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.
