Scattered Impressions of the Second Semester

One of the shower heads that we were given for New Year's broke while I was in Gdansk. (Admittedly, it was replaced quickly with another.)

Also, I had not noticed, for some reason, that Russians speak of the end of World War II not with a sigh of relief, as though to say, "Thank God it's over and there won't be more bloodshed," but as their personal victory over the fascists. I did not see any particular celebratory posters for the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II during the fall semester here, but on the way to the local park today I noticed a banner celebrating the Russians' victory. If only Russians had a little more money, they might be just as gun-friendly as their sworn enemies across the ocean.

I have collected a few more anecdotes about Russians since we last talked. They are obsessed with the idea that the floor is dirty--when I set my water bottle on the floor in the little weight room downstairs, another guy said, "Don't do that!" and put it on a chair for me as though saving me from some sort of monumental unpleasantness. (They think that the slippers that they wear in their rooms and the sandals that they wear in the halls each day are clean.) When I mentioned that they had no access to potable water, they said, "Why would you want to drink water? We have tea." A friend of mine recently told me, with a straight face, that Russians had historically treated Jews well, while another remarked of our bathroom, which is so horrifically unsanitary that a friend's mother took photos of it to show her coworkers in public health back home (the whole building would be torn down instantly in any developed country), that it was the best that he had ever seen. "In a usual dormitory," he said, "you don't even have a shower, and the toilet stalls are a series of holes surrounded in shit. I don't know why things turn out that way or how educated people can have such bad aim--they just do." My final note is that I have not seen a recycling bin (anywhere) since I got here; I have probably already mentioned that Russians do not wear seat belts, as they do not see the point.

My cultural notes are few, but they are worthy. Firstly, when a friend's relative looked at a map of Vancouver in Saint Petersburg, she ejaculated, "Hey, mom, look how straight the roads are here!" The dormitory has turned upside-down since a bunch of students from Rome got here--they have blocked up both of the kitchen sinks and plugged too many personal appliances into the outlets in their rooms, as a result of which we have had no electricity in the kitchen or bathroom since yesterday. The other three Italians here, all from the north, have admitted their dislike for those from Rome. All of my racial stereotypes are perfectly intact (the northern Italians are, in fact, all polite, educated, and friendly, and they say that "nothing works" in the south, much like in Russia). Perhaps my final notes are that Russians often complain of the cold, contrary to our stereotypes, and they think that filtered tap water tastes different from unfiltered tap water after boiling, which makes no sense to me, as its mineral composition should not change (unless the filter adds something, I suppose). I no longer feel that the coming months will be long, as I have so much to do during them that I will hardly notice their passage.

I am generally put out by how this year has been going, but I should be happier once I come back home. I had a dream about buying deodorant recently. I was somewhere in Europe, and there was a giant selection of reputable brands. Russians do not use deodorant, and the few who do use antiperspirant, as a result of which scent-free deodorant for people with sensitive skin is scarce and expensive. I have recently learned that drinking cold water with warm food is bad for you and that you should drink tea at every meal to avoid getting a stomachache. Having Jewish roots inclines you to sociability and spirituality. Corn is bad for children. Someone recently told me that, according to some TV show, the Scandinavian race was dying out for a lack of interracial marriages, while someone else saw a show in which men went to beauty parlours to get pedicures in Europe while their wives went to work ("Is it true?" he asked me. "Is that what things are really like?"). I have, since coming here, met a few intelligent people, one of whom told me that Putin was going to be pushed out of office by the end of the year for reasons that I cannot quite remember. (They ran something along the lines of this: Putin's biggest accomplishment, and the only promise that he has fulfilled, since coming to office has been stabilizing Chechnya, and someone friendly with Kadyrov, the leader of that reason, with whom Putin has to stay on good terms, was going to put pressure on him, probably by making deals with other oligarchs who could then challenge him.) My only other cultural note is an old one: people here only go to the dentist when something hurts. They do not seem to correlate this practice with their all having mouths full of crowns (or missing teeth) by the time they are fifty years old.

An apartment in Yaroslavl, a large city four hours' drive from Moscow, costs 3,000 roubles a month (a good apartment). The head of international relations here gets paid 7,000 roubles a month, or $1,621 per year, according to today's currency exchange, while doctors earn a starting wage of 15,000 roubles per month (literally a hundred times less than doctors at home, I should think). People in Ukraine, meanwhile (in the east), would be all too happy for their country to become part of Russia (economically). I suppose that one never sees real poverty growing up in Vancouver.

I did not bother mentioning that a friend's cousin, with whom I recently visited a historic city a few hours' drive from Moscow, asked, at one point, if Jesus Christ belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church. I have gotten used to questions like this and did not pay it much heed.

I should note down more of the stories that I want to tell you, as I sometimes end up forgetting them. (I just remembered the one that I had forgotten.) Someone recently asked me why we were being so hard on Putin in the Western press; everyone knows, he said, that it was Putin's friend, a violinist, who had the offshore money, and he was using it to buy instruments. One of my more interesting encounters here was in the institute's library. When I first got here, I expected the library to be all glass and steel, like the Irving K Barber Learning Centre (i.e., Main Library) on UBC's campus. Nothing of the sort. The library here is a semi-basement made all of wood: it has wooden floors, wooden shelves, a wooden desk and swinging door separating the librarians from their visitors, and wooden filing cabinets. I would like to say that there is no computer there, but there is one, although they still use the old-fashioned filing system (where you flip through file cards alphabetically), and, instead of giving borrowed books a due date and threatening students with fines, they take down their phone numbers, ask that they return books in a timely manner, and, in the case of foreign students, ask how long they are going to be in the country for. It is kind of neat that basic trust still operates in institutions like this, but I cannot say that it works particularly well.

The librarians are a combination of sweet, old ladies, the kind who compliment me on my Russian, ask about my favourite authors, chat about their own lives, and so on, and highly intelligent young women in training. While I might be making a mountain out of a molehill, I cannot help but laugh when I think of having walked into the library one day to discover that the radio was on and that they were listening to "Gangster's Paradise." Their choice makes sense, in some ways: the words mean nothing to them, as they cannot speak a word of English, and the song's beat is reminiscent of those of some contemporary soft rock. I do not expect that young black men living in inner-city slums feel much kinship with sweet old Russian ladies, but they will now forever be linked in my mind.

This next story is so good that, if you tell it to someone else, I would like for you not to mention precisely where I study, since I would not want to shame the institute. Our P.E. teacher, a sixty-nine-year-old, jovial man who teaches classes with bizarre names like "safety practices in daily life" and chats with us at the pool, lives in a suburb west of Moscow and likes to ride the train there for free. When tried to do so last week, a ticket collector demanded that he get a ticket, and he, the teacher, protested that he had been helping an old lady and was going to go back and get one in a moment. At this point he felt a hand on his shoulder, and, without looking, he spun around and kicked the owner of the hand in the nuts. This man, a police officer, dutifully punched him out and threw him in jail.

The teacher's wife arrived the next day to bail him out. The officer who had booked him was upset at his behaviour and had threatened him with a major fine. "How much does a ticket to Volokolamsk cost?" his wife asked? "Two-hundred-and-fifty roubles," the officer told her. She struck a bargain with him and ended up paying three-hundred, the extra fifty for his trouble, apologizing all the while for her husband's getting a little emotional at times. The two of them went home, and the teacher lay in bed for a few days recovering from an injury to his jaw, after which he started proudly telling his students that he had had a run-in with the law and they had "roughed him up a little” but that he would be just fine. He blames himself for having sat down, "like an idiot," in the first carriage, where ticket collection starts, and has resolved to avoid doing so in the future.

I have no real news from Russia except that I have seen yet another driver go onto the sidewalk, drive about a hundred metres to beat traffic, and swerve back onto the road. One of my teachers has suggested (as I may have mentioned) that I stay here for graduate school, and, while I want to want what people want for me, I probably would not be making good use of my time by doing so. I expect to take the coming school year to travel and plan things out further. I am not in a huge rush to get an adult job but will probably want one in roughly a year's time.

Russians despise Barack Obama. When he met with the Cuban president several months ago and the latter shook his arm off of this shoulder, the whole Russian department at the institute exchanged high fives in my presence. They do not seem to understand that the sanctions against their country are a result of their incursions on the Crimea and eastern Ukraine; they blame them all on Barack Obama himself, and one older Russian man noted to me, sadly shaking his head, “All world problems are because of America.”

Russians worry that Westerners have the impression that bears wander the streets there—they do not realise that their political problems make far bigger an impression on us than bears ever could. I have been told by countless people that there is no Ukrainian people and that the idea of a Ukrainian nation was made up by the West to undermine Russia. Jews control the media and, apparently, financed the Russian revolution. Homosexuals should be shot. Tchaikovsky’s music would be more enjoyable if he had not been a homosexual. While it is often said that Russia is torn between the East and West, the reality is that the East and West are to Russia’s right and left—Russia is not sandwiched, but in the middle.

Russians strike me as being deeply committed to quack medicine. They claim that eating cold food gives you stomachaches and that drinking tea made from the leaves of firewood, also known as great willowherb and rosebay willowherb, cures all illnesses. Eating lychee fruit once can cure you of joint pain. In other news, a marriage’s success depends entirely on the woman in it. Having kids at 28 years of age is late for a woman. No one will ever love a woman who has reached menopause except for her kids. And so on.

I do not remember if I ever related an interesting conversation that I had with a friend a while back. This friend had read on a Japanese forum that Russia was provoking the war in Ukraine, and she asked me, “Do people in the West really think we’re fighting those poor Ukrainians?” I explained that we did, in fact, think that (I did not point out that Japan was not in the West.), to which she said, “That doesn’t make any sense—we’re Slavic brothers!” I have met a lot of Russians who are aware of the country’s political problems, know that the rich steal from the poor there, and gripe, correctly, that there is nothing that they can individually do to change the system, as, if they protest it, they will be thrown in jail or killed. Most people do not think, on a day-to-day basis, about their countries’ political problems (I should think)—they get up, go to work, come home, have dinner, spend the evening, if they are lucky, at leisure, and then go back to work. I may well be unaware of a bunch of Canadian political problems, but I would like to think that we have more freedom than Russians both to discuss them and to do something about them. I also think that we have much more access to information about our government and world affairs than Russians; that is, if Russians have the same access as we do, then they do not make use of it, as most of those whom I have met have no idea that life in the West is any different from life back home.

I have just discovered a long email from the middle of the first semester, and I have to describe both my last few weeks in Russia and my final thoughts on it. I will probably fail to record everything that I thought and experienced, which goes against the grain of my perfectionism. Someone noted to me that study abroad changes one’s views of the world and of one’s own country. My year in Russia did that, if nothing else, and for this I should be eternally grateful whether or not I feel a kinship for the country’s people and organisation as a whole.

A fancy, sideways building in St. Petersburg.

Part of the Winter Palace.

The Admiralty--sadly, blurry.

One of its wings (for a sense of scale).

Fancy, low-set buildings in St. Petersburg.

One of the city's most famous churches.

Early morning light (actually, more like 11:00 AM) in Veliky Novgorod.

I must have liked these clouds.

Part of the kremlin wall.

A monument to the city's 1000-year history.

One of its many churches.

Fantastic clouds over the river (note the lack of development
on the other side).

A chunk of the kremlin wall.

Another church. Veliky Novgorod is a UNESCO World
Heritage site in part owing to its churches.

Fancy buildings downtown.

More churches on the way.

This one was fenced off.

A traditional house downtown.

The kremlin from the other bank.

More of the kremlin.

A famous bronze statue of a tourist.

Nevsky Prospect (back in St. Petersburg).

As above.

An opulent facade.

More St. Petersburg (note the lack of high-rises).

Christmas stollen. It was wonderful.

A winter sunset through my window.

Long live the Red Army! Monuments like this are everywhere.

A grey Moscow day, complete with high-rises.

A rare sunny day. Note the clear winter light.

That funky church on Red Square.

More of Red Square; more winter light.

The Kremlin from partway across the water.

A fancy house from after the 1812 fire.

The light of God adorns this church. (Is that the moon?)

The Russians made this. Sergiyev Posad.

The start of a wintry sunset there.

As above.

Moscow during a February snowstorm.

A clearer day.

On the way to class, I think.

The railroad tracks on a snowy winter day.

This tart, with creme patissiere and a raspberry topping,
was fantastic.

Zvenigorod--part of the monastery wall.

One of the many churches there.

Boston cream pie for International Women's Day.

Very nice twilight downtown.

A Russian in his native habitat: driving on the sidewalk.

The entrance to a monastery in Rostov Veliky.

A few of the churches on the monastery grounds.

As above. Mid-March.

The monastery where we stayed.

One of the churches in the kremlin.

A slightly different one, believe it or not.

A church in the centre of town (seen from a belfry).

Traditional houses near the lake.

More of the kremlin.

Spectacular winter morning light.

As above. The clouds were awesome.

A typical nineteenth-century mansion.

The lake. People drive, walk, and bike across it.

Part of another monastery that we visited.

A long fisherman to the right of the screen.

A better view of that same monastery. 

A traditional wooden house with inlaid window frames.

Another traditional house.

Some sort of market, apparently, where I bought dried apple slices.

Important people from Rostov Veliky.

The burning of an effigy to signal the symbolic end of winter.

A clear spring day seen through my window.

A very clear day. Downtown, near where I studied.

Welcome to Russia.

Grat evening light. Downtown.

A fancy church near where Lev Tolstoi lived.

His house. I find his writing really boring.

A monastery on a tenebrous spring afternoon.

Wait! This is Kolomna, a nearby historic city!