do svidaniya, mama!

While I’ve loved living and working in Tula this year and have enjoyed being only a couple of hours away from Moscow, I have sometimes been envious of the ETA’s that were sent off to remote, exotic locations in the Far East.  When I found out about the opportunity that Fulbright offers ETA’s to work at English ACCESS Summer Camps in different cities around Russia, I saw it as my chance to experience a new part of Russia.  Having always wanted to visit Siberia and see Lake Baikal, I chose to volunteer at a camp in Ulan Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia. The map below shows how far I traveled from Tula.

Getting there: All in all, my trip took about 32 hours from start to finish.  On Saturday, I hopped on a morning elektrichka to Moscow and then headed to good, old Domodedovo Airport for my overnight flight to Irkutsk.  I left at 7:30 PM and arrived at about 7 AM even though the flight was only about 5 hours.  Landing was a little scarier than usual because the airport isn’t as isolated from other buildings as they usually are.  But everything turned out okay in the end.  From the airport, I jumped in a marshrutka to the train station and checked out the city from the window on the way.  I didn’t have time to explore the city while I was waited for my train, but I’ll get to see it again when I stop in on my way back from Ulan Ude.  I lucked out with train mates to Ulan Ude and wound up sharing a kupei with three women, who watched out for me during the seven hour ride.  One of them even insisted on setting up my bed for me (I didn’t object – Russians always do a better job than me anyhow). 

After saying goodbye to my trainmoms, I was met by Olga, the Ulan Ude’s ACCESS group’s teacher, who led me to the dormitory, where I am staying at Buryatskyi State University. 

In general, the dorm is simple, but cozy and it’s got everything that I need.  Plus, the fire alarm is MUCH less annoying here and the lobby guards are incredibly friendly.  Our region didn’t have hot water for the first four or five days I was here because of various repairs and construction in the area, but I managed. 

Working at the ACCESS camp has been really relaxed and fun for me so far.  It’s held at a local school about 20 minutes away from my dorm by marshrutka or avtobus. On the first day there was a cute opening ceremony, where the groups sang songs (“Yesterday,” “Listen to Your Heart”) and gave presentations introducing themselves.  

There are two groups of about twelve kids from ages 14-16 years old and they have various activities and classes from 9 AM to 3:30 PM each day.  I only have to lead about one 45-minute activity or lesson a day and they’re usually just fun topics anyway like making paper fortune tellers or learning English songs with the ukulele. The rest of the time I just get to hang out with the groups, play games, and help set up the tables at the “canteen.” The time goes by pretty fast because we get breaks three times a day for breakfast, lunch, and tea.

In the evenings after camp, I am free to walk around the city and do whatever I want, so I’ve been trying my best to do some exploring.  Some of the places that I’ve seen so far include:

Arbat: Ulan Ude has its own pedestrian street that they call Ulan Ude’s Arbat.  Minus the Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts, I could see the similarities…

Museum of Natural History in Buryatia, where they had lots of stuffed animal displays representing the various wildlife around Buryatia. There were a bunch of strange deer species that I’d never seen or heard of before; one was gigantic and another had fangs!

Museum of History of Ulan Ude – This museum actually used to be the home of rich merchants, but now it’s rooms are filled with nice illustrations telling about the major historical events in Ulan Ude, a cool reconstruction of an old merchant’s stand at the market, national costumes that you can pay to take pictures in, and information on the Ivolginskyi Datsan.  As I was about to leave, the ticket lady came up to me and asked if I’d already seen the exhibition behind the curtains, which I hadn’t even noticed.  She then thrust a flashlight at me and told me to have a look.  It turned out to be a modern art exhibition of paintings that you had to look at with a flashlight in the dark! The flashlight gave some of the paintings a kind of holographic effect and it was really neat.  When I returned the flashlight, the ticket lady invited me to come back to one of their summer events, which included lessons in Tango and African drum playing!

Kalashnikov monument – This past Saturday after camp, I attended a ceremony celebrating the new monument to Kalashnikov, a famous author in Buryatia of a book about the Genghis Khan, which was built right outside of the school where the ACCESS camp is held.

All sorts of characters made it out for the big event including the mayor, Kalashnikov’s widow, some Old Believers, and young Russian girls with big bows. 

Ethnographic Museum – After the Kalashnikov statue celebration, a couple of my students and one of their mothers took me to the open-air Ethnographic Museum. 

It felt more like walking around a park than a museum because almost all of the exhibitions are outside. 

As you walk around you can see different types of houses that the different peoples of Buryatia have lived in.

The middle area is for sacrifices and shamanic rituals.

Stairs.

You were even allowed to touch them (or at least we didn’t see anything/one stopping us from doing it).  There was also a little zoo with camels (with two humps!), tigers, and bears (oh my). 

There was also an old Orthodox church.

I give this museum 5 gold stars. 

Around the datsan  - After walking around the ethnographic museum, we were a little hungry, so we headed to a datsan (a Buddhist monastery), where they made their own buuzi.  Buuzi are a national Buryati food that are similar to pelmeni/khinkali/potstickers. 

Lyuda’s mother compared them to yurts because of their shape and said that when you take a bite, you create the door.  Eating buuzi is also an interesting experience because once you take a bite, you have to first drink the meat juice so that it doesn’t leak out all over you. It sounds a little strange, but it was delicious. After our buuzi, we went to look around the souvenir shop and I wound up leaving with a new ring, necklace, and incense (apparently, if Russians ask you if you like something, you should say yes only if you want them to buy it for you). By the time we were done, the datsan had closed for the day, so we decided that we would come back another time. 

Overall, I’ve gotten a really great impression of Ulan Ude over this first week.  Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s summer, but the people somehow seem a little happier and more open here.  The dorm guards always smile and ask me how I’m doing, the people that work at the stores seem less grumpy, and I’ve never even been asked for exact change!

The nature here is beautiful as well with the Uda River and the mountains in the background of everything.

Now I’ve got a couple of days off for “Russia Day” (which is one of those holidays that’s there mostly just for the sake of there being a holiday), so I won’t have to go to camp until Wednesday.  My students have invited me to go roller skating, to a theme park, and general strolling over the holidays though, so looks like I’ll still be busy!

Tula in May was fantastic.  After a long winter, the city suddenly woke up from its hibernation one day and began to make up for all the hours of sunlight that it missed.  Suddenly everyone is walking around with ice cream in shorts with pukh, feathery poplar spurs, flying around everywhere. While I’m working at an English ACCESS camp at a school in Ulan Ude right now, I wanted to sum up the rest of the happenin’s in May before it gets too late (though Siberian stories are coming!)…

On one of the first days after I returned from Sweden, I was planning out a lesson for a new group of students when I heard a familiar knock on my door from my only permanent neighbor on the hotel floor, Oleg.  Casually dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he said that he was going to the park and was I going? I decided that lesson planning could wait and said sure.  While Oleg speaks English pretty well, he often chooses words that are more complicated then they need to be.  So when he told me that he was going to get “insulation,” I didn’t quite understand.  Then, he asked if I had a “plavka,” meaning swimsuit.  I only knew of the word “kupal’nik” for swimsuit, but I’d never heard this one before (in my defense, I later found out that a plavka is more of a man’s bathing suit aka a speedo). So he just laughed looking at my dress and knee-length leggings and said oh well, you’ll just have interesting insulation marks.  As you may have guessed by now, when we arrived at the big pond in the park, I discovered that we were going to sunbathe. 

And sunbathe we did. For FOUR hours. Unexpected, but not unpleasant. 

It was a gorgeous day and we had some deep conversations about life, youth, and the “Russian soul.” I did indeed get some strange “insulation marks” though.

Not too long after that, I went on another unexpected outing to the village with my friend, Sofia.  She invited me to meet her at the mall to go shopping for birthday present for her sister and when we met, she proposed that we go back to her home in Dubna and stay there for the night. I haven’t had many opportunities to visit the smaller towns outside of the city, so I was excited to go, though again a bit unprepared, having thought we would just be going shopping. 

We arrived in the evening and Sofia’s lovely family proceeded to stuff me with a full dinner, candy, locally produced tvorog and milk, and champagne.  Before going to bed, Sofia and I watched the Disney Channel, which I don’t think I have watched since I was in middle school.  I found out that they have a show now (or at least on Russian Disney) with Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence as parents and I got a little nostalgic.  The following morning we went to the local market and bought Sofia a new dress.  I could sense the size of the town as we walked around; Sofia seemed to know every other person that we passed by. 

Before lunch (shashlik!), Sofia and I walked to the forest to fetch a jug of fresh water (I felt like Jack and Jill) and so that I could go into the “nature” in Dubna. 

On the way back, we saw a baby horse running wild, playing with a plastic bag and I got excited.

The weekend before my final week of classes I also received a special visit from Sara, the Fulbright ETA in Kolomna, another city fairly close to Moscow (and Tula).  While I took her to most of the regular, obligatory attractions that I always show my visitors to Tula (Kremlin, Yasnaya Polyana, Central Park), we also went to a couple of new places.  We visited the train station near Yasnaya Polyana, Kozlova Zaseka, which is really charming with its old-fashioned street lamps and well.  The nature is pretty there as well and my friends excitedly encouraged us to walk around barefoot on the grass (scandalous!).  The next day after Sara and I took a tour of Yasnaya Polyana, my friends also drove us to a big pond, where we had a picnic with homemade blinyi, yum yum!

During my last week of classes, I also met a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant from Tula who had just returned from teaching Russian at a university in Fairfield, Connecticut.  It was fun to compare our experiences since we had basically the same job and situation in different places.  There were some interesting differences though since there are Fulbrighters from all over the world in the states.  Because of that, their Fulbright conferences were usually very international in comparison with ours, which always felt like trips to Little America.

At the end of my last week of classes before my trip to Siberia, I had to say goodbye to my host contact, Sergey Aleksandrovich, who would be in London (I think? Or somewhere far away – he’s always traveling!) when I get back.  On the day before I left, we met with the rector so I could receive an award for my “creative teaching methods” and I brought the international relations office some final brownies before saying goodbye. Sergei told me that he would be in Washington D.C. this fall for a conference, however, so if all goes well, we should be seeing each other again soon! Stay tune for an update from Ulan Ude in the next couple of days!

Because of the Victory Day holidays which fell right after my parents’ visit, I ended up having no classes to teach during the time that my parents were planning on going to Sweden for my father’s business trip.  My mother and I stumbled upon this fact while Skyping a couple of weeks before they came and before I knew it, I had a ticket to go with them! I’ve always really wanted to go to a Scandinavian country and getting back into EU territory for a little while sounded like paradise, so I was extremely excited to go.  I was not disappointed.

Here are a few of my favorite things about Sweden based on the four days that I spent there:

Lots of bikes – We spent some time in three different cities and no matter how big or small, all of them had bike paths woven throughout.

Lots of recycling – After living in Russia for nine months where recycling services are hard to come by (I’ve seen two bins in all of Tula), I was happy to see recycling bins along all the streets. 

The one pictured above even separated colored glass from clear glass.

Cool museums – The museum that I most wanted to see was Junibäcken in Stockholm, which was dedicated to the stories of Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking. 

The first and last rooms served as play spaces for children (and children at heart) inspired by Lindgren’s stories and in between was an “it’s a small world”-style ride through Lindgren’s world. 

I was a little too big for most of the play areas, but I managed to squeeze myself into a few places. 

It was neat to learn about some of the other stories that Lindgren wrote besides Pippi Longstocking. I was a major Pippi fan growing up and dressed up as her, wire-woven pigtails and all, for Halloween for about five years in a row in elementary school.  Nevertheless, I had never really heard about any of her other stories until I found out from my students this year that Lindgren’s story about Karlsson, a stout man that can fly, is the most popular one in Russia because there was an old Soviet cartoon made about him. The Swedes, of course, are familiar with even more of her stories. 

The second museum that we visited in Stockholm was the Vasa Museum, which is built around a giant recovered sunken ship from the seventeenth century.  The museum itself is huge with six levels displaying not only the ship, but everything found inside of it including everything from chamber pots to skeletons. 

There was so much to see that Mom and I had to take a meatball break in the museum’s cafe to get through it all.

The last cool museum that we visited was the Prison Museum in Gävle, a small town where we visited a former exchange student.  You can walk around the two museum buildings, which were used as prisons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

Both have very entertaining audio guides and interesting exhibitions, but the prison from the seventeenth century was my favorite.  It was half-museum-half-haunted-house with the random creaks and door slams that echo through the building as you walk through it.

And it had a free bathroom. For some reason, that was the only thing that really frustrated me in Sweden – the lack of free public bathrooms.  Even at McDonalds, I had to pay to pee.

Language – Swedish, as it turns out, is one of the cutest languages ever (next to maybe Estonian).  It’s kind of like Adorable German.  For example…

flingor

plopp

slutstation (I guess you might not call this one “cute,” but amusing nevertheless)

I also loved that the typical way of saying “hello” is “hej” (hey).  It made me feel like everyone that I spoke with was already my friend, even if they were just the person selling my train ticket.

Subway art – My parents read somewhere that Stockholm’s subway was said to be one of the longest art galleries in the world because it is decorated with so much art.  Mom and I checked out one of the stops on my last day in Stockholm and it was pretty awesome.

Unique Benches – In general, Swedish design seems to be pretty stellar from their architecture to their fashion.  My parents and I were really impressed with their weird benches though.

Hotels – While the hotel that we stayed at in Västeros was lovely with its fancy breakfast buffet and sauna with a view overlooking the city, the hotels that stuck in my mind most were ones that we saw only from afar.  In Västeros, there was a tree house hotel…

… and an underwater hotel (the red dot in the distance).

Swedes – One evening we had a really nice dinner with one of my dad’s Swedish coworkers and his wife at their home in Västeras.  They were really sweet and it was really fun to hear them talk about Swedish history, taxes, and Eurovision. They also introduced us to a typical Swedish dessert called the marang-suisse (had to look it up to be sure, but that’s the one) made of meringue, bananas, vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup, and berries all mixed together – simple, but delicious! We also went to Gavle (where the prison museum was located) to spend some time with Anna, a previous exchange student in our area.

She showed us around her beautiful Hogwarts-like school and took us to a café where I enjoyed a huge green salad (without even a speck of mayonnaise!). 

She also told us a little more about this guy.

The city is apparently known for this dog-like, goat animal that they build every year out of straw around Christmas (but apparently it always gets burned down by some hooligan). According to my wikipedia search, apparently, the real thing looks like this.

Overall, I got a great impression of Sweden from the time I spent there and it was the perfect place to escape to re-energize before finishing up my last month in Tula, which is now coming to a close. More on the remaining fun-filled May adventures soon!

So after a crazy week at Eurofest in St. Petersburg, I got in to Tula by train around 5:30 in the morning, taught two classes at the university, and then got right back on an elektrichka (a smaller train that goes to local destinations) and headed out to Moscow to embark on a new adventure. After years of talking about it, my parents were finally making the trip out to visit me in Russia.  Luckily, everything with their arrival went pretty smoothly everyone made it to Russia in one piece.  Their two stuffed suitcases were a little challenging to get through the metro, but being a girl, who under no circumstances should ever be caught lifting heavy things, I managed to score some help from a random male citizen.  Mother was highly amused.

We killed some time before our train eating lunch at MuMu, a cafeteria-style Russian chain restaurant with complimentary condensed milk candies, hitting up a nice bench in the park (jet lag hit my parents pretty hard there), and meeting quickly with Stas, a friend of the family that we knew from when he was studying in NC as a high school exchange student. Then we bid farewell to Moscow for a few days and headed to Tula for a taste of “real Russia.”

Because they came to Tula as tourists rather than as guests of the university, they weren’t allowed to stay with me at the dorm/hotel, so they stayed at the “Grand Hotel” just down the street from me.  I think it must be pretty new because most of the people I talked to here had no idea that it existed.  To my relief, it turned out to be lovely and they even brought happy breakfasts to their room. 

Unfortunately, those breakfasts did not come with coffee, so most of our days began with a trip to the McDonalds down the street for McCafe coffee.  For the three days that they were there, we did a lot of walking as I attempted to show them all the main points of interest in Tula. Along the way, we visited:

– our main street, Prospekt Lenina

- our main squares, Revolution Square

… and Lenin Square

– the Kremlin

– the Samovar Museum

– Yasnaya Polyana: On Tuesday, we took a bus to Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana. 

Even though it’s another ten- or fifteen-minute walk probably down to the actual entrance after you get off the bus, a Russian girl managed to make the entire trek in high heels.  Mother again was highly amused. 

Yasnaya was beautiful as always.  While I’ve been there a number of times during all different times of the year, it never loses its charm.

After walking around and paying our respects at Tolstoy’s grave, we stumbled upon some guys grilling and selling shashlik outside the entrance and did lunch there. 

– Central Park: We also did some strolling around the central park, which is probably my favorite place here. 

We wound up eating at an outdoor café there where I’d never eaten before, but it turned out pretty good. 

We enjoyed our blinyi, solyanka, and okroshka while listening to “live” music (… minus real instruments. Basically, it was just someone hired to sing karaoke.  For some reason, they do that a lot here.).

Other things that my mother was amused by in “real” Russia included: the way girls link arms when they’re walking, 32-card decks, clay animal whistles in which you have to blow through the tail, men’s fashion, and making the bus conductors uncomfortable by smiling at them (One of them responded with a kind of twitching at the corners of her mouth and Mom considered it a victory.).  Father, on the other hand, got a kick out of seeing an advertisement for his company, ABB, on the side of a bus.

And before we knew it, it was Thursday and time to head back to Moscow for a few days.

The first thing we did after getting settled in our hotel was head to the Kremlin to try and see St. Basil’s and Lenin’s waxy bod.  Unfortunately, being that we were there from May 3-5, Red Square was closed due to preparations for Victory Day, a gigantic celebration of the Russian victory in WWII.  Nevertheless, we peeked through the gates and waved to St. Basil’s from afar. 

Other ways we occupied ourselves included:

- exploringOld Arbat

- Honey Fair: I had heard about this from a friend somewhere along the lines and so when I saw a poster advertising it in the metro, I was determined to go. 

They had free buses from the metro and signs everywhere so it was surprisingly painless to get there.  And it was totally worth the trip.  They had different types of honey from all over Russia – I didn’t even know that there were so many different varieties!  We sampled so many types of honey by the time we’d made our rounds that we were a bit honeyed out at the end.

While we didn’t end up buying any actual honey, I did get some medovukha (honey wine) to bring back for myself.

- the Moscow River

- Souvenir shopping at Izmailovskiy

- Museum of Modern Art: I had been to the outside of this museum before (which is pretty cool in itself), but never been inside, so I didn’t really know what to expect.  I’m no art expert and I don’t visit art museums very often, but this turned out to be one of the coolest ones that I have ever been in. 

There were rooms with video projections, a dark room with pillow-covered floor, a room filled with stacks of bottles filled with different fabrics.  I was highly impressed.

- Georgian food: I headed back to a café that I had been to with the other Russian Fulbrighters, and we tried khachapuri (cheese bread) and khinkali (Georgian dumplings). 

- Stas & Friends: On our last night in Moscow, we met up again with our friend Stas for drinks near the center and he introduced us to several of his friends.  The pictures speak for themselves.

It was a fun night.

Getting my parents to the airport the next morning was a bit of an adventure.  Our hotel turned out to be at the complete opposite side of the city from the airport from which they were departing, but since we had so much trouble getting through the metro with our luggage on their arrival, we decided to take a taxi.  As luck would have it, there was a huge accident on our way (a pretty bad one too.. the car was so scorched, poking it would probably have reduced it to a pile of ash), so the trip ended up taking way longer than any of us had expected. The cab driver scolded me a little for not anticipating the traffic (which, to be quite I honest, I deserved), but assured me that he had had dropped off passengers before who were much later than we were and they still made it onto their flights (I’m not sure how exactly he found that out, but it made me feel better anyway). In the end, he was right though and they made it onto their flight in time.

After seeing off my parents, I went all the way back to the other airport at the other side of the city and got ready for my flight to Sweden, where I would join my parents again for another five days of fun. More on that to come!

Last year when I applied for the Fulbright scholarship, I proposed a side project to jumpstart an Odyssey of the Mind program, an international creative problem-solving competition with which I’ve been heavily involved, in the city where I was placed. While writing my project proposal, I discovered that by some strange stroke of luck (or perhaps fate), the Odyssey of the Mind Eurofest 2012 would be held in St. Petersburg, Russia.  At that point, I was determined that if I received the grant, I would find a way to go.  Last week, nearly a full year later, that idea became reality.

First of all, if you don’t know what Odyssey of the Mind is, take a minute to look around their website here – (it’s an amazing program and I encourage everyone to get involved). Originally thinking that I lacked experience as a competition judge, I had applied to be an official volunteer rather than a judge.  Nevertheless, by another stroke of luck, on the evening of the first night, I was notified that there were a couple of open spots in the judging team and that, if I wanted ins, I could have one of them.  And just like that, I became a style judge for the classical problem (my third stroke of luck), the one that I was most familiar with, having attempted to solve it with my “team” (thought it turned out to be more of a class, I suppose) back in Tula.

While I’ve participated in Odyssey in the United States since I was in the fourth grade, Eurofest was unique to any competition that I’d ever been to before.  First of all, since Eurofest is always held in a European city, Americans (as the name would suggest) are in the minority and there is a much more balanced representation of participating countries.  While the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals competition always attracts a vast number of international teams, it always takes place in the States and, therefore, is mostly dominated by Americans.  At Eurofest, however, you are almost always guaranteed to be in a room with someone from a different country.  This year’s Eurofest, for instance, brought in teams and officials from Russia, Poland, Belarus, Switzerland, USA, Moldova, India, and Germany among others. 

Second, there is less emphasis on the long-term and spontaneous components of the tournament and more on a unique aspect of the festival, the Mix problem.  At the beginning of the weeklong competition, each team is assigned to work with two other teams from different countries in solving the “mix problem,” which is the same for all the teams.  This year, for instance, the problem (or criteria for their eight-minute skit) was to tell the story of a town that creates a “New Patron” (or monument guard) to replace the “Old Patron,” who has grown obsolete.  The team also had to show the New Patron protecting itself somehow from vandalism and honor it with some kind of celebration (most teams put together some kind of dance number). Each group of teams then has the first three days of competition to create their solution to present at a given time on the last day of competition (Thursday).  For many of the kids, it is their first opportunity to truly interact with people from different countries and they must learn to overcome obstacles such as language barriers and cultural differences while working together to showcase their unique mixture of talents and creativity.  Suffice it to say, watching the results on Thursday was nothing short of amazing.

For me personally, however, the week at Eurofest was special because of the fantastic group of people that I got to meet.  Just as our group of Russian Fulbrighters naturally became very close due to our somewhat unique shared passion for Russia, the group of officials at Eurofest clicked because of a unique passion for Odyssey and creativity. While most of the judges had met one another before at previous Eurofests or national competitions, I came to Petersburg knowing no one.  Everyone was so incredibly friendly and welcoming, however, that this was never a problem.  Even the policeman who was called to our room by the grumpy floor monitor lady on the first night couldn’t resist smiling with these charmers.

What’s more it was fascinating to hear about how each of them had become involved with Odyssey in their own ways - some had started out as team members, others as coaches, and one had even started by volunteering to be a security guard at a local tournament.  In OotM, the word “spirit” gets thrown around a lot (spirit of the problem, team spirit, spirit of creativity, etc.).  After Eurofest in St. Petersburg, I once again found myself grasping for this word to describe magical sensations that I felt there.  No matter how diverse the personalities and cultures, everyone seemed to be intoxicated by the same lively spirit (and not just because of the organization’s seemingly limitless collection of champagne bottles).  I think that shared international spirit of excitement, inspiration, and creativity is a big part of what made the festival so remarkable for those involved and I couldn’t be more grateful have been granted the opportunity to be possessed by it as well.