By Nevsky's Finger!

These first four photographs are what we woke up to Monday morning, before and after. The before pictures were taken earlier in the trip (one has been posted before). The smoke is from the peat bog fires that plague Russia during the summer. Usually, it clears up a bit during the day, but since there is no air conditioning here, we open our windows at night. I've been waking up to a smoke-filled room all week (no smoke detector of course, so no need to worry about setting that off).


The next pictures are all from Vladimir, except for the final panorama.

How Russians live in Vladimir and the church where Nevsky's finger is held/where the Final Judgment is.

View from the bluff that the church sits on.

View from our hotel. As you can see, there is a whole lot of nothing except for living quarters in Vladimir.

Suzdal'

The church in Vladimir from behind (that is, from the bluff) and the reason why I refuse to consider this country's infrastructure developed.

A random picture that I'm not really sure why I took it, and my Лебедное озеро - Swan Lake.

These last three are from Neskuchnyj Sad, my usual place to walk since it's mostly forest and therefore cooler than the rest of the city, and it's directly across the street from the apartment.

This is a house that used to be well outside of Moscow, but urbanization has made it part of the city. It is where Pushkin composed much of his poems during the summer.

Колоколы звонят

I suppose I've been lacking on my posts for the last week and a half. I'll start by saying that I have less than 48 hours left in Russia. The last week has been filled with school-related activities revolving, for the most part, around a paper we had to write. The time that hasn't been spent in study has been spent dealing with the heat. I really underestimated what it could do to me. That is to say, I have hardly slept this past week and feel a little like a walking zombie - physically, it seems to have a taken a toll as well, and I would not be surprised to find that I have lost up to fifteen pounds when I get home.

Put all is not as bad as it seems, not as bad as I make it seem. This past weekend, we went to the ancient cities of Vladimir and Suzdal', which I'm told are even mentioned in the New Testament, but I have no proof of this. Our trip there was a real experience. They are located in a neighboring province - a distance that make two hours or three at the most to reach in America. But here that time reaches six to seven hours depending on the direction and time of day.

Once we got to Vladimir, our excursion was accompanied by rain and lasted about an hour and a half. Disappointing really. We spent the rest of Saturday in our hotel waiting for the club on the second floor to open up. It was nice to hang out with everyone, but a waste of time to do it in a bum hotel in a Russian provincial town. I really understand after staying in this place what centralizing the power in Moscow does to places like Vladimir, which really seems like it's just a place to hold excess population not necessary to run the government.

That said, the church there (I forgot the name and don't feel like looking it up) was quite impressive. All of the churches in this area are, for the most part, big and white with large gold (or in one case spangled blue) domes. The inside of the one we toured in Vladimir was painted with frescoes by Andrej Rubljov - especially impressive was his "Final Judgement" placed over the main entry to the sanctuary. One of the other more interesting things there was Alexander Nevsky's finger. It used to be his entire corpse until Peter the (not-so) Great removed most his body to Petersburg. As we were wrapping up our tour in this church a thunderstorm rolled over the plain outside. It was an amazing sight and an amazing sound as it came in. I took a panorama from the bluff that the church is on - all pictures will be in the next post.

Other than that, Vladimir wasn't much to look at - a run down facade of Russian history maintained partly because it's on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

Suzdal', however, was much more interesting. This is a church town to say the least. Our first stop was a sight where some wooden churches have been reconstructed and some wooden houses have been brought in from other area in Russia. It's a whole lot more interesting than I'm making it sound, but photos were not allowed without a pass (which I didn't really feel like paying for), so you'll have to take my word that it was pretty cool to see the inside of these wooden houses.

After that it was the Kremlin (remember, how I said this just means "citadel" in Russian), with another massive white church with gold domes. I would have thought that by now I had grown tired of these things, but they are all so impressive and each one slightly different. This one was under restoration, so there was scaffolding all over the frescoes, but we were treated to a song from a quartet of singers. One of the coolest things that has ever happened to me was listening to their music and letting my eyes roll across the massive glittering iconostasis of this church.

We then went to the Spassky Monastery, which no longer functions as a monastery. All of thee churches and buildings there are museums, and unfortunately, we were all a little too fed up with eachother (a likely result of the heat) to see much here. Our tour guide took us to a building full of church artifacts, which had the potential to be one of the most impressive museums of the trip. However, we were rushed and very hungry - it's a place to return to if I can get back to Russia and brave the insane traffic of Moscow to get there. Most people left for lunch or something (we weren't communicating very well at this point) while I hung around to watch the holy man ring the church bells.

I can't remember if I commented on church bells here, but they are an amazing thing to listen to. Most churches have ten or fifteen bells (sometimes even more) and when they ring, it is truly music. Not only that, but the act of ringing the bells is intended to be a religious experience (not just a marker of the time of day). This is not surprisingly reflected in the vocabulary. In Russia, bells do not "ring," they "call," just like a person calls out to God in prayer. The call usually lasts for anywhere from twenty to forty minutes 9not every hour, but at specific times of day - I think there are five, but don't quote me on that). It has been a real treat to be living within hearing of two monasteries while I've been here. I frequently find myself opening the windows and laying on the bed to take a break and listen to the bells.

After a riverside picnic in Suzdal', we packed up the bus and headed back to Moscow - we left at 5.00 PM and did not get back until after 11.00. We didn't even bother going into the city, but stopped at the first Metro station and got on that for the rest of the journey to our respective neighborhoods. I would not at all be surprised to find that we spent the last two and a half hours or more within fifteen miles of Moscow.

In addition to the heat, there have been peat bog fires all over the region, which have turned the city into a smoke house all week - it started to clear up yesterday and today it's clear for the most part. I have before and after photos from St. Andrew's Bridge. I'll probably go try to take some night photos tonight, because it is finally getting dark enough to do so. All the other photos will be in the next post.

"I am from America, Baby"

I know my last entry was about the heat, but Iosif just said something that is very telling about both the heat and the government here. I remarked that I was taking a cold shower today because of the heat. His response was that I should savor it because tomorrow warm water will flow from the cold tap.

Why is this? Because tomorrow it is predicted to reach nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which in America means that the water is still more or less cold. They don't bury their pipes in Russia, though, so the piping system basically is a huge radiator. This is expecially true when one considers another little Russian peculiarity - hot water, like most other things here, is centralised. It is heat at a large water heating plant and piped alongside the cold water pipes. This is probably something that contributes to the selective hot water droughts in summer. It's simply too easy to turn off the water here. Some of the more conservative estimates that we've heard have put energy loss between heating plant and consumer at about 50%, making it a BIG DEAL (that is, it would be in a country that cared about it's limited environment had a limited environment).

But enough about heat. I've been coming to the realisation lately of just how much my Russian language skills have improved since arriving here (or rather, since joining the advanced class). This is by no means a statement of fluency - I am nowhere near fluent in Russian by any measure. However, my conversational skills have improved dramatically, primarily as a result of hammering a bunch of verbs into my vocabulary by brute force because none of my textbooks or professors ever really emphasized verb usage. So it has been quite enlightening to realise that for the last two weeks or so, I've been undergoing a rapid but hardly-noticed change from speaking in well-thought out phrases to whole conversations of sentences constructed on the go. I've even developed a sense of humor with my host family. It is an exhilarating experience to say the least when you suddenly realise that you are actually for real speaking another language, understandably, and with a native speaker.

Not only that, but I also caught a pretty major grammar mistake that Iosif made at dinner tonight (I didn't dare correct him, of course - Mummy didn't raise me to do that). It's actually quite understandable when you think about it. There are three main sets of prepositions used to describe location and motion to/from somewhere or something depending on the type of word being described - there are many exceptions to the rules regarding each set and I am always just throwing out prepositions and hoping something gets right. For some reason, "Ukraine" uses the prepositions that are usually reserved for events and small outdoor locations. It is the only country not to use the large, enclosed locations set of prepositions, and nobody has given me a concrete answer as to why, although I'm pretty sure it has to do with the origins of "Ukraine," which means "at the border" in Russian (and coincidentally, the preposition used for "at" is from the set of prepositions used to describe location in relation to people . . . go figure). So I was quite astonished when Iosif spoke like a normal person and treated the Ukraine like any other country; that is, he used the wrong set of prepositions to describe a motion within and then from the Ukraine. I hope the long drawn out explanation of the Russian language's locational prepositions has not detracted from the original purpose of this paragraph - to demonstrate that I am beginning to notice the mistakes of native speakers in their normal speech. It is not nearly as exhilarating as speaking more freely, but exhilarating nonetheless.

That said, we had a tour of one of Intel's MANY Russian offices today in Russian, which was kind of cool, but honestly a little weird (not in the least helped by the fact that one of our presenters left me her e-mail address at the reception desk). It was more or less a presentation of Intel - that is, propaganda for Intel. It probably would have been a little more appropriate for prospective employees or new hires, but I guess I really shouldn't be complaining about sitting in an air conditioned room and eating free food for three hours.

Afterwards we went to a park in the Krylatsky Hills (the same neighborhood where the office was) and had an amazing panorama of the city. This place is on the North-West side of the city. Most of the panorama's you guys have been getting are from the South. It didn't strike me until I saw from this view just how massive this city is. The population of 14 million probably should have been my second hint - the first should have been the drive in from Sheremetjevo after the flight in. The Metro map would have been helpful too. However, when I looked out on that view of the skyline and hardly recognised any of the buildings except for the business park Moskva-City and a few very distant towers or Wedding Cakes, it struck me like a slap in the face that this city IS Russia. Peter, by comparison, has 5 million people, and although I'm not sure what the exact numbers are for the rest of the provinces (that's their name for the "smaller" large cities), I know that Moscow is the largest by a long shot. It's pretty overwhelming.

I learned a lesson from that as well (I say lesson, I've learned it many times before) - IF YOU HAVE A SMALL DIGITAL POINT-AND-SHOOT CAMERA, TAKE IT WITH YOU EVERYWHERE YOU GO. You never know when you'll end up in Krylatskoje.

Жар и душность

I went to my host family's dacha this weekend to get out of the city and the heat. It was definitely a good decision. I haven't talked a lot about the heat since I first got here, but it is really exhausting. Imagine living in Atlanta only the temperature doesn't mellow at night, air conditioners don't exist, and pants are standard acceptable clothing. Sounds a little post-apocalyptic right? That's what my view of Russia after 1917 has become in the last week or two - not post-Revolutionary, but post-Apocalyptic. In this environment of extremes and oppressive nature, it's pretty easy to imagine why these people put up with communism for so long, and why they are still putting up with a government that would be called nothing less than totalitarian in America. I came up with this little quote in class the other day while talking about the government here - "Путинская демокрация значит американский тоталитаризм, а американская демокрация значит русская анархия" - "Putin's democracy means American totalitarianism, and American democracy equals Russian anarchy."

Back to the weather. The heat and humidity don't go away at night, largely because the night is so short still. I can still go to sleep in full daylight and wake up long after sunrise. That is, if I could get a full night's sleep, which hasn't been happening in this weather. Because of all this, schoolwork is many times more difficult to concentrate on, and it's so easy to simply say, "I'm going for a walk in the park." Thankfully, we have fans now, and although sleep isn't any easier, I have a feeling I will actually be able to start working on my final project in earnest.

Other than this, I don't have a lot to say. The trip to the dacha was well-timed and much-appreciated. It was Marina's birthday, so we had quite a party on Sunday and I got to meet the rest of the family. Overall, it was a good weekend.

Patriarch's Ponds (Патриащие пруды), where I walked literally halfway across Moscow to go on Friday. Not particularly impressive, but slightly cooler than the rest of the city if you sit in the shade.

На Даче

This is my account of the last five days. It will be long, and I will write it in chapters. I apologize in advance for typos, because I will not have to correct them.

Часть 1. Дорога до Наро-Фоминска
Chapter 1: The Road to Naro-Fominsk

The road to Naro-Fominsk begins in Moscow, at the Pushkin Museum of Foreign Art from the 19th and 20th centuries. From there we went to Yugo-Zapadnaya on the Metro and awaited the group to assemble at 6.00 PM Saturday. From Yugo-Zapadnaya, we took a bus to Naro-Fominsk. It is interesting to note that we took a commuter bus on a limited-access highway - that is, the bus did not exit the highway to drop people off, but simply dropped them at stops on the side of the highway. At most stops, there is an elevated cross walk, which allows commuters to cross to the other side of the highway. By the time our stop came up, there were no more crosswalks, and it became necessary to cross on the pavement - and interesting experience on a highway. However, people here are very kind and allowed us to cross with ease (the strangeness of this experience I have a little trouble typing). We then walked through about two miles of woods in the middle of nowhere Russia in order to arrive at a gate and a gravel road, which led to Sasha's dacha.

Часть 2. Первая ночь на даче
Chapter 2: The First Night on the Dacha
The dacha itself is interesting, so I will take some time to describe it. It is part of a community of sorts. Only one person that I know of lives there year-round - he owns the dog, which will come later. He takes care of the place in the winter when people are not around. Each dacha is on a separate plot of land, and they are usually separated by a fence. It is constructed primarily out of two railway carriages, one of which can be seen as the small projection on the side. The room at the back of the picture is the second. The rest was built around this frame and there are five rooms in total - anteroom/washroom, kitchen, downstairs bedroom (the carriage), upstairs bedroom, and (unconnected) the second carriage, which also has a bedroom and a small bathroom (port-a-potty + shower)

Security in this country is a huge concern, primarily as a result of Stalin's Great Terror. During the Soviet Union, doors to residences (and dacha's as well, I would imagine) did not lock. This is why my apartment here is behind four heavy doors - two thick wood and two iron - each with a separate key and each with a lock, which can only by operated from the inside. Dacha's are also secured beyond imagination. The gate at the end of the road was a large iron-bar construction, similar to the front of an old prison cell. The fence for the dacha had a similar gate with some sheet metal attached for privacy. Additionally, there was a large lock on the door, like a deadbolt, but with seven separate metal bars instead of one deadbolt.

That said, people are very open about things when they are actually at the dacha, and as long as we were there, it was only necessary to lock the outer gate. Everything else stayed unlocked the entire time, even when we went swimming and left no one at the dacha.

We spent the rest of the light on the first night swimming in a nearby pond. The water was freezing cold, but comfortable if you kept moving - not difficult to get the motivation for that (I was surprised at how long I could tread water in those conditions). However, the cold water was a VERY welcome change after the heat of Moscow. If you haven't heard, we're experiencing a bit of a heatwave here, producing Atlanta-like heat. This is mixed with the humidity, usually in the 80's because of all the peat bogs and such surrounding Moscow. It is pretty miserable anyway, but you must also factor in that it is (usually) socially unacceptable for college-age males to wear shorts in the city and many of us simply did not pack for this weather. Moscow usually enjoys summer temperatures in the 70's and 80's Fahrenheit. I tried wearing shorts in the park on Monday and got myself into an interesting conversation with some drunk teenagers - it really is that easy to mark foreigners in this city.

We also had a grand party that first night. Vodka, shish-kabobs, tea, and salad. It may come as no surprise that I did not partake in the vodka, but in reality I wasn't particularly averse to it - I simply didn't feel like drinking that night. We also had two kids that Sasha knows over for dinner. Our conversation - in a unique breed of Russian and English, which we continue to speak with increasing regularity - lasted until the sky began to lighten, at which point it was agreed that we should stay up and watch the sunrise in a field nearby (at only 4.00 AM, not as impressive as it would be in the US). Here are some pictures from there, and they can speak for themselves:




This is one of our student helpers, Alina, who hangs out a bit and went with us. She happened to catch a hedgehog in the garden while we were cooking dinner.

Часть 3. Гречневая каша
Chapter 3: Buckwheat porridge

Day two began fairly normally (actually, it began in the last chapter, but this is from the time I woke up, 3 hours after going to bed). I had slept on the floor for a number of reasons - space and the amount of alcohol consumed by my bedmate being the primary two. We tried buckwheat kasha for breakfast, which was not particularly good. Kasha is one of the staples of this country; I've been served it everyday for breakfast. It's like oatmeal, only less "oat-ty" if you will allow me to make up a word. It is much more versatile in my opinion. We usually have a banana or other fruit with it, some sausage of some sort (so many choices here), cheese (also, so many choices), and bread. The reason the buckwheat kasha was not good was probably because the milk we were drinking and put into it tasted like it could have been buttermilk. Or maybe it was just nasty.

However, it was filling and sufficient for day two activities - a hike through the field, over the river, and through the woods, to our second swimming hole. It was at the beginning of this journey that we met the great Малыш, whose name means something like "little one." He is probably one of the biggest dogs I have ever seen.

This is Malysh when we first saw him. I would label him as our first bear - the story about bears in Russia is in fact not true. There are no bears (except for Malysh).


This is a picture of the same field as before, taken during the day obviously and from on of the trees we climbed to get a better view.

This is the second pond we swam in. I have a few pictures of the first, but I think this one most accurately captures what the place was like. On the dacha people just sit around and cool off after Moscow and her problems. It was interesting that when we first got there and were speaking English, everyone got out like we had poisoned the water. But when we were standing around drying off, we started speaking Russian and Vitya came by, and almost immediately people became much more willing to see us as not just tourists, but part of their vacation. I wouldn't say we had the cold shoulder at first, but they were very friendly later. We ate ice cream (so ridiculous how much Russians love ice cream, but also so good) and then left.

Часть 4. Заблудились в лесу
Chapter 4: Lost in the Woods
On our trek through the woods back to the dacha we lost two of our group. As it became evident that they hadn't followed us or figured out a way back, a search party was organised, which consisted of me (of course) and Sasha. It was a particularly grueling search, but I have definitely learned how to be a Russian woodsman as a result (for those you who know a little Russian, when I got back I said that he had gone настоящий lumberjack в лесу - characteristic of the language we speak in as well). On more than one occasion, we stopped at foraged for edibe plants like clovers from the forest floor. They tasted kind of like a mild spinach with a slightly acidic citrus flavor. I definitely was expecting them to be so tasty. Additionally, these woods are littered with tracks, but nothing resembling a solid trail for the most part - Sasha knows them like the back of his hand. In fact, I later remarked that he would probably be able to tell me the age of 80% of the trees simply by looking at one and telling me what year it sprouted. We received a call after an hour or so that our missing people had found their way back to the dacha.

Часть 5. Чемпионат мира
Chapter 5: The World Cup
Dinner the second night was not quite as eventful as the first. It would not have happened except as a result of one of the perks of being on vacation with our professor - class was cancelled for Monday, and we were staying another night. I had one condition for this - we had to get a TV working (such a rarity at a dacha) so that I could watch the World Cup final. This was met, and I had no desire whatsoever to hike to the commuter train four miles away through the woods. Dinner was primarily pel'meni and a cabbage salad with oil and vinegar. Promptly at 10.30, I made my exit and went to the kitchen, where my viewing set up awaited.

The rest of the night until about 1.30 was spent in here. At first everyone was watching, but honestly, they were just in it to say they had done it. The first thirty minutes were un-enjoyable because of this. However, most people left and I was left pretty much alone with two whole hours of World Cup final to satisfy my taste. I won't make any comments about the game on here, but I can definitely scratch "watch a World Cup final on a Russian dacha" off my bucket list.

This is the little train station that was used to get on the train back to Moscow. Like everything else in Russia, working hours were determined by the willingness of the employees to actually do their jobs. We had to wait an hour for the ticket office to open and another thirty minutes for the train.

Часть 6. Москва
Chapter 6: Moscow
It was a relief to be back in Moscow, but I'm already dying to get out into the country again (hopefully you see why). There is an excursion scheduled to a dacha this weekend, however, I will be skipping this to go to my host family's dacha. Sunday is my host mother's birthday.

Eventhough class was cancelled on Monday, we cancelled it again today. This time it was to see Lenin's mausoleum. I got into a small argument about it last night with my host father - I think he got out of it that I'm a communist and worship Lenin's dead body. I could not sufficiently convince him in Russian or English that this was entirely not the case, even when I agreed with him that it should be burned and shot out of a cannon. Tonight, we will talk about it again, and hopefully I can convince him this time, even if it means looking like a fickle and mutable college student, who changes his mind on a whim.

That said, it was an interesting experience to say the least - entirely not what I expected. Lenin's un-decomposed body is on display. I can imagine it is a supreme waste of money to keep it from decomposing. I hope that soon it becomes unsustainable and that people at the very least bury it. Although, I'm agreed with my host father that neither he nor Stalin deserve a burial for what they did.

Sorry for the long post. I hope you found it enjoyable, because I definitely didn;t have time for all this - two compositions due tomorrow and I really need to get going on my final project. Less than three weeks left . . .

Лубянка

Honestly, I don't think I'm going to have time to type out my account of the Polytechnical Museum and the Pushkin Museum, but here is a small excerpt:

The Polytechnical Museum is located on Lubjanka Square, next to the FSB/KGB headquarters - there's also a huge underground prison there - possibly larger than the above ground buildings themselves. The museum is basically the only building on the square that doesn't belong to FSB, and since it was built before the revolution, it does not at all match the Soviet architecture of the other buildings. Inside are many examples of Russian technological achievements, primarily from Soviet times, but also from before the Revolution. There was also an interesting exhibit on medieval iron working. There seemed to have been a theme of centralization, which should not have been surprising, but it was interesting to see how the philosophy was applied. For instance, there was a large excavator with a 25 cubic meter bucket on it and a body the size of a small village (no joke). The idea was to dig without the necessity of intermediary transport. There was also a design for centralised lighting - one lightbulb lighting an entire factory floor by way of a series of hollow reflective tubes and mirrors. There was also the first Soviet atomic bomb, which I of course took a few pictures with.

Otherwise, it isn't worth my time to talk further about this museum or the Pushkin museum, which is full of fakes, because of the trip to the dacha.

No Luck

There was an issue with the Internet last night, so I typed out my entry into Word. Unfortunately, I can't cut and paste it onto here, so I'll have to type it out again. This is definitely not happening today, because I'm leaving for the Pushkin Museum soon and then heading to my professor's dacha for the rest of the weekend. I'll try to post it if there's time on Sunday or Monday.