Past Week, and New Travel Plans!

I went to the Pushkin museum last week. I only went to the main gallery though which was not interesting at all – the majority of their pieces there are copies of the originals. They did have an interesting Japanese print collection however, and another gallery which I plan on going to later on that houses originals of many of the European and American artists of the 19th century.

One day last week, Cody and I went to the Gorky house. Gorky was a famous Russian author during Stalin’s time, and he lived in an amazing house, especially considering that most people during that time had one room for a family and shared communal apartments with up to ten other families. The Gorky house is very famous for its architecture – it uses the imagery of a wave a lot. (I didn’t get any pictures because, well, I guess I never really do) It also has giant windows, which is really rare for Russia.

Saturday we had an excursion the Bulgakov’s apartment. He is also a very famous Russian writer. His house, however, was a room in one of the communal apartments I mentioned earlier, and he hated living there. It was boring for the mso tpart, but also interesting because most of his books and characters are based on that apartment and the people who lived in it, so it made it easier to picture things.

Sunday night, Shamella John and I met to go to the Rihanna concert. It was at the Olympic stadium, which is huge! and I was surprised at how many Russian fans she has. Our seats were not the best, but once the show started security became pretty inefficient and only guarded main gateways and ignored people crossing under tape to get into better sections, so we moved over as well. At one point though, a group of people wanted their seats (which were not the ones we were in) but the people who were in their seats told them to harass us because we didn’t know Russian. Since we do know Russian, we managed to argue enough to have them find their real seats, and a British guy behind us managed to make them stop bothering us. That was definitely not the first time that any of us have experienced something like that just because someone assumes we don’t understand what is going on. Russians are very anti-foreign, and very racist (which we have to deal with a lot because my friend Shamella is black).
The other really amusing thing at the concert was that Rihanna kept talking to the crowd in English – and none of them understood. There was a lot of “Moscow let me hear you scream!” followed by dead silence and chuckles from the few who did understand.

Other than that, I am sick again with a bad Russian cold, and hopefully I’ll be better by the time our program trip to Kiev rolls around next week.



Oh, I also have changed my travel plans for the summer! My friend and I decided not to do the Trans-Siberian – he’s going to do the old Silk route through China, Kazakstan, Kyrgystan, Otherstans instead, and I’m going to stick to normal-people plans. =)

Right after the program, I’m going to fly to Kaliningrad with Chase and John (that strange section of Russia that is separated by the three Baltic states) and then we’ll make our way over to Lithuania for a few days. Then John and I will go see Latvia and Estonia for the next week or so and take a ferry across the Baltic to Helsinki. John is going to go home at that point, and I’m going to fly to Stockholm and spend a week there looking at some universities in nearby cities and pretending to be Swedish.
Nothing is set in stone after this, but I do have various friends living in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Romania for the summer, and a ticket out of Istanbul in late July, so it appears that I’ll be crossing Europe in some sort of fashion. I also have plans with a friend to go to Norway and see Oslo and Bergen, and hopefully some fjords!

Kazan Again

Ok, So I've done quite a bit the past week.

Thursday night, six of us left for Kazan on the train. Mike, Shamella and I were going to be visiting Aygul and Ildar, and Natasha, Cody, and Jen wanted to see the city.

Mike, Natasha and I on the train. (there are more pictures in my Picasa webalbum...a lot of them I just copied from friends who came with)

The day before we left though, Aygul went intot he hospital with a really bad sinus infection, and they had to scrape out her sinuses through her nose and ears. (yes, if I had to hear the details you do too!) We went to the hospital every day, and it was essentially just like you would imagaine a Russian hospital to be. We weren't allowed in past the lobby, instead the patients came out and we all just stood there awkwardly mingling. It resembled a prison actually, and everything was falling apart - though I was told this was better than the other hospital she was in last time and it was better once you left the lobby.

Mike, Ildar, Aygul, me, and Dilyara in the hospital lobby.

The rest of the time in Kazan was pretty normal. Saturday was March 8, which was woman's day in Russia. Women's Day is nice because all the girls get flowers, and the guys do all of the work, but it hasn't turned into a cheesy holiday like Valentine's Day in America. Another night, we all went skating at the arena across the street. I was one of the few who actually knew how to skate. We went shopping a couple of times, and then hung out the Meagan (a girl we know from ASU) and her roommate Chris. Shamella and I left for Moscow Tuesday night.

Natasha, Mike, Ildar, Jen, and I at the skating rink.

Wednesday I didn't have any class, and on Thursday we had an excursion to the Energiya plant (which is like Russia's NASA). That was really cool because it meant I had an entire week off from classes! At Energiya, we saw a lot of the original Sputniks, the first Mir spacestation, and a lot of the little pods that the cosmonauts came back down in, including Yuri Gagarin's.

This is a picture of the Russian station docked with the American one.

Friday I went to class, at which point some other people decided they wanted a Saturday class even though our teacher wasn't requiring it. so yes, on Saturday I went to class. Afterwards though, my friend Chase and I went to this market called Izmailovsky Park, where they have a bunch of souvenirs and then outside normal clothes and stuff that you can get for very cheap. Then I met up with Cody and Jen, and we went to a Modern Dance performance in this crazy independent studio in Moscow. It was taken from Japanese spiritualism, and very strange - one lady danced for an entire hours, in super slow motion, and I felt like she was acting out dying/seizures the whole time. It was...interesting.

Today I am going to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and then back to class tomorrow.

Culture Clash

Haha, so basically its really interesting seeing how much I don’t fit in here.

First example: no one can say my name right, its always Keslee. Though, I must say that the worst name problem was on the tickets coming back from Kazan, which Aygul had to buy and give our names in Cyrillic. My middle name is Layne, and the n/m got lost in translation, so my ticket read “Kelsey Lame Olson.”


Second: food. When I don’t eat everything that Galina gives me, she takes offense, so I have to either say that I don’t feel well so I don’t have to eat it all or try to explain that yes, I like it, but I don’t want three bowls of rice, no matter how much I like rice. Same with tea – if someone offers you tea here you HAVE to take it, or else they get really offended.

Third: getting into the dorms. Technically there aren’t guests allowed in the dorms, but for our program, there are. The guards at the entrance to the dorms make the homestay kids jump through all kinds of hoops to get in (I’m there enough that I think I’ve come to an agreement with the strictest one where she lets me in but I have to leave my passport at the front desk so she doesn’t get in trouble for anything) The RA told me it was leftover Soviet mentality, and some suggested we bribe them with cigarettes. Anyways, its adventuresome.

Fourth: my individuals every Tuesday. Basically ‘individuals’ are supposed to be there to work on whatever you need help with. I decided I just wanted to work on my speaking ability, so when Zoya, my individual teacher, found out I was also studying political science, she decided we would talk about politics in Russian. Zoya is incredibly nice and I like her a lot, but I’m not sure why I agreed to her suggestion of talking politics. It’s an older – vey opinionated - Russian woman who grew up during the Soviet times talking to a young idealogical American girl who has no plans to do anything with Russia after this trip, and we talk politics for two hours. I don’t even know how to convey how bad and ridiculous of an idea this has been. I really should record some of the conversations (not that anyone but me would understand them) but one day we ended up talking about Kosovo (yeah, realllly not a good topic). I obviously don’t speak well enough to convey my opinions correctly, so it gets even more interesting. Basically I ended up taking no position whatsoever and said that Russian and American should like each other again and the world would be better. Haha. She also doesn’t understand why I don’t want to work in Russia after this, and why I decided to study Tatar on top of everything. Russians also seem to have a very strange concept of refugees, because they always get really confused when I tell them that I used to/want to work with refugees in Africa. The first question is always why Africa and not Russia? They also seem to think that refugees are bad people who decide to ruin their country and go live in America in giant mansions, so the next question is why do I want to help them? Luckily I think we both realize we come from different cultures and there are some misunderstandings, but I still always end up completely floored after class on Tuesdays because things get just so crazy.

And finally, nobody ever smiles here, they are always mean unless they have a reason to be nice. They also look at you strangely if you smile at them, because unless you have an actual reason to smile they don’t understand why you are. They get especially difficult right before their lunches, and will suddenly stop talking to you in the middle of a conversation and close their window in your face if they happen to lose track of time and go into their lunch.

Elections

Yesterday was the presidential election, which was incredibly non-interesting. Obviously, Medvedev won, but I guess what was more surprising to me was the lack of attention it got here. I watch the news every morning and night when I eat at my homestay, and it is rarely mentioned – there is far more coverage of the US election than the Russian one. They showed Medvedev constantly, but never mentioned that he was running in the stories (from what I could understand) and I still don’t know any of the names of the other candidates. There were no posters or anything for candidates – there were announcements of the elections everywhere ( I already put up a picture of that one ) and this week a giant billboard of Medvedev and Putin was placed in Red Square (the picture here), but compared to other countries I’ve been in during elections it was nothing.

Many of the people I talked to were either going to vote for Medvedev and really didn’t care, or they didn’t like Putin/Medvedev and didn’t know what to do. In Russia, there used to be an option at the bottom of the ballot that roughly translates “against all” for people who didn’t want to vote for a candidate and just wanted to cast a protest vote. That was gotten rid of though, so people are left with three options: 1. to vote for Medvedev; 2. to vote for candidates who they dislike just as much and really have no experience or support; and 3. to just not vote at all. These are all options which really don’t encourage progress.
Oh, and while I was very tempted to attend some rallies (most of which were opposition rallies) my friends and I did not. While getting arrested and deported would be an incredible way to end a trip here, we decided we should wait ‘til the end of the semester. Haha…

Another interesting occurrence was that yesterday (Election Day), we went on an excursion to the Kolomenskaya Estate on the outskirts of Moscow and on the banks of the river, where the tsars had a summer palace. When we started the tour we were told that about two hours beforehand, Medvedev had been there to pray in the church on the grounds. Kind of cool that we were so close to seeing him.

This is the church Medvedev was at.

The excursion itself was kind of boring – we were all lured there with the promise of blini because it was in honor of Maslenitsa (maslo is ‘butter/oil/fat’ in Russian), a Russian festival to mark the beginning of spring and Lent. It would have been a lot better if it weren’t the worst weather ever, nothing resembling Spring, just a mixture of snow and slush and flooding everywhere. So after two hours of being bored and outside, we were finally given the blini, with some dancing and games to go along with it. We weren’t allowed to take pictures but it was definitely fun. We had to carry in the Lady Maslenitsa and be greeted by some Russians in costumes. Then they danced and sang and made us participate in skits and games. During one, our TA Lena and I were chosen to be the ‘sisters’ and we had our own teams. Everyone on our team had to run up and tie giant scarves around our heads and whichever team was done first won. Basically picture me with eleven scarves (which were the size of blankets) tied around my head. I felt a bit top heavy. Then some friends had to dress up as babushkas and dedushkas (grandmas and grandpas) and one was a bear and had to dance around. The end was definitely worth the two hours of hell we went through because I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard in a really long time.

I'll put more pictures up when I get them - I tend to be lazy about taking my camera out all the time, so I have to steal the pictures from other people =) I also put up some more pictures from around Vykhino and the dorms on the picasa photo albums

John, Shamella and I bought tickets to a Rihanna concert in Moscow the end of March. We had been looking at one of her cds here one day and talking about her music, and then the next day saw that she was coming to Moscow and decided we should just go and see her, even if she’s not any of our favorites. It will be at the Olympic Stadium too, which should be fun.

Though I haven’t gone to any clubs yet, Russians practice what they call “face control.” It is just what it sounds like. They don’t let you in to bars or clubs unless you are attractive, and oftentimes you also have to appear quite wealthy. I guess I’m not that surprised about the practice itself, but I think it’s amusing that they are so open about it. When you see an ad for a club or bar it lists what kind of food, the hours, the kind of music, and then whether or not it has face control (which is usually a positive thing).

Also, I have discovered that Skittles and Starburst here are not the same, it’s highly disappointing. Skittles have strange flavors like strawberry and red currant. Starburst are not as chewy and have apple and some other flavors. I keep buying them hoping I will like them (I’ve become slightly addicted to Skittles and Starburst in college) but, no, I never do. I’ve also been on a hunt for Root Beer. I’ve been told that it does not exist here and since my Russian friends had never had it before when they were in Arizona, I should probably believe them, but I’m determined.