Gender Roles in St. Petersburg or “Damn am I Glad I’m a Guy”

Not to come off as Xenophobic, but have you ever noticed that when you travel to other countries, the people are different from you? I know, it’s hard to believe. At least CIEE seems to think it’s hard to believe, as they spent roughly 2 hours (no hyperbole) explaining this fact to us. As if we were going to come to Russia so that we could feel right at home. But I digress. So far I’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing the city and culture as a whole, but I feel that I have failed to adequately impart unto you, gentle readers, a proper impression of the Russian people. And the easiest way to do this, I feel, is to take the middle-school-dance approach and draw a firm dividing line between the boys and the girls. This may sound both sexist and racist, but keep in mind that given the fact that the country has had multiple government upheavals in the last couple of centuries and has only recently (last couple of decades) adopted the notion of “having your own property and money”, feminism has not been terribly high on most people’s priority lists. This means that gender roles are much more firmly solidified than most western nations. So, without further ado, let’s get stereotyping!

Women: Russian women I feel can be divided into three types: Supermodels, Babushkas, and Clowns (people not quite old enough to be babushkas who still try to pull off the supermodel look with plastered on makeup). Fortunately for the male beholder, the first type is easily the most common. This is because fashion is huge here. I’m going to go out on a limb and say New York can’t even draw a bead on how big fashion is here. There is a mall near where I live where the first 3 floors are nothing but shoes. Literally. 3 floors, about 7-9 stores apiece. All of which contain nothing but shoes. And unfortunately for the women, they are pretty much all high-heels, not of any kind of friendly variety. I could slip a dime under most of them and it would cover maybe half the surface area. It’s kind of hilarious watching the girls from our group try to blend in (as if people don’t know we’re foreigners the second we even think about opening our mouths). I take a look at the oozing blisters and consistently refreshed scabs all over their feet and thank the good lord above for my Y chromosome. Unfortunately, this prevalence of impeccable fashion sense does make way for a problem we have right back home in America: Women that are too old/fat/ugly to wear the clothes that they are who desperately want to feel like part of the in-crowd (the aforementioned clowns, as that is what their makeup invariably ends up looking like). After a few decades, they turn into babushkas and take up their straw brooms and dustpans and start getting those cigarette butts off the street.

Men: Us dudes get a lot more freedom in the whole “looking like you give a crap” department. This is because there are actually more women in Petersburg than men, so consequently the men don’t have to try as hard. This is a privilege that is actually pretty heavily abused, as the prevalent hairstyle in young men is (and again, I promise I am not lying) the mullet. OK, so it’s not quite a full on white trash ape drape, but it’s definitely party in the back, business-casual in the front. I would say about 70% of the guys you see between the ages of 16 and 25 have this haircut. Apart from the hockey-hair, though guys dress basically like guys in America, except with nicer… wait for it… I bet you’ve already guessed… that’s right: shoes. But even that’s not quite as consistent as chicks in heels. In fact, I’ve found that if I’m not speaking, staring straight ahead, and looking moderately angry, it’s not uncommon that some people mistake me for a Russian. Then of course I open my mouth and it all goes to hell, but at least my method of trying to blend in doesn’t inadvertently lubricate my footwear with blood.

I Attempt To Impart Impressions on That of Which I am Thoroughly Unqualified to Speak

“But Michael,” you might find yourself wondering, “surely there is no subject about which you are not the paragon of knowledge. You are far too clever as well as handsome to have such shortcomings.” Well, while I thank you for your praise of my intelligence and dashing good looks, I will confess that when it comes to anything dancing related, I have all the sensibilities of, well, a skinny white dude. Last night, however, I attended a ballet version of Anna Karenina at the Aleksandrinsky theater, and given that the concept of going to the ballet is something entirely alien to me, I thought I’d share my humble impressions with you: the gentle internets.

The plot of the ballet centered on the triangle between Anna, Karenin, and good ol’ what’s his face (the guy Anna leaves Karenin repeatedly for… it’s been a while since I read the book and it’s not like there was any dialogue to refresh my memory). Levin and Kitty were nowhere to be found. This, however, was not a bad thing, as Kitty just acts like a snotty and aristocratic tart right up until the last couple of chapters, and Levin mopes and chops wheat for the entire damned novel. So it was nice to see that the creators of this production had the prescience to know that the interesting part of the novel is watching Anna slowly self-destruct. This ends the part of the post where I at least look like I know what I’m talking about.

The meat of the matter here, is of course the actual dancing. This was absolutely gorgeous. I don’t quite know what else to say here other than “damn, those people were bendy”, but it definitely takes some serious skills to impart a story as involved as Anna and make it comprehensible without uttering a single word.

One thing that I noticed, though, is the men (insert proper gay innuendo here). This is to say that not once did I get the impression that these guys were going to head out to a club with large drinks containing cocktail umbrellas and names like “the fire island sunrise” or something. As opposed to the look you see on male dancers in shows that seems to convey “I am having a faaabulous time”, these guys, even in their tights and slippers (especially the guy playing Karenin) seemed to convey at all times “yes, we are certainly dancing, but if you so much as snicker, we will break your spine”. Granted, we’re not in the soviet days where training to be a dancer basically meant spending your entire childhood and adolescence in some kind of ballet-gulag, but these are men who will clearly get round after round drinks bought for them in a bar because of what they do rather than getting wailed on for being a fairy, all on account of how seriously ballet gets taken here. I feel like I wouldn’t have nearly as positive an impression of the whole ballet thing had I experienced it for the first time in America, where it’s such a fringe interest, where 95% of anyone who gives a crap is female. Also, I realize I'm not mentioning anything about the women here, which doesn't help my "i assure you, I'm straight" case, but it's simply because there wasn't much to say other than they were a) Russian, b) skinny, and c) very very bendy.

And I will conclude that for the finale, the entire cast came out and conveyed to the audience the concept of a train. Through dance. They made us believe that there was an actual train. By dancing. It sounds ridiculous I know, but it’s only because it was a spectacle so intense that mere words cannot describe. Also, the first person to make reference to “doing the locomotion” will be shot. Until next time!

Novgorod the "Great"

My last update was a little big on the “America-bashing”, so I am making it my goal with this post to level the playing field, not wanting to come off like an uninformed Dostoevskian “adolescent” (literary puns are fun, kids!). So this past weekend our group went on a mandatory excursion to “Novgorod the Great”. They make this distinction because there is another city in Russia also named Novgorod, only it is called (and I am not making this up) “Lower Novgorod”, with lower basically taking the meaning of “lesser”. I guess we know who the middle child here is, at any rate. Of course, the reason the one we went to is the superior Novgorod is because it is the oldest city in the Russian empire (approximately 1200 years old, give or take). This, of course, means that there are a lot of historical sites to visit. And by a lot of historical sites, I of course mean a lot of churches. Churches seem to be synonymous with predetermined tour schedules, as apparently history is not allowed to happen unless Christians came and left their mark. And they left their mark literally every. twenty. feet.

Before I get on with this, however, I will point out that Novgorod is beautiful. In spite of the fact that there is nothing but churches for miles, they are absolutely beautiful churches. Some of the older ones don’t even have the obnoxious meticulously touched up look that a lot of places of historical significance tend to get. Crumbling wall murals, narrow and rickety staircases, and some truly epic domes make for some fantastic sight-seeing and you really get a feeling that history was allowed to simply run its course, rather than be fought off at every turn. Then you notice the scaffolding.

I guess I was faked out by the first church we went to, because after that every other one (literally) was covered in scaffolding and basically looked like shabby construction sites where you could see onion shaped spires sticking out of the top. The lines of portapotties and orange safety cones really added to the historical mystique. And of course, CIEE decided that, after waking us up at 6:30 to depart by 8, we would go on a 5 hour walking tour to every identical church in the area while our Russian tour guide spoke far too quickly to be understood by anyone. Cap it off with the fact that you couldn’t even take pictures inside the churches (which unlike the outsides, weren’t under construction MOST of the time) and you’re left with a vaguely uneasy feeling of “well what the shit did we come here for?”

It also happened to be one of our merry band’s birthday while we were there, so we decided to try to find a bar. Had we been anywhere else in the entirety of Russia, this would not have been a problem, but we had to walk a solid 40 minutes all over town asking locals whether there was any place we could drink. Most of them just laughed. Bad sign. We finally found an outdoor café a solid 30 minutes from the hotel, and that was the best we got (granted, cafes in Russia are basically bars, but without the “let’s get rowdy it’s our friend’s birthday” atmosphere).

I have often complained that Boulder is like a personal hell to me, on account of the fact that unless you’re into hiking and sporty crap, or on an absolutely copious amount of drugs, there is simply nothing to do there. I now rescind that statement and will say that if your lifestyle is Metropolitan, then Novgorod is the work of Satan (ironic, given the number of churches and monasteries, but hey, I hear the devil is renowned for his sense of humor). You walk around this place, look at pretty stuff, and slowly come to the horrifying realization that that is all there is to do there, and what’s more, once you have seen one of these pretty places, you have most assuredly seen them all. Suddenly all of these places lose their beauty and you start to resent them for simply existing. It’s like going to a historical recreation village that is an entire city, but instead of people telling you interesting facts about the past, you get scowled at by angry looking babushkas and/or monks. At least historical recreation villages stateside have people in funny costumes.