2010: A Russian Odyssey

Back in the USSR

Today I’ve got more of an observational post than a week-long recap. One of the easiest things to realize here is that Russians aren’t over the Soviet Union. I know that it’s only been just under 20 years since its collapse, but the frequency at which the USSR is mentioned in everyday life really surprised me. Before coming here I was under the impression that the current Russian government would do all it could to distance itself from the USSR, maybe even to the extent of censorship, but that’s not the case at all.

• I knew that there would be a bunch of CCCP-themed souveniers and touristy bars, but the Soviet Union is mentioned in nearly every news report, everyday.
• On “Kto xochet stat millionerom?” (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) half of the questions start with “V sovyetskie vremena…” (In Soviet times…).
• Artists interviewed on television are labeled as being from the USSR instead of the name of the present-day republic.
• Traditions like “Dyen zashchitnika Otechestva” (Defender of the Fatherland Day) are still preserved and posters announcing the holiday are decorated with the hammer and sickle, even inside metro cars.
• I walk past a statue of some evil KGB elite everyday on the way to school.
• There are at least three metro stops named after socialists, including the one I get off at for school – Chernyshevskaya.
• The music of the national anthem hasn’t changed since the 1940’s and even though the lyrics don’t mention communism or Lenin anymore, the guy who wrote the modern-day lyrics is the same person who wrote the Soviet anthem.

At the same time though, the communist party in Russia doesn’t have much backing. Its proponents are mostly over 60 years old, and a majority of the party is going to die out soon. The frenquency of USSR mentions dosen’t have much to do with supporting communism, I think it’s just a result of how everyone was raised. I imagine it’s difficult, even after 20 years, to completely forget about an institution that you were forced to support, believe in, and even fight for.

I think that once this generation of people who lived the majority of their lives in the Soviet Union fades out, Russia is going to go through some major changes. A lot of my teachers have said how even though the USSR is gone, a lot of its top leaders near the end are still in government positions – I’d be interested to see how the younger generation (which is extremely small, it’s actually a big problem here) plans to steer the country.

Maslenitsa in Novgorod

Long time no blog! The past couple weeks I’ve either not had much to say or didn’t want to spend time typing away on my computer. But this weekend we didn’t have any planned excursions, and I’ve been staying inside most of the day (I’m all caught up with LOST now!!)

Last weekend we took a trip to the city of Novgorod, a 3.5 hour bus ride from St. Petersburg. Novgorod is considered a “more Russian” city than St. Petersburg, so it was nice to get a feel for what the true Russian lifestyle, history, and architecture is all about. The main sites in Novgorod are churches… there are A LOT of churches. Besides ornately painted icons covered in Old Church Slavonic, we saw some homes that served as examples of how Russians used to live in Novgorod.

Besides museums and churches, there wasn’t much else to do in Novgorod – the most interesting looking cafe required reservations so we couldn’t even go there! On our way back to St. Petersburg though, we stopped in the city center to visit the Maslenitsa festival. Maslenitsa is a week-long Russian holiday (“Butter Week” in English) whose history I won’t even attempt to recite, I’m sure Wikipedia has some information.

Basically what we gathered was that during Maslenitsa you eat a bunch of blini (which are like pancakes, but better) and on the last day they burn a figure that looks like a babushka. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but it was fun to be a part of it – walking from the city center to the beach and watching the figure burn. It was an actual cultural experience, which was a nice change from attempting to understand culture through museums.

The past week has been mostly routine, we’re all getting into the Peterburgian groove. Our next major trip will be to Moscow, and that’s coming up around March 25. Our spring break, or “Russian travel week,” starts on March 28 in Moscow and goes until April 4. A lot of people are busy planning their week, I think most are going for the warm choice of Istanbul for the week.

My friend Zoltan and I decided to go a more historical/cultural route and are planning on traveling the Baltic countries near St. Petersburg together. Warsaw (Poland), Vilnius (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia), and Tallinn (Estonia) are currently on the list, so we’ll see how well we can plan that out.

“Hey look, it’s the sun”

Yesterday we went to Pavlovsk on our first excursion outside the St. Petersburg city limits. We caught the train in the morning at a station within ten minutes walking distance from my apartment, and the ride took about 30 minutes. The ticket was impressively cheap – only 39 rubles (a little over a dollar) for students.

The best way to describe Pavlovsk in the winter is to say it looks like the December page of a calendar. A forest full of Christmas trees (or whatever they’re actually called) leads you to a massive imperial palace on the hill:

After the palace tour a friend decided that as a child born and raised in Southern California I never got to fully experience the joys of sledding down a snowy mountain. It made me remember the time my sister and I rode down Mt. Baldy on my dad’s car mats, but besides that she was pretty much right so we rented two “vatrushki” (inner-tubes… and apparently a student ID and 600 rubles is not a good enough deposit for a plastic tube because the lady yelled at me for quite some time) and joined the crowds. In LA, kids have Disneyland, here they have the slopes of Pavlovsk – there were so many little Russian kids out and about! A lot of the slopes were safe for kids, but there was one pretty intense drop that all the adults were doing, so we eventually joined there. Connecting the two inner-tubes together and going off the huge jump there was probably not the best idea, but it was pretty fun getting several feet of air and coming in for a crash landing.

Back in Petersburg, I decided to go to my new-found Mexican restaurant (Latin American, rather) for the second night in the row. I think the waitress recognized me, maybe I can become a regular. It obviously doesn’t compare with Mexican food in California, but for Russia it is pretty impressive. They even had dancers and a live band playing Gypsy Kings in the restaurant.

After dinner we headed to a “kinoteatr” (movie theater) behind Nevskiy prospekt and watched “Voobrazharium Doktora Parnasa” (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus). It was a really good movie and insanely visual, but at the same time very confusing… I feel like it wouldn’t have made much more sense if watched in English.

Today there are no excursions planned so it’s errands time for me. My top quests for today are to buy new headphones and to somehow watch LOST!!

Ermitazh

Today after classes we got our St. Petersburg State University student IDs and went to The Hermitage to use them – students get in free, as many times as they want! Although I was there for about an hour and probably only saw less than 5% of the collections, I got a general feel for the museum. As you probably know I’m not too big on art, let alone all this classical artwork, so it wasn’t really THAT amazing for me. I liked the ancient and medieval artifacts from Siberian tribes more than the European paintings. I’ll probably be back again soon anyway, seeing as it’s free. I can see how it appeals to art buffs though, the collections are enormous.

I prefer the building from the outside and its surroundings, so I decided to make these panoramic views of The Hermitage area (Top: courtyard outside facing away from the Winter Palace entrance, Bottom: frozen over river Neva and Vasiliyevskiy Island taken from behind the Winter Palace):

“It’s a beautiful walk… in summer”

Classes started today, and I actually feel like I’m a student again! My Tuesdays start at 11:30am, so I was able to take my time in the morning and I also got to miss rush hour on the metro. When I went to campus Monday at 8:30am, I felt like I was in March of the Penguins or something. I was crammed tightly in the train car then stepped out at the stop near Smolny cathedral (Chernyshevskaya) and shuffled with the massive crowd from the platform to the escalator. I hope there aren’t any claustrophobics in Russia.

My first day made a good impression, I think I’m going to be enjoying my courses here. Today I had grammar, conversation, and ethnic studies. Grammar is probably going to be more like the courses I took at USC. Conversation was more challenging right off the bat, so that should be an interesting class. The rest of my classes, including ethnic studies, are taught in English and are not supposed to be academically challenging but instead informational/engaging. I’m looking forward to ethnic studies, which is going to be about the different ethnic groups in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and how conflicts between them shaped Russian history. Here’s my schedule:

Oh yeah did I also mention that my classes are in the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?

Kolombo

After watching about two hours of “Kolombo” (Columbo) with my host father Andrey, I now have a greater appreciation for the series. I always just passed by it whenever I saw it on KDOC (really there’s rarely anything worthwhile on KDOC), but it’s actually a really great detective show. Andrey really likes the actor Peter Falk and how he puts together all the pieces of the puzzle throughout the show (“Look! They are staging this to trick the police, but they won’t trick Columbo!”)

It was during Columbo that I was first unable to convey my point in Russian. The first episode we watched was from the 1990s and the second was from the 1970s – in the second episode Columbo ALWAYS had a cigar in his mouth or a glass of alcohol in his hand. I was trying to point this out and comment on how smoking and drinking has been phased out on American television, but it just didn’t work. I probably sounded something like “It’s interesting how Columbo to smoke and to drink in the seven but right now no smoke.”

My other observation made while watching Columbo was that people watching American television shows in Russian get a very unfortunately poor experience. There is one man dubbing all the male voices and one woman dubbing all the female voices in the show, and they rarely use emotion or inflection in dialogue. Although this is probably good for the Russian economy, I don’t really think it’s a better viewing experiencing than watching with subtitles. At least with subtitles you know how the dialogue is originally being spoken. All the grittiness of Columbo’s voice is lost with the Russian voice-over. Movies are a little more professional though, they seem to use multiple voice actors.

As a side note, I’ve been playing a lot of charades with my host family (not literally playing, but we often act out what we’re trying to say). Some of my favorite words/phrases to act out or have acted out to me so far have been: pipe (sophisticated expression with your hand like you’re holding a wine glass), icicle (grab some ice from the freezer and make a dropping motion from it), electric chair (point to the chair and shake), lethal injection (give yourself a shot), evidence (act like you’re scattering papers across a table), and gallows (motion like you’re hanging yourself, of course). Electric chair is actually a really straightforward translation, but for some reason I thought they were asking about those massage chairs you find in Brookstone.

Also here’s a photo of the queen of the apartment: