the pacific ocean

So I will briefly here sum up my trip to the Far East:

I left really early Saturday morning. I really didn’t want to, I was anxious about traveling alone and in Khabarovsk I was to be met by my language school teacher’s brother, and I was grateful and at the same time worried about that, too. Because I didn’t know him at all. I laid in bed and couldn’t sleep and my host mom was sick so I thought: “maybe I’ll get sick and then I won’t have to go, I can just hang out here.” And I also thought: “do I really have to get up at 4:45am? Let’s see, the train leaves at 6:30. So I called the cab for 5:30. So I have to –yeah, damn, 4:45am.
At the train station it was snowing wet and thick and it was quite nice waiting on the platform. I really lucked out, because I bought 2nd class tickets and in my four-person compartment there was only a middle-aged lady. After 30 minutes she was already calling me “sonny” and she fed me the whole trip and we talked a fair amount. Her name was Vera, I am going to send her a postcard from Alaska cause I wrote down her address. The train ride to Khabarvosk was 60 hours long, but it wasn’t so bad. Only I didn’t like the other people in our wagon—my favorite was the guy in the orange t-shirt who stood in the aisle, hiccupping, and giving me a dirty look. Or when I was in the bathroom, brushing my teef, when somebody bang/knocked on the door. There is a convenient light that says “occupied/vacant,” but he knocked. I said “one second,” although quietly. Twenty seconds later he knocked again, and I said “occupied,” not that quiet. He knocked again and I opened the door in anger and then realized that I hadn’t finished spitting out the toothpaste, so I sort of half-closed the door and finished up real quick. But my teeth didn’t get to be as clean as I wanted them to be.
Vera got out after hour #46, and I had the compartment all to myself. Except 2 stations later, very early in the morning, a Tadzhik got on. He was a pretty friendly guy, he was driving a truck when his partner messed up and the truck got stuck and he had to take a train back to Birobidzhan. He also shared his food with me, along with his opinion of the young lady in charge of keeping order on our wagon (favorable.) There was one sad moment when I said that my mother was a biology teacher and he said “I used to teach biology.” And later on he reminded me that “we have higher education, too, in Tajikistan.” And I thought about how sad it was that he would probably rather be teaching biology in Dushanbe than be driving a truck far from home. Its not fair, that he was born there instead of there, but what can be done?
The landscapes went from taiga to hilly taiga to swampy and barren towards Birobidzhan. The stations were all very small and dirty and full of policemen walking with passive drunks, and people selling beer. I was at this point a little tired of “the great unwashed masses,” or whatever, although I hate elitism it seemed like every face I saw was swarthy and prematurely wrinkled and showed signs of alcoholism and did not like me. I think this was just because I was only passing by train platforms—just for fun, David, try taking a tour of Greyhound stations in failed industrial towns and compare your impressions!
Another strange reminder that Russia is strange, but the Soviet Union was stranger—miles away from any other inhabited point, in the deepest steppe-taiga flashed by me a little sign made out of plywood and steel bolts, painted white. It said СЛАВА ТРУДА or "Glory to Labor!", only the C and the T were intertwined to form a hammer and sickle. But it seemed sort of out of place, and I wondered if the people who put it up were honestly excited about labor or if they just felt like they should do it to make up for some non-socialist sinning they had done earlier or something.
I got to Khabarovsk and was met by Semyon. He seemed like a good guy and I was immediately not quite so nervous. But when I got on the bus with his girlfriend Katya I couldn't think of anything to say, and I again started to worry. LUCKILY they were great people and after I chilled out I soon felt comfortable with them, I talked about Spiderman with their young son Artyom and we later watched I, Robot in Russian.
The next day we walked around Khabarovsk, and I liked it a lot. It looks like an actual city, unlike Irkutsk, and has wide streets and nicer city planning. In the great regional museum they had a 3.5m long model of a sturgeon. I heard they can grow to be 6m long, I want a 6m long sturgeon in a moat around my house. Except I was planning to live in an apartment in my future life. I recommend everyone to visit Khabarovsk, it was v. pleasant, especially in good company.
I only stayed one night and the next evening late I got on a train to Vladivostok. It was only 14 hours long, but after half an hour on that train I had the thought: "why are these people so mean?" Yes, everyone on the train was not sympathetic except the lady who took our tickets. Her replacement was not mean, but he was also sort of condescending. It was hot on the train so I decided to buy a bottle of water from the wagon lady. I was told that she only sold tea so I had to go to the restaurant car. I walked through 3 wagons, down the narrow aisles with every single passanger glaring at me as if I had 3 heads or something, and then I gave up and returned back to the same amount of glares to my spot. I don't think it was because I was a foreigner, and that bugs me even more. Why such dirty looks? It's a goddamn train, I'm not walking through your house. I just want a bottle of mineral water. Sheesh.
Luckily, Vladivostok was great. I found a cheapish hotel with a good location and because I left Khabarovsk a little early I booked 5 whole nights, which is a lot for a town of 600,000, by yourself. But Vladivostok is probably the most pleasant town east of the Urals to spend that much time. Apparently it has a climate like Seattle, but when I was there it was sunny and the days seemed longer. It is a hilly city, like Seattle too, and that pleased me a lot. I purposely planned to do very little and walked around all day and saw some museums. They have a funicular that has a nice view of the city, it has a great location, laid out on a series of spits and bays at the very end of Russia. I expected more Chinese, but I guess they are just tourists, not migrant workers like in Irkutsk.
It is strange traveling by yourself, but I've already done it several times. After I descended from the funicular I stood in line at a fast food stand for about 15 minutes because a big group of students were ordering from the local university. I listened to them talking and unlike the people at the train stations I felt like I could relate to them. I had nothing to do so I didn't mind waiting. By the time I got my blini with cheese and mushrooms they had left, and I sat down on a park bench by myself. A little homeless dog walked up and waited patiently. I fed him scraps of dough and started talking to him, in Russian, because he was a Russian dog. "I just got to this city today, dog. I don't know a single person here. I am alone in this city, but I like it a lot. You're not listening to me, huh? You just want some more dough. Fine. Here. You _____ (mildly offensive word)." Then I left. He was a very smart dog, he knew how to beg without lowering himself.
I bought some various things—a cd, a light jacket cause I was dying in my Irkutsk one, and a wristband of the Russian rock band KINO. I went to a fortress museum which was not bad but mostly interesting because of the owner, with whom I talked to for 20 minutes. She was so Russian I can't explain it. The unveiled nationalism, the energy, the spontaeneous reciting of poetry that she wrote, she was a force of nature, she said I had a slavic element in my composition. Ha.
To summarize, Vladivostok was a real city and I could see myself living there for a year or two and liking it. It's a lot cooler than Irkutsk and the middle-aged women there seemed to love me. PS to my utter shock the hotel cable included ESPN America and I watched the UNC-Villanova game in my hotel room with Russian commentary.

Ummm what else happened. My birthday was 12x better than I expected. On christmas I was sick and it didn't feel like christmas anyway, so I figured my birthday would sort of be like that, far from friends and loved ones. But it was a good day. I got up late and bought a new razor that uses razor blades but is still safe for idiots like me, and then my host mom came home and we drank wine and she said a little toast. I was planning to go to a movie with the german girls but they invited me to their dorm and there we drank champagne and they gave me nice gifts and cards and I felt very lucky and happy. Then I missed the last minibus home but I decided that since it was my birthday I was going to walk to the next stop to try to catch a bus, and if I got mugged it would be fine. I wasn't mugged, and everybody on the bus was drunker than me.
A nice moment: a few Fridays ago it was warm and sunny. I got my haircut by a lady who seemingly didn't want to cut my hair, and emerged from the salon to meet the german girls who waited for me, they had bought lime-flavored beer and we searched for a place to drink them. All the benches in the courtyards of the vast network of tower blocks that make up University region were occupied by 14-yr old emo girls, except for one bench that upon approaching was revealed to be in a kindergarten playground, which is not a good place to drink beer, even in Russia. Then Julianna pointed at a white cylindrical structure made of concrete, located on a slope covered with dead dry yellow grass. It was clean enough and we had a good view on the hillside of more giant tower blocks and a seemingly pointless ditch/ravine. It is the best place in the city and next time when the temperature raises above 50 and the snow that has fallen the last two days melts we will return.
Sunday was Russian Easter, which meant that we ate too many eggs and Easter cake and drank Easter wine, which is sort of strong. I enjoyed the game where people knock eggs against each other and whosever's cracks loses. I won a lot, for once. The day before that I worked on the dacha with my host-mom's 14-year old grandson, who is a good, very serious young kid. Things feel good with my host family, and it was nice to be there on a holiday. There are two more coming up right quick: May Day and Victory Day.
PS I met a girl from Anchorage today at a competition of people who are studying Russian. Weirrrrrrrrrrrrrrd.
PPS: in the last weeks a mysterious man has moved in next door. He is home at various times of the day and it seems that his job is to yell in a really unpleasant voice, so that it is heard through the wall, muffled but still clearly, "TI SHTO?! NI PONIMAYESH, SHTO LI? CKOL'KO RAZ YA TEBE ZHE GOVORIL? DURA!" I really don't like him. Apparently there is also a huge dog that lives there, even though his two young daughters are afraid of it. If I ever was in a situation where I yelled that much I would leave and start a new life.

That is sort of a negative note to end on, huh? PS two months from today I will be in America. I can't say that the thought isn't pleasant, but I'm not exactly counting down the days, either.

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: