http://www.travelblogger.net/members/anniecu/
http://www.travelblogger.net/members/anniecu/
I've moved my travelblog to another location which I think may be easier for you to access, and for me to use. Also, I'm getting ready to get students to use this new blog for the trip to Greece in May/June, so I need to get to know it myself!
To find the new blog, look at the top right hand side of the page that this links to, and you will see just under the Canadian flag, four options to link to: travel blogs, photos, video, and member profile. To get to the new blog, choose "travel blogs".
Please let me know if and when you have any trouble getting to this, and I'm sorry for changing direction in midstream.
Anne
http://www.travelblogger.net/members/anniecu/
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
cliches
Dumb as a post. Thick as a brick. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
It's funny how I revert to those cliches to help pull myself out of the frustration I feel every time I hear my tutor gesture with her left hand towards six pages of declined verbs and say "learn by heart for tomorrow".
So, let's see. It's 4 pm. I must go for a walk to get some exercise, go buy my evening's supper involving a walk past the dead dog in the ditch, go back to my room and try to cook supper over the steaming radiator, wash some clothes by hand and hang them randomly around my room, try to fall asleep through the barking dogs and firecrackers (see other posts), get up and have shower before hot water disappears (at least there IS hot water), make breakfast, study, answer email, have my 2 pm class, and then start the whole thing over again.
Somewhere in there I must "learn by heart" these lists of verbs; "learn by heart" lists of new vocabulary (nouns); do the exercises in the workbook, a feat which requires reading, translating, answering - and the answering is done in cyrillic handwriting, which differs substantially from print.
So, if I don't answer all your emails right away, or haven't posted any photographs (and I have several), it's because most of my time is taken up trying to live and do homework, and that's just with taking one course - Russian language.
(Regrets? Not a one. I have to admit that I'm also writing quite a bit, aside from this blog, in which I'm focusing on the day to dayness of things, I'm also working on some poems and fiction, although not in Russian!)
So, back to the cliches. When I don't manage to get all my homework completed, or memorized (it's impossible), well, it's an interesting exercise in ... something. As I walk between the residence and the classroom (I am the only student at this beginning level), I have to ward off the cliches and tell myself that I am learning this amazing language.
It's a lesson in focus, or, to use another cliche to fight off the negative ones, "keeping the eye on the ball".
It's funny how I revert to those cliches to help pull myself out of the frustration I feel every time I hear my tutor gesture with her left hand towards six pages of declined verbs and say "learn by heart for tomorrow".
So, let's see. It's 4 pm. I must go for a walk to get some exercise, go buy my evening's supper involving a walk past the dead dog in the ditch, go back to my room and try to cook supper over the steaming radiator, wash some clothes by hand and hang them randomly around my room, try to fall asleep through the barking dogs and firecrackers (see other posts), get up and have shower before hot water disappears (at least there IS hot water), make breakfast, study, answer email, have my 2 pm class, and then start the whole thing over again.
Somewhere in there I must "learn by heart" these lists of verbs; "learn by heart" lists of new vocabulary (nouns); do the exercises in the workbook, a feat which requires reading, translating, answering - and the answering is done in cyrillic handwriting, which differs substantially from print.
So, if I don't answer all your emails right away, or haven't posted any photographs (and I have several), it's because most of my time is taken up trying to live and do homework, and that's just with taking one course - Russian language.
(Regrets? Not a one. I have to admit that I'm also writing quite a bit, aside from this blog, in which I'm focusing on the day to dayness of things, I'm also working on some poems and fiction, although not in Russian!)
So, back to the cliches. When I don't manage to get all my homework completed, or memorized (it's impossible), well, it's an interesting exercise in ... something. As I walk between the residence and the classroom (I am the only student at this beginning level), I have to ward off the cliches and tell myself that I am learning this amazing language.
It's a lesson in focus, or, to use another cliche to fight off the negative ones, "keeping the eye on the ball".
Monday, January 14, 2008
Dogs and Firecrackers
I may have forgotten to tell you about the firecrackers. And, more about dogs.
A weekend has gone by and I spent most of my time in my room reading and studying and writing out words and sentences and prefixes and suffixes and listening to music.
And listening to dogs and firecrackers.
Here is how it works.
There are two classes of dog visible from my 10 storey window. Class One are the domestic dogs, those that are tied up to the side of a building, and who apparently belong to the people who live in the building to which they are tied. Class Two are the feral dogs, those who travel with impunity in packs of five or six and who seem to have a pecking order that I haven't figured out, yet.
During the daylight hours, the domestic dogs are quiet, until a pack of wild dogs follows a series of trails that wend through the backyards that I can see from my window. As the wild dogs pass through the yards, they initiate barking from the dogs tied up in each yard, until the whole neighbourhood is thronging with dogs barking and the crows lift as one, like shook coal dust.
Now, switch to people. Every evening starting as soon as it gets dark, about 4:45 pm at this time of year, the firecrackers and fireworks start going off. I don't know the names of the various firecracker options, but later today when I go to the Megacity Mall across the way, I will look at the long rows of firecrackers available on one aisle of the store and see if I can translate some of the words.
But as soon as it gets dark, the noise and light show starts, and as soon as the noise and light show starts, the domestic dogs start yelping and barking. They are, I assume, scared of the noise, not being able to investigate the source for themselves. So, lunging forward and pulling their ropes taut, they press forward looking for where the noise is coming from. And barking and barking and barking and barking until the firecrackers stop for a while. At that point the domestic dogs settle down, and the feral dogs take over. Barking and barking and barking. And when they start barking, the domestic dogs start barking again. Bark bark bark bark.
This interaction continued from 4:45 until 11:20, at which time I heard a police siren in the neighbourhood, and all went quiet.
There were times, on Sunday, when I thought that I was going to go insane. I can't stay here, I thought, I can't stay here and listen to dogs and firecrackers for another four weeks. But then I thought, well, yes, I can. And took out my camera and decided to make a study of the dogs. And I started to laugh to myself. And it is, you know, actually quite funny.
A weekend has gone by and I spent most of my time in my room reading and studying and writing out words and sentences and prefixes and suffixes and listening to music.
And listening to dogs and firecrackers.
Here is how it works.
There are two classes of dog visible from my 10 storey window. Class One are the domestic dogs, those that are tied up to the side of a building, and who apparently belong to the people who live in the building to which they are tied. Class Two are the feral dogs, those who travel with impunity in packs of five or six and who seem to have a pecking order that I haven't figured out, yet.
During the daylight hours, the domestic dogs are quiet, until a pack of wild dogs follows a series of trails that wend through the backyards that I can see from my window. As the wild dogs pass through the yards, they initiate barking from the dogs tied up in each yard, until the whole neighbourhood is thronging with dogs barking and the crows lift as one, like shook coal dust.
Now, switch to people. Every evening starting as soon as it gets dark, about 4:45 pm at this time of year, the firecrackers and fireworks start going off. I don't know the names of the various firecracker options, but later today when I go to the Megacity Mall across the way, I will look at the long rows of firecrackers available on one aisle of the store and see if I can translate some of the words.
But as soon as it gets dark, the noise and light show starts, and as soon as the noise and light show starts, the domestic dogs start yelping and barking. They are, I assume, scared of the noise, not being able to investigate the source for themselves. So, lunging forward and pulling their ropes taut, they press forward looking for where the noise is coming from. And barking and barking and barking and barking until the firecrackers stop for a while. At that point the domestic dogs settle down, and the feral dogs take over. Barking and barking and barking. And when they start barking, the domestic dogs start barking again. Bark bark bark bark.
This interaction continued from 4:45 until 11:20, at which time I heard a police siren in the neighbourhood, and all went quiet.
There were times, on Sunday, when I thought that I was going to go insane. I can't stay here, I thought, I can't stay here and listen to dogs and firecrackers for another four weeks. But then I thought, well, yes, I can. And took out my camera and decided to make a study of the dogs. And I started to laugh to myself. And it is, you know, actually quite funny.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Samara - January 11
Did I tell you the one about the four dogs that turned on a fifth and ripped it apart on the snow outside the residence? No? Oh, well, maybe that's because I've just recovered from the trauma of it all, watching pieces of dog body fall apart and listening to the sounds of an attacked, frightened, and then dying dog. Who needs television?
Did I say that I wanted to learn Russian? My teacher wants me to excell, and so she piles on huge amounts of @memory@ work that I don't have a clue about. I feel completely useless. Nice feeling, makes me feel like a child. So, she asks me to do things, and then I can't do them, and then I feel, well, I feel somewhat stupid. Feeling stupid is not a nice feeling. Not a nice feeling at all. Oh well.
So, here's the thing. I've learned the cyrillic alphabet, right? In printing. Lower and upper case. Now I have all this homework to do, but it has to be done in handwriting, but the letters in the handwriting are formed completely differently from the ones in English and not only that, some of the handwritten letters are different letters than they are in printing. So, for example, a b is pronounced v but is written as g. I think. And then the way a vowel is pronounced depends on which syllable of the word is stressed, but I haven't quite figured out how to tell which syllable is stressed.
The usual stress. Okay. So, I'm learning all these grammar rules, listening to warring dog factions, practicing my cyrillic handwriting, holding my breath against the minus 25 weather, watching some grey pollution pour out of a chimney stack, and just generally having a good time, really I am.
What I find the most comforting is the time that I spend alone in my room. My room is warm, despite the single pane window and because of the radiator that is constantly blasting out heat. When I handwash my clothes in the sink down the hall, I can hang them in my room assured that they will be dry within a few hours. Aside from that, though, the laptop that I bought has some good games and I've become particularly fond of Spider Solitaire. I've also got 66 hours of music on BearShare and then all my writing files, and this weekend I intend to start editing and rewriting some of the stories and poems that I've brought with me. I'm surprised, actually, at how little time I seem to have to get done all the homework that I have. Between looking after my basic personal needs (handwashing clothes, thawing the food that has frozen on the window sill, flushing the toilet with bottled water) and getting to class and studying and sleeping, there is not much time left for anything else, although Florian has told me that there is a great market in town that he will take me to. There is also a Museum of Fine Art with a great collection of Russian Avant garde painters which I plan to visit, and also Stalin's bunker, which can only be visited in a group (?).
Who is Florian? Florian is a Swiss banker from Zurich who is in Samara studying Russian for a year so that he can better interact with the increasing numbers of Russians doing banking in Switzerland. He is also taking lessons from the same tutor as I am, a woman named Valentina. He seems to be a good guy, and has offered to take me around a bit, and that will be interesting, I'm sure, as he speaks now Russian, English, German, French and Swiss. He also told me about the cheap student restaurant on the campus, where I can get extremely cheap lunches, hot. I could use the odd hot meal, as the yogurt, cheese and bread is wearing a bit thin, although yesterday I bought one of those plastic bowls of soup to which I can add boiling water and presto! end up with the most delicious chemical soup ever!
My teacher is Valentina. She is a woman of my age from Tashkent who studied languages in Tashkent. Philology is considered a science here, and philology is her science. She prefers, of course, mathematics, and we share a love of Sudoku. I'm not sure what else we have in common, as she speaks very little English.
Ksenya is the student from International Education who has been assigned to me, to help me to look after my needs, whatever they may be. So far she has taken me to the grocery store, and told me that if I need anything to ask her. But it is so cold here that everything seems to have stopped, well, not everything, but people are avoiding going outside unless they have to.
Money...well, the skyline outside my window is probably a bit of an indication of the state of the economy. I can see the towers - maybe 30 floors at most - of the downtown buildings, and just in the narrow view I have right now from my tutor's office, which is where I am using this computer, I can see five working cranes, swinging about and moving material from one place to another. On the way to the university this morning I watched a bricklayer working on the top of a 15 story building, laying bricks of course. In minus 25, that seemed a bit extreme.
And so that is it today. In my free time I'm listening to music and reading. Otherwise, I'm writing, studying, taking classes. Next week, when the cold snap snaps, I'm heading out for walks.
Did I say that I wanted to learn Russian? My teacher wants me to excell, and so she piles on huge amounts of @memory@ work that I don't have a clue about. I feel completely useless. Nice feeling, makes me feel like a child. So, she asks me to do things, and then I can't do them, and then I feel, well, I feel somewhat stupid. Feeling stupid is not a nice feeling. Not a nice feeling at all. Oh well.
So, here's the thing. I've learned the cyrillic alphabet, right? In printing. Lower and upper case. Now I have all this homework to do, but it has to be done in handwriting, but the letters in the handwriting are formed completely differently from the ones in English and not only that, some of the handwritten letters are different letters than they are in printing. So, for example, a b is pronounced v but is written as g. I think. And then the way a vowel is pronounced depends on which syllable of the word is stressed, but I haven't quite figured out how to tell which syllable is stressed.
The usual stress. Okay. So, I'm learning all these grammar rules, listening to warring dog factions, practicing my cyrillic handwriting, holding my breath against the minus 25 weather, watching some grey pollution pour out of a chimney stack, and just generally having a good time, really I am.
What I find the most comforting is the time that I spend alone in my room. My room is warm, despite the single pane window and because of the radiator that is constantly blasting out heat. When I handwash my clothes in the sink down the hall, I can hang them in my room assured that they will be dry within a few hours. Aside from that, though, the laptop that I bought has some good games and I've become particularly fond of Spider Solitaire. I've also got 66 hours of music on BearShare and then all my writing files, and this weekend I intend to start editing and rewriting some of the stories and poems that I've brought with me. I'm surprised, actually, at how little time I seem to have to get done all the homework that I have. Between looking after my basic personal needs (handwashing clothes, thawing the food that has frozen on the window sill, flushing the toilet with bottled water) and getting to class and studying and sleeping, there is not much time left for anything else, although Florian has told me that there is a great market in town that he will take me to. There is also a Museum of Fine Art with a great collection of Russian Avant garde painters which I plan to visit, and also Stalin's bunker, which can only be visited in a group (?).
Who is Florian? Florian is a Swiss banker from Zurich who is in Samara studying Russian for a year so that he can better interact with the increasing numbers of Russians doing banking in Switzerland. He is also taking lessons from the same tutor as I am, a woman named Valentina. He seems to be a good guy, and has offered to take me around a bit, and that will be interesting, I'm sure, as he speaks now Russian, English, German, French and Swiss. He also told me about the cheap student restaurant on the campus, where I can get extremely cheap lunches, hot. I could use the odd hot meal, as the yogurt, cheese and bread is wearing a bit thin, although yesterday I bought one of those plastic bowls of soup to which I can add boiling water and presto! end up with the most delicious chemical soup ever!
My teacher is Valentina. She is a woman of my age from Tashkent who studied languages in Tashkent. Philology is considered a science here, and philology is her science. She prefers, of course, mathematics, and we share a love of Sudoku. I'm not sure what else we have in common, as she speaks very little English.
Ksenya is the student from International Education who has been assigned to me, to help me to look after my needs, whatever they may be. So far she has taken me to the grocery store, and told me that if I need anything to ask her. But it is so cold here that everything seems to have stopped, well, not everything, but people are avoiding going outside unless they have to.
Money...well, the skyline outside my window is probably a bit of an indication of the state of the economy. I can see the towers - maybe 30 floors at most - of the downtown buildings, and just in the narrow view I have right now from my tutor's office, which is where I am using this computer, I can see five working cranes, swinging about and moving material from one place to another. On the way to the university this morning I watched a bricklayer working on the top of a 15 story building, laying bricks of course. In minus 25, that seemed a bit extreme.
And so that is it today. In my free time I'm listening to music and reading. Otherwise, I'm writing, studying, taking classes. Next week, when the cold snap snaps, I'm heading out for walks.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
1st Night in Samara
My first night in the student hostel was an interesting one. Because I had slept all afternoon, I had to force myself to go to bed at midnight in an attempt to get myself on some sort of acceptable schedule normal for humans. So, I turned out the light and lay down on my back, the sweet sounds of Lenny Breau playing on the computer beside me, the blue light from the screen bathing my face (probably with some sort of nasty cancer causing rays).
It wasn’t long before I realized that my bed has a missing spring on one side, and so my right hip gets to dip into a hole. This is not comfortable. But I arrange myself as best as I can, going through those things we all go through when trying to find the best possible position for any given imperfectly balanced bed. That went on from midnight until about 6 am, at which time I got up and gave up, not, however, without grabbing the odd hour of sleep in between position changes.
My restlessness was accompanied by a chorus of dogs, but it wasn’t just any chorus, it was a chorus that seemed to move around quite a bit, sometimes appearing to be right under my window, sometimes migrating to and coming from another direction, or from farther away. Sometimes a single dog barked in a long succession of angry warning barks and was answered by another dog who spoke in responsive explanatory but equally angry barks. Occasionally a bark would break into a howl, and sometimes that lone howl would be joined by the howls of many other dogs, and sometimes it would resolve itself into a receding line of lonely sound. Again, occasionally, a fight would break out, and a melee of two or three or more dogs would start snarling and biting and growling, a occurrence that would lead to inciting yet another pack of dogs to start barking. I had wondered, when I saw the dogs yesterday afternoon, if the back yard of the student hostel was a regular hangout for them, and apparently it is.
It occurred to me, more than once, that someone needs to get out there with a shotgun.
From time to time, though, the dogs would wander off somewhere else, where I couldn’t hear them, and so there was quiet, for a while. It seemed to be at those times that the music or talking or laughing or all three from some other student room would start up. At one point, probably at around 3 am, it sounded as if someone was hammering a nail into the wall below my room.
Later on the 8th
I meet Ksanya at 11:30 in the lobby. I have lost my gloves; at least I can’t find them anywhere in my room. I must have dropped them on my way up yesterday, and the chances are someone has found them and considered themselves lucky. They are great gloves for the cold, and it is cold here.
And so Ksanya is taking me to the mall across the street where I will buy some groceries. As I said earlier, the roads are packed with snow, and it is cold out, about -21 or so. Lying in the snow bank beside the road is a smallish dog, frozen solid, and, well, very dead. I ask Ksanya about the dogs. Why there are so many wild dogs, she tells me, is that there are not good laws about looking after your dog, so people get tired of their dogs, and push them out in the street. And there is no one to look after them. And of course by the light of day I can see that the dogs are attracted to the six garbage bins, filled to overflowing, that are right outside the building where I am staying.
Ksanya, I discover, is in the last year of her masters degree in Philology, the study of language. She speaks English very well, and tells me that she also speaks German, and of course, Russian. She is from a town 60 km away, and hopes to leave Russia when she has finished her education. She has a friend from the Cameroon, who she met through the internet, and who is teaching English in Thailand. What do you think of that, she asks me? I think what she means is what do I think of her going to Thailand to teach English, but I’m not sure, so I change the subject. Ksanya is responsible for me while I am in Samara, so I’m sure there will be other opportunities to pursue such subjects. For now, we are at the grocery store in the mall, and she asks me what I want.
Toilet paper. Sooner or later I am going to have to capitulate and use the bathroom. A hat. I left mine in Vancouver. Gloves. Dropped them on the stairs yesterday. A small kettle for making tea. Two oranges. Two yogurts, a small loaf of black bread, four slices of cheese. Two salads, one with lox and the other with beets. A cup for making tea in. That’s it. There is no fridge where I am living, so I must make do with the few things that I can jam up against my frosted single pane window. The store is close enough that I can come back easily, and there is another store even closer that has a few items. I have a feeling though, that I will be eating a lot of yogurt and bread here.
The mall, though, is an extremely modern one, and includes familiar chains such as The Body Shop. Well, that’s the only one I recognize, but the other stores in the mall include the usual clothing and shoe boutiques. Yes, there is obviously money here, although you wouldn’t know it from the residence washrooms.
The grocery store where Ksanya takes me is large, about the size of the SaveOn Foods in Nanaimo, and has about the same range of goods, including a deli where I bought the two prepared salads, at Ksanya’s suggestions. Russians, you know, she tells me, we eat lots of salads, and so I buy these two salads. On our way back to the residence, as we walk past the dead dog again, Ksanya tells me that there have never been other Canadian international students here, and that very few people speak English. But then she thinks that maybe there are some American and British professors in the English department, and she will find out. I had kind of figured that the numbers of English speakers in this area would be few, given that Samara is not on the Trans Siberian route.
My purchases cost me 1000 rubles.
It wasn’t long before I realized that my bed has a missing spring on one side, and so my right hip gets to dip into a hole. This is not comfortable. But I arrange myself as best as I can, going through those things we all go through when trying to find the best possible position for any given imperfectly balanced bed. That went on from midnight until about 6 am, at which time I got up and gave up, not, however, without grabbing the odd hour of sleep in between position changes.
My restlessness was accompanied by a chorus of dogs, but it wasn’t just any chorus, it was a chorus that seemed to move around quite a bit, sometimes appearing to be right under my window, sometimes migrating to and coming from another direction, or from farther away. Sometimes a single dog barked in a long succession of angry warning barks and was answered by another dog who spoke in responsive explanatory but equally angry barks. Occasionally a bark would break into a howl, and sometimes that lone howl would be joined by the howls of many other dogs, and sometimes it would resolve itself into a receding line of lonely sound. Again, occasionally, a fight would break out, and a melee of two or three or more dogs would start snarling and biting and growling, a occurrence that would lead to inciting yet another pack of dogs to start barking. I had wondered, when I saw the dogs yesterday afternoon, if the back yard of the student hostel was a regular hangout for them, and apparently it is.
It occurred to me, more than once, that someone needs to get out there with a shotgun.
From time to time, though, the dogs would wander off somewhere else, where I couldn’t hear them, and so there was quiet, for a while. It seemed to be at those times that the music or talking or laughing or all three from some other student room would start up. At one point, probably at around 3 am, it sounded as if someone was hammering a nail into the wall below my room.
Later on the 8th
I meet Ksanya at 11:30 in the lobby. I have lost my gloves; at least I can’t find them anywhere in my room. I must have dropped them on my way up yesterday, and the chances are someone has found them and considered themselves lucky. They are great gloves for the cold, and it is cold here.
And so Ksanya is taking me to the mall across the street where I will buy some groceries. As I said earlier, the roads are packed with snow, and it is cold out, about -21 or so. Lying in the snow bank beside the road is a smallish dog, frozen solid, and, well, very dead. I ask Ksanya about the dogs. Why there are so many wild dogs, she tells me, is that there are not good laws about looking after your dog, so people get tired of their dogs, and push them out in the street. And there is no one to look after them. And of course by the light of day I can see that the dogs are attracted to the six garbage bins, filled to overflowing, that are right outside the building where I am staying.
Ksanya, I discover, is in the last year of her masters degree in Philology, the study of language. She speaks English very well, and tells me that she also speaks German, and of course, Russian. She is from a town 60 km away, and hopes to leave Russia when she has finished her education. She has a friend from the Cameroon, who she met through the internet, and who is teaching English in Thailand. What do you think of that, she asks me? I think what she means is what do I think of her going to Thailand to teach English, but I’m not sure, so I change the subject. Ksanya is responsible for me while I am in Samara, so I’m sure there will be other opportunities to pursue such subjects. For now, we are at the grocery store in the mall, and she asks me what I want.
Toilet paper. Sooner or later I am going to have to capitulate and use the bathroom. A hat. I left mine in Vancouver. Gloves. Dropped them on the stairs yesterday. A small kettle for making tea. Two oranges. Two yogurts, a small loaf of black bread, four slices of cheese. Two salads, one with lox and the other with beets. A cup for making tea in. That’s it. There is no fridge where I am living, so I must make do with the few things that I can jam up against my frosted single pane window. The store is close enough that I can come back easily, and there is another store even closer that has a few items. I have a feeling though, that I will be eating a lot of yogurt and bread here.
The mall, though, is an extremely modern one, and includes familiar chains such as The Body Shop. Well, that’s the only one I recognize, but the other stores in the mall include the usual clothing and shoe boutiques. Yes, there is obviously money here, although you wouldn’t know it from the residence washrooms.
The grocery store where Ksanya takes me is large, about the size of the SaveOn Foods in Nanaimo, and has about the same range of goods, including a deli where I bought the two prepared salads, at Ksanya’s suggestions. Russians, you know, she tells me, we eat lots of salads, and so I buy these two salads. On our way back to the residence, as we walk past the dead dog again, Ksanya tells me that there have never been other Canadian international students here, and that very few people speak English. But then she thinks that maybe there are some American and British professors in the English department, and she will find out. I had kind of figured that the numbers of English speakers in this area would be few, given that Samara is not on the Trans Siberian route.
My purchases cost me 1000 rubles.
1st Day in Samara
I’ve been given the penthouse suite here at the student hostel, which is compensation, I suppose, for the fact that the elevator is broken “today”. Hm, I think, as I climb the stairs to the ninth floor, following Ksanya, the young woman who has been assigned to meet me at the hostel. I wonder what “today” means, and I suspect that the next month will involve the climbing of 10 flights of stairs (there is a main floor and a first floor in Russian buildings) at least once per day, unless I decide to hole up in my room.
I arrived in Samara at noon and was met at the airport by a bevy of taxi drivers which I and the other passengers had to pass through, like a gauntlet, each of them calling out “taxi, taxi!” as we passed. I shook my head, no, no, while I walked past. I, of course, would need to be getting a taxi, but needed time to get my feet on the ground and look around before I decided on a driver. It didn’t take me long. As I got to the end of the gauntlet, a quieter and less aggressive looking man called out taxi, and I nodded at him, yes, and showed him the address that I had copied out in Cyrillic lettering in my notebook. He looked at it, and squinted, and looked at it again, probably because in transcribing this address to my notebook from the email that Anna had sent me, I had written a “v” instead of a “b” at the beginning of the building name. “V” is how to pronounce a “b” in Russian, so a natural mistake. But we solved that one, and my designated driver, after checking with one of his buddies to confirm where that address was, accompanied me to the baggage carousel, where he helped me get my two checked bags and verify with security that they were indeed my bags.
And so into Samara, a 45 minute drive and 1500 rubles later, and I have watched the flat landscape roll out around me, passed over what I’m pretty sure must be the frozen solid, snow-covered Volga River, and been greeted by a long line of crystal ice covered birch trees glittering in the sun. I saw many people walking, and through one stretch of road surrounded by snowy woods I saw several people crossing the highway with cross-country skis and poles. I even saw two men jogging along the side of the road, which is the first time I have seen this in Russia. Oh, and yes, we passed a Pepsi plant, so I am assured, I believe, of being able to procure Pepsi while I am here.
The woman at the entrance to the student hostel where I am to be staying has a mouth full of gold teeth, glasses almost larger than her face, and a head of long, straight, silver hair. She is friendly in a Russian sort of way, which means that she is not nasty. I tell her that I am to meet Ksanya, but she frowns and I realize that I’m on my own, so pull out my world phone and call the number that Anna has sent me for Ksanya. Ksanya, who speaks good English, answers, and within minutes is down to get me to take me to my room. Not before, of course, producing my “papers” for the woman behind the shield at the entrance, who must transcribe my name in English by hand on to her list. It must also be explained who I am and what I am doing here, and between having done a bit of preparation by studying Russian on the Rosetta Stone program and so being able to understand the odd Russian word, reading body language, and knowing the contexts, I can see that the young man who hunches behind the shield with the woman at the entrance finds it amusing that I am here to study Russian for a month, as he smiles that sardonic smile that I have seen on others’ faces.
Nevertheless, that is what I am here to do, and Ksanya grabs one of my bags from me as we walk past the temporarily broken elevator and she asks me, with not a little incredulity in her voice, why I have chosen to stay in the student hostel. I don’t really know what is behind that question, but suspect it has something to do with my apparent ability to pay for something better, and while I suppose I could, there is something that appeals to me about being able to live very cheaply, get my basic needs met, and live a life that has to do not with surrounding myself with comfort, but with a bed, clean water and a toilet. I am, after all, here to learn Russian and to write, so what else, really, do I need? Embroidered quilts? A whirlpool? Scented sheets? A sachet in the dresser drawers? No. I am here to write, and those creature comforts can just be distractions.
It turns out that I am on the top floor, which is the tenth, and between wearing my heavy winter jacket and carrying two suitcases, it’s a bit much for me to walk up without stopping, so I take a couple of breaks to look out the window at the view around me. Samara is flat, although it is on a bit of an embankment, or plateau. The building I am in is one of the few buildings of its height in this part of Samara, so I can see quite a distance from even the 5th floor. There is a lot of snow on the ground, and by the way that the snow has been packed into the streets, it seems that there has been snow on the ground for quite a while, but no new snow. The student hostel is beside what seems to be a residential area. There is snow on all the roofs of the houses, and the yards, too, are covered with snow, and crisscrossed with paths that have been forged by both humans and dogs.
Dogs. There are those dogs again, although unlike in St Petersburg, when I could hear the dogs at night, but not see them, in Samara I see them. Out of the window of my room, I look down and see a yard that is covered with what look like moguls on a ski hill. Around the moguls are paths that have been cut by dogs, and running through the paths are two packs of dogs that appear, by the howling and barking that is going on, to be having a bit of a rumble. There are two separate groups of dogs, one with five members, the other with six members. Most of the dogs are German Shepherd type, at least of that size and coloration although none would qualify for Canadian Kennel Club membership. How to describe these dogs? Perhaps I should start with the pile of garbage that is nestled between two moguls. Four of the one group of dogs are lustily gorging on the feast of garbage, while the fifth dog from that group is facing away from the eating dogs and barking, non-stop, in the direction of the other group of six dogs, all of whom are facing towards the first pack and barking loudly and angrily. After a few minutes of this, the six dogs who are not eating, turn around and start running through the trails in the snow between the moguls, through a hole in a fence that leads through a back yard of a house, and then back out of the yard through another hole in the fence that leads back to another part of the yard of the hostel. While those six dogs have made their move to approach the pile of garbage from another direction, the four dogs who had been eating the garbage while the fifth warned the other pack away, had moved away from the garbage and had gone around the moguls from another direction in order to meet the other pack head on as they exited the back yard of the house next door. As those four dogs went to cut off the other pack, the fifth dog, who had been barking at the other pack, now hunched over the pile of garbage and was holding some treat down with his paw while he pulled at it with his teeth. Then both packs were barking and snarling at one another, the pack that had control of the garbage managing to bully the other pack out of my sight and around the corner down some side street. For a while, the barking and snarling stopped, but you have to know that I wondered how common an occurrence such gang warfare would be. I mean, these are packs of large, apparently wild dogs, roaming the streets of Samara. And those 11 dogs are only the ones I saw. I slept for 7 hours this afternoon, but when I woke up again, I could still hear the snarling and yapping and squealing of the dogs. But it was dark out when I awoke at 8 pm, and I couldn’t see the dogs.
My room in the penthouse is very clean and includes two narrow metal beds painted white, two side tables, one desk and chair, and a wardrobe. There is a large window which kind of opens, a radiator, and one overhead light. My room is down a small hall off the main hall of the floor, and there are four other rooms off this small hall; there is also a toilet on the hall and a shower stall. The cleanliness of the toilet and shower do not match the cleanliness of my room. There is no toilet paper and no shower curtain.
Ksanya shows me my room, pointing out that I might like to push the two narrow beds together to make one large bed, suggests that I rest, tells me to call her when I am ready to be shown around, and then leaves me to myself. I try both beds and discover that there is no difference between them, and that both beds are fine, if very narrow, narrower than a standard single bed that I am familiar with. As I start to make my bed using the sheets and blankets that have been provided, I feel like an anchorite. The two sheets are very, very clean and white, and have been cut down to exact size from larger pieces of sheet. The one blanket I have been assigned will be warm enough, given the heat that is pumping out of the radiator under the window. As soon as my bed is made, I decide to lie on it, and I pull out my laptop and open a new document so that I can write, but instead I play spider solitaire for an hour until I fall asleep. I don’t wake up for 7 hours, and only then because of a light tapping on my door. It’s Ksanya, wondering if I need anything.
Within a half hour I discover that I must be at the university tomorrow at 2 pm, that I can pay someone to do laundry for me or do it myself in a sink, that there is no high speed internet here but that there is at the university, that the ATM is “broken” but that there is a bank nearby where no one will speak English anyway so she is not sure how helpful that will be, that there is a store nearby but that with no money it is dubious that I will be able to buy food.
Ksanya will show me how to get to the university tomorrow in the morning, as she will be in classes at 2 pm. In the meantime, she lends me a roll of toilet paper, a sim card with a local Russian phone number for while I am here which I slip into my unlocked cell phone. (if you are traveling, don’t leave home without an unlocked mobile phone with an international sim card. If you stay in any one place for a period of time and will need to make local calls, then you can buy a local sim card, which is usually much cheaper to use than the international sim, and pop it into your unlocked cell phone. Then, when you are on the road again, you can put the international sim back in and be reachable and also phone home whenever you need to.)
It’s now 10:21 pm local time. I’ve decided that I must stay up until midnight, at least, so that I can try to get myself adapted to Russian time. I’ve been negligent about forcing myself to get on to a routine, not bothering to pay attention to time, but sleeping when tired and writing or going out when not. But while there is a huge freedom in living like that, it’s not sustainable now that I have to be somewhere at 2 pm tomorrow. The constant sound of firecrackers from outside seems to have stopped now. Russians seem to have an attraction for firecrackers, and when I was in St Petersburg, could hear them going off at night as well, and along the banks of the Fontanka saw many colorful spent shells lying beside the sidewalk.
I arrived in Samara at noon and was met at the airport by a bevy of taxi drivers which I and the other passengers had to pass through, like a gauntlet, each of them calling out “taxi, taxi!” as we passed. I shook my head, no, no, while I walked past. I, of course, would need to be getting a taxi, but needed time to get my feet on the ground and look around before I decided on a driver. It didn’t take me long. As I got to the end of the gauntlet, a quieter and less aggressive looking man called out taxi, and I nodded at him, yes, and showed him the address that I had copied out in Cyrillic lettering in my notebook. He looked at it, and squinted, and looked at it again, probably because in transcribing this address to my notebook from the email that Anna had sent me, I had written a “v” instead of a “b” at the beginning of the building name. “V” is how to pronounce a “b” in Russian, so a natural mistake. But we solved that one, and my designated driver, after checking with one of his buddies to confirm where that address was, accompanied me to the baggage carousel, where he helped me get my two checked bags and verify with security that they were indeed my bags.
And so into Samara, a 45 minute drive and 1500 rubles later, and I have watched the flat landscape roll out around me, passed over what I’m pretty sure must be the frozen solid, snow-covered Volga River, and been greeted by a long line of crystal ice covered birch trees glittering in the sun. I saw many people walking, and through one stretch of road surrounded by snowy woods I saw several people crossing the highway with cross-country skis and poles. I even saw two men jogging along the side of the road, which is the first time I have seen this in Russia. Oh, and yes, we passed a Pepsi plant, so I am assured, I believe, of being able to procure Pepsi while I am here.
The woman at the entrance to the student hostel where I am to be staying has a mouth full of gold teeth, glasses almost larger than her face, and a head of long, straight, silver hair. She is friendly in a Russian sort of way, which means that she is not nasty. I tell her that I am to meet Ksanya, but she frowns and I realize that I’m on my own, so pull out my world phone and call the number that Anna has sent me for Ksanya. Ksanya, who speaks good English, answers, and within minutes is down to get me to take me to my room. Not before, of course, producing my “papers” for the woman behind the shield at the entrance, who must transcribe my name in English by hand on to her list. It must also be explained who I am and what I am doing here, and between having done a bit of preparation by studying Russian on the Rosetta Stone program and so being able to understand the odd Russian word, reading body language, and knowing the contexts, I can see that the young man who hunches behind the shield with the woman at the entrance finds it amusing that I am here to study Russian for a month, as he smiles that sardonic smile that I have seen on others’ faces.
Nevertheless, that is what I am here to do, and Ksanya grabs one of my bags from me as we walk past the temporarily broken elevator and she asks me, with not a little incredulity in her voice, why I have chosen to stay in the student hostel. I don’t really know what is behind that question, but suspect it has something to do with my apparent ability to pay for something better, and while I suppose I could, there is something that appeals to me about being able to live very cheaply, get my basic needs met, and live a life that has to do not with surrounding myself with comfort, but with a bed, clean water and a toilet. I am, after all, here to learn Russian and to write, so what else, really, do I need? Embroidered quilts? A whirlpool? Scented sheets? A sachet in the dresser drawers? No. I am here to write, and those creature comforts can just be distractions.
It turns out that I am on the top floor, which is the tenth, and between wearing my heavy winter jacket and carrying two suitcases, it’s a bit much for me to walk up without stopping, so I take a couple of breaks to look out the window at the view around me. Samara is flat, although it is on a bit of an embankment, or plateau. The building I am in is one of the few buildings of its height in this part of Samara, so I can see quite a distance from even the 5th floor. There is a lot of snow on the ground, and by the way that the snow has been packed into the streets, it seems that there has been snow on the ground for quite a while, but no new snow. The student hostel is beside what seems to be a residential area. There is snow on all the roofs of the houses, and the yards, too, are covered with snow, and crisscrossed with paths that have been forged by both humans and dogs.
Dogs. There are those dogs again, although unlike in St Petersburg, when I could hear the dogs at night, but not see them, in Samara I see them. Out of the window of my room, I look down and see a yard that is covered with what look like moguls on a ski hill. Around the moguls are paths that have been cut by dogs, and running through the paths are two packs of dogs that appear, by the howling and barking that is going on, to be having a bit of a rumble. There are two separate groups of dogs, one with five members, the other with six members. Most of the dogs are German Shepherd type, at least of that size and coloration although none would qualify for Canadian Kennel Club membership. How to describe these dogs? Perhaps I should start with the pile of garbage that is nestled between two moguls. Four of the one group of dogs are lustily gorging on the feast of garbage, while the fifth dog from that group is facing away from the eating dogs and barking, non-stop, in the direction of the other group of six dogs, all of whom are facing towards the first pack and barking loudly and angrily. After a few minutes of this, the six dogs who are not eating, turn around and start running through the trails in the snow between the moguls, through a hole in a fence that leads through a back yard of a house, and then back out of the yard through another hole in the fence that leads back to another part of the yard of the hostel. While those six dogs have made their move to approach the pile of garbage from another direction, the four dogs who had been eating the garbage while the fifth warned the other pack away, had moved away from the garbage and had gone around the moguls from another direction in order to meet the other pack head on as they exited the back yard of the house next door. As those four dogs went to cut off the other pack, the fifth dog, who had been barking at the other pack, now hunched over the pile of garbage and was holding some treat down with his paw while he pulled at it with his teeth. Then both packs were barking and snarling at one another, the pack that had control of the garbage managing to bully the other pack out of my sight and around the corner down some side street. For a while, the barking and snarling stopped, but you have to know that I wondered how common an occurrence such gang warfare would be. I mean, these are packs of large, apparently wild dogs, roaming the streets of Samara. And those 11 dogs are only the ones I saw. I slept for 7 hours this afternoon, but when I woke up again, I could still hear the snarling and yapping and squealing of the dogs. But it was dark out when I awoke at 8 pm, and I couldn’t see the dogs.
My room in the penthouse is very clean and includes two narrow metal beds painted white, two side tables, one desk and chair, and a wardrobe. There is a large window which kind of opens, a radiator, and one overhead light. My room is down a small hall off the main hall of the floor, and there are four other rooms off this small hall; there is also a toilet on the hall and a shower stall. The cleanliness of the toilet and shower do not match the cleanliness of my room. There is no toilet paper and no shower curtain.
Ksanya shows me my room, pointing out that I might like to push the two narrow beds together to make one large bed, suggests that I rest, tells me to call her when I am ready to be shown around, and then leaves me to myself. I try both beds and discover that there is no difference between them, and that both beds are fine, if very narrow, narrower than a standard single bed that I am familiar with. As I start to make my bed using the sheets and blankets that have been provided, I feel like an anchorite. The two sheets are very, very clean and white, and have been cut down to exact size from larger pieces of sheet. The one blanket I have been assigned will be warm enough, given the heat that is pumping out of the radiator under the window. As soon as my bed is made, I decide to lie on it, and I pull out my laptop and open a new document so that I can write, but instead I play spider solitaire for an hour until I fall asleep. I don’t wake up for 7 hours, and only then because of a light tapping on my door. It’s Ksanya, wondering if I need anything.
Within a half hour I discover that I must be at the university tomorrow at 2 pm, that I can pay someone to do laundry for me or do it myself in a sink, that there is no high speed internet here but that there is at the university, that the ATM is “broken” but that there is a bank nearby where no one will speak English anyway so she is not sure how helpful that will be, that there is a store nearby but that with no money it is dubious that I will be able to buy food.
Ksanya will show me how to get to the university tomorrow in the morning, as she will be in classes at 2 pm. In the meantime, she lends me a roll of toilet paper, a sim card with a local Russian phone number for while I am here which I slip into my unlocked cell phone. (if you are traveling, don’t leave home without an unlocked mobile phone with an international sim card. If you stay in any one place for a period of time and will need to make local calls, then you can buy a local sim card, which is usually much cheaper to use than the international sim, and pop it into your unlocked cell phone. Then, when you are on the road again, you can put the international sim back in and be reachable and also phone home whenever you need to.)
It’s now 10:21 pm local time. I’ve decided that I must stay up until midnight, at least, so that I can try to get myself adapted to Russian time. I’ve been negligent about forcing myself to get on to a routine, not bothering to pay attention to time, but sleeping when tired and writing or going out when not. But while there is a huge freedom in living like that, it’s not sustainable now that I have to be somewhere at 2 pm tomorrow. The constant sound of firecrackers from outside seems to have stopped now. Russians seem to have an attraction for firecrackers, and when I was in St Petersburg, could hear them going off at night as well, and along the banks of the Fontanka saw many colorful spent shells lying beside the sidewalk.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Thursday Afternoon with Lee in St Petersburg
Lee was assigned to a bunk in the room that I was sharing with the teenagers from Holland who were traveling during their “gap” year between high school and university, a couple of puppies who lay around in the sitting room and squirmed around one another’s bodies while watching American movies in Russian and subtitled in English, and who waited until they thought I was asleep before groping at one another under their sleeping bag. Renate, the young girl, pouted and demanded that Miran, her boyfriend, cook sausages for her while she read David Copperfield, and they stayed up late wearing their boots around the hostel and ignoring Ina’s requests to remove them. Not that it was difficult to ignore Ina, whose blatant dismissal of the no smoking rule offended all the hostel inmates, none of whom smoked.
So Lee was given his choice of upper or lower Ikea bunk in the room I shared with Renate and Miran, but because I was sleeping in my bunk at the time, he was reluctant to come in the room. I got out of bed to make it easier for him to unpack and set up his things, but I was still jet lagging and would have preferred to sleep through the dark morning.
Once up out of bed, I decided to head off to the Kazanskaya area and visit the Zoom restaurant, where I had spent many a blissful hour last summer eating the cheap and large omelet while writing. It was a common hangout for SLS participants, so I could also count on running into people I knew, or at least recognize from one of my courses. Of course I knew I wouldn’t recognize anyone there that day, but I was hungry and feeling like one of those omelets, so I plotted my route on the map and got bundled up to set off.
As I was leaving, Lee, my new roommate, asks me where I am going and before I can answer, he asks if he can come with me. Um, yes, I say. You can come. I am going to the Zoom restaurant for an omelet. Do you go to Nevsky, he asks me. I hadn’t been planning to, but getting to Zoom via Nevsky is not much of a detour, and I know that what he really wants is help finding the minivan that will take him up Sadovaya to Nevsky. Yes, I am going to Nevsky, I reply, thinking that showing him how to get there will embolden my own resolve to use this transportation. I had been planning to walk.
We walk out to Sadovoya, which seems closer to the hostel than it had seemed the previous day, and stand at the corner to wait for the #212 minivan, which will take us up to Nevsky Prospekt. For 17 rubles it’s a bargain, and on the way up Lee tells me that he is from Korea, but that he is now living in New York City, attending New York University and studying mathematics. He is a PhD student, and is three years into his five years of doctoral study. He then plans to do post doctoral work and then become a professor at some US university.
I take a bit of a risk and ask him what his area of study is in mathematics. I say this is a risk because I'm pretty sure that whatever he says I won't understand. He pauses, and I figure he is trying to dumb down his explanation so that neither one of us will be embarrassed. Then he smiles and says that his focus is the area behind aircraft wings where the impact of the wings against the air leads to many things of interest in the space along the back edge of the wing. Okay. He has told me something that I can actually picture, but what I can’t picture is how those strings of letters and numbers and symbols that he works with can tell anyone anything about the physical reality along the back edge of an aircraft wing while it is in the air. That’s for another lifetime.
So here I was, in the company of a great mathematician, and I am curious now to know what it is that great mathematicians think about and do besides work with these numbers. Here is my chance.
Lee tells me that he is 31 years old. That it has been decided from the time he was very young that he would be a scientist because smart children in Korea are told by their parents that they must be scientists, and that it has been decided from the time that he was very young that he would go to the USA to study mathematics, and then become a professor, because in Korea, he tells me, there is no good mathematics study. Good mathematicians leave. Or are not in Korea in the first place. But I’m not sure. I don’t ask, though, as I prefer to let him talk about what he wants to tell me, rather than have him tell me about what I think I want to hear.
When we get to Nevsky Prospekt, he pulls out his map and asks me which direction he must walk to find the Kazan Cathedral, and when I show him on the map, he disagrees, and tells me it should be in the other direction from what I am telling him. Um, no, I say, and I have to admit that I get a bit of a thrill from being able to read a map better than a doctoral mathematics student. I take it where I can, I guess, and after he exclaims dismay at my confusion, he suddenly turns his map upside down and orients it so that it fits his comprehension of where he is standing in relation to the streets and the Cathedral as they are represented on the map. Of course this action just confuses me, so I ignore the map and start walking, telling him that if he wants me to take him to the cathedral, he should just follow me. He puts his map away, and with a look of distrust, apprehensively follows me into the underground crosswalk at the corner of Nevsky and Sadovoya.
I point out the Singer building to him, and give him a two-bit history lesson on art nouveau architecture, and we soon get to the Kazan Cathedral, which causes him to pull out his map and shake his head in amazement. So, there you go, I say. There is the cathedral. Yes, he says, nodding his head. And where are you going now?
I tell him I am going to Zoom, just down the street, for a large and cheap omelet which will mean, once I have eaten it, that I won’t have to eat again for the rest of the day. And then, I say, I am going to do some work in this café. I have my laptop with me, and I must work.
What is your work, he asks.
I pause. This is difficult, and I feel a bit of an imposter when saying it, but I reply that I am a writer. A writer? Yes, a writer. What books have you published? None. Oh. But you are a writer? Yes. What do you write? Poetry. Fiction. Travel writing. May I come with you at lunch, he asks, and have, how you say it, an omelet? Yes, I answer, and although my preference would be to be alone, I push myself to say yes so that I will learn more about Lee. I had also to remind myself that the purpose of this trip is to write, but what would I write about if I didn’t talk to Lee or others like him? So, I say yes, and we go to Zoom and I order an Americano with hot milk on the side and an omelet with potatoes and cheese, and Lee orders an omelet and hot chocolate milk.
I wrote poetry once, he tells me, even before the omelets arrive. When I was a young man, I fell in love with a girl, and so I wrote her some poetry. I was mathematics student, and she studied literature, and so I changed to study literature so I could be near her and learn to write poetry for her, but she told me after a while that she did not like me because I was not such a rich man, and so she went away with another man who will be a rich man, a doctor or lawyer or something. So, I returned to mathematics, because, you know, to understand the poetry, you have to be very smart person, and I have a hard time to understand it, what it means.
Really. Okay, now I’m interested. Who wouldn’t be?
That happens in Korea. Woman wants to marry rich man and stay home and be looked after, and all families want girls to marry rich man, and I am not a rich man and I won’t be a rich man, and so it is very hard for me to find girlfriend. Even in US it is the same, the Korean women want a rich man.
I want to say well, you got to go out and win the Nobel prize honey, and then maybe at least you will find a woman who will marry a smart man, but in my thoughts that sounds glib and crass, and I’ve determined to keep the glib and crass part of me under wraps for a few months. So I keep quiet, and don’t even have to ask him questions, he just talks non-stop for a couple of hours, and I think, well, yes, I was right that I was coming to Zoom to work, I just didn’t know what the work was to be, exactly.
As he eats his omelet, he tells me his “story”, which has to do with a 1970s Japanese animation series called Galaxy Express 999. Do you know that series, he asks me, and I have to admit that I do not, and urge him to tell me about it. It is an animation about a little Japanese boy who rides a train through the galaxy from star to star, and on every star he has a different adventure and learns something new about people. He is traveling with his guide, a woman with long blond hair and fur hat and coat, a Russian woman. He pauses. His name, the boy, is Tetra, and the woman, she is Masy; my friends, they say I am a Tetra without a Masy.
I am telling you this, he says, his fork in mid air between his plate and his mouth, because you are travel writer, and I have this story about travel, and maybe it help you in your writings.
Maybe, I think, but I am dubious.
So I saw this animations when I was a little boy, maybe 7 or 8, and I really liked them, but I did not understand them all what they meant. Later, when I was older, I found them on DVD and now I watch them all the time, and there are a few that are my favorite episodes. Let me explain. But first, I tell you the background. This boy, Tetra, he lives in a country where rich people are able to buy a machine body that allows them to live forever. But Tetra and his parents, they are very poor, so they cannot buy machine body. They are so poor that they cannot have any foods, and always the parents they lie to their son when they feed him, and they say that they have already eaten, and they give them all the food that they have. The father dies soon, and so the mother and Tetra have to leave where they are living. So they set off wearing their rags, through the cold and snow, and while they are walking, some men with machine bodies see them and shoot at them, and Tetra’s mother dies. Tetra is left alone and is very sad, so he decides that he must find money to buy machine body and live forever. He meets Masy and she tells him she can help him find machine body, and they get on this very long train, just the two of them, and one conductor. The rest of this long train is empty, and the train goes from one star to the next, and this little boy, he learns something at every star.
I saw this when I was a little boy, and it made big impression on me. Especially there is one episode when the train is on its way to the Memory Star, and there is one other person on the train. This is the only episode where there is another person on the train, and in this episode this person is a woman. The conductor falls in love with the woman, but the woman, she is cruel to him, telling him to do this, do that for her. When the train crashes, she blames the conductor for the crash and tells him he is stupid. But the conductor is still in love with her, and even when she leaves the train and removes her mask to reveal that she is the woman who he fell in love with many years ago as a young man and whom he has loved ever since, he still loves her, despite the fact that she mocks him for not being a successful rich man, but only a failure, a train conductor. The little boy, Tetra, watches and listens to everything that is going on, and he does not understand why the conductor loves this woman who is cruel to him, and when he asks Masy, his guide, she tells him that there are some things that children do not understand when they are children, but that they will understand when they are older.
Lee stops and looks at me. And so my friends, they call me a Tetra without a Masy, and I remember this episode when I first saw it, and how when Masy tells Tetra that there are some things that children can’t understand, that was very powerful for me, and it was right for how confused I was as child. And then, well then my love for the woman who studied literature is like the conductor’s love for the cruel woman. I am not rich man.
He is quiet for a while and for once my inner Dorothy Parker isn’t choking back a glib response.
And my life, he continues, my life is very boring. I do mathematics all the time, all the time reading and writing mathematics papers and studying, and I do this for many years now, and nothing changes in my life, it is always same. So I think a few years ago about Tetra traveling on Galaxy Express train, and I decide that I will travel when I can. I am poor man who travels. He pauses, then laughs, at himself, but his mouth is grim. He looks up at me. Every chance, I travel, and I visit Russia because of many things, but partly because Masy is Russian guide for Tetra, and I read that to really know Russia, you must visit in winter. But it is very cold.
Tonight, I will show you episode of Galaxy Express 999 on computer if you are interested.
I assure him that I am and he gets up to leave. As he bundles himself into gloves and hat and scarf and coat he says, and now you must work.
So Lee was given his choice of upper or lower Ikea bunk in the room I shared with Renate and Miran, but because I was sleeping in my bunk at the time, he was reluctant to come in the room. I got out of bed to make it easier for him to unpack and set up his things, but I was still jet lagging and would have preferred to sleep through the dark morning.
Once up out of bed, I decided to head off to the Kazanskaya area and visit the Zoom restaurant, where I had spent many a blissful hour last summer eating the cheap and large omelet while writing. It was a common hangout for SLS participants, so I could also count on running into people I knew, or at least recognize from one of my courses. Of course I knew I wouldn’t recognize anyone there that day, but I was hungry and feeling like one of those omelets, so I plotted my route on the map and got bundled up to set off.
As I was leaving, Lee, my new roommate, asks me where I am going and before I can answer, he asks if he can come with me. Um, yes, I say. You can come. I am going to the Zoom restaurant for an omelet. Do you go to Nevsky, he asks me. I hadn’t been planning to, but getting to Zoom via Nevsky is not much of a detour, and I know that what he really wants is help finding the minivan that will take him up Sadovaya to Nevsky. Yes, I am going to Nevsky, I reply, thinking that showing him how to get there will embolden my own resolve to use this transportation. I had been planning to walk.
We walk out to Sadovoya, which seems closer to the hostel than it had seemed the previous day, and stand at the corner to wait for the #212 minivan, which will take us up to Nevsky Prospekt. For 17 rubles it’s a bargain, and on the way up Lee tells me that he is from Korea, but that he is now living in New York City, attending New York University and studying mathematics. He is a PhD student, and is three years into his five years of doctoral study. He then plans to do post doctoral work and then become a professor at some US university.
I take a bit of a risk and ask him what his area of study is in mathematics. I say this is a risk because I'm pretty sure that whatever he says I won't understand. He pauses, and I figure he is trying to dumb down his explanation so that neither one of us will be embarrassed. Then he smiles and says that his focus is the area behind aircraft wings where the impact of the wings against the air leads to many things of interest in the space along the back edge of the wing. Okay. He has told me something that I can actually picture, but what I can’t picture is how those strings of letters and numbers and symbols that he works with can tell anyone anything about the physical reality along the back edge of an aircraft wing while it is in the air. That’s for another lifetime.
So here I was, in the company of a great mathematician, and I am curious now to know what it is that great mathematicians think about and do besides work with these numbers. Here is my chance.
Lee tells me that he is 31 years old. That it has been decided from the time he was very young that he would be a scientist because smart children in Korea are told by their parents that they must be scientists, and that it has been decided from the time that he was very young that he would go to the USA to study mathematics, and then become a professor, because in Korea, he tells me, there is no good mathematics study. Good mathematicians leave. Or are not in Korea in the first place. But I’m not sure. I don’t ask, though, as I prefer to let him talk about what he wants to tell me, rather than have him tell me about what I think I want to hear.
When we get to Nevsky Prospekt, he pulls out his map and asks me which direction he must walk to find the Kazan Cathedral, and when I show him on the map, he disagrees, and tells me it should be in the other direction from what I am telling him. Um, no, I say, and I have to admit that I get a bit of a thrill from being able to read a map better than a doctoral mathematics student. I take it where I can, I guess, and after he exclaims dismay at my confusion, he suddenly turns his map upside down and orients it so that it fits his comprehension of where he is standing in relation to the streets and the Cathedral as they are represented on the map. Of course this action just confuses me, so I ignore the map and start walking, telling him that if he wants me to take him to the cathedral, he should just follow me. He puts his map away, and with a look of distrust, apprehensively follows me into the underground crosswalk at the corner of Nevsky and Sadovoya.
I point out the Singer building to him, and give him a two-bit history lesson on art nouveau architecture, and we soon get to the Kazan Cathedral, which causes him to pull out his map and shake his head in amazement. So, there you go, I say. There is the cathedral. Yes, he says, nodding his head. And where are you going now?
I tell him I am going to Zoom, just down the street, for a large and cheap omelet which will mean, once I have eaten it, that I won’t have to eat again for the rest of the day. And then, I say, I am going to do some work in this café. I have my laptop with me, and I must work.
What is your work, he asks.
I pause. This is difficult, and I feel a bit of an imposter when saying it, but I reply that I am a writer. A writer? Yes, a writer. What books have you published? None. Oh. But you are a writer? Yes. What do you write? Poetry. Fiction. Travel writing. May I come with you at lunch, he asks, and have, how you say it, an omelet? Yes, I answer, and although my preference would be to be alone, I push myself to say yes so that I will learn more about Lee. I had also to remind myself that the purpose of this trip is to write, but what would I write about if I didn’t talk to Lee or others like him? So, I say yes, and we go to Zoom and I order an Americano with hot milk on the side and an omelet with potatoes and cheese, and Lee orders an omelet and hot chocolate milk.
I wrote poetry once, he tells me, even before the omelets arrive. When I was a young man, I fell in love with a girl, and so I wrote her some poetry. I was mathematics student, and she studied literature, and so I changed to study literature so I could be near her and learn to write poetry for her, but she told me after a while that she did not like me because I was not such a rich man, and so she went away with another man who will be a rich man, a doctor or lawyer or something. So, I returned to mathematics, because, you know, to understand the poetry, you have to be very smart person, and I have a hard time to understand it, what it means.
Really. Okay, now I’m interested. Who wouldn’t be?
That happens in Korea. Woman wants to marry rich man and stay home and be looked after, and all families want girls to marry rich man, and I am not a rich man and I won’t be a rich man, and so it is very hard for me to find girlfriend. Even in US it is the same, the Korean women want a rich man.
I want to say well, you got to go out and win the Nobel prize honey, and then maybe at least you will find a woman who will marry a smart man, but in my thoughts that sounds glib and crass, and I’ve determined to keep the glib and crass part of me under wraps for a few months. So I keep quiet, and don’t even have to ask him questions, he just talks non-stop for a couple of hours, and I think, well, yes, I was right that I was coming to Zoom to work, I just didn’t know what the work was to be, exactly.
As he eats his omelet, he tells me his “story”, which has to do with a 1970s Japanese animation series called Galaxy Express 999. Do you know that series, he asks me, and I have to admit that I do not, and urge him to tell me about it. It is an animation about a little Japanese boy who rides a train through the galaxy from star to star, and on every star he has a different adventure and learns something new about people. He is traveling with his guide, a woman with long blond hair and fur hat and coat, a Russian woman. He pauses. His name, the boy, is Tetra, and the woman, she is Masy; my friends, they say I am a Tetra without a Masy.
I am telling you this, he says, his fork in mid air between his plate and his mouth, because you are travel writer, and I have this story about travel, and maybe it help you in your writings.
Maybe, I think, but I am dubious.
So I saw this animations when I was a little boy, maybe 7 or 8, and I really liked them, but I did not understand them all what they meant. Later, when I was older, I found them on DVD and now I watch them all the time, and there are a few that are my favorite episodes. Let me explain. But first, I tell you the background. This boy, Tetra, he lives in a country where rich people are able to buy a machine body that allows them to live forever. But Tetra and his parents, they are very poor, so they cannot buy machine body. They are so poor that they cannot have any foods, and always the parents they lie to their son when they feed him, and they say that they have already eaten, and they give them all the food that they have. The father dies soon, and so the mother and Tetra have to leave where they are living. So they set off wearing their rags, through the cold and snow, and while they are walking, some men with machine bodies see them and shoot at them, and Tetra’s mother dies. Tetra is left alone and is very sad, so he decides that he must find money to buy machine body and live forever. He meets Masy and she tells him she can help him find machine body, and they get on this very long train, just the two of them, and one conductor. The rest of this long train is empty, and the train goes from one star to the next, and this little boy, he learns something at every star.
I saw this when I was a little boy, and it made big impression on me. Especially there is one episode when the train is on its way to the Memory Star, and there is one other person on the train. This is the only episode where there is another person on the train, and in this episode this person is a woman. The conductor falls in love with the woman, but the woman, she is cruel to him, telling him to do this, do that for her. When the train crashes, she blames the conductor for the crash and tells him he is stupid. But the conductor is still in love with her, and even when she leaves the train and removes her mask to reveal that she is the woman who he fell in love with many years ago as a young man and whom he has loved ever since, he still loves her, despite the fact that she mocks him for not being a successful rich man, but only a failure, a train conductor. The little boy, Tetra, watches and listens to everything that is going on, and he does not understand why the conductor loves this woman who is cruel to him, and when he asks Masy, his guide, she tells him that there are some things that children do not understand when they are children, but that they will understand when they are older.
Lee stops and looks at me. And so my friends, they call me a Tetra without a Masy, and I remember this episode when I first saw it, and how when Masy tells Tetra that there are some things that children can’t understand, that was very powerful for me, and it was right for how confused I was as child. And then, well then my love for the woman who studied literature is like the conductor’s love for the cruel woman. I am not rich man.
He is quiet for a while and for once my inner Dorothy Parker isn’t choking back a glib response.
And my life, he continues, my life is very boring. I do mathematics all the time, all the time reading and writing mathematics papers and studying, and I do this for many years now, and nothing changes in my life, it is always same. So I think a few years ago about Tetra traveling on Galaxy Express train, and I decide that I will travel when I can. I am poor man who travels. He pauses, then laughs, at himself, but his mouth is grim. He looks up at me. Every chance, I travel, and I visit Russia because of many things, but partly because Masy is Russian guide for Tetra, and I read that to really know Russia, you must visit in winter. But it is very cold.
Tonight, I will show you episode of Galaxy Express 999 on computer if you are interested.
I assure him that I am and he gets up to leave. As he bundles himself into gloves and hat and scarf and coat he says, and now you must work.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Napolean Hostel - Moscow
I'm sitting in the hallway outside of my room where there is hi speed internet, and was working away reading my emails and this guy comes along and starts talking at me in this long monologue about the following: the prices of apartments in Moscow (3500 dollars for a 2 bedroom close to the centrum); the distance between metro stations in Moscow (5 kilometres, apparently); the speed of a Moscow subway train (120 km/hour); the different costs of the various classes of transsiberian trains; his investments (how much he has invested, how much he has lost, how much he still has left, how long it will take him to make back what he has lost, how much it costs him to run his car); what countries to invest in (China, Russia, and India).
I kept trying to give him all the usual "Can't you see I'm busy" signals, but he was having none of it, and it took me about 20 minutes before I realized I would have to tell him that I needed to get to work, and even then he kept talking and I had to tell him again.
But really, though, this hostel is far superior to the one in St Petersburg. It's more centrally located, being about 3 minutes to the Kremlin, and the woman who served me coffee at the cafe yesterday where I went to post the first blog entry actually smiled at me, and more than once.
Of course that was after a gruelling trip - it took me from 7 am when the taxi picked me up at my hostel in St Petersburg until 4 pm, when I finally gasped up the final flight of stairs to the fourth floor hostel in Moscow. The actual flight between the two cities is 1 hour and ten minutes, so all the rest of the time was spent in the taxi, trying to find out how check in "works" at Pulkovo 2 (the SP domestic airport), waiting, going through customs, waiting some more, entering the ground transportation from the departure lounge to the plane, entering the ground transportation from plane back to arrivals in Moscow, standing around stupidly and slowly reading the information signs in Cyrillic, avoiding the temptation of taking the easy but expensive transportation route into the centre of Moscow and my hostel, figuring out how to get on the express train into Moscow, standing around in the Moscow train station looking stupid again and trying to figure out how to get to my hostel from the train station without taking a taxi and thus avoiding the freelance taxi drivers offering their services for a mere 1000 rubles and then lowering that to 500 when I flinched and that's when I knew the metro would be a tiny fraction of even that, arguing with a taxi driver that yes I really did want to take the metro despite his curled lip and non verbal expressions of disdain, finally "noticing" the sign for the metro station, getting yelled at by the ticket cashier for not correctly pronouncing the name of the station that I was looking for, descending deep into the bowels of the Moscow metro system, going one station too far and thus missing my transfer point, walking in all directions but the right one when trying to find the hostel...
I finally gave up and went into a coffee shop with the words "wi fi" on the door, a bit suspicious because the last time I did that in St Petersburg, the young woman in the shop had no idea what internet or wi fi was, despite a similar sign. They say that Moscow is the most expensive city in the world, but I paid only 50 rubles for an hour of connection, whereas in SP I regularly paid 100. After a coffee and an hour catching up on email, I felt "normal" again, and psychologically prepared for the final approach to my hostel whose location I had managed to locate on a Lonely Planet map, and having internalized the directions, set off with my two small backpacks and my little suitcase with the wheels.
And so upon reaching the fourth floor hostel slightly out of breath and freaking fed up with things and wanting to go home right now and seriously questioning myself and this crazy trip - what the hell, do I really think I'm going to learn any Russian in a month? - I fell into my hot pink-sheeted bed and slept the evening away, waking up refreshed and alert at midnight. Oh, and I'm hungry.
I kept trying to give him all the usual "Can't you see I'm busy" signals, but he was having none of it, and it took me about 20 minutes before I realized I would have to tell him that I needed to get to work, and even then he kept talking and I had to tell him again.
But really, though, this hostel is far superior to the one in St Petersburg. It's more centrally located, being about 3 minutes to the Kremlin, and the woman who served me coffee at the cafe yesterday where I went to post the first blog entry actually smiled at me, and more than once.
Of course that was after a gruelling trip - it took me from 7 am when the taxi picked me up at my hostel in St Petersburg until 4 pm, when I finally gasped up the final flight of stairs to the fourth floor hostel in Moscow. The actual flight between the two cities is 1 hour and ten minutes, so all the rest of the time was spent in the taxi, trying to find out how check in "works" at Pulkovo 2 (the SP domestic airport), waiting, going through customs, waiting some more, entering the ground transportation from the departure lounge to the plane, entering the ground transportation from plane back to arrivals in Moscow, standing around stupidly and slowly reading the information signs in Cyrillic, avoiding the temptation of taking the easy but expensive transportation route into the centre of Moscow and my hostel, figuring out how to get on the express train into Moscow, standing around in the Moscow train station looking stupid again and trying to figure out how to get to my hostel from the train station without taking a taxi and thus avoiding the freelance taxi drivers offering their services for a mere 1000 rubles and then lowering that to 500 when I flinched and that's when I knew the metro would be a tiny fraction of even that, arguing with a taxi driver that yes I really did want to take the metro despite his curled lip and non verbal expressions of disdain, finally "noticing" the sign for the metro station, getting yelled at by the ticket cashier for not correctly pronouncing the name of the station that I was looking for, descending deep into the bowels of the Moscow metro system, going one station too far and thus missing my transfer point, walking in all directions but the right one when trying to find the hostel...
I finally gave up and went into a coffee shop with the words "wi fi" on the door, a bit suspicious because the last time I did that in St Petersburg, the young woman in the shop had no idea what internet or wi fi was, despite a similar sign. They say that Moscow is the most expensive city in the world, but I paid only 50 rubles for an hour of connection, whereas in SP I regularly paid 100. After a coffee and an hour catching up on email, I felt "normal" again, and psychologically prepared for the final approach to my hostel whose location I had managed to locate on a Lonely Planet map, and having internalized the directions, set off with my two small backpacks and my little suitcase with the wheels.
And so upon reaching the fourth floor hostel slightly out of breath and freaking fed up with things and wanting to go home right now and seriously questioning myself and this crazy trip - what the hell, do I really think I'm going to learn any Russian in a month? - I fell into my hot pink-sheeted bed and slept the evening away, waking up refreshed and alert at midnight. Oh, and I'm hungry.
Oleg and Ina
Here is my first blog entry for 2008. St Petersburg, after I wrote this on January 2, was mostly a bust...I got sick and the internet didn't work at the hostel, and the hostel was "chaotic" (more on that later). But here is what I wrote about the first day in the hostel.
January 2, 2008
I’m sitting at a kitchen table with Oleg and Ina after having made my way from the airport to the hostel for just 17 rubles, 68 cents Canadian, by taking a marshrutky (minibus). The ride in to the city was familiar, the closer to the centre I got, the more familiar the buildings seemed, the more familiar the rush of people. I got off at Sennaya Platz, following the instructions provided on the internet by the hostel, and realized that their next instruction, to take the #212 bus on Sadovaya Prospekt, would not be easy, as Sennaya Platz is an intersection of several roads on which the traffic, cars and people, rush wildly in every possible direction. Luckily, or perhaps deliberately, I had studied the Cyrillic alphabet this past fall, so was able to decode, if slowly, the street signs which sometimes appear on plaques on the sides of buildings at the corners of streets. I was looking for Sadovaya, but there were so many streets converging and taking off from this one intersection, that it was difficult to maneuver with even my one small bag on wheels and two small packs. People were rushing, and although there is apparently less traffic in early January than there was in June/July when I was last here, the cars and trucks are still in a frenzied hurry.
I could understand why people looked at me impatiently as I stood by the side of the street clutching my blurred MapQuest map of St Petersburg and trying to assess the faces of the passers-by to see which one of them might be inclined take the time to read the Russian instructions for getting to the hostel, but people hurried by with clenched faces reddened by the cold and framed in fur. I understood why they regarded me with suspicion, or just avoided eye contact completely, as I am different, a potential liability, extra work, extra time taken on the way home from work, or the way to an important engagement. When I could not identify anyone who I could read might open up their eyes to my mumbled questions, spoken in English monosyllables with a Russian accent, I just stood on the side of the street and watched. And thought. I thought that if I continued to look around me, examine the people, really look closely at the signs on the stores, watch which buses with which numbers turned in which dirction, I might figure out where I was to go. My instructions said to catch a 212 mini bus on Sadovaya Prospekt, get off at Lermontov, and then walk down Lermontov to Labotina and find #36. And so on. Or, the instructions told me, I could walk that distance in 20 minutes. The problem was that I didn’t know which direction to start walking, and so I stood for quite a while at this intersection and felt helpless. Because I have forgotten or lost my hat somewhere between the Vancouver Airport and here, my head got cold while I stood there, and because we are just past the shortest day of the year at the same latitude as Whitehorse, the dropping sun, even at 2 in the afternoon, was also leading to dropping temperatures. The pedestrian pace around me rose as the air got colder. And I just stood there and emptied my mind. Couldn’t plan. Couldn’t decide. I had too little data to work with.
So sitting across from Oleg and Ina in the hostel kitchen, I am grateful for both the warmth of the room and the hot tea that sits in a cup in front of me, despite the limp string of the tea bag that flopped over the side of the cup. They are young women, 23 and 24. Oleg is from Kaliningrad, a city on the coast of that tiny pocket of Russia squeezed in between Poland and Lithuania. “Russia is a crazy place”, she tells me in English, and then immediately translates for Ina what she has said. “It is unpredictable.” She has long blonde hair that reaches to below her armpits, and after she had met me outside the front door of the hostel on her way home from work and led me upstairs to the hostel, an old collective apartment that was bought by an Englishman two years ago and converted to this hostel, she had changed into a tight leopard skin shirt and pink tights, apparently her comfort clothes. She is sitting across from me at the kitchen table. There is too much stress here, she says. -- Too much stress for me, she continues. Tomorrow we are going to get our visas to go to Finland, and then to France. Ina’s boyfriend is in France. Putin is a monarch. He is crazy. It will not get better for us, for the poor. There is no middle class here, just the very rich and the very poor. We are the very poor, and it is not good for us. She almost spits as she talks, and delivers each of her statements one after the other as if she has rehearsed each one of them every day, every night as she walks to work, walks home, does her laundry. I can imagine her going through her list of complaints, remembering her fears, predicting a dour personal future for herself, and knowing with certainty that she must leave.
As I listen to Oleg talk, my body is vibrating the way that bodies do when they have been traveling on planes for almost 24 hours. My semi circular canals are still working to keep my perceptions stable, but the ground beneath me is no longer rocking, and I don’t have to be alert any more, don’t have to make any decisions, any plans, read any maps or instructions. I’m home free for the moment, and so my body is rocking. I want to ask Oleg some questions, and I try, but she says, no, listen to me, I have more. she has no time for my questions, And she continues to say how important it is that they leave Russia.
Ten days! She says, telling me how the country shuts down for ten days in early January. We have this ten day holiday right now, and it’s good for no one except the rich. They go to Japan, Thailand, Egypt where they lie in the sun for ten days while the rest of the country stays in the cold and waits for them to return. What good is this ten day holiday for us now? All we can do is eat and drink and have little sleeps. She laughs, and turns to Ina to translate again, and Ina laughs with her because we have been drinking wine and eating bread with cheese and caviar, a feast they prepared, in my honour, I think, upon my arrival.
I have to leave, Oleg says. This is too stress. Too stress. Every day I don’t know what I find when I leave my house. One day cheese is 27 rubles, the next day 37, the day after that 42, and I don’t know what to expect each day or know how can I pay for these things. It’s everything too, not just food. Clothes. Electricity. Everything goes up with no warning.
Ina speaks up. I want stabilize, she says. Stabilize. She tells me she is moving to France to get married to Stephan, who lives in Toulouse. She met him at the hostel when he stayed here last fall and quickly dumped her English boyfriend, the hostel owner. Ina works here, takes care of the place. I’m always here, she tells me, you can come and go as you please and I will always be here to let you in when you come back. The English owner is in Japan, and while Oleg and Ina wrestle with a broken window, I hear the word “mushina” repeated over and over again, interspersed with laughter. And so I ask, are you talking about men? They look at me and laugh, yes, they say. Men! They leave when it gets cold and now the window is broken and there is no one to fix it. They talk to one another in Russian and laugh. But I have read Duplessix Grey's book on Soviet women, and I have a pretty good idea what they are laughing about.
And so Ina, who is a younger version of the women who sit at the entrances of university residences and museums or any other place where people come and go, has been going to France once a month since meeting Stephan in September. It is difficult to get visas to go anywhere except Finland, so to go to France she must first go to Finland and then out. Tomorrow she and Oleg are going to get visas for Finland. When I ask if they are coming back this time, she laughs and tells me maybe. Maybe in a long time. Ina is going for love, Oleg is going for work. Ina wants to have two children and stability. Oleg wants a job.
As I stood at the Sennaya intersection and emptied my head, and then wondered what to do, I realized that the solution would not come by thinking. I could not think my way to the hostel, I would have to act. Get moving, I told myself. Just get moving. So I walked in any arbitrary direction, and then saw a group of young people standing around. The young and healthy are more likely to make eye contact, especially the young women, and sure enough one young girl was looking at me curiously. I smiled, but not too widely so as not to be thought a simpleton, and said the word “Sadovaya?” She responded in broken English, where you from? I told her Canada, a country that Oleg would later describe as very stable, and the young woman on the street told me that she was from some other part of Russia, a small town. So she does not know St Petersburg, but she will try to help. She is with a small group of other young women, and the six of them ask a young man for help.
Now I’m pretty sure that if I had asked that young man for help he would have sneered at me and walked away, not wanting to bother with a crazy old woman clutching a folded piece of paper, but when six young women with faces flushed with cold ask him a question, he stops to talk, lights a cigarette, and seems prepared to bathe in the attentions for as long as he can. He, of course, is a Petersburgian, and knows exactly where Sadovaya Prospekt is, and what direction down Sadovaya Prospekt one needs to walk to get to Lermontov, so he tells them, and they tell me, and with a “spasibo” I’m on my way to what I hope will be a hostel, the plastic wheels on my carryall clunking over the uneven concrete of the sidewalks.
I decide not to wait for the #212 minivan, and instead opt for the 20 minute walk down Sadovaya. I could use a walk after those hours cooped up in planes (although the flight from Frankfurt to St Petersburg, in a plane designed to hold 300, held only 20 of us. Customs was easy, and just to see how difficult things might get for me, I deliberately did not answer one of the questions on my immigration card. The customs agent did not notice. ). And so I boldly set out to find Lermontov Prospekt, rehearsing the Cyrillic alphabet in my head so that I would recognize the street name when I came to it. After about 10 minutes, and still not finding the street, I stopped two women who were walking towards me to ask for help. They both stopped, they both made eye contact, and both listened attentively as I monosyllabled my way through Lermontovskaya Prospekt, and they both nodded and pointed in the direction I was going. Spasibo, spasibo, I say, and my temporary insanity at the Sennaya Platz is at least momentarily relieved as I head towards what I hope will be the hostel.
Are you going to Belarus? Oleg asks me. It’s worse in Belarus. It’s worse. I was there visiting my aunt and they have a new policy, a new law just decreed by their president, and everyone must buy a “flicker”, that is a reflective strip that they must wear on their bodies, they buy it for $2 and if the police find you without your flicker, they will fine you $20, and all this it is on a $300 a month salary. I don’t know how they do it, and that president, Lukashenka, he’s crazy. He has turned off all the street lights in the country, and everyone must wear these flickers, it’s a tax, and he calls it for safety, everyone must wear these flickers so that the car lights will reflect off them, men, women, children, they are all wearing flickers on their clothes, on their purses. My aunt, she told me to get one, to wear one, and I refused, I am not citizen of Belarus and they cannot fine me and I will not wear such a thing on my body.
And there is talk there of more, talk of every citizen having to wear a badge with their identification number on it for the police to see, so that if you do something, you can be fined by the badge number. Belarus is terrible. I must leave Russia. It will only get worse. Oleg is quiet, and helps herself to another piece of bread with caviar, spreading it the way one might spread peanut butter. She is 24. Ina is 25. Oleg, I remind myself, wants to leave to get work, and Ina is leaving for love. They are both angry, frustrated, confused, stressed.
By the time I got to the hostel, it had only been two hours since my plane had landed, and the further away from Sennaya Platz I walked, the quieter the streets got, the shabbier the buildings. I wondered, of course, if there really would be a hostel at #36 Labutina. But I found a number 36, and a small plaque over the security key pad indicating that this was a hostel, and so I entered the security code that I had been given, and of course it did not work; rather, the pad emitted a long shrill sound and flashed a red light each time I entered the code. I stopped and went into planning mode. But I was soon saved from this by Oleg, who came down the street towards the door of the hostel.
Are you coming for the hostel, she asked me. Yes, I said, and she says, you follow me to the second floor. And I follow her to the second floor, and a bit later, while Ina and Oleg and I are sitting around the kitchen table, she asks me what I am doing, a woman alone, traveling in Russia, in January. No one comes here in January, she says.
Exactly, I think. That’s it exactly.
January 2, 2008
I’m sitting at a kitchen table with Oleg and Ina after having made my way from the airport to the hostel for just 17 rubles, 68 cents Canadian, by taking a marshrutky (minibus). The ride in to the city was familiar, the closer to the centre I got, the more familiar the buildings seemed, the more familiar the rush of people. I got off at Sennaya Platz, following the instructions provided on the internet by the hostel, and realized that their next instruction, to take the #212 bus on Sadovaya Prospekt, would not be easy, as Sennaya Platz is an intersection of several roads on which the traffic, cars and people, rush wildly in every possible direction. Luckily, or perhaps deliberately, I had studied the Cyrillic alphabet this past fall, so was able to decode, if slowly, the street signs which sometimes appear on plaques on the sides of buildings at the corners of streets. I was looking for Sadovaya, but there were so many streets converging and taking off from this one intersection, that it was difficult to maneuver with even my one small bag on wheels and two small packs. People were rushing, and although there is apparently less traffic in early January than there was in June/July when I was last here, the cars and trucks are still in a frenzied hurry.
I could understand why people looked at me impatiently as I stood by the side of the street clutching my blurred MapQuest map of St Petersburg and trying to assess the faces of the passers-by to see which one of them might be inclined take the time to read the Russian instructions for getting to the hostel, but people hurried by with clenched faces reddened by the cold and framed in fur. I understood why they regarded me with suspicion, or just avoided eye contact completely, as I am different, a potential liability, extra work, extra time taken on the way home from work, or the way to an important engagement. When I could not identify anyone who I could read might open up their eyes to my mumbled questions, spoken in English monosyllables with a Russian accent, I just stood on the side of the street and watched. And thought. I thought that if I continued to look around me, examine the people, really look closely at the signs on the stores, watch which buses with which numbers turned in which dirction, I might figure out where I was to go. My instructions said to catch a 212 mini bus on Sadovaya Prospekt, get off at Lermontov, and then walk down Lermontov to Labotina and find #36. And so on. Or, the instructions told me, I could walk that distance in 20 minutes. The problem was that I didn’t know which direction to start walking, and so I stood for quite a while at this intersection and felt helpless. Because I have forgotten or lost my hat somewhere between the Vancouver Airport and here, my head got cold while I stood there, and because we are just past the shortest day of the year at the same latitude as Whitehorse, the dropping sun, even at 2 in the afternoon, was also leading to dropping temperatures. The pedestrian pace around me rose as the air got colder. And I just stood there and emptied my mind. Couldn’t plan. Couldn’t decide. I had too little data to work with.
So sitting across from Oleg and Ina in the hostel kitchen, I am grateful for both the warmth of the room and the hot tea that sits in a cup in front of me, despite the limp string of the tea bag that flopped over the side of the cup. They are young women, 23 and 24. Oleg is from Kaliningrad, a city on the coast of that tiny pocket of Russia squeezed in between Poland and Lithuania. “Russia is a crazy place”, she tells me in English, and then immediately translates for Ina what she has said. “It is unpredictable.” She has long blonde hair that reaches to below her armpits, and after she had met me outside the front door of the hostel on her way home from work and led me upstairs to the hostel, an old collective apartment that was bought by an Englishman two years ago and converted to this hostel, she had changed into a tight leopard skin shirt and pink tights, apparently her comfort clothes. She is sitting across from me at the kitchen table. There is too much stress here, she says. -- Too much stress for me, she continues. Tomorrow we are going to get our visas to go to Finland, and then to France. Ina’s boyfriend is in France. Putin is a monarch. He is crazy. It will not get better for us, for the poor. There is no middle class here, just the very rich and the very poor. We are the very poor, and it is not good for us. She almost spits as she talks, and delivers each of her statements one after the other as if she has rehearsed each one of them every day, every night as she walks to work, walks home, does her laundry. I can imagine her going through her list of complaints, remembering her fears, predicting a dour personal future for herself, and knowing with certainty that she must leave.
As I listen to Oleg talk, my body is vibrating the way that bodies do when they have been traveling on planes for almost 24 hours. My semi circular canals are still working to keep my perceptions stable, but the ground beneath me is no longer rocking, and I don’t have to be alert any more, don’t have to make any decisions, any plans, read any maps or instructions. I’m home free for the moment, and so my body is rocking. I want to ask Oleg some questions, and I try, but she says, no, listen to me, I have more. she has no time for my questions, And she continues to say how important it is that they leave Russia.
Ten days! She says, telling me how the country shuts down for ten days in early January. We have this ten day holiday right now, and it’s good for no one except the rich. They go to Japan, Thailand, Egypt where they lie in the sun for ten days while the rest of the country stays in the cold and waits for them to return. What good is this ten day holiday for us now? All we can do is eat and drink and have little sleeps. She laughs, and turns to Ina to translate again, and Ina laughs with her because we have been drinking wine and eating bread with cheese and caviar, a feast they prepared, in my honour, I think, upon my arrival.
I have to leave, Oleg says. This is too stress. Too stress. Every day I don’t know what I find when I leave my house. One day cheese is 27 rubles, the next day 37, the day after that 42, and I don’t know what to expect each day or know how can I pay for these things. It’s everything too, not just food. Clothes. Electricity. Everything goes up with no warning.
Ina speaks up. I want stabilize, she says. Stabilize. She tells me she is moving to France to get married to Stephan, who lives in Toulouse. She met him at the hostel when he stayed here last fall and quickly dumped her English boyfriend, the hostel owner. Ina works here, takes care of the place. I’m always here, she tells me, you can come and go as you please and I will always be here to let you in when you come back. The English owner is in Japan, and while Oleg and Ina wrestle with a broken window, I hear the word “mushina” repeated over and over again, interspersed with laughter. And so I ask, are you talking about men? They look at me and laugh, yes, they say. Men! They leave when it gets cold and now the window is broken and there is no one to fix it. They talk to one another in Russian and laugh. But I have read Duplessix Grey's book on Soviet women, and I have a pretty good idea what they are laughing about.
And so Ina, who is a younger version of the women who sit at the entrances of university residences and museums or any other place where people come and go, has been going to France once a month since meeting Stephan in September. It is difficult to get visas to go anywhere except Finland, so to go to France she must first go to Finland and then out. Tomorrow she and Oleg are going to get visas for Finland. When I ask if they are coming back this time, she laughs and tells me maybe. Maybe in a long time. Ina is going for love, Oleg is going for work. Ina wants to have two children and stability. Oleg wants a job.
As I stood at the Sennaya intersection and emptied my head, and then wondered what to do, I realized that the solution would not come by thinking. I could not think my way to the hostel, I would have to act. Get moving, I told myself. Just get moving. So I walked in any arbitrary direction, and then saw a group of young people standing around. The young and healthy are more likely to make eye contact, especially the young women, and sure enough one young girl was looking at me curiously. I smiled, but not too widely so as not to be thought a simpleton, and said the word “Sadovaya?” She responded in broken English, where you from? I told her Canada, a country that Oleg would later describe as very stable, and the young woman on the street told me that she was from some other part of Russia, a small town. So she does not know St Petersburg, but she will try to help. She is with a small group of other young women, and the six of them ask a young man for help.
Now I’m pretty sure that if I had asked that young man for help he would have sneered at me and walked away, not wanting to bother with a crazy old woman clutching a folded piece of paper, but when six young women with faces flushed with cold ask him a question, he stops to talk, lights a cigarette, and seems prepared to bathe in the attentions for as long as he can. He, of course, is a Petersburgian, and knows exactly where Sadovaya Prospekt is, and what direction down Sadovaya Prospekt one needs to walk to get to Lermontov, so he tells them, and they tell me, and with a “spasibo” I’m on my way to what I hope will be a hostel, the plastic wheels on my carryall clunking over the uneven concrete of the sidewalks.
I decide not to wait for the #212 minivan, and instead opt for the 20 minute walk down Sadovaya. I could use a walk after those hours cooped up in planes (although the flight from Frankfurt to St Petersburg, in a plane designed to hold 300, held only 20 of us. Customs was easy, and just to see how difficult things might get for me, I deliberately did not answer one of the questions on my immigration card. The customs agent did not notice. ). And so I boldly set out to find Lermontov Prospekt, rehearsing the Cyrillic alphabet in my head so that I would recognize the street name when I came to it. After about 10 minutes, and still not finding the street, I stopped two women who were walking towards me to ask for help. They both stopped, they both made eye contact, and both listened attentively as I monosyllabled my way through Lermontovskaya Prospekt, and they both nodded and pointed in the direction I was going. Spasibo, spasibo, I say, and my temporary insanity at the Sennaya Platz is at least momentarily relieved as I head towards what I hope will be the hostel.
Are you going to Belarus? Oleg asks me. It’s worse in Belarus. It’s worse. I was there visiting my aunt and they have a new policy, a new law just decreed by their president, and everyone must buy a “flicker”, that is a reflective strip that they must wear on their bodies, they buy it for $2 and if the police find you without your flicker, they will fine you $20, and all this it is on a $300 a month salary. I don’t know how they do it, and that president, Lukashenka, he’s crazy. He has turned off all the street lights in the country, and everyone must wear these flickers, it’s a tax, and he calls it for safety, everyone must wear these flickers so that the car lights will reflect off them, men, women, children, they are all wearing flickers on their clothes, on their purses. My aunt, she told me to get one, to wear one, and I refused, I am not citizen of Belarus and they cannot fine me and I will not wear such a thing on my body.
And there is talk there of more, talk of every citizen having to wear a badge with their identification number on it for the police to see, so that if you do something, you can be fined by the badge number. Belarus is terrible. I must leave Russia. It will only get worse. Oleg is quiet, and helps herself to another piece of bread with caviar, spreading it the way one might spread peanut butter. She is 24. Ina is 25. Oleg, I remind myself, wants to leave to get work, and Ina is leaving for love. They are both angry, frustrated, confused, stressed.
By the time I got to the hostel, it had only been two hours since my plane had landed, and the further away from Sennaya Platz I walked, the quieter the streets got, the shabbier the buildings. I wondered, of course, if there really would be a hostel at #36 Labutina. But I found a number 36, and a small plaque over the security key pad indicating that this was a hostel, and so I entered the security code that I had been given, and of course it did not work; rather, the pad emitted a long shrill sound and flashed a red light each time I entered the code. I stopped and went into planning mode. But I was soon saved from this by Oleg, who came down the street towards the door of the hostel.
Are you coming for the hostel, she asked me. Yes, I said, and she says, you follow me to the second floor. And I follow her to the second floor, and a bit later, while Ina and Oleg and I are sitting around the kitchen table, she asks me what I am doing, a woman alone, traveling in Russia, in January. No one comes here in January, she says.
Exactly, I think. That’s it exactly.
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