Items of Note:

Dec. 4
1) Kiosks are decorated for New Years. This combines two of my favorite things: holiday decorations, especially on an overdone, tasteless, and colorful scale; and kiosks. The prize for the best decorated kiosk goes to the ice cream kiosk on Lenin St., near Pizza Domino. It has a whole window covered in pictures of ornaments and flashing lights, and is quite festive-looking indeed. However, I must admit that I am prejudiced in favor of this particular kiosk, as the nicest woman in Irkutsk works there, so any other Irkutskians reading this can feel free to conduct their own research and get back to me.

2) Speaking of ice cream. When Sasha, V.P.’s 10-year-old granddaughter, came to the house this evening, she brought with her an ice-cream cone she had bought for me. I personally consider this to be on the list of sweetest things ever done. Even if it was probably really to bribe me to play Marble Blast Gold on my laptop with her.

3) I’m watching the news, more to improve my feel for the rhythm of spoken Russian than from any real hope for gathering any information about the events of the day. They just showed this huge police raid in Krasnoyarsk, where the camo-clad police officers knocked down a huge door, rushed in with automatic weapons, and found... a bunch of backgammon tables set out for playing. What?! Is backgammon illegal in Krasnoyarsk? Is backgammon a well-known leisure activity of narcotic rings? I am quite confused. Unfortunately, I understood this story better than pretty much any of the others broadcast today. Now some soldiers are wandering about an airport in bright red camo. This seems a bit paradoxical to me, but I guess the Russians know their own military business. Hah! Now they’re talking about Живой Журнал! That means Live Journal. And I understand that. Wait... I didn't really know what Live Journal was in English. Damn. Well, they're saying that in Russia more people use «ЖЖ» than in any European country, and almost more than in the US. This is silly. I'm turning off the news, Putin's already killed all the real journalists.

4) I think I have developed a racial prejudice against Russians. When I see a person clearly not of Russian birth, I automatically assume that that person will be more friendly, polite, and generally superior the Russians around him or her. Today on my marshrutka-ride home, a Chinese girl got in beside me in the front seat (marshrutkas generally seat two people next to the driver, and if you are the person in the middle, as I always end up being, you spend the whole time feeling that you are seriously impeding the working of the stickshift) and in the process knocked her head on the door frame. Now, if this girl had been a Russian, she would have either: a) cursed loudly at the driver for installing such an inconvenient doorframe of b) proudly pretended that nothing had happened and not acknowledged the existence of anyone else in the marshrutka. But this girl was of the genetically superior Chinese race, so instead she caught my eye and we laughed at the amusing incident.

5) I just remembered: a few days ago, when Sasha saw that I was working on a paper, she asked me, «Where are you copying it from?» I don't think she actually meant to imply that I was cheating, that's just her conception of schoolwork, that you find information somewhere and then rewrite it. My appreciation for institutions encouraging original thought is now considerably higher than when I was actually surrounded by those institutions.

6) Why can't I have short, stately and magestic blog posts like Laurel? Maybe because Laurel actually does her schoolwork instead of procrastinating by pretending to have cultural insights and then making her friends and relations read about them.

7) I just attempted an actual productive, academic activity: looking up the spelling of the Russian word for 'felt' for my Buryat paper. But I was immediately distracted by the fact that the Russian word for 'felt-tip pen' is 'flo-master.' With the stress on the second syllable.

8) The lucky ducks (I mean, unfortunate students who will miss out on another semester of language development and increased cultural appreciation) who are doing home after this semester got informational handouts from Middlebury about «reverse culture shock». My favorite advice involved supermarkets; apparently Middlebury fears that our shock at well-stocked grocery store isles will put us in danger of being locked up in a mental ward, or, alternately, make us fat. Especially odd was the advice not to use «controlled susbstances, especially beginning with 'm' and ending with 'a' before going to the grocery store for the first time. Has there been a specific instance of this, forcing Middlebury to take preventative action by warning us now? I don't know whether I'm more curious about the desire to smoke pot to enhance one's grocery-buying experience or about the typical results when high, fresh-from-Russia youths hit the bread aisle. I am considering e-mailing the Moscow office and asking- saying that if I don't hear about the results second-hand, I'm in danger of my curiousity forcing me to try the experiment myself. Wait. I just figured it out. People who are high are very hungry. In a horrible combination of the munchies and hyper-active, long-repressed consumarism, the army of 21-year-olds will buy up every carton of ice cream in Hanniford's, leaving a community devestated and thirsting for revenge.

It occurs to me that some of you may now fear, based on the long-winded and scattered quality of my blogging, that I have in fact taken to the use of controlled subtances myself. I haven't. But if Katya and Nastya sing that song whose chorus includes the words «чем виже любовь, тем ниже поцелуем» (hopefully not the real words) one more time, I may have to resort to chemical means. It's that or the chainsaw.

Dec. 5
9) I'm sort of depressed that the semester is over and I still can't speak Russian. I'm sort of depressed about my lack of knowledge in general, really. We went over our answers from our test in Baikal Studies today. And we had an unannounced test thing in our mainstream.

10) I'm going to attempt to mail New Years cards. If you get an alarming, brightly colored envelope in the mail, and it looks like it will contain coupons to a department store sale, it may be from me. Or maybe the Russian postal service will consider these envelopes too ridiculous to mail. We'll have to see.

11) I have never spent so much time in a post office. But the platinum-blond postal workers were very calm about spending 15 minutes putting stamps on my letters. They didn't yell at anyone, either, the whole time I was there. It was sort of amazing.