Some things I missed about Russia

1. Grown-ups drink juice boxes. I can buy peach juice in a .5 liter box with a giant straw for about 35¢ and then walk down the street in broad daylight sipping from my straw without getting weird looks.
2. Coat check is abundant and always free, in every museum, bar, restaurant, etc. In places where there is no coat check, there are abundant and strategically placed coat racks. How civilized!
3. The boundless pleasure a person gets from little finds when you have to stop taking every-day things for granted. Today I found a cafe that sells smoothies! Yesterday I was in a supermarket that sold peanut butter! In Russia these things are worth so many more utiles than they’re worth in the states!

Apteka Apptitude

Very shortly after my arrival in Petersburg the task fell upon me of finding a place to buy various toiletry items. Some things I was almost out of (deodorant), some things I just hadn’t wasted luggage space bringing to Russia (shampoo, shower gel), and some things I had, on 2 hours of sleep, abandoned in the bathroom of the Frankfurt International Airport (toothbrush). So I ventured out into my neighborhood in search of a pharmacy, where these types of things can be purchased. (The word for pharmacy in Russian, by the way, is “apteka,” which explains the title of this entry. Learning is fun!)
Pharmacies in Russia are of two stripes. The first, more agreeable, stripe is the modern mini-CVS-type pharmacy, where you can browse the shelves (with a dictionary) and take your selections to the cashier. The second, more prevalent, stripe is the kassa-style pharmacy. I described the hateful kassa system in a previous post last time I was in Russia, but for the uninitiated, the kassa system is a Soviet hold-over in which you go to a counter, tell the person behind the counter exactly what you want, and he or she writes out a check for it. You then go to the cashier and pay for your products, and take the receipt to the first counter, where the first person gives you what you bought. Only insert subsidiary steps 1-10, in which you plow over/are plowed over by the swarming masses of people who are also trying to navigate between the fifteen counters in the store and be always first in line.
Alas, after wandering my neighborhood at some length, a CVS-style pharmacy was not to be had, and I had to go to a kassa-style one. Plaque just doesn’t wait, as it turns out. Fortunately this kassa wasn’t very crowded, but I still had to deal with telling the kassa lady exactly what I wanted. Surprisingly (?), I don’t have an extraordinarily robust vocabulary for dealing with beauty products. So our conversation went something like this:

Me: “Shampoo, please.”
Her: “What kind? Blah blah, blah blah blah, or blah dee blah?”
Me: “Um… I’ll try that one.”
Her: “Blah dee blah?”
Me: “Yeah, the blue one.”

Repeat for shower gel, deodorant, and toothbrush.
I returned home to examine my purchases with a dictionary. I got lucky in the shampoo arena – my hair will now be “luxuriously shiny.” The deodorant also seems to be okay. My other two purchases turned out to be a toothbrush with bristles especially designed for people with braces, and a shower gel made from the extract of something that isn’t in my dictionary, but on the package looks like an orange olive.

Russian Flagship – What I’m up to, who I’m in league with and, for dessert, a nugget of second language pedagogy.

This program is a totally different animal than the one I was on before. The program is funded by the federal government in an effort to promote “global competence” (Washington buzzword alert) in the American workforce. Also, the program has been going for about 5 years, and is still largely regarded as experimental. The methods of teaching Russian at this advanced a level are still a bit doughy, so the task of the teachers and students on this program is not only to speak Russian super great so that the government is satisfied, but also to start to pull together pedagogical guidelines for language study at this level. So that’s a pretty cool project.
Everybody on the program is already at the advanced level, and the goal of the program is to get you to professional or higher by the end of the year. For the language pedagogy enthusiasts who don’t already know this: we’re working on a five-point scale here. 5 is a level that not all native speakers of a language attain – it means constantly being articulate and well-spoken in any context. 4 is essentially fluent – it’s the highest level that most non-native speakers expect to attain. 3 is professional competency, and the level that is required of teachers of Russian in the US and by most employers looking for a bilingual speaker. 2 is advanced, which is where we’re all at now. 2 means that you can communicate in most contexts and understand most of what’s being said to you, but abstraction is hard and speakers at this level tend to use Russian words in English expressions instead of finding the phrase that a Russian would use. So grammatically correct most of the time, and understood most of the time, but still sounding like an outsider. Level 1 is for people who are starting to put sentences together, and level 0 are the ones who are memorizing words and stock phrases. So we’re all at level 2 or 2+ right now (I’m at a very humble 2), and by the end of the program we are all expected to have reached level 3. So far this program has been running for 5 years or so, and 30% of participants have reached level 3, 30% level 3+, and 30% level 4. So.
We spent a few days at orientation in Washington DC (where I saw my beloved EW and we geeked out about Russian literary theory and talked about boys, and, EW, you really should be here, because I don’t think anybody wants to ironically come with me to any of the three (3) cowboy theme bars that are now conveniently located off of Nevskij) and talked about how different this language-learning experience will be from our experiences in the past. At level 2 we can all get by in pretty much any situation and say anything we want to, and the trick now is to start sounding more Russian, which is something that flashcards won’t help with as much. A good example of this: Americans use the word “I” a lot. That doesn’t always mean that we’re selfish – it also means that we take responsibility for stuff. So in English I might say “I missed my bus”. In Russian, you can say “I missed my bus”, and while that’s grammatically correct and everyone will understand you, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb if you don’t say “The bus left without me,” or something to that effect. So that’s the kind of thing we’re trying to learn this year, and the idea is that 18 hours of class each week and daily meetings with individual tutors and living with a host family and joining clubs and having an internship and auditing courses and the main university, all of which activities are required, will get us there. Whew.

Russia Redux – What on earth am I doing here *again*?

For those of my readers with whom I’ve been shamefully inconsistent in staying in touch, an update is in order. In June I graduated from Swarthmore with honors, majoring in Russian language and literature and minoring in political science. Yes, it used to be other way around. But I got back from Russia senior fall refreshed and with an updated outlook on life, and midway through fall semester decided to switch majors. Yes, that produced exactly as much a pain in the buns for me and my professors and advisors and the registrar’s office as you’re thinking it did. But I had a wonderful senior year, in which I made some very close new friends and got closer to the old ones, and generally enjoyed my last year at Swat. Somewhere in all of the confusion of growing up to the point where I am no longer covered by my parents’ health insurance, and my friends have jobs and pay rent, and people I knew from high school get married, and generally the walls of delusion about adulthood that I had so artfully constructed for myself begin to crumble, I decided that my most logical post-college move would be to return to Russia. I spent the summer at the Middlebury Russian school trying to get my Russian up to snuff, and on Friday evening finally arrived in Russia, again in St. Petersburg, with a group called the Russian Flagship.

Back in the Post-Soviet Space

Greetings from the other side of the pond (and then some)!

I’m in Russia again, which means, lucky for you fine folks, another round of excessively long and detailed missives detailing my every move in Russia, punctuated by historical/cultural/linguistic digressions as I see fit, which is often. I’ll be updating this blog as often as I can, hopefully about once a week so the posts don’t get too long (which we all know is all hope on both accounts), and also occasionally posting photos and links and stuff. Should get pretty interesting!

Be sure to leave me lots of comments. I’m lonely and miss English.