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 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.