and a continuation, in which I sit around and listen to music (Dec. 13)

We had a chaipitia (tea-drinking) with all the foreign students and some Russian students and most of the teachers today. It was sort of silly- we all at tables in a huge circle and drank tea from plastic cups- but nice enough, and the Korean students put on a skit and sang a song, and other people performed things, and such. But then at one point we started playing spin the bottle. And that is wholly unacceptable for people who have graduated from middle school. That’s about when I left...

To go to the printing-copy center tent thing at the marshrutka stop to print out a picture for our group thank-you card for Elizabeth. I am becoming good friends with the copy-machine tent. It is one of the most OOC places in Irkutsk. There are always 800 million college students crammed in there, demanding copies of 100-page notebooks. I don’t really understand why- do they have some sort of system where only one students out of every two takes notes, and then they just make copies at the end of the semester? In any case, I have a new addition to my list of jobs I don’t want.

Then I came home, because V.P. called to say she had forgotten her keys. This was the first time I had actually seen her since Sunday or something, so we drank tea and discussed the loss of my wallet and other subjects. Then she left for work, apparently taking both her keys and mine, perhaps feeling that having no sets of keys for the first half of the day and two for the second average out to the normal amount of key-possession. So I can’t leave the house now.

later:
Katya went to English class today, for about the 2nd time this semester I think. She just home and told me she raised her hand and answered every question, or something, thanks to our intensive translating sessions, and was told she didn’t have to take the exam or something. I wonder if she discussed dead ends. I like Katya a lot when she’s in a good mood.

If you are a person who wishes to read a very interesting discussion of the relationship of liturgical music and icons, the relationship of language and music, the art of musical composition in general, and about liturgy in general, you should buy the cd “Lay Aside All Earthly Cares” by the choir “Cappella Romana” and read the liner notes, particularly the article “Some Personal Thoughts of the Composition of Liturgical Music.” The cd itself is also pretty, a collection of Orthodox chants in very good English translations and musical arrangements. It is especially interesting if you are listening to it on your headphones as Katya is playing very loud disco music in the other room. Disco music aside, it reminds me of when Mama told me she considers Handel’s Messiah to be a proof of God’s existence. The Pan-Orthodox Society for the Advancement of Liturgical Music agrees, at least with the principle that religious music should be iconic, and icons necessarily correspond to “hyper-icons.” This is really very pretty. You should all buy this cd. Especially if you are a person in my family, and you want to give it to me when I get home.

Я сейчас слушаю песню «Российский Дед Мороз». It has a disco beat, a heartwarming children's chorus, and patriotic lyrics. Если ты сейчас в России, наверно тебе бы очень понравилась эта песьна.

Oh, and now in the neighboring apartment, where the piano is against my wall, the piano-playing member of the family has taken a break from playing songs from Cats (the usual occupation of that individual) and is playing that song about the New Years tree. Very festive.

I'm excited about my upcoming travels. When I started thinking seriously about this trip, and about how Abby would be seeing Siberia, I think I realized for the first time that living here is totally different than it would be living in, say, Yaroslavl. Like, we don't have «the neighboring cities with beautiful 15th century churches, founded by some tzar with an awesome name and an air of bold and romantic antiquity», (um, those quotes aren't because someone other than me was loony enough to say that, I just wanted to signify that it was one term), we have «the neighboring cities that were hastily built with no attention to aesthetics by Stalin and his army of chipper Komsomol youth when he decided there was entirely too great an expanse of space there with no cities to fill it, now facing major demographic and economic crises because the economically-illogical state-suppored factories that employed all the residents have closed.» Oo, maybe when Abby's here we'll go see Seyernno-Baikalsk. That's supposed to be one of the most poorly-planned and unattractive cities in Siberia. We talk about it in Baikal Studies on occasion, but I've never been there. Apparently it's a big deal that they built the apartment buildings without balconies, so everyone's depressed and demoralized. I don't quite understand this logic- who hangs out on a balcony in Siberia? All we use ours for is freezing the cabbage. But anyway, I sort of want to go see these balcony-less homes. Or we could just take the electrichka out to the middle of nowhere and walk around in the woods. We have a lot of woods in Siberia.