Life of a Brand-new Kartveli

Alli, why don't you know Georgian yet?

2010-01-31T00:01:00.000+04:00

The short answer: because I know Russian!

The long answer:

I never realized when living in Russia how vital my classes were in teaching me grammar and words so I could later pick them up in conversation. Maybe that sounds stupid, but it's true – I sort of had the idea that even if I weren't in class, I'd still have picked up the language okay.

Turns out, for me at least, that's just plain not true. Because I've been in Georgia for a total of seven months already, but beyond a few words and phrases, I don't know any more Georgian than I did when I first arrived.

I forgot that I'm not five years old anymore and can no longer spontaneously learn a language. In particular, most of my linguistic exposure is aural, and I've found that without written confirmation of what I hear, sounds that are new to me continue to pass by my ear – I simply can't catch them.

I know it's possible to retrain one's ears to hear new sounds, as I hear the difference between hard and soft consonants in Russian that I couldn't differentiate and the beginning of my studies. So there's hope.

Beyond my lack of formal language study – something I hope to remedy soon – there's the probably more important fact that everyone is already used to speaking with me in Russian. So it's very hard for them to remember to switch to Georgian, and I – because I understand them in Russian – don't remind them. There have been a couple attempts to “go Georgian,” but when I don't understand right away, it's too easy for everyone to just switch over to Russian rather than struggle through it to communicate in Georgian. The irony, of course, is that without Russian Reziko and I would never have met at all, but now that same language has become a crutch.

My first few months in Russia in 2005 were miserable because I didn't understand what people were saying to me. My brain was overwhelmed by linguistic input it couldn't process. But that experience is necessary to push through to language fluency. I feel like my ear is so used to hearing Georgian around me now that if only I'd learn a little grammar and vocabulary, everything would fall into place. But until I can create that uncomfortable situation where Georgian is the only language of communication, I fear I'll never pick it up.

Tovli!

2010-01-27T11:06:00.003+04:00

Well, I know all you Midwesterners have about had it up to here with snow already this winter, but I just have to share: it's snowing in Batumi!

A couple nights ago it was wintry-mixing, which is the usual order of business here when it "snows." It's like slush falling from the sky, it's gross and wet and not pretty at all. But yesterday was actually pretty cold, close to freezing all day, and towards evening REAL snow started to fall - the dry, dusty kind.

This is the first time I've really been cold here - it's one thing for temperatures to hit freezing when you have a nice central furnace heating the whole house, and another to wake up in a room not one degree warmer than outside. Brr!

But it's worth it, because this morning I woke up and even without my glasses I could see that we had a good foot of snow on the roof. Whoopeee! It's Iowa-beautiful, but in Batumi. It looks so strange and marvelous! And it will disappear so quickly once the sun comes out again... but it's fun while it's here!

Finding Balance: A Gastronomic Journey

2010-01-27T00:01:00.001+04:00

When I left Iowa City in June, 2008, to study Russian in Vermont followed by 9 months in Russia, I was physically quite fit. I worked out 4-6 days a week and carefully watched what I ate; despite occasional splurges (nummy treats at the office, anyone?) most of my food intake was carefully planned and executed. When I went grocery shopping, I bought the exact number of apples I'd need to get through the week, my dinners were planned out ahead of time, and lunch and snacks were planned, packed, and subsequently devoured ONLY at the appointed time.

Yes, it was a bit obsessive, but it gave me control, and I liked how I looked and felt. I was fitter (and thinner) than I'd ever been in my adult life, and while I've never been overweight, I enjoyed feeling trim and muscular.

I was able, for the most part, to maintain my diet and exercise routine in Vermont (although exercise started to fall by the wayside when Reziko and I met and almost all activity outside of class was replaced with Skype time). At the very least, the foods available to me gave me healthy options, and I made somewhat regular use of the campus gym.

Then came Russia. I already knew from my previous year in Petersburg to anticipate some weight gain – a different diet and climate, after all, will have their effects. But I felt like I gained a LOT last year. Maybe it was the lack of sunlight draining me of all energy, maybe it was academic burnout, maybe it was a lack of sleep from staying up late to talk to Reziko, but my willpower and motivation were sapped. I would eat a relatively healthy meal of salmon or chicken with steamed veggies, then after dinner pig out on cookies or pudding made with whole milk or my host mom's turnovers or chocolate. None of these things are bad in moderation, but I was eating them constantly, and they constituted the majority of my calories. My host mom would bake constantly, I'd helplessly scarfed it all down and beg her not to make so many or so often because I couldn't resist, and we'd repeat it next week. I started to eat not from hunger, but from boredom, stress, loneliness.

I did have a gym membership, paid all up front in September. I could use the facilities as often as I wanted, whenever I wanted, including classes. And I did go. Sometimes a couple weeks would go by without a single workout, but especially toward spring I got better at going at least 3 times a week. But with my eating out of control, the exercise did little to influence my weight or shape. My clothes were too tight, my stomach too round, and I wasn't a happy camper.

Since then, Georgia has had quite an influence on me in the diet department. My first few visits were downright gluttonous, as my desire to try everything and the Georgian tradition of stuffing guests silly ganged up on me. As I made forays back into the world of meat, I earned myself quite a lot of stomach upset, including one illness this summer that landed me in the hospital for some rehydration. But since then (and after a few weeks back in Iowa eating my comfort foods – spinach and cottage cheese), something has clicked with me, and I feel like I'm eating better than I did in Russia AND in Iowa City.

First and most important, Georgia has broken me of that nasty habit of finishing everything on my plate. Take too much? Leave it. There's no reason to stuff yourself. Finishing it does not feed starving children in China, it just messes with your hunger signals and stretches your stomach out. I've long known this, of course, but my solution back in college was to simply severely limit the amount of food available to me, based on the premise that I can't stop myself if given unlimited access to food. This is still true when it comes to chocolate. But where I went wrong in Iowa City was limiting access even to the good stuff. I don't think an extra half cup of cottage cheese or a whole sandwich instead of half of one would have killed me or made me fat – and I would have spent a lot less time running around hungry and watching the clock until my next designated eating time. Also, this strategy taught me nothing about learning to say “no” in situations were I'm not in control of the serving spoon. I've learned the hard way that taking another cabbage roll or piece of meat just to be polite does nobody any favors – especially me when I spend the whole evening or next day feeling ill as a result!

Another habit in the Gvarjaladze household has proved very helpful to me: no set mealtimes. Not hungry. Don't eat. Hungry at 11 PM? Inga will get up and fix you a plate (I've never asked her to do that, by the way, but sometimes she gets up and takes over anyway). We all eat breakfast and dinner at different times, which has provided me a great opportunity to get more in tune with my body's hunger signals.

These two developments – only eating till I'm full and only eating when I'm hungry – have been revolutionary for me, even though they aren't new concepts in the health and fitness world. I haven't been exercising here at all beyond our fairly regular seaside walks, yet, despite a diet higher in fat and with more cheese, bread, and meat and fewer veggies than before, I haven't gotten fat like I feared I would! I weigh less than in Russia and just a few pounds heavier than my lowest weight in Iowa City. Would I like more veggies? Yes. Would I like more whole grains? Yes. My diet here isn't perfect. But I am way more satisfied than I ever felt in Iowa City, and I don't feel like a gluttonous pig like I did in Russia (I know the fact that it's warmer here and my body isn't trying to store winter fat helps, but that's not all of it).

And while I'm still trying to work around fitness restraints here – weird rules about when one may and may not go running by the sea, for example – I have started in the past week or so to work strength exercises and yoga back into my daily routine. I feel perhaps I've truly started to find a balance.

New Floss

2010-01-25T00:01:00.000+04:00

Confession time: I have not always been a regular flosser. I'm an avid twice-a-day brusher, but for some reason flossing has had a hard time working it's way into my nightly routine next to the more easily habituated tooth brushing and face washing and moisturizing. I've tried, folks, I really have, but the habit has a habit of not sticking.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is that I hate the floss itself. The waxed kind is, well, waxy, and always seems to leave behind little chunks of wax. Ew. The unwaxed stuff is too hard and hurts my gums, even when I'm really careful. I had a large spool of unwaxed floss for a pretty long time, and I finally used it up last week; despite my above comments, I have been flossing regularly - if not daily - for one month and going strong. Woot!.

Once that hateful old spool of unwaxed floss was gone, I felt free to try the Crest Glide floss my friend Kerry accidentally left here when she visited last July (Ker, if you're reading this, the floss fell off the shelf into the laundry basket, which is probably why you couldn't find it when you were packing). Let me tell you, kids, I have seen the light. Apparently while I was spending all that time hating on flossing, somebody actually came up witha floss that gets between teeth without collateral (gum) damage AND doesn't leave behind a horrible residue. I'm not a paid spokesperson, I swear. This floss is just really awesome.

Where does the money go?

2010-01-23T12:55:00.002+04:00

I'm no healthcare expert, nor do I pretend to understand all the nuances and implications of the healthcare bill whose future is now in doubt in Congress, despite the fact that I regularly read the latest developments in the New York Times. But one question that definitely has not been answered, at least not in a way I understand, is how this proposed bill will lower costs. I simply don't understand why healthcare costs so much in the US.

For comparison purposes, lets turn to the world of dentistry. I haven't had dental insurance for several years now, and I haven't been to the dentist since 2006 as a result. When I looked into it in 2008, I found that an initial exam with x-ray at the dental clinic my friend recommended in Iowa City would cost $175. Just to take a peek! I didn't go then because I didn't have the money, and while I've thankfully had no dental complaints in the past four years, I don't actually know that there isn't a problem that needs attention.

Here in Georgia, we're in the process of doing Reziko's teeth. Genetics tossed him some pretty bad teeth to begin with, and in addition he's neglected getting them looked at for even longer than me, so I was quite relieved when I finally convinced him to get them taken care of (mostly by explaining how much more costly it would be to deal with a problem in the US!).

The clinic we're going to is small, clean, and professional. It's dentists are certified by the National Dental Association of Georgia, which in turn is certified by the European Dental Association. All of their tools, materials, and equipment are manufactured in Europe, America, or Japan and are held to high standards of quality. These guys know what they're doing, and they do it well.

One of the dentists here is Reziko's friend, but he's being treated by another, as the friend was on vacation when we wanted to get started. We stopped in before New Years for a consultation, and the initial exam and x-ray were free. We've come to the clinic nearly every day since January 4. The first couple of weeks were to treat some inflammation and remove some surface decay, now we've moved on to filling teeth (5!) and fitting a couple prostheses (crowns, I think they're called in English? I'm rusty on dental terminology).

In total, including all of the above plus special toothpaste and mouthwash and antibiotics, our bill is not going to top $250. That's right, just $250. True, for the average Georgian family $250 is still a lot of money to pay out of pocket, but when you consider that our entire treatment cost is just a little less than one and a half times what we would have paid in Iowa just for the first exam, the difference is truly remarkable.

As a layperson, I can't speak to the cost of materials, instruments, equipment, office space, or support staff neither in the US, nor in Georgia. Nor can I attest to the take-home pay of dentists in either country. But, other than perhaps dentist's salaries, I can't imagine that expenditures are so much astronomically higher in the US that they account for the huge difference in treatment cost. So where is that money going? And what has whoever gets it done to earn it? I think that these are the questions that need to be answered in the (now more tenuous) US healthcare debate.

Has anyone had experience with healthcare outside the United States? What were your impressions of the quality of care and cost?

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay!

2010-01-21T14:23:00.005+04:00

Reziko's interview at the consulate in Tbilisi is scheduled for February 16. One step closer to a US visa. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT! We're doing the Document Dash for the next few days...

Celebrating the Moment

2010-01-21T06:00:00.001+04:00

Last Sunday was my godfather, Iva's, birthday. Reziko and I were among 15 or so people who gathered for dinner at Iva's home. It was a typical Georgian gathering: very noisy, toasts that went on for several minutes or more, lots of joy and laughter, and even quite a bit of singing, from traditional Georgian songs to church hymns. Much hilarity ensued when our tamada (toastmaster) demanded that at least one toast be given in Russian for my benefit, as the boisterous guests did their best and gave each other a hard time about their rusty Russian.

This gathering reinforced my desire to *finally* learn Georgian, because I'm tired of being left out of the jokes while everyone around me laughs. But it also reminded me what I love about Georgians, and why I think I could live here long-term. Georgians are joyful people. They've been through a lot, and because of this they understand the importance of celebrating the moment. I like that.

New Years Resolutions

2010-01-20T00:37:00.005+04:00

So maybe I'm a bit late with the New Years resolutions post. But if you consider that New Year by the old calendar was January 14, I'm really not that late at all! Besides, I'm a bit of a year-round goal-setter anyway; New Years is just a convenient time to reflect and evaluate what my priorities are for the near future.

Before going on to tell you all about my goals for this year, I want to take a moment to look back at all the neat stuff I did in 2009:

1. I completed a rigorous study abroad program in Russia.
2. I tested at 3+ (professional+) in speaking and reading in Russian.
3. I converted to Orthodoxy.
4. I got married!
5. I successfully figured out how to cable-knit and knitted a scarf for my hubby in just under a week.
6. I rode for 8 hours over unpaved mountain roads in fog to get to an 11th century cave city.
7. I spent more than 24 hours in the transit lounge of the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul (thankfully, not consecutively).
8. I started a new job as a translator and copy editor at International Life magazine.

Not bad for one year, eh? Still, there are lots of things I'd like to get done (or at least make progress toward) in 2010. They say you'll have more luck if you don't try to change too many things at once, so here's my short-list, my top three goals for 2010:

1. Get back in shape. Original, I know. But I miss muscly Alli and the energy working out gives me. So I'm aiming for 3-6 hours of activity a week, including cardio, strength, and flexibility training. I've already gotten started with some strength exercises and yoga, but I'd like to add in some more vigorous cardio. I was looking at getting back into running (without over-training and killing my shins like last time) by following the Couch to 5K running schedule. If I can start getting my buns out of bed early enough to run during the “socially acceptable running hours,” I'll be doing 5Ks by mid-March!

2. Learn Georgian. At least a little. More than the 30 or so random words I know now, including chipi (bellybutton), bibilo (earlobe), and zazuna (hamster), all of which are fun to say but not that useful in day-to-day conversation. I know hello and goodbye, I can tell when I'm being toasted, I can say thank you, and understand from context when someone asks, “Oh, she is your spouse?” ("spouse" being one of those words in Georgian that I understand when I hear but can't pronounce myself). I also know a few swear words. but I can't follow most conversation, let alone participate, and it's starting to get embarrassing that people are STILL having to switch to Russian on my behalf. The longer I'm here, the more disrespectful it feels not to know the local language. I have a textbook, but it turns out I'm crap at sticking to a study schedule without somebody asking for my homework every day. So even though it's hopeful we'll only be in Georgia another 2-3 months, I'm again on the hunt for a Georgian teacher.

3. Become a part of the Orthodox community. I converted last summer and I've done some reading, but I still have a lot to learn about living an Orthodox life – new traditions to take up, habits to form, and lots and lots of history to read and digest. I don't expect to become an expert on Orthodox theology in a year, but I'd like to be able to fluently explain why the filioque is a heresy or what theosis means or exactly what our views on the meaning of the Incarnation are when people say, “So, you're Orthodox now. What does that mean, exactly?”

Well, there you have it. Did you make New Years resolutions? How are they coming along? Or are you more of a year-round goal setter?

Vashli Zazuna!

2010-01-18T21:38:00.006+04:00

I hear tale that the hot ticket item in the US for Christmas this year was some kind of robot hamster. Well, I'm here to tell you all that I got something waaay better: a REAL hamster!

Reziko took note of my extreme love for cuddly, fuzzy animals and got me a little blondie, like me. We named her Vashli, which means “apple” in Georgian, in honor of this video, which Reziko and I got a real kick out of:

Here is a darkish webcam pick of Vashli:

She began her residence in the Gvarjaladze home in a plastic 20-liter wine jug, but it quickly became evident that she needed more space. My godfather, Iva, came to the rescue, hooking us up for cheap with a huge glass aquarium courtesy of his friends at the glass store next to his house.

Now Vashli spends here days sleeping in the foot of an old sock I gave her and her nights crawling all over us or trying to “swim” up the walls of the aquarium to reach the edge of the curtains hanging just on the other side of the glass. In this pursuit she also repeatedly jumps from the little fake wooden Christmas tree, or chichilaki, we gave her to gnaw on. This tickles me to no end, because she doesn't jump from four paws, but rather stands on her hind legs like a dinosaur and sort of hops toward the glass. Despite her lack of success, she's very determined, and will jump toward those curtains dozens of times a night. Too cute!

Last night I actually gave her the edge of the curtain, just to see what she'd do. Poor thing latched on and then just hung there, lacking the strength to hoist her round and fuzzy self further up. This makes me worry less about potential escape should the curtain accidentally hang into the aquarium one day.

It is perfectly allowable by US government agencies to bring a hamster into the country, but we'll have to talk with the airline and really consider whether Vashli would survive such a long and stressful trip. But we still have some time before those decisions have to be made, so for now I'm just enjoying having my little hamster around.

Trying to understand

2010-01-15T15:45:00.003+04:00

I read an article in the New York Times today that gave me some insight into my own biases when it comes to understanding the mentality of my Georgian family and friends. You can read the article here, but in a nutshell, it was about how cultural understandings influence the manifestation of metal illness, and how Western ideas and methodologies and approaches are being “exported” at locomotive speed. The entire article was fascinating, but the part that struck me in relation to my family was where the author pointed out that Americans' sense of self as an individual and the influence we believe we have over our destinies, the power of personal will to change circumstances, if only we try hard enough – all of this influences how we react to mental illness. Other cultures place more value on a person's role in the kinship group or on their place in the line of ancestry, and this helps them deal with mental illness in a way that is more accepting of the condition.

I can't pretend to be an anthropologist or an expert in sociology, but through my interactions with Georgians over the past year or so, it has become very clear that they more closely fit the kinship group model. People are defined by their role in the family (patriarch, first son, second son, mother-in-law, godfather, etc), and families are defined by their relation to one another. For example, Eliko is my godmother. Because she christened me, there can be no intermarriage between our families for nine generations, because we are now considered one family; such a marriage would be considered incest in just as if we had a blood tie. Similarly, christening can only go in one direction, that is, I cannot christen the children of anyone in Eliko's family, but her brother could christen my children. When one person or family experiences misfortune, the family and neighbor community gathers round to provide support. And these are all great things.

But one thing I could never wrap my brain around is the rampant homophobia I've encountered here. This, in fact, is the one aspect of Georgian culture that I simply cannot grin and bear. However, while I am in no way comparing homosexuality to mental illness (Georgians would), the article gave me a new way to think about this issue. When I discussed homosexuality with Georgians before, my arguments were always very individual based: people are born gay and can't change that fact any more than a person can change the fact that they were born in a particular country; God made everyone the way they are and it's not our place to judge; and someone being gay has no effect on our lives – just live and let live.

This last argument in particular has little meaning for my Georgians – in their minds and cultural understanding, gay people do affect our daily lives, because by going against strongly held communal norms, they threaten the very foundation of those values. Religion plays a key role here, of course, and is most often cited in Georgian arguments against accepting gay people as they are. But religion isn't all of it, I think. Gay couples can't have children (at least not the traditional way), which means they can't have a family. “If they have no family, how can I tell where their family is in relation to mine?” I imagine the Georgian line of thinking. Being childless is considered a heavy burden in this culture, so anyone who “chooses” to live a life that leaves them childless is selfishly turning their back not only on their traditions and culture, but on all of Georgia – a people that has survived over the centuries despite nearly constant invasions, never dying out even when their population dwindled to a few hundred thousand (there are about 4 million Georgians around the world today).

This is all speculation. I haven't checked this out on any of my Georgians, but I sort of wonder if they'd have enough perspective on the issue to give me an objective answer. Of course, I haven't changed my beliefs, and I would love to see Georgian culture become more accepting. But, I think I at least understand their viewpoint now – I've gotten past my own emotional reactions to what I perceived as thoughtless bigotry. I feel that I'm one step closer to a fuller understanding of this culture which has become a permanent part of my life.

Procession of the Cross

2010-01-11T15:41:00.002+04:00

On Orthodox Christmas (January 7) I participated in my very first крестный ход, or Procession of the Cross. Usually this procession simply winds its way around town, with more and more people joining as it passes by their homes, but this year I lucked out: the procession was to escort the Cross for the top of the new church being built up the closest mountain.

I've been up this mountain before. At the end of June my soon-to-be godfather, Iva, took me and Reziko up to see the convent there. We were give a tour by Sister Barbara after riding most of the way up the mountain in a sort of scary Soviet-era bus and then walking the rest of the way. This time we'd be walking the whole way up.

Reziko and I got off to a late start due to a (typical) morning bathroom traffic jam, so the first half hour of our procession was us walking very fast to catch up with everyone. Once we caught up, it was a very cool thing to be a part of. There were probably 500-700 of us, from priests, deacons, and alter boys to lay men and women, teenagers, even some very small children. Two bulls (or oxen?) pulled a cart filled with donations for orphans to be distributed by the nuns at the convent, and a little donkey, representing the donkey that Mary rode into Bethlehem, hauled a cart with a large cross and an icon. The poor donkey pooped out before we even got out of Batumi, so he didn't make the journey up the mountain.

But the rest of us did! It took over an hour just to get to the base of the mountain (we took the scenic route). The road started out as asphalt, then just past the cemetery became cobblestones (at least a century old!), then the cobblestones gave way to a mix of dirt, gravel, and mud. Even for Batumi it was unusually warm for January, and I carried my coat for the entire trip. Fresh air, beautiful views, and participation in an ancient and holy tradition – I can't think of a better way to spend Christmas day.

Reziko and I kept up a good pace, and once we got to the mountain the crowd became a long, thin line snaking up the old roads. Even at our clip we reached the summit two and a half hours after leaving the house – and this is the littlest mountain around here! The church bells rang out every once in a while, calling us further up and providing encouragement.

At the church I expected there to be a formal service of some kind, but there was none. There were candles to be lit in prayer, and, of course, the new Cross was blessed before being raised and affixed atop the church. The church itself, still under construction, was closed.

We were among the first to arrive, and the summit slowly but steadily filled with other processioners until it became quite crowded. After lighting candles, we watched the Cross as it was raised into place on the church, then turned our weary legs towards home. At the edge of town we gave in and took a marshrutka the rest of the way, and arrived home around 5 PM.

I look forward to the day the church will be completed, when I can ride up on those creaky buses or get a workout climbing the hill myself, reach the top, look around, and feel my heart burst from the beauty of this place. I will offer up my prayers to God and the Saints among the mountains by the sea, where I feel closer to Him than anywhere else.

Post Office Scavenger Hunt

2010-01-09T15:39:00.001+04:00

My mom sent us a Christmas care package by regular post. The Georgian postal system isn't 100% trustworthy, so I was a little nervous about it getting here at all. So I was quite surprised and pleased when, just three weeks after Mom sent it, the post office delivered a notice saying I should come pick up my package.

Just a couple of problems. First, until just a few months ago, the central post office was housed in its historical building near the town square. However, that area has become prime tourism real estate, and nothing so lowly as a mere post office can take up said space, so they moved it.

But they didn't tell anyone to where, and everyone we asked had a different answer as to the new location of the post.

Secondly, an address was written on the notice, but the street name was an old, Soviet name. Street names here change faster than Liz Taylor's husbands, depending on who's in power and who's in favor. So we didn't know exactly where this street was located.

Reziko thought it was over by the park, so we headed that way first. On the way we asked some elderly ladies where the post office was, and they pointed us to some courtyard. Dubious that the central post office would be tucked away in some yard, we headed there anyway, Reziko grumbling the usually American complaint about the lack of building numbers. Then, another woman pointed us to an apartment. This apartment, while obviously serving some sort of official function, was closed. There were three phone numbers on the door, which Reziko promptly called. The first connected us with a woman who only dealt with letters from the court. She gave us the number of a guy who worked at the international post, but who said they had no packages from America. And neither of them knew the street that was written on our notice, nor could they tell us the location of the main post. We were flummoxed and annoyed. Imagine if I'd received such a package without a native Georgian speaker to help me out! As it was we were stumped.

It was close to closing time, so we gave up. The next day was Orthodox Christmas, so we didn't even try. Finally, following a new lead from friend Tamazi, we found the post office on Friday. And then we ate chocolate for a week straight. So it was all worth it.

Staying Warm in "Winter"

2009-11-16T09:11:00.005+04:00

We are lucky in Batumi that winter comes late and is overall pretty mild. The temperature rarely reaches down to freezing, and while we get plenty of rain, there are lots of sunny days, too. Nonetheless, even in this mild climate the house needs to be heated, because walking around in 40s-degree weather is not the same as sitting around in it. Brr!

Here in the older part of town, homes are typically heated by a combination of wood stoves, fireplaces, and electric heaters. Step outside in the evening on our street, and your eyes and lungs are hit by a haze of smoke, which clears once everyone goes to bed and all the fires die down. During the Soviet era everyone's homes were heated by natural gas (or maybe steam, like in Petersburg? Well, anyway, heating was centralized and government controlled). After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, the newly-privatized natural gas became too expensive for most families – when there's barely money for bread, gas becomes a true luxury. Thankfully, since then the situation has improved, and more and more people are able to get natural gas hooked up for heating and cooking.

Alas, even in natural gas hookups there's politics. We live in a forgotten part of town. To give the government its due, we do have streetlamps and modern electric meters. But, half our street isn't hooked up to the city sewage system (ours is the last house that squeaked in); they all still have septic tanks. Batumi was recently given 47 million euros (unconfirmed, but that's the number Reziko gave me) by Germany to fix our aging plumbing infrastructure. The money, at least for the most part, is going towards fixing the sewers – but only in the “good” part of town, where much of the sewage system is as new as 30 years old. Where we live, where some people have never had plumbing, there's been no work done whatsoever. The (naive?) hopeful me would like to think that they'll get to us once the rest of the system is in better working order, but history shows that that rarely happens, and that they always have an answer when we cry, “What about us?” In the same vein, the same few, main, “good” streets get repaved just about every other year, but in our quarter, which has never been paved, it will only happen if all the neighbors raise the money to do it themselves. And to get back to gas – people who live in the “good” part of town got gas lines put in for free on their streets, they had to pay only to have a line run into their homes. We have a gas pipe on our street, too, but only on our side of the street, and only because a bunch of neighbors pooled their money and paid to put the pipe in. Should the Gvarjaladze household ever want a gas hook-up, we'd have to buy into the pool (about 500 lari), as well as pay for the line into the home, the furnace, etc.

All injustices aside, what it comes down to is we'll probably be using our wood stove and electric heater for a few years yet. Growing up in Iowa, we always had a wood-burning fireplace, though more for atmosphere than for warmth, and Dad always seemed to know someone who'd give us the wood if Dad would cut down the tree for them. Here, where a significant portion of the population burns wood, firewood selling is a whole industry.

As often seems to happen, Basa waited till a rainy day to order firewood. It was already dark when one of those huge construction trucks used to haul sand and debris came rumbling down our street and halted in front of our house. It was filled with huge logs – entire tree trunks 2-3 feet in diameter and 2-4 feet long. The truck driver tipped the bed up, and all that wood came crashing down into the street. What a racket!

Reziko and Gogi rolled as many of the waterlogged rounds as they could into the courtyard; the rest stayed on the street. After the truck lumbered away, the next industry players showed up: local guys with chainsaws. For a few lari, they cut the larger rounds into more manageable chunks. The next day, two of Basa's workers came by to make some extra money and chopped all that wood into fireplace- and stove-sized pieces. We don't hire out every year; there have been many years when Gogi and Reziko are tasked with chopping all that wood themselves.

After four or five hours of steady chopping, the men finished up. Two mountains of wood now completely filled the courtyard. They stayed that way a couple of days, then, tired of tripping over the wood constantly, I rallied the forces and me, Reziko, and Gogi stacked it all under the stairs. It took three and a half hours and we ended up with three cords as tall as me. A great workout – and now we're set for winter!

Georgian Halloween

2009-11-01T09:11:00.001+04:00

We had Halloween! Reziko designed and carved his first pumpkin ever:

Here he is drawing the face he finally decided on, after we cut out the top and scooped out the innards.

And here's the final result, goopy stuff on the table included! Pretty scary, huh? Our camera died before we got a picture with the candle lit, but believe me, Reziko's jack-o-lantern delighted everyone who saw it. Added bonus: they insisted on leaving the lid on when it was lit, so a nice burning pumpkin smell filled the room. :)

On the table you can also see the first plate of about a million pirozhki, or homemade Hot Pockets, that Inga made that day. I helped with some of them - we made them with eggs and onion, potato, hamburger, and cabbage. So yummy!

Running Georgian Style

2009-10-22T08:50:00.001+04:00

A Georgian friend and I decided to start running in the mornings. This lasted all of three days, I'm afraid I have to report, but our first run out was so funny from an American viewpoint that I just have to share.

For comparison purposes, here's what I typically do when I go for a jog: I try to run more than I walk, and I give myself time limits on how long I can walk. At my peak, I was running a good 10 or 15 minutes before walking 2-4 minutes, then repeating. The time I spent out rarely exceeded about 45 minutes.

We decided to go running on the Boulevard, a stretch of path running several kilometers along the coast of the Black Sea, which turns into a track in the early hours of the morning (although it's mostly men, and mostly older men, who are running). We met at seven and headed out, our walk to the Boulevard taking about twenty minutes.

My friend has long been off the workout wagon, and I haven't been doing too great myself, so we decided to start slow, alternating three-minute jogs with walking periods. The morning sea air was fresh and invigorating, and it was motivating to see so many other people also out exercising.

About six minutes into our exercise, which means we were already walking after an initial jog, my friend saw someone she knew, and we stopped to talk for about 10 minutes. We kept going, running three minutes at a time, but walking at least 10 minutes in between, aiming to get a total of 20 minutes of running in. We did eventually reach that goal, but it took an hour and a half! This is why even though having a workout partner is a great motivator to get out of bed in the morning, sometimes it's hard to run with a partner - if your goals or abilities are too different, you can be left feeling like you haven't worked at all, or it can take waaaay to long to reach your relatively modest goals.

The biggest kicker? On our way back, we were passing by my friend's godmother's apartment, and she decided we should stop by. The walk up to the sixth floor was a great workout, but when we arrived, we woke up her godmother, which I felt bad about (but is totally normal and acceptable in Georgia - the random stop by is the preferred method of visiting). We ended up staying there, drinking coffee and eventually eating breakfast, until almost noon... when they gave us a ride home in their car! It was nice visiting, her godmother and her husband and daughter are lovely people, but it was definitely not what I was expecting from a morning run. Especially riding home in a car afterwards....

Anyway, this was an interesting insight into Georgian social patterns and their take on fitness culture. I'd still like to go running in the morning with a partner (because I really don't seem to be able to get out of bed otherwise), but I need one who is similarly focused. Reziko has offered to go with me countless times, but this offer has the caveat that I have to wake him up, which defeats the whole point of my workout partner motivating me to get out of bed because I know they're making the effort for me, too. It's so much easier when the alarm goes off to just snuggle back in and doze off than to climb out into the cold air and try to convince a happily sleeping husband that he, too, should brace for the cold and go exercise. Just doesn't happen.

Georgian Wedding

2009-10-09T08:53:00.001+04:00

On October 7, Reziko and I had a BIG party to celebrate our union. Well, it seemed big to me, as we had about 100 invited guests, but Georgian wedding receptions often run 300 or even 500 guests.

You can see pictures of the event here.

The morning of we were still running around, picking up sweets and khachapuri from the bakery and delivering them to the reception hall and attending to a thousand other details it seemed like we should have thought of before. At one I was dropped off at the salon to get a mani-pedi and my hair and makeup done, which took a good couple of hours. The girl who did my makeup spoke a little Russian, but everyone else was almost completely Georgian-only, so that was kind of awkward. They dressed me right there, which is good, because I couldn't have gotten into that dress without help. I was then whisked home in a taxi, where I sat very still and straight, because it's painful to slouch in a corset.

Everyone had gone to the reception hall except me and Reziko and our mejuarebi (best man and maid of honor) Tamazi and Irma. The reception started at 4, but apparently it's normal for the bride and groom to come a little later than that, so that the guests are all seated and waiting by the time they make their grand entrance. This was sort of a bummer for me because I was starving, but finally, at about half past four, the car showed up to ferry us to the event.

As is traditional, Reziko and I sat with Tamazi and Irma at the table of honor on a raised stage. However, the layout of the room was such that I couldn't see all of the guests. At the table closest to ours sat my parents with Eliko, who was interpreting, and my mother-in-law, Inga, and Gela, who was our tamada, or toastmaster.

I didn't have the benefit of the toasts being translated for me this time, but I think Gela did an excellent job of shouting over the guests to deliver his toasts. The first toast, naturally, was to me and Reziko and our happiness, and Gela toasted us with a khantsi, or bull's horn. Khantsi come in many sizes; I think the one at our wedding was a one-liter, and it was clear crystal, rather than a natural horn. After Gela toasted, other men who can handle that much wine at once also took their turns toasting us with the khantsi. Every time we had to stand up and hold our glasses, which at first were connected to each other with what looked like Mardi Gras beads (to symbolize everlasting union?). We quickly removed the beads, as they were a spilling hazard (our table, like every table in the place, was loaded with food), and we thought they looked kind of dumb anyway. Once everyone who wanted to toast with the khantsi had done so, Gela moved on to other toasts: to Reziko's parents, to my parents, to our mejuarebi, etc, and these were done with regular-sized glasses.

The party went on for a good three or four hours. There were mostly men there, people my father-in-law Basa knows from his job and neighbors on our little street. Reziko and I danced to a couple of slow tunes at the behest of our ever-more-drunken self-appointed DJ, and my Dad tried out his variation on traditional Georgian dancing (think doing the twist only real low). The Georgians just went wild over that. Dad also danced with Inga, which left her breathless and, I'm sure, will be fondly remembered for years to come.

The food was prolific and fantastic. One of my favorite dishes were these absolutely delicious, plump and juicy roasted mushrooms, prepared on traditional Georgian clay cookware. So yummy! There was roast suckling pig, beef dishes, chicken dishes, eggplant dishes, khachapuri, tons of other stuff. I even asked that they just bring me out a little plate of tomatoes and cucumbers, so as not to make myself sick eating just meat. One interesting tradition that I didn't anticipate is that the wedding cake is not cut on the day of the reception, but rather just sits in front of the table of honor, looking sparkly and pretty.

At the end of the night a couple of especially drunk and especially happy for us guys came over to personally give rambling (but heartfelt) toasts in Russian, wishing us long life and millions of babies. As the guests left, the food was packed up for day two (yes, it goes on!), and I finally got to go home and take my beautiful but heavy dress off.

On day two we prepared our living room for about twenty guests, serving some of the massive quantities of food that remained from the day before. I spent the morning cleaning chairs that had long been stored in a dusty attic and helping to put together an extended table. In a smaller room, the toasts seemed even louder than before, and I had a harder time staying smiley on day two (Georgians are very good at celebrating until it's not actually fun anymore), but they didn't stay too long, and we got to cut the cake this time, so that was good.

And then the wedding stuff was over at last! Now I've got the rest of the weekend to spend with my parents, who fly out on Sunday. It's been great to see them!

Wedding Reception Planning

2009-10-05T12:47:00.005+04:00

Basa and Inga are throwing me and Reziko a wedding reception. Normally this would have been done right after the venchanie at the church (which we had July 26), but we wanted to wait so my parents could be present. And now I'm learning lots about wedding planning in Georgia!

Clothes: Most wedding dresses in this part of the world look like Disney princess gone awry. Here's a sampling from the first couple pages of a Google search; these are very representative of what's available in the stores around here:

Basically, they're way not my style; many of the dresses I saw here could easily be confused for the wedding cake. If I'd been more on the ball, I would have picked out a dress I liked from the internet and had someone custom make it for me, but since it didn't occur to me early enough, I was limited to what was already on the rack. Fortunately, we did find one dress that isn't shaped like a church bell, and even though it's still sleeveless (i.e. it's a corset top - don't think I'll be eating too much!) and covered in strings of blingy rhinestones, it's still a pretty nice dress. We got a little bolero to go with it, so I won't be cold or feel so naked. I also bought my very first pair of peep-toes, so it's a good thing that my salon work-up includes a pedicure (along with manicure, make-up, and hairstyle).

Of course, I'm not the only one getting a new outfit. Reziko bought his first suit and dress shoes (do you know how hard it is to find a coat and pants for someone as skinny as he?), Gogi got a snappy new shirt, pants, and dress shoes, and lovely Inga got a new haircut and a dress, and will even be wearing heels!

Food: Basa, Gogi, and Tamazi set off at about 4 AM yesterday morning to the villages in the mountains to buy meat. They came back with about 30 kilograms of cheese, an entire cow, hacked up and stuffed into grain bags, four live piglets and about twenty live chickens. Our courtyard has temporarily been turned into a barnyard. The animals are cute but stinky; the chickens are constantly knocking over their water, and one of them is an escape artist, always squeezing out through the wire. We eventually just let her roam; she can't get far anyway, as the yard is fenced. Butchering time is scheduled for four o'clock; I'm not sure yet if I'm going to watch. I'm half grossed-out and half curious, since I never have seen how animals are butchered before. So maybe I'll watch one or two and then skedaddle. All of this food will be taken to the chef at the reception hall tomorrow morning so they'll have time to cook everything by 4 PM on Wednesday.

Clean-up: We've been scurrying around getting the house guest-ready, which has involved a lot of sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, etc. I try to stay out of the way and stick to what I know how to do, which has been mostly dish-washing and sweeping. I had a little battle of wills with Inga this morning as she physically tried to stop me from moving the couch with Gogi, saying, "You can't do that, Alli! You're a WOMAN!!" Which, I know, is just how she was raised and is used to looking at the world, but it really pissed me off. And I moved the couch anyway, and explained to her that in the US I don't just wait around for a man to show up to move something marginally heavy for me, and fumed about it for awhile afterwards, and now I'm mostly over it. Most of the time I can deal with this gender-role stuff without much trouble, but when the reason why I can't do something is not because I'm not strong enough or not tall enough, but specifically because I'm a female, that irks me. Anyway, in the end we've got the house pretty presentable, which is good, because my parents arrive tomorrow!

I hope Mom brings her camera, because I don't have one, and I'd really like pictures of us looking all spiffy, and of all the food, and of the party in general. Georgian weddings typically run to 300 people, sometimes even 500, but we're keeping ours to about 100. Still, it's going to be raucous. Stay tuned for updates after Wednesday.

Allergy Update

2009-09-29T23:08:00.002+04:00

After another miserable, snotty, sneezy morning, Reziko and I finally went to the drugstore and got me some allergy medicine. Ah sweet, sweet relief! And I'm not drowsy or loopy, and it only costs 35 tetri per pill (about 20 cents). I can handle that much per day, especially if it means I'm not going to feel like shit all winter (at least not from allergies). Yay!

Rain Rain Rain Rain Rain Rain Rain

2009-09-28T22:58:00.004+04:00

So, guess what the weather's been like here... ugh. Apparently this has been an unusual September; normally it's considered the most beautiful month of the year in Batumi. But it's only been sunny maybe five or six days since I got here, and the rest of the time it alternates between a dreary drizzle and downright downpour. I wouldn't be so bummed about it, except I'm discovering that with all the windows closed all the time, the allergies I found tolerable this summer (to mold/mildew and cigarette smoke) are making me completely miserable now. Not only is there no air exchange with all the windows closed, but when it's pouring, we can't even go out for walks by the sea, which always clears my sinuses right up. Whaaaaaah.

But it hasn't been all bad. We have had a couple of really lovely days, during which Reziko and I went for hours-long walks that seemed to pass in minutes. Last week, in the first clear day after four or five days of rain, we walked down to the beach to watch the roily post-storm waves and look for interesting rocks. The tourists are pretty much all gone now, so we have the Boulevard and the beach and the benches and the bar by the port back to ourselves again.

We also went to the local registry the other day to find out about the process for getting me a long-term residence permit, which, as far as I knew, was required for folks planning on staying beyond the 90-day no-visa-necessary period. The girl behind the counter looked at us like we were crazy (Why do you want to stay more than 90 days? her gaze inquired), then, after consulting with some other people in the office, suggested that I simply cross the border for a day to restart the 90 days. Wow, great suggestion. I guess we could go to Turkey... Well, that just didn't sound right to me, because I was sure I'd read about the process for getting a residence permit on the Georgian Embassy's website sometime last year when I was preparing for my first visit, so we decided to check back with the ol' Ministry of Foreign Affairs online. Turns out that sometime in the last few months, the no-visa-necessary period was extended from 90 days to 360! That's almost a whole year! So, I guess THAT problem's been resolved. And the United Airlines lady in DC didn't want to let me leave without a return ticket......

My and Reziko's language lessons are heating back up, as I slowly start to chip away at my Georgian beginner's textbook, and we review the English he studied this summer in preparation for further work. I've also had a little translating work to do, but I haven't been terribly active in seeking non-Reziko students of English yet.

There has also been lots of reception planning going on, from haggling over the date (the 10th. No, the 11th. No, the 12th! No, the 11th again!), to finalizing the guest list (slashed at Reziko's insistence from 250 to around 100), to writing the grocery list (meat to vegetable ratio around 10:1). In the next couple of weeks I'll be purdied up with dress and hairstyle, myriad livestock will be handpicked and butchered from the farms around Batumi, the post-no-roof-during-rain-season disaster that is our living room will be repaired, and we'll all be ready to have a grand old time.

I'm extremely happy to report that I have not had a single intestinal problem since arriving (knock on wood), which I attribute to generally less pigging out on pork and drinking of tap water than this summer. I'm hoping my luck holds out at LEAST till after my parents' visit - they arrive next week! - so that we can have a good time together, eat a lot at the reception, and not have to worry about me feeling ill constantly. Speaking of their visit, I hope the weather clears up! We have lots of neat things to show them if the weather cooperates, but I'm afraid if it's super-rainy the whole time, our options become much more limited. This isn't exactly a huge metropolitan area, after all. Well, we'll figure it out.

Back in Batumi

2009-09-19T22:06:00.002+04:00

Welcome to the recently renovated blog, which I am hoping to NOT abandon without warning like last time.

I got in last Saturday and had pretty awful jet lag for about three days and couldn't sleep at night, and I also came down with a cold a day after getting here (that's what I get for a week and a half of traveling around and not sleeping enough). But I appear to be pretty fully adjusted already, which is amazing, since it always seemed to take longer in Russia (same time zone). Maybe because the weather's nicer here. I've been in Batumi for a week now, and it has passed as if in a single day! We've managed nonetheless to have a few adventures. The day after I arrived, a huge storm blew in from Turkey and we had monsoon-like rains off and on for three days straight. This happens frequently, and usually isn't a problem, but this time, part of our roof was gone (it was in the rather slow process of being replaced), and so half of the upstairs got completely soaked. It also fried the electricity, so Reziko and I are still sitting in the dark in our room.

Why only in our room? Well, apparently, during the Soviet Union it was common practice to have two kinds of electricity running to your house: left and right. Right electricity was funneled through the meter; you ran your TV and lamps and whatnot on it, and you paid for it. Left electricity bypassed the meter; you ran your washing machine and other big appliances on it and got it for free. Legal? No. Widespread? Absolutely. Today the government has wiped out this practice by placing meters on the street before where the electric lines are split for each home, but the electrical systems themselves haven't been updated. Thus, our room is on left electricity, and that's the one that fried. We're still waiting for the electrician.

In other news, I've managed to get some baking done the past few days. I made peanut butter cookies and chicken pot pie, both of which went over rather well. Poor Inga's been sick (drinking bad water, perhaps?) so I've had the run of the kitchen, which has been nice. Not that I want her to be sick more often. I'm getting a little more assertive about cooking and whatnot, and now that I'm part of the family, Inga's been more willing to let me go wild with the cooking and cleaning and whatnot. It's a good feeling to be contributing, as well as to have a sense of control over my life and my space that is often lacking when you live with a host family (or your sweetheart's parents).

The past couple of days the weather has been great - it's warm and sunny during the day, but quite cool at night. Reziko and I have gone for some really great walks, and it's getting even nicer now that there are fewer tourists.

This first week has been a bit lazy, but we're gearing up to start our language lessons - Reziko learning English, of course, and me Georgian. I am still hoping to get a few English students while I'm here to help cover the cost of our plane tickets home.

Speaking of, no word yet on our visa petition. We know it's been received and it's in the works, but it can be a couple months or more before we hear anything - unless they need further documentation or something like that. Keep your fingers crossed that all will go smoothly - we'd love to be in the US as early next year as possible!

Not much else to report. Oh, except that the grapes are ripe and boy are they delicious! Nice to be living in the cradle of winemaking. :) Hope all at home is well!

Quest

2009-06-17T12:12:00.002+04:00

All our documents are in order. We went to church. We're nervous as hell. We're off tonight to Tbilisi... at 9:30 tomorrow morning, Rezo has his visa interview. Wish us luck!

Mushmula

2009-06-12T20:17:00.006+04:00

This funny little fruit is called a mushmula. It is very delicious. I've eaten about 100 of them in the past couple of days.

Now children, play nice...

2009-06-12T20:11:00.002+04:00

Our power was off during the day every day for almost three weeks. Finally, on Wednesday, they finished the work, and we had our power back. Yay! Yesterday we had power all day. Then today, around 10.... off it went.

Why? As it turns out, the company that has control over the power switches in the city was miffed that they didn't win the contract to do the work changing the power meters. So to punish the company doing the work, which is still trying to finish everything, and whose workers get paid only when the work is done, and who needed power to do what they were doing today, they just turned off the whole city. Or at least our whole neighborhood.

Um, childish much?

Sea!

2009-06-11T14:10:00.003+04:00

Went swimming this morning for the first time this season. The water was wonderful. I paddled around for about half an hour, swimming out a few meters, then swimming back, over and over. Rezo gets nervous when I go too far out for him to "save" me, should the need arise, since he's not much of a swimmer himself. The Black Sea is full of jellyfish that don't sting, which delights me. They're fun to scoop up. As floaty as they are in the water, they're kind of rubbery in your palm. Then you hurl them back into the water and think, “Wow, I bet that jellyfish never knew it would fly one day...”

Let me tell you a story

2009-06-09T00:14:00.003+04:00

They looked at each other over their steins of watered-down local beer. In the distance across the bay a fog obscured the peaks of the mountains. The sea washed silently against the port wall; the impending rain had transformed its hue from blue-green to gray-green. Further out a few freight ships waited their turn to dock and unload, but this close to the bar the only thing in the sea was a solitary orange bobber, which demarcated for those in the know how far out they can swim without being fined. It was a trap for milking tourists.

They looked at each other for a while, then looked out over the port. It was a strange location for a bar, but the view was still breathtaking, as far as the girl was concerned, and it was close to home.

The boy spoke up. "In August, when we were talking online and the lights went out, that was because the Russians were bombing us. They blacked out the whole city. Everyone stood out on the street to watch. We didn't have any bomb shelters, so what did it matter if we sat at home or out on the street? The places they bombed weren't military at all, they were just regular streets with houses, like ours. And they weren't small bombs, either. One bomb fell on a car and didn't explode. It was twice as big as the car, both in length and width. It was just luck that it didn't explode, who knows how much damage a bomb of that size would have caused if it had exploded.

"One time when we went into blackout, they forgot to turn the streetlamps off on our street. Imagine, the entire city is dark except our little street. Of course, we called and they turned our lights off too right away.

"It's funny what a person can get used to. The war only lasted five days, but even within that time, we got used to just waiting. When the lights went out, we just had to wait to see if we'd be next. The waiting is the worst part."

The boy paused and took a swig of his beer. Gazing out over the now-empty port, he continued, "You can't imagine what this port looked like then. Every American military vessel in the Black Sea gathered right here in Batumi. They were ready to jump in and help us if given the signal. Not just little ships either, but huge warships. Imagine what would have happened if some drunken Russian pilot took it into his head to drop a bomb on one of those ships. The Americans would have responded, and there'd have been war between the US and Russia.

"See those silos over there, across the bay? They're filled with oil. If the Russians had bombed them, there'd have been a chain reaction and the whole city would have gone. Thank God the Americans were there, and the Russians didn't dare to bomb us anymore.

"So while Europe did nothing, America really helped us. They were ready to help militarily at any moment, if it came to that. I know you don't like Bush, and maybe he did a lot of bad stuff for you at home, I don't know, I've never been there to see, but he truly saved us from Russia, and I can never think he was a bad person and I will always respect him for that."

The boy fell silent once again. Throughout his monologue, the girls eyes had not fallen from his face even once, though he looked off into the distance as he spoke. Now he looked at her for the first time, and his eyes grew wide when he saw that hers were brimming with tears. "Hey," he said a little roughly, shaking his head. "What is that?"

The girl wiped her eyes quickly and said, "It's just that I didn't know, and I'm imagining everyone I know here standing out on our little street just waiting to be bombed, and it's awful. When you went offline suddenly that day last August, I scoured the internet for information about what was happening here, but there was none. No one knew what was happening, and even now no one there knows what happened. Why would they bomb Batumi? You're not even close to Abhazia or South Ossetia. And why bomb Poti? And Gori? And Kutaisi? There was just no information. But now I know."

And now you know.

Two-week Update

2009-06-08T21:43:00.003+04:00

Time slips by unnoticed when you don't have work or school to worry about, so I was quite surprised when I realized almost two weeks have passed since I arrived. It has rained a couple times, it got blistering hot for a few days, and for now we've settled into a partly-sunny, cool-in-the-house couple of days. Here, have some vignettes:

"Electricity"

The power has been out during the day every day since I got here, including the weekends. They've been replacing the electric meters in the neighborhood, but apparently this whole side of town is on one power switch, so we've all been sitting in relative darkness for two weeks, sometimes till 9 or 10 at night. There's no A/C anyway, but it's also meant no fans, no internet, no TV, no baking (the oven is electric), and food going bad in the fridge. They say today's the last day, but they've said that every day for the past two weeks, so who knows if it's really true or not. [NOTE: By evening they told us four more days. Sigh.]

"Food"

In culinary adventures, I made tacos for my fam the other day, which were met with rave reviews. There's a sauce here that fairly closely approximates salsa, I brought with me all the spices for the meat, and Armenian lavash is practically the same as tortillas. All in all, a success. We had one rainy day when the electricians didn't work, and I baked banana bread. It was also a hit; next time we have power I'm making a double batch.

On my end, I'm still getting accustomed to all Georgian food, all the time. Inga (future mom-in-law), luckily, understands that I can't handle a lot of really fatty food, and in general doesn't use much salt at all, but nonetheless my diet here is much richer and heavier than at home, with much fewer fruits and vegetables. Sometimes this makes me fell really ill (actually, the last few days I feel ill almost all the time), and the thought of eating more bread and meat and cheese nearly brings me to tears. But mostly I try to keep a good attitude and mix a little of "when in Rome..." with introducing my own, vegetable-rich recipes.

Rezo says that's all well and good, but he has reminded me several times that it's okay both to not eat what they put in front of me if I don't want to, and that it's okay to ask for more veggies and fruits. They're just not used to it, so they forget to buy them. After the latest round of Alli-clearly-has-an-upset-tummy, brought on by a breakfast of meat dumplings, a lunch of fried cornmeal cakes and cheese, and a mid-afternoon snack of khachapuri (more bread and cheese), I gently reminded Inga that not all of us were born with carnivorous intestines, and could I please have something not from an animal? They bought me fruits and veggies. :) Including a DELICIOUS local fruit called a mushmula, which tastes a little like a Sweettart and which I ate about 7 of. Num num.

"Passport"

I've gotten a first-hand look at the Georgian bureaucracy as I've followed Rezo around while he applied for his passport. Things kept coming up which slowed the process. The first day Rezo showed up with too little money; he didn't know how much it was going to cost. The next day he discovered that his ID was expired, and he had to renew it before he could apply for a passport. So we stood in line for about 45 minutes at the civil registry to turn that in. "In line" is a broad term; it was more like standing in a very tight clump of sweaty people who were worried about losing their place, despite the established order (I guess not without reason; there were occasional cutters). I've gotten used to people in this part of the world standing much closer than they do in the US, but when this one woman's ample bosom kept squishing into my arm, I really wanted to say "Geez, lady, we all know you're next. Back off!"

Anyway, the next day we picked up Rezo's new ID, then had to leave and come back to apply for the passport later, because right then the whole place went on break for two hours. When we got back, we got all the way to the front of the line just before closing and realized we'd left a document at home. By this point, I wasn't even frustrated anymore; I just laughed, it had all gotten so absurd. The next day we finally got everything turned in, and on the 10th we can go pick up his new passport. Then we'll jump right on the visa application process.

"English"

Reziko and I have been working on his English. We agreed when I arrived that we'd set aside 2 hours a day, from 3 to 5, just for English. He's a good student and is picking things up quickly (though probably not as quickly as he'd like; we're very similar in that regard, we like things to turn out RIGHT AWAY). Hopefully, by the end of the summer he'll be ready to start his "real" English classes at Kirkwood.

"Dave"

An acquaintance of mine, Dave, decided to include Batumi in his summer travels, so we spent a few days showing him around. We walked around the zoo and the Boulevard (by the sea) one day. The next day we drove out to the Green Cape and Botanical Gardens, where the views are absolutely stunning and there are plants and trees from all over the world. Sometime in the 19th century a Frenchman came and planted the gardens; when the Communists arrived in 1921 he headed back to France, but the garden remained and has been growing for 100 years. For Dave's last day in town, Rezo invited him over for a taste of real Georgian hospitality. Inga and Liana cooked up a storm, and over the course of four and a half hours or so we made our way through almost 10 liters of wine. It was nice to not be the guest of honor for a change. While the guys regaled Dave with Georgian history and traditions, I was able to sit back, relax, and have side conversations of my own. I remember wondering back in December and January why people at the table talked while the tamada was giving toasts, bu I've come to realize that you can only listen to the same nine toasts in various permutations so often before finding your own conversation more interesting. After dinner, we packed Dave off in a train to Tbilisi, where he'll spend a few days before continuing his journey around Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

"The Fall"

The other day Rezo and I were hanging out in our room when we heard an awful thud and then cries of pain. A man had fallen from a neighbor's roof. He mangled his leg and spine and received head and eye trauma. It was awful to see. However, twisted as this may sound, it did give me an opportunity to see one of the ways conditions in Georgia have improved during the presidency of Saakashvili (since 2003). For one thing, the ambulance actually showed up within three or four minutes of calling; Rezo tells me that before, you could wait half an hour, and by the time the paramedics arrived, the person in trouble sometimes had died already. Secondly, the ambulance was new and in good condition. It did not have all the fancy equipment you'd see in an ambulance in the US, but it didn't look like it was going to break down on the way to the hospital, as the old ambulances apparently did. So the situation was still terrible, but at least the response was better than it would have been before.

"Chill"

Other than the adventures listed above, I really don't do much here, and for now, that's fantastic. I sleep as much as I want each night. I have time to read and write and cross-stitch to my heart's desire. I spend quite a bit of time chatting with Inga and watching the two kittens grow and play (I'm going to be sad when they're old enough to go to their new homes; kittens are such fun!). Reziko and I go for walks, enjoy evening beers by the sea, and talk talk talk talk. He's teaching me Georgian little by little, and sounds which two weeks ago seemed impossible to me I'm slowly learning to make. Although it's sometimes frustrating when everyone around me is speaking Georgian, and I spend much more time in a listening role than in a speaking role, I'm trying to let the language wash over me and just pick up what I can, when I can. Most of the time I love that I'm here, and I have the feeling this summer is going to go by way too quickly.

Georgia fun begins

2009-05-27T22:40:00.000+04:00

I arrived safely and on time in Batumi yesterday at around 2 PM. It was absolutely thrilling to fly in over the Black Sea and land at the tiny Batumi International Airport. The passport control guy was really suspicious this time; despite the fact that I'd clearly been to Georgia twice already in the last year, he inspected my picture under a microscope, then asked me what state I was from, and where in the US it was located – some sort of test to see if I actually was from where I said I was from? My guess is they've gotten more careful about letting people in since the anti-government protests started a couple months ago.

Anyway, I've been sleeping a LOT since I got here, trying to get caught up after my long trip and after generally not sleeping enough in Piter. It has helped that the electricity has been out all day yesterday and today; no TV or internet to distract me from sleeping. :) It's FANTASTIC to be here again; the weather is wonderful, I'm still allergic to Rezo's room, but we'll figure out what from soon enough, and I'll keep you all updated on goings on. For now, time to watch soccer. Go Manchester!!

Road Notes: What could have been a 3-hour direct flight was 36 hours of layover fun

2009-05-26T22:39:00.001+04:00

1 PM - in a coffee shop in Frankfurt

I met the other Americans in my group leaving for Frankfurt early Monday morning. There were only five of us left – everyone else had either already gone home or were extending their stays. When we went to check in, there was a problem: I was the only one in the system with an e-ticket number; the other four were nowhere to be found. I suspect that I only had a number because I changed the second leg of my ticket to accommodate my trip to Georgia; in any event, the other four didn't end up getting on the plane. Hope everyone gets home alright.

On the plane a very ill young man and his wife sat in my row. I was nervous the whole trip because I was just waiting for him to barf (he had the bag at the ready the whole time), but luckily he didn't, and just slept most of the time. Still, all that recycled air – hope he wasn't contagious. Maybe he drank the water or something. Anyway, the flight was uneventful, I stored my carry-on at the airport, totally got ripped off exchanging my last thousand rubles (I shouldn't have done it. I should have just kept them and exchanged them for lari in Batumi instead of for TEN FREAKING EURO. That was like thirty bucks when it came out of my account!), and found my way onto the train into town.

The first couple hours of the morning I sat outside at a cafe and read a book in Russian. Then I wandered around for a while. Frankfurt is so.... western! It's so clean, and the sidewalks are all even and maintained, and there are bicycles everywhere. People are friendly – they smile at you for no reason; I crossed in front of a car and waved thanks, and the driver waved back instead of speeding up to try and hit me... Being here sort of blows my mind. Also sort of weird, there are a lot of sex shops and peep shows scattered in among the coffee shops and designer clothing stores. But mostly what Germany has done for me so far is to make me feel like I don't belong anywhere. I realize how accustomed I've become to the nitty-gritty of living in Russia, and in a way I'm glad I'll be going back to that in Georgia. This western Europe thing is strange. It's hard to explain exactly what I'm feeling. I think it's a feeling of “People here just don't know how good they have it. They go around in their fashionable but relaxed clothes and buy their not-shitty coffees and work in offices for decent wages, and just a three-hour plane ride away it's a completely different world.” And now I feel like I'm a product of the western world that's aware of the uniqueness of what we have, which makes me uncomfortable in that world. At least for the moment. Luckily for me, I'll be back in Batumi in 22 hours.

4:00 PM - waiting in the Frankfurt airport

I'm being serenaded by a Turk with a guitar in the Frankfurt airport. It's quite enjoyable. Makes me wish I smelled better. This shirt is NOT fresh.

It's nice to think there's less than 24 hours left in my journey now. I'm glad I got out and walked around Frankfurt a bit; it really helped pass the time. Also, lucky for me some people speak English here, because seriously, I would not have been able to figure out which train to take to get back to the airport. Um, DUH, next time I go somewhere, I should at least know the word for “airport” in the local language.

It's extremely comforting to hear Russian in the airport sometimes. My ears strain for it; every foreign language becomes Russian until I notice I don't understand anything and admit to myself, “Oh, that's German. Or Japanese. Or Turkish.” It's nice when, occasionally, it actually IS Russian.

Rats, my serenading Turk doesn't speak English or Russian! Probably is a good thing, otherwise I'd have to stave off advances at least through boarding and possibly through the flight. Although a little conversation wouldn't kill me. I swear, I only write so much when I travel because I need to say something to someone, even if it's just a notebook.

6:00 AM - 9:00 AM - Istanbul

Wow, before we took off, my musician found me and gave me his email and facebook. Wow. After the flight, we were on the same shuttle and chatted a bit in very limited English. I found out he's a professional actor and singer and was in Frankfurt for four days to sing at a festival or concert or something like that. Neat.

Last night I flew in over this city in the dark for the second time this year. It's gorgeous at night; someday I'd love to get the heck out of the transit terminal and actually SEE the city.

I drank coffee after dinner on the plane, so to help burn off energy and pass part of my 12-hour layover, I put my stuff on a cart and walked laps around the terminal for about an hour. With my iPod, it wasn't that bad. Then I found a bench and slept for about four hours, waking up every hour or so. It was freezing.

At four-ish I got up, too cold to stay any longer, and got a big cup of coffee and a huge but dry chunk of walnut bread. A man from Israel who now lives in Spain struck up a conversation with me. At first my brain was too fuzzy to engage, but he was actually quite interesting. We talked a little about politics, about Turkey, the role of the US in the world, and how people's relationship with money belies their relationship with themselves. We talked so long that only at 5:45 did he realize that boarding for his flight started at 5:15. Hope he made it!

Then I spent about half an hour in the bathroom changing clothes and cleaning up. This, apparently, turned me into Turk-attracting goddess, because a security guard who said hi to me last night asked me for coffee when his shift got over at 8! I declined, but what the heck - that's two Turks in 12 hours, neither of whom speaks English. Strange I'm not attracting anyone I could at least talk to.

Nostalgia: A reflection in three parts

2009-05-25T22:38:00.000+04:00

Part One: A week to go

Happens every time. I spent the whole year wishing the year was over, quietly (or sometimes not quietly) grumbling about how most of my classmates annoyed me in one way or another, crying about the food, desperately wishing to go home. And here we've gotten to the end, and suddenly I realize how fond I am of my classmates, and of this city. Piter is one-of-a-kind, and I'm always going to love and appreciate this place. This year was so unexpectedly different from 2005-06, but there are parts of Piter I know will never change. I only wonder now if I'll ever make it back here again.

Part Two: The long goodbye

I've been saying goodbye to people all week. I really hate this part. I had such a good time with Elya on Tuesday (we went to the Communications Museum, which has hands-on exhibits to play with thanks to their numerous super-rich sponsors) that we decided to get together on Thursday, ostensibly so she could help me mail stuff to the States, but really just to hang out more. But every day since Wednesday I've been saying goodbye to someone for the last time. Wednesday it was everyone at work. Thursday it was Kira (who flew back to California early to see her brother graduate) and Elya. Friday it was Anya. Saturday I had such a good time hanging out at Nadya and Lyuba's that I ended up spending the night, and then left for the airport from their house at 3:30 AM Monday morning. At one point we were just sitting together, Nadya was playing her guitar and singing, and I was just so content and happy to be in their company that I nearly burst into tears. Ugh, this sucks. I wish there was a way to take them all with me. It's always moments like that when I think, “Yes, I could live here forever, as long as I could be with my friends.”

While there's a lot that drives me crazy about living here – long commutes, poor air and water quality, maddening bureaucracy and menacing police, there's a lot I'm going to miss about it, especially since I don't know when I'll be back. Like I was at Avtovo metro station Friday, and it's a really pretty station, and I thought, “This may be the last time I'm ever in this station, looking at these lovely columns and rotunda.” I look at all these fantastic old buildings that I've come to take for granted, and I know that they'll never be another place like this. But most of all, it really is the people that make the place. Piter wouldn't be Piter without Nadya, Lyuba, Elya – it's a tough place to be without friends.

Part Three: Departure

Sunday I came home after spending the night at Nadya and Lyuba's and packed my bags. It was one of those processes that had me jumping from pile to pile, unable to concentrate on any one section of stuff for too long. At one point I was seized by the need to throw everything else aside and paint my toenails so I could pack the nail polish, although rationally I knew that was not really the top priority. I finally got everything together, dusted and vacuumed (man, did it look nice! Wish I'd done that earlier. :P), and took a bath myself. Then I sat in that clean, empty room and thought about all the time I'd spent in it this year.

Galya got home from the dacha around 7. We had tea and watched TV, like usual, till 9. Then she helped me lug my stuff down to the metro, where the lady opened the turnstile gates before I was ready and denied me a proper goodbye with Galya (we hugged and kissed each other on the cheek and didn't have time to say much). Then I nearly burst into tears again on the escalator.

At 3:30 AM the taxi arrived to take me to the airport. I got one last quick hug each from Nadya and Lyuba as we held open the elevator doors, and then they were gone too. I didn't cry that time. If I'd been more awake, I probably would have, but it still doesn't seem real that we once again live in different parts of the world.

Pregnant or Irresistibly Hot?

2009-05-22T22:37:00.000+04:00

My yellow dress, skinny jeans, and black heels either make me look pregnant or turn me into a total sex bomb.

Evidence for the first: I took the No. 1 bus to the university today, toting two heavy bags of clothes for the orphanage. A guy gave up his seat for me, even telling another guy who sat down before I could get there to get up so I could sit. I thought he was just being nice, but then I thought, “Why me in particular and not one of the other girls that got on?” Well, the empire cut of that dress can make it look like I have a baby bump (particularly after nine months of Russian food), so I suspect he tapped me in particular for just that reason. In any event, it was nice to sit....

Evidence for the second: Within five minutes TWO men hit on me today. One of them approached as I walked won the ped mall towards the metro, his arms stretched wide in preparation for a hug, he said, “Девушка, я Вас люблю!” (“Girl, I love you!”). I sidestepped him and said “И я Вас тожe” (“And I you”). Gotta tell ya, this encounter put a little extra spring in my step.

Then just a few minutes later, the guy behind me on the escalator in the metro compliments me on my dress and tries to get acquainted with me. I get a creepy vibe from him and literally run away down the escalator. Luckily my train was waiting for me at the bottom, and he didn't catch up.

We're two out of three for sex bomb. I can go for that. :)

Who's a student? Not me!

2009-05-16T16:33:00.000+04:00

Oh yeah, I'm done! Finals have been taken. Language level has been tested. I passed Level 3 (again). I got a fancy certificate. And after seven years of constant study, I'm DONE being a student for a while. Woot!

Spring Sprung! Oh wait, nevermind.

2009-05-16T16:30:00.000+04:00

On Monday, April 27, spring exploded into Petersburg. Some people were unprepared, and hit the 70-degree streets in their long winter coats and hats, but most people seemed like they'd just been waiting for this day, and came out bedecked in miniskirts, short sleeves, and strappy sandals. I sat on a bench in teh sun and studied for two hours. It was marvelous.

This unbelievably fantastic weather continued for two weeks: temps in the upper 60s and 70s, light breez, and sunny sunny sunny. It gave Mom and me excellent wandering weather for her visit at the beginning of May. It called out to me while I tried to force myself to study during finals. It made my morning and afternoon walks between home and school exceedingly enjoyable. We got a little rainshower and all the buds on all the trees in the city popped simultaneously. Suddenly, we are surrounded by the freshest, most beautiful spring green I've ever seen. I was starting to think I shoulda sent my fall/spring coat home with Mom.

Boy am I glad I kept it! I woke up one day to threatening gray clouds, howling winds, and a temperature of... 35!!!! It's winter again! Argh!!!!

Luckily, it didn't last. And it didn't snow, thank goodness. But it was a quick reminder not to take good weather in Piter for granted, because it never lasts long.

Graveyard Girls

2009-05-15T16:32:00.004+04:00

Kira and I have made an awesome discovery: Russian cemeteries. They are fantastic. Wooded, lots of little paths to walk down, neat old graves, quaint chapels, and few people. They're the quietest place to hang out in all of Piter, and it's like getting to wander around the forest without leaving the city.

Russian cemeteries are more haphazard than American ones. Plots are demarcated by little wrought-iron fences, within which are often little benches and tables - Russians picnic when they visit their dead. In older sections, sometimes a path will suddenly be interrupted by a grave; old graves have sometimes been split apart by trees growing through them.

Our first venture to a cemetery was a couple Fridays ago. The weather was nice, I had a couple hours to kill, and Kira suggested we try to find the grave of the holy fool Ksenia, the patron saint of Petersburg. We never did find her tomb, but we had such a nice time wandering about that we decided to do it again the next week.

The second cemetery we visited was near-ish Kira's apartment, way out on the Northeast edge of town. Nestled between an industrial area and a dog pound, the roaring sounds of the street and the incessant barking of dogs is instantly muffled by the stillness of the necropolis; it was peaceful and wooded and wild. It was also a swamp. Literally. We wandered for a good two hours, found the chapel (it was locked up - they're usually only open for funerals), found the newest section, where they were digging a grave, and then wandered back into an older section, where it just got muckier and muckier, until we were literally climbing around the edges of plots trying to keep our feet dry. The idea of dead people water was a little gross, so I was glad when we finally found our way back to dry land. We followed a duck waddling among the graves for a few minutes, tried to get a good picture of a raven on a gravestone, spent some time at a reflecting pool at a war memorial on the edge of the cemetary. I got teary when I saw the graves of people born in 1984 - my age. What would they be doing now if they'd lived?

Perhaps not the most joyous places to hang out, but the cemetaries of Piter are some of the most peaceful places I've found here. If you get the chance to visit any Russian cemetary, I say go for it. They're facsinating places.

Kronshtadt

2009-05-11T16:33:00.002+04:00

This weekend I went to the island of Kronshtadt with Nadya, Lyuba, Father Pietro, and Sasha, one of Nadya's friends from church. Kronshtadt used to be a naval base, and until 1996 it was closed to foreigners. Father Pietro drove us over the dam connecting the island to the mainland. The highlight of the little community was the giant church, part of which has been turned into a pretty boring naval museum. We spent much of the day just wandering about, seeing the highlights. Nadya bought a little tour booklet and read to us from it at each point of interest. We saw some neat old buildings and some warships. We played an Italian card game in the park. We ate ice cream. I got a little sunburned. It was wonderful. Pictures here.

Televizor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2009-04-26T22:18:00.008+04:00

Love you, Misha!

I went to the 25th anniversary concert of probably my favorite Russian band, Televizor, on Saturday night. I missed their show in October, so I definitely didn't want to miss what may be my last chance to see them play live (I really think they're better live than in the studio). Last time I saw Televizor was around this time of year in 2006; then they played a packed Red Club, where they confiscated our chewing gum at the door, a dentist/photographer attached himself to me and Kerry the whole night, and a guy with a bowl cut helped himself to my beer, then gave my hand a sloppy kiss of thanks. That time I heard Televizor for the first time ever. They were rockin. I liked what I heard enough to buy an mp3 disc of all their albums (I know, I know, crummy way to support a band), and for the past three years I've been happily rockin out to the quirkily snythesized sounds produced by a band that formed the year I was born.

Saturday's concert was held at Lensoveta Exposition Center, a half-hour-ish walk from my apartment. Lensoveta is an old Soviet "House of Culture" - which means it was pretty hideous and smelled like pee. I arrived ridiculously early (I didn't know before I walked there that it'd take only 1/2 an hour) and milled about outside the closed theatre doors with everyone else. Fans covered a range of generations, from those who'd clearly been following the band from the very beginning, to those like me, who discovered them only after we were out of diapers, to young kids there with their parents, who belonged to the first group. Lots of people had Televizor t-shirts, but they weren't selling them at this concert, which bummed me out, because I wanted to buy one (despite the fact that I long ago outgrew wearing band shirts). Misha's voice filtered through the closed doors during sound check - the voice of an angel, it sent thrills down my spine.

When the doors finally opened, I was surprised to learn that the balcony, where I was to sit, was closed. "Wait till the second bell and find an empty seat," the stern old-lady ushers commanded everyone who approached with a balcony ticket. "Uh-oh," I thought. "Nothing worse than a 25th anniversary concert where you can't sell out the house. They shoulda picked a smaller venue - it'd be less embarrassing." My fears were allayed as the house slowly filled - by the time the concert started, pretty much the whole floor was filled, and I was glad for the free upgrade (although if I'd known I was going to get one, I'da bought the cheapest ticket in the house instead of springing for mid-range). The chairs were nice and cushy, and I had a great view - about halfway back in the house, slightly left of house center.

There are two things I adore about Russian rock concerts: 1) They start at a reasonable time, in this case at 7 PM, because most people take public transport, which stops running around midnight. This means that I'm not sleepy by the start of the show, as often happens at home. 2) Russians cut to the chase - none of this mucking about with opening bands for two hours before the headliner, so you're already worn out by too-loud music by the time the band you really came to see starts. Nope, your favorite band comes out first thing, and rocks your socks off for three hours (with one 20-minute intermission).

The show was awesome. Despite a small technical glitch right at the beginning (Misha's mic didn't work. How that is possible after sound check, I'm not sure), Misha and gang rocked us. All the songs from the new album (which I bought after the show) were interspersed with old favorites. I have to say, it is exceedingly more enjoyable to see a band when you already know the songs. What a thrill to hear the music I've pounded miles of pavement to at full volume, with fantastic acoustics. Misha's voice blows me away, and although there were definitely moments when he didn't hit the note he was going for, his energy and funny dancing around totally made up for it.

Misha's songs have always been political, but it's clear from his new songs that he feels much more free to speak his mind than he did in the 80s and 90s, when his lyrics were more metaphorical. For example, one of the new songs is called Gazprombaiter, which is a combination of the name of the energy giant Gazprom and the word "gasterbaiter," which is a fairly condescending but widespread word for immigrant workers. Misha calls Petersburg Gazprom City, Putin our tsar, etc. One song entreats us, "If you're scared, then stay home. But don't ask later why things are the way they are." And when they played the classic "Your dad's a fascist," Misha changed the words to "Your Putin's a fascist."

During the intermission, a guy in his 40s sitting behind me was talking on his cell phone. I shamelessly eavesdropped - he was talking so loud it was hard not to. His speech was interesting for several reasons. 1) He stuttered. 2) He swore, a lot. He never stuttered on the swear words. 3) Apparently, I look 18!! He was telling his interlocutor about the wide age range of people at the concert, and mentioned me, "the blonde 18-year-old sitting in front of me" as evidence. Who cares if he's a bad judge of age - in this country filled with stunning Slavic nymphs, it was nice to be confused for someone almost 7 years younger. 4) Most poignantly, he said this: "I've served my country for 20 years, and for nothing. It was all for nothing! Misha is singing the same songs as he was in the 80s, and they're just as relevant today as they were then. Nothing has changed in this country."

Straight from the horse's mouth, kids. Russia's got a ways to go. Still, have to give them ups for advances made in the freedom of expression department. This is the first concert I've ever gone to by myself and really enjoyed. I'm so glad I got to see Televizor this year - it was the perfect way to begin wrapping up my time in Gazprom City.

One Month to Go

2009-04-25T12:17:00.002+04:00

I'm flying outta here one month from today. It's hard to believe. Each month seems to take ages to pass, but the whole year has sped by pretty quickly. And there's a lot I still want to do in Piter! This coming week is my last week of class. Mom is coming to visit (yay!!!) May 1-4, so I'll be able to get some good touristing in next weekend with her. I have exams May 4-8. May 9-11 is another three day weekend (May 9 is Victory Day), so I'm thinking of going to Finland, or maybe somewhere in Russia - but taking a trip, in any event. On May 12 we are all giving presentations about our internships. May 13 and 14 (or 14 and 15?) we have language testing. And then we're free till May 24 to do what we please. I want to spend that time sleeping in, working out, going to all the museums I've neglected all year, taking in some theatre, going to Money Honey for an evening of rockabilly and Confederate flags, and just wandering around with friends while it's light out till really late.

We went on an excursion today to Nabokov's country manor, which he unfortunately lost less than a year after receiving it from his uncle, due to the Revolution. The house is over 200 years old AND made of wood, which makes its survival to the present day even more impressive. The museum itself wasn't particularly fascinating (our guide mostly went on and on about how Nabokov's son, Dmitri, is still an eligible bachelor at 72 and about the ghosts in the cave), but it was truly wonderful to get out and just wander around the park around the manor. It was pretty squishy underfoot, but it was sunny and warm, and just lovely to breathe fresh, not-Petersburg-smog air. Here are a few pictures.

Lucky to be Alive

2009-04-24T11:44:00.002+04:00

Last Friday, one of my classmates was assaulted on his way home from a night out. He was threatened with a gun, and then jumped by a group of guys, who bashed his head with a rock multiple times and left him for dead. He was discovered a few hours later in the entrance of an apartment building that wasn't his.

Kira and I went to visit him today in the hospital. His skull is fractured and he's going to need surgery to remove a dented-in piece of skull that could present a danger to the brain. However, all things considered, he's doing amazingly well. He is awake, alert, and in good spirits. An incredibly social and talkative guy by nature, it's clearly hard for him to sit alone in the hospital; he talked for almost an hour straight while Kira and I listened. He's not bitter about what happened - it could have happened in any big city, he says. The doctors have taken excellent care of him, and the police are working hard to find the perpetrators (in typical Russian fashion, the investigation has been sped along by connections - my classmate has friends who have friends in police forces around the country, and they immediately started making calls and calling in favors, without him even asking). They've been checking security cameras, and already have parts of the incident captured on tape. Additionally, his passport, which had been taken, probably to try to make it harder to identify him, has been discovered. It has been deemed safe for him to fly, so as soon as the hospital releases him, he'll be flying home.

He is an amazingly lucky guy. Had they hit him in the head one more time, he probably would be dead. If he'd been discovered even an hour later, or if he'd crawled to a less-frequented place after the attack, he would probably be dead. The doctors expected to see negative effects of the trauma on his reactions, speech, etc, but there have been none so far. When we talked to him, he seemed very cavalier about the whole event, but even just visiting, I was overwhelmed by this reminder of our mortality. I don't feel invincible like I did as a teenager, so I make much wiser choices now, but all the same, I never really think I could die anytime soon. Yet all it could take is a few blows to the head with a rock.

Insert cliche about living life to the fullest here. Seriously. I've been thinking about it.

Pascha Party and Russian Racism

2009-04-21T08:07:00.000+04:00

We didn't have class on Monday, because the university was conducting some huge round of exams and they needed all the classrooms in our building. As it happened, my host mom, Galya, hosted a lunch party on Monday to celebrate Pascha (Orthodox Easter) and her birthday. Six of her friends came over - five women and one of them's husband.

At first, it was a lot of fun. Russians dye Easter eggs, but rather than having an egg hunt, they play a game in which two people each hold an egg and bash them together. Whoever's egg breaks loses, and the victor goes on to the next person. I don't really know what the point is, but it's fun. Then you eat your egg.

Galya's friends were raucous - the one man could have given Georgians a run for their money with all his shouting. At first it was a lot of fun; I don't often hang out with the older set here, and it was interesting for me to hear about life during the Soviet Union in the 50s and 60s. One of the women there Galya has known since sixth or seventh grade! I know it's easier to maintain contact with friends over time if you don't move as much as we do in the US, but nonetheless, I was impressed that even 47 years later, they were still getting together for Galya's birthday.

After a while I got sort of worn out by the yelling. And at that moment, they decided to start giving me relationship advice. Apparently Galya has told all her friends that I'm engaged to a Georgian. In typical Russian fashion, they saw fit to give me unsolicited advice about this, in essence declaring that Rezo couldn't possibly actually love me, he's just looking for a way out of Georgia. Galya tried to stick up for me, but in comparison to her friends, she's really quiet, and I don't think they heard her. They weren't listening to anyone but themselves anyway. The worst part of the whole situation was that I just sat there and didn't say anything.

Now, I know some of you at home are thinking the same thing that these well-intended but out-of-line Russians think. The difference is, if you decide you need to tell me about your opinions, you do so in English, and probably not by yelling at me, flushed with cognac. I felt uncomfortable interrupting, which is why I sometimes go whole evenings without saying a word in Russian and Georgian company - their rules of interaction are different and don't exclude interrupting, whereas I can't seem to get over my upbringing, which says I should wait my turn to speak. I also felt out of my league linguistically - if these people had been my age, I would have known how to tell them off, but I discovered that I don't know how to tell people older than me in Russian with a respectful but firm tone that they're full of shit. And finally, I felt like crying, and I was afraid if I tried to talk, I really would. Actually, that might have been the best thing to do to get them to shut up, but at the time I didn't think about that.

Again, I know they had good intentions. All the same, I hate stereotyping and overgeneralizing, and it drives me up the wall when people talk about things they don't know anything about. Had they actually known Rezo personally and had real concerns about his intentions, that would be one thing. But it's another thing entirely to comment on the motivations of a person you've never met based on some fuzzy perception of national characteristics.

New Rules

2009-04-07T17:53:00.001+04:00

I think there should be a new law of nature which states that it is physically impossible to slip on a patch of ice after March 31.

May I just say: "OW!" and look around furtively to see if anyone saw me. I don't think they did.

Alli vs. marshrutki

2009-04-04T11:38:00.003+04:00

(The experienced Reader will note that this picture was not taken in Petersburg)

These yellow vans (sometimes more like minibuses) run all over, between, and among Piter and its suburbs. They have fixed routes, but not fixed stopping points - you just tell the driver when you want to get out. Riding on them used to terrify me.

The biggest problems with riding a marshrutka arise when you don't know where you're going. That is, you know you need to take the K-425 to get to where you want to go, but since you've never been there before, you don't know when to get out. In 2005-2006 this led me to almost never take marshrutki, because I was shy of my Russian and terrified to talk to the driver.

Nowadays I no longer fear talking to the driver, but I still haven't mastered marshrutka riding. For example, on Wednesday I was running late to meet a friend, so I decided to take a marshrutka, which I figured would be faster than walking. I thought I'd recognize when I needed to get out - but it turns out I didn't, and I ended up riding to the end of the route without even realizing we'd passed my stop. When I told the driver where I was supposed to get off, he was like, "Why didn't you say anything? We passed that place 40 minutes ago!" Oops. I caught another marshrutka headed back the way we came, and explained to him that I needed to get off at such-and-such an intersection, but I had no idea what that looked like, so could he tell me please when to get out? Needless to say, my "time-saving" manoever actually made me about an hour late to meet my friend.

However, I wasn't frightened. Annoyed at myself, yes, felt like a dolt, yes, but I wasn't terrified about having ridden to some unknown part of the city. This is HUGE progress. Doesn't mean I enjoy riding marshrutki, but it does open up much more flexible transportation options. I think this means I've accomplished the goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year of not fearing marshrutki. Yay me!

Happily, the next day I had to take a marshrutka to Sestroretsk, a small town about half an hour out of Piter. Once again, I knew I was supposed to get out at the train station, but I didn't know what that looked like (or if I'd see it in time to tell the driver to stop). Instead of panicking (or riding to the end of the route, duh), I just asked the guy sitting next to me if he'd tell me when to exit. Worked like a charm.

Petersburg weather is weird in the spring

2009-04-04T11:19:00.003+04:00

The weather here is consistent in only one respect: we have yet to reach a temperature above +4C (39.2F) since, I'd say, about last mid-October. Yesterday I walked to school in the most dreadful wintery mix I've encountered in a long time (how is it even possible that half the precipitation makes it to the ground as snow, and the other half as rain?). Even though I had an umbrella and relatively waterproof boots, I actually took the bus to school for the first time this whole year, breaking my vow to myself to walk every day. It was that unpleasant. But this morning I woke up with the sun in my eyes.

Thanks to Daylight Savings Time and Piter's northern location, we already have more than 12 hours of daylight a day, and it doesn't get dark till about 9 PM (and daylight hours are ever-increasing). It is deceptive, though, because it looks like it should be warm. But it's not.

Last Saturday our group took a tour with a guide from the Hermitage around unusual places (from the touring perspective) on Vasilievsky Island (where my school is located). It ended up being a tour mostly of courtyards, and was actually one of the most interesting excursions I've been on in Piter. I didn't take pictures of everything, but here is what I did photograph.

So when we started the tour a little after 1 PM, it was snowing. Hard. By the end of the tour an hour and a half later, the sun was peeking out. What the heck, Piter? This happens frequently - I'll wake up with the sun in my eyes, then look out the window at school and see that it's snowing, and then it'll be sunny again on my walk home. Well, I guess that's probably better than it just snowing constantly all the time.

Still, it's April, people! I'm not asking for beach weather, but if we could push the temp up to +10-12C, it would be much appreciated.

Bookends

2009-03-23T18:23:00.004+04:00

I forgot to mention this in my previous post, but I think it's funny:

On the flight from Istanbul to Tbilisi, I sat next to a Georgian man. I spoke to him as necessary in Russian. By the end of the flight, his curiosity got the better of him, and he said, "You don't look Russian. How do you know Russian so well?" I explained that I've studied for five years, including almost two years in Petersburg.

On the flight from Istanbul to Petersburg, I sat next to a Turkish man. I spoke to the flight attendants in English, as I don't know Turkish. By the end of the flight, the Turkish man's curiosity got the better of him, and he asked me, in excellent Russian, "Excuse me, but how do you know English so well?" I explained that it was my native language. He thought I was Russian!!

Spring Break

2009-03-22T14:25:00.008+04:00

I'm sitting in the airport in Istanbul, about halfway through a grueling 7.5 hour layover. I'm not a big fan of this airport limbo-world, all the more so since I've slept maybe an hour or two since waking up Friday morning - we left Batumi in a car bound for Tbilisi at around 10 Friday night, and I was afraid to sleep in the car lest the driver also nod off.

But this is the end of the story. Let's start at the beginning, it's easier for everyone that way.

I flew out of Piter on Friday the 13th (oo-oo-ooh!) on the emptiest international flight I've ever been on - there were maybe 40 people on the whole plane. Was that related to the date, or is there just not much traffic between Piter and Istanbul? Not sure. Anyway, it was nice, I laid out flat across three seats and got a little nap in. I arrived in Tbilisi at about 4 AM, where I was joyfully met by a freshly sheared and shaved Rezo. We immediately clambered into an SUV driven by a friend of Basa (Rezo's dad) and set out for Batumi. Batumi is only about 365 km (227 miles) from Tbilisi, but it's a five hour trip minimum, because the road looks like this:

Okay, so my representation of what the road looked like is an exaggeration. But it did wind a lot, and with the way Georgians drive, it was a pretty intense experience. However, I can't really complain, because apparently there have been vast improvements made to the roads - before, it was a 10 hour drive. Between Tbilisi and Batumi, I learned that if you happen to decide to pass a truck and find yourself face to face with another car barrelling towards you, rightfully in their own lane, there's no need to slow down and get back in your lane. Nope. Because three cars will easily fit where there's only supposed to be two. Yep.

Rezi and I slept away much of Saturday, but Saturday evening I got a full-on Georgian experience, which, admittedly, slammed me with culture shock. Maybe I didn't get enough sleep, maybe I just forgot to prepare myself, but I was completely overwhelmed by having six people talk to me at once, trying to keep up with the Georgian that switched to Russian and back to Georgian, eating delicious food, drinking homemade wine, and the shouting, oh the shouting! But after Saturday I managed to switch over to "Georgian Alli," that is, I got used to not understanding a lot of what people were saying and spending a lot of time nodding and smiling, and had a marvelous time.

Basa is determined to teach me Georgian as quickly as possible, and often spoke to me in Georgian. Amazingly, even though I don't know more than a handful of Georgian words yet, several times over the course of the week I simply knew what people were talking about. More than once I answered in Russian a question that was asked in Georgian, and I guessed right what they were asking about. In each of these cases, of course, the context was pretty clear, but all the same, I think it's a good start on the language-learning path. There are some words I understand when a Georgian says them, but I couldn't repeat them back to you. The thing about Georgian is that it's full of sounds my ears simply don't pick up on yet - for example, a word may have 4 consonants in a row, but I only hear 2 of them. I'm not a phoneticist, but my phonetics teacher explained that the ear of a native English speaker focuses on the vowels, since we have 20 vowel phonemes (which is why it's difficult for a Russian to differentiate between the words "pin" and "pen," for example. Their ears hear the short i and the short e as the same sound). Georgian has only five vowel sounds, so their words derive much more meaning from the various consonant combinations that I find so befuddling. So that's going to take some getting used to.

On this trip I met Rauli, Rezo's best friend, who is a sailor and therefore spends a good 8 or 10 months of the year at sea. Our schedules coincided at last, and I got to meet him. I also briefly met Iva, Rezi's friend who is currently living/studying/finding himself or something like that at a monastary. So now I think I've met the whole gang.

Rezi and I spent a lot of time just walking around Batumi, talking. Most of the week the weather was wonderful; on Thursday, it was actually hot. Friday it was rainy and gloomy though - as if the skies knew it was time for me to leave. On Wednesday Rauli took me and Rezo up in the mountains and we hiked around some pretty beautiful spots. I bet in summer, when everything is fully green, it's absolutely stunning. Here are pictures from our hike, plus a few others. Oh yeah, and I managed to fall flat on my butt on a slippery rock before taking my very first picture. I wasn't hurt at all, but I was concerned about the awful cracking noise of my camera meeting the stone full-force. Amazingly, despite its new, less-rectangular-than-before shape, it still works just fine.

The first couple days I ate way too much meat, and my stomach revolted. Inga, Rezi's mom, was very sympathetic, and on Wednesday we went to the store together and got everything for an American-style salad: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, red and yellow bell peppers, radishes, green onions, and parsley and dill. I tossed everything together, explained that it's better when everyone adds their own oil, didn't add any at all to mine, and just about cried it was so delicious. I haven't had a real salad since I left the States last August - nothing fried, no oil, everything fresh and delicious. My guts thanked me. This was the first time my Georgian family had eaten salad, and I was worried they wouldn't like it, but it was a hit. We joked that they were the first family in Georgia to eat salad. They made me laugh: "this would go great as a garnish to meat!" I explained that you can add just about anything you want to a salad, that in the summer, I would make them different versions, and that in the US, salad often IS eaten as a side to a more substantial main dish. Rezi liked it too - and tells me that Inga is making it again today. Can't wait to hear how it turns out!

So I ate that salad for three meals in a row (it was a big one!), including breakfast. And this made me think about how much my palate has expanded since I started traveling abroad. I remember barely choking down some things in Japan and in Ukraine - in Ukraine I couldn't bring myself to eat corn for breakfast. I just had very solid notions about what can and can't constitute breakfast. In Georgia, at least in Rezo's family, breakfast is comprised of the same foods as any other meal. And I don't mind at all. What's strange is that I noticed not minding eating salad for breakfast more than I noticed the fact that salad for breakfast is kind of weird.

This post ended up a little more random than I intended, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway. I had a fabulous week in Georgia, and it went by way too quickly. It was even better than in December, because Rezi and I weren't at all nervous about meeting each other, and we were immediately relaxed and chatty. Two more months in Piter, and I'll be back in Batumi. We have big plans for the summer, involving early-morning trips to the beach, grilling out, and hiking. It's going to be the best summer ever!

Metro

2009-03-12T21:38:00.005+04:00

I've had a metro blog entry churning in the back of my mind for about four months. I've just never been inspired to actually sit down and organize the myriad impressions I want to give you into a readable entry.

I wanted to write about the sort of fantastic, fusion feeling of being completely alone in a huge mass of people, yet feeling connected to them by your shared desire to get somewhere more quickly than you probably will. You start thinking like a metro rider - what car do I need to sit in to be closest to the exit at my destination station? What cars will be emptiest? What cars will likely be full of old people you'll have to give your seat up to? What car has the intractable drunk guy stirring up trouble? (Don't worry, he'll be thrown off the train by the sturdy matron at the station.)

I wanted to write about feeling like an ant as I transfer between Sadovaya and Sennaya Ploschad, just one member of a huge throng of people snaking through tunnels hundreds of feet below Piter's noisy streets, dipping and scurrying around babushki with carts and dedushki with canes, dashing down that dangerous zone on the edge of oncoming traffic. Will I crash into the mulleted young man charging towards me, as anxious to get to Sadovaya as I am to Sennaya, or will I make it around this slightly-slower-than-me couple before we collide?

I wanted to write about that unmistakable, yet indescribable, metro smell, that pheromone trail left over the past fifty-odd years by millions of other ants in the tunnels, and how the smell intensifies when the wind picks up as a train comes barreling into the station, its single headlight visible around the bend in the tunnel long before the rest of the train comes into view.

I wanted to write about the dreadful cars on the red line which are painted bright yellow on the inside - and how I noticed that one I rode in sometime last fall was manufactured in 1964! How many passengers has that car faithfully carted from one end of the city to the other, swaying and rocking around the dips and bends in the track?

I wanted to write about the escalators: three minutes down, three minutes up; two if you run down (this gives me vertigo, but I do it anyway if I'm late on the off chance I won't have to wait two or three or, on a slow day, four minutes for the next train), two also if you walk up (thighs and lungs burning, it's a matter of principle to keep climbing, even if I want to stop and just ride). How much of our lives do we spend on escalators, listening to that ever-patient female voice entreating the Dear Residents of Saint Petersburg and Guests of Our City not to sit on the steps of the escalators and to give up our seats for pregnant ladies and old people and not to delay the trains by prying the doors back open to pack a few more in (or to free the poor fellow who jumped in a fraction of a second too late)? In older stations, there are three escalators, the third one is used only during peak hours and in whatever direction has the most traffic. One day I rode the middle escalator up at Nevsky Prospekt, and I noticed what isn't acoustically noticeable from the side escalators: that the exhorting speakers are staggered. That beseeching voice pleaded now from my left, now from my right, then back to the left again, three whole minutes up to the swarming surface of the city. It felt poltergeisty.

I wanted to write about all of that, but never got around to it, until a long-awaited, yet still unexpected shakeup to my metro routine finally arrived. All year rumors have abounded about the new metro line opening in Petersburg. When I got back from Georgia in January, all the maps had been changed in the metro, so I got off at the wrong station, thinking I already lived on a new line. Turned out only one new station was open, so I still lived on my beloved orange line (No. 4). On Sunday, March 7, all that changed.

Here's what the Petersburg metro system looked like before March 7 (click for larger image):

As you can see, I live near Chkalovskaya metro station, and could quite conveniently transfer to any other line at one go. I had all the transfer stations memorized, not just for the orange line, but for all the lines, and could quickly figure out the shortest route to wherever I needed to go even without a map. By pure luck, all my best friends lived on the orange line: Kira at one end at Komendantsky Prospekt, Nadya and Zhenya at the other end at Ulitsa Dybenko. After my Wednesday evening coffee dates with Nadya, we could easily hop on the metro at Dostoevskaya and part ways right there on the platform - I'd go one way to Chkalovskaya, she's go the other direction to Ulitsa Dybenko.

All that has changed. Here's what the new metro scheme looks like (click for a larger view):

Okay, okay, I know I'll get used to it. But I don't want to live on the purple line. For one thing, I now have to transfer to get almost anywhere I regularly go - no more parting at Dostoevsky with Nadya, or sleeping till the end of the line on the way to her apartment. For another thing, I haven't quite wrapped my head around the fact that Sadovaya is now a purple station (old station, new line), and the new station, Spaskaya, is the orange one (new station, old line). I'm not the only one; despite surprisingly good signage in the cross-over tunnels, I've seen quite a few confused babushki tottering along the wrong way (Sennaya-Sadovaya-Spaskaya is Petersburg's first three-way transfer station). And I'm annoyed that if I want to go anywhere on the green line from my home, I now have a guaranteed minimum two transfers. Totally lame.

The new stations (three of them so far, but four more in the works on the expanding purple line) have a weird building-materials smell. They are impossibly shiny, bright, new. Despite the efforts of the metro cleaning staff, this won't last long. First the vandals will marker them up, and over time that most intense, take-no-prisoners Petersburg grime will set in and those lustrous, slippery granite floors will lose their sheen and become gritty, the walls will start peeling; they will stop feeling so out of place among the older stations. The new escalators have a different mechanism than the old ones; they're slower and bumpier. The new train tunnels sound different than the old tunnels as we zoom between stations at 85 miles per hour. The new male voice announcing the next station is overly perky, cautioning us too cheerfully that the doors are closing, as if we hadn't heard that warning a million times before. Perhaps it's a young voice actor trying too hard, looking for his big break.

I'll get used to it. So will the other three and a half million daily riders of the Petersburg metro (a drop in the bucket compared to Moscow's daily ridership of 9 million). And after I leave, they will continue to adjust as more stations are added and more new lines are opened, bringing those in the new high rises on the edges of the city into the fold with those living in the center. If all goes according to plan, there will be 8 metro lines in Petersburg by 2030. By then, I won't even pretend to know all the transfer stations, or the quickest route to anywhere. For now, I'm focused on remembering that Sadovaya is a purple station.

...And we're back!

2009-03-08T13:22:00.004+04:00

I would like to apologize for my month-long silence. In addition to my computer being broken for most of that time (although he's all back up and running now), I had been off and on horribly depressed. My logic was that no one wants to read about a person being depressed all the time, and a depressed person doesn't have the energy to write anyway. I am extremely happy to report that I am now NOT depressed, and have not been for this entire week. Whoo! However, I still haven't written, because not-depressed Alli still has a ton of homework, and I have simply not found the time. But I'm writing now, and I'm going to do my best to not allow so much time to lapse between entries again.

I was awakened by the sun shining in my eyes this morning and yesterday morning. That's so awesome! Even though daily temperatures are still in the 30s and there's snow on the ground, it definitely feels like spring is sneaking up on us. It's light out for a reasonable number of hours each day, the birds are singing, it feels like the whole city is waking up. Kira and I went for a really nice walk yesterday; you can see pictures from that and other post-Georgia Petersburg adventures here and here.

Speaking of Georgia, I'm going back for spring break! I leave this Friday evening, and will return to Petersburg Saturday, March 21. It's a bit of a lottery as far as the weather goes in Batumi in March - it might be gorgeous and sunny the whole week, or it might rain every day. Last Monday it snowed all day in Batumi; yesterday Rezi couldn't sleep even with all the windows open because it was so hot.

Although I haven't been writing, lots of little events have occurred which I thought people at home might enjoy hearing about. Thus a return to that favorite of blog forms, the vignette.

I'm sitting in a cafe, by the window. A man just took a picture of the cafe, which I invariably ended up in. I looked hard at the guy, studying him. Why take a picture of the Ideal Teacup? He saw me staring, clipped his heels and nodded crisply. I decided that was a gentlemanly thing to do.

***

Walking home from my internship, I notice that the lights at the soccer stadium are on. I vaguely remember fighting my way past a line to the ticket windows at the stadium on my way to school a couple weeks ago. Apparently it's game night. The sidewalk across the street from the stadium, about as wide as a two-lane road, is packed with cars. Another car almost hits me as it drives past, looking for a parking spot - I grumble vaguely to myself about pedestrian rights. Despite the below-freezing temperatures and laws against public drinking, people are tailgating. The underground crosswalk, also a metro entrance, is packed with fans. So is most of the street I need to walk up to get home. I'm swimming against a current of fanatical Zenit supporters, all wearing the tell-tale blue and white football scarves and carrying flags and banners. I silently thank myself for not wearing my Freemantle football scarf that day - Zenit fans are unpredictable, and any sign of supporting ANY other team is just asking for trouble. The stream of fans headed toward the stadium finally thins out as I get closer to home. I turn the game on over dinner - I can probably see better watching on Channel 5 than most of those fans freezing their butts off in the stadium. It's snowing; the bright green field takes on a soft-mint hue. When I turn off the TV to go to bed, the roar of the fans doesn't stop - I'm hearing the real thing, live, even through my shut windows.

***

Writing class. Darya Vladimirovna, my favorite teacher here, has just passed back our essays and is giving us some general commentary and suggestions. As I dutifully write down her comments, a sinking feeling overcomes me. "Think of an interesting title. Have a title in general. Work on your conclusions - the essay isn't done just because you've stopped writing." Oh dear lord. Those are the same comments I made to my ninth graders when I was student teaching last year. 24 years old, and I'm getting the same feedback I myself gave to 14-year-olds.

At first this was somewhat depressing. But then I thought about it: we Flagshippers are at a point in our language learning journey where it's not just about choosing the right grammar forms and trying out new vocabulary anymore, although that's still a big part of what we do. The Flagship program has taken on the gargantuan task of trying to make us fully capable of doing all the things an educated Russian person can do with the language - from writing various official documents, to understanding and properly using various stylistic choices to write academic versus personal essays, to being able to pick up on cultural references in conversation. I feel like we've been given nine months to learn what Russian schoolchildren get 10 years to master, which of course, is impossible. So I'm trying to give myself a break, remind myself that we can't master everything all at once, but we need this introduction to get us started. And if that means feeling like I'm back in ninth grade every once in a while, so be it.

***

The Russian word "посторонный" (postoronnyj)means "outsider, foreigner, extraneous;" taken literally, based upon etymology, it means "someone or something by the wayside." Some days it is really hard to come to terms with what feels like a pervasive and all-encompassing Russian indifference towards "extraneous" people. Take libraries, for example. Even in the public library, you can't just go there to study, you have to take out a book to sit in the reading rooms. Kennon and I tried to go to the journalism library at the university, because we heard that we could study there, but we made the mistake of telling the guards that we were from the philology department, and they basically told us to take a hike. We were utterly extraneous. The idea of who's in and who's out, it seems to me, plays a much bigger role in day-to-day life for me here than it does in America (where, probably thanks to my citizenship and skin color, I rarely feel like I'm "out") , and as a foreigner in this city, sometimes the feeling of being extraneous is overwhelming. But it's not just foreigners - it's homeless people, immigrant workers, and anyone who doesn't know the secret code or the right people to get "in" somewhere. You're not "in"? Then they don't give a shit about you.

***

The other day on the metro, a man sitting across from me starting yelling at a young couple standing in our car. I looked over; I couldn't see the young man, just his girlfriend. I thought the old guy was yelling at them for making out in the metro; Russians aren't shy about PDA, and the guy was yelling about decency, etc. But he got more and more threatening with his remarks, saying that it was disgraceful, that he was going to beat up the young man, etc. I started to feel really uncomfortable; other Russians in the car did too, and showed it by closing their eyes. At the next stop, the young couple moved to another part of the car to get away from the yelling guy, and I finally saw what the man was upset about - the boyfriend was black. And when I realized I'd just witnessed a serious display of racism, and that this probably wasn't the first time that couple had had this problem, and that everyone just closed their eyes and probably agreed with the yelling guy, even though they weren't willing to say it themselves - I just got really angry. But I didn't do anything either, because I didn't want to get myself into trouble. And then I got depressed about that too.

***

I've been thinking a lot lately about how this city doesn't surprise me as much as it used to, which is why it's sometimes hard to find things I think it will be interesting for you to read about. I was thinking just that thought on the way to school the other day, when I saw a man run out of the metro. On one foot he had a normal dress shoe. On the other, a plastic bag. As he ran past, I couldn't help but wonder how he ended up with a plastic bag on his left foot, and why he was running. I see all sorts of odd things like that all the time; after a while, you almost stop noticing.

***

So as not to end on a negative note, I would like to point out two things that make me feel happy and sort of negate the "extraneous" thing I talked about above. The first is that most cars really do try to drive around the huge puddles in the street so as not to splash pedestrians, at least on the street I walk down every morning. That makes me feel better about humans in general. The second thing is that twice in one day I saw a bus driver wait when he saw people running to catch the bus, when he could easily have slammed the doors and driven off (I've seen that before too). So yay for caring about other people!

Well, there are probably other vignettes I could write about, but I'm on my way out the door to eat sushi with Nadya and Lyuba. Happy Women's Day to all those awesome women out there!

Demons

2009-02-10T21:56:00.004+04:00

On Sunday Katya, Berney and I went to see the stage version of Dostoevsky's 800-page novel Demons. The play premeired in 1991 in Germany, but we went to see it at the Maly Dramaticheski Teatr Evropy (The Small Dramatic Theatre of Europe), where it's a part of the repertoire. What's so special about this play that it deserves its own blog post?

It's nine and a half hours long.

Okay, so that figure includes two 1-hour breaks. Nonetheless, we were in that theatre on Rubenshtein Street from 11:45 AM till 9:30 PM. I've been to that theatre twice before, both times to see Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and while the acting is supurb, it's one of the most uncomfortable theatres to sit in: the chairs are really hard and they're badly arranged - unless you're in one of the first three rows, you're craning your neck to see no matter where you sit in the house. This fact, more than anything, gave me pause when Katya suggested we attempt this theatrical feat. Eight hours in one of those Puritan-church-pew-hard chairs, craning my neck to see over the ample lady in front of me? No thanks. As it turns out, Katya is a genius. She got us tickets in the very last row (it's a tiny house - only 13 rows - so we weren't miles from the stage), and we were able to stand up to see better and stretch a bit whenver we needed to. This was good, because what turned out to be the most memorable and impressive scene for me took place on the4 floor in front of the stage, and if I couldn't have stood, I would have missed most of it.

If ever you plan to go see the 8-hour stage version of Demons, I have one suggestion: read the novel first. Or at least the ClifsNotes. I went in cold, and spent most of the first act trying to sort out who was who. The opening monologue by crazy Maria completely passed me by, and even at the end of the play I couldn't figure out why Nikolai Vsevoldovich and that other guy had a duel (other than the fact that no good work of 19th century Russian literature lacks a duel). I also couldn't figure out who owed who money and why - but debt is a major reoccuring theme for Dostoevsky, so it was probably important. And why was Nikolai Vsevoldovich secretly married to crazy Maria in the first place?

Anyway, the first act was just shy of three hours long, and I was pretty antsy by the end, mostly because I was really hungry. The second act when much more quickly and was very engaging. The third act had me utterly spellbound. The weird thing is that each act was equally full of Dostoevsky's philosophical monologues, orations that went on for 10-15 minutes but added nothing to the plot. When I read Dostoevsky, it's always these monologues that either stop me dead or get skimmed over so I can get the plot moving again (hence why I never got through Notes from Underground the first time - the whole first half of the book is one of those diatribes). I would have expected that my patience for these monologues would have worn thinner and thinner as the hours ticked by, but I actually found the opposite: I was completely riveted in Hour 8 by Kirillov's explanation to that scoundrel Pavel Stepanovich about why killing himself would be the highest form of evidence that he himself was God, that he refused to buy into the God that man has made up for himself to make himself feel better. That one-line summary I just gave does not do justice to the monologue.

I think from now on I should only read Dostoevsky in the original, not translated.

This play included everything a good play needs: three murders, two suicides, a duel, a secret socialist society, and one on-stage birth. Also, almost all of the women in the play had slept with or were sleeping with Nikolai Vsevoldovich, who, in my opinion, was not really worth all the fuss. The acting was really, truly excellent. I recognized several of the actors from Uncle Vanya. I was most impressed by the actors who played Kirillov and Shatov. The guy who played Nikolai Vsevoldovich did a poor job projecting, which was disappointing, as it was hard enough to understand even without straining to hear.

One thing I really love about the Maly Dramatichesky Teatr is its sets. The stage is not large, there's no curtain, and they do several different shows each week, so it's necessary that the sets and lighting be easy to change. The Demons set was very simple but very versatile. The stage was raked, sloping downwards from stage left to right. In the center was a large wooden box, about 4 meters wide and 4 meters tall. The down- and upstage sides of the box raised and lowered; the stage left and right sides could raise and lower, and were also hinged to swing downstage (to create, with the downstage side of the box, a long wall) or upstage (for the same effect). By changing the positions of the walls, we trasitioned from scene to scene and from room to room. At the very back of the stage a ladder stretched from below stage up into the rafters. Just downstage of the box, a meter-wide section of the whole length of the stage, hinged at stage right, lowered to make a ramp that led below stage and raised to bbecome a sort of inclined platform, the highest point of which was about a meter and a half above the stage. A similar platform just upstage of the box was hinged at stage left. They made really interesting use of these platforms - when a character died, they would appear laid-out on one of the platforms, which would raise to its highest point, pause, then lower below stage again. During the duel, the duelists each walked up one of the platforms (their 12 paces) as it was raising; at the summit, they shot. If I've described it well enough, you'll note that the duelists actually had their backs to each other and shot into the wings; I think this was a fantastic way to "gain" more space onstage, plus the slight disconnect of seeing one guy shoot towards stage right and the other guy react from stage left was very effective.

As I mentioned, the lighting was very simple - mostly almost plain-white light (I'm sure there were gels, but there were no obvious hues to the lighting). Despite some moments of comic relief, the play overall was pretty dark and gloomy, and the lighting reflected this - the audience ended up feeling as unclear of what they were seeing as the characters were. I could be mistaken, but I think the only brightly colored light was at the end, when blood-red light flooded the red ladder at the back of the stage.

Speaking of that ladder, it was made to be the focus of attention once in each of the three acts. In the first two, creepy music with a steady drumbeat played while a little girl climbed from the bottom to the top, while another character monologued in the foreground. Not sure what it symbolized, but it left a deep impression. And speaking of music - sound effects were minimal, but extremely well-used. I got goosebumps multiple times.

So I sort of feel like I've told you all this but described nothing of what it was really like. Simply a fantastic play. If you speak Russian and are ever in Petersburg and have 10 hours to kill on a Sunday, go see Demons.

My life is boring and that's why I'm not writing

2009-02-02T16:53:00.002+04:00

Hi Everyone,

Nothing new has really happened since I got back from Georgia, which is why I haven't been writing much. I had a my-host-mom-is-in-Egypt party a couple weekends ago which was pretty successful. I made a giant pot of chili and a triple-batch of cornbread which everyone ate with relish.

Classes are going fine. This semester they've added a mass media class to our lineup, which I'm very much enjoying, as it forces me to engage with Russian news sources more often, and since my Russian is now good enough to understand the news, both on TV and in print, we're able to work on analysis and finding bias.

I'm climbing back on the fitness wagon after a two-month hiatus. I went to the gym at 7 AM last Friday to find that the one person who could get the key from the guard was half an hour late to work, so I just went home. It was a frustrating beginning to my new regimen. Why, I stood there wondering, can't ANY employee take the key? There were three other employees also standing outside waiting. Dumb dumb dumb system. Anyway, I was able to get in and start working out right at 7 today. I'm going to try to make it a part of my daily routine. Hope it works - I'm aiming to lose 10 pounds by May.

Ummm.... yeah, that's it. It hasn't been terribly cold here. It's getting definitively lighter every day; soon I'll have the joy of walking-to-school sunrises again.

Sorry my blog got boring. I'm sure something culturally significant will happen soon about which I can comment.

Oh, also, my computer died about two weeks ago, so if I've been slow to respond to email or Facebook posts, that's why. :)

Georgia Part 8: Tbilisi, The long road back to Piter, and what comes next

2009-01-25T18:07:00.001+04:00

They cancelled my flight to Kiev from Batumi, so I ended up having to fly out of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Rezi, Basa and I took an overnight train to Tbilisi from Batumi. We only had a few hours in the morning to look around, so we saw very little of the city (we had hoped to get Rezi’s cousin to drive us around a bit to see the city, but there was a miscommunication about the timing and we couldn’t fit it in). However, what I did see I really liked – the architecture is beautiful, there are churches everywhere, and the whole city is nestled in a valley, so the view of the city from the hills is amazing. Rezi himself had never been to Tbilisi before (other than to transfer trains, which doesn’t count), and so I’ve made him promise that we’ll do some more exploring when I come back. One thing I wouldn’t suggest doing in Tbilisi – ordering khachapuri Ajara-style. They don’t know how to do it. Best to be in Ajara (that is, in Batumi) to get it done right.

My trip back to Piter was long, and made more so by the sudden feelings of loneliness that washed over me. For three straight weeks I’d been surrounded by people that made me feel like one of their own (not least of which was Rezi), and suddenly I was alone. I didn’t plan ahead and so didn’t have a map or guidebook for Kiev, so even though I had a few hours to kill between my flight and my train to Moscow, I ended up not seeing anything noteworthy (even though it’s a glorious city). Instead I went to the movies and saw the most awful film ever, “Tarif Novogodny” (“New Year’s Phone Plan”). It was so poorly written and badly acted that I don’t even want to talk about it. It was strange in Kiev to suddenly understand everything being said around me again; my ears had gotten used to simply not understanding most of the linguistic input they were getting in Georgia.

In Moscow I had the whole day to play, so I made my way to Red Square and went through all the hoopla to see Lenin’s mummy again. You have to go in the proper gate, pay to check your bag, go through the metal detectors, and then you get all of 15 seconds to look at the waxy, creepy corpse before it’s all over, and then you have to walk all the way back across Red Square to get your bag back. I’ve decided that seeing Lenin twice in one lifetime is enough – I won’t go back again.

Red Square was set up for some kind of concert, so there was no entrance into St. Basil’s Cathedral. However, I did spend several hours at the State Historical Museum. The rooms on the first floor are themselves worthy of a tour – they’re gorgeous! I was lucky enough to end up on a free excursion through the first floor of the museum, which started in pre-historic times and went up to the end of the 17th century. History of the Russian Empire was shown on the second floor; I perused that collection on my own, but wasn’t as impressed (maybe I was just tired, but really, the personal papers of various generals just weren’t that interesting).

I had a little return culture shock when I realized that Moscow was just teaming with cops. (Piter is the same way.) It’s always been like that, I’d just forgotten for three weeks what it’s like to see cops everywhere all the time.

So what comes next? Rezi has invited me back for the summer, so after Flagship ends on May 25 I’ll be heading back to Georgia, at least till the end of the summer. And after that, we’ll see.

Georgia Part 7: Observations about food, drinking, and driving

2009-01-25T18:06:00.000+04:00

Eating and drinking seem to consume the vast majority of Georgian’s time and attention (evidence: on New Year’s Day, Basa’s first day off in about a month, he was called in to work on urgent business. He rushed to work to find that the “urgent business” was a full bottle of vodka and a small New Year’s feast). With food as good as theirs, it’s understandable. While I’m no food critic, and thus lack the vocabulary to write beautifully about food, I’d like to try to describe a few of my favorite Georgian dishes. I found recipes for many of these dishes on this blog, though I have yet to actually try any of them out.

• Khachapuri – see part 3. In all I tried standard khachapuri, Mengrelian-style, Royal Mengrelian-style, and Ajara-style.
• Cucumber and tomato salad – yes, this sounds simple enough, but add ground up walnuts, parsley (actually, the more general term “greenery” was used), onions (which I always picked out) and sometimes bell peppers, and you’ve got a light and tasty starter to balance all the meat, bread, and cheese that’s loading down the rest of the table.
• Gomi – this is basically boiled cornmeal with soft cheese melted into it. VERY tasty. And white – Georgian corn is white, not yellow. Goes excellent with…
• Satsivi – chicken in walnut sauce. To die for. This with gomi is my favorite Georgian dish of all time.
• Mchadi – Georgian cornbread. It’s fried. Good with things that require dipping, especially…
• Lobio – the general word for “beans.” However they make them, they’re always really tasty.
• Shashlik – “this is actually Russian,” they’d always say as they dug in to this roasted meat dish. Typically beef, pork, or veal. I avoided the veal.
• Kabab wrapped in lovash (tortilla-like flat bread) – Really loved this because it reminded me of the sausage Dadoo made when I was a kid.
• Georgian tvorog (farmer’s cheese) with mint. – I forgot the Georgian name for this dish. But it goes great with mchadi.
• A variety of carrot and cabbage concoctions. The most important element is walnut paste. It makes everything delicious.
• Churkchelo – a string of walnuts or hazelnuts which has been dipped repeatedly in concentrated grape juice and allowed to dry to make a confection. Yummy.
• Khinkali – boiled, juicy meat dumplings that “must” be eaten with your hands (“When George Bush visited Tbilisi, he LOVED khinkali,” they told me more than once). First you bite a little hole in the dumpling, suck out the meat juice, then finish eating it, leaving behind the “bellybutton” of pure crust. Good covered in pepper; when they’ve gotten cold, you can send them back to the kitchen to be fried for Round 2 of eating. I can eat about 4-5 khinkali if I’m really hungry; I heard tale of a Georgian man finishing off a tray of 30 after claiming, “I’m not really hungry.”

While we’re on the subject of not being hungry: no one ever seemed to believe me when I told them I was full. They thought I was jus saying that to be polite. Basa was all the time saying, “Don’t be shy! If you’re being shy on my account, I’ll leave!” But really, I was just full! As time went on, I got better at both slowing down at the beginning of the meal so I wouldn’t fill up so quickly (makes sense when dinner goes on for 3-4 hours or more), and at refusing more food.

And while we’re thinking about gorging, the 30 khinkali story is not the only story I heard about eating food in mythical quantities. Eliko’s dad, Avto, ate an entire suckling pig on New Year’s Day. Temuka told of a friend who, after several hours of feasting, made a bet that he could eat 15 whole quail (I’m pretty sure that’s the bird they were talking about: tiny, with edible bones, and VERY greasy). He proceeded to eat the 15 quail, plus two extra, just to prove that he wasn’t “just” finishing the bet. Basa told of a man who ate 60 pelmeni at one go. These stories baffle me – clearly it is a source of pride and evidence of manliness to be able to eat a ton, but I just don’t see the appeal of gluttony.

• Khashi – this is the only food in Georgia I categorically dislike. Rezi assures me that many Georgians don’t like it either, but it is touted as extremely healthy, good for your joints, and a sure cure for a hangover. It’s cow hooves and stomach in broth. It cooks for a long time and smells awful, then you ladle this dreadful mass into a bowl, add a ton of garlic and salt, take a shot of vodka, and eat up. It was the texture of the stomach that got me most. And if I let myself think about the fact that it was stomach, I couldn’t swallow it. I didn’t try any hoof. I’ll try anything once, and I’m glad I’ve had the experience, but I won’t be upset if this was the only time in my life I have to eat khashi.

Drinking and eating are closely related activities in Georgia. Most families have grapevines in their yards and make their own wine, which tends to have a lot more “bite” than commercial wines (also tends to be unfiltered, which I suspect may be why it gave me a headache). In restaurants you can by local wine on tap. I’ve already talked about the importance of toasting and the other rituals that go along with drinking in Georgia. I’d just like to mention here that I was overwhelmed by the frequency of drinking. Granted, I was visiting during the holidays. Nonetheless, I was unprepared for wine at breakfast, for example. I was always surprised to find the boys already hard at it when we got to Basa and Inga’s, whether we arrived at 3 PM or at 5. I’m jumping ahead to the end here, but I was completely bowled over in Tbilisi when Basa ordered a (small) bottle of vodka to go with our khachapuris. AT SEVEN AM! When he ordered a second bottle a couple hours later at a different café, where we were waiting for some friends, I brought it up to Rezi. “Why order that bottle if we’re not going to sit here very long, and you and I don’t want to drink?” “We’re sitting at a table,” Rezi explained. “If you’re sitting in a group around a table, it doesn’t feel natural to him to not be toasting. He feels uncomfortable and disrespectful if he doesn’t invite you to drink with him, no matter what time of day it is.” I love Basa, and Rezi’s explanation of his morning drinking makes sense to me, but I am so glad I’m dating the son and not the father. Rezi’s not a big drinker – his metabolism is so high that he always ends up with a hangover before the night is even over, so he tends to drink the minimum he can get away with (or at least he did while I was around).

Driving is another part of life in Georgia that takes some getting used to (and which may make a believer out of me. Miraculously escape death enough times…) For one thing, no one wears seatbelts. Wearing a seatbelt, they reason, is like asking to be in a car accident. The lines painted on the road are taken as mere suggestions, and I often saw four cars abreast where there should have been two, passing in no-passing zones, U-turns being made in front of on-coming traffic. Lots of last-second braking. Rezi and I took taxis a lot to get around town, and I often just closed my eyes and squeezed his hand, because if I was going to die, I didn’t want to see it coming. The scariest part for me is that they drink and drive all the time. They understand that drunk driving is dangerous, but they don’t consider getting behind the wheel after “just a few” as drunk driving. The roads in Batumi were of varying quality. Larger roads tended to be pretty smooth, but we went down some side streets with potholes practically as big as the car we were in. Rezi’s street, though located in the center of the city, is unpaved. On our drive to the waterfall in the mountains, there was a distinct cut-off point up to which they’d resurfaced the road, and after which was extremely bumpy. And pedestrians beware – you do NOT have the right of way. Cars will honk, but they won’t slow down, and if you don’t jump out of the way, it’s your own fault. Batumi cracked me up with their crosswalk signals – which they only had at intersections in the touristy part of town – because they turned instantly from green to red with no warning blinking, which could easily get you stuck in the middle of the street. Seems like they haven’t quite thought that one out yet.

Georgia Part 6: Meet the parents and New Year

2009-01-25T18:05:00.005+04:00

See New Year's pictures here.

New Year’s is a family holiday in Georgia – involving, it goes without saying, lots of food and drink. Georgians put up what we call a Christmas tree, but they don’t exchange gifts on New Year or Christmas. It’s traditional around New Year and the few days after to always bring a couple pieces of candy to put on the table (usually in the bread or fruit bowl) when you go to someone’s house, because they believe it’s bad luck to be the first guest to enter someone’s house in the new year, and bringing candy somehow wards that off (appeasing evil spirits? I already don’t remember – I should have written it down when they told me about the tradition).

I was pretty nervous about meeting Rezi’s parents. Sure, I’d met his friends, and they all thought I was alright, but what would his parents think of the Internet girl? Turns out I had nothing to worry about – they both accepted me so warmly, I instantly felt at home. They really made me feel like a part of the family – actually, several times over the course of my stay I got the impression that Rezi’s friends and family are just itching for a wedding, and pretty much consider me and Rezi’s eternal bond as a done deal.

Anyway, right away on New Year’s Eve I ended up one-on-one with Rezo’s dad, Basa – a real character! 56 years old, Basa is a civil engineer with a moustache he’s NEVER shaved (for some reason, his dad forbade it) and a missing ring finger on his left hand (apparently he was wearing a ring on that finger when he decided to jump over a gate. The ring got caught at the top and stayed there – along with his finger). The funny thing about the missing finger is that Basa acts like it’s still there. He’ll hold up both hands and say something like, “We’ll leave in 10 minutes.” “More like 9 and a few seconds,” jokes Gogi. Basa, like EVERY man in Georgia, smokes like a chimney, and since he’s been at it most of his life he’s got a raspy, rumbly voice. That, coupled with the fact that he sort of mumbles anyway, made it very difficult for me to understand him at first, even though he speaks fantastic Russian (those who grew up in the Soviet system, down to about age 32, all spoke excellent Russian. For political reasons, Russian is just not a language they LIKE to speak now). Basa always has a story to tell – about what’s happening at work, about ridiculous bureaucratic adventures in the Soviet Union, about his family. Most of all I love the way he speaks with complete love, utter pride, and total devotion to his hometown, his country, and his family. He loves his boys and will do everything he can to help them out as long as he’s alive.

Rezi’s mom, Inga, is a total riot. She’s the sweetest woman ever and a fantastic cook – she makes whatever Rezi’s friends ask for when they come over, which is every day – and started calling me “moya devochka” (“my girl”) almost right away. But she cracks me up – at 47, she’s already “old.” “Oh, I’m so old,” she declares. “I wanted to sell this house and move to an apartment, but my boys won’t let me. They’re used to it here. But it’s too big for me to take care of on my own. I’m already old. Gogi used to help me, but now he’s grown up and has work. If only I had a girl, she could help me around the house.” Wow, Inga, could you drop any bigger hints? :) Inga is a master force-feeder; her habitual phrase is, “Why aren’t you eating? Eat, eat to your health!” I was a lot better off once I realized she mostly says that out of habit, and that I don’t actually have to continue eating just to avoid offending her.

New Year was a turning point in my visit. Before New Year, Rezi and I spent most of our time on our own. Though we got together with friends some evenings, for the most part it was just the two of us. After New Year, however, when I finally met Rezi’s parents, we stopped eating out every day and instead spent our days at his parents’ house (or at Eliko’s house).

On New Year’s Eve I met (or saw again) a few new friends that didn’t come out that first night in the ship restaurant. Irma, Eliko’s cousin, lives three doors down from Rezi. Tiny and bird-like, I never once saw her in a bad mood. She flits around the room, taking pictures, joking and laughing, taking people by the arm and patting them affectionately. Her addresses to me always began with, “Alli, Alli!” Always twice like that. She’s very cute. Baata, at 39, is the eldest in Rezi’s circle. He’s also gigantic – not that he’s super tall or fat, he’s just a big guy. His Russian was excellent once he broke it out for me (he even threw in a few soft consonants, which are decidedly lacking in the Georgian pronunciation of Russian, just to show off), and is always very friendly. On my last day in Batumi Rezi and I arrived at his parents house to find several of the boys, including Baata, already well into a bottle of vodka. Baata, his voice choked with emotion, toasted me, saying, “You are like a sister to us!” I was very touched, but also quite aware that he was pretty drunk. Later he gave me a dollar bill as a parting gift. Why exactly he decided to give an American a dollar, I’m not quite sure, but it probably made sense to him at the time.

New Year’s in Georgia goes on for about a week, so even though Rezi and I headed home around 2 AM after greeting the new year, we didn’t miss all the festivities. New Year’s Day I had a bit of a hangover from the homemade wine we had the night before, and when we arrived back at Basa and Inga’s house, I was immediately plied with more wine, which was not what I needed. I ate heartily at Inga’s table (including a lot of meat) – big mistake. I should have paced myself, because as it turned out, I was expected to eat ALL DAY. On New Year’s Day everyone goes around visiting, eating and drinking at every home they visit. We only went to Inga’s house and Eliko’s mom’s house, but it was way more than I was prepared to handle. In the afternoon on New Year’s Day I got my first Georgian lesson from Eliko, which was fun, but by early evening the excess food, drink, noise, and cigarette smoke had combined to give me a walloping headache. Luckily Rezi wanted to leave early, and once we got back to the quiet of our loft (and I took some ibuprofen), I felt a lot better.

When I woke up on January 2, I could tell something wasn’t quite right. I still felt full. Not just full, but as if my guts were filled with bricks. “That’s not good,” I thought. “Your stomach is sort of round and pooched out,” observed Rezi.

And it all just… sat there. And despite the fact that I felt pretty awful, I had to eat and drink a bunch more that day. Georgians say that however you greet the day on January 2 is how your whole year will go, so I tried to be cheerful all day. We started the day off at Basa and Inga’s, then went over to Irma’s house in the evening. By the time we returned to Basa and Inga’s house, my lower digestive tract had had it and finally jumped into action. I think I lost a good two pounds in about an hour. I felt so much better. Inga was very soothing, and I was like, “Well, I’m surprised the revolt didn’t happen earlier. Usually I can handle about anything, but I guess my iron guts («железный желудок») just couldn’t take New Year.” Rezi was concerned about me, and expressed it thus: “Wow, your stomach went way down! And it’s soft now, whereas it was firm before!” Thank you, sweetie. Laughter IS the best medicine…

On January 3 everyone was exhausted from so many straight days of drinking, and so everyone was lazy about speaking Russian. I felt left out all day, and started to pine for my friends at home, whose jokes I understand. In the evening Rezi, Gogi, Irma, and I went to a restaurant, but there was a kid’s birthday party and the music was really loud, so we ended up not talking there either. That was the only day I really didn’t have much fun – and it wasn’t even that I wanted to leave Georgia, I just didn’t want to feel left out all the time. Thankfully, Rezi and I spent quite a bit of time talking that evening, so by the time we went to bed I was feeling much better.

Georgia Part 5: Things I Saw

2009-01-25T18:04:00.002+04:00

See pictures from around Batumi, Tbilisi, and a couple from Moscow here.

In addition to the aquarium and the zoo, Rezi and I made our way around to the other attractions Batumi has to offer. On December 24 we went to a fortress that was built by the Romans in the first century, but it was kind of dark by the time we got there, so I couldn’t see very well. I’d like to go back when it’s light sometime. On the way there Rezi proudly pointed out that his father and brother had built the road we were on and the bridge we drove over. We also had to brake quickly for a cow in the middle of the road, which sort of cracked me up. We had a fantastic guide – Emzari, Temuka’s friend and an archeology professor at the university here (I’m pretty sure it’s also only through his influence that they opened the fortress to visitors at all in the winter). The fortress was used by the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Turks, and Emzari explained about what historical and archeological evidence they had of activity at the fortress in various centuries. I love being in a part of the world with such a rich and long history. He invited us to visit the archeology museum, which we ended up doing without calling ahead, so our tour was in Georgian (Rezi translated bits and pieces as well as he could, but mostly I relied on the English and Russian summaries on each of the display cases). I got a big cultural lesson on that tour as well – we paid for our tickets to the museum, but when our guides later found out that we knew Emzari, they were very embarrassed that we’d paid – EVERYTHING in Georgia is done based on relationships, and they would not have let us pay had they known Emzari invited us.

Emzari’s 4-year-old daughter, Lizi, came with us on our excursion, and was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. I wish I could have talked to her – she doesn’t speak Russian. But after being shy for a little while, she decided that she really liked me and gave me a lemon she picked herself from the trees in the fortress. At dinner, she refilled my juice glass for me – such a good hostess! She also recited for us the poem she’d memorized in Georgian for the New Year’s concert at kindergarten. And when her dad took her home, apparently on the way she asked if Rezi and I were an item. What a cutie!

Rezi and I also visited the other two museums in Batumi, which were admittedly less impressive. We were the first visitors at the natural and ethnographic history museum literally in months, and its sad offerings explained why. I was amazed that all the museum employees still showed up every day – what a boring job with no visitors! The art gallery was somewhat better – though Rezi found only one painting that appealed to him, I found several of the pieces quite engaging. Interestingly, I was initially not very impressed with the picture that Rezi liked – all in greys, with a hooded figure huddled under a bare tree in front of an old, ruined church. “Why do you like it so much?” I asked Rezi. “Because it is like the real Georgia,” he explained. “See how the church has been destroyed by war? And there is the sea.” While I didn’t particularly like the painting any more after Rezi’s explanation, I did appreciate hearing his point of view.

After New Year we also managed to see a pretty impressive waterfall, which was located about a 50 minute drive into the mountains. We went to the waterfall at Rezi’s father’s suggestion, and Rezi ended up being a little annoyed that we spent so much time getting there and back, as it was pretty chilly by the falling water and we only stayed about 5 minutes, and he thought it would have been more impressive had we saved the waterfall for summer. But I was glad we went – not only was the waterfall breathtaking, but I caught a glimpse of country life in Georgia, and our route, which followed a river wending lazily between two mountains, was beautiful. Georgia is fairly bursting with fresh, delicious, clear mountain spring water – on our way to the waterfall, we saw no less than a dozen mini-waterfalls coming right out of the side of the hills next to the road. You can even drink the tap water – and not only will it not make you terminally ill (like in Piter), it’s also tasty!

Georgia Part 4: New friends, feasting Georgian-style, and patriotism

2009-01-25T18:03:00.001+04:00

A few days after my arrival, but before non-Orthodox Christmas – let’s say December 21 – Rezi introduced me to some of his friends, who’d all been dying to meet me (the mystery Internet girl) since I arrived. We met up at a restaurant Rezi and I had been to once before – it’s in the shape of a huge boat! (Apparently this is the third such ship-shaped restaurant, as the first two burned down. I couldn’t help but think of Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail: “The first castle sank into the swamp, so they built a second one. That sank into the swamp too. The third castle caught fire, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up, lad, and that’s what you’re going to get!” Unfortunately, the reference isn’t funny if you don’t know Monty Python, so in Georgia I just kept it to myself).

So as not to overwhelm me, Rezi introduced me to just a few friends at first:

· Gogi (Giorgi) – Rezi’s older brother. The first night we met he was rather shy about his Russian and didn’t say much, but I subsequently found him to be very smart and engaging. I came to appreciate his willingness to let me get a word in edgewise, and best enjoyed the times when he, Rezi and I hung out on our own, because they were always considerate to keep the conversation in Russian (as soon as a fourth person showed up, the game was over – the urge to speak Georgian won out, and I’d be left out of the conversation).

· Tamazi – cheerful, extraordinarily well-read, very smart, and always telling me “how it is” in America. My favorite Tamazi quote, which became something of an inside joke among Rezi, Gogi, and me, is when Tamazi turned to me and said, “Alli, do you know who your president is?” I just looked at him, exasperated, and said, “Of course I know!” I don’t think he was actually intending to question my intelligence, it just didn’t come out in Russian quite the way he wanted. Later Gogi explained that Tamazi’s question was probably a vestige of Soviet propaganda – in school they were taught that some 70% of Americans don’t know who their own president is.

· Temuka (Temur) – 32 years old with a law degree, he works for the administration of the naval academy in Batumi. Temuka was the only one among our group who was not at all shy about speaking Russian with me right from the start, and so it was he who provided me my first introduction to Georgian culture and history.

· Eliko (Elene) – Temuka’s younger sister, a cheerful beauty with a ready laugh, she speaks excellent English – especially considering she’s never been abroad. Temuka and Eliko live with their parents right next door to Rezi’s family; their parents grew up together, and Rezi and Eliko grew up like brother and sister.

The first time I met everyone, they were all pretty shy about using their Russian – though pretty much everyone knows Russian, and most TV and movies are in Russian, they don’t often have the need to speak it out loud. Temuka was the exception, and jumped right into conversation with me. Eliko, excited for the chance to practice her English, stuck to my native language, so the whole evening – four hours in all – Georgian, Russian, and English whirled around me. Thank goodness I went to Georgia now, when my brain is already pretty good at switching between not understanding at all and Russian and English; if I had come at this time of year in 2005, I wouldn’t have understood ANYTHING, and my brain would have exploded trying. In all, we all laughed a lot, and I was really impressed by the totally relaxed and welcoming camaraderie I felt from the group.

Our dinner in the boat restaurant was my first exposure to feasting Georgian style. First rule: order more food than anyone could possibly eat. Food is served family style – everyone takes a little bit of whatever they want from the dishes in the middle of the table. Often there are so many of them that they’re perched precariously one atop another. Second rule: there must be drinking, typically wine, but sometimes vodka. The drinking is coordinated by the tamada, or toastmaster, who is responsible for making all the toasts the entire evening. Our tamada on December 21 was Temuka. Toasts do not end at a simply “Here’s to us,” or “To your health,” but go on for several minutes. The more the tamada has had to drink, I’ve noticed, the longer the toast goes on, as he adds in illustrative stories and anecdotes. The tamada also chooses a second-in-command who is responsible for adding anything to the toast that the tamada may have forgotten, or that the second would like to reiterate. It’s important to clink glasses with everyone at the table, often more than once. After the toast, it’s polite to drink nearly all of the wine in the glass in one go, leaving only a few sips at the bottom – but I learned early on that that’s a quick way to make yourself ill, and a “democratic” tamada will not take offense if you don’t drink to the bottom. Toasts that I heard over and over again throughout my stay include: to us, to our parents, to our grandparents, to those who have passed on, to life, to children, to women (for this one all the men take the toast standing), and to Georgia. There were lots of others, but those toasts were repeated every time we gathered. Temuka on that first night, and everyone else after, was always very considerate to toast in Russian so I would understand. Often these toasts were prefaced with “This sounds much more beautiful in Georgian” or “Russian can’t express this the way I’d like to,” but I found many of the toasts very moving, despite the “limitations” of the Russian language. I wish I’d recorded an evening of toasts so I could translate them for you – until you’ve experienced a Georgian toast, it’s hard to imagine.

Georgians are incredibly proud of their history and culture – and with good reason. Temuka explained with pride how every major conqueror in the world has conquered Georgia at some point in its 5000 year history – Romans, Mongols, Azerbaijanis, Russians, Greeks, some others – but they’ve preserved their culture. They expressed no sense of shame at having been conquered so often – how could it be otherwise, they reasoned, Georgia’s such a small country! Also, Georgians claim to be a very tolerant people; as evidence my Temuka cited Georgia never having an anti-Semite movement and, more recently, that Russians living in Georgia have experienced no negative fallout (i.e. hate crime) from the August war. Temuka also explained all about how Georgia is the cradle of winemaking. There used to be over 5,000 varieties of grapes represented in the vineyards of Georgia, but now there are only about 2,000 left, as conquerors always destroyed the grapevines when they attacked. Some varieties of grapes are found only in the vineyards of one or two families.

The first time I heard the above information, I was deeply interested. The twentieth time – not so much. I’m hoping it’s just because I was visiting for the first time, but I heard about Georgia being invaded by every major conqueror and yet still being a tolerant and open people from literally every person I met, and particularly from men, because they were usually raising toasts. I also heard a lot of, “You guys in America, you have it all good, while WE…” which sort of got under my skin after a while. Yes, the overall standard of living in America is higher than in Georgia, but America is a huge country, and the people in it have a huge range of experiences. I felt like I ended up smiling and nodding a lot as three or four people talked to me all at the same time – often about the same topic – but leaving me with no opportunity to get a word in edgewise.

Every Georgian I met was fiercely patriotic. Among the younger generation – Rezi, Gogi and Co. – there was a general consensus that if you live in Georgia, you should speak Georgian. More than once on our walks we’d overhear someone speaking Russian, and Rezi would say with disdain, “See how he lives here and doesn’t even speak our language? That is wrong. He lives his whole life in Georgia and doesn’t speak Georgian.” I often tried to defend the non-Georgian speaker (maybe he just moved here, maybe he does speak Georgian but he’s taking a break to speak his native language with his friends, etc), but Rezi was steadfast. When I pointed out that we were having this very conversation in Russian, he said, “That’s only because you haven’t had time to learn Georgian yet, and I haven’t learned English.” Gogi was fond of declaring, “I’m speaking the language of our official enemy only for you, Alli.” Several times I heard about their Russian neighbor, who understands Georgian but refuses to speak it. It was clear that that neighbor was not a part of the close circle on Rezi’s street into which I was readily accepted.

I do, in fact, want to learn Georgian. It’s uncomfortable to be the one person in the room that everyone else has to modify their behavior for – and besides, even when I was there, they spent a lot of time joking in Georgian, and I’d like to at least have an idea of what they’re joking about.

Georgia Part 3: First week and impressions of Batumi

2009-01-25T18:02:00.002+04:00

The first week or so followed a fairly predictable pattern. We’d wake up around 10 or 11, lounge around for a while, then, driven by starvation, finally make our way out into the bustling town. Every “morning” we ate breakfast at the same café: octagon-shaped with floor-to-ceiling windows all around, the kitchen and counter filled the center of the restaurant, with seating all around the edges by the windows. Our first time there, some boys were setting off homemade firecrackers in the park next to the café. Every time one went off I jumped. But mostly it was quiet at that café, which is why we liked it (though he grew up in a noisy culture, where people talk loudly and often gather in large groups to shout over one another, Rezi doesn’t like a lot of noise. Thus, his evaluation of a restaurant hinged on the quality of the food and whether or not it was quiet). Every day we had the same breakfast (after Day 4 or 5 our waitress stopped even asking what we wanted): we started with a cup of thick, sweet Turkish coffee, which we followed up with khachapuri Ajara-style and a glass of orange juice.

I’m going to write a lot more about food later, but I want to take a minute to discuss khachapuri. Khachapuri, at its most basic, is a flat bread filled with cheese, and is one of the most common foods in Georgia. There are several ways to make it, each indigenous to a different region in Georgia, and often it is reminiscent of cheese pizza without the tomato sauce. Ajara-style is definitely my favorite. The bread is football shaped and formed into a shallow boat, into which is spread Georgian farmer’s cheese (which should be salty, but not too salty, because the more salt, the lower the quality), about four tablespoons of butter, and a raw egg. You then mix up this delicious mass with your fork (and if you’re me, you take about ¾ of your butter and add it to Rezi’s khachapuri, because that much butter makes you ill, but he likes it, and plus his metabolism can handle it), so you end up with a bread boat filled with a thick, yellow-and-white liquid mass. Working carefully so as not to allow the egg/butter/cheese mix to escape, you then tear off chunks of the bread, dip them in the goo, and devour. So. Yummy. I want one now.

After breakfast we would walk around Batumi, sometimes in silence, as time went on, more often in conversation. We went to the aquarium, which was kind of small and sad and Soviet, but still had some interesting fishes, and to the zoo, which was mostly closed up for winter, though we did see a couple of monkeys, a baboon, and a whole herd of guinea pigs, which delighted me. We wandered around the port and up and down The Boulevard. We would walk for a while, then sit on a bench for a few minutes, then walk some more. The first week the weather was wonderful – sunny and in the 40s (though poor Rezi was still freezing all the time. I joked that if he was cold already he’d be better off not visiting Iowa in winter). Basically, we didn’t do much at all except get to know one another, which is exactly what we needed. This also provided the perfect opportunity for me to unwind, which I’d been longing to do since the BEGINNING of the semester.

As we wandered around those first few days (and more later as I saw more of the town), I noticed a sharp contrast between “touristy” Batumi and real Batumi. Batumi (population 150,000) is the capital of the Independent Republic of Ajara within Georgia (Ajara was once a separatist region like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but was reintegrated into the country peacefully several years ago), and is an important port city. It’s most important economic activity, however, is tourism. Once a Soviet resort hot spot, it now plays host mostly to Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, and other local folks (except Russians). The coast (along The Boulevard) is teeming with cafes, restaurants, and bars, which sat eerily quiet while I was there. They were typically open, but often we’d be the only clients in a restaurant with seating for 50. I imagine in the summer it’s quite a different story. In addition to The Boulevard, Batumi boasts a large park by the sea, home to exotic birds, trees from different parts of the world, and fountains that dance and light up to music at night. A sign at each of the park entrances proclaims in pictographs (like the no-smoking sign): No bikes! No littering! No dogs! No cows! Yep, folks, it’s NOT okay to drive your cattle through the seaside park in Batumi (Flossie was very disappointed – she’d so hoped to see the peacocks). In addition to the upiquitous park benches, I was happy to see numerous garbage urns, which were emptied on a daily basis (I’m not going to get into a huge Russia vs. Georgia thing, but seriously, what few trash urns there are in Piter get emptied only when the dvornik feels like getting around to it. Kind of like sidewalk snow removal. Actually, kind of like EVERYTHING the dvorniki are responsible for doing). A large billboard near the movie theatre proclaimed in English: “Batumi: A part of Europe!” They’re certainly trying to make it look that way, at least where tourists hang out. In this part of Batumi, there’s lots of construction, including the city’s first skyscraper (which looks oddly out of place among the mostly two- and three-storied buildings). Unfortunately, after the August war, much of the construction was halted as materials became scarce and money dried up, giving certain areas a half-finished feel. At some point, however, there will be a fancy new set of apartment buildings that only foreigners will be able to afford, an oceanarium with dolphins, a new stadium, and more hotels.

As you move inland and towards the mountains, the real city becomes visible. The streets and sidewalks tended to be in pretty bad shape – a couple times I cursed myself for wearing heels, particularly at night, because walking was just plain treacherous. Buildings were brightly painted in lots of different colors – even the high-rise apartment buildings, leftovers from the Soviet era, have been redone in vivid reds, blues, purples, greens, and yellows. Most houses were two-storied affairs with balconies, laundry hanging out to dry on clotheslines, and stone walls enclosing yards with mandarin and kiwi trees (I ate kiwis fresh from the tree in the backyard – in January!!) and, of course, grapevines. From what I saw, oder houses, like Rezi’s, had the staircase on the outside of the house – so you end up getting rained on on your way to the second floor. Rezi’s house has no corridors – either all the rooms lead one into the next, or you can only access a room from an outside door. The bathrooms, while they had plumbing and electricity, all tended to be separate from the house (once again, getting rained on). Additionally, the houses tend to be headed by wood-burning stoves and electric heaters, since gas became too expensive for most people once it was privatized after the fall of the Soviet Union. That means that I ended up being cold a lot more than I thought I would, since it was cold both indoors and out (especially in museums. Brr!).

There were slot machine casinos EVERYWHERE (like in Piter three years ago, before they passed a law that shut most of them down); although I don’t really understand the appeal, they must be pretty popular (and successful) for there to be so many of them. Streets were lined with shops whose wares spilled out onto the sidewalk, blending one into another so it wasn’t always clear where one ended and the next began. There were definitively western-style stores in some places – like for clothes and electronics and stuff – but most of the stores for food and day-to-day wares were more like closets than stores, the inventory stacked in magical ways to make it all fit and not come tumbling down.

One street we crossed to get to Rezi’s house was lined with loitering men toting tool belts, chain saws, and other equipment. “You can tell how good the economy’s doing by looking at this street,” Rezi explained. “Those men are all unemployed. They congregate on this street, and if someone needs a worker for the day or a project done, they come here to find someone to do it. The better the economy, the fewer of these guys you’ll see standing here.”

Batumi definitely has a small-town feel. Near the end of my second week there we had to go to the airport to make some changes to my plane tickets. While we were waiting in the parking lot afterwards for our ride to pick us up, I heard a rooster crow, which tickled me pink – it was the first airport rooster I’ve ever heard (there’s also a rooster on Rezi’s street somewhere that is bad at telling time and insistently crows at all hours of the day).

Georgia Part 2: Arrival

2009-01-25T18:01:00.000+04:00

I arrived at the tiny Batumi airport around 2:30 PM. Ours was the only plane on the tarmac, and, despite my nerves, I was delighted by the warm rays of the sun and the gentle, +12C air. In the airplane I was on the verge of tears as Batumi came into view. “What am I getting myself into?” I thought. Sure, Rezi and I had chatted online for five whole months, and I felt fairly confident that he was who he said he was – but what if I was just being extraordinarily and uncharacteristically naïve? And even if he wasn’t some sort of con man, what if it turned out that we just didn’t like each other? Of course, these thoughts didn’t just occur to me as we were landing – they’d been spinning around my brain for weeks as the date of my departure grew closer and closer. At one point during the last week of classes I even considered calling off the whole trip. But the prospect of spending my 3-week vacation in Petersburg in the deadest, darkest part of winter spurred me on. “I can always just leave early,” I reassured myself.

Waiting for my suitcase to come down the baggage claim conveyor belt, my nerves were all on edge. What would our first reaction be? What would we say to each other? Suddenly, someone walked by the automatic doors that open into the lobby and they slid open with a whoosh. A throng of about fifty Georgian faces all eagerly peered in at the recently arrived (я хотела написать «смотрели на надавно приехавших»), seeking their friends and loved ones. Which one of them was mine? Then I spotted him. Standing near the back of the crowd was the tallest, lankiest Georgian I’d ever set eyes on. He saw me too, and we waved to each other before the doors slid shut once more. “Hey,” I thought to myself. “Not a bad start. We waved. That’s a good first reaction.” Reunited with my bag, I strode resolutely into the lobby, parting the sea of curious faces as I slowly made my way forward (I was definitely the tallest, blondest girl in the airport, and everyone eyed me with interest. I didn’t see another natural blonde the whole three weeks I was in Georgia). Rezi and I hugged awkwardly, then made our way to the waiting car, where his close neighbor, Avto, patiently sat, smoking. “I wanted to take a taxi,” Rezi explained, “but my friend Avto insisted on driving us.”

Avto drove us to the apartment where Rezi had rented us the loft for the duration of my visit. We climbed three flights of stairs to get to the apartment, then inside the apartment made our way to the third floor – our home for three weeks. It was a spacious room with slanted ceilings, mustard-yellow walls, and a curious selection of framed posters, including a couple of bikini-clad pin-up girls and one larger-than-life depiction of a very small dog. We slept on the saddest fold-out couch I’ve ever laid eyes on – the springs were all broken, and the foot of the bed sagged so heavily that the first night we slept practically sitting up. We subsequently propped up the end of the bed with a footstool – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Rezi took me out to dinner at a restaurant by the sea. We sat in awkward silence. He’d say, “So say something,” and I’d say, “I don’t know what to say. You say something.” I giggled too much from nerves; he mumbled, shy of his spoken Russian, and I couldn’t understand anything he said. After dinner we went for a walk down The Boulevard – a brick-paved path lined with benches and palm trees, their fronds tied up for the winter, which stretches for no less than two miles along the rocky beach. We still didn’t talk much, but it wasn’t as awkward as at dinner. It was more that we’d spent 5 months doing nothing but talk, so now we were being quiet.

Georgia Part 1: Two nights on a train

2009-01-25T17:59:00.002+04:00

Here it is, the long-awaited Georgia Blog Post. Ironically, it took my computer breaking, thereby denying me the distractions of Facebook, iTunes, Spider solitaire, and, occasionally, homework, to get me to actually sit down and write. Admittedly, I have pages and pages of notes, but to turn them into something that would be interesting for others to read seemed to require more time and energy than I could find in the past couple of weeks. Because this blog post is covering three weeks of occasions, impressions, and thoughts, it’s very long. Therefore, I’ve broken it into several more manageable chunks, to make it easier for you both to read about and to comment on specific aspects of my trip (I know the feeling of getting to the end of a long blog and forgetting what I wanted to say about something at the beginning). Part 1, written on the train ride from Piter to Kiev, I’ve typed up from my handwritten journal; everything else here is written from the “I’ve been back in Piter for two weeks” point of view, rather than the more immediate “Holy cow I’m in Georgia!” point of view. Please enjoy!

Georgia Part 1: Two nights on a train

18/12/2008 12:15 AM

I’m sitting in Moscovsky train station in Piter. Nikolai and his friend, two random Russians who took interest in me in the metro, helped me with my luggage on the transfer between Dostoevskaya and Vladimirskaya metro stations, but they didn’t insist when I declined coffee. [Note: In Russia, coffee = sex. Usually.] I’m nervous as hell about this trip, although I’m feeling some post-rush around calm. At least I do –– f***. I forgot the peanut butter. And I thought I had everything. Well, I guess Rezo will just have to go without. He’s managed for 24 years, I’m sure he’ll manage a while longer. Dang it!

18/12/2008 11:20 AM

[On the train from Piter to Moscow] I ended up in a compartment with FIVE men. The two on the end were friends and talked a lot; the rest of us sat in silence. When the train left it was super hot, but by the middle of the night I was glad for the thick wool blanket. Every time I rolled over I woke up, but I did manage to sleep long enough to have a dream. Only now I don’t remember it.

We arrived on schedule, and I decided to take my bags to the storage room at Kievsky train station. Luckily, Kievsky is located just five metro stops from Leningradsky [my arrival point in Moscow], so I only had to wrestle my stuff through two metro stations – no transfers. Wrestle is definitely the word I would use – even though I’m using Galya’s small suitcase, I also have my computer tote, purse, and bag of provisions for the train. I sort of wish I was hungrier so I’d eat that stuff faster.

I’m sitting in McDonald’s right now, drinking the first cup of coffee I’ve had in Russia that’s been worth the four bucks and eating Galya’s apple pirozhki, which I snuck on a plate to make it look like I bought them here.

My train to Kiev leaves in about five hours. After breakfasting and resting my feet (I’m in heels! Smart, huh?), I’m going to spend a few hours perusing the collection at the Tretyakov Gallery. I’ve been to the Tretyakov Gallery of Modern Art a couple times and really liked it, but the “classic” Tretyakov I’ve been to only once, in 2005, and we had a tour guide who kept switching between Russian and English so that my poor brain couldn’t understand anything she was saying (I’d only been in Russia about two months at that point, and my listening comprehension was still not that great).

18/12/2008 4:30 PM

Sitting in the train to Kiev. We should be taking off in about 15 minutes. Some asshole selling cell phones of questionable origin started hitting on me in the train station, and wouldn’t leave me alone, no matter what I said. I told him I was married, I told him to leave me alone, but he kept following me all the way out the station and down the platform to my car (which, of course, was way at the far end of the platform). It just really pisses me off that a woman traveling alone is instantly open to disrespectful, objectifying treatment from men. I SHOULD have just as much of a right as men do to travel in peace without having to fight off punk jerks all the time.

19/12/2008 6:45 AM Kiev Time (7:45 AM Moscow Time)

I ended up traveling with just four people in my compartment, so there was a little more room for everybody. At the same time, my traveling companions were the most interesting ones I’ve had to date. Artyom – works in a construction company near the border with Ukraine, returning home after an urgent business trip to Moscow. Andrei – quiet, 30-something, plays pop music (in the form of downloaded ringtones) on his cell phone WAY too loud. And Irina – Irina takes the cake. 41 years old, she’s just returned from a birthday party and is completely drunk. Not the slur-your-words kind of drunk, unfortunately, but a belligerent drunk. She kept saying rude things to the guys, like, “I’m watching you, thieves! I know you want to steal my phone!” and absolutely HORRIBLE things about Ukrainians – even though Andrei was Ukrainian, and she herself was on her way to Kiev. She kept assuring me that the Ukrainian customs officers were going to be total bastards in comparison to their Russian counterparts. Luckily, I got on her good side by filling out her Ukrainian migration card for her – she was too drunk to write legibly in the little boxes – and she left me alone.

While Irina alternated between a sound sleep and rude exchanges with our fellow passengers, Artyom and I had a bit of our own stilted conversation (I’m just not sure what you’re supposed to talk about with strangers on the train, or how much info about myself it’s appropriate to reveal) before he went off to find someone else to talk to. I went to sleep the first time around 8:30, woke up for Russian customs and passport control at 11:15 (I was the only American in my car. Everyone, including me, watched the multi-entry visa stamping process with interest – I’ve never seen it done before), then woke up again around 3 AM Moscow time for Ukrainian customs and passport control.

We arrived in Kiev at 5:10 AM local time, Andrei helped me with my bags, I exchanged $20 for grivnyas, and got in a marshrutka to the airport. 45 minutes we drove – and that with no traffic – and now I’m waiting to check in, because so far it’s too early.

I wish I had some time to explore Kiev/ Ukraine. It looks a lot like Russia, but everything’s in Ukrainian, which is just different enough from Russian that I don’t always trust that I understand what I’m reading. Everyone I’ve talked to so far speaks Russian, thank goodness. I’ve heard that in some parts of Ukraine, particularly in the western part of the country, they’ll pretend like they don’t understand you if you speak Russian. I can imagine some fairly frustrating situations arising in the event that my interlocutor also didn’t speak English.

Just a few hours from now I’ll be in Georgia. Don’t even really know what to expect. What I’d really like to do is take a shower. Hope it’s not rude to ask for one first thing.

Eureka!

2009-01-19T19:51:00.000+04:00

So the reason I haven’t been writing is not because I don’t have anything to say, but because I’m having time management issues. I feel like I’m in middle school again and need someone to check my assignment book every night. Sheesh. Anyway, I had an epiphany I’d like to share:

You can make vegetable pot pie in a square pan.

Yes folks, it’s true, the fact that the pan is not round is not a real encumbrance on the pie-making process. It’s just that sometimes I get so stuck in my idea of how something “should” be done that a completely obvious answer to a rather simple problem just doesn’t occur to me. The lack of a round, American-style pie pan has been a real sticking point with me until today.

Thinking outside the box. Woot.

Workin on it

2009-01-14T18:40:00.003+04:00

I'm working on an extensive Georgia blog post. Thanks for your patience. In the meantime, here are some pictures.

New Year's Pictures

2009-01-06T19:46:00.002+04:00

I'm still alive and kicking here in Georgia, wrapping up the last few days of my visit. The time has gone so quickly; I'm not ready to go back to Piter yet!

I've got about 20 pages of material to put up here, but it's not ready yet, and I'm saving the editing for the train ride home. Till then, here are some New Year's photos to tide you over.

I'm outta here

2008-12-17T01:08:00.002+04:00

I leave in 24 hours for Georgia. Eep!

I've been running around trying to get things done before I go. The time crunch has forced me into linguistic situations I've been avoiding all semester, like taking my shoes in to get the heels fixed, and riding a marshrutka (minibus) all by myself to a place I've never been before... sounds elementary, but I've been ridiculously afraid of doing that since... always! Because it involves talking to the bus driver. I know, dumb, right? So yay me.

I should still have some email access from Georgia, but I'm not sure how much blog updating I'll be able to do. I'll be sure to take careful notes on my experiences, however, and give you all a probably much too full update when I get back to Russia.

If I don't get to say it later, Happy New Year!

Good news! I DON'T hate Russia!

2008-12-12T01:17:00.000+04:00

Well, finals are finally over, and though I can’t completely relax yet – we still have presentations on Monday and language testing Tuesday and Wednesday – I’m feeling much better about everything. Now that I’ve taken my exams, I sort of feel like I might have even learned something this semester! In the spirit of good moods, I feel like I have something I need to put down in writing, lest I forget again next time I come to Russia.

I’ve tried to avoid complaining too much on this blog, both because complaining is boring to read and because I didn’t want anyone to worry about me. Plus, it doesn’t really help me feel better all that much. But I have to admit, mostly to my future self, who will want to idealize Piter, I’ve been pretty miserable most of this semester, for a wide variety of reasons. Some of them are out of my control – 18-hour nights, for example. Some of them have been within my control, like averaging only 4 hours of sleep a night this entire semester – something I’ve never done to myself before, and something I never hope to do again. Some factors combined to send my control-freak, perfectionist personality into a tailspin – lack of control over my diet and resultant weight gain (6% milk?! Come ON! That’s half-and-half!), lack of motivation to study (fueled in part by lack of sleep), not having a regular gym schedule, and in general feeling like my Russian was stagnating – maybe not getting worse, but surely not improving. Accustomed to being optimistic, positive, and generally in good spirits, I was not prepared for the waves of total negativity that repeatedly bowled me over this semester. I spent entire walks to school hating everything around me; entire weekends I avoided studying by daydreaming about shopping at HyVee and cooking non-Russian food in my own kitchen. So many days I just wanted to tell Russia to f*** off, and go home and copy tapes at the Center for Media Production and live a normal, English-speaking, American life. For all that, I’ve only cried once. Instead of complaining on the blog, I tried to write about interesting occurrences. When it got really tough, I stopped writing altogether. (Regular readers may have noticed.)

I don’t remember feeling this way in 2005. It’s entirely possible that this is exactly how I felt then too, but my brain wisely forgot how awful the first few months were in favor of remembering how great the last few were. Nonetheless, I think a few things contributed to the differences between 2005 and 2008. For one thing, I actually knew and understood Russian when I arrived this year. In 2005, I think I connected a lot of my negative feelings with not understanding what was going on around me; when my language improved, my self-confidence soared, and so did my mood. This year, I erroneously expected that having prior knowledge of Russian and of Petersburg would make getting used to living here a piece of cake. In fact, I think it’s had the opposite effect – I’ve been more disappointed by how long it’s taken to adjust simply because I thought it would take no time at all.

So other than as a word of warning to myself, why am I telling you all this now? Because, dear friends, for the last week or two this feeling has been fading, and today, despite having to take two of my hardest finals, was simply a wonderful day. It was one of those days that reminded me why I love Russia, Russians, and particularly Petersburg. It was one of those days that’s gotten me thinking about ways I could extend my stay in Piter for a year or so – and it’s worthy of mention that I’ve having such thoughts in the dark, dead of winter, not in the carefree, eternal light of summer!

What was today such a great day? Simple – the human connection. At my internship today we had an organization-wide meeting (i.e. all eight of us gathered in one room) to discuss the Winter issue of our journal, The Russian Mæcenas, which just came out. Our head editor, Arkady Yakovlevich, spoke very kindly about everyone’s contributions to the journal; in my case, the translations for the English pages. The president of our organization, Inna Germanovna, also expressed her approval of my work this fall. What was important to me was not the compliments, although it’s always nice to hear positive feedback about one’s work – what was important was that they made me feel like an integral part of the collective. It made me want to do more to help the journal get on its feet; it made me want to find a way to continue working with the InterJournalist Center in the future – even if that means sending translations by email from the US.

After work I went to my elective course – the last one for me this semester, although Russians have one more week of class. After class I thanked Viktor Stepanovich for allowing us to listen to his lectures, and he insisted that we return in the spring to hear other history courses. I think I may take him up on that.

Then two of our classmates, Vasya and Seryozha, took me and Berney out for beer. While much of the evening was spent listening to Vasya talk (born with the gift of gab – but good listening comprehension practice for me), it was also interspersed with toasts to international friendships and to history (which brought us together). Seryozha walked me home (well, to the metro) afterwards, and we had a really nice conversation. I was overwhelmed by the feeling of acceptance I got from these guys – despite my imperfect Russian, they were still interested in hanging out with me. That may sound like a weird thing for me to find so touching, but I can’t describe how difficult it is to meet people who are actually interested in working through the language barrier to get to know me. While in English I’m Miss Outgoing, in Russian, it takes a lot more time and effort for me to come out of my shell; sometimes I just don’t know what to say to start or continue a conversation.

In short, I’m finding my place in Piter, and it makes me want to stay. I was really troubled for a while by the idea that my love for this city last time had somehow been a fluke, but it turns out it just took some time to find it again. It’s a wonderful feeling!

Thanksgiving Shenanigans

2008-12-05T16:04:00.000+04:00

Happy belated Thanksgiving wishes to everyone; I hope you all got to spend time with your loved ones and stuff yourselves silly. I had a full and fun Thanksgiving break. We were lucky enough to have Thursday and Friday off from school. Thursday I did nothing all day except go shopping for feast supplies. I was disappointed to learn that they were all out of turkeys at the OK Hypermarket (literally, they’d sold out. Guess all the other Americans in Piter beat me to the punch). But I got a chicken instead, which was more appropriately sized for my family anyway. Friday I went to the American Councils Thanksgiving Feast, which ended up being about five of us from Flagship plus Zhenya, one of our awesome tutors, a few very young Russians who studied abroad in the US last year, and the American Councils staff (also Russians, except the director). We had KFC. I ate a chicken breast. Can you believe it? Nearly five years of pretty solid vegetarianism, and the first chicken I eat is KFC. Good grief. Anyway, after the feast the Flagship guys, me, and Zhenya went to play pool. Kennon kicked all of our butts. It was so fun, I think it should become a new Thanksgiving tradition. Thanksgiving pool. Yeah.

Saturday the fun began at home. I cooked all day, making pumpkin pie, that potato casserole with the frosted flakes on top, roast chicken, turkey breasts (Galya found them and insisted on adding them to the feast, so that everything would be done right. What a sweetie!), stuffing, and deviled eggs. Everything turned out a little… Russian. For example, I had to use butter to make the pie crust, and make the pie in a springform pan instead of a regular pie pan, so when I put the pie in the oven, some of the crust melted off and the apartment was filled with smoke from burning crust all day. Oops. Also, the pumpkin was not the convenient pureed stuff you get in the can, but an actual gourd. It didn’t puree as well as I’d have liked (Galya’s blender, while it looks pretty fancy, is actually pretty wimpy), so the consistency was a little off. But hey, we had pumpkin pie! For the potato casserole I had to approximate my own cream of mushroom soup (Galya insisted on adding more mushrooms than I really wanted, all the time saying “but they’re tiny, you need more of them”), and I ended up not baking it long enough, so the potatoes were just a hair on the crunchy side. Meh, it was still tasty. Besides, what are you supposed to do when the oven settings are labeled 1 through 8 rather than with actual temperatures? Even Galya’s recipes are given for “hot” “medium” and “low” oven. Sheesh. The stuffing, however, turned out splendidly.

Galya and I were joined by Kira, Nadya, and Galya’s daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. Adding the Russian tradition of toasting at meals, we all raised our shot-glasses of home-brewed rowan berry vodka and took turns saying what we were thankful for. Zhenya, the always inquisitive son-in-law, kept asking, “So, you’re giving thanks to the Indians, right?” With Kira present, he had a new American to grill, so Kira spent a lot of time answering questions about earthquakes in California (where she’s from), whether people wear sombreros in California, and about her impressions of Petersburg and Russian people. Zhenya’s reaction to the pumpkin pie also cracked me up: he said that as long as he didn’t think about the fact that it was pumpkin, it was very delicious – but the idea of a pie made from a vegetable freaked him out.

In all I had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. I’ve got a few pictures up here if you’d like to see the feast for yourself.

I haven’t been updating the blog of late because I’ve been feeling very overwhelmed by everything I have going on here. I haven’t been sleeping much, but I can’t seem to get anything done either. I’m finding it much more “important” to go to the movies with Nadya or to concerts at the brand new Marinsky Concert Hall with Jay. The lack of sunlight is really depressing; I’m in school literally from dawn to dusk. Yesterday I ended up not going to class because I was so exhausted; I slept till 2, then slept another 8 hours last night straight through. I’m feeling a lot better today. I have finals next week; Monday the 15th I have to give a presentation on my elective course (which I haven’t finished writing yet), and on the 16th and 17th we have language testing. Blargh. Just gotta hold out for a couple more weeks, then I’ll have three weeks off.

The Military Space Academy and a Nighttime Encounter with a Muzhik

2008-11-24T23:13:00.003+04:00

Admittedly, when I first moved into Number 3 Petrovksy Lane, I was a bit unnerved by the columns of uniformed boys marching up and down the street all the time, cadets at the Military Space Academy. With time, however, I’ve grown to appreciate the constant presence of the cadets. For one, I always feel pretty safe walking down Krasny Kursant Street, the main road I walk on to get to the metro, to the gym, and home from my internship. I feel fairly confident that if I needed help, I could turn to a cadet, and he’d help me out – or at least not make the situation worse. And then there’s the always amusing situations that arise when a cadet decides to talk to me (okay, so there’s only been one such situation so far, but who knows what the future holds?). Today I discovered another reason I like living amongst the cadets: the Military Space Academy campus takes up several long blocks of Krasny Kursant Street, and the sidewalks along all those blocks were swept immaculately clean of the snow that’s been falling for the past few days. It was nice to take a break for a couple blocks from skidding over and trudging through the slippery, slushy, half-packed, half-loose snowy mush that covers all the rest of the sidewalks in this city.

On Saturday the streets were still clean; it didn’t start snowing heavily till early Sunday morning. Saturday evening much of our American group and several Russian friends gathered in a club downtown to celebrate the birthdays of Kennon and Andrew (a few pictures here). After a beer, some hearty laughter over Mark’s gift to Andrew (a pair of “stud undies” with a 4-foot long tube for his… well, you know), and a couple dances to the live rockabilly-blues band Forrest Gump, I headed home, arriving at Chkalovskaya metro station around 11:30 or 11:45 PM. Not that late, right? Usually I feel fine on the 10-15 minute walk home from the metro, but for some reason, I felt really uneasy walking home Saturday night. First I had to walk through a group of four guys that eyed me in a disconcerting way, then I walked past another group of them clustered around a beer kiosk. That was all on Chkalovsky Prospekt, and I thought that once I got to Krasny Kursant Street, I’d feel better. But the fun didn’t stop there.

A middle-aged muzhik (i.e. lower-class working fellow, not very educated, reeking of beer, and swearing every other word) approaches me, saying “Devushka, devushka,” to get my attention. He’s right in the middle of my path; I stop about six feet away. He’s been in a fight.

“What?” I say.
“Devushka, do you know how to get to [names some street, but I don’t catch which one]?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “You can get to the metro if you go to the corner and turn left.”
“Don’t you see, they ^%#*@ beat me up, look at my #*!@# eye @#!^&$.”
“So what?” I say, with intonation that says What do you expect me to do about it?
“Can’t you take me there?” he pleads, stepping closer. I can smell stale domestic beer on his breath. His eye does look kind of bad. I back away, into the street. My path to home is now clear, if I need to run. I curse inwardly; there isn’t a damned cadet in sight – I bet they have a curfew or something. I’m wondering if the two guys I passed near the corner were still there, and if they’d come running if I screamed.
“No,” I say.
“Are you afraid?” he asks.
“Yes, I am. Please don’t come any nearer.”
“Can’t you just take me there yourself? Look at my eye &#!@%.” I back away further. “You’re afraid.”
“Of course I’m afraid! I’m sorry, I can’t take you. The metro is right around the corner. I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t,” I say, and turn towards home. I walk quickly and don’t look back, finally feeling safe again when the heavy steel door to my stairwell locks behind me.

I tell this story not to freak anyone out at home – overall I still feel safe in my neighborhood – but because this encounter got me thinking about the rather horrible position that muzhik was in. It’s possible the whole request for help was a sham intended to get me into a position where he could take advantage of me in some way. But it’s much more likely that he was actually in need of help. He’d clearly been drinking –every muzhik drinks, often starting early in the morning. He’d clearly gotten into a scuffle with someone, and whether it was something he’d started or if he’d gotten mugged or whatever, I have no way of knowing. But there he was, with no one to turn to. To approach another man could get him into a situation worse than the one he’d just gotten out of – you never know what a man here might do if he thinks he can turn a situation to his advantage (I realize that sounds like gross overgeneralization, and perhaps it is, but in Petersburg, at night, I feel like it’s a case of “better safe than sorry,” and I avoid men like the plague). So the muzhik’s alternative is to turn to a woman for help, who, like me, is more likely than not to be afraid of him. It’s entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that he intended me no harm; that he really just needed some help getting to a medical facility or his brother’s house or something like that. But I just couldn’t risk it – just as almost any woman here wouldn’t risk it. And my reaction to his request has got me thinking about how no one trusts anyone anymore – if you’re not свой, “one’s own,” then you’re чужой, “other” – and I’m not going to risk anything to help you. It’s one of the unfortunate realities of living in a large urban area. I hope that muzhik got the help he needed, even without my assistance.

The Russian Mindset Stole my Lunch

2008-11-19T23:28:00.001+04:00

I used to eat lunch relatively frequently at this vegetarian café I like, Troitsky Most. This café offered two “quick lunch” options: the three-course business lunch for 169 rubles (about $7), or, for 103 rubles (about $4) you could get the “fitness” lunch: the salad of the day, some kind of soup, a grain/pasta dish, and a glass of juice. “Fitness” was a great deal, and wildly popular – just about everyone who went into the café around lunchtime ordered it.

They’ve done away with my fitness lunch.

Further, the fact that they did away with the fitness lunch gave me an insight into the Russian mindset. This is just an idea, so please feel free to argue with me.

I in no way pretend to be a business expert, but it seems to me that if a business has hit on a popular idea, it should do its best to develop and promote that idea – “the people have spoken” and all that. In the case of “fitness,” I think the owners of this café were unhappy with the fact that everyone ordered the 103-ruble lunch instead of the 169-ruble lunch. In America, it seems to me, business owners would look at that and try to do something either to increase sales of the 103-ruble lunch even further, or to make the more expensive lunch more attractive, or perhaps eliminate the less-frequently-ordered 169-ruble lunch. However, in the top-down tradition of Russia, the café has decided to try to force people to order the 169-ruble lunch by simply eliminating the more popular 103-ruble lunch. They’re banking on the fact that people are probably used to going there for lunch and aren’t going to stop just because the cheap lunch is no longer being offered. They’re probably right in that regard, although I’m no longer going to make a special trip all the way to that café anymore; there are cafés closer to school. But I really think their approach to this problem reflects Russia’s long history of strong, centralized power and reform imposed from above that often directly contradicts what the people are saying they want or need. Since this is what people expect to happen, they’ve stopped complaining about such changes and just say, “Well, what can you do?”

Tell me if my idea makes sense or if I sound like a crazy who’s just bitter about losing a cheap vegetarian meal.

Marvel

2008-11-19T00:45:00.003+04:00

Of all the hardships that come with living this far north, one concession that we get is the sunrise. I saw a sunrise this morning that moved me almost to tears. Gold, orange, charcoal-gray clouds glowing pink on their undersides - the entire eastern sky was awash in colors - and not just colors, but light! - that only nature can produce, and most of the world rushed by, not even noticing. I understand now what artists have been trying to capture all this time. I feel very lucky to live in a part of the city where the sunrise is visible for the first leg of my walk to school, and I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to see more sunrises in just the past three months than I have in the rest of my entire life.

Ticket Office

2008-11-19T00:39:00.000+04:00

The remnants of Soviet culture in Russia are disappearing more and more quickly as time passes. Neon signs beckon passers-by into high-end clothing stores, sex shops, and sushi bars. Brightly lit supermarkets and hypermarkets (the Russian take on Walmart) are slowly but surely replacing hole-in-the-wall grocery stores, where all the products are behind the counter and you have to talk with at least one and usually three or four surly attendants to get your groceries. Even just since three years ago, you can break a 1000 ruble note at most places without dirty looks from the cashier or needing to open your wallet and show that no, you really don’t have any smaller bills (although they still ask for change to round out the total). Stores are well-stocked. Babushki are still dressed in long, drab coats and clunky boots, but anyone under 55 is always dressed to the nines. Foreign cars fill the streets. And I even saw two separate joggers this morning. However, one place still evokes images of the bygone Soviet state: the railroad ticket office.

I buy my tickets at the main office on Canal Griboedova, not because it’s terribly convenient anymore, but because that’s where I’ve always gone, and I know exactly where it’s located. A 30-foot tall, majestic gate in the shape of an on-coming train opens to the main doors, which opens into a gigantic room. 47 ticket booths, their cashiers safely sealed behind glass windows, line both walls of the room, set into alcoves. Benches for the weary and elderly are set up along the alcoves; train schedules hang on the walls outside the alcoves, arranged according to station.

I went to the ticket office today to exchange my train ticket. I decided to get to Kiev via Moscow, thus completely avoiding Belarus; this will be much cheaper and much less of a hassle than getting a $177 transit visa.

When I went to this office a week or so ago at 3 in the afternoon, there was almost no one there. Today, however, at the exact same time, the place was a zoo. Why? Because you can only buy train tickets 45 days in advance, and New Years now falls into that time period. Everyone is getting their holiday travels in order. Only about a third of the 47 booths were open, and each of them had a line out the door. However, Russian lines do not work the way American lines do; in fact, they’re usually not lines at all. To join a line, you approach the clump of people that look like they’re waiting for the same booth, and ask “Who’s last?” Someone among that clump will raise their hand, and then you say, “I’m behind you.” You are then free to walk away, say, to double check the train schedule, and your place will be saved. Lines are complicated by the fact that many people will reserve places in more than one line (sometimes with the help of a friend), and then just watch to see which line moves faster. So there’s the potential to approach a booth that looks like it doesn’t have many people waiting, but actually end up much farther back in the line than you expected.

Today I approached Booth 47 and asked “Who’s last?” Apathetic eyes stared wearily up at me from the benches; none of them were last. A man in line pointed to the guy behind him, and I said, “You’re last? Okay, I’m behind you.” Suddenly an overweight, huffy woman in her late 50s scurried over from another line and started scolding me, “What do you mean, you’re behind him? I’m behind him, young lady! How dare you try to cut! How could you even think such a thing possible?” She then proceeded to point out the exact order of people in line. I’m like, “Okay, lady, chill out. I did ask who was last. If you are last, then I’ll be behind you.” A woman in the line for booth 45 kept barging in and telling those who approached exactly where they would be in the line, which rather set me on edge, for some reason. I felt like telling her to get her nose out of our business and occupy herself with her own line, but I didn’t say anything.

Choosing a line at the ticket office is further complicated by the cashier’s breaks, which are displayed on a card in her (always a her) window. Every two hours, she gets a ten-minute break, and invariably that break comes exactly when you get to the front of the line. When that happens, there’s nothing to do but wait for ten minutes till she comes back (unless you have a friend in another line who gets to the window faster). Today I lucked out and got to the window just before my cashier’s 4:00 break.

As it turns out, you can’t return a train ticket at booth 47, only at booth 21. So I bought my new tickets first, on the № 55 to Moscow, then on the № 41 to Kiev (I’ll have a 6 hour layover; I’m planning to hit up the Tretyakovsky Gallery). Then I found booth 21, where the cashier was also on a 4:00 break. However, I was first in line, so I wasn’t too worried about waiting. A middle-aged man joined the line behind me; I commiserated as he remorsefully explained that he’d just bought this ticket three hours ago, and now had to change it, and at a 50% loss at that, as he was returning the ticket within 8 hours of departure. Loathe to fight the crush at the regular ticket booths to purchase the ticket he wanted instead, he decided it would be okay to join the line at booth 20, ostensibly reserved for members of the military and disabled persons (later, a woman approached the growing crowd at booth 20 and grumbled loudly, “What, is this how they serve the disabled here, with lines??”).

In all, I spent 1473.1 rubles and 1 hour in lines and got 1227.6 rubles back; the roughly $10 plus time is definitely a better deal than the Belarusian visa. I’m a little bummed that this change means I won’t have any time to see Kiev between my flights and trains, but I won’t have to stay in a hostel either, which is nice. Next Wednesday I’ll be within the 45 day window to buy my return tickets; since we’ve got Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving, I’m hoping to get to the ticket office early on Thursday morning to avoid the crowd.

Approved!

2008-11-14T00:13:00.003+04:00

Hooray, I've officially gotten the go ahead on my trip to Georgia from Lena, our program coordinator. She said that other than passport control possibly being rude when they see Georgian stamps in my passport on my way back into Russia, they basically can't do anything. Whew!

Just a few loose ends to wrap up - I have to find out if I need a transit visa to go through Belarus on the train (though we'll probably be asleep as we go pass through) and get a return train ticket. I need to borrow a smaller suitcase from someone; I could probably fill one of my big ones for a three week trip, but I don't want to lug it all over creation by myself. Did that on the way to Middlebury, and it sucked.

Addendum 15/11/2008: So it turns out I need a transit visa to go through Belarus. For a double-entry (there and back), it's $177. Dang it! Still, glad I figured this out now and not a day before leaving; the State Department travel site mentions cases of people getting kicked off the train at the border for not having the proper documents. Cripes!

Oh, yeah, and before I leave, I should probably keep studying, take my finals, and do better on my language tests than I did in August. :)

This is funny:

Odobrenie = approval.
Udobrenie = fertilizer.

Good idea not to get these words confused - it could lead to awkwardness. Ha.

Regular Life Update

2008-11-13T00:43:00.000+04:00

Life continues to hum along here in Petersburg. It appears I’ve lucked out two trips in a row; this fall has been unseasonably warm. Last week the temperature hovered around freezing for a couple days, but then it warmed up again; other than that little dip in temperature, it’s been consistently around 6-10 degrees Celsius since the beginning of October. It has continued to get darker, however (global warming can’t help with that one). Yesterday and today I noticed especially that I’m now leaving the apartment at 8:30 or 8:45 in pre-dawn gloom – not completely dark, but not light either. It’s that time of day when it’s really hard to see, because your eyes don’t know whether to adjust to light or dark. Sunset is currently around 4:30.

I’ve got about a month of classes left this semester. I’m surprised at how quickly the fall semester has flown by. I seem to remember fall of 2005 dragging on for ages and ages, which was probably related to me not understanding much going on around me all the time. It’s been an easier adjustment this time. I don’t feel like I’m making leaps and bounds in my language gain, which is a little discouraging, but all the same, there is definitely improvement. This week and next week I have tests in all of my classes, which sure is a lot of fun. I’m feeling a bit more prepared this time around; last time I took all my tests right after missing two days of class from being sick, and I was definitely not ready.

I’ve got my trip to Georgia over winter break all booked up, although I do have to talk to my program coordinator tomorrow to double-check that it’s really, really okay for me to go. I’ll be taking the train to Kiev, Ukraine, spending the night in a hostel, and flying from Kiev to Batumi the next day. I’ll do the same in reverse on the way back. I sure hope she doesn’t say “no” now, as I have all my tickets already except for one (my train ticket back from Kiev; as train tickets can only be purchased 45 days in advance, I have to wait till the end of November). I’m hoping that by going through Ukraine I can avoid any potential problems at the border, particularly on the way back (knock on wood).

In more banal news, Kira and I went to a jewelry expo on Sunday, and I bought a lovely pair of pearl earrings and a ring to match. There was so much to look at and choose from, it was hard to narrow it down, but I’m happy with what I decided on. Then yesterday I bought the pair of jeans I’ve been eyeing for a couple weeks. I bought the size that fit me three weeks ago when I tried them on, and discovered upon donning them again that I’ve managed to gain significantly around my middle in the interval, despite my efforts at the gym. Nothing like a pair of Russian jeans (made in China) to give a girl a weight complex. I’ve decided that part of my overeating problem stems from the fact that my stomach (the digestive organ itself) is all stretched out from eating so much all the time, so I eat more than I need to before getting full. I’m making an effort to shrink it back down again to a reasonable size by only eating little bits at a time, and eating really slowly.

Today was my friend Nadya’s birthday. She invited several of her friends to Café Zoom (been there before – love the atmosphere). I saw my old acquaintance Katya for the first time since I got here; she didn’t know that I was in Piter, and she was so surprised to see me that she didn’t calm down for about ten minutes. We all played a pretty fun game in which each person composes a line in a poem, but can only see two of the lines written previously. Kind of like mad libs. We ended up with eight or so pretty funny poems. Other than the game, conversation was a little stilted; it was one of those parties where the only person in common is the birthday girl, and no one else knows each other. But I had a good time, and made plans to get together with Katya and Nadya on Saturday.

To end somewhat randomly, here’s a funny quote from phonetics class a couple weeks ago, right after our week-long break, that shows what a few months in Russia does to people:

Olga Valentinovna: Well, the first day back from break is always tough, but don’t worry, soon we’ll all… (pause)

Students, in unison: Die?

Olga Valentinovna: (Laughs) Good grief, I was going to say “rest over winter break.”

Feeling guilt, but doing nothing

2008-11-13T00:41:00.000+04:00

The poor and disabled of Russia have a rough life, to put it mildly. Retirees receive laughable pensions, and as a result of the economic turmoil in the 90s after the fall of the Soviet Union, many of them have nothing saved – their savings simply turned into nothing. Babushki with no one left to take care of them – those unfortunate enough to outlive their loved ones – often take to the streets to beg. A whole line of them stands outside Vladimirski Cathedral; more hardcore babushki kneel on a piece of cardboard, bowing to the earth and praying all day on the frozen sidewalks as the world hurries by. Veterans missing arms and legs in various degrees – in one case, both legs at the hip and both arms below the elbow – also line the sidewalks and metro tunnels.

More able-bodied people looking to earn some money take to selling things in the metro. Lugging a gym bag full of good, the vendor enters at one end of a metro car and gives a loud spiel proclaiming the advantages of buying whatever products they’re selling – usually road maps, pens, passport covers, DVDs and the like. They then slowly walk the length of the car, and if anyone wants to buy something, they flag the vendor down. At the station, the vendor runs to the next car and starts the process again.

All of these people – the praying babushki, the limbless, stonefaced veterans, the metro merchants – give me mixed feelings. It is outrageous that they have no alternative but to beg – the elderly gave their all to the Soviet Union, but in their old age their country has abandoned them. Those veterans fought wars that they did not chose and paid a steep price – parts of their body, without which they are unlikely to be able to find work after they return home. Again, the government here does little to support those who fought for it. As far as the metro merchants go, I have deep respect for their entrepreneurial spirit; it’s a tough job, and the profits are probably meager, but at least they’re doing what they can to make it. All the same, despite the outrage and shame I feel as I pass beggars, I never give any of them anything. I justify this to myself by saying “I can’t save them all, I’m just a poor student, tomorrow they’ll be hungry again anyway…” Pretty pathetic arguments, I know, but they usually dull my sense of guilt just enough to get me by. But the other day on the metro, I felt true shame.

A young man with a pronounced limp (cerebral palsy?) and an overpowering stutter got on my car to sell band-aids at 10 for 10 rubles. Clearly, anyone buying band-aids from this guy didn’t actually need band-aids (you can get a whole box for 40 rubles), they just wanted to help him out. This wasn’t begging, but it was about as close as you could get. He can’t possibly sell enough band-aids in a day to live on. And yet I still didn’t buy any. I stood there feeling an awful mix of shame and pity, and I didn’t buy any band-aids. I wanted the next stop to come as quickly as possible so I could forget about him. I realize this makes me to some degree a bad person. I want there to be a real solution, one that will take care of the neediest people in this society and give them back their dignity. I just don’t know what that solution is.

A few more pics

2008-11-06T16:12:00.001+04:00

I added some more pictures from around town to this album.

Russian Pick-up

2008-11-03T23:45:00.004+04:00

Walking home along Red Cadet Street. A cadet with a chirpy tenor voice starts talking to me:

Cadet: You are wearing astonishing perfume. It wafted over me as I approached from behind you. (continues in this vein, I catch something about "masculine" and "aroma.")
Me: . . . (weak smile. I'm confused. What does he mean, masculine aroma? I'm not even wearing perfume.)
Cadet: Oh, and you have a lovely smile too.
Me: . . .
Cadet: What's the deal, don't you know how to speak Russian?
Me: I know how.
Cadet: Oh, wonderful. Hooray! The girl speaks Russian.
Me: . . .
Cadet: Will you be turning here or going straight?
Me: Going straight.
Cadet: Okay then, have a good one.
Me: You too, see ya.

Russian Take on Things

2008-11-01T11:12:00.000+04:00

Hey Everyone, apologies for the long silence. As I’m getting more and more comfortable and settled in here, I’m finding it easier to concentrate on homework, working out, etc – which means less time for blogging, since blogging is often a means of putting off doing what needs to be done. Also, not very interesting to blog about the fact that “today I did my homework and went to the gym. That’s what I did yesterday too, and what I will do tomorrow.” Luckily, by the end of the week I managed to have a couple adventures.

Russian Halloween. Russians don’t celebrate Halloween, really. A few bars and restaurants downtown have Halloween parties, but it’s more because it’s exotic and a reason to throw a party than a real tradition. I decided it would be fun to have Nadya and Kira over to carve pumpkins and watch Mr. Vampire – our own mini pumpkin-carving party, like the one I usually attend in Iowa City. But no matter where I looked, I could not find a pumpkin! Well, that’s not completely true – some stores had chunks of pumpkin for sale, but not whole ones; some stores had whole pumpkins, but they were of a different variety, too long and narrow to be appropriate for carving. I finally found some pumpkins of the right shape and roughly the right color at the market, but they were 100 rubles a kilogram! Even the smallest, not-even-carvable pumpkins cost around $8; for one carving-sized pumpkin it probably would have been close to $20. So I gave up on the pumpkin carving idea. Nadya and Kira came over and ate guacamole I’d made and had tea and watched the news (which practically counts as a horror film). My friend Rezo later noted that having tea is a pretty boring way to celebrate a holiday. Have to say I agree, but it was fun to hang out with Nadya and Kira anyway.

Russian Bureaucracy. As students of the Special Department of Philology at Saint Petersburg State University, we are entitled to receive the student discount on transportation. This involves getting a special card with a magnetic strip, which is scanned to ride the metro and simply displayed to ride all surface transportation. For 450 rubles a month, you get 70 metro rides and unlimited bus/trolleybus/tramcar rides – that’s about the cost of 23 rides at full price. Pretty good deal, huh? Enter the bureaucracy. You only have to buy this card once, and then it can be recharged at any metro ticket window. But to get the card, you have to go to a particular office near the Primorskaya metro station in the last four or five business days of the month. Kira and I decided to go get our cards on Friday, the last day of October. After wandering around a bit and asking for directions, we found the office we needed. There were signs everywhere about needing a document from the bank showing that we’d paid for the card there (since they don’t handle money at this office), so we left and walked about ten minutes to the bank. At the bank, it turned out that you first needed to get a different piece of paper from the office, fill it out and bring it with you to the bank. So we walked back to the office, where we discovered that while Kira’s info was in their system, mine was not, although our dean’s office had sent all the students’ information at the same time. That means I’m SOL for November. It almost seems pointless to get a card for December, as I’m planning to travel over winter break and will only be in the city for half a month. I won’t get back to Petersburg till too late in January to pay for a January pass, so the earliest I will have a student transportation card will be February. Sigh. Anyway, I walked with Kira back to the bank, where she paid for her card, and then we walked back to the office again to get the card. The whole process took the better part of 2 hours. At least I got some exercise.

Russian Planning. In a similar bureaucratic vein, our class schedule this week is all messed up. Tuesday is National Unity Day – a day off. To give everyone a three-day weekend, Monday’s classes were to be moved to Saturday, and then we’d have Sunday-Monday-Tuesday off. But our teachers couldn’t make it on Saturday, so instead we get a four-day weekend this week (right after our week-long break. Great planning, huh?), but we’ll make up those classes next Saturday, meaning next week we get a one-day weekend. Lame-o.

Russian Recital. Last night I went to an author’s reading, Russian (or Soviet?) style. Ludmila Petrushevskaya, author and playwright, absurdist. I have to say, her readings didn’t really inspire me to read any of her works. Her presentation cycled between readings from her books, which I often didn’t understand because of the dialects she used, showing cartoons that she herself had composed and produced, and her singing songs she’d translated from French. There were a lot of young people there who laughed at all the funny places, making me feel stupid for not getting the jokes. The kid next to me kept chuckling to himself, nodding vigorously at what Petrushevskaya said, and even quietly finishing her sentences for her when she paused in the middle of a sentence. Obviously a fan. But he had bad breath. I hate that, when you have to sit next to someone whose bad breath keeps wafting over you for three hours. Anyway. I did like one cartoon she did, in which Tolstoy tries to give his wife’s pince-nez to Chekhov, although I don’t understood why he wanted to do that. And the singing made me impatient. So I can’t say it was the most entertaining way to pass a Saturday evening, but I’m glad I’ve now experienced a творческий вечер (recital).

English-speakers in Russia. On the whole, I tend to avoid other native English-speakers in Russia. If I hear someone speaking English on the street or in the metro, I try to avoid looking like I speak English (I know, how exactly does one do that?). Part of it is that tourist behavior often embarrasses me, whether it’s talking too loudly, eating on the metro, just looking completely lost in general, or other culturally inappropriate behaviors. I know it’s not their fault, and that it’s good that they’ve come to take a look at Russia, but nonetheless I am mortified by the idea that someone might think I’m with them, or see them and think that all Americans act like that. At the recital last night a British man and American woman, students in their 20s, were sitting behind me speaking English. It was driving me batty, but I can’t really explain why. They were talking about fairy tales, their purposes and America’s lack of original fairy tales. I think it’s because no matter how hard I try, I can’t help but listen to English if I hear it – it is so effortless to understand what they’re saying that there’s no way to block it out.

This blog ended up being much more negative than I intended. It is possible that I only consider something in Russia an “adventure” if it has a negative outcome. So to end on a positive note, I worked out for three hours yesterday! Today the sun is shining, and I’m going to go for a walk in the park!

In the Park

I’m sitting on a bench in a wooded park on and island about a mile from my apartment. It’s a rare November day – not a cloud in the sky. It’s pretty chilly – I regret leaving the apartment without a scarf – but the sun warms my face and the wind is calm here – it’s not so bad.

From the river flowing lazily by in front of me come the calls of ducks and seagulls. An excited child shouts, “There are ducks there, Mama! Ducks! Ducks!” In the very far distance I can hear the roar of traffic, but otherwise I could almost forget I’m in the middle of a city of 5 million people.

A three-man rowboat glides silently by, the dip and drip of the oars just barely audible from across the water.

Further in on this island there is an even bigger park, with paths, carnival rides, popcorn and balloons for sale, even paddleboat rentals in the summer. There you’ll encounter cyclists and rollerbladers, grandmothers and young mothers with baby carriages, groups of kids chasing each other around. Three years ago it was 10 rubles to get in. It’s probably 20 rubles now; I haven’t bothered to find out. That park also has loudspeakers all along the paths that blast music constantly – I much prefer the ducks and gulls and the chirps of smaller birds.

The air here is absolutely crisp and fresh. I want to bottle it up to breathe later on my walks to school, where the exhaust of hundreds of idling cars stuck in constant traffic jams renders the air toxic.

A long wooden bridge connects Krestovsky Island, where I am now, with Petrovsky Island, along which I walked to get here. The park across the street (and the river) from my house is on Petrovsky island. By comparison with the Petrograd Side, where I live, or Vasilievsky Island, where I study, these islands are miniscule. I walked almost the whole length of Petrovsky in about 10 minutes along its main (and practically only) road. I didn’t see any cars, just the No. 14 bus. I could have been on some side street in an industrial area of Des Moines.

A man just sat down next to me on this bench, open bottle of beer in hand. He stares at the ground and smokes a cigarette. He makes a phone call to some guy he’s apparently waiting to arrive by vehicle (all of that information came from a single word on my guy’s end of the conversation: «доехал». The ending tells me he was talking to a man, the prefix indicates arrival/ attainment of a goal, and the root signifies travel by vehicle. I love Russian). He speaks quietly. I appreciate that about Russians.

I know that by tomorrow it will probably be cloudy and rainy again. Our consistent +10C weather has started to feel colder, though the temperature itself has remained constant. They keep promising snow, but so fair there’s no delivery. Today I’m just enjoying the weather we’ve got.

Friday

2008-10-24T23:16:00.002+04:00

I’ve found the solution to my time-management issues: all I need to do to get everything done that I want to get done is not go to class. Haha.

Seriously, I’ve had this week off from school, and it’s been exactly what I needed. I still went to my internship and my history class, but those activities weren’t nearly so draining as usual. I’ve slept till 10 every day, when the sun finally wakes me up (sunrise is about 9 AM right now, I think, though I’m not sure, since I haven’t been up to see it rise!). Efforts to rise earlier have been fruitless, although admittedly I haven’t tried too hard. I’m not really looking forward to getting up at 7 or 7:30 again starting Monday. Funny how that seems so early now, when I’ve spent the last year or so getting up at 5 AM no problem.

I made a trip to the Consulate today to mail my absentee ballot (sure hope they count my vote!). I didn’t bother to go through all the security to go inside; I just gave the envelope to the Russian security guard out front (hope he passed it on!). I found it rather ironic that I held in my hand an envelope labeled “secret ballot” and the guard immediately asked, “Who did you vote for, if it’s not a secret?” Oh, how I love Russia.

This trip to the Consulate demonstrated one of the difficulties of living in a big city: travel time. The actual act of dropping off my ballot took all of five minutes, but getting from my apartment to the Consulate and then from the Consulate to Palace Square, where I met a friend for a visit to the Hermitage, took an hour and a half. And each of those locations is in the “center” of the city! Sometimes I miss Iowa City’s cozy downtown - drunken freshmen and all.

After wandering the Hermitage for about an hour and a half, we went to a free piano concert at my university, given by Galina Zhugova, who graduated from the Conservatory here. Man is that girl talented! She played Bach, Chopin, and Khachaturyan. It was lovely. Russian moment: when someone’s cell phone rang near the beginning of the second act, Galina glared and shook her head disapprovingly. Seems small, but it’s a big cultural difference; an American performer would more than likely ignore the ring, or at least not react to it.

Abrupt end to a hastily and lazily composed post.

Книжный червь = Bookworm = Alli

2008-10-23T22:40:00.001+04:00

Well, it took me a whole month, but I did it! I have finished reading my very first novel in Russian! 383 pages! In RUSSIAN! Yes, there were moments when I only vaguely understood what was happening, particularly since I completely abandoned the dictionary for the last 100 pages or so. And okay, Boris Akunin’s Altyn-tolobas (I can’t translate the title; it’s not even a real word in Russian. I think it means “treasure chest” or something like that in Tatar) isn’t exactly High Literature, but I bet I could write a pretty meaty analysis of it, if I were of the mind to, and as they say in the College of Education, whatever gets ‘em reading, right? I seriously got into this book. The past few days I’ve read for two or three hours at a time (about 30-40 pages each time), which is more than I’ve ever read in Russian at one sitting before. My one complaint is one I’ve raised with English literature as well: detective thriller novels do not a romance make. I wish Akunin hadn’t bothered trying to squeeze in a love story – it didn’t work at all. I don’t know why I can suspend disbelief when it comes to a historian getting caught up in mafia warfare in Moscow in the mid-ninties as he seeks the long-lost, possibly mythical library of Ivan the Terrible, but not when he falls in love with the journalistka who helps him escape from a contract killer. Just my sticking point, I guess. :)

So what next? I’m tempted to dive right into the next “Nicholas Fandorin” book – there are three or four in the series that starts with Altyn-tolobas. I had initially planned to alternate between contemporary and classic literature, and I can definitely see value in attempting one of the classics. However, I’d hate to lose my momentum in a heavy, difficult book. And we’re already planning to read more classics in my lit class before the end of the semester, in the form of short stories or novellas by Nabokov, Tolstoy, and Zoshchenko. So maybe I’ll start another Akunin novel for my free reading, so that pleasure reading will remain pleasurable and will actually be an inviting, relaxing activity.

The English language is seriously missing out without the Genitive case

2008-10-22T23:33:00.000+04:00

I’ve been doing a fair amount of translating since I got here, both for my internship and “on the side.” So far I’ve translated journalistic interviews and informative articles, and I’m currently working on an advertisement for tractors (I know, isn’t that funny?). All of these texts have been written in business-official language (rather than conversational or academic), which has given me some good practice with more formal language. All official language in Russian is marked by extensive use of the passive voice, meaning lots of past passive participles (the company was founded by so-and-so, rather than so-and-so founded the company) and lots and lots of genitive case (we researched all the areas available for rent for the production of tractors of model X). Sometimes there will be five or six words in a row in genitive, which directly translated results in a lot of “ofs” in a row. It involves a lot of messing around with word order and grammar structure in order to get a sentence like that to sound natural in English, and I suddenly find myself rather confused about English prepositions that never used to give me any trouble. So sometimes I think it would just be easier (and involve way fewer prepositions) if English simply had a genitive case.

This blog post might just win a prize for being the nerdiest one I’ve written so far.

And while I’m talking about translating, can I just mention how scary it is to be learning in real-world settings? Holy cow. It’s one thing to translate in class, where your mistakes just show your weak areas and you have multiple opportunities to get feedback and fix your work. It’s another thing entirely when you are looked to as an expert of the English language (eep!) and your translations will be published, recorded, or otherwise set down for history, mistakes and all. I mean, this tractor translation is full of really specific terminology that I’m not entirely confident I know even in English. What if I’ve got it all wrong? And since they don’t know English, or at least not well enough to translate for themselves, who’s going to check if I’ve completely misunderstood something? I mean, how do I know that одноконтурный пневмопривод тормозов прицепа really means “single-contour pneumatic actuator of the trailer brakes?” What’s a single-contour pneumatic actuator anyway? Ahhhhh!

I think I should switch to translating children’s books.

I’m writing this blog in pieces as I work on this translation. I have to say, this tractor sounds pretty impressive. If I were a farmer, I would mortgage the farm to buy one. Plus I want all the add-ons: the seeder, the plow, the cultivator, the disc harrow...

I’m a dork.

Can I just say, thank GOD for the Abbyy Lingvo Russian-English Dictionary’s expansive set of agriculture-related entries? I have no idea where else I’d be able to find “disc harrow” or “cultivator,” and as this translation is due rather soon, I’d have gone into panic mode if it had turned out that more than half the words I need weren’t in the dictionary, cuz I’m pretty sure my Russian friends don’t know the names of tractor parts in English any better than I know them in Russian.

Okay, finished! Good to know I can do a three page translation about tractors in about 4 hours. This will help me judge whether I want to take on future “side projects.” Hope this post wasn’t completely pointless and boring for you.

Pictures!

2008-10-20T17:05:00.002+04:00

I've been bad about taking photographs this trip, but here's what I've taken so far:

Trip with Anya to Peterhoff in August

Really random stuff around town

Trip to a decrepit fortress at Schisselburg

Culture shock is like...

2008-10-20T15:39:00.000+04:00

Okay, so I want to make clear that I’m doing a lot better already, and my readjustment to life in Petersburg is coming along swimmingly. However, I came up with what I consider a pretty decent and widely-understandable metaphor or parallel or whatever to culture shock, and I wanted to share it with you.

Culture shock is like learning to drive a car.

As kids, we watched from the passenger seats as our parents drove us around. It didn’t look that hard. And while they were driving, we were free to play with the radio, fight with our siblings, eat Happy Meals, and stare out the window.

Being the kid in the passenger seat is like living in your own country. Your native language is like the driving parent – when communication isn’t a problem, you can focus on lots of stuff at once, like work, school, going to the gym, hanging out with friends, etc. Everything is safe and comfortable; you know the driving parent is going to make sure you don’t crash, so even when a big or unexpected event comes up, you’re totally able to handle it.

Then you turn fourteen (or fifteen, or whenever it is now), and it’s your turn in the driver’s seat. Behind the wheel, you suddenly realize that there’s a lot more to think about when you’re driving than you thought. You’ve got to watch your speed, check your mirrors, use your turn signals, be aware of the other cars around you, stay in your lane, watch for kids running into the street, navigate to your destination, apply the right amount of pressure to each of the pedals so you don’t accelerate or brake too quickly (or too slowly), and take note of traffic signs and signals – plus you still want to do all those other things you used to do from the passenger seat. On the driver’s side for the first time, it suddenly is a lot harder to change the radio station without veering out of your lane, eat your Happy Meal without missing your turn, or fight with your sister without rear-ending the car that stops short in front of you. Plus, only a few of the other drivers on the road even know that you’re new to this game; everyone else expects you to drive like an expert, and they express confusion, condescension, mirth, or even rage if you goof up.

This is like moving to Russia. A huge amount of your attention and energy is directed towards language use and development – activities that require very little energy when operating in your native language. Then, there are all these differences between Russia and America, some little, some bigger, that you have to pay attention to, just like you have to watch your speed and all that in the car. Each of these differences taken on its own is no big deal, but unfortunately you can’t drive and only pay attention to your speed, you have to pay attention to everything else to. And as the little, no-big-deal differences pile up, it can suddenly get very overwhelming. (Mini-metaphor side note: you know that game Spot 10 Differences Between These Pictures? That’s what the little differences are like. On the surface, everything in the new culture looks basically the same as at home. Maybe one or two of the differences pop out at you right away. But with time, all ten differences become glaringly obvious, and you wonder how you ever thought the two pictures looked alike.) While you’re busy trying to accommodate all the new things you have to pay attention to in the driver’s seat, including trying to convince all the other, native, drivers that you know what you’re doing, there’s simply no time, energy, or attention left for everything you used to get to do with ease in the passenger’s seat – going to the gym, eating healthfully, doing homework, etc. Thus, in addition to the stress of paying attention to all the elements of driving/living in a different culture, there is the added stress of feeling frustrated about not being able to do all the things you used to be able to do without a problem.

But all is not lost! As all more-experienced drivers know, driving becomes automatic with time. With some miles under your belt, it gets to be no big deal to stay in your lane or watch your mirrors – you just do it naturally. You even are able to do more complicated driving tasks, like setting the cruise control, and you have the windshield wiper settings memorized so you know exactly how many clicks you need to turn the switch to get the exact wiper speed you want. You know exactly how much to break and when to reapply the gas to turn a corner smoothly, and you can judge the speeds of other cars on the interstate to know when to change lanes. In addition to being able to handle these more nuanced tasks, you also have more attention to devote to changing the radio or eating your French fries.

This is precisely what happens when you move abroad. With time, all the little differences that seemed glaring at first sort of melt into the background, and it doesn’t require any energy or attention to deal with them – they’ve become automated. Pointy shoes and mullets stop seeming like such strange fashion choices, you get used to being the only woman at the gym not wearing spandex, and you wouldn’t dream of going to someone’s house without a gift in hand. As language skills improve, you can handle a wider variety of more difficult situations (I saw this in myself a lot last time around – absolutely huge language and psychological gains were visible in activities such as buying train tickets [an onerous task], buying theatre tickets, or arguing for the Russian student price when they didn’t want to give it to me because I was a foreigner). When all these activities are humming along smoothly, changing the radio (going to the gym) and eating your French fries (or not, since you’ve gained 10 pounds during the adjustment period, ha) is much easier – you can even drive with one hand, no problem.

In the end, being behind the wheel, or living in your new country, starts to feel natural. It feels like home. You know the roads, you know how to handle your vehicle, many of the native drivers take you for one of their own, and you’ve got friends in the passenger seats pointing out new places of interest to stop at along the way. Sure, you could go back to the US and let your native language drive again – life is always going to be easier in the passenger seat than behind the wheel (though suddenly, after having been behind the wheel for a few months, you notice some very odd things about how your native language drives once you’re back in the passenger seat. The radio plays too loud, the driver screams “But I had the right of way!” when someone cuts him off – in other words, shortcomings in your own culture become apparent). It’s really not so bad being in the driver’s seat; in fact, it’s pretty empowering.

Readers who have lived or are living abroad – what do you think? Is this an accurate parallel?

Passports and Police

2008-10-18T17:28:00.001+04:00

Pete brought up some excellent questions regarding passport checks and how to act around cops in his comment to my last post. Thanks Pete! I try my best to explain things that might not be familiar to my readers at home, but sometimes I forget about day-to-day things that have become second nature for me here. I was going to answer in a reply comment, but then I realized I had enough to say to warrant a separate post.

First, a word about ID in Russia. The identification document of choice is the passport. Russians have two passports: the first is a domestic passport, which has the same identifying function as our state-issued IDs/ drivers licenses do, and additionally functions as a record of marriages, divorces, children, etc (funny side note: there’s only room for five marriage stamps and five divorce stamps on the “marital status” pages. Apparently you have to get extra pages added if you need more than five marriages!). Russians get a new domestic passport at 16, 25, 45, and, I think, 65, though I'm not sure about that last one. The second passport is the one they use to travel abroad, which is more like a passport as we understand it. Not all Russians have the second passport, but every Russian over the age of 16 has the first.

The problem with being a foreigner in Russia is that the bureaucracy to getting your documents “in order” is about five miles thick, and involves getting an invitation from an institution that is willing to be held responsible for your behavior (in our case, the university), filling out a migration card upon entry into the country (and a new one is needed every time you cross the border), and registering your passport at the host institution within three business days of arriving. Since the last time I was here, the rules have changed, and your passport has to be re-registered each time you leave and return to the city, even if you just go to Moscow for the weekend – a huge nuisance if you do any traveling at all. Each of these steps results in another piece of paper or stamp that has to be kept with your passport at all times. In our case, we have the extra step of giving up our passports for a whole month in order to get multi-entry visas (all entered Russia on a single-entry visa that is good till mid-November. Trying to get multi-entry visas from the States is hugely expensive and time-consuming). So they take your passport and give you a piece of paper called a spravka: on one side is a photocopy of the information page and single-entry visa from your passport; on the other is a document that says “This fully replaces so-and-so’s passport until such-and-such a date.” Legally, this is the only document we need while our visas are being processed. In practice, however, it does not always work the way it ought to. For example, one of the members of our group couldn’t pick up a package at the post office with her spravka; they would only give it to her when she presented her original passport. Pain in the butt, but a part of life here.

As passports are the only acceptable form of ID here, it is a perfectly normal part of any exchange with a cop for him to ask you for your passport. In fact, document checks are SOP for the cops here; they can ask you for your documents without giving any reason at all, and you have to show them. This applies particularly to young men, as the cops are always on the lookout for fellows who are dodging their requirement to serve in the army (and there are a lot of such young men; the army is a horrible place to be here. Disgraceful hazing practices, terrible food, poor living conditions; the army is in a shambles. I’m talking about regular enlisted, not officers – military academies are still fairly prestigious places to attend). Unfortunately, there’s a lot of shameless profiling that goes on – anyone who does not look ethnically Russian (read: anyone with dark hair and eyes and darker skin) is ten times as likely to be stopped for a document check. As for women – a document check is sometimes just a pick-up. Gross, huh?

Corruption is wide-spread among the police force in Russia, and you definitely have to play it cool here, as cops make up their own rules about what behavior should be "fined" - it's an easy way for them to put some cash in their own pockets. Fines can range from a thousand rubles or so (about $40) to whatever you have in your wallet, so it’s best not to keep all of your cash in one place. Their favorite “fineable” transgression: your documents aren’t in order. If they try to fine you for that, you have to feel out the situation a little bit, perhaps state firmly that they are in fact in order, and show them where on your documents it is written as such. However, arguing like that can go two ways – they’ll either give up on you as an easy shakedown, or they’ll drag you down to the station, which you really don't want. I think it's best to play respectful, pay the fine/bribe, and get out of the situation as quickly as possible.

I know it sounds scary, but really, I've only had about three encounters with the cops in all the time I've been in Russia (twice last trip and once so far this trip), and none of them have resulted in a fine. Although you see people in uniform everywhere here, they don't often concern themselves with me – I don’t fit the profile. I'm afraid the same isn't true for one of my classmates, who is of Chinese heritage, and who has been stopped and fined twice already for his documents "not being in order" (totally false). Most of the time if you keep your head low and walk like you know where you’re going (even if you don’t), they won’t bother you.

Encounter with the DPS

2008-10-15T22:27:00.000+04:00

DPS is the subdivision of the police force that is responsible for road safety and traffic control (that’s Дорожная Патрульная Служба). A “DPSnik” (day-pay-es-neek) is almost always standing on the corner of the Tuchkov Bridge, flipping the switches that control the traffic lights in an attempt to minimize jams. As you may recall from my previous traffic-related post, the cars coming off the bridge have a green right-turn light all the time – in nearly two months of crossing at that intersection, I’ve never seen it turn red.

I was walking home today and crossed the street on a green light. As usual, to get across the snake of right-turning cars (in the direction I was walking, the last lane I had to cross, rather than the first, as it is on the way to school), I just had to sort of jump in front of one to make him stop. Normally, this evokes no reaction from the DPSnik at the controls, but the guy standing there today, who I’d never seen before, waved me down and asked for my passport. I gave him my spravka, an official document which fully replaces my passport while my multi-entry visa is being formulated. He asked me why I crossed on the red, did I want to get hit by a car? Seeing by my spravka that I’m from the US, he said “Oh, you’re an American? You sure don’t act like one – Americans usually have respect for the law.” He then proceeded to explain to me that the island in the middle of the road is designed specifically for pedestrians to wait on if they can’t make it across the street before the light turns red. He sent me on my way with an “All the best.”

A few points.

1. Perhaps this is his first day at Tuchkov Bridge, and he doesn’t know that the turn arrow never turns red. But in the direction I was walking, the light was green, and it was green all the way across the street. I know it was green, because I really don’t have a death wish, and I watch the stoplight all the way across the street.

2. My ability to speak Russian is inversely related to the stress level of a situation. I was suddenly befuddled about what prefix I needed for my verb of motion to indicate “when I stepped into the street,” and completely mangled all noun endings. Blargh.

3. It doesn’t really matter how well I speak Russian, it’s really pointless to argue with a DPSnik, or any cop for that matter. Arguing will just result in a fine. However, as you all probably know, when I know I’m right, it’s very hard for me to let things go. In this case, it’s probably a good thing that I got tongue-tied, or else I would have dug myself into a hole.

3a. I do respect the law, and I resent the implication from a Russian that I don’t. Since when has the average Russian given a fig about the rule of law? Stereotyping and prejudice on my part? Yes. Still resent the insult. Later, I thought of a good comeback: «Видимо, я обрусила» (“Apparently, I’ve Russified”). Almost certainly a good thing that I was too flustered to come up with that at the time.

4. The whole interaction probably took less than a minute, but it took me the rest of my walk home to calm down afterwards. I was annoyed at myself for being upset, since in the end no harm was done (no fine even!), but I hate it when people are condescending to me. Also, since I’m still adjusting to Russia, I think it’s a lot harder to roll with the punches – especially when they come out of the blue.

So I’ve had my first encounter with the cops without a guy nearby (last time I lived here the cops only stopped me when I was with guys, who are much more likely to be stopped in general). I’m trying to have a sense of humor about it – I bet informing the scofflaw Amerikanka about the purpose of the island in the middle of the road was the highlight of that DPSnik’s day. It’s probably really boring standing there flipping traffic light switches all day. Tonight he’ll go home to a wife who nags him about how he doesn’t make enough money and they don’t have nice things, drink beer in front of the TV for four hours, and then go to bed, after which he’ll have to get up and do it all again. Flip. Green in this direction. Flip. Green in that direction.

Flip. Wait.

Flip. Wait.

Flip. Wait.

I feel better already.

Elective

2008-10-09T22:34:00.003+04:00

On Thursdays at about a quarter to six, I say goodbye to my coworkers at the Interjournalist Center and head over to the history department, conveniently located just a couple blocks from my internship, to attend my elective seminar, “Social Movement and Political Thought” («Общественное движение и политическая мысль»). As I am auditing, and thus not threatened by the specter of a high-pressure oral exam at the end of the semester, I am free to get what I can out of the lectures without worrying about what I’m missing (which, if I do say so myself, isn’t much. What a thrill to know I can understand a real lecture meant for real Russians!).

Our class is composed of six Russians, me, and Berney. I don’t know our classmates very well yet, but they are sociable and friendly, and I hope to get a chance to know them better before the end of the semester. We sit around a long table in a small, stuffy room with green walls and a weird plant on the table. Our teacher, Viktor Stepanovich Brachev, is the absolute picture of the absent-minded history professor: silver-haired, with bent-up glasses he half-cocks to the side to read his scribbly notes, always in a suit and carrying an umbrella. A thick stack of indecipherable, hand-written notes comprises the material for his lectures; each lecture is separated by a section of that slick, colored advertising paper that comes in the middle of newspapers. It’s just a hunch, but I suspect he’s been lecturing from the same set of notes since long before the fall of the Soviet Union. Viktor Stepanovich is missing two neighboring teeth on the bottom and the one right above them on top, giving him just the faintest lisp (and, oddly, giving me a little window to the rich phonetic opportunity of seeing exactly where a native Russian’s tongue is located when they produce certain sounds).

I am surprised and pleased to report that I don’t find these lectures boring in the least. For one thing, Viktor Stepanovich clearly knows his material and clearly cares deeply about it, and thus injects that little bit of life into his lectures that can quickly disappear when a lecturer is bored with his subject. Additionally, his very manner of lecturing cracks me up. I’ll try to demonstrate:

“Tonight we will be discussing Aleksander Nikolaevich Radishchev, Aleksander Nikolaevich Radishchev, Aleksander Nikolaevich Radishchev. He was an important what? A Mason. There’s nothing very surprising in this, everyone was a Mason back then [Note: also nothing surprising since we’ve been talking about the Masons for a month now]. If you went into a university in the Soviet Union, every professor was a what? A communist. A member of the party. There is nothing surprising about this, it was completely normal. You were either in the party or in Kommsomol. In the same way, Radishchev was a Mason….

“Radischev was a what? A radical. Lenin called him the first what? Revolutionary. The first revolutionary, the first revolutionary. And he was an aristocrat! Thus he was the first revolutionary aristocrat, revolutionary aristocrat, who was a radical Mason, a radical Mason, a radical Mason.”

I wish you could hear the intonation that goes along with all that repetition. Believe me, it’s hilarious. It might seem like it would be tedious to listen to an hour and a half of such speech, but it doesn’t bother me as much as I’d expect. Sometimes the repetition, particularly of names, helps me take notes, as I don’t always catch names the first time around. And when it comes down to it, Viktor Stepanovich is simply telling a story, which I find the most engaging and appealing way to study history.

In fact, that is one aspect of the Russian education system that I am growing to appreciate more and more. Russians are raised and educated as orators; from their earliest days in school, their knowledge of a subject is evaluated based on how much they can talk about it, organizing their ideas clearly and logically. This makes them very good at retelling information clearly and logically, and I am always surprised at how much the Russians I know can say about various subjects; they are extremely comfortable with the oral presentation format. By the time they themselves become teachers, they are truly master orators. Having grown up in a culture that clearly values critical thinking over information recall, I used to be highly skeptical of the Russian model of education. While I still maintain that the Russian education system (and, by extension, whole society) could benefit from an injection of critical thinking and dialogue in the classroom, I have really grown to appreciate the ability to recall information and present it in a pleasant and engaging manner, particularly as fact recall and oral presentations are not my personal strong suits.

In a particularly amusing digression this evening, Viktor Stepanovich related the tale of having to pay a bribe to get on an airplane to Ukraine, for which there were “no tickets” (during the Brezhnev era). He was extremely nervous, having never bribed anyone before, and having been, after all, well-raised to always be honest. The bribe went down without a hitch; the biggest surprise of all was the discovery that the plane was nearly empty! They flew together, five or six people in the whole plane, to Ukriane, to Ukraine, to Ukraine. Thus Viktor Stepanovich explained how he could empathize with the hero of Radishchev’s book Travel from Petersburg to Moscow, in which the hero must pay a bribe of 20 kopeks to get fresh horses at the way-station.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment of Social Movement and Political Thought. I know I will!

Sunshiney

2008-10-09T16:42:00.002+04:00

My positive focus this week: It's been sunny every single day, except Monday morning, when I saw that awesome rainbow, and then walked to school in the rain without an umbrella. It hasn't exactly been warm, but I'll take sunny over warm any day. I have the added bonus of seeing the sunrise on my walk to school - it's absolutely gorgeous glancing off the Neva River as I walk over Tuchkov Bridge. I'm hoping that my sunrise walks will continue at least through next week, after which the sun will probably start coming up after I'm over the bridge (after which it's hidden from view by buildings). By the beginning of November, I anticipate the sun to be just coming up as I arrive at school, and then full darkness till mid-morning, when I'll be in class. So for now, I'm really enjoying the cloudlessness of this usually-shrouded city.

Sunday was one of those perfect fall days that you only get two or three of each year: dazzlingly sunny, temperature around +10 Celsius, no wind. Galya's daughter Olga, her husband Zhenya, and son Tyoma swept me off to Pavlovsk, a suburb of Petersburg, Sunday afternoon, where we spent several hours wandering around the huge park there. It was indescribably beautiful: all the leaves shimmering gold, the air clean and refreshing; I was in the best mood I've been in in a while here. I absolutely adore Olga and her family, and I wish we got to spend more time together.

Despite the clement weather, I've been utterly exhausted all this week. I keep reminding myself that this will pass and that it's a part of adjusting to living in a new place, but man is it hard to be patient. I go to class and to my internship, and only with extreme effort finish my homework every day. I have yet to take my shoes to get repaired (it would take me all of 20 minutes to walk to the place and drop them off) or iron my wrinkly clothes (which I've just been not wearing), and I didn't make time to go get a student transportation pass before turning in my passport to get a multi-entry visa, so I'll be paying full price for another month. Don't even ask about the gym; I haven't been since Saturday, even though I intend to go every evening. I'm just too pooped! It's all the more frustrating when I compare what I do here to what I do at home-- full-time school, 20 or 30 hours a week at work, gym, groceries, cooking, socializing. You just get so much more done when you're 100% comfortable in your surroundings. But I'll get there. I have a week-long break from class the week after next; since our passports are stuck somewhere in the Russian bureaucracy right now and we can't go anywhere, I'm planning on sleeping in every day, and then checking out various museums that I haven't made time for yet.

I know I'm complaining a lot lately, and I'm sorry about that, but for what it's worth, I really do see that I'm making progress in getting adjusted. For example, last week I was utterly incapable of doing anything - I didn't do any homework, and instead just laid around writing pages-long letters to friends in English or spacing off. I passed my exams in every class only by miraculous intervention (proof that my fuzzy brain must be picking up something here, I didn't do nearly as badly as I thought I would, considering I did literally NO review for any of my tests - but not as well as I'd have liked either). This week, even though I'm still too tired to do as much as I want, I feel much more focused. I've been able to get started on homework at a reasonable time, as well as focus on my work for an hour or two at a time. I've gotten my homework done every day - including phonetics, which is a big accomplishment, as I've spent the entire last month not doing my phonetics homework at all (this evoked deep feelings of shame, as I really really like my phonetics teacher). I know that with a little more time, getting my homework done will not seem like such a monumental feat, and I'll be able to turn my focus to things like getting to the gym at least 4 times a week and fixing my horrendous eating patterns here (which involves eating very little during the day and about a billion calories in the evening. Not healthy!).

Hope all is well at home. Just a month till the elections! I'm still waiting for my absentee ballot to arrive... not that they count the votes from abroad anyway, unless the race is really close, but I really want to fulfill my civic duty.

Also, I've been reading a lot about the economic crisis. Can someone please tell me what this means for day-to-day life in America? Just reading the NY Times I'm not getting a very clear picture of how what's going on in the financial world is affecting regular people.

Haiku

2008-10-06T17:31:00.002+04:00

The air shimmers gold.
Rainbow gleams bright, arching o'er.
Sunrise walk to school.

A "blargh" week

2008-10-05T00:16:00.000+04:00

Fall arrived in St. Petersburg this week. In the course of just a few days, most of the leaves have turned yellow and are falling fast. We’ve had some pretty nasty fall storms, but it hasn’t completely clouded up yet, and with the temperature hovering around 10 C, being outside is still pleasant. October is when I start to notice that the days in Petersburg are significantly shorter than they ought to be—sunrise this week was around 8:30 AM (when I leave for school), and Thursday I walked home in near-darkness at 7:30 PM after my history class. By November I’ll be walking to and from school in darkness every day, and that will continue until mid-March. Wish me luck.

This was a really tough week. I spent the first half of it in bed with the flu, and the second half taking tests in all my classes. I think I did okay on most of the tests, but they left me feeling like I definitely am not doing enough studying here. Wednesday and Thursday I was getting really down on myself—I felt like a faker, that I didn’t deserve to be here because I’m not taking it seriously enough, and every time I heard other students use a new word or phrase we were supposed to have learned but I hadn’t, I felt sure that I was the weakest student here, and that I’d never master Russian beyond the level I’m already at. The ire I directed at myself then turned outwards as well, and every part of Russia that I don’t like or will never get used to, from women’s fashion to food to traffic patterns – things I usually shake my head and laugh at or grin and bear – suddenly seemed so intolerable that I couldn’t believe I’d ever liked this place. Why didn’t I stay home and get a teaching job like most of my classmates?

Last time I was in Russia my resident director suggested to all of us that when we’re feeling low about being in Russia, we should write down a list of five things we liked in Russia. As of Thursday, I couldn’t think of one thing I liked. I’m not exaggerating. This is probably the lowest point I’ve had in Russia this time around. It was made worse by this idea I had that everything was going to be easier this time, that culture shock would be minimal since I’d been here before. So when culture shock hit me anyway, it was twice as bad because I thought I should be immune, and I kept beating up on myself for not just “dealing with it.”

I’m feeling better now. I’m not going to say everything is 100% hunky dory, but I also don’t feel like absolutely everything in Russia sucks, so that must be progress. Several things have helped.

First of all, I talked to my classmates here, and it turns out that everyone is having troubles concentrating on studying or adjusting in other ways. We are all a bunch of perfectionists and control freaks, and our expectations for ourselves are really high. It is so good to know that it’s not just me.

Second, I’ve decided to scope out nearby cafes as potential study spots (where’s cheapest? where’s less smoky?), as working at home is fruitless—I just don’t get started, I find a million things to distract me, and it’s not a good use of my time. Ironically, I might end up spending a lot of time at McDonald’s—there’s no smoking there, and my tutor says it’s pretty quiet on the second floor.

Third, I am exceedingly delighted to report that I have begun reading in Russian for pleasure. Okay, so it might not sound like much, but believe me, it’s a huge step—it means I’m finally developing enough fluency to enjoy reading again. If you’re looking up every other word on a page and it takes two hours to read 5 pages, it’s not fun, it’s work. I have found a book I really like and am chugging along at about 10 pages an hour—and I’m only looking up 2-3 words per page, sometimes less. I love reading so much, and it always felt like there was something missing when I couldn’t read fluently in Russian. The fact that I can now, and that it’s only going to get better with practice, makes me feel really good about my language progress.

The other day on the way to school I thought up what I consider a good metaphor for language learning. Imagine you’re climbing up the down escalator in the metro. You climb and climb and climb, but it takes a ton of work to get even just a little bit higher on the escalator. Maybe you’ve climbed a whole mile already, but you’ve only moved about 10 feet up, and if you stop for even a second you’re right back where you started. That’s what it feels like to learn Russian. The problem is, we focus too much on how high we’ve managed to climb (the 10 feet), and forget to notice how many steps we’ve actually taken (about 200). Those steps are important—they represent a lot of work! And I think we also forget to look behind us once in a while, and see how far we’ve climbed after all. The top of the escalator is still pretty far away—but so is the bottom.

On Friday I literally saw the silver lining, and it cheered me up considerably. It was cloudy as I walked to school, but not with the low-hanging, gloomy gray storm clouds that had blanketed the city on Wednesday and Thursday, but higher, fluffier, the kind of clouds that give you a little room to breathe. The sun rises over Vladimirskii Cathedral, and although I couldn’t see the sun itself, several clouds over the cathedral burned bright gold. It was just so beautiful. The image of those clouds is now on my list of things I like about Russia.

So, I’m going to start fresh with the coming week. I hope I can find a place to focus on homework, keep going to the gym every day (also skipped that all this week, which probably didn’t help my mood), and, if I’m really doing well, curb my stress eating. One step at a time, and I’ll be happy to be in Russia again.

Russian Homeopathy

2008-09-29T21:43:00.001+04:00

I came down with the flu over the weekend, which is really lame. I spent yesterday and today in bed, shivering under piles of blankets and aching. Pity me.

I have to say, I have really lucked out with my host mom. She has not tried to cure me by using any of the traditional Russian remedies: I have not been forced to eat entire heads of garlic, nor sleep next to a plate of sliced onion, nor drink suspicious teas. However, she just got back from an excursion to a monastery near the border with Estonia over the weekend, and she did force me to drink some holy water she brought back. Good thing I’m not a vampire.

And speaking of water, I’ve been drinking so much tea the past couple of days made with tap water that I’ve now got stomach woes to accompany my flu woes. I want my mama.

On the upside, it’s been sunny for a whole week.

Two Concerts, Two Causes, One Deaf Alli

2008-09-27T00:43:00.000+04:00

Thursday night I went to see one of my favorite Russian bands, Pilot, with my friend Anya and her mom. Tickets were an amazingly cheap 150 rubles ($6!). The catch? Pilot was the headliner at an anti-drugs and alcohol festival. That meant a dry concert (I’ve never seen Pilot without piva [beer] before) and fairly corny anti-drug videos between each of the bands (including the classic, “I became a heroin addict after trying pot”). I don’t remember the name of the first band that played, but they were awful. The mediocre singer had some sort of blanket he kept wrapping around himself like a cape. Weird. Then Raznye Lyudi and Dekabr played, and they were both pretty good. Pilot played two sets. During the first they played songs from their new album, which seems like it’s going to be a little soft and floaty in comparison to their older albums (though I’m planning to buy it anyway). The second set was all old songs and was the best part of the night for me. It was so great to know all the songs already—last time I saw Pilot play, I had just started listening to them, so I didn’t know much of the music yet. I love that feeling when you and a few thousand Russian youths are all screaming along to favorite songs together.

I found the anti-drug message a little overwhelming, if sincere. I also had a little culture shock moment at how often God came up in the pleas to not do drugs. However, I have to applaud the concert organizers’ marketing campaign. The vast majority of drug users in Piter are teenagers. How do you get a few thousand teenagers to come to an anti-drug rally? Give them their favorite band for an unbelievably low price (Pilot is probably the most successful band in Petersburg, if not in all of Russia, among people under 25). Among all the appeals from the adults that came on stage, I found the brief entreaty of Pilot’s singer Ilya Chyort most appropriate and the most likely to be taken to heart: “I’m not going to tell you how to live your life [cheers from the crowd]. But if you find yourself addicted to drugs or alcohol, I just ask that you tell someone. Go to your friend and say ‘Bro, help me. I can’t fix this on my own.’ Because there are people who want to help you.” Good job, Ilya.

Friday evening I went to see DDT with Kennon and Berney. DDT are aging and awesome; they’ve been playing for at least 25 years. I couldn’t believe how full the stadium was. There were even more people than at Pilot the night before (same venue). I’m sure there were at least 5000 people, which means DDT made a real killing on tickets, which went for 500 or 1000 rubles a pop. This time around I didn’t know all the words; I haven’t been listening to DDT nonstop for the past 3 years like Pilot. However, every Russian there did know all the words, and it was really inspiring to see and hear so many fans all singing at once. DDT seems to span generations; there were middle-aged folks there, people in their 20s, and even some kids with their parents learning to be DDT fans from a young age. Awesome.

Like the anti-drug festival, DDT’s concert had a message. The theme of the concert was “Don’t Shoot,” and was all about Russia’s relationship with Georgia. To show solidarity with the various groups involved in the conflict, special guests included a band from Georgia, a band from South Ossetia, and a band from Ukraine (who’s not involved in the Georgia conflict, but with whom tensions are rising in Russia). Rather than have any of these bands be an “opener,” each played a mini-set between ½ hour long sets of DDT, which I thought worked well; it gave DDT a chance to take a break but kept the audience entertained. God also made an appearance at this concert in the form of a deacon from the Orthodox church, who made the claim that anyone who sits in front of the TV and revels in the war coverage and cheers on soldiers who are killing people is just as guilty as if they killed someone themselves. Yikes. He said a lot more than that, but I don’t remember already. Mostly I thought it was really odd to have a clergyman speak at a rock concert.

The ringing in my ears tells me I should give them a little break from live rock music. Televizor is playing October 17 (another 500 ruble ticket. Dang!) and Aria November 8. Hopefully by then I’ll be able to hear again.

The sunny side of life

2008-09-25T01:26:00.002+04:00

Written 23.09.2008 on the banks of the Malaya Neva River.

It's amazing what a little sun can do for your mood. On average, there are 75 sunny days in Petersburg in a year and we've had 2 (count em, 2) in a row. Yesterday I had my internship all afternoon, so I didn't get a chance to enjoy the sun much, but today I got out of class at 2:30 and I'm taking full advantage.

Today I walked home from school slower than usually and always on the sunnier side of the street. I slung my coat over my bag and rolled up the sleeves of my sweater - more skin exposure means more Vitamins D and K production. As I got closer to home, I couldn't bear the idea of sitting inside on an afternoon like this, so I stopped along the banks of the Malaya Neva River and found a sunny place to sit, where I'm now writing this blog entry in my little black notebook. It's fairly quiet here, the roar of the roads dampened by the trees in the park across the river from me. The river flows listlessly by, lazily carrying fronds of water plants and discarded bread bags further downstream. Eventually they'll reach the Gulf of Finland. An occasional breeze, warm and light, helps turn pages in my textbook for me. Indian Summer has arrived.

In Russian Indian Summer is called "Women's Summer" (Бабье лето). Back when all Russians were farmers, the women were too busy working in the fields and getting the harvest in to enjoy the summer. But by the time Indian Summer arrived at the end of September, they had more time to relax; Women's Summer was the only time women got to enjoy nice weather.

Women's Summer truly is a phenomenon - just a few days ago I was decked out in sweater and scarf and longjohns; today my sleeves are rolled up and I'm wishing I hadn't worn pantyhose; my legs are hot! There's no way of knowing how long this unbelievable weather will last; this could be the last day of it, or it could go on for another two weeks (I'm rooting for 2 weeks!). In a northern climate, you quickly learn not to take any nice day for granted - I for one am planning to spend every available, sunny moment on the banks of this river.

My classes

2008-09-21T22:21:00.000+04:00

I realized last night that I haven’t written anything about my classes yet. As class time occupies a significant portion of my day, I’ll give you a quick run down.

Fall semester I have class five days a week. Our group is split into two sections of 6 students (plus Berney, who’s doing his own thing), with whom we have all our classes. Every day Monday through Thursday we have two classes which run an hour and a half apiece, followed by a 45-minute one-on-one tutoring session and lunch. Twice a week I have phonetics, literature, and oral language practice. Once a week I have composition and grammar. Fridays are a bit different: the first period is listening practice, but it’s optional, so if I want to sleep an extra hour on Fridays I can. Second period is a language and culture class (unfortunately not optional), which our professors take turns leading and which covers a variety of topics. So far we’ve learned about the Christianization of Russia by Prince Vladimir, speech etiquette, and theatre in Petersburg. After Language and Culture we are either free, or we have an excursion, depending on the week.

Phonetics – some of you may remember that I hated this class last time I was in Russia. Olga Valentinovna is proof that the teacher makes or breaks a class – I absolutely love phonetics with her. She’s young, has a quick and dry sense of humor, and effectively explains how we need to form our mouths to make sounds that we don’t make in English. The class is a nice mix of theory, practice, and off-topic but interesting conversations about tangentially related things. I don’t do my homework as thoroughly as I should, but I’m continuing to work on this, because the more I can automatize phonetics, the better my accent will get without even trying during regular conversation.

Literature – Jamiliya Ruzmamatovna is another stupendous teacher. She doesn’t much care to follow the book we have and often brings in materials of her own for us to work on, particularly poetry (and thank goodness. Our textbook was written so that we discuss the same topic in all our classes for two weeks at a time. While this is an excellent way to ensure we’re hearing the same new words over and over, it can get to be a little much). Russian literature classes differ from American ones in that the teacher asks for our interpretations much less frequently, one might even say never, and instead tells us what each metaphor, symbol, or allusion means. In some respects this is actually helpful, because we don’t have the literary background to catch all the references in the texts we read. However, it’s more passive than I’m used to and has taken some adjustment. On the up side, Jamiliya Ruzmamatovna, I think, would not be opposed to hearing our opinions, if we ever decided to express them.

Oral Speech Practice – Our teacher, Irina Mikhailovna, has a finely nuanced understanding of the Russian language, and is adept at explaining differences between closely related words (for example, this week she explained when to use нет места and when to use нет мест). We get plenty of speaking time, although I still feel at times that she talks more than we do – an irony in a speech practice class. I write down more new vocabulary in this class than in any other, and I have no idea how I’m actually going to learn it all, but I’ll try.

Grammar – This class is unfortunately a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, once a week is not enough grammar for me; I tend to lose track of what we’re working on between classes. Secondly, our teacher, Kira Anatolievna, is amazingly smart, but she’s 72 years old at still teaches like she did forty years ago, using lots of grammar jargon that I’m not comfortable with even in English. She wrote the grammar sections of our textbook, and they unfortunately make little sense to me because of all the jargon. For example, our homework for Tuesday involves familiarizing ourselves with some abstractly stated grammar rules, and then somehow magically knowing from those rules how to change sample sentences provided so that they’re grammatical. Trust me, it’s harder than it sounds. So far I’ve simply resorted to looking in the dictionary, but that doesn’t always help, since the dictionary doesn’t always list all the different cases a verb can take. On the up side, Kira Anatolievna doesn’t collect homework (we discuss it in class. I think she can’t see very well, so it’s hard for her to read our handwriting), so any befuddlement on my part is not going to result in a bad homework grade. But basically I would prefer more grammar the way it was taught in Middlebury: focused on syntax, with a new structure explained and then exercises given for practice. Although it’s not the most interesting way to learn, it is effective for me, as I found several times over the course of the summer that I’d use the sentence structures we were working on in class in my conversations. Thus far here, I’m not even sure what exactly we’re working on in grammar.

Writing – Thus far this class has been devoted to teaching us how to write various documents. Russia loves bureaucracy: have a request? Write a document. Have a complaint? Write a document. Want to officially thank someone for something? Write a document. Without a document, nothing will get done. We’ve also spent some time looking at the stylistic fine points of business, academic, and creative writing. Darya Vladimirovna is kind but intimidating – she doesn’t hesitate to tell you when you’re wrong, and demands preciseness in answers (a good trait, but frustrating when you’re already doing the best you can to describe what you want to say because you don’t actually know the words you need).

Tutoring – I work with Olga, and our sessions are different all the time. We’ve spent some time working on day-to-day vocabulary I need (like shoe repair vocabulary), a lot of time on phonetics, and often work from materials she brings in for me based on things we’ve talked about. It’s much more formal than my tutoring from Nadya was; in effect, Nadya was paid to hang out with me, while Olga is much more in a teaching role. Doing one-on-one after three hours of class can be a bit exhausting, particularly if Olga decides we should work on phonetics on Wednesday, when I have phonetics right before tutoring (my tongue just can’t handle the workout!). But it’s a fantastic opportunity to get my individual questions answered and to focus on areas I feel need more work (I know tomorrow I’ll be taking my grammar questions to Olga – I really have no idea what my assignment is asking me to do!).

So that’s about it. Throw in an internship Monday and Thursday afternoons and my elective class Thursday evening, and aerobics classes at the gym all other evenings (there’s a great language learning opportunity – I have no idea what my work out instructors are shouting at us about half the time), and you’ll have a pretty clear picture of how I spend my time here. Other than the fact that it’s all in Russian, it’s not that different from home, actually.

3 in 1. Aren't you lucky?

2008-09-19T22:20:00.003+04:00

A pleasant surprise

I only drink bottled water in Russia, as water straight from the tap in Piter is not potable, and it tastes really funky even after it’s been boiled (hence a lot of tea drinking). Over the past month (holy cow, I just realized I’ve been here a whole month already!) I’ve collected quite a few bottles in my room, as we don’t have a dumpster in our courtyard, and I usually forget to take them with me when I’m headed in the direction of the nearest trash collection site. On my way to the gym this evening I finally remembered to take all the bottles with me. At the trash site I was met with a wonderful sight: next to the overflowing dumpster were two smaller dumpsters; Petersburg has a recycling program! I wish I’d known earlier; I’ve been putting plastic in with the regular garbage at home. Of course, I can’t say how widespread or effective it is, but the fact that there’s a separate dumpster for paper and one for glass, plastic, and metal is a fantastic start.

Russian Construction Sites

There’s not much anymore that really surprises me in Petersburg, and even if I find something unusual, it typically doesn’t catch me off guard. But twice in the past week I’ve experienced something that both surprised me and cracked me up. It’s Russian construction. The first experience was last weekend; me, Anya, Berney, and another of Anya’s friends were walking down Nevsky Prospekt, approaching Anchikov Bridge, which has been under construction for a couple months now. Saturday, they were resurfacing the sections of the road right where the crosswalks were. But instead of closing one side of the sidewalk at a time, as I would expect in the states, they didn’t close any side at all. Instead, all those masses of people walking down Nevsky just walked right through the construction areas, or around them as best they could. The asphalt was fresh and tarry-smelling, an ominous-looking steamroller backed up and zoomed around with nary a look at the pedestrians scuttling out of the way. In America, that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.

A similar thing happened today; they were replacing a pipe that runs under the road I walk down to get to the gym. As I approached the construction site, I could see that they’d dug up the sidewalk on either side of the road, so there was no going around. A massive pipe was slung from a crane, blocking the road. Again, at home I would have expected to see a sign at the corner, or something, as warning that it might be best to take a different route. Here, I waited for the workers to swing the pipe mostly out of the way, and scurried across the road and out of the way of a military transport vehicle, which revved its engine menacingly from behind me.

These incidents point to what I consider a paradox in the Russian idea of responsibility (a paradox in Russia? No way!). On the one hand, Russia is a very bureaucratic society, and it can make your head spin to try and figure out who is responsible for what, whom you need to talk to to get something done. The most frustrating (and frequent!) words you will hear here are, “That’s not our area. Go talk to X.” Usually X will send you on to someone else, or back to where you came from in the first place, and it takes a lot of persistence to finally get someone to do something. But on the other hand, pedestrians walking through a construction site are responsible for their own safety and well-being, we’re responsible for getting out of the way of the steamroller. Actually, maybe it’s not such a paradox; after all, the construction workers, just like the bureaucrats, aren’t taking on any more responsibility than they have to. Still, in general, I like this aspect of Russian society, the focus on personal responsibility. No one is looking out for you, no one is following you around taking care of you, telling you your coffee is hot or other equally obvious things. You have to use some common sense.

Yogurt

Russians love dairy. The range of dairy products available in Russia far exceeds the assortment found in the US, and includes sour cream (my favorite brand: Happy Milkman. He’s just so jolly!), kefir, tvorog (farmer’s cheese), a huge variety of both block and spreadable cheeses, milk, ice cream, syrok (cheesecake candy bars), tvorozhok (tvorog with jam or other stuff already mixed in), and butter, among others. The stamp of Russian dairy is its full-fat deliciousness; generally speaking, the less fat there is in a dairy product here, the more expensive it is. The milk I have with my coffee every day is 3.5%; if Galya decides to go “light,” she buys 2.5%.

Yogurt is a relative newcomer to the Russian dairy market and has been wholeheartedly embraced by Russians as a close cousin of the native kefir. My phonetics teacher, Olga Valentinovna, told us that when yogurt first appeared in Russian markets, people called it “oi-gurt,” because there aren’t any Russian words that start with “yog,” and it was hard for them to pronounce. With time, however, Russians have learned to say “yogurt,” and it is now, apparently, one of the healthiest and multi-talented foods available, as evidenced by the plethora of yogurt commercials you will see on any channel, during any show. I have seen commercials for yogurt claiming to lower cholesterol, boost the immune system, regulate digestion, make children grow, and, my favorite, a yogurt called “Beauty” which will save your hair, skin, and nails from aging. Maybe I’ll try that one out, haha. Amazingly, I haven’t yet noticed a yogurt commercial claiming that yogurt will help you lose weight, a major facet of Yoplait’s commercials in the US. Whether or not Russian yogurt can actually do any of the things people claim it can, it is yummy, which is the only criteria by which I judge my bacteria-laden food choices.

I ate about a pound of farmer's cheese today

2008-09-16T22:21:00.002+04:00

But I went to the gym yesterday. That counts for something, right? Right?

Actually, I can barely move today. I went to a class called Body Sculpt. Today I'm definitely feeling sculpted. Ouch. I'm particularly sore from about my lower back down to my knees. Our sculptor, Aleksei, stood in the front of the room, surveying the rows of struggling women and shouting "Keep your back straight! Keep your toes lower than your knee! Elbows high! Just four more - imagine how lovely your popas (bottoms) will be! We all want beautiful popas!" Aerobics is definitely more fun in Russian. I need to learn the names of more body parts.

Despite the fact that I can barely move today, now that I'm all signed up at the gym, I'm committed to getting back to my 5-6 times a week routine. Then I can eat all the farmer's cheese I want. *Insert diabolical laughter*

As I walked home from class today, I tried to think of something really really interesting, insightful, or thought-provoking to write about, but I couldn't come up with anything. Apparently I need culture shock in order to be creative. So here's some random stuff I thought up. If it's boring, I won't be offended if you don't read to the end.

I walk along a really lovely tree-lined branch of the Neva River for part of my route to university. About a week ago, one of the trees burst into red almost overnight. While part of me is a little aghast that the leaves are already turning in early September, this tree is just so beautiful that I can't help but smile every time I see it: one red-leafed tree in a whole row of green ones.

I read somewhere that you only have a certain amount of willpower (although with practice you can increase it). That means if you're using up all your willpower to, for example, stick to a crazy diet, you're more likely to give in to something else that you usually wouldn't do. I think this is true. I'm not sure if it's willpower or what, but it certainly takes a lot more energy to live in Russia and speak Russian all the time. Concurrently, I can't stop eating all the time and I have a hard time doing my homework, even though we don't really have that much (maybe an hour or so a day, if I would just sit down and do it). I'm hoping exercise helps with this, as well as simply being aware that it's happening and doing my best to stay motivated.

It's really chilly here; it's been in the 50s for about a week or so. That's not such a terrible range of temperatures, but there's no heat on anywhere in the city yet, so I end up being cold all day long. They usually turn the heat on in mid-October, but Galya says they're going to turn it on in the next week or so this year. We'll have to see. Till then: sweaters.

Exciting events this week: a trip to the US Consulate, an excursion to watch Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the European theatre (I've actually seen this production at this theatre before, but it'll be interesting a second time as well. Plus, free!), and an HIV test to get my multi-entry visa.

Sunday several of us went to the opera The Secret Marriage at the Sankt-Peterburg Opera. This is my favorite theatre in this city, and the opera was simply wonderful. It is fantastic to be back in this theatrical city, although I have to admit, I still miss IC theatre. :)

Last Friday several us went to happy hour at Evrasia, a sushi restaurant chain that I spent many afternoons at last time I was in Piter. Wow, have prices gone up. I used to be able to do happy hour for about 150 rubles (~$5). The price of my once-favorite roll has gone from 85 rubles to 245; a half-liter of beer has gone from 60 rubles to 90. Dang. Well, happy hour is still a good deal: everything is two for one. Still, I don't think I'll be going there twice a week like I was in spring 2006.

Well, folks, I miss you all. I've been missing Iowa City a lot the past few days - I get these little waves of wishing I was just at home working a normal job like a normal person. I know homesickness is just a part of getting adjusted to being in Russia again, so I'm doing my best to ride it out.

Keeping the Faith

2008-09-12T22:32:00.002+04:00

One of the most immediately visible things one has to adjust to in St. Petersburg is traffic. Moving from Iowa City to any big city would require this adjustment, of course, but Piter is in a league of its own. First of all, this is a 18th/19th century city - at least downtown is - and the streets are simply not wide enough to accommodate the ever-increasing number of cars on the road. This, in turn, leads to traffic jams (or, as they're called in Russian, "corks." Cute, huh?). When the cars finally get moving again, they don't waste any time.

The hurry hurry hurry of traffic in Piter leads to two interesting scenarios: the heart-stopping experience of being in a car and the equally life-threatening task of crossing the street when on foot.

In 2005-06 I rode in a car all of three times the whole year, and two of those times was in a taxi (I'm not counting marshrutki (minibuses) or other forms of surface transportation). This time I've already managed to have two rides in private cars. Driving in Piter is fast: you accelerate quickly, you drive fast, you turn fast, you brake fast and, most important of all, at the last minute. Lane divisions are merely suggestions, and it often seems like four cars are driving abreast where there should only be room for two. Despite all this, accidents seem not to happen nearly as often as I'd expect. I find that the best way to remain calm is to simply remind myself that Petersburg drivers are all used to the flow of traffic in the city, and that they drive the way they do because that's always how they've done it, not because they have any less control over their vehicles than people in Iowa City.

More relevant to my daily life is my interaction as a soft, squishy, flesh-and-blood pedestrian with these wildly zooming plastic and metal boxes. In theory, pedestrians in Russia have the right-of-way; in practice, it's each man for himself. When you've got the green pedestrian light, you still need to watch out for turning cars, which may or may not be watching out for you. The most interesting pedestrian situation I've encountered here is along my route to and from school every day. At the end of Tuchkov Bridge on the Vasilievski Island side there is what one might call a pedestrian crossing. Once in my first days here, I approached this crossing on foot; the light was green in my direction, but there was a green right-turn arrow directing a steady stream of cars across my path. I waited patiently for the right-turn arrow to turn red. After a couple cycles of the light, I realized that the right-turn arrow is always lit, and there is almost always a constant flow of cars turning right. What's a pedestrian to do?

For the first few days, I would wait for a Russian pedestrian to make the first move. If it looked like they weren't about to get creamed, I'd quick step it after them. Safety in numbers (this tactic also works at pedestrian crossings without stoplights). However, I don't always have time to wait around for a Russian to be heading the same direction as me; probably with good reason there's not a lot of pedestrian traffic at this particular intersection. So what do I do now? I look directly at the driver of the quickly-turning car coming towards me and just step into the street. If it looks like s/he's slowing down even a little bit, I keep moving. You just have to remember that they don't actually want to hit you, and have faith that they won't.

The thing is that Russians drive like they do almost everything else in life: they respect assertiveness. If a pedestrian is assertive and steps confidently into the street, on the whole drivers will recognize that and yield. It's the same way with the bureaucracy here: the more assertive you are with clerks, the more likely you are to actually get what you need done. Any sign of a lack of confidence or knowledge of what you're doing is taken to mean that you don't really want whatever it is you're asking for (whether that's getting an internet hookup at home, towels at the banya, or crossing the street). There's a fantastic Russian saying about the law that illustrates this point: "That's forbidden, but if you really want to, then okay" (Нельзя, но если очень хочется, то можно). There's always a way around obstacles.

By the way, I recently saw a great PSA showing a little old lady trying to cross the street at a crosswalk with no stoplight, and none of the speeding cars slow down for her. So there is a campaign to increase public awareness of the need to slow down for those who physically can't be as assertive as I described above, although I'm not sure that it's made much difference so far.

And while I'm thinking about cars, I'd like to mention a small difference (one of many) I've noticed between Russian and American news broadcasts. When they show some kind of big car accident on the news in America, all you ever see are smashed up cars, broken glass, maybe an ambulance. It's all very clean. Galya and I were watching the news last night and there was a piece about really nasty accident on the highway between Piter and Moscow, in which a big semitruck completely obliterated this car. Here's what they showed: the car, which is essentially the ripped apart outline of what was once a car, and in front of the car, a body. Holy cow, they showed footage of the victims. Not something you'd see on American TV. To make it that much more wrenching, they also showed footage of the truck driver sitting in his cab with his head in his hands, clearly completely distraught over what had happened. Whew.

Viniagrettes Follow-up: I’ll have the basalmic

2008-09-09T22:44:00.000+04:00

Internship

First day of the internship went pretty well. I translated the schedule of events for a seminar from Russian into English. That was pretty fun. And then I helped Alina translate her resume. That was a little trickier – she seemed hesitant to give up some of the Russian characteristics of a resume that simple aren’t a part of English resumes – like birthday and place of birth and hobbies. Also, Russian resumes are focused around nouns, so when you describe what you did at a job, you’d write something like “Preparation of documents for the company president. Management and coordination of a team of three people.” With the American resume focused around verbs (“Created innovative projects; collaborated with team members; produced meeting reports”), it was truly head-spinning to figure out how to restate some of her job activities.

In the future (as in, starting Thursday) I’ll be translating articles for the almanac, The Maecenas. And thank god, cuz they had a translation service do the last issue, and it’s really bad. Everything is understandable, of course, but it all sounds really translated. So I’ll try my hand at it; I hope I can get it to turn out better. Plus this will be a great way to see if translation is something I’d really be interested in doing as a career.

Buddha

Has been silenced.

Cadets

As I arrived home after class today, one of them blew me a kiss and waved. Cheeky. I smiled and waved back. I don’t think those boys see girls very much. Galya tells me that only freshmen and sophomores live in the dorm in our courtyard, so they’re all still 17 and 18 and rabbity.

Did you know? Fun food facts.

• What we call a “crisp” in the US (you know, with peaches or apples) in Russia is called a pudding (пуддинг). Also, Galya makes it with pumpkin on the bottom and apples on top. So delicious.

• Even after a large dinner, it is perfectly possible to eat half a watermelon if Galya says “you have to eat it, there’s no room in the fridge.”

• The fat in dairy products is good for you (a syrok, which is like a little cheesecake candy bar that comes in different flavors, is 25% fat). It’s bread that makes you gain weight.

• Dynia (Дыня): the Russian version of cantaloupe. It grows in the Caucuses and is long and oval like a watermelon. The flesh is white instead of orange, and on the first bite, you think you’re actually eating cantaloupe. But then the unique flavor of this late-summer delight takes over, and you can’t really tell anymore that it’s a cantaloupe cousin. Yummy.

Vinaigrettes. Wait, what? Oh, vignettes.

2008-09-05T21:26:00.000+04:00

I have made it through the first week of classes. Whew! I think for the most part they’ll be interesting, but they really tired me out this week. It’ll get better as I get settled into a routine. Currently it’s looking like Monday’s going to be a busy day for me: class 9:30-14:00, internship 15:00-19:00, and then elective class 19:30-21:00. But the rest of the week I’ll just have class till 2 every day, and then I’ll be free, so it looks like I’m going to have plenty of time to study, work out, and be social.

Internship

On Wednesday Lena, our program coordinator, took me and Berney to meet our boss and coworkers at the InterJournalist Center, where we’ll be doing our internships. It sounds like we’re going to have plenty of serious work to do, and I’m looking forward to getting started. Inna Genadievna, my boss, listed several possible projects for me, including translation work for their bi-monthly journal, making contacts to try to increase distribution of the journal, searching (and applying, perhaps) for grants, and even teaching English. Berney will be involved more with organizing seminars which the center puts on every couple of months or so.

New Friends

Last night Alina and Tanya, our new coworkers, took Berney and I to see various parts of downtown. I’d seen them all before, of course, but driving around for a couple hours really helped me get reoriented and remember where stuff is. Then we spent a couple hours at a newish club called Sochi. Excellent atmosphere. I had the Greek salad. Russian feta cheese has not improved since my last trip here. ;) Alina and Tanya are young and sociable, and I’m really hoping we’ll get to be pretty good friends by the end of the year.

50 Cadets

My apartment building shares a courtyard with a dorm for cadets in some military or aerospace academy (not quite sure which, there are a lot of academies around here). Several times a day a clump of cadets in fatigues traipses through the courtyard on their way to or from class. Usually they march in neat rows, but one thing interferes with their military discipline: they’re replacing some pipes in our courtyard, which means there’s a gigantic trench that cuts through the pavement. To cross the trench, you have to walk over a narrow plank bridge, wide enough for one person. As you can imagine, it takes a bit longer than usual to get all those boys across the courtyard because of the bridge (affectionately called a mostik in Russian, which for some reason I always think of as a “bridge-lette”). Ok, keep this in mind as I go off on what seems like an unrelated tangent.

Today I decided to go running in the park near my building. I fell off the fitness wagon about three weeks before the end of the program in Middlebury, and although Galina’s been feeding me well (steamed veggies and salmon earlier this week, yummy!) and I’ve been trying to watch what I eat, I haven’t been eating as well as I’d like. As today was sunny and warm, I decided that today was the day to get back in the saddle.

[Ok, real tangent: I have to admit to a cookie binge the other night, after the steamed veggies and salmon. 500 grams of chocolate priyaniki. That’s like 3000 calories and 365 grams of carbs. My intestines and eating schedule are still recovering from that stress-induced disaster. The funny thing is, I don’t feel stressed out. At least not to the extent that I did upon my arrival in Piter in 2005. But the fact that I don’t want to do my homework and I find myself wanting to eat all the time, even when I’m not hungry, suggests that I am indeed under some stress. I can only hope that I will get adjusted faster than I did in 2005, when it took until the middle of the spring semester before I was comfortable in Petersburg. Also, I won’t be buying any more bags of cookies. Can’t trust myself to eat just two or three.]

Although jogging is starting to get more popular in Russia, it’s still not really accepted to run on the sidewalks along the streets. Even if people didn’t stare at you like you’re a freak running down the sidewalk, I wouldn’t run on the streets here anyway: too many pedestrians to get around, and the car pollution makes deep breathing both nearly impossible and dangerous for your health. In the park people still look askance at me as I run, but as there are fewer people in the park than on the street, it doesn’t bother me.

I donned my usual exercise attire: hot pink running shorts, a black tank top, and my iPod strapped to my arm. This is definitely not the costume I would wear to try to blend in, but what are you going to do? A woman running in the park already doesn’t blend in, so I may as well wear what’s comfortable. After my jog (5 times around the park jogging and twice walking, and I almost died. I’m so out of shape. Also, is tea really acidic? My stomach felt all burny), I triumphantly returned to my courtyard. To my dismay, my return coincided with the arrival from the other direction of a clump of cadets, who were coming toward me across the mostik. My apartment is on the other side of that bridge; I had no option but to simply wait as all 50 of those boys crossed the bridge in single file. I’m not kidding you, every single one of them looked me over like I was insane, sweaty gym clothes, bare arms and legs, tattoos and all. I’m sure they were just curious, but it was incredibly uncomfortable to just stand there as they filed past, not hiding their stares. I’ve never felt so on display.

This reminds me of something I’ve noticed a lot more this time: Russians are always checking each other out. It’s not really accepted to smile at strangers on the street or even make eye contact, so it seems like they look at each other much more furtively than we might in the US. Last time I was here I was so worried about the possibility of having to interact with another person that I stared at the ground all the time as I walked. This time I’m not afraid to look at people, and I catch them looking at me too. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s so obvious that I’m foreign (not that I care anymore if they know I’m foreign), but I’ve definitely noticed it. I can’t say I’m not doing it too – I check out every pair of women’s shoes that I see coming my way. :)

The Laughing Buddha

Galina has this horrible horrible statue of the happy Buddha that actually laughs. But it’s not pleasant laughter, it’s this blood-curdling maniacal giggle. What’s worse, it laughs at random. I’m not sure what sets it off, but I’ll just be sitting in my room, minding my own business, when this creepy laughter from the other room suddenly breaks the silence. Shudder. Galina said it woke her up the other night, and she was so freaked out that she put it out on the balcony so she wouldn’t hear it the rest of the night. That begs the question: why does she have the damn thing in the first place? Or why doesn’t she take the battery out? The thing has laughed at least half a dozen times since I got home from my jog. Maybe I’ll take the batteries out.

Flash Cards

Except for in Russian Word Formation class, where we were given systematic lists of words to learn, I stopped making and using flashcards to help learn vocabulary ages ago – I found that it took a lot of time to make them, and then I rarely reviewed them. However, I think it might be time to give them another try. I have simply tons of new vocabulary that I’ve written down from class and from life just this week alone, but it’s all so random and unrelated that I don’t think I can learn it just from my little notebook. Also, in the past I’ve gotten away with not reviewing vocabulary very much because I was working to learn high-frequency words. Most words I simply eventually memorized because I heard them in day-to-day speech. Now, however, I’m working to learn lower-frequency words – the kind you find in academic settings and written language, but are unlikely to hear in a normal conversation. That kind of vocabulary is much more difficult to absorb, at least for me. If anyone has any strategies or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear from you. Actually, I’m always happy to hear from you in general. :)

Catch up

2008-09-02T22:39:00.002+04:00

Hey folks, it's been a few days. I've gotten busier and, ironically, getting internet access at home has made me lazier about writing blogs. Something about having a computer but no internet was inspiring, like I had nothing else to do, so I'd write. Here's what comes to mind about the last few days:

A. Telephone bureaucracy. Olya, Galina's daughter, and I went to Telekom the other day to sign up for DSL service at home. As it turns out, our telephone is still registered in Galina's mother's name, but Galya's mom has been dead for 10 years! So I have to wait till Olya re-registers the phone in her own name, then we can sign up for DSL. In the meantime I'm going retro: dial-up from a prepaid internet card. It's a lot cheaper than at the internet cafes, but the connection is pretty lame. I probably won't be posting any pictures until I get a more stable and speedy connection.

B. University done Russian-style. My classes started Monday, and everything with my core classes is so far going fine (although I already don't feel like doing my homework, haha). I'm getting readjusted to the Russian method of teaching, which involves a lot more lecture, even in such subjects as Oral Speech, where one would assume we'd have to talk at least a little bit in an hour and a half. Maybe it'll get better as we get into the semester.

In other University done Russian-style news, Saint Petersburg State starts with a few more heaves and gasps than the University of Iowa. Each of us Flagshippers is required to audit a course with Russian students, like a real content course. Theoretically, school started yesterday for all the Russians too, but even as of the first day of school, the course list is not finalized. So a few of us showed up to "Russian Foreign Policy" last night, and it turned out the class doesn't start till next week. Dang. I walked an extra hour and a half in heels. In the rain. For a class that no one bothered to tell us doesn't start till next week.

Today I sat in on "Problems in International Relations and Conflicts." Since it was the first day, all we did was hear the Russian students introduce themselves and then get an overview of the topics that will be covered in the course (a TON of material, and lots of reading. Glad I'm just auditing!). It's interesting to see the little differences between Russian and American classes. For one thing, while Americans write notes to each other during class if they want to communicate, Russians just talk, and often not even very quietly. For another, where an American teacher would hand out a syllabus, our Russian teacher just read us the topics and the questions for each topic (which for me means I have a haphazard and incomplete list, as I did not write fast enough or understand every word she said). I'm still going to sit in on that Foreign Policy class next Monday; we'll have to see which one I like better. The Tuesday class is at a better time, 3:30, but it's three hours long, whereas the Monday class is only an hour and a half, but starts at 7:30 PM, meaning I either stay at the university until pretty late or spend a lot more time in transit between school and home.

C. I need shoe repair terminology. Once I get that terminology, I need to find the nearest shoe repair shop. They have them everywhere here, so it shouldn't be a problem.

D. Anya and I went to Peterhoff on Saturday, where there's a big palace, lots of fountains made of gold, and a really beautiful park/garden. We got all the way there before I remembered/realized that I didn't yet have my Russian student ID (got it today, whew!). As you may or may not know, Russia has a tiered pricing system for museums, theatres, etc. The same applies at Peterhoff. The Russian student price: 50 rubles. The regular Russian price: 150 rubles. The foreigner price: 300 rubles. Yikes. Even for golden fountains, I wasn't about to pay 300 rubles. Having lived in Russia before, I know how this works: I just had Anya go through two different lines and buy two student tickets with her student ID. But then when we got to the gate to give our tickets to the grumpy lady, she asked to see our IDs. I told her I didn't have mine with me, and she told me in no uncertain terms to go buy a full-price ticket. Guess what we did instead? We walked about a kilometer down the way to a secondary entrance with a much less grumpy lady, who merely asked if our IDs were still current, and didn't make us actually show them. We were in! Haha, I love Russia.

E. The remodeling on my room was finally completed on Friday, so I'm all settled into my permanent location now. I like it; I have a lot of plants and a shiny new ceiling. The only thing is it seems like the coldest room in the apartment. Hopefully this won't be a problem once the heat gets turned on.

Okay, at the moment I can't think of anything else. If there's anything in particular you're curious about or would like me to talk about, leave me a comment and I'll be happy to oblige.

Host Family and School Stuff

2008-08-29T13:14:00.000+04:00

Today (Wednesday evening) I met Galina’s daughter, Olya, son-in-law, Zhenya, and grandson, Artyom (Tyomich). They are all simply delightful! Olya works out a lot and is in really good shape (as in, bulging triceps and abs you can see through her shirt. damn!), so next time I see her I’m going to hit her up for fitness vocabulary. Zhenya was really great about making conversation with me, and is convinced that Iowa is famous for something other than corn, soybeans, and hogs. And insurance companies in Des Moines (I learned the word for headquarters!). It’s news to me, so as soon as he remembers what else we’re famous for, I’ll be happy to pass it on to you.

Artyom is pretty much awesome. He’s almost twelve and will be starting 5th grade on Monday. I think he was flirting with me a little bit, or at least trying to impress me, because Galina said after they left that he’s usually not so energetic and rabbity. As soon as he’d decided that I understand Russian pretty well, he was off talking a mile a minute, and found it utterly hilarious every time I didn’t know some word or another, or when I completely fell off the speeding language train. At one point he was telling a story and said the word for “duck,” but he was talking so fast that I didn’t hear it. When I asked him, “wait, what was swimming/sailing in the river?” he said, “you know, a duck. A duck! That thing with the wings that quacks that swims in the river and quacks and goes like this….” on and on. Then he found it funny to explain in minute detail lots of common words, like “hill” or “green.” The kid’s a riot, seriously.

Generally speaking Olya’s family speaks pretty quickly, but I pick up on most of what they say. With a little more training for my ear (i.e. hopefully within the next month or so) I’ll be able to mostly quit saying “What? What? I didn’t hear you.”

In other home-stay news, our water heater died on Monday (boo), so we’ve been without hot water for a couple days. The mechanic (plumber? electrician? who does water heaters?) came today and said that it had died completely (what? You mean this 50-year-old gas heater won’t last forever?), so I came home to a brand new kolonka! It’s swank. I’ll post a picture if I remember. Too bad, really, that I didn’t take a picture of the old one for comparison’s sake.
Also, the renovation work on my room should be finished tomorrow or Friday, so I’ll hopefully be able to move into my permanent room over the weekend, and Galya will get her living room back.

Kennon and I found a great little Georgian cafe today, a little on the pricy side if you’re just going for tea or coffee, but it’s close to school. I’m so there for Ajara-style khachapuri!

Today we got our group assignments and our schedule for next week. My week starts with phonetics. Joy. Don’t get me wrong, I love phonetics, they’re really necessary and helpful, and I want to sound Russian when I talk, but dang, first thing Monday morning? In addition to our core classes, which include phonetics, literature, grammar, speech practice, writing, and daily work with tutors, we will each be auditing a regular university class – as in with Russian classmates and teachers lecturing in Russian on specific topics. I’m really excited about picking a class, although I’m a bit nervous about my ability to follow lectures, especially if there’s a lot of specialized vocabulary. But what a great learning opportunity! We don’t even have the full list of classes we can take yet, but so far I really have my eye on “Conflicts in International Relations;” I’m interested to see if the professor will mention anything about the war in Georgia. However, I’m also interested in “Ethnoconflict,” “The Social and Economic History of Russia,” “Social Movement and Political Ideas,” and “Russian Foreign Policy.” And those are just from among the classes available from the history and philosophy departments! We’ll be getting a list from the philology department soon, but those will mostly be literature classes, and I think for once I’m going to give literature a rest. We’ll have a lit class in our core sections, and I’d like to do some exploring outside my usual field of study.

Thus, my weekly schedule for the fall semester is starting to take shape. I’ll be in class 9:30-2:20 every day. Once a week I’ll have my audit course for one and a half or three hours (why is it that my top choice class is a three hour one? boo that.). I’m hoping to fill in some more time in the evening at the gym; I have my eye on a few different classes, but I still haven’t gone to ask for info about cost yet. I’ll also have my internship, which, although it doesn’t start officially until January, I’ll probably start working at in the fall. Between all those activities and having a social life, being in Petersburg is going to resemble life in the US in many ways. At least I’ll be busy!

My Mailing Address

2008-08-27T15:46:00.002+04:00

This address is for letters only. I'm still working on getting information about packages. For now, please don't send me packages. It could cost me a lot of money to get it from the post office.

If it's possible for you to print the address on a label or something in Russian (rather than English), your letter is more likely to reach me.

I'll post these addresses in the sidebar of this blog as soon as I figure out how to do that.

The Special Department of Philology
St. Petersburg – 199034
Nab. Leitenanta Shmidta, Bld. 11/2, Office 307
Allison Rockwell
RUSSIA

Специальный филологический факультет
Санкт-Петербург – 199034
Наб. Лейтенанта Шмидта, д. 11/2, Оф. 307
Эллисон Рокуэлл
РОССИЯ/ RUSSIA

Little moments that maybe no one else will appreciate, but oh well.

2008-08-27T15:41:00.002+04:00

1. My host mom has a steamer for cooking. As in, for two days straight, I’ve eaten vegetables that hadn’t been touched by oil. I think Galina Anatolievna was sent by god.

2. I took another oral exam today (Tuesday). I’m pretty sure I sounded like a two-year-old. As soon as I got out of the testing room, I sounded normal again. Will I ever be able to show how well I can actually speak on one of those tests?

3. Sore calves from high heels are better than quarter-sized blisters from flats that rub the wrong way.

4. One of the joys of living in a new place is figuring out the best way to walk to various high-frequency locations like, for example, school. I have most of the route pretty well down, but the bit at the beginning, getting from my house to Tuchkov Bridge has, for some reason, proven problematic time and again. I can walk along the main road, but it’s pretty busy, and the exhaust fumes are choking. Clever me, I decided to walk along a much less busy parallel road today. Guess what I discovered? The less-busy road is also less well-drained, and it rained a lot this morning. But for the kindness of the four or five cars that sped around the lakes in the road instead of through them, I would have been completely covered in dirty street water before I even got a quarter of the way to school. So, on rainy days, I’m sticking with the choking fumes.

5. A little wisdom from Galina Anatolievna for you: stewed blueberries are good for your eyesight (whether or not this is true, stewed blueberries are yummy, and have the added benefit of turning your teeth and tongue blue), and if you don’t eat before going to bed, you’ll have nightmares.

6. Filtering and boiling water doesn’t make it taste any better. That’s why Russians drink tea instead of plain water. A lot of Piter’s water problems stem from the fact that most of the pipes in the city are really ancient and made of lead and other delicious heavy metals like that. However, a huge project to replace all the old pipes is being undertaken even as I write, so hopefully at least some of the water problems will be solved within the next few years.

7. Galina and I watched the Russian version of CSI this evening. It’s called FES, Federal something something. I’ve already forgotten the acronym. This morning we watched an old episode of Daddy’s Girls (Папины дочки). The dialogue in that show is horribly stilted and poorly acted, but it still makes me laugh. In general, if Galina’s home, the TV in the kitchen is on, even if she’s sitting in front of it reading a book. It was like that at my old host family’s too, but here our kitchen is about the size of a large closet, so I find the TV a bit overwhelming. However, it is a good springboard for conversation, which is always a good thing.

8. Speaking of conversation, I’ve noticed the past few days that even though I know Russian about a million times better than I did upon my first arrival in Piter, I am still shy or nervous in situations that should already be fairly easy. For example, I’ve been putting off getting more info about joining a gym. I know my language is sufficient for such activities, but some part of me has gone back to the place I was at when I didn’t know anything and was scared of everything. Probably the best cure for this is to just quit being nervous and try stuff out. I’m sure if I go to the gym tomorrow, it won’t be nearly as scary as I’ve made it out to be in my head. Just like buying a cell phone went seamlessly yesterday (“Yeah, gimme that one. The cheapest one in the shop”). Galina again has come to my rescue – to give me a nudge towards the gym, she stopped by herself today (without me asking), and got the schedule for the aerobics and aquatics classes. Looking over the list has gotten me excited to find out more, so I’ll probably head on over there after our written test tomorrow.

9. The special department of philology at St. Petersburg State has significantly better-maintained restrooms than Herzen had. I'm talking toilet paper, soap, AND paper towels. Sure, there are still no toilet seats and it smells funny, but otherwise it's almost like heaven.

I think 9 points is sufficient for one fairly random blog entry. Good night and good luck!