Monday (the 17th of July I think) was the usual medley of classes and then going over to Tania's new house to do some studying. Tania moved a few weeks ago because her living situation in the Soviet Block housing got to be too much. Her host mother came home drunk on a regular basis and things were getting uncomfortable with her crippled host brother who suddenly had a fiance that was looking to move in. After one night when her host mother came home stumbling drunk, crying to Tania about her friend who was moving away (in a month, mind you), and trying to make her bed and then proceeding to fall over, Tania decided it was time to get out. So now she doesn't have to walk through a field of dead rats every day to get home or worry about her drunken host mother. Yay Tania!
So now Tania lives not too far from the institute in a pretty good region. Her living situation is still amusing though, seeing as she has a new somewhat cute host brother who's our age. His name if Gleb, and he's a rocket scientist (at least that's what we call him since he said he is studying how to build rockets). He speaks English pretty well. It was nice meeting him and he has a really amusing sense of humor. Watching the banter between him and Tania was also a lot of fun, with him was laughing at how easy our homework was, and us making fun of his English grammar mistakes (like gendering every object he spoke about "take the cup off him" (i.e. the table).
It's not uncommon here for children to live with their parents pretty far into adulthood, or even for just married couples to move in with their parents. It's hard to find apartments and they're not cheap sometimes. It seems like finding a job is hard too. If you are not in school you can be sucked into the military till you're 27, (military service is required here for men). Thus Gleb is a rocket scientist, a mama's boy, a wannabe death metal fan (he has really old posters of American goth type bands on his wall, which is now Tania's room), and also a hotel busboy (or rather he hopes to be, because applying for a job here is ridiculous...tons and tons of paperwork and documents).
So it was fun studying, talking with Gleb, drinking tea that resembled seaweed soup (teabags haven't completely caught on here), and listening to Prince Igor which for some reason Gleb was listening to instead of the customary death metal.
Russia is really funny that way, as far as pop culture fads. It seems as if since capitalism and the rest of pop culture has been introduced here (after the collapse), no one is sure what to draw from for fashion. You see wannabe punks and Goths (who can't quite pull off the look and mix in weird styles things), 70's style disco types, skater types, and my favorite Russian fashion for both men and women alike is the mullet. I'm not sure why, but it's all the rage here. Maybe I'm just behind the times and it's reemerged in the US this summer too, but... Wow. I don't understand. So all the fads of different decades have gotten muddled up here, and sometimes it seems like Russian people are trying to catch up to the rest of the capitalist world by reliving American pop cultural past, whether it be a Britney Spears song from 4 years ago, Greenday and Korn, or the mullets. Bizarre.
After studying I went home and had dinner, and then a second dinner when Yuna, my host parents older daughter who currently lives in Paris, came in with friends. She was home for the week for her friends' wedding. The two friends who had gotten married (Masha and Vitya) and another friend (Anya) were hanging out. It was really random actually but Masha and Vitya had met in Maine at this medical institute in Bar Harbor (maybe?). They're both Russian doctors. Masha lived in Maine for a few years, and Vitya just got a job doing diabetes research at Yale in the fall. Vitya seemed in his late 30's early 40's, Masha more like 30. They were really nice though and showed me wedding pictures. Their wedding was very informal, seeing as they had decided to get married only a few days before the wedding, where Vitya rushed back from America to marry her in Russia. They have an interesting relationship and they actually see each other rather rarely (maybe the key to a good relationship afterall). So he's only in Russia a couple of months before returning to the states, and Masha doesn't know when or if she can move to the states. I loved how refreshing their relationship was, playful, comfortable, casual isn't the right word, but you know what I mean. She wasn't into the whole big wedding thing and she actually wore a red dress and he just a white shirt to their very unreligious ceremony.
Weddings in some ways are less formal here, for example many people just get married at some state office where they sign some papers. Then you walk around taking pictures in the city all night by all the major sites and monuments.
It was fun speaking half English half Russian with them. Vitya spoke English very well, Masha was more rusty. Yuna spoke perfectly and didn't even sound Russian. She had a British accent, which was kind of strange.
So next thing I know I'm up drinking Crimean wine, French champagne, and cognac till 2am with them. The cognac was terrible stuff. Vitya said it was 85 proof by American standards. No wonder it made my eyes burn if I kept them open while trying to sip it. Yikes.
It was a little odd speaking English and meeting Yuna, because it made me feel a little skitzhophrenic, like I was two different people: a foreigner who speaks bad Russian and then my English speaking self. I guess I can understand a little more how hard it must be to be an exchange student in America, thinking about all the people I knew from ballet school and elsewhere who came to English speaking countries sometimes knowing nothing of the language. You either feel like a caricature of yourself or like you have no personality at all. Like a nonperson, or just some representative of your nationality. I sometimes feel myself saying things in exaggerated ways to give myself a personality that people can recognize. It's very odd. It must seem strange to my host parents to hear me speak with a different tone of voice in English than I do in Russian (I speak in a half apologetic nice tone in Russian most of the time), or my ability to have a more complex personality, to make jokes, or intelligent comments in English to Yuna and her friends. It was kind of relieving but also kind of strange. It was nice to feel like an adult and comfortable speaking, where I didn't feel like such a child (since my vocabulary is worse than a 2 year olds and I speak to my host parents like a child and they have to speak to me like one too).
My host parents have been really great though, and surprisingly, the obnoxious mistake of speaking louder and slower when someone doesn't understand you actually does work! Although a lot of the time they have to stop and rephrase something with words they think I might know. I've gotten creative when explaining myself with a limited vocabulary where I'll try to describe the thing I don't know the word for, or act it out charades style with sound effects, or draw pictures and of course there's also reverting to the dictionary. But there's such satisfaction in even understanding the simplest statements here.
So it was nice to speak English, but I had to remind myself that just because they spoke English didn't mean they shared the same cultural values as I did. The boundaries between language and culture get kind of messed up sometimes. They asked me why I was studying Russian, like most people have here. And everyone then says Russia is over, why are you studying Russian? It's too hard to learn for foreigners. Or they say, Russian is really easy, just stop speaking English. Oh and then there's the one how I'll never get a job and how they have this genius friend who speaks 20 languages and he still can't find a job. And when I tell people I study Latin as well people are even more amused since Latin is completely useless in this day and age (being dead) except for scholarship. Well, even if they are dead or near dead languages, they're in my opinion two of the languages most necessary to learn in order to appreciate their literature. The intricacies and subtleties of inflected languages where word order is not strict by any means offers so much poetic potential and layers of meaning that are completely lost in translation. When I read things in translation I often feel like I'm getting at most half of the story, especially when reading someone like Bely. Ah well, maybe in 15 years I'll actually know Russian well enough to get it all, and by then I'll be poor starving and living off cigarettes, vodka, Dostoevsky and perhaps a touch of Vergil if I can keep the Latin up. Excellent.
What's bad though is that I can feel my ability to both speak and write English getting worse while I'm here. We do speak a fair amount of English, but because we don't speak it as much and English is not spoken around us much and I haven't been reading in English as much as I usually do, it's been harder to think straight, especially as Russian constructions start to fill my head as much as English ones. Thinking in Russian much of the time also makes things confusing. An my Russian grammar has infected by English grammar too. I find my word order being completely messed up and my ability to render things in grammatical English more and more difficult, as you might be able to tell in the grammar of my posts (yes Patrick, I probably did split my infinitive more than once somewhere). It's pretty sad. I just hope that my Russian grammar is improving somewhat since my English grammar is declining. It's not just me either. Pretty much everyone in the group has expressed a similar sentiment, and it's amusing when you suddenly realize you're half speaking in English and half in Russian and that you don't even notice when someone speaks in fragments or uses some weird Russian construction and word order instead of an English one. Coming back home will be interesting and will feel very strange.
Here are some random pictures of my house and immediate surroundings.
My courtyard. Scenic indeed:
Also part of courtyard:
From my window:
My room:
Outside:
Elevator:
2 comments:
yup, mullets are all the rage here again...at least in MI!
Ugh. Say it isn't so. But at least that means it won't catch on in Maine for at least two years (except for the many people there who never realize that it went out of style).
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