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.

Call It Education.

I originally intended to start this blog from the very beginning of my journey—starting with the guard at airport security in Minneapolis who threatened to steal my beloved raccoon scarf (“Dayymn girl, I might have to keep that. MMM I kinda like that”), and going into detail about the rather cantankerous Russian woman I spent more than 8 hours trying to sleep next to, who, I kid you not, gave a legitimate beating to the man in front of her for reclining his seat back. I was going to make some jokes about the fact that upon our plane’s landing all the Russians gave an enthusiastic standing ovation (and were quickly reminded by the flight attendants to remain seated because the seatbelt sign was in fact still on). Then, I was going to go into detail about the struggle I had finding my friend at the airport, all the taxi drivers I wanted to punch in the face, and my epic fail of a first conversation in Russian:

Woman: Excuse me, please, can you tell me how to get to the baggage claim?

Me: Erm yeah.. Left. On the right. No. On the left. Straight. Right. Yes. Baggage. Yes.

Woman: Oh.. Understood.

(Sadly, I’m pretty sure the only thing she actually understood was that I was just some confused foreigner who she should not have wasted her time questioning.)

And while I’m sure that these stories at full length would have been of GREAT interest to everyone, you’re going to have to be content with just those condensed versions, because as I sit here and try to type on my bed (a couch situated about 6 inches away from a bed shared by a 23 year old student and her boyfriend in a janky old-school Soviet style apartment), I’m trying to remember how exactly I got here. And I can’t. Because it’s literally already been by far the craziest, most confusing and absurd experience of my life. And I thought I knew what to expect when returning to the Motherland..

In this new world I’ve somehow been transported into, purses are sealed into plastic bags before entry into Walmart-like supercenters and then pulled around in carts, excuses like “This family can’t host anyone until Tuesday because the wife has to take her drivers test” are accepted without further questioning, and when your boss says he’ll call you at 11 he really means he’ll show up unannounced at the apartment at 4.

For now I’m going to leave the details at that. First of all, because trying give anything an adequate explanation is seemingly impossible right now, and secondly because my host is beckoning me to join him for a cold beer on the balcony. My first night with them I made the “mistake” of telling him my opinion that all Russian beer is terrible, so it has become his mission during my stay to ensure that I try every kind of Russian beer and can thus make what he calls “an educated statement” about it. And as an educator now (I've officially taught one "real" English lesson!), I can't argue with that. So, cheers to education! I'm definitely getting one.