Government buildings, and whirled on,
And the lawyer climbs back into the sleigh,
Pulling his coat closed with a broad sweep.
Ships are wintering. In direct sun
Thick cabin-glass lights up.
Monstrous, like a docked battleship,
Russia rests, heavily.
And over the Neva, half the world’s embassies,
And the Admiralty towers, and the sun, and silence!
And the State’s coarse purple, rought
Like a hair-shirt, is thin, worn.
Thick discomfort presses down on a northern snob—
Onegin’s ancient boredom;
Out on Senate Square—a snowdrift,
Bonfire smoke, faint cold of bayonets…
Skiffs ladle water, gulls
Visit the hemp warehouse
Where muzhiks straight off the opera stage
Ramble, selling hot honey tea and rolls.
Cars fly in a line, into the fog;
A finicky, frugal pedestrian—
Type of eccentric Evgeny—is ashamed of poverty,
Breathes gasoline and curses at fate!
-Petersburg Strophes 1912, 42
Sorry I didn’t post again sooner. Things are quite busy, but I suppose the last post was long enough to last a week. As far as pics, there aren't as many with this post. Blogger hates me in Russia and is not uploading my pictures. I'll keep trying. Also, my pics look decent on my computer and then look bad once I upload them on another. Don't know if it's Russian computers in general or I just keep my monitor really bright... but yeah. So I put some on flickr, which is linked to the right, so look there too.
Life is pretty good. Classes have begun. Monday (of last week now) we had testing, which went ok. The testing here was much easier than the testing we had in DC. My speaking is also so much better than I remember it being. When I hear some of the other students speak I’m so grateful I came over the summer because even if I don’t know as much vocab or grammar or whatever, it sounds less stilted when I speak, I don’t get as nervous, and I often know the right little things to say when and where to sound somewhat natural. Also, I’ve gotten good at not showing utter confusion when I don’t understand completely what the other person is saying, so I’m good at faking it, basically. Heh. Which I guess is why I somehow got into the highest group. The semester students are split up into four or five groups. My group has 6 people in it. Including Mari, the girl I roomed with in the dorms, and Chris (who goes to Brown with me), and then Carlos and Alex (that you saw in the other picture), and another girl Betsy, who’s a grad student. The year-long students are still in their own classes—we don’t mix. It’d be nice to get to know them sometime though.
I haven’t wandered too much yet. The first night sleeping at home I only slept 3 hours or so. I woke up around 1:30 am and thought it was time to wake up. Nope. I didn’t fall back asleep to 7am and then had to wake up 45 min later. Yay for jetlag. So I only had about enough energy to go to sadovaya (the haymarket district) with Betsy to find her an adapter (I was proud I remembered exactly where I got mine with Zack), and then tried to find a towel for me for another hour. Good fun. I think we asked about 10 people who sent us running all over the place: “Oh, I remember there was a place over on this street” (in Russian), so we’d go over there and find out the place closed ten years ago. Hm. They were all friendly though. For whatever reason people seem friendlier in the winter than summer, maybe because there are fewer tourists around right now and they might take pity on a poor, frozen American who has no towel. I eventually found one in the market area near my house. Success! It’s surprisingly hard to find the simplest things here at times. During the Soviet period it was hard to find anything at all. The stores had nothing, and you’d have to know all the random places to go to find various things. And shopping used to take forever because of the crazy system they had of buying things, which is still in place at some stores. The system is something like this: you go to whatever department of the store you want to buy something in, you point it out to the attendant, they give you a receipt, you go pay at that department’s register, you come back with another receipt and can pick up your purchase. Things are so much better now, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to find some basic things, unless you know this city really well. Super Wal-Mart has yet to penetrate Petersburg.
I like my district because it’s easy to find things. Simple things. Like socks, and slippers, and various foods, and shampoo, and even some clothes! WOOOO. I was noticing the other day this random garage/metal barn looking thing on my street and they have these low standing tables covered in trash bags full of clothes. The places isn’t heated and has no floor, so you’re tromping around in the slush looking through garbage bags of clothes, it’s pretty cool. There’s also this amazing apteka (drugstore) right nearby. It’s actually more like an American supermarket (but smaller of course). I feel like such a poser, but I was so happy. No more long trips to random stores and parts of the city to get various things. It was clean and bright and they had a lot of American brands. It was there I found my towel, and I even had a choice of colors. Exciting, I know. I’d feel like a really lame Russian wannabe, but my host mother recommended the place to me, raving about how great it was. I’m up for a little capitalism.
Classes are in full swing. I like my teachers, especially my grammar teacher. He’s pretty young and reminds me of a crazy game show host or something. He’s wicked funny and expressive in a kind of cheesy way. I feel like if I taught English to non-english speakers I’d probably just turn into a caricature of myself and my language too. He’s really interesting to listen to though, because he’s convinced that Russian is a very logical language (hm), and will explain the tiniest irregularity in Russian to you. For those of you that might know Russian, he explained why you use the preposition “na” instead of “v” with the words post office and Ukraine. If you’re really interested in why just ask.
In other thrilling news. I bought a new sim card today for my phone. The plan I had was charging me for incoming calls, when it shouldn’t have been. I went with a few others who needed to buy cell phones altogether and talked to the guy there. He made me call Megafon headquarters to ask about my plan. No luck. She refused to believe me that I was getting charged for incoming calls. So I bought a new sim card through beeline. And it works. I love Russia so much sometimes. Cell phones in the states are awful; they are so flexible here. I had no fees to change plans or anything. You just pop out the little sim card, put in a new one, the dude registers you in about 2 min, and the new plan and sim card cost me only 180 rubles (or like 6 bucks). Awesome.
Well the week is now over. It was pretty good, but very tiring. It’s funny how easy it is to fall into another way of life when things that would be crazy at home seem so normal here. In a way I miss being new to it all.
Classes were ok, but quite hard. Most of the classes aren’t very well organized. When it comes to things like languages and math (which I’m not that good at naturally), I need very logical and organized explanations of things. So this semester will be a challenge. My classes altogether are grammar, conversation, phonetics, political science, and literature (all in Russian, of course). We have class everyday for about 5 hours, which is pretty exhausting. By the end of the day I can’t think anymore. I could feel my Russian really clicking into place the first few days I was here, but now I feel like I’m getting worse. Maybe because I’m just so tired and burnt out by the end of classes. My commute to the school isn’t that short either—about 40 min walking and metro. I guess it could be worse. The weather makes it much worse because my street is not paved whatsoever, and it’s tiring walking through the pasty snow, ice, and slush without falling on my face.
Life at home is good. I’ve gotten to know my host mother, Alla, more and also Olya, my host sister. I only have a brother, so it’s been interesting having a host sister. I was a little worried at first about it because I’m not sure how well I get along with other girls, but we’re getting along really well. We’ve had some good conversations about Russian vs. American men, about clubs, about how Americans seem to grow up later than Russians in some respects, etc. She’s 22 and works as a speech therapist, which is maybe why I can generally understand her so well. Haha. It’s nice having another person in the house to talk to as well. It’s always easier to talk to two people than just one—takes the pressure off a bit. I don’t have that much time to myself since I end up spending so much time with my host family. I barely have enough time for homework let alone blogging.
Kitchen Window:
Like, for example, the other night I watched a movie with my host mother and her friend who came over, who’s a still photographer for films (I actually saw some of her work in this art magazine here). We watched the movie Mona Lisa Smile in English. My host mother seems really interested in American culture. She knows some English and has visited NYC and Washington before. She really likes Americans and is somehow convinced that New Yorkers are the nicest and most patient people ever. I didn’t care to disillusion her. But anyway, since the movie was in English I’d have to translate random things for her—verify things that had just happened, or tell her the meanings of certain English idioms. It was interesting explaining to her what “screwing” meant. After the movie we had a discussion about women’s rights, which was pretty amusing. The movie has a feminist bent to it, for those of you who haven’t seen it. Alla asked me whether I thought the Julia Roberts character did the right thing in leaving her boyfriend in the end. I said yes, because he lied to her about his past and had a history of “screwing” his students. My host mother thought she should’ve stayed with him, of course. She then asked me how things were with my boyfriend, Patrick. I explained to her how I was the type who always wanted to know what he was up to, with whom, where, when, etc. And her reply was, “It’s better not to know.” Very comforting. Haha. But what Russian men lack in fidelity they make up for in gifts and romantic gestures. She told me that guys aren’t able to date here until they have saved up enough money, because having a girlfriend is really expensive, seeing as it is expected that he pay for everything and that he buy her gifts and flowers all the time. We talked about the revolytziya devychek (literally, the Revolution of girls), which was also interesting. We talked about why we each thought relations between men and women in the US vs. Russia respectively were so different. In Russia it’s more traditional in the sense that the man is always pampering the girl, carrying heavy bags, paying for things, etc. whereas in the US, my host mother was convinced that women have the need to do everything themselves, carry their own bags, refuse help and good manners from men in order to prove their independence. This led to a discussion about Soviet policy, voting and property rights in Russia, the equalizing of men and women during the Revolution. Alla thought that because women had to work just like men in the Soviet Union and thus lost a lot of their feminine identity there was more of a desire to be treated “like women” (hence all the gentlemanly behavior, gifts, flowers, and what not). Russian women come from a different background I guess. Their “rights” to a job and vote were “forced” upon them as their duty to the state, whereas in the states the women were fighting for theirs, or something. I don’t want to think too much about it, I’m too tired. But my host mother’s view of feminists was pretty funny. She compared them to a sad, neglected little plant that simply needed to be nourished with the water of male flatteries and attentions in order for it to bloom into a beautiful feminine flower. So basically you can turn around any feminist by treating her like a “real woman.” Interesting perspective. I’d be curious to see how that would fly in a Feminist Philosophy course at Brown.
In other news, I met my tutor. We each have our own Russian tutor here. They don’t help us with homework, but just hang out with us a couple times a week taking us places and chatting with us. My first meeting with my tutor, Nadya, was really awkward, which I wasn’t expecting it to be. I don’t think she’s tutored much before, and she seems a bit shy or uncomfortable, but in the end it has worked out. We went to the Russian Museum on Thursday to see the Vrubel exhibit. It was fun to go. She studies art and art history. The exhibit wasn’t amazing. They had a lot of the paintings we saw this summer, and some of his drawings and sketches and sculptures. We then walked around some more in the late 19th, early 20th century section. It was neat to look at the paintings I remember seeing this summer with Prof Dorontchenkov. And it was nice not to feel like a total idiot talking with Nadya about them. On Saturday we met up again to go to the Hermitage. We were able to skip the line entirely and go in for free because she works there. She leads tours for Russians. It was nice because we were able to go up into the “no access” areas of the museum to drop off our coats. I met some of her colleagues. It was fun walking around with her and I got to know her quite a lot better.
Over the weekend some of us got dinner at this pretty decent Italian place right off Nevsky. Pizza is an amazing thing. We then went to this bar/club that Kim and Alex had been to the week before right near the Church of Spilled Blood. The place was kind of dead and had a slightly emo/punk crowd. The band didn’t start till 11pm, when I left with Naomi (who had been feeling sick all day). So it was a pretty pointless evening. It’s hard to do anything since the subway closes so early and nothing picks up until around 10:30/11pm. As you know, you either have to stay out all night, know someone’s place you can crash at, or go home early. I’m still too jetlagged to stay out all night, and the prospect of hanging out at McDonald’s (a decent enough place to spend the wee hours of the morning instead of the streets or sketchy bars) is not too appealing.
Sunday I went with my host sister and host mother to the movies. We went to this really pretty kinoteatr on Nevsky prospect. I guess it’s the oldest movie theater in the city. We saw Babel, or as they chose to call it in Russia, Babylon. Not sure why they couldn’t just call it Babel, but whatever. I was wondering if it was somehow politically motivated. As most of you probably know, the film is in multiple languages, which can make it a little tricky anyway, even without the Russian dubbing. I knew a bit about the movie, so that helped in figuring out what was going on. When the film was in languages besides English they’d have that language playing and then a Russian man’s voice play over it translating the Spanish, or Japanese, or whatever. I was really hoping they’d do that for the English parts too so at least I could understand what was going on in English. But, nope. For English they had full dubbing. So I had a Russian Brad Pitt. Everyone who spoke English had their own Russian voice. No subtitles in sight. Luckily it’s a film in which the dialogue doesn’t seem to be super important. Or maybe I have no idea what happened. But in any case, it was an experience. Every once in a while my host mother would lean over to me and try to explain to me what was going on, in Russian of course still.
After the movie Olya and I went to a Sushi place since we had coupons for 30% off. We met up with two of her friend who work as tutors for our program. They tutor Daphne (who goes to Brown with me) and Heidi (ROTC airforce, Wisconsin Univ, I think). Fun, fun.
Monday I met up with my tutor Nadya again at this pretty good bliniy place. I met two of her friends who go to school with her. I felt bad because I was so tired. We talked for 4 hours. I kept expecting her to be like, “well I should get going….” Or something of the sort, since that’s usually what happens. It became so exhausting speaking Russian. I felt as if I had been drugged or something and my face hurt from smiling and trying not to look horribly confused. I never knew that speaking a language for so long could have the effect of intoxication—negative intoxication. 5 hours of classes + 4 hours of talking + coming home to speak more Russian = one very tired American. I’m glad I’m getting to know her better though. We actually have a lot of the same interests, or old interests of mine. A lot of her interests are things I was interested in when I was like 15 or so and lost interest in over time. It was good fun talking about all sorts of movies and music together. She’s a big Tim Burton fan, so we were comparing movie titles in Russian and English. We talked about David Bowie and Glam Rock for a while, haha. I think at first it seemed like we would be really different, but she’s not so different from the types I was more familiar with at some of my art schools as far as interests. Think slight rebel, bit alternative, tight black pants, short dark bobbed hair, black glasses, eyeliner, reads a lot, doesn’t go out too much. It was nice to find some common ground, since I think I came across as a little bland and frazzled the first couple times we met. I’m making her a Grateful Dead mix for Saturday.
It’s been really cold this week. When I get home I just sit by the heater for a good 15 minutes sipping tea till my feet unthaw. On a regular basis the thermometer outside the kitchen window is around –15 - 20C when I leave for school. My host mother told me that it’s supposed to get down to –35C some night this week. The hair framing my face and the scarf around my neck freeze from my breath during the treacherous walk to the metro. It’s deceptively cold here. Like at home, the sunnier the day, the colder it will be. It’s been snowing a bit most days, which has been preventing so much of the dirty snow-slop from forming. I still think it’s crazy that the women here wear high heels in the winter, but I’m starting to get why. The heels act like little pick axes in the ice and snow. I’ve noticed with my boots that the pasty snow gets lodged in the “traction” indentations so that they lose traction altogether, making it crazy to walk. I might bust out my high heeled boots after all. I did fall for the first time the other day. Not badly, but I did get some air. I fell forward, thankfully, and on my hands. I don’t feel too bad though because pretty much everyone else in the group has fallen at least once and almost everyday on the way to the metro I see a Russian slip. The side streets off Nevsky are particularly terrible though. The drainage pipes from the buildings drip water onto the sidewalk and create these big malformed, lumpy ice heaves, full of random indentations and covered with a film of slick dirty, wet snow. It’s so dangerous. I slipped on one of these.
So things are getting better and better, despite falling on my face with my ballerina grace. I’ve adjusted to home life and Russian food. I keep craving fat though, in any form. I dream of potato chips, French fries, chocolate chip cookies, ice cream, fried chicken, you name it. It’s kind of gross, and you’d think I’d be getting enough fat from all the rich Russian dishes here. I haven’t yet caved into McDonald’s (although if you were here, Tania, we probably would’ve already gone together, to the horror of Alisa). It gets noticeably lighter everyday and the cold is becoming more bearable as is the pollution. You just can’t take in any really deep breathes. My language skills are no doubt slowly improving, but things can still be exasperating. I remember feeling this way in the summer, with respect to how frustrating it can be to express yourself (as in, who you are) in a foreign language. You feel kind of like you’ve lost your identity, or you’ve created a caricatured or partial version of yourself. There’s this bubble surrounding you all the time. I remember how disorienting it was over the summer with my family because I felt like they didn’t really know me at all, didn’t know that I was a reasonably intelligent person, that in reality was able to carry on a real conversation other than: “Hi. How are you.” I have a cat. He is black” or something of the sort. It’s hard to be you within the still crude confines of another language. All the subtleties and nuances of personality are lost. I find myself gesturing more and splashing emotions over my face, or speaking more exaggeratedly. It’s certainly hard to come across as funny or witty or sarcastic, or as much more than two-dimensional for me in this language. Well, it’s easy to be funny, as in making an idiot of yourself, but yeah.
At the same time though, not knowing this language all that well is also a kind of shield. Somehow it allows me to excuse certain things, like acting like a dufus. There’s no way I can be cool in Russian. It also works as a shield as far as distancing yourself from the culture, which is both good and bad. In some ways it makes you notice more because you’re not as able to be sucked into the multifarious business of living. You can just float around in your little bubble, as if you were suddenly made deaf and could finally appreciate everything visual. Or something of the sort. This time around, since my Russian is better and I’m more familiar with life here, the bubble doesn’t seem to be as thick or opaque. I find myself more comfortable in and distracted by daily life--snitches of conversation, billboards, advertisements, shop windows, people, everything. It’s all less inaccessible now. It’s harder to take in the panorama of the city when you keep being snagged on so many things. I guess it’s a bit Gogol-like, in the sense that he could only really think about, take in, absorb and write about Petersburg when he wasn’t in Russia. Perhaps that’s why Russia has turned out so many amazing writers. Because it’s somehow always easier to write about something that is in passing, that is dying, impermanent, or changing, not quite the same. To live in a country and a city that is shifting and seething under your feet. Perhaps that’s what you get when you decide to build a city on a swamp. Despite Petersburg’s multiple identities, reinventions, name changes, and whatnot, it does have its foundation, it’s backbone, somewhere amongst these swamps, clouds of summer mosquitoes, peeling porticoes, brutal Baltic wind, and perfect snow.
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