Wet Hot American Summer

Hello all. It has been over a year since my last blog entry and eventually I’d like to return to blogging, though perhaps only sporadically, as writing a post takes a lot of time. Since it’s been a year, I guess there is a lot to write about…but this post will not be a summary of the past year, but rather a summary of my experience working at a summer camp at Lake Baikal. Perhaps I will give a year-long summary in a future post, but not today. This post was written about a month ago on a train, and only posted now:


I am writing this 3 hours into my journey home from Irkutsk. I’m scrunched up on a top bunk on train 205, wagon 8, place 52. According to the electronic display, the temperature inside is 23C and the bathroom is unoccupied, and I just cleaned a bunch of sand out of my pen. I’ve been told that I will be cleaning a lot of sand out of everything soon and will continue to do for a long while. This sand will be one of the reminders of the past 3 weeks that I spent working at a summer camp on the shore of Lake Baikal. For those of you unfamiliar with geography, it is the deepest (and most voluminous!) lake in the world, containing 1/5 of Earth’s freshwater not contained in the ice caps.


I received this job thanks to one of my uni students. While discussing her 10 days spent at camp I remarked that I too would like to travel to Baikal and hang out. She said there were still 2 more sessions left and that I should try to apply because they might need a native English speaker to teach at the camp. At this particular time, most of the surrounding areas were on fire and the city was filled with smoke. I looked out my window and thought: damn, I want to be somewhere else, it can’t hurt to try. I wrote to the camp and sent in a resume, not expecting any sort of reply, or a polite no thanks. Well a few hours later my phone rang and the woman on the other end informed me she was from the camp and said she looked everything over and was wondering how quickly I could make it. I told her I could leave whenever, and within 2 days I had purchased train tickets to Irkutsk, where I hoped this woman would meet me at the train station as she had promised. I was a bit nervous about the whole thing because it happened so quickly and seemed so organized…something that is unusual here in Russia.


My train journey was to take around 36 hours, plus a 6 hour layover in the middle of nowhere, which turned out to be extremely boring (who would have thought?). Trains here make me nervous because it’s luck of the draw as to who you’re going to get stuck with for your journey, and of course there is the fact that there is nothing to do on the train so a lot of people use this free time to see how much they can drink and often being forced into a confined space with someone who is wasted or trying to get you wasted can turn out rather badly. Luckily my train was only full of a weird spiritual group who were travelling together to Baikal because it was a source of energy. They spent the entire train ride giving each other different types of massages. They asked me if I wanted a back massage and I decided to accept since I’d never had a massage before. However, when my turn came, I was forced into receiving a foot massage (those of you who know me well know how much I hate feet…I guess at least I didn’t have to reciprocate). The massage was some special technique which was incredibly painful. Working on my left foot was a babushka named Valentina, and working on my right foot was a younger girl named Sveta. Baba Valya was especially rough, jamming her fingernails into my toes and telling me that the pain was good and I needed to breathe “through my toes”. As she was digging into my toes, she looked me in the eyes and said “you’ll always remember Valentina.” I guess it would be kind of difficult to forget since it was the most painful experience of my life and it also happens to be my girlfriend’s name.


Eventually the 36 hour massage fest ended and I arrived in Irkutsk at 6am. I was really hoping this lady who was supposed to meet me didn’t forget about me, and luckily everything turned out fine. She had thought it was a good idea for me to arrive early and spend a day or two walking around Irkutsk since it’s a historical city. The camp paid for me to stay in a hostel in the city center. The place was basically an apartment run by a middle aged woman named Lena and her son Maxim. Maxim was a self-described internet addict and spent almost 100% of his waking hours on the Russian version of Facebook pouring over pictures of some Ukrainian girl he had begun messaging on the site. The other guests of the hostel were all Europeans who were travelling on the Trans Siberian and so we walked around the city together. For those of you who haven’t been, Irkutsk is a really nice city in comparison with Tomsk. It has a much more European feel and is…cleaner. The people also seemed different (less drunks and people with prison tattoos roaming about). Despite being the same size, the city center is bigger and lacks the drab Soviet apartment buildings. However, I quickly got bored. I live in Russia, so seeing a new Siberian city isn’t exactly that interesting anymore. I was certainly ready to go to camp.


Getting to camp turned out to take longer than I had expected. Irkutsk is located only about 40 miles away from the lake and so I figured it would be a quick bus ride. I was wrong. All the new campers and new staff gathered at 8am outside of a local school and then boarded the buses. It turns out we were going to the other side of the lake, which took us 12 hours because my bus driver got lost. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to interact with teenagers, and I spent a lot of those 12 hours hoping that such and such kid wouldn’t be in my group, because they were a rather unruly bunch. We made our first stop after only an hour or two because these kids had forgotten to use the bathroom before we left. Immediately everyone poured out of the bus and lit up cigarettes. Mind you, these kids ranged from 12-18, and most of them were smoking.


Finally, after 12 hours of riding the bus and stopping for the kids to piss/smoke/eat, we arrived at the camp. Immediately we split the kids up into groups. The camp actually consisted of 3 different programs (English, Film, and a regular camp) and I of course worked in the English program, in which the kids were expected to speak English 24/7 for the next 10 days. I was thrown into working right away and told to test the kids’ language levels so we could kick out people who couldn’t function in English. I felt bad having to send kids to the other program, but whatever. Then I was shown to my tent. Yes that’s right – tent. This was real camping. No cabins, no bathrooms, no showers. Just tents, a sleeping bag, an outhouse and a banya for washing. My first impressions of the camp were that it was….rather small. It probably stretched about 300 yards and was only about 100 yards wide. I guess I was used to the large American camps and was expecting something slightly more exciting. There were no canoes, ropes courses, ziplines, swimming pools, etc. This was a beach and a lake and some tents. Even the kitchen was in a tent. There was no electricity except for in the administrator’s tent. If you were on staff you could charge your phone or maybe check your email if the satellite internet worked. For the first 3 days of camp I would be sharing my tent, but after that my tent mate left to go to Europe w/ his soon to be fiancé and I was left with my own tent, which was at least a plus since the kids were 4 to a tent.


The weather at first was shitty. I had been told that it would be cold but this was August and in Tomsk it was pretty hot so I expected it to not be as bad as they had told me. Often I think Russians try to exaggerate things to scare me, but in this case it was actually cold, with temperatures at night dropping into the low 40’s. Low 40’s would be ok if I was like…inside. But I was in a tent, sleeping on the ground and it was cold and uncomfortable. I had mistakenly not brought any sort of sleeping pants so I spent the next 20 days sleeping in jeans.


It took time getting used to everything going on at the camp. Just as a cultural note, the “bathroom” was the most difficult thing to get used to. As an American, I’m not used to shitting in a hole in the ground, and I wasn’t exactly sure of the technique. Properly squatting requires your feet to be flat on the ground, and I’ve heard that due to the tendons in your foot, if you’re not used to doing this from a young age, it is fairly difficult to acquire this skill – therefore I was a bit afraid I was going to fall in due to a balancing problem. I never did fall over (or in) but I never did feel completely at ease while using the bathroom. It’s also not the most pleasant experience to wake up each morning and have to brave the sights and smells of an outhouse.


Other than the toilet situation, another thing that was difficult to get used to was just the camp itself I guess. As I mentioned, it was relatively small and there were a lot of rules. You seemingly couldn’t do anything without the permission of someone else. Part of the reason for this is that there was an administrator who worked at the camp, but also a friend of the camp’s owner, who didn’t work there but was ultimately in charge. He came up with mindless tasks and was really strict. He was also an alcoholic but didn’t start drinking until the very last session. I feel bad saying this but when he was drinking, everything was much better because he stayed in his tent and didn’t come up with any stupid tasks or enforce dumb rules.


I felt relatively trapped, and a bit like I was in prison. The bad camp food and regimented/monotonous daily schedule certainly didn’t help matters. (fun fact about Russian camp food: there are a lot of stupid laws concerning what you can and can’t serve so meals were mostly meat and some sort of bread/pasta. No fresh fruits or vegetables or anything that could be you know…nutritious). Compounding this feeling was the fact that in general (and this is my own opinion), I don’t think that Russians think Americans are very smart, or good at things that involve being outside (the latter may be true), so they are often disrespectful. We had radios, and a number of times I heard offhand remarks about “the American” on the radio, usually after I had done something without permission. A lot of the staff just assumed I didn’t speak Russian and didn’t really acknowledge me, which was also annoying. Within a few days I had hit my wall and found myself wanting to go home. Other counselors also wanted to leave so I didn’t feel that bad about my negativity.


My work at the camp was supposed to initially involve teaching English in the English program, and I was told I would work 3 hours a day and then I could do whatever I wanted. I ended up being recruited into working in the other programs as well, which was a bit more difficult because those kids didn’t want to learn English - they’re at camp after all. I should mention I was vastly underprepared for this position because I had been told prior to arrival that I didn’t need to plan anything and that there was a book there with the daily lesson plans and I just needed to wake up, open that book and everything would be laid out for me. Not so. There were no plans, and I’m not used to working with teenagers…especially not in a setting where you need the activities to be active. Luckily some of the other teachers were able to help me out a bit but I still felt decidedly unprepared, old, and not cool, especially when working with the campers who weren’t there to practice their English.


Gradually I began to get to know some of the other teachers and staff at the camp, and when I hung out with them, everything was pretty good. Like I mentioned, at the beginning of camp the weather was rainy and bad. It sucked living on a beach next to a nice like and not getting to (or even be allowed to) swim. Eventually towards the middle of the session things began to metaphorically and literally brighten up. The sun came out and it was warm….kind of. Because Baikal is a lake, it is really windy. Even if it is in the 80’s or 90’s and sunny out, it still feels cold because it is so damn windy. It makes it awfully easy to get sunburnt because you don’t feel like you are warm and getting a tan. I also decided to participate in activities with the campers, which I wasn’t obligated to do and most of the other teachers just slept during this time. My campers the first session were pretty cool and I really enjoyed interacting with them. We also had a good dynamic because I wasn’t in charge of them or having to tell them what to do.


The first session I worked there was a lot of adjusting but by the end I was starting to have a decent time I guess. All in all when there were cool people around it was fun, but other than that it kind of sucked. The first session also ended on a bad note because I got food poisoning from some undercooked meat. A few other people also got sick. I was given some weird paste out of a tube labeled “absorbent”. I guess it was supposed to absorb all the puke in your stomach or something? I don’t know. Luckily I got food poisoning on a day when the campers were leaving so I could just stay in my tent and sleep all day. Unfortunately it was cold and raining.


I don’t have much to say about the second session, except that it overall sucked. For this session I had switched to the position of camp counselor, which meant I was in charge of a group of teenagers. This particular group was not as sociable as the kids in the first session and overall I just didn’t like them very much. I spent a lot of time hanging out with some of the counselors from the other programs and tried to spend a minimal amount of time in my own program. The weather was terrible every single day and we didn’t swim even once the second session. An interesting note about punishment at this camp: it was pretty wild. Counselors in the other programs were a lot more power hungry and strict than I was and some of the campers were pretty uncontrollable. One kid hit his girlfriend but no one saw it so we couldn’t do anything about it. Eventually that same kid and his friends kept flashing a group of my campers. They ended up being tied together at the ankles and wrists for the entire day. Imagine trying to use an outhouse toilet while tied to two other people. Another popular form of punishment was tying large pieces of wood to kids. I was pretty surprised any of this was allowed.


I was glad to finally leave and get back to civilization. My trip back was pretty uneventful. Another long bus ride back to the city, a night at the hostel, and then a train ride back. Luckily no 6 hour layover this time. When I arrived home I immediately took a shower, paid for my internet, and spent the next two days doing nothing. All in all I’m glad I went but I can’t say I had the best time ever, or that it was even good most of the time. I really liked being outside in the fresh air but sleeping in a tent on the hard ground and not having any amenities really loses its charm quickly. I was at camp for 21 days, but some of the other counselors and staff lived there for the entire two months. I don’t know how they survived. There are some people who have been living at the camp all summer since 2006 and love it. Many asked if I would return and just said maybe and it depended on what else I was doing, etc., etc. In actuality I really doubt I would go back, but I said the same thing about Tomsk and yet here I am. Life is strange sometimes always. That’s about it….I’ll leave you all with some pictures I took on my Pentax 35mm film camera:

369 and Counting

After doing some careful math (or maths if you’re using the Queen’s variant of English), I’ve determined that as of today, I’ve been in Russia 369 days. I surpassed the big one year mark on August 29th. If you want some more math(s), I’ve spent 4.25% of my life here. I think I’ve earned the honorary title of Сибиряк (Siberyak). My 365 day mark placed itself at an interesting time, as I am now staring down the barrel of another 300 and some days here, and am beginning to contemplate my future a bit more. Though summer isn’t officially over, it visibly is. The leaves are turning yellow and falling, and there is that distinctive smell of autumn in the air. Fall is my least favourite season for a number of reasons. I’m highly affected by light and colours, and since my favourite colour is green, the reds, yellows, and eventually browns of autumn really bother me. That wild and blazing orange sunlight that comes at four in the afternoon also gets to me, reminding me that soon the sun won’t even be out at 4pm. But, the thing that I hate most about fall is the sense of death and decay, because that’s what is happening all around. Slowly it grows colder and grey, and the drab Soviet apartment buildings become almost indistinguishable when set against the ever greyer sky. Many people don’t think about this, but it reminds me of my own mortality, and I don’t like that. It also reminds me that winter is coming, and here in Siberia, winter is long and very, very cold.

But enough about the weather. Today is not only just day #369, but also the beginning of the Russian school year, which I’ve never been present for, and let me tell you: It’s interesting. It is quite possibly the most disorganized thing I have ever seen. All over Russia, school officially starts on the 1st of September. Let me restate that: “officially” starts. As of the 31st of August, my department still didn’t have the schedule posted, or even finished. I went in to check my schedule and was informed that my class won’t even be put on the schedule until next week, after students have already started their other classes. This leads me to be a little worried that the university isn’t taking my course seriously, or even that they will drop it completely. I was asked by the dean back in June to plan a literature course for this semester and I chose the theme of short stories. I asked them when I should turn in my plan for the course, and they said September, and to me this was unimaginable that they didn’t even want to see my syllabus until after classes had already started, so I brought it in at the end of August, but no one really seemed to want to look at it. If they dump my class after I spent a lot of time planning it, I’m going to be pretty angry.

Another thing that has me worried at the university is a group of British exchange students who will be studying in our department. When I was checking on my non-existent schedule, I was informed that instead of teaching the four groups I was originally assigned, they were going to combine them all into one section and then combine the students from a different level and stick them in a class, meaning I’d teach 40 to 50 students per section, and only have two classes a week. I had set up my course to be discursive in nature with grading based on attendance and participation – a model that certainly wasn’t going to work with 50 students jammed into a lecture hall. I implored them to divide the classes into two groups so that I would only have to deal with 25 students at a time, which was still too many in my opinion. They reluctantly agreed to split up the larger of the two groups so that I would have three classes a week. I get paid a flat rate per month no matter how many classes I teach per week, but I legitimately enjoy teaching (most of my) classes here, so I asked them if they could give me back the students I taught last year, to which she responded “welllllllllllllll…..we’ll see, because….you knowwwww….we have these British students who will be here.” I pointed out that they were students and not teachers, but I was informed that part of their exchange program involves them participating in the Russian students' oral practice classes, so I wouldn’t be needed as much. This pissed me off a little bit, especially since I was told back in June that this would not be the case. At least none of the students like British English, and I still hold the status of native speaker of American English.

Despite all of this, I am glad for the beginning of the school year. Financially, it gives me stability. I’ll (as far as I know) be working at the university, and my private students are slowly trickling in. Summer was really tough, and a few times near the end I had to borrow money from my parents so that I didn’t starve, which made me feel really bad. The ultimate low was when my father was out of town and couldn’t put money in my account, and my mother was at work and suggested I call my little sister to borrow money from her. I couldn’t bring myself to do that, so I called my grandfather instead. The issues with money really get to me because over here, money carries a bit of an additional meaning. I know a lot of people my age and older who live with their parents, but at the same time, people here get married and start families much younger than in the United States, and the male is expected to be the bread-winner. A financially insecure male is not seen as marriage material. I am in no ways interested in getting married and starting a family at the moment, but I am still exposed to this culture 24/7, and hearing males and females alike speak on the topic of money with this attitude really annoys me. Believe it or not, gender roles in general are my least favourite thing about being here. For those of you who saw me back in December, you’ll remember that the first thing I did when I got home was paint my nails as a kind of personal protest against all the gender bullshit I was subjected to here. As an interesting cultural note related to this subject, it’s virtually impossible to have a long conversation with a female here without her somehow bringing up the topic of matrimony. Whether it be about one of her friends getting married, her own insecurities about her potential future, or another issue, the subject is unavoidable.

While on the topic of financial matters, yesterday I was contacted by a company here in town asking me to lend my voice to their software advertisement. The phone call went something like this:

Girl: Hello is this Andy?
Me: Yes
Girl: Hi Andy, this is Yuliia, I got your phone number from a professor Lyudmilla Milokova, do you know her?
Me: No…
Girl: Well, ok, she knows you. Anyways we are making a commercial for some software we’re developing and need a native speaker to do the voice over, are you interested?
Me: sure…but are you sure you want my voice?
Girl: Ok well stop by our office tomorrow at 11 and we’ll have you read through the script and we’ll see what we think!

So this morning I stopped by, and I was expecting them to be turned off by my nasally and sometimes annoying voice, but they were quite satisfied by my voice over abilities and probably more so just desperate to have a native speaker that they gave me the job. I’ll be recording on Monday and will receive a whopping $30 for my involvement. How exciting. I’m still not sure who this professor is that recommended me, for all I know the secret police gave them my number. I know from my blog statistics page that they follow these posts because before I even post on Facebook that I’ve updated my blog, I immediately get hits from Russia. Hey guys, thanks for reading!

The school year starting also means that my non-Tomsk born Russian friends have begun to come back to town, which I am grateful for. As well as being financially tough, the summer was also boring. I was sometimes actually glad when the weather was shitty because it made me feel much better about doing nothing. However, my boredom did lead me to take up some activities in my free time so that I wasn’t always banging my head against a wall or trying to find someone on Facebook to chat with. One thing that surprised even me was that I joined a gym. I’ve been meaning to get in shape for years and after running out of excuses, and getting tired of Russians asking me what fitness activities I engaged in, I decided to buy a gym membership. I picked the gym closest to my house, knowing that the closer it was, the more likely I would be to go, and to my surprise, I have been going four times a week. I also changed my diet to a relatively gluten-free and protein based diet. I’ve yet to become Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I have noticed a decrease in body fat, and hopefully soon I’ll gain some muscle. I’ve also taken up photography again, which I used to do back in high school. My father sent me my Pentax K1000 35mm SLR, which I’ve been relearning how to use. I’d never shot in colour before, so I’ve mainly been taking some test shots and trying to get the lighting and balance right. Here are some I took the other day, dust comes courtesy of the shitty scanner I used:





And so as the curtains close on summer, I look forward to the coming year in anticipation, as well as apprehension. The apprehension comes from the ever present sense of uncertainty that lingers around me. In this past year I’ve come quite a ways, but it’s always been 2 stumbles forward, 1 step back. I’ve gained friends and opportunities, but friendships I treasured have fallen to the wayside, and I’ve been stabbed in the back by people I trusted. I’ve come to expect the unexpected, but am still surprised when the unexpected occurs. I’ve been forced to grow up and have gained a lot of life experience, but I’ve also lost my sense of purpose and direction here in more ways than one. It’s becoming more and more apparent to me and to others that I don’t want to stay here much longer, I don’t belong here, yet some strange magnetic force draws me in. Russia is an interesting place because when I’m here, I hate it, but when I’m not here, I yearn for it. In my mind I’m tantalized by the romantic side of the country; Russia: Land of the Tsars, the onion-domed cathedrals, Dostoevsky, the samovars, vodka and caviar, mushroom hunting, shashliki, and those -40 degree winter nights spent inside drinking tea with babushkas. However, the reality is much harsher. I can only walk up and down the same dirty streets so many times, or ride the smelly buses that are packed with drunkards with prison tattoos. Eventually I will have to summon up the courage to leave. People often ask me what it’s like living here, and I answer them that it’s a lot like being at the circus, but someone has left the lions and bears in charge of the show, and has also given them the key to the liquor store.

To end on a positive note, I’d like to welcome my good friend Gary back to Russia. Gary and I started together in Russian 101, and he was in my group when I came here two years ago. As of tomorrow, he will be returning to Russia as a Fulbright scholar, and will be living in Kaliningrad. You can follow his highly entertaining blog posts here: http://wheninkaliningrad.blogspot.com/

Hunting the Elusive Great White

This post is from the end of July, but due to lack of internet, it has been postponed until the end of August. Enjoy.

Russia is a country that has a lot of ideas, legends, and images associated with it. Whether it be the countless onion-domed cathedrals, the vast tundra, black caviar, a journey on the Trans-Siberian, or nuclear warheads being paraded across Red Square, everyone has their own visions of Russia. A popular misconception my students have for instance, is that they think everyone in America thinks there are wild bears on the streets. One of the things that always interested me when I was studying Russian, and even for the first part of my stay here, was the variety of outdoor activities that people here engage in. Since making more friends, I’ve gotten to try a lot of them, my favourite being the traditional Russian grill out (shashlik). The planning for that is always quite annoying because there is always one person who invites everyoneeee they know without telling you, and trying to guesstimate how much food and supplies to bring can become an expensive pain in the ass. However, one activity that has fascinated and eluded me from day one is mushroom picking. I was first told that picking mushrooms is a popular activity here in Russian class at university, and ever since that day I’ve wanted to try it. Perhaps it’s because I hardly ever see mushrooms in the wild in the US, that the idea of a forest full of them excited me.

The only person I knew who picked mushrooms was the old lady I used to live with (Lyubov), and we had discussed going many times in the past, but nothing came of it. Well friends, yesterday was my big day. After going back and forth as to whether or not to go due to the possibility of rains, I made the decision that we should at least try. I was told to bring a bag, some water, a knife, something to eat, and anything else I might find useful. Then I was to stand at the bus stop at 8:30 and wait for Lyubov to call me and tell me which bus I needed to board. I waited at the stop and after several back and forth phone calls with instructions, I met Lyubov on the bus that takes you across the river and out of the city. We sat on the bus for about a half hour as it snaked in and out of the village across the river.

When we got off the bus, we weaved in between some apartment buildings and private houses to get to the entrance of the forest. I had expected to walk about ten minutes into the woods, veer off the path, and boom, there would be some mushrooms. I was partially right as there were mushrooms as soon as we got into the woods, but Lyubov informed me that we had an hour to two hour hike ahead of us so that we could go to a better place. She told me we weren’t hunting just any mushrooms, we were after the great Belie Griby (white mushrooms), and that they grow in the moss, which didn’t start for a few kilometers. We walked further and further into the woods and Lyubov showed me a few mushrooms here and there that were edible but that she considered shit. For being an old lady she sure cursed a lot. I was a bit worried at first because I wasn’t very good at identifying mushrooms and kept mistaking some mushrooms for others, and didn’t want to accidently poison myself. Luckily the poisonous ones are fairly obvious. We hiked on and I tried in vain to gather some berries along the way, but my harvest was quite poor. It’s a lot of effort to even just pick a handful of some of the smaller ones, especially when there aren’t many there.

Despite categorizing a lot of mushrooms as “shit,” I noticed that when we finally got to where the moss began to grow, Lyubov already had quite a few mushrooms in her bucket. Perhaps she was hoarding the good ones for herself. We steadily made our way off the path and made our way into the woods. Walking on moss was quite a nice feeling, as it is very soft under your feet. Because we had gotten there at around 11, many people had already been through the area, and the ground was littered with mushrooms people had discarded. Apparently a lot of people also thought these mushrooms were “shit.” Lyubov assured me that there were more mushrooms than people, and our search began. I had no idea what we were looking for, but Lyubov seemed to be finding stuff all over the place. At first I was fairly slow at finding anything, but gradually I began to find some here and there, but I still had no idea what this elusive white mushroom looked like. Lyubov said that we might not find any at all, but after a half hour or so, she called me over to show me her find. I had anticipated my keen eyesight being a key advantage over Lyubov’s magnifying-glass-sized-glasses, but apparently they weren’t. I was surprised she had seen this thing at all. There, buried beneath the moss and leaves was the barely visible reddish-brown cap of the Belyi Grib. She pulled back the moss to reveal a large white mushroom, the likes of which I had seen painted on souvenirs all around Russia. “Look how he sits there like a Tsar!” exclaimed Lyubov. She took out her knife and cut the mushroom just above the root, and then put it in her basket. I continued searching, and after a few minutes, I also thought I found one, however I was incorrect. Discouraged, I searched on, looking for mushrooms that sit there like Tsars. Mushroom hunting takes a lot of attention and patience, because a lot of them are hidden by moss or leaves, and good ones are sometimes quite rare. However, I soon began to get the hang of it, and after a while, I found my first few mushrooms on my own, and finally my first great white. I was very excited.

I figured we would be in the woods for an hour or two tops, because Lyubov is 68, and let’s face it, staring at the ground for hours on end hunting fungi can lose its novelty quickly. However, I was wrong. We wandered around for hours. After four hours I told her I thought we should begin to head back because of the approaching rain, and my hunger. My real concern was that the internet company was supposed to come to my house. Lyubov was not worried about either, and we continued on, perching on a log for a bit to eat some sandwiches that she had brought. I got up and wandered around, and found two huge white mushrooms right under the log we had been sitting on.

After our lunch, Lyubov kept wanting to wander off in all different directions to search for more mushrooms. I was done for the day and still worried about the internet, and the approaching storm. By this time the sky was beginning to darken with storm clouds, and we had lost our path. I told Lyubov I thought we should go, and she said ok, after she explores one more area. I followed behind her. By this point, neither of us had really found anything for a while, and the search was just boring. Finally she admitted defeat and decided that we should head back. But head back to where? There were no paths in sight. Luckily there were no bears in sight either. She asked where the sun was and we finally found it peeping out from behind some approaching clouds. She got out her compass and I followed her. It was a while before we found a path, but it wasn’t ours. I told her we should follow it anyways because it’s bound to go somewhere, but she wanted our path, so we trudged through the woods further. Finally we found something resembling a larger path, and to our luck it had some people (and dogs) on it. I convinced her to ask the people for directions, and after somewhat ignoring us, a man half-heartedly pointed us in the right direction.

There were two ways to get back to the village we needed, the long way, and the longer way, and Lyubov was disappointed that we were going to be going the longer way instead of the long way. I didn’t care, I just wanted to go home. By now the sky was almost pitch black and I could see lightening off in the distance. I had come prepared with an umbrella, but I could see this was going to be bad. It rains a lot in Siberia, but I don’t ever really notice storms. Lyubov kept trying to pick any mushrooms she could find along the path, which slowed us down a bit. It’s interesting to note that on the way in, these mushrooms had been shit, but now she was grabbing anything she could find.

After a half hour, it began to sprinkle. Then, it began to rain. Then, it began to pour. Then, it began to storm. Then, it began to flood. This was one of the worst storms I had seen in Tomsk, and later I would find out that certain areas of the city itself had become so flooded that the buses couldn’t even move. We got lucky…I guess. Lyubov busted out some ponchos, and I used my umbrella, but neither were very effective defenses against the torrential downpour that was occurring. What would have been a nice defense would have been a car. And we saw lots of cars. I counted around 30 over the course of a half an hour that just drove on past us. I kept expecting one of them to ask us if we’d like a ride, but Lyubov said it would never happen, and it never did. Everyone did slow down to look at us though. It made me really disappointed that during a storm, no one with means of shelter stopped to help an old lady. It was somewhat of an apt metaphor for a lot of what goes on in life here, and elsewhere. Everyone slows down to look, but no one stops to help.

Finally after about an hour, we made it back to the village, and after waiting for a while at a bus stop, we made it onto a bus, and then home. We were completely soaked. I had stupidly worn one of my last pairs of clean pants, and would not have a washing machine for another two weeks, but I was at least home and had the ability to dry off. And thus ended our mushroom adventures. I am eagerly awaiting another chance to set off in search of the Great White, the one who sits like a Tsar beneath a blanket of leaves and moss, but I have yet to make another expedition. Hopefully, next time it won’t rain. For those interested, the internet company never did come.

And some photos:

2 Month Super Long Update + Pics

If you look at the calendar, than it is officially summer here in Siberia. However, if you look out the window, you might guess it was early October somewhere in the northeastern US. The past two weeks have been cold and rainy, with the temperature hovering in the 50’s or 60’s. This certainly makes me feel better about doing absolutely nothing all day, but it somewhat magnifies my already growing boredom. Summertime here is really boring because almost everyone that I’m friends with has either left for summer, or in the case of my foreign friends, left for good. I feel somewhat cheated, because after suffering the long and frigid winter, summer is (according to the calendar) here, but there is nothing to do, and I’ve found myself longing for September. I’m already getting a preview of the weather, so it’d be nice to have something to do again.

More than 2 months have passed since I’ve posted an actual update as to what I have been up to here in Siberia, so this post will serve as catch up for the past two and half months, during which a lot has happened. I’ll sort this post into categories so as to try to keep it somewhat organized, but it’s going to be long. In no particular order:

Mom: My mother made a journey to visit me here in Russia, and I think she might have regretted it. For those of you who have been here, Russia can be very difficult to adjust to, and I would imagine becomes more difficult the older you are. I flew to meet her in Moscow, and the first thing that happened was I had to search for her in the airport for 2 hours because she had turned her phone off right after landing, and….had fallen asleep!!!! When I found her I was pretty angry. She had apparently taken a sleeping pill on the plane and it hadn’t worn off yet. She definitely did not like Moscow. Moscow is a very fast paced city and it can really grind on you, especially if you’re not used to it. The amount of walking and having to take the crowded metro everywhere was difficult for her and caused us to fight a lot. My mother obviously does not speak Russian, and not being able to do anything for yourself (such as even ordering a meal) can quickly become frustrating. Luckily, Tomsk was much easier on her, and she actually liked the city. She really enjoyed meeting the old lady I used to live with, and the highlight for me was seeing two grandmothers force my mother to take shots of cognac (my mother has never drank before other than a few sips in the past just to try something). I felt bad that we fought so much, especially because she had traveled to the other side of the globe to visit me, and not very many mothers do that.

Work: For the moment, I don’t really have any, other than two sets of private students. At the beginning of June I was fired from my job at the private English school I worked at for the stupidest reason I think anyone could ever come up with. The entire story is this: There was an American girl (Madeline) here in Tomsk that worked at another university as part of the Fulbright program. I kept hearing her name over and over again and since she was another American in Siberia, I thought it might be interesting to meet her and share experiences. We met up one time back in February, and went to a coffee shop and sat for a few hours discussing our lives here in Tomsk, then we parted ways. Fast forward a few months to May. I get a call from the secretary at the front desk, whom I happened to be dating at the time. She informed me that the director of the school was furious at me and wanted to fire me, but she had convinced her not to. I asked why she was mad at me. Nastya informed me at some point during my conversation with Madeline 3 months earlier, I had told her that I don’t make very much money at English House, and that a teacher from the university I work at had overheard me and ratted me out to the director. I was obviously very confused as to what she was mad about, especially because back in February when I had made my alleged remark, I only worked there one or two hours a week, which totaled about $70 a month, ie: not very much money. I wasn’t complaining about the salary itself, I was just making a general statement. I shrugged it off thinking the director would calm down and forget about it. Besides, I thought, why would she fire me? I’m one of only two native speakers she has, and that would be stupid to fire me.

I didn’t hear anything about it after that until a month later when I received a text message from the front desk stating that I was fired. My first reaction was to burst out laughing. Then, I called the front desk to see what this text was all about. Nastya and I weren’t really on speaking terms, so she wasn’t very keen to answer any of my questions, and hung up on me. I decided I would go in when the director was there and demand that she fire me to my face. After waiting for her for over two hours, she walked in and ignored me. I waltzed into her office and she just looked at me until I confronted her about the text message, to which she replied “but, you never worked here,” as if she was trying to play some Jedi mind trick on me. At this point I became really angry and really let her have it. I demanded my pay and she told me I would have to come in the next day. The next day I came in, she saw me, and immediately left. It took me a few more days before I got my pay. I never did get to tell her to fuck off, which really disappointed me.

Other than my private students, the only work I have is to plan my course at the university for this upcoming semester. I’m pretty excited because this coming year I will have my own course and be a full teacher, rather than just an assistant. I originally wanted to teach a cultural course about social problems in Russia, but the dean decided it would be a better idea for me to teach a course about short stories. The course doesn’t exist, so I need to design it myself, which is somewhat daunting because I need to think of an objective for the course, set up the grading structure, find stories, etc.

The News: I was on it. One of the local news programs runs a series about interesting people around town and for whatever reason they picked me. I have turned down interviews in the past based on the principle of “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” and I considered saying no to this one, but the girl was a friend of one of my students so I agreed, thinking that this would be for a newspaper no one read. I was quite surprised when this girl showed up with a film crew. I’ll be honest, at first I said no and they left, but after 5 minutes I felt bad and called them up and agreed to do it. I was a bit surprised because most of the questions I was asked dealt with my band in the US rather than with my life in Siberia. After much pleading and prodding, I agreed to play them a song or two on guitar, which is something I HATE doing. They requested that I do one of my songs, and for whatever reason I decided that I was going to change the time signature from 4/4 to 6/8 and play all the chords in jazz voicings. I played the intro and then immediately switched to Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” which I must say, I sang pretty well. Unfortunately that’s not what they used for the news. They instead used my second attempt at playing my own song, this time with the original chords intact, but slowed down quite a bit and with my voice warbling.

I was pretty worried about how the actual news clip would turn out. I wasn’t too keen on being on the news to begin with, and it came across in a lot of my answers. Part of the reason I had turned down interviews in the past was that the questions are so boring that I was afraid I would start making up ridiculous lies to entertain myself, but I answered all the questions straight, but somewhat absent-mindedly. Usually when you are given a sit down interview, you are told the questions ahead of time, and you can often edit your response a few times. Not in Siberia though. I was especially concerned because I would be speaking Russian on TV, and didn’t want to make a lot of mistakes. I thought they would give me a few chances to answer the questions, but they kept just telling me not to worry. In the end, the clip turned out better than I had expected, but I did come off as kind of a douche. They added their own narration, a few times making up things that I hadn’t actually said, or they had misunderstood. The one clip of me actually speaking that did make the news was a grammatically incorrect story about how my friend and drummer Carson had taken in a picture of Zak Hanson to his barber so that he could get the same haircut. Other moments included them using footage of me just sitting around and not knowing they were filming. Once a get a copy of the clip, I’ll link it here.

Misc: As previously mentioned, all of my friends who are not Tomsk natives have left for the summer, making me pretty bored. This past month has been filled with a million goodbye parties for various foreigners leaving, and I really miss them all. My initial impressions of foreigners in Russia were those of the rich old American men in Moscow who are there because of a midlife crisis. I wanted to stay far away from that scene, and swore off hanging out with foreigners here. However, I wish I had given them a shot much earlier here in Tomsk because they are all students, and I ended up meeting some really great people, some of whom I really wish to see again in the future. I’m so used to thinking that my Russian friends are coming back that it seems a little strange to think that my foreign friends aren’t.

I have been trying to put my boredom to good use, but I still haven’t managed to start tasks such as “getting fit.” Today I spent way too much money making a cheesecake (cream cheese here is rare and really expensive), and I have been trying to learn about wine. One major plus is that I’ve had time to focus on music again. My mother brought me my guitar, and the ability to write once again has alleviated a lot of stress. It’s been almost a year since I’ve completed any sort of composition, and getting back into it takes some time. I’ve been experimenting with a lot of open tunings and have come up with about 5 song structures already in the past month, but lyrics don’t come easily. I often have a lot to say, but once I put it down on paper, it just doesn’t seem right. The stuff I’ve been coming up with also seems a bit strange because it doesn’t have the “pop” quality I usually strive for. I blame my recent immersion into Dylan’s catalogue for this.

Apartment: I moved! For those of you who have read past posts, you know that my last apartment was a piece of shit. Well, at least the building. The apartment itself in retrospect also really wasn’t that great. However, now I live in a new (5 years old) building that until a few days ago was completely graffiti free. This means no piss or shit in the hallways, no crazy old ladies diving through the dumpsters, no gangs of kids in the stairways, no needles, and no drug addicts shooting up in the stairwell. I was hipped to this apartment by one of my former students who informed me that he was moving and put in a good word to his landlord. I pay the same amount of rent as before and have a bigger and much nicer apartment that is still in the center. Comparison pics:


Living Room


Living Room Continued


Kitchen


Entrance Way


Balcony


Elevator Area


Hallways


Bonus pics of old apartment building:



Can you count the needles???

It was 2(0) years ago today

June 21st, 2011
Two years ago today, I first stepped out of a plane and onto the soil of Siberia. Or the asphalt of the Tomsk airport. I was then yelled at for taking a photo of the plane. But minor details like that don’t matter. When two months later I stood on that same tarmac (and again got scolded for my photography), I told myself I would never come back. Now two months later, I’ve accumulated 10 months of exile here in the middle of Siberia, and am preparing myself for another 14 months here. How I ended up here again was somewhat of an accident, and I was a bit amused this morning to stumble across a message I wrote to my friend Nicole the day before I left to return to Russia back in September. For those of you who don’t know her, Nicole was in my study abroad group two years ago, and is one the nicest and most genuine people I’ve ever met. She is currently serving 26 months in the Peace Corps somewhere in Georgia. If she has a blog, you should read it.

The note I wrote to Nicole back in September underlines the uncertainty that has followed this entire experience. For those of you why know any details of my trip, I never intended to stay here in Siberia, I originally intended to live in the city of Petrazovodsk with my friend Dustin, but more or less got stuck here after coming to visit my friend’s host sister whom I had met on my study abroad and had corresponded with for a year afterwards. My plan never involved staying here at all, let alone living here for 8 more months. Here is an excerpt from that letter:

“I forgot to reply as to what I was up to yesterday. Or I didn't forget I guess but I didn't want to post it on facebook because I've been keeping it secret. Anyways, on Monday I'm going back to Russia in the hopes of finding some sort of work and improving my Russian. I'm going to start in Moscow for two weeks and then hop a plane to Tomsk to do some visiting/eating at Sibirskoe Bistro. After a few days there I'm going to Petrozavodsk where Dustin is living for his Fulbright, so I'm going to stay there with him since it's free. I'm going to try to get a job someplace and if that fails I'll try to give private English lessons.”

Reading this made me look back and smile a little bit about the naivety with which I embarked upon this whole adventure. I’m a little bit surprised I did it at all, and a bit more surprised that I succeeded to the point that I have. Packing up and moving to a completely different country without any sense of a plan o or job prospect is a really stupid idea that I don’t think I’d recommend anyone trying. Someone probably should have stopped me but luckily no one did. I’m not sure if I expected to succeed, I just didn’t consider failure as an option. If I hadn’t succeeded, I think I would have felt like a terrible failure and fallen into some sort of depression, so it’s good that I did.

A lot of people, both back in the states and here in Siberia, have asked me why I’m choosing to stay here another year. My original goal was to simply become fluent in Russian so I could move to NYC and find a job and pursue my love of music, and to some degree those goals haven’t changed. I’m not going to lie, I don’t particularly like it here, and I think most people know that. I myself question what I’m doing here at times. However, despite not exactly enjoying my surroundings, I do find it to be interesting. I’d honestly love to move to another city here in Russia, somewhere in the south west with a warmer climate and a more European culture, but I’ve chosen to stay here in Tomsk because I don’t want to start over, and moving would undo the months of networking I’ve done, which is really the only way to move up in pay here. There is also the issue of starting over when it comes to friendship. It is analogous to the first few months at university when you go through 75 groups of friends until you find people you actually click with, and I’m just now starting to click, although I am also trying to reconnect with the people who I used to hang out with here every day when I first arrived. Being here is lonely enough, and I don’t want to have to meet new people all over again.

Preparing to stay another year forces me to examine a lot of questions about my future, such as what am I doing here? How long do I intend to stay? What do I hope to accomplish? What will I do when I get back to the United States? I unfortunately don’t have answers to a lot of those questions, which worries me a bit because I don’t want to get stuck in the rut of complacency. As I’ve said time and time again, I never intended for my path to lead back here to Siberia, and Russia is a big place which I would like to further explore. Perhaps I’d be much happier in another place. However, exploring different places here will take more time and at some point I have to return to the United States. I can’t stay here forever, and don’t want to stay here forever. I have dreams to pursue back home, mainly music, and I don’t want to be too old by the time I get back to seriously pursue any of my goals. I feel a bit like the main character in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” in that at the moment, I really do have no direction home, and that bothers me a little bit. My response to the question “how does it feel?” is that it makes me feel uneasy.

Another problem with staying too long is my growing inability to relate to other people when I get back. Throwing yourself head first into completely different country and culture forces you to grow up quite a bit, and question a lot of things about yourself. This type of experience fundamentally changes you. It doesn’t necessarily change who you are, but it does force you to do some serious self reflection and pick what you value and who you want to be. When I get back, I will have spent at least 2 very formative years of my life living in a culture and place that I’m not part of, that that’s not something a lot of people deal with. I’m dealing with all the pressures, anxieties, and uncertainties of post college life, except I’m facing those problems in a language and place I will never, ever fully comprehend. I’m not taking the “holier than thou” approach, I am just doing something different than most other people, and I don’t think I’ll be able to just snap back into place when I get back to the United States. I found it hard enough to relate to other people while I still lived there, so I can only imagine how much harder it will be when I get back.

I’m having a similar experience here just because I am a foreigner, and that automatically sets you apart from others, especially in a place that doesn’t have a lot of Westerners. One of the things that is really strange about this whole experience is the minor celebrity status you can achieve as a foreigner in such a small place. The second you open your mouth you can be assured that everyone is going to turn around and stare at you, which is something I’ve more or less gotten used to. People approach us on the streets all the time, the papers want to interview you about your experience here, some people take your picture, and others want to start fights. I think being “special” is paradoxically one of the things I will miss the most, and at the same time absolutely won’t miss at all. It will be a strange day when I can stand on the street talking on my phone and no one turns around to look at me, but that day is a little ways in the future. I’ll be interested to hear how other friends of mine who have just returned home after spending a year here take to adjusting back to their lives in various countries. I guess I’ll find out in about a month.

I think this post is long and disorganized enough already, so I’ll sum up what I’ve been up to in a future post after a week or so, because these past two months have certainly been interesting, and I think my experience here will only get stranger. Hopefully I’ll have some good news to share come next week, but at the moment I don’t want to jinx it. I’ll also someday post pictures. I promise. For now though, I’m going to just hold on tight and see where things take me. And I’m sure that after a year, looking back on this post will certainly be interesting as well.

Saturday Bloody Saturday

As I’ve mentioned a few times in previous posts, part of my job at the university entails simply “being American.” Actually that seems to be my job in general here. I get asked to come to classes and events all the time just so that they can have a real life American there. This past Saturday was not really any different. The university was holding an event titled “Armchair Across America,” and as it was explained to me, would be a fantastic day full of school children and university students putting on plays, singing songs, and giving presentations about the United States. In other words, 6 hours of torture. They begged me all month to come to this event, trying to lure me in with promises of apple pie and banana bread. I asked if the banana bread would have walnuts in it, to which there was no general consensus. I said I would probably come, and they asked me to give my own presentation at the end, restating over and over how excited people would be, and that there would be apple pie and banana bread (with or without walnuts). Then I found out they invited some otherrrrr American who is doing something or other at the American Embassy in Novisibirsk (a city located a 4 hour drive away from here). Fuck. That. I want to be the only American, so I retracted my previous probablys in favour of “no.” Plus the woman I work for assured me that it lasts all day and is in general a snooze fest.

Despite my repeated answers of no, the begging continued, and I compromised by saying I would arrive for the second half…maybe. No one really ever checks up on what I do at the university, so sometimes I show up to events just to make sure she knows (or thinks) that I am doing something. It will be good leverage when I decide to ask for a higher salary. When Saturday morning rolled around I was very hungover, but figured I should show up anyways in case the dean of the department was there. I would have much rather spent the day walking around with my friend, but I was good and went to the university. Sometimes when I’m hungover it feels somewhat like being stoned and I just sit there with not much going through my mind. I sat through some inaccurate presentations about American civic groups, Indians (of the feather variety), fast food, and a rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” that resembled sober and shameful karaoke. I had to look away so that I wouldn’t laugh. Pro tip: If you can’t access the upper register of your voice, you probably shouldn’t choose that song to sing in front of an audience. But to her credit, she at least didn’t mess up that key change there at the end.

When the performances had ended and the judges were tallying up the votes, I conversed with some of my more mature and interesting students (the kind that don’t invade my life or gossip). I also talked to some sorority type girl from Indiana who is here to do her teacher training. She wanted to “do something outside of her comfort zone,” so they shipped that bitch here to Siberia. She doesn’t speak any Russian. Coincidentally, I ran into her on the street slutting it up with an Ivan Dragov knock-off. Then John Silver (the American from the Embassy) tried to talk to me, but my desire to be wantonly rude got the best of me so our conversation didn’t get very far passed the question “So, how did you get here?” to which I dryly responded “On an airplane, and you?” I unfortunately missed my opportunity to make any Long John Silver cracks. What a pity.

After sitting through the awards, which always consist of “prizes” which are actually just leftover text books and teaching materials from the office, I left with some friends of mine. As we came around the bend by the main building, we noticed a large congregation of police, students, and police vehicles by the main gates of the university. Large gatherings of police aren’t really unusual in Russia, but that they were on campus and that there was a large gathering of students set off some alarms. We approached slowly and were directed around the vehicles towards the gates. As we passed by the cars, it became apparent that something awful had taken place. In the center of the ring of vehicles were two huge pools of blood and some blood soaked rags. In the woods next to the entrance, a few police officers searched the surrounding area with search dogs.

We stood by the main gates not really knowing what to do. Obviously we wanted to know what had happened, but Russian police are in general not very friendly people. One girl, Natasha, debated as to whether or not she should ask, and finally I went with her to ask a police officer. He stated simply that something bad had happened, eerily smiled and told us to leave. Natasha said we have a right to know what happened but once again he told us to leave. Natasha then asked if he would at least tell us if whatever happened had happened to a person or a dog (I’m not really sure why she asked this, but she was perhaps hoping that maybe someone had killed a stray dog). He smiled and said it wasn’t a dog, and to go home. We stood there for a bit longer and the police began to disperse, leaving the two pools of blood unattended. A large orange power sprayer had been brought in to clean up the scene. Natasha and her friend then walked over to a group of students who had just been questioned by the police. When she came back she had a horrified look on her face. She informed us that two students, a male and a female, had been attacked and stabbed in the neck by one of their classmates. The attacker then fled the scene, which explained why the police were searching with dogs. The reason for the stabbing wasn’t known, but according to the students, the attacker had always been fairly mentally unstable. They also said that the victims had been alive when they were taken away, but that the girl in particular had lost a lot of blood and was in bad condition.

Once we heard this, we decided it was best to just leave. Staying there a few yards away from such a scene just made us kind of sick. We walked down the street and stopped outside of the movie theatre to get some free snacks from two guys passing out cracker samples. While there, one of the girls in our group got a text from one of her friends stating that apparently the female victim had died, but I still haven’t been able to confirm this. True or not, it made my mood for the rest of the day rather melancholy. If the girl had died, it makes me really uncomfortable to have seen the remnants of her life spread out there on the pavement. It’s too intimate for me to have shared in the last moments of someone I didn’t know, and to see their life giving fluids splattered everywhere, knowing that the loss of those fluids had caused their death in such a public way. I don’t even know quite how to put these thoughts into words.

Besides having to see the scene, another thing that upset me was the way the whole thing was, and is being (not) handled. The fact the police didn’t tell us what had happened isn’t exactly surprising, but in the context of the situation, the public definitely should have been informed that there was an armed psychopath on the loose who had already stabbed two people. Universities in the United States would probably be put on a state of alert or lockdown. Also, the media outlets have chosen to completely ignore the event, in favour of stories such as May Day celebrations, or pickets at the main square by angry mothers. I’ve been searching the news sites in hopes of finding out if the girl lived or died, but nothing is mentioned at all. I don’t work at the university on Monday, but I’ll be very interested to see how this tragedy is handled. I’m guessing they will also gloss over it as if nothing had happened. That seems to be a trend here.

Insert Title Here

Everything is broken. I had hoped to make this post a little bit sooner, but my internet has ceased to work. I’m hoping it’s because of the construction going on in my building and not something wrong with my computer. I’ve been in Siberia for 8 months, and by this time, I’ve gotten used to minor inconveniences (what some people would dub “white people problems”). These inconveniences include: no hot water, no water at all, no internet, jackhammers going in the hallway, jackhammers in the room next door, having only one television channel, the elevator sporadically not working, food not at all resembling the picture on the menu, the list goes on and on. Really the only one of these things that actually bothers me is when the water gets shut off. I at least think it would be polite if they would let us know about it. Supposedly in the summer the hot water will be shut off for anywhere between 2 weeks to 2 months, depending on who you ask. For me this is terrible, because I like to be clean, and showering in cold water is awful. The water isn’t even just cold, it’s fucking. Freezing. My attempts at boiling water for bucket showers have proved relatively unsuccessful, but I’m sure practice makes perfect. This rich Russian tradition of shutting off the hot water during the summer seems antiquated, and many argue that they don’t actually do anything to the pipes as promised, it’s just a way for people to suffer more. And while I’m whining, my headphones also stopped working. I have a hard time existing without music, and unfortunately due to finances, buying new ones looks way off in the future.

Finances have been really, really tight the entire time I’ve been here. April has been the most difficult month because a lot of my students who studied with me at the private school left to go to various countries and won’t be returning for quite some time, if at all. Despite the fact that I make a lot more than many Russians, the salaries here are extremely low compared the cost of living. All of my end of the month income goes straight to rent, so I am forced to live off of the money I get from my private students. This is about $40 dollars a week, which is very hard to live on when you need to buy food, pay for transportation, and any other incidentals. There are many times when I have to choose between eating or something else. Most of the time, I choose eating. When dealing with such small amounts of money, the difference between something that costs 50 cents and 75 cents becomes a very big difference in the long run. I don’t think my mother would be very happy to know that there are spans of days when I have absolutely no money in my wallet, or in my bank account. Luckily, I don’t think she reads this. But despite all of this, Russia makes me thankful for what I do have, and I still wouldn’t ever consider myself poor, because I know that I can always ask for help. Some people unfortunately don’t have this option, and I am not sure how they survive here on such small salaries. I’ve certainly learned a lot about budgeting.

But moving on, my Easter turned out to be much better than I had anticipated. Despite my prior pessimism, the whole weekend was one of my better weekends on memory, especially in Russia. I unfortunately worked until 9pm on Friday, but after that, one of my coworkers and I engaged in my new favourite activity, which is drinking on playgrounds after dark. This is a popular activity among disenchanted youth, especially gopniki (the stereotypical track suit clad white trash gangster wannabe’s, look them up on Wikipedia). Saturday was more of the same, this time at a café instead of on a playground. Easter morning I actually worked. I thought both sets of my private students would cancel, but they didn’t. This was good for me, seeing as I need money, and had not much else to do. The two children I taught in the morning were surprisingly well behaved, and they and gave me a “kulich,” which is a traditional Russian Easter cake. After teaching in the morning, I went to a soccer game with previously mentioned coworker. We attempted to meet up with my Italian friends but there were some technological problems that prevented this. However, it turned out to be a great time anyways, despite having to avoid another one of our coworkers. After the soccer game I taught another private lesson, and that was Easter.

Hanging out with a small group of my coworkers has turned out to be a much better idea than hanging out with students. I only hung out with my own students a few times, but even hanging out with other students can sometimes be annoying because I still have to deal with their dorm gossip bullshit. Some of my groups have recently taken advantage of my past casual approach by being just plain rude and arguing with me, which I’m going to have to put a stop to. Marina’s (I’m assuming Pashkova?) comment on my last post is pretty spot on. I have unfortunately achieved a minor celebrity status at our university, and in town in general. There are extremely few native speakers of English in town, so when people hear English being spoken, they turn and stare. I guess I’m used to the United States where everyone is speaking a different language, so being stared at was at first quite strange. It’s very difficult to carry on a conversation with a friend when 20 people are staring at you. I’ve gotten used to it, but it still bothers me from time to time, and sometimes the attention isn’t always positive (drunks wanting to bother me or fight on the bus, for instance). Men especially have quite an angry look on their face when they stare at me, as if they suspect I’m here to steal their women-folk.

In other news, my past prediction about it becoming cold and snowing was accurate. It has been overcast and rainy all week, and on Thursday night it snowed an inch or two. It has since all melted. Thursday night was especially nasty because it had rained all day, and then the snow covered up the slushy puddles, making spotting them impossible. While walking my friend back to her house at 2am, I several times fell victim to these camouflaged slushy traps. It’s interesting that despite surviving a winter where temperatures reached -40F, 30F feels really cold after experiencing summer like weather. That’s all for today. I’ll update with another soon about a tragic event on campus and some photos of my apartment. For now you can enjoy these photos of the view from my balcony: