This Country is Ridiculous but Sort of Interesting

On Saturday sometime after 3:00, when I was at the Cafe Fiesta posting my previous post, actually, one of the 3-muscateer math majors from the hiking club called me and said if I wanted to go to Skazka (the cabin where the club often camps, and which is, incidentally, owned by one of our guides on our group trip to Buryatia), I should meet him at the fountain at 5:00. This was highly inconvenient in many ways: I had to sprint about the city and anxiously wait for irregular marshrutkas to get home, pack (in a plastic bag, as I have no backpack- I picked one up from the club in Shelekov, the town where they meet), and get back downtown; I had long looked forward to shopping for boots with Natasha and her host mother on Sunday; who the heck leaves for a camping trip at 5:00 pm?; my host mother had told me she would take me to a concert Sunday night, and I am sorry to miss any of the time members of my host family are not at work; and, I had no time to fill out a travel form for Elizabeth, which I think we’re supposed to do two days ahead of time every time we leave the city. Despite all these things, I feel like I have to spend time with this hiking club whenever I have an opportunity - it’s my only chance to hear conversational, informal Russian spoken for long periods of time. Plus I want to see more of Siberia than the no. 4 marshrutka. So I SMSed (how I now say “text message,” since I’m so hip and European) Elizabeth, who very nicely was merely disapproving rather than actually forbidding me to go, sprinted about, and met Max and one of the Alyosha’s at the fountain.

It was an interesting trip. We didn’t even get on the electirchka out of Shelekov until after 9:30 - first we sat in a middle school art room- or something, I actually have no idea where we were- in Shelekov for a long time and watched a conference about a trip the club had made to the Far East (I don’t know how to translate this into English, actually- it doesn’t mean China and Japan, it means the very eastern part of Russian, where hardly anyone lives) in the summer. The schoolkids who went gave presentations, which were judged, and lots of people gave out lots of certificates and flowers and things. Anyway, the hike to Skazka in the dark was sort of amazing. Only half the group had flashlights, and the trail is very rocky has a lot of fallen trees and rivers across it and sometimes just unexpectedly falls away completely; so the way was fraught with danger and adventure. It was rather exhausting- think of how mental tiring driving on unknown country roads in the dark is, and then add to that the actual physical exhaustion of hiking, plus the fact that living in Russian is fairly tiring anyway, so by midnight I am not especially functional. There was no moon, but it was a clear night and the stars were beautiful. We didn’t actually see them very often, because we were staring intently at the ground trying to see around our own shadows to any rocks and roots and trees the flashlight of the person behind us might be illuminating; every once in a while though, when we stopped, the view really was a amazing, through the tall pines. The best was on top of hills, when the stars shone not only above the trees but among the trunks, out in all directions. We stopped for a few minutes to eat piroshki on one such hill, all squatting in a circle in the road.

When we got to Skazka (we went the last couple of minutes completely without flashlights, which was challenging but fun), we found an already crowded cabin with a cheerfully burning woodstove. We drank some tea and went almost straight to bed, crammed close together, such that no one could figure out what to do with their arms, under the shelf-bunk thing characteristic of Russian cabins (or so I judge from the 3 I’ve been in). Those who had not just been hiking about in the dark sat up with a guitar and sang. I really like Russian campfire songs.

The next day was devoted to the continuation of the construction of a banya near the cabins – the condition, I think, on which the actual owner of Skazka is letting these hooligans stay there all the time. After a brief cold breakfast I set out through the woods with a few other people to find some boards for the roof that had been dropped off somewhere. I thought, as I half-ran along after my long-legged tovarishi like a little dog, about how much more comfortable I was than the first time I had been camping, and I wondered how much of it I could reasonably attribute to improved language abilities. After walking over hill and over dale, through woods and down narrow paths with tall grasses poking you in the eye all the time, and over a small river, we found the boards, clearly torn off some other surface, very long, and very heavy. For future reference, it is almost impossible to defend against thousands of little sticks poking you in the eye when your hands are full of board. It was difficult enough, actually, to be fun and interesting rather than just hard. Unfortunately, it was the only work I did all day; women aren’t really supposed to work in the presence of men, apparently, and whenever I would try to do something several people would shout at me in alarm to stop. It was fairly frustrating, and meant that I just sat around for many hours watching other people dig holes and carry dirt and carry big tree trunks around. Every once in a while I would manage to do something while the boy who was supposed to be doing it whined about it; then people would ask him if he were not ashamed that a girl had performed the task, and he would be, and would rush about working for a while. After this happening about twice I gave up. As I sat watching Alyosha and Max dig a hole, they attempted to explain why it just too embarrassing for Russian men for a woman to do physical work other than cooking and cleaning; their various explanations were sort of amusing but not really helpful. At one point Max referenced the Domostroi, in complete seriousness, as evidence of why in Russia women should not work outside the home. I made a vague protest that the Domostroi was written in the middle ages, and that it was written not as a legitimate civil code but as an impossible collection of spiritual advice by fanatic priests, but I could not really argue with people who think that the Domostroi is an acceptable source of social policy. I couldn’t decide whether my overwhelming reaction was “this country is out of control” or “boys are stupid.” Of course, I don’t really want equal treatment: what I want is a system where men do all the work when I don’t feel like doing it or don’t know how, but I get to work when I want to. I want a higher, more sophisticated level of chivalry in which men work harder than I do but pretend that they don’t. Come on, males of Russia, get with the double standard.

I really like the meals and tea breaks associated with camping. There is interesting, sort of rough-hewn seeming tea, made in an long, skinny iron pot thing hung over the stove, bitter and with bits of tea-leaf everywhere, and there is an endless variety of dried bread and cookie, and there is dogs-dinner-like soup, and then, my favorite, there is condensed milk. I don’t know why we don’t eat more condensed milk in America. It is my new favorite thing. You can put in it your tea, you can dip cookies and crackers in it, you can pour it over bread, you can pour it into your mouth from the can; it is sweet and thick and perfect.

When we left Skazka, instead of hiking back to the electrichka stop, we hiked to where some guy had parked his mini-bus (well, it was pretty much a mini-van with all the seats taken out) and he drove us to Shelehov. This was an interesting ride, with seven people and their backpacks and some odd metal objects crammed in the back, and roads designed for tanks, maybe, rather than old mini-vans, and much getting in and out so that the van could drive though lakes, and much flying of people out of their seats (seat meaning “where we were sitting on our backpacks), and at one point the guy in the passenger seat, in a baseball cap with earflaps, riding for about 5 minutes with a rifle pointed out the window. I still have no idea why, but everyone in the van seemed to think it a reasonable possibility that he would shoot it, because they covered their ears. When we finally got to Shelehov Max, Alyosha, Vitalya and I walked to the bus station, where we waited a long time to elbow lots of people out of the way and get on a bus going back to Irkutsk. Apparently people on buses who need to get around you in the aisle so they can get off hate you lot more than usual if you have a large backpack. Anyway, eventually Vitalya and I got off at our stop, and found a marshrutka, and I got home. It’s amusing being in public with Vitalya, who for some reason is always in full camo and a cargo vest and looks very official.

For dinner I had a plate of some sort of crawfish animal. And Katya told me that if I buy boots now they will be fall boots, and I will eventually need winter boots. I am not allowed to wear winter boots yet. She asked me if my feet are cold now, and I said no, I was just the only person in Russia without boots. She told me that foreigners are supposed to look different.