I have 27 mosquito bites at the moment. As Lindsay so graciously described it, I’m starting to look like I have chicken pox.
Sorry. I’m a bit out of it right now, as I try to stay awake until dinner. We didn’t sleep much on the train last night. The bonus was that this time Lindsay, Rose, Allison, and I were all next to each other, with Lindsay and I on bottom bunks. On the way to Petersburg, we were spread throughout the car, all on top bunks, which kept us from being able to sit up for the duration of the ride. Note to travelers – get the bottom bunk. You can store your luggage inside the bench (as opposed to sleeping around it, as I did going out there), and you have enough headroom to sit. The top is nice because that’s where the breeze from the window goes, but get the bottom bunk. Or, even better, don’t do third class.
I figured I should be more descriptive today, you know, using imagery and all that creative writing stuff, so here’s a description of the train ride:
Picture an older-looking train, perhaps from the 1980’s. It’s green on the outside and the windows are curtained with yellowish lace. You walk down the platform, looking for your assigned car by checking the numbers in the window. You find number 11, and hand the female conductor standing at the door to the car your ticket and your passport. She checks them, then hands it to you with a stream of Russian. Somewhere in there is your seat number, which you fortunately know from the ticket because the number’s syllables are buried among the Slavic tones. You step up into beige plastic-and-metal interior, take a sharp left turn to squeeze past the toilet, drinking fountain, some piece of heat-emitting machinery, and the conductor’s compartment to find yourself surrounded by red-pleather benches. There are two benches on your right, one above the other, running parallel to the train. To our left are sections of four benches apiece, laying perpendicular to the train two above and two below. Between each four is a collapsible table, and the middle part of the lower bench on your right also flips over to become a small table. Scattered on the benches are various bedrolls, luggage, and Russians.
The heat is stifling on the train – there’s no air circulating at all. You find your seat number, shrug off the backpack, and immediately try to open the window. By practically dangling from it so that your are using gravity and your body weight to assist you, you manage to lower the window about 6 inches. You lift up the bench you’re assigned to and store your backpack inside.
While trying to sleep last night, I searched for some comparison to these benches. I think they must have been padded at some time, but the padding left long ago. So imagine a bench made of metal or plastic. There are the bedrolls – thin cushions you spread out to sleep on. They smell a bit, but at least you paid the higher price for your ticket so the conductor hands you a plastic-wrapped package of sheets when she comes by to check your ticket.
Once the train starts moving, the motion is actually rather soothing. I felt it still for a while after we got off the train in St. Petersburg – kind of like how you still feel the waves of the ocean after you spend the day at the beach. They play techno music during the waking hours, then apparently arbitrarily, decide it’s bedtime. That’s when they turn off the music, turn off the lights, and everyone lays down to sleep.
If you are a male reader of mine, let me speak directly to you. Please don’t take off your shirt in public. It’s not attractive. Even if you’re young, no no. And especially no if you’re older. Just, no. I know it’s hot on the train, believe me. But I manage to keep my clothes on, and so should you. There were many fellows on the train whose sweaty backs I had to see (or worse, sweaty fronts with man-nipples and such. Ew.) on the trains, including two guys who stripped down to their boxers to sleep. Again, ew.
This train didn’t stop as often as the one going did, which was nice. I started to drift off around 1:30am, when there was suddenly a loud bang and this older Russian lady in a green floral dress in the section next to ours started screaming. She yelled at somebody for several minutes, then I guess the conductor managed to appease her. The same thing happened again around 3:30 am. I’m not sure what the banging was. Theories include – someone falling out of bed, a bench collapsing, a car hitting the side of the train, the train hitting a metal barrier. Who knows?
The conductor shook my knee at about 4:30 am, saying “Yaroslavl” gently. My traveling buddies and I packed up hurriedly, folded and returned our sheets to the conductor’s cabin, rolled up the bedrolls, then sat and sat and sat. I really needed to use the bathroom at that point, but the conductor locks them up within 30 minutes of a town, so I sat there cross-legged, waiting desperately for the train ride to stop.
As we waited the 45 minutes or so of slow arrival into our station, I watched the sun rise. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but a sunrise does look and feel different than a sunset. The sky turned milky-blue, then cream with pink streaks under the clouds. As the light grew, you could see this fairy-tale mist between the trees and bushes in the forest alongside the tracks. As dawn came, the mist crept back into the woods, dissipating slowly around the greenery and the few scattered houses. It was really rather lovely.
We got back to our hotel around 5:30 am. Rose went straight for the shower, and I dropped my bags right next to the door and curled up on the bed in a fetal position. We slept until 8:30, getting up in time to dress for our placements for the day.
Speaking of, I feel like I haven’t done justice to my descriptions of the work. I was going to write about today’s work, to give you some ideas of what it’s like, but this entry’s long enough. Tomorrow, then.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
St. Petersburg Pictures
Greek food! Happiness! Now picture the soundtrack from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" played by a live band in a blue room as I ate this.
The Peter and Paul Fortress across the Neva River at Sunset. I took this while waiting to meet Rose and Yan after the ballet. It's 10:30pm in this picture, by the way. Geography's weird.
Me in front of the Church on Spilled Blood.
Women selling produce outside of the church near Dostoevsky's house. (It's a little blurry because I was shooting surreptitiously.)
Rose and Yan at the Literary Cafe. This was the cafe Pushkin met his second at the morning he fought his fatal duel. We had a yummy dessert there, and it was only a block from our hostel.
The stage and orchestra pit of the Hermitage Theater (I took this withot a flash, long before the show began, by the way).
The waiting area of the train station we left from in St. P.
Sunset from the window of our train.
Not a St. P. picture, but this is my favorite of our CCS drivers. A very funny guy.
The Peter and Paul Fortress across the Neva River at Sunset. I took this while waiting to meet Rose and Yan after the ballet. It's 10:30pm in this picture, by the way. Geography's weird.
Me in front of the Church on Spilled Blood.
Women selling produce outside of the church near Dostoevsky's house. (It's a little blurry because I was shooting surreptitiously.)
Rose and Yan at the Literary Cafe. This was the cafe Pushkin met his second at the morning he fought his fatal duel. We had a yummy dessert there, and it was only a block from our hostel.
The stage and orchestra pit of the Hermitage Theater (I took this withot a flash, long before the show began, by the way).
The waiting area of the train station we left from in St. P.
Sunset from the window of our train.
Not a St. P. picture, but this is my favorite of our CCS drivers. A very funny guy.
Monday, August 06, 2007
St. Petersburg
It's about 2:30pm in St. Petersburg, on a sunny, hot Monday. We are exhausted!
Yesterday, Rose, Yan, and I headed out on the town. We took the metro to the monastery southeast of town, and went into one of it's three cemetery's to do some major tourist gawking. There we found the grave of Dostoevsky, which sent Rose into spasms of delight. We also hunted out Tchaikovsky's tomb and I found M. Petipa's grave as well. It actually was quite lovely, as graveyards go - lots of intricately carved monuments to the dead.
We tried to metro back towards the city, but had the delightful experience of sitting on the train as an unintelligible announcement is made in Russian, then watching every single person on board the train get off, leaving you there alone. Huh. Using my deductive powers, I figured that the next station (the one we were trying to get to) was closed, so we hoofed it along something-that-starts-with-a-Z Prospect to the Dostoevsky House-Museum. Again, much delight for Rose. We toured his flat, looking at his hat, his office, his clock, etc. This was his last apartment - the one where he wrote "The Brothers Karamazov". Literary coolness.
We were starving by that time, so we made our way back towards Nevsky Prospect, stopping for lunch at a pizza place on the way. Our main culinary goal in St. P. was to avoid Russian food, since we get plenty of it during the week. Hence some delightful meals of the Greek, Italian, and Sandwich variety. Excellent.
Next was the Hermitage. I've got to say, it's one of the few museums where the actual structure rivals the art inside. I enjoyed it as much as possible, but it was absolutely packed, particularly with tour groups, which I began to despise as I had to wait again and again to enter a room while masses of people wearing pink stickers followed ladies with paddles that say "Baltic Tour #9" and such poured through the small doorways. Still, I had art satisfaction.
After dinner at Subway's (on Nevsky!), we walked to the Church on Spilled Blood and went souvenier shopping. Many, many roubles later, Rose and Yan were kind enough to escort me to the Hermitage Theater. They went on a boat tour, and I saw Swan Lake in Catherine's theater - a tiny, lavishly decorated place. It was filled at about 200 people, all seated in a semi-circled series of benches. I got there about 30 minutes early, and sat in a decent seat to the left of center in the back row of benches (it was open seating).
There was a live symphony, the conductor was this charming old guy in a white bowtie, and when the curtain went up and the dancers came out onto the beautiful set with splendid costumes, it was so pretty I teared up a little. Then the tourists started.
Here's the thing. I understand that you may want to capture the moment of a play. Sure, there've been several productions that I've wished I could take pictures at. But I learned at this production exactly why pictures should stay verboten. Not only did the touristy-tourists (I am not one of these, I decided, since I was there as a theater connoisseur) start taking pictures, adding little digital "pings" to Tchaichovsky's score, but they did it with flash! And they wouldn't turn off the eye, so there would be a little flash to pull you away, then a larger flash right afterwards. I got angrier and angrier as again and again my focus was put on the audience and their damned cameras instead of the dancers I had paid to see. I started translating "No photography during the show" in Russian in my head, so strong was my desire to stand up at the intermission and shout out the ban to the audience, but then I realized that there probably wasn't a native Russian speaker in the house. I hit the boiling point when one Japanese couple started creeping into the aisle in front of the stage to get a better shot. So mad was I!
Ranting aside, I really did love the show. The principles were great, the chorus was a little sloppy at times, Odette had no respect of the sight line upstage left. Still, I am happy to say that I saw this ballet in St. Petersburg's oldest theater.
Rose and Yan met me after the show, and we walked back to the hostel, enjoying the night's coolness.
Today, we slept in a bit, did a tad more shopping, then hit the Russian Museum, which I really liked. There's some great pieces in there, especially in the more modern sections. We ate dessert at the Literary Cafe, and are now killing time back at the hostel until our train in about an hour. We could do more, I guess, but we're all pretty tired and feel satiated artistically and culturally. At least I do.
Last heinous train ride of the summer. Whoo!
Yesterday, Rose, Yan, and I headed out on the town. We took the metro to the monastery southeast of town, and went into one of it's three cemetery's to do some major tourist gawking. There we found the grave of Dostoevsky, which sent Rose into spasms of delight. We also hunted out Tchaikovsky's tomb and I found M. Petipa's grave as well. It actually was quite lovely, as graveyards go - lots of intricately carved monuments to the dead.
We tried to metro back towards the city, but had the delightful experience of sitting on the train as an unintelligible announcement is made in Russian, then watching every single person on board the train get off, leaving you there alone. Huh. Using my deductive powers, I figured that the next station (the one we were trying to get to) was closed, so we hoofed it along something-that-starts-with-a-Z Prospect to the Dostoevsky House-Museum. Again, much delight for Rose. We toured his flat, looking at his hat, his office, his clock, etc. This was his last apartment - the one where he wrote "The Brothers Karamazov". Literary coolness.
We were starving by that time, so we made our way back towards Nevsky Prospect, stopping for lunch at a pizza place on the way. Our main culinary goal in St. P. was to avoid Russian food, since we get plenty of it during the week. Hence some delightful meals of the Greek, Italian, and Sandwich variety. Excellent.
Next was the Hermitage. I've got to say, it's one of the few museums where the actual structure rivals the art inside. I enjoyed it as much as possible, but it was absolutely packed, particularly with tour groups, which I began to despise as I had to wait again and again to enter a room while masses of people wearing pink stickers followed ladies with paddles that say "Baltic Tour #9" and such poured through the small doorways. Still, I had art satisfaction.
After dinner at Subway's (on Nevsky!), we walked to the Church on Spilled Blood and went souvenier shopping. Many, many roubles later, Rose and Yan were kind enough to escort me to the Hermitage Theater. They went on a boat tour, and I saw Swan Lake in Catherine's theater - a tiny, lavishly decorated place. It was filled at about 200 people, all seated in a semi-circled series of benches. I got there about 30 minutes early, and sat in a decent seat to the left of center in the back row of benches (it was open seating).
There was a live symphony, the conductor was this charming old guy in a white bowtie, and when the curtain went up and the dancers came out onto the beautiful set with splendid costumes, it was so pretty I teared up a little. Then the tourists started.
Here's the thing. I understand that you may want to capture the moment of a play. Sure, there've been several productions that I've wished I could take pictures at. But I learned at this production exactly why pictures should stay verboten. Not only did the touristy-tourists (I am not one of these, I decided, since I was there as a theater connoisseur) start taking pictures, adding little digital "pings" to Tchaichovsky's score, but they did it with flash! And they wouldn't turn off the eye, so there would be a little flash to pull you away, then a larger flash right afterwards. I got angrier and angrier as again and again my focus was put on the audience and their damned cameras instead of the dancers I had paid to see. I started translating "No photography during the show" in Russian in my head, so strong was my desire to stand up at the intermission and shout out the ban to the audience, but then I realized that there probably wasn't a native Russian speaker in the house. I hit the boiling point when one Japanese couple started creeping into the aisle in front of the stage to get a better shot. So mad was I!
Ranting aside, I really did love the show. The principles were great, the chorus was a little sloppy at times, Odette had no respect of the sight line upstage left. Still, I am happy to say that I saw this ballet in St. Petersburg's oldest theater.
Rose and Yan met me after the show, and we walked back to the hostel, enjoying the night's coolness.
Today, we slept in a bit, did a tad more shopping, then hit the Russian Museum, which I really liked. There's some great pieces in there, especially in the more modern sections. We ate dessert at the Literary Cafe, and are now killing time back at the hostel until our train in about an hour. We could do more, I guess, but we're all pretty tired and feel satiated artistically and culturally. At least I do.
Last heinous train ride of the summer. Whoo!
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Russia - St. Petersburg Arrival
Hello from St. Petersburg!
We survived the very long, very hot, very horizontal train ride and found our hostel without too many problems. It's Sunday morning now, and Yen and Rose and I are heading out in just a moment to go to 1) Dostoevsky's Grave, 2) Dostoevsky's House-Museum (a bit of a pilgrimage for Rose), and 3) the Hermitage (!). I plan to get ballet tickets for myself for this evening along the way, too. Dang well better!
Anyway, the others are waiting. I'll tell you more about the train ride when I have longer. In the meanwhile, off to the cemetery! Whoo!
PS. St. P. is SO much better than Moscow - more open, more friendly, more European (v. Soviet). It's a winner in my book so far. As is the awesome Greek restaurant we ate at last night. Again, more later. Tah!
We survived the very long, very hot, very horizontal train ride and found our hostel without too many problems. It's Sunday morning now, and Yen and Rose and I are heading out in just a moment to go to 1) Dostoevsky's Grave, 2) Dostoevsky's House-Museum (a bit of a pilgrimage for Rose), and 3) the Hermitage (!). I plan to get ballet tickets for myself for this evening along the way, too. Dang well better!
Anyway, the others are waiting. I'll tell you more about the train ride when I have longer. In the meanwhile, off to the cemetery! Whoo!
PS. St. P. is SO much better than Moscow - more open, more friendly, more European (v. Soviet). It's a winner in my book so far. As is the awesome Greek restaurant we ate at last night. Again, more later. Tah!
Friday, August 03, 2007
Russia - Weekend Voyage Two
Just a quick note to say that I'm off to St. Petersburg in four hours. I'll post a description of the new adventures when I return (and recover, I imagine. Our train back arrives at 5:00am. Fun!)
TTFN!
TTFN!
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Russia Day 10 - Back to Work
Hurrah! Despite a cough, I'm back at placements today. I will say this for my cold - it seems to be making me sleep soundly at night. Although I woke up when my cell phone rang at about 1:30am (Janelle left a voice message), I did not wake up when the drunken Russian from down the hall came calling on our suitemate at around midnight. Our hotel room is a little suite of rooms - you enter a door from the general hallway (which can't lock), and to the right is the toilet and the shower rooms (2 seperate rooms). One the left is the door to mine and Rose's room. Straight ahead is Allison's door, which is where Vulva (no, really, that's his name) came pounding and demanding to be let in. Fun! He woke Rose up, who locked our door. I didn't wake up, which is okay with me. We notified the hotel staff today, but who knows what the harrassment laws/policies are here. Try not to worry too much, Mom, now that I've posted the story.
The placements today were quite, but nice. Deaf kindergarten in the morning, with 7 kids, the largest group so far. There were three girls who went nuts for my camera, posing and dancing all the time. I played quite a bit with the kids, swinging them about and playing monster with them. I'm picking up some Russian sign language too - words like "share!" and "Thank you!"
The afternoon placement was the Kirovski City Camp. We did fingerprint drawings and played games with a very tame group of kids with an excellent and friendly staff.
Tonight I joined a group for pizza at a place called Marios, although it tasted more like a tortilla topped with gouda. I'll tell you more later, but my time online's about to end, so I need to post this asap.
Love you all!
The placements today were quite, but nice. Deaf kindergarten in the morning, with 7 kids, the largest group so far. There were three girls who went nuts for my camera, posing and dancing all the time. I played quite a bit with the kids, swinging them about and playing monster with them. I'm picking up some Russian sign language too - words like "share!" and "Thank you!"
The afternoon placement was the Kirovski City Camp. We did fingerprint drawings and played games with a very tame group of kids with an excellent and friendly staff.
Tonight I joined a group for pizza at a place called Marios, although it tasted more like a tortilla topped with gouda. I'll tell you more later, but my time online's about to end, so I need to post this asap.
Love you all!
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Russia Day 9 - Rostov
Unbelievably, I am halfway through my time in Russia.
There are several people who are leaving this weekend, and I am glad I’m not one of them. There is a lot left to do, and I think doing three weeks was the best choice. I will be ready to get back to the comforts of home, but with the satisfaction of not feeling rushed here to cram it all in.
Today was our second field trip, this time to another Golden Ring town, Rostov. It was about an hour away by van, and we left after the Russian lesson this morning (numbers 100-1000 and directions). Our first stop was the town’s enamel factory. We toured the museum (which was really just a room with a few cases in it), the guide explained the enamel-making process to us (1. Cut a sheet of copper to the shape desired, 2. Coat the copper with a glass powder mixture on each side, 3. Melt the glass powder. 4. Transfer a picture onto the glass using paint mixed with ‘technical oil’, 5. Bake and repeat as needed), then we got to go upstairs to the factory to see the workers making the pieces. We went into two rooms – one for the painters, one for the jewelers who were shaping the wire that frame the pieces. The end of the tour was, of course, the factory’s store. They were cash only, and I wiped out the rubles I had with me buying Christmas presents (and a bit for myself). I did not bring enough rubles.
Back in the van, we headed to the town’s kremlin. The buildings inside the kremlin have been falling into disrepair, so the town began renting them out. They’re now used a various museums, plus one as a hotel. We did not go inside any of the museums, but we walked around the area and took a lot of pictures. I’ll post a few below. Appreciate them, since they charged 60 rubles for the privilege of taking pictures.
On to the town’s monastery. The women in the group had to wear skirts and scarves for the day, since that was the dress code of the monastery. A guide met us there and she took us through two of the cathedrals inside the monastery’s walls – one built and frescoed (can that be a verb?) in the 17th century, and one built and decorated in the 19th century. It was very interesting to compare the artwork of the two and see the progression in fashion and in skill. They figured out how to paint depth, for example, in between the two, as well as trompe l’oeil. The latter one was decorated with plaster-formed flowers all over the ceiling, and where the flowers couldn’t fit, they had painted in fake replicas with shadowing underneath.
We also climbed to the top of one of the wall towers, where there was a grand view of the monastery’s buildings and the nearby lake.
After posing for a group picture, which our driver was kind enough to take for us, we drove to the center of the town for lunch. We were going to eat at the monastery, but it was a religious holiday today (Elijah Day, or something like that), so instead we went to a café in town. It was one of the better meals I’ve had in a while, although the ingredients were very familiar by now – beet and pickle salad (with potatoes), a regional soup called “salenka” (?) that was spicier and made with at least five different kinds of meat, a meatloaf topped with onions and potatoes and cheese, and the usual tea (I mixed a Theraflu dose in the cup instead). They also gave us little pasteries baked in the shape of walnuts that were filled with cooked sweeten condensed milk (dulce de leche, essentially). You know, that would be a wonderful way to get children to drink milk!
We got back to our hotel after a very, very bumpy ride (the driver took a different route, and the road’s disrepair got to a few of us – I had my ReliefBand cranked up to 3 for it). I found the laundry I had sent out folded neatly on my bed, as shown below. This was definitely costlier, but classier than sink-cleaning I had done with the faster-drying parts of my wardrobe. I sent out 13 pieces of clothes (three pants, including my jeans, and several shirts), and they came back within 24 hours clean and folded for 380 rubles (about $15). Hopefully this will tide me over until I get home. They really were not exaggerating, though, about how dirty you get at the placements.
Speaking of, I’m feeling a lot better today, so with luck I’ll be able to get back to work again tomorrow. I’m scheduled for the deaf kindergarten in the morning and a new placement (to me), the Kirovski City Camp, in the afternoon.
Paka!
There are several people who are leaving this weekend, and I am glad I’m not one of them. There is a lot left to do, and I think doing three weeks was the best choice. I will be ready to get back to the comforts of home, but with the satisfaction of not feeling rushed here to cram it all in.
Today was our second field trip, this time to another Golden Ring town, Rostov. It was about an hour away by van, and we left after the Russian lesson this morning (numbers 100-1000 and directions). Our first stop was the town’s enamel factory. We toured the museum (which was really just a room with a few cases in it), the guide explained the enamel-making process to us (1. Cut a sheet of copper to the shape desired, 2. Coat the copper with a glass powder mixture on each side, 3. Melt the glass powder. 4. Transfer a picture onto the glass using paint mixed with ‘technical oil’, 5. Bake and repeat as needed), then we got to go upstairs to the factory to see the workers making the pieces. We went into two rooms – one for the painters, one for the jewelers who were shaping the wire that frame the pieces. The end of the tour was, of course, the factory’s store. They were cash only, and I wiped out the rubles I had with me buying Christmas presents (and a bit for myself). I did not bring enough rubles.
Back in the van, we headed to the town’s kremlin. The buildings inside the kremlin have been falling into disrepair, so the town began renting them out. They’re now used a various museums, plus one as a hotel. We did not go inside any of the museums, but we walked around the area and took a lot of pictures. I’ll post a few below. Appreciate them, since they charged 60 rubles for the privilege of taking pictures.
On to the town’s monastery. The women in the group had to wear skirts and scarves for the day, since that was the dress code of the monastery. A guide met us there and she took us through two of the cathedrals inside the monastery’s walls – one built and frescoed (can that be a verb?) in the 17th century, and one built and decorated in the 19th century. It was very interesting to compare the artwork of the two and see the progression in fashion and in skill. They figured out how to paint depth, for example, in between the two, as well as trompe l’oeil. The latter one was decorated with plaster-formed flowers all over the ceiling, and where the flowers couldn’t fit, they had painted in fake replicas with shadowing underneath.
We also climbed to the top of one of the wall towers, where there was a grand view of the monastery’s buildings and the nearby lake.
After posing for a group picture, which our driver was kind enough to take for us, we drove to the center of the town for lunch. We were going to eat at the monastery, but it was a religious holiday today (Elijah Day, or something like that), so instead we went to a café in town. It was one of the better meals I’ve had in a while, although the ingredients were very familiar by now – beet and pickle salad (with potatoes), a regional soup called “salenka” (?) that was spicier and made with at least five different kinds of meat, a meatloaf topped with onions and potatoes and cheese, and the usual tea (I mixed a Theraflu dose in the cup instead). They also gave us little pasteries baked in the shape of walnuts that were filled with cooked sweeten condensed milk (dulce de leche, essentially). You know, that would be a wonderful way to get children to drink milk!
We got back to our hotel after a very, very bumpy ride (the driver took a different route, and the road’s disrepair got to a few of us – I had my ReliefBand cranked up to 3 for it). I found the laundry I had sent out folded neatly on my bed, as shown below. This was definitely costlier, but classier than sink-cleaning I had done with the faster-drying parts of my wardrobe. I sent out 13 pieces of clothes (three pants, including my jeans, and several shirts), and they came back within 24 hours clean and folded for 380 rubles (about $15). Hopefully this will tide me over until I get home. They really were not exaggerating, though, about how dirty you get at the placements.
Speaking of, I’m feeling a lot better today, so with luck I’ll be able to get back to work again tomorrow. I’m scheduled for the deaf kindergarten in the morning and a new placement (to me), the Kirovski City Camp, in the afternoon.
Paka!
More Russian Pictures - Rostov
The soup from lunch today:
A jeweler at the factory welding some silver:
An artist painting an enamel piece:
A window of a building at the kremlin in Rostov. Beautiful woodwork!
The catherdral inside the kremlin - I liked the pattern painted on it:
The entrance (as seen from inside) of the monastery:
The view of the monastery from the top of the wall's tower:
Our group in Rostov:
My folded laundry:
The view from our window yesterday - a lovely rainbow after the usual rainstorm, somewhat obscured by our drying unmentionables:
A jeweler at the factory welding some silver:
An artist painting an enamel piece:
A window of a building at the kremlin in Rostov. Beautiful woodwork!
The catherdral inside the kremlin - I liked the pattern painted on it:
The entrance (as seen from inside) of the monastery:
The view of the monastery from the top of the wall's tower:
Our group in Rostov:
My folded laundry:
The view from our window yesterday - a lovely rainbow after the usual rainstorm, somewhat obscured by our drying unmentionables:
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Russia Day 9 - Sick Leave
And hello again!
It's 15:43 right now, and I'm typing to you from an internet cafe across the street from our hotel. I'm starting to feel better (finally), but I'm still coughing, so Nadia told me to take another day off to get well. No contaminating the orphans, I suppose.
I was up and dressed this morning on time, just in case I could go out on the placements, so I decided to go for a walk around town instead. Besides, Rose and I both did laundry last night and together we had raised the humidity of the room quite a bit with our hanging, drying clothes everywhere.
I got on the tram outside the hotel (8 rubles a ride, or about 35 cents) and took it to the center of town. I walked over to a bookstore there and browsed for a while, eventually getting some postcards of Yaroslavl. From there I wandered through an outdoor market, over to the park near the Cathedral of Elijah the Prophet and found a bench to write postcards on. I walked to the monastery where I paid 15 rubles (35 cents) to enter the grounds. I had heard there was good souvenier shopping there, and they were right. I bought several items (300 rubles worth, actually), and managed to do it all in (highly limited) Russian. I used my Russian once again to mail the postcards at the central post office (I hope they get to America, at least), then stopped by a pharmacy to get some toilet paper. Yes, the hotel has toilet paper, but the maid will not give us a new roll until we have exhausted the old one. Between my cold and Rose's allergies, we have run out of tp mid evening twice now, so I figured I would stock up.
After getting slightly turned around, I walked back to the tram stop, caught the #3 going back, and returned to the hotel just in time for lunch. Today we had cole slaw, borsch (soup made with beef, onions, cabbage, and beets, topped with sour cream), half a roasted chicken breast, mashed potatoes, a sweet roll, and an orange. The lunches here, like Europe, are the main meal of the day. We always get four course lunches like that, while dinner is much lighter. And, of course, there are always the potatoes.
And now I'm here. Rose and Yen are typing away near me, as is Mary, another member from our original group. I think I'll go to the grocery store next, then back to the hotel for a nap. I'm worn out, actually, so maybe it's a good thing I stayed behind again today. Tomorrow is a field trip to Rostov to visit a monastary and an enamel factory, so I hope this cold moves on it's way quickly.
TTFN!
It's 15:43 right now, and I'm typing to you from an internet cafe across the street from our hotel. I'm starting to feel better (finally), but I'm still coughing, so Nadia told me to take another day off to get well. No contaminating the orphans, I suppose.
I was up and dressed this morning on time, just in case I could go out on the placements, so I decided to go for a walk around town instead. Besides, Rose and I both did laundry last night and together we had raised the humidity of the room quite a bit with our hanging, drying clothes everywhere.
I got on the tram outside the hotel (8 rubles a ride, or about 35 cents) and took it to the center of town. I walked over to a bookstore there and browsed for a while, eventually getting some postcards of Yaroslavl. From there I wandered through an outdoor market, over to the park near the Cathedral of Elijah the Prophet and found a bench to write postcards on. I walked to the monastery where I paid 15 rubles (35 cents) to enter the grounds. I had heard there was good souvenier shopping there, and they were right. I bought several items (300 rubles worth, actually), and managed to do it all in (highly limited) Russian. I used my Russian once again to mail the postcards at the central post office (I hope they get to America, at least), then stopped by a pharmacy to get some toilet paper. Yes, the hotel has toilet paper, but the maid will not give us a new roll until we have exhausted the old one. Between my cold and Rose's allergies, we have run out of tp mid evening twice now, so I figured I would stock up.
After getting slightly turned around, I walked back to the tram stop, caught the #3 going back, and returned to the hotel just in time for lunch. Today we had cole slaw, borsch (soup made with beef, onions, cabbage, and beets, topped with sour cream), half a roasted chicken breast, mashed potatoes, a sweet roll, and an orange. The lunches here, like Europe, are the main meal of the day. We always get four course lunches like that, while dinner is much lighter. And, of course, there are always the potatoes.
And now I'm here. Rose and Yen are typing away near me, as is Mary, another member from our original group. I think I'll go to the grocery store next, then back to the hotel for a nap. I'm worn out, actually, so maybe it's a good thing I stayed behind again today. Tomorrow is a field trip to Rostov to visit a monastary and an enamel factory, so I hope this cold moves on it's way quickly.
TTFN!
Monday, July 30, 2007
Russia - Days 5-8
Dobrey Vecher!
I am writing to you as one sick tourist. Alas! Those of your who have known me for a while, though, are probably not at all surprised. A rather nasty cold hit me just in time for our trip to Moscow. I actually missed my placement this morning in order to sleep, and despite that I’m not getting better. I think I may need to miss tomorrow’s placements as well in order to get rid of this thing. Drat. Then again, they probably don’t want me around the kids if I’m hacking and sniffing, right?
Complaining aside, let me tell you about the past few days.
Last Thursday a large group of us (15) went out on the town. The veterans took us to a restaurant above a movie theater in Yaroslavl that serves sushi, and it wasn’t bad, either. I got a cucumber roll and a tempura something roll. I have no idea what the fish was, since the menu was all in Russian, although I have found that navigating restaurants isn’t too bad if 1) you can sound out the words to look for similarities (sushi, tempura, tuna, and miso, for example, are the same words) and 2) you’re willing to take a chance and get something weird or unexpected. Service is very slow, though, so dinner took us about 2 hours.
Afterwards, we went to a bowling alley a few buildings down. It was quite funky - black lighting, disco balls, and lots of animation between rounds (if you got a spare, the screen showed a dinosaur tromping across the pins, for example). You pay by the hour there, so we rented two lanes for an hour at 600 rubles per lane. We also had some fun ordering shoe sizes, which required knowing your European shoe size as well as how to say the number in Russian. I did terribly, as usual, but it was fun. Oh, and we also went to the Baskin Robbins after dinner for ice cream cones (yes, Baskin Robbins.) It was one of those evenings where you do rather American things, but you’re in Russia so it’s all a very cultural experience.
Dima, one of the translators at CCS came with us for the evening, and I think it was more educational for him than for us. He’s this 19 year old boy who’s lived in Yaroslavl his whole life. Very shy, but quite kind and dignified. He had sushi for the first time that night, as well as his first experience bowling. He took third place overall in the group. When I had gotten my third gutter-ball in a row, he told me (in his nervous English), “You don’t have to try so hard. It seems to me that no matter what the ball will go down there, so just send it on it’s way.”
Dima also rescued us by volunteering to help Rose and I get the train tickets we needed. Rose and I were in the CCS office looking up the words we thought we would need to get tickets to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and Dima came in. I guess our Russian sounded terrible enough that he figured we couldn’t do it without him. Which is fairly accurate. So, he accompanied Paul, Rose, and me to the train station to buy the tickets.
Others had warned us about how awful it was, but I must say that I didn’t believe them until I had experienced it myself. It took us over an hour to get through the line of about 6 people. It was a vigorous hour, too, since Russians have no qualms about cutting in front of you, or trying to steal your place. The line is a loose term, to, since it’s more of a mob of people, pushing their way to the front. Dasha, another translator, said today that she thinks Russians do this “because we had to wait in line for everything when we were Soviet”. I think part of the reason it takes so long to help each person is because there is no published schedule anywhere. You just go to the window and tell them where you’d like to go and roughly when, and the cashier looks it up on her computer and you have to negotiate the options. Paul got quite frustrated, and has added electronic train ticket kiosks to the growing list of improvements he will make when he’s elected mayor of Yaroslavl (it also include updating the tram system and repaving the sidewalks).
Once we got to the window, Dima took over. 40 minutes later, we had 3rd class tickets to Moscow. The cashier refused to help us with the other tickets, so we had to come back the next day and go through another 2 hour process to get the tickets to St. Petersburg. But we have them, by golly!
On Friday Nadia took our group to a nearby town called Nostarovoe. There, amid the rain, we toured a small museum about the history of the town (known for the salt they draw from the river), and visited two churches. At one of them, we were met by the priest of the church, who told us the history of the cathedral. He was very kind and said that he hoped we would all be able to “find comfort from the church’s icon, no matter what religion you are.”
Saturday morning Paul, Rose, Allison, Tanya, Lindsey, Yen, and I met in the lobby of our hotel at 6:25 and headed off to the train station. We met Dima there, who was coming with us for the weekend, and boarded our 7:15 train to Moscow. The ride there was pleasant – we had cushioned, individual seats, plenty of leg room, and a decent toilet in the back. Not bad for 230 rubles!
We got to Moscow just before noon and made our way to the hotel. Getting a place to stay was the struggle of Friday night – after two hours of trying to book and/or get through to hostels in vain, I had finally given up and called Marriott. With the approval of the rest of the group, I booked us three rooms for $108 each. The hotel turned out to be rather luxurious – right on Tverskaya Ulitsa, the main shopping road of the town, near a metro, with really nice rooms. Plus, the staff all spoke English really well. A part of me feels guilty for enjoying that last quality so much, as if I’m cheating somehow, but boy was it nice not to struggle for a while.
We dropped our bags off at the hotel and walked down Tverskaya Ulitsa to Red Square, passing Pushkin Square and Tchaikovsky’s statue. It was very exciting to walk around a corner and suddenly there it is – the red brick walls, the brightly colored domes of St. Basil’s. It’s like the excitement of seeing the Eiffel tower for the first time. We were snapping pictures like crazy, but by no means were we the only ones. There were throngs of tourists there – Japanese, Chinese, American, British, even loads of Russian tourists. And tons of bridal parties! It seems to be fashionable to do wedding photos on Red Square – we saw perhaps 20 different brides in the course of the afternoon, all posing for various shots around the square.
We paid to go inside St. Basil’s after taking tons of photos outside of it (I can check off another one of my 63 life’s goals!), and afterwards Dima took us to a cathedral he said would be much prettier than St. Basil’s. So we walked along the road between the Kremlin and the Mosckva River to the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer. It’s much newer, and the interior was absolutely gorgeous. Then, after a desperate search for a bathroom for Tanya and me, we walked up to Old Arbat, did some souvenir shopping, and then took the metro back to the hotel.
By this time, my cold was getting much worse. Dima took me to a pharmacy and got me some Theraflu drink mix and some kind of lozenge, but I was done for the night. Rose and Tanya were rather tired, too, so we crashed at the hotel. Paul, Yen, Allison, and Lindsey went out to a bar, I ordered some soup and a milkshake from room service, and the others ate some bread and cheese from a market around the corner.
The next day we were slow getting out. Allison and Lindsey had stayed out all night, and stayed in their hotel room until check-out time at 3:00. Yen and Tanya got up early and ran out to the airport to retrieve one of Tanya’s suitcases, which the airline had lost last weekend (they refused to deliver it). I was slow getting up because of my cold. When I got out of the room, finally, I found Dima, Paul, Rose, Tanya, and Yen in the lobby. It turns out the hotel had a computer with free internet access, so there was much excitement all around (except for Dima – he seemed a little baffled by our delay).
We finally headed out, taking the metro back to Red Square to visit the Kremlin. After another stressful round of ticket-buying, we made it in. It’s really rather lovely inside, and I think we were early enough (and it was Sunday) that we avoided a lot of the tourist crowds. We looked inside the three cathedrals, listened to an a capella quintet, sat for a while in the “secret gardens”, and, of course, took a lot of pictures.
Afterwards, we ran into Allison and Lindsey, and went to lunch at a coffee house chain. I had a good-tasting chicken sandwich and some fresh-squeezed apple juice, which cost me about $15. People weren’t kidding when they said Moscow was one of the most expensive cities in the world. There was also some excitement when Rose accidentally locked herself in the bathroom of the restaurant. We didn’t know it until Paul went upstairs to use the restroom and heard Rose through trying to tell two Russian ladies to find her friend Dima to help her. The Russian ladies just kept yelling instructions louder and louder until Paul brought Dima back and he was able to translate the instructions to Rose and get her out. It was rather entertaining for everyone except Rose, actually.
After lunch, the group split up – Yen, Rose, Dima, and I headed back towards the hotel, stopping off at two bookstores on the way while the others went to the GUM department store. We met back up at the hotel, retrieved our bags, got back on the metro, and hopped on the train back to Yaroslavl.
The train back was much worse than the train there. This time, the seats were just benches, with three people to a bench, and three benches to each section. It was quite crowded, and the claustrophobia kicked in when people started lowering the berths above the benches to sleep on them. I was rather miserable by this time, but luckily I was in good company. Once we finished complaining about the seats, we all pulled out our various mp3 players, and listened to our music in silence. Eventually, we started sharing music and soon even the Russian fellow who was laying down above Paul, Yen, and me was passing his headphones across to Tanya to share music with us. We told stories, swapped book suggestions, and laughed in that loopy exhausted way the rest of the way to Yaroslavl, arriving just after 11:00pm.
It was a full and tiring weekend, but fun. I’m glad I got to Moscow, and I’m proud that I finished another one of my goals, but I don’t think I’ll be eager to return to Moscow again soon. There are some museums I missed, and I would love to go to the Bolshoi theater, but I can wait for those. In the meantime, I’m going to try to get over this cold so I can get to my placements again and so I can keep up with the others in St. Petersburg next weekend.
This was a very long textual post, and I’m sorry about that. I’ll balance it by posting some pictures below. Click on them to see them in full resolution if they're too small to see here. Enjoy and thanks for reading!
I am writing to you as one sick tourist. Alas! Those of your who have known me for a while, though, are probably not at all surprised. A rather nasty cold hit me just in time for our trip to Moscow. I actually missed my placement this morning in order to sleep, and despite that I’m not getting better. I think I may need to miss tomorrow’s placements as well in order to get rid of this thing. Drat. Then again, they probably don’t want me around the kids if I’m hacking and sniffing, right?
Complaining aside, let me tell you about the past few days.
Last Thursday a large group of us (15) went out on the town. The veterans took us to a restaurant above a movie theater in Yaroslavl that serves sushi, and it wasn’t bad, either. I got a cucumber roll and a tempura something roll. I have no idea what the fish was, since the menu was all in Russian, although I have found that navigating restaurants isn’t too bad if 1) you can sound out the words to look for similarities (sushi, tempura, tuna, and miso, for example, are the same words) and 2) you’re willing to take a chance and get something weird or unexpected. Service is very slow, though, so dinner took us about 2 hours.
Afterwards, we went to a bowling alley a few buildings down. It was quite funky - black lighting, disco balls, and lots of animation between rounds (if you got a spare, the screen showed a dinosaur tromping across the pins, for example). You pay by the hour there, so we rented two lanes for an hour at 600 rubles per lane. We also had some fun ordering shoe sizes, which required knowing your European shoe size as well as how to say the number in Russian. I did terribly, as usual, but it was fun. Oh, and we also went to the Baskin Robbins after dinner for ice cream cones (yes, Baskin Robbins.) It was one of those evenings where you do rather American things, but you’re in Russia so it’s all a very cultural experience.
Dima, one of the translators at CCS came with us for the evening, and I think it was more educational for him than for us. He’s this 19 year old boy who’s lived in Yaroslavl his whole life. Very shy, but quite kind and dignified. He had sushi for the first time that night, as well as his first experience bowling. He took third place overall in the group. When I had gotten my third gutter-ball in a row, he told me (in his nervous English), “You don’t have to try so hard. It seems to me that no matter what the ball will go down there, so just send it on it’s way.”
Dima also rescued us by volunteering to help Rose and I get the train tickets we needed. Rose and I were in the CCS office looking up the words we thought we would need to get tickets to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and Dima came in. I guess our Russian sounded terrible enough that he figured we couldn’t do it without him. Which is fairly accurate. So, he accompanied Paul, Rose, and me to the train station to buy the tickets.
Others had warned us about how awful it was, but I must say that I didn’t believe them until I had experienced it myself. It took us over an hour to get through the line of about 6 people. It was a vigorous hour, too, since Russians have no qualms about cutting in front of you, or trying to steal your place. The line is a loose term, to, since it’s more of a mob of people, pushing their way to the front. Dasha, another translator, said today that she thinks Russians do this “because we had to wait in line for everything when we were Soviet”. I think part of the reason it takes so long to help each person is because there is no published schedule anywhere. You just go to the window and tell them where you’d like to go and roughly when, and the cashier looks it up on her computer and you have to negotiate the options. Paul got quite frustrated, and has added electronic train ticket kiosks to the growing list of improvements he will make when he’s elected mayor of Yaroslavl (it also include updating the tram system and repaving the sidewalks).
Once we got to the window, Dima took over. 40 minutes later, we had 3rd class tickets to Moscow. The cashier refused to help us with the other tickets, so we had to come back the next day and go through another 2 hour process to get the tickets to St. Petersburg. But we have them, by golly!
On Friday Nadia took our group to a nearby town called Nostarovoe. There, amid the rain, we toured a small museum about the history of the town (known for the salt they draw from the river), and visited two churches. At one of them, we were met by the priest of the church, who told us the history of the cathedral. He was very kind and said that he hoped we would all be able to “find comfort from the church’s icon, no matter what religion you are.”
Saturday morning Paul, Rose, Allison, Tanya, Lindsey, Yen, and I met in the lobby of our hotel at 6:25 and headed off to the train station. We met Dima there, who was coming with us for the weekend, and boarded our 7:15 train to Moscow. The ride there was pleasant – we had cushioned, individual seats, plenty of leg room, and a decent toilet in the back. Not bad for 230 rubles!
We got to Moscow just before noon and made our way to the hotel. Getting a place to stay was the struggle of Friday night – after two hours of trying to book and/or get through to hostels in vain, I had finally given up and called Marriott. With the approval of the rest of the group, I booked us three rooms for $108 each. The hotel turned out to be rather luxurious – right on Tverskaya Ulitsa, the main shopping road of the town, near a metro, with really nice rooms. Plus, the staff all spoke English really well. A part of me feels guilty for enjoying that last quality so much, as if I’m cheating somehow, but boy was it nice not to struggle for a while.
We dropped our bags off at the hotel and walked down Tverskaya Ulitsa to Red Square, passing Pushkin Square and Tchaikovsky’s statue. It was very exciting to walk around a corner and suddenly there it is – the red brick walls, the brightly colored domes of St. Basil’s. It’s like the excitement of seeing the Eiffel tower for the first time. We were snapping pictures like crazy, but by no means were we the only ones. There were throngs of tourists there – Japanese, Chinese, American, British, even loads of Russian tourists. And tons of bridal parties! It seems to be fashionable to do wedding photos on Red Square – we saw perhaps 20 different brides in the course of the afternoon, all posing for various shots around the square.
We paid to go inside St. Basil’s after taking tons of photos outside of it (I can check off another one of my 63 life’s goals!), and afterwards Dima took us to a cathedral he said would be much prettier than St. Basil’s. So we walked along the road between the Kremlin and the Mosckva River to the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer. It’s much newer, and the interior was absolutely gorgeous. Then, after a desperate search for a bathroom for Tanya and me, we walked up to Old Arbat, did some souvenir shopping, and then took the metro back to the hotel.
By this time, my cold was getting much worse. Dima took me to a pharmacy and got me some Theraflu drink mix and some kind of lozenge, but I was done for the night. Rose and Tanya were rather tired, too, so we crashed at the hotel. Paul, Yen, Allison, and Lindsey went out to a bar, I ordered some soup and a milkshake from room service, and the others ate some bread and cheese from a market around the corner.
The next day we were slow getting out. Allison and Lindsey had stayed out all night, and stayed in their hotel room until check-out time at 3:00. Yen and Tanya got up early and ran out to the airport to retrieve one of Tanya’s suitcases, which the airline had lost last weekend (they refused to deliver it). I was slow getting up because of my cold. When I got out of the room, finally, I found Dima, Paul, Rose, Tanya, and Yen in the lobby. It turns out the hotel had a computer with free internet access, so there was much excitement all around (except for Dima – he seemed a little baffled by our delay).
We finally headed out, taking the metro back to Red Square to visit the Kremlin. After another stressful round of ticket-buying, we made it in. It’s really rather lovely inside, and I think we were early enough (and it was Sunday) that we avoided a lot of the tourist crowds. We looked inside the three cathedrals, listened to an a capella quintet, sat for a while in the “secret gardens”, and, of course, took a lot of pictures.
Afterwards, we ran into Allison and Lindsey, and went to lunch at a coffee house chain. I had a good-tasting chicken sandwich and some fresh-squeezed apple juice, which cost me about $15. People weren’t kidding when they said Moscow was one of the most expensive cities in the world. There was also some excitement when Rose accidentally locked herself in the bathroom of the restaurant. We didn’t know it until Paul went upstairs to use the restroom and heard Rose through trying to tell two Russian ladies to find her friend Dima to help her. The Russian ladies just kept yelling instructions louder and louder until Paul brought Dima back and he was able to translate the instructions to Rose and get her out. It was rather entertaining for everyone except Rose, actually.
After lunch, the group split up – Yen, Rose, Dima, and I headed back towards the hotel, stopping off at two bookstores on the way while the others went to the GUM department store. We met back up at the hotel, retrieved our bags, got back on the metro, and hopped on the train back to Yaroslavl.
The train back was much worse than the train there. This time, the seats were just benches, with three people to a bench, and three benches to each section. It was quite crowded, and the claustrophobia kicked in when people started lowering the berths above the benches to sleep on them. I was rather miserable by this time, but luckily I was in good company. Once we finished complaining about the seats, we all pulled out our various mp3 players, and listened to our music in silence. Eventually, we started sharing music and soon even the Russian fellow who was laying down above Paul, Yen, and me was passing his headphones across to Tanya to share music with us. We told stories, swapped book suggestions, and laughed in that loopy exhausted way the rest of the way to Yaroslavl, arriving just after 11:00pm.
It was a full and tiring weekend, but fun. I’m glad I got to Moscow, and I’m proud that I finished another one of my goals, but I don’t think I’ll be eager to return to Moscow again soon. There are some museums I missed, and I would love to go to the Bolshoi theater, but I can wait for those. In the meantime, I’m going to try to get over this cold so I can get to my placements again and so I can keep up with the others in St. Petersburg next weekend.
This was a very long textual post, and I’m sorry about that. I’ll balance it by posting some pictures below. Click on them to see them in full resolution if they're too small to see here. Enjoy and thanks for reading!
Russian Photos!
A shot of the screen at the bowling alley showing our scores:
A house in Nostarovoe. The houses almost all had beautiful woodworking around the windows like this one.
Our group with the priest in Nostarovoe
A few of the icons in the cathedral in Nostarovoe
A diorama showing the salt-making process in Nostarovoe
The merry travelers outside the Kremlin (Dima, me, Tanya, Rose, and Yen. Paul's taking the picture)
Rose and I in front of St. Basil's
Tanya and Paul showing off the Tsar's Canon inside the Kremlin
Rose, Yen, and I posing with Lenin and Tsar Nicholas outside Red Square(who knew they were friends?!)
The Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer
A house in Nostarovoe. The houses almost all had beautiful woodworking around the windows like this one.
Our group with the priest in Nostarovoe
A few of the icons in the cathedral in Nostarovoe
A diorama showing the salt-making process in Nostarovoe
The merry travelers outside the Kremlin (Dima, me, Tanya, Rose, and Yen. Paul's taking the picture)
Rose and I in front of St. Basil's
Tanya and Paul showing off the Tsar's Canon inside the Kremlin
Rose, Yen, and I posing with Lenin and Tsar Nicholas outside Red Square(who knew they were friends?!)
The Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Russia Day 4
I'm back in the hotel lobby today with a fully charged battery and quite the experience this morning. Paul, Yan, and I were just browsing potential hostels for Moscow and St. Petersburg. In a few minutes, Rose and I are going to brave the train station to try to get tickets to those cities. From what we've heard, it's quite the ordeal, so fingers crossed! There's 7 of us going to Moscow, and 6 going to St. P, so I hope it all comes together well. Paul's been saying that it's no big deal if we can't get tickets to St. P because he can "just pop right over again another time". The rest of us point out then that it's slightly easier with his living in the UK than for those of us from the states. We'll see what happens.
So. This morning I was assigned to go to the Hospital for Women, a psychiatric institution. It was a good thing that those who had been there before briefed me on it, because it was startling even with descriptions of what it would be like.
The van dropped Nina, Allison, Tanya, Julia (the translator), and I off in front of a three-story cement building painted an orangey-red. The windows all have bars across them, but the bars are arranged in kind of sun-ray-shaped patterns, so it's not as awful-looking as you might expect.
We climbed up a staircase to the second floor, and were shown into a small room by one of the nurses. There, we changed to the indoor shoes we brought with us, then donned knee-length white cotton shirts, kind of like doctor's jackets. I imagine we wear these to stand out among the patients?
Once ready, they unlocked a wooden door and Julia was immediately hugged by two of the patients who were excited to see her again. We stepped inside and were lead into the common room by some of the women. There were maybe 30 women in there, all gathered at the door. They lined up on either side of it in clumps, making a sort of human passage-way for us to pass through to get to the tables at the back of the room. We got to the table at the back, and one of the nurses locked the entrance after us.
The women were all wearing flower-printed nightgowns and dressing gowns, hospital-issued, I guess. Most of them had their hair cut short and messily, and they all had brown, jagged, or missing teeth. More startling than their appearance was the smell - the stink really hit you when you walked in. Nina immediately opened up some windows, but the compressed stench stayed on my clothes even after we left the placement.
I was surprised, I suppose, that in this situation the Hollywood movies I've seen of mental hospitals were not exaggerating.
Allison plugged in a CD player, and put on one of the two CDs in our bag - Dance Hits of the 90s, I'm guessing it was. I was surprised at how much the music helped. I immediately felt more at ease, and the room seemed easier to handle once there was that background filler, even if it was Gloria Estafan. One woman came up to me and asked me, in English, what my name was. I told her and asked her the same in Russian. Her name was Vera. She seemed very nice, actually. She was also not at all shy. Later, I was coloring a picture with a woman who kept telling me a very long something in Russian. Julia couldn't help me translate since the woman was mumbling so much that even Julia, a local, could not understand her. When Vera came over to us, the mumbling woman greeted her like a friend and told me something that was apparently quite funny to her and Vera. Vera then seemed to agree, and to prove whatever the story was, she lifted up her nightgown and showed me... I don't know what the point was. Her underwear? Her breasts? Her scars? I have no idea. Nor did I have the slightest idea how I was supposed to respond to that.
So there was coloring, and a stack of magazines that several women immediately took to another table to look through, and the main craft of the day, dreamcatchers. It turns out that although I had nothing to do with the planning of the activity, I was the only one in the group who actually knew how to make a dreamcatcher. We used pipecleaners to make the hoop, yarn to string the net across it, and beads and feathers for the decoration. We assisted the women in making them, sometimes just making the majority of one ourselves, then passing it on to them to finish and show off. The ones who participated seemed quite please with themselves and with the project. One women, who Julia said has never participated before, spent a lot of the second half of the time with me, and she made two of them rather well. She insisted that we finish the second one before we left, actually.
Another woman sat there watching me work with that lady, but she kept saying she didn't want to join us. As the first woman learned enough to work on her own, I started fiddling with the extra pipe cleaners. I made a face out of a few of them, and offered it to the second woman. She held it up to her face, trying to see out of the eyes, then complained that it didn't fit. She started to yell for Julia, and told Julia "Malenka! Malenka!" - too small, too small. So, I made a pair of glasses for her out of pipe cleaners. She was thrilled! She put them on immediately and spent the rest of the morning going around to people, beaming at them through these black and white pipecleaner frames.
They are all medicated, I guess, so there was a lot of them just sort of drifting about. They were quiet, on the whole, but I guess sometimes they can be quite loud. One woman I was warned about before, because she once got a bit of glue on her hand, and after she washed it off, she began screaming, believing that the glue was there and spreading up her arms, across her body.
A few of them liked dancing, and they pulled Tanya and Allison out to the middle to dance to the music. When one CD ended, they immediately insisted that we fix it.
Some of the women were quite skilled. One used a needle and thread we brought her to sew together a cup she had made out of folded candy wrappers, cutting the bottom for it out of a juice box she had been saving until we came. Another woman brought us a doll she had made to show us. The doll was made out of yarn, with a scrap of fabric tied to make a dress over it. There were two beads for eyes, and a bit of felt for a mouth. The doll was actually quite well made, but the most remarkable part of it was the little booties she had crocheted for it. She told us, through Julia, that she had crocheted the booties using a pipecleaner as a crochet hook, since the real kind are not allowed. It was amazing.
After about 2 hours, we packed up our supplies, said many, many goodbyes, and went back to the little room. There we changed shoes again, packed up the smocks and supplies, counted the scissors (we have to make sure that we don't leave any scissors, needles, or long pieces of string there), and headed back.
Most of you know that I signed up for this trip in the first place as a risk-taking exercise. Well, I think my morning spent in a mental institution was by far one of the biggest risks I've ever taken in my life. I'm happy to say that I did it, I learned from it, and I think that if I am scheduled for there again, I will look forward to it. And next time I'm going to bring my pictures from home to show them.
So. This morning I was assigned to go to the Hospital for Women, a psychiatric institution. It was a good thing that those who had been there before briefed me on it, because it was startling even with descriptions of what it would be like.
The van dropped Nina, Allison, Tanya, Julia (the translator), and I off in front of a three-story cement building painted an orangey-red. The windows all have bars across them, but the bars are arranged in kind of sun-ray-shaped patterns, so it's not as awful-looking as you might expect.
We climbed up a staircase to the second floor, and were shown into a small room by one of the nurses. There, we changed to the indoor shoes we brought with us, then donned knee-length white cotton shirts, kind of like doctor's jackets. I imagine we wear these to stand out among the patients?
Once ready, they unlocked a wooden door and Julia was immediately hugged by two of the patients who were excited to see her again. We stepped inside and were lead into the common room by some of the women. There were maybe 30 women in there, all gathered at the door. They lined up on either side of it in clumps, making a sort of human passage-way for us to pass through to get to the tables at the back of the room. We got to the table at the back, and one of the nurses locked the entrance after us.
The women were all wearing flower-printed nightgowns and dressing gowns, hospital-issued, I guess. Most of them had their hair cut short and messily, and they all had brown, jagged, or missing teeth. More startling than their appearance was the smell - the stink really hit you when you walked in. Nina immediately opened up some windows, but the compressed stench stayed on my clothes even after we left the placement.
I was surprised, I suppose, that in this situation the Hollywood movies I've seen of mental hospitals were not exaggerating.
Allison plugged in a CD player, and put on one of the two CDs in our bag - Dance Hits of the 90s, I'm guessing it was. I was surprised at how much the music helped. I immediately felt more at ease, and the room seemed easier to handle once there was that background filler, even if it was Gloria Estafan. One woman came up to me and asked me, in English, what my name was. I told her and asked her the same in Russian. Her name was Vera. She seemed very nice, actually. She was also not at all shy. Later, I was coloring a picture with a woman who kept telling me a very long something in Russian. Julia couldn't help me translate since the woman was mumbling so much that even Julia, a local, could not understand her. When Vera came over to us, the mumbling woman greeted her like a friend and told me something that was apparently quite funny to her and Vera. Vera then seemed to agree, and to prove whatever the story was, she lifted up her nightgown and showed me... I don't know what the point was. Her underwear? Her breasts? Her scars? I have no idea. Nor did I have the slightest idea how I was supposed to respond to that.
So there was coloring, and a stack of magazines that several women immediately took to another table to look through, and the main craft of the day, dreamcatchers. It turns out that although I had nothing to do with the planning of the activity, I was the only one in the group who actually knew how to make a dreamcatcher. We used pipecleaners to make the hoop, yarn to string the net across it, and beads and feathers for the decoration. We assisted the women in making them, sometimes just making the majority of one ourselves, then passing it on to them to finish and show off. The ones who participated seemed quite please with themselves and with the project. One women, who Julia said has never participated before, spent a lot of the second half of the time with me, and she made two of them rather well. She insisted that we finish the second one before we left, actually.
Another woman sat there watching me work with that lady, but she kept saying she didn't want to join us. As the first woman learned enough to work on her own, I started fiddling with the extra pipe cleaners. I made a face out of a few of them, and offered it to the second woman. She held it up to her face, trying to see out of the eyes, then complained that it didn't fit. She started to yell for Julia, and told Julia "Malenka! Malenka!" - too small, too small. So, I made a pair of glasses for her out of pipe cleaners. She was thrilled! She put them on immediately and spent the rest of the morning going around to people, beaming at them through these black and white pipecleaner frames.
They are all medicated, I guess, so there was a lot of them just sort of drifting about. They were quiet, on the whole, but I guess sometimes they can be quite loud. One woman I was warned about before, because she once got a bit of glue on her hand, and after she washed it off, she began screaming, believing that the glue was there and spreading up her arms, across her body.
A few of them liked dancing, and they pulled Tanya and Allison out to the middle to dance to the music. When one CD ended, they immediately insisted that we fix it.
Some of the women were quite skilled. One used a needle and thread we brought her to sew together a cup she had made out of folded candy wrappers, cutting the bottom for it out of a juice box she had been saving until we came. Another woman brought us a doll she had made to show us. The doll was made out of yarn, with a scrap of fabric tied to make a dress over it. There were two beads for eyes, and a bit of felt for a mouth. The doll was actually quite well made, but the most remarkable part of it was the little booties she had crocheted for it. She told us, through Julia, that she had crocheted the booties using a pipecleaner as a crochet hook, since the real kind are not allowed. It was amazing.
After about 2 hours, we packed up our supplies, said many, many goodbyes, and went back to the little room. There we changed shoes again, packed up the smocks and supplies, counted the scissors (we have to make sure that we don't leave any scissors, needles, or long pieces of string there), and headed back.
Most of you know that I signed up for this trip in the first place as a risk-taking exercise. Well, I think my morning spent in a mental institution was by far one of the biggest risks I've ever taken in my life. I'm happy to say that I did it, I learned from it, and I think that if I am scheduled for there again, I will look forward to it. And next time I'm going to bring my pictures from home to show them.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Russia - Days 2 and 3
Zdrasvyetye, my friends!
I am typing this from the lobby of the second floor of my hotel. After two other failed attempts, I finally got my laptop connected to the promised wi-fi of the hotel. Apparently, I need to be in the lobbies of the first or second floor in order to use it here. I bought an internet card worth 300 rubles (about $12) to use here, so I'm glad it does indeed work. That will make things nice when, like tonight, I want to communicate but I also want to stay in. I am tired! And, I smell like bug spray. And, I am covered in dust, despite numerous handwashings. It is those last two sensations that are my primary objections to camping. But, boy, am I having a good time.
I've had 4 placement sessions so far, at three different locations. They've been keeping us busy here. I started today at 8:00am with Russian lesson #2, and had a full schedule until after dinner at 8:00 tonight. It's good - I've been sleeping very soundly, even with the noises outside and the full daylight coming through the window at 5:00am (it wakes me up only long enough for me to panic that I'm late for school, then realize that I'm in Russia, then panic that I'm late for a placement, then realize that I don't have to be up for another two hours).
The kids are fun to work with, although there are some adjustments. The first placement, the Summer Camp, was the hardest so far - there were a lot of kids, with a wide range of ages and many of them were aggressive. From the teenagers skulking about in tank tops, smoking, to the 10-14 year olds who kept throwing pine cones at the other kids, to the little ones who kept pulling things out of the crafts bag without asking, then running off with them, there were a lot of discipline issues. It didn't help that the three of us volunteers who were sent to that cabin were all totally new and our translator, Dasha, went with the other volunteers to a different part of the camp. Paul, Janna, and I just did our best and it went okay. The kids seemed to have fun, which was the point of it all.
The second placement, the deaf kindergarten, was fun. I did that one both yesterday afternoon and today. There were 5 little boys there yesterday and 6 today. The camp has been dwindling in size since the city decided that they are going to close it next week and convert the building into a camp for kids with tuberculosis. The little boys are very cute, and it's more relaxing for us volunteers because there's not the same stress of non communication. I learned their signs for "No", "That's mine", "That's yours", "less/smaller", and "more/bigger" very quickly. The kids aren't shy about grabbing you to get you to get your attention either. One kids today got some glue on his finger and he just wiped it on my shirt and kept on working. My clothes have gotten very dirty, actually, so I think I'll be doing some sink washing tomorrow during my afternoon off.
With the kindergarteners, we did a quick craft activity (decorating butterflies yesterday and making paper crowns today), then just played with them - toy cars are very popular, as are a set of magnetic tiles that they use to build garages and houses for the cars. They're very cute and very friendly.
This morning I worked at the hospital for kids. The kids were probably between 6 and 13 years old, and were placed at the hospital either for treatment for a psychological issue (schizophrenia is a popular diagnosis here), because they were too aggressive for an orphanage, or because they kept running away from their orphanages. I actually thought they acted like a normal group of kids. I'm not sure if that means that their psychological issues are minor, or if the kids I work on a usual basis are just as disabled. In any case, these kids blazed through the craft we brought in order to get to the sports. I played soccer, basketball, football, frisbee, and volleyball this morning, all in a fenced in area with no grass. It was very dusty, but a lot of fun. The kids were very friendly and more patient with our lack of the language. Some of them even asked Olga, the translator, how to say things in English so they could talk to us in our language.
And I'd love to say more about it, but my battery's about to die and I don't have an outlet nearby, so I'm going to post this before I lose it.
Love you all and more later!
I am typing this from the lobby of the second floor of my hotel. After two other failed attempts, I finally got my laptop connected to the promised wi-fi of the hotel. Apparently, I need to be in the lobbies of the first or second floor in order to use it here. I bought an internet card worth 300 rubles (about $12) to use here, so I'm glad it does indeed work. That will make things nice when, like tonight, I want to communicate but I also want to stay in. I am tired! And, I smell like bug spray. And, I am covered in dust, despite numerous handwashings. It is those last two sensations that are my primary objections to camping. But, boy, am I having a good time.
I've had 4 placement sessions so far, at three different locations. They've been keeping us busy here. I started today at 8:00am with Russian lesson #2, and had a full schedule until after dinner at 8:00 tonight. It's good - I've been sleeping very soundly, even with the noises outside and the full daylight coming through the window at 5:00am (it wakes me up only long enough for me to panic that I'm late for school, then realize that I'm in Russia, then panic that I'm late for a placement, then realize that I don't have to be up for another two hours).
The kids are fun to work with, although there are some adjustments. The first placement, the Summer Camp, was the hardest so far - there were a lot of kids, with a wide range of ages and many of them were aggressive. From the teenagers skulking about in tank tops, smoking, to the 10-14 year olds who kept throwing pine cones at the other kids, to the little ones who kept pulling things out of the crafts bag without asking, then running off with them, there were a lot of discipline issues. It didn't help that the three of us volunteers who were sent to that cabin were all totally new and our translator, Dasha, went with the other volunteers to a different part of the camp. Paul, Janna, and I just did our best and it went okay. The kids seemed to have fun, which was the point of it all.
The second placement, the deaf kindergarten, was fun. I did that one both yesterday afternoon and today. There were 5 little boys there yesterday and 6 today. The camp has been dwindling in size since the city decided that they are going to close it next week and convert the building into a camp for kids with tuberculosis. The little boys are very cute, and it's more relaxing for us volunteers because there's not the same stress of non communication. I learned their signs for "No", "That's mine", "That's yours", "less/smaller", and "more/bigger" very quickly. The kids aren't shy about grabbing you to get you to get your attention either. One kids today got some glue on his finger and he just wiped it on my shirt and kept on working. My clothes have gotten very dirty, actually, so I think I'll be doing some sink washing tomorrow during my afternoon off.
With the kindergarteners, we did a quick craft activity (decorating butterflies yesterday and making paper crowns today), then just played with them - toy cars are very popular, as are a set of magnetic tiles that they use to build garages and houses for the cars. They're very cute and very friendly.
This morning I worked at the hospital for kids. The kids were probably between 6 and 13 years old, and were placed at the hospital either for treatment for a psychological issue (schizophrenia is a popular diagnosis here), because they were too aggressive for an orphanage, or because they kept running away from their orphanages. I actually thought they acted like a normal group of kids. I'm not sure if that means that their psychological issues are minor, or if the kids I work on a usual basis are just as disabled. In any case, these kids blazed through the craft we brought in order to get to the sports. I played soccer, basketball, football, frisbee, and volleyball this morning, all in a fenced in area with no grass. It was very dusty, but a lot of fun. The kids were very friendly and more patient with our lack of the language. Some of them even asked Olga, the translator, how to say things in English so they could talk to us in our language.
And I'd love to say more about it, but my battery's about to die and I don't have an outlet nearby, so I'm going to post this before I lose it.
Love you all and more later!
Arriving in Russia
Here, my friends, is my blog entry on arriving in Russia from a few days ago:
Hello from Yaroslavl! I have arrived.
After my kind parents drive me to Salt Lake Friday night (otherwise it would have been a $600 plane ticket – ouch!), I caught a 10:00am flight to JFK. I tend to pick minor things to stress over when I’m facing a big challenge, and this time it was the new Harry Potter book. I could wait if needed to read it when I returned to the USA, but my fear is that I would overhear people talking about it. Luckily, the Salt Lake airport was well-stocked, and I boarded my plane with Book #7 in tow.
I also had a paperback edition of book #6, which I wanted to reread before starting the last one. So, I read book # 6 on the flight to JFK, and actually began reading book #7 on the same flight.
I had a two hour layover in NYC, which turned out to be a good thing. When I deplaned, I asked an agent which gate I needed to find next. He directed me to gate #4. During the 15-minute (no exaggeration) brisk walk from gate 28 to gate 4, I decided that I really don’t like the layout of the JFK airport. It’s thoroughly inefficient.
Anyway, when I got there, I waited at the desk for an agent to show up to get a boarding pass. When a woman finally came, I told her I needed a boarding pass for the Moscow flight.
“It’s already gone,” she curtly said without looking up from her computer screen.
“Not that one, the 6:50 flight,” I said.
“No such thing.”
I eventually persuaded her to offer me some actual customer assistance, at which point she explained that Aeroflot flies out a different terminal. Because the terminals are not connected physically (again, brilliant design plan) I actually had to exit the building, walk alongside the road about a block, then take the train over one stop to Terminal 1. Fun!
Three desk agents later, I had my boarding pass and joined the line for security. There were people there with flights sooner than mine, so I channeled my pity towards them. In any case, I made it to my gate in time and we took off with no problems.
Once settled in my seat, I was startled to find that everything around me was in Russian. There were occasional translations, but the labels, the announcements, the passengers’ conversations – all Russian. I wasn’t expecting that until we landed. So I kicked my Cyrillic alphabet into gear and started practicing sounding out the words.
As we pulled away from the gate, I cracked open Harry Potter and continued to read. Four hours later, with most of the other passengers sleeping around me, I finished the book. I liked it. And that’s all I’m going to say about it here.
I tried to sleep after that, but to no avail. Airplanes are just hard for me to sleep on.
We landed at 12:20pm, Moscow time. The passport checkpoint was quick – the airport seemed to only have our flight going on. As I waited in line, I met Tanya, a student from Iowa who is also a CCS volunteer. Thanks, t-shirts! We chatted as we waited for luggage to come. I was lucky – both of my bags arrived, but Tanya only got one of her two bags. I helped her a little in figuring out who to talk to (she hasn’t traveled much, it seems), then we went through customs.
That one was even easier, since as we approached the entrance, the guard disappeared. On a break? We don’t know. But everyone just kept moving through without him, so we followed suit.
Once through, we found the other CCS volunteers without a problem and started the introductions. We waited about an hour and a half for Dasha, the CCS translator who met us there, to arrive, to round up everyone, and to help Tanya with the luggage issue. The we piled ourselves and our suitcases into two vans and were off.
(Given the amount of luggage sitting here outside the plane, I'm surprised that mine came through!)
To my amusement, the first building I noticed as we pulled away from the airport was an Ikea. Hee! I looked out the window of the van, sounding out words on billboards and buildings for a while, until I dozed off.
We stopped at a truck-stop type place about 3 hours into the drive and had dinner all together. I had borscht, a small salad (which turned out to be cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, bell peppers diced and covered with a lot of parsley), and blini with honey. The borscht and the blini were not too bad. Some of the volunteers tried to keep up pleasant conversation, but most of us had been awake for over 24 hours at that point, so there were a lot of lapses into silence.
Back in the vans for another two hours (which goes by quickly when you’re asleep), and we arrived in Yaroslavl. The city looked interesting, and I’m excited for the tour we’re getting tomorrow. Our hotel is pretty good – I’m sharing a room with Rose, a veterinary student at Cornell, and aside from the lack of storage space and a missing shower curtain, the room is nice.
So. It’s 10pm local time, and although I couldn’t connect to the internet tonight, I figured I would type this up now so I can cut and paste it into my blog when I do get online. I’m starting to get sleepy, and the sun is starting to set, so I believe I will bid you all a good night and head to bed.
Spakoyna nocha!
Hello from Yaroslavl! I have arrived.
After my kind parents drive me to Salt Lake Friday night (otherwise it would have been a $600 plane ticket – ouch!), I caught a 10:00am flight to JFK. I tend to pick minor things to stress over when I’m facing a big challenge, and this time it was the new Harry Potter book. I could wait if needed to read it when I returned to the USA, but my fear is that I would overhear people talking about it. Luckily, the Salt Lake airport was well-stocked, and I boarded my plane with Book #7 in tow.
I also had a paperback edition of book #6, which I wanted to reread before starting the last one. So, I read book # 6 on the flight to JFK, and actually began reading book #7 on the same flight.
I had a two hour layover in NYC, which turned out to be a good thing. When I deplaned, I asked an agent which gate I needed to find next. He directed me to gate #4. During the 15-minute (no exaggeration) brisk walk from gate 28 to gate 4, I decided that I really don’t like the layout of the JFK airport. It’s thoroughly inefficient.
Anyway, when I got there, I waited at the desk for an agent to show up to get a boarding pass. When a woman finally came, I told her I needed a boarding pass for the Moscow flight.
“It’s already gone,” she curtly said without looking up from her computer screen.
“Not that one, the 6:50 flight,” I said.
“No such thing.”
I eventually persuaded her to offer me some actual customer assistance, at which point she explained that Aeroflot flies out a different terminal. Because the terminals are not connected physically (again, brilliant design plan) I actually had to exit the building, walk alongside the road about a block, then take the train over one stop to Terminal 1. Fun!
Three desk agents later, I had my boarding pass and joined the line for security. There were people there with flights sooner than mine, so I channeled my pity towards them. In any case, I made it to my gate in time and we took off with no problems.
Once settled in my seat, I was startled to find that everything around me was in Russian. There were occasional translations, but the labels, the announcements, the passengers’ conversations – all Russian. I wasn’t expecting that until we landed. So I kicked my Cyrillic alphabet into gear and started practicing sounding out the words.
As we pulled away from the gate, I cracked open Harry Potter and continued to read. Four hours later, with most of the other passengers sleeping around me, I finished the book. I liked it. And that’s all I’m going to say about it here.
I tried to sleep after that, but to no avail. Airplanes are just hard for me to sleep on.
We landed at 12:20pm, Moscow time. The passport checkpoint was quick – the airport seemed to only have our flight going on. As I waited in line, I met Tanya, a student from Iowa who is also a CCS volunteer. Thanks, t-shirts! We chatted as we waited for luggage to come. I was lucky – both of my bags arrived, but Tanya only got one of her two bags. I helped her a little in figuring out who to talk to (she hasn’t traveled much, it seems), then we went through customs.
That one was even easier, since as we approached the entrance, the guard disappeared. On a break? We don’t know. But everyone just kept moving through without him, so we followed suit.
Once through, we found the other CCS volunteers without a problem and started the introductions. We waited about an hour and a half for Dasha, the CCS translator who met us there, to arrive, to round up everyone, and to help Tanya with the luggage issue. The we piled ourselves and our suitcases into two vans and were off.
(Given the amount of luggage sitting here outside the plane, I'm surprised that mine came through!)
To my amusement, the first building I noticed as we pulled away from the airport was an Ikea. Hee! I looked out the window of the van, sounding out words on billboards and buildings for a while, until I dozed off.
We stopped at a truck-stop type place about 3 hours into the drive and had dinner all together. I had borscht, a small salad (which turned out to be cucumbers, onions, tomatoes, bell peppers diced and covered with a lot of parsley), and blini with honey. The borscht and the blini were not too bad. Some of the volunteers tried to keep up pleasant conversation, but most of us had been awake for over 24 hours at that point, so there were a lot of lapses into silence.
Back in the vans for another two hours (which goes by quickly when you’re asleep), and we arrived in Yaroslavl. The city looked interesting, and I’m excited for the tour we’re getting tomorrow. Our hotel is pretty good – I’m sharing a room with Rose, a veterinary student at Cornell, and aside from the lack of storage space and a missing shower curtain, the room is nice.
So. It’s 10pm local time, and although I couldn’t connect to the internet tonight, I figured I would type this up now so I can cut and paste it into my blog when I do get online. I’m starting to get sleepy, and the sun is starting to set, so I believe I will bid you all a good night and head to bed.
Spakoyna nocha!
Monday, July 23, 2007
Russia - Day 1
Hello all!
I have a nice long entry for you all detailing my journey here, but it's on my laptop, which I have not yet gotten connected to the internet.
Right now, I am sitting in an internet cafe in downtown Yaroslavl! I find it strange, still, to think that I am actually here. The fact that all of the instructions on this blog-entry page are in Russian should probably tip me off. Good thing I pretty much know where the ones are that I use to post.
So, what to share? I've been in Yaroslavl for about 24 hours now. In that time, I slept very well, despite the jack-hammer like noise of the tram going by and a male voice that kept making unintelligible announcements over a loudspeaker outside the hotel during the night. Between the Soviet-like decor of the hotel and the noises outside, it felt a little like I had stepped into a Cold War era science fiction novel. 1984-esque, you know? It's kind of fun.
All of our meals are provided at the hotel's restaurant, a room that seems to double as a dance room. I assume this based on the mirrored and pink-curtained walls, the wooden floor, the keyboard and microphone in the corner and, best of all, the disco ball that revolved over us all through dinner. The food served are as follows:
Breakfast - Yogurt (I forgot how good European yogurt is!), ham, cheese, eggs, and a roll.
Lunch - Green apples, Cole slaw (with peas), potato and beef soup, Meatballs with rice and some kind of orange gravy, and rye bread and rolls.
Dinner - A salad made of olives, mushrooms, apples, and peas covered with a glob of mayonaise and shredded egg whites, fried chicken breast with potatoes, and delicious vanilla ice cream with crushed almonds on top.
I think I will get my fill of potatoes very quickly. The meals are heavy, and full of starch, but they keep the portions reasonable, and I feel like my body's adjusting to it okay. I felt a little off yesterday, but I've been drinking water constantly, and that seems to help. I learned my lesson about staying hydrated while traveling when I was in Scotland with Emily. Our room has a little fridge in it, so I've been collecting water bottles as I go and plan to keep the fridge stocked so I can get water whenever. Plus, my tablemates were very impressed when I said, "Excuse me, I need some water please," to the waiter in Russian.
Activities for the day included 1) An orientation to the program, including our placements for the week. I'll be going to the summer camp for orphans tomorrow, and, later in the week, the hospital for kids, the deaf kindergarten, and the hospital for women. I'm excited about the placements and eager to start the work. 2) Russian lessons. Today was the basics, but they geared them towards our work, so a lot of the phrases were new to me. Things like "Let's draw!" and "Give me the ball/crayon/scissors/jump rope" were not covered in my Russian classes in college. 3) A walking tour of the city. We got a lot of the history and saw a lot of churches. I am taking pictures on my camera, which I promise I will post as soon as I can.
So, things are going well. I'm feeling the jet lag today, but I think the switch to Russia time will go fairly smoothly. They keep us busy during the day, which helps. No naps!
Until I get online again, thank you for the well wishes by email and happiness to you all!
Monday, July 09, 2007
Your Little Body's Slowly Breaking Down
I'm alive! I promise. And I've been having adventures that I need to blog about. There's the train ride to Chicago, the conference in Chicago itself, a family reunion at Bear Lake, my Russian studies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm in Colorado now, working at my dad's office and enjoying a vacation for a bit. Thanks to Apple's remarkable repair service (mailed it Thursday, got it back fixed this morning!), I am happily catching up on my internet-ing. Including my sister's blog, where I found a link that taught me this:
$5325.00
Try it yourself.
I'm in Colorado now, working at my dad's office and enjoying a vacation for a bit. Thanks to Apple's remarkable repair service (mailed it Thursday, got it back fixed this morning!), I am happily catching up on my internet-ing. Including my sister's blog, where I found a link that taught me this:
$5325.00
Try it yourself.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Suppertime!
Tonight, Heidi, Brent, and I took a cooking class at our local Sur La Table. The class was entitled "Early Summer Farmer's Market Dinner"; essentially, a full meal you can make using mostly produce found at local markets. I've been looking forward to the reopening of the city farmer's market, so I thought this class would be apropos. I also though I would share my experience with the blogging world, being inspired by my sister's awesome food and photos. Although, as a disclaimer, I need to say that I was shooting with the camera on my cell phone, so the photos aren't nearly as pretty as the food was. The dishes, especially the carrot soup, were really terrifically colorful.
There were twelve students all together, and we were divided up into pairs or groups of three to make the different courses. Before we started cooking, the chef (who was aptly named Scot Rice) gave us appetizers to tide us over during the introductions - a Spanish frittata with a tomato-almond remoulade, two cheese selections with garlic crackers, and, my favorite, watermelon and cantaloupe cubes sprinkled with cilantro, lime juice, and rum (whoops).
Here's the dinner:
We made
- Roasted Grape Tomato Crostini with Green Garlic and Goat Cheese (my favorite dish of the night)
- Carrot Soup with Parsley, Shallot, and Orange Peel Gremolata (my other favorite dish)
- Lemon Risotto with Prosciutto and Thyme
- Garlic-Roasted Broccoli and Cauliflower and
- Prosciutto-Wrapped Halibut with Fava Beans, Sugar Snap Peas, and Pea Shoots
Here I am, enjoying the soup (I liked the chef's presentation idea of putting the soup in drinking glasses - it looked nice and worked well for a buffet).
These two people, Brent (Heidi's husband) and Noelle (a microbiologist from Pennsylvania I met tonight), and I were in charge of the dessert: Orange Muscat Zabaglione with Raspberries and Thyme Shortbread Cookies. The alcohol was a little strong in the Zabaglione for my taste, but I loved the cookies and will definitely make them again.
Here's the chef dishing up the dessert and here's Heidi enjoying it:
All in all, it was a fun and delicious evening. I'll be meeting Janelle at the farmer's market tomorrow morning for some shopping. It's a little early in the season for produce, but I feel inspired to do some baking tomorrow night. Mmm!
There were twelve students all together, and we were divided up into pairs or groups of three to make the different courses. Before we started cooking, the chef (who was aptly named Scot Rice) gave us appetizers to tide us over during the introductions - a Spanish frittata with a tomato-almond remoulade, two cheese selections with garlic crackers, and, my favorite, watermelon and cantaloupe cubes sprinkled with cilantro, lime juice, and rum (whoops).
Here's the dinner:
We made- Roasted Grape Tomato Crostini with Green Garlic and Goat Cheese (my favorite dish of the night)
- Carrot Soup with Parsley, Shallot, and Orange Peel Gremolata (my other favorite dish)
- Lemon Risotto with Prosciutto and Thyme
- Garlic-Roasted Broccoli and Cauliflower and
- Prosciutto-Wrapped Halibut with Fava Beans, Sugar Snap Peas, and Pea Shoots
Here I am, enjoying the soup (I liked the chef's presentation idea of putting the soup in drinking glasses - it looked nice and worked well for a buffet).
These two people, Brent (Heidi's husband) and Noelle (a microbiologist from Pennsylvania I met tonight), and I were in charge of the dessert: Orange Muscat Zabaglione with Raspberries and Thyme Shortbread Cookies. The alcohol was a little strong in the Zabaglione for my taste, but I loved the cookies and will definitely make them again.
Here's the chef dishing up the dessert and here's Heidi enjoying it:
All in all, it was a fun and delicious evening. I'll be meeting Janelle at the farmer's market tomorrow morning for some shopping. It's a little early in the season for produce, but I feel inspired to do some baking tomorrow night. Mmm!
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
"What Did I Just Do?"
What I've Done on my Summer Vacation (so far)
* Convinced the AVID lady at the district that I really did want to take the train to Chicago, and yes, I am aware that it is a 30-hour journey that starts at 4:45 am (she apparently has no faith in my knowledge of geography or traveling velocities).
* Started cooking dinner again instead of take-out every day!
* Read three novels
* Spent three days at school to make my classroom look like this:
(which included organizing and filing papers from the past two years of teaching - glorious!)
* Spent one day in my classroom to make my desk look like this:
* Watched "The Valet" (recommended!) with Teresa (who's back - yay!)
* Watched "Waitress"
* Watched "A Midwinter's Tale"
* Watched "Sing Faster!"
* Went to IKEA again to get shelves
* Installed said shelves, after moving my desk near my kitchen:
* Discovered that getting shelves level is tricky when you're working alone, but by golly I did it!
* Saw "Thoroughly Modern Millie" with Heidi (also back - yay!) and Virginia, Spanish teacher at my school
* Saw "Saturday's Voyeur" with Heidi and her new husband
* Watched the Tony's with Janelle and Donavon ("Spring Awakening" and "Coast of Utopia" - no surprises there!)
* Went to the doctor for my first checkup since, well, ever
* Was told "your cervix is stellar!"
* Got four shots and two blood samples taken
* Found out I am TB, HIV, and syphilis- free (no surprises there, either)
* Began reorganizing my library (including the closets!)
* Met with Heidi and Katharine daily this week to begin some serious writing work in anticipation of creating our play about teaching.
* Enjoyed said writing meetings in this glorious place:
* Wrote three pieces I rather like so far, and revisited others from before.
* Am gaining confidence in my abilities as a creative writer.
* Discovered the Community Writing Center
* 30 minutes on my elliptical every day since school got out!
* Am finally starting to feel rested, capable, and organized again.
Hurrah for summer!
* Convinced the AVID lady at the district that I really did want to take the train to Chicago, and yes, I am aware that it is a 30-hour journey that starts at 4:45 am (she apparently has no faith in my knowledge of geography or traveling velocities).
* Started cooking dinner again instead of take-out every day!
* Read three novels
* Spent three days at school to make my classroom look like this:
(which included organizing and filing papers from the past two years of teaching - glorious!)
* Spent one day in my classroom to make my desk look like this:
* Watched "The Valet" (recommended!) with Teresa (who's back - yay!)
* Watched "Waitress"
* Watched "A Midwinter's Tale"
* Watched "Sing Faster!"
* Went to IKEA again to get shelves
* Installed said shelves, after moving my desk near my kitchen:
* Discovered that getting shelves level is tricky when you're working alone, but by golly I did it!
* Saw "Thoroughly Modern Millie" with Heidi (also back - yay!) and Virginia, Spanish teacher at my school
* Saw "Saturday's Voyeur" with Heidi and her new husband
* Watched the Tony's with Janelle and Donavon ("Spring Awakening" and "Coast of Utopia" - no surprises there!)
* Went to the doctor for my first checkup since, well, ever
* Was told "your cervix is stellar!"
* Got four shots and two blood samples taken
* Found out I am TB, HIV, and syphilis- free (no surprises there, either)
* Began reorganizing my library (including the closets!)
* Met with Heidi and Katharine daily this week to begin some serious writing work in anticipation of creating our play about teaching.
* Enjoyed said writing meetings in this glorious place:
* Wrote three pieces I rather like so far, and revisited others from before.
* Am gaining confidence in my abilities as a creative writer.
* Discovered the Community Writing Center
* 30 minutes on my elliptical every day since school got out!
* Am finally starting to feel rested, capable, and organized again.
Hurrah for summer!
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
They Say It's Wonderful
Two days in, and I am truly enjoying summer. It's in the good way too - where I'm staying productive and busy so I don't feel guilty, yet I'm balancing it with delightful non-stressful days.
For example, I'm getting up around 8:30, exercising, eating breakfast (I really like Raisin Bran Crunch right now), playing "Super Mario Sunshine", running errands, and going to school.
Yes, still going to school. Consumed with field trips, grades, assemblies, and general end-of-the-year craziness, I decided not to rush the cleaning of my classroom. We're required to box up and clean out all surface areas in the room (including walls and bulletin boards), cover bookcases and such with butcher paper, and stack everything off the floors. I've rushed that the past couple of years, throwing papers into boxes thinking that I'll file them "later". This year, though, I decided the time had come to get organized again, so I'm doing it with leisure and pleasure. I've put in a couple of hours each day, so it's slow going, but it's rather relaxing to sort and file without any students or lessons or grading to worry about.
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