Russian life, unabridged...

Instead of a chronological account of things I've done, here are some random musings I've been accumulating on my laptop for the past week and a half or so.

It’s kind of a shame that everything I could possibly say about language acquisition in a foreign country has already been said, more humorously and incisively, by David Sedaris in “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” On the other hand, that book is amazing. Read it.
I especially identify with the part where an entire French class explains Easter with only a basic grasp of vocabulary (see: me on Yom Kippur, trying to explain to my babushka that the reason I wasn’t eating had nothing to do with the quality of her food) and about how the fiercest critics of Americans in foreign countries are other Americans (the fanny packs! the map reading! the loud, obnoxious English speaking!)
There are some things that are specific to Russia, however, like the fact that even six-plus years of studying Russian only gets you a few feet (meters?) into the great labyrinth of Russian grammar. I only learned a few days ago that when Russians use the imperfective aspect of a verb in the imperative form, it means they are telling you to continue a process that had been interrupted. Suddenly I realized that every time my host mother puts a plate in front of me and says “kushai,” she is not telling me to begin eating, but rather to pick up my eating process from where I left off, before it was interrupted by such things as classes, meetings, and life in general.

I went to “Tuesdays,” the oh-so-strange indie music gathering that occurs every Tuesday night chez Yuri Kasyanik, a veteran experimental/avant-jazz musician for whom I’ve been doing some translation. I ended up in a trippy jam session, if you could call it that, with Kerry (from my ACTR group, plays bassoon), her host mother’s brother (piano) and Yuri himself (flute, when he wasn’t reading poetry.) In addition to having no idea what I was doing and the fewest years of musical experience of anyone there, I was also playing an ancient, five-stringed guitar with a third of a pick. Basically I just played whatever I thought went with what other people were playing, based on my (limited) atonal music and free jazz experience. The results were recorded on tape, much to Yuri’s delight and to Kerry’s and my dismay.

Only in Russia: a show advertised as “heavy metal” turned out to be, as explained to me by a random sketchy Russian guy, “ochen tyazholiy (very heavy) techno.” And this after we bought the tickets (not very expensive, but still) and waited three-odd hours for the show to start, since we thought it would be at 8 and it turned out to be at midnight.
A couple of days later, however, Hilary and I made it to the local metal club (and that would be actual metal, not “heavy metal” that is really “tyazholiy techno.”) For the most part it was like any metal show in the U.S.—loud guitars, lots of cigarette smoke and guys with long hair waving the rock sign in the air. A couple of bands even sung in English (although it was hard to understand all that many lyrics besides “Kill!” “Die!” and “Revenge!”—but again, that’s like any metal show in the U.S.)

On Saturday, I went to the opera for the price of a latte back in the States. Sometimes I really love this city. Carmen was gorgeous. The singing in Russian was a little off-putting, but they managed OK, and it helped me get a little more of the plot than I would have otherwise. Those of us who were unsure of the details but knew it had to end in tragedy got confused when, at the end of the second act, the cast bowed and the audience started clapping in rhythm (the Russian equivalent of a standing ovation), especially since the act had ended with the entire cast singing “Freedom awaits!” all happy-like.

The problem with good-looking guys in St. Petersburg is that they’re all metrosexual. I don’t mean that in the figurative sense of the word, although that’s probably true as well. No, I mean it quite literally: Metro. Sexual. These are the guys you see in metro stations, on metro escalators and inside metro cars. Although really, you only see them from the nose up: the rest is obscured by the impossibly thin, bored-looking Russian girls wrapped around them as if they contained some kind of hidden air supply. You want to scream “Get a room!” but I think if I tried to express that in Russian, it would be more like “Receive a room!” I could try “Rent an apartment!” or “Sleep in a hotel!” or maybe just “I know she is very pleasing to you, but is it not possible for you to move so that you are more than a centimeter from my face?”

Some of the stranger techno remixes I have heard:
Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
Dire Straits, “Money for Nothing”
Phantom Planet, “California”
Don McLean, “American Pie”

Finally, a quote from the other night:
Me: I’m pretty sure my family shares a phone line with our neighbors.
Alison (from the ACTR group): You mean you have a party line?
Me: Yeah…a communist party line! Ohhh!