First week of classes and Olkhan Island

Russia never fails to make me feel like a complete idiot. All day long I only mildly understand what people are saying to me and express myself in only the simplest and shortest sentences. Native Russians speak far too quickly and do not annunciate their words enough for me to understand even the words and phrases that I do know. Although it’s getting easier, it’s hard to imagine a point in time when I will be fluent. School days are long and boring, and there is not nearly enough caffeine in tea (the preferred hot beverage by all Russians) to keep me going.

In light of frustrations at school, I decided to skip class on Friday (evidently something that is perfectly acceptable here) and go on a last-minute weekend trip to Olkhan Island with some friends. Naturally, we traveled the 7-hour journey by mashrootka, otherwise known as the Russian version of Greyhound buses (enough said). Now, I mentioned the mashrootka earlier, but I don’t think I articulated in enough detail the whole mashrootka experience. These van-sized buses seat sixteen people in a space that appears to seat only eight. The rows face each other, so half of the passengers have the pleasure of facing the rear of the vehicle during the bumpy ride. Undoubtedly, these are Soviet-era vehicles with the durability of an army tanks, and if you’re lucky, your mashrootka will have its own gasoline supply ready to be pumped from a barrel stored behind the back seats. This way, you don’t need to stop at gas station along the way; you just pull off the side the road and your driver pumps the gas right there. There is also something to be said about the Russian highway system, or lack thereof. Right outside of the city, it’s a paved, two-lane road with potholes approximately every 5 meters. A few kilometers (yes, I use the metric system now) outside of the city there are no actual “lanes” per se, and the terrain is gravel, not asphalt. Later, you’re driving on dirt, snow, and ice on what appears to be a back country pathway. But no, this is a perfectly acceptable road, and they even equip these “roads” with roadsigns. This may sound very dangerous, but honestly, a marshootka could probably drive through a heavily wooded forest without sustaining much damage. If a marshrootka gets in an accident, you’d be more concerned with the thing that it hit than the marshrootka itself.

After this long and bumpy ride we were greeted by a staff member from Nikita’s, the place where we had booked rooms for the weekend. The guy from Nikita’s picks us up in a marshrootka, of course, and drives us across the lake to the island. Yes, you drive across the lake. And there are roadsigns. In the lake. Naturally, I was afraid that we would fall through the ice when I learned that this was how we were getting to the island, but I was assured that the lake freezes in late November, and stays that way until early April. The ice is 7 meters thick.

Nikita’s is located in a tiny village consisting only of log cabins whose inhabitants were only introduced to electricity in 2005. There’s no running water or plumbing. For 800 rubles a night (about $15) you get your own little room in one of the cabins, complete with carved wood architecture and a stove-oven heater. You’re also fed breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and have free access to the banya (which is your only option for bathing since there is no running water). On Saturday, we went on an excursion across the lake. For most of the day we were driving around on the ice, even the parts where the ice had collected into stacks of giant cubes. There are few words to explain this whole experience—a video will be soon to come. Basically it was like the scene from Doctor Zhivago after he has deserted from the Red army and is wondering the Siberian tundra in a blizzard to find his way home (except here it’s too cold to snow; instead, tiny specks of ice fall from the sky and blow around on the ground like sand).

On our return trip to Irkutsk by way of mashrootka, our driver refused to stop during the 7-hour journey for a bathroom break and the marshrootka was completely full, leaving absolutely no room to move my freezing cold feet (of course there is no heat). About 20 minutes outside of the city, he stopped to have a smoke break. This was quite possibly the most miserable travel experience of my life. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Although I had a great weekend away from the craziness of the city, I was happy to come “home.” It was good for me to go away so that I could begin to identify the dormitory as my new home, and I was really glad to catch up with my other friends. Even now as I sit in my room listening to a random dog barking down the hallway (there are various animals in the dormitory whose owners seem to be anonymous), I feel like this place isn’t so foreign any longer. I still wake up each morning wondering why the hell I’m in the middle of Siberia (oftentimes I feel like I’m living in Soviet Russia), but it’s beginning to become a little more comfortable and familiar.