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!
No comments:
Post a Comment