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.

The foods of Tatarstan, continued

I'm not as good at eating for your entertainment as some people, but sometimes I make an effort. This is one of those times.

My favorite guys at the market are the Central Asian dried fruit sellers, because they are far friendlier than Russians. A week or two ago my friend Ruth and I went to the market, and an Uzbek fruit seller convinced me to buy some of his special, not-to-be-sold-to-just-anyone dried apricots. I didn't really buy that they're actually from a special reserve, but I got home and tried them and oh, my. I have never had a dried apricot that even came close to these. I'm not sure I believe they're really apricots. They're dark orange, squishy and succulent, without that leathery bite apricots can have, and they have a tang and spiciness to them that hints of - dare I say it? - Silk Road mystery. A taste of Samarqand.

Anyway, enough about the apricots - I'd better stop with the Orientalism before I make myself gag. While I was making my purchase, I noticed some funny-looking stuff hanging from ropes, labeled чурчкелла/churchkella. It looks like this:



Gross, right? But I asked what it was, and was told that it's an Azerbaijani sweet made of walnuts threaded on a string and dipped, old-tyme candlemaking-like, into a vat of grape syrup. (That's about all I can find online about it, too - apparently it's not such a common sweet outside of Azerbaijan.) I decided to give it a try. When you slice it, it looks a bit nicer:



And it tastes like all the best parts of an oatmeal cookie - warm and nutty, and the grape syrup has a very mild, mellow raisin flavor to it. It's chewier than Turkish delight, less sticky than taffy. Good stuff. I'm bringing a log of it home for Rosa (of the candy blog linked above) to try.

cultural-linguistic lacunae

Yesterday evening I made the acquaintance of a charming young gentleman by the name of Arslan. (A good Turkic name ["lion"] for a fine Tatar boy!) He lives in my apartment building, two floors up. When we met in the courtyard, he giggled, then cooed, raised one eyebrow quizzically, and burst into tears, upon which his mother took him inside for his evening bottle. During this whole interaction I was at a loss for words, pretty much reduced to making cooing sounds myself.

I had this problem last year in Turkey with my young neighbors Yiğit (7 months) and Cennet (2 years): I have very little idea of what one is supposed to say to babies in other languages. Obviously, the babies themselves don't much care, but their parents have their expectations. Talking to babies in front of their parents is a pretty highly scripted act in any language, so it's easy to screw up and sound silly (or be insulting!) if you don't know what's going on.

By observing my host mom and sister with Yiğit and Cennet, I learned that "Yerim, ya!" ("I am going to eat you [because you are so cute]!") is a common baby-exclamation in Turkish. One can also exclaim "Çirkinsin!" ("You are ugly!") to a baby, as a means of expressing pleasure at its adorableness and simultaneously deflecting the evil eye (which is always out to harm the beautiful, lucky and successful). Much later, when I was no longer interacting with Turkish babies, we had a sentence in grammar class at Georgetown that translated as, "The baby's legs were so plump that there came to me a desire to bite them." So in general, it seems that a good Turkish baby = an edible baby. Compliment parents on their children's tastiness, and you're good to go.

Somehow, baby-talk has been notably absent from my (much longer!) Russian education. Perhaps the vastly different birthrates in Russia vs. Turkey play a role? I wanted to compliment Arslan on his big, expressive eyes, but I faltered - can baby eyes be called glaza, like grownup eyes, or do they require a diminutive suffix, to become glazki or glazonki? Does one call a boy baby "handsome" in Russian and compliment him on his masculine characteristics ("little man", "so big and strong!"), like we do in English? And are Tatar babies as susceptible to the evil eye as Turkish ones? I plan (only sort of kidding, here) to observe the courtyard babushki with Arslan for the rest of the summer and compile field notes.

Hello!

Hello! I'm still alive! I'm sorry I haven't been writing as much lately. Things get busy, and resident directors for other State Department language programs come and want to drink beer and watch the World Cup with you, and then you get into things you've been reading, and then you have 27 midterm reports from students to deal with and a job interview to rock (results of job interview still pending, but I tried my darndest to rock it), and you just generally start to build a daily routine that doesn't involve a constant need for contact with the motherland. You know how it goes.

This goofy picture is of me секонд–хэнд shopping [if you're thinking, "hey, that looks like the words "second-hand" transliterated into Cyrillic," go get yourself a cookie!] with some of the ducklings today. I did not end up purchasing this lovely head scarf.

Happy 4th!

It's over, here, but happy Independence Day to my American readers!

Today was the first rainy day in Kazan in over a month, which spoiled my grand plans to go to a lake and go swimming/grilling with the ducklings, but we managed to have intercultural fun anyway!



If you are asking, "Is that a poorly-lit photo of a Russian named Ivan, standing in Leslie's kitchen, eating his very first s'more, which was prepared over the flame of a gas stove?", the answer is YES.