Updates

Summary

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:51:00 +0400

I’ve been too busy to write about all the things I’ve been doing, so here’s a quick update.

In January I travelled across Russia by train with a group of other American girls here on the same program. At the end of January I had to say goodbye to my wonderful roommate, Judith. In February a new wonderful roommate arrived, Julie, and our classes started up again. In March, my friend since middle school, Katie, came to visit. And in between there has been lots of Russian studying, cloudy days, and trying to figure out how to play guitar.

As my Russian skills have improved, my writing is finally beginning to move from notes and sketches to stories, but still nothing worth sharing yet. (For those who don’t know or have forgotten, I’m writing in English, but the stories are set here so language development is very important.)

I have plans to fill in some of the blanks, I just don’t know how soon I’ll have another opportunity to sit in a wi-fi enabled space until my battery runs out.

New Year’s Eve

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:47:49 +0300

I’ve never been a very big fan of New Year’s Eve. To me, it means the holidays are winding down and it’s time to go back to school.

Here, it means the holidays are just getting started.

It is my understanding, and this is based on observation and word of mouth, not research, not even Wikipedia, that during Soviet times Christmas traditions were shifted to New Year’s just as pagan traditions were once incorporated into Christian holidays. That means you have a Grandfather Frost, who looks a lot like Santa, and he has a helper to assist him in handing out gifts (her name is Snegorochka and she’s his granddaughter). There are New Year’s trees to decorate and New Year’s gifts to exchange. New Year’s Eve begins as a family holiday and then after midnight people go out and meet friends.

Even though Christmas is once again a permissible holiday, New Year’s Eve has kept its place as the more prominent holiday. There are New Year’s themed movies. This year the hit is New Year’s Tariff, about a phone plan that calls back in time one year. Then there’s the classic, Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Bath!, a Soviet equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life, at least in the annual viewing sense.

If New Year’s Tariff taught me anything more substantial than MTS is the best company to buy a sim card from (the movie is essentially a hollywood style hour and a half long ad for the biggest cell phone provider), it’s that Red Square is the best place to be for New Year’s. Which makes sense—the country’s biggest holiday in the country’s most renowned square.

So, Hannah and I watched Irony of Fate today and then went to Red Square. We were a little early, which meant the lines to get through security were not very long, but it also meant most people there were other tourists who thought like we did, that New Year’s is celebrated in the hours leading up to midnight and then everything winds down. It turns out midnight for many Russians is when things begin, when the teenagers are allowed to leave the family party and go out with their friends.

We avoided the tourists, but a group of Russians walking past heard our English and one of them asked for a photo with us, probably to be able to say, “Look! I met Americans! Real live Americans!” and we shrugged, smiled for the picture, and the group walked away. Well, then another Russian decided he also needed a photo with us. And another. The next person to approach us asked how much we were charging. I answered 100 rubles and he believed me until we started laughing.

We spent the rest of the night walking around to keep our toes from freezing. There was such an atmosphere of excitement, it didn’t feel like we were just waiting around but like the saying goodbye to the old year was part of the party. There was a wide mix of celebrants—the uniformed guards, the skaters on the Red Square Rink, the tourists, the average Russians, the people with light up devil horns (possibly because it’s the year of the bull?), the huddled groups who had managed to sneak champaign past the security guards. At midnight there were fireworks and cheers and after a bit people started migrating to the metro.

It was more fun and climatic than any New Year’s Eve I’ve experienced before. But it was still New Year’s. I had hoped that maybe celebrating the holiday here would give me some profound insight into why Russians hold it so dear, but I find that the only thing that will be different after this December 31st is the same thing I encounter every year: I’ll have trouble writing the correct date until at least March.

Photos

An Easier Way to buy Train tickets

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:47:00 +0300

I’ve complained before about the horrors of trying to buy train tickets. Well, Hannah and I went to the train station expecting to waste much of the day buying tickets for our upcoming Trans-Siberian adventure. We were, for once, pleasantly surprised.

We were already standing in a line when we noticed a couple ATM-like machines along one wall that no one was using. Upon further investigation, we found it was possible to buy tickets with a credit card using these machines. It gave us much more control. We could chose exactly the places we wanted without having to speak to an unpleasant woman behind a window. There were a few annoyances, like not being able to buy only one lower bunk per order, but we made it work. Knowing how easy that was, I now wonder why anyone stands in line to buy tickets.

Pictures from my week with Hannah

Stomping grounds

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:46:03 +0300

Today, Hannah and I went two years back in time.

Well, not exactly, but it felt that way, going back to Vuikhino, a place so familiar and yet so foreign. Hannah and I crossed this market once or twice a day for four months, and neither of us had been back since. It’s at the end of the purple line, not a place I’ve had any reason to go. But because Hannah was around, we decided to visit her host mother.

Tanya welcomed us into her home like family, and truly Hannah had been family for those four months. Tanya and I’d had a little exchange going. One day, she sent me some borscht, because she’s the kind of host mom who asks her students how they spend their time, when she learned that “Myra, the friend who lives in the dorm” had to cook for herself, I think she became concerned. I sent the container back with some lentil soup I’d made and I think that convinced her that I wouldn’t starve, though I’m not sure if she ate it. Later, for Easter, she gave me a decorate egg. I didn’t actually meet her until near the end of the trip, but even then it felt like we already knew each other.

Today Tanya fed us and entertained us with stories of traveling to Egypt with her daughter (a relative works as a travel agent and advised her to snatch up these package trips while they were affordable) and updates on how family members are doing (her son’s job is directly affected by the crisis. His company is closing for the month of January and may or may not reopen in February, but the workforce will be decimated either way and those that remain will take pay cuts).

In the evening we had a little reunion with Ksenia, a very kind Russian girl who spent many evenings at the dorm while we studied abroad.

I wish we’d had more time to just walk around the neighborhood. It was a good place to take walks. Now I live in the center of the city, where buildings, sidewalks, and roads have no spacers between each other. Farther out, there is often a line of trees or swatches of grass (snow this time of year) to break things up.

Cemetery Tourism

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 21:43:33 +0300

Today being Meredith’s last day in Russia, it was mostly spent sightseeing. We started near Red Square, but it was closed, so we just walked around trying to get close to it but getting turned away at every street. We then decided to go to Novodevichy cemetery where lots and lots of famous people are buried.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a famous person’s grave on purpose. It’s a strange thing. Today I saw where Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Bulgakov, Khrushchev, and Yeltsin are buried. I felt like I ought to experience powerful emotions by their gravesides but it felt more like checking them off a list of “Graves on Must See” and ignoring everyone else. Maybe I would have dwelt on how disrespectful that is, but it was getting very cold in the walled-in cemetery.

Wanting to stay warm before dinner, we did some Metro tourism after that. We visited Sparrow Hills, Kievskaya, Belorusskaya, Mayakovskaya, Chekhovskaya, Trubnaya, and Sretenskii Bulvar—a few of my favorite stations. It was fascinating to actually look at these stations attentively rather than just in passing, something I haven’t really taken time to do (though I keep planning to) since my first trip to Moscow in the summer of 2005.

We had a farewell dinner at a Georgian restaurant then saw Meredith off.

Photos from Novodevichy