“Что нам нужны?!”

“Голы!”

“Что нам нужны?!”

“Голы!”

“Что нам нужны?!”

“Голы!”

“Сколько?”

“Много!”

“Кто?”

“Неважно!”

And then something that Marina could not even understand.

“What do we need?!”

“Goals!”

“How many?”

“A lot!”

“Who?!”

“Doesn’t matter!”

The two guys who were rolling it our like drill sergeants were our of breath by the end of the chant each time. In any case, the Russian team gave them what they needed because they won every game in the tournament. The World Championship is, I believe, next May, and if they keep playing like they did, their chances for success are good.

*** 

I started teaching English two weeks ago. “Teaching” might be the wrong word. “Speaking English” to English students is more accurate. There is a large demand for native English speakers to aid in language instruction in Moscow. I received my job through a woman who works in my faculty, Olga, who seems to be a sort of advisor in the office “Студентческий Совет.” She often comes into class and invites us to faculty events, and speaks to us often, likes to stock the fire of discussion and argument, put people in uncomfortable situations. Once the SUNY students were at a table with quite a lot of Russia girls (the whole point was that we meet each other), and Olga started asking people, “So which Russian girl are you going to marry?” Behind her back, I call her “Crazy Olga.” There is another Olga I know who I call “less Crazy Olga.”

The first English class I led, I did not know anything about the English level of my students, so I went in cautiously. We talked about their interests in school and their families. They all want to go to MSU, the premier college in the country, and were impressed to learn that I go to MSU when I showed them my documents. My dirty little secret is that I didn’t actually have to do anything to get into MSU, and that MSU does not regard me as a 100% true student. They all want to be biology, physics, or chemistry majors, are 15 or 16 years old. Their parents seem all hold respectable jobs—one’s mother makes costumes for major Russian films, another’s parents are scientists, one’s mother is a political economic advisor. One girl didn’t seem to want to say what her father is, “I guess you could call him ‘A businessman’,” she said, which leaves we with the excellent opportunity to assume he is either a Mafioso or FSB.

My employer is their physics teacher. He was originally a mechanical engineer, but after volunteering at Pioneer camps, the Russian Boy Scout camps, he realized he loves teaching and went back to school to become a teacher. He is also a tour guide in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and France during vacations. For him, teaching is all about the task’s inherent joy. He gave me a book, said, “Take a look at it, use it in the class if you want.” The title was Happy English Reader 3. I opened up Happy English Reader 3 and found the first chapter: “Blacks and Whites: why do they fight?” That is really all the time I had to skim the book before class, so I assigned them reading the first couple of pages, to which they responded with moans and growls. “We have tests this week!” “We have so much homework!” Вадим Абрамович, their physics teacher, had returned and was standing next to me. “Should I assign less?” – “They do this every time.” And suddenly I remember high school, especially 11^th grade physics, and I know there really isn’t any difference between us and them.

I was impressed by their English last week- some had been studying 11 years- so I started class by writing on the board “Race Relations” in big letters and asking them what it meant, at which we encountered obstacles, and I had to refer back to the text which I had assigned, which was about a young man in school who betrayed two of his absent colored friends by laughing along to a joke in order to fit in with those around him, and then felt terrible the rest of the day. Most of the students had not read it, which I actually had expected, so we read it quickly in class, and then I asked them how one could describe that joke. Everyone was quite unsure. The bravest student raised her hand and said, quite unsure of herself, “all the people laughed when they said the joke.” And I said yes, but that was clearly a bad thing. How could we negatively describe the joke? In the end I tossed out what I was looking for: the adjective “rascist,” at which I was met with “oooohs” and “aaaahs” in a very “Now I get it” manner. “Rascism” is one of those international terms that stays the same in most languages, except for the way it is pronounced.

Before long I opened up the topic to include all types of general intolerance and prejudice, stereotypes, and things like that. I asked, “Why do Russians think, that Americans think that there are bears on the streets of Moscow?” to which they responded “why do you think there are bears on the streets of Moscow?” and one girl, who lived in Siberia for a long time, told us about the time a bear wandered into her village and started killing the chickens, causing panic. Then I asked them which stereotypes Americans have about Russians. Their list was pretty accurate: Vodka, funny hats, a sort of “people of the cold,” and I asked them what stereotypes Russians have about Americans, to which I received silence for a long time, so I went on to a different subject, before one girl- the brave one- opened the topic back up again, having heard the stereotype that all Americans are fat. That was perfect, because, having lived in Germany, I was ready to hear anything anyone could say about an American and not be surprised. Another girl retorted laughing, saying, “yeah, maybe, like one.” She clearly did not believe in American obesity, so I taught them the word “Obesity,” and told them about the studies done a few years back which brought all of scandal of unhealthy Americans to the surface. Next, the brought up McDonalds, of course, which, they told me, they had went to nearly every Wednesday in September and October. I explained how I only like McFlurries. After plenty of effort, they brought up the American courts being saturated with petty suing cases, and finally cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and horses, at which I pulled out my map of American and pointed to Texas, where some of my Aunts and Uncles live, and I pointed to New York, and told them that people where I am from all think that that is how people in the south dress all of the time. “That,” I said, “is the stereotype that people from the Northeast, where I am from, have against people in the south and southwest.”

Then one girl raised her hand and asked, “Do Americans really think they won the Second World War?” This is a tough question to answer and as soon as I started the group took on a rather solemn mood. I had originally heard about this from Sasha, who was poking fun at us for thinking we were the sole victors. I said, probably in simpler terms, that Americans consider their country to have played a vital role alongside the other allied forces in the elimination of the Axis threat. In general, the way we learn about World War II in school does put a great emphasis on the efforts of American forces, and, of course, by comparison, less on the Soviet forces. I told that it is generally recognized that Russia, by a large margin, made the greatest sacrifice in numbers of lives lost during the war, but because the Cold War began so quickly after the end of the Second World War, American history books tend to make less of a reference to the efforts of Russia in WWII than would be appropriate. History, I explained, although it is supposed to an objective science, very rarely is taught that way, and can functions as an important political tool, especially for building nationalism. The easiest and least conscience-damaging manner of playing with history is simply being picky about that which is included, and that which is left out. I added, that in my history course in Germany, there was also a tendency to put greater emphasis on the efforts of America in freeing the country from fascists than those of Russia, although the Russians reached Berlin first. This is likely due to the great power the West held on the three-quarters of Germany which proved politically more influential in the reunification. At this point my poor students were looking at their desks, rather sadly, so I added that I am hopeful, for it seems we are all now becoming more objective in our views of history. This statement may or may not have been a lie.

I changed the topic and explained to them racial profiling, which was very difficult. I started by explaining to them how it was a big topic in American airports, where people would be pulled out of line and searched because of their name or ethnic appearance. When this was unsuccessful, I added that racial profiling is not uncommon in Moscow, either, and I used my neighbor’s example. For those who don’t know, in Russia it is necessary to carry “documents” on one’s person when in public. Russians have a domestic passport, foreigners usually carry their international passport and visa or copies thereof, as I do. I have only been stopped twice by police and asked for my documents. Once, it was perfectly legitimate, I believe, because I was with a friend who happened to be sitting on top of a WWII monument (the bottom part of the gigantic obelisk in Парк Победы) consuming beer, and, in retrospect, should not have been. The second time it was not legitimate, for I was simply entering the Метро in Petersburg, and was stopped. However, having only been stopped twice, I cannot complain. My roommate, Kiheung, from Korea, tells me he is stopped for documents rather often, and I know other people who are more clearly not from Russia and are also stopped very often. Now I have been told that it is illegal for police to request documents without just cause, and I assume this is true, freeing me to say: “Я позвоню посольству!” However, this changes nothing about the fact of racial profiling.

Then I got down to the core of what I wanted to discuss. I described Civil Liberties to the class as simply as I could, which was very difficult, especially for kids who only have a very slight idea who Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is, and then tried to get them to give their opinion on racial profiling: which is more important, protecting the civil liberties of a group of people or protecting a nation? I thought this topic was relevant because Moscow, like New York, has also fallen victim to terrorism in the past, regardless of one’s beliefs as to who was really behind the acts. I soon realized some of us were still struggling with the concept of racial profiling, and some of us did not want to give an answer, I believe, for fear that I would form an opinion of them around it. Luckily, Вадим Абрамович had returned, listened to the last of what I was saying, quickly knew what I was talking about and said to me, although clearly more for the sake of his students, “This question not even our governments can answer. Very difficult to say, very difficult to say…”

Then it was already time to go. Next week there is no class because Каниклы, school holidays, begin. I wished everyone success on their exams this week and Vadim Abramovich added, that he especially wishes them luck on their physics exam. Russian Christmas, Роджество, is on the 7^th of January, in accordance with the Russian Orthodox calendar, but much more noise will be made on New Years. Старый Новый год, old New Years, is on the 14^th of January in accordance with the Russian Orthodox calendar, but is not recognized except of its historical significance. That will be the day I teach next. I assigned severely less reading (although the time before it was still very little), and said we would talk about types of communication. I plan on attacking instant messenger programs for their ability to mess up people’s lives.

Moscow is filled with homeless dogs. In the summer they are there, and we know they are there, but it is not until the winter, when they tend to move into warmer areas, that they become really visible. I run into them everywhere, and think about them, but after the initial shock of their presence, my heart, as those of most people, has little room to pity them.

In class I referred to them once as “wild dogs,” декие собаки, but was rightfully corrected. They are not wild, they are urban homeless, бездомные. Here in the winter one can enter the metro and they are piled up on each other next to the entrance. Sometimes they navigate the underground system on their own.

The other day I was very upset at one of them, standing in the road barking, his nose within a centimeter of the sides of cars, releasing violent bursts of anger (or maybe it was misinterpreted pleading) as each car sped by. I was waiting for the man on the light to change to green, getting angry at the dog for nearly giving me a heart attack due to actions of his which I could not interpret. Another time I was filled for pity for a couple of them while walking to the metro. They were shaggy black dogs, not very big, who appeared to have long handlebar mustaches. Seated in the snow by blustery wind, they barked once every few seconds with little rhyme to their action.

Kenny, one of the students with me from SUNY, is very upset by the dogs. He used to by them kolbasa and share with them. But oftentimes even the homeless dogs seem spoiled. For instance, once when I was with Kenny walking to the local supermarket, “Рамстор капитолный,” he stopped and purchased a Пирог (pirog, often translated as “pie”), for three dogs which he saw seated outside of the metro stop barking at people. He ripped the pirog into three pieces, offering one to each of them. The first sniffed at it, the second ignored it, and the third politely took it out of his hand before setting it on the ground in front of himself. On the way back from the supermarket, the three dogs had nested themselves up against the exterior wall of the metro station, and the pieces of pirog were where we left them.

The most exciting run-ins with dogs have taken place in Воробьёвы Горы, where I have twice run into areas which the dogs must have considered their personal territory, resulting in the my forced expultation from the area. Короче, they charged at me. Luckily, taking a few steps back and yelling “Halt!” at them, although not immediately effective, always slows them down enough until one can build a big enough distance between oneself and the dogs that they forgive one’s trespasses.

Also, right after the first snow fell, there was a group of five or six dogs on campus approaching individuals personally, sniffing bags, and begging for food. One woman in the area was helping them out. My friends and I had nothing to give them, so we kept walking. However, the followed us, quite at our heals, and one even possessed such boldness that he dared nip at the cuff of my jeans. I was so surprised by the action that I turned around and gave the dog a personal warning: “Das reicht doch! Aufhören!” It turns out most of my experience yelling at dogs has been in German, so it flows in that manner. The dogs seemed to understand.

Kenny, who holds more sympathy for the dogs than for me (and I believe is backed up by our Испанка-Подруга, Paula) says I had better watch out running on the snow, because patches of ice tend to hide themselves such that one is already on the ground before knowing one realizes what happened. And then he’ll find me torn apart by the dogs the next day. And maybe he is going to pour water on the ground and watch from a bush with a club just in case I start to get back up after hitting the ice patch.

In actuality, I know his efforts are in vain. He can leave me for the dogs if he wants, but after a few sniffs they’ll already decide that the meat is not high quality enough for them.

The past few weeks we have been using class and the Russian language as a means for slinging insults at each other. We played a game last Wednesday when the guys in class (Kenny, Matt, and I) had to describe the morning routine of the girls in class (Alessia and Paula), and they had to do the same for us. I like to consider Alessia and Paula our “Mediterranean colleagues,” although neither of them are from the coast, they are both from countries with Mediterranean boarders, and being able to group them makes it easier for me to create the “us and them” so necessary for protecting one’s own identity. They are under the impression that I am the biggest ботаник, or nerd, on the planet, and skillfully described how I wake up every morning and run, followed by a breakfast of Каша, class, and several hours of studying, which is much less true than I wish it were. I do not remember exactly what they said about Matt, other than that he eats breakfast in the stolovaya every morning and he goes on a date Jill, an English girl he met in a bar here, every evening, which is probably less true than he wish it were. Kenny’s day consists of skipping breakfast except for coffee, reading The Economist, and finishing the day by watching TV, which is actually usually pretty accurate.

According to us, Alessia and Paula wake up at 10:11, Alessia takes showers on Wednesdays (it was Wednesday, so we were in luck), Paula never takes showers, Alessia has a cigarette and cup of coffee for breakfast, Paula has a muffin and a special brand of chocolate powder available only in the region of Iberia for breakfast (магдалена и кола-кау: не знаю, как писать латинскими буквами), then they spend 47 minutes deciding what to wear, because each time they almost choose something they fear it will not please Matt and me, change their minds, and after finally choosing something take another 11 minutes getting dressed, and then start to think about going to class, and usually make it there in time for the second half. The cigarette comment was very offensive to Alessia, so we took it back (“Шутка! Шутка!”), and Matt’s comment about this chocolate drink powder tugged at Paula’s heartstrings, filling her with homeward pine (the closest thing she can get to it here is Nesquick). Our description was less true than we do and do not wish it were.

But the important thing is that we learn Russian while doing these things.

A few weeks ago, walking exploring the boulevards in Moscow, I felt very, very cold, leading to scoldings and advice from the Russian women I know: “Why don’t you have a scarf?!,” “That’s your warm jacket?” and “You need to buy mittens instead of gloves,” “Foreigners all end up getting thermal underwear,” and “Make sure you have good boots; if the feet are cold, the whole body is cold.” Now the temperature is even lower, and the world has been covered with snow, but I felt absolutely fine, in spite of still not having the basic necessity of a scarf. Of course, I recognize that this is only November, and the weather is like a normal early January in New York.

The past couple of days I had been running in shorts because I did not feel cold in spite of them, although a long sleeve shirt, gloves and a hat is necessary. I went out in the storm several nights ago, running along the river Moscow, which is really one of the best paths I have ever run along (to get there, one needs to pass through the park Vorob’yovi Gori, which is heavily wooded, and makes the run a bit more interesting). From one bridge to the next, to my surprise, was not visible, but there were more people out in the hard snow than I expected, but young lovers on the benches along the river, having not been chased off by anything up to this point, were conspicuously absent.

The next morning I ran the other direction up the river, and on the way back was greeted, by a man, probably in his sixties, with a large smile. “Открыл Зиму!”—Otkril Zimu– I heard him yell, which, assuming I heard correctly, I understood, by forced me into a state of grammatical quandary: Otkril—past-tense, masculine of “to open”, Zimu—accusative of “winter,” set up that in normal grammatical language this could not be a passive statement, according to my reasoning, because (1) it lacked the reflexive suffix “-ся,” and (2) the genders of the two words do not match, and (3) “winter” was accusative. That all indicates that Somebody must have actively opened our new season, but I do not know who. Maybe the man was telling me that he opened winter. Then I thought to myself, someday I will not have to think about these things anymore. Then I made the poor decision to run straight up a snowy hill, a task which I am incapable of completing, and had to revert my full cognitive energies t o figuring out how to crawl, slip and fall my way to the overlook above.

I was telling Marina about how I had gotten used to the cold and she took back her scoldings and said maybe I don’t need a scarf after all. The next day I ran again and felt major pain in my legs and upper chest, thus being defeated by the early Russian winter after all. The temperature had dropped further, and such that it was no longer hovering just below freezing but actually cold. I do not think I’ll go back out until I get sweatpants or a jogging suit. Lesson: Me’stnij know what they are talking about.

I went to the Old Tret’jakof Gallery the other day, and spent nearly six hours there, and although I love art galleries, I wasn’t in the greatest health in the first place, and I was quite worn out by the time I left. That evening I had a meeting with our Russian language buddies again, and I showed up nearly an hour and a half late because of the museum (having, of course, called ahead—and Matt was there, too). Roman is not in town right now, rather, an area considered a suburb of Moscow, although rather distant. We met with Ira, her boyfriend Sasha, and roommate Sasha, a girl. I met them a few weeks ago, at the Kabak, and was delighted by the ease with which I knew I would remember their names. We drank tea the way Russians make it, a strong brew poured from one pot, diluted to one’s individual taste by hot water poured from another pot, and ate roulette, a type of cake. All of our Russian language buddies are in the Faculty of Geology, concerning themselves with earth studies. Sasha the roommate studies meteorology. Ira indicates a barometer hanging above their window. When it leans slightly left, she says, it indicates that snow is more likely, and when it leans slightly right, rain. It is leaning very, very slightly to the left, I say. But it is not snowing right now. Then I remember that we hear the barometer on one of MSU’s towers is the biggest in the world. Ira doesn’t know for sure, but could find it pretty easy to believe.

Matt asks me, ”Do you really believe that?” He’s not the only Albany delegate who has become fed up with hearing that the world’s biggest things are located in Russia, usually precious stones and the like. I really do not mind. Russia is already the biggest country in the world, it has a lot of things, even the last things one would expect. I was at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse and I met a woman who was, many years ago, in a dance troupe which searched the original Kan Kan music and dance steps—a French dance, and found the only remaining copy stored away in Petersburg. And then I reason, who builds giant barometers anyway?

If I understood correctly, Sasha the roommate said the barometer on her wall it is not correct for our elevation. She was on an excursion with other meteorology students, in the Caucus, and they were already there before the realized that not one student had thought to bring their barometer along, which, by her opinion, is really was scandal. I did not understand how she got this one, but I assume she bought it. Then she pulled out a meteorology coursebook and read out the calculation procedure for some sort of pressure conversion according to elevation. Out of it I understood only “bars,”“Pascal” and “this is important.”

The music they had on their computers, to my delight, included Die Ärzte, my favorite band, introduced to them, I suppose, by a Russian student of German, and Gogol Bordello, a Ukrainian immigrant to New York who call his style immigrant or gypsy punk. I did not know that Gogol Bordello was known here. He’s barely known in America. However, Sasha’s grandmother does live in Kiev, so maybe things get back to where they started.

Sasha the roommate and Matt are going to an Alice Cooper concert on Thanksgiving. Sasha also invited us to go with her to Minsk (for those who don’t know, the capitol of Belarus) next week, but we cannot. We do not have passports right now. We have passport copies and registration copies and Spravki, which are a pretty effective replacement when we are stopped by militsia, but still, there is a lot of talk in the dorms about Russian bureaucracy. I cannot say I am complaining, because I do not feel like it is so terrible, but I also have not been hit by the worst of it. One of my Irish friends, Conner, told me he had to go back to the final office 4 times before he finally had everything, because he was not fully informed about necessary documents for the new visa all at once. The group of students I registered for new visas with was luckier, probably only having to leave the office once and return. Now we have to wait to get our passports back. The past couple week I asked my roommate, Kiheung, almost every day how he is, and he was “bad” every day, because he did not have his passport back yet. It had not seen it in six weeks and it is still not in his hands again. Two days ago he heard he would have it back on Friday, so he would have it back sooner now. Of course, at that rate, the other Americans who are here with me will receive their passports with their new visas just in time to leave for home. They are rather upset by this, because they wanted to make a trip like a final hurrah to Kiev right before Christmas, but I am pretty sure the visas are single-entry anyway.

Ira asked us if we had met any more Russians since our last meeting. “Ну… да, мы познакомились с русскими девушками… 20-25,” I answer lazily. We met some Russian girls. 20 or 25. Ira was surprised, and I guess it made sense. “What does that make us then?!” she wanted to know. Matt quickly assured Ira and Sasha that they are our favorite in an attempt to keep the peace. We were introduced by Olga, who heads the office for SUNY operations at MGU, and we had met a few weeks ago. We met for tea and pastries (there are a lot of tea and pastries in Russia) and then went to a jazz concert at the international library not far from Taganka. Then the next week a few of us met to got to the Modern Art Gallery on Petrovka Street, went to a café for tea and pastries, although I skipped the pastries this time, and talked about our families, dogs, and majors. Right now I guess the next meeting is in planning. There were several votes for going ice-skating in Gorkij Park, which everyone has assured is the best place to go.

Gorkij park ice rink was also recommended to us on a separate account by our friend Jermaine, from L.A., when we ran into him at the grocery store yesterday. We met by chance a few months ago when he recognized us as Americans by the “JiffyLube” patch on my jacket, which I had bought in an Alabaman thrift store. He had been globetrotting since graduating from college and has not seen home in several years. Just last year, while teaching English in Moscow, he decided it was time for graduate school, and that MGU looked like a respectable college and just went and started asking about it until he found out how to get in. Now he had been at the college and wants to change his major but is being frustrated by the difficulty of the procedure.

I was buying products to prepare Suplee (although I really do not know how to spell it exactly), an Italian appetizer which Alessia has been craving for a long time and had claimed to miss more than her mother. Yesterday evening we made it. Rice, mixed with a seasoned tomato sauce, packed into a ball around a chunk of mozzarella cheese, and then rolled in breadcrumbs and fried. They were pretty amazingly delicious. In Italy, Alessia, said, they have one or two before pizza. More than that would kill you. We were eating them as the main course, however, and took the risk of having more. The Americans here have been cooking more and more (having originally mainly only eaten in our dear ctolovaja, and then begun to accept food from our Italian friends), mainly stir frying and making things that could be prepared in a similar pan or boiled.

Русская кухня, Russian national cuisine, has mainly been an adventure within the ctolovaja, the cafeteria downstairs in our building, and has been very diversified. In class, my grammar teacher claims that if you want to get students to speak a language, even shy ones, talk about food. In the past people thought that talking about love life was the best bet, but she says she knows that the top instinct is based in the need to nourish oneself- and preferably well. Then she also says, true Russian cuisine is extremely limited: in actuality it can claim its own only kasha (a grain) and soups, like borsch. She backed it up by declaring that everything else has roots elsewhere. The блины (bliny), similar to a pancake rolled up around meat, cheese, caviar, or a sweet filling, apparently is originally Chinese. Котлета, cultlets, popular as they are, hail from Western Europe, as do other forms of meat and poultry preparation. Potatoes, so widely consumed now (and in so many forms), are, of course, from America. Her faculty, the faculty of foreign languages, busies itself with questions like this. She has also told us that the definition of “culture” must in this age also be very specific and limited. Language was one aspect of culture she claimed legitimate, and there were two others, but I have unfortunately forgotten what they were. Any other use of a nation’s title (such as English, Italian, or Russian) is a brand name label. National cuisines fall under this category.

Nonetheless, the Alessia and Paula get sorts of “Ты Моледец!”s for their countries’ national cuisines, Italian and Spanish, but when I mention “American Cuisine” in class I always get the same response: “Can I ask you a question?! What exactly is American national cuisine? Hamburgers and French fries?” Alessia, remembering a past discussion, said, clearly critically of me, “no, barbeque, he is going to say.” I exploded without anger but began to yell. “Нет! Ты не понимаешь! Не умеешь понимать!” Not just “barbeque,” I assured. I’m talking about Carolina style vinegar based barbeque, and hush puppies and coleslaw and corn on the cob and the list went on and Kenny, from Buffalo, but a student at Albany, added corn bread and mentioned that buffalo also has many delicacies you cannot find anywhere else and I said “like the garbage plate” and he said “no, that’s Rochester” and I said “oh, your right,” but the only thing I can think of right now is sponge candy, which can’t really count, but I am sure Kenny knows everything else. And the teacher stopped us but was obviously impressed that she had overlooked these things. And right there I decided I would need to show those Mediterranean-type class comrades with their world famous foods what it means when I say Carolina vinegar-based barbeque (which, I of course, should be classified as “untranslatable” and thus, in the future be read in Russian exactly as written above but probably in Cyrillic instead.)

But first, this reminds me, that that walk last week, the Thai girls agreed to make dinner on Wednesday, so it looks like the barbeque will have to wait.

Wheat costs are also an issue, especially here where bread is one of the cheapest things that can be bought. The same newspaper reported “grain prices have risen 60% year on year globally, as higher energy costs and increased demand for grain have coincided with poor harvests.” President Vladimir Putin has, of course, had his say about this. High inflation (breaking the projected 8% for 2007) means, in the face of approaching elections, political consequence. However, in a televised “Question and answer session,” Putin, so it seems from the media, softened his peoples’ worries concerning the inflation, and providing the triple-headed explanation that 1) Regional governments have been supporting monopolies (and adding that “measures should be taken”) 2) extreme price fluctuations are part of Russia’s joining the world economy. 3) “The European Union recently stopped subsidizing many food stuffs.” I remember that the future of the European Union’s farmer subsidy, as the most expensive of all EU programs, was a hot topic in my German Erdkunde Class two years ago. Looks like the future happened, but I never thought I would realize it.

Putin did not fail to assure everyone that an economic crisis as seen in the late nineties was not going to happen. The government has put money into buying food to reduce prices, which has been criticized by some as a solution meant only to escape putting through difficult reforms which would actually make a difference. All in all, however, opinions are mixed, and Putin’s support base is wide. Sometimes it seems every action reported about him, from his dog to his personal lifestyle, seem to make him more likeable. For example, last week he was in Germany talking to Kanzlerin Merkel (in his perfect German, of course), and when asked by a third party about rumors of assassins waiting for him on his Iran visit, he dismissed all concern. Even when in cruel jest, like the publishing of photos of him without his shirt on while fishing, popularity seems to rise. (I don’t know that the similar photos of the French president had the same effect for him, but I do not think the two are comparable anyway. As little as I know about it, Mrs. Putin stays out of the limelight, and Mrs. Sarkozy, from her peace talks to the current “scandal,” seems to be pretty much in the center of things—but as I said, it doesn’t matter, and I know little about it.) And as terrible as it is and as negatively as Putin can be viewed (I know enough Russians who don’t think highly of him), every once in a while I wish I could have a president that people liked, but then I think to myself, that would not be a democracy.

Yesterday in class Paula, from Spain, had her passport with her, so I asked to see it during break, and after some hesitation on her part, she let me see it. I handed Paula my American passport. The Spanish passport has a very interesting: on each page there is a picture of an animal accompanied by a small map of the world showing the area it inhabits and/or its migration pattern. Some of the animals do not even have anything to do with Spain. The new American passports are filled with pictures of pristine wilderness or another pretty view and important quotes from American history. The Americans here have recognized the tendency of Russian visa stickers to be on either page 10 or 11, covering up half “excerpt from the Declaration of Independence,” and leading us to joke that that is the quote the visa-bureaucrat hated most of all so he had to ruin it for us. I think to myself, probably whichever animal they hated the most is the one covered up in Paula’s passport. We quickly affirm that I live in the field with the buffalo grazing in front of the Rockies on page 13, and on page 20 I am the cowboy on the horse, and the bull with the biggest horns is my pet dog. Paula hands returns my patriotic document with the response I was hoping for: “типичный американский”- typical American, and I help her out by reminding her America did, after all, invent freedom.

That night we were at a bar last night semi-watching the Russia-Italy soccer game (probably one of the last in the whole city to still have room), but mostly chattering about nothing at all, or everything, and it was a treat because I usually turn down such invitations to do other things, like study Russian. I was in the corner surrounded by my Italian friends. There were also a French girl, a Croatian girl who grew up in Italy, and, part of the time, a couple other Americans. Languages flow in and out of each other. One of the Italians speaks some German so I feel alright if I forget how to say something in English and haven’t learned it in Russian yet. The Italians are happy with the French girl’s advancement in Italian, and nobody, although I very impressed by many of these people’s grasp of Russian, is happy with their personal advancement in Russian. The language is just like that. But we speak it, or, if not Russian, then English (or Italian—they are, after all, the grand majority at this table), and after a while, if someone does not understand, it is more like they weren’t listening. Language is perfect when it stops being words. Or very confused. The other day we went to see a comedy at the cinema (День Выборов, which was poorly understood by most of us), and one of the Italians blurted out Italian for “how much does a ticket cost?” –and I recognize the phrase is widely recognized—and I heard and thought it were either English or Russian, because, as a general rule, I do not understand Italian. But this is the case that proves the beautiful philosophy: at some point, words stop being words, and they become their meaning.

All of the Itailans look Italian. Except one, Alissia (the correct Italian spelling of which I have not yet learned). She says the rest of her family looks Italian and she is the weird one. She’s the exception that proves what Italians look like. Maria, sitting next to me, looks very Italian. She dates my Latvian friend, Iskater. She began to tell me I remind her of the anteater on the internet cartoon Happy Tree Friends, which I can admit having never watched. The муравьед, or anteater, she explains, is a ботаник, and I am one as well. Plus, our shirts are the same color. “Ботаник” is Russian for “botanist”, but slang for “nerd” or “bookworm.” Once the anteater was trying to change a light bulb with his mouth and it ended violently when he fell off the ladder. I make a face to prove disinterest. “American humor…,” she says.

Then she starts to complain to me about an internship she had to do, for which she worked for a service which sets up student exchanges between the US and America. She said she was the “Americans’ slave for three months.” Whenever they needed something, they called her. And she hated it. It took them a week to figure out how to use the public transport. They had no understanding of drinking correctly. Once, she received a panic phone call at four in the morning regarding a carrot-chopping incident, in which one American was to have “taken his finger clear off.” Maria rushed to meet him and the caller at the hospital to find out he had only a light flesh wound. Her list continued.

I stopped her and put my finger down on the table, and I let her know that I’ve heard it before. “Every time I come to Europe…”–I began to hit the table hard with my pointer finger (the use of which in Russia is a faux pas, by the way)—“Every time I come to Europe I get the pleasure of hearing from you.”—(it was the plural you, the you all – the ye, if you may, but most of all, the you Europeans)—“about some stupid $&*! that Americans did. Every time.”

My memory flashed back to a party I showed up to for a little bit a few weeks ago, just to meet the German speaking crowd. It was the birthday of a young man from the French-speaking region Switzerland, who had already studied Russian four years and as such had succeeded in really speaking nothing other than Russian since his arrival. Most of the people at his party were from Austria and Germany. It was here I got some of the kindest compliments on my German I ever have. My theory: when everybody is under pressure to learn the third language, everything else starts sounding a lot better. But then he began to tell me, about his trip to Texas, when he was in a store, and the saleswoman, inquiring of his origin, followed up with the question: “Wow, that is very far away! And how long did it take for your family to drive here from there?”

There are a lot of Germans with a lot of stories like that. Getting it from an Italian was something new. I put my hand over my heart and insincerely apologized. She said its okay, its not my fault. Besides, she had befriended them in the end, anyway, it just took some getting used to.

Italy won the soccer match and the girls began to yell, to my surprise, to the young Russian men on the other side of the room. “Италия выиграла! Мы вы выиграли!”—“Italy won! We won!” Their accents were as Italian in Russian as in any other language, but of course, much more beautiful than an American accent has ever been considered in Russian. I did not know exactly how to react, because in my opinion, the fans of the losing team in football match are pretty close to the top of my “Don’t mess with these things” list. The young men, of course, just looked disappointedly at the Alissia and Maria, to which they responded “У нас мужини!”—“There are men with us,” pointing to me and Eric, clearly intending to indicate to them that they possessed defenders.

***

A large truck rambles past with a huge tank on the back. In the front, two jets of water cross perpendicular to the trucks line of motion, blasting the sidewalk clear of any debris which may have been there. But, of course, the sidewalk was already clean. The twenty-member teams of groundskeepers had swept raking and sweeping most of the morning. I saw them when I had hustled past earlier on the way to the supermarket. Now Matt and I were headed to the Metro Station to meet our new “language buddies,” Ира and Роман. I expressed my concern to him: “Мне стрессиво, когда я знакомюсь с новыми людями, осебенно если мы будем говорить по-русски.” In actuality, this is warming up. Maybe I was making mistakes, but most important is trying to flow. We stood outside the metro and watched a couple of people who looked like they were waiting for us for a few minutes, until Matt called his contact and one of the two took out his cell phone. The idea is this: We meet once or twice a week, one day we converse по-англиский, the next, по-руссий. Ira and Roman are students of the Geography faculty, and have had little English training outside of school, so it seems they are perfectly matched for us. Because they initiated the meeting, we spoke English this week. We met in the dessert Café Schokoladnitsa, which is as common in Moscow as McDonalds in other cities, I do believe, and whose main dish is liquid chocolate similar to that which one receives in Spain. We talked about their majors and life in the dorms, language, and other simple subjects. Ira hinted that she had to take a class on Russian as a foreign language such that she could better understand foreigners. The statement was only made in passing, but I am going to have to ask her again about it at the next meeting. As I have said before, the stress on words in Russian are very important, and I could imagine the existence of a course based purely in explaining why foreigners say “moloko” instead of “melako” when they want to say “молоко.” Next meeting we are going to what Roman has described as a “Кабак,” or tavern, and figuratively hubbub and ruckus, which he says carries the atmosphere and character of a bar in the Soviet 1980s. Ira laughed and expressed dissent, but did not dissent to the degree that she would outright deny the plan. We meet again tomorrow.

Last weekend we traveled with the guide hired by SUNY, Марина, into the Golden Ring of Russia to visit the towns of Владимир and Суздаль. It was nice to get a break from the city. The Golden Ring, or Золотое Кольцо, is a very scenic part of the country which has, in contrast to most of Moscow, remained rather natural. In Vladimir we took a look at the Golden Gate, once the only entrance to the city, and the city’s ancient walls. Marina told us, when Katherine the Great came to visit Vladimir, her coach did not fit through the city’s gate, so the Administrator ordered the earthen defense wall near the gate be dug out to make room for her. Over the years, however, the gate’s stability had come to depend on the fortification, and once it was removed, the gate collapsed. I do not believe that in the end it made it any easier for her to enter the city. Nowadays. roads direct automobile traffic around the Golden Gate, whose stability is insured by the cylindrical additions on each corner.

The first church we went to the Успенкий Собор, or Assumption Cathedral, one of the most important churches in Russia because of the frescoes by Андрей Рублёв it contains. Andrjej Rubljov introduced the first Russian style of painting, where before frescoes had been done according to the tradition of Byzantium. Where once the colors used were dark in order to instill in the worshippers a sense of respectful uneasiness in the presence of their God, Rubljov utilized bright colors meant to instill hope. Marina explained that this was particularly important for the people at the dark point in Russia’s history at the time Rubljou painted. She suggested viewing a film about his work, which I may write about at another time.

Every bit as beautiful as Western churches, those I saw in Vladimir and Suzdal are different distinctly from them. I have not yet encounted a cross-shaped foundation, as seen in so many Catholic cathedrals, and churches seem to be smaller as well, although in exchange for that, greater in number. There basically seems to be three main church-patterns: tent shaped, square, and a combination of both. The Assumption Cathedral began as a square church, was expanded after it was burned (with its original owners inside!), and later received a tent-shaped addition such that it is now of the combination pattern.

I studied the frescoes on the wall the walls for a good amount of time before moving along. Russian churches seem to be tight. Every space on the wall and columns is decorated with frescoes. In another, larger, and better lit church, Marina showed us the three levels of paintings on the walls, the bottom two of which contained stories from the bible, accessible, though their visual manifestation, also to the illiterate. Above them were painted scenes from Russian history. On the columns, which seem to usually be square and not cylindrical, members of the past local aristocracy are depicted. At the Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir, there is a more modern iconoclasm, most likely painted in the 18^th or 19^th century, onto which light is filter from above with impressive artistic accuracy. The pinky finger bone of a saint whose name I failed to experience is housed to my right. I squeeze past the Russian women gathered at the icon stand next to the entrance of the church and back into daylight.

The Cathedral has five domes. At one time this was a required aspect of Russian religious architecture: The central dome for the Messiah and the surround four for each of the four gospels. Of course, there are also churches with one dome or more than five, but those built as such, as I have understood it, were built either before the requirement was instated, or with the use of extra logic defending their existence, such as representing the holy spirit ascending heavenward in the form of fire.

Suzdal contains, it seems, as many churches as people. Among other things we visited Кидекша. At Kideksha, many old wooden structures from the 19^th century are kept. One church, upon being dismantled and moved to Kideksha, was discovered to have been built fully without nails and all cuts made only by axe. The roofs on these structures are built out of aspen for its durability and its silver color. The walls, I believe, are of pine. One of the churches had horsehair in between each log of the wall to account for warmth in the winter. Marina pointed out the benches around the inside of the walls. Individual chairs were not introduced in communities like these until nearly the 20^th century, she explained. The wall-fastened benches doubled as beds.

Inside of a rich countryman’s home, we found that the lateral support above the doorway is inconveniently low. This served a double purpose. Firstly, it helped hold heat in rooms in the winter. Secondly, it forced anyone who entered a room to bow to the corner containing religious icons, whether they intended to or not. Kitchens doubled as bedrooms for the sake of warmth, the bed located above the stove being reserved for the oldest and the children, or, of course, for the ill. A rich man’s home is distinguishable from the home of a man who is not poor off not only by the size and by the detail of the exterior woodwork (which reminded me of the half-timbered homes, or Fachwerkhäuser, in old German towns), but also by the material of the roof. If one was well off enough, he could have an iron roof. I can’t imagine what that may have been like when it rained.

There was also an example of an old windmill. A small model inside the mill demonstrated how its rotating fans could cause grindstones near the ground to rotate. A diagram on the wall outlined the surprisingly large number of windmills the area around Suzdal once contained, somewhere in the 250-300 range, if my memory serves me correctly. Although I cannot provide an area of land within which they were contained to explain their frequency, the surrounding counties had far fewer. Asking Marina about the wind in the area, she pointed out the landscape on which we found ourselves: few trees on rather flat land, and an excellent opportunity for strong winds, although that day was particularly still. I could not help cursing Russia’s coveted and expansive non-renewable resources which must have been powering this whole area. If windmills could have been so useful for grinding grain back then, oh, what could achieved with some functioning as power plants today. Sprinkled on the countryside here and there, they would in no way damage the harmony of the beautiful landscape. At least, they would be much better than a pair of nuclear cooling towers thrown in down the road from a monastery, which I saw on one occasion, although I somehow failed to photograph the setting.

Suzdal is also known for its mead, or медовуха (medavukha), an alcoholic honey drink which I had always though of as being a Viking thing, but supposedly is rather Russian as well. There are several different degrees of distilled mead, and of course, the less distilled, the sweeter it is. The first time we tried it we took the medium distilled bottle. Суздальская Медовуха printed tastefully on the orange label, below which a bear licked out of a jar, approached by two clearly upset villagers. In Russian, both words медовуха and медведь (medvjet), bear, are related to the word for honey, мёд (mjot). I do not believe there could be a more romantic stem for the word which means “bear”.

The taste of мёд was very surprising, I suppose, in spite of it being right along the lines of what I had expected, but I could not decide if the consistency was as thick as I thought it would be, and the alcoholic bite was difficult to distinguish. Later I tried some more, further distilled mean, at the expense of our guide, who thought it a pity if we were not to find appreciation for something so closely considered with the town of Suzdal. I did not look down upon her actions, for she is, after all, in charge of exposing us to important aspects of Russian culture. This was by far the best mead I had had so far, not that I am going to actively seek it for a time, but the others rejected it fully. Marina had also provided us with солёные огурци, pickles, easily purchased from a woman selling them on the street. They are most certainly the best pickles I have ever had. Even Matt, who dislikes pickles enough to turn down the offer multiple times until Marina became vehement, found, in the end, a place in his heart for them. As we snacked, Marina pointed out that they are no where near as good in Moscow. I’m guessing the woman who sold them also planted and pickled them herself.

While on the topic of drinks, Russia seems to have a wide range to offer. The jury is still out on whether it is safe to drink Moscow tap water, although, after becoming sick a couple weeks ago and recovering, I have continued to drink it and seem have to been fine since then. Tea is consumed in unbelievable mass in Russia. Juices with stewed fruit are set out for purchase every day among the more ordinary apple and orange juices. However, more baffling is the dense yogurt-like drink called кафир (kafir). Today I found out Marina had called it an “acquired taste,” indicated we would hate it for the first four times we drank it, and then we would begin to like it. After having consumed it for the first time in Russia, very upset to find it was sour and not at all the milk I had expected it to be, I realized I had once before purchased and drank a bottle of kafir at a Döner-Imbiss in Hamburg out of curiosity for the alleged “Turkish national drink.” For all the difficulty getting it down, I always feel healthier with each sip when I have a kafir in the hand, psychosomatic or otherwise. By Marina’s math, I have to drink it in distaste twice more before things start to look better. I made it a goal to like kafir, but I am having trouble bringing myself to buy it at dinner. Another drink, Квас (kvass), I think is made from rye and has a very low alcoholic content and part of the process. It is a very dark brown liquid which tastes, as I have heard it described, “like bread,” which was true on one level, but bread somehow lacks the bitter kick which lies under a superficial sweetness in the kvass. Plus, bread is rarely carbonated. On my first sip of kvass, I think my eyes involuntarily crossed themselves. Jon, a fellow student of the Russian language, is bent on teaching himself to like it.

It is time to practice, and I do. I spend a lot of time studying because fluency is a big goal for someone in my shoes, but I feel as if I have a good amount of time to achieve it, too. Last Monday I took a placement test and landed in level “RUS02,” the lowest offered here, but all the same not terribly damaging to my ego nor difficult to understand because, of course, I did just finish Russian level one. At first I was somewhat worried about the pace of RUS02 because we were going over things I already knew as if they were new material, but I stopped and reevaluated our Ausgangspunkt, to realize the material we were now going over was at least three to seven months into the RUS level 100 courses, backed up by the teacher’s assurance I would be speaking Russian as she does come late November, thus calming my concerns. There remained one disappointment about not being in RUS03, namely the lack of a literature course in the 02 level, but I decided I will simply have to make up for anything lacking in my courses outside of class. It seems there will be a lot of time for it, with only 18 hours a week and very little homework.

And we are doing our best to make up for it. Matt is one of those acquaintances who become quick friends when everyone lands in a new setting with few connections all at once. He had studied abroad in Spain before, so we like to compare past experiences to our present situation. We had both had much more of our second language before studying abroad than we have now of Russian. Matt and I went to get a movie to watch in Russian, and we came out of the store with a real steal: “Бог Большой, Я Маленькая” was only 99 Rubles, or approximately four dollars. We bought the film on account of recognizing the Amelie title-role actress Audrey Tautou on the cover, its being in French and Russian only, forcing us to watch in Russian, and probably the elite good-taste we like to imagine we have which causes us to take interest in international cinema.

Ultimately, the film idea was kind of a flop. The Russian dubbing for Dieu Est Grand, Je Suis Toute Petite was emotionless, mistimed, and, because the French soundtrack was playing in the background, difficult to hear. The Russian subtitles we also mistimed, staying on the screen for far less time than I would expect even a Russian would need in order to read them.

Still, what we did get out of the film, other than a slightly better semantic understanding of Russian and some new words of phrases, was the stress about one aspect, and in my opinion the most difficult aspect, of spoken Russian. This is the system of stresses in Russian is very important. Every word has only one stressed syllable, and the position of the stress is decisive in understanding the word. This causes misunderstandings when context is unclear, and can simply take understanding out of the picture even when the context is clear. I am time and again corrected on my pronunciation of words by Eric, my roommate, an American whose parents raised him in a Russian speaking household. At a restaurant one student ordered a oRANdschnaja drink, confusing the waitress and causing the necessity of pointing to pictures, such that when mutual understanding was reinstated, the waitress said “Ooh, you want the ORandschaja drink,” as if it were something completely different. One of my classes this semester is about speaking accent-less Russian, and we spend a lot of time studying the stresses in words and the reductions which happen to the letters which are not stressed.

The worst scenarios with mis-stressed words, are actually opportunities for the most language fun. This is when a mispronunciation leads to a different word.

During the film we were alerted to yet another one of these opportunities, when Matt, the both of us confused as it was, read and translated “мир в душе,” “mir v’duschje,” as that which Tautou’s character was searching for in practicing the Buddhist faith. “Peace in the shower!?” he exclaimed. In texts in Cyrillic, unless written for foreigners, stress is not marked. Similar to some other languages, “dusch”, means shower in Russian, “Mir” means peace, or world. The context made it clear that she would be searching for peace, but because “dusch” was in the prepositional case, indicated by the preceding “в” and the “e” added to the word’s end, the word’s true meaning was hidden without further consideration. Most feminine words drop their last letter (a or я), and take on an ending “e.” “Душа” is one such word, the stress on the ending “a.” The stress is preserved. “Душ” keeps its stress in prepositional case as well. Thus, if we had heard the Russian dubbing over the French, we probably would have already known: Tautou was searching for “peace in her soul,” a, for some people much more fulfilling goal than the same in the shower.

Russian language textbooks often highlight the importance of correct stress by use of the word “mука,” pronounced mukA, and meaning “flour.” A shift in stress, however, leads to mUka, or “tourture.” Of course, a shift in what one purchases indicates huge rifts in personal philosophies of cake-baking.

But like I said, or should have said if I haven’t, life here is not only about stress, its also about context. In looking up “душа” once again to make sure I did not tell any lies that I could be called on, I found that historically “душа” could also mean “serf,” this word also with end stress. That gives the phrase “мир в душе” any of six plausible meanings.

When leaving my house in Germany I forgot to bring a water bottle, and in spite of the huge amount of food I brought with me, I was very hungry by the time breakfast was served, which was a pleasant surprise, because my flight itinerary indicated I would be receiving nothing more than a complimentary snack.

I did not eat again until evening. Everything went smoothly entering the country. The woman on the other side of the миграция counter gave me no trouble, and there was no customs – таможенные пошлины – except for those who filled out a declaration, and I had nothing to declare, so I got to take the quick “green lane”. Upon entering the general lobby, the stress began, as taxi drivers began to harass me to accept their services, and I had a very exact plan already. One told me several times over that I was going to have a “luggage problem,” and while it was true that I did have two suitcases and two carry-on bags, I had had enough practice toting them around Frankfurt and New York City, having visited my brother in Brooklyn before proceeding to JFK, to take the chance of dragging my bags around Moscow. My argument with the taxi driver became “I do not have the money,” which he found ridiculous, although I could have paid his “very cheap” price if I wanted, 2000 rubles. Knowing that the 20 Euro I had just exchanged landed me with just over 600 rubles, 2000 was clearly out of the question.

Outside of the airport there were throngs of people waiting to get on a shuttle bus to the метро, and I waited among them. Shuttles to the station I had planned on going to were vans, and it appeared extremely difficult to board one successfully, especially when weighed down with one’s own weight in kilograms. (Kilograms, of course, because I am in Europe.) A bus pulled up large enough for many people and their bags, and although I was not sure which station, I could make out the word Metro on a sign in the front window, so I got in, and paid four-hundred rubles, 25 for me and each piece of baggage, I suppose the backpacks only counted for ½ a bag each.

During the ride I became concerned I would not see the metro station and fail to get off the bus. Or, worse yet, I became concerned the sign I had seen had perhaps indicated distinctly, although not for a foreigner – иностранец – on his first day in Moscow, that (and I may end up using “that” way too often by the end of this year, because, in Russian, as in German, dependent clauses required the use of “that”) we would not be stopping at a Metro station. There was a sympathetic looking girl seated not far from where I was standing, doing my best to keep my luggage and the luggage of some others standing, I leaned over to her, and said, with courageous effort (my first time actively speaking to someone in Russian, as it was), “Excuse me, is that the metro?” And she said “net.” “Nyet” was exactly what I was hoping to hear. But then she continued to speak, and I did not have a hope of understanding. So I said, “Do you speak German or English?” Which may have sounded more like “You speaks Germans or Englishes,” To which she apologetically responded — по-русски – “Russian.” So I thanked her, and spent the rest of the ride considering attempting to ask whether the bus drives to the metro station, and, if so, does she not want to let me know when we are there? But, although saved from taking the sissy way out and speaking a language I can use well by our common lack of knowledge in foreign languages, I did not have to ask any more questions other than “This is the metro?” when everyone stood up to leave the bus, about 45 minutes into the trip. To this she nodded. “Da.”

In the metro there was a large poster which indicated, as it appeared to me, that the line on which my hostel was located was being constructed on at the moment, so I got out a good kilometer or two away from my final destination, and made my first action to be the acquisition of a map. I found a little pavilion, to my great appreciation, right outside of the Metro station. I set my bags, which would have taken up the majority of the space in the little pavilion, on the wall outside, and went in to the cashier, prepared to ask for what I needed, but the gears in my mind hit a rough spot, and I spoke with long pauses between the four words of my question: “Do… you… have… a map… of Moscow?” By the time I finished my question she seemed terribly relieved the great tension of the mystery of my question was past. She responded clearly and loudly, yelling almost “Карта Москвы? Конечно у меня карта Москвы. Вот она, в коробке.” So I thanked her and bought it.

I later found out the name of the station I exited from translates to “pure ponds,” although I didn’t see any myself. I walked to the subway station I was supposed to get out, and took out my directions to the hostel, and, after some orientation—orientation is important, always take time to orient yourself, and passing it by once, I found the “Lenin Hostel,” which was marked by nothing more than a weather-beaten computer printout above the door.

The hostel, located on the fourth floor, had overbooked due to a system mistake. I did not speak Russian with the staff. Guests in this type of place are not expected to, rather world’s lingua franca, English. I was given the option of either sleeping in a double bed with a stranger, or going across Moscow again to another hostel. I did not want to go to another hostel, so I said I would sleep on the floor of the lounge if it had to be. In the end it worked out because I got the double bed to myself, and paid eight dollars less than I expected.

I met a couple of English travelers. They were going to have to move across town to the other hostel. Anita had early skipped a year and learned Italian as a waitress, although she did not say in which city, had just graduated from her London college before flying to Japan to meet Paris, a friend from college who had spent a year teaching English in Hiroshima. Anita offered to share their dinner with me, which she was cooking herself with the youth hostel’s facilities. We sat on the balcony above Bolshaya Sukharevskaya, a huge Moscow street, with something like five lanes filling and emptying like clockwork. They poured me a glass of the wine they purchased—“real French”—Anita insisted, and we ate pasta with spicy pepper sauce and salad. Paris is half Czech and has a name Anita cannot pronounce. I learned they had been traveling only by bus and train through China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and now Russia, and they were wondering if they would stop in Paris or not. I was impressed by their having stayed away from flights. Paris went in to make coffee and I had to admit to Anita that ever since reading Wir Klimaretter and experiencing that flying is the number one most destructive thing an individual person can do the planet, I have had shame following me everywhere I go. Just that morning I had arrived by plane in Moscow. Anita said the leftist newspapers in England had been attacking flying for a few months now, deadly as it is.

I spoke with my contact in Russia over the phone and she told me I would me I would meet a certain Ruslan at 10:30 a.m. on the stairs of Dom Kultury, the most-used student entrance of the main building at Moscow State. She was at first opposed to my taking the metro and not a taxi, but I explained I had survived yesterday without it. I have probably saved more than 3500 rubles (140 dollars) by traveling in my cheap and very proletariat way. From the university metro stop, it was about a 10 minute walk to the main building, and another few minutes trying to find my way to the entrance. I was a half hour early, I waited at the top of the stairs outside the entrance. Students flooded in and out. One came up to me and asked if I had a cigarette. Sorry, no, I don’t. He found one from someone else, and came back to me. He was easy to understand. His questions were ones I had practiced. Are you a German? No, America… Americ…– For some reason I could not finish the word “Amerikanyets,” but he did for me. Then I added, but I lived in Germany. Are you a student? Da. I told him I still speak and understand poorly, my key sentence, and he said a word which I did not recognize, but sounded sympathetic, so I like to imagine he was saying it would come with time. Do you understand German? Yes, I said. He suddenly stood up very straight, reached out his hand and said in a very stark Russian accent “Ich heiβe …” and his name, which I unfortunately forgot immediately thereafter. I was overjoyed and returned his gesture, shaking his hand—a Russian handshake, yes– with my name. He finished his cigarette, stood up straight, as he did before, said, “Auf Wiedersehen,” and left.

Ruslan came, although I had begun to worry I was in the wrong spot, and I followed him through the entrance. He did everything for me, when we got to the administration offices, I just had to provide the documents. We communicated through our broken knowledge of each others’ language. While waiting in line (Ruslan smiled and rolled his eyes several times because of the wait), decided to try out what I could on him, just to show him I’m not a total Russian Language failure. I found out his age, 27, that he is an aspirant, or graduate student, and studies philosophy. Philosophy is very interesting to me, I told him, to which he responded “not interesting!?!” and I said no, no, and tried to stress harder the “o” in “очень” and differentiate my “otschyen’” from my “ne.” I repeated what I said and told him I study politics and Russian language. I think he said he studied politics as an undergraduate. I asked him his favorite philosopher, with the stresses on the words all wrong, to which he said “Nietzsche.” And there was much rejoicing in my soul.

After I had my room keys and pass – пропуск –, which is very important for entering and exiting the building and my personal hall, Ruslan got a call from my director, with whom I spoke. She told me she would meet with me tomorrow around four o’clock. At that time the other students traveling with SUNY would be there, and on Sunday there will be a tour of Moscow. She said not to go too far from my dorms until we had met. I am not yet registered with the police, and it is a pain in the neck if I am taken to the station. I told her I would stay put for the most part. I am tired and not up to exploring too much right now. I”ll have plenty of time for that soon enough.

Ruslan left and I organized myself and my belongings. The room is dusty as if it has not been occupied in a while. There is an internet outlet, but I couldn’t get my computer to connect. I spent the afternoon relaxing and studying Russian. Later, when I first turned on the water in the bathroom, which I will share with one other student, black, filthy water was ejected from it at a very high speed. I let it run until the water became clear. With the warning from the faucet, I also tested the shower. I needed drain dirty water out of that as well. But more surprisingly, the showerhead was broken and shot water out of its side as well. European showerheads are usually attached to a flexible hose, as many probably know, and this was no exception, so for the time being I simply removed the showerhead and let the hose work on its own. *

However, I did not even try to imagine what this would be like, and I am in no way disappointed, I will get my hands on some cleaning supplies and a new showerhead and a broom or vacuum within the next few days and this will, in the end, be a very home-like residence. Additionally, I live on the fourteenth floor of one of Moscow’s most famous buildings, one of Stalin’s “seven sisters,” the crowns of communism Stalin ordered built when he recognized the number of skyscrapers crowning NYC. I have a lovely view of Moscow, and now that it is evening the exterior lighting on my building came on a few minutes ago, and it looks lovely lit up.

Well, now I had better get to work rememorizing all Russian case endings as I had told myself I would do tonight. Sentence building will become much easier after completing this task, although my vocabulary needs a major boost!

*Before putting this online, it is necessary to add that I the room I was put in here was only temporary, and I now live in a room with a good showerhead and clear running water in the bathroom.

On a side note, in this last paragraph I needed to go back and un-capitalize at least 10 nouns. For those who have never studied German, the language capitalizes all nouns. Its kind of a pity that I feel like I just now got my German back up to running speed and am on my way to Russia now. At life’s velocity of change, however, it can often feel as though as soon as anything is brought to running speed it is time to pause it for a while.

Today is my last day. I am in the train to Frankfurt, and tomorrow morning at about 5:30 I will go to the airport, and check in for my flight to Moscow. Interestingly, and in contrast to my usual reaction to new things, in which I am first nervous and then thereafter excited, I was nervous for the past few weeks straight, and yesterday after lunch that all melted away and now I am just excited and confident about going to Moscow. Confidence in my current Russian abilities is another story, but I yesterday on the phone I spoke to Mr. Pasquill, the program director, and he asked me if my Cyrillic understanding were good enough to follow metro stops and street signs and arrive successfully at my youth hostel tonight, which I expected to be prerequisite for the trip.

Additionally, in a month I will be well on my way to, if not pure fluidity, at the very least good understanding and some understandability on my part as well. And then it goes further from there. Short-term, I don’t know if this prediction is optimistic or pessimistic: Essentially, I have had very little opportunity to test the spoken Russian I have thusfar learned. In the long-run, however, my expectations are very positive.

For a moment, I am sixteen years old. I’m back in the DMV, getting my drivers permit. This place smells too much like bureaucracy. My number is called, and I go up to a little window to hand in my documents. The woman behind the window is very much human, even if the system rarely is. My passport indicates that I am an American. She says “, We speak English, yes?” I retort in German. “If you would like. I just have to get Russian down still.” She apologetically tells me I need to fill out another form.

But this really is not bad. Not compared to applying for an American Visa. Two of my German host siblings had to go through that before. Applicants for American visas do not get to speak their own language when applying, they speak English in and interview with a consular officer. The American Consulate is not even located in downtown Berlin; if I remember correctly, the underground does not go out that far, and one must arrive their by car. You can’t bring in your bags, I am told, and technically, you can’t even bring in your keys. And, in spite of the excruciatingly painful currency exchange rate between Euro and American dollars, I think it is more expensive, too.

After filling out the form, I have to wait in line until all of the currently complete visas have been handed out, but I feel better, now that the room is clearing up and I feel as though there is a certain amount of understanding between the woman behind the window and me. I accept mentally that I should not curse my presence in this room, for she has to work here every weekday. In exchange, she speaks to me in German.

Calculating now, I must have completed the consular tasks within three hours. I was exhausted, but it is somehow sinful to be in Berlin and not at least take advantage of the opportunity to look around. When I left the train from the Berliner Hauptbahnhof, the largest train station in Europe, I entered immediately the Regierungsviertel, the government quarter, on my way to the city’s most famous alee, Unter den Linden, Under the Linden Trees. Now, after retrieving my backpack, I followed a side street parallel to the grand alee until I came across, the Spreeinsel, where most of the city’s most decorated museums are.

Wandering without direction, I found myself in the Oranienburgerstraβe, home of the city’s Jewish Temple, crowned by its massive golden dome. The Tacheles Art Commune building is also on the street. Standing on the third floor a year an a half ago, pleasantly surprised by the postmodern art experiments which surround me, the building’s interior seemed like a secret and my presence there a privilege. The glitz of the surround cocktail bars and discos, Middle Eastern techno pumping out of their entrances, drowned out the silent, dark high house. When my friend Johanna tried to take a picture of a work of art with her cell phone, a man appeared out of a back room and began screaming in anger. Leaving with purpose in our step, we came across a young woman seated uncomfortably alone in the hallway, jet black hair hiding her face, a sign next to her offering her portrait service. I think she was asleep. Or dead. Another floor up was a hallway where all the doors were shut. Johanna insisted we open one, behind which people could be heard. If my memory serves me correctly, the room’s inhabitants were gathered around red candles performing a sort of communal prayer ritual. I do not feel the need to interfere, and shut the door. On the top floor was an almost completely unlit bar furnished with second-hand furniture, techno loud enough to at least hinder meaningful conversation, and small groups of friends who seemed to be engaged in such nonetheless. The wall had two huge glassless windows, the cool late spring air whipping in and out of them, through which a beamer projected photographs and short clips from unrecognizable old movies onto the exterior wall of the neighboring building, seemingly in-time with the techno music. My comrades wished not to stay lest the bar’s hygiene was below their comfort level, so we ended up at an Indian cocktail bar across the street.

Now, in the light of midday, I visited an exhibition on the bottom floor, but didn’t explore further. Since my last visit I had learned that this commune was actually responsible for the street’s revitalization since the early nineties. Next door was a small Asian food restaurant trailer, at 3.50 Euro a plate probably one of the best deals in Berlin. A map consultation over a plate of tofu and vegetables in coconut garlic sauce helped me back in the direction of Unter den Linden.

On the topic of culture, I have never sensed very much difference between East Coast US and and Germany. A few weeks ago, Inken, a host sister of mine who was at that time just now finishing up her year as an Au Pair in America, came to visit in America. I took her along with a couple of close American friends to a very special event at Longbranch Park on Onondaga Lake outside of Syracuse: The Bavarian Culture Festival. There were a good many people in red flannel shits, lederhosen reaching down to the top of their knees, and green, feathered caps. They were eating Würst and Pretzels, and it was great because I could beam and claim to teach Inken about her culture with a wave of my hand: This is You. Of course, the Bavarian culture is only one part of Germany, and only the traditional part of that part, and has very little to do with Inken, which she implored, more or less, for Greg and Sarah to recognize. Of course, a Bavarian Culture Festival or Oktoberfest in America is very much like an American Culture Fest in Germany, which does Kaiserslauten, not far from the American base Rammstein. “America Town,” as it is called, is a party where everyone shows up in 10 Gallon hats and one of the main attractions is the bull riding contest.

However, there is one cultural difference, and an important one, which does come forth now and again, regarding crosswalks, or, as the Germans call them, Zebrastreifen– “Zebra Stripes.” In Germany, cars stop at the crosswalk when there is someone in it. For me, this has meant confusing drivers on several occasions by waiting for them to pass before crossing the street. For Inken, it meant almost being hit by trucks on several occasions when navigating Chicago as a pedestrian.

On the other side of the same coin flip, Germans principally, at least in the north and east, wait for the “Walk” symbol when presented with a “Don’t Walk,” sometimes even in the biggest cities, like Berlin, and sometimes even when there are clearly no cars coming. Standing at the edge of the street, I wait for the Ampelmännchen, which translates approximately to “Little Streetlight Man” to walk, ready to follow his example. If I did not inherently know it on my own, the Ampelmännchen would have clearly given away my being in East Berlin. The two city sections have distinctly different designs since. In East Berlin, the Streetlight Man is plumper, and as a result appears to be shorter than the West Berlin Streetlight Man. Also, in East Berlin, the Streetlight Man is wearing a hat. Interestingly, a friend once told me, the presentation of the design for their East Berlin’s Ampelmännchen, led to a minor conflict when it was uncertain if a hat lent the Ampelmännchen “bourgeois” appearance. In the end, the symbol was kept because for “Walk” it looked like he was “happily going to work.” The West Berlin Ampelmännchen also looks like he is going to work, but, in my opinion, appears much more hectic. As far as I know, there was no conflict in the development of his design.

The Russian Embassy, far ahead of me, was always located in East Berlin. The Fernsehnturm, or Television Tower, a gift from Stalin to East Germany, is not far behind me. It was part of the never ending recognition campaign: there was a certain need to prove that communist cities can have nice things, too. Between these two buildings is, or was, the Palast der Republik, the Palace of the Republic, another part of that same campaign.

Before World War II, there was a palace located on the Spreeinsel, which had slowly developed since the late 15^th century. After bombing and fire had cleared the building of its wooden interior, there was a great deal of discussion on the part of the East Berlin Municipal Government as to what to do with the ruin: rebuild or replace? On one hand, the building was one of the best examples of German baroque architecture to stand. On the other, it was very much a symbol of feudal-capitalist hierarchical structure. Representation of this same hierarchical structure on the same scale were rebuilt after the war in the city of Dresden. However, the bombing of Dresden was purely out of revenge for the bombing of Coventry in England in 1940, both of which were cultural rather than militarily strategic targets, and the rebuilding of Dresden served the DDR as an opportunity to show the resolve of the socialist peoples in the face of the capitalist American and English forces. In contrast, the bombing of Berlin was a given, and there was not an ideologically strong enough reason to rebuild the Spreeinsel’s palace. It was decided the palace on the Spreeinsel would be replaced with a building for the people, rather than the old palace. By the end of the 1970s, the old baroque hull gave way to a modernist structure, very square, with bronze reflective exterior windows, higher-end hotel rooms, a restaurant, and a theater. The structure could never become self-sufficient, able to pay for itself through income, and was kept afloat by the government.

In the past two decades since the reunification, a great deal of funds have switched between Coventry and Dresden as a symbol of reconciliation between the England and Germany, leading to the rebuilding of many of the important cultural assets of both cities. The crown of Dresden is the Frauenkirche, a beautiful white baroque church, the inside adorned with angels and pastels. Nonexistent since the Second World War, it reopened last year.

In the two decades since the reunification, the Palast der Republik underwent a massive asbestos removal project, served as a sort of festival ground, and had housed art exhibitions, but most of all slowly fell into disrepair. After its use as a festival ground had increased interest in the building on the part of the problems, Green and other left-oriented politicians argued to save the building in 2004, for several reasons, the one which meant the most to me being: Are we not making the same mistake as the DDR-government, if we are to bury a building with historical value for the sake of our ideological differences?

They clearly lost the argument, because I now stood in front of the building’s skeleton, held back by a fence covered in posters outlining the building site’s history. A poster proclaiming that the Palast der Republik would not be demolished, rather deconstructed piece by piece for the sake of the environment had been painted on by the hand of a dissident, proclaiming the workers inside the fence were earning a meager five Euro per hour.

It will be interesting to see how Russia deals with monuments of its communist past.

I needed to read something German but was to cheap to put out the money for a social psychological political book I wanted (Euros are far too expensive for my taste right now. Last year was bearable. This year I am just thankful to not having to change money into pounds.), so I found a more reasonably priced book, Wir Klimaretter- So ist die Wende noch zu schaffen, We Climate-Savers – Such is the Change still to be Achieved, and bought that instead. In German, Climate-Saver is one word, due to the language’s beautiful tendancy to form compounds. Also, Retter, or “Saver,” does not sound awkward, the way “Saver” would in English, so please do not think the author was a moron just because I am a bad translator.

We roll by a long row of windmills, just off of the Autobahn on either side. We’ve passed many and will pass many more. Germany is full of them. The author claims Germany, one of the world’s example setters for alternative energy use, is also Europe’s worst pro capita Carbon Dioxide emitter. News to me. America is frowned upon around the world for its high pro capital emission rates, and I have felt my share of shame, so I had to remind myself that Germany’s poll position should not make me feel better, and especially not in the sense that I can say “We’re not so bad! Look at what you emit!” An interesting fact offered from the author, although somewhat a given, I never really thought about it before: “Even when China’s CO2 emissions surpass those of the United States, the pro capita emission will still be only a seventh of the US pro capital emissions and a fourth of the German.” Thus, the authors set forth wide-sweeping demands on society and German political and economical powers. Reform and expansion of the EU carbon trading system, reform in modern building code, reform in power plant building finance, cars, food, fuel efficiency. Speed limits. The Autobahn needs a speed limit. I think about it again as a car which seems like it must be going four times our speed passes us. Jen’s car trembles from the shockwave. We both turn a shade paler for a moment.

One-hundred and twenty kilometers/hour translates to approximately seventy-four miles/hour. I once met a middle-aged English man on Greyhound bus from Buffalo to Maine. He was vague, but told me he had flown from London to Buffalo just to see the headliner reunion of a band which had not played together in five years. He told me he did not understand American speed limits. We build cars with huge engines and restrict them with our low speed limits. At home in England, he said, when he is driving home on the highway between two and three in the morning, he goes 220 miles per hour.

– You mean, 220 kilometers an hour, don’t you?

No. He meant miles. I doubted him, but was nonetheless astonished. He drives fast. I told him, in my experience, Greyhound busses and charter busses usually go a little slower than surrounding traffic in general. That upset him. He wanted to get to Boston. Upon learning of my being a political science student, having lived in Germany and planning on living in Moscow (I was reading Blowing Up Russia by Alexander Litvinenko, the former FSB agent poisoned in London last November and Journalist Yuri Felshtinsky on that particular bus ride), he stated his approval, adding his concern that because America is so big, Americans generally take little interest in the wider world. I let him know I was once worried about that, too, but less so after having begun study on the university. Then he told me he does not envy my generation because we would have to deal with the climax of explosive population and water problems. He said, if I am worried now, he does not want to meet me when I am forty, because he was optimistic as a 19-year old and had only become more depressed since.

I thought to myself, he must be going through a mid-life crisis, talking last-minute overseas trips for concerts. The English man sat in front of me, uncomfortably wrenching his head around to talk. We were both too obstinate to change seats, both afraid we would lose our privilege of not having a neighbor. If I left my seat, it would be taken. On the Greyhound, physics prevails. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Sitting in Jens car now, we are going faster than 120km/hr, the speed limit suggested by environmentally-minded engineers, above which the fuel efficiency of a car begins to decline, and carbon-dioxide emission increases exponentially. I take note of our being part of the problem and not the solution. Undoubtedly, nature hates us as well.

The traffic around Hamburg is not terrible, and we get to Frauke’s new home very reasonably in the moments before dinner begins. Frauke began working at Hof Seekamp, a Bio-Bauernhof, or organic farm, five weeks ago, for what is known as a “Volunteer Ecological Year.” All German males are required to either work in the Bundeswehr, the German military, for approximately ¾ of year after graduation, or state in writing their religious, philosophical, political or physical reasons for not participating, and instead take part on either a volunteer social or ecological year. While women are not subject to such requirements, many, like Frauke, choose to spend a year volunteering before attending university.

The table is long and full. There are at least 30 people present for dinner today. While growing produce and raising animals organically, Hof Seekamp also hosts “Farm Experience” for groups of children to help cover the costs of the farm. In this, the children general have the opportunity to ride ponies, go swimming in the lake on the premises, help take care of the animals, and even overnight in a pile of hay next to the pig stall. Of course—and at their age they certainly don’t realize the importance of this—have the opportunity to dine on fresh organically grown products. Apparently, three of the employees have are slightly mentally handicapped, although one really can’t tell. A NGO supporting the rights and well-being of people with similar handicaps helps fund the farm for this reason, and fits well in the Hof Seekamp’s overall socio-environmentally responsible paradigm. For the ideas and type of moral which lie behind it, Hof Seekamp seems to be a rural version of Common Ground Commune for the socially fair reconstruction of New Orleans or the anti-gentrification networks my brother had supported in NYC.

On Hof Seekamp, Jens and I were guests treated as employees, which is always, quite honestly, the best way to learn about an enterprise such as this one. In the morning, I peeled onions in one barn with a 17-year old worker named Max. He told me, he was not exceptionally opposed to working in the Bundeswehr. The required service cannot land one overseas anyway, and one can only be made to fight if Germany is directly invaded. Having graduated at the age of seventeen, however, and not being able to join the Bundeswehr until he was eighteen, he did not want to