It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year...Not!

Hello, dear lovely readers (all two of you...)!

So, because summer school was determined to be insufficient torture, we are now undergoing exams. Six of them. Today. I've already sat three, and I *think* one more is coming before lunch (we're really not well-informed about what's going on - you know which exam is next when they hand you the paper). The reading wasn't bad, the listening was fine, and I totally bombed the phonetics. I am okay with this, as I am not a linguist, I have no desire to become a linguist, and I can still pronounce the words, even if I can't sit down, look at a list, and tell you which consonants are hard in which configurations. Oh, and I'm not sure how I was supposed to acquire some of this information in a class that primarily consisted of repeating random syllables and asking people for directions...

After they've turned our brains to mush, there's going to be a big party thing, where we will be expected to speak Russian and receive pretty pieces of paper. Maria and I will also be performing a Russian folk dance (which we may forget) while Jennifer sings. All three of us will be dressed in Russian national costumes (and they're going to have heart failure, because Maria and I typically dance barefoot, and this is not. okay. in Russia...).

We also have class and a vocabulary test tomorrow. After finals. Making sense is not the Astrakhan State University way, if you haven't noticed.

The weekend will be spent at a "tourist base" out on the banks of the river. Highlights are sure to include the trip out to see the lotus fields (looks cool) and avoiding drunk students (not so cool). Then it's packing and flying on Tuesday (woohoo five hours in the Moscow airport - the only part of Moscow I've ever seen), St Petersburg Wednesday and Thursday (more tests and excursions - don't these people ever get tired of tests?) and then flying home on Friday (Friday, Mother, Friday!).

This may be my last blog post from the Motherland, as both internet time and time in the country are fleeting. I'm planning a few posts of stuff I never got around to once I'm back in the States (Things my textbook taught me, How to cook macaroni in Russia, etc), but no promises, especially since I'm apparently applying for a Marshall (I enjoy rejection). Stay cool!

В Принсипе

So remember how I said I'd write on say, Wednesday? (Note that it is now Friday.) Today's lesson in Russia: the concept of "in principle". In principle, Russia has everything. In principle, we had an hour of internet time on Tuesday. This is how things ACTUALLY worked out:
EVIL HEAD TEACHER: Everyone going on the mosque trip needs to be downstairs in 10 minutes.
STUDENTS: But the schedule says it doesn't start for another hour!
EHT: That's nice. Ten minutes.
STUDENTS: But, but....
EHT: *stony silence*
Please note, in principle doesn't really go both ways. I may be able to use it in order to turn my diary in on Monday instead of Friday (it was due on Friday in principle), but gosh darnit, they're still going to have get it, even if they have to pry it from my cold, dead hands. (This is, in fact, more related to such things as theoretical academic progress, but I'm a touch bitter that I just got the darn thing back today and it's due again tomorrow...)

Only one week left of classes! Finals are on Thursday. Of course, said finals may or may not be actually related to what we've done to date, but what can you do? It'll be nice that come up to a period of final exams that I'm not stressing about, since as far as I'm concerned, things are as they are.

As alluded to earlier, we went to a mosque on Tuesday. It was pretty cool - we got to talk to the imam and the guy who runs the school at the mosque. The professor talked the same we do - English and Russian run together (except he threw in Arabic from time to time, just to be special). Nothing of great import was said, though we did learn where to find halal meat in Astrakhan, should you ever need this vital information.

After the mosque, we had tea with a Tatar (nationality in Russia) family, which I enjoyed. Our director summed it up as "Classic Russia - lots of little babyshkas running around, tossing meat pastries down your throat". The highlight was definitely the honey cake, which several people announced that they would do just about anything for. The one downside was the heat - we had quite a few people crammed into a rather small room, and since we were eating with all the important people, all of the girls had to stay veiled. The guys got hot, the girls with scarves simply tied over their hair got hotter, and since I was wearing my scarf hijab-style (it's what I'm used to, my shirt was kind of open, and my scarf's too big to tie any other way), I melted. When the important people left, the babyshkas told us we could unveil, the comment, "Poor dear, you must be so hot," was definitely made to me.

For everyone who thinks Russia is all snow and balalaikas, I hereby invite you to Astrakhan in the summer. It's hot. And there's no A/C most of the time, since Russians are convinced that A/C causes illness. How hot is hot? It's supposed to be up to 40C today - that's 104F, and there's been rumors that it may get as high as 50F before we leave (that would be 122F). So enjoy your nice air conditioning for me, okay?

That's about it for the moment - I'll be home in half a month! Stay cool!

Me, Crazy? Never!

So, long time, no post. You can blame the folks who write our schedule for that - there was absolutely no internet time last week (trust me, this is much more tragic than you think). You can also thank them for the fact that I'm writing right now, instead of learning my Russian folk dance. You see, dance club was supposed to start at 4, but the meeting we had with the rector (head of the university - he's the President Lilley of ASU), was also supposed to run until 4.30. Thus, when we arrived at clubs at 4.30, the girls who teach had decided no one was coming and left. I felt terrible, but the lady in charge of stuff like that theoretically explained what happened. Argh!

Russia remains Russia. School is driving me more than a little crazy. The grades on my midterm sheet say I have learned diddly squat thus far, which I have simply decided is more a reflection of the exams than me (otherwise, unbearable depression would probably result). I sincerely miss the concept of the rubric, which might at least give some indication of *why* grades are what they are. This, of course, is too much to ask. I'm also still trying to figure out how, exactly, I have a grade for a reading midterm no one took... Oh, Russia!

In other news, we had an interesting excursion this weekend. We rode 4+ hours each way on a bus in order to see the largest Buddhist temple in Europe, which is somewhat randomly located in the middle of Russia. Kalmykia is Russia's only Buddhist republic, but they seem to be doing pretty well at it. The temple was gigantonormous and Buddha himself was big, too - 2 stories of gold Buddha! He also had a decent-sized army of tiny golden minion-Buddhas. It was interesting to see, but on some level heart breaking - there were all these food offerings left to this huge statue, made by nothing but human hands...

Lecture today (if I haven't mentioned it before, lecture is a special level of hell reserved for us after lunch...) was supposed to be over tolerance. No one, Russian or American, read the article (I read enough to declare it funny and then watched West Wing* instead), and thus it was a lot of "Well, I think..."

This then was directed to immigration. Mind you, we didn't redirect it to immigration - the head teacher rather naively decided that we should talk about it. Things kind of deteriorated from there, since controversial topic (which I really wouldn't want to discuss in a large-group setting in English) + relatively simple language skills = um, yeah. It was interesting, if you wanna call it that.

I was forced to attempt to explain the influence of the job situation in France on racial tensions, and then the professors tried to ask further questions regarding my opinion on some policy of the French government on something (from what I understood, they were having difficulty with the whole concept of open borders for work under the EU - can't really help you there if you don't get it...). I just gave up and said that anything the French government said about jobs was a fairy tale - I'm not terribly well-versed in French policy in English folks! I was just trying to deal with the fact that there was more to the situation than people randomly going crazy and burning cars, which seems to be the Russian take. The joke is that we're going to talk about the war in Iraq next week, so we can just line up on opposite sides of the room and practice shouting insults at each other.

The internet is being problematic at the moment, so that'll have to be all. We're going to see mosques tomorrow, but there should be internet time the day after (emphasis on the *should*) or something like that.

*Oh Mother Dearest! Season 3 of the West Wing would be an awesome Welcome Home present... *looks innocent*

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!

Keep on Movin' Down the Road

So it's been forever (aka a week) since my last entry. I keep meaning to write more often, but last week's schedule kind of went out the window, since we had a visit from the head director. This also entailed much scolding in the days immediately prior, since we weren't supposed to speak English around said director. Said director *also* scolded us for being the city that doesn't speak Russian. Those of us interested in speaking Russian at school (wow, that sounds pompous) are trying to find ways to make it work, but some days you just can't. I dunno - things have been better of late, so perhaps the changes will stick.

I still have yet to determine whether or not Russians perform Sousa, but they certainly do play jazz. I went to a jazz concert at the philharmonic on Thursday night - "A Portrait of Duke Ellington", and it was quite good. The instrumentalists were excellent, especially the trumpet soloist. There were three female singers - I thought the first two did a beautiful job, especially with regard to what must be the considerable difficulty of singing English language jazz without accent and with proper diction and all that - I really enjoyed their songs. The third singer, who was by far the favorite of the evening, had a voice like, in my oh so humble opinion, an angry cat. She certainly proved that singing scat is an American art... The philharmonic's sound engineers apparently fell asleep at the mixing board, though - the balance veered between standard jazz-loud and downright painful :-(

Saturday's excursion was "interesting", if you want to call it that. It consisted of hiking up two hills to gaze at what was essentially central Texas in March, and two tiny museums that were somehow related to the production of fish products in Astrakhan. The most interesting part was definitely the fact that both museums had an entire room devoted to the USSR and collectivization/Lenin/propoganda/the color red. It makes sense, but the joke was that either Lenin loved fish or fish loved Lenin... I'm now very interested in the role of women in the WWII in Russia, as the shrines to the honored veterans of the Great Patriotic War frequently include photos of highly decorated women - I've never heard much on the topic, and thus have no idea if they were factory workers, some sort of equivalent of WAVS/WACS, or something else entirely.

Sunday was a lovely free day - two of the other Americans, Shelley and Laura, and I went to the movies at a local mall. As usual, we grabbed the wrong marshytka - it's our hobby - but it went to a familiar stop and we were together, so no problems. We saw "Sex in the Big City", as the "Sex and the City" movie is called in Russia. It ended up being really bizarre - the movie is so very American, so walking back out into a Russian mall after watching it (in Russian, of course) was a little confusing - I had to ponder which continent I was on for a moment.

That's all I can come up with for now, but all of y'all should take care - I can't wait to be home and see all of you!
PS - Mom, could you e-mail me "Stars and Stripes Forever" from the I Love A Parade CD in time for the Fourth? It seems appropriate...

Not What I'm Supposed to Be Doing...

So, I'm supposed to be listening to either a) my phonetics disc or b) tomorrow's lecture (I'm not sure what's going on there...). Instead, I'm reading blogs and posting, so I can go home early instead of waiting for normal internet time. This isn't even what's on the schedule for this block, but they like to rearrange things for fun...

Quite a bit has happened since my last post: flood, theft, chastening, a trip, illness, and traffic violations (plural). And thus, Davai!

Flood: The flood waters arrived Thursday afternoon as we were riding home from an excursion to the book making factory/printing press (absolutely fascinating. Terribly inefficient, but absolutely fascinating.) Initially, pretty much everyone was glad to see the rain, because it would bring the temperature down. Problems started arising when it started raining hard and didn't stop. All the good Texans in the group figured that it'd pour for a bit and then stop, so we attempted to wait it out by sitting in the foreign exchange office and drinking tea. No such luck - we waited a good bit, and then realized that the rain definitely wasn't letting up. Thus, we went ahead and went to the stop to wait on marshytkas. I caught one pretty quickly, and proceeded to ride in a tiny van with 20 other people while our driver drove part of the way on the sidewalk in order, to a) avoid the flood waters and b) move around the mounds of non-moving traffic. I thought the woman sitting across from me was going to have either a heart attack or salvation experience every time we tilted dangerously while lurching on and off of curbs... My normal commute tripled in length (it took about an hour and a half), but I'm just grateful that our marshytka never joined the legions of stalled vehicles with flooded engines that were all over the roadways. Water was knee-deep in several places - a few students in our program were in cars that lost complete contact with the ground and floated for a while. Fun times.

Theft: Not me, but poor Ross had his wallet stolen from our super-full marshytka on stipend day, no less. Boo Russian thieves.

Chastening: While we were being scolded for our decidedly lacidasical attitude towards the Russian-only pledge, I brilliantly piped up with the comment that it's hard to get others to do it, as no one wants to be the "Russian Police". Apparently, we are supposed to be the Russian Police (rysskie militsia) in the name of "community policing". I'm trying harder, but I'm pretty sure community policing requires some level of commitment from the whole community. *le sigh*

Trip: Volgograd/Stalingrad again - my favorite (honestly. Hard as it is to believe, I do occaisionally ditch the sarcasm). I had a bigger memory card in my camera and I bought a picture pass in the museum, so lots of pictures to come. We had a lecture over the Great Patriotic War (essentially, the war of Russia against Germany - occured simultaneously with WWII, but is generally regarded as a semi-separate entity. I think.) prior to the trip and I took two pages of notes in Russian - this is apparently impressive. Train was normal and all that jazz.

Illness: The only downside of the Volgograd trip - the restaurant that we've now eaten at three times apparently didn't do so well Saturday night, and early Sunday morning found me befriending the trash can at the end of the train car. (TMI, I know, but if you've ever been sick by yourself in a foreign country, you know it stinks...)

Traffic Violations: In the last week, my marshytka has been pulled over by the militsia (police) twice. This morning, it was my fault. I was riding standing, which may or may not be technically illegal - it's certainly common practice, but who knows? Anyway, I was standing when we got pulled over. I thought it was a stop, so I was looking for who was getting off (generally, the standers have to pile out so that people can exit), when everyone started telling me to get to the back of the marshytka. I complied and squatted with the other guy who'd been standing. What I didn't understand was that I was supposed to be *hiding* from the militsia - I thought everything'd be okay as long as I was sitting-level. So of course the militsioner saw me and detained our driver for almost an hour, while I sat on the bus and everyone glared at me. When everything got sorted out, the driver was clearly pretty ticked, so I got off a few stops early, rather than risk being alone with him. I felt/still feel absolutely terrible - I'm sure he had to pay a fine, and he lost work while we were waiting, but I almost always ride part way standing up - half the time, it's the only way to get a marshytka in the morning from my stop. I'd figured it was okay, since two people got off at my stop (hence, two places in theory), and there was already another guy squatting in the floor. I'm kind of scared to ride the marshytka again (not like I have a choice), and I'm going to try and avoid that particular one for a while, but I don't know... At least half my class rode standing today, the three of us who rode back from the theater all stood partway... I hate subjective laws!

I think that's all of our excitement. Well, at least, it's excitement for me - it might be really boring to read. So if you don't get throught it all, don't worry - I still love you!