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.
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