Проходить

I moved in with my Russian “family” last Saturday. This “family” is comprised of a mother. Other families got fathers, brothers, sisters, and a mix of the above, “fathers” being the most lacking component. There are several reason for this. One reason being that Russian men's average life span is 58 years old (I hope my facts are right). Another reason being that the divorce rate here is 80%. My “mother's” name is Galina. She's probably in her late 50's, like to watch Russian soap operas, is very dramatic, and always on the phone with somebody. She made me answer her phone for her the other day, because she was taking a shower. “Laura, Laur! See who it is . . .”

My secret belief is that she can speak English fluently, although I have absolutely zero proof of this. Her daughter was visiting the other day and caught me off guard by knowing the English names for all the animals on my mug.

I've been walking to school every morning. One and one half hours. Quite a change from the five minute walk when we were on campus. But it's better this way. The first morning I took the bus . . . the usual rush-hour bus ride . . . Forty five minutes to go the 5 miles to school. Traffic jams, very crowded, pressed up against hot bodies, some overdue for a washing, and telling you so by the odor.

At 7:18 my alarm goes off. I try to sneak through the living room where Galina sleeps, without waking her up, but have not succeeded yet.
I have a nice room here-- the only bedroom in the apartment. It's warm and cozy, and looks down on a busy sidewalk, and the bus stop and street a little further away.
We have a bathtub, but not a shower. Now, this bath tub has a hose with a sprayer on the end, and, in theory, you would hang it up to make a shower, only it doesn't hang up. There's also no shower curtain, so that it order not to get water all over the floor, you have to either hunch down, or lie in the bath tub and spray yourself with the hose thingy to take a shower. I feel like Gollum hunched down naked in the tub, stringy hair hanging down, water and splashing. I've wanted to sing the “juicy sweet fish song” every single time. One of these days.

Yesterday we visited the “Fantastica” (Фантастика). A huge shopping mall in the city of Nizhni Novgorod. Actually, it looks exactly like the West Gate Mall in Spartanburg. It has a movie theater and everything. I felt okay speaking English out loud here, since all the stores had either English or French names. We even ate at Subway . . . Losers.

Today I made one of the best purchases that I will make here. A bus pass. This way I don't have to constantly dig in my pockets, scrounging up enough rubles to make it to wherever I need to go. However, since this pass only works on the state buses, I am going to have to give up my favorite bus: Маршрутка (Marshrutka) №19. This is one of those extra junky buses, with the dusty outsides, falling-apart seats, and brakes that don't work so well, but are obviously driven by skilled drivers, because I haven't been on one that has crashed yet. I like to stand up at the front by the driver and watch how close he gets to the bus in front of him at every bus stop. This bus brings me to school, home, Harley's, the grocery store, and my service project. And, if that was not enough, this bus only costs, 10 rubles, as opposed to the standard 14 ruble fee. An excellent bus all round. I will miss you, my friend.

Рынок - The Market

Anastasia and I went pumpkin hunting today. They don't sell pumpkins in the grocery stores here like they would back home in October. For pumpkins, you must go to the market. The market consists of rows and rows of stalls (rusty metal boxes turned on their sides) lining a dirt, or concrete street, in which muddy water stands, and from which people sell their vegetables and fruits, pickles, cabbage salads (out of buckets), socks, coats, DVDs, pig heads or anything else that you might be looking for. We got the directions to the market from our Russian teacher, who lives in this part of town that we had never been to. This smells of adventure.

We hopped on our Marshrutka bus, carefully counting out the allotted 10 stops to Ploshad Sovietskaya, between struggling to stay standing upright despite the jolting and sudden stops with worn out, squeaking breaks, and trying to talk quietly enough so as not to turn heads. After locating the market, we wandered throughout, keeping our eyes peeled for pumpkins, and soon had the located the whole two in the entire marketplace. At two different stalls. My transaction went smoothly and I got a nice sized boogar for 50 roubles, or approximately a dollar and a half. We went back to the stall where we had seen the other pumpkin earlier, and asked the old lady at the stall if we could buy it. She said a price and started talking about something. We were confused for a second, but then realized that she was giving us a recipe for how to make the pumpkin, how to peel and cook it, and what to serve it with. When we replied to her, she realized that we were not Russian, and asked us what language we spoke. “English” we said. She then asked us if we were from England. “Da,” we said. “Oh, I studied German in school,” she said. Very nice lady.

We also needed some red potatoes out of this trip, and found them at a stall on the way out. They were piled in buckets all around the front of the stall, freshly pulled out of the earth and covered in dirt. Anastasia walked up to the man selling them. “Can I have four?” she asked him. He then pulled out a plastic bag and proceeded to dump the bucket of potatoes into the bag. “Nyet, nyet, nyet!” says Nastya, “four potatoes.” “Oh,” says the man, laughing, “I thought you wanted four kilograms.” -“Are you Finnish?” He adds . . . “Da,” says Nastya.

We got four free potatoes out of the deal. “A present,” said he.

Spay and neuter doesn't happen in Russia. As a result, there are packs of dogs wandering the city streets, swarming the outside of the dormitories, and cats in the Hermitage (which is actually intentional, since they keep the rodents at bay). The dogs in the streets are not a problem, they are not vicious, or mean and will eat whatever food scraps you throw to them. I'm just worried about them when it gets cold. Humane societies? Nyet. I've also seen packs of dogs, ear tagged like cattle-- still intend to ask some Russian friends about that-- I'll get back to you when I find out.
Birds here are interesting, too. They've got some monster-sized gray and white ones, bigger than the biggest crow I've seen. I tread carefully past these ones. They're like sleeker, faster, flying chickens. Then there are the smaller ones that live in the grocery store down the street. They seem to be out only at night. In flocks. Yesterday they were at the packaged foods, I don't know if they actually got into any of the bags, but they were having fun hopping around on the shelves. The night before they were perched in the produce section, helping themselves to the green grapes, leaving little beak marks as I chased them away. That same night, Masha and I walked back to the dorms. It was dark. As we came up to the doorway into the building, we saw a nasty rat scurrying into the basement culvert right under the kitchen. Eew. I'll now keep my eyes peeling for fur or pooh in my salad.
In other dormitory news, Rich and Rob woke up to people propelling on bed sheets from the third story past their window. The curfew isn't to their liking. But bed sheets? I guess there is a reason that people actually use them to climb out windows. They work.

Вчера

Yesterday was the first day of our service projects. I chose working at the orphanage; mainly because that's what I've wanted to do for my entire life. But other than that, no special reason. ;) Other options were helping with a middle school English class, helping with a college English class, or working on a church building. Rob is my compatriot in the orphange visits, which will be happening for the next weeks. This orphanage is actually not really an orphange, per se. Most of these kids still hae parents. It's more of a between house. This is where kids who have been taken away from their parents (mainly because their parents are alcoholics) are taken while the state decides whether to give them back, or transfer them to a more permanent Children's Home. Our group of kids was between the ages of 4 and 5. These kids are amazing: they are extremely friendly, come up and hold your hands, talk to you in their sweet little Russian, climb up in your lap to watch a movie . . . Just generally all around sweet. Don't be surprised if I come home with all 13 of them. The first day, as usual, was pretty confusing. The orphanage is located on the other side of the town across the river, the side of town that we don't ever go to, and are not really familiar with at all. For that reason, Harley brought us over, with the intention of teaching us how to get there so that we, by ourselves, could get back. One of the issues with getting to this place is that there are two buses that go there, after riding one of those two buses to the designated spot, we walk to the next bus stop and wait for another bus that takes us directly to the front of the orphange-- this bus only runs once every hour. So if you miss it, rain or shine, you're waiting. We missed it. By a few minutes. After waiting for about 20 minutes in the rain and cold, Harley hired a taxi (a toasty warm BMW) and we took it to the orphanage. Everything went well there, although we were pretty late. Harley introduced us to the director people, and left. Nobody there speaks English. After our time with the kids was up (we took them for a walk in the rain, played some games, and watched Monsters, Inc.), we went out to wait for our bus. Everything went well up until the time to change buses. Rob thought we should go to the other side of the road to wait for our bus, since that was the direction that we needed to go to get back home. I thought that we needed to go the the stop where we got off, since, obviously, even though it was headed the wrong direction, the bus had to turn around at some point. Plus, all we could see on the other side was a tram stop. Oops. We waited for our bus for about 20 minutes, after which we got on the bus, relivieved that we were out of the cold and finally headed home. We rode the bus for about 10 minutes, and watched as we pulled into this big bus parking lot. We looked around and realized that we the only people on the bus. The lady told us that this was the end of the line, and that we needed to get off. We looked horrified. She looked confused, but said the same thing again. Crap. We were now 10 minutes in the oppossite direction away from home than when we started. We found our way back to the main road, located a bus stop, jumped on what we thought was our bus, and headed back towards the university. Once we saw that we were crossing the bridge, we finally felt secure, and, 2 hours after leaving, jumped off the bus in front of our home sweet university. No worries, we have the kids to look forward to, and now we know what not to do next week.

Первого Октября

For the first time today, my ears got red and my fingers stiff from walking to the grocery store. The city turned on the heat this morning, and our room radiator is a toasty spot, although heat means a clicking in the pipe by the head of my bed. The government controls the heating system in Nizhnii, and will only turn it on after it's been colder than a certain temperature for a certain number of days. Colder weather means that our food in our “fridge” (the space between our double window) will last longer, though, and that I can wear the many warmer things that I dragged across the Atlantic just for this purpose.

Maria and I went another one of our exploratory walks around the city. This time we found a dirt path leading off the road and followed it. It led through a hilly, overgrown field with power lines, old, weathered, decrepit fences almost hiding the cottages and garden behind them. We crossed a metal bridge with an assortment of trash underneath in a stopped-up stream: a sled, a tricycle and a tire . . . a suitcase, in the bushes, it's clothes spread out around it, looking like it had been there a while. Piles of trash and fire pits up every minor trail leading off the main one. Through hole in the fence, we found what I still say are missile containers, (big metal boxes with locks on them). The path was well traveled; we didn't get to follow it to the end, but it has to lead somewhere, I'm thinking. The funny thing about this field is that it is right in the middle of the city. Granted, it's not the only strange field like this in the city, and the cities here let their vegetation grow-- there are dirt oaths through the woods everywhere, which I'm a fan of. There's even a stairway down the mountain behind the university. It, too, is decrepit. The hand rails have fallen off, the benches alongside have the frames, but nowhere to sit. And, like everywhere else, covered in trash. Broken beer bottles abound. You can't exactly see it on the postcards that I've sent you (haha), but it's pretty trashy and grimy here. Your shoes, and even your socks underneath get covered in a film of gray dust.

We've been studying Pushkin, one of Russia's most renowned poets over the past few days. Our teacher says that Pushkin is untranslatable, and that you have to read him in Russian to really get the full effect. Eventually, maybe :) Even though his mother tongue is French, he was consider the “creator” of the Russian language. I think I get the gist, even in English, so I'll leave you with one of his love poems: (turns out he was a womanizer, had a bad marriage, and died in a duel over his wife :( So sad.)

I loved you once, that love, still, perhaps
has not died out completely,
but may it not trouble you anymore.
I do not want to cause you sorrow in any way;
I loved you silently, hopelessly, and slavishly and jealously, I languish.
I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly, that may God grant you to be loved in that way,
by someone else.

Я вас любил, любовь ешё, быть может,
В душе мой утсла не совсем.
Но пусть она вас болше не тревожит,
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем
Я вас любил без молвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим.
Я вас любил так искрено, так нежно,
Как дай вам Бог любимой быть другим.