Greetings, comrades.
When my eight-year-old cousin (who gave me a fantastic Google Maps tutorial) and I looked last week at a Google picture of the apartment building I would be staying in in Petersburg, it appeared to be a plain but very nice structure. Turns out we had accidentally looked at the building across the street.
I arrived at my “host home” yesterday, which is on the 20th floor of a building covered in (Cyrillic!) graffiti and has handwritten numbers marking each floor in one of the scariest elevators I have ever been in. Consequently, it took me a good 10 minutes to figure out how to get to the ground level last night.
But I was immediately welcomed into my host family’s home and I began to feel comfortable very quickly. My host mom, Tatjana, is hilarious, awesome, eccentric, and has endless amounts of energy. Her husband, whom she calls “Big Sergei,” works at night for a news station, so I have yet to meet him (he’s sleeping now.) Her son, whom she calls “Little Sergei,” is just graduating from high school and is about 18 years old. I didn’t get to meet him right away last night either because, as Tatjana described, he is a silly, angsty teenager who goes out with friends every night during the summer. She told me a story about how he had an informatics exam this year at 10 a.m. one day and came back from partying at 5 a.m. the night before (technically that morning), slept for a few hours and then woke up and rushed to his exam completely unprepared. Tatjana doesn’t really sleep at night because Big Sergei gets home early in the morning and she usually gets nervous and likes to stay up until Little Sergei comes home.
Finally, the fourth member of the house is a black cat named Vasya who angrily awoke from his nap yesterday to glare at me, a bizarre stranger infringing on his territory, when Tatjana introduced us. A few minutes later, he decided to nap on my bed and show me who’s boss. So far he’s bitten me twice. I think we’re becoming good friends.
I sat down to eat dinner late last night while Tatjana talked with me at the table. She served a typical Russian soup of dill and potatoes and highly questionable-looking beef chunks which turned out to be ridiculously delicious. Eating in Russia is a little like eating with grandparents. With the consumption of every crumb, you are bombarded with questions about the food and then you give very succinct responses such as, “No, no, no more. Thank you. Yes, delicious. Mmm…delicious. No, thank you, I ate. No. Yes. No, no, thank you. I’m quite full. Very delicious. Thank you.”
The apartment is comprised of three rooms. There’s a small kitchen, a bedroom which Big Sergei, Little Sergei and Tatjana all share, and then my room. There’s also a small bathroom which is separate from the toilet, a space which takes the “closet” in “water closet” a little too literally. Also, the cat’s potty is directly next to the human potty in that space. Tatjana compliments Vasya every time he goes potty. I’m a little jealous I don’t get the same kind of support.
Nobody in my family speaks any English. Tatjana joked that she took English in elementary school and that literally all she knows now is “von, two, tree, four, fife” and “Vat ees your nehm?” She also complained that Little Sergei was supposed to learn some English in school but that he’s not a very good student and can’t speak well at all. Hoping that I might have even a little bit of a linguistic ally in the house, I asked him if he speaks any. He shook his head and didn’t bother trying to talk. Tatjana said that Big Sergei studied German in school, which will be tremendously helpful considering my entire arsenal of German vocabulary is a poem about ducks in water and text from Beethoven’s 9th.
But seriously, I’d like to take a moment to brag about myself a little. I’m doing way better with the language thing than I expected. Tatjana likes to talk. And talk. And talk a lot. And I understand and can respond pretty well. She told me that she was talking with her friends Lena and Tatjana (she told me she has three friends named Tatjana in the same apartment building) who are also hosting students, and she said they complained that their students can’t understand anything or speak. “But you,” she cried, “you speak well! You understand! We understand each other!” To brag a bit more, Tatjana doesn’t slow down with the speech at all. She talks quite quickly. There’s a bit of necessary charades-playing and gesturing from both of us in our conversations, but I’m pretty happy with myself. My proudest moment so far? We were talking about Palin today (for the first time ever, I can actually see Russia from my house) and I gave a somewhat detailed description of the conservative Tea Party as well as the Boston Tea Party. We also jump from topic to topic pretty quickly. Last night, for example, Tatjana poured me chai, then discussed economics in Russia, then talked about how her mother had died of heart disease but the hospital had sent her home because they told her she could get more rest there and then she didn't want to cremate her body, then she said I have beautiful black eyes and that I’m a good girl.
Later last night I walked around the area with two other students from the program. We went to a grocery store, drank cold chai and ate crab-flavored Lays potato chips. When in Rome, eat tacky foods.
Architecturally, Russia feels like a giant déjà vu. I walk a few feet and see exactly the same building I just passed a couple seconds ago. Then I remember that it’s not a déjà vu, it’s just Soviet-chic. A real déjà vu? I’m sitting right now at the internet café closest to the apartment--it's called Café Dubai. Wow. Plus the apartment offers a beautiful view of other crumbling, gray Soviet buildings as well as a few bridges and the Gulf of Finland. Gulf of Arabia in January, Gulf of Finland in June. Got my gulfs covered.
I was wrong about the Church on Spilled Blood yesterday. Apparently that’s tomorrow. Yesterday we had orientation, which was quite orienting, and it was nice getting to learn about the classes we’re taking and also have the opportunity to socialize with the group more at lunch.
Internet access is hard to find right now, but I’m hoping to buy a modem card thing which will allow me to have some access at the apartment. Got my phone yesterday, though. Please feel free to call me at +7 921 849 16 83. Incoming calls to me are free on my end, though the person on the other end (lucky you!) will have to pay according to an international calling plan. The easiest way to call would probably be to add money to a Skype account and dial from there. I’d love to talk.
I wasn’t ever intending to write a blog post the length of “Crime and Punishment,” but that ship has sailed. Oh well. Makin' old Fyodor D. proud.
From Russia with love,
Даша/Dasha/Dana
Too much writing.
ReplyDelete