Read only if you have a lot of time

[Note: I was going to post this yesterday but ended up going on the electric train thing to some other town for a meeting of the hiking club. It involved tea-drinking and incomprehensible conversation. But everyone seemed very nice, and I think I agreed to go on a camping trip near Baikal on Saturday. And the trip there and back- past cool colorful villages and forests and such.]

Hello all! If I post this, it means I found the one wireless internet place in Irkutsk and successfully bought tea there and managed to use the internet and cut and paste this onto my blog. If this seems simple to you, you do not live in Russia, where you get used to thinking about all activities, especially those involving interactions with other people, as, alternately, daring adventures, stabs in the dark, games of chance, entering a minefield of almost sure frustrations, a new chance to get glared at by everyone in the room, etc. You should have seen it when 4 Middlebury program students, including myself, attempted to buy toiletries today. However, as I was informed by multiple charts and graphs in our orientation process, I am still in the “honeymoon” phase, so it all seems interesting and funny.

I’m writing this from my bed/coach item in my room on the 7th floor of building 70 on Universitetskii street, or block, or something. I’m looking at my zodiac-themed sheets and at the various knick-knacks all over my desk left there by the room’s previous resident, Katya, a girl my age who now has to sleep in her mother’s room. She (I presume) has also left two multi-colored, crazy-fonted crayoned messages on the papers tacked to the wall- not, I think, for my benefit- one says “Set for yourself high goals” with a picture of a tower, and the other “When the idols go out, the gods come in.” I wonder what that means. She seems very nice, actually, though my interaction with her has been mainly limited to her making me meals when her mother isn’t here and running out the door late for some class or meeting or choir rehearsal- she, like her mother (Valentina Petrovna) and older sister, works directing the city’s children and youth chorus, and she is also a university student, studying “culture” or something. An older daughter also lives here, but I’ve seen her less than Katya- I did, however, go with Valentina Petrovna to watch her sing in the Chinese restaurant next to the apartment building, as she does every night from 8-1. It was something. They all have dyed platinum-blond hair- well, Katya died hers red today, actually.

So, I’m just going to quote directly, with very little editing, my half-asleep journal entry as we few into Irkutsk (including odd capitalization):

“The Sun also Rises
Huge Yellow Moon leaving Domodedovo
big moon, even fuller, over the Moscow River the night before
Pastel Sunrise over Siberia
I saw the Moon, and the Moon saw me, but never through the boughs of an old oak tree, and it sure didn’t shine over the ones I love.
Where am I? Terrestrial, if not cosmic displacement. 13 hours is about as far out of orbit as you can get.
Bus ride through Moscow disconcertingly like Qrto- not the центр [downtown] of either, but in each the area around the center, except when an onion dome or an arched window gave it away, it all could have been Calle Primavera. Well more like those streets near Dulce's house- I don't remember the name of the development anymore, but there around Sam's. Something in the angle of the curbs an the visual tone of the road signs and the big medians full of scraggly trees and a couple blades of grass and just dirt- in the concrete banks of the Moscow River and the metal gating, in the billboards and other big advertisements.
The sunrise over Germany was deep and brilliant, a shade of red-orange, mostly red, reflecting off water, that seemed the world's truest color,- not quite sure what I mean- what is it the color of? Of truest energy, of the energy of creation. But not busy, moving creation, creation fierce and unbearable in its static force. I said something like that about the body positions and glances of Rublev's Trinity once to Maria, when I was fishing for an intellegent-sounding response. But it's true here.
Time is moving too quickly, literally- the sunrise is over and the sky is bright blue and I miss that salmon pastel tone, we flew over it and rushed it.
...
Going through security was interesting, with my coat and jacket pockets crammed full of 15 lbs worth of stuff and put through the x-ray, and my computer and and shoes and copious pant-pockets contents going through seperately and me still in two wool sweaters. The i-Pod was all that raised comment though.
This is a very ancient plane and very uncomfortable, and the flight attendents and brusque and have already spilled things on several people, almost without apology. I'm sitting next to Ivan.
Joseph and I were the only two not to have to pay for overweight baggage. It was quite the process, with tickets being taken all over the airport and fighting for places in line.
I like Elizabeth, the RC, more and more. My initial reaction was just alarm that this quiet, very young person was all the help we had in living in Siberia, but she's really very nice and competent.
Landing in an hour & 15 min.
A man on row 3 is drinking from a large glass flask.
Natasha bought M&Ms yesterday from a little store in shopping center thing, and great was her pride at her successful transaction. I would have been pleased too.
...
Fog from Baikal, had to fly to Ulan Ude and wait. Cool to fly over Baikal (except of course that it was sort of foggy) and really cool to see Burkatia. The Buryats weren't very happy about the whole thing- they just yelled at us for not getting on buses fast enough and for taking pictueres. Frankly, I don't think anyone would bother doing any harm to the airport. It's more... well, something- in the middle of nowhere, donde Jesus perdió su lucero [not the right word, but it means where Jesús lost his cigarette lighter], old-looking, generally backward than San Pedro Sula [airport], where you fly into the plantain fields. There WAS a mosaic inside, of a cosmonaut who looked a lot like a lobster. Elizabeth bought us chocolate, Natasha bought an interesting-looking ice cream cone the she proclaimed to be very good, ... , some Russian played some very loud DVD player and we all listened to a male, comedic version of «My Heart will go on» for a very long time. When we left the grumpy Boryats checked our tickets and asked Natasha if the Spongebob-in-a-coat assembly was a ребёнок [child]. Excellent. We should be in Irkutsk in 25 minutes, they said..... I like the brusque flight attendent now, after those Buryats. She's nice, in a brusque way.
Just took off, over an amazing area of little wooden houses. There was a window in the upstairs waiting room/balcony (like in Burlington) of the airport that looked, as Ivan pointed out, like Bi Hall but without the comfy chairs, just wooden benches. I love flying over mountains.
The туман [fog] is really very pretty where it fills the mountain valleys. Flying over Baikal again.»


So, I didn't realize when I started that that was so long and boring, sorry. Now there's no space to actually comment on Irkutsk. So I'll do that later- much later, I promise, if you by some chance are still reading.