Orthodox Monks Drink Starbucks

Well, actually, he’s drinking Tropicana Tomato Juice and eating a tuna sub. But, clothed head to toe in long black attire, holding a cloth and wooden-bead rosary after just crossing himself, right to left in the Orthodox manner, he is sitting across from me in Starbucks. Though I’m still in Russia, the last two days wondering the streets of Moscow have been a sharp reminder of the incredible diversity that can exist within one country (and, as Muscovites would tell me, I’ve been living in “the provinces”). I feel as if I’m in a foreign country. And it’s not just the Starbucks. It’s the clothes people are wearing, the accents they are speaking with (and the dozens and dozens I’ve heard speaking English), it’s the way cashiers smile and people pass you on the street. The stalitsa (capital), as it’s often called, has been a refreshing break from the dreariness of Yekaterinburg. But like Yekaterinburg, and much of the rest of this country, it remains a mix of old and new, Russian and foreign. And, perhaps to remind me of where I am, men in black dresses are dining at Starbucks.

Goodbyes and Hellos

February 17, 2008

13.54 MOSCOW time. I awake to a slipping mattress and a descending sun beaming through the train’s west-facing window, illuminating pine bows and rooftops heavy with snow. We ourselves, like the sun, are westward bound, more or less, somewhere mid-way between Yekaterinburg and Moscow. We have left Yekaterinburg (almost) for good, and yet it feels as if we’re just going on a little trip, away for the weekend. But we’ve gone, leaving behind friends and, however frustrating at times, familiarity. In the chaos of packing, last-minute planning, etc., I think I postponed feeling any emotion about our new reality; I put of thinking about what leaving really means, the complete uncertainty of the upcoming weeks. And so now, I am gripped for the first time with feelings of doubt and regret—was this the right decision? Why did we ever want to leave the friends and familiarity of Yekaterinburg? Should we have just stuck it out? Especially since we don’t know if what lies ahead will be any more fulfilling? Where are we going, anyway?

And yet with the clinking of iron rails beneath me, the steady rock of this train and the sun-kissed white fields beyond, I feel a feeling creeping back into my chest, and excited tightness that has been absent for far too long. It is perhaps a feeling elicited most readily by the open road (or iron rails), for the physical movement of traveling demands that our minds work through where we are, where we’re going, where we’ve been. It is a feeling fueled by the simultaneous fear and excitement that comes with embarking into the unknown. A feeling that has accompanied me through long portages and long essays and many other things in between. A feeling that inspired me to get up out of my Waterloo bed, pack my life into a LowAlpine bag and head across the ocean. A feelin that is the natural and necessary companions for all of us who wander, whether we know where we’re going or not: wonder. I am moved, for the first time in months, by birch and snow and wide open skies back to this calmly anxious, quietly questioning, curiously excited state. And with the returning of this, I am comforted in knowing that this decision to leave was not necessarily right or wrong, but nonetheless a good decision.

Yet before I am too many rails away, I would like to give voice to some of what we’ve left behind. While I won’t miss being woken to the water blasting through our pipes, chips of ceiling falling to the floor, the bureaucracy of the obschezhitie, the mediocrity of the university, trying to get anywhere on public transit between 9am and 8pm, etc, there are certainly things—views, people, smells (well, maybe not smells), sounds, daily rituals, that I will miss. Things like: the glint of the setting sun on windows lining Prospekt Lenina, before it disappears behind the; trekking out to Shartash Lake bright and early every morning to ski with Varya and assorted guests; cheap stolovoya pastries; discussing life in the business world, life as an 11-year old in Soviet Russia, and everything in between with Yan and Ivan (and hopefully helping them improve their English through all of this); Defri (and Defri’s zharni ris/nasi goring/fried rice); listening to Jenny and Josefina’s lively conversations through our bedroom wall; evenings of ice cream, beer and durak (a Russian card game) with Paul, Mark and Guilherme; waiting for the water to boil in the corner of our desperately tiny choir rehearsal room, then drinking tea and eating cookies waiting for rehearsals to begin; happening past Trinity Cathedral or the Church on the Blood when the bells are chiming; the one person whose goodbye brought me to tears: Guzial. These, among other things, I will miss.

Now two days departed, sitting in Starbucks on Arbat St. in Moscow (pretending for a brief minute that I’m back in North America), although I know I will miss these things, I am further glad for the adventures and new experiences that the coming weeks and months are sure to bring. Excited for the chance to explore once again, to see knew things, to meet new people, to dig deeper (and farther east) into this great big country. And so I bid a (slightly) bitter- (but mostly) sweet farewell to Yekaterinburg, though not to its memories, to friends, but not to their friendship, and say hello to the wonderous adventures that are yet to come.

A Russian Wedding, Turkish Style

Our last day in Yekaterinburg proved to be quite a memorable one, as we spent the afternoon and evening celebrating Aycan and Olya's wedding. It was my first Russian wedding with ecclectic Turkish flavouring, and an all around enjoyable evening (and, owing to the caterers oversight that 1/3 of the guests were Muslim, plenty of meat and alcohol) Here are some pictures

Presidential Elections, Russian Style

Even on the other side of the ocean, I've been relatively aware that the United States is gearing up for a presidential election. In between primaries, debates, election forecasts and more primaries (all of this still over half a year to the real elections), I've come to appreciate the efficiency of not having set election dates. Russia, like the US, has 4-year presidential terms with defined expiration dates, and, as is probably also well known, Putin's term is nearly up. In fact, the country will be going to the polls in just two weeks to "elect" a new president. After the colourful and sometimes witty election posters that went up during the duma election in November, I was expecting something of the same this time around. I was beginning to lose hope of courting any more federal propoganda, until the following signs went up on the street outside the obshezhitiye. These posters, however, leave something to be desired. They are not, as one may expect during a presidential campaign, posters soliciting support for one candidate or another. The candidates, I am told, are the same as always. Zhirinovsky (as in the last 3 elections) will run for LDPR (the party with nationalist tendencies), Zyuganov will run for the communist party (as he's done twice before) and, new this year, Bogdanov will run for the Western-leaning "Democratic Party of Russia". Actually, I had to just look up these names on Wikipedia, for the only person anyone is really talking about is Dmitri Medvedev, the current vice Prime Minister, supported by Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia) and Spravedlivaya Rossiya (Fair Russia), who together occupy 75% of the Duma, and, more importantly, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. With this backing, it's not wonder I haven't seen a poster with a candidate's name on it: the results are already a foregone conclusion. The real "elections" happened months ago, when Putin announced Medvedev as his successor. (I still remember the first time I heard his name--one of our teachers started talking about him, and Mark thought she was being witty by calling him a "bear," as "medved" in Russian means bear. Side note: she was explaining that Medvedev was a suitable candidate because he has hair--from Lenin to Putin, Russia's strongmen have alternated between being bald and having full heads of hair) So, in lieu of candidate-supporting posters, these posters have gone up, posters that bare a suspicious resemblance to the Yedinaya Rossiya posters of the Duma elections, and the double-entendre tag "elections of the President of Russia March 2" (vote for president of vote for the president?). And while Russians are fond of criticizing America as a poor model of democracy (often warranted criticism), and while I too wonder how efficient a system can be if it takes 2 years of a 4 year term to choose a leader, if I had to choose between these two extremes, I would choose the system where citizens actually have a say. Are Russians outraged by these events? Not at all. As the duma elections illustrated (whether completely fair or not), Russians, by and large, support their president, and, by extension, will stand behind the new president as well.

"Be in the know--vote for the future"

"Bring your neighbours with you"

"10 Minutes of your time for the future of our children"

"For the continuation of the State's social policies"

An Addition from the Capital:
Contrary to what I wrote above, since arriving in Moscow I have found a poster backing a specific presidential candidate (well, not in so many words, but the picture speaks for itself). This poster, have a building tall, is supremelely located just outside the Kremlin walls. I will let you come to conclusions yourself. The caption reads "Together victorious." If you don't know the face of the man on the right, I can assure you you will soon.

Why Russia? Mid-year reflections and disillusionment…

Friday night. We find ourselves, not untypically, lounging on Mark and Defri’s floor, digesting dinner, aided by Bochkaryev. Katia and Dorotoa, Italian and Polish teachers respectively, have just returned from holidays back home, and the conversation falls to how they are finding being back in Russia. Katia’s face is longer than normal, perhaps still jet-lagged, or, as she tells us, not yet adjusted to being back in Russia. It is not that she is a stranger here—she’s already spent close to 2 years in the country—but that she is finding it increasingly difficult to go back and forth between Italy and Russia. “I want out,” she tells us, “I can’t stay in Russia any longer.” Every time she returns, she tells us, it is just a little bit harder to fit in at home, to converse with old friends and family, to feel normal. She tells us that it as if there is this dark side of her that none of her friends quite understand, and that she can’t really express anyway. “And I feel as if it is either now or never: I need to decide whether I want to stay here, to start a family, build a career—or, get out while I still can.”

Katia’s remarks resonate with many in the room. We are nearing 6 months in this country. Others have been here over a year or two or three, but we all know what she means. Living in Russia is no vacation. And the days where I feel like giving up and running home are not infrequent—if anything, they are becoming more frequent. It is not just the cold, or the dark, both which are now subsiding every slow slightly, or the cold faces on the street, or the eternally frustrating bureaucracy of the government, the university, hell, even the obshezhitiye. Most disturbing is the subtle way in which the culmination of these combined frustrations slowly begin to change the way that we, as foreigners, speak and think, act towards others, and towards ourselves. We have learned to blend in with the stoic faces, to wear black coats (and maybe even fur), to eat meat and mayonnaise, to speak shortly and confrontationally (as this is the only way to accomplish anything), we’ve become short-tempered (or at least easier-to-anger), or, as Katia said, we’ve developed a “darker side.” Is it merely survival instinct—when in Rome, as the adage goes? A chameleon response? Or have we really grown easier-to-anger, embittered by the challenges of being foreign in Russia?

Whatever the case, our commiseration (note the etymology of this word—co + misery) leads back to the question: what are we doing here anyway? Why Russia? The question is directed to Katia, where this conversation began. She, like many of us, began studying Russian in her undergraduate, more on a whim than for any practical or planned purpose. She fell in love with the language, came to St. Petersburg to study for 6 months, and fell in love with the place. In retrospect, the tells us that she thinks she fell in love more with the city than the country, St. Petersburg being as European as Russia gets. Russia, then, she tells us, became sort of a life mission for her. She returned to Italy to do a Master’s in Eastern European Studies (a year of which she completed in Yekaterinburg), focusing on Russian nationalism. Understanding Russia, helping Russia to be better even, became a driving force, direction. But what of this former enthusiasm now? Perhaps it was naïve, believing that Russia could be helped, that Russia was heading for better times (read “democracy, openness, prosperity, stability, free speech,” etc.), especially by a foreigner. Or perhaps it is frustration with the seeming backward step Russian seems to have taken in these areas. Or perhaps it is homesickness catching up with her. Or, perhaps more simply, it is the simple fact that Russia cannot be half of your life. You either here or your not. “I can’t keep going back and forth,” she tells us, “studying Russia is an all-or-nothing affair.”

“What drew you to Russia,” someone asks Mark. I know Mark’s story—he read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago a few year’s ago, was fascinated by the extremes of Russia’s history, the multiple concentrated attempts to control people, to shape society, and began studying Russia. Mark replies, “it has something to do with the search for real emotions. I understood emotions in Russia to be strong, to be real—even if these emotions are more often than not related to suffering. So much of my life in Canada seemed superficial. I guess I was searching in a way for a stronger, more real emotion.” I am a little surprised by this response, coming from someone warned me before that if you study sadness, you will find sadness, but I understand it nonetheless. For I, too, was drawn to something similar. Beyond a love for the language, I was fascinated by the “idea” of Russia—the wide open, seemingly limitless geography, the idea “wandering” which has figured into Russian history and is seen as a typically Russian characteristic, and the contemplative nature that comes with this, Russia’s rich literary tradition, the competing extremes that define that elusive so-called “Russian soul.” Somewhere between landing in Sheremetyevo II two and a half years ago, reading Dostoyevsky and studying Russian in Canada, and deciding to come back, I fell in love with the “idea” of Russia. Perhaps my disillusionment is a simple result of how little this “idea,” whether legitimately formed or not, fails to match up to the reality. Yes, Russians, on the whole, are well-versed in their literary past and proud of their literary heroes. Yes, there is truth to the “cold on the street, warm in the home” image of Russian person-to-person relations. Perhaps they know a little more about suffering too. But, on the flip-side, it is hard to describe the crudeness of the capitalism that is sweeping the country. Women talk unabashedly about finding husbands with nice cars and money, are shameless in their public application of make-up, their love of fine clothing, stilettos, and tight jeans, etc., and are unforgiving when they share of their dislike for “feminism.” Men stare back in return, approvingly grabbing buttocks here and there. Stores and restaurants are flooded with bad English pop music, despite the fact that no one knows what the songs are about (they are probably better off for it). The streets are lined with barefaced advertisements; the IKEA mall is the newest hangout. “Honour” and “honesty” seem as foreign as concepts can be—university walls are lined with advertisements of where you can buy theses, exams, etc. (when Jenny told the language institute she was too busy writing her thesis to teach this term, they replied “we can ‘help’ you with that”). Contrary to Mark’s expectations, superficiality is alive and well—thriving even—in Russia. Russian capitalism has a crude and unforgiving face. Individualism (in so much as this equals self-interest) is in, communal, shared responsibility is out.

(one week later)

…but did I not just spend the evening surrounded by friends, real friends, both foreign and Russian? And were they not laughing, joking, smiling, tearfully saying goodbye? From this sample, everything I’ve just written seems irrelevant. Is it merely self-flattery to say that my Russian friends are atypical, that I mix with a crowd that is somehow above the rest? Perhaps. But are they not just as human, in their faults as we? Is there really anything that separates us at all? Who am I to judge, to know anything about a country, a people, at all? How can I ever know, I, a wayward goldfish always looking through an invisible (though sometimes acutely visible) wall?

Images of the Steppe (Adventures in Magnitagorsk Part III)

I realize this post is now a month and a half overdue, but better late than never, right? (Plus I now have a super speedy wifi connection in the dorm, only 5 months later than expected) Sometime way back when we were in Magnitagorsk, we took a day trip to a mountain in neighbouring Bashkartostan, and instead of the ski lift, we used our legs to get to the top. Despite foggy weather on the way up, the sun did make an appearance, illuminating the steppe below. Here are some images...

King (and Queen) of the Hill

Contrary to popular belief, the Urals actually are mountains