Russia, Part VII: Actually, I really want to live in Petersburg

Dearest Fans,
Only in Russia will you find a Buddhist Republic that has claimed itself to be the "International City of Chess." Chess City comes complete with a place where people can get married, several rows of houses, a large museum and this marshmallow-topped structure which I think is the place where people actually play chess. A regular Las Vegas! That was our excursion on Saturday...very tiring (it was a eight hour bus ride round trip), but very interesting.

When we first got to Respublika Kalmykia, we walked around the area and saw various statues, fountains, and gazebos decorated with Buddha and other Buddhist symbols. We walked to a bazaar which was really nothing special and then pretty much everyone got lost so our director, Timothy (pronounced "tim-o-tee" in Russian), spent most of his time running around finding stranded students. After that, we went to the large temple. And by large, I mean gigantic (my English is rather limited now). And red. And there was a huge Buddha in the middle of the temple. And lots of little Buddhas and other gods surrounding it. After exploring the temple, we went to the Museum below. There we met a lady who had been worshipping in the temple; she said to us "Where are you from? You speak Russian so poorly." We told her that we were from America and she then started taking us around to various exhibits in the museum and explaining how Buddhism traveled to that area of Russia. She was so cute!

The lunch wasn't as good as the Kazakh one (mostly because it wasn't free), but much better than the Fish Museum! I'm sooo glad that I'm in an area of Russia where I can escape eating Russian food. :) We had fried bread (vkysno!), pelmeni (kind of like pot stickers), tea with butter in it (why!!!???), and I ordered apples with sour cream. My host dad, Koyla, gave me a weird look when I told him about it, but it was actually really good! It was kind of like apple sauce with semi-sweet sour cream. And come to think of it--that's kind of weird. We went to the chess city and then homeward. Since we got back so late, I had to take a taxi home and my taxi driver asked me "Where are you from? You speak Russian so poorly!" But hey, at least he was nice about it!

On Sunday, I just about to go to the holiday/festival "Day of Fishermen" (Russians have an incredible amount of holidays...) when Valya asked me "Um...where do you think you're going?" I told her that I had to go to the festival because we were assigned to write an essay entitled "My First and Last Day of Fishermen." She then informed me that I was not going to the festival, but to the beach with the family and their friends in order to celebrate the holiday. She told me that it was much better than actually going to the festival. I met (for a second time), her friend Marina, Marina's husband Sasha, and their daughter, Nasten'ka. When I first met Nastenka at the dacha, she immediately grabbed my hand and said "Let's be friends!" So she's my russkaya podruchka. Sasha was really nice and someone must have told him that I was Italian because he kept saying "Mamma Mia!" and during our vodka toasts he said "Chin Chin." (It's an Italian toast). We had shashlik, which is still my favorite food here, and grilled fish, which definitely isn't, and pickles! Gotta get that dill in somehow. Then I went swimming in the Volga with the kids, which was a lot of fun.

Classes are fine, grammar class sucks, and our lectures are simply unbelievable. Yesterday, we had a lecture on tolerance; they wanted to know the "American opinion about immigration." Uh...do you have a few days and perhaps a hospital nearby? It was really funny to listen to my classmates yelling at each other in broken Russian. Today, we continued the lecture on tolerance; they started by asking us to give our opinion about the following hypothetical situation: there is a hypothetical place in European Union (hypothetically France) with a hypothetical group of non indigenous people that are hypothetically 80% of the population...should they (hypothetically) be allowed to secede and form their own state? What?! Have they never heard of a little place called Chechnya? I spent the period looking up how to say "Let them eat cake!" in case our teacher called on me. After that, we had more hypothetical role playing, in which I starred as the "jobless neighbor" who thought that immigrants should only be allowed in "our" country as tourists. We soon found out that the entire lecture was based on the fact that Astrakhan is "multinational" oblast' and yet, everyone lives in complete peace and harmony. Except for feral cats and dogs, that is.

This is for Emily! Today our excursion was to one of the Mosques in the region. We went inside and the most adorable old man started talking to us (about the mosque/religion) in heavily accented English (Arabic accent). Then Timothy told him that he should talk in Russian, so he started talking in heavily accented Russian and translated everything into English. Then Timothy said "no, no, it's okay, they'll understand Russian." So he started speaking in half-Russian, half-English (called Russlish), which went something like "Tак...thirty years назад, когда был Soviet Union, наш..." He told us that he spoke Arabic, Tartar, Russian, English, and German...I wonder if he has the accent in all languages! He was so excited about everything; it was fun to listen to him. After the mosque, we went to to a house across the street and they served us a Tartar afternoon tea, which is quite unlike a British one. British babushkii probably don't offer food three times and after you've denied it, put it on your plate anyway and say EAT EAT EAT! They also don't pack a table so full of food that it's impossible to put your tea down. Since the Imams were eating with us, we had to keep on our scarves and sweaters and there were about thirty of us in a small room without an open window or air conditioning and we were drinking hot tea...whew! I thought I was going to pass out. They all were very kind and hospitable and the food was scrumptious.

Tomorrow we're going to the house museum of an (apparently) world famous author from Astrakhan, Something Something Khlebnikov (he's so famous I've forgotten his name...). I convinced our reading teacher to let us read his poetry instead of the boring biographical text she had planned, so I'm actually excited to learn more about him. I have to recite one of his poems, but when my teacher gave it to me she said "Loudly please, if you speak normally, no one will be able to hear you..." We'll see! I've refused to go on the last excursion this weekend, as it includes camping, so I'm going to have a free weekend again. Ura!

Well, that's all folks.

До next неделя!

Maria

PS: Oh! My subject title! I am really excited at the moment because I found out that we get to go on excursions when we go back to St. Petersburg (I thought there were only 30 days in July, so I didn't realized we would be there for three nights...thus proving, once again, that I am unable to count). I signed up for the Hermitage (the big art museum) and Petergoff (the place where the Czars lived). It'll be awesome!

PPS: Here's a video of a lake we drove through...(I think Astrakhan' will be heavenly once they get a drainage system).