Bracing For Impact

I have officially hit the point where it is roughly two weeks (maybe less, depending on when I actually have a chance to post this) until I return to the states. Granted, this is not all bad, as I will get to see my friends and family etc., but I still can’t help but be a little sad to be leaving this country (what feels like) so soon. Especially since my Russian has finally gotten to a point where I’ve noticed real improvement across the board (today my phonetics teacher was amazed that I hadn’t had much intense phonetics drilling in my past classes. You know, because I’m awesome), I somewhat dread knowing that within a couple of weeks of not speaking any Russian, I will probably lose a solid 50% of this improvement. However, in order to ready myself for transition, I have decided to compile a list of the little things that I will be genuinely looking forward to upon my return (again, apart from the obvious).

-Food: While Russian cuisine can be quite tasty, there are a few areas that could use improvement. Example: dill is meant to be a seasoning, and I will be filled with glee when it returns to such a state, as opposed to being a substantial portion of the calories of every meal I eat. Also, while I have learned to enjoy salads here, I’ll look forward to a point when sour cream or mayonnaise are no longer considered acceptable as “dressings”.

-Laundry: Russian apartments are small. Really small. Thusly, so are their washing machines. And just forget about dryers because they are like snipes: oft heard of, but never seen. This means two things: laundry is done in several small loads that takes almost an entire day to two days to complete, and then you have to tack on another day or two for your clothing to line dry. This would be all well and good if my host family didn’t leave clothes to soak and subsequently dry in the shower. This means each week I am faced with the decision of whether I want to have an acceptable body odor, or wear clean clothing. It is not a decision I enjoy as no matter what I choose, something on my body is dirty and gross. Also, line-dried socks feel like slipping my feet into cardboard.

-Making Purchases: While the dollar-to-ruble exchange rate is awesome for any traveler fortunate enough to have the former, there is a slight problem. See, my bank charges me $4 every time I make a withdrawal here, so I like to make sure it’s a worthwhile withdrawal (as getting nickled and dimed to death because Chase can’t catch up with Citibank, which has branches all over the city, makes me cringe). This means every time I take out money, I am saddled with thousand-ruble bills. The problem? Russians are so goddamn lazy that sometimes they would rather not make a sale than make change for you. So even though I have roughly one hundred dollars worth of Rubles in my wallet after a trip to the ATM, to just about every store in the city, I might as well have no money, so I then have to make an expensive and frivolous purchase to justify using a thousand just so I can have smaller bills to get the little things. Like food.

-Beverages: Again, there are many things to hail here. Soda is cheap and made with cane sugar, they make Red Bulls in half-liter cans, and you can walk down the street double-fisting cans of Baltika (the tastiest beer this side of the Neva) and if you’re not acting like a drunk asshole, no cops will give you problems. However, there is a Russian superstition that cold causes sickness because when it’s cold out, everyone gets sick. I guess no one bothered to explain to them that people get sick from huddling inside and turning their tiny apartments into tiny petri dishes. Anyway, a result of this superstition is that their definition of cold drinks generally means “brought back a few degrees from boiling”. To put it in the terms of a rational person sans hyperbole, generally a few degrees below room temperature. Vending machines are usually an OK way around this, and sometimes at grocery stores the refrigerators are for more than show (but don’t hold your breath), but any bar, restaurant, or street vendor that advertises “Kholodnie Napitki” (Cold Drinks) is simply lying to you. And forget about ice, because the water here makes New Jersey seem like Palm freaking Springs, so no one ever bothers making it.

So yeah, that’s about it. See you around.

3 Days in the Big City

I’ve mentioned a few times that I find St. Petersburg to be a city eerily similar to New York. However, having just returned from Moscow, that statement needs to be slightly amended. Moscow is probably much more similar to New York in terms of its overall size, its population (double or more than that of Petersburg), and its status as a tourist destination (I heard more English being spoken on the streets in 3 days in Moscow than I have heard in over a month and a half in Petersburg). However, it is incredibly dissimilar to New York in the sense that it both looks and feels like it was designed by M.C. Escher. Go google a map of Moscow, I’ll wait. Yeah, we had to navigate that sight unseen for three days. I could do a play by play of each day we spent there, but honestly, our schedule was so disjointed that it would make that style kind of hard. Since bulleted lists seem to be my forte here, I see no reason why I can’t run down the highlights in that fashion here. Tally ho!

The Weather: I never thought that there would be a place in the entire world that would make me long for the temperate climate of the city that was built over a damned swamp, but Moscow taught me the dangers of using the word “never”. My hotel room was, upon entry, over 30 degrees Celsius. Now I can never remember the conversion for Celsius to Fahrenheit, but I will estimate that it comes out to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. And on the street, where there was open air, it was only moderately better. I think I was moderately to severely dehydrated the entire time we were there, and not for lack of consuming water.

The Metro: So if you googled that map of Moscow like I told you too, you might have noticed that it looks like it was the product of some spider beast. I think their metro might be a diagram of the structure of said beast. It’s pretty cool actually, but if you don’t have much time to get acclimated, it is a bitch and a half to figure out. Also, unlike Petersburg, which was a planned city, important areas are in no way denoted by stations with connections to other stations. You can roll through to a 3 station junction, emerge from any of them, and be greeted by nothing but pharmacies, but go to a lone stop way out on the green line and you get 5 different museums and clubs within spitting distance. I guess the thesis here is that you simply have to know where you’re going and can’t try to make judgments about areas based on metro popularity like you could in NY or Petersburg. This would have been nice to not have learned the hard way Saturday night when Chris and I went to every junction in the middle of the circle line looking for some damned thing to do only to walk away disappointed and a little more tired and wet from the kilometers we walked in the rain trying to find diversions.

National Holidays: Pay attention to when they are, or like my entire group, you may wind up schlepping all the damn way down to Red Square to go see Lenin only to find after arrival that there’s one going on and the Mausoleum is closed. As are most of the museums in the city. Yeah, thanks for the superb planning, CIEE. At least the Bulgakov house and Patriarch Pond were accessible, as it means I basically got my wishlist granted for the trip (yes I know there is much more to see there, and I would have been interested had we not only been there for 3 days).

Walking: be prepared to do a lot of it. I probably walked twice as much per day in Moscow as I do in Petersburg, and I walk at least a good 2 miles per day here. I think I ruined every pair of socks I brought with me.

I feel like that about covers my main points. Anyone wanting further details on stuff, feel free to ask. I am back in Petersburg and remain here for about 12 more days (as of writing this), so I’ll be seeing you all sooner than you think.

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.

In Which I Draw Broad and Sweeping Comparisons

I have come to the decision that if I were to write solely about “what we did this week” there would simply be no point in updating. That isn’t to say that we haven’t been doing interesting things, as there have been interesting things aplenty, it’s just that it would be very samey. So for this post I’m just playing the role of the comparative observer.

As many of you probably know, most big cities are rife with similar qualities, and despite its inherent “Russian-ness”, St. Petersburg is no exception to this rule. That is to say there are a lot of aspects that remind me of New York. However, there are some noticeable differences and right now, if I had to choose between Petersburg and New York based solely on features of the city (and not the people therein) Petersburg would win in a landslide, even in spite of my inability to communicate with anyone without them either immediately knowing I’m American and rolling their eyes and responding to my pitiful attempts at the simplest of conversation in English, or wondering if I have suffered severe head trauma. Allow me to elaborate:

1.) The Metro: Now it’s certainly not a perfect system. There are only 5 separate lines and a few dead zones that require a fair amount of walking or bus transfers, but hey, anyone here familiar with the West Village or any part of Manhattan west of 8^th Ave. for that matter? So it’s not much of a con. The worst part is that it closes at midnight. This wouldn’t be too awful if it weren’t for the fact that all bridges from the mainland are raised at 12:30 AM and stay that way until 4 AM. If you live on any of the outlying islands (like me) this is kind of a problem, because if you’re not in that station by midnight, you’d better hope you’ve got some friends with you because you're in for one hell of a wait, and even stuff in Petersburg closes SOME time. But, that having been said, the trains come basically every 5 minutes, no matter the hour. God help you if you want to take the subway after 9 PM in NY. It also only costs about $0.75 per ride. Can you say bonus? Plus you get to ride these awesome escalators for what feels like about a bajillion miles (roughly) underground. This is because rather than being wusses and going over bodies of water on bridges, the Russians just built their system to go underneath the largest river in the city. Bad. Ass. I’d take pictures, but I can’t because the metro system is (and I am not making this up) a guarded state secret, as it is their mass fallout shelter in case of nuclear war. And in spite of all this, my cell phone gets perfect reception everywhere in the stations except when the train is in motion. My calls in New York get dropped when I'm thinking about the subway.

2.) Homeless People: As we know, the homeless exist solely to stink, pester us for money, stink, pee in public, stink, touch themselves in public, stink, shout crazy shit in public, stink, and pretend they are not going to spend the change you might throw at them on crack, booze, or crack and booze. Also they smell funny. And in NY, you can’t spit without hitting roughly 8 per block (Although it’s probably the closest thing to a shower they’d ever get). My point is that in all the time I’ve spent walking around the major metropolitan areas in Petersburg, I could count the number of homeless people I’ve seen on one hand. Literally. I have seen 3. I don’t know if housing is just more affordable, or the Militsiya are doing an incredibly efficient "cleanup" job in the 2 hours of actual night time we get per day, but either way I’ve never lived more human-nuissance free. And before you start telling me how hard they have it and how some of them are honest and can’t get back on their feet because of the cruelty of the man, or mental problems, believe me when I say, from the bottom of my heart, I could not care less. All I care about is that my change is staying in my pocket, where it belongs and can be spent on things I want (because change is actually useful here) rather than being used as a bribe to get a smelly hobo out of my face.

3.) All this talk of dirt and cleanliness leads me to my final point, which is… well, dirt and cleanliness. 5 million people live in St. Petersburg, about 4,999,999 of them are smokers (and that one holdout is most likely in a permanent coma), and yet if you walk down Nevsky Prospekt, you’ll see a discarded cigarette butt maybe once or twice per block. In New York, it would probably be easier to use them as material from which one could pave roads. The same goes for assorted litter and general crap. In spite of those “clean up NY” trash cans you see on every corner, let’s face it, it would be an improvement if even half the population ever noticed that they existed, let alone used them. I’m not saying that Russia is perfect, as no place is. My point is that if a country with a government and bureaucratic structure as backwards-assed as Russia can accomplish simple tasks of “not letting their biggest cities slowly devolve into ratholes” then what’s our excuse?

I could go on and on, but I feel like these are the most important points. Another long post, but hey, has brevity ever been my forte? More updates when more stuff happens/occurs to me.

The Homestay: first impressions

Alright, so right now I'm basking in the fast internet glory that is the CIEE study lounge. I bought a "kartochka interneta" to get online at my homestay only to find out that the only thing worse than no internet, is internet via Russian phone lines. Anyway, things are happening at such an eclectic rate that I've already done way more than I can conscionably write in one post. Thusly, I'm simply going to pick up where I left off: Homestay.

So I'm living on Vasilievsky Island, which is to St. Petersburg what Queens is to Manhattan. You know you're somewhere exciting, but can't quite shake the feeling that all the action is happening several dozen miles away from where you are (some students walk to class, I ride public transportation for an hour). All of the buildings are Stalinist era apartments, which means they make lower east side tenements look like luxury suites. That, however is only the exterior. Inside they're actually quite nice. The apartment I'm in is small, but nice. I'll put up pictures... well, whenever I feel like it. I'm living with a woman named Natalya Semyonovna and her daughter Lina (who is a little older than me). Not to brag, but I think my family is the coolest one. They are indominatably cheerful, fantastic cooks, and Lina speaks some English, so if I really can't get points across, she saves my ass. They do seem to be the one family in Russia that doesn't drink (sad face) but you know, somehow, I think I'll manage. This of course made things a little awkward when I came home after throwing back several fairly strong Russian beers after our placement exams to find Lina at home. She immediately smelled it on me, realized I was at least a couple sheets to the wind, and proceeded to laugh at me for about 2 hours as I pitifully tried to string words together. It wasn't judgmental, she just thought it was hilarious.

Still, though, they are very patient as I try to fumble my way through speaking this language and I might even come back a few pounds heavier than I left. This is because I have eaten their fantastic cooking until I felt like I was going to throw up every night only to come to the terrifying realization that I'm only done with the first course. It's kind of rude not to clean your plate in Russia, so I strap my game face on and go to town on that shit. In spite of my desire to be a good guest, however, I have yet to completely consume an entire meal. Fortunately, another reason my family is so awesome is that they don't seem to mind.

Anyway, I'm gonna log off because I'm thinking in English way too damn much right now and that's going to make my life hell when I get home and have to switch gears. Anyhoo, do skoroy vstreche, and I will update soon.