And only 2 weeks to go...

And Siberia continues to amaze me with its strangeness and its beauty. Every time I walk down to the lake, it never fails to completely take my breath away. On clear days, the water reflects a cool blue-green tropical color, and it's so crystal-clear that from the shore, you can see straight through to the stones at the bottom. The other day I went for a long walk along the beach, and when I got thirsty, I drank the water straight from the lake. It's still icy cold, and in certain areas there are still piles of snow on the shore, but I remain determined to swim in the lake before I leave!

The weather has been beautiful, but the wind is chilly enough that I'm still wearing sweaters on a daily basis. At nighttime it's uncomfortably cold, but almost every night there's a bonfire and guitar sing-along either at Nikita's or down at the beach. I've managed to make some transitory friends as tourists come and go and have also become good friends with Dima, the guy who's in charge of the internet and wi/fi at Nikita's (by the way, he is one of 5 "Dima's" that I'm friends with). A few years back he spent a year in Texas, and his English is so good that at first I thought he was an American. Unlike most Russians I know, he has excellent taste in music, and we spent a few hours the other night exchanging music (I'm in desparate need of new stuff; I go on so many long walks with my iPod and I think I've listened to my iTunes library more than 3 times).

Luckily, my friends from Irkutsk have been passing through every few days, so I've gotten a chance to say goodbye to everyone one last time. My best friend Anna is coming today and will stay for a few days, which will give us enough time to plot our next adventure together (we decided we want to travel somewhere together; I mean, after navigating Eastern Siberia, everywhere else will be so easy!).

In the two short weeks that I've been here, my Russian has actually gotten a lot better, and after having a conversation with a fellow worker during lunch today, I noticed that I didn't have to ask "what?" even once! The man I was talking to was asking me if I'll return to Russia after I graduate from college. When I told him I would have to work for a while to earn money before I could return, he responded, "Money isn't necessary. Just get married to a Russian man. And have children. This is the most important thing in life."

And then there are the conversations that I have with locals on my way back and forth from the store. Yesterday evening, I was walking in the village and a car stopped to ask me for directions to a restaurant I've never heard of (which is surprising, because there are only like 3 in the entire village). After hearing my accent, they immediately knew I was a foreigner and asked me where I was from. When I told them I'm from America, the guy in the passenger's seat, who was holding a beer in one hand and a small child in the other, jumped out of the car with the child, took a last gulp of beer, threw the can into a bush, and when I asked him what he was doing, told me that he wanted his son to meet a real American. I stood and talked to them for a few minutes and then told them I needed to get back to work. The encounter was both hilarious and incredibly sad; I just hope that they made it to their destination in time before they were too drunk to drive. The little boy was sitting on his father's lap in the front seat without a car seat or even seat belts. Luckily, there is literally no traffic in Khuzir and not a whole lot to crash into either.

Overdue pictures

I get kind of aggressive when I play sports and accidently tripped my friend Paul!

A project seminar for GBT. We built a walking trail in the botanic garden.

Manual labor.

Dima and I

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…

Pics from Mongolia

Monument of Ghengis Khan in the estimated location of his death

Our hostel...

Лощадь (horse)

Overlooking Ulan-Bataar from a memorial in dedication of Russian-Mongol relations

It was so windy in the desert when we stopped for a "bathroom break" that we could barely stand straight!

The most beautiful place on earth

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!

Snowstorms in May

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!