During my time here in Siberia, I often find myself wondering, "How did the path of my life lead me here?" (In fact, a man from Olkhon asked me this very question on the marshrutka from Irkutsk to Olkhon yesterday.) And as I sit here at my little desk answering tourist questions, ordering marshrutkas for visitors, and booking the banya, I feel espeically disoriented. My job is conducted almost primarily in Russian, and for the most part, I can understand when given direction. Even so, I've found that Russians tend to be extremely vague and pretty much expect you to figure out everything by yourself. For example, this morning I was given a small office in a shed labeled "customer service" and told to answer tourist questions. I was not, however, informed how to answer these questions, nor how long I would be sitting there (so far six hours and counting). It turned out that I spent the better part of the afternoon entertaining and practicing English with the owners' 13-year-old son. I was just thinking of some of my first jobs and how it's always awkward to start a new job because for the first few days you never know exactly what you're supposed to be doing. And here I am, going through that awkward phase, but completely in Russian. For example, earlier today an older Russian woman came up to my little "help desk," introduced herself, and asked me where I was from, why I'm here, etc. Later in the day, I was delagated the duty of collecting laundry for the guests and the lady came up to me, pointed to the pile of laundry on the floor, and asked me something with her strong "village Russian" accent. Because I thought this woman was a guest, I assumed that she wanted to drop off her laundry and I explained the process (you drop it off, pay by the kilogram, pick up the next day). She then mentioned something about picking up laundry, which I assumed meant that she had dropped off her laundry yesterday and wanted to know where to pick it up. I then told her that she should ask in reception because I hadn't been working yesterday, but she kept pointing to the laundry and saying something out of which I could only distinguish the words "Don't be scared." When I saw an employee who speaks English walk by, I asked him to help me, and he told me she was simply stopping by to pick up the laundry. It turned out that she works here at Nikita's and thought that I was "afraid" to give her the laundry because I didn't believe she actually worked here and that she would steal it, when in reality I simply had no idea that she was the laundry lady!
All other things aside, Olkhon is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been and probably ever will be. Believe it or not, the lake is still partially forzen, and if you stand in a quiet spot you can hear the ice cracking like glass. Last evening I watched a beautiful sunset over the lake followed by a strange lightening storm that I watched safely from my front porch. The village of Khuzir is peaceful and simple, and I truly enjoy the chance encounters that I make with the people who live here. Yesterday, my firneds and I met an old man ouside of the village's only grocery store and talked to him for almost 45 minutes about the Ukraine and Belerus's dependence upon Russian oil. This was all before his wife, dressed in a sparkely purple dress, came over and yelled at him, "How old do you think you are?! What are you doing talking to these young ladies?!" The funny thing was, he was a bit senile and for some reason insisted that we were German, and tried to speak to us in German multiple times.
So there's my update for now! Within the next few weeks I'll probably be writing more often than I have been because I'll sitting at my little desk for most of the day refusing to give the laundry lady the laundry!
Sorry everyone, but the internet has been so bad lately that I can't even load photos onto the blog website, so you'll just have to wait for me to get back! J
This past weekend we had our last horah with our Russian friends from the university and took a weekend trip to Baikalsk, a small village about 4 hours north of Irkutsk and the place where we had gone skiing 2 ½ months ago. Unfortnately, on the day we were supposed to leave we missed our train and had to order a marshrutka, which meant we have to splurge a whole 150 rubles ($5.50) instead of paying only 40 rubles (less than $1.50). I think I'm really going to miss cheap public transportation when I'm back in the US and I have to pay $60 to get from New Haven to Harrisburg on Amtrak. All 30 of us stayed in this odd gymnasium-school-hostel that our friend Olegue knew about (he grew up in Baikalsk), and ate in a school cafeteria for 50 rubles (which was truly the most rotten food I think I've ever eaten). When we got back from lunch, two of my friends from England started a football (soccer) match with all of the guys. When I joined in, I think they weren't really expecting anything from me, mainly because I'm a girl and the standard mentality here towards women is that they can't do things (especially sports) nearly as well as men. It turned out that I held my own pretty well in front of my rather good-looking European guy friends and even scored 3 goals! Given that I haven't played soccer in probably about 8 years and that I haven't managed to work out regularly within the past 3 months, I could barely move the next day because my muscles were so sore.
We spent the evening utilizing the banya and toasting to friendship, international relations, and several other things as the evening proceeded. We spent the next day and a half doing pretty much the same things: kicking a soccer ball around, banya-ing, and having a vecherinka (party). All in all, it was great for everyone to spend the whole weekend together before the end of the semester and the beginning of exam week.
Now, when I say "exam week," I don't mean the type of exam week that I had last semester when I didn't leave my room for a whole week and lived off of crackers and coffee. When I say "exam week," I mean that the teachers threaten about an exam all semester and then end up giving you an "avtomat," which means that you get an "automatic" 5 (A) because you did your homework and showed up for class. I only actually took one real exam, and for one of my classes the conversation with regard to by grade proceeded as such: teacher—"Do you agree with a 4 [B]?" Me—"Um, ok." Teacher—"Do you strongly want a 5?" Me—"Well, yes." Teacher—"Well ok then, 5!" If only things worked this way at Wesleyan!
Right now I'm sitting in Studio Coffee looking out the window at the May blizzard that fell upon Irkutsk late this morning. I'm waiting for my Greek salad and americano to arrive while watching the wealthy Irkutsk businessmen come and go, braving the weather in their sharp suits and Russian-style pointed-toe men's shoes. I'm thinking back to my first trip to Studio Coffee back in February when all of my friends had taken a trip to Ylan-Yde and I was stuck in Irkutsk by myself feeling homesick and lonely, looking for any semblance of American culture that I could experience. Even though by looking out the window alone you can't tell that much time has passed, I feel like that was a lifetime ago and that everything has changed since then (except maybe, the precipitation). Back then I orded a cappucino because it was the only thing on the menu that I could recognize and I remember looking up how to say, "waitress, can I have the check?" Now, I'm capable of ordering a marshrutka by phone and understand even the most weathered drivers (every one here seems to agree that marshrutka drivers have their own sub-culture and speak their own version of Russian which is nearly unintelligable even to native Russians). I feel like the gloomy skies are indicative of my current mood, mainly because all of my American and international friends will be leaving within the next week and my time in Irkutsk and in Russia is coming to an end. It's hard for me to imagine returning to the US because I've really made a life for myself here in this bustiling Siberian city. I've made a few good Russian friends, become extremely close with my dormmates, manged to finally crack the code of the local transporation system, located all of the good cafes in the city (even the ones that have coffee "to go"!), and finally gotten a handle on conversational Russian. I've seen the lake change from solid ice that you can drive on to a (nearly) liquid state and I can finally see buds on the trees. I've braved what locals have dubbed "the coldest winter in recent memory" and exeprienced the most awkward experience that I'll (hopefully) ever have when I accidentally brought up gay marriage at a Russian non-profit (it still makes me angry thinking about it). The truth is, I've really changed as a person and have become more patient, thankful, and have gained some very important new perspectives, not to mention a completely new tolerance for cold. The city is a completely different place in the spring and I feel completely different about Irkutsk and Russia in general than when I arrived. Nonetheless, I so excited to spend my last three weeks living on Olkhon and reflecting upon this amazing, awful, boring, exciting, ridiculous experience!
It's 9:00 on a Tuesday night and it's RAINING! This normally wouldn't be exciting, except for the fact that this is the first form of precipitation that I've seen that hasn't been in the form of snow (although now that I look a little more closely, it might be a snow/rain combo). I'm currently fighting the endless struggle with the internet, which works about as fast as the internet worked in the US in the year 2000, and waiting for my laundry to finish soaking in the sink. I'm really going to miss Irkutsk when I leave at the end of the month, but I will never be nostalgic for washing my clothes by hand. Luckily I'll have no reminders of this because most of my clothes are nearly destroyed from hand-washing and I'll be leaving almost all of them behind.
I spent this past weekend in Ulan-Bataar, Mongolia, which was a surprise trip SRAS organized for the 4 of us on the program. In all, the trip was pretty amazing, although I don't know who is responsible for planning a trip in which we spent 2 ½ days traveling and only 1 full day in the city. We left by overnight train on the trans-Siberian railway late Friday night and arrived in Ylan-Yde early Saturday morning. From there we took a 12-HOUR bus ride to Ylan-Bataar, Mongolia. Crossing the border was, of course, a complete fiasco and pain-in-the-ass. The process goes like this: Pull up to the border, wait. An official comes on the bus and personally checks everyone's passports, wait. Cross the border, disembark, gather luggage, wait in line. Passport control, customs, wait. Get back on the bus. An official comes on the bus and personally checks everyone's passports, again. Then we cross the border. And that was just to get out of Russia. The same process occurs on the other side with the Mongolian officials (the only difference was that the Mongolian drug dogs were a lot wimpier than the Russian ones).
We got to Ulan-Bataar around 7pm and met our tour guide, who was about 20 yrs old and spoke excellent English (and quite attractive, might I add). When I told him I was from PA, he told me that he's going to Lehigh University in the fall! He then added that he had also applied to Colgate, Vassar, Hamilton, Brandeis, and Lafayette, and that he had to apply two years in a row because none of the schools he applied to the first time around offered him enough financial aid. When he told me that he found out about these schools by reading US News & World Report's "Top Colleges" list (my temporary bible when I was applying to college), I realized just how small the world is. Even though he was obviously a very intelligent person, it turned out that he didn't really know too much about Mongolia (we started to doubt the fact that he grew up in Ulan-Bataar) and wasn't a very good tour guide.
He showed us to our hostel to drop off our stuff before going to a Mongolian barbecue buffet for dinner (where I tried horse meat for the first time). After commenting on how "nice" the hostel was, we all realized that our standards had significantly lowered after coming to Russia. Looking back, the hostel was of about the same quality as you would expect at "Purdy Motel" on 11&15 South. After dinner, my friend Andrew and I went to a very Western-style karaoke bar and had the opportunity to hear Mongolian renditions of songs by Michael Jackson, Journey, and Whitney Houston. We also tried the very popular Mongolian "Chengis Khan" beer, which was a disappointingly light and flavorless beer. (I don't know why, but I was kind of expecting something dark and bitter.) Before we left, I left a 100-tugrug (Mongolian currency) tip for our waitress, only to rush back to our table as soon as I realized I had only left her the equivalent of $.07. In fact, the currency in Mongolia is so inflated that they stopped using coins a few years ago.
On Sunday, our one and only full day in Mongolia, we went to a giant metal statue of Chengis Khan in the desert outside of the city. This was supposedly the estimated location of his death, and there was a whole complex constructed in his honor. Unfortunately, the museum was under construction and there really wasn't much to see, but we got a chance to take an elevator up to the top of the statue and look out over the mountainous desert. We then drove further and went to a national park out on the steppe, where I felt the strongest wind I've ever experienced in my life; in fact, while we were climbing a hill I had to take a few breaks to sit down for a few moments because I was afraid the wind would blow me over.
We then headed back into Ulan-Bataar for the city portion of our excursion. Ulan-Bataar is really unlike any other place I've ever been in my life. The outskirts of the city are pretty rough, and there are even young children begging on the streets (which is something I've never seen in Russia). Also, most people who live outside of the center of the city or in the countryside live in yurts, which are round collapsible tepee-like dwellings no more than ten meters across and 2 meters high. They actually seem quite roomy from the inside, and I bought a beautiful silver bracelet as a souvenir for myself from a man who turned his yurt into a tourist shop (with his bed and belongings situated neatly against one of the walls). The inside of the city is fairly modern and somewhat resembles Irkutsk. The only huge difference was that behind the tall buildings you can see the desert mountains in the background, which makes you realize that even though you're in a city, you're still in a desert in the middle of nowhere, and outside the city walls there is literally nothing for miles and miles; only about every 60 miles or so do you see a tiny yurt village and a herd of animals. A lot of people in Mongolia still live semi-nomadic lives, and Mongolia is considered the most underdeveloped country in the world because it is so sparsely populated. In fact, the population of Mongolia is only about 3 million, and one-third of those people live in the city of Ulan-Bataar.
In the city, we had the chance to walk around the main city square and visit various Buddhist temples and statues. By the end of the day we were pretty exhausted and headed off to bed early to brace ourselves for the long journey back to Irkutsk. Whoever planned this trip had surely never sat on a bus for 12 hours with no ventilation, no restroom, and nothing to look at but miles and miles of desert wasteland. Additionally, the road between Mongolia and Russia is covered in potholes and blocked every couple of miles by wandering livestock. When we finally got to Ulan-Yde, we still had another overnight train ride ahead of us, and we arrived to Irkutsk at 7:30 this morning, giving us just enough time to quickly finish up our homework and drag our zombie-like selves to school.
In case anyone back home is till unaware, I recently received a grant from Wesleyan to stay an extra month in Russia during which I will work and live for free at Nikita's Homestead on Olkhon Island (the place where I stayed back in February). There, I'll probably teach English, translate for foreign tourists, help with cooking and cleaning, and, most importantly, have the chance to see Lake Baikal UNFROZEN. By now I'm getting pretty homesick, but I simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I'm actually becoming pretty excited about it, and I think it will be a great way to end this crazy experience I've had here in Siberia. Although, I'm still looking forward to the end of June, when I'll be able to grab a coffee to go at Starbucks, use a washing machine, and walk around outside without a coat. Until then, it will be instant coffee, hand-washed laundry, and wool jackets in May.
Pictures soon to come!
