Iz next!: School of the languages

Somehow, tonight I got distracted watching a series of English language lessons in which the instructor guarantees he'll teach Russians how to speak English in just 16 hours.

To see for yourself, tune into this episode which features a Madonna lookalike, a mobster, and an escapee from a barbershop quartet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDrofxKsKXQ&feature=related

The instructor claims facility in "7 or 8 European language and familiarity with several tens of other languages."

Unbelievably, about 15 of the hours of these classes are of the teacher talking to / interrupting the students. Check out minute 17 for some of the choice language the students are exhibiting. 

Throughout all of the lessons, the students furiously copy down all of the instructor's grids and sample translations. If they ever lose those little notebooks, they'll be in trouble.

Russia in 1995

Since this country is in so much flux, I thought it would be interesting (for me at least) to put down my observations of life here, so let's start with the first time I got to Russia.

When I arrived in Saint Petersburg in 1995 just a few years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia was a country in upheaval, run by a clueless, ex-Communist alcoholic (as opposed to the still Communist thug who is in power now and doesn't appear to be going anywhere).

Communism and state ownership disappeared (?) overnight. Those who were fast, or clever, or simply in the right place at the right time snatched up the shattered pieces of the country and became the new leaders. If you managed the milk factory under the Soviet system, it wasn't hard for you to declare yourself the owner of it in the new Russia.

So, in those tumultuous years immediately following the end of the Soviet Union, as the country was being redivided among the privileged few -- many of whom were the same privileged few in the previous system -- life changed very little for the average citizen. Of course, with the accumulation of wealth at the top and new access to Western products, the old babushka trundling across one of Moscow's wide boulevards with her groceries had to run twice as fast now to avoid being run down by some rich oligarch's new Mercedes, but her life was not so different otherwise.

Grocery stores looked much the same as they had in the Soviet Union. If you wanted dairy products, you went to the "Milk" store. Meat and fish were found (however rarely) at the "Meat" store and "Fish" store. We foreigners were sometimes allowed to shop at the so-called Beriozka, or "Birch," stores. This is where, in Soviet times, foreigners and members of the Communist Party shopped. At the Beriozka you could find western vodka, chocolates (frequently expired), chewing gum, all the things that were unavailable to the 96% of Russians who were not Party members. 

Shopping whether it was for books or clothes followed the senseless Soviet payment system. If you wanted to buy a book, you'd go to the bookstore and when you spotted the one you wanted behind the counter, you'd ask the saleslady if you could look at it. If you decided you wanted it, you'd note the price -- say 10 rubles --  hand the book back to her and then go wait in line at the cashier in some other part of the building. You'd give the cashier 10 rubles and she'd give you a receipt saying you'd paid 10 rubles. Then you'd go back to the book counter, show the saleslady your receipt and she'd give you the book -- making a small tear in the top of the receipt to show that you'd paid. Very tedious. 

Customer service in general did not exist. If you went to a clothing store, for example, you were summarily ignored. If you did decide to buy something, the cashier treated the interaction as a huge inconvenience to her -- often barking at you and refusing to complete the transaction until you produced some change to make her math easier. Where we have smiles in the U.S. all you got in Russia was eye-rolls and sighs of disgust.

It was hard to be a student in a summer language program in Russia in 1995. There were simply no cafes, bars, coffee shops, dance clubs, restaurants, or other public places to gather or to get a meal. There were occasional cafeterias where you could get a meal (lunchroom-style), but the food was pretty bad. Chicken was almost always a tiny bit of meat attached to a strange knot of tendons and bones. As a result we had to do nearly all of our cooking in the dorm or eat in the university cafeteria. With the poor quality of the kitchen in the dorm, that meant I subsisted almost entirely on soda crackers and Balance bars I had brought from home. Our group leader did manage to get us access to breakfast at a dormitory just under a mile away from the one we lived in. That was a very long walk in the snow (yes, in May) to get kasha and tea, and maybe a hotdog. Of course, if we had lived with a family, the food would have been fine. It still would have consisted mostly of potatoes, cabbage, and dill, but it would have been warm, buttery and home-cooked. It was mostly a function of poor cooking facilities and an absolute absence of restaurants that made that a lean summer.

Other conveniences that we take for granted just didn't exist or were far from what I was used to. There were no ATMs and Western Union was too difficult to use, so we had to travel with several thousand dollars to cover all of our expenses in the country. That meant wearing a stuffed money belt all the time. It was possible to use traveler's cheques, so I would go to the western-style Grand Hotel Europe where they had chairs you could sit in and a proper toilet, not the squat-style ones that were only occasionally to be found elsewhere in the city. 

Letters coming to Russia took forever, and ones going out took even longer. I believe I beat several of my letters home. With an unreliable phone system and no such thing as email or cell phones, it was easy to feel very isolated. 

In other ways, it was great to be a tourist here. The dollar was quite strong against the ruble. A super-fast ride on the efficient and clean metro only cost about 11 cents. Beer from Finland was excellent and cheap. And souvenirs could be hand for a song. 

Respect for the family and the elderly was noticeable. I recall being at the philharmonic theater one time and the two young girls next to me were giggling to themselves. The old man in the row ahead of us turned around and said "girls, you are being a bother!"  Since in the U.S. any time someone criticizes us or reprimands us, the automatic response is to be defensive or to sass back, I was stunned with the girls simply fells silent. There were no more giggles or mutterings about a "stupid old man." They just quieted down. 

When you talked to Russians at that time, they seemed cautiously excited about the changes happening in their country. They were acutely aware of how far behind the rest of the world they were in terms of quality products and a productive economy, but they could sense that great change was possible. 

They were also very skeptical of anyone who did become successful. That person was immediately assumed (often accurately) to have connections to the Russian mob and to have probably compromised on their ethics along the way. The average person just tried to stay away from these "New Russians." On several occasions, my short hair (and perhaps stern look) got me mistaken for a mob member and I was ushered to the front of the line at the store so that I'd get my business done and be out of their hair more quickly. With the daily mob killings around the city at the time, that was probably a good move on their part -- blood-soaked shelves are hard on business. 

Considering all these challenges, isn't it odd that I've come back so many times over the years?

1995 in pictures. our dear home

This is a view from my bedroom window at the Chajka hotel. The field is a dump (that's a fact, not an opinion) People cook hotdogs over piles of burning tires here. 

1995 more pictures

Here is a line for "kvas" a delicious (in my opinion) drink made from fermented black bread. I think it tastes a bit like unsweetened root beer. There is a spigot on the back of the tank and you bring your own vessel to fill.

1995 in pictures

I don't have too many pictures from 1995 and many of the ones I do are not very great because . . . well, digital cameras hadn't hit yet, so what you have here are pictures of pictures. 

But what you'll see here are some scenes of daily life: people buying veggies from the back of a truck, people selling their clothes swap-meet style in front of the metro station. 

Not by bread alone

Living in our dormitory is a lot like camping. The building, The "Chajka" (Seagull) Hotel, is on the very edge of the gulf of Finland. Lots of fresh air and fewer cars than downtown, but we are also pretty isolated out here. Sure there are corner groceries (not on the corner) and a few places to eat, but mostly people live here so they make all their meals at home.

And that's what we do. Each apartment here has a small kitchen with a tiny 30 year-old stovetop. The ovens are all turned off and usually only one burner works. However, I discovered tonight that if I turn on the "magic" burner, then a second one is also willing to heat up for me. 

The setup is the same in every apartment. Same kitchen. Same dorm fridge. Same small table. The only difference is the number of bedrooms. I was given a single, but the students all live in apartments with either 2 or 3 bedrooms (= 4 or 6 inhabitants).

Since I've been here before, I knew the setup so I packed my frying pan and a nice sturdy wooden spoon -- have I mentioned all this before? This feels like repetition.Perhaps the jet lag is making me repeat myself.  In any event, I'm all set up here and have been more able than I expected to cook for myself. 

I'm attaching a couple of pictures of typical meals for me. Breakfast consists of a fried egg along with some sturdy black bread topped with mustard and a sizable chunk of cheese. Dinner recently was some nice tomatoes that I cooked down, added some canned beans and some whole wheat pasta ($6/bag). It lasted me a few days and was very yummy. 

I've succeeded in finding several different vegetarian restaurants. Well, let me amend that to saying I've been to one vegetarian restaurant. Another one was closed when it was supposed to be open, so I was forced (by hunger) to go to a weird-looking Mexican restaurant in which the non-smoking section consisted of a single table, separated from the smoking section by two strings of beads (I wish I were kidding). 

Bottom line. I'm eating just fine . . . so far

[gratuitous foreshadowing]

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night!

I just got back from watching "The Hunter" a disastrous Willem Dafoe movie. The story was very confused -- something about him being a hunter who everyone in Down On Your Luck Lumber-town thinks is a tree hugger scientist so they smear poop on his car, kill his would-be girlfriend, and leave a dead chicken in his bedroom. Only (ha ha) it turns out he's in town to kill the last remaining animal of a species -- which he does for Mr. Big (who we only every encounter on the other end of the phone). Then our hero burns the animal's body and adopts the dead girlfriend's son (who was not killed in the fire). 

Caution, spoilers above.

The movie was made even worse by being a bootleg showing. Someone bought a copy of the DVD, set up a couple dozen theater seats in the upstairs of an old Soviet palace and played the movie on a big screen. There are no subtitles. Instead they have two actors (one for each gender) do all of the dialogue, by speaking (in monotone) directly over the actual actors. In this case, with a story set in Australia and Mr. Dafoe attempting the accent, much of the movie just sounded like a riot at a soccer game. 

In The Old Days, all movies and TV shows were done this way in Russia, but lately, big screen movies have had professional translation and dubbing. Very enjoyable. I guess this explains the suspiciously low cost of tonight's movie. 

Oh yes, and I think I was the only one in the theater who did not take at least one cell phone call during the movie. Foolish of me to turn my phone off. 

Time to do bed checks. We've already got several students teetering on the brink of being sent home for breaking curfew and drinking. 

Technical difficulties

Ahem, 

Sorry that the pictures and description for Victory Day are a bit out of order. I was having bandwidth challenges (that's a suitably vague excuse, right?). 

Celebrating the older generation

If nothing else, Victory Day is about celebrating the accomplishments of the elderly. There are a lot of people still living in Petersburg who directly experienced the war -- including the 900 days that Hitler surrounded the city and deprived it of all food and fuel. Over those three years of searing summers and crippling winters, the people of Leningrad quickly exhausted their food. So they ate their animals. When those were gone they ate the wallpaper (the paste is made with starch). In some cases, they even ate each other. And what they couldn't eat, they burned for fuel. Unbelievable horrors. You rarely encounter a person here whose parents or grandparents didn't experience the Blockade.

Communists

The Communist party had a sizable contingent, but when the lady with the Stalin picture passed by, there weren't too many supportive yells. Too soon?

Victory Day -- День победы

The weather was perfect for Victory Day. And after 5 days of celebration, culminating in the parade, people were ready to celebrate. Victory Day recognizes the Soviet victory over "fascist Germans." It's a huge source of pride here, considering the military cost of the war and the huge losses in St Pete to Hitler's blockade of the city. 

The parade runs the length of Nevsky Prospect, from Uprising Square all the way to the Hermitage Museum on the embankment of the Neva river. 

I muscled my way through the crowds to find a good place to stand. Most were taken as the parade was about 2 hours late in getting started.

As you can see in the pictures below, the parade is a blend of old and new. Lots of fresh faces in uniforms, but also a lot of WWII-era cars. It's really strange to see so many Soviet flags in the parade. I don't remember this always being the case. I mean, it's understandable in some senses -- the people who served in WWII were Soviet soldiers, so it makes sense for they to have Soviet military symbols on their military banners from the period. But it seemed to me that there were a lot of contemporary Soviet flags that were meant to symbolize Russian pride, but with a particular political bent -- the one that says "things were better under the Soviet Union." It wouldn't surprise me to discover that (Czar) Vladimir Putin is quietly encouraging this brand of nostalgia. 

I've also included the picture of the giant woman I got stuck behind as I was looking for a place to watch the parade. She was trudging home from work and wearing this advertisement on her back. Judging by her apron, I think she's in food service. Maybe she brings in a few extra rubles by slipping the sign on when she's out on the town.

Hussars

I liked the Hussars. Those guys must have been roasting in their fur coats.

Is it still day 1 if you've only slept 4 of the past 30 something hours?

I got to Russia with no problem at all. The weather here is gorgeous and tomorrow we will go out to see the countless parades and other events for the national holiday -- Victory Day. The day 67th anniversary of "victory over the Fascists (Germans)".

I guess I should explain who 'we' is and why I'm here. 

The 'we' is the students in the Duke in Russia program, a two-month study abroad program run by Duke. It's a great program. I've participated in it as a student and then later as a chaperone/assistant to the director. And that's what I'm doing this year. Through machinations not entirely clear to me, the director of the summer program came up short one assistant and since she knew I had experience with her program she asked me. 

I've known about this trip for the past 6 months. That's not just good planning, it's absolutely necessary. Russia continues to make it difficult for foreigners (let's just say Americans, okay) to visit the country. In order to freely walk the streets of Saint Petersburg, you have to be invited (by a person, a business, or a hotel). Then you send your invitation, along with an obscene pile of money, and an invasive application to the consulate and you get a visa. The whole process takes no less than 12 weeks, but 6 months is a safer bet. 

Since i'm not a political scientist, I can't accurately explain why Russia puts up all the obstacles, but I'm happy to speculate. I'd say that it's a combination of Cold War thinking -- back when out countries distrusted each other so profoundly that any contact with the enemy was suspect -- and unfounded rhetoric about Western Decadence. After all, according to the popular press, America gave Russia drug addiction, AIDS, and violent crime. We tried to give them Justin Bieber, which certainly would have brought the Krelim to its knees, but we were rebuffed.

This is an amazingly exciting time to be in Russia and I'm really happy to have this chance to help out with the program again. Russia has just "elected" Vladimir Putin for another term and the jails are rapidly filling up with people who voted against him. 

In St. Petersburg there is a new law that says that you also get a free trip to jail if you say that same sex families are just as okay as opposite sex families. For example, if a lesbian couple tells their child that their family is just as worthy as a family with a mother and father, that's considered propaganda in favor of pedophilia (yes, they are equating sex with minors with sex between consenting, same-sex adults) and the lesbian parents are subject to arrest. How's that going to twist a kid's brain?

So, in any event, it's an interesting time to be here.

If you are wondering what's happened to my life back in SF, here's the deal. Richard and the dog, Bogart, are keeping one another company during my absence. As for my job teaching ESL, I'm doing that from Russia. It's really no different from being in SF. 

Okay, that's a lie. there's an 11 hour time difference and whereas California specializes in all sorts of agriculture, delicious wine, interesting foods, and so on, it's sort of a cabbage and potato scene here. Nonetheless, I rarely work face-to-face with students, so it doesn't matter where I'm living. For dinner tonight while I was logged in doing my SF job, I enjoyed a steaming plate of dumplings and broccoli (something from the more interesting branch of the brassica family).

Doing my SF job from here is a piece of cake. It took all of 15 minutes today for me to buy a cell phone and a USB modem for my computer. Now I've got stellar internet speeds wherever I want them. 

It's interesting how well-developed cell technology is here. Back in the 90s when I first started coming to Russia, there were no cell phones and landline phones were awful. You spent most of your time screaming "hello!" into the receiver trying to see if you had a connection. The line would go dead all the time and when it was working, you'd hear other people's conversations bleeding through. Dreadful. No one lingered on the phone.

So, when cell technology came along, there was no interest in fixing the decrepit landline system. People just switched wholesale to cell phones. In fact the hotel I'm staying in took out all of the landlines because they, apparently, were being forced to pay for a trunk line that no one used anyways. 

Today I paid just over $80 for a brand new cell phone (nothing flashy) and a cell modem for my computer. I should get about a month or so of use from each of them before I'll need to top up my account with more minutes (a trivial expense). Take that, Verizon!

Tomorrow I hope to have interesting snapshots from the Victory Day celebrations to share.

Next Stop, Mayhem

I am on the doorstep of my summer travels in Russia, on the Finnair flight from JFK to Helsinki. This is perhaps the best flight I've ever been on.

No, the seats are not the spacious ones the sheikhs, sultans, and oil magnates get on Emirates Air -- in fact my seat is pretty dinky, but the seat next to me was miraculously unoccupied so I managed to ball myself up like a yogi and get several solid hours of sleep.

With the exception of my first year in Russia (1995) when I flew Czech air -- let's not talk about that since it involves a mysterious emergency landing in Riga -- I've always flown on Finnair and they've always been a delightful airline. Even though an enormous percentage of their passengers are Russians heading home to the Motherland, the Finns have scarcely lifted a finger to make those passengers feel welcome. It starts with the announcements on the plane -- all are made in English, Finnish, and Swedish, (but no Russian) and continues on in the distinct reluctance to include any Russian text in their in-flight magazine. And what they do print is typeset as poorly as possible, including odd line breaks between words. I'm sure that the acrimony toward the Russians is due in no small part to years of abuse from their gargantuan neighbor, the Soviet Union as well as from several wars and skirmishes.

I managed to take a picture of the super moon out my window, but the superness is hard to make out since it's just the moon off the wing of a plane.

The reason for this trip to Russia is to act as a sort of chaperone and assistant to the program director for the Duke in Russia summer program. I've done this same job for the same group many times in the past and I thoroughly enjoy seeing Russia for the first time through the student's eyes. It is quite a country -- like nothing you're likely to find elsewhere. It is the Wild West.

After a short layover in Helskinki, we will make the 40 minute flight across the Gulf of Finland into St. Pete. It's hard to describe the contrast between Russia and the rest of Europe. The shock is something like walking from the crisp cleanliness of your house into your teenager's bedroom. There's no order; the gifts you gave them for christmas or birthdays are broken, dented, and stuck to the carpet by something unrecognizable. The first thought that comes to mind is, "How can people live like this?!" But teenagers do, and so do the Russians.

It has been 7 years since I was last in Russia (Moscow) and 8 years since I was in Saint Petersburg. I'm really excited to see what has changed over those years.I'm sure there will be many surprises, which I will share with you here.