One month

yeah so i've been here one month. i'm not feeling very reflective, but i feel a little bit more comfortable every day, which is supposed to happen. Vyso po planu. Except I still need to find something to do. It's a shame that in childhood I never sticked with a sport or an instrument, but its just not in my nature, I guess.

Nothing much happened. I bought a striped shirt at Shanghai because I like striped shirts and they happen to be an alternative to Black which is popular among Russian men and women. Shanghai is a market full of Chinese people that apparently will steal anything off of you if you so much as one second don't hold onto it. The shirt cost 650 rubles, which I thought I paid too much for, but my host mom said it was a normal price. 650 rubles = 26 dollars. But it is a nice, long sleeved shirt. It is from what I hope is a very prestigious shirt factory in China.

Last weekend we went to Arshan, which is a popular tourist spot in the neighboring Buryat Republic. I know this from my host mom, my professors, and my favorite billboard in the city, a strange looking girl with pale flabby arms doing a strange gesture in front of the Sayani mountains with "REST IN ARSHAN" written above it. I'm not saying that the girl is not pretty, its just that she has weird arms, and they are prominently featured in the ad as she is gesturing with them.

We went to the bus station, which is kind of dumpy and not pretty like the railways station and bought tickets. We sat down on our minibus, only to find that it was going to drop us off at the train station anyway. The ride was very beautiful-around Irkutsk there is mixed forest, then in the central part a broad valley, and near Arshan real, beautiful mountains, not sissy Vermont mountains, but more like Alaskan ones. Kevin's host mom found us a place to stay ahead of time and we then went to a Datsan, or buddhist monastery, which was very small but peaceful. After that we went to see the famous waterfalls. It was a very strange place, because many people go there "to heal." There was a big sanatorium with strange playground equipment, a monument to those that died in World War II, and a big plaster gate with socialist realist workers on the top. The waterfalls were located along a steep and kind of scary trail, but there were tons of Russians of all ages walking around too. That meant that there was a lot of trash and graffitti, but it was still very beautiful. Some things I noticed:
Russians usually just write their name, their city, and the year on the rocks. Nothing else to say.
Russian women take what we would call a "senior photo" every time they are in front of something pretty. Which usually means lying on the ground with the hand on the chin, or with an arm wrapped around a strategically placed tree. They also like to block the trail when they do this.

Afterwards we decided to find a place to eat. We walked along the main road of Arshan, which was not really anything, just some stores and houses. At the very end of the town (15 minute walk) we found a zakusochnaya, where we ordered pozi and cherembeki. Pozi are the national dish of Buryatia, who are like Mongolian type peoples, only not. It consists of a dumpling filled with meat and about 6 oz. of grease. They are good, but you have to eat them right or about 5 oz. of grease will spill on your jeans, which in Russia is awful because a) you're not allowed to wear dirty pants and b) people very seldom wash their pants. All the tables were full so we decided to wait at the outside tables, and four different people asked us: "you're not cold?"

My favorite part of Arshan was this little green strip in the middle of the town (really a village.) It wasn't really a road, just a strip of land about 30m wide that had a little stream running down it, powerlines up above, and grass and dirt paths and cows wandering along it. It was very peaceful.

Yesterday was a day of shame for me. I came home, opened the window like my host mom reminds me to every day, but today I didn't forget, only I stepped over my bed on the way back and not around it and smacked my head into the chandelier and broke one of the glass plates (there are about 30 plates and one was already broken, but this is still bad.) So then my host mom came home, and in the doorway told me to stop scraping my keys against the wooden door because she can't afford a new door, and of course I had to tell her then about the chandelier, she wasn't too happy but not really angry, because it was an accident. Later she scolded me for not picking up my clothes (rightly so) and for not changing my clothes and lying on my bed. Which I understand, but she told me that there is a lot of AIDS in Irkutsk, which is true, but I didn't want to tell her that you can't get AIDS by sitting on a dirty bus seat, or standing on one, because I knew she wouldn't believe me. I was lying on the bed because for God knows what reason, my host mom had a copy of Catcher in the Rye, in english, in her bookshelf, and I read it yesterday. I still really like a lot, and if anybody tells me that Holden Caulfield just complains the whole book, than he is a moron who doesn't understand anything.

this post is turning out to be pretty long. We are going to Severobaikalsk tonight for a week, so have a good week everybody.

David