A quick post

What a boring title.

A couple of quick things because I should update but dont have much time.

Friday: Went to a concert and, afterwards saw the most beautiful thing I have seen here so far-fog on the river Volga. I was going to write a long entry just about this but unfortunately I am pressed for time and will just say now how wonderful it was. There was fog everywhere and me and some friends walked along the banks of the Volga and if you looked closely in clear areas you could see whisps of fog being pulled like cotton from off the surface of the water. And it took only a few steps for one to dissapear completely into the mist and only see a few feet ahead or behind you.

Saturday- Went into the woods with people from the Russian YMCA where we played games and celebrated Масленица with traditions that involved making a giant person sized doll, then tying to her a strand of fabric we recieved (into which we thought all of the bad things that happened in the previous year) and then burning her and then jumping over the fire. My friend took pictures so they will be forthcoming

Sunday: walked around the город. Actually, EVERYONE waled around the город. As this was the official day of Масленица everyone goes otu to гулать (walk around- but with a connotation of having no direction in mind, "stroll" is perhaps the more accurate definition)

Sunday: I also washed my clothes. By hand. A long entry is forthcoming about this b ecause I want to detail it properly.

On Monday I came down with something and have been sick but am feeling better. I didnt go to classes on Tuesday and thus was able to sample many various home remedies from my babooshka. These included:

-Garlic. Garlic all the time. Everywhere. With every meal she gave me two slices to put in my soup and two other slices to sniff.

Yes.

To sniff. Or rather, inhale as deeply as possible.

Apparently it helps stop infection and as I have no complaint against garlic I obliged. I think it works to some degree but I'm weary that some time in my future photos will show up somewhere of me with garlic up my nose and will cost me an important election.

-Honey. This is key. Honey with chai, on bread. And its quite good.

-Чай (tea): I thought Russians had a lot of chai to drink when they were healthy..but apparently the amount grows exponentially when one is болень (sick)

I'm not that sick anymore (and it was only a sore throat, a headache, and a nose which ran enough to rival Gogol's) so no one need worry. The only thing one has to be careful of here is the cold whether. Tomorrow it will likely be -30 degrees Celsius and in Arhangelsk it could be minus 40 or more.

We leave for Arhangelsk on Sunday and I am very excited.

Ok, I must go now, sorry for the staccatic rythym of this post I have about 1000 things to do today.

I think some new pictures should be uploaded soon.

До встреча,

-Гриша

Update

Just a few things:

I wish I could convey properly how incredible Wednesday night was. I could say that it was one of the best times I’ve had here but that would be a horribly trite phrase. I could carefully detail out every action so the only thing that would be missing would be the feeling, the unspoken subtleties of comfortability and ease. I could say a lot of things, in either English or Russian but none could fully describe just how fun it was. Therefore I will just say I spent Wednesday night celebrating Valentines day with three wonderful people and we talked and ate and laughed for about seven hours.

Oh, and Аня (the girl whose house we were at) had a cat.

Who I spoke Russian to.

And then she promptly ran away.

The cat.

Not Аня.

Other things of note:

-Tomorrow is Friday (but most likely today since that is when I’ll be posting this)

-There is a week long celebration going on currently in Ярославль called Маслоница so every night there are festivities like music concerts, film marathons, etc. Anyways I just found out that Saturday and Sunday morning a bunch of hot air balloons are going up in the air (obviously…) above the Волга River. I’m crossing my fingers that anyone can ride in them if they pay money, but either way I will go to see them.

-I just got the name today of someone who teaches lessons on the Балалайка (a Russian stringed instrument spelled like Balalaika?). I’ve found a few people who teach guitar here but the Balalaika would be very cool to learn if I have time.

-Saturday I’m going with people from the Имка to a big event in the park we’re doing for the kids. There will be games, etc.

-One thing I really enjoy noticing in Russia is the similiarities between cultures. I don’t mean the normal similarities like people’s opinions or ideas or sense of humor (though those are all interesting). I mean things like the easy release of breath and the sudden lightening of tension and cooling of temperature that ripples through a concert audience that second right after the last note of a classical music piece goes silent. Small things like that which are so inherently human that perhaps its foolish even to notice them.

-On Wednesday I bought a ticket and went to see Syranno De Berjerak (the spelling is ужасный but it’s the French play about the poet with the giant nose who loves the girl and ends up writing letters to her for someone else). AND its probably one of my favorite stories ever AND I sat in the first row. Anyways, it was incredible and after seeing the performance I was struck with such a powerful feeling of remembering why I love art and how important writing is to me and everything was just целый. The following paragraph in Russian I originally only wrote to show to one person but I’m including it here because I think it captures (or attempts to capture) the feeling I had leaving the theater and walking out into a new snow:

Сегодня после того, как я посмотрел спектакл, я вышел из театра и увидел что снег уже начнел идтй. Но, надо понимать что это снег был совсем другим чем какой-нибудь снег я видел здесь раньще...был новым и белым, был спокойным и молчаливым. И, идя домой под коричневым небом, в темной аллее ночи, и с снегом который шел мягко и молча, молча и мягко...казался мне что все люди спят сейчас и я единственный человек бодрый в мире...один на большой улице, в молчаливом стране, и под небом, снежным, коричевым.

-A week from this Sunday our group of American students is going on a 5 day trip to АрхангелскArkhangelsk) which should be beautiful and cold. I believe its located on the black sea but I’m not совсем уверен of that. (

-I don’t want people to get the impression that everything here is always wonderful and easy and incredible, that would be an unfair simplification of the experience, the country, and myself. There are definitely times when things are difficult and annoying and when I don’t feel like speaking Russian or seeing snow or being cold. But all of these are always balanced out by something good. According to the sheet they gave us on Culture Shock I am still in the first phase where everything is new and exciting and incredible. The next phase is one of disillusion and annoyance and overreaction etc so it will be interesting to see when and if that hits. And then the final stage is a reconciliation between the two. Though I honestly feel like I came into this with a preset idea of reconciliation which makes each small annoyance easier to handle and I wonder occasionally if I’m more prone to a quicker path to stage 3 but, then again its still only the first month. If in a few months I’m submitting angry pictures with the entire country of Russia inside of a giant red circle with a cross through it, don’t worry, it’s just stage II!

But yes, things are good here, I should go get work done now. Спокойни ночи!

-ALSO: There is a very good chance I will be in Moscow a week from tomorrow to see a concert. Yes, a Russian Rock Concert. Of one of my favorite Russian groups no less. Their name is Сплин (Spleen is the English spelling I guess).

-Гриша

Каждый раз когда я начинаюсь чувствовать себя плохо эдесь, что-то случилось что-бы я чуствовал себя лучше...

This was to be posted Saturday.

Despite the fact I had made plans to go to a museum today with a girl from the Roman History course I woke up feeling completely unmotivated and having very little energy to go знакомится (get to know, make friends with) people. So I sat in bed for awhile debating what to do and finally convinced myself that even if I didn’t think I would have that good of a time I may meet someone (she was inviting other people) who I end up becoming good friends with.

And that’s exactly what happened. The two guys joining us were named Alex and Olyeg, two of the nicest people I’ve met here (that’s actually tough to say, I’ve met a lot of wonderful people here already). Anyways, we all went to the museum, had a great time, and it turns out that both Alex and Olyeg are going to be in America this summer in order to improve their English. In order to receive their Visa they are required to give short, concise, well worded, descriptions in English of what they hope to achieve in the US, what they will be doing there, their philosophy of life, etc. to the consulate, I believe. Its insane compared with what I had to do to get my Visa, in fact, I didn’t even have to write or speak a word of Russian, everything was done through professors’ recommendations and forms filled out in my native language.

Anyways I promised to help them with their English (they are already quite good) and if all goes well I should be able to meet up with them some time this summer. After seeing the museum we all went to МакМастер (MacMaster – a rip off of McDonald’s) where we talked about various things and, after discussing differences in holidays between our countries, Аля (the girl from the Roman history class) decided she wanted to celebrate Valentine’s day as they don’t have it in Russia. Therefore all of us are going to get together this Wednesday and celebrate an Amercian Holiday in Russian. I am incredibly psyched.

Afterwards I went to the Имка (Russian YMCA equivalent) again. I’m so glad I decided to do this. I love the people there, I love the kids, and its incredibly fun. I could say a whole lot more about it and I probably should but I really want to wrap this up.

After that I went to an Organ Concert which was incredible and, after looking out on the Volga River at night, walking around, and taking the trolleybus back, I am sitting at home and getting ready to go to bed.

Its difficult to write about everything that happens because I am not a fan of constant cataloguing of events, but its occurred to me that I still have yet to describe the city in any detail as well as various other things I’m sure people are interested in. Therefore, if there is anything you would like to hear more (or less) about, or just have any questions in general be sure to comment and I will be happy to try and answer them.

I hope everyone is doing incredible and enjoying whatever occupies them currently,

До встреча

-Гриша

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Edit: Sunday I visited a monastery in an incredibly beautiful part of Yaroslavl and I recently posted new pictures of our trip there.
The first is the room where I am currently living
The next few until Lenin's statue are from the region of Yaroslavl where I live
and eveyrthing else is from the region where the monastery was.

Today’s Objective: The Mainstream Course

Friday I began the difficult task of trying to find a mainstream university course to take, that is, one with real Russian students. Its difficult for a number of reasons:

1). Расписение or the schedules….are, in the first place difficult to find and usually not posted until the day before classes start.

2.) The schedules….even after you find the schedule you still need to attempt to read it- this is almost impossible. Each schedule is arranged in various columns by time of day listed in roman numerals (you have to find out what time corresponds to what roman numeral in another part of the building and they are different for each schedule), class group and level, and most are filled in by hand in pencil. They are subject to change at a moment’s notice and there are no copies of the schedule, just one giant one on a bulletin board that each student needs to make a copy of in their own notebooks. Luckily a very kind девушка assisted us in reading the schedule for the history department.

3). The schedules….lets say you’ve managed to find the schedule, understand it to some degree, and are all ready and gung-ho to go to the class. Well, there’s a decent chance the class will have changed times without you knowing, or just have been canceled. They warn us about this before hand though it has yet to happen to me. However, as I will be trying out classes all next week I am eagerly expecting it at least once.

Its not really that bad but the first time you stand in front of a bulletin board for 20 minutes trying to figure out how to read the schedule it’s a bit disconcerting.

Anyways, Friday I tried out my first class. I had no idea what it was since the name wasn’t posted on the schedule. It turned out to be roman history and the professor was really nice and after class she asked me how I liked the city and I told her I loved being here though I was just starting to understand what “cold weather” really meant.

I really like the class and the people in it are very nice (I got the phone numbers of a few of them) the only thing is I’ve already taken Roman History and as nice as it would be to already know what is going on in the class I feel like that would kind of be cheating, not to mention it would be interesting to attempt to learn something new in Russian. Well, I have all of next week to see- I’ll be trying out at least one different class each day.

Хорошо, that's all for now, I'll continue this post later,

Счастливы!

-Гриша

Week 1!

Apologies for not keeping up with this more, I'll try to give an overview of this past week but so much has happened I will hardly be able to cover all of it. First, however, a story about my first meal in Yaroslavl that was not provided by a бабушка (grandmother).

I was with my group (4 people total) and, after a morning of touring the city, we stop by a local diner for lunch where, not to my surprise at all, I could barely understand the menu. But I stand there for a while, looking at it and finally I see something I recognize "фасол с мясом" (fasole s myasom) and i think "well, I have no idea wat the first word is but I'm pretty sure the second word means meat". Not only is meat good but I know what it is so I go ahead and order that, the entire time wondering pleasantly what "fasole" (the first word) might be. So I wait. And I wait. And finally the waitress arrives.

With the most gigantic mound of red kidney beans I have ever seen in my life.

And I think "ok, well, I like beans, at least there will be meat"

"с мясом" I hear her ask, and I nod my head at least 4 times and say "Да!" (yes)

And so she takes out a giant vat of butter and begins to pour it over the aforementioned mound of beans.

And then I realize that not only have I forgotten the correct way to decline the word 'meat" in the instrumental case but, of more immediate importance, there will be no meat served with this meal.

For those of you that don't speak russian the word с маслом means "with butter" and is somewhat close to my incorrect idea of what "with meat" was.

And so my first lunch in Yaroslavl consisted of water, butter, and about a pound of kidney beans.

Interestingly enough, I wrote a poetic parody about it that strikes me, and probably only me, as humorous. For those of you unfamiliar with the Russian poet Blok, you should be. He's great. Anyways, he has this one poem which is one of my favorites and which I shall post here. Included afterwards is a direct word for word translation just so people hwo don't speak russian will have an idea of what it is about - granted it completerly lacks the beauty, flow and rythym of the original:

Ночь, улица, фонарь аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет
Живи еще хоть четверть века
Все будет так. Исхода нет.

Умреш- начнеш опять сначала,
И повторится все, как встар;
Ночь ледяная, рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.

-А Блок

Night, street, streetlamp, store
Meaningless and dim light
Living still after a fourth of a century
All will be so. No escape.

[You] Die- [you] start again from the beginning
And repeat everything, as before.
Night, icy ripples of the canal,
Store, street, streetlamp.

It is this poem I chose to write a parody of. It follows the rythm decently and has absolutely none of the artistic value of the original,

Нож, кухня, фасоль, тарелка.
Красная гора - это обедь.
Смотрел на ней хоть три минута-
Я уж купил. Исхода нет.

И так – я ем. Что можно делать?
Судба- единственный король.
Нож, мой голод- души, живота,
Тарелка, кухня, фасоль

and a word for word translation:

Knife, cafe, beans, plate
A red mountain- this is lunch
[I've] stared at it already three minutes-
Already bought. No escape.

And so - I eat. What can I do?
Fate - the only king.
Knife, my hunger - of soul, of stomach,
Plate, cafe, beans.


I can almost hear Блок turning in his grave.

Ok I dont want to make this too long so I will wrap up listing a few things I have done this week.

-Had classes

-Walked around the city for hours on end

-Asked for (and recieved) help finding various places

-Went to a music and time museum, got a tour of which I understood about 50 percent

-Saw a play at the theater in town.

-Saw an Ingmar Bergman film in russian at a local film club (scenes from something it was called), understood almost all of it, and made two russian friends there with whom I have hung out with.

-Volunteered at the russian equivalent of a YMCA, spoke english to young russians, was promptly told by said young russians that Russia was better than the USA, and, above all, spent about 5 hours at the YMCA with other volunteers about my age and made friends (russians would say "aquaintances) with about 6 or 7 real russians, all of whom are very friendly, very funny, and just wonderful people in general.

-Had my first birthday in Russia which was amazing. Recieved chocolate, and ice cream from my class, chocolate and a special dinner from my babooshka, various birthday greetings from aforementioned russians and ate 3 dinners.

Really things have been great so far but I should wrap up this post. Today I tried to find a course to take at the Russian university and it was an ужасный experience because the schedules are so hard to read. I will talk about this later.

До скорого,

Гриша

This was meant to be posted some time ago

Over a week ago to be exact..., but here it is anyways:

Hello all. Though this will probably won’t be posted online for a few days I am currently writing from my new home in Yaroslavl. My host бабушка (grandmother) is wonderful and very interesting to talk to but I will get into that later. Today I think I experienced to a very small degree all the various stages of culture shock, or at least the beginning hintings of its presence.But first, I’ll finish up talking about Moscow

After my last post I stayed at the hotel two more days while we finished up orientation. Probably the best story that came out of those two days occurred one night when, trying and failing miserably to sleep, I turned on the TV and was incredibly happy and surprised to find a Russian cartoon on. In fact I think I actually said outloud “Oh Да!” All Russian cartoons tend to lean towards the incredible (in all senses of the word) and this one actually explained the story behind why cats and dogs don’t like eachother. Apparently one day there was this dog who had ruined his hat and went to get it fixed by the seamstresses..who were, of course, cats. They fixed it for him, BUT while waiting for him to return a very rich goat arrived at their shop one day. A very rich goat who, incidentally, had also just ruined his hat and had been laughed at by a female goat all in the same day. I’d just like to pause here and point out the seven plus layers of tension underlying this cartoon already. Anyways the goat can’t find a hat he likes so, in a last ditch effort the main cat gives him the dog’s hat because he knows he will make more money off of the rich goat than the dog who was a sheperd. There was also another odd show on that basically enacted out Russian jokes and, at the punch line of each, became host to an array of raining smiley faces with big lips that laughed at the aforementioned Russian анекдоты. Said floating mouths helped to make it clear when the punchline was but did absolutely nothing to assist with the humor of any of the jokes.

The last day in Moscow I went with two of the girls in my group to see the рынок (market). Even though I didn’t buy anything it was nice because it’s one of the only situations where everyone around you wants to speak to you. As a result I got a lot of practice saying “no thank you, I don’t want one”.

But probably my favorite thing so far has been our 4 hour train ride from Moscow to Yaroslavl. After waiting for about an hour in the train station (вокзал) we saw that our train was finally boarding and headed outside where we saw what, for me, was the most wonderful, albeit stereotypical, scene ever. Outside it had started snowing and the air was frigid with cold. The ground was a mix of sloshing brown slush and since it was only snowing lightly the entire train station acted as an immense looming backdrop seen through the flakes. There were trains, and I mean trains, each lined up next to one another with the backs facing us, and stretching as far as the eye could see (this is not an exaggeration, we had to walk for a good 10 minutes just to get to our вагон or train car) In between each train was a snow covered walking path that had those giant metal speakers you usually see in films about Russia or in army training camps every 50 feet or so. If I had to describe the scene the entire feeling was just- brown, a dirty brown but not a disgusting brown, a brown that loomed over the scene while at the same time subtly pervading the expanse of cold, dark blue. It was almost like the feeling one gets during a long summer’s day when its hot and sticky and the day feels as if its stretching just a little farther holding out against the night and things feel both too thin and too full of nothing at once. It was like that but imagine the color scheme changed to a darkish blue and imagine that stretched out feeling, instead of being hot, as being rooted in cold, actually frozen in cold so its not longer stretching just completely and utterly living static. And after a long period of trying to get our giant чимоданы (bags) into our small space we sat drinking sugery чай (tea- learn to recognize this word, you’ll see it a lot, its all they drink), warming up and watching through the windows into the night and the snow covered ground and the black endless forests that passed by.

Then we arrived in Yaroslavl and took a micro bus to drop each of us off . I was the first and I spent the whole time reciting my hsotesses’ name so I wouldn’t get it wrong. Люция Владимировна (Lyootseeya Vladimirovna) met me at the door and then, after carrying my things up, she told me I was not wearing enough in the cold and made me food and tea. She’s very nice and very interesting to talk to. This is already becoming too long of an entry. Very quickly about today:

We were shown around the city of Yaroslavl. It was below zero and we were shown the university which looks like a 1 star hotel on the inside and various entrances are through random metal doors in back alleys. Also the toilets have no toilet paper so you have to bring your own. But it was interesting and fun though I quickly became tired and cold. It was frustrating as the day went on trying to communicate with people in various shops so that by the end of the day I came back wanting a break from it all. But I’ve had time to relax now and had a nice dinner so I feel like I’ve come full circle. Alright I don’t feel like writing anymore-

That’s another thing, I’m not sure how much I’m going to write in this. I want to of course but at the same time I don’t want to detract from my Russian and I know from summer school how much one can improve without speaking or writing any English. The other thing of course is I’d like to write to some degree just so I’m not completely rusty when I get back. Regardless I’ll try to find a balance. Alright, I am off to talk with моя бабушка.

Also, we saw the Volga river which was beautiful.

And tomorrow we are going to a monastery and seeing a play.

And I start classes on Monday.

До скорово

-Гриша