real life

It’s not as though my life has had nothing exciting to offer and thus, nothing to blog about.  Rather life has reached a sort of satisfactory even-keel pace.  Granted, things get cancelled, mornings get darker, my bed gets warmer, so on and so forth, but for the most part, things are currently excellent, excellent indeed.  Thus, I’ll recap on a few stories and events from the recent past:

1) С праздником мил (ahhem) полиция.  Last week Russia, well a small very “self-loving” part of Russia celebrated their own holiday: Police Day.  For average Russians this day is sort of ironic.  Police go out, get hammered, and then, well they’re the police, so they drive themselves home, trumping the “zero tolerance” rule that they typically enforce.

On this day, I met up with another American who was in town for business, and he invited me out for dinner with his Russian colleague, Slava.  Slava suggested we go to this great Azerbaijani restaurant, famous for its lamb kebab.  He called ahead of time and discovered that it was “Police Day” and they were celebrating in this restaurant.  No matter, we would go anyways.  We had a great lamb kebab with a vegetable and cheese plate and we washed it down with red wine and vodka.  Furthermore, we had great entertainment: watching Russian police men get hammered drunk and attempt to dance to American pop songs.  Generally watching Russians dance to American pop songs is a great form of entertainment; this was even better, as they were police!

Furthermore, Slava told great stories about his friendship with the American, as they’ve known each other for five years.  He was trying to tell one story and he asked Royce (the American):

Slava: “you remember that little car you had?”

Royce: “ehm, what one?  I’ve had a few different ones.”

Slava: “you know!  that little one!”

Royce: “hmmm… no, I’m not sure what one you’re talking about.”

Slava: “That little car you drive on your lawn!”

Royce: “ohhhhh my tractor!“

Yes, Slava loved Royce’s little car that he drove on his lawn. fantastic.

2) Talent shows. Russians loveeeee love love their talent shows.  Last week there was a “First Year Talent” show, where the groups from the first year showed each other their talents. I’m not going to get started on this, because I could rant about it for hours upon hours, with not much good to say. However, there was a few funny skits and one of my students did a great job at recreating a Beatles song.  Not connected with this particular  talent show, but very impressively talented, was the video a group of my students made.  When I first started teaching their class we had the theme “theater”.  Since I know very little about theater, and it’s more of a Russian-cultural based theme and their head teacher can do a way better job than I ever could at effectively teaching them terminology, I decided to work with the film/musical “Hairspray”. I personally love this movie and after watching it in September, I concluded it wouldn’t be too difficult for my students to understand linguistically and would be very interesting culturally.  We spent one month, breaking down the film, answering questions, discussing cultural themes, and writing skits.  They then created their own skit, based on the Hairspray characters. As if I wasn’t already proud enough, they surprisingly put together the following video, which they showed at the beginning of the skit:

3.) DACHA! I had my last visit to the Dacha, for this season at least.  I went over the holiday weekend with my colleague and her family.  We had sashlik, drank wine, helped rake leaves, played volleyball, and made a small fire.  The fresh air was wonderful, and I’m glad I got to spend the last beautiful fall day outdoors.  Pictures:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/63603472@N03/sets/72157628139343716/show/]

going green in Astrakhan.

Friday was a holiday… National Unity Day. Two important things happened: I sort of became and activist and I fell in love.

I met with my new friend Katya in the morning to go to what she called a “meeting”, which is essentially the Russian word for “protest”.  I was immediately interested; yes, of course I’ll go, thanks for the invitation!  We arrived quite early, checked out the scene, and walked around a bit.  Katya loves to take pictures; there was a group of police men standing in messy lines near the square and she approached them to take a photograph.  Everyone was staring at her, but she still took the picture.  Only after, as she was walking away did a man approach her.  ”Girl, who are you?”  ”I’m no one; just a student.”  ”Why do you want a picture?”  ”just because.”  ”I’m going to ask you to delete it.”  He proceeded to walk away and made another man go up to Katya and watch her delete the picture.  Then yet another man approach, silently.  Katya was baffled, as it was the first time that’s ever happened to her.  ”Don’t worry,” I said, “it happens to us tourists and foreigners all the time.”

Some of Katya’s friends were there, and so I met them as we chit-chatted, waiting for the event to begin.  I didn’t really know what to expect, and only realized actually what was going on as the event was taking place.  A stage was set up and people were really starting to arrive.  Suddenly, I saw lots of flags go up: United Russian, some that said
“Youth Guard” or something of that sort, and Nashi, a United Russian youth movement.  Katya had a flag for her ecological group and she was the only private group there.  Representatives from Yabolko were walking around, but were not allowed to have flags.  Other political parties did not make an appearance.  However, Yabolko’s colors are green and white, essentially the colors of Katya’s flag.  People keep approaching us asking what the flag was about.  Some men in all black, trying to look really important and cool came up to us a few different times, making sure we weren’t supporting a political party.  Katya is great; she’s super energetic and optimistic.  She walked around, handing out flyers, answering questions, talking to friends.

The stage turned out to be put to use.  First, the mayor of Astrakhan appeared and said some nice words, then the leaders of these local groups: Nashi, United Russia and so on said their tid bits, and then a concert took place.  There were some Russian acts, but it was supposed to symbolize the diversity of Astrakhan, so there were some historic dances and a Kazakstani duo who performed a nice few songs.  They also gave out free oatmeal, snacks, and tea and produced in the Soviet style.

 

Katya successful handed out her flyers.  She wanted me to join her,

but I was too nervous that people would ask me questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer and I would make a fool of myself.  I promised to be more active next time.  As Katya roamed around the crowd, I manned the flag and fell in love.  He’s the director or leader or whatever of some local political group, I do believe Nashi.  However, this is not important.  What’s important is that he’s active, gorgeous, a great speaker, and good with people. And so, I fell in love.

oh and I’m going to join this Ecological organization.

Helluween

My favorite part about Russian Halloween is how they pronounce it.  ”Happy Hell-u-ween”

I’m not keen on Halloween, but its my duty as practically the only American in Astrakhan and a young ambassador to spread the Halloween joy, or fear I suppose.

I first entertained Halloween party at the local Japanese Restaurant, Sushi.Ru.  This place loves to have themed parties and they host a new one about every month.  The idea is good and fun, if the guests reflects those ideals.  For some unknown reason my friends wanted me there like hours ahead of time; I practiced my pumpkin drawing skills on a piece of paper.  At about 7:30 the guests sort of stopped trickling in, and so the party began.  In general there were not that many people there, but enough to play a few games and get people to dance.  The first thing I noticed was the music.  If they Russians got the decorating and games just about right, they really messed up on the music.  The dude was playing Edna, Russian Hits, and some random American pop songs.  He threw in a few Halloween jams, but really missed some traditional goodies.  There were some costumes; the staff had their faces painted, the hosts were all dressed up, and a few of the guests brought their favorite costumes, probably from previous years.  Of course, no Russian party in a family restaurant would be complete without strip tease. Yes they had real strip tease.  What I noticed most of all, I mean aside from the fact that the girl was practically naked, was that almost all the guests were couples and yet lots of guys were taping the strip tease.  I imagine the girlfriend said something to the following effect:  “yes, go ahead honey and tape the girl who’s shirtless and in a thong.  In fact make sure you use HD.”  I later asked someone a question regarding the “spectacle” and he said, “well they’re probably taping it to just put it on the internet or something.”  There was even a family there with little kids. The mom took her son into the bathroom and the dad stayed behind to enjoy the show.  After the spectacle, they played a semi-successful mummy game, and then I was on stage for pumpkin carving.  So I was supposed to show these three guys how to carve pumpkins.  However, the host introduced me and was like – “say something about Halloween.”  HUH?  I wasn’t prepared for that, so I mumbled something and someone asked me to say something in English.  And then we carved pumpkins.  Well I tried to; …. a few notes on Russian pumpkins: they are thick, like five times thicker than our pumpkins, thus so hard to cut; they are green; they are small.  It worked out because the men took over, had their mini-competition, and I just “over-saw”.  I then made friends with this little eight-year old boy who was insistent on playing the blow-out-the-candle-relight-blow-out game, which was entertaining for me for about five point two seconds.  Furthermore he insisted on following me around and hitting me when I wouldn’t pay attention to him.  I took one of the pumpkins home for temporary decorations.

Sunday I attended another Halloween event a private language school for little kids.  Approximately twenty kids showed up with parents awkwardly and interestingly starring at us from the entry way.  The kids were all dressed up in true Halloween spirit.  First Warren another American living in Russia, described Halloween to the kids.  We explained trick-or-treating and then had them show of their costumes.  We then gave them each “prizes” or “awards” for their costumes, and they trick-or-treated us for candy.  Then we showed them how to carve pumpkins.  This pumpkin turned out a lot better, for me at least.  Essentially, I carved the pumpkin while the kids and even one mom circled around me, asking me question after question.

“Do you have a TV!?”

The mom really loved that one.  The girls asked me for a picture and then the mom wanted one too.  There is always a few kids in every group I really take a liking to and there was this one shy little guy in a vampire costume.  I made sure he got the best prize because he seemed so shy and nervous.  As he left he said “bye” about ten times.  This other little girl had to wait longer for her mother, so she would walk over to where I was sitting, stand there for a few seconds, and then return to her seat.  She did this a few times in a row until I finally told her to come sit by me.

At first when I go to events like this I don’t really realize what I’m doing.  I sort of just “do my duty.”  But every time, as the students are leaving they throw these compliments at me, which literally leave me stunned.  “you’re so cool!” “We like you so much!” “you’re so nice!”  These make me reflect on the actual impact I have made on these young kids (and even adults!) in such a short period of time.  The realization that who you are – simply by nationality can have such an effect on someone is a powerful tool and should be used with great care and awareness not to be abused.  I’ve started to understand that it’s such a gift to these kids, to be able to meet someone from America!  Who has actually  celebrated Halloween.  I asked to come back again.