I’m back…kind of. Plus: Choir performance!

I’m sorry for being away. But here’s something exciting to make up for it!.. Listen and watch “Beryozovye sny” (“Dreams of Birches”) and another choral piece performed by my choir at the 2010 Student Spring Festival today. Can you find me below!? Answer posted at the end, along with a video of the first one, [...]

Spring Break (Day 1): ‘Trevoga’ redeemed in U.U.

Russians have a word (“trevoga”) for the spiritual qualms that you experience before traveling until you’re safely seated on your train/plane seat. I call it stress. Whatever it is, I feel it. The day of our departure, I went straight from classes to my internship, and then straight to choir rehearsal, leaving early around 8 [...]

Happy Defenders of the Fatherland Day, a.k.a. Men’s Day!

Since the holiday began a many year ago when, of course, men defended the country and women stayed home to have babies and cook, I’ll save the discourse on sexist discrimination for another day. The abbreviated history: the day was started under Lenin to honor those in the Red army, but once “the Fatherland”/USSR fell [...]

Weeks 21-23: Getting back in dodge

At the gate to my flight from Berlin to Moscow, again surrounded by the fur-donning crowd of Russland, I’ll admit, there was slight dread of going back. That was the closest to home I’d be for another five months. Landing in Moscow and re-arriving in Irkutsk four days after that, though, were happy enough meetings [...]

Moscow: 10 million plus one in 2010 (Jan 1-4)

Moskva. Bottom line: my feet hurt. Yes, great metro and bus system, but stepping out of every metro station and glancing around would hardly give a traveller the right idea of the city. Thus, walking can’t be done without, and so, walk I did. Jan 1. And the decade begins. Streets quiet (except for the [...]

Holiday: Christmas and Y2K+10

Wrapping up the end of a semester, year, and decade in Russia came with a few idiosyncrasies, challenges, and definite high points. Hardest of all was being away from family and friends in the comfort of my grandparents’ living rooms, wishing that my Christmas and New Year’s could be white. But, the trade-off turned out [...]

Holiday: It’s beginning to look at lot like New Year’s. . .

To properly describe my experience in the realm of the Russian “holiday season,” if such a concept actually exists as a period defined apart from the general conception of everyday life in this country, then I should go back to my Thanksgiving holiday here. Walking out of a delightful evening of intercultural dialogue (conversation over [...]

Weeks 14-15: Take two

I’ll blame my lack of posting on a few things. First, wrapping up finals season always comes with alternating bouts of productivity and extreme laziness, meaning that when I was working, I was burning the midnight oil, and when I wasn’t working, I really wasn’t. Second, Ryan got into Irkutsk two weeks ago, so between [...]

Week 13: Once upon a December (+Quotables)

December has a special meaning (kind of) for Eastern Siberia (the region of the middle of Siberia, not the Far East), if not just for Irkutsk. For better or for worse, it has nothing to do with the Mandy Moore song (blog post’s title) or the Disney movie Anastasia about the last Russian tsar, in [...]

Tradition: ‘It’s Happy Thanksgiving’

“. . . Thanksgiving, hooray! / We’re going to dinner / at Grandma’s today,” is the little stanza from Jack Prelutsky’s collection of Thanksgiving-related children’s poetry that I end up recalling every year about this time. Obviously, I’m in Russia, and obviously, in Russia, American national holidays are not observed. So this year was a [...]