I ate moose the other day

with potatoes. Artur, the husband of Tatiana, Valentina Petrovna’s oldest daughter, shot it, and Tatiana did whatever one does to animals to turn them into food, and Valentina Petrovna cooked it with potatoes. Man, I am so cool.

Today Natasha and I were on the marshrutka to Cafe Fiesta, when a guy flagged down the van as it pulled out of the stop. The driver proceeded to, well, hit this person with the moving vehicle, which was sort of a surprise to all involved. Then the guy got into the marshrutka and the driver yelled at him for not being more careful, and that was the end of it.

Then we got to Cafe Fiesta, and waited in a very long line for pizza, and then in a very long line to ask for the internet password, only to be told that to get the internet password one must now order from the pastry line, the pizza line does not count. They make these sorts of rules up every once in a while, because they are Russians and like dumb rules and because they are too lazy to turn on the machine to print out the passwords. So we left and went to an internet cafe where I spend obscene amounts of money. I almost always use the labs at the university now, but I didn’t want to leave downtown until I knew whether the hiking club was meeting, in which case I would take a bus from the statue of Lenin. It wasn’t meeting.

In the evening we all went to dinner with Ivan’s father, who got in the day before. It was an odd oasis of English-speaking in our Irkutsk lives. And it was also very nice of Ivan’s father to take us out to dinner. We could, I think, have chosen our restaurant better; it was on the second floor of the building of Cafe Fiesta, and I think some of the unpleasantness and overpricing of Cafe Fiesta seeped upstairs. For instance, what kind of restaurant charges and entrance fee? Especially without telling you about it until you get the bill? On the ... well, I can’t decide whether this an upside or not... we saw many half-drunk business-class middle-aged Russians get up and dance with the supremely horrible pop music playing at ear-splitting volumes. And you have not seen bad dancing until you have seen this particular demongraphic.

Sept. 10, Saturday
Went to the bus station this morning to get a ticket to Listvianka, got one, then had almost an hour to wait; decided to go into the odd, bright pink church I always see when I go to the bus station. It was much prettier inside, and they were having a service, and there was a very pretty choir, four older women in sensible black shoes and shawls and the standard headscarf (I was wearing a winter scarf on my head, but I hardly got any strange looks). I am impressed by Orthodox choirs in general, because they sing for so dang long, almost the whole service straight. But this one was just particularly angelic-sounding. After the main service, when people dispersed to light various candles and kiss various icons, one of the priests went over to the left of the sanctuary for the usual prayers for the dead (I am almost certain that is what is going on, but I could be wrong) in front of the candles people lit for the purpose. The little choir went and stood behind him and sang most of the prayers. Sometimes the priest would have a part to chant though, and his voice was seriously damaged; it was gravelly and gruff except when a word would get stuck in the back of his throat until he finally pushed it out in a painful shriek. The circle of women behind him with their perfect harmonies of soaring music in encouraging response to his pained efforts, though, made it anything but unpleasant; one might think that the contrast would make his chants more ugly, but they seemed in harmony with him as well as with each other; they beautified rather than anything, and his voice beautified theirs as well.

Listvianka was very nice. Ivan and his father were there, and we ate omul and cedar nuts, and walked around a lot, looking at the huge ridiculous new mansions and the old cottages, and at half-frozen streams, and at boys riding bicycles on the ice, and at weekending Russians.

Now I should be preparing report for Baikal Studies about the causes of extinction of large mammals at the end of the ice age. Apparently my fascination with woolly rhinoceros was noted. What was not noted, however, is that my fascination extends only to the concept of the existence of these creatures; this long article I’m supposed to be reading is utterly impossible. I don’t know what any of the words mean in English; they all refer to eras and events of geological history. I am also supposed to be writing an essay for speech practice about something lame like what it means to be an individual. I’m going to make dinner to avoid doing those things.

In the always-sensical words of everyone’s hero Ozark Henry:
Indian Summer
Opiate company
As bare as truth can be
without apologies
I feel the summer
The humming I inhere in
Indian Summer
has no apology

Well, I made dinner, and ate it (rice and butter and cheese and tomato; I have finally found a dish other than pasta and ketchup that I can make), and read another paragraph about large mammals of some climate zone some distance from the arctic. My best estimation of what it says:
It has been suggested that the extinction of mammals was in great degree a matter of the hand of man and connected to the Mesolithic revolution. The unique role of man as the most specialized super-consumer, forming itself on the basis of the active half-day predator, corresponds well with the conception of the out-stripping of the victim of the specialized predators. The disappearance of megafauna in the Golarctic landscape, having studied it’s [I think the antecedent is megafauna] enormous function in all types of grassy biomes on all continents, obviously, there should have resulted also global landscape perestroika. It was enabling by the result of the extinction of big figaphors’ (?! my new theory is “animals who eat figs”] eating resources and the ceasing of the allowing-them-to-influence-small-growing-mammals...
At this point I gave up. This sentence goes on for a long time and I don’t know where the subject and object are exactly. I’m going to find another course of dinner. Maybe another Mesolithic Revolution, whatever that is, will occur between now and the time I have to give this report and I will be saved. Other than that possibility, I don’t know what I’ll do. There are 30 more pages. I haven’t even finished 2, and I still don’t understand the premise. On to writing about being a unique snowflake, as Eddie recently described this assignment, or, as he much less logically said another time, a unique sunflower.

Sunday Nov. 11
Snow in the night, still at it. I decided to walk around in the snow and while I was at it see what time there were services in the ugly Catholic Church. So, after a pretty walk I got there at 10:00, and a notice on the door informed me that the Sunday morning service was at 11:00. So I walked around the apartment blocks and little ice cream stands and unused playgrounds all the other omni-present elements of Irkutsk outskirts for half an hour, and then it was just too cold and I went into the church. It was almost as odd inside as outside; as did the exterior, it displayed a notable fondness for severe angles with an absolute value as far as possible from 90. The backs of the chairs where the priests sat were trapezoidal, the whole front of the church jutted out at the congregation alarmingly, the pews tilted backward oddly, even the doorways, which were by necessity rectangular, were framed by jaunty slanted lines. There were 4 huge statues in the church, each maybe 20 feet high; off to the far left there was a dark metal, sort of impressionistic construction of the baptism of Jesus, with figures suspended confusingly in tongues of water and perhaps fire; on the near left was a light wooden pillar item with very bright gold figures of an elongated Joseph holding the infant Jesus, with a huge lily of the same gold halfway down the pillar; in the center of the complex multi-angled jutting alter area was a crucifix about which I remember little but I think it was wooden with a metal Christ in all the usual gore of the scene; and on the right was the oddest of them all, made of the same materials as the Joseph and Jesus: a big tree with the trunk a wavy construction of the light-colored wood and the leaves the oddly-bright gold, extending very far out into the church, with a cloaked, hooded, long-faced Mary standing lightly on one of the branches. But despite the bizarreness of the architecture and interior decorating, the general atmosphere was shockingly identical to that of an American suburban Catholic church, or at least the 7 or 8 that I’ve been in; I swear they imported the turtle-neck-sweatered, pious-faced little girls, who for some reason always find 100 reasons to be bustling in and out of the sanctuary and whispering to each other and reprimanding their brothers, but very seriously cross themselves every time they cross the alter, from northern Virginia. And they were just as talented at finding the least catchy or attractive music possible for their hymns, and about the same proportion of people actually sang them. In general, it was the same atmosphere of self-satisfied nice-family-ness that in my native climes find rather repellent, but here I was just amused and pleased at its familiarness. Plus, despite my cynicism and unfair scorn of what I’m sure is honest and good, the basic experience of being in a congregation was nice. Orthodox churches in Russia, like Catholic churches in Mexico, don’t feel like congregations at all; people can go to a different church every week and no one would think it odd or notice at all, as far as I can tell. And it had many of the elements common to the Western Christianity and not Eastern that are nice, such as pews and the passing of the peace and conduction of the service in the vulgate and everyone saying the Lord’s Prayer. It also had the attraction of having priests with really funny accents; I wish I knew where they were from. One attraction it was definitely lacking was heat; man, it was freezing in there. After the service I went to there was going to be a mass in Polish, as today is the “National Holiday of the Polish Diaspora.” How can you have a national holiday of a diaspora?