Week Three?

This week's gone by really fast. We've buckled down to the serious Russian grammar, media literacy, phonetics, and "speech practice." This week we've been delving into the wonderful world of the Prepositional Case, which I learned two or three years ago. What I really need is more practice speaking and listening, and tons more vocabulary. Russian teachers tend to emphasis grammar over vocabulary, and theory over practice, so that's been frustrating. It's hard to stay engaged in classes where I'm mostly not speaking very much, just listening and writing stuff down, learning and re-learning the ins and outs of the prepositional case.

On Tuesday, we had our first P.E. class at the university. It consisted of running a mile, maybe a mile and a half, and most of the Russians started walking after the first few hundred feet. For once I was running up front, along with a couple other Americans and a couple other Russians, and I left the class feeling pleasantly competent.

Not so with the sambo class we had later that evening. It was the first class, so we did mostly strength and agility training, falls and rolls. I'm pretty good at the falls, but I can't seem to do the rolls right; our instructor, miming without words so as to be perfectly understood, told me I was rolling over like a dead person. My whole body is still pretty sore from our Tuesday class, and I have another class tomorrow.

On Wednesday after classes, we went to Millenium Park and played a rousing game of Frisbee Post League, a frisbee sport we've invented that can be easily played in the small, thickly wooded parks of Kazan. Then on Thursday, I had an audition for the university "violin ensemble," a group of seven or eight violinists with piano accompaniment.

I arrived at the music department early. The conductor was very late. When he arrived, I was deep in conversation with a Russian student about race relations in America and the proper usage of the words "slick" and "cool."

The conductor, Oscar, is an energetic, eccentric man with a crazy sense of humor. I'd been told that he was "strange;" as I suspected, he's just a typical conductor. After I played part of the Beethoven sonata I'd prepared, he asked if I could play him something "technical," then took my violin, saying, "for example:"

He played a ridiculous Paganini caprice. I said, "Net." He laughed and said, "Xorosho, yasno."

He was very friendly, if a little intimidating, and it sounds like he's going to let me play.

The other violinists started to arrive. They were all really good, conservatory-level violinists, and they played some awesome arrangements of pieces by Dinicu, Khachaturian, and Shostakovich. I sat and listened; there was no way I could keep up sightreading. Oscar conducted, sometimes beating time with an orange comb that snapped in half under the weight of his exertions, sometimes waving his arms, almost dancing, sometimes, when the spirit moved him, picking up my violin and playing along from memory. I was fascinated and moved; I stopped worrying about my Russian, and suddenly I was understanding everything. I was speaking, as the Russians say, "freely," if not totally fluently.

It's that old saw again - "music is a universal language." I would assert that it's more like a universal community; all my life I've felt at home among musicians, and Kazan is no exception. Once you share something as deep as music, everything else seems easy.