A few days later...

So here I sit in my cold drafty shed with a hot morning tea and space heater that my co-worker set up for me before I got here. I just ate a delicious breakfast of kasha and blini, and I'm well-rested from a good night's sleep following a few hours at the banya. I've been taking evening walks along the shores of Baikal, watching the last of the ice melt away into clear blue water, and I watch the sunset at midnight (yes, I'm that far north!). Although I've been a bit bored and lonely, I've also been busy with the tasks that I've been assigned, especially laundry collection, which has turned out to be particularly difficult. How can laundry collection be difficult, you ask? Well, I'll tell you: I have a list of women who volunteer to do laundry for some extra cash, and new ones are coming up to me each day telling me that they would like to do laundry too. Although I have nearly ten women on my list, there are usually only 3-4 bags of laundry each day at most. Because these women have volunteered primarily because they need the extra money, they come up to me hourly, asking me if there's any laundry, if there will be any laundry, if there was laundry and I gave it to someone else, etc. I've realized that it's very important to distribute the laundry evenly so that no one gets left out, but there just isn't enough laundry to go around. I've even considered pawning out my laundry just to keep them busy (even though I've been washing my laundry in a sink for 4 ½ months now and I'm pretty much a pro). In addition, these women are from the village of Khuzir, and village Russian is extremely difficult to understand, even for native speakers from the city. Oh god, I can see one of the laundry ladies approaching right now…

Other than laundry collection, I занимаюсь (one of my favorite Russian verbs that can't be directly translated into English; it means "occupied by" or "kept busy by") teaching English to 7 and 8-yr-olds. Oh my god are they adorable. They know a few phrases, but I have to teach mostly in Russian, which has turned out to be extemely rewarding given that they don't measure my intelligence by how well I speak Russian (I feel like this is the case when I'm speaking to adults). I teach them simple phrases, which they repeat in unison, and play silly games like "Simon Says" and "I spy." Secretly, Matvei is my favorite. He's this adorable 7-yr-old with two front teeth missing and wears a skull cab with bear ears on it. Another thing that I find completely adorable is that they all address me with the formal "you" ("vui") and greet me with a formal hello ("zdrastvuiche") every time I see them.

Although these things keep me reasonably busy, I spend most of the day sitting at my desk with nothing to do. The other day when I told Alexei (the Russian construction worker who comes to visit me) that I was bored, he told me to make a birthday card for the owner's younger son Tihon. I told him that I can't draw very well, but he still insisted that I make a card. Naturally, I got my computer, got on the internet (which is so fast here, thank god!!), and starting looking for a picture to look off of so I could draw something. When he caught me doing this, he said "Katusha [diminunitive of my name], what are you doing?? When I was in the army, we didn't have the internet! You have to draw something from your mind!" He then made me close my computer and told me to draw "uz dushaa" ("from the soul"). After he left, I managed to outsmart him by drawing a replica of the map hanging on the wall, and wrote on the card "Happy Birthday from America, from Europe, from Africa, etc." When he came back and realized I had done this, he almost fell over laughing, saying, "See, you just have to use your head! You don't need the internet! The internet is for stupid people [dyraki]."

Aside from Alexei, I've had other interesting conversations with Nikita's staff. One older man with whom always end up having meals because we happen to be on the same schedule, told me the history of the tribes that used to live in this portion of Siberia thousands of years ago, and then went off on a tangit about eugenics. After spending a year and a half at Wesleyan, it is, admittedly, a bit refreshing to hear what people actually think, minus all that political correctness nonsense (even though I completely disagreed with what he was saying).

So that's all I can think of for now, but I'll keep you posted…