I'm sorry I write so much.

I think I successfully avoided my host mother, I just hope no one saw me on the street. At this point I think I’m being overly neurotic. And feel like dying. I still have homework to do.

Update: host mother came home, appears as if she suspects nothing. My defense is that I’m very, very tired.

I’ve already watched 2 movies today. I keep watching the same movies over and over again, but I think I’m okay with that. Speaking of which, I love You’ve Got Mail. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen it, but it’s simply fabulous. It reinforces my love for so many things. New York, fall, books, coffee. I love everything about this movie-the cast, the soundtrack, the colors, everything-from Meg Ryan’s haircut to the twinkle lights in the windows. AH. I’m sorry, I sound ridiculous.

I love snow, the color yellow, down comforters, twinkle lights, pumpkins, autumn, that crisp smell when it starts to get cool, sweaters, skirts, early mornings, window displays, reading the paper, email, coffee shops, books, book stores, suits, taxi cabs, scarves, park benches, flowers, long coats, literature, tea, New York, being able to sit alone in a coffee shop and read, boats, comfy chairs, mystery, grocery shopping, pictures, springtime, lunch dates, soup, fruit, hardwood floors, streetlamps, umbrellas, a cold and rainy day every once in awhile, white button-downs, friends, coffee mugs, sunshine, bikes, the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”…all can be found in You’ve Got Mail. Sorry, that was unreasonably long and unnecessary, I just felt the need to share that.

I just about had a heart attack. I hear snippets of phone conversations, and don’t completely know what’s going on. So, my host father is supposedly coming home soon (he works somewhere in the taiga from April until November). Interestingly enough, no one’s really sure when he’s supposed to be back. At first my host mother said the beginning of November. Then like, 2 weeks ago she warned me that he’d be coming…sometime. It’s almost the end of November and he’s still not here. I actually think this is somewhat of a problem, I heard my host mother calling a bunch of people trying to find out where he is. I think she was crying too. I could imagine that that would be stressful, not knowing what’s going on with your husband, when he’s coming home, or if he’s okay. And since she freaks out and worries 15 times more than regular human beings, this has to be pretty intense anxiety. Anyway so the point of this (before the tangent) is that I hear snippets of phone conversations and the host father could be coming home soon. Well, earlier in the evening I hear my host mother yelling at someone on the phone because she’s been expecting them for something. Then I hear her tell Nadya “He’ll be here in 15 mins.” Note, this is at 10:30 at night. So I start freaking out because I’m thinking the host father is coming home, now ALL of my freedom will be gone instead of just most of it, I’m not going to be able to flush my kasha down the toilet in the mornings and put back my sandwiches, I’m going to have to eat EVERYTHING, I’m not going to be alone in the afternoons, I’m so not ready for this! So then someone calls and the host mother says “yes, I’ll come let you in”. I assume that this is necessary because they about a month ago changed the locks on the outer door. The host father probably doesn’t have a key. But then I notice on the phone she’s using “Vy” and not “ty”. You wouldn’t use the formal with your own husband, right? So I’m now not so much freaking out, just a little more confused.

And in walks this guy in some sort of worker outfit. He comes, measure’s Nadya’s window (which they half replaced about a week and a half ago), says he’ll come tomorrow at 2 PM, and leaves. WHAT?! It’s 11 at night! Who does that? What kind of window man has those kinds of hours? And it’s not like he was just in jeans or something, he was fully outfitted to replace windows. Also, did they just not measure the window last time? WHAT IS THIS?! So, moral of the story is, I’m still confused, relieved that my minor freedoms haven’t been taken away yet, and Russia is completely ridiculous right now.

Oh, also, Monday at the SPO Phoenix I shared my mini peanut butter packs (thanks mom)! They were all really excited and I was really excited and it was great. Except at the time I had my splitting headache. They all weren’t sure how to eat it though, and I got to explain the many applications of peanut butter. If we were playing sports, but in, like, a food world, I think peanut butter would be the utility player. You can eat anything with peanut butter. That’s not actually true, now that I think about it, but whatever.

We also played this horrible game where we had to act out a fairy tale. We were each given parts with what we needed to do, and then we were supposed to interact for 20 mins. First of all, once I figured out what we were doing, I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do. And then I understood everything, just didn’t know what to do, because I’m a horrible actress and my vocabulary is relatively limited. That didn’t help the headache.

Wednesday, November 21st
So next time I’m sick I’m just going to flat out be sick (I wasn’t really sick so much though, because migraines/headaches aren’t like the flu or a cold or something). The avoiding the host family and worrying about being seen on the street and actually dragging myself out of the apartment for three hours (which was entirely unnecessary, by the way) was way more work and effort then just convincing them to leave me alone. Also, mom, I did take an Excedrin, but then it made me really nervous and jumpy and I started hiding under the bed when I heard the cats playing with a bucket, thinking it was the key in the door. Is this extreme? Yes. I really think the Excedrin was too strong (I can’t remember the last time I had that much caffeine at once) and made me think that these things were necessary. So I ended up leaving the house an hour and a half before they were supposed to arrive (did I already mention that? Probably.)

My host mother just gave me an extremely long-winded rundown of what leftover dinners are. Because I’d never heard of one before.
Mama Olya: Tonight we’re going to eat all the food we have! We have to. It’s been in the fridge and we need to eat it all.
Natasha: Okay. Sounds good.
Mama Olya: You see, all the food we’ve had for the past little while we haven’t eaten all, and it can’t sit there forever, so we’re going to have to eat it all now. It must be gone by the time dinner is done. It’s all of the food I made this week (explains the various food items, which I am actually familiar with, having eaten them just a few days ago).
Natasha: Okay. I’m ready.
*10 mins later at the dinner table*
Mama Olya: So I was cleaning today because the window man was here, and I noticed that I had all this frozen meat but I didn’t manage to make anything (man, if I could only directly translate the verb успеть and how it’s used in conversational Russian), but then I realized that we needed to eat this food that I made earlier, because there’s a lot of it in the fridge, so I decided we would do that tonight, and that’s why we’re eating all of these different things and we have to eat them all.
Natasha: Yup.

The other thing was that she made me scrambled eggs with noodles. I’m pretty sure she made the noodles yesterday, which means they aren’t going bad anytime soon, and we probably don’t need to eat them. Also the eggs probably could have been saved as well. So my dinner wasn’t really leftovers at all (except for the soup, which to be honest, tasted a little funky).

This morning I just about had a heart attack when I walked out of the apartment and realized that I only had a 500 ruble bill. You can’t pay for a 10 ruble marshrutka ride with a 500 ruble bill. So I panicked for a second, thinking I needed to find a bankomat or something small to buy, and I would be late for Baikalovedene and I HATE being late for class, and then I had a moment of clarity. My stop has a kiosk (as all stops tend to have) that sells phone cards. How convenient! I probably could use a phone card! I managed to purchase my 300 ruble phone card (which should last me the rest of my stay, I think), hopped on the 64 marshrutka, and was even 15 mins early for class. Excellent. Joseph and I talked with Pavel Alexandrovich, who may be one of my favorite Russians that I am in contact with (maybe that’s because we’re only in contact 2 hours and 40 mins per week). Joseph seemed to have had a number of catastrophes in the last, like, day and a half, most of them involving balalaikas. And then Pavel Alexandrovich smiled and said “I had a catastrophe too!” and told us this story about how he needed to return a book to his colleague, the colleague got sick, and now Pavel Alexandrovich is teaching this other guy’s class (like, substituting). I don’t know if that is the catastrophe or if I just missed something (clearly I missed something, there had to be more than just that). Maybe the catastrophe is he didn’t prepare anything for the class. He also gave us websites to find information for our paper.

Then we talked about more projects that the Soviets started (and rarely finished). One of them was that they wanted to build a dam and control the water level of Baikal based on how much water they needed to use for energy purposes. Pavel Alexandrovich said that this would be disastrous for some reason, I think some sort of plankton would die off for some reason and the galamyanka wouldn’t know what to do if the plankton were a few meters higher than they should have been. That’s probably not true, but that’s what I got out of it. The other thing he explained (that I clearly did not fully understand) was that they were cutting down these pine trees (“like the ones we have at Christmas and New Years,” Pavel Alexandrovich explained) and just putting them into the river so they would flow into Baikal. Then when they were in the lake they would gather them with boats (well, they’d tie them together with ropes). This plan didn’t work evidently because the pine trees kept drifting apart, even with the ropes. I’m not really sure what the point of this was, but, as Pavel Alexandrovich explained, most of these projects didn’t really have a point to them.

Okay, that’s something I completely can’t understand. So the Soviet Union started all of these projects, but never really thought them out. It would be one person’s idea, and then they’d start it. It didn’t really matter where they did it or whether or not it would be beneficial. But then if the person died, and no one else cared about it, they’d just drop the project. Or, most of the time, they didn’t have the money to finish it. So there were like, thousands of these half done projects, and they kept starting new ones. Like, how is there a collection of people that don’t think that is absolutely ridiculous? What a waste of money! Great job, Soviet Union. Also, cutting down pine trees and then throwing them into the river so they’ll flow into Baikal and THEN gathering them? They were already gathered! It’s called a forest!

Okay, enough of that. Sometimes it baffles me how a country could have been so ridiculous and disorganized. And sometimes still is. But it just seems like no one cares; all of the people we’ve talked to (which, truth be told, is a limited amount of people, but STILL) don’t seem to care. They don’t know what the government is doing, what any of their politicians think, what would be best for the country as a whole…it’s this idea that if it’s not affecting them, it doesn’t matter. And they don’t THINK that it affects them but when the entire country is, well, as it is, it DOES affect them. How can they not see this?

Sorry, I think that was me being, like, WHOA American.

Tomorrow we have this conference where all the foreign students get together and talk about their experiences. See, it wasn’t until today that someone fully explained this to me. Everyone had been talking about this conference and how it was this huge deal and we HAD to say something, but no one told us what we were supposed to talk about or what it even was until today. I guess the point is to figure out what they could improve on and how our experiences differ. We’ll be there, the Koreans, the Chinese, and the Germans. They also said that they invited the Russian students, but about 10 will probably show up. For some reason we’re in the giant lecture hall, which intimidates me a little bit. When we asked Vladimir Konstantinovich when it started, he said maybe 1:30, but that may vary because it takes time to gather everyone (this is something else I don’t understand. People aren’t, like, sheep. They don’t need to be gathered. They just need to bring themselves to the conference at the appropriate time. Again, the disorganization). I’ll let you all know how it goes. I’m actually interested to see what the other students have to stay. They live in dorms, not with families, so I’d like to hear how that is.

Then tomorrow we have Thanksgiving dinner at Elisabeth’s. I’m making homemade peanut butter cups (I think. I have the peanut butter, and the marshmallows, but the semi-sweet chocolate chips I couldn’t find, so I just bought 2 dark chocolate bars. I’m pretty sure this is going to be a disaster).

We watched the most God-awful movie today. It was like 2 ½ hours long, where a bunch of people are working in an office and this geeky looking guy with thick glasses (looked like one of the professors in the physics department, actually) pursues his boss, who is this woman that looks A LOT like a man. For the last like 10 mins of the movie they’re screaming at each other and throwing things and chasing each other, trying to hit each other, etc (this was quite the pathetic office fight scene, stacks of paper and telephones being thrown), and the guy tries to run away but the woman is still trying to attack him, then he gets into a cab and she follows him, so as the driver is driving they’re smacking each other in the backseat, and then he kisses her and everything is okay. WHAT?! It was awful. I wanted to die.

Also China is a no-go. It’s just way too expensive and would be way too much time and just impractical. BUT it means I can come home earlier…J. And I can hang out with Jenna a lot at home. So now the question is…do I want to be home for Christmas? This would limit my traveling ability around St. Petersburg and Moscow and Yaroslavl….but I might just want to do that.

Okay, I’m off to make homemade peanut butter cups.

Update: Okay, I don’t think that was as much of a disaster as I thought it would be, but I guess we’ll see. I think I burned it a little bit, but hopefully it’s not noticeable? Also I greased my pan with a marshmallow. There aren’t any napkins or paper towels in the apartment right now. I tried to use toilet paper, but it sort of disintegrated as I was greasing, and little blue paper bits were in the butter. And I didn’t want to use my fingers, so I just used a marshmallow. I am SO resourceful.

Thursday, November 22nd
Happy Thanksgiving!

So we’ve been talking about all these projects they had in the Soviet days, and today we talked about some sort of land distribution. I don’t really know. I think they redistributed animals too. That’s probably not true, but they did try to introduce flora, fayna (how would you write that in English?), and some sort of fish that would eat mosquitoes to keep people from getting malaria. I think that all this reintroducing of animals would through off the balance of the food chain, but Pavel Alexandrovich didn’t seem to think so. Also there was some sort of tie between capitalism and what we do with nature, and he said that they couldn’t do that because capitalism couldn’t survive in Russia (or maybe it just wasn’t there? I also think capitalism is struggling here), so this was socialism’s solution to their nature problem (reintroduce animals and create specialized land zones). I don’t really know what the problem was to begin with, but that’s okay. Also Stalin wanted to plant a giant wall of trees along the southern border of Russia to protect Western Russia from the strong winds coming from Central Asia. WHAT?! Like, who comes up with that? I can’t believe these people ran a country for so long. Actually, I can, because he just killed anyone that disagreed with him, and Russia ended up a disaster, as one would expect.

Pavel Alexandrovich is still completely awesome though. Despite the fact that earlier in the semester he told us that different types of galamyanka couldn’t mate with each other (well, they physically could, they’re the same species, but different types), and his explanation was that it was the same way that different races of humans couldn’t mix. This led us to believe that it was, in fact, possible, for these galamyanki to interbreed (is that a word?), as well as wonder whether or not all Russians think like that, or just him.

Today there was a major conference, “Russia through the eyes of foreigners” (roughly translated). I think it went sort of well, but it was REALLY long. Like 2 hours. A lot of Russians were there and they said they thought it was interesting. Vladimir Konstantinovich and Alexandra Vladimirovna were especially pleased. They took my essay to do something with it. Not really sure.

I’m off to Thanksgiving dinner with my burnt homemade peanut butter bars! I’m going to buy ice cream and hope that drowns out the burnt flavor.

Further update: Thanksgiving was great. I'm going to another children's home tomorrow but would sort of rather start working on my paper and studying for my TEST we have in Baikalovedene Thursday! ahhhhhh