Kazan-Yerevan

I recently read a pretty funny David Sedaris piece on how boring epic stories of awful air travel can be, so I will spare you my complaints except to say two things:

There are two adorable and unbelievably naughty little Armenian boys on my flight to Yerevan. As I was putting my carry-on through the conveyor and trying to explain what the x-ray of Ivan Ivanych was (I'm not sure why they wondered - I mean, his x-ray looks exactly like what you'd expect an x-ray of a hedgehog lawn ornament to look like), I also was treated to a full-body x-ray of 4-year-old Sasha, the younger of the two, who crawled onto the conveyor and managed to get all the way into the x-ray machine while his mom and the security women weren't looking. Conveyor belt operator and Sasha: very amused. Her supervisor and Sasha's mom: not very amused at all.

My last time leaving Russia (2008), I burst into tears of deep existential anguish when I forked over my documents to the passport control lady. This time, I was much more pleasant and businesslike, and was rewarded with the request that I remove my glasses (clearly a spy disguise) and a ten-minute questioning conducted with my glasses off: Why are you leaving Russia? Why were you in Kazan? What were you studying? (My visa type is "for study," so some bending of the truth had to happen there.) What is this "summer Russian course" you speak of? Why are you going to Yerevan? Do you have relatives there? Who are you staying with? How long will you be there? Do you have a "tourist voucher"? (By then I was getting pretty short with the woman, possibly implying that she knows very well that there is no such thing as a "tourist voucher.")

Duly noted: next time, just burst into tears. The whole episode reminded me of an article we read in one of my classes next year that boiled down to this: the Russian bureaucracy is so inefficient because it works based on the assumption that everyone is doing something illegal, and enormous amounts of state resources must be devoted to ferreting out what exactly it is. Well, you caught me, passport lady. I'm not sure what exactly you caught me doing, but you made all the people in line behind me very cranky at me, so you clearly won.

Soviet service

Most of Russia is slowly catching on to the idea of customer service, which was (as far as I can tell) nonexistent in the Soviet era. But still, Russians spend more time waiting in line than any other European nation. Much of the waiting comes from extremely long lines at the post office and bank.

That's part of the reason I hate going to the post office in Russia. But only part of it. There are other things - ridiculous forms, rules about where you can send packages to (only central post offices can process packages to the U.S.) and what you can put in them (absolutely no mixing of print materials and non-print materials! Birthday card with birthday present? No dice.), and the little conversation I just had:

"I need to send a package to the U.S. Can I do that here?"
"Yes, but not right now."
"Why not?"
"We're out of boxes."
"When are you getting more?"
"I don't know."
"Well, where can I get a box?"
"I don't know."
"I have to use a box from the post office, right?"
"Yes."
"So there's no way for me to send a box to the U.S."
"In short, no."

(I eventually wrestled it out of her that there's another central post office near the train station, and I should check there. Glad I scoped the situation out before taking all my students to mail stuff.)

Harder and harder to breathe

As some of you might have heard, we're not doing so well in Russia right now. There aren't any fires in Kazan's immediate vicinity (though there are fires in some parts of Tatarstan, as well as neighboring Mari-El), but the wind has picked up in the past few days, carrying a haze of smoke to the city from points west. (When I checked the weather this morning, Weather Underground said "88 degrees and smoky." Eww. I did not know that "smoky" was a possible weather condition.)

I'm not worried yet, although I did advise the students not to do much physical activity outdoors (besides the visible haze, the smell of smoke is quite noticeable) and I'm planning to discuss with my superiors how to determine when a public health threat becomes evacuation-worthy. I'm sure it won't come to evacuation, since we're leaving in (exactly!) a week anyway, but a Young Pioneer is Always Prepared!

Of melons and men

To counter that last gloomy post, let me assure you that funny things happen to me in Russia all the time!

One of the funny things about this summer has been that Ruth (my counterpart for the high school version of our program) and I get hit on all the time. This counts as "funny" because it runs completely contrary to my general experience of being an American woman in Russia. That is, the experience of constantly not being up to snuff in terms of figure, clothing, makeup, or priorities. Which is demoralizing sometimes, but generally just something that you live with; and actually I have to say that it was quite nice to feel, for the majority of my Fulbright, that I was totally invisible to the men of Russia. I mean, street harassment levels were near zero.

But it turns out that two amerikanki are better than one, at least in terms of approachability. A lone American just looks like she might be a schlubby Russian. But two Americans – schlubby though they may be – are probably speaking English, and can therefore be pegged as Foreign Chicks. Foreign Chicks are apparently hot by definition, because every time Ruth and I go out together, we end up with male admirers.

Early this week, we were riding the bus together on the way to visit one of Ruth's students' host families. As soon as we got off, we heard a voice behind us: "Girls! Girls! May I speak to you for a minute?" Sketchy, but it was daylight and there were plenty of people around, so we stopped to chat with Ibragim, a Tajik who was hoping to get us to go on a double date with him and a friend this weekend. We fed him the old line about not having cell phones (we're always worried that one of our students is going to call us as we are delivering this line, but it hasn't happened yet), and he wrote down his number for us on a scrap of paper. Then he reached into his black plastic grocery bag and pulled out... a big ol' melon! He presented us with a melon! We couldn't help but burst out laughing. This would be like a Nebraska boy giving you an ear of corn, or a Mainer pulling a lobster out of his bag. But we graciously accepted the gift (feeling slightly bad, for we are never going to call him back) and thanked him.

Then we had to schlep this melon into the grocery store - we needed a hostess gift, and determined that regifting the melon would be gauche – and leave it with the security guard, because of course you're not allowed to enter the grocery store with a melon. (Handing over the offending melon caused us to burst out laughing again. No English was spoken to reveal us as Foreign Chicks, so I'm pretty sure the security guard just thought we were straight-up crazy.)

Today I went for a long wander in Starotatarskaia Sloboda, the old Tatar section of town.

I was walking down a narrow, busy street lined with halal cafes and small kiosks selling assorted housewares, magazines, "Muslim goods" (clothing and books), and snacks. It was dusty and hot, and I was walking toward the minaret of a bright green-painted brick mosque. As I walked, the midday call to prayer began. I love the call to prayer, and hearing it is a rarity in the parts of Kazan I live and work in. Just as it began, half cry, half song, I walked past a homeless man, skin burned deep brown by the sun, either dead or sleeping in a pile of grass, trash and dust under a tree. A tram clacked deafeningly by on the tracks that run down the middle of the street. A second came from the other direction, and then a third. Nobody even rides these trams; taking one is hardly faster than walking. They give the appearance that public transportation exists, but are in fact of no use to anyone. By the time they had passed, the call to prayer was over.

Probably I was just cranky, but this moment called to mind the themes of a great deal of Russian literature: Gogol and his innocent, mad heroes, crushed by the cruelty of their fellow men; Bulgakov's Muscovites, ordinary, decent people who have had their spirituality spoiled by the "apartment problem" - no one can get a decent place to live except by lying and cheating; the thoughtless savagery of Shalamov's Gulag. To say nothing of Dostoevsky! In short, the indifference and ease with which everyday life destroys beauty, the complete irrelevance of a call to prayer in a world of clacking, empty trams and dying homeless men.

And now for something completely different!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cary-fowler/kremlinrussia-stop-the-de_b_659123.html

I'm famous!

Ok, not really. But a friend who does this sort of thing (social media, I mean) had me translate that little snippet of Twitter text into Russian. Mostly, after an utterly demoralizing week of job searching (argh, not qualified for anything!), I'm just pleased that I have a skill that is occasionally useful. For saving the planet!

And isn't it ridiculous that they're even thinking of bulldozing such a treasure? Hopefully saner heads will prevail, but since it's the Russian government, I'm not holding my breath. Still, I'll admit, I wrote a letter to the Kremlin about it. (Today I also wrote a letter to Kavkazskii Uzel, my favorite Caucasus news source, asking if they need volunteer Russian-English translators. Yes, like a Soviet pensioner, I have recognized but not accepted my helpless position in society, and have thus begun spearheading futile letter-writing campaigns.)

More Ivan Ivanych!

Album updated with pictures from our riverboat cruise to Samara here. I wasn't very attentive about taking pictures, so there aren't many of the boat ride itself, which was about 18 hours each way (for a four-hour jaunt in Samara - yes, clearly it was about the journey, not the destination).

That's ok, we can use our imaginations. Picture a river boat. Now, make it Russian. Specifics: Russian discotheque at night, which includes terrible European techno and terrible Russian dancing (for a stereotypically sexy nation, Russians cannot dance their way out of a paper bag); Russian women wandering around in inexplicably high heels and Russian men wandering around drunk, both at 10 a.m.; heavy Russian food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (it's like how you get fat on a Caribbean cruise, but with none of the deliciousness); Russian-style cruise narration, which is light on anecdotes and heavy on information on the various mineral deposits of the Volga provinces; and a little old man who turned out to be a stowaway, sleeping in the deck chairs at night, using stories about how he wept at Kennedy's death (J.F.'s, that is) to get our boys to buy him drinks at the bar, and shamelessly filching all of our group's free toilet paper from our cabins right before we all disembarked.

Now imagine that you have 27 American college kids, a resident director, and two middle-aged Russian women, and they all have cabins right over the boilers. And you'll have a pretty accurate picture. Thankfully, nobody got drunk and fell off the boat, or (to my knowledge) pregnant, so, there's that.

Not to imply that it wasn't fun. It was! It was just a very specific, very Russian kind of fun, which requires some gritting of the teeth.