Last Two Weeks

Last week our Kirovian counterparts came to Kazan for a four-day visit. These are the students, also on our program, who spoke no Russian at all when they came to Kirov, a smaller city 16 hours north of us. We showed them the ever-impressive Kremlin, took them to the Intellect Cafe (an excellent establishment with chessboards and free refills on tea), and went bowling. Then the next day we went to an art museum, a skating rink, and to a Tatar-language play at the Theatre Kamal. Then the next day we went on an excursion to Bulgar, home of the ancient Bulgars who settled Kazan and whose descendants now live in Bulgaria. We walked around the new Bulgar, a sizeable village, and the old Bulgar with its ancient ruins. We also waged some epic snow fights, made animal friends, and had an amazingly quiet few minutes by the banks of the frozen Volga. The next day we went to Boogie-Woogie Pizza, another excellent find, and then we said our goodbyes. The next day, as part of our birthday celebrations for Kelsey, we watched "Kniga Masterov," or "Book of the Masters," the first Russian Disney film. It was an interesting combination of Russian and Disney fairy-tale elements: Baba Yaga, mermaids, princesses, the water of life, and happy endings all around.

Swine flu has overtaken the city, so this past week all the students except us have been "quarantined," meaning they don't have class. On Wednesday, this crazy dance teacher coerced Sam, Ian and I into working lights for a concert for the rector's birthday. I use the word "concert" loosely, charitably. It turned out to be three and a half hours of speeches, set to the ubiquitous disco remix of "Pirates of the Caribbean," interspersed with occasional karaoke numbers. Doing silly things with the spotlights soon lost its charm. We thought it was done, and then the rector got up and made his own speech, which was actually pretty good...the man had something to say about being a teacher.

After all this ridiculousness, we went to see "Czar," a kind of psychological thriller about the life and craziness of Ivan the Terrible. It was gory and incomprehensible.

Friday night I had a gig at The Leprechaun, Kazan's only Irish pub. It was pretty low-key; I just played my limited Irish repertoire for about half an hour.

Today I went and saw an excellent concert of folk music and culture. Really great stuff. It was mostly folk singing in various regional styles. It was all pretty loud and strident, with interesting harmonies and vocal techniques.

So that's been the past two weeks for me. Just over a month remains. I have nothing profound to say right now. I'm having a great time.

Working with our Russian student-tutors, who help us tackle challenging grammar and review the stuff we already know.

The view from the Kremlin at sunset, which happens at 3:30 in the afternoon these days.

Bulgar - home of the ancient Bulgars. These were some fun ruins.

Us on a tank at Victory Park.

"Everybody's Waiting for the Next Surprise"

I think Halloween is something you have to experience to understand. Friday night I was the guest native speaker at an English language "conversation club." The theme was Halloween, and we talked about Halloween traditions and symbols. Everyone spoke really good English, but it was still hard to convey the spirt of Halloween and the idea of scaring people and being scared for fun. People mostly know what Halloween is here, but they don't have the same kind of associations and symbols as we do. For instance, when the little kids saw us carrying pumpkins, they said, "Are those real pumpkins? Are you going to eat them?"

On Saturday we created an American Halloween party of epic proportions at School 165. We carved pumpkins with our Russian friends. (When we smelled burning pumpkin, we remembered to tell them to scoop out the insides.) We cut out bats and pumpkins and witches from wallpaper. Ben and I made an impressive spider web. We dressed up in various costumes, ranging from vampire to "person with a mouse on his shoulder" to President Medvedev.

When our guests arrived, our friend Ilsur made a speech to his "dorogiye druzya." We had a trick-or-treat trail for the little kids and showed the big people the Russian version of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Then the students at the school performed an English play, which involved rhyming couplets and impressive costumes, and we performed our play, a Russian version of Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin that barely held together until the arrival of our friend Diana and her pinata, which was meant to look like a pumpkin but ended up being a kind of ghoul in the Colombian national colors.

After that we took our guests out into the hall for games such as Spooky Musical Chairs (the kids ran around while I played "Danse Macabre" on the violin), Bobbing For Apples, Fortune Telling, Pin the Nose on the Witch, and Mummy-Making (wrapping up little kids in toilet paper.) Then there was the costume contest, and then the party fizzled out. Sam and I recited Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." (Sam was the Raven.) We raised over $4,000 rubles for the orphanage. We smashed the pumpkins on the snow-covered Russian sidewalk. It was the best Halloween I've had in a long time.

Observations

Hello all. This post will consist largely of several unrelated observations, and maybe a few photos as well.

1) Anti-Semitism in Russia.

I hear it all the time in casual speech. At Yalchik, someone called me a "Yevrey" ("Jew") for not sharing my bread, probably not knowing that I really am Jewish, half anyway. (He then retracted this assertion of Jewishness when I gave him some bread.) Yesterday I was playing chess and I moved my pieces to evade a checkmate. "Ah," said my friend Seryozha, "a Jewish move! Sly," he explained when I looked at him funny.

I don't get it. Maybe it's just a way of speaking, the way some Americans say, "That's gay!" to mean "That's bad!" even if they're not particularly homophobic. Or maybe it's deeper than that; maybe the Russians who say these things really do think Jews are stingy and sly. Whenever I confront people about it, they totally evade the question, with non-sequitors such as "Jesus was Jewish!" or "I want to learn Hebrew." They don't even try to explain it or provide a context. It's really irritating.

2) The Disco.

Last night we went to the disco as part of the Day of the First Years celebrations. It was my first club experience, and in many ways had all the seeming of an American club: DJs, strobe lights, bouncers, everyone dressed to kill. The party went until 3 in the morning, and then a lot of the first years went elsewhere to party some more. Crazy. It was very surreal, very very far from home. Probably the highlight of my evening was when they played a techno remix of the Muppets theme song: "Manamana. Doo doooo doo doo doo!" True story.

Today in class we were talking about American clubs vs. Russian discos, and I explained how we card in America. My teacher was incredulous. "You have to show your documents at the club?!" she exclaimed. I laughed so hard; in Russia you have to show your documents everywhere but the club: at the university, at camp, at the gym, whenever the police ask you for them. And not just passports but superfluous, ridiculous documents. The bureaucracy! The absurdity! I would have gone on a rant if I'd had the right vocabulary. I guess I was really tired. The culture shock hit me like a brick wall this week.

Left: Tatar dance/comedy skit. Right: real live communists on Bauman street!

Last couple of week

It's been a good almost two weeks here in Kazan. The weather's getting chilly and the heat's coming on in my apartment. I can't believe I'm almost halfway through my time here.

A couple weeks ago, a few of us went to our friend Kostya's English lecture. We had nothing prepared, so we fielded questions from the students, who were mostly upper-level English or lexicology students, and skillfully drew muffins, bagels, and a map of the United States. We explained American humor, such as "knock-knock" jokes (which were lost in translation), "that's-what-she-said" jokes (which were altogether not kosher for class), and walking into a wall, which is pretty funny in any language. We also taught the students and teacher some useful American slang, such as "chill," "fo sho," "that party was off the hook," and "thizz face." (Forrest's Bay Area slang was new to me too.) However long these students had studied English, I could tell most of what we were saying was lost on them; they sat quietly, wearing faces of polite confusion. After close to seven weeks trying to do everything in Russian, I recognize that face. I guess it's a long road to true fluency, past the entry level of practical vocabulary and into the thicket of real speech.

On Sunday we went to the orphanage and told the orphans about Halloween. We showed them how to carve a jack-o-lantern, too. We're planning some Halloween festivities for them there at the orphanage, and also an event for our friends and acquaintances at a school, with food, a haunted house, a play, and a raffle, as a benefit for the orphanage. Sam, Ian and I have been put in charge of the haunted house, and I'm teaching myself Saint-Saen's "Danse Macabre" as fast as I can.

This week has been a tiring series of rehearsals and audition/performances for "Day of the First-Years." I will likely be in two acts in the final, surely epic, concert on the 20th, playing Irish music and dancing with American and Russian friends.

Today Hillary Clinton was in Kazan. She spoke at Kazan State University, and we were hoping that since we are, after all, here on state department scholarships, we might be able to get in to see her speak. But no such luck. From what I understood of our conversation with the head of security, only people on a list, or of a certain "quality," (i.e., Kazan State students), were being allowed in. So that was disappointing, but I had a nice walk in the park after, so it was all good.

The other day one of our teachers told us about going to school during the Soviet era. It sounded awful. She told us about being made to write with her right hand even though she was left-handed, being made to drink milk even though she hated milk, even to wear her hair a certain way. We had typical American gut reactions to all this: "That sucks! Stick it to the Man, man!" It's one thing to say that and another thing to really stick it to the whole Soviet system of conformity-as-collectivism. Still, I wanted to tell Stalin, do you think the Bolsheviks accomplished the revolution by sitting down quietly, speaking when spoken to, drinking milk when told to drink milk?

The way our teacher put it was, "At home, I was a person; at school, I was just under this system." Since Gorbachev, the education system has changed, but a lot of that mentality still prevails. There's still often a stark contrast between who you have to be at work, at school, out on the street, and who you become at home, around friends and family. Maybe it explains the way people dress up, don't smile, and blend in on the street, giving Western tourists the impression that Russians are cold and paranoid. Exchange students who live with host families find out otherwise; inside the apartment, everything changes.

I was talking to a Russian guy on the bus who simply could not understand why I came to Kazan. "What are you, a Muslim?" he said. I said no. "What are you doing here? Why did you come here?" he asked me five or six times. "To study Russian and understand Russian culture," I said. He repeated, "Why did you come to Russia? Your own problems aren't enough?" I tried to explain that I don't have any problems here in Russia: I'm having an amazing, paid-for study abroad experience, I have friends, I have food, I have interesting and meaningful stuff to do. He still didn't get it.

I've been in a good mood lately. I think that's because I came here to do exactly what I'm doing: learning through experience what I can only learn here. I don't know whether I'm on that long road to language fluency, but I'm definitely in the catacombs of culture, going back and back like the bazaar, through an endless maze of dog-hair socks and discos.

Random stream-of-consciousness post

Hello all. I've spent over a month here in Kazan. It feels like fall now; the leaves are even turning a little bit, although it's nothing like the spectacular colors of New England. I've been really busy cramming my head full of new words, getting to know my Russian peers, preparing for the epic performance that is Day of the First-Years, and still getting to know my way around a new city and a new culture that seems more evasive and full of contradictions the deeper I go into it.

We Americans have finally received our schedules for our other classes; we were told that we hadn't received the schedules earlier because even the regular university students hadn't received their schedules, which was simply not true. So now that we have our classes, we've been spending the bulk of this week scouring the landscape in search of them. Each week the locations of the classes change, and the new schedule is posted in each building. This schedule, too, lies; more often than not we go to room 479 expecting a literature class, only to find that room 479 is really the office of the German department. Or, better yet, some of my friends were looking for a class in Room 2, and found the rooms in the hall numbered 5, 4, 3, 1. No 2.

There's a level of bureaucracy here, especially in the university, that borders on absurdity. No one seems to know where anything is; today I went on a wild goose chase across the center of town, looking for my rehearsal. The conductor told me it was in the psychology department; asking around, I was told that the psychology department was upstairs, across the street, that there could not be a rehearsal in the psychology department, and that there was no psychology department. When I found the psychology department, the security guard asked where I was from, and when I said "America," he launched into a hearty rant about Tatars vs. Russians, Chechnya, Afghanistan, etc, etc, etc. Then the conductor called me and said he really meant the physics department, so I went back to where I came.

The lectures I've found, though, have been good; I sat in on a History of World Art class in which the professor was talking about art in the Stone Age and how the representations of men and women changed as people's lifestyles changed from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. The visuals helped. Then I went to a Music History class where I understood almost everything the teacher said. It helped that I already knew a little about early baroque music, and a lot of the vocabulary was Italian (pizzicato, oratorio, conservatoria, etc.)

And speaking of which, I went to my first opera on Sunday. It was Puccini's "Madam Butterfly," and it was an excellent production, with an amazing set that used lots of moving furniture and projections of different images. The cast was really talented too, and the orchestra. It was a lot to follow, between the Italian singing and the Russian subtitles, but it was great. One fluid, colorful act, then down to the lobby for caviar, then another act.

I also discovered a Russian thrift store. The sign said "Second hand clothing," so I decided to check it out. I could have walked in there with my eyes closed; remarkably, it smelled exactly the same as the Turners Falls Salvation Army. They didn't have any shirts that fit me, but it was a nice find.

Day of the First-Years (Den' Pervogokurnikov), a big university holiday with a huge concert, is approaching swiftly, and I am in two acts. One: a rendition of "The Rocky Road to Dublin," a popular Irish folk song, with me fiddling, my friend Ben singing, and some of our Russian friends jigging in the background. At the "audition," we were one of two acts to get a perfect score, and the other students clapped along to it like they clapped to everything at Yalchik, creating a weird three-against-two Hemiola effect. It was great though.

The other act is a ridiculous dance, also with Ben and me and our Russian friends. We were woefully unprepared, which brings me to my big accomplishment of the week: my first legit joke in the Russian language.

We all went to one of the dancers' apartment to rehearse our dance. We ended up watching TV and eating lots of food instead. During the meal we were talking about how unprepared we were going to be, and I said something like, "This is only practice, guys; tomorrow we're going to have to do this in front of an audience: eat and watch television!"

Okay, okay, it wasn't great. I'm keeping my day job. But I said it in Russian, and they laughed. It's a start.

Na Lager!

Hello friends; I've just returned from the "lager" (camp) at Yalchik, a village about two hours away from Kazan by train. It was a kind of orientation/team-building camp for the freshman class at the TGGPU University, led by some upperclassmen.

How can I even begin to describe it? In some ways, it was like my freshman orientation for high school, except longer, colder, and mostly incomprehensible. We had several "trainings," as they were called, in which we broke into groups and did various team building activities, scavenger hunts, games, and assignments, most of which were totally lost on me. Then we sat around and talked about them for what seemed like hours...it was a grueling test of my aural skills, and often miserable. They kept us very busy at Yalchik; we got up in the morning for "physical education," which turned out to be a kind of outdoor, seemingly eternal, discotheque, and we also broke into groups and prepared skits, songs and dances for a concert, and ate simple but long-anticipated meals.

The constant structure, the trainings, the disco at seven in the morning and the techno at all hours of the night, all the clapping and chanting and singing together, all contributed to a sense of ubiquitous, (to me) oppressive, collectivism. Everything was done in a group, and any stragglers or people who went off on their own, usually the Americans, were quickly led back into the fold. All this made us Americans feel irritable and slightly rebellious, but the Russian kids seemed to love it. It makes sense after decades of a communist society. Maybe it's even older than that.

On the last night, after a concert in which the American men performed Monty Python's "Lumberjack Song" ("Pesnya pro lesnikov"), there was a long meeting , in which we sat in a circle and talked about our experience, passing a candle around. I was amazed at how emotional everyone was; after four days, and with five years of togetherness to look forward too, these kids were crying! It felt like a collective expression of emotion, just another part of the shared experience of the camp, of the class, of the university in general. The act of sharing these dance parties and treasure hunts was more important than those experiences themselves; the togetherness of it all was the experience.

That's what it seemed like to me, but how do I know? I only understood half of what was being said in the candle circle, and when I asked a Russian friend who speaks fluent, impeccable English, she said she couldn't explain why everyone was crying when everything was just beginning; she said she didn't have the English words.

After the candle circle, we put all the candles into the lake, and then we trekked off into the forest to a camp fire. As the fire was dying down, we chanted one of the several slogans that we had been chanting for the past few days: "Vmeste ne strashno!" Roughly, this means "Together, it's not awful!" This seemed to neatly sum up the past few days; we'd been hungry and tired and cold as hell, but what was important was the togetherness. Even for us Americans. This experience brought out all our American cynicism, criticism, and utilitarianism. ("Why are we doing this? This sucks. What is it for?") Still, we made close friends across a cultural chasm that's wide and narrow by turns. We learned Russian folk songs and Russian slang, and somewhere out there, some kids in Kazan are singing:

"I cut down trees, I skip and jump, I like to press wild flowers. I put on women's clothing, and hang around in bars!"

Well, maybe.

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.