Blini, long hikes in the Siberian wilderness, and sore muscles

So where did I leave off? I feel like so much has happened in the past week, but I’ll try to give everyone the Readers’ Digest version. As I mentioned in my last post, I agreed to go to a Maselnitsa celebration with a few people from GBT on Sunday. After carefully locating our proposed meeting spot on a map, I was fairly confident that I knew how to get there. But after I got on the bus, I got a little disoriented and, given that I couldn’t see out the windows because they were frozen with condensation, got off at the wrong stop. By the time I figured out where I was (which is difficult, mainly because there are no street signs), I was supposed to have met my friends ten minutes ago. I asked a very nice woman on the street how to get to Kykolnii Theatre (the place where I was supposed to be), and headed off in the right direction by foot. While nearly running down the street I called my friends on the phone and told them I would be about 10 minutes (in Russian, by the way, which is not the easiest thing to do over the phone while running). They waited for me for 20 minutes with a bus full of people, which was incredibly kind and considerate of them. I’m really glad they didn’t end up leaving without me because I had a blast. Tal’si is basically an ethnological museum that is a model of what a typical Russian peasant village would look like. There were a ton of things going on there, including sledding (see picture), burning a symbolic doll representing the end of winter, and eating lots of blini. Between my semi-decent Russian, the few words they knew in English, and the common language of laughter, we had little difficulty communicating with each other. I came home feeling incredibly excited to be here and on my way to making some real Russian friends.

The school week went by slowly and was incredibly stressful as usual. I got lost midweek when my Grammar teacher started talking about the verbs “to be blue,” “to be green,” etc. It turns out that every word in Russian can be a noun, an adjective, and a verb depending on its form and the way you conjugate it. By the time Thursday rolled around, I was feeling pretty discouraged. I headed off to the weekly GBT meeting and again had a few failed conversations that pretty much involved me pretending to know what was going on when in actuality I was very confused. Right before I left the meeting, a guy named “Dima” came up to me and asked me what I was doing that Sunday. I told him I didn’t have any plans, and then agreed to go on a “trip” with him and few other people from the group. I asked him 3 times where we were going and left the meeting still not quite understanding what I had gotten myself into. All I gathered from the conversation was that we were meeting at the main train station on Sunday morning at 10 am, I was supposed to bring a lunch, and something about wearing better shoes (I had been wearing my black high-heeled boots at the time). To make matters worse, I got on the wrong bus on the way home and after asking the bus driver how to get home, he laughed and said “I don’t know.” At this point no one else was left on the bus, it was nearly 9:30 at night, and we were somewhere outside of the city almost in the woods. Luckily he was really nice and drove around until he saw a mashrootka I could take. It took me nearly an hour to get home from where I was, which means I had gone way, WAY out of the way. I got home feeling frustrated with the impossible transportation system, confused about what I had committed to on Sunday, and generally discouraged with my language skills. I was so glad that the school week was almost over and that I had a 4-day weekend coming up.

On Saturday Dima text messaged me and gave me more details about our “trip.” It turns out the word he said was “nohote,” which means “hike;” I had thought he said “noezd,” which means trip. Although I was a little nervous about hiking in the Siberian wilderness, I still agreed to go and when we set out on Sunday, I was really glad I did. It was a beautiful day and we took the electronic train to an area about an hour outside of the city. The views were absolutely breathtaking, and it felt good to actually get some exercise. And oh did I get some exercise. We hiked uphill in the snow for two and a half hours and then stopped for a short lunch. It was tough, but I was having a great time and I assumed at this point that we were going to make our way back downhill after lunch. It turns out we hiked until 7:00 pm, involving a lot more uphill treks and some climbing. By the end I was dead tired and really cold because the sun had gone down around six. When I had agreed to go hiking, I kind of imagined something like the hiking trails at Rickett’s Glen in northern PA. I guess I forgot that I was in the middle of Siberia, and that Siberians are a lot tougher than your average hiker. I went straight to bed when I got back and could barely move the next day, which was unfortunate because I had a planned excursion to Listviaka with my program. The excursion to Listvianka, which is the closest location on Lake Baikal from Irkutsk, was a lot of fun, but all day I was looking forward to getting back so that I could take a hot bath. Luckily I have all day today (Tuesday) to recover. So that’s my crazy week in a nutshell! I’m still missing everyone at home, which is the main reason why I’ve been trying to keep busy. Hopefully there will be more adventures to come!