Not very interesting post, but very cheery and stuff

I think I now take my life in Irkutsk pretty much for granted. I rarely have an urge to rush home and write up blog posts for you people about the hilarious thing I saw on the marshrutka. It all seems pretty normal. This should not be misinterpreted as “comfortable” or “a social system in which I have a place, or can even communicate with people on more than a basic level, due more to cultural than linguistic divides.” Still, though, it’s not only that I am accustomed to my Irkustk life; I do rather love my adopted “historic if vaguely seedy Irktusk,” as Lonely Planet says. Actually I think it’s the seediness that makes affection possible. In any case, as Mary Chapin Carpenter teaches us: you can shoot straight in the dark, but you can’t take love for granted. So instead of complaining about the everyday annoyances of my recent life, as is my wont, I will try to wrest especially beloved aspects of Irkutsk from the realm of the taken-for-granted and list them here.

1) The interior of the Philormonia (Philharmonic hall?)

2) The little colorful plastic ice-sleds of small children, just little flat circle of brightly-colored plastic, and how they carry them about the city and just sled down the ice-covered cement every time there’s an incline

3) When parents pull their children around in more substantial sleds

4) The caramelized evaporated milk that is now sitting in a can in the kitchen, and of which I ate vast quantities at both lunch and dinner

5) When drivers and passengers of marshrutkas engage in yelling arguments about whether the passengers yelled loud enough for the driver to stop

6) 7 ruble ice cream, especially the kind that doesn’t come in a plastic wrapper but just arrives at the kiosk or tiny magazine in a big crate of already-filled cones; especially the brand Angaria

7) people selling plastic bags on the street

8) The occasional person on the street who gives you directions to where you want to go in a pleasant tone, instead of pretending not to know where that place is located and rushing off. Particularly this one woman with gold teeth and fur coat who told me where the post office I was looking for was last week.

9) Fur hats, in all their variety

10) How the Chinese venders sometimes don’t know I’m not a Russian

11) Riding shotgun in marshrutkas

12) The hats, and also the long, green wool coats, of the students in the police academy

13) Handsome wooden houses, especially the ones on Marat street

14) The view behind Everything Will Be OK hypermarket; this view consists largely of high-rises, so I’m not sure why it’s so pretty, but it is, especially combined with:

15) Fog in the morning from the Angara

16) Tapochki (slippers) and their place in culture

17) Seeing eminently-respectable, fur-coated middle-aged women emerging from hideous, aging cement apartment buildings that we would consider ghettos

18) Babushkas sprinting after marshrutkas; well not after them in the sense that they are leaving: the marshrutkas are slowing to a stop, and the babushkas (along with everyone else) want to get to them first and get a seat

19) The little woman who distributes our mail and cleans the blackboards in our classrooms and the rest of the day sits at a desk in the department office looking very stern and being very nice. Mainly it’s her supercilious nod that I like. Maybe one day I will learn her name.

20) Pozi and their juice; pilmyeni; 12 ruble loaves of fresh black bread from bread kiosks; Cartons of fresh, drinkable yoghurt; Tea with whole milk; Mayonnaise made in the “Irkutsk oil-fat factor”- best mayonnaise in Russia, I’ve been told several times; ginger pryaniki (large soft cookie-things); pine nuts; raspberry preserves; in general every food item is a bigger deal, since there is such a small number of them, in terms of variety.

21) the path from my apartment to the university building, which runs alongside a grove of birch and always has picturesquely-frozen or snow-covered reeds and things

22) The reading room of the University Library, with windows looking out over the river, even if its use is rather limited by that fact that the library has practically no books

23) The fact that people buy underwear from street peddlers. Also the very odd male-unitard undergarments that I saw being sold today. Ok, maybe that’s not really on my list of things I love about Irkutsk, it’s just funny.

24) Ice slides and ice sculptures

25) The very seedy-looking Hotel Angara and its dominance of the main square

26) The city/ oblast flag, depicting the non-existent animal the ‘babr’ with a dead sable in its mouth

27) Cement apartment buildings at night, with the windows lit. Clean, modern-looking buildings would not have the same charm.

28) How you can get on an electric train and travel hours away from the city, into the taiga, for less than a dollar

29) glossy mink jackets on men; I’m not sure why I find this more acceptable than fur coats on women

30) The maritime-themed cafe at the marshrutka stop: the horribleness of this establishment, from the rudeness of the waitresses, to the slowness of the service, to the badness of the food, to the cheesiness of the decorations, to the awful music blaring from the wall reaches such an amazing level that it is impossible not to return, weekly, just to make sure it’s just as horrible as it was

31) singing songs from My Fair Lady with Valentina Petrovna

32) the fact that there are buckets of frozen shredded cabbage and carrot on our sitting on our balcony; mainly due to my memory of the shredding process

33) The white, square radio with round speaker in the middle hanging on the kitchen wall; how it only gets one station and has no on/off switch

34) The big salmon-colored building with the round turret on the corner of Karl Marx and Lenin streets; there was a picture of this building in one of our Siberian History textbooks, but I never figured out why it was important. Also the two odd, hermaphroditic-looking neoclassical statues sticking off of one of its walls. Incidentally, I wonder if I will remember, when I get back to America, that English sentences should have verbs.