"We are living in the future
I'll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago
We're all driving rocket ships
And talking with our minds
And wearing turquoise jewelry
And standing in soup lines…"
-John Prine, 'Living in the Future'
I had what you might call a Jewish Grandmother kind of weekend (fixed latkes, bought a woolly sweater), but there was one heart-racing moment: Sunday night, when I thought my sketchy Russian Internet had finally given out. Sunday night, when I realized (not for the first time) that I love the Internet more than whiskey, ice cream, and puppies. If some perverse Soviet landlord offered me a household Sophie's choice: hot water or Ethernet? – I would go out and buy a big kettle to bathe in. No question.
The 21st century, so far, is distinctly lacking in awesomeness. I came along far too late to be shattered by the end of 60's idealism, but even I can see that. Where are the hover-cars? Where are the eerily intelligent and benevolent aliens? Where are the honest politicians? Anyway, the Internet is one of the few things that are inarguably futuristic and awesome in 2009. This morning, without even getting out of bed, I checked my mail, read the newspapers of three countries, admired my friends' vacation photos, and listened to some music. Later on I'll visit the forums at Dave's ESL café and see if any other English teachers, scattered across the globe, have come up with cool ideas for teaching the irregular past simple to bored 13 year olds. I'm sure they have.
Writing this now makes me feel a bit guilty for being so irked at Skype last night. I was talking to my parents and the connection/sound quality was lousy. I think the exact way I put it was: "Your picture is chopped to bits and your goddamn microphone sounds like you put it in a tin box and dropped it down an artesian well." It was so bad that we had to hang up.
But 'bad,' I now realize, is relative. What did people gripe about before email, bandwidth, international cell phones, etc?
490 BC: Message received. Would have sent him back, but unfortunately, he's dead.
1805 AD: Dear President Jefferson. Bad weather in the Bitterroots. Had to eat the horses. Send help if you receive this letter in the next two years.
1917: About those battle plans, Lieutenant…I think the carrier pigeon got held up in a wheat field…
Put things in perspective. Still, I love hand-written letters, even if they're impossible to receive/send in the black hole of the Russian postal system. Escape velocity can be achieved, but only for a price (insured airmail by European FedEx). Maybe I should handwrite letters and then scan them into my computer and email them. Whoa dude! Too trippy!
Sadly, I don't have a scanner. And the babushkas outside are all bundled up, wading into the snow to sweep the streets with birch-twig brooms, just like they're done for untold centuries. So maybe we're not living in the future after all. S'ok. This era suits me fine. Just as long as I have my Internet...
Monday, December 7, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Rockwell Thanksgiving
In direct contrast to the weird debauchery of their previous party, the girls were hosting Thanksgiving dinner, complete with pie and cranberry sauce. Jeff was in Moscow for the weekend and I'd even made a coffee cake. It was a bleak November day but the pink kitchen was cozy and bright. Everyone was fussing around, putting dishes together, getting everything ready for the guests to arrive. Jeff made eggnog, Jenny and I fixed deviled eggs, Caroline cooked mashed potatoes. I hadn't seen much of them since the end of the internship, so we had a lot of catching up to do.
At 8 PM we laid out the spread and people started showing up, mostly Russian friends, who all refused to touch the dinner until somebody had gone out to a produkti and procured vodka for them to drink with it. It was a lovely meal, albeit culturally divided by those who understood green bean casserole and those who did not, never mind the grisly meat gelatin and cheesy mayonnaise ham rolls that Grisha provided.
After dinner, Oleg brought out his electric guitar and everybody sat around in the living room, listening as he and Jenny sang English pop songs. A little later on, Lindsay and Ayden showed up, and it wore on as really the nicest and most mellow kind of evening. Except for a glass of eggnog, I didn't drink much; I just wasn't in the mood. The Russians, of course, drank steadily, at one point going out in search bigger plastic cups and more bottles.
3 o'clock in the morning found the men in the living room, singing a wobbly rendition of 'Yesterday.' That song always makes me sad, so I went out to the kitchen, where I found Jeff, Heather, and Lindsay sitting on the floor (the chairs had all been taken out to the party room). Jeff was teaching them to count in Chinese. I joined them by the table, and as we talked, people retreated to sleep, the Russians departed, and the night went gently away.
Noon next day found us fixing tea, helping the girls clean up, making plans to meet up later at Mayakovskaya downtown. Since it was my birthday, we were going to revisit the English bookstore and then have a celebratory coffee at the Starlite diner.
I left with Lindsay and Ayden and again we ended up in a kitchen, Ayden's this time, sitting dreamily around the table eating rice and listening to a Shostakovich concerto. It was another gray twilight, hooded crows cawing in the trees outside, lights blinking on across the alley. We got so lost that the whole evening might have disappeared that way, except for Jeff and the girls waiting downtown. So we ventured out again.
Mayakovskaya, the theatre district, was crowded with people strolling in their beautiful evening clothes. The Starlite diner was full of milkshakes and expats, and I bought a visual Russian-English dictionary at the Anglia shop. A nice night out in Moscow. But if I think about this weekend, I have to say that at its heart it was a kitchen weekend.
And really, what more can you ask on Thanksgiving?
At 8 PM we laid out the spread and people started showing up, mostly Russian friends, who all refused to touch the dinner until somebody had gone out to a produkti and procured vodka for them to drink with it. It was a lovely meal, albeit culturally divided by those who understood green bean casserole and those who did not, never mind the grisly meat gelatin and cheesy mayonnaise ham rolls that Grisha provided.
After dinner, Oleg brought out his electric guitar and everybody sat around in the living room, listening as he and Jenny sang English pop songs. A little later on, Lindsay and Ayden showed up, and it wore on as really the nicest and most mellow kind of evening. Except for a glass of eggnog, I didn't drink much; I just wasn't in the mood. The Russians, of course, drank steadily, at one point going out in search bigger plastic cups and more bottles.
3 o'clock in the morning found the men in the living room, singing a wobbly rendition of 'Yesterday.' That song always makes me sad, so I went out to the kitchen, where I found Jeff, Heather, and Lindsay sitting on the floor (the chairs had all been taken out to the party room). Jeff was teaching them to count in Chinese. I joined them by the table, and as we talked, people retreated to sleep, the Russians departed, and the night went gently away.
Noon next day found us fixing tea, helping the girls clean up, making plans to meet up later at Mayakovskaya downtown. Since it was my birthday, we were going to revisit the English bookstore and then have a celebratory coffee at the Starlite diner.
I left with Lindsay and Ayden and again we ended up in a kitchen, Ayden's this time, sitting dreamily around the table eating rice and listening to a Shostakovich concerto. It was another gray twilight, hooded crows cawing in the trees outside, lights blinking on across the alley. We got so lost that the whole evening might have disappeared that way, except for Jeff and the girls waiting downtown. So we ventured out again.
Mayakovskaya, the theatre district, was crowded with people strolling in their beautiful evening clothes. The Starlite diner was full of milkshakes and expats, and I bought a visual Russian-English dictionary at the Anglia shop. A nice night out in Moscow. But if I think about this weekend, I have to say that at its heart it was a kitchen weekend.
And really, what more can you ask on Thanksgiving?
Monday, November 16, 2009
Banya Stories
"You are going to this, right?" Lindsay said on Friday afternoon. We were sitting in the teacher's room, drinking tea. "I'm not going to be the only non-naked person there?"
"Glyn said there'd be a room," I said. "Next to the pool and the sauna. We could hang out there and, you know, drink vodka. And keep our clothes on."
It's traditional, when visiting a Russian bathhouse, to get both undressed and inebriated, but this was a coworker's event, and thus not so much a question of modesty as of survival. The banya visit had been in the works for a long time, and now Masha, one of the Russian teachers, had apparently rented us one. From 11 PM on Friday to 5 AM on Saturday, we would have the run of the place: dry room, sauna, and all.
"I don't know how you rent a bathhouse," I said. "I guess we'll find out."
"Yeah, that's really why I want to go," Lindsay said. "Just to see what it's like…"
At 10 PM, we finished teaching and left work, acquired initial refreshments from the produkti, and met Glyn, the Welshman, at the bus stop. Glyn led us on a vodka-acquiring mission, and then we piled into the #3 bus and rode to the very edge of town, where we found Josh, Masha, and a handful of Russian friends waiting on a muddy path under the trees. Mustered, we walked through the dark to what appeared to be a warehouse. The inside didn't give this impression the lie: on the contrary, there was a large truck, some tools, and a stack of bricks.
"Bricks!" Lindsay hissed at me. "Fucking bricks! Where are we?"
"No idea," I said. "And how does this always happen to us?"
While we were having this philosophical debate, the others were knocking on a metal door in the wall. After a long pause, the door opened on a young woman in uniform, who beckoned us into a shadowy lobby. Masha explained our reservation, and the woman led us through the dark into a cavernous space that turned out to be a mirrored dressing room. A staircase led downwards, presumably to the banya rooms. The Russians began to take off their coats and scarves in a way that struck me as ominous. Lindsay clutched the lapels on her penguin jacket.
"I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it!"
We sidled toward the staircase, but Masha stopped us.
"Take off your street shoes. You might get big fine."
She indicated a sign on the wall forbidding, among other things, shoes and birch twigs. (Birch twigs, of course, are what Russians traditionally use to flog each other in the banya).
I took off my shoes, put on some guest sandals, lest I be rendered sterile by the contact between my bare feet and the cold floor*, and at last went downstairs.
Well, Glyn wasn't kidding when he said we'd rented it out. Yes we had, a whole underground complex consisting of a large room, painted red where it wasn't covered with fake log paneling, red leather sofas, a big projector screen, a pool table, and a stage with a stripper's pole. The whole thing was like a cross between your parent's basement and a brothel.
Up another short flight of stairs was a tiny, icy swimming pool, some showers, and the sauna. Everything was made weirder by the fact that there were only 8 or 9 of us drifting around this big space that was clearly made to be packed full of raucous drunken Russians.
The boys went to play pool, and the girls went off somewhere, while Lindsay and I sat down on the sofa closest to the snacks and vodka. Stepan and Andrei, two slightly awkward young men, joined us, and we all had a kind of stumbling conversation. I tried to talk to Stepan in Russian, but he stopped me.
"You speak English? Easier this way. Is OK, I need practice to speak English."
But he ran out of English shortly afterwards, and the two of them got bored and wandered off
"Let's start on the vodka," Lindsay said. Well versed in the Russian style, she had already poured us out 2 cups apiece, one of vodka and the other of cranberry juice. Drinking straight vodka makes you an alcoholic in Russia, but drinking straight vodka followed by a slosh of juice, or maybe a pickle, makes you not only not an alcoholic, but a really fun and sociable individual.
Then we watched the guys play pool for a while, but soon people began started to go off and reappear in swimsuits. Josh and Glyn showed up in trunks, Masha in a pink robe, and Stepan in an unfortunate Speedo, and all of them urged us to join them in the sauna.
I had anticipated this peer pressure, and packed for it.
"Want a skirt?" I asked Lindsay, and so she put on one of my black miniskirts while I put on the other. I had also had the foresight to wear a black bikini top instead of a bra, so in the end I emerged as a modest but sufficiently unclad partaker of banya.
"Do you think we should take another shot?" Lindsay said. "I feel like we should."
We had another v/c for courage, and joined the others in the sauna.
Well, what can you say about saunas? They're hot. This one was so stoked up that my gold necklace heated up within a minute, and I had to claw it off lest it singe me. We stood it as long as we could, and then ran out to fling ourselves into the icewater pool. Then we drank some more. Then we went back in the sauna. Rinse. Repeat. I feel that this is the kind of sport that drives fat elderly businessmen into cardiac arrest.
-Vasily Ivanovich, where's Yuri Mikhailovich?
-I don't know, have you checked the bottom of the pool?
After many repetitions of this routine, I got too cold and shivery to swim, but too warm for the steam room, and fell back to merely dipping my toes in, and then to sitting on the bench outside the sauna and pressing my back to the nice toasty wall. Everyone was spinning around in the big space, losing coherence as a group, or just coherence period, so I was surprised to come across Josh huddled on the ledge at the opposite corner of the pool.
"What's up?" I said. It felt like the first thing I'd said in hours.
"Oh nothing," he said. "But I think we need to go soon. It's 5:30 and they're just up there watching us. They've been doing it for a while now."
Sure enough, the woman who had let us in and her male companion were standing behind a glass door at the head of yet another flight of stairs, staring down at us like the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw.
'Good Lord, that's creepy," I said. "Yeah, we should go."
I located my shirt and jeans, pulled them. Everyone else was milling around in various states of undress and confusion. Across the room, Andrei was carefully, lovingly, blow-drying Lindsay, all over, her hair and t-shirt, my skirt. She saw me raise an eyebrow and shrugged in that helpless, 'well-what-can-you-do?' way.
Masha collected some money to pay the rent, and then we all gathered our things, went out through the warehouse, and fell back into the fog and the rain. One by one people caught their buses and disappeared, until it was down to me and Glyn, who lived furthest away.
"Tell me another story about bears," he said in Russian, referring to a conversation we'd had a few weeks ago.
"I don't have any more bear stories," I said. "There's really not that much to say about bears. But once upon a time I was a caretaker for a quadriplegic woman who also hypoglycemic and always late, and she used to make me give her meals as we went down the highway at 70 mph…"
I was in that peculiar state of post-party clarity where you feel witty and tell (what seem at the time) very funny and engaging stories.
When I got back to my building, the babushka behind the door, the night shift babushka with the dyed orange hair and cat glasses, demanded to know where I'd been and what I'd been up to. I explained that I'd been at the banya with my friends, but she didn't understand my accent. She didn't understand, but she certainly disapproved.
I went off to bed and woke up 5 hours later in a dire state. But at least I knew about banyas now. Sometimes you have to make personal sacrifices in the name of research…
*A common belief. How do you say in Russian, 'I don't keep those bits in my feet?' Never mind, they get so upset that it's simpler and politer just to bow to custom and put some shoes on.
"Glyn said there'd be a room," I said. "Next to the pool and the sauna. We could hang out there and, you know, drink vodka. And keep our clothes on."
It's traditional, when visiting a Russian bathhouse, to get both undressed and inebriated, but this was a coworker's event, and thus not so much a question of modesty as of survival. The banya visit had been in the works for a long time, and now Masha, one of the Russian teachers, had apparently rented us one. From 11 PM on Friday to 5 AM on Saturday, we would have the run of the place: dry room, sauna, and all.
"I don't know how you rent a bathhouse," I said. "I guess we'll find out."
"Yeah, that's really why I want to go," Lindsay said. "Just to see what it's like…"
At 10 PM, we finished teaching and left work, acquired initial refreshments from the produkti, and met Glyn, the Welshman, at the bus stop. Glyn led us on a vodka-acquiring mission, and then we piled into the #3 bus and rode to the very edge of town, where we found Josh, Masha, and a handful of Russian friends waiting on a muddy path under the trees. Mustered, we walked through the dark to what appeared to be a warehouse. The inside didn't give this impression the lie: on the contrary, there was a large truck, some tools, and a stack of bricks.
"Bricks!" Lindsay hissed at me. "Fucking bricks! Where are we?"
"No idea," I said. "And how does this always happen to us?"
While we were having this philosophical debate, the others were knocking on a metal door in the wall. After a long pause, the door opened on a young woman in uniform, who beckoned us into a shadowy lobby. Masha explained our reservation, and the woman led us through the dark into a cavernous space that turned out to be a mirrored dressing room. A staircase led downwards, presumably to the banya rooms. The Russians began to take off their coats and scarves in a way that struck me as ominous. Lindsay clutched the lapels on her penguin jacket.
"I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it!"
We sidled toward the staircase, but Masha stopped us.
"Take off your street shoes. You might get big fine."
She indicated a sign on the wall forbidding, among other things, shoes and birch twigs. (Birch twigs, of course, are what Russians traditionally use to flog each other in the banya).
I took off my shoes, put on some guest sandals, lest I be rendered sterile by the contact between my bare feet and the cold floor*, and at last went downstairs.
Well, Glyn wasn't kidding when he said we'd rented it out. Yes we had, a whole underground complex consisting of a large room, painted red where it wasn't covered with fake log paneling, red leather sofas, a big projector screen, a pool table, and a stage with a stripper's pole. The whole thing was like a cross between your parent's basement and a brothel.
Up another short flight of stairs was a tiny, icy swimming pool, some showers, and the sauna. Everything was made weirder by the fact that there were only 8 or 9 of us drifting around this big space that was clearly made to be packed full of raucous drunken Russians.
The boys went to play pool, and the girls went off somewhere, while Lindsay and I sat down on the sofa closest to the snacks and vodka. Stepan and Andrei, two slightly awkward young men, joined us, and we all had a kind of stumbling conversation. I tried to talk to Stepan in Russian, but he stopped me.
"You speak English? Easier this way. Is OK, I need practice to speak English."
But he ran out of English shortly afterwards, and the two of them got bored and wandered off
"Let's start on the vodka," Lindsay said. Well versed in the Russian style, she had already poured us out 2 cups apiece, one of vodka and the other of cranberry juice. Drinking straight vodka makes you an alcoholic in Russia, but drinking straight vodka followed by a slosh of juice, or maybe a pickle, makes you not only not an alcoholic, but a really fun and sociable individual.
Then we watched the guys play pool for a while, but soon people began started to go off and reappear in swimsuits. Josh and Glyn showed up in trunks, Masha in a pink robe, and Stepan in an unfortunate Speedo, and all of them urged us to join them in the sauna.
I had anticipated this peer pressure, and packed for it.
"Want a skirt?" I asked Lindsay, and so she put on one of my black miniskirts while I put on the other. I had also had the foresight to wear a black bikini top instead of a bra, so in the end I emerged as a modest but sufficiently unclad partaker of banya.
"Do you think we should take another shot?" Lindsay said. "I feel like we should."
We had another v/c for courage, and joined the others in the sauna.
Well, what can you say about saunas? They're hot. This one was so stoked up that my gold necklace heated up within a minute, and I had to claw it off lest it singe me. We stood it as long as we could, and then ran out to fling ourselves into the icewater pool. Then we drank some more. Then we went back in the sauna. Rinse. Repeat. I feel that this is the kind of sport that drives fat elderly businessmen into cardiac arrest.
-Vasily Ivanovich, where's Yuri Mikhailovich?
-I don't know, have you checked the bottom of the pool?
After many repetitions of this routine, I got too cold and shivery to swim, but too warm for the steam room, and fell back to merely dipping my toes in, and then to sitting on the bench outside the sauna and pressing my back to the nice toasty wall. Everyone was spinning around in the big space, losing coherence as a group, or just coherence period, so I was surprised to come across Josh huddled on the ledge at the opposite corner of the pool.
"What's up?" I said. It felt like the first thing I'd said in hours.
"Oh nothing," he said. "But I think we need to go soon. It's 5:30 and they're just up there watching us. They've been doing it for a while now."
Sure enough, the woman who had let us in and her male companion were standing behind a glass door at the head of yet another flight of stairs, staring down at us like the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw.
'Good Lord, that's creepy," I said. "Yeah, we should go."
I located my shirt and jeans, pulled them. Everyone else was milling around in various states of undress and confusion. Across the room, Andrei was carefully, lovingly, blow-drying Lindsay, all over, her hair and t-shirt, my skirt. She saw me raise an eyebrow and shrugged in that helpless, 'well-what-can-you-do?' way.
Masha collected some money to pay the rent, and then we all gathered our things, went out through the warehouse, and fell back into the fog and the rain. One by one people caught their buses and disappeared, until it was down to me and Glyn, who lived furthest away.
"Tell me another story about bears," he said in Russian, referring to a conversation we'd had a few weeks ago.
"I don't have any more bear stories," I said. "There's really not that much to say about bears. But once upon a time I was a caretaker for a quadriplegic woman who also hypoglycemic and always late, and she used to make me give her meals as we went down the highway at 70 mph…"
I was in that peculiar state of post-party clarity where you feel witty and tell (what seem at the time) very funny and engaging stories.
When I got back to my building, the babushka behind the door, the night shift babushka with the dyed orange hair and cat glasses, demanded to know where I'd been and what I'd been up to. I explained that I'd been at the banya with my friends, but she didn't understand my accent. She didn't understand, but she certainly disapproved.
I went off to bed and woke up 5 hours later in a dire state. But at least I knew about banyas now. Sometimes you have to make personal sacrifices in the name of research…
*A common belief. How do you say in Russian, 'I don't keep those bits in my feet?' Never mind, they get so upset that it's simpler and politer just to bow to custom and put some shoes on.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Popping Out to the Shops
This morning I went to Kopeka, the local universam (supermarket), and bought some supplies. Not the most riveting thing to do, but certainly worth commenting on, in the socio-cultural sense.
Russian stores come in many varieties: at the most fundamental is the 24-hour produkti, a tiny walk-in store with glass cases full of sausages, pre-packaged blini, ice cream, candy, and cheese. Behind the cases are wall-to-wall shelves of alcohol and a whole galaxy of cigarettes. You step inside the produkti, place your order with the shopkeeper, and get your goods handed over. Sometimes the shopkeepers are bored out of their minds and latch onto your funny accent just to have someone new to talk to; sometimes they're haggard and angry (especially late at night, when they've been dealing with drunks for hours and hours). We teachers have a favorite produkti, literally two steps away from 1649 school, where we go for supplies between classes.
Three days ago I got thrown out of this shop because the shopkeeper was outside having a smoke with her friends from the fruit stand. Even though everything was locked in cases and she was standing 10 feet away, the produkti was CLOSED, by God, and she was damned if I was going to stand in there and wait for her. So she threw her cigarette down, marched in, and expelled me by force. Pretty funny, except that I was seriously jonesing for peanut-butter halva. Stymied, I returned to 1649 School, waited 20 minutes, and then went back and bought it, no problem at all.
Such is the produkti way.
The next store level up is the universam, also known as the supermarkyet or gipermarkyet. Every time I see the latter, I get a strange vision of Dear Ronnie's toothy visage, but there's no arguing that the selection is better. The key thing to remember is that you have to stuff your bags into a lockable cubby by the door before you go in, lest you be suspected of shoplifting. Once inside, it's a babushka scrum, especially in the sour cream, egg and produce sections. By the rules of the game, you can ram carts, but not people – the correct thing to do is shout, 'Coming through, coming through!', wait while the Red Sea of apple-squeezing, egg-checking humanity parts approximately 13 mm, and then squeeze through, trying not to catch your wheels on anything. Kopeka suffers from a serious dearth of carts, which I think must be deliberate, to avoid total traffic breakdown. It's difficult for me though, being an American who was raised to regard shopping carts as one of the natural rights of man. I usually waltz into Kopeka, hit the produce section, and then remember that I only have two hands, whereupon I'm forced to go out and scavenge in the parking lot for an abandoned cart. Other people hover, vulture-like, at the end of the checkout lines and snag carts as soon as they're pushed through.
Plastic bags are also scarce, but I kind of admire this, because people keep old bags in their purses and resuse them till they're tattered rather than pay the 5 kopeks or whatever a new one costs. I do it too, except when my flatmate and I running out of trash bags again.
In terms of food, I can find most everything I need at the universam (except spinach and tzatziki). Russian food suits me; I could, and pretty much do, live off pelmeni (little boiled meat and potato dumplings), cabbage, apples, chicken pancakes, pickles, cheese, and fresh bread with creamy Russian butter. To wash it down: kvass, a mysterious, medieval beverage whose taste can be summed up as 'bread-flavored Coca Cola,' and kefir, a salty yogurt drink nothing like the overpriced, fruit-flavored swill guzzled by locavorous yuppies back in Chicago.
Alcohol I'll barely mention, because it goes without saying that it's ubiquitous. However, the canned-alcohol industry is fascinating, because it's not really caught on in the US, whereas in Russia you can select from such novelties as ½ L 'Gin and Tonic,' various kinds of syrupy coffee-based concoctions that promise 'not less than 8% alcohol,' and my personal favorites: 'Taste of Whisky Cola' and 'Super Hooch.' The former is exactly what it sounds like, cheap whiskey and generic cola, conveniently premixed; the latter is a grapefruit or cherry flavored energy drink containing equal parts booze and caffeine. Super Hooch is something you try once on a whim, and then not again. Ditto for the spiced 'Black Russian' coffee drink. I have a vague memory of drinking one of these once and then spending 5 minutes trying to explain to someone how it tasted exactly like Christmas, 'but not in a good way.' Then I was sick.
Another western decadence that Russians have successfully expanded upon is the potato chip. Unlike the Canadians, who also have novel chips, but in lousy flavors like ketchup, Russian potato chips are actually delicious: they come in various cheese flavors and a pleasant pesto/mozzarella combination, along with the standard salt, dill, etc. The shashlik flavor, however, is a glaring exception: shashlik means 'barbeque' and the shashlik potato chip tastes like meat. Meat. Not barbeque seasoning, but slightly underdone meat. Like deep-fried slivers of Alpo. For travelers planning a visit to Russia, but not yet conversant in Russian, it would be worth your while to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, just to avoid the culinary atrocity that is shashlik potato chips. You have been warned.
Russian stores come in many varieties: at the most fundamental is the 24-hour produkti, a tiny walk-in store with glass cases full of sausages, pre-packaged blini, ice cream, candy, and cheese. Behind the cases are wall-to-wall shelves of alcohol and a whole galaxy of cigarettes. You step inside the produkti, place your order with the shopkeeper, and get your goods handed over. Sometimes the shopkeepers are bored out of their minds and latch onto your funny accent just to have someone new to talk to; sometimes they're haggard and angry (especially late at night, when they've been dealing with drunks for hours and hours). We teachers have a favorite produkti, literally two steps away from 1649 school, where we go for supplies between classes.
Three days ago I got thrown out of this shop because the shopkeeper was outside having a smoke with her friends from the fruit stand. Even though everything was locked in cases and she was standing 10 feet away, the produkti was CLOSED, by God, and she was damned if I was going to stand in there and wait for her. So she threw her cigarette down, marched in, and expelled me by force. Pretty funny, except that I was seriously jonesing for peanut-butter halva. Stymied, I returned to 1649 School, waited 20 minutes, and then went back and bought it, no problem at all.
Such is the produkti way.
The next store level up is the universam, also known as the supermarkyet or gipermarkyet. Every time I see the latter, I get a strange vision of Dear Ronnie's toothy visage, but there's no arguing that the selection is better. The key thing to remember is that you have to stuff your bags into a lockable cubby by the door before you go in, lest you be suspected of shoplifting. Once inside, it's a babushka scrum, especially in the sour cream, egg and produce sections. By the rules of the game, you can ram carts, but not people – the correct thing to do is shout, 'Coming through, coming through!', wait while the Red Sea of apple-squeezing, egg-checking humanity parts approximately 13 mm, and then squeeze through, trying not to catch your wheels on anything. Kopeka suffers from a serious dearth of carts, which I think must be deliberate, to avoid total traffic breakdown. It's difficult for me though, being an American who was raised to regard shopping carts as one of the natural rights of man. I usually waltz into Kopeka, hit the produce section, and then remember that I only have two hands, whereupon I'm forced to go out and scavenge in the parking lot for an abandoned cart. Other people hover, vulture-like, at the end of the checkout lines and snag carts as soon as they're pushed through.
Plastic bags are also scarce, but I kind of admire this, because people keep old bags in their purses and resuse them till they're tattered rather than pay the 5 kopeks or whatever a new one costs. I do it too, except when my flatmate and I running out of trash bags again.
In terms of food, I can find most everything I need at the universam (except spinach and tzatziki). Russian food suits me; I could, and pretty much do, live off pelmeni (little boiled meat and potato dumplings), cabbage, apples, chicken pancakes, pickles, cheese, and fresh bread with creamy Russian butter. To wash it down: kvass, a mysterious, medieval beverage whose taste can be summed up as 'bread-flavored Coca Cola,' and kefir, a salty yogurt drink nothing like the overpriced, fruit-flavored swill guzzled by locavorous yuppies back in Chicago.
Alcohol I'll barely mention, because it goes without saying that it's ubiquitous. However, the canned-alcohol industry is fascinating, because it's not really caught on in the US, whereas in Russia you can select from such novelties as ½ L 'Gin and Tonic,' various kinds of syrupy coffee-based concoctions that promise 'not less than 8% alcohol,' and my personal favorites: 'Taste of Whisky Cola' and 'Super Hooch.' The former is exactly what it sounds like, cheap whiskey and generic cola, conveniently premixed; the latter is a grapefruit or cherry flavored energy drink containing equal parts booze and caffeine. Super Hooch is something you try once on a whim, and then not again. Ditto for the spiced 'Black Russian' coffee drink. I have a vague memory of drinking one of these once and then spending 5 minutes trying to explain to someone how it tasted exactly like Christmas, 'but not in a good way.' Then I was sick.
Another western decadence that Russians have successfully expanded upon is the potato chip. Unlike the Canadians, who also have novel chips, but in lousy flavors like ketchup, Russian potato chips are actually delicious: they come in various cheese flavors and a pleasant pesto/mozzarella combination, along with the standard salt, dill, etc. The shashlik flavor, however, is a glaring exception: shashlik means 'barbeque' and the shashlik potato chip tastes like meat. Meat. Not barbeque seasoning, but slightly underdone meat. Like deep-fried slivers of Alpo. For travelers planning a visit to Russia, but not yet conversant in Russian, it would be worth your while to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, just to avoid the culinary atrocity that is shashlik potato chips. You have been warned.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
1649 School
Soaking wet, I dragged myself into work on Friday morning. Tanya, the assistant administrator, looked up from the reception desk and muttered hello. I returned the compliment, then went on into classroom 4, where the first class of the day was about to start. T minus 8 minutes, but my students would probably be late, owing to the rain and the traffic. I wasn't bothered. It was bloody early, I'd overslept, and I needed coffee, strong coffee. Dry socks too, but you can't have everything.
For a moment I stood next to my desk, staring at the whiteboard. What did I need from the teacher's room...textbook. Yes. And board markers. Blue board markers…
Just then my boss, Andrei, looked around the door.
"Leely! Good morning! Have you read the sign in the teacher's room?"
"Dunno," I said. "There are a lot of signs in there."
"Well, read the green one," he said. "It's the most important."
"Will do," I said, and went back to staring at the board. But his voice had acted like a whip cracked over the haunches of my limping thoughts, and I was awake now.
Andrei was a thin and crazy Russian. I'd liked him ever since he picked me up from the airport in his Lada with half a door missing and a tin can for an ashtray – "Leely, are you sure it is OK I have a ciggy? Because I smoke like, like shithead. All the time." He taught me to cross streets 'the Russian way' (i.e. walking straight into traffic), and drove me and my suitcases to my new flat, where my arrival came as a total shock to my new flatmate, because he had forgotten to warn her that she was about to get company...
Under Andrei's mercurial rule, 1649 School always seemed be teetering on the brink of anarchy and chaos. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...To his credit, though, most things usually came back together. As long as you avoided him on Wednesdays. He didn't like Wednesdays.
My curiosity piqued now, I went into the teacher's room to have a look at the green sign.
Scrawled in board marker, taped to the wall, it read,
OI, YOU LOT!!!
Forget to change your watches and clocks on Saturday…
Or Andrei will kill you in your sleep!
Have a nice weekend.
The juxtaposition of death threat and pleasantry was particularly striking. But I was stymied by the paradox: how could I remember to forget something? Particularly the end of Russian Daylight Time? Anyway, what a great sign. I took a picture of it with my cell phone and went back to class.
The students were ten minutes late. When they finally came in, we sat down and had a meaningful conversation about verb tenses. Since there were only two of them, an adult brother and sister taking private lessons, the lessons mostly went at their pace, dictated by their interests. Or lack of interest, since the brother never did homework. He was a busy man. I agreed that studying was, indeed, his prerogative, and then went over all the information that his sister had already picked up. But he was not interested in action verbs. At the end of class he demanded to know when I was finally going to visit the Kremlin School of Riding, where, according to his business card, he was the commercial director. This was a long-standing invitation that I'd forgotten about.
"Maybe next weekend?" I said. "I do miss being around horses..."
"Many horses at the Kremlin School of Riding!" my student promised me, and with that, he and sister took their leave.
Hard on their heels came my twittering ladies, Lena, Vera, Victoria, and Yana, a quartet of middle-aged women. Our first classes together had been rough; they were intensely dubious about my age and my American accent, but now I was winning their trust. They were a good class, friendly and motivated, as long I recognized the smoke signals of incipient panic and confusion that they occasionally sent up. That was my cue to leave the board, sit down on a desktop and say, "OK. Let's...talk about this." Then we might well spend the rest of the lesson going over the sticky point, batting it back and forth until they were happy again, pacing schedules be damned.
Lena paused at the end of class to show me some photos of her son and his bride, and then they all left together.
By then it was 12:00 and no more students for the moment, but the day was hardly finished; I was going to take the bus across town to go boot-shopping with Lindsay, find some lunch, come back to 1649 and plan my lessons, then teach from 5 to 9:30.
Outside, the rain had mostly stopped and fog filled Zelenograd, softening the hard edges of the concrete high-rises. I turned up the collar of my raincoat against the damp, and then the bus came. We went through the streets, passing the forest, the technical college, the burnt-out shell of a sports dome rising from the shore of a dirty lake, the Japanese restaurant (beloved of expats), the movie theatre, the park with its pink fountains, and the rain came again, misting up the windows, so that everything seemed far away, boots, bosses, lesson plans, and I floated through the streets in the silence of my Russian morning.
For a moment I stood next to my desk, staring at the whiteboard. What did I need from the teacher's room...textbook. Yes. And board markers. Blue board markers…
Just then my boss, Andrei, looked around the door.
"Leely! Good morning! Have you read the sign in the teacher's room?"
"Dunno," I said. "There are a lot of signs in there."
"Well, read the green one," he said. "It's the most important."
"Will do," I said, and went back to staring at the board. But his voice had acted like a whip cracked over the haunches of my limping thoughts, and I was awake now.
Andrei was a thin and crazy Russian. I'd liked him ever since he picked me up from the airport in his Lada with half a door missing and a tin can for an ashtray – "Leely, are you sure it is OK I have a ciggy? Because I smoke like, like shithead. All the time." He taught me to cross streets 'the Russian way' (i.e. walking straight into traffic), and drove me and my suitcases to my new flat, where my arrival came as a total shock to my new flatmate, because he had forgotten to warn her that she was about to get company...
Under Andrei's mercurial rule, 1649 School always seemed be teetering on the brink of anarchy and chaos. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold...To his credit, though, most things usually came back together. As long as you avoided him on Wednesdays. He didn't like Wednesdays.
My curiosity piqued now, I went into the teacher's room to have a look at the green sign.
Scrawled in board marker, taped to the wall, it read,
OI, YOU LOT!!!
Forget to change your watches and clocks on Saturday…
Or Andrei will kill you in your sleep!
Have a nice weekend.
The juxtaposition of death threat and pleasantry was particularly striking. But I was stymied by the paradox: how could I remember to forget something? Particularly the end of Russian Daylight Time? Anyway, what a great sign. I took a picture of it with my cell phone and went back to class.
The students were ten minutes late. When they finally came in, we sat down and had a meaningful conversation about verb tenses. Since there were only two of them, an adult brother and sister taking private lessons, the lessons mostly went at their pace, dictated by their interests. Or lack of interest, since the brother never did homework. He was a busy man. I agreed that studying was, indeed, his prerogative, and then went over all the information that his sister had already picked up. But he was not interested in action verbs. At the end of class he demanded to know when I was finally going to visit the Kremlin School of Riding, where, according to his business card, he was the commercial director. This was a long-standing invitation that I'd forgotten about.
"Maybe next weekend?" I said. "I do miss being around horses..."
"Many horses at the Kremlin School of Riding!" my student promised me, and with that, he and sister took their leave.
Hard on their heels came my twittering ladies, Lena, Vera, Victoria, and Yana, a quartet of middle-aged women. Our first classes together had been rough; they were intensely dubious about my age and my American accent, but now I was winning their trust. They were a good class, friendly and motivated, as long I recognized the smoke signals of incipient panic and confusion that they occasionally sent up. That was my cue to leave the board, sit down on a desktop and say, "OK. Let's...talk about this." Then we might well spend the rest of the lesson going over the sticky point, batting it back and forth until they were happy again, pacing schedules be damned.
Lena paused at the end of class to show me some photos of her son and his bride, and then they all left together.
By then it was 12:00 and no more students for the moment, but the day was hardly finished; I was going to take the bus across town to go boot-shopping with Lindsay, find some lunch, come back to 1649 and plan my lessons, then teach from 5 to 9:30.
Outside, the rain had mostly stopped and fog filled Zelenograd, softening the hard edges of the concrete high-rises. I turned up the collar of my raincoat against the damp, and then the bus came. We went through the streets, passing the forest, the technical college, the burnt-out shell of a sports dome rising from the shore of a dirty lake, the Japanese restaurant (beloved of expats), the movie theatre, the park with its pink fountains, and the rain came again, misting up the windows, so that everything seemed far away, boots, bosses, lesson plans, and I floated through the streets in the silence of my Russian morning.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Down the Rabbit Hole
The night had started normally enough, two teachers on a weekend jaunt to the city, an hour's train ride away. Our plans were mild: we were going to meet up with some other teachers, hang out, go to an English bookstore and a German pool hall, drink a bit, all that lite jazz. But here it was, 2 in the morning, and we were following two Russian girls with a bullwhip through the deserted streets of Moscow.
There were several of us involved in this pursuit: Lindsey, who had come with me from Zelenograd; Rick, Ayden, and Adam, the Moscow teachers; an English journalist, his friend visiting from London; and a young Russian man who knew Rick.
"Why?" I said to Lindsey.
"Who cares?" Lindsey said. "She has a bullwhip!"
Impeccable logic. The area of Moscow we were passing through was swank, and looked old. High walls blocked the apartments from the street, and cobbled alleys ran off at intervals. Across the street, lights glinted on the surface of long lakes flanked by statues.
"Look over there!" I said. "Are those the Patriarch's Ponds?"
Nobody paid any attention.
The girl wasn't even using her bullwhip. It lay coiled harmlessly over her arm. Neither she nor her friend appeared to be prostitutes, or dominatrixes, or anything kinky whatsoever; they were simply two Russian girls, in jeans and parkas, that we had happened to meet in a park. At 2 AM, toting a whip. Could happen to anyone. It was the same park where Rick and Ayden had been jumped the previous weekend, their loud, drunken English having inspired some nationalistic Russians to beat them up. Lindsey had been there too. Carried away by the whole thing, she had offered to fistfight one of the toughs' girlfriends. But the girl replied disdainfully that Russian women don't brawl, so she and Lindsey sat side by side on a park bench until their respective menfolk finished, whereupon they dragged them off in opposite directions to lick their wounds.
Why had Rick led us back to the park? His motives were inscrutable, but I half suspected that he was looking for more trouble, perhaps hoping that the nationalists would have knives next time, the better to leave him with another interesting scar, like the one he had slipped out and gotten a few weeks ago, the big spiral that he had paid some back-alley tattooist to carve into his side. Well, there were cheaper ways…
The girls were just walking in the park, minding their own business (whatever the hell that was) when we met them. They refused to flog Rick, despite his coaxing, but offered to lead us – somewhere? Perhaps a club? There was a rapid-fire exchange in Russian, and then we all rushed off through the night. I walked with Lindsey, Adam, and the Englishmen, who were equally bemused. But you know, these things happen in Moscow. So we relaxed and rode the weird.
After a few wrong turns, we went down another dark, cobbled alleyway and cast up in front of a set of steps leading down into a stone basement. This, I gathered, was the club. Our new friends said something to the bouncers, who let the demand "Passports, passports!" die on their lips, and we went down into a brick-lined corridor that wound away under the street. Lindsey and I joined the queue for the toilets while the boys slid off around the corner. The girls with the bullwhip sat down on the stairs and looked around.
The toilet line was long, and packed into a tight side corridor, but everyone seemed to be taking it in stride. They grinned and made easy conversation and stood aside so that other people could squeeze past to get out, unusual behavior for your average Muscovite. A man with a guitar took it out and began to play.
"Guantanamera, Guantanameeeeeraaaa…"
"Oh my God," Lindsey said. "He's playing Joan Baez!"
And indeed he was, slightly off-key, with a heavy accent, but charmingly. He never used the john, he just stood in the corridor playing. By the time it was my turn he was onto the Beatles, and then 'Kumbaya.'
Finished, we set out to explore further. Adam and Ayden we found in what turned out to be a tiny bookstop, set off the main hall. Ayden in particular was enchanted by the bookshop.
"If there were any hipsters in Russia, this is where they would hang out," he said. "But it's awesome!"
Wandering on, we came to the main room, where there was a bar, some tables crowded together, and a dance floor. And this became our home. The guys had already settled in and bought drinks, so we joined them. The crowd was young, mostly Russian with a few expats thrown in, and casually dressed. The music was excellent, mostly old rock songs in several languages. It was the kind of chill dive that I had dreamed about, and consistently failed to find, back in Chicago.
After sitting awhile, I moved out onto the floor, and within five minutes, I had myself a partner, a serious-faced young Russian named Sasha. We linked hands very naturally and started tangoing to the Zombies. He was an excellent, intelligent dancer, with some witty moves. But we were such good partners that after a while it seemed natural to talk a little, and here we ran into trouble, because my Russian is not stellar at the best of times, never mind when I'm slightly tipsy and standing under a subwoofer. And he spoke no English at all, so basically, it was a conversational dead-end. I apologized.
"I don't understand, I can only dance,' I said.
In response, Sasha shook his head and held me tighter.
"You are very very beautiful," he said into my ear, slowly. "I'm sorry I don't speak English."
So I laid my head on his cardiganed shoulder, and we danced some more.
After a while I broke it off to catch up with my friends at our table. The dynamics had altered slightly: the second Englishman, a wide-eyed, redheaded boy, was talking enthusiastically to an unknown Russian girl who had joined us somewhere, a few friends of Rick's had shown up, for lack of chairs Lindsey was sitting in Ayden's lap, and Adam was in the corner, still looking bemused under his flop of blond hair. It was 4 or 5 in the morning and the party was still going strong.
Back on the floor I ran into Sasha again, and we picked up where we had left off, or perhaps a little further. The lack of conversation was more and more frustrating. Finally he took my hand and led me off the dance floor, towards the corridor, where it was quieter, gesticulating, trying to explain things all the while. Then he found the coat-track and put on his coat, gesturing that I should do the same.
"One minute, one minute," I said in my flawed Russian. "I can't leave. My things, my friends…"
He made an impatient gesture. Just then I spotted Rick coming down the corridor, looking not much the worse for wear.
"Rick!" I said. "Come translate for me!"
As Sasha spoke rapidly to Rick, they took each other in, the American in a white t-shirt with the stripes and star of the Israeli flag tattooed all the way around his forearm, the Russian dark-haired and drawn-faced, buttoned into a black coat.
I looked back and forth, feeling ridiculous.
Rick said something decisive. Without answering, Sasha pulled his coat tighter and left the club.
Rick and I went back to our table.
"What did he want?" I demanded. "What did you say?"
'He wanted to go back to his apartment for some food, some breakfast," Rick said. 'I told him, basically there are eight of us here, we're together, nobody's leaving without anybody else, the end. If you want to leave next time, just leave, but otherwise don't… Just sit down! Sit!"
I sat.
At 6, half the party suddenly packed up and disappeared, leaving me, Lindsey, Ayden, and one of the Russian girls, the one who had become more and more involved with the redheaded Englishman, until they were at the table entwined in each other's arms, sucking face, to the disgust and astonishment of the rest of us. Alone again now, she sat at the table dragging on a cigarette, looking a bit lost.
But Ayden, Lindsay, and I were going back to crash at the flat Ayden shared with Rick, so we left her there and went off to catch the Metro.
Yes, you haven't been drunk till you've been drunk at 6:30 AM on the Metro. Here were respectable people, freshly scrubbed, off to work or church or whatnot, and here were people in their party clothes, still lost in last night. We weren't the only ones.
Leaving the Metro, we bought cheese pastries and walked back to the flat, where I crashed in Rick's mercifully Rick-less bed. There followed a long lazy Sunday, the kind of Sunday I always seem to have after wild evenings, with meandering conversations conducted in the kitchen over tea and pelmeni.
Late in the day, Lindsey and I took the bus back to Z.
"For our next trip, let's find a boxcar and camp in it," Lindsey said. "You know, with a bottle of vodka and a trashcan fire..."
And then she fell asleep. I leaned against the bus window and looked at the setting sun turning the birch forests to gold. There were lessons to plan, the week's campaign to organize, but for the moment I was happy just to sit back and think. Yes, it had been an excellent weekend.
There were several of us involved in this pursuit: Lindsey, who had come with me from Zelenograd; Rick, Ayden, and Adam, the Moscow teachers; an English journalist, his friend visiting from London; and a young Russian man who knew Rick.
"Why?" I said to Lindsey.
"Who cares?" Lindsey said. "She has a bullwhip!"
Impeccable logic. The area of Moscow we were passing through was swank, and looked old. High walls blocked the apartments from the street, and cobbled alleys ran off at intervals. Across the street, lights glinted on the surface of long lakes flanked by statues.
"Look over there!" I said. "Are those the Patriarch's Ponds?"
Nobody paid any attention.
The girl wasn't even using her bullwhip. It lay coiled harmlessly over her arm. Neither she nor her friend appeared to be prostitutes, or dominatrixes, or anything kinky whatsoever; they were simply two Russian girls, in jeans and parkas, that we had happened to meet in a park. At 2 AM, toting a whip. Could happen to anyone. It was the same park where Rick and Ayden had been jumped the previous weekend, their loud, drunken English having inspired some nationalistic Russians to beat them up. Lindsey had been there too. Carried away by the whole thing, she had offered to fistfight one of the toughs' girlfriends. But the girl replied disdainfully that Russian women don't brawl, so she and Lindsey sat side by side on a park bench until their respective menfolk finished, whereupon they dragged them off in opposite directions to lick their wounds.
Why had Rick led us back to the park? His motives were inscrutable, but I half suspected that he was looking for more trouble, perhaps hoping that the nationalists would have knives next time, the better to leave him with another interesting scar, like the one he had slipped out and gotten a few weeks ago, the big spiral that he had paid some back-alley tattooist to carve into his side. Well, there were cheaper ways…
The girls were just walking in the park, minding their own business (whatever the hell that was) when we met them. They refused to flog Rick, despite his coaxing, but offered to lead us – somewhere? Perhaps a club? There was a rapid-fire exchange in Russian, and then we all rushed off through the night. I walked with Lindsey, Adam, and the Englishmen, who were equally bemused. But you know, these things happen in Moscow. So we relaxed and rode the weird.
After a few wrong turns, we went down another dark, cobbled alleyway and cast up in front of a set of steps leading down into a stone basement. This, I gathered, was the club. Our new friends said something to the bouncers, who let the demand "Passports, passports!" die on their lips, and we went down into a brick-lined corridor that wound away under the street. Lindsey and I joined the queue for the toilets while the boys slid off around the corner. The girls with the bullwhip sat down on the stairs and looked around.
The toilet line was long, and packed into a tight side corridor, but everyone seemed to be taking it in stride. They grinned and made easy conversation and stood aside so that other people could squeeze past to get out, unusual behavior for your average Muscovite. A man with a guitar took it out and began to play.
"Guantanamera, Guantanameeeeeraaaa…"
"Oh my God," Lindsey said. "He's playing Joan Baez!"
And indeed he was, slightly off-key, with a heavy accent, but charmingly. He never used the john, he just stood in the corridor playing. By the time it was my turn he was onto the Beatles, and then 'Kumbaya.'
Finished, we set out to explore further. Adam and Ayden we found in what turned out to be a tiny bookstop, set off the main hall. Ayden in particular was enchanted by the bookshop.
"If there were any hipsters in Russia, this is where they would hang out," he said. "But it's awesome!"
Wandering on, we came to the main room, where there was a bar, some tables crowded together, and a dance floor. And this became our home. The guys had already settled in and bought drinks, so we joined them. The crowd was young, mostly Russian with a few expats thrown in, and casually dressed. The music was excellent, mostly old rock songs in several languages. It was the kind of chill dive that I had dreamed about, and consistently failed to find, back in Chicago.
After sitting awhile, I moved out onto the floor, and within five minutes, I had myself a partner, a serious-faced young Russian named Sasha. We linked hands very naturally and started tangoing to the Zombies. He was an excellent, intelligent dancer, with some witty moves. But we were such good partners that after a while it seemed natural to talk a little, and here we ran into trouble, because my Russian is not stellar at the best of times, never mind when I'm slightly tipsy and standing under a subwoofer. And he spoke no English at all, so basically, it was a conversational dead-end. I apologized.
"I don't understand, I can only dance,' I said.
In response, Sasha shook his head and held me tighter.
"You are very very beautiful," he said into my ear, slowly. "I'm sorry I don't speak English."
So I laid my head on his cardiganed shoulder, and we danced some more.
After a while I broke it off to catch up with my friends at our table. The dynamics had altered slightly: the second Englishman, a wide-eyed, redheaded boy, was talking enthusiastically to an unknown Russian girl who had joined us somewhere, a few friends of Rick's had shown up, for lack of chairs Lindsey was sitting in Ayden's lap, and Adam was in the corner, still looking bemused under his flop of blond hair. It was 4 or 5 in the morning and the party was still going strong.
Back on the floor I ran into Sasha again, and we picked up where we had left off, or perhaps a little further. The lack of conversation was more and more frustrating. Finally he took my hand and led me off the dance floor, towards the corridor, where it was quieter, gesticulating, trying to explain things all the while. Then he found the coat-track and put on his coat, gesturing that I should do the same.
"One minute, one minute," I said in my flawed Russian. "I can't leave. My things, my friends…"
He made an impatient gesture. Just then I spotted Rick coming down the corridor, looking not much the worse for wear.
"Rick!" I said. "Come translate for me!"
As Sasha spoke rapidly to Rick, they took each other in, the American in a white t-shirt with the stripes and star of the Israeli flag tattooed all the way around his forearm, the Russian dark-haired and drawn-faced, buttoned into a black coat.
I looked back and forth, feeling ridiculous.
Rick said something decisive. Without answering, Sasha pulled his coat tighter and left the club.
Rick and I went back to our table.
"What did he want?" I demanded. "What did you say?"
'He wanted to go back to his apartment for some food, some breakfast," Rick said. 'I told him, basically there are eight of us here, we're together, nobody's leaving without anybody else, the end. If you want to leave next time, just leave, but otherwise don't… Just sit down! Sit!"
I sat.
At 6, half the party suddenly packed up and disappeared, leaving me, Lindsey, Ayden, and one of the Russian girls, the one who had become more and more involved with the redheaded Englishman, until they were at the table entwined in each other's arms, sucking face, to the disgust and astonishment of the rest of us. Alone again now, she sat at the table dragging on a cigarette, looking a bit lost.
But Ayden, Lindsay, and I were going back to crash at the flat Ayden shared with Rick, so we left her there and went off to catch the Metro.
Yes, you haven't been drunk till you've been drunk at 6:30 AM on the Metro. Here were respectable people, freshly scrubbed, off to work or church or whatnot, and here were people in their party clothes, still lost in last night. We weren't the only ones.
Leaving the Metro, we bought cheese pastries and walked back to the flat, where I crashed in Rick's mercifully Rick-less bed. There followed a long lazy Sunday, the kind of Sunday I always seem to have after wild evenings, with meandering conversations conducted in the kitchen over tea and pelmeni.
Late in the day, Lindsey and I took the bus back to Z.
"For our next trip, let's find a boxcar and camp in it," Lindsey said. "You know, with a bottle of vodka and a trashcan fire..."
And then she fell asleep. I leaned against the bus window and looked at the setting sun turning the birch forests to gold. There were lessons to plan, the week's campaign to organize, but for the moment I was happy just to sit back and think. Yes, it had been an excellent weekend.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Babushkas
As another teacher observed last night, babushkas rule this country. You see them everywhere, stomping resolutely down the street in their sturdy black shoes, heads covered with floral-patterned headscarves in the Russian Orthodox style. Most of them stand 5' 0 or less, but don't let this fool you: babushkas are battleaxes. If you're poky getting off the train you're liable to get shoved, hard; tracing the shove back to its source you find a small shapeless bundle that on further inspection reveals itself to be an elderly woman wearing approximately 27 layers of clothing, none of which hinders her mobility in the slightest. Yesterday I saw a very tiny, very old woman dash across Gogol Street against the light. Buses were bearing down, but she hiked up her skirts, tucked up her parachute-sized handbag and stuck her head straight out in a dead run. She was grinning at herself as she did. I really liked that woman.
They sell things on the street, all kinds of things, in all weather. The ones who gather by my train station favor roses, nylons, and live animals. They sit on boxes by the hour, with whole litters of kittens buttoned into their overcoats. Or along certain stretches of the road from Zelenograd to Moscow, spaced every fifty feet. I always wonder what these women think of each other. Do they get along? Are they comrades in capitalism? Or do they sneak around when the others aren't looking and dump bleach in their rivals' watering cans?
When I first moved here, I didn't understand my front door, and the babushka who lives behind the entrance window of my building used to shout at me (when I tackled the complicated problem of unlocking it), "otkritye, otkritye!' meaning 'open it, open it!', gesturing to the same. Realizing that it was already unlocked, I would quickly forge through to the hall, but she stood up and followed me, saying 'otkritye, otkritye!' to drive it home until I said, Yes, yes, I know now, in a heavy accent, whereupon she threw up her hands at my helplessness and went back to watching dubbed soaps.
[As a side note, that's how my babushka introduced herself to me: What is your name? -Lily - How nice, Lily, I am babushka.]
Now we're friends, and she greets me in English with "Hello childrens! How are you! Goodbye!" when I come in. But being a foreigner I often do things that strike her as strange and alarming, like walk around in shirtsleeves when the temperature is 50 F or less. So I get a lot of, 'Aren't you cold?! Don't you know it's winter? Do you wish to die?' from her and from the flock of ladies who sun themselves outside my apartment in the mornings when I'm going to work. One bawls me out when I put the trash down the trash pipe the wrong way, and another when I take the stairs instead of the elevator. Silly foreigner! They know I'll change my ways in the end.
They sell things on the street, all kinds of things, in all weather. The ones who gather by my train station favor roses, nylons, and live animals. They sit on boxes by the hour, with whole litters of kittens buttoned into their overcoats. Or along certain stretches of the road from Zelenograd to Moscow, spaced every fifty feet. I always wonder what these women think of each other. Do they get along? Are they comrades in capitalism? Or do they sneak around when the others aren't looking and dump bleach in their rivals' watering cans?
When I first moved here, I didn't understand my front door, and the babushka who lives behind the entrance window of my building used to shout at me (when I tackled the complicated problem of unlocking it), "otkritye, otkritye!' meaning 'open it, open it!', gesturing to the same. Realizing that it was already unlocked, I would quickly forge through to the hall, but she stood up and followed me, saying 'otkritye, otkritye!' to drive it home until I said, Yes, yes, I know now, in a heavy accent, whereupon she threw up her hands at my helplessness and went back to watching dubbed soaps.
[As a side note, that's how my babushka introduced herself to me: What is your name? -Lily - How nice, Lily, I am babushka.]
Now we're friends, and she greets me in English with "Hello childrens! How are you! Goodbye!" when I come in. But being a foreigner I often do things that strike her as strange and alarming, like walk around in shirtsleeves when the temperature is 50 F or less. So I get a lot of, 'Aren't you cold?! Don't you know it's winter? Do you wish to die?' from her and from the flock of ladies who sun themselves outside my apartment in the mornings when I'm going to work. One bawls me out when I put the trash down the trash pipe the wrong way, and another when I take the stairs instead of the elevator. Silly foreigner! They know I'll change my ways in the end.
How to be a Successful Expat English Teacher
1) Get the job
2) Tell everybody you know about it, as casually as possible
3) Go abroad, etc
4) Go to an internet cafe downtown, update your Facebook status to note that you're sitting in an internet cafe downtown. Don't mention that the cafe is actually a McDonald's
4a) extra points if you can convincingly argue that where you are, there is no downtown, or even coherent infrastructure, and that in order to scrape up enough electricity to power your laptop, you had to go without food and hot water for 3 days
5) Start a blog
6) Work on the blog
7) Hang out in bars with other expats
8) Teach some classes
2) Tell everybody you know about it, as casually as possible
3) Go abroad, etc
4) Go to an internet cafe downtown, update your Facebook status to note that you're sitting in an internet cafe downtown. Don't mention that the cafe is actually a McDonald's
4a) extra points if you can convincingly argue that where you are, there is no downtown, or even coherent infrastructure, and that in order to scrape up enough electricity to power your laptop, you had to go without food and hot water for 3 days
5) Start a blog
6) Work on the blog
7) Hang out in bars with other expats
8) Teach some classes
Thursday, October 15, 2009
On Latkes
Last night I came home from teaching and made latkes. I've had a 3-lb sack of potatoes sitting on the counter all week, getting hoary around the edges, so I decided to finish them all off in a single burst of culinary efficiency. The chief appeal of latkes (besides their deliciousness, of course) is that making them is such an involved, untidy project. Very pleasant, on a certain kind of evening. It was raining and the wind was howling around, but inside my blue kitchen with the art-deco lamp, everything was cozy and bright.
I launched into the job with a single bowl and a hand-grater, but by the time I was halfway through, pretty much every dish in the kitchen was involved, as I had bowls full of potato shavings ready to be mixed up, cutting boards, milk, flour, sour cream, bits of diced onions clinging to everything, sunflower grease, hot latkes airing on paper towels, raw cakes ready to go on, my hands covered in potato, and the whole kitchen just a spectacular disaster zone. A huge dramatic delicious mess. I felt like a 7-old with a bucket of Playdough.
Then I ate the crispiest, most golden ones with a smatter of salt, and life was good.
I launched into the job with a single bowl and a hand-grater, but by the time I was halfway through, pretty much every dish in the kitchen was involved, as I had bowls full of potato shavings ready to be mixed up, cutting boards, milk, flour, sour cream, bits of diced onions clinging to everything, sunflower grease, hot latkes airing on paper towels, raw cakes ready to go on, my hands covered in potato, and the whole kitchen just a spectacular disaster zone. A huge dramatic delicious mess. I felt like a 7-old with a bucket of Playdough.
Then I ate the crispiest, most golden ones with a smatter of salt, and life was good.
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