Goings on

Well, well, well,

So according to my calculations, I’ve been here at least a week. I now know that internet café’s here are sort of like the DMV in America. It’s really too bad that I fiend the net like a наркоман, that my hands start to shake when I haven’t checked my e-mail in 24 hours, and that I’m like a slobbery, wild-eyed puppy who doesn’t know what to focus on when I actually get my hands on the stuff. That said, I’m looking for an apartment for reasons I’ll explain in a bit, and hopefully I can get the net installed there.

I’ve still been doing almost nothing, and yet there’s not enough time in the day. I wake up and make myself a breakfast of bread cheese and sweet little grapes, take a shower, grab my trusty passport pouch, and hit the road. Speaking of my morning routine, I think I’m going to be just about out of laundry in the next two days, so I might have to confront the cruel desk ladies about our laundry room being locked 24/7. My other option is to sneak into the 4th floor laundry room without being seen by the locals who monopolize it.

So, I’ve decided to get serious about my apartment search. The cockroaches keep making suicide dives at my boiling pot of food. It’s not quite as close to the university as I thought. The curfew is strictly enforced, and I even get grilled if I don’t waive my ID in the face of the ladies at the desk. I also learned that there is a no guests ever policy. I would imagine that in the -40 degree weather it will be nice to have a place to entertain company, so as not to spend the winter singing to the cockroaches in the kitchen. Plus, all the Russians on my hall are planning to evacuate the dorm as soon as they pass some English test. It will cost a little more, but I’m ready to be out of the dorm after 4 years of undergrad.

I start Russian classes tomorrow and still haven’t heard much in the way of when I’ll be teaching what. My contact Svetlana, or Sveta, as I’m now allowed to call her, says she’s going to look into the whole teaching thing tomorrow. I’m pretty excited to get started. I tried to find my Russian class in the wrong building, which I suspect was the subject for that one painting where the staircases go up, down, and upside down. Then I tried the right one, but found only a closet where the map of the building said there should be a hallway leading to 5 more classrooms, including my own. Hopefully I’ll find it tomorrow. I’m interested to see how the classes are. They could be either really helpful or a waste of time and money. Judging from the test, they might be kind of a joke.

I’m slowly managing to meet people. The extremely helpful and hospitable lady from the American Center, after having shipped me off on a very interesting tour of their old-book archives, invited me to go with her son and his friends to the river to make shashlyk (shish-kebobs). This is one of the best old Russian traditions, and I had never been invited, so I was pretty excited, and a little worried about having been forced on these people by their mother. Pyotr and his girlfriend Olya, who’ve both been to America (met their in fact) on work and travel trips, were great. We drove out the Ushaika River (Pyotr just got his license after failing it some incredible number of times and paying dearly for each test) and deliberated for about half an hour on how to get the car through the woods to an ideal place. Finally we chose one and started setting up camp, preparing food, lighting the little portable shashlyk grill (Russian starter fluid leaves much to be desired). Their other friends arrived, including Sasha who wants to move to New York and become a teacher or a post man, and we had a good old time. They even toasted to my birthday, which made up for my having spent my birthday night (the night before) alone. After eating the sashlyk, which was delicious, we tried to make a fire. Apparently some wild looking Russian man with an axe helped them find some firewood, and just a few minutes later, he came over with some nervous looking friends and asked for a ride to the hospital. His arm was hanging out of his socket. He took it pretty well. Pyotr came to the rescue, and, much to the chagrin of Olya “They stole the music!” (the car had been blasting Russian pop into the forest, along with a song that plays about once every fifteen minutes here, “I kissed a girl and I liked it!”).

Pyotr came back and the fire finally got going, but only when we dumped a bunch of trash on it. They regretted not having started the fire that way before (to cook the shashlyk) and I suggested that the little shashlyk stands around the city advertise shashlyk “so vkusom musora”, or “with the taste of trash”. This is probably the first joke I have told in Russian that got a real thunderous bout of laughter (all flavors are advertized in Russia as “with the taste of ___”, including “chips with the taste of crab”).

So I got home and was invited by my neighbor Kolya to watch a movie and drink a beer with the whole section (4 rooms). It turned out that it was the new Batman, which I’ve seen quite a few times. I told them I liked it a lot, but they, somehow, all seemed to be bored to tears with it. They also didn’t know it was 2.5 hours long. I tried to point out some of its merits, but they just weren’t having it. I also explained three times that Gotham was not a real city. They did like the parts with lots of action, and expressed their approval with unanimous cheers of “normal’no”, which literally means “normal”. Really though, if you can get a Russian to agree that something is normal, then that’s something, and so all things considered, normal’no would translate better as “INCREDIBLE!”

Unfortunately, I haven’t had too many chances to speak Russian, but I’ve met with Anya, a friend of Megan’s (former ETA in Tomsk) to do a sort of conversation exchange (we talk half the time in English, have the time in Russian). This has been very helpful, and I hope my conversational Russian will start to improve significantly. Anya is from Seversk, which is north of the city and forbidden to anyone who doesn’t live there, because of the nuclear power plants that are there. It’s fenced off and everything. Still, according to Anya, 120,000 people live there. That’s one place I won’t be able to get a tour of.

Welp, it’s 1 AM, and I’m itching to make a good impression in my first class tomorrow, so I’d better be off to bed. Stay tuned for more updates on my quest for a decent apartment and adequate clothing. I’m also embroiled in a failure of a quest for a used bike. We’ll see where that leads.

Love ya’,
Jason