesture, communicating an honest message. In America, a dishonest smile is not a smile when one is actually sad, but a smile when the smiler is actually working against the smilee, or does not wish him well.
Issue number 2: Only Russian Orthodoxy takes seriously the issues of grief and suffering
The evidence that was brought forth in our literature class today for this was that in western Christendom the most important holiday is Christmas, showing that we are concerned with individualism and positiveness and such (it’s important that God became man, every human being is important, etc.) and in Holy Russia the most important holiday is Easter, before which a proper number of tears have been shed, unhappiness experienced, etc. Um, unfair ignoring of independent variables. Christmas seems like a bigger deal than Easter in the West mainly because it corresponds with the secular holiday celebrated by Russians on New Year. And then, all the evergreen and light imagery of Christmas is about pretty much the same thing that Russians talk about as being their own higher, more atune-to-the-closeness-of-death-and-dispair understanding of Easter: celebrating the victory of life over death, light over dark, good over bad that comes even in the frightening circumstances of winter and want.
And then, where do they get off claiming to have the only form of Christianity is which pain and suffering get coverage? They need to be sent to Spain to look at some gory crucifixes, or read about medieval pilgrims putting stones in their shoes, or watch The Passion of the Christ or something. I find all of those things fairly distasteful, but it’s the principle of this silly psychological analysis of entire cultures that is under discussion. If Russia gets to over-emphasize sorrow and suffering, so do we. Stop trying to hog all the misery for your own country, Rooskies.
I could go on for a long time. People just decide these silly things—American movies always have happy endings, Russian culture is based on the number 3 (because they are so holy), etc., and then they only see what supports them.
Issue number 1: The American Smile
Everyone talks about how Americans smile all the time, and these smile-commenters are very damn smug about the whole thing. If Americans were not so hypocritical, or so naive, or so rich, or so unable to understand suffering (whatever trait the speaker wants to impute to America at the moment), we would stop all our stupid smiling. The most charitable interpretation of the American smile is that it is a cultural unwillingness to discuss unpleasantness, a cultural expectation that everyone should be happy and cheerful and that everything should be great all the time. Whether or not it is true that we feel that we must live up to a high expectation of success in life, I resent the classification of smiling as a form of hypocrisy. Here is my own sweeping cultural theory, based not on ethnic character traits but on the actually cultural basis of forms of nonverbal communication: while Russians think of a smile as communicating only happiness, for Americans the smile serves a double function, communicating either happiness or goodwill (or both, of course). In America, when people smile at each other on the street, they are not saying “I wish you to know that I at this moment am especially happy,” they are saying “I wish you well, and our relationship, even if it is only a relationship of short standing and based only on our sharing the same sidewalk, is positive and friendly.” There is nothing hypocritical about smiling in such a situation, even if each smiler is harboring grief and sorrow. The smile is not, in this situation, an expression of emotion but a social gesture, communicating an honest message. In America, a dishonest smile is not a smile when one is actually sad, but a smile when the smiler is actually working against the smilee, or does not wish him well.
Issue number 2: Only Russian Orthodoxy takes seriously the issues of grief and suffering
The evidence that was brought forth in our literature class today for this was that in western Christendom the most important holiday is Christmas, showing that we are concerned with individualism and positiveness and such (it’s important that God became man, every human being is important, etc.) and in Holy Russia the most important holiday is Easter, before which a proper number of tears have been shed, unhappiness experienced, etc. Um, unfair ignoring of independent variables. Christmas seems like a bigger deal than Easter in the West mainly because it corresponds with the secular holiday celebrated by Russians on New Year. And then, all the evergreen and light imagery of Christmas is about pretty much the same thing that Russians talk about as being their own higher, more atune-to-the-closeness-of-death-and-dispair understanding of Easter: celebrating the victory of life over death, light over dark, good over bad that comes even in the frightening circumstances of winter and want.
And then, where do they get off claiming to have the only form of Christianity is which pain and suffering get coverage? They need to be sent to Spain to look at some gory crucifixes, or read about medieval pilgrims putting stones in their shoes, or watch The Passion of the Christ or something. I find all of those things fairly distasteful, but it’s the principle of this silly psychological analysis of entire cultures that is under discussion. If Russia gets to over-emphasize sorrow and suffering, so do we. Stop trying to hog all the misery for your own country, Rooskies.
I could go on for a long time. People just decide these silly things—American movies always have happy endings, Russian culture is based on the number 3 (because they are so holy), etc., and then they only see what supports them.
Northern Wilds
I went for a walk this afternoon and spent a lot of time trying to take a picture of a magpie. But though they flew right by me many a time, flashing the metallic-green feathers on their back, I never had my camera out at those times. So you will have to take my word for it: there are lots and lots of magpies here.
I did, however manage to photograph one of the other principle factors of physical reality in springtime Irkutsk:
[note especially the depth of mud on the foot in the background]
I promised to write about my spring break. But there’s not that much to say. I spent lots and lots of time on a train with middle-school girls (my host-mother’s choir). I heard the new Brittney Spears song (“Do You Wanna Piece of Me”) many times. I answered lot of questions about whether I had ever seen the king and queen of America, how I liked London, was all we ate hamburgers, doesn’t Irktusk seem small when Americans live in the world’s largest cities, etc. I am still puzzled by how often I get asked about kings and queens. Something is clearly wrong with our democracy propaganda. But then, I think it’s just part of everyone thinking that Great Britain and America are the same place. And not just middle schoolers.
Ust-Ilimsk, the little city to the north where Valentina Petrovna’s choir sang and I hung around, was not really differentiable from any other small Siberian city, except that it’s only 30 years old (like Syeverobaikalsk), so it’s somewhat less run-down looking. Like Syverobaikalsk, it was built by the Young Communist League, and the main streets are called: Karl Marx Street (standard), World Street (the name could also mean Peace Street, but I was told that it was so named because it was built by the whole world), Friendship Among Nationalities Street, Romantics’ Street, and Dreamers’ Street. All these streets were rather broad and un-crowded, and the city had a pleasant, open feel. I spent a nice two days there being away from Irktusk. I mainly hung out with the very nice family I stayed with, especially with their middle-school daughter, Nadya, who was very sweet and non-teenagery. She had also just won the “Little Princess Ust-Ilimsk” pageant or something, and I got to go to her big TV interview with her.
Me being a cool kid and hanging out at the movie theater with Nadya and her friend- here we are pretending to play a motorcycle-racing game. DDR was also played. That’s how cool I am.
Oh, and here I am talking to Nadya’s English class, who did not understand a word of English. Here is how their teacher introduced them to me: “This is the 6-M class. They are the class of English. But they do not like English, because they are not interested in travel or in being well-educated people.” The students were not offended, because they did not understand a word that she said.
Final note: there is special mayonnaise for Lent. But not special cabbage. You must go one eating the same cabbage that once sat in your hallway in the fall, and you must eat it in greater quantities than ever before, because, in the words of the great cabbage-preserver herself, “It is spring! We must constantly eat cabbage! Needed acids!”
I did, however manage to photograph one of the other principle factors of physical reality in springtime Irkutsk:
[note especially the depth of mud on the foot in the background]
I promised to write about my spring break. But there’s not that much to say. I spent lots and lots of time on a train with middle-school girls (my host-mother’s choir). I heard the new Brittney Spears song (“Do You Wanna Piece of Me”) many times. I answered lot of questions about whether I had ever seen the king and queen of America, how I liked London, was all we ate hamburgers, doesn’t Irktusk seem small when Americans live in the world’s largest cities, etc. I am still puzzled by how often I get asked about kings and queens. Something is clearly wrong with our democracy propaganda. But then, I think it’s just part of everyone thinking that Great Britain and America are the same place. And not just middle schoolers.
Ust-Ilimsk, the little city to the north where Valentina Petrovna’s choir sang and I hung around, was not really differentiable from any other small Siberian city, except that it’s only 30 years old (like Syeverobaikalsk), so it’s somewhat less run-down looking. Like Syverobaikalsk, it was built by the Young Communist League, and the main streets are called: Karl Marx Street (standard), World Street (the name could also mean Peace Street, but I was told that it was so named because it was built by the whole world), Friendship Among Nationalities Street, Romantics’ Street, and Dreamers’ Street. All these streets were rather broad and un-crowded, and the city had a pleasant, open feel. I spent a nice two days there being away from Irktusk. I mainly hung out with the very nice family I stayed with, especially with their middle-school daughter, Nadya, who was very sweet and non-teenagery. She had also just won the “Little Princess Ust-Ilimsk” pageant or something, and I got to go to her big TV interview with her.
Me being a cool kid and hanging out at the movie theater with Nadya and her friend- here we are pretending to play a motorcycle-racing game. DDR was also played. That’s how cool I am.
Oh, and here I am talking to Nadya’s English class, who did not understand a word of English. Here is how their teacher introduced them to me: “This is the 6-M class. They are the class of English. But they do not like English, because they are not interested in travel or in being well-educated people.” The students were not offended, because they did not understand a word that she said.
Final note: there is special mayonnaise for Lent. But not special cabbage. You must go one eating the same cabbage that once sat in your hallway in the fall, and you must eat it in greater quantities than ever before, because, in the words of the great cabbage-preserver herself, “It is spring! We must constantly eat cabbage! Needed acids!”
Friday, March 21, 2008
auto-otvetchik
Our spring break starts on Monday; I'll be out of town from then until the next Sunday. So I will not be answering e-mail.
Hey, Wanna Hear a Pretty Poem?
I’m supposed to be writing an essay about this Alexander Blok poem, but instead I will translate it for you. It was written during the Russo-Japanese war.
A girl sang in a church choir
Of all those tired in a foreign land,
Of all the ships, gone out to sea,
Of all, who had forgotten their joy.
How her voice sang, flying up to the cupola;
And a sunbeam shone on her white shoulder,
And from the darkness each one watched and listened
To the white dress sing in the sunbeam.
And it seemed to everyone that there would be joy,
That all the ships were in quiet backwaters,
That in the foreign land all the tired people
Had found themselves bright lives.
And the voice was sweet, and the sunbeam was slender,
And only on high, at the royal gates,
Was the keeper of the secret—and the Child cried,
For no one would come back.
1906
A girl sang in a church choir
Of all those tired in a foreign land,
Of all the ships, gone out to sea,
Of all, who had forgotten their joy.
How her voice sang, flying up to the cupola;
And a sunbeam shone on her white shoulder,
And from the darkness each one watched and listened
To the white dress sing in the sunbeam.
And it seemed to everyone that there would be joy,
That all the ships were in quiet backwaters,
That in the foreign land all the tired people
Had found themselves bright lives.
And the voice was sweet, and the sunbeam was slender,
And only on high, at the royal gates,
Was the keeper of the secret—and the Child cried,
For no one would come back.
1906
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
English Lessons, Cont.
I just got back from my first class with a new group, one of the “work and travel” classes for college-aged kids who will be working in America this summer. Almost all of them will be working in Myrtle Beach, and three of those are working for Krispy Kreme. They didn’t really understand why I thought that was so exciting. Anyway, the idea of this class is, as much as language practice, to prepare the kids culturally for American life. Unfortunately, I know nothing about America. I’m sure that there are a thousand things that will blow their cabbage-fed minds as soon as they get off the plane, but I can’t pin down exactly what they are, or how to prepare them for those things. It doesn’t really help that they don’t believe that they don’t know everything they need to know about America from watching TV. But really, whenever people ask me questions about America here, I have no idea how to answer. For instance, I made a vague attempt today to discuss the issue of gender roles. But... I don’t really how to explain the fact that it’s considered ideal for men to try to help out around the house (one of the phrases we learned today, by the way), but they usually don’t much, or that we consider that women are just as smart and capable as men, but they are often not as well paid. While on the one hand America is becoming more and more a lost paradise the longer I am here, on the other hand, I continually have to face up to our pervasive self-denial. This always happened when I tried to teach classes about racism, too. I would start out with the attitude that I had to explain to these racist Russians how to behave in a civilized society, but then I would start talking, and the message would be that it is a very big deal to use derisive terms to describe racial and ethnic identity in America because... we have a long history of violent racial conflict. Sigh. But if any of you have ideas for lessons for this class, let me know. Especially ideas connected to concrete information of some kind—that’s generally what I lack. I currently hide my lack of direction under a distracting cloud of verbal phrases I make them learn: to hang out/ up/ ten; to work out/ around/ through/ on; to wash out/ away; etc. Keeps them from thinking too much.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Trans-Baikalin' it
Along with about 600 other people, literally, I got off the electrichka yesterday at the stop “Dark Valley” and headed toward Baikal. It’s probably the last weekend it’s safe enough to cross the ice, and I think most of the city of Irkutsk was taking advantage of it. Skiers had been getting off at the 4 or 5 stops before mine, and later trains brought new crowds of people. It was quite the colorful party on the half-hour or 45-minute descent to the ice: there were dogs running around in windbreakers, and old women in bright purple jogging suits, and teenagers blaring music, and groups of middle-aged friends loudly singing songs from their youth, and young women in their usual leather boots and fashionable jeans, and young men in the camo that they for some reason find it necessary to wear every time they are involved in outdoor activities of any kind. My favorite members of the parade were the fur-coated women pulling small children in brightly-painted sleds; the best was when the kids would stare at the snow-covered ground intently until they could reach it, grab a handful of snow, and, laughing hysterically, throw it at their mothers’ behinds. This is apparently the official pastime of children in sleds. The official activity of everyone else was basically falling down: it was a long, steep, slippery way down to lake-level.
Towards Baikal somehow the huge swarms of people disappeared- before the lake groups gradually pulled off to make campfires and cook hotdogs or something, and then as soon as we got to the shore the hugeness of the lake just sort of swallowed everyone. I saw some old bridges and tunnels of the Circumbaikal railroad, and had my first picnic on a frozen beach, and then started out across the ice. It was a bright, sunny day, and the snow on the lake glittered in all the colors of the rainbow, and the jagged mountains on the other side were skirted in neon-blue clouds, and often forest-green trains could wind along the mountainsides on the shore. Overall, it was sort of like a Lisa Frank notebook cover, only it was real life, so rather than being horrible and cheesy it was just pretty. And there were no rainbow-colored unicorns involved, just long strings of skiers in the distance.
Towards Baikal somehow the huge swarms of people disappeared- before the lake groups gradually pulled off to make campfires and cook hotdogs or something, and then as soon as we got to the shore the hugeness of the lake just sort of swallowed everyone. I saw some old bridges and tunnels of the Circumbaikal railroad, and had my first picnic on a frozen beach, and then started out across the ice. It was a bright, sunny day, and the snow on the lake glittered in all the colors of the rainbow, and the jagged mountains on the other side were skirted in neon-blue clouds, and often forest-green trains could wind along the mountainsides on the shore. Overall, it was sort of like a Lisa Frank notebook cover, only it was real life, so rather than being horrible and cheesy it was just pretty. And there were no rainbow-colored unicorns involved, just long strings of skiers in the distance.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
History of Religion
I gave a report in my mainstream history class today, on the topic of the influence of New England Puritans on the formation of the government of our great nation. It was fairly painful, I'm sure, for the other students, but it is over with.
The professor then proceeded to talk about Protestantism in general, and he posed the question to the class of why Protestantism game into being. I didn't bother trying to think of an answer, as I knew that Pavel Evfrofeevich would just look sardonically at every attempted answer before explaining, in a tone of presenting the obvious, that the answer was Developments in Agriculture. The answer is always developments in agriculture. Just like in History of Post-Soviet Russia the answer is always "no, that was in fact not a good idea, but a bad one," and in children's sermons at the ER UCC the answer is always "God."
The professor then proceeded to talk about Protestantism in general, and he posed the question to the class of why Protestantism game into being. I didn't bother trying to think of an answer, as I knew that Pavel Evfrofeevich would just look sardonically at every attempted answer before explaining, in a tone of presenting the obvious, that the answer was Developments in Agriculture. The answer is always developments in agriculture. Just like in History of Post-Soviet Russia the answer is always "no, that was in fact not a good idea, but a bad one," and in children's sermons at the ER UCC the answer is always "God."
Spring Group Trip
We all successfully returned from Syeverobaikalsk, I am happy to report. Well, I’m happy that the return was successful, but I’m not all that happy with the return as a basic fact. Syeverobaikalsk is about the coolest place ever. I have no idea why people live in Irkutsk when Syeverobaikalsk is a mere hour and twenty minutes away by plane.
Early in our second morning on the train, we went through a very, very long tunnel. This tunnel just kept going, and going, as the half of the train that was awake fiddled with their teacups and sat on the edges of their beds and waited uneasily for sunlight. And then at last the tunnel ended, and our train glided on through a sunrise over bare, white mountains by little local stations half covered in snow drifts. And then, after the whole car was up and had gathered together their uneaten loaves of bread and remnants of cheese and unused packets of instant soup, and had folded their sheets and returned their blankets to the impatient, blond conductor girl, we pulled into the bright, modern station in Syeverobaikalsk. Our guide was waiting for us, and the marshrutkas into which we piled with our suitcases was new and clean and fairly large and drove us down the wide main street of a clean, crisp city with gracefully curving apartment buildings. After turning onto a few smaller roads, lined with well-ordered cottages, our marshrutka took us to a two-storey wooden house with a different color scheme in each of the three guest rooms upstairs and a table set out with bottled water. That natural conclusion was that the early-morning tunnel had taken us straight through the earth and we were not in Russia at all, but Colorado.
This impression was very soon corrected when we got to the “ski mountain” later that day, which I would describe more as “completely unregulated and dangerous mess,” but I may just be bitter because I was the only one wholly unable to figure out the pull-rope system and spent a lot of time being dragged about through the snow having Russian snow-boarders laughing at me. Or because I was given skis more appropriate in size to a 5-year-old. Or because Marina, our guide, had a very irritating tendency to rush about doing everything possible to humiliate one further after every incidence of incompetence. Anyway. Went skiing. Also, that day... tour of the city, before the skiing, and BAM museum. And after the skiing hot springs, which was fun but involved a lot of drunken Russians, one of whom yelled at Elisabeth a lot for trying to steal her tapochki.
Our basic activities, the whole time we were there, were playing in the snow and taking pictures of Baikal. There were other, more planned activities framing these two, but they were always just covers for the ones mentioned. So it was a good time. Everything was just very pretty, and clean, and free of traffic and trash and crowed sidewalks. One time some ice fisherman let us play with their equipment and try to dig holes in the ice and stuff, and we (they) caught a fish that we then passed around and took pictures with. By the time I got the fish it was fairly dead, but the fisherman kept encouraging me to slap it to make it wriggle around more, the better to take pictures with. The most amazing part, though, was when we passed off the fish to its rightful owners and they conclusively killed it: have you ever seen a fish being punched in the head? Luckily, Elisabeth has a film. I don’t mean there was demonstrative, needless cruelty to fish involved: it was a very matter-of-fact, quick-and-decisive head punching. But still. Another time we climbed a trail that prisoners in a Stalinist camp took to collect mica from the mines near the top of the mountain. Well, I don’t know how much of a mine it was- it seemed to me more like mica sitting around on top of the mountain. But anyway, it was a hard mountain to climb up and down, and I was glad I was not hauling mica, or being shot when I tried to stop. We didn’t actually go to the prison camp, as it’s too hard to get there in the winter, but we had the place pointed out to us from afar. It’s in this place in the mountains where in the winter the sun doesn’t shine at all, and it’s accessible only by ski. If I had a choice between that camp, which is famous and has a name that I should remember because it’s in the title of a book that I have read, and the camp that we saw on the most beautiful beach on Olkhon, I think I know which I would choose. I’m still confused by that Olkhon prison camp.
Our last night, clear and moonless, some of us walked out to Baikal and lay on the ice and looked at the stars. The next morning we took the same road and watched the sunrise over the mountains on the other side of the lake, slowly slowly in its winter course, but beautiful, and the red light hit the big, clear ice-blocks standing around us on the lake very impressively. When the sun had cleared the mountains a rainbow appeared, one of several we saw on the trip. For some reason I still don’t understand, there are a lot of rainbows in that area, though it never snowed or rained.
Early in our second morning on the train, we went through a very, very long tunnel. This tunnel just kept going, and going, as the half of the train that was awake fiddled with their teacups and sat on the edges of their beds and waited uneasily for sunlight. And then at last the tunnel ended, and our train glided on through a sunrise over bare, white mountains by little local stations half covered in snow drifts. And then, after the whole car was up and had gathered together their uneaten loaves of bread and remnants of cheese and unused packets of instant soup, and had folded their sheets and returned their blankets to the impatient, blond conductor girl, we pulled into the bright, modern station in Syeverobaikalsk. Our guide was waiting for us, and the marshrutkas into which we piled with our suitcases was new and clean and fairly large and drove us down the wide main street of a clean, crisp city with gracefully curving apartment buildings. After turning onto a few smaller roads, lined with well-ordered cottages, our marshrutka took us to a two-storey wooden house with a different color scheme in each of the three guest rooms upstairs and a table set out with bottled water. That natural conclusion was that the early-morning tunnel had taken us straight through the earth and we were not in Russia at all, but Colorado.
This impression was very soon corrected when we got to the “ski mountain” later that day, which I would describe more as “completely unregulated and dangerous mess,” but I may just be bitter because I was the only one wholly unable to figure out the pull-rope system and spent a lot of time being dragged about through the snow having Russian snow-boarders laughing at me. Or because I was given skis more appropriate in size to a 5-year-old. Or because Marina, our guide, had a very irritating tendency to rush about doing everything possible to humiliate one further after every incidence of incompetence. Anyway. Went skiing. Also, that day... tour of the city, before the skiing, and BAM museum. And after the skiing hot springs, which was fun but involved a lot of drunken Russians, one of whom yelled at Elisabeth a lot for trying to steal her tapochki.
Our basic activities, the whole time we were there, were playing in the snow and taking pictures of Baikal. There were other, more planned activities framing these two, but they were always just covers for the ones mentioned. So it was a good time. Everything was just very pretty, and clean, and free of traffic and trash and crowed sidewalks. One time some ice fisherman let us play with their equipment and try to dig holes in the ice and stuff, and we (they) caught a fish that we then passed around and took pictures with. By the time I got the fish it was fairly dead, but the fisherman kept encouraging me to slap it to make it wriggle around more, the better to take pictures with. The most amazing part, though, was when we passed off the fish to its rightful owners and they conclusively killed it: have you ever seen a fish being punched in the head? Luckily, Elisabeth has a film. I don’t mean there was demonstrative, needless cruelty to fish involved: it was a very matter-of-fact, quick-and-decisive head punching. But still. Another time we climbed a trail that prisoners in a Stalinist camp took to collect mica from the mines near the top of the mountain. Well, I don’t know how much of a mine it was- it seemed to me more like mica sitting around on top of the mountain. But anyway, it was a hard mountain to climb up and down, and I was glad I was not hauling mica, or being shot when I tried to stop. We didn’t actually go to the prison camp, as it’s too hard to get there in the winter, but we had the place pointed out to us from afar. It’s in this place in the mountains where in the winter the sun doesn’t shine at all, and it’s accessible only by ski. If I had a choice between that camp, which is famous and has a name that I should remember because it’s in the title of a book that I have read, and the camp that we saw on the most beautiful beach on Olkhon, I think I know which I would choose. I’m still confused by that Olkhon prison camp.
Our last night, clear and moonless, some of us walked out to Baikal and lay on the ice and looked at the stars. The next morning we took the same road and watched the sunrise over the mountains on the other side of the lake, slowly slowly in its winter course, but beautiful, and the red light hit the big, clear ice-blocks standing around us on the lake very impressively. When the sun had cleared the mountains a rainbow appeared, one of several we saw on the trip. For some reason I still don’t understand, there are a lot of rainbows in that area, though it never snowed or rained.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Day in Review
Today I was very stressed out because I have my two mainstream classes on Thursdays. I thought I might have to give a report in history (the due date was not at all clear to me), and I still didn’t know how to say “Congregationalist” in Russian as of this morning, and I hadn’t printed it, etc. And then my spelling class is terrifying by definition. Plus I started taking the spelling class because it was in the room where I thought a different class would be, so I wasn’t sure if I could find the class again. Plus I hadn’t found the questions we were supposed to answer for homework.
So, after grammar class at the mezhfak, I rushed downtown, went to an internet cafe, used Wikipedia to solve some of my translation woes, printed the paper, continued to stress out about how I can’t read out loud in Russian and I can’t speak well enough to give the report without reading, went to the spelling class. The latin class of the group whose spelling class I went to was cancelled, about which they were very happy, so they were combined with this other class that was supposed to have latin at that time... sorry, this story is long and uninteresting so I’ll stop it. But first thing in the class, we did a “dictation.” That is, the teacher, this large woman with very long gray hair that she wears in a whale-spout, read sentences, and we were to write them, with correct spelling. But I never understood a word she said. So that was good. O% on that assignment. Then the class continued, following some textbook I don’t have. Then it was revealed that the class would meet for two class periods today. But I ran away after the first, because I had history class. But we sat in the class for 20 minutes, and no teacher appeared. I chatted with a very nice boy behind me, and eventually I asked, sort of laughing, “So, what are we sitting around not having class?” And he told me that the professor’s son’s funeral had been the day before. Oh. So then we all left, which means I could have gone to the other class period of the spelling class. It also means I didn’t give my report. Mainly, of course, I am sorry about the death of the professor’s son. Interesting, un-death-related note: my report contains the word “Mayflowerski.” I made that word up. It means “relating to the Mayflower.”
We’re leaving on our group trip tomorrow evening, and getting back Wednesday afternoon. I lost the schedule, so I don’t really know what we’re doing. We’ll see a famous hydroelectric plant, I know, and a museum of the BAM, this segment of railroad that the communists spent lots of year and dollars building but is sort of useless. And we’ll go downhill skiing at this famous ski mountain, but Middlebury only pays for an hour. I’m mostly excited about grocery shopping for the 36-hour train ride.
Very warm here the past few days. On my dash from the internet café to the linguistics department I saw the sad sight of a soft, crumbling ice palace. I hope it’s warmer near Syeverobaikalsk, wither our group trip, as I think our travel plans depend on being about to drive on a frozen Lake Baikal.
So, after grammar class at the mezhfak, I rushed downtown, went to an internet cafe, used Wikipedia to solve some of my translation woes, printed the paper, continued to stress out about how I can’t read out loud in Russian and I can’t speak well enough to give the report without reading, went to the spelling class. The latin class of the group whose spelling class I went to was cancelled, about which they were very happy, so they were combined with this other class that was supposed to have latin at that time... sorry, this story is long and uninteresting so I’ll stop it. But first thing in the class, we did a “dictation.” That is, the teacher, this large woman with very long gray hair that she wears in a whale-spout, read sentences, and we were to write them, with correct spelling. But I never understood a word she said. So that was good. O% on that assignment. Then the class continued, following some textbook I don’t have. Then it was revealed that the class would meet for two class periods today. But I ran away after the first, because I had history class. But we sat in the class for 20 minutes, and no teacher appeared. I chatted with a very nice boy behind me, and eventually I asked, sort of laughing, “So, what are we sitting around not having class?” And he told me that the professor’s son’s funeral had been the day before. Oh. So then we all left, which means I could have gone to the other class period of the spelling class. It also means I didn’t give my report. Mainly, of course, I am sorry about the death of the professor’s son. Interesting, un-death-related note: my report contains the word “Mayflowerski.” I made that word up. It means “relating to the Mayflower.”
We’re leaving on our group trip tomorrow evening, and getting back Wednesday afternoon. I lost the schedule, so I don’t really know what we’re doing. We’ll see a famous hydroelectric plant, I know, and a museum of the BAM, this segment of railroad that the communists spent lots of year and dollars building but is sort of useless. And we’ll go downhill skiing at this famous ski mountain, but Middlebury only pays for an hour. I’m mostly excited about grocery shopping for the 36-hour train ride.
Very warm here the past few days. On my dash from the internet café to the linguistics department I saw the sad sight of a soft, crumbling ice palace. I hope it’s warmer near Syeverobaikalsk, wither our group trip, as I think our travel plans depend on being about to drive on a frozen Lake Baikal.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Homeward Bound, someday
I called STA Travel, after waiting for it to be business hours in Arizona Standard Time, which was not too convenient, and have successfully changed my ticket home to June 1. I get in at 3:something p.m. In case you wanted to know.
It is muddy and slushy and yet still cold and cloudy here. I have not yet been killed by an icicle.
Yesterday on the television set Valentina Petrovna and I watched a concert of nuclear scientists and the like singing and playing guitars and such. They are big stars. They are also pretty awesome- all these old guys in cardegans up on the stage singing clever songs. At least I was assured that they were clever- I of course did not understand any of it. But the music part was agreeable. I think this is one of the cultural advantages of the absence of free market- in the Soviet Union, musicians didn't have to be good looking.
It is muddy and slushy and yet still cold and cloudy here. I have not yet been killed by an icicle.
Yesterday on the television set Valentina Petrovna and I watched a concert of nuclear scientists and the like singing and playing guitars and such. They are big stars. They are also pretty awesome- all these old guys in cardegans up on the stage singing clever songs. At least I was assured that they were clever- I of course did not understand any of it. But the music part was agreeable. I think this is one of the cultural advantages of the absence of free market- in the Soviet Union, musicians didn't have to be good looking.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
С Празником
Yesterday was two important days in the cultural life of Russia. Well it was only one day, but two important anniversaries were noted. Important Thing Number 1: Day of the Defender of the Fatherland. This is the Russian Federation’s replacement of Red Army Day. In effect, this holiday is a combination of Memorial Day, Veterans’ Day, and Armed Forces Day (I vaguely remember that we have such a holiday-- we do, right?) But then, as International Women’s Day is coming up, or maybe just as a cultural relic of a time when every man was a veteran, the holiday has picked up the added role of Men’s Day, and you have to congratulate every man. This is especially ridiculous when people congratulate the boys in the Middlebury program, who, as I repeatedly pointed out to them after they were congratulated by babushkas, defended nary a fatherland.
I approve of this holiday: it makes Russians festive and cheerful, which is quite a feat. It is in fact the only holiday other than New Year’s upon which I heard people congratulating each other days in advance, on “the approaching holiday.” This puts it way ahead of Christmas, Epiphany, and Day of the Forest Worker. I personally celebrated this holiday by laughing at Russians trying to get into the post office, which was obviously closed; by going to look at the Eternal Flame by the river, and at the other people going to look at the Eternal Flame; by making a heroic effort to read the long poem on the WWII memorial, about the “Leninist sons of city and of taiga;” by almost getting run over by a group of students from the police academy going to march about by the Eternal Flame; and by attending a concert for veterans in which V.P.’s choir took part. You may point out that I am not, in fact, a veteran, so what was I doing taking the seat of some deserving old man who, were it not for me, would have had a better view of the balalaika orchestra? I do not have an answer for you, other than that when Valentina Petrovna commands, I obey. The best part of the concert was the folk dances, especially when performed by cute little 6-year-old girls. Now I am jealous that I did not grow up in Russia and couldn’t be in an awesome Russian dance troupe.
The second significance of the twenty-third of February is that it is the anniversary of the birth of Anastasia Vladimirovna Shulga, my Chinese-restaurant-singer host sister. This meant that the day was a frantic flurry of salad-making, mostly involving beets, and that the extended family assembled at the apartment for a birthday dinner. I don’t really know how to describe this event. The important elements were 1)“the table” which was assembled before the guests arrived, with the aforementioned salads and strives for the adjective “rich” and 2) the giving of toasts, which as far as I could tell were all very similar but all went on for a long time. This doesn’t sound that OOC, I know, but it was, especially by about the 4th toast. Singing and dancing became increasingly involved, as did the intensity with which V.P. yelled at people who she didn’t think were drinking enough. My response to this problem was to escape whenever possible and play Marble Blast Gold on the computer with the grandchildren, but after a while I would always be summoned back. Ok, I have completely failed to capture this event, but oh well, I can’t think of anything else to say.
I approve of this holiday: it makes Russians festive and cheerful, which is quite a feat. It is in fact the only holiday other than New Year’s upon which I heard people congratulating each other days in advance, on “the approaching holiday.” This puts it way ahead of Christmas, Epiphany, and Day of the Forest Worker. I personally celebrated this holiday by laughing at Russians trying to get into the post office, which was obviously closed; by going to look at the Eternal Flame by the river, and at the other people going to look at the Eternal Flame; by making a heroic effort to read the long poem on the WWII memorial, about the “Leninist sons of city and of taiga;” by almost getting run over by a group of students from the police academy going to march about by the Eternal Flame; and by attending a concert for veterans in which V.P.’s choir took part. You may point out that I am not, in fact, a veteran, so what was I doing taking the seat of some deserving old man who, were it not for me, would have had a better view of the balalaika orchestra? I do not have an answer for you, other than that when Valentina Petrovna commands, I obey. The best part of the concert was the folk dances, especially when performed by cute little 6-year-old girls. Now I am jealous that I did not grow up in Russia and couldn’t be in an awesome Russian dance troupe.
The second significance of the twenty-third of February is that it is the anniversary of the birth of Anastasia Vladimirovna Shulga, my Chinese-restaurant-singer host sister. This meant that the day was a frantic flurry of salad-making, mostly involving beets, and that the extended family assembled at the apartment for a birthday dinner. I don’t really know how to describe this event. The important elements were 1)“the table” which was assembled before the guests arrived, with the aforementioned salads and strives for the adjective “rich” and 2) the giving of toasts, which as far as I could tell were all very similar but all went on for a long time. This doesn’t sound that OOC, I know, but it was, especially by about the 4th toast. Singing and dancing became increasingly involved, as did the intensity with which V.P. yelled at people who she didn’t think were drinking enough. My response to this problem was to escape whenever possible and play Marble Blast Gold on the computer with the grandchildren, but after a while I would always be summoned back. Ok, I have completely failed to capture this event, but oh well, I can’t think of anything else to say.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Misc.
I don’t have any exciting new experiences to relate. Still, I’m sure that I am absorbing all sorts of cultural information and such. But I don’t remember anymore what will be interesting to American readers. I’ll try to think of some things.
A) I’ve gotten used to the word ‘Tajikistan’ being pronounced with either angry scorn or with the kind of pity with which people in the western hemisphere say ‘Haiti.’ Apparently it is a place no one wants to be, including the Tajiks, who all seem to live in Russia. All news about Tajikistan involves fatalities. Even in Soviet times, it was always the poorest republic, with few important resources, and I get the impression it was sort of ignored by the government. Before it became a Soviet republic, I think it was ruled by the Uzbeks; Tajiks have tough luck. Am I the only person who didn’t know that there was a long civil war there in the 1990s? At least they probably have good food, being in central Asia and all.
B) This evening, being a conscientious student of Russian language and culture, I read part of a children’s book lent to me by one of my teachers. It is one of the thousands of ‘tales from the history of our great and God-appointed nation’-type children’s books sold everywhere here, with colorful pictures of shining onion-domes and blond men on horseback killing Mongols and such. This one is about the great and holy heroine Evpraksia of Ryazan. The reason that she is great and holy, and a good model for the nation’s youth, is that when Ryazan was invaded by the Mongols she threw both herself and her young son from the highest tower. Our literature teacher talked to us at great length about why this was so heroic and necessary to the patriotism of her fellow Russians (I can’t really say countrymen, because there was no united country), but I am still not sure this is the best subject for a children’s book. Listen well, kids: when in difficulty, the best and most romantic solution is to kill yourself and any minor children under your protection.
C) There are going to be elections soon, but no one cares, because there are no real candidates.
D) We are about to run out of homemade raspberry jam and I am very sad.
A) I’ve gotten used to the word ‘Tajikistan’ being pronounced with either angry scorn or with the kind of pity with which people in the western hemisphere say ‘Haiti.’ Apparently it is a place no one wants to be, including the Tajiks, who all seem to live in Russia. All news about Tajikistan involves fatalities. Even in Soviet times, it was always the poorest republic, with few important resources, and I get the impression it was sort of ignored by the government. Before it became a Soviet republic, I think it was ruled by the Uzbeks; Tajiks have tough luck. Am I the only person who didn’t know that there was a long civil war there in the 1990s? At least they probably have good food, being in central Asia and all.
B) This evening, being a conscientious student of Russian language and culture, I read part of a children’s book lent to me by one of my teachers. It is one of the thousands of ‘tales from the history of our great and God-appointed nation’-type children’s books sold everywhere here, with colorful pictures of shining onion-domes and blond men on horseback killing Mongols and such. This one is about the great and holy heroine Evpraksia of Ryazan. The reason that she is great and holy, and a good model for the nation’s youth, is that when Ryazan was invaded by the Mongols she threw both herself and her young son from the highest tower. Our literature teacher talked to us at great length about why this was so heroic and necessary to the patriotism of her fellow Russians (I can’t really say countrymen, because there was no united country), but I am still not sure this is the best subject for a children’s book. Listen well, kids: when in difficulty, the best and most romantic solution is to kill yourself and any minor children under your protection.
C) There are going to be elections soon, but no one cares, because there are no real candidates.
D) We are about to run out of homemade raspberry jam and I am very sad.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Dog Sleds, or perhaps Dogsleds, or Dog-sleds
We went to Listvianka yesterday, and Middlebury paid vast sums of money for each of us to dog sled for 5 km, which was about 15 minutes. The whole thing was not really remotely adventurous but just completely touristy, but it was still very fun.
It was a pretty, sunny day, and Listvianka was abuzz with activity: cars driving all over the lake, ice-fishing, ice-skating, a hover-craft scooting about, a bunch of dog-sleds on the ice, and a huge walled ice-palace thing with ice-slides and an ice-rink and several ice-castles and sculptures. When we drove in on the marshrutka we had a brilliant view out the window of the mouth of the Angara, never frozen, but a very cold stripe of bright-blue between two endless expanses of ice, with the Shaman Rock sticking up in ice-covered whiteness against the blue too.
The dog-sledding center was far back from the lake up on a hill dotted with dozens of dog-houses with the owners’ little wooden house in the middle. We had to wait around for a long time for a sled to be ready, because it is Russia, and nothing ever works out the way you’ve arraigned it. While we waited, a very quiet woman showed us video clips of a big race in Kamchatka that they enter, and of the fall training they do with the kids from the village, in which dogs pull kids on scooters. They did a 3-day race over Olkhon on such scooters, one dog to each scooter (not razor scooters, but bicycle-size). Meanwhile, a preternaturally serious baby stood by the door and observed us with concern.
The sled-dogs are raised to be completely free of aggression toward people, and they were indeed very friendly. They even had to get a guard-dog at the sledding-center, since the sled-dogs would let anyone come take them away. They aren’t huskies, but some other, smaller breed, in various shades of white and brown. They certainly loved to run; the second the break was let off the sleds they would shoot off down the trail. I think there were 8 dogs pulling the sled, in 4 pairs. The second pair from the back was especially energetic, and when they were all supposed to be resting between runs would object to the lack of activity by leaping as high into the air as their harnesses would allow. Though it was a nice day for us, it was hot for the poor dogs, who did a lot of rolling around in the snow between runs. What else? Oh, my favorite part of my run was when the dogs tried to run off the track to chase some horses. What kind of dogs chase horses? If I were not already fairly used to Russian live-stock practices, my other question would be, why were there horses wandering around Listvianka by themselves?
I have pictures. Maybe if I ever finish posting pictures from break I will put them up on the picture site.
It was a pretty, sunny day, and Listvianka was abuzz with activity: cars driving all over the lake, ice-fishing, ice-skating, a hover-craft scooting about, a bunch of dog-sleds on the ice, and a huge walled ice-palace thing with ice-slides and an ice-rink and several ice-castles and sculptures. When we drove in on the marshrutka we had a brilliant view out the window of the mouth of the Angara, never frozen, but a very cold stripe of bright-blue between two endless expanses of ice, with the Shaman Rock sticking up in ice-covered whiteness against the blue too.
The dog-sledding center was far back from the lake up on a hill dotted with dozens of dog-houses with the owners’ little wooden house in the middle. We had to wait around for a long time for a sled to be ready, because it is Russia, and nothing ever works out the way you’ve arraigned it. While we waited, a very quiet woman showed us video clips of a big race in Kamchatka that they enter, and of the fall training they do with the kids from the village, in which dogs pull kids on scooters. They did a 3-day race over Olkhon on such scooters, one dog to each scooter (not razor scooters, but bicycle-size). Meanwhile, a preternaturally serious baby stood by the door and observed us with concern.
The sled-dogs are raised to be completely free of aggression toward people, and they were indeed very friendly. They even had to get a guard-dog at the sledding-center, since the sled-dogs would let anyone come take them away. They aren’t huskies, but some other, smaller breed, in various shades of white and brown. They certainly loved to run; the second the break was let off the sleds they would shoot off down the trail. I think there were 8 dogs pulling the sled, in 4 pairs. The second pair from the back was especially energetic, and when they were all supposed to be resting between runs would object to the lack of activity by leaping as high into the air as their harnesses would allow. Though it was a nice day for us, it was hot for the poor dogs, who did a lot of rolling around in the snow between runs. What else? Oh, my favorite part of my run was when the dogs tried to run off the track to chase some horses. What kind of dogs chase horses? If I were not already fairly used to Russian live-stock practices, my other question would be, why were there horses wandering around Listvianka by themselves?
I have pictures. Maybe if I ever finish posting pictures from break I will put them up on the picture site.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
This was to be posted several days ago too. I dislike technology.
It has come to my attention that my last post was somewhat lacking in content. But here is my question for you: are you people writing any blog posts at all, that you can so freely criticize mine? Well, for all I know you are, and just don’t want me to read them. Hmm. Moving on. I have posted the brilliant observations of Russian culture, whose absence you were so mourning, below. You were not mourning the absence of Russian culture, but of my observations of it. I am too bad at English to go back and fix that sentence instead of writing a lengthy explanation. And since I am supposed to be studying Russian and not English, it doesn’t matter.
I am, however, enjoying passing on my limited knowledge of the English language to the high-paying people of Irkutsk. This evening I worked as a sub in an adult class and made them read “The Gift of the Magi.” I never realized how incredibly difficult to read that story is. The students were fairly alarmed. I think they still liked it though: the copy room had been locked and the printer in the office ran out of ink, so we were sort of lacking in the third and forth pages of the story, and after class I saw them fighting over the few existing copies. For one thing, judging by my own appreciation of Russian rock lyrics, if metaphors are wrapped in incomprehensible grammar and dozens of unknown words, they seem much more clever when you figure them out. And then Biblical allusions were all very fascinating to them, as they had never heard of any of it. They need Barbara to come do the Three Wise Men rap for them, or whatever. Also, Mama, you were quoted as having often told me in my childhood “Who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba?” They thought that was very funny. But really, it so difficult to judge how they are feeling about lessons when they just don’t smile. They explained once that it’s very fake and dishonest for Americans to smile all the time, but I’m realizing more and more that for us smiling is a very important method of communication. It is not dishonest to smile when you are not happy if a smile, in the given situation, communicates something that you intend for it to and is true, such as good will.
My main class remains the hooligan middle-schoolers on Monday mornings. After the success of I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor, I’m planning on starting all classes with a short and interesting song, so if you think of any let me know. I really want to make them sing “I don’t want a pickle,” but since it’s a song about mispronouncing words, that might not be the best idea. I wish I had these kids more often than once a week: then I would have much more power over their vocabularies, and I could raise a generation of Irkutsk youth to go around saying all the things I think people should say more often, like “For the love of Mike!” and “befoozled” and “nincompoop.” They would also listen to a lot of country music and Silly Wizard.
I am, however, enjoying passing on my limited knowledge of the English language to the high-paying people of Irkutsk. This evening I worked as a sub in an adult class and made them read “The Gift of the Magi.” I never realized how incredibly difficult to read that story is. The students were fairly alarmed. I think they still liked it though: the copy room had been locked and the printer in the office ran out of ink, so we were sort of lacking in the third and forth pages of the story, and after class I saw them fighting over the few existing copies. For one thing, judging by my own appreciation of Russian rock lyrics, if metaphors are wrapped in incomprehensible grammar and dozens of unknown words, they seem much more clever when you figure them out. And then Biblical allusions were all very fascinating to them, as they had never heard of any of it. They need Barbara to come do the Three Wise Men rap for them, or whatever. Also, Mama, you were quoted as having often told me in my childhood “Who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba?” They thought that was very funny. But really, it so difficult to judge how they are feeling about lessons when they just don’t smile. They explained once that it’s very fake and dishonest for Americans to smile all the time, but I’m realizing more and more that for us smiling is a very important method of communication. It is not dishonest to smile when you are not happy if a smile, in the given situation, communicates something that you intend for it to and is true, such as good will.
My main class remains the hooligan middle-schoolers on Monday mornings. After the success of I’m Being Swallowed by a Boa Constrictor, I’m planning on starting all classes with a short and interesting song, so if you think of any let me know. I really want to make them sing “I don’t want a pickle,” but since it’s a song about mispronouncing words, that might not be the best idea. I wish I had these kids more often than once a week: then I would have much more power over their vocabularies, and I could raise a generation of Irkutsk youth to go around saying all the things I think people should say more often, like “For the love of Mike!” and “befoozled” and “nincompoop.” They would also listen to a lot of country music and Silly Wizard.
More Russian TV News
There was a news story this evening about a toll road in Belarus. I guess I can see how the concept of a toll road would be odd to people used to the ideas of socialism, but it was still sort of funny how struck they were by it all. They filmed the sign with the list of fees, and they pointed out gravely that often a line forms when every car has to stop at the toll gates.
There was a clear struggle on the part of all involved to reconcile in their minds the concept that roads belong to the public sphere and should be free to drive on the same way the government should be guaranteeing you work and a pension and the argument of the Belarusian officials, repeated many times throughout the broadcast, that the road was a very good one, everyone benefits from a good road, and if a society wants a good road they’re going to have to pay for it.
Personally, I was pretty impressed with the road too. And, as Gogol, or perhaps some other Russian writer, said, in Russia there are two problems: fools and bad roads. So I think the Russians should be taking notes. Incidentally, it is because the roads are so bad that we don’t have McDonalds in Siberia- you never know if you can ship products in a timely fashion, so businesses that depend on providing the same products in a uniform manner are often out of luck. Sometimes all the stores in Irkutsk are all out of the same food item- and then you know that whatever truck was supposed to deliver it all couldn’t get through.
The news anchor was also a little indignant when reporting the next story: in Kazakhstan they’re changing the names of the streets to reflect Kazakh rather than Soviet history. No more 5-Year-Plan Street for you, whatever-the-capital-of-Kazakhstan-is. It was a day of activity in general in the former Republics: a very large factory opened in Kyrgyzstan, record-setting low temperatures are killing everyone in Tajikistan, well-dressed children gave out prizes at an industrial exposition in Moldova, etc.
The last piece of news, at which the anchor was very amused, was that the archbishop or something of Kamchatka has started a blog. It is much more impressive-looking than mine. Unfortunately I don’t think they said the address.
Update:
This semester one of my classes is “Post-Soviet History.” Right now we’re studying the last few decades of the USSR, for historical perspective. The reading, though it is taking me forever to get through, as it is written in a foreign language or something, is pretty amazing; it’s like the world has a whole other, alternate history. Soviet dissidents who I have always heard spoken of as heroes in the struggle for human rights are in this textbook members of a cultural elite far from the life of the people, ready to sell out the country for cosmopolitan glamour; ‘communist’ is not a synonym for ‘evil’, and the account of the Vietnam war is wholly unrecognizable. To confirm that the Vietnam part was not the version I had probably heard before, I just looked it up on the World Book that came with my computer, but it was too depressing to read and I had to switch to an article about ‘lilac,’ the first sentence of which is “Lilac is a beautiful shrub that is loved throughout the world for its fragrant flowers.”
There was a clear struggle on the part of all involved to reconcile in their minds the concept that roads belong to the public sphere and should be free to drive on the same way the government should be guaranteeing you work and a pension and the argument of the Belarusian officials, repeated many times throughout the broadcast, that the road was a very good one, everyone benefits from a good road, and if a society wants a good road they’re going to have to pay for it.
Personally, I was pretty impressed with the road too. And, as Gogol, or perhaps some other Russian writer, said, in Russia there are two problems: fools and bad roads. So I think the Russians should be taking notes. Incidentally, it is because the roads are so bad that we don’t have McDonalds in Siberia- you never know if you can ship products in a timely fashion, so businesses that depend on providing the same products in a uniform manner are often out of luck. Sometimes all the stores in Irkutsk are all out of the same food item- and then you know that whatever truck was supposed to deliver it all couldn’t get through.
The news anchor was also a little indignant when reporting the next story: in Kazakhstan they’re changing the names of the streets to reflect Kazakh rather than Soviet history. No more 5-Year-Plan Street for you, whatever-the-capital-of-Kazakhstan-is. It was a day of activity in general in the former Republics: a very large factory opened in Kyrgyzstan, record-setting low temperatures are killing everyone in Tajikistan, well-dressed children gave out prizes at an industrial exposition in Moldova, etc.
The last piece of news, at which the anchor was very amused, was that the archbishop or something of Kamchatka has started a blog. It is much more impressive-looking than mine. Unfortunately I don’t think they said the address.
Update:
This semester one of my classes is “Post-Soviet History.” Right now we’re studying the last few decades of the USSR, for historical perspective. The reading, though it is taking me forever to get through, as it is written in a foreign language or something, is pretty amazing; it’s like the world has a whole other, alternate history. Soviet dissidents who I have always heard spoken of as heroes in the struggle for human rights are in this textbook members of a cultural elite far from the life of the people, ready to sell out the country for cosmopolitan glamour; ‘communist’ is not a synonym for ‘evil’, and the account of the Vietnam war is wholly unrecognizable. To confirm that the Vietnam part was not the version I had probably heard before, I just looked it up on the World Book that came with my computer, but it was too depressing to read and I had to switch to an article about ‘lilac,’ the first sentence of which is “Lilac is a beautiful shrub that is loved throughout the world for its fragrant flowers.”
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Fresh Notebooks
I’m reviewing the notebooks I bought this afternoon in honor of the new semester. I went to two different bookstores on this serious venture; the first one’s notebooks were not up to par. The notebooks are such:
1) black; little raised, irregular, shiny black spots; in the center a little cartoon of a fuzzy cat covered in yarn; above this in cursive “I am a little Kitty”
2) back-drop: photo close-up of some wrinkled canvas clothing item, or maybe bag
center: insane-looking cartoon monkey with crossed eyes, pointing down at his own toussled head; thought bubble: “Jeans style?”; in top right-hand corner- “copybook”
3)Ronhaldhinho theme
4) in lower right-hand corner “fish copybook”; pictured: two tropical fish; glitter is involved
5) white, with Soviet flag across the center; drawing of partially-peeled banana, I guess resembling Warhol, on top of that; across the bottom pictures of Soviet metals and large word ‘tyetrad’ (‘notebook’)
6) one I have long admired: black, with a glitter- covered cartoon rooster crazily running across center stage; scrawled above him “i’m taking OFF’ with ‘i’m taking’ in white and ‘off’ in red
I think it’s a good haul. None of them quite as good as the “Rope” notebooks sold last semester, or as the one with a cartoon Darwin hugging monkeys.
1) black; little raised, irregular, shiny black spots; in the center a little cartoon of a fuzzy cat covered in yarn; above this in cursive “I am a little Kitty”
2) back-drop: photo close-up of some wrinkled canvas clothing item, or maybe bag
center: insane-looking cartoon monkey with crossed eyes, pointing down at his own toussled head; thought bubble: “Jeans style?”; in top right-hand corner- “copybook”
3)Ronhaldhinho theme
4) in lower right-hand corner “fish copybook”; pictured: two tropical fish; glitter is involved
5) white, with Soviet flag across the center; drawing of partially-peeled banana, I guess resembling Warhol, on top of that; across the bottom pictures of Soviet metals and large word ‘tyetrad’ (‘notebook’)
6) one I have long admired: black, with a glitter- covered cartoon rooster crazily running across center stage; scrawled above him “i’m taking OFF’ with ‘i’m taking’ in white and ‘off’ in red
I think it’s a good haul. None of them quite as good as the “Rope” notebooks sold last semester, or as the one with a cartoon Darwin hugging monkeys.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Weekend in Review
Friday
Today was proclaimed Cabbage Day in apartment 54. I got up and found the kitchen occupied by large-scale cabbage activity; Valentina Petrovna had apparently had an allergic reaction to some food the day before, and thought the rash had disappeared, she had decided that this was a sign from her body that she should stay home from work this morning and make cabbage pie. For breakfast I ate some of the cabbage-carrot concoction from the endless supply, in this particular manifestation with a bunch of ran onion mixed in. Then when the big pot of shredded, frying cabbage reached some edible stage, I was given a plate of that too. Have you, readers, ever seen cabbage being fried in a pot? It’s rather pretty, actually- first the pot is overflowing with a messy ball of long, crisp-looking, bright-white strands, and then it’s all turned over fast fast fast with a fork, rotating through the oil at the bottom of the pot, and then the pot is half full of golden, translucent... cabbage. Ok, so. Then I left for the university computer lab to continue my fruitless search for summer internship or work, but when I returned I was delighted to find that the effusively domestic mood was continuing. I returned to the sunny, busy kitchen and was given cabbage-and-meatball soup, and then several pieces of the fresh cabbage pie, and we sat and drank tea and talked about how cool it was in the Soviet days when university students went off to work in Kamchatka in the summers. Nastya was home, too, but not sharing in the good cheer; she’s having one of those days that Russians claim are so advantageous to one’s health in which you just drink kefir all day and don’t eat anything. Oh, we opened a huge jar of homemade raspberry jam today, much to my delight. I had been mourning the absence of jam.
Do any of you know anyone who would like to give me a job in the northeast for the summer? Or, if you act fast, an unpaid internship, and I will apply for a stipend from Middlebury. No, mother, I do not have in mind Staples.
Here is my other question. Is Vyachislav not an awesome name? I’m considering replacing ‘Methushael’ with ‘Vyachislav’ as my name of choice for my first-born son. I really like ‘Ethelred’ better, but everyone would immediately think of Ethelred the Unready, and I don’t want to burden the boy with historical connotation.
Saturday
Went to Slyudyandka on the electrichka. It was, I believe, the prettiest train ride of my life- sunny train car almost to ourselves (ourselves being Ilana, Joseph, me), panoramic view of snow-covered forests, tracks winding along the side of mountains like in a cartoon, after a few hours views of Baikal far below- it was pretty sweet. There was not really enough to do in Slyudyanka to fill the time until another train returned to Irkutsk, but it was very pretty there, with tall purple mountains surrounding the frozen lake, and boys ice-skating on a snow-plowed patch of ice far away from the bank, and lots of people ice-fishing. The train station itself was all made of stone and was very cute. Other than that Slyudyanka is a pretty unattractive place, taken apart from its natural surroundings, and there is markedly little to do indoors. We spend a lot of time walking around a grocery store; I have now spent about 80 times more hours in Russian grocery stores than American ones, I think. We got back to Irktusk late; we were afraid we would have a hard time getting home, if the public transportation had stopped running, but then an amusingly successful passenger revolution forced the train to stop at the little local station at the east end of town, from when Ilana and I could walk home and Joseph, I hope, found a marshrutka.
Sunday:
Last day of vacation!
Went XC skiing with Valentina Petrovna’s awesome wooden skis. I had long been unable to borrow these skis due to inability to figure out how to fasten them to shoes, but at last I discovered the secret; they do, in fact, have corresponding ski boots, I had just always mistaken that particular footwear for odd-looking dress shoes. So, in my funny leather shoes and snowpants (one of the main reasons I was anxious to go skiing: I love all opportunities to justify having brought snow pants with me to Russia) I set off for the woods. These woods were another long-unsolved mystery: people were always telling me there were these big woods right next to our house, but I had never managed to find them. Apparently you have to go up a big flight of iron stairs behind the pharmacy. So, found woods, attached skis to boots, then finally had to face the fact that I have no idea how to cross country ski. It worked out ok, though. My basic strategy was:
1) Waddle up a long, not-too-steep hill
2) Achieve summit
3) Pretend to be on downhill skis over which I didn’t happen to have control of any kind
4) In the advent of the approach of another person, stop and pretend to admire the scenery
Today was proclaimed Cabbage Day in apartment 54. I got up and found the kitchen occupied by large-scale cabbage activity; Valentina Petrovna had apparently had an allergic reaction to some food the day before, and thought the rash had disappeared, she had decided that this was a sign from her body that she should stay home from work this morning and make cabbage pie. For breakfast I ate some of the cabbage-carrot concoction from the endless supply, in this particular manifestation with a bunch of ran onion mixed in. Then when the big pot of shredded, frying cabbage reached some edible stage, I was given a plate of that too. Have you, readers, ever seen cabbage being fried in a pot? It’s rather pretty, actually- first the pot is overflowing with a messy ball of long, crisp-looking, bright-white strands, and then it’s all turned over fast fast fast with a fork, rotating through the oil at the bottom of the pot, and then the pot is half full of golden, translucent... cabbage. Ok, so. Then I left for the university computer lab to continue my fruitless search for summer internship or work, but when I returned I was delighted to find that the effusively domestic mood was continuing. I returned to the sunny, busy kitchen and was given cabbage-and-meatball soup, and then several pieces of the fresh cabbage pie, and we sat and drank tea and talked about how cool it was in the Soviet days when university students went off to work in Kamchatka in the summers. Nastya was home, too, but not sharing in the good cheer; she’s having one of those days that Russians claim are so advantageous to one’s health in which you just drink kefir all day and don’t eat anything. Oh, we opened a huge jar of homemade raspberry jam today, much to my delight. I had been mourning the absence of jam.
Do any of you know anyone who would like to give me a job in the northeast for the summer? Or, if you act fast, an unpaid internship, and I will apply for a stipend from Middlebury. No, mother, I do not have in mind Staples.
Here is my other question. Is Vyachislav not an awesome name? I’m considering replacing ‘Methushael’ with ‘Vyachislav’ as my name of choice for my first-born son. I really like ‘Ethelred’ better, but everyone would immediately think of Ethelred the Unready, and I don’t want to burden the boy with historical connotation.
Saturday
Went to Slyudyandka on the electrichka. It was, I believe, the prettiest train ride of my life- sunny train car almost to ourselves (ourselves being Ilana, Joseph, me), panoramic view of snow-covered forests, tracks winding along the side of mountains like in a cartoon, after a few hours views of Baikal far below- it was pretty sweet. There was not really enough to do in Slyudyanka to fill the time until another train returned to Irkutsk, but it was very pretty there, with tall purple mountains surrounding the frozen lake, and boys ice-skating on a snow-plowed patch of ice far away from the bank, and lots of people ice-fishing. The train station itself was all made of stone and was very cute. Other than that Slyudyanka is a pretty unattractive place, taken apart from its natural surroundings, and there is markedly little to do indoors. We spend a lot of time walking around a grocery store; I have now spent about 80 times more hours in Russian grocery stores than American ones, I think. We got back to Irktusk late; we were afraid we would have a hard time getting home, if the public transportation had stopped running, but then an amusingly successful passenger revolution forced the train to stop at the little local station at the east end of town, from when Ilana and I could walk home and Joseph, I hope, found a marshrutka.
Sunday:
Last day of vacation!
Went XC skiing with Valentina Petrovna’s awesome wooden skis. I had long been unable to borrow these skis due to inability to figure out how to fasten them to shoes, but at last I discovered the secret; they do, in fact, have corresponding ski boots, I had just always mistaken that particular footwear for odd-looking dress shoes. So, in my funny leather shoes and snowpants (one of the main reasons I was anxious to go skiing: I love all opportunities to justify having brought snow pants with me to Russia) I set off for the woods. These woods were another long-unsolved mystery: people were always telling me there were these big woods right next to our house, but I had never managed to find them. Apparently you have to go up a big flight of iron stairs behind the pharmacy. So, found woods, attached skis to boots, then finally had to face the fact that I have no idea how to cross country ski. It worked out ok, though. My basic strategy was:
1) Waddle up a long, not-too-steep hill
2) Achieve summit
3) Pretend to be on downhill skis over which I didn’t happen to have control of any kind
4) In the advent of the approach of another person, stop and pretend to admire the scenery
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Your Questions Answered on Frozen-Block-of-Cabbage TV
So, Reading Public, I watched some TV this evening, and I am now able to answer several of the questions that have been plaguing us all.
Q: From what country is the world’s most productive individual milk cow? What other major world power is also very proud of ITS milk cows, thank you very much? What determines how much milk a cow gives?
A: The big list of the top 16 world milk cows came out recently, it seems. Somewhere in Russia, there is a wall covered with large portraits of these bovine beauties, with their names written beneath. At the moment of coverage by some Russian news agency, many Russian “cow collective” administrators stood about cow-covered wall and discussed with pride the milk-producing prowess of ... some Russian cow whose name I did not note but who made the list and who was later extensively filmed in her natural huge-metal-filled-cow-barn environment. But this cow did not occupy first place. The most milk-producing of all cows, in all the world, is a resident of... The United State of America. How about that. Oh, and as for the last part of the question, according to some Russian dairy worker interviewed, milk-productivity is determined by “attitude.”
Q: What is more annoying that rap music as performed by Whoopi Goldberg?
A: Russian dubbing of said rap.
Q: What is much more entertaining that American informericals?
A: American infomercials dubbed into Russian. They have to sound cheery and enthusiastic and stuff, and it sounds incredibly unnatural and forced. I know a lot about the 9-Minute Marinade now, though. It uses the power of the vacuum to get marinade deep down to the inside of the meats and vegetables- everyone will think you soaked the food for several days, but really it all just took nine minutes. They even throw in some handy plastic cutting boards, free.
Q: What is the cause of Russia’s recent demographic crisis, according to the solemn, serious expert on the news show “News”?
A: The population was in a bad mood. You’ll be glad to hear that the situation is improving.
Q: What is totally awesome?
A: The United States has a hockey-with-a-ball team! And they are, even as we speak, playing against Canada in some round of the world championship!
And here is the answer to another question, posed by one of you gentle readers, the answer to which I gleaned not from television sources but from Valentina Petrovna.
Q: In the Russian translation of My Fair Lady, how does Eliza sing about ‘Enry ‘Iggins?
A: In the Russian translation, Elisa has not a colorful accent but a speech defect. Is this sort of lame? I think so. Anyway, I received an account of the sounds that Eliza so amusingly mispronounces, but I don’t remember what they are.
Q: From what country is the world’s most productive individual milk cow? What other major world power is also very proud of ITS milk cows, thank you very much? What determines how much milk a cow gives?
A: The big list of the top 16 world milk cows came out recently, it seems. Somewhere in Russia, there is a wall covered with large portraits of these bovine beauties, with their names written beneath. At the moment of coverage by some Russian news agency, many Russian “cow collective” administrators stood about cow-covered wall and discussed with pride the milk-producing prowess of ... some Russian cow whose name I did not note but who made the list and who was later extensively filmed in her natural huge-metal-filled-cow-barn environment. But this cow did not occupy first place. The most milk-producing of all cows, in all the world, is a resident of... The United State of America. How about that. Oh, and as for the last part of the question, according to some Russian dairy worker interviewed, milk-productivity is determined by “attitude.”
Q: What is more annoying that rap music as performed by Whoopi Goldberg?
A: Russian dubbing of said rap.
Q: What is much more entertaining that American informericals?
A: American infomercials dubbed into Russian. They have to sound cheery and enthusiastic and stuff, and it sounds incredibly unnatural and forced. I know a lot about the 9-Minute Marinade now, though. It uses the power of the vacuum to get marinade deep down to the inside of the meats and vegetables- everyone will think you soaked the food for several days, but really it all just took nine minutes. They even throw in some handy plastic cutting boards, free.
Q: What is the cause of Russia’s recent demographic crisis, according to the solemn, serious expert on the news show “News”?
A: The population was in a bad mood. You’ll be glad to hear that the situation is improving.
Q: What is totally awesome?
A: The United States has a hockey-with-a-ball team! And they are, even as we speak, playing against Canada in some round of the world championship!
And here is the answer to another question, posed by one of you gentle readers, the answer to which I gleaned not from television sources but from Valentina Petrovna.
Q: In the Russian translation of My Fair Lady, how does Eliza sing about ‘Enry ‘Iggins?
A: In the Russian translation, Elisa has not a colorful accent but a speech defect. Is this sort of lame? I think so. Anyway, I received an account of the sounds that Eliza so amusingly mispronounces, but I don’t remember what they are.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
more ice
I went to a game of Baikal Energia, the Irkutsk hockey team, today. It was pretty dang cool- we got our own, Siberia hockey here, and it does not much resemble the NHL. It reminded me a lot of indoor field hockey, actually, or a cross between that and soccer. The rink is huge, as it is actually just the soccer field with water poured over it; each team plays with 8 players and a goalie; there are no lines painted on the rink to create all those hockey rules I still don’t understand; the goal is big, almost the size of a soccer goal; the sticks are the size of field hockey ones; they play with a ball rather than a puck. What else? There are no walls, just 3-inch barriers around the boundaries that the ball can bounce off of but players obviously cannot; you can’t skate behind the goal; they play out corners like in field hockey, and also corners like in soccer (I actually forgot what those are called in field hockey, when the ball is passed in from the corner of the pitch); I don’t think you can check; the ball was in the air a lot and could be played in the air, which was cool looking; the flow of the game and even the stick-handling just reminded me a lot of indoor field hockey. EXCEPT: IT WAS NOT INDOORS. Seriously, whose idea was it to have a hockey league in SIBERIA IN JANUARY that would play in outdoor stadiums, hours after the sun has gone down? My toes and fingers are still sore. There were a lot of people there though: they’re a tough bunch, these Siberians. There were also a very large number of police officers, maybe one for every 10 people. I didn’t know Irkutsk had so many police officers. They had bullet-proof vests. That is some hardcore hockey. Ok, I can feel Abby’s scorn for this hockey-with-a-ball coming in waves from across the Atlantic, especially after I compared it to field hockey. But... we have a skating nerpa! His costume is just a white tube over his head with a face painted on, but he’s so cute! You can’t hate us, when our mascot has those big melting eyes and is in need of protection from global warming and poaching!
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Not very interesting post, but very cheery and stuff
I think I now take my life in Irkutsk pretty much for granted. I rarely have an urge to rush home and write up blog posts for you people about the hilarious thing I saw on the marshrutka. It all seems pretty normal. This should not be misinterpreted as “comfortable” or “a social system in which I have a place, or can even communicate with people on more than a basic level, due more to cultural than linguistic divides.” Still, though, it’s not only that I am accustomed to my Irkustk life; I do rather love my adopted “historic if vaguely seedy Irktusk,” as Lonely Planet says. Actually I think it’s the seediness that makes affection possible. In any case, as Mary Chapin Carpenter teaches us: you can shoot straight in the dark, but you can’t take love for granted. So instead of complaining about the everyday annoyances of my recent life, as is my wont, I will try to wrest especially beloved aspects of Irkutsk from the realm of the taken-for-granted and list them here.
1) The interior of the Philormonia (Philharmonic hall?)
2) The little colorful plastic ice-sleds of small children, just little flat circle of brightly-colored plastic, and how they carry them about the city and just sled down the ice-covered cement every time there’s an incline
3) When parents pull their children around in more substantial sleds
4) The caramelized evaporated milk that is now sitting in a can in the kitchen, and of which I ate vast quantities at both lunch and dinner
5) When drivers and passengers of marshrutkas engage in yelling arguments about whether the passengers yelled loud enough for the driver to stop
6) 7 ruble ice cream, especially the kind that doesn’t come in a plastic wrapper but just arrives at the kiosk or tiny magazine in a big crate of already-filled cones; especially the brand Angaria
7) people selling plastic bags on the street
8) The occasional person on the street who gives you directions to where you want to go in a pleasant tone, instead of pretending not to know where that place is located and rushing off. Particularly this one woman with gold teeth and fur coat who told me where the post office I was looking for was last week.
9) Fur hats, in all their variety
10) How the Chinese venders sometimes don’t know I’m not a Russian
11) Riding shotgun in marshrutkas
12) The hats, and also the long, green wool coats, of the students in the police academy
13) Handsome wooden houses, especially the ones on Marat street
14) The view behind Everything Will Be OK hypermarket; this view consists largely of high-rises, so I’m not sure why it’s so pretty, but it is, especially combined with:
15) Fog in the morning from the Angara
16) Tapochki (slippers) and their place in culture
17) Seeing eminently-respectable, fur-coated middle-aged women emerging from hideous, aging cement apartment buildings that we would consider ghettos
18) Babushkas sprinting after marshrutkas; well not after them in the sense that they are leaving: the marshrutkas are slowing to a stop, and the babushkas (along with everyone else) want to get to them first and get a seat
19) The little woman who distributes our mail and cleans the blackboards in our classrooms and the rest of the day sits at a desk in the department office looking very stern and being very nice. Mainly it’s her supercilious nod that I like. Maybe one day I will learn her name.
20) Pozi and their juice; pilmyeni; 12 ruble loaves of fresh black bread from bread kiosks; Cartons of fresh, drinkable yoghurt; Tea with whole milk; Mayonnaise made in the “Irkutsk oil-fat factor”- best mayonnaise in Russia, I’ve been told several times; ginger pryaniki (large soft cookie-things); pine nuts; raspberry preserves; in general every food item is a bigger deal, since there is such a small number of them, in terms of variety.
21) the path from my apartment to the university building, which runs alongside a grove of birch and always has picturesquely-frozen or snow-covered reeds and things
22) The reading room of the University Library, with windows looking out over the river, even if its use is rather limited by that fact that the library has practically no books
23) The fact that people buy underwear from street peddlers. Also the very odd male-unitard undergarments that I saw being sold today. Ok, maybe that’s not really on my list of things I love about Irkutsk, it’s just funny.
24) Ice slides and ice sculptures
25) The very seedy-looking Hotel Angara and its dominance of the main square
26) The city/ oblast flag, depicting the non-existent animal the ‘babr’ with a dead sable in its mouth
27) Cement apartment buildings at night, with the windows lit. Clean, modern-looking buildings would not have the same charm.
28) How you can get on an electric train and travel hours away from the city, into the taiga, for less than a dollar
29) glossy mink jackets on men; I’m not sure why I find this more acceptable than fur coats on women
30) The maritime-themed cafe at the marshrutka stop: the horribleness of this establishment, from the rudeness of the waitresses, to the slowness of the service, to the badness of the food, to the cheesiness of the decorations, to the awful music blaring from the wall reaches such an amazing level that it is impossible not to return, weekly, just to make sure it’s just as horrible as it was
31) singing songs from My Fair Lady with Valentina Petrovna
32) the fact that there are buckets of frozen shredded cabbage and carrot on our sitting on our balcony; mainly due to my memory of the shredding process
33) The white, square radio with round speaker in the middle hanging on the kitchen wall; how it only gets one station and has no on/off switch
34) The big salmon-colored building with the round turret on the corner of Karl Marx and Lenin streets; there was a picture of this building in one of our Siberian History textbooks, but I never figured out why it was important. Also the two odd, hermaphroditic-looking neoclassical statues sticking off of one of its walls. Incidentally, I wonder if I will remember, when I get back to America, that English sentences should have verbs.
1) The interior of the Philormonia (Philharmonic hall?)
2) The little colorful plastic ice-sleds of small children, just little flat circle of brightly-colored plastic, and how they carry them about the city and just sled down the ice-covered cement every time there’s an incline
3) When parents pull their children around in more substantial sleds
4) The caramelized evaporated milk that is now sitting in a can in the kitchen, and of which I ate vast quantities at both lunch and dinner
5) When drivers and passengers of marshrutkas engage in yelling arguments about whether the passengers yelled loud enough for the driver to stop
6) 7 ruble ice cream, especially the kind that doesn’t come in a plastic wrapper but just arrives at the kiosk or tiny magazine in a big crate of already-filled cones; especially the brand Angaria
7) people selling plastic bags on the street
8) The occasional person on the street who gives you directions to where you want to go in a pleasant tone, instead of pretending not to know where that place is located and rushing off. Particularly this one woman with gold teeth and fur coat who told me where the post office I was looking for was last week.
9) Fur hats, in all their variety
10) How the Chinese venders sometimes don’t know I’m not a Russian
11) Riding shotgun in marshrutkas
12) The hats, and also the long, green wool coats, of the students in the police academy
13) Handsome wooden houses, especially the ones on Marat street
14) The view behind Everything Will Be OK hypermarket; this view consists largely of high-rises, so I’m not sure why it’s so pretty, but it is, especially combined with:
15) Fog in the morning from the Angara
16) Tapochki (slippers) and their place in culture
17) Seeing eminently-respectable, fur-coated middle-aged women emerging from hideous, aging cement apartment buildings that we would consider ghettos
18) Babushkas sprinting after marshrutkas; well not after them in the sense that they are leaving: the marshrutkas are slowing to a stop, and the babushkas (along with everyone else) want to get to them first and get a seat
19) The little woman who distributes our mail and cleans the blackboards in our classrooms and the rest of the day sits at a desk in the department office looking very stern and being very nice. Mainly it’s her supercilious nod that I like. Maybe one day I will learn her name.
20) Pozi and their juice; pilmyeni; 12 ruble loaves of fresh black bread from bread kiosks; Cartons of fresh, drinkable yoghurt; Tea with whole milk; Mayonnaise made in the “Irkutsk oil-fat factor”- best mayonnaise in Russia, I’ve been told several times; ginger pryaniki (large soft cookie-things); pine nuts; raspberry preserves; in general every food item is a bigger deal, since there is such a small number of them, in terms of variety.
21) the path from my apartment to the university building, which runs alongside a grove of birch and always has picturesquely-frozen or snow-covered reeds and things
22) The reading room of the University Library, with windows looking out over the river, even if its use is rather limited by that fact that the library has practically no books
23) The fact that people buy underwear from street peddlers. Also the very odd male-unitard undergarments that I saw being sold today. Ok, maybe that’s not really on my list of things I love about Irkutsk, it’s just funny.
24) Ice slides and ice sculptures
25) The very seedy-looking Hotel Angara and its dominance of the main square
26) The city/ oblast flag, depicting the non-existent animal the ‘babr’ with a dead sable in its mouth
27) Cement apartment buildings at night, with the windows lit. Clean, modern-looking buildings would not have the same charm.
28) How you can get on an electric train and travel hours away from the city, into the taiga, for less than a dollar
29) glossy mink jackets on men; I’m not sure why I find this more acceptable than fur coats on women
30) The maritime-themed cafe at the marshrutka stop: the horribleness of this establishment, from the rudeness of the waitresses, to the slowness of the service, to the badness of the food, to the cheesiness of the decorations, to the awful music blaring from the wall reaches such an amazing level that it is impossible not to return, weekly, just to make sure it’s just as horrible as it was
31) singing songs from My Fair Lady with Valentina Petrovna
32) the fact that there are buckets of frozen shredded cabbage and carrot on our sitting on our balcony; mainly due to my memory of the shredding process
33) The white, square radio with round speaker in the middle hanging on the kitchen wall; how it only gets one station and has no on/off switch
34) The big salmon-colored building with the round turret on the corner of Karl Marx and Lenin streets; there was a picture of this building in one of our Siberian History textbooks, but I never figured out why it was important. Also the two odd, hermaphroditic-looking neoclassical statues sticking off of one of its walls. Incidentally, I wonder if I will remember, when I get back to America, that English sentences should have verbs.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Лед
I usually hate it when Irkutsk-ites (Irkutskians? Irkutskers?) act like Baikal is the same as the ocean. Because it’s not. It doesn’t have the same feeling of endlessness at all, where you are seeing the same body of water in Maine and in Florida and for that matter in Africa, should one be there. And it doesn’t smell like salt. But maybe it is more like the ocean than I indignantly internally protest, or I think of it as like the ocean more than I think I do. Because my shock at it being turned into a huge expanse of ice was sort of close to what I imagine it would be like to go out the door of one’s Outer Banks beach rental and find that the ocean had totally frozen. And if people were driving large motor vehicles on top of it. And if you could just go walk around on top of it, and if people who had never seen the Atlantic didn’t quite believe you that the big snow-covered plain they were looking at was not just land. Man, it was so crazy.
Abby and I were at Olkhon a few days ago. You faithful readers may remember that I was there in the fall. At that point it was surrounded by a liquid lake, and there were sandy beaches with waves breaking on them, and there were yellow larch forests. Not so now.
I would subject you all to rapturous accounts of the surrounding beauty, but I think I’ll just wait till I can post pictures. But I won’t be posting the pictures taken of me on the first afternoon on the island, as I bear a disturbing resemblance to an escaped inmate of a psychiatric prison. The chief factors in the creation of this resemblance are 1) the feathers flying out of the sleeve of my sleeping-bag-like coat, torn open by a crazy dog named Foox; 2) The frozen blood on my coat and face, from a bloody nose caused by the extreme cold and having resisted the hasty scarf-clean-up-efforts of myself and Abby; 3) the general look of frantic concern of my face and the hunted haunch of my shoulders, left over from the frantic efforts of the past ten minutes to hide my blood-covered self from the fast-approaching hip young Muscovite professionals, the owners of Foox, who were staying with us in our hotel. Plus my hands were very freezing from being covered in frozen blood. And I had the unsettling knowledge of my blood-covered scarf hidden within my coat. Man, this paragraph is gross. But it was very hilarious at the time. If you pay me $10 I’ll show you a picture sometime.
We could hear the ice forming, sometimes. It was sometimes like sound-effects in arcade games. And sometimes like we were just hearing the upper register of some deep, slow, mournful complaint voiced far below the earth. One night, especially, we stood on big blocks of ice by a previously-sandy beach and listened to the ice forming almost beneath us. It was sort of scary.
The next morning I went for a walk by myself. I climbed as far as I could on the Shaman Rocks (one of the five global energy points for the Buryats, which, as Ivan said the first time we were there, isn’t saying that much considering the rather limited geographical range of that particular ethnic group, but they attract a lot of shamanistic/new-age religious activity anyway), saw a fox run out from a nook in the rocks below, watched the morning light coming over the island and making it to the western shore, where I was. The light hit the sandy beach of the night before very attractively, and I decided to walk there over the ice, saving a lot of trouble from the fault-and-rock-covered shoreline. Far out from the shore, the ice was as smooth as a mirror, and I could see far down into the thickness of it, which was cool. But, as it was after all Baikal, I could see farther than that, all the way down to the bottom of the lake. And that was very, very far down. At that point I got really scared, but I couldn’t get back on shore for a long time, as the banks were just the tall red cliffs that seemed so pretty when I was on top of them rather than beneath them.
Abby and I were at Olkhon a few days ago. You faithful readers may remember that I was there in the fall. At that point it was surrounded by a liquid lake, and there were sandy beaches with waves breaking on them, and there were yellow larch forests. Not so now.
I would subject you all to rapturous accounts of the surrounding beauty, but I think I’ll just wait till I can post pictures. But I won’t be posting the pictures taken of me on the first afternoon on the island, as I bear a disturbing resemblance to an escaped inmate of a psychiatric prison. The chief factors in the creation of this resemblance are 1) the feathers flying out of the sleeve of my sleeping-bag-like coat, torn open by a crazy dog named Foox; 2) The frozen blood on my coat and face, from a bloody nose caused by the extreme cold and having resisted the hasty scarf-clean-up-efforts of myself and Abby; 3) the general look of frantic concern of my face and the hunted haunch of my shoulders, left over from the frantic efforts of the past ten minutes to hide my blood-covered self from the fast-approaching hip young Muscovite professionals, the owners of Foox, who were staying with us in our hotel. Plus my hands were very freezing from being covered in frozen blood. And I had the unsettling knowledge of my blood-covered scarf hidden within my coat. Man, this paragraph is gross. But it was very hilarious at the time. If you pay me $10 I’ll show you a picture sometime.
We could hear the ice forming, sometimes. It was sometimes like sound-effects in arcade games. And sometimes like we were just hearing the upper register of some deep, slow, mournful complaint voiced far below the earth. One night, especially, we stood on big blocks of ice by a previously-sandy beach and listened to the ice forming almost beneath us. It was sort of scary.
The next morning I went for a walk by myself. I climbed as far as I could on the Shaman Rocks (one of the five global energy points for the Buryats, which, as Ivan said the first time we were there, isn’t saying that much considering the rather limited geographical range of that particular ethnic group, but they attract a lot of shamanistic/new-age religious activity anyway), saw a fox run out from a nook in the rocks below, watched the morning light coming over the island and making it to the western shore, where I was. The light hit the sandy beach of the night before very attractively, and I decided to walk there over the ice, saving a lot of trouble from the fault-and-rock-covered shoreline. Far out from the shore, the ice was as smooth as a mirror, and I could see far down into the thickness of it, which was cool. But, as it was after all Baikal, I could see farther than that, all the way down to the bottom of the lake. And that was very, very far down. At that point I got really scared, but I couldn’t get back on shore for a long time, as the banks were just the tall red cliffs that seemed so pretty when I was on top of them rather than beneath them.
Monday, January 14, 2008
And a blog from Irkutsk, where it is sunny and 39 below, Celcius
Trying again with this blog business. Don’t know how to go about it. I think a mere recounting of principle events, arrivals and departures and tourist sights seen and so on, will give very little sense of the experience of the past week. I am convinced that even the pen/keyboard of the most skilled novelist, endowed with all the strength and dexterity and fineness of syntax accumulated by the English language over the centuries, could not explain why the Tea Spoon Blini Cafe at the Moscow Train station in St. Petersburg was such a very, very miserable place at 9:00 Tuesday, Jan. 8, or why the train on which I wrote my last attempt at blogging was such a wonderful one. But if an attempt at literary representation of the week were to be attempted, perhaps it would center around the ever-popular “light and darkness” theme. It would begin, I would say, with Epiphany, the holiday of Light celebrated 8 days ago. I, on this day, was in Helsinki. For a better literary tone, I would have celebrated Epiphany in some more liturgical, high church setting than the Rock Church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. There would be a lot more deep theological insight and more candle carrying and such, and the complete looniness of the skinny little Scottish-accented pastor, crazy African preacher, bizarre congregation of non-native English speakers at an English service, church architecture like a UFO built in 1970s Protestant Church-retreat-center style, all brown and uncut stone and meant to be cozy but actually just sort of dirty looking, loony “praise songs” sung led by swaying loons at microphones, etc., would be passed over. Ecclesiastical looniness or no, the service, in which the theme of light was discussed, including much discussion of the fact that in Finland in winter there is not much light at all, would play a key role. This lack of sunlight in the north of the world will play an important role in the coming narrative.
Abby and I are now trading off in blog writing. And I see that she is doing a very fine job of writing a detailed and entertaining account of our journey, so I feel free to continue talking about nothing. You can all just skip this and click on the link “former compoundmate” or whatever I called that link.
So. Finland was indeed cold, and there were indeed few hours of sunlight, but I remember the sun that there was generally being bright and fully, cheerfully illuminating of the Nordic Walking Amazingness that was occuring. Open Scene 2. Time: 6:30 am Monday morning, Helsinki time. Place: neat, attractive park with paths along lakes. Temperature: fairly crisp, at the time described as freezing cold. Mood: expectant beginning-of-journey feeling, mixed with regret of parting friends. Light: none. Okay no actual scene will be written, just the stage-direction-y bit.
Train ride. Dark for many hours. Finally sort of light, but on crowded bus, little feeling of sunlight. Arrival in Petersburg. About an hour of week light, I think. By 6:00 pm, when our wandering about waiting for our train the next morning was in full swing, Stygian Darkness in full reign. This is very important. It means that by 7:00, as it had been dark pretty much since 4:00, we felt like it was about midnight, and we had been out much of the night already. Long night, impossible to describe. Perhaps the fireworks we saw with Vanya play a symbolic role of some kind. They were nice. Some light shone forth even in the freezing darkness. Petersburg is pretty. Mainly dark and cold though. The main moment, I think, is when we emerged from the metro at about... I don’t know, some hour of the morning at which it should have been light, at which we felt that night should have ended and we should be getting on with the “waiting around in the morning for our train” segment of our lives and finished with the “wandering around St. Petersburg all night” segment. But it was still pitch black. This experience of St. Petersburg, I now realize, was very literarily appropriate. It was just as unpleasant as I imagined from Dostoveyski. Anyway, if the literary development to this point was effective, the horror of this darkness, after our night of life in the shadows, would be clear to you. As we trudged along the dark, icy streets, somewhere around Palace Square, in an alley of souvenir stalls, I slipped on the icy and as my legs shot out from under me they brought Abby down with me. We untangled ourselves, retreated into even darker shadows and laughed rather humorlessly for a few minutes. Then we ventured forth again. Soon after this was our miserable visit to the Teaspoon establishment. We slept through most of the sunlight that day, in seats at the back of our long-awaited train to Moscow. We slept sporadically, the door next to us slamming shut often and letting in cold air and dirty water. We got to Moscow in the dark, crossed the street in an underground walkway to another train station, and set about waiting for our next train, scheduled for departure at 2 am or something, I don’t really remember. There was a lot of cold and damp and sleazy pelmeni restaurant and tea from thin plastic cups and observing the drawn-out-over-several-hours spectacle of one bum being fleeced by another. It was dark. We thought our train didn’t exist. It did. I have already described the amazingness of that train. Also, the daylight portion of our train ride included the sun streaming over snowy fields for a few hours. The boys who played Marble Blast Gold with us later gave us chocolate, and when we got to Kazan they came back to proudly point out the spires of the Kremlin and such. It was very sweet.
So. Back to the light and dark. Such a treatment would perhaps make use of the drastic white of the ancient Kremlin walls. We got to Kazan at 3, and the sun was already setting. Soon these white walls were rising dramatically from a dark, very cold city. And I mean cold. It was 24 below, Celsius, I think. I’m not sure how many times in my life I’ve been more cold than coming down the huge hill from that Kremlin, looking for any open building to go inside. The odd Mordor-like night club with smokestack and underground chambers with glass pyramidical roofs sticking up from the ground would make the cut in the description of the landscape. I spent a lot of our time in Kazan slipping on the ice. At this point in our travels there was a certain abandonment of economy. We ate in a real restaurant- one in which my entree, for which I felt guilty for ordering when more economic options were available, was 4 dollars. Also when we went grocery shopping we bought cheese. Yeah. I don’t know what that has to do with light and darkness. The warmth and light of the “trakter” in which we ate? Our need for material comfort after wandering in the cold, dark world?
At the end of our stay in Kazan occurred a most amazing adventure involving our luggage, a locked train suburban train station, insights into the world of homelessness in southwestern Russia... I don’t really know what to say about it, so I’ll leave it in the realm of the hypothetical author about whose description we are speculating. There were a lot of hours of dark. Then we met Elizabeth and her friends on the platform, we entered the train, and we headed to Siberia at last.
The train was cold. A woman in our compartment bought some dog hair one of the crazy merchants who sneak on the train and sprint down the aisles selling odd things. I have nothing else to say about it. It was very, very cold.
I’m tired of this entry. We were in Novosibirsk. Even colder there, but we weren’t on the street as long. Mainly we hung out in this boring museum, because it was warm there. There was a crazy floral arranging competition. As we were with Elizabeth, there was a lot more order and less craziness occurring. We slept in a hotel and ate in very reputable restaurants. Left Novosibirsk in the middle of the night, on a much warmer train. Spent the morning watching the very, very pretty landscape near Krasnoyarsk. I love Siberia. Then that night was Old New Year and there were obnoxious drunk men and it was awful. Giving the computer to Abby now.
Abby and I are now trading off in blog writing. And I see that she is doing a very fine job of writing a detailed and entertaining account of our journey, so I feel free to continue talking about nothing. You can all just skip this and click on the link “former compoundmate” or whatever I called that link.
So. Finland was indeed cold, and there were indeed few hours of sunlight, but I remember the sun that there was generally being bright and fully, cheerfully illuminating of the Nordic Walking Amazingness that was occuring. Open Scene 2. Time: 6:30 am Monday morning, Helsinki time. Place: neat, attractive park with paths along lakes. Temperature: fairly crisp, at the time described as freezing cold. Mood: expectant beginning-of-journey feeling, mixed with regret of parting friends. Light: none. Okay no actual scene will be written, just the stage-direction-y bit.
Train ride. Dark for many hours. Finally sort of light, but on crowded bus, little feeling of sunlight. Arrival in Petersburg. About an hour of week light, I think. By 6:00 pm, when our wandering about waiting for our train the next morning was in full swing, Stygian Darkness in full reign. This is very important. It means that by 7:00, as it had been dark pretty much since 4:00, we felt like it was about midnight, and we had been out much of the night already. Long night, impossible to describe. Perhaps the fireworks we saw with Vanya play a symbolic role of some kind. They were nice. Some light shone forth even in the freezing darkness. Petersburg is pretty. Mainly dark and cold though. The main moment, I think, is when we emerged from the metro at about... I don’t know, some hour of the morning at which it should have been light, at which we felt that night should have ended and we should be getting on with the “waiting around in the morning for our train” segment of our lives and finished with the “wandering around St. Petersburg all night” segment. But it was still pitch black. This experience of St. Petersburg, I now realize, was very literarily appropriate. It was just as unpleasant as I imagined from Dostoveyski. Anyway, if the literary development to this point was effective, the horror of this darkness, after our night of life in the shadows, would be clear to you. As we trudged along the dark, icy streets, somewhere around Palace Square, in an alley of souvenir stalls, I slipped on the icy and as my legs shot out from under me they brought Abby down with me. We untangled ourselves, retreated into even darker shadows and laughed rather humorlessly for a few minutes. Then we ventured forth again. Soon after this was our miserable visit to the Teaspoon establishment. We slept through most of the sunlight that day, in seats at the back of our long-awaited train to Moscow. We slept sporadically, the door next to us slamming shut often and letting in cold air and dirty water. We got to Moscow in the dark, crossed the street in an underground walkway to another train station, and set about waiting for our next train, scheduled for departure at 2 am or something, I don’t really remember. There was a lot of cold and damp and sleazy pelmeni restaurant and tea from thin plastic cups and observing the drawn-out-over-several-hours spectacle of one bum being fleeced by another. It was dark. We thought our train didn’t exist. It did. I have already described the amazingness of that train. Also, the daylight portion of our train ride included the sun streaming over snowy fields for a few hours. The boys who played Marble Blast Gold with us later gave us chocolate, and when we got to Kazan they came back to proudly point out the spires of the Kremlin and such. It was very sweet.
So. Back to the light and dark. Such a treatment would perhaps make use of the drastic white of the ancient Kremlin walls. We got to Kazan at 3, and the sun was already setting. Soon these white walls were rising dramatically from a dark, very cold city. And I mean cold. It was 24 below, Celsius, I think. I’m not sure how many times in my life I’ve been more cold than coming down the huge hill from that Kremlin, looking for any open building to go inside. The odd Mordor-like night club with smokestack and underground chambers with glass pyramidical roofs sticking up from the ground would make the cut in the description of the landscape. I spent a lot of our time in Kazan slipping on the ice. At this point in our travels there was a certain abandonment of economy. We ate in a real restaurant- one in which my entree, for which I felt guilty for ordering when more economic options were available, was 4 dollars. Also when we went grocery shopping we bought cheese. Yeah. I don’t know what that has to do with light and darkness. The warmth and light of the “trakter” in which we ate? Our need for material comfort after wandering in the cold, dark world?
At the end of our stay in Kazan occurred a most amazing adventure involving our luggage, a locked train suburban train station, insights into the world of homelessness in southwestern Russia... I don’t really know what to say about it, so I’ll leave it in the realm of the hypothetical author about whose description we are speculating. There were a lot of hours of dark. Then we met Elizabeth and her friends on the platform, we entered the train, and we headed to Siberia at last.
The train was cold. A woman in our compartment bought some dog hair one of the crazy merchants who sneak on the train and sprint down the aisles selling odd things. I have nothing else to say about it. It was very, very cold.
I’m tired of this entry. We were in Novosibirsk. Even colder there, but we weren’t on the street as long. Mainly we hung out in this boring museum, because it was warm there. There was a crazy floral arranging competition. As we were with Elizabeth, there was a lot more order and less craziness occurring. We slept in a hotel and ate in very reputable restaurants. Left Novosibirsk in the middle of the night, on a much warmer train. Spent the morning watching the very, very pretty landscape near Krasnoyarsk. I love Siberia. Then that night was Old New Year and there were obnoxious drunk men and it was awful. Giving the computer to Abby now.
a blog from the road
Do you want to really, really, really love a bunk on a train? Do you want to feel that getting to spend the night, or even from 1:00 am on, in the crisp, white sheets and thick blanket in platscart, with the train moving under you and the heating system in full operation, is that best thing that ever happened to you? And that a eating a plastic cup of just-add-water soup with a fork is the ideal meal? I have some suggestions as to how this level of appreciation can be brought about. This just seems like a set-up for a long post of whining. But that’s not how I meant it; I am really so insanely happy to be sitting in this train right now, the sun shining on snowy forests and plains out the window, having slept until almost 11:00 in a warm bed, that all discomfort of the past few days seem relevant only as contrast to the excellence of this train.
We left Helsinki Monday morning, Abby informs me; I have very little sense of time, so I would have no idea if asked. So, yes, got up at some very early hour Monday morning, dragged our belongings through the National Finn Fitness Park or whatever it is that lies between the Hostel Stadion and the Helsinki train station, had our last look at the frigid lakes and well-ordered paths along which we have seen so many a hardy Finn striding hardily about walking his or her dog, or engaging in “Nordic Walking” in a purple jogging suit. Sadly said goodbye to Laurel in the clean, well-ordered train station. At this point I’m not entirely sure what happened. We rode on a train for a long time, but there are a lot of trains in this story, and I don’t remember anything about this one. There were a lot of Russians in snow pants. There seem to be set occasions in which Russians wear snow pants, but I haven’t really figured out what they are. Oh, a very cute little boy named Zhenya sat in front of us and he was very awesome and Russian and shot everyone on the train with a toy gun. For a while an almost-equally-cute little girl named Katya sat next to him and they colored together and it was like a ridiculous juice-box commercial or something their conversation was so cute. My favorite part of the train ride was when we crossed the Russian border and Katya’s father, this strapping man with a blond Russian-style almost-mullet, looked out the window at the snow-covered pines and such and said “А, Родина, Вот она такая!» (Oh, the homeland, what a one she is!). I'm not sure why I found this so amusing.
Got to St. Petersburg in the afternoon sometime. Depostited our heavier luggage in a very complex locker in a very crouded lockerroom in the train station. Set our for a night of homelessness, as we hadn't been motivated enough to book a hostel. Hopefully Abby will write a list of the actual things we did, because I don't really remember. We ate a lot of chocolate bars, walked through a lot of shopping centers, etc. Met Ivan around 9:00, I think, in a fasttfood blini restaurant, stayed there until it closed sometime after 10:00. I had always wanted to be one of those people who sits about leisurely in an establishment even as it is clear that it is closing.
Earlier in the evening, Abby had had the brilliant idea of taking a «Night-time Petersburg» bus tour. When we asked at the «expeditions» kiosk how long the tour lasted, and learned that it was from 11:00 to 6:00 am it seemed not only brilliant but genius. So we headed to that expedition kiosk area. Saw some very nice fireworks and laser show on Nevsky Prospect, I think in front of the Russian Museum, on the way. Went to grocery store. bought ice-cream. Got on bus. Very long bus-ride began. Oh man, I don't know how to describe this bus tour. The guide was this little woman in a gray bun. She talked very, very fast. My favorite was at the very beginning, on Nevsky Prospect, when she had to say what every single building was as we passed it, as they are all important. It was like a very enthusiastic radio sports broadcast, I guess. «And, on-the-right the Someone-important-Palace! Minister of Catherine the Great! And on the left Pushkin once ate lunch! And on the right something-or-other-no-one-understands-because-I'm-speaking-very-fast-and-everyone-on-this-bus-is-a-beer-drinking-hooligan-anyway!» You could get whiplash, if you didn't watch out. Every once in a while we would stop so we could go take pictures. Except that is was the middle of the night, so it was sort of pointlesss. But there was a lot of enthusiastic picture-taking anyway. The guide really liked throwing dramatic quotations of Lermantov and Ahmatova into the lecture. I would know a lot about every activity of those persons, as well as of Blok and especially Pushkin, if I had been able to listen to the woman for 6 hours straight. She especially relished describing the deaths of the famous people whose old apartments or schools we drove by. Like of this one poor man who was discribed as having «caught his last tramvai.» There was a lot of half-sleeping in the back of the bus, where the cool kids (me and Abby, of course) were hanging out. It would have been full-sleeping, but there was a crazy babushka yelling about scultures of sphinxes and hooligans poking their girlfriends and trying to wake them up, and stopping of the bus to look at dark churches, interrupting our slumber. And poor Abby was sick and just freezing cold the whole time, and it was very sad. At 2 am we stopped at a cafe and all got out and bought tea. Then back in the bus for more babushka-tour. Agh, it was so out of control. But in many ways more in-control than at 5:45 am when we were set down in the dark streets with no where to go. There was much darkness and coldness and tiredness involved. And cafes with drunk people being chased out of them. And 24-hour bookstores. 24-hour bookstores don't seem like such a good economic venture to me, but we appreciated them anyway. Eventually we just got on the metro and rode it for a long ...
This entry was inturrupted by 100 3rd grade boys swarming the compartment and asking what games I had on my computer. Actually only about 5. Much Marble Blast Gold was played. Gettng into Kazan. Will be there 11 hours. No hotel again. But Abby and I are now pros at this.
We left Helsinki Monday morning, Abby informs me; I have very little sense of time, so I would have no idea if asked. So, yes, got up at some very early hour Monday morning, dragged our belongings through the National Finn Fitness Park or whatever it is that lies between the Hostel Stadion and the Helsinki train station, had our last look at the frigid lakes and well-ordered paths along which we have seen so many a hardy Finn striding hardily about walking his or her dog, or engaging in “Nordic Walking” in a purple jogging suit. Sadly said goodbye to Laurel in the clean, well-ordered train station. At this point I’m not entirely sure what happened. We rode on a train for a long time, but there are a lot of trains in this story, and I don’t remember anything about this one. There were a lot of Russians in snow pants. There seem to be set occasions in which Russians wear snow pants, but I haven’t really figured out what they are. Oh, a very cute little boy named Zhenya sat in front of us and he was very awesome and Russian and shot everyone on the train with a toy gun. For a while an almost-equally-cute little girl named Katya sat next to him and they colored together and it was like a ridiculous juice-box commercial or something their conversation was so cute. My favorite part of the train ride was when we crossed the Russian border and Katya’s father, this strapping man with a blond Russian-style almost-mullet, looked out the window at the snow-covered pines and such and said “А, Родина, Вот она такая!» (Oh, the homeland, what a one she is!). I'm not sure why I found this so amusing.
Got to St. Petersburg in the afternoon sometime. Depostited our heavier luggage in a very complex locker in a very crouded lockerroom in the train station. Set our for a night of homelessness, as we hadn't been motivated enough to book a hostel. Hopefully Abby will write a list of the actual things we did, because I don't really remember. We ate a lot of chocolate bars, walked through a lot of shopping centers, etc. Met Ivan around 9:00, I think, in a fasttfood blini restaurant, stayed there until it closed sometime after 10:00. I had always wanted to be one of those people who sits about leisurely in an establishment even as it is clear that it is closing.
Earlier in the evening, Abby had had the brilliant idea of taking a «Night-time Petersburg» bus tour. When we asked at the «expeditions» kiosk how long the tour lasted, and learned that it was from 11:00 to 6:00 am it seemed not only brilliant but genius. So we headed to that expedition kiosk area. Saw some very nice fireworks and laser show on Nevsky Prospect, I think in front of the Russian Museum, on the way. Went to grocery store. bought ice-cream. Got on bus. Very long bus-ride began. Oh man, I don't know how to describe this bus tour. The guide was this little woman in a gray bun. She talked very, very fast. My favorite was at the very beginning, on Nevsky Prospect, when she had to say what every single building was as we passed it, as they are all important. It was like a very enthusiastic radio sports broadcast, I guess. «And, on-the-right the Someone-important-Palace! Minister of Catherine the Great! And on the left Pushkin once ate lunch! And on the right something-or-other-no-one-understands-because-I'm-speaking-very-fast-and-everyone-on-this-bus-is-a-beer-drinking-hooligan-anyway!» You could get whiplash, if you didn't watch out. Every once in a while we would stop so we could go take pictures. Except that is was the middle of the night, so it was sort of pointlesss. But there was a lot of enthusiastic picture-taking anyway. The guide really liked throwing dramatic quotations of Lermantov and Ahmatova into the lecture. I would know a lot about every activity of those persons, as well as of Blok and especially Pushkin, if I had been able to listen to the woman for 6 hours straight. She especially relished describing the deaths of the famous people whose old apartments or schools we drove by. Like of this one poor man who was discribed as having «caught his last tramvai.» There was a lot of half-sleeping in the back of the bus, where the cool kids (me and Abby, of course) were hanging out. It would have been full-sleeping, but there was a crazy babushka yelling about scultures of sphinxes and hooligans poking their girlfriends and trying to wake them up, and stopping of the bus to look at dark churches, interrupting our slumber. And poor Abby was sick and just freezing cold the whole time, and it was very sad. At 2 am we stopped at a cafe and all got out and bought tea. Then back in the bus for more babushka-tour. Agh, it was so out of control. But in many ways more in-control than at 5:45 am when we were set down in the dark streets with no where to go. There was much darkness and coldness and tiredness involved. And cafes with drunk people being chased out of them. And 24-hour bookstores. 24-hour bookstores don't seem like such a good economic venture to me, but we appreciated them anyway. Eventually we just got on the metro and rode it for a long ...
This entry was inturrupted by 100 3rd grade boys swarming the compartment and asking what games I had on my computer. Actually only about 5. Much Marble Blast Gold was played. Gettng into Kazan. Will be there 11 hours. No hotel again. But Abby and I are now pros at this.
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