Я ГОТОВ

So I guess a lot has happened. I’ve been in a good mood a lot, I don’t want to say that I’m comfortable yet, but I think I have reached another nameless stage in the battle with Culture Shock. My 21st birthday is coming up in less than a week, and although I haven’t accomplished many of the things I hoped to do by then, Russia isn’t to blame for that. But more importantly, things seem to have been going my way the last few weeks, and I think I will start off the 22nd year pretty well.
We had a group trip to the neighboring Buryat Republic. Basically our coordinator Lisa planned everything very well, as usual, and we drove around in a little van around the region. One day we visited local Buddhist temples, which made me want to learn more about Japanese Buddhism, like when I was in Mongolia. The best part was a little room “museum” devoted to some holy figure of the Buryat people, which had some of his personal items and three wax sculptures, very realistic. I think I am secretly a Buryat and no one told me. Russians are so funny—we stopped in a small roadside café and the lady behind the counter seemed bugged because we were slow to order and hard to understand, and when she asked us where we were from it seemed more accusatory than friendly. But then she revealed that her son studied abroad in Charlotte, NC, and when we got up to leave she gave us little packets of incense as a gift, without dropping her serious tone. I’m glad I didn’t tell her that Charlotte, NC is nothing special.
The next day we drove out again to visit another Russian religious group—the semeiskiye. They are a group of Old Believers that ran away to Poland, lived peacefully, and then Russia acquired Poland and Catherine the Great sent them to live in Eastern Siberia, where the land isn’t so great. But they didn’t complain, they made a pretty damn good living for themselves. Nowadays only the young kids and the very old are religious, but we happened to show up in the small village on the last day of Russian Maslenitsa, and there were all sorts of folk games—climb the greasy pole, jump over the burning effigy of Winter, tug-of-war, and a contest that I will call “how many times can the young men of the Village raise and lower a 15-pound weight over their head”. Only the pole was too icy, and nobody could climb it. But I got to see the Russian version of Red Rover, which is probably safer than our limb-wrenching version. It wasn’t for tourists, it was a real Russian village, celebrating more or less like they had for hundreds of years, and we were lucky to see it.
That night Middlebury College gave Lisa 4000 rubles to give to us to find a place to eat. 4000 rubles is a lot, so we walked around Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, looking for a place to eat. We walked down their pedestrian street, which is a lot nicer than ours, and I realized that Ulan-Ude has a much nicer center than ours, although ours is recognized as being better and more historic. I just like Soviet centers, especially when they include ice sculptures and the largest Lenin head in the world.
Our groupmate Sarah was taking her time photographing the ice-sculptures, and I went over to her because I was sort of hungry. But it turns out she was talking to two Buryat ladies, who were delighted at everything we said. They were slightly (or not really slightly) drunk, and soon they were escorting us to a nice restaurant. We walked to the nearby hotel Baikal-Plaza, one of those ex-Soviet ones that are quite luxurious. We were the only patrons that night, because there were “elections” going on. I’m not sure why elections would stop people from dining at 8:00pm, but still. Our new aunties loudly demanded that we be served well, because we were foreigners that study in Irkutsk, and left us in peace.
Our waiter was a young Buryat named Evgeny, who was probably the best waiter in the world, because he did not even smirk at us despite our casual/outdoor apparel and the fact that we all spoke to each other with ridiculous American accents and grammatical errors, as if that was the normal thing to do. He informed us that the kitchen could prepare European, Russian, Buryat, and Mexican cuisine. “You said Mexican?” I asked.
“Of course.” So I had Mexican-style lamb. The only thing that could make eating alone in a fancy Soviet restaurant was when the DJ made a speech to the center of the hall, where no one was sitting, because we on the side, and said, looking at the imaginary, (he was probably imagining hot, well-dressed Russian women instead of frumpy Americans), he declared that the next song was “especially for you.” And then he sang three or four songs, only not to us, and then sat down again. We even ate desert. Middlebury College, shame on you! There is an economic downturn going on!
The next three days we spent on the frozen Lake Baikal, which is especially beautiful in winter, the ice is transparent and makes strange patterns. We drove directly on the lake, and when large cracks appeared our trusty guide/driver Misha looked for a good place to cross and then gunned it. We stayed one night in a yurt with other fisherman, and we drilled holes into the ice right by our yurt-beds, but the fish weren’t biting.

What the hell happened to March? I just got back from yet another trip, this time to the Far East, which was all by myself and I think a life-changing experience. Not really, but I had a lot of time to think to myself, and I walked around a lot by myself. I will write about it in about a week or so, probably, after I remember what I did in March. I think I mainly just read articles about UNC basketball on the internet, who by the way WON THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP. But I have been using the internet a lot less, lately, because I can go back to that in about two months, anyway.
PS yesterday it was sunny and almost 60 degrees, today there was gray dust blowing everywhere and I could taste grit in my mouth, but the sun is shining again now. I expected more out of this post, sorry. Nevermind.

PS I should also announce that I am going to write a senior thesis about the Russian rock hero Viktor Tsoi: