More Russian Bits and Pieces

Greetings from the lowest geographical point in Europe! This is not an exaggeration - Astrakhan is literally the lowest point on the continent. It used to be part of the Caspian Sea, as opposed to being located near the Caspian Sea. This would explain the near-routine flooding...

Today's the Fourth (duh), and thus we managed to get the second half of the day off (this was not the original plan, but apparently we complain pretty well). Of course, there was a writing exam (in which I may have permanently harmed the Russian language) and a vocabulary quiz this morning, but we'll take what free time we can get. There's supposed to be a get-together tonight, but it doesn't start until 8, which is only an hour before the marshytka system starts getting sketchy, and I don't know if I want to be left at its mercy... The original plan was to hit the beach (the Volga is apparently pretty decent, as large bodies of water go), so of course, the heavens opened up about an hour before we were due to leave, and now there's a beach of sorts on the streets...

Not much exciting this week, despite the high volume of blog posting. There may be nothing at all next week, since independent work/office hours were completely omitted from the week's schedule... (This was not anticipated, and I got the impression that the American side of the house had not approved the change, so the schedule may be revised...)

Other Experiences that make Russia what it is:

• Bizarre things I've eaten: Hands down, the winner is last week's pizza - ham and bread and butter pickles (the little sweet ones). I believe this officially establishes that the Russians do not properly understand the concept of "pizza" - it's either covered in dill or sporting pickles :-( I bought and ate a German brand of frozen pizza this week - I carefully checked, and the ingredients were all normal, but the pizza just didn't taste right, and there was pretty much no cheese to speak of. Apparently, frozen pizzas are also a strictly American thing (which is a shame - frozen pizza is a beautiful thing).
• Bathrooms: Oh, Russian bathrooms, where shall I begin? First of all, as is common in Europe, never assume that the bathroom is free. Even port-a-potties cost about 10 rubles. Second, one must always carry toilet paper in one's purse - every girl has a travel pack of tissues for this express purpose. Of course, you generally can't flush stuff, either. In addition, one can expect squattie potties (aren't you loving the vocab here?) with half doors - think Old West saloon. Bathroom visits are always adventures... The one we have here at school has apparently been declared foreigners-only, as we have a key and must lock and unlock the door upon entering/leaving. Ever tried explaining to someone that you are permitted to use this bathroom, but they are not? Yeah, it's bunches of fun...

There's certainly more (and plenty of it's funny - the more you can laugh, the better things are), but I'm tired of writing, so have a wonderful holiday!

Pieces of the Russian Life

First and foremost, we have an answer! Russians, do, in fact, play Sousa! "Stars and Stripes Forever," no less! There are not words for my reaction at the philharmonic yesterday when the chamber orchestra's pianist launched into "Stars and Stripes" for his first encore. I'm still excited about this :-) (I'm also still in shock that the pianist played no fewer than four encores, but that's a different subject...)

In other news, Russia is still Russian, as I am constantly reminded. How exactly is it "Russian", you ask?

• The Sex and the City movie contains a scene in which a character eats yogurt for breakfast from a bowl. The girls behind us began querying one another as to what that substance might be: ice cream? Smetana (Russian sour cream)?
• Russians, as a general rule, hate making change. This is one of those things that I continue to struggle to understand - ATMs generally dispense thousand-ruble notes (a little less than $40), five hundreds, if you're lucky, and yet I've never spent more than hundred fifty rubles at the grocery store ($6-ish). Change is a fact of life! And yet, handing over a bill is almost guaranteed to merit a grumpy look and a request for something smaller. (I admit it - I lie to shop girls when I need to break a big bill...)
• On grumpy looks, smiling in public places is not okay, unless you're with friends and clearly have something to smile about. Americans in good moods are generally viewed as being head cases - we're far to smiley. On the flights over, it was almost surreal - in all of the Luftansa literature, everytime a flight attendent appeared, she (or he) sported a Disney-big smile. The Luftansa flight attendents? Very "serious" types...
• Sexism, is on some levels, at least, still alive and well. Want to play soccer in gym? You better be male (my host father had trouble with the concept of all-girl soccer teams when I told him I'd played growing up. "But what do they wear?"). When magazines get handed out in lecture, the girls are supposed to take the "women's interest" glossies over the news. Climb over a desk? "Girls don't do that in Russia!" I can only imagine what they would've said had they seen Laura and I climbing on a tank last week...
• I'm also a terrible girl because I don't have any heels here, and would never consider wearing them if I did. Watching the poor Russian girls struggle up the side of a hill last week was persuasion plenty. I'll stick to my off-roadable shoes, thankyouverymuch. My family doesn't make much of a fuss about it, but at least one of the other girls is being made to wear a dress and heels every day. Not fun.

All of the above was not to give a negative impression of Russia, of course. It's just terribly difficult to express all the tiny things that make up this foreign experience. We're more Russian-ized on this program, I feel, and sometimes it makes life that much harder. (And they don't have tortilla chips here - how on Earth do people live without tortilla chips?!? We made the mistake of discussing American food (in Russian) this weekend, and now I'm craving chips and queso... Of course, I totally miss blinni when I'm in the States, so things balance out...)

Much love to you all!

Holy Updates, Batman!

So despite yesterday's marathon post, I feel the need to write still more. So consider it a gift for procrastination, or roll your eyes, pretend you read it, and go back to studying. Whatever floats your boat.

Part of this constant updating is probably partially my way of dealing with my lack of roommate these days - I have one-sided conversations with the great unknown Internet. I can't wait until I can go back to having two-sided conversations with y'all.

Other news from the Russian front: we went to the puppet theater on Friday to see a show. The theater itself is very pretty - it's in the Voronezh album (the clock with flying figures and the dog and all). The show we saw was "The King's Striptease", roughly. Of course, when our teacher was telling us about it, all we caught was "striptease", "Hans Christen Anderson", and "puppets", which left us with some interesting ideas, of course. It was a political satire with the rough framework of "The Emperor's New Clothes", but we didn't figure that out until the second act. It was done as a mix of live-action and puppetry - ie, you could see the puppeteers at all times. Overall, it was pretty interesting, but it would've helped if I understood more of the political references and such.

Life at the apartment has been interesting today. The hozhaika didn't get up until I was leaving for church this morning (technically, the dog woke her up, since he didn't approve of my leaving...). She paniced that I hadn't eaten, but I reassured her that I'd cut a piece of the apple pirog on the table, and then I bought a cinnamon roll on the street, too.

When I got home from church, after another round of bus-related fun (riding the bus is not difficult. I don't know what my problem is of late), I'd already bought two rolls for lunch, and I was only in the kitchen because I wanted to locate the butter and toast them, right? She instead informs me that she and Sasha had leftover fish from last night for breakfast (at this point I became very thankful that I'd missed breakfast), and that now I was going to eat some, too. It was not a "would you like some fish?", it was a "You are going to eat some fish" as she put it on a plate. This is, in fact, very common with the hozhaikas here - they are all determined to make all of us very fat. Refusing food or asking for a smaller portion requires a great deal of patience and determination - it's actually kind of funny.

I started Christmas shopping in earnest yesterday. The lady from whom I am purchasing most of y'alls presents already loves me, and I haven't bought everything yet. It's the beginning of a beautiful thing. The hozhaika probably thinks I'm crazier than usual, though, since I have all this random stuff stacked around my room (I'm going to try and put a box in the mail home tomorrow, so I don't have to make everything fit in my suitcase).

Russia's not far behind the US in commercialization, so everything's either decorated or in the process of becoming so. Since they decorate trees for New Year's, I've taken to referring to any decorate pine tree I see as a "Tree of Indeterminate Holiday", since I don't know whether they're for Christmas (in January) or New Year's. There are lots of Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) figures up to, all of which are basically Santa Claus. Actually, I think a lot of them are Western Santas that have just been renamed...

And that's all for now, folks. Much love!

The Rumors are True - I'm Still Alive...

Argh. Blogger just ate the start of this post. So, to recap, Hi, I'm here, I'm sorry it's been a while, and is H going emo, because I need to know if I should start looking for recipes.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Ours was probably the most traditional non-traditional set-up I've been to. The university provided turkeys (which actually turned out to be of decent size) and some other bits, the weirdest of which was definitely the random inclusion of tuna. We pot-lucked the rest - most of the boys couldn't be compelled to cook, so they brought drinks, Lindsey managed to prepare a tub (literally- think RubberMaid) of stuffing, there were some vegtables, Laura managed pumpkin pie, and I made PinkStuff.

The actual name is GreenStuff, since when the recipe is followed correctly, the end result is a pale green. However, as I think everyone cooking discovered, trying to find ingredients in a foreign country is kind of complicated. I couldn't find pistachio pudding, so I substituted strawberry and I ended up crushing whole canned strawberries instead of having crushed pineapple. I'm really glad my hozhaika wasn't home while I was cooking, since she probably would've been kind of alarmed. I couldn't find a can opener (I found a few things that looked like can openers, but none of them would open the can...), so I found something sharp-ish and physically pounded an opening in the can. I'm sporting a nice gash on my finger from that. Then, I was substituting whipped cream from a can in place of CoolWhip, and the stuff wasn't gelling - it really kind of looked like soup. I ended up running out to another grocery store (my third-ish of the day) and buying more whipped cream. Final count, there were 3.5 cans of whipped cream in the dish (it was a double recipe, at least). But everyone really liked it, and I took home a dish licked clean, so all was well.

Thursday's cooking adventures also included long periods of time spent on various buses, since I never did find the original grocery store I was hunting. Part of the problem was my unwillingness to stay on the bus too long, since I'd already had a bus adventure on Wednesday night. You see, Wednesday, I went to English class with Sasha (son in host family) as a token exciting native English-speaker. More on that in a second. The class went on after my bit, so Sasha told me the numbers to get a bus going home. No problem, right? I've got the bus thing down. Except almost all of the buses home were marshutkas - essentially, a large yellow van that you have to tell when you want to get off. Not my cup of tea. So being my stubborn self, I decide to wait for the single bus that's supposed to run home. This resolve lasts until everyone else has left the stop and I'm freezing to death. Thus, I hop on a marshutka. However, I managed to screw up the numbers and climb aboard the wrong marshutka, which then proceeds to take me not home. I recognized where I was when I finally managed to get off, but it was a ways from home, so I went to wait at the bus stop for a real bus to take me back. The cold won again, as every bus that stopped was going elsewhere, so I gave in and walked. And thus it took me an hour to get home, when the direct walk is about 25 minutes. By the time I got home, my general reaction was, "I want America."

The English class was, um, interesting, if that's the phrase one uses to describe being simultaneously hit on by multiple teenage Russian boys. It was basically a question and answer session about me, the United States, and a foreigner's perception of Russia. Questions ranged from "Do you know any Russian? Say something!" (a. No, it's not like I'm studying it or anything, and b. way to put me on the spot. Thanks.) to "Do you know anything about Russian history?" (at which point I forgot everything I'd ever studied) to "What do you think of Russian-made goods? How do their quality and pricing compare to what you're used to?" (um, the chocolate's good?) on the normal end. Highlights of the weirder side include "Do you have a boyfriend? Do you want one?" (Creeper.) and "Describe your ideal man" (Not you). The overall vibe was pretty good, though, and the teacher did apologize that the boys were young and whatnot. Her English was kind of interesting; one of the other Americans teaches evening English classes and she's complained that the book encourages the use of crutch words to help speech sound more fluent, and that's exactly what the teacher did. Her favorite word was "well", but she'd insert it in places where it didn't make sense with the flow of the sentence. Definitely interesting.

So I'm really impressed if you're still with me after all that. Hopefully that's enough reading material for now, since I'm tired of typing. I come home in 4 weeks! Miss you all!

The Weather Outside is Frightful...

Yeah, I know - it's not even Thanksgiving yet, and I'm already doing Christmas songs. The weather here is seriously messing with my Texas-accustomed mind. We had our first proper snowfall yesterday (ie, snow that stuck). Actually, it's still sticking around, primarily in the form of pretty banks of white snow and sort of treacherous icy sidewalks. I've been wearing my boots in the snow - for some reason, it makes me laugh.

According to the Russians, winter doesn't really start until after the third snowfall. By my count, this is third, but by the Russian count, I think this is just the first or second. We were telling our teacher about all the snow earlier this week, and we got told that part of it didn't really count as "snow". This distinction confused (and continues to befuddle) all of the Texans - as far as we're concerned, white stuff falling from the sky that isn't sleet = snow. But apparently, there are finer distinctions.

Other exciting nonsense in my life:
I went to the ballet twice this week - Swan Lake on Wednesday, 1001 Arabian Nights on Friday. The same company produced both, which is quite impressive - that's a lot of dancing to remember. As with the Nutcracker, some "artistic liberties" were taken... Somehow, Swan Lake ended up with a happy ending. Swan Lake is a tragedy - everyone dies. That's what I explained in my intermission synopsis (somehow, I'm the one who always knows most of the story - it's odd). And then, at the end of the ballet, the prince and the swan went off together, all happy, completely oblivious to their interspecies dating issues. The orchestra was kind of lacking, too - the harpist was choppy (just commenting, not that I could do better, but no one pays me to try, either) and the oboe player was having a very rough night. He kept cracking the top notes of the main melody, so it was da-daaa-da-daa-da-HONK.

1001 Arabinan Nights was really, really short - just two acts, clocking a not-so-impressive hour and 20 minutes. The choreography was okay, but parts of it definitely felt like a musical, except no one was singing. On the whole, though, the costumes were amazing and the music was much better than Wednesday, so it was certainly worth the $6.

There's nothing much to report about school. We leave on Tuesday for a week-long excursion to the Caucauses, so don't expect to hear from me. (To the rest of you: I check blogs daily - you should write more often.) It's another 24-hour train ride each way, which is always fun. It's supposed to be warmer there, so that'll be exciting. And no, we're not doing anything dumb, like going to Chechnya.

Things I've learned today:
-Walk on white snow, not on gray snow. Gray snow generally means a million other little feet have already trod there, packing the snow down in yicky ice.
-Krasnaya Shapochka candy is really good.
-You can make pancakes ("americanskii blinni") from some form of cake mix. (My hozhaika's son made them this afternoon - one of their previous exchange students had taught him how).
-Cirok with cocoa is amazing. Cirok, for the uninitiated, is essentially a small bar of cream cheese coated in chocolate. The aforementioned variety is chocolate cream cheese coated in chocolate. It takes some getting used to, but now I'm hooked. And the chocolate stuff is way better than the kind I had with breakfast - plain cream cheese, coated in chocolate, with raisins in the middle. (Raisins?)
-Russians seem to value foreign language skills more highly than Americans. (Actually, pretty much everybody puts more emphasis on foreign languages than we do.) Anyway, my beloved bookstore that sells English-language literature (I bought Mill on the Floss today - it's on my reading list, and since I finished all 1000 pages of Don Quixote, I needed some new and educational.) also sells books in Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Japanese. I found the same version of Marcelino, Pan y Vino that I read junior year in high school. I may buy a Spanish title and something in German, so I can brush up on those skills, too.

Photos: I know some of you who read don't have access to my Facebook account, so links to all the albums posted are below.
St Petersburg:
http://baylor.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2138813&l=fcded&id=9214311
http://baylor.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2138988&l=3290c&id=9214311
http://baylor.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2139130&l=7eb3d&id=9214311
http://baylor.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2139245&l=dee96&id=9214311
Voronezh:
http://baylor.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2139363&l=b06f8&id=9214311

That good ol' college try

First off, I think this link may work for pictures : www.russiantrip.snapfish.com/snapfish . If not, inform me again, and I'll give up and curl into a little ball under the desk at the Internet cafe.

I saw Chelsey's secret twin on the bus today. I was mildly spooked. Privet, Chelsey :-)
Obviously, I successfully rode the bus to school today. I'm still getting over my stomach bug or whatever, so I didn't really feel like making the walk.

I went to class on a proper schedule today for the first time this semester. (Everyone else did yesterday, but I was at home sleeping.) We had phonetics (yuck), grammar, a bit of history (to fill the time, we think), and speaking (for idiots). I also had History of the Russian Military (in Russian) this afternoon. I'm really excited about that one - the professor seems pretty cool, even though he doesn't speak any English at all. We had to take pictures by university (only 2 of the 4 Baylor girls are taking that class) and number ourselves in relation to the role.

After morning classes, my small group found a pizza place that actually makes fairly believable pizza. Ok, so one of them was an interesting shade of fluorescent yellow, but the rest seemed pretty normal. I'm still getting better, so I didn't eat any. They really like to douse everything in rosemary here, which kinda grosses me out.

Laura and I found the yarn shop today, so we have supplies to work on scarves and whatnot. I'm excited - I'll have something to do, finally. I'm rapidly running out of English-language literature to read (Lindsey's going to have to share her reading list, I think...). If you've ever noticed how busy I stay during the year, it's partially because I'm not very good at not doing anything...

It's getting chilly here, which means in another month or so, I'm going to be dying of cold. Excellent. I should probably get around to buying a coat, maybe, possibly, perhaps.

I <3 the lot of y'all. Be good!