The maudlin "The End" post, but not quite the end.

Today and Tomorrow are becoming rarer words, filled with bigger meanings as each moment expands to fill the whole scope of time, and plans are executed on a scale of hours instead of days, and every second becomes important. Tomorrow isn't just Friday, it isn't just Christmas, it's the last day that I will wake up and go to sleep in Russia. It's my last full day on this continent, in this country, and this beautiful city, and although I've had it in my sights for months my eyes still don't quite know how to focus on it.

With an open suitcase looming in my 17th floor den--a pile of things to sort into "с собой" or "не", trash bags bulging with already stricken homework assignments and ticket stubs and receipts--I'm taking the obvious course of action and avoiding it, sitting instead in a corner at the Republic of Coffee, where the waitresses don't come out from behind the counter so as long as I don't approach them, I don't have to worry about being asked to order something. Reading about the "Massive Christmas winter storm" and the "landmark healthcare reform bill" that comprise big news in the USA, trying to brush up on Western Hemisphere current events before I find myself plunked down in the middle again.

Everything from my past few weeks is mingling together, the slow panic of essay writing, the appearance, then disappearance of the sun, the triumph or exams and the savage slicing winds scraping the windows of the Primorskaya high-rises, the snow like dirty flour piling up, piling up, the mess in my room piling up, piling up as I sped out the door to dinner, to the Hermitage, to Nevsky Prospekt, to my photography exam ("if you continue studying photography, you won't turn out half bad!" said Professor Igor Lebedev, who never in his life has given out an A--"Such people just don't exist."). Mornings dark and afternoons dim, evenings dark again but filled with sparkling lights. Ice on the Neva, broken and frozen-over again in crinkled sugar-crystal formations. Cross-country skiing at Krestovsky Island with people dear to me (guys!), throwing bottles onto the ice at the bay of Finland, and the frustration when they skittered away hollowly and refused to break.

It's one big slideshow and it's tragic, leaving it all behind. I'm going to miss the six-story metro escalators, the tiny grocery stores on every corner, the absurdities of daily apparel. The tall, elegant Uzbek man with the squinty-eyed smile who sold me bread at the market, the clunk of my shoes on the splintery floor in the entryway of Yuri's studio. The "Осторожно--двери закрываются" we all memorized after a week of riding the metro. My people! The faces I've grown accustomed to, the people I adore (and you're probably reading this!). One last hurrah on Christmas day.

St. Petersburg! Our Piter! When will I see you all again?

Yet I feel a soft and slow relief when I imagine the warmth and comfort waiting for me in my homeland, in a little snow-shouldered house in Ithaca, NY. Even in the face of the nightmare of navigating New York City public transportation with my suitcase, hiking pack, violin, and guitar in hand (and on back, and rolling beside me). Even though I am, as of yet, not sure where I'm spending my first night back, or my second. I understand now the loyalty my father described, when he packed his life into a suitcase and set off with the intention of leaving this country behind--his head went dizzy and his knees weakened, and he lay on his front lawn waiting for his eyes to clear, fully aware he just couldn't leave his home. The relief I feel at coming home isn't just about clean tap water I can bathe in or Greek yogurt or being able to explain what I'm looking for to a librarian or cashier or policeman. It's about coming HOME.

So tonight, Christmas Eve, I'm going to a drag show at a funky bar on Sennaya Ploschad with my friend Cait and toasting my triumphant return as a wiser, freer, more determined person, awake to the opportunities life may present me and ready to work to realize them.

Cheers!

Автопортреты ван Гога и Гогена--Я вас сделала!

Even though my back aches from sitting for hours, even though the staff at Книги/Кофе is starting to recognize me as that girl who comes in at 4 and leaves at 9, orders a pot of tea and chicken-pecks at the keyboard (still can't get the hang of the Cyrillic keys), and even though I think I might be going blind from staring at my computer screen incessantly since the 14th of December, it might be worth it just to be able to say that I've got an 8-page critical analysis paper in my second language to pin under my name. Take THAT, Russian Language! Take your participles and shove it!

Six days left and counting down! I'm taking a brief exhale before I delve back into studying for my final tomorrow. After Tuesday I'm done with all my schoolwork and have the remainder of the week to figure out--well, everything.

Written on the bus to Russia, 14.12

YES, HELSINKI! Whatever you ask me. It's yours. Just give me in return what I ask of you--your shy creamy sunlight lighting up tidy low buildings and a sky as fresh and pale as an after-dinner mint. Your playful sprinkling of cotton-candy snow, the kind that swirls around you ticklishly, persuading you to fall in love even with the sharp wind that bites and stings. Give me your quiet, narrow streets, your sweetly enticing window displays, your idiosyncratic mélange of blocky art deco, sleek modern design, and charming, Scandinavian traditionality. Give me your smooth ski resort serenity, please, and in return I'll pay 5€ for a cup of coffee, rent an apartment by the week for what I'd pay monthly in the States. Just keep me sated on cobblestones and mulled wine, because your chic mellowed-outness is worth the trouble and the price. Kiitos, Helsinki. Ты--настоящий друг.

There's a ubiquitous aroma of nutmeg and cinnamon on the air here, not just outside restaurants but in elevators and museums and clothing stores, as though behind every closed door is a jolly blonde woman pulling a sheet tray of those omnipresent star-shaped spice cookies, so delicate and wafer-thin, out of a hot brick oven. The flurry of snow that descended starting early Sunday morning settled inoffensively on the trees and sidewalks like sugary icing on a gingerbread city. By the next morning it had turned into brittle ice like a layer of sparkling hard candy. The footprints I pressed into the fairy-tale snow each presented a thrill of a certain pride at being where I was. I felt privileged to be there, leaving my mark on the cement and stones, a guest of such elegant, ethereal people in such an enchanting town. This city is magical.

Now, with the long afternoon sun transfering a distorted rectangular shadow from the bus onto the blurry, snow-speckled highway speeding past, I'm reluctantly racing the daylight back to St. Petersburg. As the sun sinks I'm feeling a little despondent in the face of the destination awaiting me. St. Pete looms chaotic, dirty, and dark on the other side of these remaining 5 hours, seeming even more garish and overblown after the polished subtlety of Helsinki. The intoxicating luxury behind me I'm exchanging for an almost ascetic sparseness and the pile of temporarily set-aside assignments, obligations, responsibilites. The wide, noisy streets don't strike me as welcoming, and I'll bet I can count on these fading beams being my last taste of sunlight until December 26th, when my flight breaks through the palpable grey shroud above and around St. Petersburg into dazzling daylight, too lazy to penetrate the clouds.

Helsinki! Come with me!

The Architecture in Helsinki

8:54 AM in Helsinki, fresh off the bus from St. Petersburg, and fresh indeed: maybe it's my imagination, but the air feels fresher and crisper here. My first impression, footsteps echoing through empty streets (a city that sleeps in until 9 AM?), is CLEAN. And, glancing in the upscale store windows, luxurious. That, and the architecture really is worth naming a band after.

As the sky started lightening at about 8:30, I realized that this city reminds me strikingly of a ski resort. There's a similar sort of quiet charm and tidiness, only on a grander scale and with less pretension. Maybe it's all the people wearing Scandinavian hats. Or the fact that nothing's open yet.

Now I'm going to get cozy with Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow to the End of the Line, just started last night and the antithesis of all thigns clean, sober, and Finnish, and wait for my friend Gordon to meet me. I can't guarantee a live feed, but updates are promised and forthcoming.

Eat up those persimmons, girl, for tomorrow we go Free!

My medical staff has switched out every day; tomorrow will make 6 nights in the hospital and I've had a different nurse every day. Today's variant seemed very shy but very sweet, and she grinned when she came in and saw me sitting on the windowsill and playing my guitar.

Russians, by the way, are very particular about sitting. Who sits, how, and where are all potential cultural battlegrounds. For one thing, women are always offered a seat before men. Old women before mothers, mothers with children before young women, and pretty women before...all the rest. On a crowded bus or Metro car, young men can almost certainly count on standing. By the time they hit their 20's it's practically an instinct--they don't even try to take a seat if there's a crowd. At first it seems polite, but after awhile the underlying chauvinism peeks through the curtain of what looks like a very respectful gesture. That's not to say that if a young man offers me his seat on the bus I'll turn it down, shake my fist and grumble about sexism and equal rights. No, I'll probably thank him and take the seat, because it's better than standing and it will only cause a scene if I don't. Still, though, being treated daily as though I'm less capable of standing than some бездельник who stinks of vodka has become one of the everyday burrs of nostalgia for my homeland.

It's also very rude to sit with your legs crossed in what is known as "American-style", with one ankle propped up on the other knee and the legs apart. And the list of places you aren't allowed to sit is long and extensive: any floor, the curb, the 6-story escalators in the Metro, anywhere cold, the windowsill--essentially, anywhere that's not specifically designated as "chair", "bench", or "sofa".

But I digress.

The doctor told me today that, unless I redevelop a fever, I'll be free to go tomorrow morning, provided I stay home from class until Thursday (ha) and come back in a week for follow-up. I'm beside myself with excitement at the prospect of re-entering The Outside World. I just want to get out of here!

But, as I'm not sure how soon I'll once again have free time, internet, and inclination all at once, I'm taking advantage of my last night in the hospital to reveal my plans for the next few weeks. They're actually looking pretty busy.

--Next weekend, November 19th-23rd...is the program trip to Moscow! We're leaving Thursday night and coming back Monday morning, and I don't know what our specific itinerary is, but there's bound to be some free time in which I will embark on adventures.

--November 26th...Thanksgiving! Which is so quintessentially American that of course the program coordinators have planned a group Thanksgiving dinner, which is bound to be a fiasco. Our hostess has invited us all to the apartment where she lives alone, which I'm sure is plenty comfortable for her but less so for 30+ people and a Thanksgiving spread. But it will be cozy and we will eat, drink, and be merry, and hopefully the chaos will be the good kind. I'm also looking forward to cooking something for it.

--November 28th...My mommy is coming to visit! I know it's only been a few months since I said goodbye in Spokane, but I'm far more excited than I should be to see her. She'll be here until December 7th and I'm jazzed about showing her around my city.

--November 29th...I'm going to the ballet! The Smolny-Bard program is treating its American students & guests to a performance of Don Quixote at the Mariinsky Theatre.

--December 1st...Gogol Bordello is playing at GlavKlub in St. Petersburg and IIIIIII've got tickets!

--December 10th-13th...Skipping town for the weekend to visit Gordon in Helsinki, see the city, and celebrate the Finnish release of his new book.

...And then it's already mid-December and time to start thinking about my final exams and papers and how to fit my semester back into the suitcase from whence it came!

But now isn't the time for that. All I need to worry about for the time being is how to carry all my stuff back to the dorm tomorrow morning. And what to do with all these persimmons...

But Doctor, you must be joking.

I feel like I could easily be the main character in some musty, psychological Gogol nightmare, minus all the squalor and filth. In this story, the patient visits the doctor for an ailment small and unassuming--a sore throat, a cough, headaches in the afternoons, the choice is left to author. The important bit is only that the patient be largely unconcerned. But the doctor listens to the patient's lungs and heartbeat, peers into her ears, takes her temperature, then steps back with hands folded and pronounces--well, something big, something far more serious than the patient expected. Surely, doctor, you can't be serious! No, it really is ----, and we can't let you leave until we've got this sorted out. You'll just have to stay the night. Don't be alarmed.

So she's taken to her room by closed-mouthed nurses (Would the story be better if they gave instructions in a different language? They did.) who buzz around her hospital bed. They draw blood, start an IV of a fluorescent yellow liquid with no explanation, thrust a medicinally-sweet smelling drink into her hand and tell her to drink it. Tablets are given. She is made to inhale an astringent gas that dries out her mouth and tastes like pennies.

And the way the story would go, over the next few days she is poked, prodded, and x-rayed repeatedly, and all the while the nurses empty bottles of liquid the color of lemon gatorade into her veins. Every morning they take her blood pressure and temperature, pursing their lips at the results and whisking them away before the patient can see. The doctor tells her her condition is getting worse, they need to do more tests, take more x-rays, up the medication, keep her longer. The patient begins to get anxious, pent up in her room. And throughout the story--it would only be a few pages, the length of a Pushkin tale--the better she feels the darker the doctor's pronouncements become: her lung has collapsed, or her liver is ill, or--what have you, but they must do a surgery, she absolutely cannot leave just yet. And of course, because it's a work of fiction, the patient acquiesces to everything, grateful that the doctor is preempting these ailments before they cause her body pain. She goes for days, for weeks without leaving the hospital, without seeing the sun, and begins to view her room as a prison, the silent nurses as guards, the doctor as a foreman. Her muscle wastes away. A year passes and she has begun to feel sick, more frail and fatigued with every procedure they perform, though other than the side effects of the surgeries she feels no ill health. And because it's Gogol, after a year she is finally let go, a gaunt and hollow bent stick of a woman, pronounced cured by the doctor. Maybe in the end she'll discover that she was healthy all along and go insane, true to the author's body of work.

Clearly, Based on a True Story (tm).

The only truth in that is that I don't feel ill other than a slight wheezing and a strong but intermittent cough. Certainly I don't feel ill enough to STILL be in the hospital. And the doctor does keep telling me I have to stay longer. After my X-rays on Wednesday morning the doctors informed me that I have "A Big, Serious Pneumonia" in my right lung and they couldn't possibly let me leave until Saturday at the earliest. Just three days of intensive care (daily IV antibiotics, pills, and inhalations) and monitoring, then I'm home free with a week's supply of oral antibiotics. So I resigned myself to the rest of the week in this hospital room, made cheerier by the arrival of friends (Thanks friends!!) with essential supplies in hand--books, fruit, chapstick, and cookies--and later our program coordinator with my guitar, a bag of clothing, more fruit and cookies...Now I've got more persimmons than I could eat in a week piled on the corner of my desk, a bunch of bananas, and even STRAWBERRIES, which I hadn't seen since early September. I was concerned I would still have too much fruit to carry by the time they let me out of this place...but this morning they took another x-ray and did indeed see that a part of my lung has essentially glued itself to, um, itself (there's a verb for that in Russian, and that's why I love this language). So they did a bronchioscopy and changed their position once again--turns out I can't leave until Sunday night or Monday morning.

Bronchioscopy, by the way, is disgusting and painful and I don't know why anyone would ever want to become a bronchiosurgeon. Ew.


I'm restless, though. I hate not moving around, seeing the same neutral-colored walls incessantly. I hate being sedentary. Especially when I'm only here for so long! I hate to spend my time here, HERE! being cooped up. And the food is awful...Yeah, for me, hell would be a hospital.

I guess this place isn't all bad, but I am a little sad I'm spending my weekend in the hospital. They let me take a walk today, but it was the first time I'd been outside since Tuesday and probably the only time all weekend. I'm mostly bored, but I have been learning a few songs on the guitar and reading a lot. I finished Heart of Darkness and started Oblomov, and next...well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. We'll take it as it comes.

At least it's not swine flu!

Whoooooo deep breath. Propped up on an overly-springy pillow, full from a classic Russian breakfast, warm and cozy in my hospital bed under the care of the nurses and with every convenience in reach, I feel as though I'm getting my first chance to breathe freely since mid-October. Though, given the circumstances, I'm hardly breathing freely.

These past several weeks have been a rough ride. The Pushkinskaya-10 Sea Level festival coincided perfectly with the cluster of midterms huddled around the semester's halfway point, and I suddenly found myself at the Manege exhibition hall nearly every day, without evenings free to study, but meeting artists, musicians, and the movers-and-shakers behind the Pushkinskaya-10 phenomenon. A worthy trade-off, to be sure, but also a stretch in terms of time and energy. Between schlepping to and from classes, violin lessons, and volunteering I'd somehow managed to absorb all of my free time. Even the Uzbek Bread guy, whose kiosk I've taken to visiting nearly every weekday for a delicious, nutritious (I'm sure) lunch of лепёшка ассорти, remarked that he hadn't seen me all week.


In the midst of all this, the weather turned bright, sharp, and clear, and the sun made its first appearance of the month three weeks into October. I took advantage of the situation to call an acquaintance I'd made who, within moments of meeting, confided in me that he had the key to the exhibition hall's roof and invited me to do "rare photography" if the weather ever cleared. I dragged Sarah into the deal and the three of us spent an hour that frigid afternoon taking photos with the unbelievable view of Исаакевская Площадь(That's "St. Isaac's Square" for you Cyrillic-challenged readers) as backdrop. Our gracious host took every chance to remind us that not only was the excursion strictly illegal and not a little bit dangerous, we were also the first Americans ever to set foot on that roof. Пионеры такие! While we were breathing life back into our frozen digits in Manege's underground cafe and bragging about our adventure to our coworker Tamuna, Anna (the closest person we had to a boss) called Sarah's cell phone and summoned us to the registration table, presumably to reprimand us harshly for abandoning our posts for the past hour or so. We approached Anna braced for a tongue-lashing, and instead received...an invitation to th concert that night celebrating 20 years of Pushkinskaya-10, with Russian rock legends DDT and Аквариум headlining! I thanked my laziness and stinginess for holding me back from buying tickets, which I'd been meaning to do ever since posters advertising the concert began plastering themselves over every available surface over a month ago. I've got a soft spot for DDT after learning their 1990's hit "Что такое осень" ("What is Autumn") in Phonetics class. It turns out that the lead singer of Аквариум had swine flu or something, so DDT was the only big name playing, and we stood patiently through the opening bands in anticipation. But, we stood patiently for too long (i.e. Boris Butusov played WAY past his welcome) and by the time DDT took the stage I was already starting to check my watch. Tired, achy, and cranky, I missed the last bus home and had to take the metro, then walk the remaining 20 minutes to the dorm in the crackling cold.

By the next afternoon (Halloween, coincidentally), it was clear that I'd come down with something, likely while gallivanting on the roof of the art gallery. I dragged myself robotically through the usually-enjoyable printmaking class and what would have been a really fun, interesting outing to the Buddhist Temple on Petrograd side with Sarah and Andrey (and their friend Dima) before I decided to call it a day, cancel my plans for costumed clubbing later in the evening, and curl up with a cup of tea and some Nyquil until I passed out. I made a cameo appearance at the Halloween party the girls across the hall were throwing, and in conversation with my multinational peers I was educated about various traditional Russian home remedies. A cup of tea with a shot of cognac for a cold, vodka with black pepper for a sore throat--and for a fever, hot water with the juice of two lemons and then STRAIGHT to bed, and no delay!

I had all those symptoms and all the necessary ingredients on hand, so I shrugged my shoulders and tried everything that was suggested to me, and woke up the next morning not only delirious with fever, but slightly hungover to boot. So much for home remedies...

I barely had a day to recover my strength (half of which was spent shivering at Manege) before the barrage of midterms resumed. I coughed and stumbled my way through the week, and this past weekend I spent every available moment poring over the texts from my Impressionism class, trying hopelessly to somehow absorb into my germ-clogged brain (osmosis?) the ideas necessary for my oral miterm exam, which was on Monday. At some point during my many comings and goings from Cafe Dubai (for the wi-fi), there appeared next to the elevators, surreptitiously and unannounced, a list--ten pages long, with a header in Russian--of students who were required to bring "fluorography results" to the dormitory's main office, and who, in the case of noncompliance, would find themselves within the week lacking card access to the building.

That's just how it is here. You don't ask questions, you just do it. Except that I did ask questions, since I had no idea what flurography is, nor how or where to obtain results. I sniffed out the answers from my Italian roommates: fluorography is an X-ray procedure used to detect signs of tuberculosis, and Russians generally get tested once a year. It's apparently really difficult to get a job if you don't have current fluorography records, because who knows? you could infect the rest of the staff and leave the business without employees.

I needed an excuse not to go my Conversation Practice class before my midterm on Monday afternoon, and medical testing is always good for that! Plus, I value having a working key to my place of residence...so Monday morning I got off the bus a few stops early, with directions in hand to a clinic and fluorography lab. The building was a one-story, square, pseudo-neoclassical structure painted mustard yellow (I couldn't help recalling that yellow, in Russian culture, is the color of sickness and insanity--mental asylums are painted yellow. Raskolnikov's wallpaper was yellow), squatting inside a cast-iron fence with an overgrown, weedy lawn. The interior, once I had walked around half the building to find the entrance, was filled with warped light from frosted windows, refracted into a faint insalubrious glow by the dull tiles and pale walls of an indistinguishable color, a sickly sterile smell, by which I could identify that this was a hospital even though it looked more like a bathhouse than any hospital I'd ever seen, and--of course--a line of people already waiting to register for their test. Four or five middle-school boys in matching tracksuits sat around indolently, and a silent old man in a leather jacket and newsboy cap, standard apparel for St. Petersbur's elderly, held the spot ahead of me.

They summoned us based on gender into a separate waiting room where we took off our shirts and stood around shivering while they called patients one by one into the X-ray room. When my turn came I stood in front of the machine awkwardly, not sure if I understood the nurse's instructions (it takes my Russian language muscles awhile to warm up in the morning). The x-rays showed up on her computer screen and her eyes widened. "Девушка! Ты болеешь?"(Miss! Are you sick?) My heart thumped and I held up my fingers an inch apart to indicate "чуть-чуть". She left the room and I waited only a moment, wishing I had my shirt on, before she reappeared with the doctor, speaking fast and low. He sat down and inspected the pictures of my lungs, then yelled over to me, "Девушка! Ты болеешь?" I grew more concerned, and not only because they were addressing me in the personal ты instead of the formal вы. "I just had the flu" I explained, and he chuckled darkly. At this point I think both he and the nurse noticed I was still half-naked, and told me to get dressed and wait outside.

I sat in the doctor's office while he rattled off a bunch of medical terms I didn't understand, presumably explaining what he was jabbing his finger at on my x-ray. Finally he stopped mid-sentence and asked, "How much Russian do you know?" and I explained that I'm studying here but don't know any medical language. He nodded and then said very slowly, "Do you know, what is пневмония?" I blanked for a moment, trying to make sense of "pnev-muh-NI-ya", and then suddenly remembered that Russian has a nasty habit of replacing "u" and "w" with "v" in foreign words. "OH!....Pnevmenia?!"

So that's it, kids. I've got pneumonia. The clinic wanted to send me to a doctor right away, but I'd been studying all week for this midterm and there was no way in hell I was going to miss it on account of a silly cough. So I walked the eight blocks remaining to Smolny, took my oral exam--and passed it, with a B+, with pneumonia, in Russian! I'm clearly a demi-god. But still sick, so last night I took the bus across town after class to Euro-med, the posh clinic where the doctors speak English and there's a coffee machine in the lobby, and which also happens to be free with my health insurance through Smolny. The doctor (Doctor Boris) looked me over and gave me a talking-to for waiting so long to come and see him, and then told me I'd have to spend the night at the clinic because although they work 24-hours, they'd already shut down their x-ray machine for the night. And I would be lying if I didn't say that my night in this hospital room has been the most comfortable experience I've had since I got to Russia. They didn't feed me dinner, but breakfast was great, and I just checked out "Heart of Darkness" from the city library's foreign language collection yesterday.

The only hitch is that I'm paying for it in blood, quite literally, with the holes they've poked in both my arms to run tests and inject me with antiphlegmatics. That, and I don't know when they'll let me go. They need to do more tests, I think, and x-rays as well...To be quite honest, I'm getting better health care here than I could ever afford in the United States. But, to be quite honest, I wouldn't have gotten pneumonia in the United States, either.

My Chinese language, my shitty English, my bad bad Russian...

Last night I had just swapped my earrings for my bulkiest, comfiest sweater and resigned myself to a slow, quiet Saturday night with my books and guitar when, from the Italians' room--"Nadia! You want some wine?" Equipped with my wine-jar and my tri-cultural goggles, I joined Consuelo, Iladia [Oh yeah, I found out a few weeks back, in a sitcom-worthy head-on confrontation, that though I had been addressing her as "Anatolia" for nearly a month, my roommate's name is actually Iladia. We laughed it off.] and their Russian friend Nikolai (Kolya), whom they met smoking in the staircase--which, aside from the balconies, is the only area in the dorm where smoking is allowed. It's also, incidentally, how they meet all their friends. The two of them smoke like chimneys; if I'm in for the night, I hear the door open and close in a predictable rhythm throughout the evening. Every so often they bring home acquaintances and I see them squint-eyed in the morning after carousing until the wee hours with the folks they met in the staircase. Everyone smokes in Russia, so it ends up being a really good way to meet people--the staircase is a contemporary public watering-hole.

The (metaphorical) tri-cultural goggles came in handy almost immediately, as the three of us came up against Kolya's typical Russian chauvinism in the age-old debate of women driving cars. We headed out to the staircase to continue our fight with the stabilizing affect of nicotine and "fresh" air (in my case, neither) and within moments we were joined by one, two, five students from our floor. Somebody conjured up a guitar, and suddenly Dima was growling Gogol Bordello and folk songs and classic Russian rock--and then there was a clatter from the 18th floor and a flock of Chinese boys bounded down the staircase, offering "Chinese cigarettes? Chinese cigarettes? Double luck!" to anyone who looked their direction--and steps from below and a boy from two floors below came into view, carrying his girlfriend piggyback. I called David to come up from the 6th floor to join us. And then! My Italians, back and forth from our room, brought out a bottle of wine and--another, and--another! Everyone was singing along, somehow one of the Chinese boys got the guitar and banged out some accented Nirvana, Katya with long, long blonde hair started up a primal yell. The guitar got back to Dima, Iladia reappeared with a bottle of champagne, and soon we were all on our feet, in a line with our arms around each other, kicking to the beat.

The crowd shifted, people came and went, the ruckus died to a simmer when the champagne was gone, and now Dima sat on the floor and sang us a song about our languages, declaring each "the best in the world". He stopped singing and told us to speak, each of us speak in our own language, and suddenly the staircase resonated with the polyglot echoes of Chinese, Italian, Russian, English--laid over the guitar, Dima's voice rumbled out "That Chinese language...My shitty English, my bad, bad, bad, bad Russian language..."

Five o'clock clicked into place and the party had dispersed. Just me, Katya, Kolya, Iladia, Dima, a few boys with another guitar, whose names I never caught, on the landing of the 13th floor--Consuelo had slipped off up the staircase with a 14th floor boy, David called it a night at 4 AM, everyone finished their last cigarette and emptied their glasses and slouched off to bed. The guitar ended up in my lap and I heard my voice echo around the stairwell in sudden silence as they listened and then clapped along to my "very American" Old Crow Medicine Show and Neutral Milk Hotel.

The night felt good, and when I poured myself into bed, I grinned into my feather pillows and fell asleep in instants.

As if these were adventures

Books! A brief interlude: for a reason somewhere between convenience and nostalgia, I picked up On The Road when I finished Master & Margarita and found myself in need of a new bus-and-metro book. I've never read Kerouac before, and after Bulgakov his writing was especially refreshing in its honesty and irreverence. I flipped the pages with gusto and with each adventure I read, I got a stronger urge to document my own--as if these were adventures. But adventures or not, they don't write themselves.

Incidentally, after I finished On The Road, I skimmed an awful translation of Gorky's A Sky Blue Life and Other Stories, putting it down after the first few tales because it was clear that in Russian the writing would be beautiful, but whoever translated it did so without a trace of tact. Each sentence was stilted, in quality and clarity only a step above free online babel-fish translation. The prose came off as bald and intangible, without atmosphere or emotion. The lesson learned in throwing that aside: no matter how good the original, a good translation can make or break the deal. No wonder Nabokov caused heart palpitations in the literary world with his prose translation of Eugene Onegin--for all y'all non-Russian lit buffs, Pushkin's original was written in verse. I'd prefer a beautiful prose translation to an artless literal one , but purists were scandalized and many maintain he desecrated the novel. That said, now I'm in the first few pages of Andrey Bely's 1920's Symbolist masterpiece Petersburg--or rather Robert Maguire and John Malmstad's translation thereof. Far more appropriate reading material!

So last weekend found me in between all this, having just finished On the Road and just coming to the conclusion that A Sky Blue Life was uninteresting, and thus without a good book for the 5-hour bus ride to Pskov. Pskov! An ancient Russian city that makes America look like a bouncing baby, and to hear our guide Mikhail Ivanovich tell it, one of the most glorious cities on earth. Better than Paris, better than Tokyo--and New York? Psh, that's not even a city. And I can't really disagree with him, Pskov is pretty impressive. The oldest city we've got is what, 300 years old? 400 if you count settlements that have been no more than tourist attractions for the past century or more. St. Petersburg is 300 years old and it's considered "young" by Russian standards. It's still finding its feet. Now Pskov? Pskov has over 1,000 years under its belt. You can't dispute that for seniority.

The excursion to Pskov was one of the Bard-Smolny Cultural Events, which meant free meals, fancy lodging, and traipsing around the city with Mikhail Ivanovich all day--but there's only so much you can take of doing everything in a giant group. And our group was giant! Not only the vast majority of the American students (about 30), but also ten or twelve Russian students made the trip, as well as our program coordinators, and one gaunt, bearded Russian History professor who informed us early on that our first tour-guide--whose name I didn't catch--hadn't a shred of credibility, and spent the rest of the weekend raising his eyebrows and correcting her under his breath. Apparently she had claimed that Saint Olga founded Christianity.

We left Petersburg at 8:00 Saturday morning (and allowing an hour and a half for the commute I woke up at 6), gathering in the dawn at the feet of the largest statue of Lenin I've seen to date. Petersburg is strange in its statuary: It seems like every block in this city has its own statue of Lenin, or bust of Voltaire, or oversized anchor on a pedestal. While these seem to be the most popular themes, there are monuments to Soviet heroes tucked away everywhere in the most unlikely of places. Cosmonauts, explorers, foremen, writers--just today I came across a larger-than-life bust in military garb, perched on a craggy pedestal with a bronze camel curled sanguinely at its base: a tribute to some man who explored central Asia? All this aside, this statue of Lenin was most impressive that morning, right arm flung forward (pointing towards the glorious future of Communism, no doubt) as if the proletarian commander of the troupe of groggy, duffel-toting students clustered beneath him.

The weekend, quite frankly, was made up a series of fantastic meals at nice restaurants, interspersed with long periods of walking around and looking at ancient things. They always feed us so well as a group, especially when there are Russian students along! Lunches consist of a salad and a main course, often soup, followed inevitably by tea and usually by dessert. Most of the cultural excursions are worth going to, but even if they were entirely dull they'd be worth it for the lunch with which each one concludes. But I digress...Pskov is around 50 km from the border with Estonia, historically serving as a guard city, and is thus encircled by a millennium-old stone wall and fortress. I zoned in and out of Mikhail Ivanovich's tour and more than anything just enjoyed the crisp, clean sunlight and solemn peaceful feeling I imagined radiating from the tired old stones. There's just something about sitting on a wall that's been unchanged for over 1,000 years that put me in a quiet and unhurried mood.

Friday night after dinner I joined forces with a few of our girls and sought out the infamous Banya--a Russian tradition that's among my favorite aspects of this culture. The Banya is a public bathhouse where visitors alternate between sitting in a suffocatingly hot sauna where they beat each other with birch branches (to stimulate circulation, see?), and pouring icy cold water over themselves or jumping into a similarly icy cold pool. The process is repeated as the visitor desires. Risley: imagine Pool if it were funded by the Russian government.

We spent Sunday at Izborsk, cite of another ancient fortress and an incredible panorama spread out beneath the guard towers--rolling hills and a flat horizon, trees lazily changing their leaves on the banks of a pristine reflective lake rippled only by flocks of swans floating barely in motion. I imagine this landscape unchanged a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. The phonetics instructor Svetlana Borisovna, upon our return, told us with a note of sincere tenderness that the view from the ruins at Izborsk is, for her, the most beautiful Russian landscape, the symbol of all of Russia, the place that feels most like Homeland. I don't know if it's possible, but I imagined I felt something like that as I spread my gaze over that beautiful, serene place untouched by the heavy pace of history.


All my Russian classes are canceled this week due to some bureaucratic error in the university's system--which is a pretty standard occurrence here--but this week is as full as ever due to my inimitable talant for over-scheduling. I have Impressionism today and Photography on Friday, and I'm volunteering for the art-center Pushkinskaya, 10 on Wednesday and for the Hermitage on Tuesday. Pushkinskaya, 10 is hosting an international contemporary art festival starting next weekend, and my job is to help the non-Russian artists navigate their time here, whether that means hanging paintings, buying art supplies, or taking them to the hairdresser. After the festival starts on the 24th, I have 4 shifts a week as a дежурник, or attendant, in the gallery. Hopefully that means talking with visitors about the show, getting familiar with the pieces exhibited. I'm looking forward to meeting the artists and working so closely with them! It's really exciting having the opportunity to be involved with such important institutions in the art world. The Hermitage, though, to be honest, is far more exciting in theory than in practice--I spent an afternoon working on artists' biographies in English last week, and it felt like doing homework in Uris computer lab. At least my résumé is getting its first real field-related addition, um, ever. The Hermitage, too, is about to open a new show, on tour from the Saatchi Gallery in Britain, and I'm helping compile the information regarding that. Links, if you're interested: This is the Saatchi Gallery show, and you can find the "Level of the Sea" Festival here.

Hopefully, though, all this won't interfere with my intentions for a whirlwind trip to Estonia in the second half of the week...plans are in the works, but not concrete quite yet, so I'll put off any more detail until I've got tickets.

And October already!

From a letter to someone dear:


I've been here for 6 weeks already, and the stories are piling up. I'm stifled under them and in one part of my heart I wish I could give them all to you now, but the clock's ticking down to morning and they're already too backed up, and even in two languages I haven't enough words or the right ones to tell you everything. Another piece of me doesn't want to waste them in empty cyber-space Helvetica: isn't it better to save them up for that illusive SomeDay when I'll call you up and time will graciously stop so we can share everything that we've been missing in each other's lives.

Sunday I went to the opera on one of our many "Cultural Excursions"--or, more aptly put our "Tourist Free-Time". We had third-balcony seats in the Mikhailovsky Theatre to see Iolanta, a Tchaikovsky opera about a king who hides from his blind daughter the fact that she's blind. I think I would have enjoyed it more if they didn't have a clock above the stage for me to glance at every ten minutes or so, if my thoughts didn't keep drifting away from the incomprehensible sung dialogue (incomprehensible because no word, in any language, can be understood when sung on a high C) to the coat check, where my violin was waiting on a bottom shelf. Before the last strains of applause had died away (granted, we applauded for around 10 minutes) I dashed out with the peremptory goodbyes, caught a late bus to Театральная Площадь, "Theatre Square", and walked a few blocks to catch the end of a jam session that had started an hour before. This weekend there was an experimental music festival at the Манэж Gallery/performance space and they were closing Sunday night with an open jam. I wandered in with some friends (Jason and Ben, and I'd love to tell you about them, but this is not the paragraph for introductions) on Saturday, listened to the concert, and afterward talked to a boy who'd been setting up the sound. "We only have 8 channels on the mixer, but anyone is welcome." We communicated only in 2nd languages, my broken Russian perhaps equaling the English he insisted on speaking.

I made it in time for a few jams, some electro-acoustic noise that, frankly, was a little disappointing. What we needed most was a beat to center ourselves around, too many melodic instruments vying for attention--violin (mine, and I tried to take it easy), trumpet, sax, guitar--not enough structure. A few older guys on hand-drums, but when they didn't succeed in establishing a pulse after several tries, they packed up their drums and went backstage to smoke cigarettes and sullenly kick at the ground. The horn man improvised wildly without any sense of rhythm, the guitarist strummed half-assedly with too much distortion. Devin would have set them straight with a nice groove. Still, jam is better than no jam, and I gave that same blond boy my email address and asked him to let me know if they get together again to make some noise. The guitarist, speaking very jaggedly but clearly wanting to say something to me, managed "Next time it will be better," in English as I packed away my violin, and I walked to a nearby bus stop with a smile on my face despite the wind and my feet aching in my opera heels. But the bus didn't come, so I flagged down a gypsy cab, that is to say a random car, and haggled a ride to the metro station for 50 roubles, or $1.50, or more simply a price that a foreigner never gets. I felt Russian. ^_^

You see what it takes just to write down the story of one night? And every day I'm doing things I want to write down. Every day I'm wishing I had the time to tell you everything. For example: yesterday I went to a poetry reading, again with Jason and Ben, and sat in the corner of the room drinking in the words and my jasmine green tea (which I spilled in my lap), listening more for rhythm, taste, and texture than lexical meaning. I saw Пётр Швецов there--one of my printmaking instructors. He and I have bumped into each other twice times now in this big city, once at a gallery opening and again last night. He's an interesting fellow, he looks like Pushkin, with giant sideburns and violently curly hair and a grave, piercing expression, always carrying his bicycle seat under one arm to keep it dry (or un-stolen). We didn't speak last time we met, just inclined our heads at each other in the ubiquitous gesture of Russian politeness--but in a city of 5 million you can't ignore it when someone keeps turning up, so we said a few words before parting ways. I hope he does keep turning up; I'd love to have someone in the art scene to whom I say more than hello and goodbye.


So much has happened! I've got to get on top of my game and get these stories out before they disappear like the dreams I don't remember.

Week 5

Italian flatmates are a riot. They gave the suite a thorough cleaning, scrubbed the floors, replaced the shower curtain, even bought a toilet-bowl air freshener and new sponges for the kitchen. Everything was squeaky clean within a matter of hours after they'd moved in. I see them around the Philology Department at SPBGU, looking glamorous in their big black sunglasses and leather jackets, two classic blonde Italian babes, Consuelo at least a head shorter than Anatolia. They go everywhere together. Every time I step out of the elevator I see them smoking cigarettes together in the stairwell. They yell at each other in Italian and I hear it through the wall, always wondering if they're really angry at each other or just passionate, because it seems like that's the only way to speak Italian, with the full strength of your voice so that your mouth gets to cherish the vowels and consonants rolling around and flipping off your tongue. They speak to me in a mixture of three languages, and somehow our messages get through. They make my flat a little less empty and a little more like a home.

Tomorrow's my day off, and I'm looking forward to filling it with art: there's a contemporary art festival in P-burg right now, with installations scattered across the map of the city, and I've been to a few but they're far apart and I didn't get to all of them on Saturday. At 1:30 I have an appointment with Anna Pushina, the volunteer coordinator at Pushkinskaya 10 Art-Centre, so I can finally start my internship there (which will last throughout the month of October, as far as I can tell). They need English-speaking volunteers to help with an international festival they're holding in October, but I really hope it's a chance to practice my Russian as well.

But now, I'm due to meet some friends in the metro for our guilty little treat of American culture--the new Tim Burton movie, "9", is playing, and if we're lucky we might get the original sound track + subtitles instead of dubbed awfully into Russian. An early night on Nevsky Prospekt, a break from my usual Tuesday night debauchery. I've got things to do!

Боже мой!

I had my first violin lesson! It was lovely to get some guidance again. I miss taking lessons. It was difficult because I only understood half of what he was saying (Igor Dmitrivich, my teacher), but like my printmaking class it was made easier by sensory communication--showing, playing, listening, watching, and finally understanding. He's a great guy! He calls me "Nadyushka", the ultra-diminutive of Надежда, the Russian word for Hope. No, Nadya isn't diminutive enough for him, it's not a high enough level of cute. He needs to be absolutely sure that I understand how seriously little and sweet he thinks I am. You know, in English it'd seem unbelievably condescending, but in Russian it's just...it's just how it is.

My language skills are improving. My accent feels more natural every day, my tongue is getting used to the gymnastics of Russian pronunciation (thanks to a little help from my Phonetics class with Svetlana Borisovna), and I think I could honestly say I'm learning no less than one new word a day just in conversation, not to mention the vocabulary I pick up in class. Замечательно! That is to say, right on!

And life here goes on: Tuesday night I went to a rehearsal of the SPBU choir and afterward had tea with a girl from choir and her roommate, both named Dasha, both very sweet wholesome-seeming girls. They're a pair predestined: they grew up in the same city, have the same name, both study sociology at SPBU, and while I was visiting both of their mothers called them--and yet they didn't know each other before they became roommates. They invited me to...a concert? I'm not really sure what they invited me to, but it seems to me it could be fun. And I didn't have class yesterday so I stayed out late. I walked from bar to bar with what could turn out to be my regular Tuesday night crew, starting at an Irish-themed bar the size of our kitchen where they were watching German girls mud-wrestle on TV. Then, we went to the only Mexican restaurant I've seen in this country. We couldn't just pass it by without checking it out--Mexican food is like the Holy Grail here: many search for it, but it remains hidden or perhaps even mythical. Every so often somebody claims that they serve a taco or burrito, but the first ketchup-and-sour cream-smothered bite proves it to be a hoax. So we got what turned out to be passable, even tasty, chips and salsa and the bartender gave me a free experimental drink (who would have thought that Baileys, mint, vermouth, and grenadine would be good together? Let me amend that--who would have thought that any drink tastes amazing if you set it on fire first?). Then, onward in the rain to a Soviet kitsch-themed bar where I played chess with a guy named Maxim and lost spectacularly (I thought his queen was his king! The cultural barrier extends to the gender of chess pieces, I guess).

I have new flatmates. Xoi Shun, the Taiwanese girl who lived next door, moved out several weeks ago and now the room that shares a kitchen and bathroom with mine is occupied by two Italian girls, Consuela and Anatolia, whom I barely met Tuesday night on my way out the door. They seem nice, and they'll be my motivation to clean up and do my dishes (no longer will I live in squalor!). Yesterday we met more in-depth, and it turns out they cleaned the whole apartment, bought air freshener and paper towels, scrubbed the toilet. Thanks, ladies--only now am I acutely aware of how grubby my own room is. Some things will never change--I put everything in order and and and and a moment later my desk is invisible under a landscape of papers once more.

Thursday already! I can't believe how quickly time is flying. Before I know it I'll be on the plane back home. I'm already compiling a list of things I miss, and things I will miss.

A toast to Tuesday night! A plague on Wednesday morning!

Having no class on Wednesdays almost but not quite makes up for having class at noon every Saturday. While nothing can take the place of the freedom afforded by two days off in a row, Wednesday morning rolls around and every week I'm more relieved than I expected to be when I hear my hallmates scuttling off to class and I don't have to go with them.

Tuesday night I was prepared to make up for my relatively tame weekend (home by 1 AM every night). With David and Paul from U Chicago, Lila from Reed, and Rachel from Lawrence, I was lured to "MOD club", an apparently foreigner-friendly club with no cover charge on weeknights, by the promise of live "funk-brit-pop" and cheap drinks. And funk-brit-pop there was, more or less, made funnier by the fact that all the lyrics were in Russian and that we couldn't figure out what was British about it. All the same, live music is live music, and the rumbling bass is the same in every language. You don't have to translate the beat of a drum.

Wednesday I finally made it to the Hermitage! Even without any fine art, the Winter Palace is astounding. Many of the rooms are simply recreations or preservations of 19th century Russian royal style, with furniture, decoration, and brocade in place. One small ("small") hall was lit by three enormous crystal chandeliers, probably 10 feet in diameter at least, which reflected off the pale marble pillars and life-size solid gold sculpture of a peacock perched on a branch surrounded by smaller wilderness animals.

The museum was easy to get lost in, as it's somewhat haphazardly organized, and I wandered from room to room following the pull of certain colors or paintings that caught my eye. But I was tired, carrying in my limbs and clouded head the weight of another night out. It made itself known in the throbbing of my soles and shadows of fatigue on my face, drew my mind from the museum, my legs dragging like sandbags, my eyes drooping past Matisse. So I left the rest for another day (another several) and sat in the courtyard to absorb how good it felt to be surrounded with art. I get wrapped up in this gloomy idealist perfectionism--or perfectionist idealism?--and museums sometimes help to lift it. I love to watch an artist's work progress as they move away from what was accepted, standard, and into their own style, pursuing not perfection but their own voice, a mode of expression that translates their souls or spirits or intellect. It's refreshing, I come to adore the "flaws" in composition and representation, feeling the artist as a real person at the moment they pressed their brush to the canvas.

I just love art.

The week: a summary

This is about as brief a summary as will ever exist of all the sweet things that happened this week, from last Saturday to this Sunday.

Saturday I had my first Printmaking class, noon to 4 PM, which is a shame because it means that my Friday nights are cut out early, but honestly this class is not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon. I had a hard time finding it last weekend--it's in the studio that the "professor" shares with another artist, which is on the fourth floor of a standard apartment building off of the Sennaya Ploschad metro station. One of the uniquely Russian things about St. Petersburg is the courtyards--you often have to walk through an archway and away from the street, where it opens up into a courtyard that's shared by all of the businesses or homes around it. It's interesting but it makes it difficult to find certain places, especially on a Saturday morning after 3 hours of sleep and dancing all night.

But when I walked into Yuri Shtapakov's studio I suddenly felt so good, energized and awake and peaceful surrounded by so many objects of creativity and artistic tools. Yuri's enthusiasm was infectious as he invited us to make some tea (his) and have a cigarette (our own, if we had them). He didn't speak slowly, nor did he speak simply, but something in the clarity of his voice and his accompanying movements made him perfectly understandable. I was conscious that he was speaking Russian, but most of the time I stopped translating and just absorbed the meaning of what he was saying. He said that his favorite pieces of art are those done by people who "know nothing" about art, people who have never studied it and just let their creative ideas take control, because he sees an honesty in their work that is absent in a lot of experienced artists. We sat on mismatched couches in the corner of his studio, drinking tea and chain smoking (well, not me) while he flitted around and every few moments would jump up and say "Я сейчас вам покажу...--I will now show you..." and pull out another old piece of his to illustrate a point, or a work in progress, or a model for an installation that has yet to happen.

Then, Saturday night I accidentally stayed out all night--again, two nights in a row. I had meant to go home after the first wave and be home by 1 AM, but before I knew it the clock said 12:30 and I was still drinking and dancing with Megan, Joe, David, Lila, and Pasha & Roman, the guys we met on Friday night. Details are hazy, but 4:00 AM found me alone on the far end of Nevsky Prospekt, the only person on the street except for the bored taxi drivers and night owls who sometimes yelled down the street me, "Do you need a ride? Directions? You lost?", walking past the empty 24-hour cafés where the attendants were all asleep with their heads propped up on their hands behind the counter. I walked all the way up Nevsky, from end to end. I felt like a Dostoevsky character, tired and hungry, alone in this city where smiles must be earned. It took me over an hour, and along the way I ran into Roman, who did a double take and said "Why are you here?" and bid me goodnight after making sure I wasn't lost. At the other end I met up with my group and we got blini and tea at Chainaya Loshka, the Tea-Spoon, and took the first bus home to our dorm in Primorskaya at 6:03.

Sunday: we had an excursion to St. Isaac's Cathedral, which meant another night of sleep cut short. I met some excellent Russian girls--Olya, Tanya, Natasha, and Nadya, students at Smolny. The nap I had when I got home was on par with finding a bathroom after a pot of coffee and a long walk, in terms of relief gained.

Monday: I walked into my Impressionism & Postimpressionism class with Sarah and sat down to wait with anticipation while all the other students filed past us, late as are all Russian students (and Russians in general). The professor began talking in a low and fast tumble of words I didn't understand, and I began to feel a little panic rising in my throat. I'd expected to be able to hear at least a few words I knew--painting, artist, creativity, or even "Impressionism"--but it didn't seem that she would get around to that right away. I managed to pick out "Hegel" and then something about Lacanian analysis and the panic hardened into a little knot--Wow, I thought, unaware that there even were Lacanian undertones in Monet's Water Lilies and Van Gogh's Starry Night. About a half-hour into the class my eyes were glazed over and I was considering how to meet my Art History credit requirements without taking any Art History classes this semester when Sarah jabbed a piece of paper onto my desk. Do you also think we're in the wrong class?

And then the professor started talking about Marxism and I knew we were in the wrong place--there's just nothing Marxist about Degas' ballerinas! But we were too afraid to leave, so we just sat, fidgeted, and passed notes back and forth for another half-hour until the coffee/bathroom break midway through the four-hour period.

It turned out that our Art History class was a floor below us, and the one we'd been in was an upper level philosophy class called "Contemporary problems in ideology and knowledge" or something like that. That made me feel a little better about not understanding what the professor was saying, considering that I probably wouldn't have been able to follow it in English either.

Tuesday nothing interesting happened. I think I got some Uzbek bread for lunch, which was fantastic--they have these steaming hot little bread pockets filled with meat or cheese or chicken and tomatoes, like a hot pocket but fresh from a clay oven, for 50 rubles and only a 7-minute walk from the main Smolny building. It's my lunch just about every day.

Wednesday I had no class all day, so Joe and I walked around St. Petersburg, museum-hopping. We started at the museum in Dostoevsky's apartment off Sennaya Ploschad (and I don't know what Dostoevsky was bitching about--he had a pretty kushy place) and walked up the Fontanka to the museum in Anna Akhmatova's apartment, which was my favorite in terms of museum quality, while Dostoevsky's was my favorite apartment. Then we went to Pushkin's apartment on the Moika Canal, where our tourguide had a habit of spontaneously reciting Pushkin's poetry (in Russian, of course) with a grave face.

We had planned to go to the Nabokov museum as well, but it was almost closing-time by then and, as Sarah later said, we'd already made it through "The Trifecta" of Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, and Pushkin. We got some blini on Nevsky Prospekt and then I took the metro out to Sarah's apartment off Kirovsky Zavod to make a tart and eat dinner with her, her boyfriend Andrey, and our classmate Misha/Michael. It was a grand old time, as it tends to be with Sarah and Andrey. Aw friends! ^_^

Friday: we had a group outing to a bowling alley, where I won the first round (with a score of 100, probably among my highest ever!). Afterwards--details again are hazy, but I ended up in a karaoke bar by the Smolensky Canal that runs through Primorskaya, my neighborhood, a bar that resembled something between an old-west line-dancing hall and a day-camp cafeteria, more a tent than a building, filled exclusively with middle-aged people dancing waltzes and singing karaoke to Russian popular folk songs. We got a bottle of vodka between the 10 or so of us and somebody decided to sing "A Whole New World", which of course we all got roped into. We stuck around and possibly annoyed the regulars, and ran home at 12:50 to get inside the dorm before the curfew.



Saturday: printmaking class, which was again fantastic. We made our first attempt at printing, each creating our own templates and pressing them ourselves. It was fantastic. Partial results:



(mine is the metaphysical teacup)

Saturday for dinner we had a gigantic blini party, which meant I stood in front of the stove and cooked everybody blini for two hours, and after that we sat on the concrete shore of the Gulf of Finland in the fading light, playing music (a mandolin, violin, and guitar trio), singing, and drinking until just before the 1 AM curfew.

And today we had another cultural excursion to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where we saw the sarcophagi of most of the Romanovs from Peter the Great on down the line, and the prison cell where Maxim Gorky was held (among other things). We had lunch at a vegetarian cafe run by a religious cult (kind of like The Maté Factor!) and then I walked an hour back to the bus stop. Now I'm at Café Dubai for the free internet, drinking the last dregs of my Turkish Coffee (Кофе в Турке) and using this blog post as a distraction from my 30 pages of reading about the origins of the Impressionist movement, in Russian, for tomorrow afternoon's class. Thanks!

Night life

I'm tired, still, woozy from fatigue and fighting to keep my eyes open. I don't think I slept more than 7 hours the From Friday to Sunday. What a weekend!

St. Petersburg is full of inconvenient time limits, deadlines and curfews. The bridges go up at around 2:30 AM to allow boat traffic through, so if you live on Vasilevsky Island (I do) or one of the other islands, you have to be across the bridge before then or wait until 6:00 in the morning. Then, the dormitory where I live locks its doors at 1:00 AM, as a safety precaution in a neighborhood where serial rapists have been known to lurk, which means that you have to be back inside by 1 or wait until they open again at 6:00. Finally, the last trains on the metro lines leave at midnight (buses stop running at 11), so unless you want to take a gypsy cab--or a real cab, for a much higher price--you have to make it back to the metro at midnight. All this combines to create a really interesting night culture in St. Petersburg. People generally either go out early and come back home around midnight or 1 AM, or go out on the last train and stay out until the wee hours of the morning. 12:00 AM is a really interesting time to be on the metro, because the early birds are raucous, rumpled, and swaying on the up-escalator, while the night owls are groomed and alert, ready for a night out that starts on the down-escalator into the station.

Friday I was ready for a night out. I had good company: a group consisting of Andrea, Alisa, and Gabby, my neighbors across the hall; Alesia, Dorian, Christina, and Lena, others from our program; and three internationals we picked up at the dorm. We left at 11:30 to walk to the metro, 20 minutes away. We were meeting our friends (Megan, Joe, David, Rachel, Paul and his girlfriend Ella, Cait, Alex, and Lila) at Fish Fabrique, the famous artsy bar of the Petersburg Avant-Garde--but word came down the line that there was an exorbitant cover charge (ha!) in the realm of 6 dollars, or 200 roubles, so we diverted ourselves and the two groups didn't cohere. Alex and Cait met us on Liteniey Prospekt and we walked to Griboyedev, a famous [infamous] club in the neighborhood. It wasn't raining, but it had been, and my toes were wet in my culturally-appropriate high heels by the time we got there. We managed to haggle the cover charge down from 300 roubles and went inside and downstairs into the dark, thumpingly loud basement club, where the walls were plastered with magazine cut-out collage and the luxurious couches occupied by beautiful young Petersburgers with legs crossed and shoes dangling, or smoking cigarettes and in animated conversation, or heads close together with secret smiles, whispering in each other's ears. On a whim I told the bartender it was my birthday and got a free shot of absinthe! It's a trick I plan on trying out every time I go somewhere new, because they generally don't ask for any sort of identification. This way it can be my birthday every weekend! (Isn't that the best way to do it, Katie?)

After having a dance-off (I think that's what was going on?) with a well-dressed, serious dark young man, I went up to the roof and met some linguistically confused Finns who were smoking there. The three of them wouldn't believe that my friend Cait and I weren't Russian and kept repeating "Oh! Bez accenta, bez accenta!" ("No accent!") until we broke down and admitted that we're actually from Moscow. One of them couldn't decide which language was best to speak in and slurred between Russian, French, English, and Spanish. He would ask a question in one language, then switch to another as soon as I'd answer in that language.

When that got old, about 3 AM, we took a gypsy cab to Dacha, a club in the international-nightlife district where a lot of Americans hang out (I don't know why, it's awful, and I don't know why everyone wanted to go.) to dance more. There I met Pasha and Roman, roommates who told me they were brothers and who I later found out were really just roommates. We talked a bit about music and decided to meet up the next night at another club where they were having a Beatles, Doors, and Rolling Stones themed dance party.

By the time 5:00 rolled around, my friends were all worn out, sitting in a 24-hour cafe around the corner from the club district, picking listlessly at their shashlik (shish-kabobs) and shverma (like gyros, with lamb and mayonnaise). We finally connected with Megan, Rachel, Joe, and Lila and walked to Chainaya Loshka, "The Tea Spoon", a chain tea-and-blini place next to the bus stop, to wait for the first bus to roll in at 6:03.

And it did, and we got on it, and went home. But now it's Monday evening and I have homework to do and a nap to take, so Saturday will have to be documented another time.

A new rhythm

A new rhythm's taking hold of me here, or maybe I'm just trying to grab hold of it. Finding my balance is hard, keeping my feet is harder.

Not counting RSL (Russian as a Second Language) classes, which have been going on for two weeks, I have my first class in Russian today! Yesterday I had my first non-RSL class of the semester, Russian & Eastern European Film. The class is conducted in English, but there are a few Russian students in the class. It's also over 3 hours long, from 4:40 until 8 PM on Thursday nights...we watched Man with a Movie Camera during the class and then discussed it. I was in awe and humiliated to discover that the Russian students were not only extremely good at English, but more articulate than any of the English students in the class. They led and dominated the discussion while the rest of us dumbly conceded our first language to them.

On Wednesday I had a free afternoon and the weather was phenomenal, so I walked around the city, first with my friend Joe--we went to St. Isaak's Cathedral (but it was closed) and Nevsky Prospekt, and then found a little café where we got the best espresso we've managed to find in the city so far. Coffee is a cultural import here, and drip coffee doesn't exist--if you order "coffee" you get NesCafé or an Americano if you're lucky. We also went to the Mikhailovsky Garden, where we managed to find a (rare) bench and sit for awhile in the gathering chill. Later, I met up with Nikolai, a boy I met at the dormitory last weekend when I was being harassed by the Kommandant. Our pass-cards are formatted so that when you swipe them your picture comes up on a screen for te Kommandant to see, but for some reason my pass-card was connected to the image of a gruff-looking young man instead of my face. Nikolai helped me find the office to get my card fixed and waited while I attempted to explain the problem in patched-together Russian. He speaks English and did foreign exchange in high school, so we decided to get together to practice our respective second languages. Nikolai and I met at Palace Square, walked around Peter and Paul Fortress, across the Neva (twice!), and finally ended up on Nevsky Prospekt as it was getting dark. He treated me to dinner at Subway, the other American fast-food import besides McDonald's. Unfortunately, other than our languages we don't have anything else in common, so once we'd gotten past introductions, it was pretty funny.

ME (in Russian): What kind of music do you like?
NIKOLAI (English): Oh, I like rock a lot. Do you know Limp Bizkit? I like them a lot. And Blink 182. And Linkin Park. And Metallica. Do you like electronica?

Anyway. Off to my Photography class! I'm a little nervous, but I have a pocket dictionary and every day my comprehension skills improve. This is what I came here to do--learn Russian, in Russian (in RUSSIA!), so...here goes!

С днём знаний!

Today is the traditional Russian holiday День Знаний, the Day of Knowledge, which means that little kids come to school with bouquets of flowers for their schoolteachers, and a band plays in front of the school, and bus fare is free (or maybe they just don't care enough to check your pass). School has never been this big a deal in the United States!

Peterhoff in the rain

Flickr is a liar and a cheat. I just discovered their monthly upload limit, and there's no way I can upload the ungodly plethora of photos I take within that limit. I'm strongly considering paying for a pro account with no upload limit. The facebook uploading apparatus is horribly slow, and I haven't been anywhere with fast enough internet to make it feasible in under half an hour. But I have pictures! lots of them! Some are good! How can I share them?

It's Monday of the second week of our Russian Language Intensive, and all our regular classes begin on Wednesday. In Russia the 1st of September is "Ден Знание," the Day of Knowledge, when all schools and universities throughout the country begin their semester. However, Smolny is in a state of constant turmoil and disorganization (they're half in one building, half in another, one of which is under restoration and one of which is under repair), so because they've been unable to get their act together, Smolny students start on Wednesday. Until then, it's just three hours of Russian class every morning. You know, nothing much.

When they say "intensive", it's what they mean. It all seems like sound-soup in my head and ears right now, but I'm persevering with the hope and expectation that there's got to be a moment when everything shifts slightly, the sounds turn into meanings and I get it.

For now, it's impossibly frustrating. I feel paralyzed in everyday situations like at the grocery store or on the bus, unable to communicate with anyone around me. I understand a lot bit of what people say, usually enough to get by, but I'm helpless to respond. The language barrier feels like a physical thing, a two-way mirror where I hear what they're saying but no matter how I try I can't make them understand me. Being deprived of my language is terrifying. No matter how I try to gather my nerve, it's discouraging. I want so much to stay positive about everything, but I have trouble negotiating mundane interactions--I don't know how to read a menu, I don't know how to ask what the next stop is on the bus, I can ask for directions but I don't know how to follow them. It's scary. I'm trying, but it's hard.

As far as...life? This weekend was sort of a blast. I went to Klub Arktika, reportedly the best club on Vasilevsky Island (and the hub of Goth culture in St. Petersburg), on Friday night. I walked 25 minutes in heels to get there, incredulous the whole way that some St. Petersburg women (most, in fact) wear stilettos no matter where they are or what the occasion. Women here are extremely well-dressed, overdressed, beautiful dolls promenading up and down Nevsky Prospect ("a young lady, who turns her head to the glittering shop windows as a sunflower turns toward the sun"). But we are very clearly American no matter how many inches we stack under our heels, in little ways like the way we hold our cigarettes or our styles of dancing.

Saturday afternoon I met my friend Jason for a jam session by the canal, in the sun. After a year of playing with Funk Apteryx it felt very strange to play in a different style with a different person. It was shaky but fun, and we agreed to play again soon. That evening I went to visit my friend Joe down the hall and when I came back, my door was locked and my keys were inside--I guess my flatmate had left and locked the door behind her. So I spent some time mulling around, visiting different friends, waiting for Rebecca to get home. Unfortunately, everyone decided to go out to Fish Fabrique, the bar associated with the famous Pushkinskaya 10 gallery and art center, but the girls across the hall let me hang out in their room (instead of the hallway) while I waited for my roommate...and fortunately, Rebecca got there only 10 minutes after they left, so I joined them there. Fish Fabrique is a great little bar, there's live music and dim lights and foozball...A++, would Fish Fabrique again.

Sunday it rained all day, a catastrophe of gigantic proportions because we spent the whole day outside, at Peterhoff, the palace and park built to celebrate Russia's naval victory over Sweden or something like that. It's sickeningly opulent but really quite beautiful, and even though we froze our asses off, the grey sky really brought out the green.

First weekend

It's sunny again! And my feet hurt. I walk much more here than I did in Ithaca, on the scale of miles every day. Public transportation is great, but it never gets you to get exactly where you're going, and considering that I haven't found a gym or other means of exercise, the walking is good for me. And there's no better way to see the city than roaming its streets making wrong turns.

It's hard for me to believe that I just lived this past weekend. It turns out that I know the same people as a few kids on this trip. A boy from my Russian class (Jake/Fedya) went to high school with Sarah, with whom I hit it off pretty quickly. We decided almost on a whim to room together in a triple (with Rebecca--just throwing names out because it feels wrong not to), a situation that's working out really well so far. No sooner had I dropped my bags in my room than I found myself trotting along the canal with Sarah on our way to a documentary film festival at Klub Arktika to see a film that her friend Karina made for class. I met her "Russian friend" (wink wink) André, another film student who speaks only a little bit of English. The way the two of them communicate is beautiful to watch and listen to, a playful compromise between her broken Russian and his broken English. If language is a barrier, then they're Pyramus and Thisbe learning to kiss through a hole in the wall. She's been here for two summers already, so she understands most of what she hears and speaks very good, practical, rudimentary Russian. Between my jagged conversational skills, André's English, and Sarah sweetly acting as interpreter, we managed to pleasantly pass several hours together. On our way back towards the dorm (past one particularly menacing residential building that took close to 10 minutes to walk by--it spanned the length of the canal), she turned from André, with whom she'd been conversing in incomprehensible Russian, and said, "I know you're jet-lagged and must be very tired, so you may not want to, but we're going out to visit his family in Kamenka for the night, and if you'd like to come, you're welcome to." I briefly considered the pro's and con's--going back to the dorm for a much-needed 13 hours of sleep or so, or braving the depths of sleep deprivation in Soviet Kamenka.

Well. In about an hour we were on the train out to Kamenka, about 200 km (I'm practicing!) of St. Petersburg, a 1 hr 40 min ride. When I asked Sarah how much train tickets cost she laughed a little and explained that it's no more expensive to pay the "fine" (bribe) if they catch you without a ticket than it is to just buy one, and it's far cheaper if they don't come through and check (which is most of the time).

That's another thing: bribing is natural here. It's expected. The police often stop people who've done nothing and either hassle them until they hand over a wad of cash or just downright rob them. If you refuse to give them money they can conjure up on the spot some crime you're not guilty of. Most people don't fight it, and most people in official positions expect bribes. So, when the train conductor did come through the compartments, André wordlessly handed over 100 rubles (like, $3?) and she moved on without a comment.

Night had fallen when we got to the Kamenka station, and as the train pulled to a stop and we walked forward through the cars (like running down the down escalator), Sarah casually threw over her shoulder--to my deliriously fatigued delight--"Oh, so...we might have to hitchhike a little." We followed the crowd onto the platform and André secured us a ride the 20 minutes into town with two young men who blasted factory-direct hi-tempo industrial techno and sipped Baltika 7 (think Keystone Light, in large glass bottles), which the driver held between his knees as he steered. Uhhhh....sometimes I forget I'm in Russia.

As I'd been warned, André's mother was cooking when we got there, even though it was 11:00. Everything they've taught you about Russian mothers is true. Every time I'd put down my fork, Natalya would say "Kushe, kushe!" ("Eat, eat!"). If I refused something her face fell into an awful expression of affront and genuine concern and she'd quietly say "No Pochemu?" ("But why?"). The next morning she cooked us a gigantic breakfast and, even though I was still full from the night before, I swallowed my refusals along with her delicious fried squash pancakes and rice porridge. After breakfast we took a walk down to the lake with Alyosha, André's 6-year-old brother (So as not to eat anymore, I whispered to Sarah, and she laughed).

The language barrier was difficult, but fun. Natalya made jokes or argued with her son, and after everyone finished laughing Sarah would translate. "What she said, was..." I understood bits of it, and talked a little, and when we ran out of things to talk about I just pointed to things and they taught me the names.

We returned to Petersburg exhausted, sleeping on the train with our backpacks as pillows, and André bid us goodbye on the metro. The two of us walked around Nevsky Prospekt until 5:30 when we met the group for a boat tour of the city. But I was still so tired, the guide's commentary melted into the buzz of the motor in a vaguely Slavic drone that hit the ear slightly like language. I slipped in and out of sleep, happily drinking in the sun and feeling grounded, present, and unhurried.

And that night we bought Baltika and walked along the beach on the Gulf of Finland, me, Joe, Lila, Rebecca, Alisa, and Joe's roommate Matio--celebrating our Last Day of Summer with our feet dangling off the pier, our mouths full of laughter and cheap beer.

That's Russia for you!

Feeling groggy, puffy, and a little bit seasick, I'm sitting in an open area on the fourth floor of the Smolny building, watching my computer battery tick down from 9% and rain splatter against the window. My view is a rust-red sheet metal roof and mildewing whitewashed walls, antiqued antennae and powerlines, and a granite sky. It's the First Day of School and it's raining, how typical. It's as though the past few days of beautiful clear skies were St. Petersburg's begrudging welcome to us, but followed with a stern reminder not to get too used to it.

First night

Finn Air is awesome! The JFK-Helsinki flight was without a doubt the best flight I've ever flown. They provided me with a vegetarian dinner, and wine & beer were complimentary so I had a wonderful little single-serving bottle of South African shiraz and toasted with my friends behind me over the back of my seat. Breakfast wasn't nearly as exciting, as the vegan option was a half-pita with cucumber, tomato, and lettuce, but they did give us tolerable coffee. I did have to declare my violin at customs in St. Petersburg, but the agent who inspected it didn't give me any trouble and actually seemed interested in it. I was feeling so tired and laissez-faire by the time I got to customs that I leaned up against the table (which supported my enormously heavy hiking backpack) and plucked my violin lazily like a mandolin while he conversed with his superiors.

This city is beautiful and strange, although I haven't seen much other than the hotel, the river, and the view from the bus. The bus ride here was silent most of the way. I think everyone was overwhelmed. All of a sudden this thing we've been looking forward to is real, we're here and it's so much bigger and scarier than I thought it'd be. Looking out the window I felt like I could see the pulse of history underneath the city, each building another subsequent pump of the St. Petersburg's heart, from Neo-classical to baroque to boxy concrete Soviet-era apartment buildings, the skyline torn by spires and the smokestacks that jut from the staggeringly vast factories that have lined the Neva's banks since the mid-1800's. I feel history and it's a history I'm not a part of, and that's very...beautiful and strange!

After lunch and the second round of HIV testing (they're serious about it here; you can't get a visa unless you get a negative result), I returned to the hotel to nap. The flight was fun, but crossing 8 time zones means a loss of a full night's sleep, and by this time I was feeling it pretty strongly. I set an alarm for 6:20 so I'd make it to dinner at 6:30, but I guess I didn't set it well enough because I woke up groggy and disoriented at 8:30, having missed dinner completely. With the dual mission of finding dinner and finding alcohol, I set out from the hotel as part of a mob of students who were invested in at least half of those objectives. We stopped at a grocery store, a tiny, half-underground 10x10 room that was half cheese, milk, & meat, and half alcohol, but the only things I really knew how to identify & pronounce were "яблоко" (apple) and "кефир" (kefir), so my dinner turned out to be...an apple and a pint of kefir!

The group decided to buy a bottle of vodka and sit on the bank of the Neva, but I started feeling really uncomfortable with the dynamic, like I was a duckling invisible within a flock, just following out of helplessness, and it's illegal to drink vodka on the streets in St. Petersburg anyway (but not beer or wine), so I and three boys, Ben, Joe, and Jason, decided to drink in a real bar. We had a hell of a time not only finding a bar that sold cocktails and more than two kinds of beer, and also trying to order without seeming really dumb. We failed: the bartender laughed at us. We toasted to our first night in Russia, and then to Finn Air, and then to our terrible Russian. After a couple of drinks (absinthe isn't illegal here! it's delicious!) we strolled along the bank of the Neva in the dusky dark, taking our time in returning to our hotel. It was so beautiful, nearly 11:00 and still bright in the western corner of the sky, streetlights reflecting like strobes against the fluttering waters of the same river that's swallowed thousands throughout history.

And now...I'm on about 3 hours of sleep and breakfast is served in about 8 hours, so it's about time to crash. Tomorrow: several more hours of lectures, and a bus tour of the city!

And we're off!

It's hard to believe that I'm actually here with the train rumbling beneath me, embarking on the first leg of my journey. I don't know what I'm expecting or what I'll find at the other end of the line, but I'm growing to love this feeling of uncertainty and potential.

Russia! The Motherland! The hulking giant stretching across two continents and eleven time zones! My home for the next four months!

I woke up this morning freezing, having already packed all my blankets, along with just about everything else I own that isn't in my suitcase, hiking pack, or violin case, into boxes in the sweltering attic of my house. I felt springy and a little sick to my stomach, and after a brief shower (I didn't realize my towels were packed away until afterward) I frantically finished packing and Devin & I set off for the train station in Syracuse.

I've developed patience for in-between periods after riding the rails cross-country three times, so the hour's ride to the station flew by, and three hours on a train isn't too bad either--but I don't know how much more waiting I can stand. The whole length of summer has been leading up to this point, from feeling like it was a daydream at two months away, to grasping its reality at the one-month point, to the actual unbelievable preparation at a week and a half to go, and this past weekend's frenzied rush to finish. By now it feels like the next two days will stretch into eternity, like somehow they made Russia up and I'll be stuck in limbo forever. I wish I could skip the two-day Orientation at Bard College and just hop right onto the plane, get up and go, without this wretched purgatory first.

I don't have a choice, though, and the scenery's pretty nice in the meantime. I love traveling by train if only for the easy-going atmosphere of the train station and the lax (nonexistent) security. Unfortunately, I had to spend the first half-hour of the ride picking clean the inside of my backpack, as my lunch (a salad with such odorific ingredients as goat cheese --wince!-- and tuna --cringe!) opened and spilled all over the inside of my bag. I think I'm already the token crazy person in this car, after the trial I had getting my 50 lb suitcase into the overhead storage, my multiple trips back and forth to the bathroom for paper towels to clean up the mess, and the resulting pungent smell of tuna emanating from my luggage (and, I'm sure, from me...what a great first impression I'll make on my classmates!). But it's okay! I'm about to spend a semester immersed in a notoriously xenophobic culture, so I'm getting some good practice in being stared at.

Speaking of which, that's the biggest wild card on my mind. I don't know how much hostility I'm going to encounter, especially from people my own age. I fear that it'll be more than I can imagine, or in ways that I hadn't thought of, but I expect and hope that at this time, in a big city--and St. Petersburg especially, Russia's historical "Window to the West"--the people I meet will be less hostile towards foreigners than in rural areas or even in Moscow. Still, from what I've read, culturally they're much less inclined to embrace individuality and things that go against the norm, which are things I generally do embrace...It's an assumption I don't want to make, so I won't, but it's an observation others have made that I can't ignore.

For better or worse, I requested to share a suite with several Russian students in the dorms that the Smolny Institute shares with St. Petersburg State University. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to live with my peers, but it will be...interesting, to say the least, to find out how similar we are in some aspects of our lifestyle and how radically different we are in others. All I hope for is that I don't let shyness, fear, or ignorance (or fear of ignorance) keep me from trying to interact with others around me and especially from speaking Russian.

And I'll probably meet some incredible American students as well, and I'm hoping to connect with them too, but I feel like this is the only opportunity I'll ever have to coexist and assimilate with Russian college students, people who have lived through the same span of history that I have, but have viewed it through the lens of an unimaginably different culture, within the context of a vast, conflicted, and stormy history, as a piece of that giant crouched between Europe and Asia, as Russian. Someone told me it's going to be like dropping out of the sky onto another planet, but I think it'll be more like an alternate dimension, where everything looks vaguely familiar but skewed in the details, almost recognizable and just enough like home to make me miss it.

Well, here goes something!