A Real Russian Family

Yesterday I had my first experience with a real Russian home and family. Jeff, one of the Americans, is in a home stay here and we went over to his house after dinner yesterday to meet up with them.

When we got there, Jeff's host mother Ludmila welcomed us in with typical Russian hospitality. She made us tea, shared some cake, offered us socks, and plopped us down on the couch. Jeff's family has six boys, and it was the youngest's birthday. We got a tour of the house, which was very kid-friendly and quite charming. All of the rooms had cartoon characters painted on the walls - Monster's Inc, spiderman, and some other little Russian cartoons I didn't recognize. After the tour, we started talking about the boys' hobbies. Ludmila got out tapes of her son's dance recital and one played guitar for us. It was the sweetest.

I felt a little bit uncomfortable since Jeff and Jordan speak much better Russian than I do and I didn't always understand the conversations. I understood most of what was said, but even then I didn't really feel like I could formulate my thoughts well enough to contribute wisely to them. I mostly smiled a lot and nodded and enjoyed my tea. But it was quite charming having these Russians welcome us so warmly into their home.

This brings me to something we discussed in our RFE class the other day. That weeks' visiting lecturer was an American who's lived in Vladivostok for twenty-ish years. He mentioned that in his opinion there are two versions of Russians: the Street Russians and the Home Russians. The Street Russians are curt and sometimes pushy. They're not really concerned with anyone other than themselves. Home Russians, however, are the exact opposite. They're welcoming, concerned with your health, your hungriness, your comfort... everything. Although I think our professor may have been exaggerating a little, but after going to Jeff's house I see a grain of truth in this. It really warmed my heart hanging out with this cute little Russian family who truly seemed to enjoy having us (or at least Jordan and Jeff, who could contribute to intelligent conversation) there.

My experiences with Russian people thus far have been some of my favorite parts of being here. They're always excited to meet Americans and they love to talk about Russia, America... basically everything. They always seem to be having a good time. They can be bossy, overbearing, and difficult sometimes but somehow I find that a little bit endearing too. Maybe it's the anthropology student in me, but I love hanging out with Russians for all the weird things they say and do. Seeing the family side of Russian life for the first time gave me a new love of these people and their crazy, sometimes confusing, but overall good-hearted ways.

Холодильник

After that one freak day of winter all the snow disappeared, but the cold is here to stay. It is officially fur coat weather here in Russia, which I love, Not that I have a fur coat of my own, but it definitely feels a lot more like I think Russia should to have people walking around all bundled up in their ridiculously large furry coats and hats.

There is, however, one down side to the wintery wonder. They have yet to turn any sort of heat on in the dorms, and my room is very cold. The central heating in the building is on, so classrooms are warm and the entry to the dorms is normal. The dorm rooms are slightly colder, but most get some residual heat from the hallway and are tolerable.

My room, however, is located at the very end of the building where no heat dares to travel. It's about ten degrees colder than the hallway. We keep the curtains closed all the time to try to keep some of our meager heat supply in, but to little avail. Yesterday Iuliia came home to find me bundled up in my sweatpants, sweatshirt, scarf, hat, and hood. We literally remark on how cold our room is every time we come in. Basically we don't even need a refrigerator, we could just leave our food on the counter and it would last forever. No bacteria can withstand the icy confines of our living area.

I keep hearing rumors that soon they will turn on the heat, but soon I might go ask someone if they could just turn ours on a little earlier. When I emerge from my snow cave with blue lips and numb fingertips, I'm sure they'll be understanding.

A Lone Photo

I think part of the reason I've been less diligent about blogging lately is that I haven't been taking many pictures. When I have great new photos I'm always excited to share them! Plus, I think blogs are more fun to read with more photos. So here I offer the one and only photo I have taken recently. It's of Iuliia (my roommate) and I out the other night. 

Sexism in Russia...

Sexism in Russia is a topic that I've wanted to address on my blog for a while, but it's too daunting a task. There's no way to make you, my loyal blog reader, from the comfort of your probably fairly gender-equal home, understand the multifaceted monster that is gender relations in Russia. It's positively archaic.

However, I will share this one small anecdote with you that should help illustrate the cause of my dismay. It's not a usual occurrence in itself, but it is entirely characteristic of Russian culture. Read and enjoy, and hopefully appreciate your equal gender standing in society a little bit more........

So I'm not sure if I have written much about my Russian Far East class here yet. Basically, it's our only class taught in English. It's a twice-weekly lecture given by various professors and "specialists" about different aspects of the Russian Far East. They are all Russian, and some have better English than others. It's a difficult class because usually we're talking about subjects that the students don't have the Russian to discuss and the lecturers don't always have enough English to satisfy them. But we manage.

On Tuesday, we arrived at RFE to find not one, but two professors! And, lo and behold, one of them was male. Until that time I had had zero male professors. In fact, the only male professor I'd even seen was an American who teaches English here. Anyways, here they were, a woman and a man, whom I assumed were here to co-lecture our class.

The woman introduced herself and mentioned that the man was her husband. He didn't really introduce himself, just nodded a lot and occasionally added a word here or there. Today's topic was the economy of the Far East. She began to lecture.

But as she lectured (in English, which she was clearly not very comfortable with) the man would interrupt her in the middle of about every other sentence. Sometimes he would correct her English (which was really unnecessary because we understood what she was saying). Sometimes he would ask her skeptically where she got a statistic. Sometimes he would ask devil's advocate questions that weren't really helpful to our conversation, and only seemed to undercut her. A couple of times he flat out told her she was wrong. He also called her powerpoint boring on several occasions.

The woman was very patient and submissive and waited calmly while the man bashed her lecture. It was painful to watch. I have literally never seen adult professionals behave like this. It was like I was watching them have a marital dispute while discussing the different mining regions of the Russian Far East. It was wild. 15 minutes before our hour-and-a-half-long class was over, the man physically took the mouse from the woman, exited her powerpoint while she was talking about it, and tried to open something else on the computer. The woman took the mouse back and reopened her powerpoint. The man got so agitated that he simply left. He gave a little bow, announced his departure, and that was the last we saw of him. Those last 15 minutes were the most productive of our day.

So that was a weird and uncomfortable day of class. Yep.

An Apology

Good morning blog readers,

I apologize that it has been so long since I last wrote. There are several contributing factors to this.
Firstly, we haven't had any super cultural excursions in a while. Honestly, this has been a nice respite from the constant rushing about and given me time to relax a little.
Secondly, it's a very busy time of year here homework-wise. It's basically the Russian equivalent of midterms, and we have all our tests next week. We also had an essay due for a writing competition and this week we're making projects for "Tolerance Week," a holiday designed to help Russian people and Chinese/Korean/Japanese people hate each other less.
Thirdly, I ran out of "cookies." I don't know what this means exactly, except that my computer wouldn't go to some websites. So I deleted all my cookies, and it forever logged me out of everything and I spent all yesterday trying to figure out how to get back into my google account.

Anyways, I'll make it up to you. Right now I have to go to my early class (ick), but stay tuned for a couple of entertaining posts about the antics of the last week or so.

Also, today is my least favorite holiday. So in case I don't get my Halloween In Russia post up today, I hope you all enjoy your halloween!

A Cultural Moment

I wanted to share a moment of cultural differences with you. We have a Korean friend here named Anton. He understands Russian much better than me and has a larger vocabulary, but it's sometimes hard to understand him because of his accent. He's a very nice, smart, and interesting guy, but our conversations are usually really awkward. And today I figured out why.

Today Anton and I were sitting in my room talking. This always includes a lot of long pauses, during which I usually look at Anton and wait for him to say something. Today, the silence was broken by him asking (in Russian), "It is a burden when we are talking and you are always looking at me."

I didn't understand, nor did I know the Russian word burden. Eventually I kind of got it. "You don't like it when I look at you?"

"No," he said, "Why do you always look at me with your eyes so big?"

"Because," I replied, "I don't want you to think that I'm not listening to you."

"AAAAAH! It's cultural!" Anton exclaimed.

"In Korea, when people are talking, they don't look at each other?" I asked, interested.

"No," said Anton, "I can talk to you and listen to you but I am looking over here."

It's things like this that I never think of as significant cultural differences, but now that I know that when Anton is silent I don't have to wait attentively for him to speak our conversations go a lot smoother. I told him I was going to write about our "cultural moment" for my blog, and he told me to include that my eyes are "like an eagle" watching for prey. I think I made him really uncomfortable. But now we're friends, and he's going to approve this post before I publish it. Riiiiiiiight.... now.

Aaaaaand we got the OK from Anton. He says hi.

I Feel Famous

United States	158
Russia	14
Germany	5
France	4
Italy	4
Netherlands	4
Greece	3
India	2
Norway	2
Algeria	1

I pretty much feel like a superstar that people (even though it's not many people...) all over the world are reading my blog... ah, the wonders of the interwebs!