A Day in the Lyfe

So we’re about a third of the way through our stay and things have finally kind of normal-ed out here. I realized that I’ve rambled a lot about generalizations about Russians and cross-cultural differences, but I have not gone into too much detail about my daily life. What exactly do I do day after day? Well, today you’re all in for a little treat, because I’m about to go into excruciating detail about my life as a summer student in a Russian University. R U READY?!

7am: Waking up in the morning. Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs. Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal. Seeing everything, the time is going, tickin’ on and on, everybody’s rushing. Gotta get down to the bus stop, gotta catch my bus. I see my fraaaands..

Oh, whoops, sorry guys, this is just my schedule on Fridays.. Back to the real deal now that I have your attention. Or maybe I lost it with that. Eh. With as lame as that song is (Rebecca Black in case you missed the reference), it does summarize the first half hour or so of my day fairly well. I do wake up at 7am, and I do get fresh, which in Russia is not always an easy feat. I wish I had cereal, but my host mom only buys me “dannisimo” brand Danon yogurt. So in her war against my waistline she of course only chooses the choco-loaded flavors, which of course include chocolate cocoa-puff type toppings that you’re supposed to add to the already richest tasting yogurt you’ve ever had. This as you can imagine, while delicious, is no nutritious staple to any balanced breakfast. I used to at least be able to find some fruit to pair it with, but ever since that birthday party over a week ago, my host mom’s been force-feeding us leftovers, some of which include very, very ripe fruits from the fruit basket she had assembled. I think she’s refusing to buy more fruit until that stuff’s gone, but the flies hovering around it in our kitchen have done a better job devouring it than either me or my host sister have..

7:35ish: I leave my apartment and head for the metro station, which is a pleasant 5-10 minute walk away. I get to walk along a sidewalk through a little park and observe the wildlife. Which mostly just consists of stray cats lounging on benches. There’s even a small area where the little old grandpas feed leftover breadcrumbs to swarms of birds.

7:45-8:30ish: Commute to the University. Takes a long time. And this is the time estimate for when I powerwalk like a Russian and play a game of weaving through the metro crowd I either like to call the “move it or lose it people” or “jerk imma cut you” game, depending on how the day began. I find it’s been good to get my morning rage out before starting class. I have a lot I could say here, but I think the metro deserves a separate blog post.

I owe this machine my life.
It owes me about twenty dollars.

8:30-9am: This small period of time has become essential to my survival of each day. It is during this time that we all separately arrive and congregate around this magic drink-making machine. For only about a dollar you can have your pick from a wide array of caffeinated beverages. I’m a fan of the long espresso shot, which provides me with maybe enough energy to make it up the stairs to our first lecture of the day. It is also during this time that we share the ridiculous things our host families said or did or served for dinner the night before or breakfast that morning. There’s definitely your fair share of “you’re wearing THAT today?!” stories, and of course, the classic, “The meal looked great until she slathered it in sour cream/mayonnaise/ketchup” line. 

9am: Lecture. This is the one class all thirty of us have together before being split off into our small groups for the rest of the day. Since we’re here for a shortened semester, they’re giving us a sort of taste-test of all the normal lectures. For example, for the first week and a half we had the History of Russian Music, and right now we’re studying Geography. I really liked the music professor; he is just a very energetic, passionate guy. And I could tell this by the small heart shaped sweat stain that would seep out from his shirt and grow bigger and bigger throughout lecture everyday. His love for the subject was clearly evident. He would get so excited about certain compositions that when he would play a YouTube video or recording of them he often couldn’t restrain himself from playing along on the piano. Cool guy. And the geography teacher is a nice guy too, but geography? There’s a reason we don’t waste our time overly studying it in the US, and I’m pretty sure it’s because we don’t want our high school drop out rates to skyrocket. If I had to sit through as much geography as the average Russian I would have considered dropping out myself. We spent an hour talking about berries today. BERRIES. What on earth is there about berries that should ever take that long to discuss?!

10-12: Classes. Everyday our class schedules are different, but the classes we are taking are: Grammar, Conversation, Literature, SMI (kind of a politics course), Video, and Phonetics. For the first two weeks, they kept randomly cancelling our phonetics class and replacing it with an additional two hours of grammar everyday. My group might as well have moved into Depression Town, because it was just uzhasno.

Noon: Lunchtime! As can be expected, that yogurt I have for breakfast everyday doesn’t always hold me over until noon. So I’m usually pretty excited come lunchtime. We all head over to the Stolovaya, or cafeteria, which is located in the dorm building right behind the university. The food there is pretty cheap and very Russian. I usually go for a salad or a light soup, and then get talked into (or just forced) to get a ‘second course,’ which is usually some kind of mystery meat substance plus a carb like rice, pasta, or mashed potatoes. Then you just move on down the line and pay at the end. I’m convinced the stolovaya ladies are trying to rip me off, as they have on multiple occasions seemingly charged me random amounts for things. For instance, I got the same meal as the girl in front of me in line, yet they charged me twenty rubles extra! And then they always yell at you for not having exact change, even when they clearly have enough to make change themselves. Lunchtime is always a fairly interesting experience.

1-3: More classes. Depending on which classes you have during this second half of the day, you’re either straight up asleep or you’re just powering through. Phonetics, for example, seems to go pretty quickly. That professor is hilarious, as is the general theme of the class. We just go around the group trying to produce Russian sounds and failing. Plus, since this professor just had bronchitis or something, she’s super paranoid we’re all going to get sick. The other day she spent like fifteen minutes yelling at me and another girl for not wearing sweaters on this like 80-degree day. We made sure to have our sweaters on for class the next day so we were rewarded by her exclamation of: “Мои добрые, умнейшие женщины!” and then she went on to berate the boys about why they weren’t wearing undershirts not that it mattered since they’re not going to live as long anyways or something. Hilarity.

So then the day ends and we all meet up outside to figure out what, if anything, we want to do next. Some days we’ll go exploring, some days we’ll sit in a café and soak up the free wifi, and other days we might just go home. On Thursdays from 5:30-7 we have an optional American Club meeting. It’s supposed to be a way to get to know Russians who want to meet Americans, but so far its been about a 25:4 ratio of Americans to Russians, soo it doesn’t seem to really serve its purpose too well. But basically our resident director will pick a topic and we’ll split into groups to make lists about it and then share our lists with the whole group to discuss. Last week we taught the Russians about American slang, which basically turned into how to swear in English.

I should also note that we only have classes on Monday through Thursday. On Fridays we go on excursions to various places in Moscow. Last week, for instance, we toured the Red October chocolate factory. Best. Day. Ever. I was so shocked by how generous they were with their samples, and there was actually a point during the tour I didn’t think I could handle eating more chocolate. And this is saying something for a choco-holic like me. It was heaven. The week before that we took a boat tour on the Moscow River, and tomorrow we are touring MosFilm, Russia’s huge movie studio.

But back to my suuper interesting daily schedule, I typically get back home anywhere between 4 and 8 on a normal weekday. I like my family for how relaxed they are about when they eat. There have been a lot of nights where I’ll get home late and they still won’t have eaten dinner yet, so we’ll feast together. And then there’s other nights where I’m on my own and can just scavenge whatever I want out of the fridge. After dinner, if we aren’t all in a rush to go off and do whatever, we usually have tea and desserts. This is the best time for me to practice speaking Russian with them, since my host mom’s mouth is usually full of food, meaning I have time to get out a complete thought before either she or my host sister break into another quick-tongued argument about whatever and such. I have found that they are in general much better speakers than they are listeners..

Most days, at least as of lately, end with me falling asleep on my homework. Which, if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to do now. Спокойной ночи!