Friday, December 28, 2007
A Christmas to Remember
I know you are probably all anxious to know how Christmas was spent by a Canadian in Russia, away from home for the first time during the holiday season... Rest assured there will be quite a story told here shortly. For now, let it suffice to say that our Christmas began with mashed potatoes, stuffing and homemade egg nog a la Paul (the American astrophysicist) and, also thanks to Paul, the viewing of the 1960s Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer Classic...then progressed to Glintvein and appetizers with various other foreigners in the city, then digressed into an extended argument with the Soviet-morality minded dejournaya, a 3am pepper-spray incident and open windows in -25 degree weather, and concluded with chicken hot dogs and beer. It was, not a typical or even merry Christmas but it was, without a doubt, a Christmas to remember. We're headed to Magnitagorsk today to meet the New Year with Guzial's family, then may wonder back to Yekaterinburg via Ufa (in Bashkirostan), though I hope to have some more details up here soon. Until then, I wish you all a Happy New Year!
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Holiday Greetings
When I began this letter a month ago today, my intention was to mail it to all of you along with some Christmas cards, though I kept getting lost in other thoughts and did not finish it in time. It is still not really done, but I think it may never be, and I've decided to post it here for you all now. Especially today, Christmas Day, I need to feel that I still have some connection with all of you over there on the other side of the Atlantic, and in sending this wondering thoughts out into the world I feel just a little bit more like I am not an island in this vast sea.
Greetings dear friends and family!
As I begin this letter, I am staring out through a slightly foggy window at a stand of pine trees heavy with November snow. The forest floor in which they find root is a clean white blanket sprinkled only with pine needles, the soft footprints of birds, and the occasional heavier trail of a person who has ventured to spend time with these trees. Between here and the forest grow a variety of now leafless trees with which I am unfamiliar, though have come to be my favourite for the eternally-ripe red berries that decorate their bows like ornaments on a Christmas tree, regardless of the layer of snow and ice that now cover each cluster. While the sky is overcast now, last night it was lit brightly by the full moon. As we moved from the retreat centre to the shashlik (shishkabob) fire to the banya and back again, the Big Dipper--or Medvyeditsa (she-bear) as its called in Russian--seemed to travel almost half the sky. Though the nights are long and the winter consetellations travel, I am comforted in knowing that I am looking at the same big sky lit by the same full moon as all of you, even if from a different angle.
One of my modest goals for this year was to use my free time to write, though now approaching December I feel as if I have failed miserably in this task. I have written to some of you periodically, to others of you even less, and for myself even less still. I hope to partially remedy this silence with this letter. I remember my parents receiving Christmas Newsletters from various friends in various countries, MCC alumni and relatives, always complete with a family photograph. The letters were usually addressed to "Peter and Cath" and sometimes "and children" or "Christina, Jodie and Steven" in smaller letters and I always found the tradition of receiving a yearly update on the lives of people I'd never met, or knew only in passing, a bit odd. Now sitting here in a forest in the Urals, however, I'm starting to understand this practice, this desire for contact with the familiar, the impulse to share, to let far away friends into my foreign life. And so I write to you, both for you and for me, to fulfill this need to narrate the experiences of this far-away and close-at-hand life, to remain connected to a social sphere now half a world away, and to let you all in, to give you a picture, to perhaps insight you reflection or day-dreams or itchy feet or wonder and gratitude for the by-chance incidents and intentional experiences, the conversations and landscapes and wandering ideas that make up this life. How does one begin to describe the experiences of four months of transitions and new things, the frustrations and revelations that come with this, and the every day particularities of life in between? I'm not really sure, though I am still driven to try, in stories, pictures, anecdotes--with words.
And so I will begin at the beginning. August 13, 2007, Mark and I boarded a plane in the Hamilton Airpot bound for the Doncaster/Sheffield airport in England. After a bizarre encounter with an immigration official, we headed to Manchester, where we spent a few days wandering the city and checking out the university where I have since applied to do a Master's program. From here we headed to Oxford, then on to London. From London we flew to Hamburg, then took a train to Bremen where we spent some time with Kosntantin, the German exchange student who lived with my parents this year. From Bremen we went to Kiel to visit an old high school friend, then took a bus to Strasbourg and a train to Mulhouse where we were met by an old friend of my families and taken to his wonderful farm near the border of Alsace, Franche-Compte and Switzerland. We returned to Bremen, then flew out of Hamburg to Moscow, then caught a train to Yekaterinburg. A whirl-wind tour of Europe, to say the least, and thinking back on it now I am surprised by the peculiar memories and images that have remained in my mind. Memories like falling alseep to the music coming from the jazz club across the street from our Manchester hostel, or watching rowers glide down the river while we enjoyed a dinner of peanuts and avacado from the shore. Or happening upon an international youth orchestra performance in Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford, and enjoying a locally-brewed beer in one of the college pubs with our physicist Philipino doctoral student host. Or being excited by the selling of fresh hazelnuts from the Turkish store under the apartment where we stayed in Dalston (London) with a fellow Canadian friend-of-a-friend. Or taking a rest on the banks of the Thames after wandering the Tate Modern for hours, watching a Muslim man quietly perform his prayers to the backdrop of St. Paul's Cathedral. Or the Kurdish man who we befriended on the airport shuttle in Hamburg, who bought our train ticket to Bremen. Or watching the kites and the wind-surfers against a blue sky on a sandy Baltic beach just north of the Kiel canal. Or the relief of jumping in the water of an over-crowded public French swimming pool, just across the street from the EU Parliament. Or breakfasts of fresh milk and honey with Cephas' uncle Henri in the 150+ year-old farm kitchen. Or wandering a Swiss mountain immune to the turrential rain and cold for the adventure and the company of the moment. Or cooking way too much curry for the street festival outside Konsti's house. Or sharing a coffee in the Hamburg airport before beginning the last let of our journey. Or the feeling of utter frustration and exhaustion born of not being able to find an ATM in Moscow and the complete unhelpfulness of the train ticket sales person. Or the copious amounts of food--bread, cheese, meat, eggs, vegetables from his grandma's garden--shared by our kupe-mate on the train from Moscow. Or the surprise at finding Defri at the train station, sent in Jenny's place after an early morning mugging. Or the ineffably strange feeling of returning to a place that was once home though is still completely foreign...
December 2, 2007
It’s three months to the day since we arrived in this country, and I find myself once again on a train headed east towards Yekaterinburg. We are returning from a weekend in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, with Guzial, a Tatarian friend who sings in the same choral ensemble as I. We’ve just spent two days wandering the clean winter streets of a city where the likes of Lenin and Tolstoy studied, located at the crossroads of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, a city which is also the meeting place of languages and cultures (Russian and Tatarian) at the heart of which is a UNESCO protected kremlin that houses both an Orthodox Cathedral and one of the most stunning recently reconstructed mosques I’ve ever seen. And now, once again, we are east-ward bound, heading home to the Urals, past the same forests, fields and track-side villages as when this adventure began. The scenery has changed—the fileds are not blank white canvases that beckon newness and creativity as this clean page waiting to be villed with words. The trees are heavy under winter’s dress, the conifers fully outfitted while the birch and poplar among them hold snow like floured baking hands, their bare branches upturned fingers asking—or praising—something from above. And it is now, in transition once again, neither here nor there, that I am able to put my thoughts to paper, to document the ups and downs, wonderings and wanderings of the last three months.
And it’s been three months of just that—ups and downs, in every possible sense of these words, and in all areas of life. I will begin with the most obvious "up." I have also found the process of learning a language somewhat akin to that of climbing a seemingly never-ending spiral staircase with very wide platforms between steps. There are long periods of time where it feels as if you are making no progress, as you slowly progress across one plateau, and then steep intervals of upward movement, where upon arriving at a higher level you have the brief privilege of seeing the distance you’ve traveled. This moment is, however, fleeting, as you once again begin to make your way across the next plateau and the only thing visible to you is the long distance yet to be traveled. There are days—many of them—where I feel completely inadequate at expressing myself, lost in a language that I feel I will never understand, frustrated by my lack of ability to speak and understand clearly, inhibited from fully experiencing this country because of my linguistic deficiencies. Yet then there are also days, conversations, moments, when I will be pleasantly aware, satisfactorily conscious of the progress I’ve made—moments like, for example, laughing at the subtle dry humour of our choir director because I actually understand and not just because everyone else is laughing, or understanding the nurse as he instructed me to roll over, inhale and exhale, and puff up my stomach as he did an ultrasound to determine the source of my stomach woes (mayonnaise and cabbage is my own diagnosis…), or suddenly realizing that I now have a passive understanding of the conversations going on around me on a crowded trolleybus making its way through traffic, or here on the train now, or no longer being conscious of switching between languages as I spent time with Mark, Guzial and her cousins this weekend as my thought processes have become integrated, or being able to sit and write a small essay in class on the moral character of Pechorin, Lermantov’s "Hero of our Time." And while there remain days where I do not even have the energy to open my mouth, this language learning continues to be a humbling process, a process that has led me to a fuller appreciation of the potentials of literacy and communication skills, a learning endeavour that daily reminds me of my limitations, a process that continues to deepen my respect for all those people who live daily in foreign languages—either by choice or external circumstance. And, above all, this is a process that continues to deepen my love of language, an infatuation with words, for understanding their relationship to each other, to their environmental surroundings, to their historical and contemporary significance, for the entry they provide into understanding how a people think and live, ….
A few more weeks and no more words have passed since I last tried to write this letter, and I've resigned myself to accepting that it will not reach you before the New Year. I'm sitting in the library at school, after a mid-day walk along the misty Iset River that cuts through the downtown. It's been awhile since I've taken the detour to walk along the river, and I was pleasantly surprised by how fresh, clean and new the city looks under a layer of snow. I stopped for a moment to take a full breath of -15 degree winter air and to appreciate the cold beauty and stillness of this small oasis in the middle of a busy city, and was then once again overcome with the urge to write. It seems that the only time I am filled with this impulse is surrounded by the blankness of snow, a newness that calls forth creativity. The result of this is that, as you may have noticed a trend, you are getting a lot of descriptions of snowy landscapes, but little of substance in between. I am currently reading Orhan Pamuk's "My Name is Red," and I just read a passage written in the voice of the colour red, who described the phenomenon of being used by artists in all varieties of purpose, and for the remainder of the day all I could see around me was red. Today, as I think about the creative evocation of snow, it is white--the white of the slightly drawn curtains, the light socket, the inner pages of books lying on their spines on the shelves, the industrial ceiling, or papered signs on the wall. I wonder briefly how long I will be able to keep your attention with these descriptions, though I trust if you've made it this far, you will continuing reading on, and perhaps be able to find some meaning inbetween these lines, in the honesty of my wandering thoughts, in the snow-white of the paper on which they are written.
My plan was to continue on with the stair metaphor as a means of describing this city and my life in it to you. I was going to write that if learning a language is like climbing stairs, then coming to know a city, a country, a people, is like slowly descending a parallel staircase, each step down one step closer to the heart of things, to the cold and comfort and dirty that comes with descending into the earth. I was going to write about the obshezhitiye and the university as the top of the staircase, about my life living with an American, a Korean, a Swede, a Brazilian, and Indonesian, and studying with a host of disillusioned Chinese students. I was going to make poignant comments about how this was perhaps a strange entry into Russia, a slightly foggy window through which to watch this world, and I was probably going to mention how studying in this hopelessly unorganized university has made me fully appreciate the value of my Canadian education. I was then going to say that the next step down included my attempts to break into the not-for-profit world of this city--a trip to an orphanage with a group of Russian students, evenings spent in the bunker-like Yekaterinburg headquarters of "Memorial" flipping through their endless collection of records of victims of Stalinist repression and talking about what significance remembering these victims has for today. And then maybe I would have mentioned my recent entry into the working world, the English-class I'm teaching twice a week or how I'm becoming an expert in Russia's steal industry grace a a job tutoring the head managers of a steal company. I would have maybe peppered this brilliantly written description with word-paintings of the city, mentioning the way the sun that never makes it more than 30 degrees above the horizon glints off of windows of newly constructed sky-scrapers, or the ice-village they are building next to Lenin in 1905 Square, or the little ice-fishing tents that now dot the city pond, the shadows cast by the steeple of the city duma in the red-orange sunset sky every day (at 4:30pm!), or perhaps the the way the hazel of the eyes of the babushka, who sits diligently every day with a cup in her hand on the graffitied wall of the bookstore beside the university, matches her wool boots.
December 14-25, 2007
This is what I was going to write about, and I was going to leave you with a wonderful view of a foreign city that I am making my home. As I sit now in my bedroom, wrapped in three layers of clothes--or, as Guzial likes to say, "dressed like a kapusta" (cabbage)--pondering how I've survived the oppressive wallpaper and cold for this long, I am again lost for a place to begin. The truth of the matter is that I have spent the last week taking a hard look at why it is that I came here in the first place, what it is that I am doing here now, and whether or not I actually want to stay. I would like to say that this room has become my home, yet I cannot. I would like to say that I belong in this city, but I feel as foreign as ever, perhaps even more so the longer I stay here and become more familiarized with the subtle differences of this place, the endlessly frustrating bureaucracy, not to mention the cold (current temperature: -27). But, what can I do but try and make the best of where I am? Am I not the one who brought myself here in the first place? I am living the consequences of my own decisions. Perhaps that is enough, to know that I am writing my life. Yet, like many a Russian literary hero, perhaps my belief that I am in control, that I am the master of my own fate, is both my greatest strength and weakness. And what I need is not resignation to less than ideal situations, but acceptance and welcome of the learning that comes through such challenges. And this I believe has always been there, somewhere in the back of my mind, somewhere in initial impulse to come to this big cold country. What begins with wonder, though this wonder may at times be blackened out, shall, I hope, return to wonder, return to a sense of awe for the beauty in the strangeness that surrounds me. And wonder, awe and gratitute may perhaps mingle once again and I will find joy in both happiness and trial... or, as Rumi says...
THE GUEST HOUSE
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
November 25, 2007
Greetings dear friends and family!
As I begin this letter, I am staring out through a slightly foggy window at a stand of pine trees heavy with November snow. The forest floor in which they find root is a clean white blanket sprinkled only with pine needles, the soft footprints of birds, and the occasional heavier trail of a person who has ventured to spend time with these trees. Between here and the forest grow a variety of now leafless trees with which I am unfamiliar, though have come to be my favourite for the eternally-ripe red berries that decorate their bows like ornaments on a Christmas tree, regardless of the layer of snow and ice that now cover each cluster. While the sky is overcast now, last night it was lit brightly by the full moon. As we moved from the retreat centre to the shashlik (shishkabob) fire to the banya and back again, the Big Dipper--or Medvyeditsa (she-bear) as its called in Russian--seemed to travel almost half the sky. Though the nights are long and the winter consetellations travel, I am comforted in knowing that I am looking at the same big sky lit by the same full moon as all of you, even if from a different angle.
One of my modest goals for this year was to use my free time to write, though now approaching December I feel as if I have failed miserably in this task. I have written to some of you periodically, to others of you even less, and for myself even less still. I hope to partially remedy this silence with this letter. I remember my parents receiving Christmas Newsletters from various friends in various countries, MCC alumni and relatives, always complete with a family photograph. The letters were usually addressed to "Peter and Cath" and sometimes "and children" or "Christina, Jodie and Steven" in smaller letters and I always found the tradition of receiving a yearly update on the lives of people I'd never met, or knew only in passing, a bit odd. Now sitting here in a forest in the Urals, however, I'm starting to understand this practice, this desire for contact with the familiar, the impulse to share, to let far away friends into my foreign life. And so I write to you, both for you and for me, to fulfill this need to narrate the experiences of this far-away and close-at-hand life, to remain connected to a social sphere now half a world away, and to let you all in, to give you a picture, to perhaps insight you reflection or day-dreams or itchy feet or wonder and gratitude for the by-chance incidents and intentional experiences, the conversations and landscapes and wandering ideas that make up this life. How does one begin to describe the experiences of four months of transitions and new things, the frustrations and revelations that come with this, and the every day particularities of life in between? I'm not really sure, though I am still driven to try, in stories, pictures, anecdotes--with words.
And so I will begin at the beginning. August 13, 2007, Mark and I boarded a plane in the Hamilton Airpot bound for the Doncaster/Sheffield airport in England. After a bizarre encounter with an immigration official, we headed to Manchester, where we spent a few days wandering the city and checking out the university where I have since applied to do a Master's program. From here we headed to Oxford, then on to London. From London we flew to Hamburg, then took a train to Bremen where we spent some time with Kosntantin, the German exchange student who lived with my parents this year. From Bremen we went to Kiel to visit an old high school friend, then took a bus to Strasbourg and a train to Mulhouse where we were met by an old friend of my families and taken to his wonderful farm near the border of Alsace, Franche-Compte and Switzerland. We returned to Bremen, then flew out of Hamburg to Moscow, then caught a train to Yekaterinburg. A whirl-wind tour of Europe, to say the least, and thinking back on it now I am surprised by the peculiar memories and images that have remained in my mind. Memories like falling alseep to the music coming from the jazz club across the street from our Manchester hostel, or watching rowers glide down the river while we enjoyed a dinner of peanuts and avacado from the shore. Or happening upon an international youth orchestra performance in Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford, and enjoying a locally-brewed beer in one of the college pubs with our physicist Philipino doctoral student host. Or being excited by the selling of fresh hazelnuts from the Turkish store under the apartment where we stayed in Dalston (London) with a fellow Canadian friend-of-a-friend. Or taking a rest on the banks of the Thames after wandering the Tate Modern for hours, watching a Muslim man quietly perform his prayers to the backdrop of St. Paul's Cathedral. Or the Kurdish man who we befriended on the airport shuttle in Hamburg, who bought our train ticket to Bremen. Or watching the kites and the wind-surfers against a blue sky on a sandy Baltic beach just north of the Kiel canal. Or the relief of jumping in the water of an over-crowded public French swimming pool, just across the street from the EU Parliament. Or breakfasts of fresh milk and honey with Cephas' uncle Henri in the 150+ year-old farm kitchen. Or wandering a Swiss mountain immune to the turrential rain and cold for the adventure and the company of the moment. Or cooking way too much curry for the street festival outside Konsti's house. Or sharing a coffee in the Hamburg airport before beginning the last let of our journey. Or the feeling of utter frustration and exhaustion born of not being able to find an ATM in Moscow and the complete unhelpfulness of the train ticket sales person. Or the copious amounts of food--bread, cheese, meat, eggs, vegetables from his grandma's garden--shared by our kupe-mate on the train from Moscow. Or the surprise at finding Defri at the train station, sent in Jenny's place after an early morning mugging. Or the ineffably strange feeling of returning to a place that was once home though is still completely foreign...
December 2, 2007
It’s three months to the day since we arrived in this country, and I find myself once again on a train headed east towards Yekaterinburg. We are returning from a weekend in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, with Guzial, a Tatarian friend who sings in the same choral ensemble as I. We’ve just spent two days wandering the clean winter streets of a city where the likes of Lenin and Tolstoy studied, located at the crossroads of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, a city which is also the meeting place of languages and cultures (Russian and Tatarian) at the heart of which is a UNESCO protected kremlin that houses both an Orthodox Cathedral and one of the most stunning recently reconstructed mosques I’ve ever seen. And now, once again, we are east-ward bound, heading home to the Urals, past the same forests, fields and track-side villages as when this adventure began. The scenery has changed—the fileds are not blank white canvases that beckon newness and creativity as this clean page waiting to be villed with words. The trees are heavy under winter’s dress, the conifers fully outfitted while the birch and poplar among them hold snow like floured baking hands, their bare branches upturned fingers asking—or praising—something from above. And it is now, in transition once again, neither here nor there, that I am able to put my thoughts to paper, to document the ups and downs, wonderings and wanderings of the last three months.
And it’s been three months of just that—ups and downs, in every possible sense of these words, and in all areas of life. I will begin with the most obvious "up." I have also found the process of learning a language somewhat akin to that of climbing a seemingly never-ending spiral staircase with very wide platforms between steps. There are long periods of time where it feels as if you are making no progress, as you slowly progress across one plateau, and then steep intervals of upward movement, where upon arriving at a higher level you have the brief privilege of seeing the distance you’ve traveled. This moment is, however, fleeting, as you once again begin to make your way across the next plateau and the only thing visible to you is the long distance yet to be traveled. There are days—many of them—where I feel completely inadequate at expressing myself, lost in a language that I feel I will never understand, frustrated by my lack of ability to speak and understand clearly, inhibited from fully experiencing this country because of my linguistic deficiencies. Yet then there are also days, conversations, moments, when I will be pleasantly aware, satisfactorily conscious of the progress I’ve made—moments like, for example, laughing at the subtle dry humour of our choir director because I actually understand and not just because everyone else is laughing, or understanding the nurse as he instructed me to roll over, inhale and exhale, and puff up my stomach as he did an ultrasound to determine the source of my stomach woes (mayonnaise and cabbage is my own diagnosis…), or suddenly realizing that I now have a passive understanding of the conversations going on around me on a crowded trolleybus making its way through traffic, or here on the train now, or no longer being conscious of switching between languages as I spent time with Mark, Guzial and her cousins this weekend as my thought processes have become integrated, or being able to sit and write a small essay in class on the moral character of Pechorin, Lermantov’s "Hero of our Time." And while there remain days where I do not even have the energy to open my mouth, this language learning continues to be a humbling process, a process that has led me to a fuller appreciation of the potentials of literacy and communication skills, a learning endeavour that daily reminds me of my limitations, a process that continues to deepen my respect for all those people who live daily in foreign languages—either by choice or external circumstance. And, above all, this is a process that continues to deepen my love of language, an infatuation with words, for understanding their relationship to each other, to their environmental surroundings, to their historical and contemporary significance, for the entry they provide into understanding how a people think and live, ….
December 14, 2007
A few more weeks and no more words have passed since I last tried to write this letter, and I've resigned myself to accepting that it will not reach you before the New Year. I'm sitting in the library at school, after a mid-day walk along the misty Iset River that cuts through the downtown. It's been awhile since I've taken the detour to walk along the river, and I was pleasantly surprised by how fresh, clean and new the city looks under a layer of snow. I stopped for a moment to take a full breath of -15 degree winter air and to appreciate the cold beauty and stillness of this small oasis in the middle of a busy city, and was then once again overcome with the urge to write. It seems that the only time I am filled with this impulse is surrounded by the blankness of snow, a newness that calls forth creativity. The result of this is that, as you may have noticed a trend, you are getting a lot of descriptions of snowy landscapes, but little of substance in between. I am currently reading Orhan Pamuk's "My Name is Red," and I just read a passage written in the voice of the colour red, who described the phenomenon of being used by artists in all varieties of purpose, and for the remainder of the day all I could see around me was red. Today, as I think about the creative evocation of snow, it is white--the white of the slightly drawn curtains, the light socket, the inner pages of books lying on their spines on the shelves, the industrial ceiling, or papered signs on the wall. I wonder briefly how long I will be able to keep your attention with these descriptions, though I trust if you've made it this far, you will continuing reading on, and perhaps be able to find some meaning inbetween these lines, in the honesty of my wandering thoughts, in the snow-white of the paper on which they are written.
My plan was to continue on with the stair metaphor as a means of describing this city and my life in it to you. I was going to write that if learning a language is like climbing stairs, then coming to know a city, a country, a people, is like slowly descending a parallel staircase, each step down one step closer to the heart of things, to the cold and comfort and dirty that comes with descending into the earth. I was going to write about the obshezhitiye and the university as the top of the staircase, about my life living with an American, a Korean, a Swede, a Brazilian, and Indonesian, and studying with a host of disillusioned Chinese students. I was going to make poignant comments about how this was perhaps a strange entry into Russia, a slightly foggy window through which to watch this world, and I was probably going to mention how studying in this hopelessly unorganized university has made me fully appreciate the value of my Canadian education. I was then going to say that the next step down included my attempts to break into the not-for-profit world of this city--a trip to an orphanage with a group of Russian students, evenings spent in the bunker-like Yekaterinburg headquarters of "Memorial" flipping through their endless collection of records of victims of Stalinist repression and talking about what significance remembering these victims has for today. And then maybe I would have mentioned my recent entry into the working world, the English-class I'm teaching twice a week or how I'm becoming an expert in Russia's steal industry grace a a job tutoring the head managers of a steal company. I would have maybe peppered this brilliantly written description with word-paintings of the city, mentioning the way the sun that never makes it more than 30 degrees above the horizon glints off of windows of newly constructed sky-scrapers, or the ice-village they are building next to Lenin in 1905 Square, or the little ice-fishing tents that now dot the city pond, the shadows cast by the steeple of the city duma in the red-orange sunset sky every day (at 4:30pm!), or perhaps the the way the hazel of the eyes of the babushka, who sits diligently every day with a cup in her hand on the graffitied wall of the bookstore beside the university, matches her wool boots.
December 14-25, 2007
This is what I was going to write about, and I was going to leave you with a wonderful view of a foreign city that I am making my home. As I sit now in my bedroom, wrapped in three layers of clothes--or, as Guzial likes to say, "dressed like a kapusta" (cabbage)--pondering how I've survived the oppressive wallpaper and cold for this long, I am again lost for a place to begin. The truth of the matter is that I have spent the last week taking a hard look at why it is that I came here in the first place, what it is that I am doing here now, and whether or not I actually want to stay. I would like to say that this room has become my home, yet I cannot. I would like to say that I belong in this city, but I feel as foreign as ever, perhaps even more so the longer I stay here and become more familiarized with the subtle differences of this place, the endlessly frustrating bureaucracy, not to mention the cold (current temperature: -27). But, what can I do but try and make the best of where I am? Am I not the one who brought myself here in the first place? I am living the consequences of my own decisions. Perhaps that is enough, to know that I am writing my life. Yet, like many a Russian literary hero, perhaps my belief that I am in control, that I am the master of my own fate, is both my greatest strength and weakness. And what I need is not resignation to less than ideal situations, but acceptance and welcome of the learning that comes through such challenges. And this I believe has always been there, somewhere in the back of my mind, somewhere in initial impulse to come to this big cold country. What begins with wonder, though this wonder may at times be blackened out, shall, I hope, return to wonder, return to a sense of awe for the beauty in the strangeness that surrounds me. And wonder, awe and gratitute may perhaps mingle once again and I will find joy in both happiness and trial... or, as Rumi says...
THE GUEST HOUSE
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Images of Kazan
Last weekend Mark and I with our friend Guzial hopped on a train and spent the weekend in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan that just recently celebrated its 1000th anniversary. We caught the train Friday afternoon, arrived in a snowy Kazan at precisely 5:44am, were greeted by some of Guzial's relatives, and spent the day wandering the beautifully clean and white streets of a city where minarets and bell towers stand side by side, where the likes of Lenin and Tolstoy spent some of their student days (however brief they were!) After a whole lot of walking and not too much sleep, on Sunday afternoon we got back on the train and headed home. Total cost of our train tickets: 980 roubles ($37). Total time spent on the train: 35 hours. Result: An unforgettable weekend. Here are some images of our adventures...
3 hours to sunrise
Happy 1000th Birthday Kazan!
The Kremlin--A UNESCO Protected World Heritage Site
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Oh, Dairy-Oh: An Ode to the Dairy Products of Russia
The price of milk jumped about 20% this week, from around 25p a carton to 30p. As I enjoy the ease of cereal in the morning, and have accepted that veganism is a foregone impossibility in this country (is there even a word for "soy" in Russian?), I sucked up this jump in price an bought my carton of 0.5% Parmalat milk anyway. I am not sure what precipitated this jump in price. My Swedish roommate said she heard it was related to a cutback in subsidies to EU dairy farmers, though apparently this happened in the beginning of the year so doesn't explain the jump in price this week. The cost of produce has been steadily rising, as winter approaches and vegetables are no longer in season, though as far as I knew, the milking patterns of cows were not affected by the cold. My best guess, in lieu of an official reason, is that perhaps the cows' milking patterns have been confused by the time change, and it is not the cold but the increasingly incessant darkness that makes milking more difficult. Or, perhaps dairy farmers assume that if people will pay more for peppers and tomatoes, or maybe because they can no longer afford these things, they will be willing to pay more for their morning cereal as well. While wandering the dairy aisle, pondering the multiple forms of milk packaging and the cheapest way to continue drinking milk, I was forced to pause and appreciate the diversity of choice in front of me--a plethora of not merely milk packaging, but the exotic nature of dairy products in general. Though most of these products have tragically lept beyond what my food budget allows, I offer you the following literary tour of the contents of the dairy aisle of my local supermarket.
Milk: Let's begin with the obvious. Or not so obvious. Even if I regularly drank milk in Canada, I would have not arrived to this country with an adequate knowledge of milk to navigate this section of the grocery story. The milk section is so volumunious that it spills from the dairy aisle into the central aisle across from the deli and frozen foods section. Why? Well, if you thought "skim" 1% and 2% was choice, guess again. Milk in Russia is available in fat-quantities at intervals of 0.5% ranging from 0.5% to 7.0% (and we aren't talking about cream yet, people). Most Russians don't know what to do with anything less than 3%, so the section is dominated by 3.5%, 4% and 4.5%, multiplied by about 7 brands then multiplied by another 3 ways of packaging. The standard cartons of milk are found in the aisle facing the deli, while the slightly cheaper though more combersome bags of milk are found interpersed with the rest of the dairy products. At first I thought these bags a rather strange phenomenon--they look like flattened cartons minus most of the stability of cardboard--until my American roommate informed me that Canadians were weird for buying milk in bags. While the Russian cardboard-like vacuum sealed bag of milk does not resemble the transparent Canadian bag in the least, I have thus since reformed my view of these bags of milk from strange to possible practical, though, lacking a milk jug, I have stuck to buying the carton.
Cream: Neighbouring the milk in the milk aisle is cream. The cream section is comprised of everything to thick to be considered milk (i.e. liquid dairy products ranging from 7.5% to 40% fat). You cannot, however, purchase whipped cream. For pumpkin pie lovers, this delicacy comes at the price of good ol' fashioned elbow grease (or some sugar, a fork, two hours of foresight, a steady mixing hand and a whole lot of patience).
Yoghurt: Yoghurt marks the beginning of the actual dairy aisle, taking up approximately 8 shelves (I'm not kidding). This section is populated mostly by single yoghurt cups (to my dismay, as much as Russians love dairy, you cannot buy 1L tubs of yoghurt), including plain yoghurt, fruit-flavoured yoghurt, yoghurt with fruits and nuts, vanilla yoghurt, chocolate yoghurt, caramel yoghurt, yoghurt with active bacteria culture, and, for the particularly extravant taste, yoghurt with crunchy chocolate balls.
Yoghurt Drinks: Hopefully this category is fairly self-explanatory, even if odd to Canadian eyes. If you like yoghurt, why shouldn't it be available in drinkable form? Who needs spoons anyway? For 25-30p a bottle, yoghurt drinks are a healthy and popular purchase for Russians on the run, or who's tastes have wandered from the traditional Russian yoghurt-like drink: kefir.
Kefir: Somewhere between milk, yoghurt and sour cream in taste and texture is kefir. If you can't imagine what it could possibly be from that description, you may be out of luck, unless, perhaps, you are familiar with the Middle Eastern drink ayran. Kefir is the Russian equivalent (though, in my opinion, less tasty) of this drink, a thick drink similar to drinkable yoghurt, minus the flavour or sugar. Heated with a bit of honey or sugar, and in the right mood, this can be a pleasant snack. Under no circumstances, however, will it quench your thirst, or leave you feeling light and healthy and sound in stomach.
Tvorog: Like kefir, tvorog is something difficult to conceive of until tasted. Somewhere between cottage cheese and cream cheese in taste, and feta and cottage cheese in texture, tvorog is most often used as an ingredient in baked goods, as the topping on cookies, or, as it is sold at our favourite croissant stand, baked into a croissant with spinach. Tvorog is sold muh like butter, squarely wrapped in waxed paper. As I recently discovered, tvorog is also available in a sladkaya (sweet) form, and sometimes mixed with raisins. In this form, I've been told, tvorog is best enjoyed with tea, added in the same manner as sugar or cream.
Smetana: I am not sure why I chose to refer to this product in its Russian form, for smetana is something I knew before venturing to the motherland, i.e. sour cream. Perhaps this linguistic choice is due to the fact that one of it is one of the first words I learned in Russian (more specifically, in the phrase "sup bez smetani, pozhaulsta" or "soup without sour cream, please"). More likely, however, is the fact that sour cream consumption in Russia is in such a league of its own that the very product cannot be adequately rendered by its English equivalent. Plus it just doesn't taste quite like it does at home, probably due to a higher fat content. In any case, smetana is a favoured condiment (or primary ingredient) for such varied dishes as: borscht, blini, pelmeni, vereneki, various salads, bread, cookies, smetanichka (a very taste cookie-cake like dessert whose name is derived from its main ingredient), or, if there is nothing else in the kitchen cupboard, smetana can be enjoyed eaten straight out of the container with a spoon.
Mayonnaise: Mayonnaise is not technically part of the dairy aisle--in fact, it has its own aisle--but it warrants mention here as a dairy-based product near and dear to the citizens of Yekaterinburg. I am told, after all, that we are living in the mayonnaise capital of the world. I place it after smetana as it is often consumed in the same way, though to an even greater extent. 98% of Russian "salads" have mayonnaise at their base, and, now that I think of it, I do not think I have ever been to a Russian-prepared meal where mayonnaise was not featured prominently. It can be purchased in large tubs, small tubs, tubes, or squeezable bag-like containers.
Sirok: I was introduced to this sweet snack by Guilherme when we stopped at a grocery store on the way to Shartash the other week. Although sirok typically costs between 4 and 7 rubles, I ended up spending 20 minutes and 100 rubles at the store when the cashier gave me change as if I'd given her a smaller bill and when I corrected her began a process of counting all of the money in the till, while Mark and Guilherme stood outside eating their sirok and laughing at me. When her manager came and started the process over and refused to answer when I asked how long it would be, I decided my time wasn't worth the 65 rubles difference. Despite this unpleasant first encounter, sirok is perhaps the best dairy find of this trip--it is a small, chocolate coated slightly frozen product with a filling somewhere close to that of cheese cake, mixed, if your heart desires, with an assortment of different fruity options. Mark has been plotting to mail some of these tasty treats home to a cheese-cake loving sister, though we've yet to figure out how to keep them from melting on the trans-Atlantic journey.
Butter: Margarine hasn't caught on in Russia quite has it has in North America (though it is available sometimes), to the result that the butter section occupies a sizeable portion of the aisle.
Butter of all qualities and grades (ranging from 25 rubles/200g up to 60 or 70 rubles), and in all sizes is available, for any taste, appetite and purpose. I don't think I have ever purchased butter in Canada, though in an effort to make brownies I was forced to stare down this section of the aisle. In various other baking adventures since, I now know exactly where to go to avoid the overwhelming feeling that everything around me is going to melt into unindentifiable mounds of yellowy creaminess...
Cheese: Despite being slightly lactose intolerant and having vegan aspirations, cheese is the one and only dairy product that I have always loved. And Russia offers much for the cheese lover. In this section you can find speciatly foreign cheese products such as small cream cheese packets similar to La vache qui rit and feta, mozerella and cheddar, as well as a wide assortment of cheeses that I have given up trying to translate. Tragically, this week these cheeses jumped in price to cost as much as mozerella. The only cheese still affordable to me has become "kolbasnaya sir," or "sausage" cheese--a smoked cheese packaged in much the same way as sausage (i.e. in some strange waxy-like coating in the shape of a large sausage).
Ice Cream: Rounding out the dairy aisle is the dairy freezer. Actually, there are multiple freezers, and they are interpersed along the front of the store...Come to think of it, with these freezers in the front, the mayonnaise aisle up the left, the milk spilling over into the deli section, and the dairy aisle itself, dairy products indeed form a ring around the entire store. But back to ice cream. Ice cream comes in many shapes and forms, from vanilla packaged in tubes, to plastic tubs, frozen ice cream bars, and to a product that Len introduced us to the first time we walked a Russian street with him: the 4 rouble ice cream cone (well, it was 4 roubles 2 years ago, the cheapest you can find them today is 7 or 8). This ice cream cone comes in a transparent plastic wrapper, and, while it tastes like ice cream, I have my doubts as to the purity of the ingredients. Len was a fan of buying 3 or 4 of these little cones at once, and putting the extras in his pocket or briefcase for later consumption. Strangely, they seemed to keep just fine, even on a September street.
Well, a few weeks have gone by since I began this entry, the temperature has dropped 15-20 degrees, there are 4 inches of snow on the ground, an hour less daylight, and milk has somehow returned to 25 roubles a carton. Alas, my projections of cow milking patterns seem to have been proved incorrect, the price of dairy products instead dictated by the whims of the market. And now thrown into the cold and the dark that is to be this winter, and the fatigue that comes with this weather, the dairy consumption of Russians is seeming a little less odd. I have been instructed daily by one particular teacher to eat more calories--butter and smetana were her specific instructions--in order to keep myself warm. This logic still seems a bit bizarre to me, though in a country of seemingly anorexic women and a population who've survived these winters for centuries, I'm coming to believe that perhaps they've discovered some secret in dairy consumption that we have missed, something glanced over in the drive towards low-fat, low-calorie products. Something that would no doubt be the envy of Ontario dairy farmers. Whatever it is, I am going to take advantage of the opportunity of sirok, havarti, ice cream, tvorog, smetana, etc. being considered essential to my healthy survival of winter in the Urals. Bring on the dairy-oh!
Coming soon: A Survival Guide to Winter Cooking in the Urals (or, 101 ways to cook cabbage and potatoes)
Milk: Let's begin with the obvious. Or not so obvious. Even if I regularly drank milk in Canada, I would have not arrived to this country with an adequate knowledge of milk to navigate this section of the grocery story. The milk section is so volumunious that it spills from the dairy aisle into the central aisle across from the deli and frozen foods section. Why? Well, if you thought "skim" 1% and 2% was choice, guess again. Milk in Russia is available in fat-quantities at intervals of 0.5% ranging from 0.5% to 7.0% (and we aren't talking about cream yet, people). Most Russians don't know what to do with anything less than 3%, so the section is dominated by 3.5%, 4% and 4.5%, multiplied by about 7 brands then multiplied by another 3 ways of packaging. The standard cartons of milk are found in the aisle facing the deli, while the slightly cheaper though more combersome bags of milk are found interpersed with the rest of the dairy products. At first I thought these bags a rather strange phenomenon--they look like flattened cartons minus most of the stability of cardboard--until my American roommate informed me that Canadians were weird for buying milk in bags. While the Russian cardboard-like vacuum sealed bag of milk does not resemble the transparent Canadian bag in the least, I have thus since reformed my view of these bags of milk from strange to possible practical, though, lacking a milk jug, I have stuck to buying the carton.
Cream: Neighbouring the milk in the milk aisle is cream. The cream section is comprised of everything to thick to be considered milk (i.e. liquid dairy products ranging from 7.5% to 40% fat). You cannot, however, purchase whipped cream. For pumpkin pie lovers, this delicacy comes at the price of good ol' fashioned elbow grease (or some sugar, a fork, two hours of foresight, a steady mixing hand and a whole lot of patience).
Yoghurt: Yoghurt marks the beginning of the actual dairy aisle, taking up approximately 8 shelves (I'm not kidding). This section is populated mostly by single yoghurt cups (to my dismay, as much as Russians love dairy, you cannot buy 1L tubs of yoghurt), including plain yoghurt, fruit-flavoured yoghurt, yoghurt with fruits and nuts, vanilla yoghurt, chocolate yoghurt, caramel yoghurt, yoghurt with active bacteria culture, and, for the particularly extravant taste, yoghurt with crunchy chocolate balls.
Yoghurt Drinks: Hopefully this category is fairly self-explanatory, even if odd to Canadian eyes. If you like yoghurt, why shouldn't it be available in drinkable form? Who needs spoons anyway? For 25-30p a bottle, yoghurt drinks are a healthy and popular purchase for Russians on the run, or who's tastes have wandered from the traditional Russian yoghurt-like drink: kefir.
Kefir: Somewhere between milk, yoghurt and sour cream in taste and texture is kefir. If you can't imagine what it could possibly be from that description, you may be out of luck, unless, perhaps, you are familiar with the Middle Eastern drink ayran. Kefir is the Russian equivalent (though, in my opinion, less tasty) of this drink, a thick drink similar to drinkable yoghurt, minus the flavour or sugar. Heated with a bit of honey or sugar, and in the right mood, this can be a pleasant snack. Under no circumstances, however, will it quench your thirst, or leave you feeling light and healthy and sound in stomach.
Tvorog: Like kefir, tvorog is something difficult to conceive of until tasted. Somewhere between cottage cheese and cream cheese in taste, and feta and cottage cheese in texture, tvorog is most often used as an ingredient in baked goods, as the topping on cookies, or, as it is sold at our favourite croissant stand, baked into a croissant with spinach. Tvorog is sold muh like butter, squarely wrapped in waxed paper. As I recently discovered, tvorog is also available in a sladkaya (sweet) form, and sometimes mixed with raisins. In this form, I've been told, tvorog is best enjoyed with tea, added in the same manner as sugar or cream.
Smetana: I am not sure why I chose to refer to this product in its Russian form, for smetana is something I knew before venturing to the motherland, i.e. sour cream. Perhaps this linguistic choice is due to the fact that one of it is one of the first words I learned in Russian (more specifically, in the phrase "sup bez smetani, pozhaulsta" or "soup without sour cream, please"). More likely, however, is the fact that sour cream consumption in Russia is in such a league of its own that the very product cannot be adequately rendered by its English equivalent. Plus it just doesn't taste quite like it does at home, probably due to a higher fat content. In any case, smetana is a favoured condiment (or primary ingredient) for such varied dishes as: borscht, blini, pelmeni, vereneki, various salads, bread, cookies, smetanichka (a very taste cookie-cake like dessert whose name is derived from its main ingredient), or, if there is nothing else in the kitchen cupboard, smetana can be enjoyed eaten straight out of the container with a spoon.
Mayonnaise: Mayonnaise is not technically part of the dairy aisle--in fact, it has its own aisle--but it warrants mention here as a dairy-based product near and dear to the citizens of Yekaterinburg. I am told, after all, that we are living in the mayonnaise capital of the world. I place it after smetana as it is often consumed in the same way, though to an even greater extent. 98% of Russian "salads" have mayonnaise at their base, and, now that I think of it, I do not think I have ever been to a Russian-prepared meal where mayonnaise was not featured prominently. It can be purchased in large tubs, small tubs, tubes, or squeezable bag-like containers.
Sirok: I was introduced to this sweet snack by Guilherme when we stopped at a grocery store on the way to Shartash the other week. Although sirok typically costs between 4 and 7 rubles, I ended up spending 20 minutes and 100 rubles at the store when the cashier gave me change as if I'd given her a smaller bill and when I corrected her began a process of counting all of the money in the till, while Mark and Guilherme stood outside eating their sirok and laughing at me. When her manager came and started the process over and refused to answer when I asked how long it would be, I decided my time wasn't worth the 65 rubles difference. Despite this unpleasant first encounter, sirok is perhaps the best dairy find of this trip--it is a small, chocolate coated slightly frozen product with a filling somewhere close to that of cheese cake, mixed, if your heart desires, with an assortment of different fruity options. Mark has been plotting to mail some of these tasty treats home to a cheese-cake loving sister, though we've yet to figure out how to keep them from melting on the trans-Atlantic journey.
Butter: Margarine hasn't caught on in Russia quite has it has in North America (though it is available sometimes), to the result that the butter section occupies a sizeable portion of the aisle.
Butter of all qualities and grades (ranging from 25 rubles/200g up to 60 or 70 rubles), and in all sizes is available, for any taste, appetite and purpose. I don't think I have ever purchased butter in Canada, though in an effort to make brownies I was forced to stare down this section of the aisle. In various other baking adventures since, I now know exactly where to go to avoid the overwhelming feeling that everything around me is going to melt into unindentifiable mounds of yellowy creaminess...
Cheese: Despite being slightly lactose intolerant and having vegan aspirations, cheese is the one and only dairy product that I have always loved. And Russia offers much for the cheese lover. In this section you can find speciatly foreign cheese products such as small cream cheese packets similar to La vache qui rit and feta, mozerella and cheddar, as well as a wide assortment of cheeses that I have given up trying to translate. Tragically, this week these cheeses jumped in price to cost as much as mozerella. The only cheese still affordable to me has become "kolbasnaya sir," or "sausage" cheese--a smoked cheese packaged in much the same way as sausage (i.e. in some strange waxy-like coating in the shape of a large sausage).
Ice Cream: Rounding out the dairy aisle is the dairy freezer. Actually, there are multiple freezers, and they are interpersed along the front of the store...Come to think of it, with these freezers in the front, the mayonnaise aisle up the left, the milk spilling over into the deli section, and the dairy aisle itself, dairy products indeed form a ring around the entire store. But back to ice cream. Ice cream comes in many shapes and forms, from vanilla packaged in tubes, to plastic tubs, frozen ice cream bars, and to a product that Len introduced us to the first time we walked a Russian street with him: the 4 rouble ice cream cone (well, it was 4 roubles 2 years ago, the cheapest you can find them today is 7 or 8). This ice cream cone comes in a transparent plastic wrapper, and, while it tastes like ice cream, I have my doubts as to the purity of the ingredients. Len was a fan of buying 3 or 4 of these little cones at once, and putting the extras in his pocket or briefcase for later consumption. Strangely, they seemed to keep just fine, even on a September street.
Well, a few weeks have gone by since I began this entry, the temperature has dropped 15-20 degrees, there are 4 inches of snow on the ground, an hour less daylight, and milk has somehow returned to 25 roubles a carton. Alas, my projections of cow milking patterns seem to have been proved incorrect, the price of dairy products instead dictated by the whims of the market. And now thrown into the cold and the dark that is to be this winter, and the fatigue that comes with this weather, the dairy consumption of Russians is seeming a little less odd. I have been instructed daily by one particular teacher to eat more calories--butter and smetana were her specific instructions--in order to keep myself warm. This logic still seems a bit bizarre to me, though in a country of seemingly anorexic women and a population who've survived these winters for centuries, I'm coming to believe that perhaps they've discovered some secret in dairy consumption that we have missed, something glanced over in the drive towards low-fat, low-calorie products. Something that would no doubt be the envy of Ontario dairy farmers. Whatever it is, I am going to take advantage of the opportunity of sirok, havarti, ice cream, tvorog, smetana, etc. being considered essential to my healthy survival of winter in the Urals. Bring on the dairy-oh!
Coming soon: A Survival Guide to Winter Cooking in the Urals (or, 101 ways to cook cabbage and potatoes)
Sunday, October 28, 2007
A Russian Ramadan
Friday, October 12, 2007
Although I've already been awake for over an hour, there is no sign of the sun as Defri and I exit the obshezhitiye into the brisk pre-dawn. We round the obshezhitiye towards Ulitsa Vosmova Marta, walking carefully across the rubble that is now Ulitsa Stepana Razina. I comment to Defri that between the dark and the upturned street it looks as if we're walking through a war zone. We make our way up a slowly waking-up city towards the metro stop. Along the way, Defri nostalgically describes to me what his family is doing to celebrate this day, a day that has already arrived in Indonesia.In Russian, today is Ramazan Bayram. This day is more familiar to me as Eid, the festival that marks the end of the month of fasting in the Muslim calendar. We are on our way to meet some friends in the Uralmash district of the city, then head north to a small town that is home to what Defri tells me is the nicest mosque near Yekaterinburg. We make our way to the subway, passing quickly through the usually packed turnstiles and onto the train before morning rush hour really begins. I am struck by the abnormally high percentage of men onboard, the morning shift of the metallurgical factory we are currently travelling under.
We travel the 5 stops to the end of the subway line (despite the intricate subway plans displayed in the trains and stations, we have indeed just travelled the entirety of Yekaterinburg's metro system) and meet Rinda, another Indonesian friend at the station. We resurface to darkness and, after working through some changed travel plans, we begin to look for the bus stop. The streets are slowly coming alive, and the bus stop is considerably more crowded than the subway lines. A tram pulls up and a group of 40 or so gypsie--90% of the passengers--pour out of the doors. I have seen these people in various parts of the city before, and have already had some not-so-pleasant encounters, and, despite the warnings and stories of friends, I am trying not to let my attitude towards them be soured. This particularly group is comprised entirely of women with covored heads and children in colourful dress. Half the women have children on their hips, the other half are watching the rest of the pre-pubescent crowd who seem to wander automatically with outstretched, upturned palms and puppy eyes to all those who pass them by. As I ponder the demographics of this group I realzie that have never seen a man, or a boy over the age of 8 for that matter, amid their ranks. Begging, perhaps, is women's work.
Our bus pulls up and some of the children rush to climb on. The konductor--the woman who collects the fares--starts yelling, telling them they cannot get on this bus. When these warnings fall on deaf ears, she physically starts pushing the children down the steps onto the street. I am frozen where I stand, simultaneously horrified and unphased in my fatigue by this strange incident. Defri starts to board inbetween the children with Rinda following behind, though they are met with strong words from the konductor. " You cannot ride on this bus," she says, this time obviously directed at Rinda, with her covered hair and darker skin. Defri tells her that Rinda is with him, but she repeats this command and when Rinda continues up the stairs she is pushed backwards towards the street. Rinda does not react, but calmly begins climbing the stairs again. "She is with me, not with them," Defri repeats. The konductor continues to object, though I am now standing behind Rinda so she cannot be pushed off. Defri pushes his way onto the bus and the doors close. The konductor comes to collect our fares and I hand her the usual 9 rubles. She yells something I don't understand, until Defri interjects with the name of the stop where we are getting off. She tells me that if this is indeed where I am going, then I need to pay 16 rubles. I pay the difference and Defri and Rinda do the same, ready to do anything for this woman to leave us alone. Once she leaves, Rinda leans over to me and whispers in a level English "that was so racist." I, who was not assaulted in the least, am near tears, though I sense that this episode was tragically not out of the ordinary for Rinda.
The bus rattles through the increasingly congested streets as Rinda, Defri and I converse with our eyes. At the next stop a man with a black beard, wearing the traditional loose, long cotton dress and white prayer cap boards the bus. The konductor comes to collect his fare and he pays her 9 rubles. Defri asks him where he is going, and when he confirms that he too is going to the mosque Defri asks why he only had to pay 9 rubles. The konductor overhears this exchange and tells us that we have to get off at the next stop. This bus will not be going to the mosque today. When Defri tries to ask why we had to pay 16 rubles and why she didn't tell us this when we first boarded he is met with a cold silence. Once she leaves, our new travel companion extends a hand to Defri and offers quietly "s praznikom," the generic Russian holiday greeting. Defri returns the greeting and his eyes show the relief of knowing he is among friends. We get off the bus at the next stop and make our way across the street to another bus stop where we meet a dozen or so other men who are also heading to the mosque. I smile to myself, as this increasing concentration of Muslim men on the side of the street reminds me of walking down Erb St. on a Friday afternoon. The horizon is beginning to brighten, washing the skyline of tired smoke stacks and steeples in a late autumn light. As it is already approaching 8 o'clock, the start time of the service, our bearded friend tries to flag down a car. A marshrut with a Muslim driver finally pulls over, and we pile inside. Rinda climbs into the front, and I find myself the sole woman in the back of the overcrowded van. The men shift around to make room for me on the back bench. I'm drawn to the smile and laugh of a young man in a colourful prayer cap facing backwards. He has kind eyes that smile along with his mouth as he converses with his neighbour. I guess that most of these travellers are of Tajik origin, though I've generally lost faith in my ability to distinguish Central Asian ethnicities. They have the faces of the manual labourers that I pass on street corners doing the seemingly endless work of laying brick sidewalks. They have the faces of the women who wash the floors of the university. They are the faces of a sizeable underclass of workers--legal and illegal--who are not always well liked by government officials. For now they are among friends--brothers--as we make our way to the mosque.
We arrive as the sun has just appeared over the horizon. I don't have much time to check out my surroudings--we are late and are bustled inside. I awkwardly try and cover myself with the perfume-scented scarf Jenny has lent me for the occasion. Rinda and I along with another young woman are led through the basement, full of men, up some stairs to the main floor, also full of men, then up a further set of stairs to a balcony. At the far end of
the balcony is a row of elderly women, sitting on a bench to ease feeble knees. One of them motions for me to sit beside her in the remaining space on the bench, and Rinda takes a seat on the floor beside me. I finally have a chance to look at where we are. The mosque is stunning--the walls are decorated with a careful calligraphy and windows inlayed with geometric designs, and ceiling above us opens into a dome of elaborate design. I settle into the sturdy voice of the man leading the prayers. After a few more minutes of studying my surroundigns I realize that we and the elderly women beside us are the only women in the mosque, while there are probably 250-300 men. Another man delivers a message of sorts, and I begin to feel the effects of an early morning and our unpredictable travel. Rinda gently lays her head against my right leg, and I know I am not alone in my fatigue. The message comes to an end, and the final prayers begin. A number of other younger women have gethered behind us, and I move to the back to make room for them to pray. One of the woman keeps asking Rinda for instructions, explaining that she doesn't know how this particular prayer works. I watch silently as the 300 congregants of the mosque rise and prostrate in unison, save for the old women who remain on their bench. The prayer finishes and Rinda gives me a confused look. "I don't think they did it right," she whispers. Sure enough, 10 seconds later the cantor appologizes for not doing the correct holiday prayer, and the cycle begins again.When the service ends, Rinda begins talking with some of the women around us. One of the women, dressed in a long brown skirt and scarf, continues to ask Rinda to explain what is going on. They ask about where she is from, where I am from, and comment on Rinda's beautifully embroidered white full length dress. She explains that all women in the mosque in Indonesia wear
such dress, and we continue to chat while we wait for the men to clear out. Rinda whispers to me that it is strange that these women are so unfamiliar with what is going on. She tells me, however, that very few Muslim women in this city leave the house. She is the only woman I have seen in the city who covers her head, and she confirms that she is definately the only student at the university. I am intrigued by this phenomenon, as it seems a complete reversal of the men-women ratio in the Orthodox churches that I have frequented. When most of the men have cleared out of the basement, we head downstairs to collect our shoes. Rinda can only find one of her shoes, and we spend another 10 minutes searching the corners and shelves for the other one. We exit the mosque to a crowd of people gathered around the corpse of a cow (still visibly in the form of a cow), that is being cut apart with an ax for people to take home. We head around the corner and up the stairs towards the bus stop. Part of the gypsy crowd we met before seems to have made its way here as well, instinctively knowing where they will find a crowd, perhaps even a crowd in a generous mood. We take a few pictures, then board the bus.In full daylight, I am better able to see where we have come. We drive through a village of sorts of dilapitated wooden buildings, with quaint painted windows and fenced yards, interpersed with 5-storey Soviet apartment blocks. We pass two more mosques, one is small and made of wood, the other closer in size to the one we have just come from, though less well kept. Outside of both mosques, people are smoking meat and conversing. This village--part of the 905 belt of Yekaterinburg--is home to many of the Central Asian residents of the city, and explains why the downtown remains relatively white.
We make our way back to the metro stop, then take the subway back to the circus. I mention that I am hungry, and Defri's face lights up. "Let's go to Kupets to eat" he exclaims, "we need to celebrate." We enter Greenvich, a newly renovated mega-shopping centre, and head upstairs to the food court. I order soup from the Uzbek booth, Rinda orders pizza, and Defri blini (a traditional crepe-like Russian dish) with strawberries and whipped cream--I realize that they have ordered probably the only two meals that do not contain meat. Tired and hungry, we enjoy together the first day-light meal Rinda and Defri have had in a month. "S praznikom" we say, clinking our mugs of tea, and I laugh to myself at the unusuallness of the morning, brought to an end with an equally unusual meal, a Canadian and two Indonesians in Russia, eating pizza and blini to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Perhaps, however, it is not the food, but the act of eating together, the act of communally partaking in the nourishment of our bodies, that is at the heart of the holiday feast.
Home, I Said (Or, Everything is Illuminated)
October 9, 2007
Overture to the Commencement of a Very Rigid Search
Taking advantage of no longer having classes on Fridays, Mark, Guilherme and I set out to find Shartash, a lake at the edge of the city that we always talk about going to but never seem to find the time. With no more than a rough idea of where in the city the lake was located, we hopped on a tram (at first, the wrong one), and set out. The following is a photographic documentation of our adventure… If you do not understand the sub-titles (and for an illustration of why I have re-entered the world of omnivorous human beings), I highly recommend watching the movie by the same name as this title (Everything is Illuminated).
Commencement of a Very Rigid Search
A Very Rigid Search
Illumination
Finally at the shore of the lake, I flip open my Mary Oliver book and happen upon this poem.
The River
~ Mary Oliver
Just because I was born
precisely here or there,
in some cold city or another,
don’t think I don’t remember
how I came along like a grain
carried by the flood
on one of the weedy threads that pour
toward a muddy lighting,
surging east, past
monkeys and parrots, past
trees with their branches in the clouds, until
I was spilled forth
and slept under the blue lung
of the Carribbean.
Nobody
told me this. But little by little
the smell of mud and leaves returned to me,
and in dreams I began to turn,
to sense the current
Do dreams lie? Once I was a fish
crying for my sisters in the sprawling
crossroads of the delta.
Once among the reeds I found
a boat, as thin and lonely
as a dead young tree. Nearby
the forest sizzled with the afternoon rain.
Home, I said.
In every language there is a word for it.
In the body itself, climbing
those walls of white thunder, past those green
temples, there is also
a word for it.
I said, home.
I sit for a moment, in the clear and cold and light of the shore of the lake, in the circular nature of life, in the awe and silence that only sitting beside water illicits. For lack of other words, I will include here a piece I wrote while living in Riviere-du-Loup this summer.
Et je situerai l’homme où naît mon harmonie
Ma langue est d’Amérique
Je suis né de ce paysage
J’ai pris souffle dans le limon du fleuve
Je suis la terre et je suis la parole
Le soleil s’endort sous ma tête
Mes bras sont deux océans le long de mon corps
Le monde entier vient frapper à mes flancs
J’entends le monde battre dans mon sang
Je creuse des images dans la terre
Je cherche une ressemblance première
~ Gatien Lapointe, extrait d’Ode au Saint-Laurent ~
I have a friend who was born in the lush green mountains off the Turkish coast of the Black Sea. He told me once that he could not live without water. An obvious declaration, perhaps—without water, we would die of thirst—but he was not talking about the water that we drink. We were on a boat, crossing the Bosphorus, a river that was the centre of the great capital of the Ottoman Empire—Istanbul; a river that is at the centre of the soul of the city and all the inhabitants of this wondrous place. He was describing the water of our souls. He was speaking of his need to live near water because without it, he does not feel himself complete. Although we were on the other side of the world, I understood this sentiment, as it is a feeling that I also know well, a feeling that I have known many times in my life—beside many rivers lakes and oceans that render me incapable of explanation, lost for words to describe the stilling of the soul that this water incites—but a sentiment that, although I know it well, I still do not understand.
Now, on this side of the Atlantic, I descend the hill on my bike, a light salty wind cleans my face. I have just arrived, finally, to the banks of the river. I stop, momentarily, because the river—this river here, the Saint Laurence—renders me mute. This is a phenomenon that belongs to all of the wondrous lakes, rivers and oceans of the world. I search for words again, but there are none. What is it that pulls us towards water, that draws us in with gentle, confidant arms? What is it that forces us to stop for a moment, to pause, to breath, to reflect on our lives past and future? What is it that renders me mute, lost for words? Perhaps it’s the freedom of the wind as it carries a light salted air from the ocean towards the setting sun. Perhaps it is the soft pink of the dusk sky that fades to orange, then violet and finally towards night and a blanket of stars? Perhaps it is the gentle tide lulling against the rocky shore—rocks that have been formed by centuries and millenniums of running water. Perhaps it is the endless expanse of sky, clouds, sun, mountains and the horizon that rolls without end and incites the soul to journey farther, deeper.
Perhaps it is the simple beauty that I have just here described. But I think it is also an understanding of the historic significance of these rivers. The Bosporus was—and remains—the spine of a city that was the centre of an Empire. This river was crossed by sultans and emperors for centuries, and Istanbul’s current form and location is owed to the existence of this mighty river. And the same is true for the Saint Laurence, a river that was once called—and for good reason—“The Grand River of Canada” because it was by means of this river that our country was colonized in the way that we know today. When we feel the weight and historical significance of these rivers, their importance for our lives today and the social form of our world, it is impossible not to be filled with a sense of awe.
This indescribable phenomenon of sitting near water is probably the result of a combination of the sheer beauty of their landscapes and the weight of their histories. There is something, however, beyond this. I think that perhaps it is because we are like the water to which we are drawn. We need stability and consistency in our lives—like the mountains and the rocks and the sky and the riverbed. But we also need, like water, constant movement. We need to constantly be growing, learning, exploring, like the current of a river or the tide of an ocean. Perhaps that is what draws us towards water: it is our perfect companion, a companionship in which we are completely at home. This river, that constantly changes just as I, that is the sum of innumerable parts—rocks, sun, rain, history and the unpredictable actions of countless individuals—just as I. And like me and the rest of our wondrous species, this river will join the ocean, where it will disappear into another body, where it will join the beauty of all the other wondrous rivers, lakes, seas and oceans of the world. Where, as Lapointe writes, we will search for—and find—our ressemblance première .
Overture to the Commencement of a Very Rigid Search
Taking advantage of no longer having classes on Fridays, Mark, Guilherme and I set out to find Shartash, a lake at the edge of the city that we always talk about going to but never seem to find the time. With no more than a rough idea of where in the city the lake was located, we hopped on a tram (at first, the wrong one), and set out. The following is a photographic documentation of our adventure… If you do not understand the sub-titles (and for an illustration of why I have re-entered the world of omnivorous human beings), I highly recommend watching the movie by the same name as this title (Everything is Illuminated).
Commencement of a Very Rigid Search
A Very Rigid Search
Illumination
Finally at the shore of the lake, I flip open my Mary Oliver book and happen upon this poem.
The River
~ Mary Oliver
Just because I was born
precisely here or there,
in some cold city or another,
don’t think I don’t remember
how I came along like a grain
carried by the flood
on one of the weedy threads that pour
toward a muddy lighting,
surging east, past
monkeys and parrots, past
trees with their branches in the clouds, until
I was spilled forth
and slept under the blue lung
of the Carribbean.
Nobody
told me this. But little by little
the smell of mud and leaves returned to me,
and in dreams I began to turn,
to sense the current
Do dreams lie? Once I was a fish
crying for my sisters in the sprawling
crossroads of the delta.
Once among the reeds I found
a boat, as thin and lonely
as a dead young tree. Nearby
the forest sizzled with the afternoon rain.
Home, I said.
In every language there is a word for it.
In the body itself, climbing
those walls of white thunder, past those green
temples, there is also
a word for it.
I said, home.
I sit for a moment, in the clear and cold and light of the shore of the lake, in the circular nature of life, in the awe and silence that only sitting beside water illicits. For lack of other words, I will include here a piece I wrote while living in Riviere-du-Loup this summer.
Ode to the Saint Laurence (and all other wondrous lakes, rivers, seas and oceans of the world)
Et je situerai l’homme où naît mon harmonie
Ma langue est d’Amérique
Je suis né de ce paysage
J’ai pris souffle dans le limon du fleuve
Je suis la terre et je suis la parole
Le soleil s’endort sous ma tête
Mes bras sont deux océans le long de mon corps
Le monde entier vient frapper à mes flancs
J’entends le monde battre dans mon sang
Je creuse des images dans la terre
Je cherche une ressemblance première
~ Gatien Lapointe, extrait d’Ode au Saint-Laurent ~
I have a friend who was born in the lush green mountains off the Turkish coast of the Black Sea. He told me once that he could not live without water. An obvious declaration, perhaps—without water, we would die of thirst—but he was not talking about the water that we drink. We were on a boat, crossing the Bosphorus, a river that was the centre of the great capital of the Ottoman Empire—Istanbul; a river that is at the centre of the soul of the city and all the inhabitants of this wondrous place. He was describing the water of our souls. He was speaking of his need to live near water because without it, he does not feel himself complete. Although we were on the other side of the world, I understood this sentiment, as it is a feeling that I also know well, a feeling that I have known many times in my life—beside many rivers lakes and oceans that render me incapable of explanation, lost for words to describe the stilling of the soul that this water incites—but a sentiment that, although I know it well, I still do not understand.
Now, on this side of the Atlantic, I descend the hill on my bike, a light salty wind cleans my face. I have just arrived, finally, to the banks of the river. I stop, momentarily, because the river—this river here, the Saint Laurence—renders me mute. This is a phenomenon that belongs to all of the wondrous lakes, rivers and oceans of the world. I search for words again, but there are none. What is it that pulls us towards water, that draws us in with gentle, confidant arms? What is it that forces us to stop for a moment, to pause, to breath, to reflect on our lives past and future? What is it that renders me mute, lost for words? Perhaps it’s the freedom of the wind as it carries a light salted air from the ocean towards the setting sun. Perhaps it is the soft pink of the dusk sky that fades to orange, then violet and finally towards night and a blanket of stars? Perhaps it is the gentle tide lulling against the rocky shore—rocks that have been formed by centuries and millenniums of running water. Perhaps it is the endless expanse of sky, clouds, sun, mountains and the horizon that rolls without end and incites the soul to journey farther, deeper.
Perhaps it is the simple beauty that I have just here described. But I think it is also an understanding of the historic significance of these rivers. The Bosporus was—and remains—the spine of a city that was the centre of an Empire. This river was crossed by sultans and emperors for centuries, and Istanbul’s current form and location is owed to the existence of this mighty river. And the same is true for the Saint Laurence, a river that was once called—and for good reason—“The Grand River of Canada” because it was by means of this river that our country was colonized in the way that we know today. When we feel the weight and historical significance of these rivers, their importance for our lives today and the social form of our world, it is impossible not to be filled with a sense of awe.
This indescribable phenomenon of sitting near water is probably the result of a combination of the sheer beauty of their landscapes and the weight of their histories. There is something, however, beyond this. I think that perhaps it is because we are like the water to which we are drawn. We need stability and consistency in our lives—like the mountains and the rocks and the sky and the riverbed. But we also need, like water, constant movement. We need to constantly be growing, learning, exploring, like the current of a river or the tide of an ocean. Perhaps that is what draws us towards water: it is our perfect companion, a companionship in which we are completely at home. This river, that constantly changes just as I, that is the sum of innumerable parts—rocks, sun, rain, history and the unpredictable actions of countless individuals—just as I. And like me and the rest of our wondrous species, this river will join the ocean, where it will disappear into another body, where it will join the beauty of all the other wondrous rivers, lakes, seas and oceans of the world. Where, as Lapointe writes, we will search for—and find—our ressemblance première .
Золотая осень
Zolotaya osyen. It’s Thursday night and Mark, Guilherme, Jenny and I are celebrating the approaching weekend with a trip to the local brewery/pub—Tinkhoff’s. Jenny offers to pay the difference between a pitcher of Tinkhoff’s standard brew and the seasonal special, zolotaya osyen, or, “golden autumn.” The beer that comes to our table is not golden as the name implies, but the amber of leaves that have already fallen, browning as they become more brittle. “Isn’t that the name of a painting?” I ask. Shishkin or Levitan, perhaps? Or is it “Zolotaya Rozh” (Golden Rye). This one Jenny and I agree on, though I can still picture another painting in my head, a painting on the bottom right hand corner of my textbook, a river and cutting through the lower right, autumn-coloured birch trees flanking the left shore.
October 2, 2007
It is Tuesday afternoon and I have a few hours to kill between class and choir rehearsal. I check out the shoe store next to the university, then decide to wander down a street where I think I may find a vendor selling pumpkins. I turn accidentally a street too early, but decide to continue and see where it goes. I walk past some familiar looking stairs, and find myself at the back entrance to Ascension Cathedral, one of the oldest remaining cathedrals in the city, that is now paled by the Church-of-the-Blood that stands across the street. Just beyond the stairs is the corner of what looks to be a park. I walk closer, and beyond the iron-post fence I see an endless golden blanket of birch leaves scattered on the forest floor, floating on the surface of the water, and dancing their way from the tree tops to the ground. I have seen pictures of this place—of the Romanesque pavilion on the small island of the pond—and always wondered where in the city it was, and am excited to have finally stumbled upon it. I follow the iron fence half-way around the perimeter of the park until I finally find an open gate. I wander the main paths for awhile, then allow myself the pleasure of trampling through the drying leaves, enjoying the familiar crackling underfoot, until I finally make my way to the bank of the pond. I follow a small set or stairs down from the bridge and sit beside the water. The sun is shining, and bouncing off the water and the yellowing willow tree under which I am sitting, this small corner of the pond is bathed in an incandescent shade of gold—zolotaya osyen.
For the first time since we arrived in this city, I can breath.
More to come... not quite finished
October 2, 2007
It is Tuesday afternoon and I have a few hours to kill between class and choir rehearsal. I check out the shoe store next to the university, then decide to wander down a street where I think I may find a vendor selling pumpkins. I turn accidentally a street too early, but decide to continue and see where it goes. I walk past some familiar looking stairs, and find myself at the back entrance to Ascension Cathedral, one of the oldest remaining cathedrals in the city, that is now paled by the Church-of-the-Blood that stands across the street. Just beyond the stairs is the corner of what looks to be a park. I walk closer, and beyond the iron-post fence I see an endless golden blanket of birch leaves scattered on the forest floor, floating on the surface of the water, and dancing their way from the tree tops to the ground. I have seen pictures of this place—of the Romanesque pavilion on the small island of the pond—and always wondered where in the city it was, and am excited to have finally stumbled upon it. I follow the iron fence half-way around the perimeter of the park until I finally find an open gate. I wander the main paths for awhile, then allow myself the pleasure of trampling through the drying leaves, enjoying the familiar crackling underfoot, until I finally make my way to the bank of the pond. I follow a small set or stairs down from the bridge and sit beside the water. The sun is shining, and bouncing off the water and the yellowing willow tree under which I am sitting, this small corner of the pond is bathed in an incandescent shade of gold—zolotaya osyen.
For the first time since we arrived in this city, I can breath.
More to come... not quite finished
Sunday, October 7, 2007
This is Where I Live
September 23, sometime in the wee hours of the morning
I haven’t been able to write lately. Not for lack of time or new faces and experiences, but more out of that feeling with which I am sometimes overtaken—the feeling that I have nothing worthwhile to say. And while I’ve been searching for something significant, prophetic, awe-inspiring, I have been missing what is right here in front of me. Trying to wait out the copious amounts of caffeine Jenny and I consumed today, I stumbled across the blog of Betsy, the American who lived on the other side of this wall last year. I read her final entry, her farewell to this place, if you will, and was transported in a way I do not know if I have experienced before. Transported away from here, into the mind of someone I have never met, into the stories and experiences of a stranger, and yet as I read her words I was brought squarely back to here, to this “fading-Soviet dorm” as she called it, to the white and blue walls of our kitchen, to the machine gun-like sounds and vibrations of the hot water pipes, to the blaring techno music so kindly broadcast to our windows, to the idiosyncrasies of our neighbours who frequent the blue-and-white-walled kitchen, to the efforts of the sun to break through the grey sky, to this modest corner of the Urals that is to be my home for the upcoming year.
And so I will write about this, my home: 16a, ulitsa Chapaeva, Obschezhitiye No. 6, Komnata 207, 
fet (buffet), and restoran (restaurant). I am never quite sure what to make of this spray-painted statement, not sure if the artist was naming what these dumpsters were for him (I doubt this, however, as most of the people who frequent these dumpsters are women), or if he was just making a quiet observation, a jest, or something in between. This is what I see through my window, my window to
Mediating this view is a window, a window that I wake up to every morning. In the window sill now sit two candles that I inherited from Josefina, a birch-tree wall hanging I inherited from Tugrul, a lamp shade I inherited from Midori (the Japanese girl who lived here last year) a picture of two geese, a plant I bought last week, some grammar books I borrowed from Jenny, and what remains of yesterday’s baking experiment. On the window hangs a small Lawren Harris print, a Gandhi quotation, and my favourite picture—three canoes at sunset on Little Crow Lake, the gunwales of the canoes illuminated by the remaining light of the sun before it slips behind the horizon. Things from others’ homes, things to remind me of home, things to make this feel like home. One level back are my curtains, red and white curtains that Josefina put up when she lived here last year, and for which I am eternally grateful. In front of these stands my bed, a hammock-like piece of furniture to which I have added to planks of wood—boards that Betsy used last year. My pillow-case is louder than the curtains—a pattern of pink and orange and red that Jenny bought at the recently-opened IKEA and donated to this pillow to hold its wayward feathers in. It is out of place among the grey and brown standard issue bedding of the residence, but it is, for now, mine. Next to this is my night stand, then my desk, and against the other wall, those of my roommate. Yoon Ka Hye is from
Beyond my room is a small foyer, littered with shoes, boots, coats for all seasons, a small fridge and an even smaller washing machine. On one end of this corridor is our shower, a place I do not really want to talk about, and on the other a small room with a toilet and another with a sink. We share this with Jenny and Josefina, the American-missionary from
Our small apartment is enclosed by a large green steel door of sorts, with a lock that looks like it was welded in after the original door was made. It is a finicky lock—it will only lock or unlock from the outside if it is set at a specific angle, a lesson I learned quickly after being locked out, and probably locking someone else out. On the other side of this door is a small foyer and entrances to two other apartments. In one live a woman and her young adolescent son, the other is shared by a young couple and a baby, and another young man. These are our neighbours. At our end of the foyer is the entrance to the kitchen that we share—yes, this is 
Soviet architecture at its finest. The kitchen has two small stoves, an oven with a precariously attached door, two sinks, a purring fridge, a clothesline, a table, and some makeshift shelves. The windows are decorated with flowers, snowmen, and Napoleon Dynamite window-clingers, and in an uncharacteristically nationalist mood, Jenny and I hung our flags (and a small Swedish flag that I made out of construction paper) on the clothesline—a reminder of where we come from and a little life to distract from the grease stains and flaking paint. Jenny has been wary of the reactions she would get by hanging her flag, and I’ve decided to make it my mission this year to allow her to be comfortable in her Americanism. Our neighbours rarely use this room anyway—only to smoke and occasionally bake, so we have decided to make it our own. This is where we live.
Beyond this room is a building populated by Russians—teachers and their families, students—as well as all of the foreign students of the university (approximately 30 Chinese students, 20 Koreans, and 15 others). Guilherme, Mark and Defri live on the other side of the building on the top floor, in the room where the Turks lived two years ago, two floors above my old apartment. This section of the building is guarded by a dejournaya, a (usually) elderly woman who sits in a glass box and regulates who comes and goes to the upper floors. If you are not a resident of these floors, you are officially supposed to leave your documents, though a few of these women recognize me from before, and I’ve discovered that if I turn the corner and continue up the stairs with enough conviction and a small (or no eye contact at all, depending who is there), then I can get away without this layer of bureaucracy. If I want to sleep in my own bed, however, I must respect the 1am curfew, when the door between the 6th and 7th floor is locked, along with the main entrance. This entrance, too, is guarded by a usually elderly woman sitting in a glass box, a metal turnstile, and usually two younger guys in camo security gear who watch the comings and goings of the residents. We must show our ID when we enter, and leave our ID when we have guests. As hard as I try, I will never understand this security, this remnant of Soviet bureaucracy, and although I find myself frequently committing small acts of rebellion, I know that I must follow the rules, because this is where I live.
Nearly a week has passed since I began this entry, and, like Betsy, I am now writing in our kitchen, the tapping of the keyboard and the humming of our fridge, the rustling fall leaves and Russian pop drifting through the window combining in an odd musical way, making this space seem less empty and cold than it is. For now it is a comfortable temperature—they turned the heat on this week, and since we have no control over how much heat comes out of the heaters (an amount that won’t change until it’s turned off next spring), most of the windows of the building have been opened wide to air out the now sauna-like temperatures of the rooms. The leaves outside the window have turned and are starting to fall, and it is strange to think that I will watch these trees shed their dress to be greeted by bows heavy with snow, then to springtime buds and new leaves. Like the leaves, I will watch the city live through the seasons, the short days and long nights of winter near the 60th parallel, the cold wind of the Urals, the dirty melting of the snow, and then the excitement of spring. It has been a hard week, in many ways, as I try and find my place in this building, in this city, in this country, as I struggle with what it is I should be doing with my time here, combined with the ongoing fatigue of living in a language that I only half understand. But sitting here watching the yellow lives whipped up by the wind, I find a quiet excitement at the prospect of living through the cycles of the year in this place, of discovering this city, this country, of testing my own emotional and intellectual limits, of developing friendships with those who also call this place home, of actually turning this place into a home. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, ‘till next summer does us apart, this is where I live.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Mushrooms After the Rain
Saturday, September 8, 2007
As many a time so far on this trip, it is raining. We are packed inside a marshrut, a mini-van like form of public transit, heading north of the city centre to the “kitayski rinok” (Chinese market). We’ve come in search of bulk rice, cheap produce and cheap products. We follow the river north for awhile, past the imposing, crisp-white-and-shiny Church-on-the-Blood, the newly constructed shrine to the Romanov family who were killed at this location by the Bolsheviks. Past the church, we turn to a less impressive part of the city, where drab Soviet apartment blocks stand diligently row-on-row, though they appear to be tiring after years of such stringent conformist obedience. These buildings seem not quite sure of how to keep up with the roads that flank their sides, the ballooning number of billboards that are sprouting on their shoulders, and, especially, with the changing goals and aspirations of the passengers of the ever-increasing number of cars that travel these roads every day.
We come to an abrupt stop and clamber out of one of these cars into the light rain. Defri directs us across the road, through a small fruit market and under the new highway underpass. The people here are visibly different—not necessarily Chinese as the name of the market implies, but not as white as those you find in the downtown. I notice especially a group of women in colourful dresses and head scarves crossing the road nearby. Their skin is the colour of coffee with a dollop of cream, though I cannot place where they are from. They remind me of gypsy characters in a Hollywood film, dark and mysterious and colourfully dressed, and I guess that they are probably of Central Asian descent, Tajik or perhaps Uzbek. But I do not to look too hard; I do not want to stare or gawk or gape, and I focus my gaze instead on the opened-air market unfolding ahead of us. Unless you have seen such a market, it is hard to imagine. The best I can do is to say that it is a zoo of people hassling you to make a sale (they especially seem to like calling out devushka or “young woman”), rows upon rows of merchandise—fur coats and hats, boots, shoes, pots and pans, sheets and towels, shoelaces and sweaters—followed by rows of food vendors and the glorious smell of smoked meat dampened by the rain, interspersed with strange mall-like buildings that are almost as zoo-like as their outdoor equivalent. We wander up and down the rows, past merchandise that seems to repeat itself fairly often, trying not to look too obviously foreign, Mark buys some towels and Guilerme and I find winter coats, and Defri leads us to a place to eat. We sit for a moment away from the chaos and then head back towards the bus stop. As we leave the market, we pass again the place of the people with the light chocolate coloured skin. It is still raining and cold enough that I’ve put on my new coat, but despite the damp cold, one of these women is sitting on the curb nursing a child. As I try not to stare, we are approached by another child. His body is the size of a 3 or 4 year old, though his face is older and his eyes are those of someone who has already seen too much. He is colourfully dressed like his mother, and he approaches us with an outstretched arm carrying a dilapidated tin cup. There is dirt under the fingernails that clutch this meager begging bowl, and snot or juice—I can’t decide which—caked between his upper lip and his nose. He is joined by a friend, or perhaps a younger brother. No one around us seems to take notice of them, and I force myself to do the same. We pass under the highway once again, leaving these children behind us, but it is too late: his dark brown eyes have already seared a hole in my heart, and I know that as long as I live I will never forget his face.
We return to the dormitory just in time for me to meet a Russian friend with whom I’ve kept in contact over the last two years. We decide to walk downtown to grab a coffee and catch up. He asks how I’m finding being back in Yekaterinburg. As we walk past construction site after construction site, I tell him that I sometimes barely recognize where I am and am amazed at the number of new buildings. He tells me that he too felt the same way after being gone for only a month in the summer. He tells me that Yekaterinburg will be host to the 2009 Asia-Pacific summit convention, and much of the construction is part of a project to make-over the city in time for this event. We reach the coffee shop, “Mamma’s Biscuit House” on Prospekt Lenina, and I debate between an over-priced “Kafe-Amerikana,” “Mega-Kapucino,” or “Mokka.” I wonder if Lenin, who still stands in the main cit square just outside the café, would still be smiling if he could see us here now. I order the “Mokka” and my friend the “Lattey.” As the rain continues outside, we enjoy our warm drinks and he tells me of his work, his school, his family. He is tired, he says, tired of the stress of his job and studies—he is, at age 23, halfway through his PhD, teaching 20 hours of lectures a week, and about to publish a textbook—and also tired of being here. Tired of being in a country where his sexuality is taboo, where he is not free to publicly love who he wants to love. On our walk back to the dorm, we fall back into our discussion of the construction that has overtaken the city. As we pass a new Silvercity-like cinema complex, he tells me that soon Yekaterinburg will be very beautiful. Yes, in 5 years, he says, it will be very beautiful. He tells me that in Russia they say that this construction boom is “like mushrooms after the rain.” After the rain, you know, the wild mushrooms grow unhindered across the fertile forest floor.
Mushrooms after the rain… I can’t get the image out of my head for the rest of the day. It is an ironic image in a way that I cannot yet pinpoint. Mushroom collecting, like dachas, banyas and vegetable gardens, is a deeply entrenched and much loved Russian custom—part of the Russian psyche, or the illusive Russian soul. On a warm summer day, Russians love to head into the forest with their baskets and collect wild mushrooms. A section of my Russian textbook was even devoted to the identification of different types of mushrooms, to the result that I know the names of more types of mushrooms in Russian than I do in English. I immediately recognize this metaphor of mushrooms after the rain as a deeply Russian metaphor. And yet I am not sure exactly what these metaphorical mushrooms or this metaphorical rain really mean. Capitalism has hit Russia as a tropical storm, leaving little recognizable—save some deteriorating Soviet apartment blocks—in its wake. It has been a fertile rain for some, no doubt, and the city seems awash in new money, the buildings mushrooming from the ground testament to this wealth. Yet while it has been fertile for some, it has flooded others out; for tho
se who don’t know how to swim, it has meant a return to make-shift houses on the side of an unpredictable, eroding riverbank. This is unbridled free-market capitalism at its best—or its worst. You can either jump in the rainy river and try to follow the rampant current to the top, or be thrown in and left to drown unless you learn quickly to swim, or at least to float with the current. And while this river has watered the mushrooms, it is hard as of yet to identify which ones are okay to eat, which will make good soup and which will send you to the back of a line at an overcrowded hospital, or to a street corner with a tin cup or a baby on your breast. And so perhaps the metaphor is not ironic after all, but perfect as a metaphor could be. Or perhaps it is perfect in its irony, in the strange tension and contradictions that it depicts. Russia has, I suppose, long been a country of contradictions, of extremes, of high highs and low lows. Why, then, should we expect this New Russia to be any different? Perhaps we will only find out when the rain slows and the sun manages to break through the clouds, casting new shadows across a new forest floor.
As many a time so far on this trip, it is raining. We are packed inside a marshrut, a mini-van like form of public transit, heading north of the city centre to the “kitayski rinok” (Chinese market). We’ve come in search of bulk rice, cheap produce and cheap products. We follow the river north for awhile, past the imposing, crisp-white-and-shiny Church-on-the-Blood, the newly constructed shrine to the Romanov family who were killed at this location by the Bolsheviks. Past the church, we turn to a less impressive part of the city, where drab Soviet apartment blocks stand diligently row-on-row, though they appear to be tiring after years of such stringent conformist obedience. These buildings seem not quite sure of how to keep up with the roads that flank their sides, the ballooning number of billboards that are sprouting on their shoulders, and, especially, with the changing goals and aspirations of the passengers of the ever-increasing number of cars that travel these roads every day.
We come to an abrupt stop and clamber out of one of these cars into the light rain. Defri directs us across the road, through a small fruit market and under the new highway underpass. The people here are visibly different—not necessarily Chinese as the name of the market implies, but not as white as those you find in the downtown. I notice especially a group of women in colourful dresses and head scarves crossing the road nearby. Their skin is the colour of coffee with a dollop of cream, though I cannot place where they are from. They remind me of gypsy characters in a Hollywood film, dark and mysterious and colourfully dressed, and I guess that they are probably of Central Asian descent, Tajik or perhaps Uzbek. But I do not to look too hard; I do not want to stare or gawk or gape, and I focus my gaze instead on the opened-air market unfolding ahead of us. Unless you have seen such a market, it is hard to imagine. The best I can do is to say that it is a zoo of people hassling you to make a sale (they especially seem to like calling out devushka or “young woman”), rows upon rows of merchandise—fur coats and hats, boots, shoes, pots and pans, sheets and towels, shoelaces and sweaters—followed by rows of food vendors and the glorious smell of smoked meat dampened by the rain, interspersed with strange mall-like buildings that are almost as zoo-like as their outdoor equivalent. We wander up and down the rows, past merchandise that seems to repeat itself fairly often, trying not to look too obviously foreign, Mark buys some towels and Guilerme and I find winter coats, and Defri leads us to a place to eat. We sit for a moment away from the chaos and then head back towards the bus stop. As we leave the market, we pass again the place of the people with the light chocolate coloured skin. It is still raining and cold enough that I’ve put on my new coat, but despite the damp cold, one of these women is sitting on the curb nursing a child. As I try not to stare, we are approached by another child. His body is the size of a 3 or 4 year old, though his face is older and his eyes are those of someone who has already seen too much. He is colourfully dressed like his mother, and he approaches us with an outstretched arm carrying a dilapidated tin cup. There is dirt under the fingernails that clutch this meager begging bowl, and snot or juice—I can’t decide which—caked between his upper lip and his nose. He is joined by a friend, or perhaps a younger brother. No one around us seems to take notice of them, and I force myself to do the same. We pass under the highway once again, leaving these children behind us, but it is too late: his dark brown eyes have already seared a hole in my heart, and I know that as long as I live I will never forget his face.
We return to the dormitory just in time for me to meet a Russian friend with whom I’ve kept in contact over the last two years. We decide to walk downtown to grab a coffee and catch up. He asks how I’m finding being back in Yekaterinburg. As we walk past construction site after construction site, I tell him that I sometimes barely recognize where I am and am amazed at the number of new buildings. He tells me that he too felt the same way after being gone for only a month in the summer. He tells me that Yekaterinburg will be host to the 2009 Asia-Pacific summit convention, and much of the construction is part of a project to make-over the city in time for this event. We reach the coffee shop, “Mamma’s Biscuit House” on Prospekt Lenina, and I debate between an over-priced “Kafe-Amerikana,” “Mega-Kapucino,” or “Mokka.” I wonder if Lenin, who still stands in the main cit square just outside the café, would still be smiling if he could see us here now. I order the “Mokka” and my friend the “Lattey.” As the rain continues outside, we enjoy our warm drinks and he tells me of his work, his school, his family. He is tired, he says, tired of the stress of his job and studies—he is, at age 23, halfway through his PhD, teaching 20 hours of lectures a week, and about to publish a textbook—and also tired of being here. Tired of being in a country where his sexuality is taboo, where he is not free to publicly love who he wants to love. On our walk back to the dorm, we fall back into our discussion of the construction that has overtaken the city. As we pass a new Silvercity-like cinema complex, he tells me that soon Yekaterinburg will be very beautiful. Yes, in 5 years, he says, it will be very beautiful. He tells me that in Russia they say that this construction boom is “like mushrooms after the rain.” After the rain, you know, the wild mushrooms grow unhindered across the fertile forest floor. Mushrooms after the rain… I can’t get the image out of my head for the rest of the day. It is an ironic image in a way that I cannot yet pinpoint. Mushroom collecting, like dachas, banyas and vegetable gardens, is a deeply entrenched and much loved Russian custom—part of the Russian psyche, or the illusive Russian soul. On a warm summer day, Russians love to head into the forest with their baskets and collect wild mushrooms. A section of my Russian textbook was even devoted to the identification of different types of mushrooms, to the result that I know the names of more types of mushrooms in Russian than I do in English. I immediately recognize this metaphor of mushrooms after the rain as a deeply Russian metaphor. And yet I am not sure exactly what these metaphorical mushrooms or this metaphorical rain really mean. Capitalism has hit Russia as a tropical storm, leaving little recognizable—save some deteriorating Soviet apartment blocks—in its wake. It has been a fertile rain for some, no doubt, and the city seems awash in new money, the buildings mushrooming from the ground testament to this wealth. Yet while it has been fertile for some, it has flooded others out; for tho
se who don’t know how to swim, it has meant a return to make-shift houses on the side of an unpredictable, eroding riverbank. This is unbridled free-market capitalism at its best—or its worst. You can either jump in the rainy river and try to follow the rampant current to the top, or be thrown in and left to drown unless you learn quickly to swim, or at least to float with the current. And while this river has watered the mushrooms, it is hard as of yet to identify which ones are okay to eat, which will make good soup and which will send you to the back of a line at an overcrowded hospital, or to a street corner with a tin cup or a baby on your breast. And so perhaps the metaphor is not ironic after all, but perfect as a metaphor could be. Or perhaps it is perfect in its irony, in the strange tension and contradictions that it depicts. Russia has, I suppose, long been a country of contradictions, of extremes, of high highs and low lows. Why, then, should we expect this New Russia to be any different? Perhaps we will only find out when the rain slows and the sun manages to break through the clouds, casting new shadows across a new forest floor.
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