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.