To remember that ridiculousness has a healthy existence outside of Russia...

...I am currently listening to Joan Baez sing Guantanamera.

In Siberian history we are discussing the make-up of the population of pre-revolutionary Siberia. As time goes on, the population consisted more and more of exiles and prisoners. We were reminded that the first exile to Siberia was ... I’ll give you all time to think of an appropriately punishment-deserving state enemy in the 16th century...

the village bell of the town where tsarevich Dmitrii fell on a knife and died (or, if you believe the opera “Boris Gudenov, was hilled by Gudenov’s henchmen, or, if you believe lots of crazy people in Russia and Poland at the time, escaped to Poland the better to grow up to be a physically-unrecognizable person who wanted to hand over Russia to Poland). Our teacher didn’t seem to think it was as odd as we did that a bell was exiled.

In Baikal Studies today, after I gave the best report in recorded history on the extinction of large mammals, we discussed industrial projects of the Soviet Union in Siberia. The basic story is that they were very often more silly than exiling bells. They built things just to publish pictures of them and brag about them, so they were usually much larger than was at all useful, and they were often useless irregardless of size, and they liked to start projects without having enough money to finish them. In the north of the Irkutsk region, apparently, they started building this big road, but only had enough money for the bridges. So there are lots of very, very nice bridges out there with no accompanying road.

Ivan, Eddie, Joseph and I went to a museum today in the house of one of the Decembrists. It was pretty much the least informative museum I have ever visited. I still have no idea what the Decembrists did when they were in Irkutsk, other than make their relatives in Europe send them lots of things that are now displayed in this museum. Who has a grand piano shipped to Siberia? Or who, when moving there to a life of exile, embarking on a journey that I’m pretty sure still at that time took a year or something, brings a collection of china dolls? I guess those two examples both refer to the wives of the Decembrists rather than to the Decembrists themselves... I have even less idea what the Decembrists did with their time. I think we saw a desk where one wrote letters. And we saw the portrait of one’s mother, and were told that she wrote him lots of letters, and also lots of letters to the tzar, which eventually got his sentence commuted. That’s about all the information I gathered, except a re-confirmed dislike for Russian museum emplyees who follow you suspiciously around the museum and act annoyed when you don’t look at things fast enough and yell at you when you listen in on tours but don’t go turn on the lights and things in the next room so you can get away from the tour. At least Middlebury reimburses us for museum tickets.

We’re out of tea in the apartment, so we drank raspberry jam in hot water. It is actually very good. Don’t listen to Eddie.

I’ve gotten tired of speaking in broken, idiotic sentences that are often not only ungrammatical but incomprehensible. I’ve begun a high-intensity campaign to memorize song lyrics so I can sing along and for the moment be eloquent. In Russian, of course; I have no idea where all these Joan Baez in Spanish songs came from. It is certainly the first time I have heard them, and I hope it will be the last.