Умом Россию не понять
On Pandora, the oceans aren't depleted.
Blog readers, I am in the US right now, after a brief trip to Amsterdam. Needed a break from the constant joy and amusement that is life in Russia. I’ll be in SF for a few weeks and then in New York for a few days, then back to Peter in mid-February. Let’s hang out!
So sorry for long time no update. I haven’t been doing much–in fact, I feel currently engaged in the longest and most utterly comprehensive leisure period of my life. I have so, so little to do, it’s amazing. I have been sleeping extremely late. We also, like the rest of the world, are experiencing a huuuuge snowstorm. Rumor has it, this is the most snow Petersburg has seen in 130 years. It’s feet and feet of snow; it’s been snowing for like two weeks straight it seems. The city also appears unable to deal with it. Sidewalks haven’t been cleared at all in some places, which means there’s fluffy snow to slog through, but beneath treacherous mounds of ice that was once snow. Walking around has become a seriously precarious experience that requires constant vigilance. Thankfully there is little slush (comparatively little I guess) at this point and hopefully I’ll be gone before everything melts.
Also, in part responsible for lack of blogging is the holiday season. Bluntly put, the holidays sucked. Being halfway around the world from my family and in a country that does not celebrate a holiday on December 25th did not inspire in me feelings of Christmas cheer. On Christmas Eve I went to a club that purported to give a free bottle of champagne to every lady, but they were out of champagne when we got there although the club was basically empty due to the snowstorm. There was, however, a drag show (!) which I honestly never thought I’d see in Russia. The drag queen was really holding it down with her comedy routine and wearing absurd wigs and ball gowns, and every one of her jokes seemed to be about orgasms. To my surprise all the dudes in the club loved it. They were cracking up completely, which was nice to see. The drag queen was backed up by 100% female go-go dancers wearing holiday bustiers, who did a sort of mechanical-looking sexy dance. They were replaced by dancers wearing neon thongs and bras. Stay classy, Christmas Eve!
On Christmas I went to some faculty holiday parties at work, where the English department scarfed down pungent blue cheese by the forkfull and guzzled champagne. They also made some references to Christmas–oh, isn’t today Christmas somewhere???–which caused them all to have a good chuckle. Although I must admit it was kind of nice to relax with my co-workers, most of whom seem to think I don’t understand Russian or English. After a long afternoon of drinking free champagne, Hardie and I ate some Chinese food at the only Chinese restaurant I’ve ever been to that was staffed entirely with non-Chinese people, and went home. Holy night indeed!
Soon after Christmas came my birthday, which was fun but also kind of sad. Since my birthday is just two days after Christmas I’ve never spent it away from home and already it’s kind of an awkward day–like hey guys, celebrate me! But I ended up having a nice day, made some french onion soup and had some people over and everyone was extremely convivial.
Anyway, the holidays have been quite strange. Today is New Year’s Eve, which for Russians is like the secular part of Christmas (tree, presents, family dinner) combined with normal NYE things (drinking, fireworks, revelry, insane/excessive presence of riot police in the streets) combined with Halloween (costumes). This holiday, (which at home is my least favorite, any holiday that prompts so many people to say things like “be safe out there tonight” and “let’s get fucking wasted” is not the holiday for me) doesn’t really capture any holiday spirit for me either. It feels like Christmas hasn’t happened yet, or like it just didn’t occur, which I guess it didn’t, because it’s just another day in the year. It’s so strange to think about what’s going on at home, because it seems like it couldn’t really be happening. I wonder how it’ll feel when I get home in January.
Anyway, happy holidays everybody!
And so ends the first semester of my illustrious teaching career.
Yes, to my delight, on Friday the semester ended for me. For everyone else at the college it continues on a schedule I don’t understand at all, involving exams both now and after the holidays, but it’s not really important because I won’t be there! Also, pleasantly, I’m still getting paid although I’m not working! Yay!
The end of the semester did change my attitude toward my studyenti. I guess this is typical of Russian schools but they started coming to class a bit more regularly, which I have to say, bothered me because, really, what is the point of attending the last class of the year when you missed the last eight or twelve? Will I give you a better grade? No, I will remember your face and give you a worse grade.
Still, a lot of the students did come more in the second half of the semester and, to my delight, in several cases seemed to lose their bad attitudes and actually start, you know, trying to speak English. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before here, but the college is like 90% female–okay maybe 75%. The boys more often than the girls have attitude issues. In my pre-intermediate classes, there is always at least 1 boy who is just not fucking having it. Like he will sit there, staring at me like I’m a total idiot, laugh at me kind of derisively when I try to ask him a simple question in English (Do you travel by train? for example), and then tell one of the well-behaved girls their answer in Russian to be translated into English. This is ridiculous to me because I don’t care if you laugh at me or smirk or stare at me in a weird way; doing so will not result in you learning anything, or me changing the class, or giving you a good grade. Trying to convince me with your facial expression that you are too cool for the class will not, in fact, make you too cool for it. Yes, it will probably make me feel awkward, but I have a tolerance for awkward feelings. It will also probably make me dislike you.
So this was a problem in at least two of my classes on and off throughout the semester. But at the end of the semester, to my joy, a lot of the boys changed their ways and started coming, doing their homework, and participating. That was actually, dare I say it, kind of rewarding!
Also rewarding were the whimpery sad sounds and frowny faces that the girls in my pre-intermediate classes made when I told them it was our last day. Ah, supra-linguistic communication! The more advanced girls asked me if I would be back next semester, but I prefer the pre-intermediate response. They made me promise I would be teaching them again, which at that moment, made me happy as well.
In Business English, however, the strangest End of Semester occurrence transpired. After over a month of zero attendance (I think, I stopped waiting more than ten minutes for them to arrive after a while), Aksinia showed up to class. Surprising indeed! I was not excited about teaching a one-person class using the lesson plan I had so I asked her if she had anything she wanted to talk about. She responded quite forcefully. Yes, she did–American psychologies. What is that? Ah, the age old, business issue of who pays in the US when a girl and boy go on a date!
So we talked about this for a while and our conversation got more and more personal, until it was just Aksinia venting about Russian men and Russian society and the opportunities they both afforded to young women. Verdict: opportunities are not good. Aksinia was torn between the desire to have a career and the desire to have a family. Not so unusual a plight. However, her timeline was disturbing. She said if she doesn’t get married by the time she’s 25 and start having kids, she’ll basically be an old maid. If she focuses on her career and waits until she’s 27, she’ll be a bit too old to catch a good man. But wither these good men? She also said she was disinclined to get married that early because when her imaginary future husband divorces her when she’s 30, she’ll be stuck with no job skills and a baby and no looks and then she’ll really be lost. Plus the population imbalance (more women than men, mostly due to wars and alcoholism) makes it harder to find a good guy who won’t cheat on you and who makes money and who isn’t a total drunkard (indeed such a man in Russia is more like a mythical creature than a potential mate). She had friends, she said, who got married when they were 17 and now she can hardly talk to them because they know so little about the world.
The conversation then turned to a variety of depression hypothetical scenarios. What would I do if I was dating someone now, and I really loved him, but he said he would leave me if I didn’t have a baby with him? I would tell him to go right ahead and leave, I said. But if I really loved him? I told her I would probably take some time to question what was really going on there, because its hard for me to imagine loving someone who could so completely fail to understand my life goals, my ownership of my body and basic family planning, among other things.
Was it okay if you were, for example, twenty and you had not found a boyfriend yet because you are waiting for someone special and you don’t want to just go with many different guys? Indeed it is okay, I told her. It’s important to know who you are outside a relationship, and inside a relationship. Apparently this is a very American answer, I later learned, though I’m not sure exactly how.
Any what if, you are, for example, twenty years old (she kept specifying that it was an example about a twenty year-old when she had only a few minutes ago told me that that was her age), and you saved yourself for your prince, but your prince broke your heart? How could you go back? At this point, I was really beginning to question the connection to topics of Business English and my expertise on these issues. I told her to stop waiting for a prince because princes don’t exist, because your life is not a romantic comedy.
Aksinia really wants to be a diplomat, she said, so she can travel all over the world and go to LA especially (diplomatic hotspot, naturally), but no one in Petersburg understands her, she said. Her girlfriends don’t understand why anyone would want to have a real career, why you would want to leave home, why you wouldn’t want to just find a husband.
Poor Aksinia! I didn’t really know what to tell her except that she should go for her dreams and do what’s right for her! I did all I could to encourage her and I think she left, finally, feeling encouraged. I really felt like a guidance counselor. At the same time I can’t imagine facing such issues at this point in my life–get married right now or be an old maid forever? Have a baby to keep your man, even though you know he’ll leave you in a few years no matter what you do? Things like this make me pretty grateful that I grew up in the US. For women my age, it seems like the conflict between family and career is ten years down the line and I can’t imagine facing it now. In previous posts I think I complained, about the limited views of my female students, that I couldn’t understand why they would go to college if they didn’t think women should work. Now I understand that a little better.
****Bonus! Bear suit pix****
In a Bear Suit, attempting to pose like a Russian. Clearly I lack the flair!
So my trip this weekend was really, really awesome. Most of the time I was actually not in Moscow, but driving around in Dima’s Ford Focus and hanging out in wonderful Tula.
Mayakovsky Museum
After an overnight platskart train ride, I arrived in Moscow at 6:45 am feeling not so very refreshed from my slumber in a miniature bunk bed in a train car crammed with people. However, meeting up with the wonderful Alexi Shaw soon brightened my spirits. I dropped my stuff off at his apartment, we speedily consumed several espressos at Shokoladnitsa and we headed to the Mayakovsky Museum.
Usually, museums devoted to writers are a little, well, stuffy. They tend to involve lots of documents you can’t read, but seem like they’re probably not that important, and a lot of photographs of the person in question looking stoic. Sometimes they feature real artifacts of the person’s life, like the reverential display of Tolstoy’s shirt and shoes at a museum in Petersburg,
but not usually. The Mayakovsky Museum is totally different. It’s definitely one of the best museums I’ve ever been to, because it really evokes the spirit of Mayakovsky. It’s more experiental. The multi-floor museum is full of wooden and metal apparatuses that reference constructivism, and you sort of wander through this maze-like, collage-like environment learning things from the ladies who work there, who were really friendly and knowledgeable and didn’t mind when we touched things. It’s actually quite an inspiring space, because it captures the creative energy of Mayakovksy–though I have to admit, I am no Russian poetry buff and I have read shamefully little of his work. I will say, however, that he cuts quite a striking figure.
After that we went on a long walk through the center, and got up close and personal with the Peter the Great statue I posted about earlier. Apparently that statue is taller than the Statue of Liberty. It also has a mechanically rotating flag on top! Just as charming in real life as in pictures. We also passed a famous sculpture that raises awareness of sins against children. It features a lot of extremely creepy animal-people monstery things who embody such diverse sins against children as prostitution, war, pseudoscience, ignorance, alcoholism, child labor, sadism (!) and indifference. Imagine explaining that to your eight year-old!
The Russian Pavilion: Alexi insisted I take a picture because "it looks like Lenin is wearing a bib"
We also visited the All-Russia Exhibition Center, a series of pavilions meant to display the accomplishments of the the nationalities of the USSR. The VDNKh as it’s acronymed in Russian is one of the most ridiculous places I have ever been to. It really shows the clash of the Soviet past and the Capitalist present. Construction on the pavilions was begun in 1930 and continued until the ’60s. The architecture is nothing short of absurd–over the top, ostentatious socialist realism. Naturally, the pavilions have been converted to commercial centers. The Russian Pavilion now houses an absurd museum and a gallery of booths selling cheap crap–holograms of naked girls, blacklight art, goth attire, pirated DVDs and CDs, insence, electronics, and several are devoted to medicine and vitamins. One pavillion houses the remains of a mammoth. These pavilions are now home to one of the basest forms of capitalism. Ah, cruel fate. There’s also an amusement park here, which means that the whole place is constantly subjected to extremely loud techno music. We declined a ride on the extremely high ferris wheel.
Naturally, we visited the strange museum in the Russian pavilion, although I cannot for the life of me recall what exactly it was supposed to be exhibiting. It seemed to be a bunch of junk that one would want to get rid of at a garage sale.
There were two gigantic, detailed and totally unread maps of Russia.
Most of this stuff was not behind glass and was covered with five and ten-kopek coins (the equivalent of like, less than half a cent.) Naturally we picked up some of the stuff, like a wooden turtle with a crossword puzzle on its back, which was next to a bird house with a crossword on it. It was made in like 1999. Ah, the native crafts of Russia!
There was also this beautiful bathmat with Putin's face on it.
Strangely, the cashier woman tried to get us to participate in some kind of a contest or scavenger hunt, but we didn’t accept her offer. We did, however, play dress up with the costumes the museum provided.
Tartar Sauce
I also got to punch Alexi in the head using an oversize boxing glove.
There’s also the Cosmonautic Museum nearby, which features this inspiring appendage
Alexi considers travelling into space, the final frontier.
After this exhilarating day, we ate some Lebanese food with our future fellow traveler, Dima, and some of his friends who were English. We also attended a British Pub (which are EXTREMELY popular here) whose claim to fame was their imported pint glasses.
And so, with dreams of Yasnaya Polyana and a road trip in our heads, our day of tourism in Moscow concluded…
There is something so dismal about the Centigrade scale, so depressing. Maybe it’s the way it can dip so far below zero, in a way that Fahrenheit can’t? Or perhaps the way I can’t really understand what it means. -16 °C, -21 °C with windchill? Highs of -11 °C and lows of -19 °C? What does this mean? Well, -16 °C is around 4 °F. The rest of the world will feel like a sauna after this winter. Definitely feel silly to ever have complained about the cold in New York.
It seems that when I came back from Moscow, the weather in Petersburg was different. The canals were part frozen, it had snowed, the sky was clear (!) because it’s so cold. With the solstice just around the corner (Monday) it’s always sunrise, sunset or night, which is frankly kind of cool, because you always feel like you got up before dawn and I ride the bus at 10:30 to work in the sunrise and walk home around 3:00 when it’s setting.
And yet, Russia also gives me some perspective on the cold. Everyone I’ve talked to from Siberia has mentioned that in their hometown it’s currently a brisk -42 °C!!!! I didn’t think on Earth it could get that cold, least of all where people lived and went about their daily lives, doing such things as going to work! If you’re wondering how cold that is in your language, -40 °C and -40 °F are the same. THE SAME!
So I thought I was going to post the rest of the stuff I did in Moscow a week or two ago, but, alas, I got distracted by carrot salad and other stuff and then went to Moscow again this past weekend! About which I will post shortly. For some reason, I feel the need to preserve some kind of chronology and so now I’m going to finish up what I did on my first Moscow trip.
Kramskoi's Inconsolable Grief
We went to the Tretyakov Gallery, which is like a more prestigious version of the Russian Museum. It has all the most famous works of Russian painters (the Hermitage, if you’re wondering, houses exclusively European art). Photography is not allowed in the Tretyakov, which is normal for museums. You have to buy a permit to take pictures but usually I just do it without the permit and when they tell me to stop I pretend I didn’t know. In this case, however, the second I took this picture a swarm of babushka-security guards all menacingly wearing anti-Swine Flu masks descended upon me and yelled at me and informed me that they would be watching me on the security cameras if I continued. This painting is mentioned several times in the book I wrote my thesis about, thus my interest in it.
Why are gigantic bells always breaking? At the Kremlin.
The first night we also went to the Circus, where I accidentally sat in the wrong seat (4th row from the floor, not 4th row in the balcony) so I had a really prime view of a kind of awesome circus that was entirely on ice skates and involved several misbehaving animals, including four huge sea lions who seemed like maggot-dog hybrid creatures. Also got to eat cotton candy! Amazing.
After a restful few hours of sleep at the hostel (where I was the only girl in an 8-person room–one of the Russian tutors turned out to be a student of mine who had never attended class. His reason “I just can’t come to school on Mondays, I just can’t do it. I don’t have interest. I’m sorry!”.) we had a tour of the Kremlin. This was not, sadly, as interesting as it might have been because it was way too fucking cold to be interested in anything that involved walking around outside. We mainly looked at the churches in the Kremlin, which, while amazing and important etc. are probably not of interest to the readership of this blog so I’m not going to mention them further.
Patriarch's Ponds
After lunch I met up with Alexi, who is living in Moscow and working for a Coca-Cola bottler. He rescued me from the Arbat walking tour and instead showed me several cool places and took me to Moo-Moo, the Nyamburg of Moscow. He took me to see Patriarch’s Ponds, which looked especially dismal in the cloudy weather. This pond features prominently in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, one of my favorite books. The devil first appears at this pond. It does not look quite as attractive as I had imagined it.
The next day, we toured the Novodevichy Monastery, an experience which was, again, sullied for me by the total coldness that I was feeling. Next to the Monastery is one of the most important cemeteries in Russia, where many great figures are buried, from Gogol and Chekhov to Yeltsin and huge variety of sports stars and scientists and musicians and clowns and composers and astronauts and military people that I’ve never heard of. It’s always surprising to me how chaotic cemeteries are–full of dead flowers, moss, overgrown places, undergrown places, garbage.
Yeltsin's Grave
After the cemetery I got to visit the Church of Christ the Savior, which you might remember from the post about snow in Moscow. Christ the Savior was recently constructed to replace a church the Soviets blew up. It is enormous, the biggest church in Russia, and it is totally unlike the other Orthodox churches in Moscow. Normally, Orthodox churches do a good job of evoking a spiritual feeling in the visitor, even if the visitor isn’t religious. It’s something to do with the icons and the iconostasis and the darkness and the insence and everything. This church did nothing of the sort. It looked more like a Catholic church than an Orthodox one. Even the icons didn’t look Orthodox–some really looked like Mexican pictures of saints. I’ve also never been in an Orthodox church that was as confusing to navigate–I guess because it’s so big?–but this church was like a maze. Also, it had a metal detector. Definitely a strange experience.
What else, what else! Went to a modern art museum (Petersburg doesn’t really have one) that had a show called Pantheon of the Russian Underground, which was about underground (obviously) artists from the last thirty or forty years (including my man Erofeev!). Ate my first Cinnabon and spotted one of the few Starbucks in Russia. Had tea with Alexi at one of the fanciest restaurants in the city. Saw the Lyubyanka, the former KGB headquarters, and the Seven Sisters–Stalin’s skyscrapers.
Went to the biggest McDonald’s in the world! It opened in ‘89, and the lines to get a burger were hours long. According to Bryan, at that time there was no internationally valued currency, so McDonald’s was paid in fur coats, which they then resold for a profit.
All in all, an amazing time! I was so exhausted afterward, I felt like I took me a week to catch up on my sleep again. I really thought I would hate Moscow, since people so often make it seem like it’s totally opposed to Petersburg (like New York and LA, you like one and hate the others), but I really enjoyed the city. It’s definitely the biggest city I’ve ever been to and it was quite refreshing to be in a different, totally new environment. It’s been a while since I’ve really been a tourist anywhere.
Indeed, I enjoyed it so much that I went back a few weeks later! More on that tomorrow…
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