31.8.09
Pictures coming soon
I've taken some pictures here but forgot to save them on my flash drive, so I can't transfer them yet. I'll do it tomorrow.
Travel
I deliberately arranged to have a layover of several hours in Moscow, so the full trip from Minneapolis to Novosibirsk was brutally long but mercifully uneventful. I was expecting to have to put up more of a fight for a waiver on my excess baggage fee, but they didn’t even try to charge me at Scheremyetevo. (I was pretty happy: Not only did I save money, but it was nice to know that nobody was out to swindle me… not yet, anyway.)
В Новосибирске
I knew long before coming here, of course, that I had been assigned to teach at a place called the Сибирская Академия Государственной Службы*, but more frequently and affectionately called СибАГС (SibAGS). My predecessor at the school, a Fulbrighter named Matt Nelson who is now working in Vladivostok, sometimes called it “Sea-bags,” which I thought was pretty funny, although “Sea-bugs” would be closer to the Russian pronunciation.
Before I set off, Lena Lyuks of the Department of International Connections at SibAGS had written me an e-mail saying she would be at the airport when I arrived, holding a card with my name on it. She was. She was much younger than I expected (a month younger than I am, as it turned out), about five feet tall, very kind and very talkative. She asked me question after question in the car on the way to the Academy – had I been in Russia before, for how long, what I’d studied in the United States, what other languages I spoke, what I needed to buy, and so on – and told me a few things about herself – that she'd been married two years, was planning to take the TOEFL in September, etc. – and a few things about SibAGS.
We got to the Academy and she showed me to my room in the dorm, and told me to take a nap. It turned out I needed it.
*The Siberian Academy of Public Administration (literally "Siberian Academy of State Service")
Я не шокирован
Just a few hours later, I was in the Office of International Connections at SibAGS, checking e-mail. Lena and the two Julias (Lena’s colleagues, also in their twenties) were laughing about something, and I was in the middle of a NY Times article about Ted Kennedy dying.
I must have had a very serious expression on my face. Lena asked me, “Kevin, are you already ‘shocked’?” She was using a calque: “shokirovan” (шокирован) – the English word “shock” with a Russian affix and participle ending stuck onto it. It was obvious that she could only have meant “culture shock.”
It was a little odd. She expected me to feel culture shock after only a few hours in the city? As I was trying to remember how to say “Not really,” I smiled and shrugged.
Lena took this as a definite “Yes.”
“Is it from us?” Lena asked. Julia Polonik chimed in, “It’s from us, isn’t it?”
“No, no, it’s not from you at all,” I said, forgetting to explain that I wasn’t even ‘shocked’ yet, either by them or anything else in Russia. But Lena had already started to say some reassuring words, “Don’t worry, Kevin. We’re just talking about the new outfit Julia bought yesterday…” I lost the thread after that. I can still only understand about 60% of what people say to me here anyway…
Лена
Lena seems to have something in common with several Russian women I met in St. Petersburg in 2007: She’s firmly convinced that a foreigner my age is as helpless as a baby in Russia, and has taken on baby-sitting duties with an earnest zeal. After I’d met everyone in the international office, been shown around the academy, and checked my e-mail on my first day, Lena took me out to show me the nearest metro station, exchange some money, and buy some things. We were out for less than an hour, enough time to buy a SIM-card, get some rubles in my wallet, and pick out a cheap cell phone.
Before I’d even paid for the phone, Lena suddenly took ill. She called a taxi.
Even in that state, she would never have dreamed (dreamt?) of leaving me hanging. On our way back to the academy, Lena, leaning back against the back seat of the taxi with her eyes closed and clutching her gut, called someone whose name I didn’t catch, said she felt bad and had to stay in, and asked if he or she could come help me. Back in the dorm, we found her friend Dima, who cheerfully took over as Lena went back to her room. Dima led me to and through the big, local Western-style grocery store, chatting affably with me about school and girls and cars in fractional English, while I answered in halting Russian, with each of us lapsing into our native languages when necessary. (I’ve met up with Dima every day since then to eat or drink tea or take a walk together. We get along well.)
The next day, Dima told me Lena had had to go to the hospital. Whatever she had, however, wasn’t enough to make her quit. She called me from her hospital bed later that day to suggest a potential tutor for me to contact (I had asked her about getting a Russian tutor earlier). She called again later to ask if I had met with the faculty of the foreign language subdepartment (I had) and how it had gone (pretty well). I’d never seen this kind of conscientiousness. When she asked how I was doing, I said, “Everything’s fine with me. Will everything with you be fine? I’m kind of worried.” I could hear her smiling when she said, “Oh. Well, it’s nice that you’re worried about me.” Jesus. Of course I was. So I thanked her for calling and told her I hoped she would feel better soon.
Lena has been back from the hospital for a day now, and is OK. Of course, the reason I know this is that as soon as she got back, she called to ask if I needed anything. (I didn’t.)
В Новосибирске
I knew long before coming here, of course, that I had been assigned to teach at a place called the Сибирская Академия Государственной Службы*, but more frequently and affectionately called СибАГС (SibAGS). My predecessor at the school, a Fulbrighter named Matt Nelson who is now working in Vladivostok, sometimes called it “Sea-bags,” which I thought was pretty funny, although “Sea-bugs” would be closer to the Russian pronunciation.
Before I set off, Lena Lyuks of the Department of International Connections at SibAGS had written me an e-mail saying she would be at the airport when I arrived, holding a card with my name on it. She was. She was much younger than I expected (a month younger than I am, as it turned out), about five feet tall, very kind and very talkative. She asked me question after question in the car on the way to the Academy – had I been in Russia before, for how long, what I’d studied in the United States, what other languages I spoke, what I needed to buy, and so on – and told me a few things about herself – that she'd been married two years, was planning to take the TOEFL in September, etc. – and a few things about SibAGS.
We got to the Academy and she showed me to my room in the dorm, and told me to take a nap. It turned out I needed it.
*The Siberian Academy of Public Administration (literally "Siberian Academy of State Service")
Я не шокирован
Just a few hours later, I was in the Office of International Connections at SibAGS, checking e-mail. Lena and the two Julias (Lena’s colleagues, also in their twenties) were laughing about something, and I was in the middle of a NY Times article about Ted Kennedy dying.
I must have had a very serious expression on my face. Lena asked me, “Kevin, are you already ‘shocked’?” She was using a calque: “shokirovan” (шокирован) – the English word “shock” with a Russian affix and participle ending stuck onto it. It was obvious that she could only have meant “culture shock.”
It was a little odd. She expected me to feel culture shock after only a few hours in the city? As I was trying to remember how to say “Not really,” I smiled and shrugged.
Lena took this as a definite “Yes.”
“Is it from us?” Lena asked. Julia Polonik chimed in, “It’s from us, isn’t it?”
“No, no, it’s not from you at all,” I said, forgetting to explain that I wasn’t even ‘shocked’ yet, either by them or anything else in Russia. But Lena had already started to say some reassuring words, “Don’t worry, Kevin. We’re just talking about the new outfit Julia bought yesterday…” I lost the thread after that. I can still only understand about 60% of what people say to me here anyway…
Лена
Lena seems to have something in common with several Russian women I met in St. Petersburg in 2007: She’s firmly convinced that a foreigner my age is as helpless as a baby in Russia, and has taken on baby-sitting duties with an earnest zeal. After I’d met everyone in the international office, been shown around the academy, and checked my e-mail on my first day, Lena took me out to show me the nearest metro station, exchange some money, and buy some things. We were out for less than an hour, enough time to buy a SIM-card, get some rubles in my wallet, and pick out a cheap cell phone.
Before I’d even paid for the phone, Lena suddenly took ill. She called a taxi.
Even in that state, she would never have dreamed (dreamt?) of leaving me hanging. On our way back to the academy, Lena, leaning back against the back seat of the taxi with her eyes closed and clutching her gut, called someone whose name I didn’t catch, said she felt bad and had to stay in, and asked if he or she could come help me. Back in the dorm, we found her friend Dima, who cheerfully took over as Lena went back to her room. Dima led me to and through the big, local Western-style grocery store, chatting affably with me about school and girls and cars in fractional English, while I answered in halting Russian, with each of us lapsing into our native languages when necessary. (I’ve met up with Dima every day since then to eat or drink tea or take a walk together. We get along well.)
The next day, Dima told me Lena had had to go to the hospital. Whatever she had, however, wasn’t enough to make her quit. She called me from her hospital bed later that day to suggest a potential tutor for me to contact (I had asked her about getting a Russian tutor earlier). She called again later to ask if I had met with the faculty of the foreign language subdepartment (I had) and how it had gone (pretty well). I’d never seen this kind of conscientiousness. When she asked how I was doing, I said, “Everything’s fine with me. Will everything with you be fine? I’m kind of worried.” I could hear her smiling when she said, “Oh. Well, it’s nice that you’re worried about me.” Jesus. Of course I was. So I thanked her for calling and told her I hoped she would feel better soon.
Lena has been back from the hospital for a day now, and is OK. Of course, the reason I know this is that as soon as she got back, she called to ask if I needed anything. (I didn’t.)
Повратимы?
After getting my assignment from Fulbright, I was reading up on Novosibirsk and discovered, to my astonishment, that my hometown of Minneapolis and Novosibirsk are sister cities (Sister Cities?). The word for it in Russian is “города-побратимы”, which translates to “blood brother cities.”
(Well, to be strictly accurate, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Novosibirsk are Sister Cities. But everyone in the world – except, I believe, the residents of St. Paul – knows that we just didn’t want to be mean, so we [sigh] let St. Paul tag along too. Not to denigrate ya or anything, li’l twin. As far as I know, the State Department thinks you’re cool, but I couldn’t swear to it because, you see, the opinions expressed here in no way reflect or represent the views of the State Department, and should merely be understood as the opinions of a private citizen.)
So, as you might expect, I was pretty geeked about the coincidence, and I decided to see if anybody at City Hall wanted to send a token of Minneapolitan (yes, it’s a word. My spell-checker even recognizes it) good will with me when I went. Or at least, I didn’t want to get blamed for not asking, in case they were already planning to send something.
It turned out I didn’t have to worry about that. I wasn’t too shocked to find out that authorities in Minneapolis hadn’t made a high priority of our special link with Novosibirsk, and they hadn’t been planning to send anything over there either sooner or later. In fact, they had even gotten an invitation to send a youth delegation to Novosibirsk in 2007 for some cultural exchange event (a sign that the relationship wasn’t completely defunct, at least), but had declined due to lack of funds and a committee to organize it. I gather the Sister City program is, in a general way, a little neglected, and just a teensy bit under-funded. Also, the relationship with Novosibirsk was struck up 20 years ago when Party Secretary Gorbachev paid a visit to our glorious, lakey North Star State. It may have rusted and eroded a bit more than our newer, shinier relationships with say, Uppsala, Sweden or Harbin, China.
Of course, I’m not condemning anyone in either city. This is the kind of thing that’s hard to keep strong when few residents of either partner city are committed to it. Personally, I’m not even sure what a sisterhood (or побратимство) between cities is meant to entail, or what purpose it was meant to serve when it started. And I don’t think I’d be too happy to find out, in exact figures, how few residents of Minneapolis have even heard of Novosibirsk. (Or vice versa, I guess…)
But anyway, the lady I finally talked to at City Hall (I’ll just call her “C”... I don’t know if she’d want to be identified) improvised as well as anyone could have in her place. I ended up feeling sorry for C: I’d come to her with this trivial problem that was completely out of her control, and her whole tone, every time I talked to her, was very apologetic. She seemed embarrassed at how little we, as a city, had to show for this nominal connection. C pitched around for something to send along with me, found a few things (not priceless, but at least unique), and even got me a letter signed by Minneapolis’s mayor, greeting the mayor of Novosibirsk.
I’ll clear it with the Fulbright Program first, obviously, but if it’s kosher and everything, I’ve now got a letter from my home city’s mayor and a couple of small gifts to give to whoever’s remotely interested in my city of assignment. I know it’s all pretty ridiculous, but I figured if the relationship meant something, I would have been a jerk to just ignore it… oh well.
I’ve also decided to send the gifts by pouch so as to stay under the baggage weight limit, so I won’t need to worry about this until October, at least. I figure if the relationship between our cities had stagnated this long already, a few more weeks wouldn't make a difference.
La preface prétentieuse - or - Voici mon blogue
(Written Wednesday 19AUG09, posted later)
Welcome, one and all, to my web-journal (or “bjournal”, as some like to call them) on my upcoming trip to Novosibirsk, third biggest city by population in the Russian Federation, and self-proclaimed Capital of Siberia. For anyone who is just joining us, I’m going because I got a Fulbright grant to teach English there for a full academic year, with Russian lessons (for me) and some research about civics education on the side.
Among my horde of loyal friends who will be swarming to read this, a few of you followed the last bjournal I kept, in Argentina in 2007, at Annie Burke’s urging. (The link is on facebook, and no, parents, you don’t get to see it.) First of all, I’m sorry to have bailed halfway through… as some of you know I ran into some pretty severe academic problems at UCA in the second half of the semester. Secondly, although I don’t want to disappoint you, I’m not going to write much about moaning lionesses, dog-piles, deadly miasmas in foreign cities, or “changüiches [sic] a la chicчona” in this one. If you were hoping for a sequel to that stuff, I hope you won’t be bored.
But…
I’m on a shorter leash now, because the State Department is footing the bill, and even a humble grant-recipient represents them in some modest capacity. With pointer fingers wagging and brows frowning, they told us to refrain from publicly expressing any opinions that might be deemed offensive by a general readership, or construed as denigrating to our host country or its citizens. Maybe this is all to the good; I hope nothing I said last time would have offended an Argentine reader or anyone else. But this time I have to be extra sure, so I’ll save my, um, stronger feelings on sensitive subjects for private correspondence.
I’m also not supposed to cuss. Hmm… I’ll do my damnedest.
As you come in, take a moment to glance up at the unique URL, painstakingly selected from among literally infinite possibilities by… the author himself. I’m using “longitude83” because tracing that line is the best way of finding Novosibirsk on the prodigious breadth of steppe, taiga, and boreal forest that is Siberia. When I tell Americans where I’m going, the best I can do is say, “Yeah it’s not too far from Mongolia. A little closer to Kazakhstan. But it’s not really that close to anything [that you’d recognize by name].”
For people who know more about Russian geography, Novosibirsk is where the Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the Ob’ River, a landmark to which that title at the top of this page, “Eight Months on the Ob’” makes reference.
Calling this bjournal “Eight Months on the Ob’” is also blatant plagiarism: As part of my preparation for this sure-to-be-epic undertaking, I read a book by someone who had done something like this already: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler. It’s about his experience teaching English in Fuling, Sichuan Province, China as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late ’90’s.
Here’s one of the best things about having read River Town: It was a valuable emotional boost to know my process of adjustment would probably be easier than Hessler’s. That’s not to make light of the inevitable spells of culture shock, loneliness, frustration, and homesickness I’ll undergo over the course of this year, but I think I’ll have some significant advantages over Hessler. He only learned Chinese after arriving, and being white in China marked him as a foreigner (making him a target for cat-calls, prejudiced insults, and condescension) the whole time he was there.
I’m nervous, but Russian culture will feel more familiar to me than Chinese culture was for Hessler. As Hessler described it, the most visible aspects of Fuling’s culture were Party propaganda, lockstep conformity to government/establishment ideology with few voices of dissent, naive optimism about industrial modernization, and reverence for Mao and his successors, all in a strange mix with centuries-old attitudes about gender, family, and the individual that had somehow survived the Cultural Revolution.
Novosibirsk, by contrast, is long since industrialized, no longer communist, and home to people who look European like me. None of my students are likely to be “peasants” (the word is still in common use in China, but in Russia it probably sounds nearly as archaic as in the U.S.) or peasants’ children. They’ll have lived most of their lives in a consumer culture, and they won’t have needed to demonstrate their understanding and acceptance of Marxist ideas to reach university level.
Hessler would sometimes make major gaffes even after becoming relatively comfortable in China. As late as two weeks before the end of his stay, he got in serious trouble for filming people on the street and attracting a crowd, which reminded him how much of an alien he still was. It may be too much to hope for, but I think it may be easier to avoid a similar eventuality in Russia.
Of course there will be challenges, and not knowing what they’ll be makes this all the more nerve-wracking, but there’s no point in trying to predict them, and less point in worrying about them. There’s also no point in making this bjournal entry any longer now that I’ve started spouting platitudes, so I’ll just finish it…
…here. Пока.
Welcome, one and all, to my web-journal (or “bjournal”, as some like to call them) on my upcoming trip to Novosibirsk, third biggest city by population in the Russian Federation, and self-proclaimed Capital of Siberia. For anyone who is just joining us, I’m going because I got a Fulbright grant to teach English there for a full academic year, with Russian lessons (for me) and some research about civics education on the side.
Among my horde of loyal friends who will be swarming to read this, a few of you followed the last bjournal I kept, in Argentina in 2007, at Annie Burke’s urging. (The link is on facebook, and no, parents, you don’t get to see it.) First of all, I’m sorry to have bailed halfway through… as some of you know I ran into some pretty severe academic problems at UCA in the second half of the semester. Secondly, although I don’t want to disappoint you, I’m not going to write much about moaning lionesses, dog-piles, deadly miasmas in foreign cities, or “changüiches [sic] a la chicчona” in this one. If you were hoping for a sequel to that stuff, I hope you won’t be bored.
But…
I’m on a shorter leash now, because the State Department is footing the bill, and even a humble grant-recipient represents them in some modest capacity. With pointer fingers wagging and brows frowning, they told us to refrain from publicly expressing any opinions that might be deemed offensive by a general readership, or construed as denigrating to our host country or its citizens. Maybe this is all to the good; I hope nothing I said last time would have offended an Argentine reader or anyone else. But this time I have to be extra sure, so I’ll save my, um, stronger feelings on sensitive subjects for private correspondence.
I’m also not supposed to cuss. Hmm… I’ll do my damnedest.
As you come in, take a moment to glance up at the unique URL, painstakingly selected from among literally infinite possibilities by… the author himself. I’m using “longitude83” because tracing that line is the best way of finding Novosibirsk on the prodigious breadth of steppe, taiga, and boreal forest that is Siberia. When I tell Americans where I’m going, the best I can do is say, “Yeah it’s not too far from Mongolia. A little closer to Kazakhstan. But it’s not really that close to anything [that you’d recognize by name].”
For people who know more about Russian geography, Novosibirsk is where the Trans-Siberian Railway crosses the Ob’ River, a landmark to which that title at the top of this page, “Eight Months on the Ob’” makes reference.
Calling this bjournal “Eight Months on the Ob’” is also blatant plagiarism: As part of my preparation for this sure-to-be-epic undertaking, I read a book by someone who had done something like this already: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, by Peter Hessler. It’s about his experience teaching English in Fuling, Sichuan Province, China as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late ’90’s.
Here’s one of the best things about having read River Town: It was a valuable emotional boost to know my process of adjustment would probably be easier than Hessler’s. That’s not to make light of the inevitable spells of culture shock, loneliness, frustration, and homesickness I’ll undergo over the course of this year, but I think I’ll have some significant advantages over Hessler. He only learned Chinese after arriving, and being white in China marked him as a foreigner (making him a target for cat-calls, prejudiced insults, and condescension) the whole time he was there.
I’m nervous, but Russian culture will feel more familiar to me than Chinese culture was for Hessler. As Hessler described it, the most visible aspects of Fuling’s culture were Party propaganda, lockstep conformity to government/establishment ideology with few voices of dissent, naive optimism about industrial modernization, and reverence for Mao and his successors, all in a strange mix with centuries-old attitudes about gender, family, and the individual that had somehow survived the Cultural Revolution.
Novosibirsk, by contrast, is long since industrialized, no longer communist, and home to people who look European like me. None of my students are likely to be “peasants” (the word is still in common use in China, but in Russia it probably sounds nearly as archaic as in the U.S.) or peasants’ children. They’ll have lived most of their lives in a consumer culture, and they won’t have needed to demonstrate their understanding and acceptance of Marxist ideas to reach university level.
Hessler would sometimes make major gaffes even after becoming relatively comfortable in China. As late as two weeks before the end of his stay, he got in serious trouble for filming people on the street and attracting a crowd, which reminded him how much of an alien he still was. It may be too much to hope for, but I think it may be easier to avoid a similar eventuality in Russia.
Of course there will be challenges, and not knowing what they’ll be makes this all the more nerve-wracking, but there’s no point in trying to predict them, and less point in worrying about them. There’s also no point in making this bjournal entry any longer now that I’ve started spouting platitudes, so I’ll just finish it…
…here. Пока.
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