22

Last week I was drifting around Sokol'niki and found myself in the middle of a huge red-clad throng yelling obscenities.  Actually I wasn't drifting at all; I went there on purpose to see a hockey match with my friend Marina and her husband, Alyosha.  Just, it was such a startling experience.   It was a playoff game between Moscow's Spartak, in red and backed by thousands of drunken bull muzhiks, and Petersburg's SKA, whose side boasted about 40 fans down from Leningrad, in blue and spirited, but a bit cowed by all that angry flesh.  Since Marina's husband is from Petersburg, and they're the ones who invited me, we were going for SKA, and sitting in the small section at the end of the stadium reserved for enemies.  A riot-armored chain of Russian swat officers formed a circle around our little section to make sure nothing unpleasant went down just because of what was happening out on the ice.  For, sitting there--and this was the strangest thing in comparison to sports in the U.S., where it seems to me fans mostly keep things civil and the fights that do break out are between Ron Artest and Pacers fans--I never got over the impression that all those Spartak fans in red there giving us fingers, singing "We will, we will, f--- you" (you see, even your average Russian snow shoveler has enough grasp of English to fill that one out), howling, would surely have beaten us to death otherwise.   Not least of all because, well aware that they had a role to fulfill, our SKA fans would return these epithets with some of a similar strain aimed at Moscow.  Probably for the best, SKA, after being up 2-0 in the first period, went down 3-2 under a deluge of slapshots from a captain named Rybin, or Fishman.  As far as the hockey goes, you are all probably wondering if I even know the rules.  Well, no, not really, I can't say I do, beyond a very primitive understanding of penalty boxes and holding your stick up too high.  But I enjoyed it.  Quite a bit.  I won't say more because there's nothing more intelligent to say about it.  The whole experience really was a great one, so much enthusiasm and unbridled passion, but it was a bit tempered by the fact that the police held us at the stadium for an hour after the end of the match to allow all the jubilant Spartak would be-batterers to disperse.  And then, rather than simply walking us to the metro, the cops herded us all onto a bus headed to Petersburg, despite our appeals of "we live in Moscow!"  I seriously thought for a bit that I would find myself in Peter the next morning.  Finally, instead of dropping us off at a metro--any metro, please!--they just pulled over onto the side of a highway and let us out.  When I asked Marina and Lyosha why they didn't just continue on until they drove by a metro when it would cost zero additional effort, she returned, "In Russia we do everything one way, and that way is-- ass."  

21

Every day I wake up, eat some muesli that Eleanora Viktorovna has set out for me the night before, drink a cup of Nescafe, check my email, and set out on a run to the detskii (children's) park that is a couple of blocks away.  Training in winter is a bear; if it's cold I can only make it through five loops around the park; if it's only around zero C I'll run some more, but either way I've got to run through snow and over four months of icemud.  I used to complain about running on the beach through sand.  But leaving the apartment every day for a run is the best thing I can do to remind myself that I'm responsible for molding myself.  The Stockholm Marathon is May 30th.  It feels like winter started just about right after I got here, and I know we've got at least a month and half to go.  That makes it about six months.  I've been wearing the same crummy ski jacket for six months.  I go to the indoor skatepark when I can make it all the way out there--it's about an hour's journey from the center--but that only reminds me how badly I want to skateboard outside on roads without that disgusting ice aggregate.  In short, I've never looked forward to spring so much.  In fact, in Florida I used to lament spring's approach, because that just meant that summer was two weeks away.  

So the weather is wearing me down a bit, but otherwise I'm doing fantastic.  My Russian continues to chart progress.  I've gotten to the point where I can comfortably read texts and often divine unfamiliar words from their stems.  I'm in classes on "The Newest Russian Literature," "Russian Poetry of the Silver Age," and "History of 20th Century Russia."  And I'm taking German.  Most crucially, I've really developed a great circle of friends and am having loads of adventures.  There will be stories for all of you.  I'm planning on coming back to the great U.S.A. before June 4th to see my little brother graduate.  I can't wait to speak English again, at least for a little while.  Every time I speak it here I feel like I've lost half of its richness.  

20

Uh, huh

I've got quite a bit of catching up to do.  The rest of the Middlebury students left town around December 20th, after our final exam of the semester, so it's just been me and a Virginian named Robert Frasco and a steadily expanding circle of Russians and internationals here through Christmas, New Year's, Orthodox Christmas, Old New Year, and now the start of a new semester.  A history built on two calendars means twice as many holidays, and Moscow essentially shuts down, or stays up all night for two weeks straight, depending on how you look at it.  I labored under cloudy skies on applications and projects and reading novels and when the sun set went off looking for other stuff to do.  Eleanora Viktorovna and I have become quite good at telling each other stories.  On Jan 7th, Orthodox Christmas, I flew out of Moscow at 5:30 am and arrived in Vienna at 6:30 am.  After taking a bus into town, wandering around the train station's neighborhood for a few hours, and lamenting how deplorably I have let my German deteriorate, I checked into my hostel, which was called Wombat's and must certainly be one of the nicest hostels in the world.  It kind of reminded me of a college student union.  I spent three days in Vienna walking around very clean streets and museums and meeting other world travelers at the hostel before taking a bus to Split, Croatia overnight.  From there, in short, I took a ferry out to the island Hvar, slept in Stari Grad one night and Hvar Town the other, and took another ferry all the way down the coast to Dubrovnik at the southern tip of Hrvatska, the most singular city in the world.  I took a room in Dubrovnik for 100 kuna ($20) from a crazy guy named Ivo Gugic, who told me a lot of great stories about the travelers that have come through his place and was in all the best host you could ask for.  Croatia's Dalmatian coast is founded on tourism, so first of all nearly everyone speaks English, and second of all in the winter, when the water's too cold to swim and you can't lie on the beaches, nearly all of the infrastructure built up to accomodate all of the tourists is very inexpensive.  So although I didn't get to swim in that azure water, the weather was fine compared to Moscow's and I traveled very inexpensively.  From Dubrovnik I took another overnight bus to Zagreb, the capital, whence I took a train back to Vienna and flew back to Moscow.  Zagreb must be the most heavily-graffitied city in the world.  I didn't spend enough time there to do the city justice, and I would like to go back when I learn Serbo-Croatian.  I arrived in Moscow Friday night, went shopping Saturday for stuff like a headlamp and ski pants and gloves, and left late Saturday night for Appetiti, a small mining town just south of Murmansk.  An astounding 33 hours later we (5 Americans and a British girl) arrived, dressed in heavy layers, and met up with our Russian guides before heading out to the wilds.  I have never met a person like Igor Vladimirovich Arkhipov, our guide, and I will never forget him.  He was more full of life in his calmest moments than most people are when they're ecstatic.   We lived for a week in a tent, skiing up and down white-clad mountains on cross country skis, eating pasta with ketchup, freezing our hands while putting up tents and then warming them again by the stove.  These guys were as hard as nails, never complained of cold feet, and could work without gloves for 30 minutes without feeling the frost while my hands went dead after 30 seconds.  When they aren't slogging up mountains on 1000 calories a day and cutting down trees with their bare hands they're back at the base slugging vodka and belting out Russian songs over feverish guitar.  They were times when I cursed my decision to go, especially when it fell to me to prepare breakfast and I had to get up at 6 in the -10 C morning to fetch water from the stream, but this was really one of the most authentic experiences of my life.  In the north, angling your skis up a mountain pass, all of the self-consciousness of the city vanishes.  On the last day we packed all of our stuff on sleds, climbed on, and were towed behind snow-mobiles at 40 mph through the tundra, terrified the whole damn time of falling off and fearing frostbite from the wind chill tacked onto a frost of -20 C ( -2 degrees F).  As we swung through the last pass into the Khibini Mountains, the afternoon sun just above the red horizon, I caught a glimpse of Arkhipov swinging out slalom-style behind the snow mobile: he had decided to put on mountain skis and be towed like a water-skier into the city and was yelling "My soul is singing!"

I'll have pictures in a bit.   Right now my internet is too slow for the file sizes.

19

Just returned from Croatia and I'm off to Murmansk in the great white north (look at it on a map!) tonight; pictures and ghost stories when I get back on the 28th.  I'm well.  How are you?

18

In short, I spent the past week: at a concert of gypsy music, in aleksandrovsky garden, at cafe bilingua, at home, watching the english patient, reading russian science fiction since it's easier than Gogol, reading Gogol's The Government Inspector, playing ping pong, dodging traffic, skirting assembled police officers, listening to old yiddish folk songs, drinking beer in front of statues, learning bass parts for the new band, aimlessly browsing the internet, christmas shopping at the enormous outdoor market at izmailovsky, cursing constant cloudy skies, grimacing at cigarette smoke, playing the ukulele, embracing sour cream, thinking of the U.S.A. in many different respects, trying not to fall into too binding of a schedule that would too closely resemble Davidson, dreaming again of a rural life.  

17

Happy Thanksgiving, all; I'm thankful to report that I didn't spend Thursday evening reading Gogol and eating shchi, for a Middlebury in Moscow alumnus now working for the American Embassy here invited us all to her place to speak English and celebrate everyone's favorite holiday.  The meal was just what I needed, thanks to a few diplomats in the kitchen and the American food store on the other side of the complex (where you can buy Hellmann's mayonnaise and other classics), and the company was also rewarding.  At times it's surprising how little I know about the other students in my program--since all our conversation is restricted to Russian--so I enjoyed the chance to speak English with them very much.  The diplomats were also an interesting bunch, with plenty of international travel behind them, so we got to hear some good stories from a professional path that, by the looks of it, several students in our program intend to look into as well.  

Otherwise, the big news is that I'll be playing bass for a local band here, at least for a little while.  The guy I work for (tutoring English), who's beginning to resemble less an employer than a straight-up benefactor, told his wife, who sings for the group, that I can play bass, so yesterday I went over to their rehearsal and played around the fretboard a bit.  They're a very strange band--to be honest not exactly my style--playing an odd type of medieval pop-rock, but I'm stoked to be playing and practicing my Russian in such a non-academic situation.  Today I'm going to try to go to the big indoor skatepark here.

16

I'm forced to break my internet silence by the snow that has been falling silently for the past 20 hours or so, great flat flakes falling sideways by like a river.  Perfectly silent--that's the first thing my ears, accustomed to the thunderstorms of Florida's summers, noticed, and my face noticed how much more effort is required to keep it out of your eyes when the wind intends to blow it right under your hood.  Make no mistake, Moscow is no more peaceful--Russians, of course, pay almost no attention to snow, except to complain about global warming--but it is darker and a bit more alien, at least until I get used to walking around in snow and an early sunset.  A lengthy ski trip without the skiing.  Fall is beyond reclamation, I suppose.

But really--I am enjoying myself entirely.  A wise friend pointed out to me that my posts here are quite melancholy, something which hadn't occured to me because, unfortunately, I haven't been thinking much about this thing and, it would seem, when I sit down to write something here I unintentionally slip into the half soapbox/half forced irony front that characterizes all internet writing and is the main reason I hate blogs, something I have almost always been honest about.  Of course, I want to share my doings with you all more than I hate blogs, so here we are.  I beseech your patience, that's all.  

My life here is comfortable--perhaps too comfortable--and duly stimulating, and if there are times when it's not exciting as one comes to demand from a semester abroad it's on account of lack of effort on my part.  Most obviously, a lack of effort to go anywhere outside of Moscow's garden ring.  But it's a pleasant inertia, I can't deny that, mostly because it is a grand adventure as it is, being a foreign student in Moscow, and sometimes I'm simply tired.  Tired from Russian all the time, tired from boring classes--that's the plain truth of it: my classes are boring--tired from always hunting for new opportunities to make friends because most of the contacts I have here are unsatisfactory and unreliable.  There's no better Russian lesson, however, and, most important, I've learned the kind of tact that life in the U.S. failed to teach me.  Finally--and please don't worry about me--I don't write much exciting here because, well, exciting means an element of danger, and I don't want you to worry.  Adieu!