“American Babies are like Cucumbers, they’re Plump and Juicy”

Hey all! Sorry I didn’t write a blog for last week, but I was pretty blogged out after my epic recollection of the Volga River cruise. But, luckily for you, I’m going to write about both last week and this week, so you don’t miss a day in my exciting life (please note the sarcasm). Last last Friday on our excursion we went to Circus school. And this isn’t just any circus school, folks. This is the only Circus University in Russia, and it just happens to be located right next to the gym I work out at (not that I ever knew it was there). We got to watch the students (age 16-20, I think) practice their acts, whether it be juggling, balancing on a tight rope, gymnastics, or magic tricks. There were a bunch of young boys in tiny spandex shorts juggling right in front us us, and it really creeped me out, reminding me of some Charles Dickens novel, with young boys sell their “wares” while a sketchy old man gets the profits in the background (the sketchy old man being the circus school director who was talking to us).This one really talented girl sat on a giant metal ring suspended from the ceiling and did all these crazy contortions on it and hung off of it by her foot. I think the boys were really interested, because this girl also happened to have huge boobs and apparently didn’t believe in sports bras. I really thought every time she hung upside down in her spandex tank-top, one of the girls was going to fall out. Then we moved from the main big top area to a back room where a bunch of boys were doing tricks on a trampoline, a couple of girls where doing handstands, and this Greek god of a Russian man doing the rings (the kind they have in the Olympics). He was tall and blond and had light eyes and every girl in our group couldn’t stop staring at him. At one point he went to wipe his face with his tank top, and as he showed his completely ripped stomach, I whispered to Emma, ‘This is like circus porn.” After the gratuitous hot man, we got to see their class rooms, where the students take math, literature, science, etc., as well as the circus arts. Then we got to sit in (or stand in, rather) on a ballet class. The teacher was a scary, old Russian woman who made sure her students performed their best in front of us. One of the boys in the back of the group couldn’t keep up and she told him to just stop dancing. He looked so upset and had to stand in the corner for the rest of class. Another one of the boys was pretty overweight and was leaping around in shorts and a tank top. I normally would be able to keep it together, but he had this massive smile on his face like he effing loved ballet. I couldn’t help but laugh. We left circus school having seen dancing, jumping, tumbling, flipping, contortions, and one very sexy circus man. It was phenomenal.

That night Erika and Paige texted me (or SMSed me, if you want to be European), saying they wanted to go out dancing. I was really excited for this, as we hadn’t been out to a club since we got here, and all of us were a bit scared to go after a girl in our program got sent home after a particularly awful night of clubbing. I only had two hours notice, and it takes me an hour to get anywhere in Moscow, so I took the world’s fastest shower and booked it out of my house. While waiting at the metro station for the other girls to arrive, I bumped into one of my tutors. He thought it was a crazy coincidence, as there are millions of people in Moscow and over a hundred metro stops. He was waiting for his girlfriend (also my tutor) and said “the reason for which I am here is Kyle.” I was kind of confused because Kyle is a boy in my program who is friends with Ivan and Elvira, but I wasn’t sure why they would be meeting at 8:00 on a Friday. Later when Erika, Paige, Kat, and Julia showed up, Erika mentioned that it was Kyle’s birthday party that night, and the birthday group was meeting at the exact same metro an hour later. It was kind of awkward because none of us had heard about the party and obviously had not been invited, so we left the metro before the other group arrived. Julia really wanted to go to the giant bookstore by the metro station, Biblio Globus, one of the few that has a good selection of English books. We perused the store for a while and then Kat and Julia decided to go drop in on Kyle’s party, while Erika, Paige, and I decided to just go to the club, because we felt awkward about crashing the festivities. Erika had brought a Nestea bottle half full of Kahlua, so we three sketchily looked around for a good place to pre-game on the street. It’s illegal to drink on the street in Russia, so we had to find somewhere out of the way. We ended up picking a little nook under an awning, being hidden by a giant van. Under Paige’s giant umbrella, we took turns sipping the Kahlua, when the rain decided to come pouring down. We made a run for the club, Propaganda, which turned out to be a restaurant that only turned into a club at midnight. Since it was only 9:00, we obviously needed to kill some time. We bought some delicious cocktails and drank them until Julia and Kat arrived. They said Kyle’s party had to move somewhere else because the original restaurant they were in was having a concert and trying to make people pay more to watch it. Julia called up her two friends that she was meeting up with, and we went out on the street to find them. I can’t remember the girl’s name, but Julia knew her through the Middlebury Russian summer program. The girl brought the guy she is seeing, Maxim, who was so incredibly attractive, I gave her props. He was French Canadian and knew almost no Russian, which I can’t even fathom while living in Moscow, but he’s surviving. We collectively decided that we needed food, so we went to the Moo Moo we had seen on the way to the club. Moo Moo is a cheap cafeteria style chain restaurant which has Russian food and is cow-themed. It’s really popular with students. When we got to Moo Moo we quickly realized that we’d stumbled upon where Kyle’s birthday party was relocated to. Feeling even more awkward, we grabbed our food and drinks and went to the basement to eat. Annabel and Nastya came down to say hi to us and eventually convinced us to come up and say hi. We went over and sat with the birthday group, wishing Kyle snyom razhdenia. I felt really bad, but Kyle didn’t seem to mind. Around 11:00, Moo Moo kicked us out, and the entire group made its way back to Propaganda. Somehow when we got back in, only Annabel, Anton-Reese (of Spakonee Noch, Anton), Julia and her friends, Kat, Paige, Erika, and I were left. We sat at a table until the dance floor opened up and started dancing to the techno music the DJ was spinning. We decided that because the metro closed at 1 am and reopened at 6 am, we would just have to stay all night until the metro reopened. Annabel left around 12:30 to make the metro, but the rest of us kept going strong through the increasing annoying house music. Around 2:00, we definitely hit a wall. We were all sober, exhausted from bopping around for two hours, and getting sick from the cloud of cigarette smoke, so we took a break and went up to the balcony area to sit down. While we were up there, an extremely drunk overweight girl proceeded to pole dance with the stair banister and a couple of other girls joined her at various places along the railing. It was kind of creepy. Behind them a couple was heavily making out, so it was kind of like we were in the front room of a brothel, with smoke everywhere and really dim lighting. We tried our best to rally, dancing for half an hour, then resting for half an hour, although I will have to say, Anton-Reese was in the zone, dancing surprisingly well by himself to the terrible techno music until 3:00 am, when he announced he was peacing out and just left. I’m pretty sure he walked home, which is insane as he lived about an hour away and it was 3:00 am. At this point the rest of us were loathing house music, as it had no melody and was the same beat, and effectively the same song, for the last 4 hours. Around 4:15 am, we decided we could take it no longer and left, finding a 24 hour Coffee House down the block. We stayed there, drinking coffee and hot cocoa, until 6 am, when we wearily walked to the metro. Basically I felt like I was dead, and all the other people on the metro that early looked like it, too. I finally got home around 7:00 and passed out in my bed. Of course, I could only sleep until 10:00 am, as I have a giant window in my room and the sun was too bright. The funny thing is that Paige has a really overprotective host mother who won’t let her out of the house after 8:00 pm, but somehow her coming home at 7:00 am was SO bad, it became an accomplishment, and her host mother proudly told all of her friends how Paige stayed out all night until the metro reopened. My host mom just texted me at noon asking me where I was, and I replied I was in bed, and she just said ok, didn’t see you when I left. My house is pretty lax. So the moral of the story is that clubbing until 6 am, especially when house music is involved, is a really not as good of an idea as it sounds. Actually that doesn’t even sound like a good idea, it sounds terrible.

The rest of my week was considerably normal. My host mom started feeding me again, which is pretty great. Food has become one of my number one issues in Russia, and I’m pretty sure that’s true for most of my classmates. If I were to draw a food pyramid of my current food intake, the bottom biggest part would be dairy. I don’t think it’s possible to get through a meal here without consuming some type of milk product. There’s yogurt, sour cream, butter, milk, kafir (will talk about that later), cheese, tvorog (like cream cheese) which is used in desserts and also in cirniki (like fried mini cream cheese pancakes) which is a breakfast food, and ice cream. Kafir is this super nasty milk product that Russians love. It basically tastes like spoiled cream, and they drink it instead of milk. There’s also a kafir soda, I can’t remember the name for it (maybe fen?), and that’s like drinking cheese soda. The next level up from the dairy products would be watermelon. My host mom is currently force feeding me watermelon at alarming rates. She bought one from the watermelon cages by our house and is freaking out that it’s going to spoil. I am so sick of watermelon and she literally tried to get me to eat a fourth of one a couple of nights ago. She claims she loves watermelons, but I feel like I’m the only one eating the damn thing. Above the watermelon level would be the beet level. I eat borsch probably twice a week, eat so many salads that contain beets, and my host mom just made vinigret again, which is essentially beet – cabbage sauerkraut. I always know vinigret is coming because she has this giant rock sitting on top of a white ball in a big cooking pot on the counter for about three days before the vinagret appears. She tried to explain to me why she has the giant rock surrounded by beet juice, but she only said its part of the preparation. So yeah, now we have a giant pot of vinagret in the fridge. I’m pretty sure my insides are permanently dyed fuchsia now. Above the beet section would be bread, and then in a teeny, tiny corner on the top would be fruits, vegetables, and meat. Oh, and covering the pyramid, oozing down from the top would be all the oil, butter, and fat the Russians put on everything they cook. My stomach hates me all the time and I’m basically malnourished, but at least I’m getting fed!

This week, classes were particularly interesting, not so much for what we are doing in our lessons, but for what our teachers said. Clearly teachers in Russia don’t try to be PC. I’m sure they don’t even know the meaning of the word. To give you some of the best quotes from this week, I have the following:

• Our male geography teacher asking all the girls how many babies they were planning on having
• Our CMU (Mass Media) teacher saying “American babies are like cucumbers, they’re plump and juicy.”
• Our CMU teacher asking us what color Jesus was, with white, black, and arab not being the correct answer.
• Our Phonetics teacher pulling out a stuffed animal dog and talking to it for 5 minutes before telling us she was reciting a poem about a dog, and then proceeded to make us recite the poem to the stuffed dog, too.
• Explaining to our conversation class teacher the difference between punks and hippies (she didn’t know). Big Ben said in Russian that hippies smoke pot and said that hippy women don’t believe in showers or shaving. The female teacher asked, ‘They don’t believe in shaving where?” And Ben replied, “Everywhere.”
• When we told our phonetics teacher we were discussing Chekov before class, she whipped out about 20 photos of Chekov, that she of course had lying around.
• Our geography teacher was describing the central Asian people to us, as “The people who clean our school and the streets, those are Tajik people. The people begging in the metro, those are the Kirgiz people.”
• When Jenna told our literature teacher that it was her mother’s birthday that day, our teacher said, “How wonderful! And do you know what your mother wants most? Grandchildren. She’s waiting for them, Jenna.”

I’ve also started going to the gym almost everyday with Paige. She used to train for marathons, so she is really hardcore about working out. She’s basically being my personal trainer and it’s awesome. Hopefully I’ll come back from Russia super fit. Although with the amount of walking I do to even get to the gym (from my house it’s an hour and a half away), I should be in tip top shape in no time. The gym is slightly ridiculous. The women there are never actually working out. They come with their hair down and in stomach showing outfits and have a personal trainer, who is always a good looking man. There is so much sexual tension, you could cut it with a knife. The only other kind of exercise I’ve seen women do is the hula hoop. I’m not even kidding, they just stand in front of the mirrored wall and hula hoop away. Paige and I must look like roaring lesbians, coming in together every day and working out so hard we actually *gasp* sweat. I’m sure people think I’m nuts for doing push-ups and crunches. So to recap: Russian women are extremely beautiful and inhumanly thin, but they don’t work out. I will figure out how this works before I leave in May. It’s one of my goals. Then there is the women’s locker room. Oh boy. The first day Paige and I went in there to change into our gym clothes, there were about 5 or 10 women just waltzing around buck naked. And it’s not even like they’re in the process of changing or coming from the shower. These ladies blow-dry their hair nude, talk to each other nude, text on their cell phones nude. I’m sure if they were allowed to, they would leave the locker room in the buff as well. Paige and I have gotten a little more comfortable with it, but I really hope we don’t come back nudists.

On Wednesday after working out, Paige and I went to another university’s Russian American club. The girl running the club was someone Paige knew from Bucknell. We met up with the girl, Taylor, and Emma at the Hovoslobodskaya metro station, and headed over to Taylor’s school, Moscow State University of the Humanities. Her college was AMAZING. It was five giant buildings, and even had some semblance of a campus. Our school is only one building and looks more like a shopping mall than a university. There were so many students at her school and they all looked normal. Ok, well by that I mean, not as decked out in designer labels as my school and they actually looked over the age of 18. Taylor showed us her dorm room, which was also really nice, and then we went to the club. It was a round table setting and there were super delicious cookies there (again, my life here revolves around food). We talked about our first impressions of Russians and Americans, and this one Russian girl would not shut up. She seemed a little "special" and kept saying "I have friends everywhere. From Ohio to Texas. From Maine to California. From Canada to Illinois. Everywhere. My dream is to go to US. It is my dream. I have friends everywhere." She would wait about five minutes in silence and then start up her friends speech again. It was to the point where she would interrupt other people talking to tell us about her friends in Massachusetts. The other Russians were laughing and I was trying really hard to keep it together because she may very well have been special, but then she started bragging about how good her English was and how people think she can't be Russian, she has to be American. That made me laugh, as the rest of the Russians in the club all had better English than her. It was really bizarre. On the way home that night, I passed by the 24 hour Indian food restaurant which is never open, and right in the middle of my path was a giant dead crow. It's the special kind of crows they have over here that have grey torsos and black heads and wings (like they are wearing a sweater vest). I did my best to walk around the bird carcass without getting sick. The best part of it all is that the bird was still there for the next two days, right outside the restaurant. All I could think of is that this is where bird flu comes from. Finally on the third day, the dead bird was gone. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when I saw its rotting carcass under a tree on the side of the path. Nice. I think finally one of the street dogs must have eaten it, but it's good to know Russia does such a great job at disease control.

This Friday we went to Polyanaya, which is the country estate of some famous wealthy artist. Not too many people came because it was going to be an all day excursion. We all got on the tour bus at 11:00. Paige shared her Ipod headphones with me and we listened to some quality Russian techno music and then to Abba, which was fantastic. It took about an hour and a half to get there. It was absolutely freezing outside, and they plac we were at was basically in the middle of some woods. When we were waiting for Jon to buy the tickets to go in the house, a really cute dog came up to us, and Jan tried to speak to it in Russian. When he actually got it to sit, he gave it some food. Then another wet, stubby dog came over. It had white paint behind its ears, which I have no idea how it managed that. Finally we made our way over to the artist's house. It was a beautiful place, with genuine paintings covering all the walls, and all these mini artifact collections like mammoth bones and relics from Egypt. The family I guess had been an entire family of artists, but since most of them were female, only the male son got to go to art school and become famous. We got to wear those awesome slipper things we wore in BDNKh that let you slide across the parquet floor. After we toured the house, Jon brought us to a little room, which had a diorama in it. Apparently the artist made it in his final year of life, and it kind of showed. It was like a story for small children about a trip around the world, and the picture would be lit from the front and show one scene, and then it would change to being back lit and would turn into a totally different picture. It was sort of cool, except the story that went along with it that the Russian woman was reading was like "And this is the choo choo train. Woo-Woo! It is traveling to Venice, which has lots of water and Italians." Matt, who was sitting behind me, was eating an apple really slowly because I don't think we were meant to have food in the room, and all of a suddenly he started laughing and the rest of us all caught the giggles too. Even Jon. It was pretty bad. After the diorama, Jon told us we had two hours to kill in the middle of this forest on a cold day, so we walked down to the beach on the edge of the Oka River and played in the sand for a little. We were incredibly bored so we walked back up to the house. While we were there, a couple of chickens came out from behind a fence and approached us, begging for food, if chickens can really beg. They kept getting really close and Matt wanted to feed them part of the hardboiled egg he was eating, but we thought it was a little too disturbing. We passed the rest of the two hours in the café, getting coffee to stay warm. In the cafe, Paige went on a little rant about the song "Beggin'" by Madcon. I don't know if you guys have this song in the US, but it's EVERYWHERE here. It's at least one person on the metro's ringtone every morning, it's on a couple of commercials, and the music video is always playing on MuzTV. Paige hates the song but knows she'll have to buy it on iTunes in a year or two because it will remind her of Russia. We finally left at 4 pm, getting back to Moscow around 5:45. It was kind of a pointless excursion, but then again, most of them are.

On Saturday, I went to the market at Izmayaleva with Allison and Jenna. It's a giant souvenir market that you have to pay 10 rubles (fifty cents) to get into. They created this huge tacky castle just for the market and there is a giant wooden windmill which you can see from the metro entrance. On the way to the market, we saw a bear which I think you could take pictures with. In front of the actual market was this pseudomarket of all Central Asian vendors selling fur coats. As we walked through, some of the creepy vendors said "Senorita, I love you" in English and then proceeded to grab out bags and arms and butts. It was like molestation alley. Once we got past that and into the real market, it was fantastic. There were matrushka dolls, and scarves, and soviet memorabilia everywhere. You could bargain for the price and I ended up getting a bunch of stuff for a good deal. When I was looking at furry hats, the vendor came over to be and said in English, "Rabbit, freshly killed," while petting the fur. I think that tells you guys a lot about Russia. I'll probably end up going back later to get more souvenirs before I leave.

Ok, so I love all you guys very very much. I'm doing my best to email you all this month, but of course my Georgetown email is being super sketchy and not letting me access it. Oh and anyone who is reading this, if you will be in Spain or France from Dec 17-Jan 4th, let me know! We need to meet up, as I will be there with the lovely Erin Ernst! Ok, that is all for now. Until next time (when I can get internet service) - Hilary