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.