I ______ Russia (The Postening)

Well let’s start trying to get this out!

I don’t think I’ve posted for . . . two weeks? Or is it three? This is the second weekend after Petersburg, so that probably means at least three.

My flights to Petersburg were both good and bad. I don’t know if I flew on the only good jets Aeroflot has, but my Aeroflot experience was completely different from that of everyone else ever, apparently. The jets were nice – roomier than American ones, and they gave us lots more food. I’m a fan of the airline, except I got delayed four hours in Irkutsk, so I missed my connection in Moscow. Have you ever had to get rescheduled in a Russian airport, in Russian? I have. Well, it was more like getting rescheduled in Frantic/Exhausted Gesturing, but whatever. After I got all that stuff done (which involved getting at least six different people at different desks to stamp and/or sign my ticket – varying from a belegured looking woman behind a desk who dealt with, like, entire flight (I was at the back of THAT line) to a very official looking guy in a big office with a nice suit/uniform. i don’t think i was really supposed to see him either time, but he obligingly signed my ticket on both visits) I talked to Sara using this machine that you stick your daddy’s credit card in and then dial numbers. I was limited to “thirty” on that, but if that was minutes, rubles, dollars, euros, or sheckels I can’t say. Dad can! Then I drank a beer. Then I flew to Peter.

Seeing “St. Petersburg – Leningrad: Hero City” in huge letters on the side of the airport as we bused in from the tarmac was frankly, enormous. Chilling. I already began to feel what I’d known I would: the beast of history is thick in Peter, probably only that thick in four or five other cities on earth (we’re talking Cairo, Rome, that level). You can feel the press of ghosts around you. Thirty dead people behind each living today indeed. Sara met me in the airport, and it was as wonderful to suddenly go down some steps and see her waiting as I had expected it would be. Deleriously pleased to have arrived, with Sara on my arm (or really me on hers), I found my bag and we found a bus. Sara’s waiting was not so hot, I don’t think, since she got to get to know not one but two lecherous uzbeks. One complete with hilarious moral advice.

So we made our way to the hotel. Then we went to a bar and I started meeting her friends, who were cool. Some kids on the Midd program in Moscow were visiting and pissing everyone off about being super language-pledgy (I indulged in being annoyed with those pushy geeks – this WAS my speak-english week).

The week generally worked like this: Sara was at school during the day. I would meet her at her classes-place when she had some class trip (she has lots, probably the best part of the ACTR program) I could tag along on. When she didn’t she’d come to the hotel and we’d make plans to go out that night. I think we went to bars every night, sometimes with her friends, sometimes not. We at at lots of nice restraunts and generally played the extravagantly rich (which is were you ignore how much money you have – NOT were you have that much) couple about town. I mostly slept during the day, or read a little Gogol, or listened to Meat Loaf, or screwed around online.

I got my wallet stolened on the way to Petropavloskaya Krepoct on Wednesday (after Dom Knigi), so we didn’t go and instead called my parents to get my cards canceled. Then the week got really fun, since Sara bought me anything and everything I wanted (mostly beer and hamburgers). On Halloween we partied down with her friends at the ex-patriot bar. Absinthe may have been drunk.

By the time the weekend arrived, we realized we had done very few cultural activities, and were chagrined. So we crammed in as much as two lazy-ish people can in a weekend. We say the palace where they killed Rasputin (it actually has a name that doesn’t involve Rasputin! can you believe it?!). There wasn’t a cafe across the street, because across the street was a canal (I’m not sure anyone knows this, but Peter is full of them, imagine that!). We climbed up a big cathedral (though not Smolny, the tallest) to look out over the city. We say Petropavloskaya FINALLY, where every Tsar since Peter is buried (if that’s not right, they’re only missing a few in between Peter and Catherine, but I don’t think they are) – I guess all the Emperors and Empresses, really. We saw several famous monuments, including one to Suvorov (my new crush), Rimsky-Korsakov (with which I have a personal history), Peter I (I sat on its lap and made it wear my new Red Army point hat – how perverse!), and, of course, the Medni Vcatnik (Bronse Horseman). It was, true to legend, covered in shattered champagne glasses.

We also walked all over the place, mostly from Petropavloskaya to the Vcatnik and from Issakevsky (the cathedral) to my old dorm (that was a good two hours). So we saw lots of the city, much of it on the canal at night. It was frankly glorious. And of course all po Nevskemu. Really an amazing city. Really.

And then I had to leave, so that was frankly miserable. Sara and I just sort of rode morosely to the airport and parted ways, me laden with a ridiculous amount of junk I’d brought, her with all the stuff of hers that had accumulated in the hotel. Flights back were just as cushy and about a billion percent more on-time. Returning to class was miserable, and those first few days back were rough. I think my bad mood was because vacation was over and I was five timezones from Sara again, and because my classes are mostly dumb and obnoxious and, you know, not history. And because I had a doklad to prepare, which was unpleasant. Once that got done I was perked up some.

My main class I do not like is Praktika Rechi. That’s conversation practice (well, sort of), anyway, we’re always talking about really dumb psuedo-deep shit like “Who Needs Oridnary People?” and stereotypes and stuff. Also the teacher likes to tell me how much I suck and then still pretend we are somehow close. I’m actually starting to really like the film class more. Most of the last four or five films have been really good (am I really understanding them better? i doubt it, to be honest, but it seems that way). Vladmir Konstantinovich is nice, he just drones on so. But I think he’s been doing that less of late. Praktika Grammatiki (I bet you can figure that one out) is grinding and awful, but our teacher is kind of saucy and fun. Kind of. She’s an aquired taste. Our real course (our mainstream) is not very demanding. Once I week I sit there and try to pay attention (fortunately I fail within twenty minutes usually and can go to doodling). Most recently, I sat a lot closer (instead of the very back, where we sit because we are afraid of Russians and they all have class in that room all day so when we get there they’re all long deployed) and understood more. This could have been because I sat closer and could hear better, because it was about Peter Pervi, or because I succeeded (slightly more – in most contexts what I did would still have been “fail to listen”) in paying attention. Sonya always writes down lots of stuff. Bah! Baikalovideniya is probably my favorite, mostly becuase Pavel Alexandrovich is such a friendly, intelligent young man with an awesomely strange moustache. It’s hard to explain why I like him. He’s nice and he’s smart (probably, I don’t understand much). He laughs when I pantomime “elk” because I forgot the word (this is a long time ago, I do actually know it know: lyos’).

Most days we go to a little cafe at the bus/marshrukti stop nearby (Universitetsky) which we call Morsckoi Cafe because all the waitresses wear sailor uniforms, but I think it’s really called Brig Fortuna. The food there is good (I just get blini with sgoshonka – God, I hate transliteration) and very cheap. And they play positively awful music videos. They’re at least as bad as American ones, and some are like, actually pronographic. I mean, there are, like, girls covered in oil in bikinis rubbing against each other and moaning. There are sometimes people actually having sex on big plasma screens on the walls. One day they played “Thriller”, and it was fantastic. Now I want the album. Other times we go to the Tex Mex restraunt here. It is actually very good, and I can feel the addiction squeezing my brain in class most days. I have eaten roughly twenty chimmichangas in the last month. Really. Big beef ones. Hmmm. Usually waitresses at these places are huge bitches. And usually Vanya loses his tag from the coat check. Seriously. Like four out of five times. But we love him.

We went to a bar on Friday, and then the tex mex place afterwards! That stuff was fun. We drank beer and I ate pelmeni. Our waitress was nice. At tex mex afterwards our waitress redefined the above-mentioned standards of bitch-ness, however. But she brought me chimmichanga #18, so I didn’t beat her up. Taxi home. Next night movie with Leonya, Anya, and Lucy. Theatre was way comfy. Movie was “Golden Age”, about Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada. Hollywood history: good on epic, bad on historical accuracy! Philip II was channeling Darth Vader. Like, really. I sipped beer. Stella Artois = good. Leonya told me that we are going to see Stephen King’s “The Mist” when it comes out in like a week. Of course it will be in Russian. I am way excited.

Money is becoming an issue. Mom’s gonna have to wire me more (becuase I have no cards, re: the wallet theft). Also that guy got my social security card, though I’m not too worried about identiy theft. Plus it doesn’t look like it’s very important, so I’m not sure he’ll even expect he COULD try to do something with it. I have to buy cards all the time: cards for phone time, cards for internet time. My lifeblood. Can you have two lifebloods? What a dumb question.

I’ve been talking to Elisabeth about buying my ticket back. I think she’s got it by now, for mid-day on the 16th of December. I’ll fly there, spend a day or two with Sara (she’s flying back to America the same day as me, the 18th) and then fly home through Atlanta. My plan is english-culture fest, where I beg as much money from Mom and Dad as possible (my finances will by then be in utter tatters), go out (dead from jet-lag) and proceed to buy my body weight (greatly increased by my stay in Russia) in CDs and comic books. Then I’ll rent twenty movies, go home, and lie on the floor underneath all of this stuff. Then I’ll start watching movies and reading comic books, ordering and eating Brooklyn Pizza pizza as needed. When my strength is up, I’m heading to La Fondita. Home Friends who’ll be living up to their name will be invited, nay, begged, to take part.

But the real point of bringing this up is to say that whenever I’ve had to talk to Elisabeth about this ticket, I’ve been hit with a big wave of sadness. THAT’S perverse. What am I going to miss? Feeling like an idiot every time I open my mouth? Having tons of food, most of which, whether I like it or not, is murder on my digestive system – MURDER, forced on me at all times? The classes I just explained why I don’t like? The cold (okay, we all know I won’t lack for that at Midd)? The not being able to order from Amazon (this has been death, despite the fact that all the stuff I want to order I only have come in contact with through Leonya)? No comic books? No HISTORY books?!

I know I will miss Leonya and Anya a ton. A ton. They’re just great. But they’re just two people, and I’m returning to gastronomic and cultural comfort, dozens of close friends and relatives, and studying something that is not Russian (the reasons this is good are many: I do not look like an idiot when I’m studying history or philosphy, I like those subjects better, I’ve been studying Russian at insane levels for six months).

But I will be sad. I’m already sad! So I can only conclude that Sibera has in fact cast a spell on me, making me love it completely unrelated to all the reasons living her is hard. I believed that this could happen – smart people I respect told me it would. But I didn’t think it would happen to me, until about three days ago. I just have to stop talking about this write now. The asshole culture shock graphs told me it would go this way, but I’m not even sure I want to leave. Jesus.

I expect this coming semester to redifine awesome, frankly. I’m signing up for awesome classes, I’m pumped about seeing all my friends (and playing DotA . . . oooooh, computer games – my first and forever love). I’m really thinking I’ll look up a ton of awesome history books for myself. I’ll get to see Sara a few times while she’s back. I love college! Phew, talking about the good things I’m going back to is a little comforting. The strength of loving (God, what’s the right word for this?) Siberia is honestly frightening.

And, to be honest, once I start really worrying about these two ten-page papers I have to write (yes, of course in Russian), I expect (really?) to go back to miserable homesickness and depression. I wouldn’t describe the norm here as “miserable homesickness and depression”, but I’ve been melancholy for much of the semester. Except recently it seems like I’m chaging from “not so hot with little breaks of happiness” to “usually good with little spikes of depression”. Who knows? Too much psychoanalysis never works. I’m done.

I think Miss Jones said at some point that there aren’t words to desrcribe just how she feels about Russia. Ooooh, I feel that way.

I ______ Russia.