я хотел бы остаться с тобой, просто остаться с тобой

I’m still in Russia, still in Siberia. But not for very much longer. I already feel weird, weirder than I thought I would, but it will only be weirder when I get back to America, which is June 23rd, by the way.
The last few weeks have been nice. Testing at the international department went fine, we had a nice last dinner, but I was a little disappointed that Alexandra Vladimirovna didn’t start crying. Because she said she was going to. It was a bummer seeing the new students go. They had all gotten a lot better at Russian and they were a good group. After our farewell lunch we walked one last time down the hill, bought a bottle of Soviet Champagne for $3.50 and 5 little plastic cups and we all said a little toast. In the woods by Lermontov street. Which proves that we all learned something from Russian culture here.
After that I mostly just hung around and wrote a paper about the fall of the Ottoman empire for my class at the history department. And did absolutely nothing to plan for my parents’ arrival with my aunt. The day before they arrived I didn’t sleep well at all—soon my parents, probably the anchor of my previous life in Americaland—would be in Irkutsk, the center of Irkutskland. I was especially anxious waiting in the hotel lobby. But it was fine, the day was hot and gorgeous and we walked around all my favorite parts of the center. But that evening I realized after my host mom called how many things I had not done to prepare for their time here and how I would not have time to do them: I had to write a paper about Vasily Shukshin, buy tickets for a boat and a van, find housing, etc. And I got really stressed out. And I don’t hardly ever get stressed, even at Middlebury, and I remembered that I don’t deal with stress well. I just get really tense and irritable and unfocused. So that night after we went out to dinner I didn’t sleep well either.
I’m not going to share all the boring details, but everything worked out, except for the weather, which after two brilliant days around 80 degrees, in which we finally went swimming at the dacha, which I had been looking forward to all year, and which was blissful, turned to 55 degrees and cold ugly rain. Which continued for 2 and a half days. So we had two sort of gray and not-so-great days at Listvyanka, but my planned showcase, Bolshiye Koti, went really well. I think they saw Baikal and enjoyed their Russian banya and etc. Only the public rocket boat doesn’t run on Mondays, so we had to hire a fisherman for three times the price. Oops!

I downloaded a saccharine Russian pop song from the 90’s after I read the chorus at the end of a Viktor Pelevin novel. The chorus has taken on a sort of strange meaning for me now:
Завтра улечу Tomorrow I'll fly away
В солнечное лето To a sunny summer
Буду делать все, что захочу I'll do whatever I want

The lyrics are about as heavy as the casio accompaniament, but I like that image. Its not like I haven't had fun in Russia. It's not really about Russia, but about a time in my life: I think living here has made me more confident, and there were a lot of things that I never did earlier in my life that now seem harmless. I think I should do more things that I always wanted to do, as long as it doesn't bother anybody else. So I guess study abroad really is a formative experience blah blah blah.

Two holidays and a funeral

MAY: SPRING LABOR PEACE VICTORY GLORY

There’s a Russian superstition that its bad luck to be born or get married in May, which I don’t really understand, because May is probably the greatest month in Russia. It starts out with May 1st, International Labor Day, which is basically an excuse for a 3-day weekend and some protest marches by old Communists who don’t matter any more.
Then May 9th is Victory Day, where the achievements of those old Communists are celebrated. I think an American wouldn’t really understand what all the fuss is about: we fought in World War II, as well, and Veterans Day is enough for us. But then you have to look at how the war was fought for both sides. We lost about 300,000 men, which is roughly all of Anchorage. Which is awful. But the Soviet Union lost 25 million, which is like all of New York City, its suburbs, and part of New Jersey as well.
After the war we were finally completely free of the Great Depression and a new period of prosperity began. The Russians were left with almost all of European Russia (the part where everybody lives) in ruins, and there was starvation in the first years after the war.
So despite all the ineptitude that the Stalinists showed at the onset of the war, despite the cooperation between Nazi Germany and the USSR before June 1941, despite the war with Finland, the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states, and despite the 40 years that followed the war in Eastern Europe, all of these things that are not really mentioned in Russia, despite all this, the Russians have a reason to celebrate. Because they fought 70% of Germany’s armies back to Berlin while we landed in Normandy. But 25 million is 25 million, and today I saw a poster that said “May 9th Is Joy With Tears In Its Eyes,” and that seemed appropriate to me.
What did I do on these holidays? For May Day I went back to Arshan, a 3-hour trip, with the other American girls minus Sarah and Igor, a nice Russian kid who is dating one of the Americans. Across from me on the minibus sat a buryat girl who frowned most of the way and asked Claire to close the window in an offended tone. But, as has happened several times before, she surprised me by talking to me after the mid-way rest stop. It turns out that she had just spent 5 months in Myrtle Beach, of all places, under a program called “Work & Travel.” She liked the US a lot, she was afraid of black people when she took a grayhound from NYC to South Carolina, she worked in Eagle’s, if any of you have been to the beach on the East Coast. She liked Atlanta a lot, as well.
We had a nice relaxing time, I washed the dishes, that was the only thing I was good for, really, and the weather was pretty nice. At the base of the trail of the waterfalls Claire made friends with a drunk Russian named Vladimir, who tried to speak German with her. While we were relaxing at the base of the waterfall who did we see but Vladimir, who walked right by Claire, seeming to have lost his peculiar interest in her entirely. He instead stripped to his underwear and dipped into the shallow, cold water and slapped his belly for comedic effect. The other Russians all laughed. Igor decided to go for a dip as well, and I decided to join him, because besides watching dishes my other talent is enduring cold water. Except I’m not especially good at washing dishes, I just don’t mind doing it.

The water was really cold.

As for Victory Day, I was at the dacha and had a relaxing time. We worked on what will hopefully one day become a chicken coop. Grandma was sometimes in a good mood, sometimes not, because her back has been bothering her a lot lately, and sometimes tempers flared a little between her, my host mom, and her son Konstantin. It’s strange how my family works in an entirely different way. Tolstoi was wrong when he said that all happy families are alike. Every damn family is different, even happy ones.
I watched the live news feed of the parade on Red Square in Moscow. I purposely avoided thinking about what modern helicopters have to do with the unconditional surrender of German forces on May 9th, 1945, about whether military parades themselves are fascist, and instead just tried to enjoy the pomp and ceremony of the event. It was neat, I should say, to watch those big planes that refuel other jets in the air fly over the Kremlin.

Last Wednesday was my first trip to the Russian police station: what happened today? Nothing as alarming, but also very strange. You see, on May 10th a helicopter carrying the governor of Irkutsk oblast’ Igor Esipovskiy and three others crashed not far from Lake Baikal, killing everyone on board. When I was told this on Sunday I just felt weird. I don’t trust any Russian politician, really, and very few American ones, but on TV he seemed like an okay guy. His tubbiness and thinning hair was sort of a relief from the tough guys that take most positions, and he seemed likeable, really. He had only been governor for about a year—in Russia they aren’t elected but appointed by Moscow.
But it was just weird, in a word. He was 49, he was making himself a career, and he died. Even stranger is the alarming number of Russian governors that have died in helicopter accidents—at least 4 others, maybe 5, including Alexander (?) Lebed, the third-place candidate for President in 1996.
Today as I approached Kirov square I saw a row of police officers. When I got closer I saw that the whole area around the hulking gray Administration building was cordoned off to traffic. There was something going on in front, so I crossed the street to check it out. There were four military cars lined up with artillery pieces attached, and a red velvet place to hold a coffin. Government members were standing on the front steps of the building, woman were coming in and out with flowers, and military men were walking around, giving orders. The crowd was made up of mostly passerbys like myself, and was pretty quiet. We all waited patiently for at least 15 minutes: the cars all started their engines and everyone perked up, but it was a false alarm. After 10 minutes the doors opened and a lot of the who’s-who in the Irkutsk region gathered out front, along with the bereaved. I should mention that it was hot—at least 75 degrees. Soldiers appeared, carrying four coffins, and a military band started playing. The cars went out first, followed by people carrying huge garlands, and lastly a large column of various businessmen and community leaders. I spotted a rabbi, two Orthodox priests, a Catholic clergyman, and a Buddhist monk, who looked a little out of place, honestly, in his yellow and red robes. The parade moved very slowly and people watched it go down Lenin street. Woman scattered roses along the way and the band kept playing.
People weren’t saying much, just watching quietly. I walked along with the band and listened. The songs they played were very simple and slow. They seemed to say “this is sad, this is sad, this is sad,” and nothing else. It was very strange, I had never been at a public funeral like this before. After about 3 blocks they carried the caskets into vans, which drove away to the airport and on to Moscow. Kirov Square is a rectangle surrounded on four sides by a traffic circle, and the empty street with roses scattered all over it was probably the strangest sight of all.

After the buses taking the policemen home started to leave, I bought myself some ice cream.

An Unpleasant Incident

After class at the literature department I set off with my german friend Almut to find the used book store that was located somewhere around the bus station. We found it only after asking a grocery store security guard who shocked us by telling us exactly where it was and how to get there. It was just what we were looking for—it was full of old soviet books for ridiculously cheap prices. I bought a photo-guide to the neighboring Buryat republic from 1971, a 15-postcard set of Soviet actors from 1972, some postcards with nice black and white pen drawings of the Russian countryside with Esenin quotes on them, two trashy science-fiction/adventure journals aimed at teenage soviet boys, and a collection of stories by Platonov. All this together cost about six dollars. It was great.
We decided since it was a nice day to sit down in a nearby park that we saw and look at our finds together. We both bought some beer to drink, which I should say is pretty normal in Russia, in every park there are young men and women and older men drinking beer causally. We were told that officially it is now illegal to drink in public, but nobody ever seems to follow that rule. While we were looking at photographs of the Buryat republic together, a young man walked up and asked if he could sit with us. He was wearing an orange long-sleeved shirt, had earbuds on, and seemed fine enough. He explained that he also had a book. But as soon as he started talking to us it became quite clear that he was insane. His name was Sasha, he spoke English surprisingly well in little fits and bursts and apologies, and he asked us at least 6 times if we understood Russian, and every time said he was really happy that he met us.
He seemed mostly harmless, but he asked us to help him buy drapes for his windows, and I said that we have to go soonish, so we couldn’t. But I was getting sort of uneasy because whenever somebody passed by us he would say something to them: when a young buryat walked by he offered him some cognac (I forgot to mention that he had some cheap cognac in his backpack, too) and when he ignored Sasha he sneered and said “I bet he doesn’t speak Buryat. Didn’t even say “I don’t want any.”. When a lady walked by he blurted out a tangle of swear words that I didn’t understand but understood as such, and he said in Russian “what I said was untranslatable.” And then in English “that is untranslatable, sorry, how do you say it?” Lastly, he was smoking the second of Almut’s lady cigarettes and smoked it down to the end when a Central Asian man walked by with a cart full of stuff. Sasha got up, walked to the trash can, but instead flicked the butt into the Central Asian man’s cart. The man just looked at Sasha and kept going, thank God.
When I repeated that we had to go soon, he got sort of upset, and asked me, in Russian then in English, why I was afraid of him. I tried to explain that we were planning to sit there for just a few minutes and we had already been talking for 10, and he asked for Almut’s number. I wrote mine down on a piece of paper and gave it to him, just so he wouldn’t get upset. He demanded that Almut listen to one song on his mini ipod, but when we found out that it was 8 minutes long we said nuh-uh. We compromised on a song less than a minute long. At this point I was getting nervous. I tried to get him to write something on a paper so he didn’t feel cheated, and he kept mentioning about how we should come see him. Finally he asked Almut about the song and we said that we had to go. Some girls asked us where a movie theater was and he got up to help them and during that time we also gathered up our stuff. But he didn’t want us to go. It was painful and disconcerting to look at his face when suddenly he would narrow his eyes at me and said that he had a feeling that we weren’t planning to go before he came and that we hadn’t drank our beer yet.
We were about to break away, finally, when I noticed some police officer talking to some Central Asians in the park. I thought, if Sasha won’t let us go than I can at least address the police officer. But as we were getting ready to go the police officer walked by us, with Central Asians in tow, and I think Sasha’s strange behavior caught his attention, and he asked us for our documents. He was surprised to see that we were foreigners, and Sasha gave him his textbook instead of his documents and in general didn’t answer any of his questions. The officer calmly asked us to accompany him to the station.
I wasn’t too worried, because I knew that we would probably have to pay a fine, and that’s it, and I had my passport and my documents all in order, anyway. I was more upset that I didn’t just walk away from Sasha earlier, but in the beginning he seemed like a normal guy and then the rest was just trying to leave without upsetting him. And I gave him my real number because I was worried that he would call me right then and there, so that I knew his number, and he would find out that I lied to him. So I walked with Almut and sort of apologized and said that this is just #(!%(*@#, and listened to Sasha babble on with the police officer behind us.
The “station” was one room in the bus station. There were a lot of people there, and while we were waiting for a space to clear, the police officer asked us a few routine questions, and Sasha started making fun of our accent, which made me lose a lot of sympathy for him. We all sat down. A drunk was mumbling loudly when we walked in:
“Let me go, let me go! I have two kids! I have to pick them up, I was sitting in the park, drinking a beer calmly, let me go. This is ridiculous.”
They told him to be quiet. When the officer announced to his senior that we were citizens of Germany and America, he laughed, and everybody sitting there was surprised. “Foreigners, huh? And a visit to the police?!” and he laughed.
I laughed too, because it was sort of funny, but in a way that I hoped that people didn’t think they were laughing at me. They asked us if we drank cognac, we said no. Only Sasha drank the cognac.
“That’s right! Russians drink the strong stuff!” and we all laughed.
Sasha kept babbling on about random things, and making fun of our accents.
The drunk started ranting again, and he even stood up. “I have two kids, let me go home, I have to pick them up!”
Sasha translated for us “I have two children, I need to take them, I need to go to home!” He spoke English pretty well.
The cop thought this was funny. “You’re translating for them?” “Yes.” “Like, a live translation?” “Yeah.”
“I’ll show you a live translation. Keep me here 3 more minutes, and I’ll show you a goddamn live translation.”
He was still standing and was shuffling towards the door.
“What, you didn’t understand? Sit down immediately. What don’t you understand? That’s it, we’re keeping you as long as we can. Sit down!”
But he didn’t sit down, and the cop pushed him down. He stood up again, and the cop hit him, not too hard, in the chest. He stood up again, and the cop hit him again, but I didn’t see where, because I was trying to pretend like I didn’t see anything.
“That’s enough, Grisha!” the other cops said. “That’s already an excess!”
“C’mon, Grisha, let’s go.” And Grisha left.
“I’ll show you a goddamn live translation.” Said the drunk.
“Respected citizen, please sit down.” Said the cop who took us in.

“So, citizen, I take it you were drinking with these two foreigners in the park.”
“Yes, officer. (in English: I waz dreenking witt deese foreigners.”)
“You’re translating again?”
“Yes. We were _____” and here he used a Russian verb that is more formal than “boozing” but less formal than “having a drink.”
“Now you’re talking like an honest Russian. So you were _______ing.”
“Drink” said another drunk shyly from the corner, in English. He looked at me and I gestured that “drink” is absolutely the right word in English.

They kept talking with Sasha for amusement, during which they gave us back our documents, and when Sasha said “be careful!”, the officer said “check them, if you want. Are all your documents there?” They were. He explained that we weren’t going to pay a fine, because we were foreign citizens, but Sasha was damn well going to pay something. It was unclear if we could go or not, but we could. “We have no pretensions to you”, he said, which is a phrase I hear in Russian a lot, which seems to mean “this is just a warning.” He said that we could wait on the bench for Sasha if we wanted to and then we could continue drinking. Almut and I left, relieved.

It wasn’t really scary, the only part that was unpleasant was when they hit that man who refused to sit down, but in America they would have just handcuffed him so he couldn’t leave. I didn’t see any handcuffs. It was sad that all the Russians in there were either drunkards or perhaps prostitutes, while the Central Asians seemed pretty sober and were probably just drinking one beer in the park. I heard that they have a quota, but I have no idea if that’s true. Now I’m only worried that Sasha is going to use my number to find me and confront me, but I don’t think that’s likely. I think he already called me, but I didn’t answer. Another plan is to ask a Russian to answer and say that he has the wrong number. It was a weird experience but the police weren’t that bad, but if I was not a foreigner I don’t know how it would have played out. I know I won’t be drinking beer in public anymore, though. My host mom seemed more concerned with germs from the police station. So it was sort of unpleasant but not as much as when we were on the Mongolian border, and now I tell this boring story to people to make me feel tough.

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:

One more thing: a linguistical exercise

and then i will finish reading "we are all similiar, but we are different!" to gain valuable culture knowledge.

Actually, two things: one: I posted some pictures from first semester, they are on the side.

Two: I have always thought about being a translator, and I remembered in Nabokov's "Pnin" that the emigre-hero once recalled a particulary beautiful passage from the Russian translation (Kroneberg's) and cannot find similiar words in the english version. I looked both of them up and I am surprised at how easy it is to read Shakespeare in Russian. Which is sort of odd, I'm not going to say "wrong," just that Shakespeare is hard to read at times for English speakers, although I like him a lot. But I did a rough translation of the Russian version, it just shows me how hard it must be a translator. Because if you translate too closely you lose the poeticism of it, but if you fool around so much you will lose the most beautiful images. It seems like Kroneberg opted for the former. Here is the scene where Queen Gertrude talks about Ophelia's death:

In English:
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

From Russian, my shabby version:
There is a willow there: she, brushing aside its branches,
gazes at her reflection in the crystal waters.
In it's shadow she weaves garlands of lily, rose, violet, and jasmine.
Wishing to put them in order, she climbed up the tree
The branch under her suddenly broke
And she fell with it into the weeping waters
with her garlands and blossoms. Her clothes,
spread wide among the waves, carried her up instantly,
like a mermaid.
Unhappy, not comprehending her calamity,
she swam and sang, sang and swam,
like a creature born in the waves.
But this could not continue for long:
Her clothes grew wet and she went to the bottom.
Life and tender melodies fell silent!

The original Russian, so you can point out my mistakes and explain how I don't get it, because its true:
Там ива есть: она, склонивши ветви,
Глядится в зеркале кристальных вод.
В ее тени плела она гирлянды
Из лилий, роз, фиалок и жасмина.
Венки цветущие на ветвях ивы
Желая разместить, она взобралась
На дерево; вдруг ветвь под ней сломалась
И в воды плачущие пали с нею
Гирлянды и цветы. Ее одежда,
Широко расстилаясь по волнам,
Несла ее с минуту, как сирену.
Несчастная, беды не постигая,
Плыла и пела, пела и плыла,
Как существо, рожденное в волнах.
Но это не могло продлиться долго:
Одежда смокла - и пошла ко дну.
Умолкли жизнь и нежные напевы!

and lastly, the words that poor Pnin were looking for in English were "Plila i pela, pela i plila", or "she swam and sang, sang and swam." But those verbs just aren't the same in English. They just aren't the same. Now I wonder if I will ever be able to feel russian literature if I read it in Russian or English, and not just read it.

happy women's day

Oi blin I forgot to update this blog for a long time, huh? I don’t think anybody lost a lot of sleep about it, anyway. But today I am in a good mood and I have been in a good mood a lot recently, probably because spring is coming, earlier than the Anchorage one, I might add. But any kid who has lived in a northern town (who wrote that song? Bonus points) knows that spring is pretty caca for the first 3-7 weeks, because the snow is melting and strange gray dirt/mud covers everything. But that’s not important.
Looking at that last post, there was a lot of enthusiasm in it, too much for a country like Russia. The new students are great but we don’t see them too much because I am taking only 2 classes in the international department, and there is sort of a weird language barrier where nobody really speaks Russian, but we don’t speak Russian better than they do. I guess. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
On the making Russian friends issue I have made not much progress, but as they say, (actually, I think I’m the only one who says it and everyone else thinks its stupid,) if I made zero progress last semester and I made a little this semester so far, that means that I am doing infinity times better. Sorry for that.
Here is a good story, I think. Sarah, the other student who stayed on, and I took the three new girls to a cheap and not awful fast-food place called MakFud’s. And we were explaining how things work in Irkutsk when some girl two tables over said “Where are you from?” We started talking a little bit, but mostly Sarah with them, and we exchanged phone numbers. Well, mostly Sarah did. I told the new girls that this never happened to us, that someone in public reacted to our accents with something besides a smirk or impatience. But as our new friends got up to leave, I noticed there was something odd about them. They didn’t dress fancy like most Russian girls, and they had short hair. And then I remembered how one of them introduced her friend: “This is Nikki, or “Nick.” “Were they lesbians?” I thought.

I try not to judge people, but the next day I asked Sarah what she thought. She showed me a text message from Alyona that she received later that evening: “Sara u r a very cute gurl ;)” Sarah, who is not attracted to the “weak sex” (a common and not very offensive term in Russian) wrote back “and you are a very friendly girl.” We never heard from them again, and I think they never wanted to see me in the first place. Maybe they wanted a “straight friend,” like the teenage girls in those Hollywood films always have a “gay friend.”
Although it was warm when the new students arrived, I am glad to say that the temperature hit a new low for my time here—32 below zero, Fahrenheit! Now they can say “it was 30 below!!!!!!!” but it was winters last hurrah, I think. No more frosts from now on.

One thing I was looking forward to/dreading was signing up for more classes at the history and literature departments across the river, because the students are nicer there and it would be a real class with real challenges, etc, just like “real” Russians. Unfortunately, fate conspired against me a little bit. But now I think I can say that things are going okay. But here is a chronology of my attempts to find classes, visit them, and get the professors to sign forms:
First week of classes: we had not received formal permission from the dean, so we didn’t try.
Second week: Monday: received a shot against tick-borne encephalitis (not funny) and only had time to look at the schedule. Although that evening I attended a screening of the Mexican film “Nazarin” at a film club full of thirty-year old intellectuals. I plan to go there more often. The film was a little dry and awfully dubbed, but I went with two German girls who study in a different program and who are becoming my new best friends in Irkutsk.

Tuesday: eagerly showed up to the class “history of Western and Southern Slavs,” sat awkwardly in the corner until a girl asked me “who are you,” after about 2 minutes of conversation I asked her how the professor was. “He is really strict, scary really.” I didn’t really believe her, I thought she was screwing with me. So, using my carefully constructed casual speech that I have just begun to use, I asked her: “Are you messing with me?” But she didn’t hear me. So I sat for about 12 more minutes until some kid came into the class and said that the professor wasn’t going to show up. So I left with them. PS afterwards I went to a music store and bought two recentish albums by The Fall for about 4 dollars.

Wednesday: Sarah and I sat on an extremely interesting Soviet literature class, with one of those sardonic, brilliant, hardass professors, and it seemed right up my alley, but when we talked to him afterwards he explained to us that we were studying in the philology dept, not the journalism dept, so we should take some other class. We tried to explain that we were actually studying in the intl department, and that we were Americans so it doesn’t matter what class we take, but the matter would not be decided.

Thursday I didn’t go to that building across the river.

Friday: Sarah and I decided to take a “history of Russian lit” class in our own department, but I arrived 10 minutes early and noticed that the class was in room 115. But the ground floor is numbered 200, and the basement is blocked off. So after about 9 minutes I asked the grouchy guard where room 115 was. It was in the dormitory, of course! I didn’t know which dormitory and where it was located, so I gave up until next week.

0 for 3.

The next week worked out fine:

Monday: Day of the Defender of the Motherland: no classes. I never defended any motherland, much less the soviet/Russian one, but the holiday sort of transfers to all men, so I was congratulated. My host mom and I have been having better, almost real conversations lately, and we were having a good one when her sister Ira called. “No, David and I are talking, we are tired, its too late, we won’t come. Maybe if you had called earlier. What? Your husband? Put him on. Vladimir Evegenich! Hello! Happy Defender of the Motherland Day! (note: Vladimir actually served in the army) What? No, we can’t co… Oh, fine. David, get dressed, we’re going to my sister’s.”
And so we did. And it was nice, we sat in the living room and ate yummy chicken while the TV showed gory war movies. Only my host mom’s granddaughter had this thing where she threw up a little every 35 minutes, and that pretty much killed the evening. She was fine, though. But not a bad holiday, at all.

Tuesday: I showed up again to that history of Southern and Western Slavs class and the professor did as well. He was an aged, doughy man that was hard to understand but it seemed pretty interesting, and I was looking forward to taking the class. And he wasn’t scary or strict at all, suchka. So I asked him afterwards if I could sit in. He said “of course,” but that he would be in Poland for a month in a half. I should have known—western slavs live there. But the point is I couldn’t get credit for that class.
I was forelorn. It was already almost 3:45. I looked at the schedule, and the only class besides “foreign language” which I couldn’t take was “History of the countries of Africa and Asia.” With slung shoulders, I went to the classroom. A sort of dopey-looking kid was standing by the chalkboard. “Is this History of the countries of Asia and Africa?” I asked. “Yes.” he answered. “And it meets once a week?” “Yes.”
So I sat down. And the professor for some reason reminds me of an American: first of all, he talks more about cultural understanding, not industry, and he sort of looks like a Florida retiree. So actually it is turning out to be an interesting class.

Wednesday: I attended “Siberian literature” and “History of Russian literature” and both were interesting, but a bit too fast so far, but I think I will get better at writing stuff. The only hard part is when they mention an author’s name only once. We talked about “Dersu Uzala,” which is funny, because I watched the Kurosawa film adaptation a long time ago and namely the Russian spoken by the main officer convinced me to start studying it.

So we’ll see how that goes. I should be studying more now, a lot more reading, but unfortunately I bought a USB modem and finally got it to work and have been reading articles about UNC basketball instead.

Also we just got back from a week-long excursion to the neighboring Buryat republic, where we visited Buddhist temples, ate pozi, celebrated Maslenitsa (like Mardi Gras) in an old-believer village, and then drove around on the ice of Lake Baikal for 3 days. And the girls in our group danced with Buryat boys in a Chinese restaurant/disco in Ulan-Ude. And you know what, those Buryat boys really could dance. I probably should write more about that, but I plan to post pictures on the internet besides on facebook so all you old codgers can see them too.