New Blog!

Seeing as I am no longer spending this year in Russia, I thought it'd be appropriate to create a new blog for my new adventure! For posts on my year abroad in Almaty, Kazakhstan, use this link:

http://kazakhjan.blogspot.com/

That'll Happen.

Updates and Upgrades

So, somehow it happened. I made it to the last week of my trip. And these last few days in Ryazan are flying by! It's been a big week so far. Check out my crazy work schedule:

lolz. so busy.

But it's all good, because an empty schedule just means more time for me relaxing at the dacha. Which is update #1. I love the dacha. And with sunsets like this every night, can you really blame me?

Update #2: Our school's "no electricity in the bathroom" situation got a nice little upgrade this week. Sangria bottle candle holder? Pretty schwanky.

Update #3: Guess who finally got registered this week (only 5 weeks late) and can now legally leave the country?! THIS GIRL! She also apparently got a sex change (Famale? Good one, Russia).

Day-Trippin' Moscow #SelfieStyle

I recently took a day trip to Moscow with my newest host, Dasha. She's 18 and is starting to apply for universities. Since most things in Russia are outdated by at least thirty years [read: general fashion sense (scrunchies are still cool?), stances on "liberal" social issues (they love dropping the N-bomb and hate gay people), and very basic concepts on infrastructure (which I am just not even gonna go into)], it's not surprising that they haven't quite made the leap to electronic applications yet. What this means is that for every school Dasha wants to apply for, she actually has to go there and fill out document after document after document after document after.. you get the point.

So while Dasha took care of her business, I was given a whole day to roam the streets of my lybimaya Moskva completely on my own. "Moscow? Unleashed?" I thought to myself. "What should I do?!" Realizing that I spent the majority of my time exploring Moscow last summer in a group, I decided to return to my favorite places. Alone.

I would like to preface this post by saying I'm not a #selfie person. However, in Russia, as I've mentioned before, nothing is more important than proper documentation. So here it is. My documentation, or what I like to call "A Girl, her iPhone, and 8 hours to kill in Moscow."

The journey begins at the main fountain in Gorky Park. It was a beautiful-to-too-hot kinda day, so this place was packed with people cooling themselves down by dipping a toe (or ten) into the water, letting their kids splash around in it, nommin' on overpriced ice cream and mountains of cotton candy, and watching the fountain's streams of water dance in tune to some classic Soviet jamz. Then at one point a guard came around an yelled at everyone about a "strict" no swimming policy. Which makes sense, since, you know, it's a shallow, public fountain. But as I've learned time and time again, Russians love to break the rules, so naturally, this man's harsh words discouraged no one, and the scene returned to its above described state immediately upon his disappearance, if not sooner.   

Next I headed to Kolomenskoye Park, which was a former royal estate way back in the day (I'm talkin 1500s or so) and super scenic. This place took my breath away. Not only are the ancient buildings (pictured: Ascension Church and Bell tower) absolutely stunning, but it was probably the cleanest air I'd breathed in quite some time, and my silly little lungs, confused by the unfamiliar substance, had no idea what to do with it all. 

To give the little guys a break, I bought myself some pirogi and popped a squat under a nice, shady tree. This lasted for about as much time as it took for me to get the above picture. As it turns out, ants love these little pies just as much as I do. To avoid becoming an apartment for ten-ants (lolz see what I did there?), I soon relocated to the only shady bench I could find not already being occupied by an elderly woman with 5+ plastic bags.

I could have stayed in Kolomenskoye all day. And if sunburn, dehydration, and fear of using porto-potties weren't real life problems, I probably would have. Getting on the metro, I had no idea where I wanted to go. I decided to go about making my choice the Russian way: leave it up to fate (and then if that doesn't work out, find a scapegoat and hold a grudge against it for a hundred or so years, never accepting personal responsibility). Oh Russia, I tease. LYLAS! 

 So I picked a random person and decided that when she exited, so would I. Luckily for me, this stiletto slut didn't have too far to go (and in 8 inch heels where could you go? really.), and exited at Teatralnaya Ploshad. From there I headed to the Bolshoi theater. I've been reading George Orwell's "1984," which just seems appropriate given, well, you know, Russia. So I sat down at the fountain in front of the theater and read for a bit, but then I became super convinced that the guy on the bench next to me was an agent of Big Brother and I decided it was time to go.

Then I wandered on over to say hi to Marx, but we didn't chat for long. He was too busy with his cool new friends (pigeons) to care about me or the times we never spent together. Also he's a statue. Soo that was a little awkward. And at this point of the day it's becoming clear I need to get myself into some shade, because the heat seems to be having an interesting effect on my sanity.

But finding shade? Who has time for that nonsense? NOT I. 

T-2 hours til departure. Must venture on.

 And venture on I did. To Red Square, of course! I could never get sick of staring at St. Basils. But I could definitely get sick of the crowds there. While I had definitely mastered the "pretend to be taking a picture of the beautiful thing in front of me while really taking a smug selfie and also capturing the beautiful thing behind me" creep-shot, I was not doing a great job avoiding bumbling tourists and their unleashed children. I swear those things and their sticky fingers just pop up out of nowhere sometimes. Or all the time. Anyway, I don't want to point any fingers (none of which are sticky), but SOMEONE (pigeon?) was distracting me, and while I'm not entirely sure what happened, I do know that my sandal was a casualty in the incident. A small child may or may not have been involved. All I'm gonna say is that I titled this post "Day-Trippin'" for a reason. 

Whatever it was that happened, it was nothing a little ice cream couldn't remedy. So I went into GUM (goooom), the shwanky shopping mall on Red Square, for some self-medication. Last summer, Mustache, our most feared and admired literature professor, made the comment that you can't say you've lived in Moscow without having eaten ice cream at the fountain in GUM. I've done it a dozen or so times already and I have to be honest, I don't really get it. I mean, it's good ice cream. It's also like three times more expensive than ice cream you can find on any other street in Moscow without having to wait in line. But I'll give it points for a nice atmosphere, and the ice cream contained just the right amount of sugar to fuel the rest of my journey.

Next, I crept on Joseph Stalin and Comrade Lenin, two gossipy teenage girls, I mean politicians, who I was pretty surprised to find sitting next to each other. After all, there's not doubt that Stalin eventually found out through the grapevine all those things Lenin said about him back in the day.

HISTORICAL FUN FACT: before Lenin's death he wrote a Testament, in which he stated that Stalin was unfit for leadership of the party, warning that given too much power, Stalin would become intolerable (#nailedit!). He also told the party a bunch of Stalin's secrets he had shared at their last slumber party like how he had made out with a hotdog and got diarrhea at a Barnes & Noble one time. Ok, Ok, so obviously that last part didn't actually happen (although wouldn't a "Mean Commies" parody film be kind of fun?). The point I really wanted to make was that after all that nonsense Stalin put the country through, like, you know, killing everybody off and then burying Lenin's envisioned ideological plan with the rest of the bodies, I'm sure that this little reunion of theirs contained at least one reaaal awkward "I told you so." Just look at that tension.

But then wait, another Stalin? Alright, now I'm convinced I'm seeing things. And I am not amused.

 

Time for one quick drive through of Aleksandrovsky Sad, 'sad' meaning 'garden,' not the emotion.

Although at this point I am not looking too perky, I will say that. That double-Stalin vision is still really freaking me out. Good things it's just about time to meet Dasha at the metro station.

 I made it to our meeting destination with time to spare! Waiting for Dasha, a very gap-toothed Asian man approached me. For whatever reason, I'm always getting asked for directions, which is hilarious since I'm typically the one who needs them, so I just assumed that this man was going to ask me how to get somewhere, and I was fully prepared to utilize my newly perfected "Russian direction giving" strategy of always just saying "Pryamo, Go Straight!" regardless of where they're headed. But no, he opened his jacket, pulled out a shiny black rectangular object, and whispered, "iPhone 7? You want?" 

Um, excuse me? I may have just spent a day scrambling my brain cells in the heat of the Moscow sun, and I may not be able to tell if I have achieved foot tan greatness or have just been unsuccessful in my foot scrubbing regimen, but I KNOW I am not crazy enough, even at this point, to fall for that one. 

And so the day ends with this girl, her iPhone FIVE, and a full wonderful day's worth of Moscow memories.

konets.

It's Only Natural

 Much like the delectable scent produced by Ryazan’s premium plasma-TV factories and oil refineries, many things here are now just natural.

For example, it’s only natural that when I come to work the floors will be flooded and the power only works in one room. And since that one room is not the bathroom, it’s only natural that we have to pee by the light of a candle.

It’s only natural that in a town of about 520,000 people we run into the same guy literally everywhere who, regardless of whether or not we invite him to tag along (and we never do), he somehow ends up spending the day trying to make awkward conversation with us.

Further, it’s only natural that if you smile and laugh too much while a Russian is telling a story, they get really insecure and tell you to stop being so cruel.

It’s only natural that what Russians consider a “private” spot to change into your swimsuit on the beach is really just the frame of an old bus stop covering inhabited by drunken speedo-donning old men who can’t tell the difference between English, German, and let’s be honest, probably their own two feet.

It’s only natural to be teaching a lesson and have the school’s resident stray cat come in, pat your students down for food, find none, and in retribution sit on top of your open books, refusing to leave.

From that of course, it’s only natural for me to strongly desire to be able to beat this cat with the same monkey wrench it so intensely loves throwing into my lesson plans all the time.

It’s only natural that teaching English has strengthened my awareness of stupid idioms, but not at all discouraged their use. Clearly.^^

It’s only natural that when you order ethnic food in Russia, it will taste like Russian food. No matter what. Also, pizza and sushi are almost always sold at the same restaurant. Naturally.

It’s only natural that, although whenever I’m at Misha’s he offers us nothing but beer, nothing in a beer bottle in his house is to be assumed to actually contain beer. Lesson learned.

Further on the topic of past hosts, it’s only natural that when I complained to Lena (my 23 year old host who insisted on holding my hand every time we crossed a street and once woke me up at 8am to grate a giant stump of carrot) that there was no food at my next host’s home, she responded by saying “I am ashamed of my countryman” and swiftly wrote him an angry message/essay on what it means to be a proper Russian host (which naturally only shamed me).

To be honest though, this guy wasn’t a great host. To him it was seemingly natural to wait until I came home from a long day in the sun, ready to shower and fall asleep immediately, to tell me, “Oh by the way, I’m leaving for Petersburg tomorrow, so you have to pack your bags. You’re moving out in an hour.”

While it’s possible that he warned me of this earlier in the week, it’s only natural that the details of the plan were lost somewhere in my attempted translation of his convoluted use of a language I’m pretty sure he just made up. Someone needs to tell him that mixing Russian with English, Spanish, and Bob Marley is not in fact natural, and he needs to cut that shit out. Because it makes no sense and I hate it.

Finally, it's only natural to reward those of you who put up with this post with some pictures of nothing other than RUSSIAN NATURE. It's only natural.. (I swear I'm done now)

 Oh yeah, Russia, yeah.

Russian Frogger

Some days you just can't win. In other words, public transportation is a punk. Since Ryazan is not a large enough city to employ a metro system, it's citizens rely heavily on a routed taxicab system. These sketchy child abducting vans are called marshrutki and I hate them. To me they are one of the most bizarre things and I don't understand how or why they seem to work. Clearly.

Today, a day just like any other, involved me waking up, eating a breakfast of bony fish and mashed potatoes, being questioned about American contraceptive use and the names of different types of beans (real conversations, guys, really), and hopping on a marshrutka to meet my boss in our fifth attempt to register our visas. I knew this marshrutka ride was too good to be true: for once I had exact change, I got first choice of seating, and instead of blasting sappy Russian soft rock which literally makes my brain feel like it's melting, the driver chose a news station, which somehow got away with calling Putin an "enemy of the people" and a tyrant. It seemed like the day was off to a good start.

Then it came time to call out my stop. Though these taxicabs are technically routed, they only stop when people are outside very clearly waiting for it, or someone inside calls out a varied form of "остановите на следующей остановке, пожалуйста" or, logically "please stop at the next stop." Most people just shorten it to a calm "на следующей" ("at the next") and hop on off. This has always been the biggest stress of my daily commute since pronouncing words correctly and trying not to stick out as a foreigner are definitely what I consider my greatest demons when in Russia. 

So today, since we were meeting to do visa work, I had to get off at the stop, one past the usual place, at Lenin's Square. This is a popular meeting place so I was a bit surprised when no one immediately yelled out the magic words. Still with enough time, however, I mumbled them out only for the lady next to me to say "He definitely didn't hear you (ya dumbass)." Granted, she was polite about it, and I'm just embellishing it to show what it felt like with the addition of Russian's confusing patterns of intonation, which, to an American with an intermediate-high level of Russian understanding, can turn a sweet phrase into something evil if you're already panicking enough. 

So I shouted it out a second time, just to make sure everyone on the dang thing new I was a foreigner, and the driver asks "at ploshad' lenina?" "DA POJALISTA" but it was too late. Russian traffic, as you may be aware, is terrible. As a combination of the most poorly maintained streets and seemingly untrained drivers, this should come as no surprise. Thus, the driver had already moved into the middle lane and had no ability to get me to the stop. Nevertheless, he shouted something angrily at me, slammed on the brakes, and dumped me out into the middle of the road, which I barely froggered myself out of in avoidance of sudden death. This wasn't even the worst part for me though. If living in Moscow last summer taught me anything, it was how to sprint across 9+ lanes of Russian traffic unscarred. For me, a very serious language learner who admittedly tends to take her failures very hard, the worst part was the woman's response to the rude bus driver: "That's just how they speak." THEY. Ugh. 

This one broke down only 10km from our destination

Let me just try to explain why this irked me so much. In Russia, Americans are seen as loud and insincere (you know, because we smile and laugh all the time). Russians, on the other hand, never make a sound. Yeah, ok. This isn't actually true, but I will say their voices don't seem to carry as much. At least on the metro last year I often noticed that almost everyone would be having conversation, yet I couldn't hear a word that was said. Maybe this has something to do with the whole past gulag torture thing for those who dared raise their voices loud enough, I don't know, but the same thing tends to happen on marshrutki. I can barely hear people call out their stops, yet there's never been a problem like today. So why, when I speak at a volume a little louder than the average Russian, is it so impossible to understand and stop the bus?!  Xenophobia? Deafness? I don't know.

And since i cant explain it I guess I'll just add it to my list of confusing things. Like why we don't have bacon flavored Pringles in America, why toilet paper here is so stretchy, or why, when getting into a taxi our boss commented, "ah, a female driver. you're lucky." I just don't get it. 

Flexibility

A couple nights ago my “boss” (quotations will be clear later) texted me telling me to come into the school at 10am the next day to “make a registration.” Having no idea what this actually meant, I assumed it had something to do with meeting and registering a new student. Whatever it was, it seemed like it was important for me to show up on time. However, due to the fact that I currently live in the boondocks of the city, getting anywhere on time in the morning involves waking up at the buttcrack of dawn, waiting in two hours of traffic on an overcrowded sweltering marshrutka (routed taxicab), and powerwalking like a manic. And then today, when I finally got there, the door was locked and I had to wait over a half hour. Of course.

As it turns out, our “boss” still hadn’t registered me or the other two American interns working at my school. According to Russian law, you have to get your visa registered within seven working days of your arrival. And that was working day #6. If there’s anything you should know about Russian bureaucracy it’s that it’s notorious for a hellish amount of paperwork and procrastination. This day’s experience was no exception.

Me and the other interns arrived to the school on time. Our boss’s son, an 18-year-old boy named Nikita, was for some reason put in charge of the registration process. In fact, he’s been in charge of just about everything so far. This poor kid had to pick us all up from the train station in Moscow, coordinate our bus adventure to the city, and now he’s in charge of organizing our work schedules and registering our visas. I haven’t seen our actual boss since one of the first days when he bought us maps of the city, took them away to label certain landmarks, and then never gave me mine back. And now I’m just lost all the time. And so far it seems like our real boss is an eighteen-year-old boy with a lip ring. So that's cool.

The last part of the visa registration process was to go to the post office with all our forms. Seeing as we went the day before a holiday (Wednesday was Russia day, y’all!), the place was packed with people trying to finish up last minute business. After waiting over an hour in this stuffy hellhole we finally got to the counter only for a lady, clearly having already lost patience with the world, to tell poor Nikita that since he doesn’t own the school we’re being registered to (his dad does), he has no ability to file the forms. So we sulked off back to work, tired, annoyed, and hungry.

The point of this long ramble, however, was not to enlighten you about Russian bureaucracy, but about a bigger theme: flexibility. While waiting in the ridiculous line at the post office I read my horoscope for the first time in a while. Here were Yahoo Astrology’s fine words of wisdom: “Force yourself to loosen your grip on something. You don't know for sure what's coming next, but you are pretty certain that you're going to need to be flexible to cope.”

Ha. Ha ha ha ha. These words not only spoke about the day’s activities, but about the trip as a whole. I don’t know what our expectations were when we arrived in Ryazan almost two weeks ago, but I know they weren’t very high. We expected what seemed to be basics: a consistent host family who would feed us twice a day, a predictable work schedule, and some general guidance/an initial tour of the city or something. Honestly these expectations are all pretty laughable at this point. If I had 30 rubles (about a dollar) for every time we’ve asked ourselves what the frack is going on (slight variation on word choice), I can assure you I would have more rubles in my wallet than the average citizen of Ryazan.

Flexibility is the only way we’ve gotten through living out of our suitcases day to day, wondering who we’re going to be living with next, if we will have class or not, and whether or not we’ll be kicked out of the country, because, you know, WE’RE STILL NOT REGISTERED YET.

The whole living situation thing is definitely where we’ve had to be most flexible though. After getting off the bus from Moscow and cramming three girls and our luggage into this random eighteen-year-old boy’s tiny car (an act that took some very literal flexibility), we were first brought to a lady named Lena’s home. We were told we would stay there for three nights until they could find us each individual host families.

Lena was a very pleasant host; her home was clean, she was very friendly, and although she didn’t speak any English, we all got along fine. After feeding us dinner she showed us pictures of her son dressed in various costumes such as a sailor, pilot, artist, etc., posing with stuffed dogs, with his friends at camp, and you know, breastfeeding. Normal things to show someone you only just met, really. She left early the next morning and came back three hours later with who would become our next host.

Mikhail, or Mishka as we fondly call him, is a thirty-year-old factory worker employed by a company recently bought out by British Petroleum (BP). I don’t really know how to properly describe this guy, but I can tell you that we all decided we pretty much loved him instantly. And what’s not to love? His main interests include soviet films, Asian philosophy, telling off-color jokes, German beer, and salsa dancing. Also: shadowboxing and rambling about how much better life was during the Soviet Union (since Putin is obviously a terrible person, but Stalin? Yeah, he was all right).

Our first adventure with Mishka was to Globus, a Costco/Walmart-like superstore on crack, where we ate lunch and shopped for groceries. Through the program we’re on, our hosts are supposed to receive compensation for our daily meals. We didn’t know this then, but Misha was planning on buying all of our groceries without compensation. Looking back on it though, that definitely explains our strict diet of hotdogs, bread, and beer. And all the milk you could drink since he apparently gets it for free from his job.

As a temporary host, Misha was great. He provided the basics and even a few treats every once in a while. For example, on the first day, Mandy, one of the other interns I work with, mentioned her love of cats. The next day, he comes home from work and says, “You wanted cat? Here’s cat” and just threw some random cat at us.

While having to boil our own hotdogs for every meal while Misha was at work was becoming more than a little bit pathetic, we were at least finally starting to get comfortable. Then, after we’d been in the city about four days already, our boss finally made his first appearance and announced a few living situations in development. He listed off that there was a family with children, a young female student, and some musician all interested in hosting us and that we would just have to decide between us who wanted to live where. Although theoretically willing to be flexible, I wasted no time dibsing the student, not wanting to live with children or some random dude with a guitar, and I can’t say I’ve regretted it.

For the past week and a half or so I’ve lived with Lena, a 23-year-old student learning English and French, and her boyfriend Albert, a 30-year-old computer programmer in whose supra Soviet apartment we’re staying. I was pretty freaked out when I entered the apartment for the first time, realized there was only one room and that I would literally be sleeping at the foot of a young couple’s bed. Then I saw the bathroom..

They often joke that they were fully prepared for me to run at the sight of the place, but I’m glad I stayed. While the conditions aren’t necessarily stellar, their hospitality and warmth has been more than satisfactory. Lena is a great cook, and while we still eat hotdogs on a fairly consistent basis, it’s more often than not associated with Russian friends and conversation, a campfire, and the backdrop of Russia’s incredible scenery.

Unfortunately, however, this chapter is coming to an end, and on Monday (or Tuesday. Who the heck ever really knows), I’ll be moving in with this illusive musician character. He’s not too illusive though, don’t worry. I met him today and he is nice and seemingly normal. Except we randomly spoke to each other in Spanish. So that was weird and unexpected. But I'll deal with it. I’m flexible.