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.