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.)