11/20/2007
I published this a while ago and then accidentally deleted it. It belongs before the last one.
So it looks I’ve finally decided to break that language pledge, to which my belatedly developed steadfast devotion has prevented me from maintaining this guilty pleasure of English indulgence I used to look forward to every week….well, if I were telling the truth, I guess that would only be three out of the twelve weeks I’ve been here. I wish I could say I’ve been too busy to write in this, but it’s really difficult to become too busy here. So yeah, I don’t really have an excuse, but I’m sorry! both to you and to my grandchildren, who, due to the disappearance of my camera in addition to this lack of entries, will now see no hard evidence in the future supporting my stories of Siberian chainsaw massacre survival (I’m not going to write about this experience but I think you can look in the blogs I’ve linked to left for the full story) and daily battles with cabbage and salmon pancakes. But now that I have a computer, in my last three and a half weeks I’ll try to regurgitate as much about my daily life and as many its-the-end-of-the-day-and-I’m-on-the-wrong-autobus-again-and-now-I-have-another-hour-until-I-get-home-so-I-guess-I’ll-try-think-about-Russia reflections as possible.I think soon after my last entry, the fallout that occurred after my credit card, migration card and camera all managed disappear across the space of four days monopolized my time. The first to go was the credit card. It seems like the ATMs here are as hungry as my babushka would like me to be. While absent-mindedly wallowing in accomplishment after successfully retrieving money during my first experience with a monolingual Russian-only speaking ATM, I soon realized that machine had decided not to give me back the card and I was a stupid American in an isolated Siberian city with only forty dollars in American Express travelers checks to his name. My parents and I found a way to wire me money from America through Western Union. Unfortunately, the first day I attempted to navigate this efficient western-but-made-complicated-by-Russian-unpredictability system (many banks only offer the service until 2 in the afternoon and on some days the computer program crashes at every receiving point in the city) was on a Saturday....I knew that banks in Middlebury,VT and Nottingham, NH rarely open on Saturdays, but I didn't know that this rule applied to 700,000 person cities.In those days I usually packed my camera with me, always planning to take some pictures of Irkutsk streets in the fall, and always not following through because a flashing a camera in public would automatically reveal my oblivious foreignerness and good targetness for pickpockets. On that day, however, I decided some productive picture taking would make up for my lack of successful banking of the morning. But no later than five minutes after my first picture (of café fiesta L), a ten year old bumped into me and ran away and I looked down into an empty, unzipped camera case. I arrived home depressed and determined not to lose anything else…so I removed my passport from its satchel in order to adoringly stare at one important document that remained safely in my possession. But I quickly realized it no longer clutched my migration card, which had been there that morning and usually fits snuggly between the final pages of the passport ….it probably disappeared at one of the banks.I’m still not sure what the purpose of the migration card is. It’s a tiny square piece of thin paper that all foreigners receive upon entering the country and then give to an official migration card collection officer upon leaving. I think it proves that you came into the country at a legal entry point…but if you have a legal visa, why should that matter? Anyways, these migration cards are distributed only at border crossings and can’t be replaced if lost, stolen, or if the border crossing officials happen to run out of them on your day of entrance….which is very bad because you need them to officially register in any city in Russia (which must if you plan to stay there for more than three days). Together with a registration document, your passport, and your visa, these cards are often required to do anything semi-official anywhere in Russia, including, as I discovered two days later, western union transactions.At that point, I had only 30 rubles in my wallet (about $1.20), and when unexpectedly asked for the card at a bank, the already typically unhappy Russian bank lady was not happy to see only a photocopy. I finally found one bank that didn’t care about my potential illegal immigrant status. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so nervous when I watched the bank worker print the money from her money-printing machine, ceremoniously photocopy my passport, visa, and registration card and then flip several times through the pages of my passport (I thought she was searching for the non-existent migration card…those other three documents rarely like to do anything here without the fourth). But she eventually stopped the flipping and gave everything back to me…including the money.Everything worked out in the end.…though deus-ex-machinally. I got a new card on the border with Mongolia when we went there two weeks after the incident, and dad brought me a new bankcard when he came to visit. But without that series of fortunate events, I might have spent my last 20 rubles on my ride back to my apartment that day and remained on my bed next to my overactive heater until the end of the program or until someone called (my cell-phone also had exhausted its ruble supply). This collection of experiences served as a wake-up call about the potential consequences of my disorganization and how my very ability to survive here depends on certain products of Russian bureaucracy….I’m still disorganized though.That was a really long-winded and I feel bad for reviving this thing with such a detailed account of a bad experience. Other than that incident, things have been going really well. Mongolia was amazing (I made a hand written journal of that trip (both in English and Russian! (for one of my classes)…maybe I’ll post it later))). ))))))))))))))Russia is amazing too!! At the beginning of November, Irkutsk began to look like Vermont in February (which I really like)…it seems to snow every other day, I can already see people ice-skating on the little lake outside my window now. I guess I always expected Siberians to complain about winter, but they really take pride in what most would consider geographic unfortunateness. Whether or not we receive as much snow where I live as they do in Russia serves as the most common conversation item now. Of course, I always answer that New Hampshire and Vermont considered to be cold, snowy places. But they defensively respond that Mid-December temperatures will redefine my idea of winter.They also know how to protect themselves from the cold better than you and want you to know that…..and they are usually right. I had lunch at my babushka’s niece’s house yesterday and so that her daughter could practice her English with me. Though our conversation covered many topics and included only a brief mention of the weather, when asked by her non-English speaking mother what we were talking about, she responded “oh just about how cold he’s finding Siberia to be.” After hearing this, the mother left the room and returned with an authentic Russian fur hat for me! I’m not sure what animal its from, but it fits perfectly. Its somewhat rough around the edges because her husband wore it for some number of years, but he apparently doesn’t need it anymore. It’s definitely much warmer than my Middlebury bookstore hat.Such fur hats, fur coats, and fur lined high heels ride on the trolley more frequently now than even bottles of alcohol. Russians must to anxiously anticipate that first snow because it seems to usher in the most fashionable time of year. Also, even though they don’t have thanksgiving to mark the beginning of the holiday season, almost the day after we Middlebury students celebrated it (while continuing to speak Russian!) at the resident coordinator’s place, Christmas trees and garlands appeared overnight. The wooden neighborhoods downtown all look like gingerbread village.Hanging alongside the Christmas decorations are posters for next week’s election. For a while the only posters and television advertisements I saw were generic PSA’s saying things like “Elections December 2!” “Russia needs you and you need Russia” “We Believe in Russia! And we believe in ourselves!,” They always displayed a logo of a Russian flag and polar bear, which I thought just served as some sort of national symbol for the Russian federation. But it turns out that’s the official symbol of Putin’s “One Russia” Party. Gradually, new vote for Putin (or his party…these are the parliament elections…though all of the posters focus only on him) advertisements are finding themselves in the same places where the more generic ones hung last week. The only opposition advertising seems to come from the LDPR party whose propoganda tactics extend little beyond enormous head shots of a frowning mafia-esque man (the leader of the party I think) holding a clenched fist in the air. Under his slightly terrifying portrait always appears the party’s motto “not to be afraid.” I think I would also chose the polar bear. The news told me that Putin currently polls at 63% and no other parties are above 15%, but this one and only Russian news station I think is owned by Gazprom, Russia’s energy monopoly that is run by Putin’s government.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Saturday, December 1, 2007
11/27/2007
So classes are starting to come to a close. We’ve complained!? throughout the semester about the lack of any sort of serious homework here, but now we have term papers and exams and I think its starting to dawn on me that plenty of information and readings have been thrown at me throughout the semester…I just didn’t have the language skills to allow all those Russian sounds and letters to form words and retainable thoughts in my mind when the were spouted at lightning speed by the professors of my Baikal Studies and History of Russia courses, the two hardest classes and the only ones that require significant finals work. My paper for the History of Russia mainstream class is about the geopolitical consequences for Russia of World Ward I. I told my Baikal studies professor I was planning to write about relations between Cossacks, Buryats, and Old Believers living east of Baikal in the nineteenth century, but I think it might be even too complicated to sort through Russian card catalogues in search of information relating to only one of those three groups. With such broad topics, so many varying points of view to explore, and my reading rate of about 3 pages an hour…it’s difficult to know where to begin.
In any case, we decided registration at the main university library was probably a good beginning (though the beginning of the semester might have been a better time for the completion of this process). University buildings in Russia don’t usually gather together on a campus. They are spread throughout the city. Each building contains a department an each department contains a library, but you can only check books out of your department’s library or from the main central library which requires a separate registration process, and so that was what we set out to do. It’s a nice place…marble staircases, comfortable chairs, chandeliers everywhere…but its difficult to check a book out to read under the chandeliers.
The process begins with a requirement to leave your coat in the coatroom. Basically any official building in Russia contains a large coatroom with several workers in front of a window ready hang your coat up as quickly as possible and then return with a numbered ticket that you must have (but that I frequently lose) to retrieve the coat at the end of the day. In many buildings, including our international department at the university, a guard reprimands anyone who plans to irresponsibly keep themselves too warm by continuing to wear the coat after leaving the front hall. Unlike the other public buildings, the library has another set of guards after this first one to make sure you don’t bring any books from home that may accidentally mix with and tarnish the collection already inside. Natalie’s grammar textbooks barred her entrance one day. You then register yourself in the library, and to obtain one book, you hurdle yourself through a series different rooms with various card catalogues, filling out of various request forms and then giving the request forms to a lady sitting at a desk at the front of the reading room (the only place where students are allowed to use the books…they can’t be taken home). Here students can’t wander among the library stacks contemplating their vast university’s stores of knowledge like we do in the US. Instead, the front desk lady gives the form to another worker whose job is to efficiently retrieve the requested book from the shelves …but she often does quite a bit of aimless wandering herself and returns only to yell at you for asking for a book that doesn’t actually exist in that set of shelves. It turns out only a handful (maybe around 100) library books are actually located in the main library building….the university stores the rest in another building a few minutes down the road. So you then make your way to the official university book request dispatch desk where they send out a dispatch for the book, which won’t be arrive at the main library until tomorrow or the next day, when you usually don’t have time to return
Sometimes Russia is fastidious in its organization. I’m sure few books have been illegally extracted from that web of bureaucracy that exists I guess to prevent book theft…or maybe its also there to maintain book quality and keep people like me, who have a talent for accidentally breaking textbook bindings within the first three weeks of receiving them, from spending too much time with them. One book I used had a copyright of 1946, but I saw absolutely no folded page corners or scratches on the covers.
Inside the home, observed is a similar many-stepped meticulousness aimed towards cleanliness, healthiness, and safety. You open five locks before entering the apartment, everyone’s require put on slippers within minutes of taking off their shoes, you’re supposed to change into sweatpants before sitting on the bed so as to not soil the bedspread with your jeans that have been outside all day, every three days the floor must be scrubbed….I’m actually not sure if everyone universally observes the rules or if they apply only to my apartment, but every Russian home I’ve seen (though that number may only amount to 4) has been immaculately spotless. Of course, many of the rules seem cumbersome and unnecessary, but they contribute to an observable good result. Immediately outside of the home, any sense of organization disappears. The exteriors of most of the apartment buildings are dirty and in need of repair. Rusting twenty-year-old playgrounds stand at the centers of their unmaintained courtyards. Around six construction projects that no one seems to be working on anymore dominate my neighborhood’s skyline. And, as discussed in our orientation materials, Russia as a country and government, despite its bureaucracy, is pretty disorganized.
In one of our classes we read this article about how much Russians like fences. Any visit to a Russian village confirms this purported stereotype. But, as I think Susanna pointed out, its difficult to know why the fences exist or what they divide. Cows goats and flower gardens often co-mingle. Putting up fence is an easy way to create a sense of order, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to purposeful beneficiality…like the all the fences preventing university students’ easy access to the knowledge in the libraries…its more about an impression of order than a necessary result. Maybe Russians like a sense of rigid organization and tradition inside the home because for so long there rarely existed a trustworthy safety net outside to provide day-to-day protection and predictability. If you’re living in a remote village in the mid-1600s in subzero temperatures, its impossible to work to maintain order beyond your immediate confines….but I think that’s enough broad generalization for today.
So classes are starting to come to a close. We’ve complained!? throughout the semester about the lack of any sort of serious homework here, but now we have term papers and exams and I think its starting to dawn on me that plenty of information and readings have been thrown at me throughout the semester…I just didn’t have the language skills to allow all those Russian sounds and letters to form words and retainable thoughts in my mind when the were spouted at lightning speed by the professors of my Baikal Studies and History of Russia courses, the two hardest classes and the only ones that require significant finals work. My paper for the History of Russia mainstream class is about the geopolitical consequences for Russia of World Ward I. I told my Baikal studies professor I was planning to write about relations between Cossacks, Buryats, and Old Believers living east of Baikal in the nineteenth century, but I think it might be even too complicated to sort through Russian card catalogues in search of information relating to only one of those three groups. With such broad topics, so many varying points of view to explore, and my reading rate of about 3 pages an hour…it’s difficult to know where to begin.
In any case, we decided registration at the main university library was probably a good beginning (though the beginning of the semester might have been a better time for the completion of this process). University buildings in Russia don’t usually gather together on a campus. They are spread throughout the city. Each building contains a department an each department contains a library, but you can only check books out of your department’s library or from the main central library which requires a separate registration process, and so that was what we set out to do. It’s a nice place…marble staircases, comfortable chairs, chandeliers everywhere…but its difficult to check a book out to read under the chandeliers.
The process begins with a requirement to leave your coat in the coatroom. Basically any official building in Russia contains a large coatroom with several workers in front of a window ready hang your coat up as quickly as possible and then return with a numbered ticket that you must have (but that I frequently lose) to retrieve the coat at the end of the day. In many buildings, including our international department at the university, a guard reprimands anyone who plans to irresponsibly keep themselves too warm by continuing to wear the coat after leaving the front hall. Unlike the other public buildings, the library has another set of guards after this first one to make sure you don’t bring any books from home that may accidentally mix with and tarnish the collection already inside. Natalie’s grammar textbooks barred her entrance one day. You then register yourself in the library, and to obtain one book, you hurdle yourself through a series different rooms with various card catalogues, filling out of various request forms and then giving the request forms to a lady sitting at a desk at the front of the reading room (the only place where students are allowed to use the books…they can’t be taken home). Here students can’t wander among the library stacks contemplating their vast university’s stores of knowledge like we do in the US. Instead, the front desk lady gives the form to another worker whose job is to efficiently retrieve the requested book from the shelves …but she often does quite a bit of aimless wandering herself and returns only to yell at you for asking for a book that doesn’t actually exist in that set of shelves. It turns out only a handful (maybe around 100) library books are actually located in the main library building….the university stores the rest in another building a few minutes down the road. So you then make your way to the official university book request dispatch desk where they send out a dispatch for the book, which won’t be arrive at the main library until tomorrow or the next day, when you usually don’t have time to return
Sometimes Russia is fastidious in its organization. I’m sure few books have been illegally extracted from that web of bureaucracy that exists I guess to prevent book theft…or maybe its also there to maintain book quality and keep people like me, who have a talent for accidentally breaking textbook bindings within the first three weeks of receiving them, from spending too much time with them. One book I used had a copyright of 1946, but I saw absolutely no folded page corners or scratches on the covers.
Inside the home, observed is a similar many-stepped meticulousness aimed towards cleanliness, healthiness, and safety. You open five locks before entering the apartment, everyone’s require put on slippers within minutes of taking off their shoes, you’re supposed to change into sweatpants before sitting on the bed so as to not soil the bedspread with your jeans that have been outside all day, every three days the floor must be scrubbed….I’m actually not sure if everyone universally observes the rules or if they apply only to my apartment, but every Russian home I’ve seen (though that number may only amount to 4) has been immaculately spotless. Of course, many of the rules seem cumbersome and unnecessary, but they contribute to an observable good result. Immediately outside of the home, any sense of organization disappears. The exteriors of most of the apartment buildings are dirty and in need of repair. Rusting twenty-year-old playgrounds stand at the centers of their unmaintained courtyards. Around six construction projects that no one seems to be working on anymore dominate my neighborhood’s skyline. And, as discussed in our orientation materials, Russia as a country and government, despite its bureaucracy, is pretty disorganized.
In one of our classes we read this article about how much Russians like fences. Any visit to a Russian village confirms this purported stereotype. But, as I think Susanna pointed out, its difficult to know why the fences exist or what they divide. Cows goats and flower gardens often co-mingle. Putting up fence is an easy way to create a sense of order, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to purposeful beneficiality…like the all the fences preventing university students’ easy access to the knowledge in the libraries…its more about an impression of order than a necessary result. Maybe Russians like a sense of rigid organization and tradition inside the home because for so long there rarely existed a trustworthy safety net outside to provide day-to-day protection and predictability. If you’re living in a remote village in the mid-1600s in subzero temperatures, its impossible to work to maintain order beyond your immediate confines….but I think that’s enough broad generalization for today.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
So we just got back (well 3 days ago) from our weeklong program-provided trip outside of Irkutsk. The first few days took place in Ulan Ude, a big city located on the opposite side of Baikal. We spent the rest of the trip very closely in touch with nature around, on, and in Baikal.
Ulan Ude has a population similar in size to that of Irkutsk, and located 10 hours away by train, is its next-door neighboor by Siberian standards. It serves as the capital of the Buryatia Autonymous Republic....When an ethnic minority makes up significant portion of a region's population, Russia bestows upon it some sort of autononomy (I think its allowed to hold its own parliament) that somehow distinguishes it from the Oblasts, Krayas, and other administrative subdivisions with funny names. The Buddhist Buryats make up only around 30% of Buryatia's population, but despite their minority status in their own republic....they've left their imprint on the land with a lot of pagodas or temples or monasteries whatever the technical term is for large Buddhist houses of worship that always contain a statue of Buddha, places to leave food and money, a square of tables with lots of golden wheels behind which monks study and recite from the sutras, and ocatagonal prisms that you can spin to grant yourself whatever is scrawled in attractive but unreadable Buryat Calligraphy of on the exterior. We saw a few places like this. One of our guides enthusiastically expounded the meaning and purpose of every spinning toy, wheel decoration, and painting, but we became skeptical when he claimed some sort of prayer mat was designed for push-ups.
Coexisting with the buddhists in Buryatia are members of another religious minority...the old believers. I'm not sure what old beliefs they hold because I was five minutes late to my baikal studies class the day their importance was discussed...I think they disagreed with reforms in the Orthodox church in the seventeenth century. Most of them live in isolated communities throughout Siberia, maintain little contact without the outside world, and, alongside their religous practices, have reformed few aspects of their daily lives accross the past four hundred years. From observation I know that the men have long beards...anyways, I'm sure wikipedia could provide a much more detailed and accurate description than than I am right now.
Well, we visited one of these villages. It had a museum that contained mammoth bones, money from around the world, and a big scale, religious icons, and some other things I don't remember because I was too busy playing with my camera. I didn't really know where we were until the musem guide revealed the true extent of his lifelong unshavenness. His beard already looked amazingly, rasputinesquely long before his modesty gave way and he showed us the three fourths of it concealed behind his open-air-historical-musuem-character style robe. I think I remembered something Mrs. Kokernack told us in Western Civ about the pride the Bouyars or sixteenth century Russian men in general held towards their beards....so I made an assumption about our location....or maybe I just intuitively associated beards with oldness because I mistakedly asked one of the other students standing directly next to the guide if we were in a village of Older/Elderly Believers.
Our whirlwind tour of Siberian religious diversity continued the next day when we observed a baptism at a contemporarily believing Orthordox Monastery. The priest told that people should stop attempting to view buddhism as more progressive than Christianity because Jesus was born several hundred years later than Buddha and his religion is therefore more contemporary.
We saw very little Ulan Ude itself beyond the central pedestrian street and square whose major attractions are the world's largest head of Lenin and a rundown late-night carnival with broken bumper-cars.
Because showers run in short supply in Siberian villages, we went swam several times inBaikal...an experience supposedly so body-numbing it will add ten years to life. It really didn't feel much colder than Maine ocean water in June, but we could drink directly from it...and at one point cows from a nearby village arrived to wade in the water in front of us! I think that was the highlight of my Siberian experience thus far. When I entered into one of once hourly my photo fits that occur when I delay the rest of the group because I frantically capture around 16 pictures of the same image...none of which will be of interest to anyone later, one of the guides laughed at what appeared to be an urban american seeing farm animals for the first time. I tried to explain to him that cows definitely have they're place in Northern New England society...but that it was just so neat to one roaming free along a beach...and that later that night it'd know how to meander back to its owner's front yard to be milked. New Hampshirites don't place that much trust in their livestock.
We also saw a few villages, the the lake's largest peninsula (though I'm not sure where this classification comes from because we rode a ferry to get there), and 967543214 birch trees. Here birches don't induce that childhood thrill of discovery in finding something light in the middle of the dark and scary forest....because they often make up the enitre forest. For this reason everything in the woods brighter and happier and theres no feeling that your leaving something behind when you enter.
It was also fun just to spend time in these villages. In my life as a tourist, I think I've only visited folksy villages free from twentieth century architecture when the village has instituted zoning laws to prevent the contruction of twentieth century architeture in order to preserve the folksiness that attracts so many tourists. But these places were authentic. Because they are located directly next to Baikal, I'm sure they see they're fair of visitors. But from the lost goats wandering up and down the dirt roads, to rusting fishing boats parked permanently on the beach, I felt like I was observing living, breathing rustic country-villageness that hadn't been recreated for revenue.
Tourism is obviously messier and less efficient here. Though we were on an official tour, it seemed the only official daily policy followed was to ignore anything written on the official schedule, and our official guides were much more interested in the girls in our group than drawing the american line forbidding relationships between um...tour guide and guidee? But the trip definitely surpassed any great outdoor excursion I've experienced in the US....or maybe I'm happy to have finally found a culture that openly embraces disorganization.
Ulan Ude has a population similar in size to that of Irkutsk, and located 10 hours away by train, is its next-door neighboor by Siberian standards. It serves as the capital of the Buryatia Autonymous Republic....When an ethnic minority makes up significant portion of a region's population, Russia bestows upon it some sort of autononomy (I think its allowed to hold its own parliament) that somehow distinguishes it from the Oblasts, Krayas, and other administrative subdivisions with funny names. The Buddhist Buryats make up only around 30% of Buryatia's population, but despite their minority status in their own republic....they've left their imprint on the land with a lot of pagodas or temples or monasteries whatever the technical term is for large Buddhist houses of worship that always contain a statue of Buddha, places to leave food and money, a square of tables with lots of golden wheels behind which monks study and recite from the sutras, and ocatagonal prisms that you can spin to grant yourself whatever is scrawled in attractive but unreadable Buryat Calligraphy of on the exterior. We saw a few places like this. One of our guides enthusiastically expounded the meaning and purpose of every spinning toy, wheel decoration, and painting, but we became skeptical when he claimed some sort of prayer mat was designed for push-ups.
Coexisting with the buddhists in Buryatia are members of another religious minority...the old believers. I'm not sure what old beliefs they hold because I was five minutes late to my baikal studies class the day their importance was discussed...I think they disagreed with reforms in the Orthodox church in the seventeenth century. Most of them live in isolated communities throughout Siberia, maintain little contact without the outside world, and, alongside their religous practices, have reformed few aspects of their daily lives accross the past four hundred years. From observation I know that the men have long beards...anyways, I'm sure wikipedia could provide a much more detailed and accurate description than than I am right now.
Well, we visited one of these villages. It had a museum that contained mammoth bones, money from around the world, and a big scale, religious icons, and some other things I don't remember because I was too busy playing with my camera. I didn't really know where we were until the musem guide revealed the true extent of his lifelong unshavenness. His beard already looked amazingly, rasputinesquely long before his modesty gave way and he showed us the three fourths of it concealed behind his open-air-historical-musuem-character style robe. I think I remembered something Mrs. Kokernack told us in Western Civ about the pride the Bouyars or sixteenth century Russian men in general held towards their beards....so I made an assumption about our location....or maybe I just intuitively associated beards with oldness because I mistakedly asked one of the other students standing directly next to the guide if we were in a village of Older/Elderly Believers.
Our whirlwind tour of Siberian religious diversity continued the next day when we observed a baptism at a contemporarily believing Orthordox Monastery. The priest told that people should stop attempting to view buddhism as more progressive than Christianity because Jesus was born several hundred years later than Buddha and his religion is therefore more contemporary.
We saw very little Ulan Ude itself beyond the central pedestrian street and square whose major attractions are the world's largest head of Lenin and a rundown late-night carnival with broken bumper-cars.
Because showers run in short supply in Siberian villages, we went swam several times inBaikal...an experience supposedly so body-numbing it will add ten years to life. It really didn't feel much colder than Maine ocean water in June, but we could drink directly from it...and at one point cows from a nearby village arrived to wade in the water in front of us! I think that was the highlight of my Siberian experience thus far. When I entered into one of once hourly my photo fits that occur when I delay the rest of the group because I frantically capture around 16 pictures of the same image...none of which will be of interest to anyone later, one of the guides laughed at what appeared to be an urban american seeing farm animals for the first time. I tried to explain to him that cows definitely have they're place in Northern New England society...but that it was just so neat to one roaming free along a beach...and that later that night it'd know how to meander back to its owner's front yard to be milked. New Hampshirites don't place that much trust in their livestock.
We also saw a few villages, the the lake's largest peninsula (though I'm not sure where this classification comes from because we rode a ferry to get there), and 967543214 birch trees. Here birches don't induce that childhood thrill of discovery in finding something light in the middle of the dark and scary forest....because they often make up the enitre forest. For this reason everything in the woods brighter and happier and theres no feeling that your leaving something behind when you enter.
It was also fun just to spend time in these villages. In my life as a tourist, I think I've only visited folksy villages free from twentieth century architecture when the village has instituted zoning laws to prevent the contruction of twentieth century architeture in order to preserve the folksiness that attracts so many tourists. But these places were authentic. Because they are located directly next to Baikal, I'm sure they see they're fair of visitors. But from the lost goats wandering up and down the dirt roads, to rusting fishing boats parked permanently on the beach, I felt like I was observing living, breathing rustic country-villageness that hadn't been recreated for revenue.
Tourism is obviously messier and less efficient here. Though we were on an official tour, it seemed the only official daily policy followed was to ignore anything written on the official schedule, and our official guides were much more interested in the girls in our group than drawing the american line forbidding relationships between um...tour guide and guidee? But the trip definitely surpassed any great outdoor excursion I've experienced in the US....or maybe I'm happy to have finally found a culture that openly embraces disorganization.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
So what has my life been like here?
I live in one of those depressing multistory, monument-to-utilitarianism apartment buildings. But while my neighborhood's exterior may belong in a slideshow of art's failed reconiciliation between aesthetics and modernism (though when I forget to wear my glasses the, dirt on the concrete i guess almost create that "weathered charm" effect that that makes people like decadent cities like Venice so much) the inside of my apartment isn't a sad place. Its very cozy. Lots of oriental carpets cover the floors and hang on the walls...not too different from from my home in New Hampshire...only so much cooler beacause I'm actually in the orient...sort of, but I don't think I'm too far from the silk roads where caravans originally carried such rugs(apparently the world's narcotic supply route roughly follows such ancient pathways and Irkutsk, with some of the highest rates of heroin usage in Russia, certainly qualifies as a major break-and-bulk point) and I have seen two camels give rides to tourists through the city's central market on several occasions, so I guess I can always fantasize...about what I'm not really sure.
Anyways, beyond a few rugs on the walls, the smells from the kitchen probably contribute most to the extreme hominess of the apartment. Something is always being painstakingly prepared... and I am always expected to eat it. I usually do because everything is REALLY good (except the salads covered in mayonaise...for breakfast...that I wishfully think are bowls fruitloops in milk when my tired eyes view them from far away), but I'm never able to finish...and this I think upsets my babushka...our resident coordinator warned that Russian mothers view fall as a time fatten up their sons to provide them with natural insulation against the cold winter.
There is plenty of fat even when I don't finish...we add sour cream to everything from pancakes to soup, the milk tastes more like half and half and cookies or cupcakes accompany every meal. I'm often forced leave the cookies untouched after the three course lunches....a potential bone of contention I passively started to confront by bringing them to my room to eat later. After seeing an empty cookie plate left in the dining room one day, however, my Babushka frantically baked another batch for me, saying "it looked like you finished them all this time, and I was sure you'd want more as soon as possible."
But my babushka's amazingness extends far beyond her cooking prowess. She used to serve as dean or asisstant dean or some sort of administrative figure at the International department of the Irkutsk State University (where we study). She was in charge of international students back when the only international people allowed in Siberia were Mongolians....so she always has plenty say about the shortcomings of Ulaanbaatar's higher education system of twenty years ago (though the shortcomings of my Russian communication skills make these conversations pretty one-sided), when she's not busy looking after her 85 year old husband, 35 year old son who still lives time at home, and immaculately shiny floors that must nevertheless must be scrubbed everyday. Her husband is also very nice but has difficulty hearing, and I have difficulty understanding rapidly spoken Russian idiom, but we smile and hold doors open for each other and he turns on Russian soap operas for me when it looks like I've been studying too long. The son knows where New Hampshire and Maine are located asked me during our first conversation some very specific questions that I didn't quite understand about lobstering.
The city of Irkutsk turned out to be more attractive than I expected. Log cabins/life-size gingerbread houses are scattered everywhere across downtown. During the eighty degree weather we experienced after our arrival, their various pastel facades allowed me to imagine I had chosen to study abroad in a tropical carribean city...It's too cold to imagine that anymore though. Wide boulevards flanked by nineteenth century architecture that certainly support the paris of siberia rep. cut through the city's center near parks with ornate gazebos (and, in one, a twenty-foot radius drawing of packman on concrete?) that line a big river. But walking residents are forced to enjoy the city's aesthetics at their own risk because pedestrians are just one more minority whom Russia holds no respect for...a danger we were warned about that was confirmed on our first day when one student saw walkers dive out of the way of an oncoming abulance. Here green lights are more likely to turn yellow to warn people in crosswalks than to stop oncoming traffic......on the rare occasion that the crosswalk has some sort of official designation. Using the sidewalks to avoid speeding ambulances can prove treacherous, however, because loose manhole covers hiding deadly boiling water have apparently claimed a few lives accross the years. But having spent my life in the villages of New Hampshire and Vermont, I've never really been categorized as a pedestrian before...so its difficult to know how severely my rights have been infringed upon.
Despite the killer manholes and fruitloops that turn in to coleslaw, however, I'm pretty happy to be in Irkutsk. This is the most remote, yet most urban place I've ever lived in...so I guess I'm just glad to be learning to navigate cosmopolitan life while fulfilling my post-His Dark Materials fifth grade dream of spending the rest of my life in a cold deserted wasteland like Svalbard (A big island in the Arctic Ocean...Watch the Golden Compass movie when it in comes out in December and you'll better understand the roots of this desire!).
I live in one of those depressing multistory, monument-to-utilitarianism apartment buildings. But while my neighborhood's exterior may belong in a slideshow of art's failed reconiciliation between aesthetics and modernism (though when I forget to wear my glasses the, dirt on the concrete i guess almost create that "weathered charm" effect that that makes people like decadent cities like Venice so much) the inside of my apartment isn't a sad place. Its very cozy. Lots of oriental carpets cover the floors and hang on the walls...not too different from from my home in New Hampshire...only so much cooler beacause I'm actually in the orient...sort of, but I don't think I'm too far from the silk roads where caravans originally carried such rugs(apparently the world's narcotic supply route roughly follows such ancient pathways and Irkutsk, with some of the highest rates of heroin usage in Russia, certainly qualifies as a major break-and-bulk point) and I have seen two camels give rides to tourists through the city's central market on several occasions, so I guess I can always fantasize...about what I'm not really sure.
Anyways, beyond a few rugs on the walls, the smells from the kitchen probably contribute most to the extreme hominess of the apartment. Something is always being painstakingly prepared... and I am always expected to eat it. I usually do because everything is REALLY good (except the salads covered in mayonaise...for breakfast...that I wishfully think are bowls fruitloops in milk when my tired eyes view them from far away), but I'm never able to finish...and this I think upsets my babushka...our resident coordinator warned that Russian mothers view fall as a time fatten up their sons to provide them with natural insulation against the cold winter.
There is plenty of fat even when I don't finish...we add sour cream to everything from pancakes to soup, the milk tastes more like half and half and cookies or cupcakes accompany every meal. I'm often forced leave the cookies untouched after the three course lunches....a potential bone of contention I passively started to confront by bringing them to my room to eat later. After seeing an empty cookie plate left in the dining room one day, however, my Babushka frantically baked another batch for me, saying "it looked like you finished them all this time, and I was sure you'd want more as soon as possible."
But my babushka's amazingness extends far beyond her cooking prowess. She used to serve as dean or asisstant dean or some sort of administrative figure at the International department of the Irkutsk State University (where we study). She was in charge of international students back when the only international people allowed in Siberia were Mongolians....so she always has plenty say about the shortcomings of Ulaanbaatar's higher education system of twenty years ago (though the shortcomings of my Russian communication skills make these conversations pretty one-sided), when she's not busy looking after her 85 year old husband, 35 year old son who still lives time at home, and immaculately shiny floors that must nevertheless must be scrubbed everyday. Her husband is also very nice but has difficulty hearing, and I have difficulty understanding rapidly spoken Russian idiom, but we smile and hold doors open for each other and he turns on Russian soap operas for me when it looks like I've been studying too long. The son knows where New Hampshire and Maine are located asked me during our first conversation some very specific questions that I didn't quite understand about lobstering.
The city of Irkutsk turned out to be more attractive than I expected. Log cabins/life-size gingerbread houses are scattered everywhere across downtown. During the eighty degree weather we experienced after our arrival, their various pastel facades allowed me to imagine I had chosen to study abroad in a tropical carribean city...It's too cold to imagine that anymore though. Wide boulevards flanked by nineteenth century architecture that certainly support the paris of siberia rep. cut through the city's center near parks with ornate gazebos (and, in one, a twenty-foot radius drawing of packman on concrete?) that line a big river. But walking residents are forced to enjoy the city's aesthetics at their own risk because pedestrians are just one more minority whom Russia holds no respect for...a danger we were warned about that was confirmed on our first day when one student saw walkers dive out of the way of an oncoming abulance. Here green lights are more likely to turn yellow to warn people in crosswalks than to stop oncoming traffic......on the rare occasion that the crosswalk has some sort of official designation. Using the sidewalks to avoid speeding ambulances can prove treacherous, however, because loose manhole covers hiding deadly boiling water have apparently claimed a few lives accross the years. But having spent my life in the villages of New Hampshire and Vermont, I've never really been categorized as a pedestrian before...so its difficult to know how severely my rights have been infringed upon.
Despite the killer manholes and fruitloops that turn in to coleslaw, however, I'm pretty happy to be in Irkutsk. This is the most remote, yet most urban place I've ever lived in...so I guess I'm just glad to be learning to navigate cosmopolitan life while fulfilling my post-His Dark Materials fifth grade dream of spending the rest of my life in a cold deserted wasteland like Svalbard (A big island in the Arctic Ocean...Watch the Golden Compass movie when it in comes out in December and you'll better understand the roots of this desire!).
Friday, September 14, 2007
I really should have done this three weeks ago...that way my first few entries would have been devoted my its-a-small-world-afterall first impressions of Russia upon seeing McDonalds written in cyrillic and whatnot.... I tried to keep a handwritten journal for the first few days, but it metaphorphisized into into a place to write down emergency contact numbers, adresses, public transformation hints and a list of heard-ten-times daily vocab words that were supposed to be memorized but weren't, before reaching its mature form on Wednesday as my notebook for my Russian film class. Jet-lag and the fact that all my airline tray tables were flimsy, difficult-to-write-on-kind ones that you pull out of the arm rather than from the seat in front you produced primarily unreadable and incomprehensible thoughts. But the initial reflections I have managed to rectify can be found below, re-reflected upon after my first month here.
From what I remember, I spent my final three days in the US sitting in front of my half-packed, yet already overweight suitcase, accomplishing nothing but increasing my anxiety by reading and rereading the school in Russia handbook, whose contents contained a few too many statements about Russia leaving a "permanent emotional mark on even the most mature and able students. " Its final sentence read something like "some of our students have accomplished more than just survive Russia, they've actually gotten something out of it, but only through extreme effort." While some of my stress stemmed from my (well-justified) lack of confidence in the time management and organization of my packing skills, this book made me afraid of Russia itself. Also, from the time I received my study abroad packet in April and the reality dawned on me that in less than five months I'd be on a five hour planeride from Moscow to the (what most visitors described as inaccurately and oximoronically) self-proclaimed Paris of Siberia, I had heard few good things about my future home. The Economist warned me weekly that not even investment capital, and therfore clearly not naive American college students, should make an any effort to associate with Putin's Russia. Former Irkutsk middkids, though insistent that their times spent there proved rewarding, always latently credited their love of the place to the enjoyment that emerges from experiences described in those "tough times make us stronger" adages. And my final conversation in Russian at language school was with a Professor from Saint Petersburg who assured me and fellow students that we would daily see fistfights streets of Irkutsk resulting from barbarious siberians' inability to civilly adapt to new capitalist conditions in Russia.
I guess I'll conlcude this probably unsuccessful attempt to begin this blog somewhat philosophically by saying that the culture shock and dangers of life in Russia described in all three of our pre-Russia study abroad packets, in an hour-long power-point presentation at orientation, and again in booklets that we received in Moscow and Irkutsk containing "only new information," haven't really shocked me (though I've definitely seen and experienced them) as much as how quickly my anxiety lifted upon arrival. My ascension into this fearlessness to face scary Russia began as our plane descended into Moscow. I was sitting next to someone who, earlier this summer as we took the language pledge (to speak only Russian for the next two and half months), shook an entire row of auditorium seats during some sort of bizarre nervous convulsing. Her surprising calmness on the plane served as the first check against my own excessive, yet internal bizarre nervous covulsing. But I think my true savior was the view through window of Russian housing developments. From what I understand, suburbia didn't exist in pre-Putin Russia. During the Soviet and Yelsins eras, everyone lived in those depressing, multistory, monument-to-utilitarianism apartment buildings. But within the past seven years, Russia's metropolitan landscape has looked towards the actions taken by 1950's american city for guidance. The results were easy to see. Everywhere, BIG, cookie cutter, box mansions/monstrosities, often constructed in what I guess is california neo-meditteranean style more appropriate to Orange Country, covered what was expansive steppe only last year. Due to brandnewness, none of the roads were paved and few houses looked inhabited. But even though these urban vacant buildings destroyed the pristine traditional Russian landscape that all guidebooks insist still exists just outside of Moscow, they somehow made me happy, providing "something familiar in what I thought would be a world of unknowns......blah blah blah." And while I may never accept the fact that I was cured by collosus of cul-de-sacs, I'll always remember them as the first indication that Russia would be a place of far more familiarities than I expected. This realization isn't too original, but its been a central theme of my relations with the place over the past few weeks. I would like to write about familiarities right now and about unknowns and about all the big events of the past month. I've started to, but I don't have time to proofread anything right now because my Babushka expects me home home momentarily to eat a meal that will no doubt be very tasty, but that I (probably futilely) hope will not exceed in calorie count the two chicken wings, cucumber, three tomatoes, bowl of rice pudding, bowl regular white rice, square of cheese, and loaf of bread that composed only my breakfast this morning. Da zaftra. I'll be back back tomorrow.
From what I remember, I spent my final three days in the US sitting in front of my half-packed, yet already overweight suitcase, accomplishing nothing but increasing my anxiety by reading and rereading the school in Russia handbook, whose contents contained a few too many statements about Russia leaving a "permanent emotional mark on even the most mature and able students. " Its final sentence read something like "some of our students have accomplished more than just survive Russia, they've actually gotten something out of it, but only through extreme effort." While some of my stress stemmed from my (well-justified) lack of confidence in the time management and organization of my packing skills, this book made me afraid of Russia itself. Also, from the time I received my study abroad packet in April and the reality dawned on me that in less than five months I'd be on a five hour planeride from Moscow to the (what most visitors described as inaccurately and oximoronically) self-proclaimed Paris of Siberia, I had heard few good things about my future home. The Economist warned me weekly that not even investment capital, and therfore clearly not naive American college students, should make an any effort to associate with Putin's Russia. Former Irkutsk middkids, though insistent that their times spent there proved rewarding, always latently credited their love of the place to the enjoyment that emerges from experiences described in those "tough times make us stronger" adages. And my final conversation in Russian at language school was with a Professor from Saint Petersburg who assured me and fellow students that we would daily see fistfights streets of Irkutsk resulting from barbarious siberians' inability to civilly adapt to new capitalist conditions in Russia.
I guess I'll conlcude this probably unsuccessful attempt to begin this blog somewhat philosophically by saying that the culture shock and dangers of life in Russia described in all three of our pre-Russia study abroad packets, in an hour-long power-point presentation at orientation, and again in booklets that we received in Moscow and Irkutsk containing "only new information," haven't really shocked me (though I've definitely seen and experienced them) as much as how quickly my anxiety lifted upon arrival. My ascension into this fearlessness to face scary Russia began as our plane descended into Moscow. I was sitting next to someone who, earlier this summer as we took the language pledge (to speak only Russian for the next two and half months), shook an entire row of auditorium seats during some sort of bizarre nervous convulsing. Her surprising calmness on the plane served as the first check against my own excessive, yet internal bizarre nervous covulsing. But I think my true savior was the view through window of Russian housing developments. From what I understand, suburbia didn't exist in pre-Putin Russia. During the Soviet and Yelsins eras, everyone lived in those depressing, multistory, monument-to-utilitarianism apartment buildings. But within the past seven years, Russia's metropolitan landscape has looked towards the actions taken by 1950's american city for guidance. The results were easy to see. Everywhere, BIG, cookie cutter, box mansions/monstrosities, often constructed in what I guess is california neo-meditteranean style more appropriate to Orange Country, covered what was expansive steppe only last year. Due to brandnewness, none of the roads were paved and few houses looked inhabited. But even though these urban vacant buildings destroyed the pristine traditional Russian landscape that all guidebooks insist still exists just outside of Moscow, they somehow made me happy, providing "something familiar in what I thought would be a world of unknowns......blah blah blah." And while I may never accept the fact that I was cured by collosus of cul-de-sacs, I'll always remember them as the first indication that Russia would be a place of far more familiarities than I expected. This realization isn't too original, but its been a central theme of my relations with the place over the past few weeks. I would like to write about familiarities right now and about unknowns and about all the big events of the past month. I've started to, but I don't have time to proofread anything right now because my Babushka expects me home home momentarily to eat a meal that will no doubt be very tasty, but that I (probably futilely) hope will not exceed in calorie count the two chicken wings, cucumber, three tomatoes, bowl of rice pudding, bowl regular white rice, square of cheese, and loaf of bread that composed only my breakfast this morning. Da zaftra. I'll be back back tomorrow.
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