Today's adventures - The lost and the kind - Day 5 in Russia

Today's adventures - The lost and the kind - Day 5 in Russia

This rural girl lost her way in the city today. Did not get lost location-wise, but lost the way to her destination on two occasions. I live furthest away of all the Bard-Smolny students from the university. I left my dom at 09:15, a time that was supposed to be early enough for me to have a margin of error. I got to Smolny at nearly 12:00, and we were meant to meet there at 10:45 (even I was not the last arrival!). First I seem to have taken the wrong bus from my street. It came to the end of the line much earlier than expected and then I had to take another that ran for a very, very long time. When I finally reached ploschad' Truda I wandered around confused for something on the order of a half hour, not recalling the path our group took yesterday. I had the correct street but the wrong side of the intersection. A man on the street asked to where I was trying to go when he saw me looking at my piece of paper and at the numbers on the buildings, so I told him and tried to follow his directions but ended up confused again back at the ploschad'. The same thing happened when I approached a man at a gate for help. I had forgotten that the underground crosswalk here goes multiple directions below the entire ploschad', not just underneath one street. This intersection confused other people too. Two separate Russian women asked me for directions. One asked how to get to a building that was not familiar to me and I simply told her that I did not know. The other was in the same situation as me, trying to figure out whether the street in question actually continued on the other side of the intersection and how to get there. I told her that I did not know and also wanted to find out. Yesterday the Program manager told me to expect people to approach me for directions since I blend in with the locals when I am on my own, and it was funny that it happened so soon. I think I would have finally figured out how to cross the street within the next 10 minutes but, to be sure that I did not end up even later, I called the Assistant Program Manager to tell her I was lost. The only problem is that the mobile phone is very quiet and I have always struggled to hear people on the telephone, even more than in person. So she began texting me since I could not hear her. She texted me in English but I had not yet figured out how to text in English, so had to figure out what say in Russian: I see a yellow arch, now I see Galernaya st. building thirty two (I had to also write out the numbers because I did not know how to enter digits). The very first things out of her mouth when I arrived were that everything would be okay and, "Did you cry?" (no, I did not, and she thought that was good). She will look at the phone with me tomorrow and see if they have another one that would be easier to hear on. I hope to buy a SIM card for my own phone soon because it might be easier to use, both for hearing and for writing messages. A drawback is that the cold does cause it to malfunction.

The public bus attendants on the four buses I took today (it should have been only two total today) were all women and were all kind. When my first bus this morning came to the end of the line the attendant told me more than once that this was the end, so I need to get off, but also helped me find the next bus stop where I could pick up another bus line. The second incident today was me getting on a bus on the way home that was not going to either of the stops near my dom. The static signs and digital signs indicating the bus numbers and routes and the route tags on the buses seem to have some disagreement with each other. The attendant looked sad that I had paid for the wrong bus and very diligently did her best as I went several stops on her bus to explain to me which number bus to take and from where I could take it. I disembarked and waited for the correct number bus. This time as I got on the attendant was close enough that I could speak to her right away. I asked if I could get to such-and-such street. She was not sure what it was, so I said the name of the street next to it and she said yes. I remained standing, partly because I was feeling tense, but after a few stops she came and insisted that I sit, so I did. When we got to the stop before mine I was not sure whether mine was next. The attendant came and told me without me asking that the next stop was mine, not this one, something that helped my nerves. As I walked down the street with the bus stops to my street I began to shiver for the first time here. I felt very tired and very hungry. It was already dinnertime when I got back because I walked around longer than expected with some of the group after lunch and then had trouble with the buses.

This morning we had our preliminary Russian placement test. There were some words on it I did not know and others the forms of which I was not sure how to choose from. Others in the group are much more fluent than I am, especially, understandably, the heritage speakers. I am trying to remember when I feel inferior that I am not stupid and that I simply have more to learn. We all had lunch with the Russian as a Second Language instructors and the program managers and we conversed almost entirely in Russian. The academic advisor for Bard-Smolny students thought it was funny when one of us four Bard students in the group said that Bard campus is in the woods and I interjected that Bard was not located in the woods, that if anything I live in the woods but Bard is not in the woods! Tomorrow the two-week language intensive starts. I am nervous. I want to learn as much as possible while I am here.

I will be so tired tomorrow. I meant to go to bed earlier tonight but also meant to be back here several hours earlier. Maybe tomorrow?

Orange jam is NOT marmalade

My host mom: "Twenty years old and never had orange jam before!?"

On my 4th day in Russia, 27 Jan 2019

On my 4th day in Russia, 27 Jan 2019


After lunch with the group I split off on my own to witness more of the 75th anniversary commemoration of the lifting of the 872 day Leningrad Blockade (872, а не "900 дней и ночей"!) on the "Road of Life". I watched the performance of songs and poetry recitation by young people from Youth Patriotic Action "Muse of the Blockade" and the Committee on Youth Policy and Interaction with Public Organizations, saw part of a prerecorded video interview, looked at posters and newspapers from the time of the blockade, walked along a chronicle of the siege, and read heartbreaking personal stories of children of the blockade on a wall of memory arranged for the occasion. After wandering around the city center for a while, I used my pocket atlas of the city and the sight of the church across the street from me in order to find my path back to Gostinyj dvor metro station. This proved to be less difficult than I had imagined. My trip to Poland in 2016 flying all by myself, my bus trip to Boston last summer, my visit to Brighton Beach over spring break and my exercise of intentionally getting myself lost in Kingston once I finally obtained my driver license seem to have been a perfect course of preparation for this adventure in Russia. I walked alongside the Fontanka (and, yes, briefly, on the Fontanka, where many people were walking and a memorial of flowers was placed). My toes finally began to feel the chill of the perhaps -12 degree weather (positive 10 degrees or so for Fahrenheit) through my two pairs of socks and my excellent boots as I tramped on in my long coat, knee legwarmers, hat and earmuff, and thin gloves plus thick gloves, with a ruby-purple scarf wrapped around my head. Slipped I have, but not fallen yet. My boots are wide soled and lend me stability. The weather here really seems not much different from what we have in some New York State winters. I recommend that you find a below-ground crosswalk or a metro station entrance if your fingers begin to ache; the warmth brings relief with surprising quickness. City life has never been my life, and cities have usually provoked some claustrophobia in me. But here I love seeing the buildings. They have beautiful colors and there are no skyscrapers severing you from the vast dome of the world. I felt perfectly comfortable setting out on my own as the rest of the group left the restaurant together. The Petersburg metro at first pass strikes me as much more pleasant and easily usable than the New York subway system. For a brief moment concern struck me on the metro escalator when I saw only one zheton (metro token) in my hand and thought, "But I bought two! What happened?!" . . . but then came the hilarious realization: "Oh, I used one to enter the metro in the first place, of course!" In honesty, there being no expectation of a smile or interaction with strangers whom you encounter on the street feels so much more natural to me (the others have mentioned how hard it is not to keep smiling automatically - not a problem for me, you see!). And, knowing that crowding each other is expected, I really do not mind it. There is less hesitation surrounding one's every move. Keep all important possessions in internal pockets or clearly in your sight and you should be fine. Up on the streets adults tow small children on sledges. The sidewalks are busy and slippery, yet people rarely walk into one another. There is a true advantage here this time of year for those who love the sunrise but struggle to rise early enough to see it - the sun does not rise so early. The sunlight throughout the day is fresh and gentle, remaining so similar to the light of dawn and dusk. It is beautiful.

Upon returning to my host dom I succeeded in requesting an additional blanket for the bed. My room is somewhat cold at 16 to 18 degrees (60 to 65 Fahrenheit), not unlike my room in the States. There are many everyday vocabulary words as of yet unknown to me, but for certain I will improve, and for certain I will feel very frustrated with myself. What may seem most ironic to some is the fact that, aside from not being able to converse very well in Russian at the moment, I feel more at home among the Russians so far than among the others from the United States. One of the cultural notes given us was that Americans tend to stick out in groups in Russia because they are very loud. I find it strange and grating when some of the others start speaking with excessive volume. Even to me they can seem like "loud Americans". At least two of us are usually quiet ones (we also seem to be the main science nerds of the group). At the hotel some of us discussed our nervousness about moving in with host families and struggling with the language. It seems to me that the type of uneasiness they described matches my usual experience almost anywhere at any time. In a way my excessive baseline anxiety may turn out to make all of this easier for me than for them. Whether I have ever experienced jet lag before I do not know. Since arriving here I have slept without major complaint, felt tired throughout the day but not become too sleepy before nighttime, and gotten up in the morning without issue. I have gone to bed between midnight and 1:00 in the morning each night since arriving (I will need to start getting to sleep a bit earlier moving forward). Perhaps my extraordinary sleep schedule at home this month before my departure mitigated potential difficulties of the transition. I was staying up until 3:00-4:00 in the morning regularly. Then I had only one and a half hours of sleep the night prior to my flight and not more than one hour of sleep on the airplane.

Ate dinner a while ago, and now preparing for tomorrow. I shall take the bus for the first time in the morning with my new rubles in hand.

Pictures and video to follow at a later time.

Nothing quite in this way of being abroad with fellow citizens reinforces how little I belong among my own countrymates.

A doctor is having me tested for markers of lupus. I officially now belong on an episode of House, M.D. 😂😄🙃

P.S. If you never really watched that series, it might be hard to understand what makes this so funny. I shall try to explain anyhow (be warned, I make lots of other comments too):

Part of the issue is that when you are trying to find a causal disease for symptoms, a lot of things can resemble lupus, making differential diagnosis difficult. Lupus is sort of a syndromic disease that can have a varying assortment of signs and symptoms. It is often diagnosed upon ruling out other possible diseases (So how many do you then need to rule out? The process of elimination is a daunting task and a problem faced in the diagnosis of many other conditions too. The existence of high overlap in symptomatic or marker profiles, along with a slew of variables, paints a picture in which the question of whether a particular disease even exists or several diseases are truly distinct becomes nearly impossible to answer.). Many of the patients on the show had illnesses that proved challenging to diagnose and/or treat. Many episodes for a streak included references to the possibility of lupus, so much that it became an amusing catchphrase. -- Lupus is almost always on the table diagnostically because of the range of symptoms associated with it. The flip side of that: It is also almost always off the table because it can resemble so many other diseases (or, at least, many other collections of signs and symptoms bearing diagnostic labels). -- So, most of the time on the show, the response to the suggestion of lupus was something along the lines of a sardonic "Really, are you kidding me?" And then in one case the final diagnosis really was lupus and the whole discussion was hilarious. The disease itself is not hilarious, but the rigmarole surrounding it and the diagnosis of many others can be.

EDIT, 23 Jan 2019. The results came back negative, of course!