Sorry for not updating this in awhile. I've been incredibly busy with classwork and whatnot, and internet here is spotty at best.
Yesterday marked the one month anniversary of my arrival here. I've gotten it down to an artform. Wake up at 7:15, breakfast at 7:30 (kasha, a sort of porridge with homemade pound cake called kiks), get to the metro by 8, push into the crowd and through the turnstiles and down the esclator, and finally by 8:20 i'll usually catch a train to Mayakovksya, where I transfer to the red line (a nightmare), and then take a bus from Chernyshevskii station to my university. Such a hectic pace really wakes you up in the morning.
Classes are continuing to be good. Grammar is frustrating at best, impossible at worst. We recently learned that there are around 28 different verbs expressing the verb "to go", depending on if you go by vehicle or foot, if you do it repeatedly or just a single time, if you are going inside something or out of something. Add in verbal prefixes, and it comes out to be about 168 words to express the verb "to go". I'm getting most of them down though, and some are obscure ones nobody really uses in everyday conversation (to flee out of a building on foot, for example).
I also take a culture class that focuses on the film industry of the Soviet period. Despite strict censuring by the Soviet authorities, the movies still manage to provide biting social commentary and a satircal twist to everyday life in the Soviet Union.
However, our professors are incredibly anti-Soviet, and take every chance to decry actions taken by the Soviet Union. For example, in our civilization class today; we were discussing the differences between Russian/American social strata, and at the end our professor wrote on the board: "The Soviet Union depended on three things to keep its people in line, and these three tools are still used today. Terror. Fear. Lies." This is also the same professor who compared Putin's political party to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
This is in stark contrast to my life at home with my babushka. She is a pensioner, who depends on the state for all of her needs. The state provides her with subsidized rent/utilities, and free public transportation. However, with the high prices of consumer goods in Russia, her pension cannot cover many of her other needs, such as food and clothing. In Soviet times, all was provided for pensioners, including comprehensive health care and all necessary prescriptions. When the USSR collapsed, many of those benefits also went away. Thus many older people in the city resign themselves to just getting by, gathering foodstuffs from their summer cottages (I came home the other day to see my babushka busily chopping at what was almost 10kg of cabbage. I have had a lot of cabbage soup these past few days.). They would like to get more benefits, but they know that the state could not afford to provide such things. Thus they say what seems like the mantra of Russia: "что делать?" This phrase, translated as "what can be done about it?" illustrates the uselessness of trying to cope with a constantly Westernizing Russia clashing with deeply rooted Soviet traditions and rules. And of course, theres nothing to be done, "ran'she bilo lushee" (earlier (or during Soviet times) was easier). These phrases are oft repeated by my babushka as she stares out of the kitchen window at the endless apartment blocks, as she longs for better days long past.
Until Monday or so,
Alex
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