Without making too much of a big deal about it, I think I have to preface this entry by acknowledging the unforgivable time lapse between this and my last submission. I had every intention of picking up my computer and writing about all my adventures of late, but then I got discouraged because there’s simply too much to tell. I even have a note in my ‘stickies’ application with a list of things I wanted to talk about up until I started planning my vacation at the end of October, so I guess I’ll start with those little things until I get on more of a roll.
The first bullet on this list is, “didn’t pass face control,” which is pretty self-explanatory—I went to a club with some friends and we didn’t get in. I think the club was called “London.” I was with two American friends from our program and about 5 or 6 of our Russian friends. Our Russian friends told us to speak a lot of English, and loudly, because they said that would be an exotic and welcome factor in their club. I doubted the validity of that assumption, (and rightly so, as it turned out), but went along with it anyway. When we got to the club (at around 11:30pm) we were so early that there was no one even lined up yet. Anyway, the fact that we were early didn’t help us get in. Even though we were the first in line at the entrance, they weren’t planning on letting us in. Then other people started coming and just waltzed passed us, kind of like in those movies where there’s a big queue of people begging the bouncer to let them in, but he stands firm until a couple of pretty ladies come and then he opens the rope just for them. Except none of the ladies they were letting in were anything special. In fact, I would venture to say that the only people being let in were tacky and ugly. (yes I’m biased, but I’m also not wrong.) After about 45 minutes of this weird selective entry process, we collectively decided that based on the people they had already let into the club, we didn’t want to be socializing with their kind anyway. We did speak a lot of loud English, but I’m pretty sure in the end that hindered more than it helped. It was a bit of a disappointment for all of us, especially considering that we had all got dressed up and were prepared to spend the whole night at the club (because the metro closes at 1am and opens back up at 5:30am). So instead of the club, we got some snacks at a little grocery store near our friend’s apartment (metro station Planernaya, just a few stops up from my beloved Oktyabr’skoye Pole on the purple line) and hung out there the whole night. One thing I have noticed about the Russians I’ve met is that they seem to have no problem staying up all night. When we went over to this guy’s apartment, I thought we were going to just hang out until 5:30 and then say “see you later, I’m going to catch the first metro and hit the hay.” As it was, I didn’t end up leaving until around 10am. I would have left earlier, but I didn’t want to walk to the metro alone because I didn’t know exactly how to get there. I really wish I were better at navigating. I have a terrible habit of blindly following people wherever I go and then not having the slightest clue how I got there.
About a month ago, Regina hosted her Ukrainian doctor friend for a couple of days while he was on a trip to attend a medical neurosurgery convention here in Moscow. He was a nice guy, and he spoke pretty good English. In fact, when we were sitting together at the kitchen table while Regina was washing dishes, one of the cats walked in and started crunching its food really loudly. The doctor then asked me, “Don’t they bother you? Their… wool… or hair… is everywhere. But I think she ignores it because she loves them.” I told him they did kind of annoy me at first, especially with the first shock of there being three cats in a very small apartment that smelled of pee, but that I got used to it in a relatively short period of time. The doctor and I had a nice chat together. I tried to teach him some English colloquialisms, but that proved to be quite tricky. Like “to deal with something” and “I can’t put my finger on it.” Those were especially difficult to explain for some reason. He thought the thing about the finger was funny.
The doctor asked me if I had trouble adjusting to Russian behavior on the streets, i.e. how people here wear a permanent frown. He said when he was in America, people smiled “bez kontsa” (without end). What’s more, he found it strange that as a habit Americans will ask each other how they’re doing, and regardless of how they’re actually doing, the reply is always “fine” or “good.” I tried to defend our polite fakeness by saying that it makes people feel more comfortable if everyone around them is happy, and usually someone will say they’re fine when they’re not fine in order to avoid getting into a deeper explanation of why they might not be fine. I mean if you’re having a crappy day or your wife just left you or something, you don’t necessarily want to bog a stranger or a friendly acquaintance down with all the unpleasant details. So you just smile and say everything’s fine, and then both of you can move on with your day. I suppose it is a rather artificial practice, but I can’t help but miss the fake smiles every now and then. Even if people here are keepin’ it real, it’s a little too real sometimes.
One of the friends from my program, Alexandra, said that once she saw a TV special where they questioned if places like Wal-Mart and Target were “too friendly,” like when employees look at the last name on your card and make it a point to say, “Thank you Ms. Petrovic!” before you leave. Alexandra said that at the time she was ready to agree that situations like that were over-the-top on friendliness. But then she said that since she’s been here and dealt with surly Moscow cashiers/employees, she’s decided there is no such thing as being too friendly. Our joke about shopping in Moscow is that “the customer is never right.”
A while ago someone asked me if I had started thinking in Russian yet. The answer is… not quite. I don’t think I’ll ever get to the point where I can have a natural stream of consciousness in Russian, but a lot of times I’ll try to think of how I would translate an English thought into Russian. I do have a few exclamatory remarks that I picked up from Regina. For instance, now I can’t even remember what sound I made before I started using “oy!” as a reflex outburst noise. If I stub my toe or drop something or if there’s a loud noise somewhere, now without thinking about it I say “oy!” That seems to be a very Russian thing. In fact when I was in Stockholm recently, I saw a woman bump into someone and then heard her cry out “oy!” in surprise. I paused and wanted to hear her talk to her husband for a few seconds afterward, suspecting she might be Russian, and indeed she was!
Another thing I started saying is, “gospodi!” (oh, lord!) Regina says this a lot, especially when she watches “Murder, She Wrote” and she’s responding to some twist of events. Also I tend to say “uzhas” (awful, horror) and “koshmar” (nightmare) a lot, but usually I use those jokingly, and only with friends from the program.
Recently Regina went on vacation for about three weeks, and she left her friend Katya in charge of the cats. When I say she left her in charge of the cats, I really mean she left her in charge of me, since she was basically living at the apartment for those weeks. Katya is one of the sweetest, wackiest ladies I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. While she was here she took really good care of me. For instance, she would make me lunches to take with me to school and say that she would feel at peace knowing I would eat my fill during the day. She also helped me plan the 2-week abroad vacation that the EAP students get at the end of October (4 of my friends and I took a trip to St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Tallinn). We called hostels and train stations together to compare lodging and ticket prices and reserve spots for me and my friends. Whenever she knew I needed help with anything, she would practically bend over backwards to help me sort things out. I told her I was having trouble finding unique souvenirs to bring back for my family since you can pretty much get anything anywhere these days. She personally took me to several obscure indoor and outdoor Russian markets to find specialty gifts for my friends and family. Sometimes I thought she got even more excited than I did about buying things at those markets, and she’d try to talk me into buying weird trinkets that she thought were the bargain of the century. If I didn’t know better I’d have thought she was getting a commission from those vendors.
The first time I ever met Katya, she showed me the sweater she was wearing and said, “I know what you’re thinking. This sweater doesn’t look very warm, does it? But wait!” Then she pulled out the collar of her sweater to reveal what appeared to be a standard thermal undershirt. “Tyopli sekret!” (warm secret!)
One time when I came home from school, Katya said she would whip me up a quick omelet for dinner. What she made did have some eggs in it, but I would never have called it an omelet. It had flour in it, so it turned out like a fluffy bread-like thing, with some salty stuff and melted cheese on top. When she lifted the lid to show me, she said, “Do you know what this is called? Pizza Express.”
Katya says she’s a “doctor without a degree,” although she also happens to be a chain smoker. She’s the one who introduced Regina to the brewed rice drink, although I have to say I prefer Regina’s brew. The one the Katya made smelled like blue cheese and tasted like warm salty dishwater. I felt a little guilty about it, but every morning and night when she poured me a generous glassful I would discreetly pour it down the sink while she stepped out into the hallway to have a smoke. However, to her credit she made really great looseleaf tea. She said Regina is ruining her health by drinking the stuff that comes in teabags.
Katya is Russian, but she grew up in Georgia and lived for 5 years in Croatia and didn’t know any Croatian when she first moved there. So she told me she understands what it feels like to be in a foreign country and feel like an outsider. She showed me how to cook Georgian dishes (my favorite so far being an appetizer called “khachapuri,” which is basically any type of cheese and bread put together). We had a few “domashnie dni” (home days), as Katya called them, where we would just stay in and cook together. We would go to some out-of-the-way grocery store and she would point out what a great deal everything was, since she had compared these prices with the ones all over town. Then we would come back and she’d show me step-by-step how to make cold Georgian bean dip or this shredded cabbage stuff with walnuts, or rice pilaf. The secret to a lot of the stuff we made seemed to be in the spice packets she bought while we were out, so I have doubts about being able to replicate a lot of these recipes when I come home. I had to laugh when she told me to be careful of how spicy the bean dip was, because when I tried it there was just a little kick of black and red pepper, and a lot of garlic. I don’t consider myself to be a lover of spicy foods, but I find myself craving them now that I’m in a spiceless drought surrounded by dill, beets, and potatoes. Katya thinks I’m some kind of salt fiend, but really it’s just that the food here tends to be on the bland side.
Katya has her own brand of baby talk that she uses to talk to the cats, and, like Regina, is convinced that when the cats produce a two-syllable meow, they’re saying “mama.” She tells me that the cats only say “mama” to her—“they don’t talk this way with Regina.” I didn’t want to burst her bubble and tell her that the cats even call me “mama.”
Sometimes I have to admit that Katya could be a little bit stifling and would want to lecture me for hours on anything and everything. At the end of spending a whole day with her, I could get a little bit exhausted and frustrated with her. She’s got an unbelievable amount of energy. But I could never hold anything against her for long, she always had good intentions and is inherently a very loving woman. Overall I had a really great time when she was living here. I have to say, now that Regina is back I have a Katya-shaped hole in my heart…
I shouldn’t be too hard on Regina, though. I learned a lot about her from Katya while she was on vacation at some old-people’s spa/hotel in Anapa. It turns out she never had children after all. The girl Regina was telling me about when I first moved in was just a close pupil friend who went to live in America. Apparently Regina’s ex-husband was a bit of a tyrant and didn’t allow her to have any children, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t quite have motherly instincts, yet still tries to be caring in her own standoffish way. Katya said that the reason Regina went on vacation was more of a trip to cure herself than for her to have fun. She said that Regina only has enough energy to putz around in her apartment, and asked if I noticed how tired she got when we went out together to Ashan (a big shopping center) to get a hairdryer for me and groceries for her. I actually didn’t notice that she seemed tired at all, and I wondered if Katya was exaggerating things, as she sometimes does.
Katya, like Regina, was really nervous about giving me a key to the apartment when I would leave for school, but to an even greater degree than Regina. She told me it would be really easy for someone to make a copy of the keys and then if they knew where I lived, break in. Then she took me into the kitchen to show me how they would make a copy of the keys, which turned out to be a long demonstration involving a key and a bar of soap. People here seem to be really paranoid about break-ins. I have no way of knowing what the actual incidence is of that sort of thing, but it must be high, or else everyone just lives in extreme paranoia under fortress-like conditions. In addition to having a code to get into our main building, we live on the fifth floor and have a locked door leading to a hallway with 2 other apartments, and then our own apartment door is really thick and padded and has 3 complicated locks that each require a different number of turns. Katya said that if someone were to come into the apartment, Regina would definitely have a heart attack—“even if someone were to come into the kitchen and just take off this little flower embroidery off the wall, that would do her in.” Personally, I find it highly unlikely that someone would go to the trouble of stealing all 5 keys from me, then make copies of them with a bar of soap, then follow me to see where I live, and then on top of that, actually know how to use all of those keys. But since I’m not in charge of the keys, I don’t make the rules.
I get the feeling that a lot of Russians think they’re experts on health, and are really big on home remedies. Katya, for one, is a big fan of eating honey straight in large quantities to stay healthy. When she was here, every morning she would dole out big spoonfuls of honey in a bowl for me to eat. I like honey in tea or on bread, but I can’t eat much of it unless there’s a vehicle of some sort. And I don’t mean a spoon. Katya joked with her friend that she gave me a bowl of honey to eat, and instead of eating it all in one sitting, I thought I was supposed to ration it out over a week. She and her friend thought that was pretty funny.
A few weeks ago, Katya took me to a Georgian restaurant called Tamada, not far from our apartment. At the end of the meal, everyone was ordering tea but I decided to just get water. And water is not exactly the neutral choice that it would be in America. I knew it would be an unpopular choice, but I was really thirsty and didn’t feel like hot tea. As soon as I said this, everyone at the table immediately tried to talk me out of it. “Lydia! No! Don’t you see how cold it is outside?! It’s dangerous to drink cold water in weather like this.” I thought this was sort of funny, seeing as how the temperature inside was stifling and they were sitting enjoying their hot tea. And the water I ordered was room-temperature anyway. A few days later, I came home from grocery shopping with a big bottle of water, which I like to keep in my room to drink when I get really thirsty and tea doesn’t cut it. As soon as Katya saw it, she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, water. Your favorite.”
Before she went on vacation, Regina painted her toenails and then came into my room wearing those foam rubber toe-separators. First she asked me if I knew what yoga was, and if I was aware of its positive health effects. I got excited because this was something I did actually know a little bit about already, but then what she went on to talk about seemed entirely unrelated to yoga. She said that the secret to good health is to keep your toes spread out as much as you can, all the time if possible. “When me and my girlfriends go to the beach, we always put some hot stones in between our feet and sunbathe for hours. And those are the nights that I always sleep the best, after a day of separating my toes. When I’m in the shower washing my feet, I can always tell if I’m not feeling very well based on how tender my toes feel when I try to pull them apart. And then conversely, when I feel great my toes don’t hurt as much. It feels like a massage when I wash them.”
Saturday, November 8, 2008
a long overdue update (introducing katya!)
Without making too much of a big deal about it, I think I have to preface this entry by acknowledging the unforgivable time lapse between this and my last submission. I had every intention of picking up my computer and writing about all my adventures of late, but then I got discouraged because there’s simply too much to tell. I even have a note in my ‘stickies’ application with a list of things I wanted to talk about up until I started planning my vacation at the end of October, so I guess I’ll start with those little things until I get on more of a roll.
The first bullet on this list is, “didn’t pass face control,” which is pretty self-explanatory—I went to a club with some friends and we didn’t get in. I think the club was called “London.” I was with two American friends from our program and about 5 or 6 of our Russian friends. Our Russian friends told us to speak a lot of English, and loudly, because they said that would be an exotic and welcome factor in their club. I doubted the validity of that assumption, (and rightly so, as it turned out), but went along with it anyway. When we got to the club (at around 11:30pm) we were so early that there was no one even lined up yet. Anyway, the fact that we were early didn’t help us get in. Even though we were the first in line at the entrance, they weren’t planning on letting us in. Then other people started coming and just waltzed passed us, kind of like in those movies where there’s a big queue of people begging the bouncer to let them in, but he stands firm until a couple of pretty ladies come and then he opens the rope just for them. Except none of the ladies they were letting in were anything special. In fact, I would venture to say that the only people being let in were tacky and ugly. (yes I’m biased, but I’m also not wrong.) After about 45 minutes of this weird selective entry process, we collectively decided that based on the people they had already let into the club, we didn’t want to be socializing with their kind anyway. We did speak a lot of loud English, but I’m pretty sure in the end that hindered more than it helped. It was a bit of a disappointment for all of us, especially considering that we had all got dressed up and were prepared to spend the whole night at the club (because the metro closes at 1am and opens back up at 5:30am). So instead of the club, we got some snacks at a little grocery store near our friend’s apartment (metro station Planernaya, just a few stops up from my beloved Oktyabr’skoye Pole on the purple line) and hung out there the whole night. One thing I have noticed about the Russians I’ve met is that they seem to have no problem staying up all night. When we went over to this guy’s apartment, I thought we were going to just hang out until 5:30 and then say “see you later, I’m going to catch the first metro and hit the hay.” As it was, I didn’t end up leaving until around 10am. I would have left earlier, but I didn’t want to walk to the metro alone because I didn’t know exactly how to get there. I really wish I were better at navigating. I have a terrible habit of blindly following people wherever I go and then not having the slightest clue how I got there.
About a month ago, Regina hosted her Ukrainian doctor friend for a couple of days while he was on a trip to attend a medical neurosurgery convention here in Moscow. He was a nice guy, and he spoke pretty good English. In fact, when we were sitting together at the kitchen table while Regina was washing dishes, one of the cats walked in and started crunching its food really loudly. The doctor then asked me, “Don’t they bother you? Their… wool… or hair… is everywhere. But I think she ignores it because she loves them.” I told him they did kind of annoy me at first, especially with the first shock of their being three cats in a very small apartment that smelled of pee, but that I got used to it in a relatively short period of time. The doctor and I had a nice chat together. I tried to teach him some English colloquialisms, but that proved to be quite tricky. Like “to deal with something” and “I can’t put my finger on it.” Those were especially difficult to explain for some reason. He thought the thing about the finger was funny.
The doctor asked me if I had trouble adjusting to Russian behavior on the streets, i.e. how people here wear a permanent frown. He said when he was in America, people smiled “bez kontsa” (without end). What’s more, he found it strange that as a habit Americans will ask each other how they’re doing, and regardless of how they’re actually doing, the reply is always “fine” or “good.” I tried to defend our polite fakeness by saying that it makes people feel more comfortable if everyone around them is happy, and usually someone will say they’re fine when they’re not fine in order to avoid getting into a deeper explanation of why they might not be fine. I mean if you’re having a crappy day or your wife just left you or something, you don’t necessarily want to bog a stranger or a friendly acquaintance down with all the unpleasant details. So you just smile and say everything’s fine, and then both of you can move on with your day. I suppose it is a rather artificial practice, but I can’t help but miss the fake smiles every now and then. Even if people here are keepin’ it real, it’s a little too real sometimes.
One of the friends from my program, Alexandra, said that once she saw a TV special where they questioned if places like Wal-Mart and Target were “too friendly,” like when employees look at the last name on your card and make it a point to say, “Thank you Ms. Petrovic!” before you leave. Alexandra said that at the time she was ready to agree that situations like that were over-the-top on friendliness. But then she said that since she’s been here and dealt with surly Moscow cashiers/employees, she’s decided there is no such thing as being too friendly. Our joke about shopping in Moscow is that “the customer is never right.”
A while ago someone asked me if I had started thinking in Russian yet. The answer is… not quite. I don’t think I’ll ever get to the point where I can have a natural stream of consciousness in Russian, but a lot of times I’ll try to think of how I would translate an English thought into Russian. I do have a few exclamatory remarks that I picked up from Regina. For instance, now I can’t even remember what sound I made before I started using “oy!” as a reflex outburst noise. If I stub my toe or drop something or if there’s a loud noise somewhere, now without thinking about it I say “oy!” That seems to be a very Russian thing. In fact when I was in Stockholm recently, I saw a woman bump into someone and then heard her cry out “oy!” in surprise. I paused and wanted to hear her talk to her husband for a few seconds afterward, suspecting she might be Russian, and indeed she was!
Another thing I started saying is, “gospodi!” (oh, lord!) Regina says this a lot, especially when she watches “Murder, She Wrote” and she’s responding to some twist of events. Also I tend to say “uzhas” (awful, horror) and “koshmar” (nightmare) a lot, but usually I use those jokingly, and only with friends from the program.
Recently Regina went on vacation for about three weeks, and she left her friend Katya in charge of the cats. When I say she left her in charge of the cats, I really mean she left her in charge of me, since she was basically living at the apartment for those weeks. Katya is one of the sweetest, wackiest ladies I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. While she was here she took really good care of me. For instance, she would make me lunches to take with me to school and say that she would feel at peace knowing I would eat my fill during the day. She also helped me plan the 2-week abroad vacation that the EAP students get at the end of October (4 of my friends and I took a trip to St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Tallinn). We called hostels and train stations together to compare lodging and ticket prices and reserve spots for me and my friends. Whenever she knew I needed help with anything, she would practically bend over backwards to help me sort things out. I told her I was having trouble finding unique souvenirs to bring back for my family since you can pretty much get anything anywhere these days. She personally took me to several obscure indoor and outdoor Russian markets to find specialty gifts for my friends and family. Sometimes I thought she got even more excited than I did about buying things at those markets, and she’d try to talk me into buying weird trinkets that she thought were the bargain of the century. If I didn’t know better I’d have thought she was getting a commission from those vendors.
The first time I ever met Katya, she showed me the sweater she was wearing and said, “I know what you’re thinking. This sweater doesn’t look very warm, does it? But wait!” Then she pulled out the collar of her sweater to reveal what appeared to be a standard thermal undershirt. “Tyopli sekret!” (warm secret!)
One time when I came home from school, Katya said she would whip me up a quick omelet for dinner. What she made did have some eggs in it, but I would never have called it an omelet. It had flour in it, so it turned out like a fluffy bread-like thing, with some salty stuff and melted cheese on top. When she lifted the lid to show me, she said, “Do you know what this is called? Pizza Express.”
Katya says she’s a “doctor without a degree,” although she also happens to be a chain smoker. She’s the one who introduced Regina to the brewed rice drink, although I have to say I prefer Regina’s brew. The one the Katya made smelled like blue cheese and tasted like warm salty dishwater. I felt a little guilty about it, but every morning and night when she poured me a generous glassful I would discreetly pour it down the sink while she stepped out into the hallway to have a smoke. However, to her credit she made really great looseleaf tea. She said Regina is ruining her health by drinking the stuff that comes in teabags.
Katya is Russian, but she grew up in Georgia and lived for 5 years in Croatia and didn’t know any Croatian when she first moved there. So she told me she understands what it feels like to be in a foreign country and feel like an outsider. She showed me how to cook Georgian dishes (my favorite so far being an appetizer called “khachapuri,” which is basically any type of cheese and bread put together). We had a few “domashnie dni” (home days), as Katya called them, where we would just stay in and cook together. We would go to some out-of-the-way grocery store and she would point out what a great deal everything was, since she had compared these prices with the ones all over town. Then we would come back and she’d show me step-by-step how to make cold Georgian bean dip or this shredded cabbage stuff with walnuts, or rice pilaf. The secret to a lot of the stuff we made seemed to be in the spice packets she bought while we were out, so I have doubts about being able to replicate a lot of these recipes when I come home. I had to laugh when she told me to be careful of how spicy the bean dip was, because when I tried it there was just a little kick of black and red pepper, and a lot of garlic. I don’t consider myself to be a lover of spicy foods, but I find myself craving them now that I’m in a spiceless drought surrounded by dill, beets, and potatoes. Katya thinks I’m some kind of salt fiend, but really it’s just that the food here tends to be on the bland side.
Katya has her own brand of baby talk that she uses to talk to the cats, and, like Regina, is convinced that when the cats produce a two-syllable meow, they’re saying “mama.” She tells me that the cats only say “mama” to her—“they don’t talk this way with Regina.” I didn’t want to burst her bubble and tell her that the cats even call me “mama.”
Sometimes I have to admit that Katya could be a little bit stifling and would want to lecture me for hours on anything and everything. At the end of spending a whole day with her, I could get a little bit exhausted and frustrated with her. She’s got an unbelievable amount of energy. But I could never hold anything against her for long, she always had good intentions and is inherently a very loving woman. Overall I had a really great time when she was living here. I have to say, now that Regina is back I have a Katya-shaped hole in my heart…
I shouldn’t be too hard on Regina, though. I learned a lot about her from Katya while she was on vacation at some old-people’s spa/hotel in Anapa. It turns out she never had children after all. The girl Regina was telling me about when I first moved in was just a close pupil friend who went to live in America. Apparently Regina’s ex-husband was a bit of a tyrant and didn’t allow her to have any children, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t quite have motherly instincts, yet still tries to be caring in her own standoffish way. Katya said that the reason Regina went on vacation was more of a trip to cure herself than for her to have fun. She said that Regina only has enough energy to putz around in her apartment, and asked if I noticed how tired she got when we went out together to Ashan (a big shopping center) to get a hairdryer for me and groceries for her. I actually didn’t notice that she seemed tired at all, and I wondered if Katya was exaggerating things, as she sometimes does.
Katya, like Regina, was really nervous about giving me a key to the apartment when I would leave for school, but to an even greater degree than Regina. She told me it would be really easy for someone to make a copy of the keys and then if they knew where I lived, break in. Then she took me into the kitchen to show me how they would make a copy of the keys, which turned out to be a long demonstration involving a key and a bar of soap. People here seem to be really paranoid about break-ins. I have no way of knowing what the actual incidence is of that sort of thing, but it must be high, or else everyone just lives in extreme paranoia under fortress-like conditions. In addition to having a code to get into our main building, we live on the fifth floor and have a locked door leading to a hallway with 2 other apartments, and then our own apartment door is really thick and padded and has 3 complicated locks that each require a different number of turns. Katya said that if someone were to come into the apartment, Regina would definitely have a heart attack—“even if someone were to come into the kitchen and just take off this little flower embroidery off the wall, that would do her in.” Personally, I find it highly unlikely that someone would go to the trouble of stealing all 5 keys from me, then make copies of them with a bar of soap, then follow me to see where I live, and then on top of that, actually know how to use all of those keys. But since I’m not in charge of the keys, I don’t make the rules.
I get the feeling that a lot of Russians think they’re experts on health, and are really big on home remedies. Katya, for one, is a big fan of eating honey straight in large quantities to stay healthy. When she was here, every morning she would dole out big spoonfuls of honey in a bowl for me to eat. I like honey in tea or on bread, but I can’t eat much of it unless there’s a vehicle of some sort. And I don’t mean a spoon. Katya joked with her friend that she gave me a bowl of honey to eat, and instead of eating it all in one sitting, I thought I was supposed to ration it out over a week. She and her friend thought that was pretty funny.
A few weeks ago, Katya took me to a Georgian restaurant called Tamada, not far from our apartment. At the end of the meal, everyone was ordering tea but I decided to just get water. And water is not exactly the neutral choice that it would be in America. I knew it would be an unpopular choice, but I was really thirsty and didn’t feel like hot tea. As soon as I said this, everyone at the table immediately tried to talk me out of it. “Lydia! No! Don’t you see how cold it is outside?! It’s dangerous to drink cold water in weather like this.” I thought this was sort of funny, seeing as how the temperature inside was stifling and they were sitting enjoying their hot tea. And the water I ordered was room-temperature anyway. A few days later, I came home from grocery shopping with a big bottle of water, which I like to keep in my room to drink when I get really thirsty and tea doesn’t cut it. As soon as Katya saw it, she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, water. Your favorite.”
Before she went on vacation, Regina painted her toenails and then came into my room wearing those foam rubber toe-separators. First she asked me if I knew what yoga was, and if I was aware of its positive health effects. I got excited because this was something I did actually know a little bit about already, but then what she went on to talk about seemed entirely unrelated to yoga. She said that the secret to good health is to keep your toes spread out as much as you can, all the time if possible. “When me and my girlfriends go to the beach, we always put some hot stones in between our feet and sunbathe for hours. And those are the nights that I always sleep the best, after a day of separating my toes. When I’m in the shower washing my feet, I can always tell if I’m not feeling very well based on how tender my toes feel when I try to pull them apart. And then conversely, when I feel great my toes don’t hurt as much. It feels like a massage when I wash them.”
The first bullet on this list is, “didn’t pass face control,” which is pretty self-explanatory—I went to a club with some friends and we didn’t get in. I think the club was called “London.” I was with two American friends from our program and about 5 or 6 of our Russian friends. Our Russian friends told us to speak a lot of English, and loudly, because they said that would be an exotic and welcome factor in their club. I doubted the validity of that assumption, (and rightly so, as it turned out), but went along with it anyway. When we got to the club (at around 11:30pm) we were so early that there was no one even lined up yet. Anyway, the fact that we were early didn’t help us get in. Even though we were the first in line at the entrance, they weren’t planning on letting us in. Then other people started coming and just waltzed passed us, kind of like in those movies where there’s a big queue of people begging the bouncer to let them in, but he stands firm until a couple of pretty ladies come and then he opens the rope just for them. Except none of the ladies they were letting in were anything special. In fact, I would venture to say that the only people being let in were tacky and ugly. (yes I’m biased, but I’m also not wrong.) After about 45 minutes of this weird selective entry process, we collectively decided that based on the people they had already let into the club, we didn’t want to be socializing with their kind anyway. We did speak a lot of loud English, but I’m pretty sure in the end that hindered more than it helped. It was a bit of a disappointment for all of us, especially considering that we had all got dressed up and were prepared to spend the whole night at the club (because the metro closes at 1am and opens back up at 5:30am). So instead of the club, we got some snacks at a little grocery store near our friend’s apartment (metro station Planernaya, just a few stops up from my beloved Oktyabr’skoye Pole on the purple line) and hung out there the whole night. One thing I have noticed about the Russians I’ve met is that they seem to have no problem staying up all night. When we went over to this guy’s apartment, I thought we were going to just hang out until 5:30 and then say “see you later, I’m going to catch the first metro and hit the hay.” As it was, I didn’t end up leaving until around 10am. I would have left earlier, but I didn’t want to walk to the metro alone because I didn’t know exactly how to get there. I really wish I were better at navigating. I have a terrible habit of blindly following people wherever I go and then not having the slightest clue how I got there.
About a month ago, Regina hosted her Ukrainian doctor friend for a couple of days while he was on a trip to attend a medical neurosurgery convention here in Moscow. He was a nice guy, and he spoke pretty good English. In fact, when we were sitting together at the kitchen table while Regina was washing dishes, one of the cats walked in and started crunching its food really loudly. The doctor then asked me, “Don’t they bother you? Their… wool… or hair… is everywhere. But I think she ignores it because she loves them.” I told him they did kind of annoy me at first, especially with the first shock of their being three cats in a very small apartment that smelled of pee, but that I got used to it in a relatively short period of time. The doctor and I had a nice chat together. I tried to teach him some English colloquialisms, but that proved to be quite tricky. Like “to deal with something” and “I can’t put my finger on it.” Those were especially difficult to explain for some reason. He thought the thing about the finger was funny.
The doctor asked me if I had trouble adjusting to Russian behavior on the streets, i.e. how people here wear a permanent frown. He said when he was in America, people smiled “bez kontsa” (without end). What’s more, he found it strange that as a habit Americans will ask each other how they’re doing, and regardless of how they’re actually doing, the reply is always “fine” or “good.” I tried to defend our polite fakeness by saying that it makes people feel more comfortable if everyone around them is happy, and usually someone will say they’re fine when they’re not fine in order to avoid getting into a deeper explanation of why they might not be fine. I mean if you’re having a crappy day or your wife just left you or something, you don’t necessarily want to bog a stranger or a friendly acquaintance down with all the unpleasant details. So you just smile and say everything’s fine, and then both of you can move on with your day. I suppose it is a rather artificial practice, but I can’t help but miss the fake smiles every now and then. Even if people here are keepin’ it real, it’s a little too real sometimes.
One of the friends from my program, Alexandra, said that once she saw a TV special where they questioned if places like Wal-Mart and Target were “too friendly,” like when employees look at the last name on your card and make it a point to say, “Thank you Ms. Petrovic!” before you leave. Alexandra said that at the time she was ready to agree that situations like that were over-the-top on friendliness. But then she said that since she’s been here and dealt with surly Moscow cashiers/employees, she’s decided there is no such thing as being too friendly. Our joke about shopping in Moscow is that “the customer is never right.”
A while ago someone asked me if I had started thinking in Russian yet. The answer is… not quite. I don’t think I’ll ever get to the point where I can have a natural stream of consciousness in Russian, but a lot of times I’ll try to think of how I would translate an English thought into Russian. I do have a few exclamatory remarks that I picked up from Regina. For instance, now I can’t even remember what sound I made before I started using “oy!” as a reflex outburst noise. If I stub my toe or drop something or if there’s a loud noise somewhere, now without thinking about it I say “oy!” That seems to be a very Russian thing. In fact when I was in Stockholm recently, I saw a woman bump into someone and then heard her cry out “oy!” in surprise. I paused and wanted to hear her talk to her husband for a few seconds afterward, suspecting she might be Russian, and indeed she was!
Another thing I started saying is, “gospodi!” (oh, lord!) Regina says this a lot, especially when she watches “Murder, She Wrote” and she’s responding to some twist of events. Also I tend to say “uzhas” (awful, horror) and “koshmar” (nightmare) a lot, but usually I use those jokingly, and only with friends from the program.
Recently Regina went on vacation for about three weeks, and she left her friend Katya in charge of the cats. When I say she left her in charge of the cats, I really mean she left her in charge of me, since she was basically living at the apartment for those weeks. Katya is one of the sweetest, wackiest ladies I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. While she was here she took really good care of me. For instance, she would make me lunches to take with me to school and say that she would feel at peace knowing I would eat my fill during the day. She also helped me plan the 2-week abroad vacation that the EAP students get at the end of October (4 of my friends and I took a trip to St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Tallinn). We called hostels and train stations together to compare lodging and ticket prices and reserve spots for me and my friends. Whenever she knew I needed help with anything, she would practically bend over backwards to help me sort things out. I told her I was having trouble finding unique souvenirs to bring back for my family since you can pretty much get anything anywhere these days. She personally took me to several obscure indoor and outdoor Russian markets to find specialty gifts for my friends and family. Sometimes I thought she got even more excited than I did about buying things at those markets, and she’d try to talk me into buying weird trinkets that she thought were the bargain of the century. If I didn’t know better I’d have thought she was getting a commission from those vendors.
The first time I ever met Katya, she showed me the sweater she was wearing and said, “I know what you’re thinking. This sweater doesn’t look very warm, does it? But wait!” Then she pulled out the collar of her sweater to reveal what appeared to be a standard thermal undershirt. “Tyopli sekret!” (warm secret!)
One time when I came home from school, Katya said she would whip me up a quick omelet for dinner. What she made did have some eggs in it, but I would never have called it an omelet. It had flour in it, so it turned out like a fluffy bread-like thing, with some salty stuff and melted cheese on top. When she lifted the lid to show me, she said, “Do you know what this is called? Pizza Express.”
Katya says she’s a “doctor without a degree,” although she also happens to be a chain smoker. She’s the one who introduced Regina to the brewed rice drink, although I have to say I prefer Regina’s brew. The one the Katya made smelled like blue cheese and tasted like warm salty dishwater. I felt a little guilty about it, but every morning and night when she poured me a generous glassful I would discreetly pour it down the sink while she stepped out into the hallway to have a smoke. However, to her credit she made really great looseleaf tea. She said Regina is ruining her health by drinking the stuff that comes in teabags.
Katya is Russian, but she grew up in Georgia and lived for 5 years in Croatia and didn’t know any Croatian when she first moved there. So she told me she understands what it feels like to be in a foreign country and feel like an outsider. She showed me how to cook Georgian dishes (my favorite so far being an appetizer called “khachapuri,” which is basically any type of cheese and bread put together). We had a few “domashnie dni” (home days), as Katya called them, where we would just stay in and cook together. We would go to some out-of-the-way grocery store and she would point out what a great deal everything was, since she had compared these prices with the ones all over town. Then we would come back and she’d show me step-by-step how to make cold Georgian bean dip or this shredded cabbage stuff with walnuts, or rice pilaf. The secret to a lot of the stuff we made seemed to be in the spice packets she bought while we were out, so I have doubts about being able to replicate a lot of these recipes when I come home. I had to laugh when she told me to be careful of how spicy the bean dip was, because when I tried it there was just a little kick of black and red pepper, and a lot of garlic. I don’t consider myself to be a lover of spicy foods, but I find myself craving them now that I’m in a spiceless drought surrounded by dill, beets, and potatoes. Katya thinks I’m some kind of salt fiend, but really it’s just that the food here tends to be on the bland side.
Katya has her own brand of baby talk that she uses to talk to the cats, and, like Regina, is convinced that when the cats produce a two-syllable meow, they’re saying “mama.” She tells me that the cats only say “mama” to her—“they don’t talk this way with Regina.” I didn’t want to burst her bubble and tell her that the cats even call me “mama.”
Sometimes I have to admit that Katya could be a little bit stifling and would want to lecture me for hours on anything and everything. At the end of spending a whole day with her, I could get a little bit exhausted and frustrated with her. She’s got an unbelievable amount of energy. But I could never hold anything against her for long, she always had good intentions and is inherently a very loving woman. Overall I had a really great time when she was living here. I have to say, now that Regina is back I have a Katya-shaped hole in my heart…
I shouldn’t be too hard on Regina, though. I learned a lot about her from Katya while she was on vacation at some old-people’s spa/hotel in Anapa. It turns out she never had children after all. The girl Regina was telling me about when I first moved in was just a close pupil friend who went to live in America. Apparently Regina’s ex-husband was a bit of a tyrant and didn’t allow her to have any children, so it makes sense that she wouldn’t quite have motherly instincts, yet still tries to be caring in her own standoffish way. Katya said that the reason Regina went on vacation was more of a trip to cure herself than for her to have fun. She said that Regina only has enough energy to putz around in her apartment, and asked if I noticed how tired she got when we went out together to Ashan (a big shopping center) to get a hairdryer for me and groceries for her. I actually didn’t notice that she seemed tired at all, and I wondered if Katya was exaggerating things, as she sometimes does.
Katya, like Regina, was really nervous about giving me a key to the apartment when I would leave for school, but to an even greater degree than Regina. She told me it would be really easy for someone to make a copy of the keys and then if they knew where I lived, break in. Then she took me into the kitchen to show me how they would make a copy of the keys, which turned out to be a long demonstration involving a key and a bar of soap. People here seem to be really paranoid about break-ins. I have no way of knowing what the actual incidence is of that sort of thing, but it must be high, or else everyone just lives in extreme paranoia under fortress-like conditions. In addition to having a code to get into our main building, we live on the fifth floor and have a locked door leading to a hallway with 2 other apartments, and then our own apartment door is really thick and padded and has 3 complicated locks that each require a different number of turns. Katya said that if someone were to come into the apartment, Regina would definitely have a heart attack—“even if someone were to come into the kitchen and just take off this little flower embroidery off the wall, that would do her in.” Personally, I find it highly unlikely that someone would go to the trouble of stealing all 5 keys from me, then make copies of them with a bar of soap, then follow me to see where I live, and then on top of that, actually know how to use all of those keys. But since I’m not in charge of the keys, I don’t make the rules.
I get the feeling that a lot of Russians think they’re experts on health, and are really big on home remedies. Katya, for one, is a big fan of eating honey straight in large quantities to stay healthy. When she was here, every morning she would dole out big spoonfuls of honey in a bowl for me to eat. I like honey in tea or on bread, but I can’t eat much of it unless there’s a vehicle of some sort. And I don’t mean a spoon. Katya joked with her friend that she gave me a bowl of honey to eat, and instead of eating it all in one sitting, I thought I was supposed to ration it out over a week. She and her friend thought that was pretty funny.
A few weeks ago, Katya took me to a Georgian restaurant called Tamada, not far from our apartment. At the end of the meal, everyone was ordering tea but I decided to just get water. And water is not exactly the neutral choice that it would be in America. I knew it would be an unpopular choice, but I was really thirsty and didn’t feel like hot tea. As soon as I said this, everyone at the table immediately tried to talk me out of it. “Lydia! No! Don’t you see how cold it is outside?! It’s dangerous to drink cold water in weather like this.” I thought this was sort of funny, seeing as how the temperature inside was stifling and they were sitting enjoying their hot tea. And the water I ordered was room-temperature anyway. A few days later, I came home from grocery shopping with a big bottle of water, which I like to keep in my room to drink when I get really thirsty and tea doesn’t cut it. As soon as Katya saw it, she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, water. Your favorite.”
Before she went on vacation, Regina painted her toenails and then came into my room wearing those foam rubber toe-separators. First she asked me if I knew what yoga was, and if I was aware of its positive health effects. I got excited because this was something I did actually know a little bit about already, but then what she went on to talk about seemed entirely unrelated to yoga. She said that the secret to good health is to keep your toes spread out as much as you can, all the time if possible. “When me and my girlfriends go to the beach, we always put some hot stones in between our feet and sunbathe for hours. And those are the nights that I always sleep the best, after a day of separating my toes. When I’m in the shower washing my feet, I can always tell if I’m not feeling very well based on how tender my toes feel when I try to pull them apart. And then conversely, when I feel great my toes don’t hurt as much. It feels like a massage when I wash them.”
Thursday, September 25, 2008
mini update
Hello again-- I just read my last post and realized how much time has gone by! Sorry to leave all you faithful readers hanging, but without any substantial events to center a post around, I've been hesitant to write in this thing. Right now I'm at the computer lab in the university, which we're allowed to use on Thursdays after 4pm. It seems odd that for a university where all the students are of the rich upper-middle class, everything happens in one building and there is only one computer lab with limited access for students. But then again, maybe that's the spoiled American in me talking.
Speaking of rich students, now that the Russians are back at school (us EAP students had the school to ourselves before the Russians came back from summer vacation), our academic environment is slightly... intimidating. Well, when I say intimidating, it's only because all the young people in Moscow love to dress every day like they're going to a club. In every direction one can see shiny black pumps and matching Gucci handbags, sleek hairstyles and designer jeans. It's a bit of a spectacle, and even though I don't really respect that kind of ostentatious wealth, I have to admit I'm not always immune to all their conspicuous consumption. At any given moment you can walk into the ladies' restroom and find greater than or equal to 2 girls primping hair or touching up makeup in front of the full length mirror next to the sinks. And for some reason when I walk in, they immediately look down at my feet and then I feel slightly embarrassed that I'm wearing flat mary-janes or dansko clogs instead of trendy patent leather high heels. The other day I was minding my own business in the university when I saw a group of Russian girls looking in my direction, talking and laughing. Then when they realized I had seen them, they sarcastically yelled over, "OCHEN' CLASSNO!" (really cool) and then pointed to my clothes as if to explain that they were talking about my outfit. But I don't think they really thought it was ochen' classno.
Classes are going tolerably well, but I still feel like an absolute idiot most the time. I haven't felt truly competent in a long time. I think that's one of the things that I miss about America-- feeling like a competent adult. Here I feel like a child, messing everything up and then being constantly reprimanded for misunderstanding or not anticipating the way things are done here. A lot of people (especially older people) here love to ask the question "why?" in a very rhetorical, chastising way. "And why didn't you take check your jacket in the coat room before getting in this cafeteria line?" "I see you handwashed your laundry-- why did you have so much of it? You should have done it sooner." "Why were you waiting here for so long? You could have come in the room." "And why do you need to know that?" "Why didn't you tell me you were going to ____?" "Why did you hang your sweater like this? It's going to stretch the fabric." The list is endless, really. Usually in my head I try to come up with a good response to defend myself, but usually in my head I can only come up with, "Well, I forgot..." or "I don't know, I must be an idiot." I don't think they really want an answer, they just want to call your attention to the fact that you messed something up and it rubbed them the wrong way.
I went off on a little bit of a tangent there, when what I really wanted to talk about was how my classes are going. At first I thought the film class was my favorite. While I do enjoy that class, literature has far surpassed it, if only because of the wacky/wise professor. His sense of humor is at the same time very silly and very subtle. (For those of you who went to high school with me, it will be easiest for you to grasp his personality if you imagine the Russian counterpart of Mr. Holmes.) I gather that some people in our class don’t quite understand his sense of humor; when he makes sweeping generalizations or says something wildly exaggerated or biased, he’s really laughing at us behind a straight face. Let me try to recall some class discussions to give you an idea… the humor might not translate very well, not because of a language barrier but because I can’t possibly convey in plain text his delivery:
1) We’re reading Pushkin’s short story “Pikovaya Dama” (queen of spades), and after we read a passage detailing the old countess’ makeup/dress regime, our professor asked us if men wore makeup in those days. After it was decided that yes, they did, he posed another question:
-Alex, do you think that girls are prettier now or were they prettier back then?
-Um… now?
-Well, okay. [to the whole class] And what about men?
-…
-It’s a very strange thing, but men are better looking now than in the old days. Look at photographs before WWII and you’ll see. They had short legs, big bellies. Yes, for some reason people got more beautiful after the war.
2) -What are people talking about in America now, what’s in the news?
-The election?
-What about it?
-One of the presidential candidates chose a woman from Alaska for his running mate.
-And?
-Her daughter is 17 and she’s pregnant.
-Okay. So?
-She’s not married?
-Right! By the way, to be 17 and pregnant—that’s normal.
3) –This story begins with a girl. Her name is Irina. What is she like?
-Pretty?
-No!
4) -Don’t ever buy any vodka from a kiosk. Be sure you get it from a store. The stuff they sell in the kiosks… it’s a risk. It could be floor cleaner. And by the way, all that vodka they sell in America, it’s good stuff. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not good quality.
-What about Popov? In America we say that if vodka comes in a plastic bottle, it’s bad.
-No. Popov is good quality vodka. A plastic bottle? No.
5) -So Lizaveta and Germann look at each other for a week. And when does she first smile at him? After a week! That’s how relations between men and women used to be. And now, how do YOU carry on? Blehhh! [Waves arms wildly, presumably to illustrate the reckless behavior of modern youth]
Different people have different ideas about his system of blinking and winking after he says something he wants you to remember. To me, the deep blink with an accompanying nod means something like, “This is how it is. Remember that.” The wink, on the other hand, is a little more whimsical, and usually I think it means, “Get it? Hehe.” But I don’t mean to say that the blink is always more serious, because usually the blink is quite playful in its own way.
In our film class we’ve finished 3 films and are almost finished with our 4th. The second film we watched was called “Rusalka,” (mermaid) a slightly dark melodrama about an odd adolescent girl who moves with her mother and grandmother to Moscow. I don’t think a lot of people liked that movie because the girl was a little bit alien-like and hard to relate to. After “Rusalka” we watched “Kukushka,” (cuckoo) a movie set in WWII where an outcast Finnish soldier and an outcast Russian soldier, through various circumstances, end up in the home of this Laplander woman who takes care of them. None of them speak each other’s language, so it’s funny to watch how they all talk to each other and come up with their own interpretations of what the others say. I was surprised at how many layers that movie had, especially with the “kukushka” theme. For one thing, all the characters thought the other characters were a little “cuckoo,” and kukushka also retains the “crazy” connotation in Russian. Also, cuckoo mothers reject their young and throw them out of the nest, like the Russian and Finnish soldiers in the movie were cast out by their own. In Russian folklore, the kukushka is believed to have the ability to tell how many years a person has left to live. So after you ask a cuckoo bird how long you’ll live, the number of times they call out is how many years you have. During WWII, Russians called Finnish snipers “kukushkas” because of that parallel to kukushka folklore. Pretty cool stuff!
I ended up dropping the history/political science class, for a few reasons. First, I think if I were to take that class for credit I would surpass my unit ceiling at Berkeley, and I don't want to stress out about having too many units. Also, I wasn't prepared to fight for that class because the lectures are very confusing. Even though the class is taught in English, I understand it less than all my other classes that are taught in Russian. Some people need to keep that class to get credit for a political science major, but for my major at Berkeley, they are going to give credit for an advanced language class and 2 general electives, so it doesn't matter which classes I take here. The good thing is that I can still audit the accompanying Russian-language seminar that the literature professor teaches. I just can't get enough of that guy.
The weather has been significantly cooler these days. I think it’s a bit uncharacteristic of Russian Septembers for it to be this cold. It’s not unbearable, though. The past couple of weeks I’ve been able to get away with wearing long sleeves and then layering 2 lightweight jackets during the day. Although every night it’s a little chilly in my room, and I don’t think it helps that I have a big window that is a poor insulator. Usually I put on a sweater at night and I’m fine. However, getting up in the morning is a bitterly cold and cruel affair. I asked Regina Konstantinovna (yep, I found our her name) when they would turn the heat on (whoever “they” are—I haven’t exactly figured out the antecedent to this vague pronoun) because I guess that stuff is controlled municipally. She said usually they turn it on sometime around October 15th, unless the weather is really bad, in which case they turn it on October 1st. Today she said she thinks they might turn it on October 1st because everyone else she knows in the area already has their heating turned on, but for whatever reason this building gets everything last.
Incidentally, Regina approves of my sport Dansko clogs. She says they’re perfect for rain and puddles. And to think, I took them on a whim. What I don’t tell her is that I prefer to wear the clogs not for the puddles, as I usually just avoid them altogether, but rather because my jeans are too long and it’s one of my top 5 pet peeves to have my jeans drag the ground. Speaking of shoes and puddles, I have no idea how people in Moscow keep their shoes clean. I bought a new pair of little blue tennis shoes a couple weeks ago and they already look 4 months old from all the dirt they’ve picked up. My friend Jaime has a similar problem with her white-background slip-on Vans. The other day as she was leaving for school in the morning, her xoziaika told her she should wash her shoes because otherwise no man would want to marry her. No wonder I haven’t found a husband yet; my shoes are filthy.
I don’t think my xoziaika is quite that old-fashioned. In many ways she seems fairly liberal, and generally appreciates Western ways. A little while ago, I came home at night and to my dismay, the code to open the building’s door did not work. The door was completely unresponsive and the keypad wouldn’t register any new code submissions. It was slightly nerve-wracking, especially because it was a cold night and it had just started to rain. Shortly after I tried to open the door, a young man came home and then we both started troubleshooting. Well, mostly I watched from a distance as he first tried using brute force to pull the door open, and then as he found a bizarre metal antenna contraption nearby and tried to pry it open that way. Meanwhile I had already called Regina and she said she would get help, so I stood back and watched this guy struggle in vain with the door. Eventually I heard her voice on the other side of the door accompanied by a man’s voice. There was some banging, and then the door swung open to reveal a large, shirtless man with his leg in the air, having just kicked the door in. He grumbled something and then went back inside his apartment on the ground floor (he might have been some kind of superintendent, I’m not sure). So when the three of us (Regina, me, the stranger guy) got in the elevator, he pressed the third floor (you have to do the floors in sequence, I think it only remembers the last number you press). Regina, surprised, asked him why he pushed the third floor, when we were on the 5th.
“I live on the third floor.”
“Oh, and I thought you were with us!” [chuckle]
So the fact that she would be that nonchalant about me bringing home male guests suggests that she’s not an altogether conservative lady. But since I wasn’t planning on doing that anyway, this information doesn’t particularly delight me.
The annoying thing is that Regina doesn’t give me keys regularly. Before I leave each morning, she either says “take the keys today, I might be at the store this afternoon,” or “don’t take the keys, I’ll be home.” That’s all well and good for weekdays, when I don’t make it a habit of staying out very late. But on weekend nights it’s downright stressful to be out later than 11. Not because I feel unsafe being out late—on the contrary, my neighborhood is actually quite safe. In fact, I feel more at ease walking home here after dark than in Berkeley. No, on the contrary, it’s a stressful situation because I have to ring the doorbell late at night and wake Regina up so that she can let me in. And of course it’s not just an open door that greets me. It’s an entire rhetorical interrogation. I say rhetorical because she doesn’t really care about what I was doing when she says “Why were you out so late?” or “What would happen if you missed the metro?” It’s rather like having another mother here, but without love… and without the ability to argue coherently. I told her that I didn’t want to disturb her that usually I don’t like to stay out very late, it’s just hard in a situation where your friends want to stay out late and you don’t want to walk to the metro alone. She still doesn’t want to give me keys full-time, and says that she would wake up if I used the keys in the door anyway. She says that she knows I’m not really the partying type, since she’s seen me studying in my room a lot. But her knowing that about me doesn’t really help the situation with the awkward late-night arrivals.
Another thing that stressed me out with Regina was that one of these nights where I accidentally came home later than planned, she chastised me for giving her too much laundry to do in one load. Before I left, I told her that it would be all right to wash everything together. When I said this, I wasn’t thinking of the size of the load, rather it was referring to the colors/whites issue. But when I got home and she had done it all, she said she had done it all in one load like I told her, but next time I needed to give her smaller loads because the washing machine is really small. You know those little plastic bags at the grocery store? That’s how much laundry I had. So this is kind of a drag because laundry is $8 a load… Lately I’ve been thinking of trying a shirt-recycling policy, especially because it’s cooler weather and maybe I can get away with wearing things twice and not have them be so dirty. And then every time I squeeze into the metro and am wedged between a tall man’s armpit and a short man’s waxy ear, I wonder why I continue to be so obsessive about laundry and hygiene here.
A week or so ago I, horror of horrors, got a pimple, and it really freaked Regina out. Granted, it was kind of an intense one, but I was counting on people to be gracious and turn a blind eye until the situation sorted itself out. No such luck. The first time she saw it her eyes widened and she said, "What is that??" Not knowing the word for pimple at the time, I shrugged and said, "Nu..." (well...) and trailed off. Then, trying to elicit a concrete response from me, she asked if it was ___ or ___. I didn't know what either word meant.
"Is it ___ or from nature?"
"Well, technically it IS from nature, but..."
Finally we agreed that it was a pimple (pryshch), and so I thought that was the end of it. Nope! When I came home later, I told her I was planning to go out that evening with friends. I ate dinner with her and we successfully managed to avoid the pryshch topic. But then after I got up from the table and was making preparations to leave, she stopped me.
"Listen, I'm going to give you something for that. I really don't like it. I just don't like it."
Then she gave me some antiseptic and a cotton ball and then something that doubled as a type of topical cream and cover-up. So that was a rather humbling ordeal.
I see a lot of old women with white-purple hair here. Originally I thought this was a Russian thing. I even appreciated how spunky the old ladies here seemed, trying out something new as if to say, “I’m not dead yet! Here’s my purple hair to show you that I’ve got a little bite left in me.” But today I found out that this is actually a pretty common phenomenon around the world, and it just means that they had a botched dye-job. Oops.
Oh, I almost forgot to write about my birthday. Since my actual birthday was on Sunday and I didn’t want to be out late then, I told everyone to meet at the retro club (the same one I mentioned a few posts back) on Saturday evening. We met at 7 to avoid face control and an entry fee, and spent a leisurely evening dining and dancing. One of our Russian friends was surprised that we didn’t want to spend the whole night in the club (most clubs close at 6am), but since the metro closes at 1am we called it a night at around 12:15. The funny thing about this club is that they played the same retro music on the ground floor (there were different floors that had different kinds of music) as they did the last time we were there. The same songs. In the same order. So even though it wasn’t any retro music that I grew up with, it felt retro from a few weeks ago, and I got excited when they played the songs I “knew.”
As for my birthday day, well it wasn’t anything special. Sometimes birthdays are just that way. But I don’t know how to stop looking forward to birthdays so as to avoid the disappointment of the anti-climactic ones. I got home late morning, having spent the night at a friend’s house (to avoid the wrath of Regina). Then I went to meet some friends who were going to see an independent film near Belorusskaya station. It was called something like, “Uzhas, kotoriy vsegda s toboi,”—“The Horror That is Always With You.” I fell asleep for most of it, but I got the gist. Some guy and his wife are intruded upon by these government soldiers who carry out a stake-out mission in their apartment, except in the end I gathered that it was the wrong apartment and the wrong guy got killed. Anyway, after the movie my friends wanted to go home, which was kind of disheartening because I had hoped to get together some more people that night for a casual birthday dinner. Maybe that was being a little greedy, since I had already had a birthday fling the night before. So I went across the street to KFC because they have free wi-fi there, but the internet wouldn’t work on my iPod so I read my book there for a while—Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” which I bought in English because, frankly I’m tired of feeling like an Idiot when I read things in Russian. Then I got a text from my Russian friend that a group of them were going to see a movie and to meet at Kurskaya on the dark blue line at 7 (I’m not sure if anyone’s following the metro references, but I like to throw them in to give a little bit of info about the setting of my anecdotes). We ended up seeing “Stepbrothers” dubbed in Russian. To me it was funny because I could imagine how Will Ferrell would say the things that were being dubbed, and also it was satisfying to be able to understand jokes in Russian. The Russians hated it, though. And I can understand why—I think that kind of humor is hard to translate, especially because most of it is absurd and childish. I couldn’t really explain to them why Americans would think that movie was funny. I told them that that kind of humor is indeed very silly, and it shouldn’t be taken too seriously because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. But honestly, I was hard-pressed and a little embarrassed to explain it.
This week I signed up for a V Kontakte account, which is the Russian version of Facebook (vkontakte.ru). I think Facebook is suing them because they lifted the design and layout from their website. As if I need to be distracted by more friend-networking sites like facebook and myspace...
One thing that I really want to try to bring back to the US is "tvorog," which is like cream cheese but sweeter and a little bit more curdled. Someone translated it at "cottage cheese" once, but really it's not that at all. Regina makes these tasty little pancake/blintzes with the tvorog called "cyrniki" (a translation of this could be "little cheesy things?") Sometimes she gives it to me raw for dessert, and then I mix it with sour cream and jam. Russians don't use jam like we do, on toast or bread. They eat it plain or mix it with kefir (this yogurty sour milk stuff), or they mix in a little milk and drink it like that, kind of like a room temperature milkshake. Another Russian thing that Regina introduced me to last night was drinking pickle juice. She gave me a little shot of the brine she had used to make her pickles, and said that it's very healthy. I think she said that it helps drunk people get rid of their headaches. I told her that when I was younger I used to drink olive juice, but everyone thought I was weird. She said "ah yes! That's also healthy stuff."
This weekend we’re going to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s birthplace. We’ll be there all Saturday—meeting at 8am at Chkalovskaya on the light green line and taking a 3-hour train to get there. I heard this weekend is supposed to be cold and rainy in Moscow. I looked up the forecast in Yasnaya Polyana and it said it would be cold and rainy there, too. Ironic, since "yasno" means "clear."
Speaking of rich students, now that the Russians are back at school (us EAP students had the school to ourselves before the Russians came back from summer vacation), our academic environment is slightly... intimidating. Well, when I say intimidating, it's only because all the young people in Moscow love to dress every day like they're going to a club. In every direction one can see shiny black pumps and matching Gucci handbags, sleek hairstyles and designer jeans. It's a bit of a spectacle, and even though I don't really respect that kind of ostentatious wealth, I have to admit I'm not always immune to all their conspicuous consumption. At any given moment you can walk into the ladies' restroom and find greater than or equal to 2 girls primping hair or touching up makeup in front of the full length mirror next to the sinks. And for some reason when I walk in, they immediately look down at my feet and then I feel slightly embarrassed that I'm wearing flat mary-janes or dansko clogs instead of trendy patent leather high heels. The other day I was minding my own business in the university when I saw a group of Russian girls looking in my direction, talking and laughing. Then when they realized I had seen them, they sarcastically yelled over, "OCHEN' CLASSNO!" (really cool) and then pointed to my clothes as if to explain that they were talking about my outfit. But I don't think they really thought it was ochen' classno.
Classes are going tolerably well, but I still feel like an absolute idiot most the time. I haven't felt truly competent in a long time. I think that's one of the things that I miss about America-- feeling like a competent adult. Here I feel like a child, messing everything up and then being constantly reprimanded for misunderstanding or not anticipating the way things are done here. A lot of people (especially older people) here love to ask the question "why?" in a very rhetorical, chastising way. "And why didn't you take check your jacket in the coat room before getting in this cafeteria line?" "I see you handwashed your laundry-- why did you have so much of it? You should have done it sooner." "Why were you waiting here for so long? You could have come in the room." "And why do you need to know that?" "Why didn't you tell me you were going to ____?" "Why did you hang your sweater like this? It's going to stretch the fabric." The list is endless, really. Usually in my head I try to come up with a good response to defend myself, but usually in my head I can only come up with, "Well, I forgot..." or "I don't know, I must be an idiot." I don't think they really want an answer, they just want to call your attention to the fact that you messed something up and it rubbed them the wrong way.
I went off on a little bit of a tangent there, when what I really wanted to talk about was how my classes are going. At first I thought the film class was my favorite. While I do enjoy that class, literature has far surpassed it, if only because of the wacky/wise professor. His sense of humor is at the same time very silly and very subtle. (For those of you who went to high school with me, it will be easiest for you to grasp his personality if you imagine the Russian counterpart of Mr. Holmes.) I gather that some people in our class don’t quite understand his sense of humor; when he makes sweeping generalizations or says something wildly exaggerated or biased, he’s really laughing at us behind a straight face. Let me try to recall some class discussions to give you an idea… the humor might not translate very well, not because of a language barrier but because I can’t possibly convey in plain text his delivery:
1) We’re reading Pushkin’s short story “Pikovaya Dama” (queen of spades), and after we read a passage detailing the old countess’ makeup/dress regime, our professor asked us if men wore makeup in those days. After it was decided that yes, they did, he posed another question:
-Alex, do you think that girls are prettier now or were they prettier back then?
-Um… now?
-Well, okay. [to the whole class] And what about men?
-…
-It’s a very strange thing, but men are better looking now than in the old days. Look at photographs before WWII and you’ll see. They had short legs, big bellies. Yes, for some reason people got more beautiful after the war.
2) -What are people talking about in America now, what’s in the news?
-The election?
-What about it?
-One of the presidential candidates chose a woman from Alaska for his running mate.
-And?
-Her daughter is 17 and she’s pregnant.
-Okay. So?
-She’s not married?
-Right! By the way, to be 17 and pregnant—that’s normal.
3) –This story begins with a girl. Her name is Irina. What is she like?
-Pretty?
-No!
4) -Don’t ever buy any vodka from a kiosk. Be sure you get it from a store. The stuff they sell in the kiosks… it’s a risk. It could be floor cleaner. And by the way, all that vodka they sell in America, it’s good stuff. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not good quality.
-What about Popov? In America we say that if vodka comes in a plastic bottle, it’s bad.
-No. Popov is good quality vodka. A plastic bottle? No.
5) -So Lizaveta and Germann look at each other for a week. And when does she first smile at him? After a week! That’s how relations between men and women used to be. And now, how do YOU carry on? Blehhh! [Waves arms wildly, presumably to illustrate the reckless behavior of modern youth]
Different people have different ideas about his system of blinking and winking after he says something he wants you to remember. To me, the deep blink with an accompanying nod means something like, “This is how it is. Remember that.” The wink, on the other hand, is a little more whimsical, and usually I think it means, “Get it? Hehe.” But I don’t mean to say that the blink is always more serious, because usually the blink is quite playful in its own way.
In our film class we’ve finished 3 films and are almost finished with our 4th. The second film we watched was called “Rusalka,” (mermaid) a slightly dark melodrama about an odd adolescent girl who moves with her mother and grandmother to Moscow. I don’t think a lot of people liked that movie because the girl was a little bit alien-like and hard to relate to. After “Rusalka” we watched “Kukushka,” (cuckoo) a movie set in WWII where an outcast Finnish soldier and an outcast Russian soldier, through various circumstances, end up in the home of this Laplander woman who takes care of them. None of them speak each other’s language, so it’s funny to watch how they all talk to each other and come up with their own interpretations of what the others say. I was surprised at how many layers that movie had, especially with the “kukushka” theme. For one thing, all the characters thought the other characters were a little “cuckoo,” and kukushka also retains the “crazy” connotation in Russian. Also, cuckoo mothers reject their young and throw them out of the nest, like the Russian and Finnish soldiers in the movie were cast out by their own. In Russian folklore, the kukushka is believed to have the ability to tell how many years a person has left to live. So after you ask a cuckoo bird how long you’ll live, the number of times they call out is how many years you have. During WWII, Russians called Finnish snipers “kukushkas” because of that parallel to kukushka folklore. Pretty cool stuff!
I ended up dropping the history/political science class, for a few reasons. First, I think if I were to take that class for credit I would surpass my unit ceiling at Berkeley, and I don't want to stress out about having too many units. Also, I wasn't prepared to fight for that class because the lectures are very confusing. Even though the class is taught in English, I understand it less than all my other classes that are taught in Russian. Some people need to keep that class to get credit for a political science major, but for my major at Berkeley, they are going to give credit for an advanced language class and 2 general electives, so it doesn't matter which classes I take here. The good thing is that I can still audit the accompanying Russian-language seminar that the literature professor teaches. I just can't get enough of that guy.
The weather has been significantly cooler these days. I think it’s a bit uncharacteristic of Russian Septembers for it to be this cold. It’s not unbearable, though. The past couple of weeks I’ve been able to get away with wearing long sleeves and then layering 2 lightweight jackets during the day. Although every night it’s a little chilly in my room, and I don’t think it helps that I have a big window that is a poor insulator. Usually I put on a sweater at night and I’m fine. However, getting up in the morning is a bitterly cold and cruel affair. I asked Regina Konstantinovna (yep, I found our her name) when they would turn the heat on (whoever “they” are—I haven’t exactly figured out the antecedent to this vague pronoun) because I guess that stuff is controlled municipally. She said usually they turn it on sometime around October 15th, unless the weather is really bad, in which case they turn it on October 1st. Today she said she thinks they might turn it on October 1st because everyone else she knows in the area already has their heating turned on, but for whatever reason this building gets everything last.
Incidentally, Regina approves of my sport Dansko clogs. She says they’re perfect for rain and puddles. And to think, I took them on a whim. What I don’t tell her is that I prefer to wear the clogs not for the puddles, as I usually just avoid them altogether, but rather because my jeans are too long and it’s one of my top 5 pet peeves to have my jeans drag the ground. Speaking of shoes and puddles, I have no idea how people in Moscow keep their shoes clean. I bought a new pair of little blue tennis shoes a couple weeks ago and they already look 4 months old from all the dirt they’ve picked up. My friend Jaime has a similar problem with her white-background slip-on Vans. The other day as she was leaving for school in the morning, her xoziaika told her she should wash her shoes because otherwise no man would want to marry her. No wonder I haven’t found a husband yet; my shoes are filthy.
I don’t think my xoziaika is quite that old-fashioned. In many ways she seems fairly liberal, and generally appreciates Western ways. A little while ago, I came home at night and to my dismay, the code to open the building’s door did not work. The door was completely unresponsive and the keypad wouldn’t register any new code submissions. It was slightly nerve-wracking, especially because it was a cold night and it had just started to rain. Shortly after I tried to open the door, a young man came home and then we both started troubleshooting. Well, mostly I watched from a distance as he first tried using brute force to pull the door open, and then as he found a bizarre metal antenna contraption nearby and tried to pry it open that way. Meanwhile I had already called Regina and she said she would get help, so I stood back and watched this guy struggle in vain with the door. Eventually I heard her voice on the other side of the door accompanied by a man’s voice. There was some banging, and then the door swung open to reveal a large, shirtless man with his leg in the air, having just kicked the door in. He grumbled something and then went back inside his apartment on the ground floor (he might have been some kind of superintendent, I’m not sure). So when the three of us (Regina, me, the stranger guy) got in the elevator, he pressed the third floor (you have to do the floors in sequence, I think it only remembers the last number you press). Regina, surprised, asked him why he pushed the third floor, when we were on the 5th.
“I live on the third floor.”
“Oh, and I thought you were with us!” [chuckle]
So the fact that she would be that nonchalant about me bringing home male guests suggests that she’s not an altogether conservative lady. But since I wasn’t planning on doing that anyway, this information doesn’t particularly delight me.
The annoying thing is that Regina doesn’t give me keys regularly. Before I leave each morning, she either says “take the keys today, I might be at the store this afternoon,” or “don’t take the keys, I’ll be home.” That’s all well and good for weekdays, when I don’t make it a habit of staying out very late. But on weekend nights it’s downright stressful to be out later than 11. Not because I feel unsafe being out late—on the contrary, my neighborhood is actually quite safe. In fact, I feel more at ease walking home here after dark than in Berkeley. No, on the contrary, it’s a stressful situation because I have to ring the doorbell late at night and wake Regina up so that she can let me in. And of course it’s not just an open door that greets me. It’s an entire rhetorical interrogation. I say rhetorical because she doesn’t really care about what I was doing when she says “Why were you out so late?” or “What would happen if you missed the metro?” It’s rather like having another mother here, but without love… and without the ability to argue coherently. I told her that I didn’t want to disturb her that usually I don’t like to stay out very late, it’s just hard in a situation where your friends want to stay out late and you don’t want to walk to the metro alone. She still doesn’t want to give me keys full-time, and says that she would wake up if I used the keys in the door anyway. She says that she knows I’m not really the partying type, since she’s seen me studying in my room a lot. But her knowing that about me doesn’t really help the situation with the awkward late-night arrivals.
Another thing that stressed me out with Regina was that one of these nights where I accidentally came home later than planned, she chastised me for giving her too much laundry to do in one load. Before I left, I told her that it would be all right to wash everything together. When I said this, I wasn’t thinking of the size of the load, rather it was referring to the colors/whites issue. But when I got home and she had done it all, she said she had done it all in one load like I told her, but next time I needed to give her smaller loads because the washing machine is really small. You know those little plastic bags at the grocery store? That’s how much laundry I had. So this is kind of a drag because laundry is $8 a load… Lately I’ve been thinking of trying a shirt-recycling policy, especially because it’s cooler weather and maybe I can get away with wearing things twice and not have them be so dirty. And then every time I squeeze into the metro and am wedged between a tall man’s armpit and a short man’s waxy ear, I wonder why I continue to be so obsessive about laundry and hygiene here.
A week or so ago I, horror of horrors, got a pimple, and it really freaked Regina out. Granted, it was kind of an intense one, but I was counting on people to be gracious and turn a blind eye until the situation sorted itself out. No such luck. The first time she saw it her eyes widened and she said, "What is that??" Not knowing the word for pimple at the time, I shrugged and said, "Nu..." (well...) and trailed off. Then, trying to elicit a concrete response from me, she asked if it was ___ or ___. I didn't know what either word meant.
"Is it ___ or from nature?"
"Well, technically it IS from nature, but..."
Finally we agreed that it was a pimple (pryshch), and so I thought that was the end of it. Nope! When I came home later, I told her I was planning to go out that evening with friends. I ate dinner with her and we successfully managed to avoid the pryshch topic. But then after I got up from the table and was making preparations to leave, she stopped me.
"Listen, I'm going to give you something for that. I really don't like it. I just don't like it."
Then she gave me some antiseptic and a cotton ball and then something that doubled as a type of topical cream and cover-up. So that was a rather humbling ordeal.
I see a lot of old women with white-purple hair here. Originally I thought this was a Russian thing. I even appreciated how spunky the old ladies here seemed, trying out something new as if to say, “I’m not dead yet! Here’s my purple hair to show you that I’ve got a little bite left in me.” But today I found out that this is actually a pretty common phenomenon around the world, and it just means that they had a botched dye-job. Oops.
Oh, I almost forgot to write about my birthday. Since my actual birthday was on Sunday and I didn’t want to be out late then, I told everyone to meet at the retro club (the same one I mentioned a few posts back) on Saturday evening. We met at 7 to avoid face control and an entry fee, and spent a leisurely evening dining and dancing. One of our Russian friends was surprised that we didn’t want to spend the whole night in the club (most clubs close at 6am), but since the metro closes at 1am we called it a night at around 12:15. The funny thing about this club is that they played the same retro music on the ground floor (there were different floors that had different kinds of music) as they did the last time we were there. The same songs. In the same order. So even though it wasn’t any retro music that I grew up with, it felt retro from a few weeks ago, and I got excited when they played the songs I “knew.”
As for my birthday day, well it wasn’t anything special. Sometimes birthdays are just that way. But I don’t know how to stop looking forward to birthdays so as to avoid the disappointment of the anti-climactic ones. I got home late morning, having spent the night at a friend’s house (to avoid the wrath of Regina). Then I went to meet some friends who were going to see an independent film near Belorusskaya station. It was called something like, “Uzhas, kotoriy vsegda s toboi,”—“The Horror That is Always With You.” I fell asleep for most of it, but I got the gist. Some guy and his wife are intruded upon by these government soldiers who carry out a stake-out mission in their apartment, except in the end I gathered that it was the wrong apartment and the wrong guy got killed. Anyway, after the movie my friends wanted to go home, which was kind of disheartening because I had hoped to get together some more people that night for a casual birthday dinner. Maybe that was being a little greedy, since I had already had a birthday fling the night before. So I went across the street to KFC because they have free wi-fi there, but the internet wouldn’t work on my iPod so I read my book there for a while—Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” which I bought in English because, frankly I’m tired of feeling like an Idiot when I read things in Russian. Then I got a text from my Russian friend that a group of them were going to see a movie and to meet at Kurskaya on the dark blue line at 7 (I’m not sure if anyone’s following the metro references, but I like to throw them in to give a little bit of info about the setting of my anecdotes). We ended up seeing “Stepbrothers” dubbed in Russian. To me it was funny because I could imagine how Will Ferrell would say the things that were being dubbed, and also it was satisfying to be able to understand jokes in Russian. The Russians hated it, though. And I can understand why—I think that kind of humor is hard to translate, especially because most of it is absurd and childish. I couldn’t really explain to them why Americans would think that movie was funny. I told them that that kind of humor is indeed very silly, and it shouldn’t be taken too seriously because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. But honestly, I was hard-pressed and a little embarrassed to explain it.
This week I signed up for a V Kontakte account, which is the Russian version of Facebook (vkontakte.ru). I think Facebook is suing them because they lifted the design and layout from their website. As if I need to be distracted by more friend-networking sites like facebook and myspace...
One thing that I really want to try to bring back to the US is "tvorog," which is like cream cheese but sweeter and a little bit more curdled. Someone translated it at "cottage cheese" once, but really it's not that at all. Regina makes these tasty little pancake/blintzes with the tvorog called "cyrniki" (a translation of this could be "little cheesy things?") Sometimes she gives it to me raw for dessert, and then I mix it with sour cream and jam. Russians don't use jam like we do, on toast or bread. They eat it plain or mix it with kefir (this yogurty sour milk stuff), or they mix in a little milk and drink it like that, kind of like a room temperature milkshake. Another Russian thing that Regina introduced me to last night was drinking pickle juice. She gave me a little shot of the brine she had used to make her pickles, and said that it's very healthy. I think she said that it helps drunk people get rid of their headaches. I told her that when I was younger I used to drink olive juice, but everyone thought I was weird. She said "ah yes! That's also healthy stuff."
This weekend we’re going to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s birthplace. We’ll be there all Saturday—meeting at 8am at Chkalovskaya on the light green line and taking a 3-hour train to get there. I heard this weekend is supposed to be cold and rainy in Moscow. I looked up the forecast in Yasnaya Polyana and it said it would be cold and rainy there, too. Ironic, since "yasno" means "clear."
Monday, September 8, 2008
st. petersburg etc.
St. Petersburg etc.
Wow, it’s been a while since my last update… I keep putting it off because a lot has happened and the obligatory blog recap has been looming menacingly in the back of my brain for some time.
So last weekend our whole EAP group visited St. Petersburg, which was fun but rather whirlwindy. Our train left on Thursday night (actually Friday morning) at 12:30am. The train ride is around 7-8 hours, so these late-night trains are the best ones to take, so that (ideally) you can sleep on the train and arrive in the morning, fresh as a daisy and ready to see the sights! I’m kidding, of course. I don’t think there were any fresh daisies to speak of at 8am Friday when we rolled up in Petersburg. I’m pretty sure everyone sharing our train car is still cursing the irreverent Americans who, refusing to sleep the night, kept everyone awake with their clanking champagne bottles and giddy laughter.
This having been my first experience with sleeper trains, I thought the accommodations were quite nice. Luxurious, even. Actually our return train ride to Moscow was really something because we were provided with food boxes, fresh (?) sheets, and even a shoe-shine kit. (Incidentally the shoe-shine kit turned out to be little more than a shoe horn and a moist towelette. But it still screams luxury.)
When we got to St. Petersburg, we walked to our hostel (which seemed like a really long walk on the way there, but on the walk to the train station for our return trip, it was literally around the corner) and settled in there. Well, I say “settled in,” but that’s a bit of a stretch. Only one of the rooms was ready, so all 24 of us put our stuff in the one room and then everyone took a communal nap. Well, except for me. I took a shower, of course. Which was no small feat. The showers were downstairs (our rooms were on the 3rd and 4th floor), and the accommodations reminded me of being back in the dorms… wearing flip flops and trying to put on jeans in the privacy of a shower stall without getting any pant legs wet on the grimy shower floor, trying to get the shower head to spew water at regular angles, etc. But it was the best possible thing I could have for myself, because we spent the whole day taking a boat excursion and then went to the Hermitage later. I don’t have a lot to say about that, except that it was all very stunning and I was very tired. Then the next day we took a tour of Petergof, which is this amazingly beautiful and expansive estate of Peter the Great that is full of picturesque gardens and fountains galore. I wish I could say more about it, but since our tours are almost always in Russian I can never keep up with details.
The next day in Petersburg we took a walking tour of the city, which was one of the best tours we’ve taken so far. Our tour guide Sasha conducted the tour in English, which was a big plus. We walked all over and I think we all got a pretty good feel for the city. We saw a lot of historical sites like Smolny Cathedral and the apartment where Lenin wrote his speeches, and the famous Kresty Prison where Akhmatova’s son was imprisoned (there’s a really beautiful monument of her across the street erected at her request). We also walked around random alleys and periodically stopped at cafes for tour breaks. It was an exhausting tour, but I think everyone got a lot out of it. At the end of that day (Sunday), we had to catch the train back to Moscow at 9:30pm. But before that a group of us went to a big bookstore and picked up some reading material for the train ride back (although I’m not sure anyone actually read more than 2 pages of their books on the train before passing out and waking up dazed at 5am the next morning when we arrived in Moscow). I bought “Tainstvenniy Sad” (The Secret Garden), a book of Maiakovsky poetry, and “Aristokratka” by Mikhail Zoshchenko. Zoshchenko, incidentally, was an early 20th century writer specializing in short satirical stories. A lot of us are fans of him because of the simple prose he uses, which we can actually digest at our rudimentary level.
As a side note, something that became a bit of a ritual with a group of us (or as much of a ritual as it could be after 3 days) in St. Petersburg was going out to eat at this pel’meni place around the corner from our hostel. Pel’meni are, for lack of an American equivalent, Russian dumplings, usually served with sour cream. I can’t be sure what kind of meat they put in them at restaurants, but if you browse the frozen food section of any Russian grocery, you’ll find a wide variety of pel’meni stuffed with every type meat you could imagine (and even some you didn’t know existed). Beef, lamb, pork, veal, young beef, young pork, “Siberian,” “Classicheskaya,” “home-cooked.” Actually, even when the packages have labels the meat manages to retain a bit of its mysterious charm. Anyway, my point is that we went to this pel’meni dive religiously, at first because it was convenient and we didn’t want to embark on a long food search, and then came back for more because I think we somehow enjoyed the abuse we suffered from the tight-lipped young woman who worked there. Before every transaction, she would give us a hostile spiel about how we must use exact change. Which is no easy task, especially when something is R125 and all you’ve got in your wallet is a 500 or (heaven forbid) 1000 note. Those 1000-ruble bills are sometimes downright useless, and before one can even dream of approaching a kiosk or going out to dinner, one must scramble to break this burdensome note in McDonald’s or some other well-established chain with steady cash flow. Anyway, every day we would go to this pel’meni place, scrounge for 10-ruble notes and 1-ruble coins, and feast on our dumplings with sour cream. The last day we went there, we even got our lady cashier friend to smile when we went there thinking it was closed and then upon discovering that it was in fact open, unanimously shouted, “URA!” (hooray). I’ve since boiled up some frozen pel’meni at home, but it’s just not the same. Probably because the pel’meni that I bought don’t have unchewable gristle bits tucked inside their greasy meat folds. But those gristle bits were part of our nitty-gritty Petersburg experience, so I hold them dear in my memory.
Last Monday (the day we returned to Moscow) there was some sort of holiday, “day of knowledge” or something to that effect. As such, we were invited to a celebratory event at our university, where all students (including the Russians who had previously been on vacation) were invited to come and listen to a speech given by the mayor of Moscow (Yuriy Luzhkov). I’m not sure why I rushed to take a shower and put on a nice dress for this event, because we waited for hours for him to arrive and then the speech he gave was blatantly anti-American. I didn’t see what it had to do with knowledge or education, it was mostly about oil and how America is self-serving. I’m exaggerating slightly, but only slightly. The whole time I was thinking how unlikely it would be for the mayor of New York or San Francisco to give a speech like that. I don’t know if people here consider a speech like that to be openly hostile or just candidly biased? Regardless, I felt sheepish during his speech and was thoroughly embarrassed afterward when one of our Russian teachers grabbed Lushkov as he was exiting and said, “We have students from California to see you!” and then insisted we take a photo with him. I think someone from our group got a video of him giving what was probably a sarcastic thumbs-up in response to this announcement.
Since last Tuesday, we’ve started our “real” classes. The workload is a little more hefty than I was led to believe by previous EAP students. For one thing, the physical time spent in class is considerable. Most of us start at around 10 (one of my days starts at 9) and then it’s possible to be in class until 5 or 6. However, I don’t want to dramatize things—usually there are breaks between classes that can range from 1-3 hours. But since we can’t exactly go home and come back to class easily, it’s still a pretty full day. I’ve decided to take all three elective classes being offered, in addition to the mandatory grammar and speech classes. So all total I have literature, film, political science (history), grammar, and speech practice. Each of these meets about 4-5 hours a week, so it’s a pretty full load.
My favorite so far is the film class, because our professor knows exactly where to pause the film and recap to make sure we’ve understood everything, and the vocabulary we learn there is really useful. We just finished watching an old short film called “Dvoe” (pair), which is about a young man who studies at a music conservatory who tries to get to know a deaf girl. The actress from it reminded me a lot of Audrey Hepburn. (Camille, I thought of you when we watched this—I know you would like it.)
In our literature class we’re reading Pushkin’s “The Shot,” which is fairly challenging because there is a lot of vocabulary I don’t recognize and I find myself having to look up every other word in the dictionary just to piece together the story. The literature teacher is sort of a funny guy. He’s got extremely rotten teeth from smoking and has a very soft, lilting speech pattern. Every once in a while when he says something he’ll wink at you slowly several times to make sure you’ve completely understood the innuendo of what he’s said, even if it doesn’t seem like there is any innuendo whatsoever. But by the third wink he’s given, you become absolutely convinced that he’s just imparted some hilarious or intimate secret. The other day in trying to explain the historical ruble value of something in the Pushkin story, he asked us how much a horse cost in America in 1830. Obviously we had no idea, but he kept trying to eke it out of us, as if we were coyly choosing to withhold the information. Eventually he gave up and said, “vy ploxie amerikantsy!!” (you’re bad Americans!).
The history class is a little underwhelming. I’m frustrated by how little information I’m able to absorb there, even though it’s the only one conducted in English. Maybe things will improve… I think the professor is planning on taking us on excursions to various museums throughout the term.
Last Friday we went on an excursion to New Maiden Convent, which is the most beautiful and prestigious convent in Russia. This is where all the tsars put their wives or female relatives when they got tired of them or thought they were getting too uppity. Since the women had to give up their wealth and jewels and earthly possessions upon entering the convent, it became really wealthy and powerful. Our tour guide told us an interesting story about how during the war with Napoleon, the French planned to invade and plunder the convent, but since the nuns took them in and fed them and were very pleasant, they decided to leave the nuns in peace and even left some sick French soldiers with them. But then after the French left, one of the nuns went to the basement and discovered all kinds of lit fuses attached to powder kegs. They managed to put the fuses out before any damage was done, but what a sneaky thing of the French to do. Right now there are about 30 nuns still living in the convent. I didn’t see any, but our guide said if we wanted we could take pictures of them but not talk to them because they don’t like it.
After the monastery, we visited the cemetery next to it, where a lot of famous people are buried. Some highlights were the graves of Boris Yeltsin, Gogol, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Khrushchev, and Stalin’s wife. Some stories:
1) Apparently Gogol had a condition in which he had no pulse but was still alive. Because of this, he specifically requested that no one bury him until after he had already started to decompose. Of course they didn’t observe his wishes and then when they went to relocate his body to New Maiden (from some other location, I can’t remember where), his body was turned on its side and there were scratch marks on the coffin. Also later someone stole his head, and then they mysteriously found the head of a younger man buried some feet below Gogol’s grave. Bizarre.
2) Chekhov’s grave has a monument that is exactly as tall as he was, which was really tall! I can’t remember how tall, especially because she gave the figure in meters, but… it was tall.
3) Bulgakov loved Gogol so much that he asked to be buried like him (don’t worry, not alive). They ended up just taking Gogol’s old tombstone rock and putting “Bulgakov” on it. I wondered why it was such a lame grave, and that’s why. It’s just a lump of a rock.
4) Since Khrushchev died after he was in power, he didn’t get buried in the Kremlin like all the other generals/leaders. Instead, he got buried in New Maiden and the funeral wasn’t even public. Outside the cemetery they just hung a sign that said, “Maintenance day” or something to that effect. Ouch!
5) The death of Stalin’s wife is something of a mystery. Apparently one night there was this party where Stalin was flirting heavily with young actresses and throwing breadcrumbs down their dress fronts. When his wife asked him why he was doing that, he said, “Here you can have some bread, too,” and then threw a loaf of bread at her. The next day they found her dead in her bed with a shot through her head. It’s possible that she killed herself because she had really bad headaches, but it’s also possible that Stalin had some people kill her. Nevertheless, Stalin came to her gravesite a lot and sat pensively on a bench nearby.
Unfortunately the battery life on my laptop is such that I will have to hastily recount the events of this last weekend, which was the “Den Goroda,” or “city day.” Basically it was Moscow’s birthday and there were a lot of festivities on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday I met up with some people at Park Pobedy and mulled around until we got bored of the live music and went to a bar for a little bit. Then we went to Krasniy Ploshchad’, but since there was a boxing match it was closed to the public. Then we went to Chistye Prudy because we heard there was another concert there but there was nothing that great so I just went home. To be honest, the night was a bit of a flop for me because my feet hurt from all the aimless walking done in not-so-sensible shoes on cobblestone streets. Everyone from the group kept getting split up and there was a near run-in with some skinheads when we were outside Krasniy Ploshchad’, which was a little nervewracking because I was alone with our friend’s friend who is from Kazakhstan. And everyone knows how much the skinheads love Asians. But anyway, we successfully avoided them and all’s well that ended well. Then yesterday (Sunday) I enjoyed some time spent alone in my apartment because my xoziaika spent the weekend at her friend’s dacha and I had the place to myself. It’s not that I mind her company, it’s just that I find her presence a little stifling at times. Especially in the kitchen, where she’s made it clear that she does not want me to do any cooking because she’s got her own system of doing things. So yesterday I woke up early, handwashed most of my laundry (major accomplishment), and then found a yarn store nearby where I got some needles and yarn and started a little scarf. (I know it sounds lame, but knitting has actually been a great outlet for me lately.) Later in the evening I met up with some friends at Shokoladnitsa, a café that’s comparable to Kofe Xaus. Then we went to Teatral’naya and wandered the closed-off streets full of people and activity. We managed to see the fireworks just outside of Red Square, which were amazing! Some of the best fireworks I’ve ever seen, probably.
Ahh I really have to go now and I wanted to get around to answering some of the questions in your comments but alas, cannot at this time.
Wow, it’s been a while since my last update… I keep putting it off because a lot has happened and the obligatory blog recap has been looming menacingly in the back of my brain for some time.
So last weekend our whole EAP group visited St. Petersburg, which was fun but rather whirlwindy. Our train left on Thursday night (actually Friday morning) at 12:30am. The train ride is around 7-8 hours, so these late-night trains are the best ones to take, so that (ideally) you can sleep on the train and arrive in the morning, fresh as a daisy and ready to see the sights! I’m kidding, of course. I don’t think there were any fresh daisies to speak of at 8am Friday when we rolled up in Petersburg. I’m pretty sure everyone sharing our train car is still cursing the irreverent Americans who, refusing to sleep the night, kept everyone awake with their clanking champagne bottles and giddy laughter.
This having been my first experience with sleeper trains, I thought the accommodations were quite nice. Luxurious, even. Actually our return train ride to Moscow was really something because we were provided with food boxes, fresh (?) sheets, and even a shoe-shine kit. (Incidentally the shoe-shine kit turned out to be little more than a shoe horn and a moist towelette. But it still screams luxury.)
When we got to St. Petersburg, we walked to our hostel (which seemed like a really long walk on the way there, but on the walk to the train station for our return trip, it was literally around the corner) and settled in there. Well, I say “settled in,” but that’s a bit of a stretch. Only one of the rooms was ready, so all 24 of us put our stuff in the one room and then everyone took a communal nap. Well, except for me. I took a shower, of course. Which was no small feat. The showers were downstairs (our rooms were on the 3rd and 4th floor), and the accommodations reminded me of being back in the dorms… wearing flip flops and trying to put on jeans in the privacy of a shower stall without getting any pant legs wet on the grimy shower floor, trying to get the shower head to spew water at regular angles, etc. But it was the best possible thing I could have for myself, because we spent the whole day taking a boat excursion and then went to the Hermitage later. I don’t have a lot to say about that, except that it was all very stunning and I was very tired. Then the next day we took a tour of Petergof, which is this amazingly beautiful and expansive estate of Peter the Great that is full of picturesque gardens and fountains galore. I wish I could say more about it, but since our tours are almost always in Russian I can never keep up with details.
The next day in Petersburg we took a walking tour of the city, which was one of the best tours we’ve taken so far. Our tour guide Sasha conducted the tour in English, which was a big plus. We walked all over and I think we all got a pretty good feel for the city. We saw a lot of historical sites like Smolny Cathedral and the apartment where Lenin wrote his speeches, and the famous Kresty Prison where Akhmatova’s son was imprisoned (there’s a really beautiful monument of her across the street erected at her request). We also walked around random alleys and periodically stopped at cafes for tour breaks. It was an exhausting tour, but I think everyone got a lot out of it. At the end of that day (Sunday), we had to catch the train back to Moscow at 9:30pm. But before that a group of us went to a big bookstore and picked up some reading material for the train ride back (although I’m not sure anyone actually read more than 2 pages of their books on the train before passing out and waking up dazed at 5am the next morning when we arrived in Moscow). I bought “Tainstvenniy Sad” (The Secret Garden), a book of Maiakovsky poetry, and “Aristokratka” by Mikhail Zoshchenko. Zoshchenko, incidentally, was an early 20th century writer specializing in short satirical stories. A lot of us are fans of him because of the simple prose he uses, which we can actually digest at our rudimentary level.
As a side note, something that became a bit of a ritual with a group of us (or as much of a ritual as it could be after 3 days) in St. Petersburg was going out to eat at this pel’meni place around the corner from our hostel. Pel’meni are, for lack of an American equivalent, Russian dumplings, usually served with sour cream. I can’t be sure what kind of meat they put in them at restaurants, but if you browse the frozen food section of any Russian grocery, you’ll find a wide variety of pel’meni stuffed with every type meat you could imagine (and even some you didn’t know existed). Beef, lamb, pork, veal, young beef, young pork, “Siberian,” “Classicheskaya,” “home-cooked.” Actually, even when the packages have labels the meat manages to retain a bit of its mysterious charm. Anyway, my point is that we went to this pel’meni dive religiously, at first because it was convenient and we didn’t want to embark on a long food search, and then came back for more because I think we somehow enjoyed the abuse we suffered from the tight-lipped young woman who worked there. Before every transaction, she would give us a hostile spiel about how we must use exact change. Which is no easy task, especially when something is R125 and all you’ve got in your wallet is a 500 or (heaven forbid) 1000 note. Those 1000-ruble bills are sometimes downright useless, and before one can even dream of approaching a kiosk or going out to dinner, one must scramble to break this burdensome note in McDonald’s or some other well-established chain with steady cash flow. Anyway, every day we would go to this pel’meni place, scrounge for 10-ruble notes and 1-ruble coins, and feast on our dumplings with sour cream. The last day we went there, we even got our lady cashier friend to smile when we went there thinking it was closed and then upon discovering that it was in fact open, unanimously shouted, “URA!” (hooray). I’ve since boiled up some frozen pel’meni at home, but it’s just not the same. Probably because the pel’meni that I bought don’t have unchewable gristle bits tucked inside their greasy meat folds. But those gristle bits were part of our nitty-gritty Petersburg experience, so I hold them dear in my memory.
Last Monday (the day we returned to Moscow) there was some sort of holiday, “day of knowledge” or something to that effect. As such, we were invited to a celebratory event at our university, where all students (including the Russians who had previously been on vacation) were invited to come and listen to a speech given by the mayor of Moscow (Yuriy Luzhkov). I’m not sure why I rushed to take a shower and put on a nice dress for this event, because we waited for hours for him to arrive and then the speech he gave was blatantly anti-American. I didn’t see what it had to do with knowledge or education, it was mostly about oil and how America is self-serving. I’m exaggerating slightly, but only slightly. The whole time I was thinking how unlikely it would be for the mayor of New York or San Francisco to give a speech like that. I don’t know if people here consider a speech like that to be openly hostile or just candidly biased? Regardless, I felt sheepish during his speech and was thoroughly embarrassed afterward when one of our Russian teachers grabbed Lushkov as he was exiting and said, “We have students from California to see you!” and then insisted we take a photo with him. I think someone from our group got a video of him giving what was probably a sarcastic thumbs-up in response to this announcement.
Since last Tuesday, we’ve started our “real” classes. The workload is a little more hefty than I was led to believe by previous EAP students. For one thing, the physical time spent in class is considerable. Most of us start at around 10 (one of my days starts at 9) and then it’s possible to be in class until 5 or 6. However, I don’t want to dramatize things—usually there are breaks between classes that can range from 1-3 hours. But since we can’t exactly go home and come back to class easily, it’s still a pretty full day. I’ve decided to take all three elective classes being offered, in addition to the mandatory grammar and speech classes. So all total I have literature, film, political science (history), grammar, and speech practice. Each of these meets about 4-5 hours a week, so it’s a pretty full load.
My favorite so far is the film class, because our professor knows exactly where to pause the film and recap to make sure we’ve understood everything, and the vocabulary we learn there is really useful. We just finished watching an old short film called “Dvoe” (pair), which is about a young man who studies at a music conservatory who tries to get to know a deaf girl. The actress from it reminded me a lot of Audrey Hepburn. (Camille, I thought of you when we watched this—I know you would like it.)
In our literature class we’re reading Pushkin’s “The Shot,” which is fairly challenging because there is a lot of vocabulary I don’t recognize and I find myself having to look up every other word in the dictionary just to piece together the story. The literature teacher is sort of a funny guy. He’s got extremely rotten teeth from smoking and has a very soft, lilting speech pattern. Every once in a while when he says something he’ll wink at you slowly several times to make sure you’ve completely understood the innuendo of what he’s said, even if it doesn’t seem like there is any innuendo whatsoever. But by the third wink he’s given, you become absolutely convinced that he’s just imparted some hilarious or intimate secret. The other day in trying to explain the historical ruble value of something in the Pushkin story, he asked us how much a horse cost in America in 1830. Obviously we had no idea, but he kept trying to eke it out of us, as if we were coyly choosing to withhold the information. Eventually he gave up and said, “vy ploxie amerikantsy!!” (you’re bad Americans!).
The history class is a little underwhelming. I’m frustrated by how little information I’m able to absorb there, even though it’s the only one conducted in English. Maybe things will improve… I think the professor is planning on taking us on excursions to various museums throughout the term.
Last Friday we went on an excursion to New Maiden Convent, which is the most beautiful and prestigious convent in Russia. This is where all the tsars put their wives or female relatives when they got tired of them or thought they were getting too uppity. Since the women had to give up their wealth and jewels and earthly possessions upon entering the convent, it became really wealthy and powerful. Our tour guide told us an interesting story about how during the war with Napoleon, the French planned to invade and plunder the convent, but since the nuns took them in and fed them and were very pleasant, they decided to leave the nuns in peace and even left some sick French soldiers with them. But then after the French left, one of the nuns went to the basement and discovered all kinds of lit fuses attached to powder kegs. They managed to put the fuses out before any damage was done, but what a sneaky thing of the French to do. Right now there are about 30 nuns still living in the convent. I didn’t see any, but our guide said if we wanted we could take pictures of them but not talk to them because they don’t like it.
After the monastery, we visited the cemetery next to it, where a lot of famous people are buried. Some highlights were the graves of Boris Yeltsin, Gogol, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Khrushchev, and Stalin’s wife. Some stories:
1) Apparently Gogol had a condition in which he had no pulse but was still alive. Because of this, he specifically requested that no one bury him until after he had already started to decompose. Of course they didn’t observe his wishes and then when they went to relocate his body to New Maiden (from some other location, I can’t remember where), his body was turned on its side and there were scratch marks on the coffin. Also later someone stole his head, and then they mysteriously found the head of a younger man buried some feet below Gogol’s grave. Bizarre.
2) Chekhov’s grave has a monument that is exactly as tall as he was, which was really tall! I can’t remember how tall, especially because she gave the figure in meters, but… it was tall.
3) Bulgakov loved Gogol so much that he asked to be buried like him (don’t worry, not alive). They ended up just taking Gogol’s old tombstone rock and putting “Bulgakov” on it. I wondered why it was such a lame grave, and that’s why. It’s just a lump of a rock.
4) Since Khrushchev died after he was in power, he didn’t get buried in the Kremlin like all the other generals/leaders. Instead, he got buried in New Maiden and the funeral wasn’t even public. Outside the cemetery they just hung a sign that said, “Maintenance day” or something to that effect. Ouch!
5) The death of Stalin’s wife is something of a mystery. Apparently one night there was this party where Stalin was flirting heavily with young actresses and throwing breadcrumbs down their dress fronts. When his wife asked him why he was doing that, he said, “Here you can have some bread, too,” and then threw a loaf of bread at her. The next day they found her dead in her bed with a shot through her head. It’s possible that she killed herself because she had really bad headaches, but it’s also possible that Stalin had some people kill her. Nevertheless, Stalin came to her gravesite a lot and sat pensively on a bench nearby.
Unfortunately the battery life on my laptop is such that I will have to hastily recount the events of this last weekend, which was the “Den Goroda,” or “city day.” Basically it was Moscow’s birthday and there were a lot of festivities on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday I met up with some people at Park Pobedy and mulled around until we got bored of the live music and went to a bar for a little bit. Then we went to Krasniy Ploshchad’, but since there was a boxing match it was closed to the public. Then we went to Chistye Prudy because we heard there was another concert there but there was nothing that great so I just went home. To be honest, the night was a bit of a flop for me because my feet hurt from all the aimless walking done in not-so-sensible shoes on cobblestone streets. Everyone from the group kept getting split up and there was a near run-in with some skinheads when we were outside Krasniy Ploshchad’, which was a little nervewracking because I was alone with our friend’s friend who is from Kazakhstan. And everyone knows how much the skinheads love Asians. But anyway, we successfully avoided them and all’s well that ended well. Then yesterday (Sunday) I enjoyed some time spent alone in my apartment because my xoziaika spent the weekend at her friend’s dacha and I had the place to myself. It’s not that I mind her company, it’s just that I find her presence a little stifling at times. Especially in the kitchen, where she’s made it clear that she does not want me to do any cooking because she’s got her own system of doing things. So yesterday I woke up early, handwashed most of my laundry (major accomplishment), and then found a yarn store nearby where I got some needles and yarn and started a little scarf. (I know it sounds lame, but knitting has actually been a great outlet for me lately.) Later in the evening I met up with some friends at Shokoladnitsa, a café that’s comparable to Kofe Xaus. Then we went to Teatral’naya and wandered the closed-off streets full of people and activity. We managed to see the fireworks just outside of Red Square, which were amazing! Some of the best fireworks I’ve ever seen, probably.
Ahh I really have to go now and I wanted to get around to answering some of the questions in your comments but alas, cannot at this time.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
some more info
Well, here I am once again in McDonald’s— if you’ve got a metro map in front of you (Omar) it’s the one right outside the Novoslobodskaya metro station on the brown circle line. My apartment is near the Oktyabrskaya Pole metro station on the pink/fuchsia line. I hope I don’t gain tooo much weight from all these McDonald’s trips; I’m not sure if it’s a requirement to buy something to use the internet, so I err on the side of caution and do it anyway so that I can keep up appearances with a cup of coffee or orange juice next to my laptop. Sometimes they do have a “security guard” circle around. I’m not sure what kind of offenses they’re hired to keep at bay, but I also don’t want to find out. Something else that I’ve noticed about Russian McDonald’s is that it’s a huge ordeal to order something without mayonnaise. This is usually what happens:
-Cheeseburger, without mayonnaise please.
-What?
-Without mayonnaise.
-Uh… what about ketchup?
-Well… okay, that’s fine.
-Without mayonnaise?
-Yes!
Then the employee has to go over to the grilling station and yell, “CHIZBURGER BEZ MAIONEZA. BEZ MAIONEZA. I KNOW, I KNOW. JUST DO IT.”
Okay, that’s my McDonald’s story of the day. For some reason I always feel the need to provide unsolicited details about it since that’s where I usually am when I have get internet.
So! Tomorrow it will be a week since I moved into my new apartment. Things are going pretty well. I feel relatively comfortable in this new home, and I even got used to the cat pee smell to the point that I don’t notice it. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but for now let’s say it’s good. For as small as this apartment is, the cats are fairly unobtrusive. Although one of the cats (Romashka – “chamomile”) insists on jumping up on my desk every morning to roll around vigorously on all my papers and books. She does it because she wants to be petted, which is endearing until she pushes a stack of paper and notebooks onto the floor.
I’ve been talking to my landlady more and asking questions about things. (Regina I think is her name, there was only a vague introduction and now I’ve definitely missed my window of opportunity for asking what her name is.) She’s really good about helping me learn words and repeating them a lot, but sometimes I feel like my brain is full and I can’t absorb any more words or grammar. From talking with Regina, I’ve gathered that she used to work in TV and radio, and then she sang in a choir for 14 years, and then she was a teacher until she went on her pension. She still gives music (mostly voice, but maybe piano, too) lessons regularly to students in her apartment. Yesterday I came home earlier than usual and she was in the middle of a lesson with one of her pupils, a teenage boy who was trying to sing through some classical pieces. She’s kind of a tough teacher. I wondered if he was embarrassed that I was overhearing the lesson, because it seemed to me a rather humbling and personal affair.
I told Regina that I was interested in cooking and that I’d like to watch her do her thing in the kitchen, which she said was fine but so far I haven’t been home to make that happen. One thing I was particularly interested in was this kvas she makes from scratch. For those of you who don’t know, kvas is a popular Russian drink that is made from fermented bread. It’s very mildly alcoholic and has this rich, woody taste that I can’t really describe. I’m not a big fan of kvas, but the stuff that Regina makes is interesting because it’s not made from bread, but rather from rice. Apparently the rice she makes it with is from the sea… I still don’t quite understand how she got it, she said they don’t sell it and you have to get it from a friend. But what I understand is that you can use the rice over and over again to brew as many batches as you want. Basically she puts water in a jar and adds the rice, sugar, and some golden raisins and lets the concoction sit for a few days. Then she strains it to get the rice out and then strains it again through a funnel and some cloth. Et voila! You have a clear, slightly tangy liquid that Regina says is good for basically every part of your body. I asked her if it was alcoholic, and she seemed a little shocked and said, “no!” I said, “Isn’t kvas generally just a little bit alcoholic?” Nope, not according to her. I think that’s because the alcohol content is so low that to call it an alcoholic beverage is funny to Russians. When Regina drinks the kvas she usually says, “ahh, lekarstvo” (medicine), and then cackles good-naturedly. This makes me wonder if it really is healthy or if it’s a just a little joke of hers. Nevertheless, I drink it up happily with her every morning and night, and imagine all the alleged vitamins coursing through me and doing good deeds for my body. Regina said the kvas might help with my “hair problem,” since I explained to her that the reason I shower every day is because of how oily my hair gets. As you can probably guess, Russians aren’t nearly as obsessive about bathing as I am. This is something I had previously guessed based on the overwhelming smell of body odor on the metro.
Speaking of the metro… I’d just like to say that I’m sorry I ever mentally cursed BART and how smelly or uncomfortable it is. Now I know what a luxury it is to get a seat 9 times out of 10 when I ride BART, and how deliciously cool those air-conditioned trains are in the summertime. In the Moscow metro’s defense, I will say that the stations are absolute works of art. The architecture is really amazing and in quite a few stations there are all sorts of grand monuments to artists or influential historical figures. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people (myself included after only 3 weeks) tend to become desensitized to all of the amazing historical art in the metro and in Moscow in general, because usually you find yourself staring at the back of someone’s head being pushed by someone else’s shopping bags when you’re trying to get from point A to B. There’s just no time to stop and smell the roses, or at least that’s how the hustle and bustle of the city makes you feel. When I first got here, I wondered why people insisted on running down the escalators (the left “lane” is always left clear for passing) and would run to catch a train, because a new train comes every 30-90 seconds. However, after a few weeks here I’ve found myself doing the same kind of mindless hurrying that everyone else does, pushing others out of the way just to get 3 feet closer to your destination.
Yesterday we went on a tour of the Kremlin, which was very beautiful but like all our tours, not terribly informative. Usually they’re not informative because the tours are given in Russian and we all tune out. This time it was in English, but the tour guide was so softspoken and spoke so slowly that it was equally as difficult to follow. I wish I had more to say about the Kremlin, since it’s a pretty big deal in Moscow, but like everything else that I’ve seen, all I cay say is that it was a big and beautiful place. One thing I did find interesting was that they keep birds of prey on the grounds so that they can minimize the raven population in the Kremlin. Apparently it’s a problem keeping the roofs clear with all the ravens that take over.
To answer a few questions:
Yes, TV programs here (including Murder, She Wrote) are dubbed in Russian. The frustrating thing is that they don’t mute English language track underneath, so sometimes I find myself trying to listen to the English track and then I get on a roll with that but then the Russian sound level overpowers it and then I don’t know what’s going on so I tune it all out.
No, generally dryers are not used here. Fortunately Lena called Regina about the steep laundry prices, so the other day I did my laundry and she only charged R100 (about $4) because it only filled up half the machine and the other half was filled by her clothes. Still a little pricey, but that’s the going rate in the other homestays. At first I was afraid Regina was being passive aggressive when she said that she would charge me less because she “didn’t want to go against the university,” but I don’t think people here are passive aggressive like that. Generally she takes pretty good care of me, and is loving in her own way. She taught me how to properly handwash clothes, she tells me if I need to iron my skirt before I leave the house, and wakes me up if I’ve slept past the time I said I would wake up in the morning. The only thing is that she doesn’t let me carry my own set of keys with me unless she knows she won’t be home. Sometimes I wonder how she keeps sane staying home for so long, but she is always home when she says she’ll be. Last night I felt uncomfortable about this because I had planned to go out to a club to celebrate a friend’s birthday and knew I wouldn’t be back until late. She said she wouldn’t sleep until I got home anyway, and that if I used the key in the door she’d wake up quick as a flash. I ended up going home with my friend so that a) I wouldn’t have to worry about walking home alone at night, and b) wouldn’t need to feel guilty for bothering Regina. The metro closes at 1 anyway but to be getting home at 1:30 and ringing the doorbell is something I’m not eager to do.
Incidentally, the club last night was pretty fun. A large group of us met at the Mayakovskaya metro station and from there walked to this club where they play retro music on the dance floor. The retro music they played was a little odd, though. It seemed American, but I had never heard any of the songs. Then when they started playing the Russian retro music, it was really funny to see all the Russians singing along. It’s weird how every culture has those songs that everyone knows from their past. Before he played one really popular song, the DJ was like “It will be impossible to just listen to this one!” And then he played this random song that everyone knew and we all pretended to know the words, too.
About the stray dogs. They really come in all shapes and sizes. In the beginning I was really tempted to pet this one little dog that was wandering in and out of the metro because he was so little and looked so innocent. But then I was warned about all the diseases those dogs carry. There’s one dog that lives near our dormitory that I call the Bob Marley dog because it looks like he has huge shaggy dreadlocks instead of fur.
Regarding classes, this coming week will be the last week of only having language classes. Then starting September 1, we have the option of taking 2-3 other electives in addition to our language classes, the choices being history/politics, Russian film, and literature. The problem I have right now is that they seem to have changed the number of units that the language classes are worth. So instead of 8 quarter units, the language classes are now worth only 7. We have to take a minimum of 18 quarter units, and while the history class is worth 6 units, the literature and film classes are only worth 5 each. This means that unless they give us an opportunity to take 1 more unit, we HAVE to take the history class to fulfill the minimum unit requirement. And I really wanted to just take the literature and film classes.
I do have a snail mail address, but I’ll have to ask Regina about mail and also get the address with the zip code and everything. In my last entry I made a mistake—the address is Volokolamskii proezd, not Vokolamskii. I’ll have to look at the spelling again when I get home.
Kofe Xauz – depending on how hardcore you are with the KH sound, it could either be a hard H or a more intense fricative. I haven’t heard any actual Russians pronounce the name yet, but I’m assuming they lean toward saying “khhh-ahh-oo-z.” Maybe not that exaggerated.
The weather is not at all consistent. One day it’s swelteringly hot, the next day I’m walking home from the metro taking a cold shower in the pouring rain. The beginning of last week was very hot, but now the temperature is mild and sometimes downright cool. I have to find a blow dryer soon so that I won’t have to walk around with wet hair in the chilly weather that is coming soon. Finding blow dryers (let alone reasonably priced ones) is a real headache around these parts. Regina said she might be able to take me shopping at a place that has them, but I’m not sure when that will happen.
I’m glad everyone is enjoying the blog! I had no idea it would reach such a wide audience, but it’s nice to know that people are finding my daily goings-on here interesting. I tried to cram as much into this entry as I can, as internet visits are few and far between now that I’m in my new apartment.
-Cheeseburger, without mayonnaise please.
-What?
-Without mayonnaise.
-Uh… what about ketchup?
-Well… okay, that’s fine.
-Without mayonnaise?
-Yes!
Then the employee has to go over to the grilling station and yell, “CHIZBURGER BEZ MAIONEZA. BEZ MAIONEZA. I KNOW, I KNOW. JUST DO IT.”
Okay, that’s my McDonald’s story of the day. For some reason I always feel the need to provide unsolicited details about it since that’s where I usually am when I have get internet.
So! Tomorrow it will be a week since I moved into my new apartment. Things are going pretty well. I feel relatively comfortable in this new home, and I even got used to the cat pee smell to the point that I don’t notice it. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but for now let’s say it’s good. For as small as this apartment is, the cats are fairly unobtrusive. Although one of the cats (Romashka – “chamomile”) insists on jumping up on my desk every morning to roll around vigorously on all my papers and books. She does it because she wants to be petted, which is endearing until she pushes a stack of paper and notebooks onto the floor.
I’ve been talking to my landlady more and asking questions about things. (Regina I think is her name, there was only a vague introduction and now I’ve definitely missed my window of opportunity for asking what her name is.) She’s really good about helping me learn words and repeating them a lot, but sometimes I feel like my brain is full and I can’t absorb any more words or grammar. From talking with Regina, I’ve gathered that she used to work in TV and radio, and then she sang in a choir for 14 years, and then she was a teacher until she went on her pension. She still gives music (mostly voice, but maybe piano, too) lessons regularly to students in her apartment. Yesterday I came home earlier than usual and she was in the middle of a lesson with one of her pupils, a teenage boy who was trying to sing through some classical pieces. She’s kind of a tough teacher. I wondered if he was embarrassed that I was overhearing the lesson, because it seemed to me a rather humbling and personal affair.
I told Regina that I was interested in cooking and that I’d like to watch her do her thing in the kitchen, which she said was fine but so far I haven’t been home to make that happen. One thing I was particularly interested in was this kvas she makes from scratch. For those of you who don’t know, kvas is a popular Russian drink that is made from fermented bread. It’s very mildly alcoholic and has this rich, woody taste that I can’t really describe. I’m not a big fan of kvas, but the stuff that Regina makes is interesting because it’s not made from bread, but rather from rice. Apparently the rice she makes it with is from the sea… I still don’t quite understand how she got it, she said they don’t sell it and you have to get it from a friend. But what I understand is that you can use the rice over and over again to brew as many batches as you want. Basically she puts water in a jar and adds the rice, sugar, and some golden raisins and lets the concoction sit for a few days. Then she strains it to get the rice out and then strains it again through a funnel and some cloth. Et voila! You have a clear, slightly tangy liquid that Regina says is good for basically every part of your body. I asked her if it was alcoholic, and she seemed a little shocked and said, “no!” I said, “Isn’t kvas generally just a little bit alcoholic?” Nope, not according to her. I think that’s because the alcohol content is so low that to call it an alcoholic beverage is funny to Russians. When Regina drinks the kvas she usually says, “ahh, lekarstvo” (medicine), and then cackles good-naturedly. This makes me wonder if it really is healthy or if it’s a just a little joke of hers. Nevertheless, I drink it up happily with her every morning and night, and imagine all the alleged vitamins coursing through me and doing good deeds for my body. Regina said the kvas might help with my “hair problem,” since I explained to her that the reason I shower every day is because of how oily my hair gets. As you can probably guess, Russians aren’t nearly as obsessive about bathing as I am. This is something I had previously guessed based on the overwhelming smell of body odor on the metro.
Speaking of the metro… I’d just like to say that I’m sorry I ever mentally cursed BART and how smelly or uncomfortable it is. Now I know what a luxury it is to get a seat 9 times out of 10 when I ride BART, and how deliciously cool those air-conditioned trains are in the summertime. In the Moscow metro’s defense, I will say that the stations are absolute works of art. The architecture is really amazing and in quite a few stations there are all sorts of grand monuments to artists or influential historical figures. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people (myself included after only 3 weeks) tend to become desensitized to all of the amazing historical art in the metro and in Moscow in general, because usually you find yourself staring at the back of someone’s head being pushed by someone else’s shopping bags when you’re trying to get from point A to B. There’s just no time to stop and smell the roses, or at least that’s how the hustle and bustle of the city makes you feel. When I first got here, I wondered why people insisted on running down the escalators (the left “lane” is always left clear for passing) and would run to catch a train, because a new train comes every 30-90 seconds. However, after a few weeks here I’ve found myself doing the same kind of mindless hurrying that everyone else does, pushing others out of the way just to get 3 feet closer to your destination.
Yesterday we went on a tour of the Kremlin, which was very beautiful but like all our tours, not terribly informative. Usually they’re not informative because the tours are given in Russian and we all tune out. This time it was in English, but the tour guide was so softspoken and spoke so slowly that it was equally as difficult to follow. I wish I had more to say about the Kremlin, since it’s a pretty big deal in Moscow, but like everything else that I’ve seen, all I cay say is that it was a big and beautiful place. One thing I did find interesting was that they keep birds of prey on the grounds so that they can minimize the raven population in the Kremlin. Apparently it’s a problem keeping the roofs clear with all the ravens that take over.
To answer a few questions:
Yes, TV programs here (including Murder, She Wrote) are dubbed in Russian. The frustrating thing is that they don’t mute English language track underneath, so sometimes I find myself trying to listen to the English track and then I get on a roll with that but then the Russian sound level overpowers it and then I don’t know what’s going on so I tune it all out.
No, generally dryers are not used here. Fortunately Lena called Regina about the steep laundry prices, so the other day I did my laundry and she only charged R100 (about $4) because it only filled up half the machine and the other half was filled by her clothes. Still a little pricey, but that’s the going rate in the other homestays. At first I was afraid Regina was being passive aggressive when she said that she would charge me less because she “didn’t want to go against the university,” but I don’t think people here are passive aggressive like that. Generally she takes pretty good care of me, and is loving in her own way. She taught me how to properly handwash clothes, she tells me if I need to iron my skirt before I leave the house, and wakes me up if I’ve slept past the time I said I would wake up in the morning. The only thing is that she doesn’t let me carry my own set of keys with me unless she knows she won’t be home. Sometimes I wonder how she keeps sane staying home for so long, but she is always home when she says she’ll be. Last night I felt uncomfortable about this because I had planned to go out to a club to celebrate a friend’s birthday and knew I wouldn’t be back until late. She said she wouldn’t sleep until I got home anyway, and that if I used the key in the door she’d wake up quick as a flash. I ended up going home with my friend so that a) I wouldn’t have to worry about walking home alone at night, and b) wouldn’t need to feel guilty for bothering Regina. The metro closes at 1 anyway but to be getting home at 1:30 and ringing the doorbell is something I’m not eager to do.
Incidentally, the club last night was pretty fun. A large group of us met at the Mayakovskaya metro station and from there walked to this club where they play retro music on the dance floor. The retro music they played was a little odd, though. It seemed American, but I had never heard any of the songs. Then when they started playing the Russian retro music, it was really funny to see all the Russians singing along. It’s weird how every culture has those songs that everyone knows from their past. Before he played one really popular song, the DJ was like “It will be impossible to just listen to this one!” And then he played this random song that everyone knew and we all pretended to know the words, too.
About the stray dogs. They really come in all shapes and sizes. In the beginning I was really tempted to pet this one little dog that was wandering in and out of the metro because he was so little and looked so innocent. But then I was warned about all the diseases those dogs carry. There’s one dog that lives near our dormitory that I call the Bob Marley dog because it looks like he has huge shaggy dreadlocks instead of fur.
Regarding classes, this coming week will be the last week of only having language classes. Then starting September 1, we have the option of taking 2-3 other electives in addition to our language classes, the choices being history/politics, Russian film, and literature. The problem I have right now is that they seem to have changed the number of units that the language classes are worth. So instead of 8 quarter units, the language classes are now worth only 7. We have to take a minimum of 18 quarter units, and while the history class is worth 6 units, the literature and film classes are only worth 5 each. This means that unless they give us an opportunity to take 1 more unit, we HAVE to take the history class to fulfill the minimum unit requirement. And I really wanted to just take the literature and film classes.
I do have a snail mail address, but I’ll have to ask Regina about mail and also get the address with the zip code and everything. In my last entry I made a mistake—the address is Volokolamskii proezd, not Vokolamskii. I’ll have to look at the spelling again when I get home.
Kofe Xauz – depending on how hardcore you are with the KH sound, it could either be a hard H or a more intense fricative. I haven’t heard any actual Russians pronounce the name yet, but I’m assuming they lean toward saying “khhh-ahh-oo-z.” Maybe not that exaggerated.
The weather is not at all consistent. One day it’s swelteringly hot, the next day I’m walking home from the metro taking a cold shower in the pouring rain. The beginning of last week was very hot, but now the temperature is mild and sometimes downright cool. I have to find a blow dryer soon so that I won’t have to walk around with wet hair in the chilly weather that is coming soon. Finding blow dryers (let alone reasonably priced ones) is a real headache around these parts. Regina said she might be able to take me shopping at a place that has them, but I’m not sure when that will happen.
I’m glad everyone is enjoying the blog! I had no idea it would reach such a wide audience, but it’s nice to know that people are finding my daily goings-on here interesting. I tried to cram as much into this entry as I can, as internet visits are few and far between now that I’m in my new apartment.
Monday, August 18, 2008
home sladkii home
Since this is probably going to be the most interesting aspect of my life here in Russia, I decided to find a McDonald's (wi-fi) and spin you a little yarn about my homestay; I realize yesterday's post was a bit of a cliffhanger. And don't worry, I haven't been choked or stolen from at this McDonald's yet. Although I did get some weird looks after ordering an iced coffee. I know I know, it was a bit ambitious of me to even try. People were mostly amused by the request. In the end all I could get was a cup of ice and a regular cup of coffee. An old woman ordering next to me pointed and smiled and said "Interyezno! (Interesting!) I've never seen such a thing before." I told her I was from America, and that it was just that kind of day, you know? (It's really hot here and I've been toting around a heavy backpack all day.)
Okay, the homestay. Yesterday was the second day of moving all of us into our homestays. We went in pairs based on the general regions we were all in. Our program director Lena and some other guy vaguely associated with the university (Igor) drove us to our apartments to meet our new xoziaikas (landladies, but this Russian word has a slightly different meeting-- basically it's pronounced huh-zyAHee-kuh). One guy has a xozyain (a man host) but most of us have old women who live alone.
So first we drove to my friend Tinian's apartment (she's the other girl from Berkeley on this trip). She lives about a mile away from me. Both our landladies are new to the program; they have another stockpile of known quantities that, for better or worse, we didn't get. So we got to Tinian's and at first I was a little freaked out because Tinian got this big, clean, awesome room to herself. Her landlady seemed very welcoming, too. While Lena was talking specifics with the landlady, Igor was telling Tinian and me that although Tinian was pretty far from the metro, she'd really lucked out with the quality of apartment, especially because he'd already seen 90% of the homestays. And then he told us that both of us were really far from the metro. So again, I was really freaked out and did not know what to expect. It turns out that I am not so far from the metro, about a 10-15 minute walk in a fairly decent neighborhood. BUT. Igor and Lena got lost several times before we actually made it to the place. So we're driving down deserted dirt-road alleys with lots of stray dogs (there are so many of those in Russia, my friend Igor got attacked by 3 of them yesterday after he left the McDonald's in his area and had to fight them off with a cart). And I'm hearing Igor (the man Igor, not my friend from the program) talking to Lena in Russian, saying "What is this?? She's not living here, is she? How could she live in this!?" They kept bickering which would have been funny because he kept saying she was stubborn like his wife, except I was paralyzed with fear in the backseat, imagining myself walking home and having to fight off dogs with an umbrella or something.
Anyway, after they called my landlady a couple times, we successfully drove to my homestay. 1 Bol'shoi Vokolamskii Proezd. It's next to a big police station, and my landlady said the neighborhood was generally pretty quiet as a result. Then I told her that frankly, I was scared of the police here. She seemed surprised at this, so hopefully that means there's nothing to worry about. There are a lot of families and playgrounds here, and the local church is quaintly beautiful. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. That was on the walk my landlady and I took so that she could show me where the metro was.
So Lena and I take the elevator to the 5th floor (incidentally, one of the elevators has no light whatsoever, it's a creepy ride so I usually try to wait for the fully-lit elevator) and we go to the apartment #26. There's an entryway with other apartments on the way to that, I'm not sure who lives there yet. And so the landlady greeted us, we exchanged our shoes for slippers, and went inside so that Lena could discuss a few details with the landlady. Oh, did I mention that the smell of cat pee filled the air once we were in the entryway? Right. My landlady has 3 cats. 3 fat cats. Which is fine. Except sometimes when I think she's talking to me, she's actually talking to the cats. I mean usually it's not hard to tell who she's talking to because she puts on a falsetto and does the whole baby talk thing. She's either teaching them how to say "Mama" or she thinks they already know how, because sometimes she says "MAMA" really slowly to the cat, and when it meows in response, she gets my attention and says "See? Mama. They know." The first thing she showed Lena and me was 2 different framed photographs of her cats. I'm not making fun of her though, she must be lonely. Her daughter is grown and lives/studies in Ohio. But I'm not sure how much she knows about American life through her, because when we were watching Agatha Christie together in the living room and eating dinner, she asked if we have tv commercials in America, too. I said "yes" and then tried to explain that some channels like HBO don't have them, but I don't think she understood. Later I realized that in the USSR there were obviously no commercials because there would have been no need to sell any particular brand.
Generally things are comfortable in the apartment, it's small but I have my own room with a degree of privacy if I decide to close the door. The only thing is that there IS a pervasive cat pee odor that I haven't adjusted to yet. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. I might try to get some Febreze or it's equivalent later, and hope she won't be offended.
Another thing that is bothering me is how much she has decided to charge me for food and laundry. I had heard a lot about how some landladies are happy to cook you meals for free, but this lady is clearly not in that camp. For me to take breakfast and dinner with her would be $300 a month, so I told her I would just eat breakfast on my own dime and then she could make me dinner. That is $200 a month. I asked her if it might be okay to cook my own meals and shop for myself, but she said it might be inconvenient with all the pots and pans being occupied etc. We'll see. I'm just going to try this only-dinner business out for a month. Then she said that a full load of laundry would cost $20. So at that point I mentally decided to just suck it up and handwash everything. However, this morning, of course all of us come to class exchanging stories about our homestays. Generally it sounds like the biggest problem for a lot of people is how far their homestay is from school (my commute is about an hour), but mostly the landladies sound nurturing and generous. I talked to Lena and asked her about how expensive everything was. She said that while $200/month for only dinners was reasonable, $20/load of laundry was not, and that she would give the lady a call about it.
I think right now I just don't want to exchange stories with anyone about our homestays. Last night I didn't have a bad time, nor did I feel an overwhelming sense of doom when I went to bed. Sure, it smelled like cat pee and my landlady is a bit of a kook. But even though I felt really awkward and a little out of my comfort zone, it still felt really awesome to be living in Moscow, not just living in a dorm isolated from the nitty gritty. Right now after I leave McDonald's, I'm going to get on the metro, buy some yogurt at the grocery store, and maybe take an ice cold shower at my new home. Oh yeah, a lot of people don't have hot water in the summer... kind of messed up but not totally unbearable in this hot, hot heat. And apparently it's going to be back on in a week or so. This morning my landlady boiled some water for me to wash basics in, but I ended up just taking a cold shower because it was easier to take a gaspingly cold shower from a shower nozzle than splash some water on my armpits from a bucket. She was worried about me that I washed my hair though, and said I would probably get a cold or at least a runny nose.
Okay, poka for now.
Okay, the homestay. Yesterday was the second day of moving all of us into our homestays. We went in pairs based on the general regions we were all in. Our program director Lena and some other guy vaguely associated with the university (Igor) drove us to our apartments to meet our new xoziaikas (landladies, but this Russian word has a slightly different meeting-- basically it's pronounced huh-zyAHee-kuh). One guy has a xozyain (a man host) but most of us have old women who live alone.
So first we drove to my friend Tinian's apartment (she's the other girl from Berkeley on this trip). She lives about a mile away from me. Both our landladies are new to the program; they have another stockpile of known quantities that, for better or worse, we didn't get. So we got to Tinian's and at first I was a little freaked out because Tinian got this big, clean, awesome room to herself. Her landlady seemed very welcoming, too. While Lena was talking specifics with the landlady, Igor was telling Tinian and me that although Tinian was pretty far from the metro, she'd really lucked out with the quality of apartment, especially because he'd already seen 90% of the homestays. And then he told us that both of us were really far from the metro. So again, I was really freaked out and did not know what to expect. It turns out that I am not so far from the metro, about a 10-15 minute walk in a fairly decent neighborhood. BUT. Igor and Lena got lost several times before we actually made it to the place. So we're driving down deserted dirt-road alleys with lots of stray dogs (there are so many of those in Russia, my friend Igor got attacked by 3 of them yesterday after he left the McDonald's in his area and had to fight them off with a cart). And I'm hearing Igor (the man Igor, not my friend from the program) talking to Lena in Russian, saying "What is this?? She's not living here, is she? How could she live in this!?" They kept bickering which would have been funny because he kept saying she was stubborn like his wife, except I was paralyzed with fear in the backseat, imagining myself walking home and having to fight off dogs with an umbrella or something.
Anyway, after they called my landlady a couple times, we successfully drove to my homestay. 1 Bol'shoi Vokolamskii Proezd. It's next to a big police station, and my landlady said the neighborhood was generally pretty quiet as a result. Then I told her that frankly, I was scared of the police here. She seemed surprised at this, so hopefully that means there's nothing to worry about. There are a lot of families and playgrounds here, and the local church is quaintly beautiful. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. That was on the walk my landlady and I took so that she could show me where the metro was.
So Lena and I take the elevator to the 5th floor (incidentally, one of the elevators has no light whatsoever, it's a creepy ride so I usually try to wait for the fully-lit elevator) and we go to the apartment #26. There's an entryway with other apartments on the way to that, I'm not sure who lives there yet. And so the landlady greeted us, we exchanged our shoes for slippers, and went inside so that Lena could discuss a few details with the landlady. Oh, did I mention that the smell of cat pee filled the air once we were in the entryway? Right. My landlady has 3 cats. 3 fat cats. Which is fine. Except sometimes when I think she's talking to me, she's actually talking to the cats. I mean usually it's not hard to tell who she's talking to because she puts on a falsetto and does the whole baby talk thing. She's either teaching them how to say "Mama" or she thinks they already know how, because sometimes she says "MAMA" really slowly to the cat, and when it meows in response, she gets my attention and says "See? Mama. They know." The first thing she showed Lena and me was 2 different framed photographs of her cats. I'm not making fun of her though, she must be lonely. Her daughter is grown and lives/studies in Ohio. But I'm not sure how much she knows about American life through her, because when we were watching Agatha Christie together in the living room and eating dinner, she asked if we have tv commercials in America, too. I said "yes" and then tried to explain that some channels like HBO don't have them, but I don't think she understood. Later I realized that in the USSR there were obviously no commercials because there would have been no need to sell any particular brand.
Generally things are comfortable in the apartment, it's small but I have my own room with a degree of privacy if I decide to close the door. The only thing is that there IS a pervasive cat pee odor that I haven't adjusted to yet. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. I might try to get some Febreze or it's equivalent later, and hope she won't be offended.
Another thing that is bothering me is how much she has decided to charge me for food and laundry. I had heard a lot about how some landladies are happy to cook you meals for free, but this lady is clearly not in that camp. For me to take breakfast and dinner with her would be $300 a month, so I told her I would just eat breakfast on my own dime and then she could make me dinner. That is $200 a month. I asked her if it might be okay to cook my own meals and shop for myself, but she said it might be inconvenient with all the pots and pans being occupied etc. We'll see. I'm just going to try this only-dinner business out for a month. Then she said that a full load of laundry would cost $20. So at that point I mentally decided to just suck it up and handwash everything. However, this morning, of course all of us come to class exchanging stories about our homestays. Generally it sounds like the biggest problem for a lot of people is how far their homestay is from school (my commute is about an hour), but mostly the landladies sound nurturing and generous. I talked to Lena and asked her about how expensive everything was. She said that while $200/month for only dinners was reasonable, $20/load of laundry was not, and that she would give the lady a call about it.
I think right now I just don't want to exchange stories with anyone about our homestays. Last night I didn't have a bad time, nor did I feel an overwhelming sense of doom when I went to bed. Sure, it smelled like cat pee and my landlady is a bit of a kook. But even though I felt really awkward and a little out of my comfort zone, it still felt really awesome to be living in Moscow, not just living in a dorm isolated from the nitty gritty. Right now after I leave McDonald's, I'm going to get on the metro, buy some yogurt at the grocery store, and maybe take an ice cold shower at my new home. Oh yeah, a lot of people don't have hot water in the summer... kind of messed up but not totally unbearable in this hot, hot heat. And apparently it's going to be back on in a week or so. This morning my landlady boiled some water for me to wash basics in, but I ended up just taking a cold shower because it was easier to take a gaspingly cold shower from a shower nozzle than splash some water on my armpits from a bucket. She was worried about me that I washed my hair though, and said I would probably get a cold or at least a runny nose.
Okay, poka for now.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
off to the homestays
Today I'm moving out of the dorms and into my homestay! I'm a little nervous but trying to be excited in a good way right now. Some students moved into their homestays yesterday and reports back were mixed. Some people are about as far away as you can get from the university, but I'm hoping that's because most the students who got moved in yesterday were boys, and they'll be safer on their own than a girl would be metroing/walking home a long distance. I'm hoping for a few things: a) that my landlady is nurturing and isn't some sort of no-nonsense ice queen, b) that my landlady won't try to take advantage of me when it comes to negotiating prices of food or laundry services, c) that there is at least a washing machine, d) that the apartment will be at least within 2 or 3 metro stops. Some of the people who moved in yesterday said that they don't have hot water in their homestay right now; it gets turned off during the summer. According to one student who asked his landlady about it, it will be off for another 10 days or so. This is somewhat disturbing, although to be honest it's been so hot here that I can't help but wonder if I'll even mind. Last night it was so unbelievably hot and humid, and of course there's no air conditioning here so we all just had to suffer and be sweaty and sticky while packing up our suitcases.
There's been a lot of silly melodrama between the EAP students lately. I'm ashamed to say that I am a part of it, although I have no idea how I got involved. It's usually something I try to avoid. I feel like I'm back in my freshman year in the dorms, getting riled up over petty things and caring too much about being liked and accepted.
I'm not sure what my internet's status will be once I'm in the homestay. Hopefully I'll be close to a McDonalds or Kofe Xaus because those places have wi-fi. I'll try to check in again soon!
P.S. Martine had a question about night life and the clubbing scene here. A few people have been more hardcore about pursuing that arena than I. A lot of people are intimidated by the "face control" that they have here, which basically means they don't let you into the club if you don't look or aren't dressed a certain way. Some clubs are stricter than others, I think some girls went out the other night and had no problem getting into a club (like America, it's generally easier to get into a club if you're a girl), but they went early and that makes it easier. The first week after we were here, we were going to go out to a club for a student's birthday here, but since we're such a large group and some people felt like they didn't pack snazzy enough clubbing clothes, we were afraid not everyone would get in. We ended up going to a bit of a dive bar, which was basically like an American bar but way more expensive. They were playing American country music for a while, which was kind of awful and not exactly the Moscow nightlife experience people were looking for. There's still more time to explore the club scene here, I'll keep you updated about it.
As for the food question, I do like it but it's hard to say what defines Russian cuisine. Lots of mayonnaise salads, beet and cabbage soups with sour cream on top. They use dill in practically everything, so I've come to associate that as a very Russian thing. Sosiski (sausage) is a big deal here, they usually have it on open faced sandwiches. They eat bread with everything (which is okay by me!). Something I've noticed about buying things from food vendors or from the dorm cafeteria is that meat is often undefined.
"What is this?" I ask while pointing to some kind of breaded patty while in line. "Meat."
"What is this stuffed with?" I ask about a meat pie (pirozhok). "Meat."
I guess I'm getting more comfortable with eating meat that comes from an unspecified part of the body of an unspecified animal. People who came here as vegetarians or who leaned toward vegetarianism have set that diet aside for this trip, I think.
There's been a lot of silly melodrama between the EAP students lately. I'm ashamed to say that I am a part of it, although I have no idea how I got involved. It's usually something I try to avoid. I feel like I'm back in my freshman year in the dorms, getting riled up over petty things and caring too much about being liked and accepted.
I'm not sure what my internet's status will be once I'm in the homestay. Hopefully I'll be close to a McDonalds or Kofe Xaus because those places have wi-fi. I'll try to check in again soon!
P.S. Martine had a question about night life and the clubbing scene here. A few people have been more hardcore about pursuing that arena than I. A lot of people are intimidated by the "face control" that they have here, which basically means they don't let you into the club if you don't look or aren't dressed a certain way. Some clubs are stricter than others, I think some girls went out the other night and had no problem getting into a club (like America, it's generally easier to get into a club if you're a girl), but they went early and that makes it easier. The first week after we were here, we were going to go out to a club for a student's birthday here, but since we're such a large group and some people felt like they didn't pack snazzy enough clubbing clothes, we were afraid not everyone would get in. We ended up going to a bit of a dive bar, which was basically like an American bar but way more expensive. They were playing American country music for a while, which was kind of awful and not exactly the Moscow nightlife experience people were looking for. There's still more time to explore the club scene here, I'll keep you updated about it.
As for the food question, I do like it but it's hard to say what defines Russian cuisine. Lots of mayonnaise salads, beet and cabbage soups with sour cream on top. They use dill in practically everything, so I've come to associate that as a very Russian thing. Sosiski (sausage) is a big deal here, they usually have it on open faced sandwiches. They eat bread with everything (which is okay by me!). Something I've noticed about buying things from food vendors or from the dorm cafeteria is that meat is often undefined.
"What is this?" I ask while pointing to some kind of breaded patty while in line. "Meat."
"What is this stuffed with?" I ask about a meat pie (pirozhok). "Meat."
I guess I'm getting more comfortable with eating meat that comes from an unspecified part of the body of an unspecified animal. People who came here as vegetarians or who leaned toward vegetarianism have set that diet aside for this trip, I think.
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