Я только говорю по-русски сейчас. Русские книги, русская музыка, т.д. Я всегда хочу рассказывать всё по-английски, и думаю потому-что я пишу здесь все время, между другими причинами. Так что, несколько дней я не говорю или думаю по-английск, кроме когда я отвечу е-майл сегодня. Если мы ездим на Ольхон на выходные, наверно я вернусь к ангийкому тогда. Это не очень долго.

So, I wrote that this morning. And I'm breaking my russian-only vow because I feel that I've earned it. I spent an hour and 40 minutes this evening listening to crackly old records of carefully-dressed women with tall hair playing accordians of various kinds. Actually the experience was very interesting for the first hour. Joseph, it seems, does not have time to practice the balalaika between his Tuesday and Thursday lessons, so his Thursday lesson has turned into a music history lesson, and today Ivan and I went with him. So... we looked at lots of diagrams of different kinds of accordians, and at actual accordians of various kinds, and learned how to construct accordians that would sound more smooth or more sharp (in theory; no actual construction look place) and listened to Joseph's enthusiastic 60-something teacher walk around the apartment-turned-music-lesson-place blowing into some accordian part, claiming we could hear the difference when he closed various doors to change the accoustics. And I though about how nice it was to listen to someone talk about what interested him, even when it was not really comprehensible, and about how much I like the equipment associated with music- the old intruments, the sheet music, the record covers, the calloused fingers, the music stands, everything with the slight grime of people's fingers and lips and over many hours, and all slightly too practical to be able to be truly pretty – concerts don't quite count, they are in a way a false front. I don't really mean too practical, lots of very practical things are very pretty, like gardening tools, but musical equipment just somehow isn't quite. And then music seems to me rather like an exclusive club, which increases its allure - people who can actually discuss all those keys and clefts and things seem to belong to some kind of gnostic club, able to mix with ordinary society in most circumstances but still in some way aloof from it and accessable only to each other. So, back to our bare room with the accordians: we listened to a lot of records. And I liked these records, and I liked that we all had to sit together in a room to listen to them and couldn't just put the music on our i-pods, and I liked that the music was linked to a physical object that I could see bumpily spinning around the record player, which looked like something made in a high-school shop class. But there is a limit to how many accordians one non-accordian-enthusiast can listen to. Or maybe just to how long I can sit still.

Anything else interesting to relate as long as I'm speaking English anyway? In our history of Siberia class today we discussed far northern tribes, up in the tundra where you can wander for years and never meet another person. Apparently when running into another person is such a big deal, they make a big deal of guests, for whom all possible must be done. For instance, the host must offer the guest his wife for the night. And if the guest refuses it means he does not respect the host. So children brought up in a man's house hold are fairly often not all his, but some random guest's. I see great soap opera potential. Like, what if the wife likes the guest better? Or what if the guest hangs around for more than one night? Also, our teacher was very impressed by the toilet-building abilities of far-northern tribes, so we talked about that for sort a disproportionate amount of time. She several times pointed out that tribes in the frozen north are much better at building sanitary toilets than tourists and residents around Baikal. We also learned that babies in the tundra would freeze if they wore diapers, so they're put in cribs with rotten, absorbent wood in the bottom. This is if they survive being tossed out into the snow for a while, as is done with them after they're first born. If it's spring, they have to settle for cold water. Back to Russian.