I feel that this blog probably hasn’t been very successful in conveying what I think its readers (if there are any) wish to know about, which are the little things that make my life here so much more different from my life back at home. It’s probably because I’ve spent a whole lotta time outlining the similarities between these two countries in order to avoid becoming preoccupied with feeling alienated and homesick all the time. The truth is that this isn’t the third-world that people probably imagine it to be. In fact, it’s not the third-world at all.
For example, I have never seen so many nifty electronic gadgets in my life. Every one has a cooler phone than I could ever hope to afford here or in the States, every one has an MP3 player, and every other person has a digital camera (if it isn’t included in the phone). I saw a USB/Flash drive music player in a gypsie cab that I took the city, once. Anyway, these are all the same people who walk 4 kilometers to work and use an outside squatter to tinkle…
On a typical day, I pass countless free-roaming cows and at least 2 donkey-pulled carts on the hike to school. My street has 3 three community water spickets where women and children tend to congregate as they fill their gigantic canteens, which they pull on rollers for at least a half-kilometer over disintegrating, muddy asphalt. Afterward, they lug the things home to their small and immaculately clean houses. Inside their homes you will find dozens of brilliantly colored wall-tapestries, eastern woven carpets, and lush floor pillows strewn about the common rooms. There is almost always a television or radio room centerpiece, sometimes a full entertainment system.
When you are invited to visit (pronounced “ghostie” in Russian), the people are overwhelmingly hospitable. Sometimes the hostess will present you with a small gift on top of wining and dining you as if you were royalty. On my last ghostie, I was presented with a pretty pair of Turkish woolen socks— the warmest socks in the world, so I’m told. The average evening’s table spread puts some American families’ Thanksgiving dinner to shame, even in winter time when fruits and veggies are harder to come by.
Vegetarians have it super hard here. Many of them become so malnourished in the wintertime that their hair falls out. Meat is the dietary staple here. They love it so much that they make it into jell-o, of all things. I love the stuff simply for the reason that it cracks me up. No one can figure out why I giggle uncontrollably when Mama parades into the room with a jiggling mold of meat jell-o.
A list of interesting meats I’ve sampled since I’ve been here: chicken feet, chicken heart, chicken kidney, horse (surprisingly not bad), various kinds of kielbasa (mysterious bologna), pig fat, cow fat, cow tongue, and (my favorite in level of disgustingness) cow face— scraped right off the jaw bone and into my soup. Yum.
I love, love, love the young people here. The village teenagers just kill me. They are very fashion conscious and aspire to be “cool” in the most creative ways. For example, since they all have really neat cell phones, they like to download ring tones (usually some random hip-hop hit) and play the music just as they're walking up the path to school. It’s like their soundtrack or something. They even subconsciously choreograph a little strut to go along with their personalized ring tone. The boys in their greaser leather jackets and the girls in their sexy six-inch stiletto boots swagger through the winter street-muck to the beat of 50 cent. Miraculously, they all manage to make it to class without any mud spatter, which is something I’ve yet to accomplish.
*
I’m writing this on Groundhog Day. We celebrated the holiday with the most excellent English Club ever. Surprisingly, my kids had heard of this holiday already because television stations have broadcasted the movie—the one with Bill Murray in it—dubbed in Russian. It makes me happy to know that my students have been exposed to the comic wonder that is Bill Murray and that they can identify Punxsutawney on a world map. They couldn’t, however, understand why any culture would celebrate the prolongation or shortening of winter in such a weird way, by the glorification of a subterranean rodent. I agree with them on this matter; it’s bizarre. Of course, I don’t know a soul who actually celebrates this day. And there are weirder animals to glorify. Isn’t it the Lughnasa festival in Ireland that celebrates the onset of spring and fertility via a goat elevated on a 15 foot platform?
For the longest time I considered the groundhog to be a fictitious animal, like the Easter Bunny or a jackelope or a snipe or something. According to my students, groundhogs live in the mountains around these here parts. I hope they weren’t pulling my leg, because I didn’t pretend to not believe them. Are groundhogs really real animals? Akin to prairie dogs and gophers, right? It’s too bad that Russki-TV doesn’t air Caddyshack in addition to Groundhog Day.
Speaking of mountains! I received the greatest news the other day. I remember hangin’ out with friends one whiskeyful night back in Austin and getting a good laugh out of people who LARP (Live Action Role Play i.e. dress like video game characters and fight in city parks). The world cannot be such a terrible place if people are LARPing in it. And now I can rest assured; recently it has come to my attention that LARPing is in fact an international pastime enjoyed by computer geeks and fantasy novel freaks the world over. My new friend Ruslan explained to me that every weekend a fanatical band of Tolkienists dresses like Middle-Earthlings and retreats into the mountains near Almaty (practically my backyard!) to sword fight. A friend, Jack, later informed me that people do it in the forests near St. Petersburg as well. And they say that Kazakhstan won’t be fully developed until 2030…
Anyway, my initial reaction was to laugh like crazy and insist that we try and find these people. Why waste my time babbling in pigeon English or crappy Russian when I can bridge the communication gap with Elvish? How much cooler would my weekend be than everyone else’s if I spent it hiding out in Asiatic mountains dressed as an Orc? That’s when Ruslan tensed up and told me in all seriousness that my perception of this Tolkienist culture is too romantic and that the participants are overly zealous. Dangerous, even. They like to draw blood and break bones. As far as I’m concerned, that makes the prospect of meeting these people that much more appealing. I tried to assure Ruslan that I do not wish to LARP and that I only want to talk to a Tolkienist—maybe one of the “hobbits,” if it would make him feel better. But he is convinced that it’s much too dangerous, and I’m better off pretending that I had never heard about it. It’s too much, man. He’s probably one of them. He has no idea how much more I’d like him if he actually was…
Let’s see. In other news, I’ve made many more friends in the village as of late. None of them are over the age of 20, which is strange but refreshing. For the longest time I feared I would morph into one of the babushkas whom I frequently take chai with, but I no longer need to worry about that. I’ve got youngens to hang with now. Some of them are as young as my littlest sister, Hannah, who is 16. None of them believe me when I say that I’m nearing 24. I’ve no qualms about that.
That’s all I got today. :)
For example, I have never seen so many nifty electronic gadgets in my life. Every one has a cooler phone than I could ever hope to afford here or in the States, every one has an MP3 player, and every other person has a digital camera (if it isn’t included in the phone). I saw a USB/Flash drive music player in a gypsie cab that I took the city, once. Anyway, these are all the same people who walk 4 kilometers to work and use an outside squatter to tinkle…
On a typical day, I pass countless free-roaming cows and at least 2 donkey-pulled carts on the hike to school. My street has 3 three community water spickets where women and children tend to congregate as they fill their gigantic canteens, which they pull on rollers for at least a half-kilometer over disintegrating, muddy asphalt. Afterward, they lug the things home to their small and immaculately clean houses. Inside their homes you will find dozens of brilliantly colored wall-tapestries, eastern woven carpets, and lush floor pillows strewn about the common rooms. There is almost always a television or radio room centerpiece, sometimes a full entertainment system.
When you are invited to visit (pronounced “ghostie” in Russian), the people are overwhelmingly hospitable. Sometimes the hostess will present you with a small gift on top of wining and dining you as if you were royalty. On my last ghostie, I was presented with a pretty pair of Turkish woolen socks— the warmest socks in the world, so I’m told. The average evening’s table spread puts some American families’ Thanksgiving dinner to shame, even in winter time when fruits and veggies are harder to come by.
Vegetarians have it super hard here. Many of them become so malnourished in the wintertime that their hair falls out. Meat is the dietary staple here. They love it so much that they make it into jell-o, of all things. I love the stuff simply for the reason that it cracks me up. No one can figure out why I giggle uncontrollably when Mama parades into the room with a jiggling mold of meat jell-o.
A list of interesting meats I’ve sampled since I’ve been here: chicken feet, chicken heart, chicken kidney, horse (surprisingly not bad), various kinds of kielbasa (mysterious bologna), pig fat, cow fat, cow tongue, and (my favorite in level of disgustingness) cow face— scraped right off the jaw bone and into my soup. Yum.
I love, love, love the young people here. The village teenagers just kill me. They are very fashion conscious and aspire to be “cool” in the most creative ways. For example, since they all have really neat cell phones, they like to download ring tones (usually some random hip-hop hit) and play the music just as they're walking up the path to school. It’s like their soundtrack or something. They even subconsciously choreograph a little strut to go along with their personalized ring tone. The boys in their greaser leather jackets and the girls in their sexy six-inch stiletto boots swagger through the winter street-muck to the beat of 50 cent. Miraculously, they all manage to make it to class without any mud spatter, which is something I’ve yet to accomplish.
*
I’m writing this on Groundhog Day. We celebrated the holiday with the most excellent English Club ever. Surprisingly, my kids had heard of this holiday already because television stations have broadcasted the movie—the one with Bill Murray in it—dubbed in Russian. It makes me happy to know that my students have been exposed to the comic wonder that is Bill Murray and that they can identify Punxsutawney on a world map. They couldn’t, however, understand why any culture would celebrate the prolongation or shortening of winter in such a weird way, by the glorification of a subterranean rodent. I agree with them on this matter; it’s bizarre. Of course, I don’t know a soul who actually celebrates this day. And there are weirder animals to glorify. Isn’t it the Lughnasa festival in Ireland that celebrates the onset of spring and fertility via a goat elevated on a 15 foot platform?
For the longest time I considered the groundhog to be a fictitious animal, like the Easter Bunny or a jackelope or a snipe or something. According to my students, groundhogs live in the mountains around these here parts. I hope they weren’t pulling my leg, because I didn’t pretend to not believe them. Are groundhogs really real animals? Akin to prairie dogs and gophers, right? It’s too bad that Russki-TV doesn’t air Caddyshack in addition to Groundhog Day.
Speaking of mountains! I received the greatest news the other day. I remember hangin’ out with friends one whiskeyful night back in Austin and getting a good laugh out of people who LARP (Live Action Role Play i.e. dress like video game characters and fight in city parks). The world cannot be such a terrible place if people are LARPing in it. And now I can rest assured; recently it has come to my attention that LARPing is in fact an international pastime enjoyed by computer geeks and fantasy novel freaks the world over. My new friend Ruslan explained to me that every weekend a fanatical band of Tolkienists dresses like Middle-Earthlings and retreats into the mountains near Almaty (practically my backyard!) to sword fight. A friend, Jack, later informed me that people do it in the forests near St. Petersburg as well. And they say that Kazakhstan won’t be fully developed until 2030…
Anyway, my initial reaction was to laugh like crazy and insist that we try and find these people. Why waste my time babbling in pigeon English or crappy Russian when I can bridge the communication gap with Elvish? How much cooler would my weekend be than everyone else’s if I spent it hiding out in Asiatic mountains dressed as an Orc? That’s when Ruslan tensed up and told me in all seriousness that my perception of this Tolkienist culture is too romantic and that the participants are overly zealous. Dangerous, even. They like to draw blood and break bones. As far as I’m concerned, that makes the prospect of meeting these people that much more appealing. I tried to assure Ruslan that I do not wish to LARP and that I only want to talk to a Tolkienist—maybe one of the “hobbits,” if it would make him feel better. But he is convinced that it’s much too dangerous, and I’m better off pretending that I had never heard about it. It’s too much, man. He’s probably one of them. He has no idea how much more I’d like him if he actually was…
Let’s see. In other news, I’ve made many more friends in the village as of late. None of them are over the age of 20, which is strange but refreshing. For the longest time I feared I would morph into one of the babushkas whom I frequently take chai with, but I no longer need to worry about that. I’ve got youngens to hang with now. Some of them are as young as my littlest sister, Hannah, who is 16. None of them believe me when I say that I’m nearing 24. I’ve no qualms about that.
That’s all I got today. :)
posted by Ms. Krystal @ 11:30 PM
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