Friday, April 10, 2009

Things I Should Have Written About Last Month

Last night at the grocery store I bought a new brand of popcorn to try because it was on sale and because I've been on a popcorn kick lately. For the record, it was one of those pre-portioned 100 calorie pack things, and it had Weight Watchers points on the side of it so, okay, I suppose it is being marketed to a certain audience. When Penn and I got home from the store and were putting things in the cupboard, I noticed that the back of my new box of popcorn says, "We know you're a multi-tasking mom!" and then went on to tell me about some eco-friendly shopping bag that "Master Multitaskers" can get for mailing in three proofs of purchase. Sigh. I told Penn about the back of the box and said, "Is this really my demographic now? I'm buying products that just assume I'm a mother?" And Penn said, "Better get used to it!" And then I stood in front of the bathroom mirror for five minutes scrutinizing the wrinkles on my forehead (which maybe only I can really notice so far, but they're permanent now!!) and then I melodramatically whined to Penn, "We need to get married soon or else I'm going to be all wrinkly and you're going to be gray-haired in our wedding pictures!" (because we all know that the ability to have pretty wedding pictures is ENTIRELY the reason behind having a wedding). I don't actually care about this and I'm only writing about it here because it amused me, but I actually do have permanent forehead creases now (tiny, but permanent) and the other day on the subway I found a gray hair in Penn's beard and our friends are having babies and buying houses and, wow. I'm well on my way to being one of those women that subscribes to Redbook.

In other news, I have finally fully committed to my bicycle. I've had it since February and I've used it for exercise on the trails around here once or twice a week since then, but up until last week there hadn't been much good bicycling-for-fun weather, and the bicycle commuting wasn't happening yet because I didn't have a bike lock or a bag that I can carry when on the bike. But now that it's spring (and now that I finally have extra money to spend) I bought a good bike lock and a helmet and a water bottle that will fit in my bike's water bottle holder and a pouch to go under the seat so I can carry my phone and ID when I'm out exercising and Penn bought me a bike bell that says I Love My Bike and now I can actually really utilize my bike for both exercising and commuting. Hooray! But the main reason I wrote this whole paragraph was to tell you that my new bag has 12--12!!!--separate zipper pouches. Why? Why does anyone need twelve individual pockets in one bag? Yesterday when I rode my bike to work I had my laptop and a couple of books in one pouch, my sandwich and water bottle in another, my phone in another, my keys in another, and my lip gloss and a couple of pens in another and I still had 7 empty pockets. It's bizarre.

This past week went by really fast. I can't believe it's already the weekend again. We had a good visit with Penn's mom last weekend (and I thought the birthday cake was tasty, by the way!) and then this week I've just been working and trying not to get overwhelmed by all the e-mails that my department chair has been sending out lately about scheduling comprehensive exams and making book lists and...blah. There is so much that needs to happen in the next 7-8 months, but hopefully by the end of 2009 I'll be a PhD candidate (as opposed to a PhD student, which is what I am right now; you're not a candidate until you've passed your comprehensive exams and you're ABD-All But Dissertation).

Anyway, I promised a few more highlights from my Russia trip, and since it has now been almost a month since I went, I guess I should wrap that up. So, here are some bullet points of the highlights:
  • We took an overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Anna and I ended up sharing a sleeper car with Dr. New and Dr. Scary. Actually, we spent a lot of time together on the trip. It's a weird situation at this point in my education, because I'm definitely not just a student, but I'm not quite a colleague yet, either. Anyway, the train was fairly comfortable, but it was ancient. Anna looked at the reading lights above our bunks and said, "I'm fairly certain those were made by Stalin himself." Seriously, the train might have been around for that long. Also, the snack that was waiting for us in our compartment was red caviar in little jars. Not really what I would think of as a midnight snack (we caught the train at 11:30 PM), but interesting. I brought the jars home to the states for Penn. It's really, really salty. Oh, and we also had a snack pack for the morning, and it had yogurt in it but it wasn't cold. Our hotel in St. Petersburg had free continental breakfast and they would put out unchilled yogurt every morning, too. Isn't yogurt supposed to be refrigerated? I was too scared to even try the room temperature yogurt, but I'm guessing since that's how they serve it everywhere in Russia it must be okay. Still, yuck.
  • You know what rocks, though? Russian porridge. I rocked the porridge every single morning. Ooh, and they had these muffins with marmalade inside. They came in handy little plastic packages so I'd swipe a couple every morning to eat when I got hungry walking around town.
  • Other Russian food that rocked: pelmenis and varenikis. Freakin' addictive dumplings in sour cream sauce. I need to find somewhere to get them here (I guess pierogis would more or less fulfill the craving and those are relatively easy to find in this part of the country). And blini, which are thin buckwheat pancakes similar to crepes but a little thicker that could be either savory (smoked salmon, yum!) or sweet. I'm also going to make a sweeping generalization here and say that Russians are really into potato salad. Sometimes we were on our own for meals but a lot of times when we were together as a group we had prearranged meals. Often the prearranged meals were "traditional" Russian food, and every single time we had a Russian meal, the first course was a potato salad (and the second course was borscht, and the third was meat in some sort of cream sauce). A couple of times at a restaurant separate from the group I would slowly sound out the menu, order a salad, and then remember too late that "salad" pretty much always means potatoes with something.
  • While I'm at it, here are a couple of other sweeping generalizations: 1) Russian women love knee-high spike-heeled black leather or pleather boots. And while I'll wear knee-high leather boots to go out at night, I don't generally consider them work appropriate (well, okay, maybe sometimes appropriate at my job, if worn with tights and a skirt that is at least knee length, but I don't think I'd be wearing them if I had a corporate job). Apparently in Russia it's perfectly acceptable. 2) Russians are big fans of the cloakroom. Which I guess makes sense, considering you're wearing coats for so many months out of the year. You know how here in the U.S. there is sometimes a coat room at a nicer restaurant or a theatre or club, but even then you generally have to tip and/or pay and so it's optional? Not in Russia. In Russia, everywhere we went had a coat room unless it was a coffee shop, and even then there were coat racks everywhere. Draping your coat over the back of your chair like we do here just wasn't acceptable. There were a few times in museums where it was kind of chilly and I wanted to keep my coat, but it wasn't allowed. There are old ladies manning the cloakrooms and they get pissed if you don't check your coat.
  • The Hermitage Museum is amazing. I'd go back to St. Petersburg again someday just to be able to go back to the museum. I've been thinking about it, and I'm pretty sure it's my favorite of all the art museums I've ever been to (and I've been to a lot of impressive museums: the Met, the Vatican Museums, the Uffizi Gallery, The Tate, the Philadelphia Museum of Art...I do really love the British Museum, too, although I feel like that's a different kind of museum and it's sort of like comparing apples to oranges. I've never been to the Louvre--it was closed due to striking workers the one time I was in Paris--so I can't make a comparison there). Given, I'm not judging entirely on their art collection, although that was very impressive. Name a well-known western artist and there is probably an entire room (at least) devoted to that person's work in the Hermitage. It's a HUGE collection. I was there for 6 or 7 hours over the course of two days and I probably only saw 40% of the collection. What made it impressive for me, though, was the design of the Winter Palace and the other connected buildings. It was so beautiful inside. The ceilings were covered in detailed painting, the floors were incredibly elaborate inlaid wood, there were glittering chandeliers...Many of the rooms were literally breathtaking. I would walk into a room and go, "Da Vinci, wow...OH MY GOD, look at the floor!" Also, one of the professors that took us on the trip used to work at the museum before he came to the United States, so because of his connections we were able to go down into their vaults and look at things that are not normally displayed to the public. It was amazing. We got to see tapestries from the 1200s, dresses that belonged to Maria Feodorovna and Alexandra Feodorovna, tiny little shoes belonging to Nicholas II's children, caftans worn by Peter the Great. It was fascinating, not so much for the garments themselves but because of the history of the people who wore them.
  • One night a couple of friends and I went to a restaurant called "Lucky Shot" that advertised "Lots of meat and game over an open fire," and there was bear on the menu. Bear! It was $90 a serving so we didn't get it. I guess it's so expensive because someone has to go out and actually hunt the thing. It's not like you can farm bear. Have you ever seen bear on a menu here? I haven't.
  • One night a bunch of us went to a drag show. One of the guys on the trip read about it and wanted to check it out. It was such a funny experience. None of us speak Russian so we missed most of the jokes, but it's amazing how much can be conveyed just through tone of voice and gestures. At one point the two drag queens took a couple of our guys up on stage and joked about them for a bit and then picked the smaller guy up and carried him back to our table. It was hilarious. Everyone in the coffee shop (the drag show was at a coffee shop/bar) sang a Russian national song at the end that everyone knew but us, and as soon as they were done the drag queens came running up to one of our guys, who had already told them he was from Brazil, and told him, "National song Brazil!" So he gamely sang the Brazilian national anthem. Everyone was cheering and laughing. I was proud of him for playing along. That same night we started talking to the people at the table next to us--most of them spoke very broken or no English and I was the best of the Russian speakers in our group at the time (and my entire vocabulary consists of the numbers 1-5, "thank you", "bear", "beer", "chocolate", "tea", and the words that happen to sound the same in Russian and English, like coffee) but one of the girls was actually relatively fluent in English so we were able to get by--and they were going to take us to another dance club. However, after almost 45 minutes wandering the streets of St. Petersburg in the middle of the night, during which time our translator was swigging from a handle of whiskey and getting progressively more and more tipsy and my friends and I were becoming less and less clear on exactly where we were in relation to our hotel, we decided to call it a night and head home. I think our Russian friends were very insulted that we didn't trust them, but it was getting a bit shady and we had lost our translator to the whiskey, so what else could we do?
  • I think that was also one of two nights that I saw the gypsies. We were walking down the street and I heard horse hooves on the cobblestones and I assumed it would be mounted police, but no. Both times it was a couple of women about my age or maybe a bit older riding their horses through the street with the reins in one hand and a can of beer in the other. It was my friend who had been to Russia before that told me they were gypsies. I have no idea if it's actually legal to ride your horse through the city center of St. Petersburg. My guess is no.
  • Another highlight of St. Petersburg was our visit to Catherine Palace, the tsars' summer home about 40 minutes outside the city. The palace was insane. It was HUGE, and it's divided into baroque and classical styles, both sections of which are ornate as can be. The famous Amber Room is also there, which was sort of interesting although it was much smaller than I was expecting it to be. Anyway, the palace made me realize why there was the Bolshevik Revolution (seriously, Russian royals, who needs that much effin' gold leaf when everyone else is eating beat soup and freezing to death?!) but it was still pretty stunning. I did have a mildly scary experience at the palace, though. We had gone through the palace with a tour guide, and at the end of the tour she said that she was going to give us twenty minutes to look at the gift shops and then we were going to meet in the lobby. So I looked around the gift shops and about ten minutes before we were supposed to meet up to go to lunch I decided to buy myself an amber ring and buy a gift for my mom. Then there was this whole series of ridiculous events where the cashier didn't want me paying with a credit card so I tried to use my debit card in two different ATMs but couldn't get cash out for some reason so I came back to the store and finally convinced her to just let me pay with the credit card even though she stuck her nose in the air and growled, "This is small charge for credit card," (it was a $45 purchase, I wouldn't exactly call that small, but I guess it's all relative when some of the items in the shop were selling for thousands of dollars). By that time twenty minutes had passed and I was supposed to be back with my group, but here's the thing: I could see them. From where I was standing at the cash register making my purchase, I could see my group about twenty feet away putting their coats on and gathering up their things to go outside. So I knew we were about to leave, but I figured I had a minute to finish my purchase. But I literally looked down to sign my credit card receipt, looked up, and my entire group was gone. Vanished! In the entire nine days we had been in Russia prior to that point nobody had moved that fast the whole damn time, and the one time I need everyone to loiter an extra two minutes they actually decide to leave somewhere on time (seriously, the whole week prior to this we'd pick a meeting time and then actually leave 10-20 minutes after said time). I didn't think it was a big deal, though. The coat room was just around the corner, I figured I'd run over there, grab my coat, then head out into the snowy garden which is where I knew we were going next and catch up to them. Well, yeah. That didn't happen. I grabbed my coat, left the lobby literally a minute after they did, and they had already disappeared down the garden paths! It didn't help that the garden is huge and that every single person in sight was wearing a black coat, so in the big sea of tourists I couldn't possibly tell which group was mine. I briefly thought about just heading into the garden and searching for them, but then I remembered my mom's constant lecture any time we were going somewhere crowded when I was a child, "If you get lost from me, DO NOT TRY TO FIND ME. Stay right where you are and I promise I will come back for you." So that's what I did. I went back into the lobby, figuring that at some point someone would realize I was missing and come back for me. I knew they were going to wander in the garden for a bit and then go to a group lunch, and I figured that if they never noticed I was missing while they toured the garden then when there was an empty space at lunch they'd figure it out. And I figured at the very, very least if somehow they got all the way through lunch without noticing I was gone they would absolutely, definitely notice when they got back on our van to drive back to Petersburg. So I was like, "Okay, just chill. It may take two hours, but someone will realize you're gone and they'll come back." And that's when I realized my wallet was missing! Yes, I lost my entire tour group AND my wallet in a five minute period. So I ran around frantically trying to ask the cashier (who spoke limited English) and the coat check woman (who spoke no English at all whatsoever) if they'd seen my wallet and getting progressively more and more panicked. The only reason I was okay about that was that it was the last day of the trip and I figured I could just go back to the hotel, cancel the credit and debit card in the wallet, and bum a bit of money off of someone just to get me back to the states. So I knew it was going to be okay, but I was like, "What kind of bad karma is this?!" Fortunately, everyone realized within about twenty minutes that I was missing (and I think it only took that long because everyone had sort of split up temporarily to see the garden and it was only when the whole group came back together again that someone thought to do a headcount) and my prof and the tour guide came back for me. I actually felt bad when they came into the lobby because they looked so much more scared than I felt. My prof said, "We were panicked!!" and he gave me a big hug and started trying to hustle me out of the building when I was like, "No, wait, I have a bigger problem. My wallet is missing!" My professor probably thought I was the biggest dingbat in the world at that point, and he said, "What was in it?" and I said, "Just two credit cards and my student ID" and he said, "Oh, that's okay, that's nothing." I'm sure he was thinking, "Good lord, this woman lost her passport and we're supposed to leave in the morning and now I'm going to be stuck in Russia with her until we can figure this out." Fortunately, I know better than to carry my passport in my wallet or purse (I carried my passport, whichever card I wasn't planning to use that day, and my driver's license in a flat fannypack type thing that I hid under my pants). I asked my professor if he could ask the coat check lady if she'd seen the wallet, and he said, "It's useless. It's gone. I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier, to be honest." But amazingly enough, she directed him to the information booth and there was my wallet, just sitting in their window!! I had been carrying it in my hand while we'd been in the palace (since I had to check my coat and backpack in the stupid cloackroom), and I think when I realized my group was missing I got so panicked as I was putting my coat on that I temporarily just forgot to hold onto the wallet since I don't normally carry my wallet in my hand and I just dropped it to the floor or something really flighty like that. So anyway, I was reunited with both my group and my credit cards and now it's just a funny story for everyone else to tell, the time *A* got lost at the Catherine Palace.
  • One final story: on our trip home we had to get up at 3:45 AM, take a van to the St. Petersburg regional airport, fly to a Moscow regional airport, and transfer somehow from that airport to the international airport to catch our flight to New York City. Note that I said "transfer somehow". No one had bothered to figure out how a dozen people and all of our luggage were going to get from one airport to the other. So I watched my Russian professor do the best thing ever. He took out a thousand ruble note, handed it to a van driver, had a brief discussion, and then said, "Hurry, everyone, bring me your things and get on this bus." So we all piled into the van with our stuff. There was another old man already on the bus, along with two women in the back seat who just sat there like statues as we loaded all of our luggage around them. Finally about five minutes into the drive the old man looked at Misha and said, "Did you RENT this? Where is it going?!" Misha explained to him that the bus was going to drive us to the airport but then it would go on ahead to wherever it was originally supposed to go. Basically, it would be like me climbing onto the crosstown bus, handing the driver $30, and saying, "Can you drive me ten blocks downtown first and then come back up here and finish your route? Thanks, buddy." In other words, that would never happen here! But in Moscow the driver was just like, "Yeah, whatever, no big deal." The best moment, though, was when my professor said to no one in particular, "This is very Russian. Don't panic." And we weren't panicking, until he said that! Fortunately, we made it to the airport safely and we made it home safely and the whole trip was a really interesting experience.
  • Russia is probably the hardest place to explain of anywhere I've ever been. It's modern but not, European but not, capitalist but not, gray and dreary but not...it was somehow very much what I expected it to be and not what I expected it to be at the same time, and the feeling I had when I was there was different than the feeling I've had on other trips I've taken, although I still haven't been able to put my finger on what made it feel different. There's a tension there that's impossible to explain, and not even entirely a negative tension. Go, though. It may not be first on your list of places you want to see. I know Russia is maybe not on everyone's dream vacation list, but if the opportunity ever presents itself, go. You'll see some beautiful and interesting things, and you won't regret it.

No comments: