A Whole New Kazan

So when I last left off in Kazan, expectations were pretty low. The heat was so unbearable I hadn’t gotten around to much of the city and what I had seen of it on my long sweaty stroll down to the Kremlin and back was fairly bleak. It seemed a grey sprawling city full of grandiose Soviet architecture long faded from its glory days, broken dust-filled streets that you have to watch as you walk so that an uneven patch doesn’t catch you by surprise and send you tumbling. I remember a moment on my way back from the Kremlin as I was walking alongside a dried up, trash laden canal, having been in Paris and walked a similar stretch of the Left Bank just the week before, thinking, well, this is exactly what you get for wanting to go to places other people don’t go.

Meanwhile, the battle over my dietary regime was still raging on the homefront. I had won what I thought was defining ground over a dish Aigul called “ovoshi” or “vegetables,” a medley of boiled potatoes, cabbage, sliced hot dogs and a crumbled grayish mystery meat, by falling into bed early and feigning sleep until she went to work the next morning thereby avoiding it for both dinner and breakfast. However, I soon found that whatever ground I claimed one day came back as soon as we squared off again in the form of lengthy harangues that go something like: “you are bad eater, why didn’t you eat all of the cheese in the refrigerator while I was at work, why are you drinking cold water, you shouldn’t drink cold water,  I would never drink water cold, the yogurt that you like is repulsive and full of chemicals, I would never eat that yogurt, instead I am now drinking a mug full of cream, why don’t you want to drink a mug full of cream too? there is something wrong with you.”

And I know that I stand accused of harboring a cultural superiority complex. I know this and I dare any anonymous soul out there preaching equality and tolerance among all the world’s peoples to go live in the home of someone from a different culture for a few months. Because it’s all well and good to champion cultural relativity from afar. But it is a completely different proposition when ideas about what is right and good and important for your own health and comfort are being foisted upon you and you are being pressured to change the most basic habits that you know from tried and true experience of your own will make you feel healthy and comfortable. It is realpolitik on a micro individual level. It is true war. I want to behave a certain way. Aigul wants me to behave a completely different way. If I succumb, there is peace. If I resist, there is continued fighting. Real tolerance is only possible with a ridiculously large amount of space between people!

I also know that in resisting rather than submitting I have upended the traditionally defined Tatar roles of guest and host and that the same would be true in any Russian, Georgian, Albanian, Serbian or Tajik home I’ve ever visited. In doing so, I am being supremely rude. I know this. And yet I can’t seem to just give myself, particularly my body, over completely. Maybe I am too old to be doing this. Maybe teenagers and college kids go abroad and stay with host families while adult professionals don’t, not because of the differential in resources and opportunities, but because of the differential in levels of flexibility. The weird thing is that this is all making me question fundamentals about who and what I am. Because if you’d asked me two weeks ago, I would have self-reported that I am a very flexible person who is interested in and sensitive to other cultures and that is exactly my value added in going into the field to study comparative politics. I think potentially I am still that person but I am just reporting much of the day-to-day conflict that otherwise goes unreported. Though, I don’t know. Did Jim Scott and Libby Wood feign sleep to avoid the version of “ovoshi” they were served or did they lap it up like good political anthropologists? Is this strife a way of highlighting where the differences between cultural assumptions lie and therefore productive and positive? Or have I really just become the insensitive American who goes abroad and snubs local ways of life? (I did have that moment of deep-seated craving for McDonald’s after all!) Is this just the inevitable chafing of a square unit from one system trying to insert itself into a universe of circle units? And will it abate as my edges get worn down or continue chafing until I head home at the end of the year? I suppose only time will reveal how much of a self-interested asshole I have actually become.

Such was life in Tatarstan, somewhat fractious and seemingly grey, until a fortuitous moment in the basement level computer room of Kazan State University. I had made significant progress with the university bureaucracy. They had assigned me an instructor and after a compromise I probably shouldn’t put in writing lest grant officers catch wind of the blog, we agreed that I would have 30 “academic” hours of one-on-one Russian classes with her per week. I’d met the instructor for the first time that morning and liked her very much, and she had dismissed me for the day so that she could work on planning my curriculum.

Internet-starved I was in the midst of returning emails when two girls chattering in English and smacking gum walked in. My first response was to ignore them, the hackles rising up along my shoulders at the sound of their American accents. And I think this is exactly why I became so interested in neuroscience, as a potential albeit after deeper consideration as of yet completely impractical way, of solving the world’s problems. There is the part of my brain that instinctively hunches and narrows my eyes in response to outsiders. It comes on first and starts the stream of conscious narrative in my head moving in an ugly direction, reacting negatively to every innocuous comment out of their mouths, and actually physically making my posture tense, my shoulders hunched and closed. And then, thankfully, there is another part of my brain that detects this behavior and rejects and censures it. This part interjects into the stream of conscious narrative like a parent or a boss and starts berating the narrator. “Stop this foul behavior. You are being a jerk. Put your shoulders down, take a deep breath and talk to these girls.” There is resistance from the bratty narrator who doesn’t want anything to do with these outsiders, but eventually it concedes that the other part is right and we will all, in this organism that is Leslie, be made better off by positive social interaction.

I turned in my seat and flashed a smile at the girls, “Hey, are you guys American?”

The one girl, a solidly built brunette looked over her shoulder at me, “No, we’re Russians who just speak really good English,” she scoffed. Her friend, a lither blonde, chortled as she glanced over her shoulder to eye me up.

And I think a similar process of resisting interaction with an outsider and then correcting for better social graces must have been occurring in the neural pathways of these girls’ brains as well because the brunette then made eye contact and smiled more avidly saying, “I mean, no, of course we’re American. Did you just get here?”

 “Yeah, I just got here yesterday. Have you guys been here for awhile?” I asked.

“Yeah, we’ve been here for the whole summer” the blonde informed me, now turning to face me. “This is our last day. We’re actually leaving tomorrow.”

“Yeah. We were on the Blah-Blah-Blah scholars program,” the brunette took up from her friend at blazing conversational speed, “which is so awesome because it’s funded by the State Department and we get a stipend and don’t have to pay for anything. And if we want, we can apply for the same program next year to come back for a whole year and I’m totally going to do that because I totally love it here. I mean I’m from Manhattan so it’s not like I’m from the middle of nowhere and this place is *really* cool. What program are you on?”

The “I’m on a very elite program, tell me which program you are on so that I can rank myself relative to you” question really irked me but I pressed on with the conversation, intentionally not dropping any names. “I’m on my own actually. I’m here to work on my Russian and then do research in the region for my dissertation.”

“What’s a dissertation?” the brunette asked, her eyes squinting, “I mean, I think I know what it is, but I’m not totally sure.”

“Oh, no, of course,” I apologized because the realization had just hit me like a brick in the face—these were *high school* girls. That was what was so strange and obnoxious about them! It wasn’t their fault. “I’m doing a PhD. You write a dissertation to get a PhD.”

And once we had broken the ice, and the girls had placed me as a non-threatening perhaps even interesting entity somewhere in their high school social hierarchy, all jousting ceased and the floodgates of information opened, both of them talking over each other to tell me *everything* that I needed to know about Kazan.

“You have to go to the Meat House on Baumana street, everything there is really good.” “And the Blini House too, right nearby on Baumana, has the best ice cream and the best lemonade. I mean it’s not like real lemonade but it’s the closest you can get and it’s really good.” “And the ice cream on the street is really good too and it’s really cheap. Gelato is more expensive, but that’s true anywhere.” “And if you go to the beach near the city, don’t put your head underwater because the water is really dirty. But if you go an hour out it’s ok cause the water is cleaner.” “Oh and you have to go to Koltso, the mall, you’ll see it, it’s the big building at the start of Baumana street with a big ring in front.” “Yeah, they have super cheap movies and you have to get the sladkiy (sweet) popcorn cause it’s amazing.”

And any lingering worry that the next generation is growing up too fast that I might have acquired watching teenagers drink scotch and sleep with call girls on Gossip Girl (shhhh, terrible habit) was completely alleviated. I found the fact that these girls did not mention a single bar but gave me explicit instructions on where to find the best lemonade in the city completely endearing.

“So where is Baumana street exactly?” I asked.

“Oh my God, you haven’t been on Baumana street yet,” the blonde’s jaw dropped.

“Evvvvverything’s on Baumana Street” the brunette shook her head.

And after the girls departed, I braved the heat, which had at least abated into the 90s, to check out this Baumana street of which they spoke. I was reading from the instructions they had given me worried that I might not find it. “Turn right outside of the university, then right again. Walk down the hill and you’ll see a huge red brick onion-domed building.” And looking up that’s exactly what I saw. This oddly gothic but incredibly welcoming almost playful building soaring way up in the air marked the start of Baumana street.

Onion-Domed Red Brick Building

a.k.a. the Chapel of the Church of the Epiphany

With the Actual Church of the Epiphany Hiding Behind It

I turned the corner and it was as if I had suddenly walked into a whole new Kazan. The city went from a grey post-Soviet wasteland to a wildly colored seaside town with quirky character and erratic charm. Walking down the brick paved pedestrian boulevard of Baumana street literally and quite surreally felt like walking down a boardwalk. There was carnival music playing loudly out of speakers spaced along the street. There were games to play, darts to throw, pictures to be taken with doves a handler put on your shoulders, cotton candy and ice cream and bubble gum to buy. There were fountains and carriages, both bronzed as statues and horse-drawn walking down the street. There were artists painting caricatures and serious portraits and little tattoo booths where pierced, sullen teenagers were waiting to exploit a moment of bad decision-making and take needles to your arm. 

Fairytale Kazan

Note Girl with Doves in the Foreground

Maybe Explains Why My Host Mother has so Many Stuffed Animals around the House??

Seaside Town without a Sea (Though Perhaps the River Counts for Landlocked Locals)

Strangely Somewhat Reminiscent of both Tallinn and Belgrade 

Bubble Gum!

Spitting Frog Fountains

Mr. Souvenir

And both sides of the street were overflowing with cafes and restaurants each more creatively themed than the next--from the Che decorated Cuba Libre to the traditional old tea house, from the Meat House to the Blini House-- it all looked like so much fun.

Cute Tea House

 The Intellect Bar

The Bear Bar

And by the time I made it down to the spectacle that is the Koltso shopping mall at the very end of Baumana street, my previously calculated projections for how the next three months would go were shattered as it now seemed anything might be possible in this brave new Kazan.  

Kazan or Abu Dhabi??

A Brave New Kazan, Indeed!

Memories from Moscow -- Part 2

After finally letting myself fall asleep in the heat, I slept without waking until 1:00 the next afternoon. By the time I woke, Miriam had already packed her bag for the day and was just waiting for me to get up to escape the heat. The plan was to go to Café Pushkin, the most expensive restaurant in Moscow, because they were guaranteed to have working air conditioning and wireless internet access. We had been invited to stay at her friend Catherine’s house which had extra beds, high test air conditioning and sealed windows that night. So we only had to make it through the day until we reached our luxury version of a refugee camp. Miriam was sure that if we ordered carefully we could work in the air conditioned Café Pushin until the evening and then go directly to Catherine’s limiting exposure to the outside world.

When the taxi called from downstairs, we donned our masks and entered the smog and 105 degree heat. Ten paces outside the door there was a man sprawled out prone on the street. “Is he dead?” I looked at Miriam who grimaced. When we got closer she recognized him as a local drunk. He didn’t appear to be breathing. However, as we approached he choked on his phlegm, briefly opened his eyes and rolled to his side. At least he wasn’t dead.

Not Dead Drunk (though perhaps dead drunk) Laying in the Street

In the cab Miriam confirmed that the driver would not be charging us an extra 30% for air conditioning and then tried to engage him in shared exclamations about what a nightmare this all was. “What are you talking about?” he shrugged. “The smog, the fires, the carbon monoxide in the air,” she waved her hands. “Bah,” he said “I don’t believe any of it. It’s all a conspiracy to make the people who own the mask companies rich.” This completely exasperated Miriam. “But you can see the smoke hanging in the air. You can feel it burn your lungs if you open the window. Look there, you can’t see the Kremlin! Of course it’s real!”  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he waved her away, “a little smoke, who cares? You foreigners get all riled up about nothing. And you try to make everyone else panic so you can control us.” She sighed too fatigued from the heat to argue. Another mile down the road as the driver dropped us off among the limousines and Hummers lined up at the entrance to Café Pushkin, he gestured to a disheveled woman walking from car to car selling hospital masks. “See,” he said, “It’s all about the money.”

Taxi Shot

Hot Shot Lady Making Tons of Money Off the Crisis, Clearly

Entering Café Pushkin was like entering an alternate universe—an alternate 19^th century universe, that is. Under grandiose marble ceilings, slim waiters in waistcoats wove their way between Doric columns to serve their well-healed patrons with one hand behind their back and a bow. Just as we were entering, Miriam got a call from France 24, a new English language media outlet in Paris, asking her to do a radio interview. In the past few days she had been making a killing speaking about the fires and smog on various channels without their own correspondents in Moscow, always ending with or pausing mid-interview for a dramatic (though never entirely faked) cough. She was sure at this rate that she would at least be able to cover the medical costs for treating her uninsured foot at a respectable hospital in the States. A woman with blond braids to her waist in a long flowing tunic seated me in a red velvet upholstered chair at a table for two by the window. When Miriam joined me she expressed concern about carbon monoxide leakage through the window, but conceded that it was worth the risk to watch the people and cars cutting through the smog out on the street.

When we first entered Café Pushkin we were like wilted flowers. These two bedraggled urchins with long faces, covertly using their napkins to wipe sweat from their brows, who didn’t quite fit among the rest of the upscale clientele. I felt like a zombie made of jello having lost all higher level cognitive functioning and simply oozing out of my chair and onto the table. I could barely keep my head up without propping it on my arm. We ordered a few salads and an assortment of piroshki stuffed with various delicacies. And slowly, slowly, the air conditioning worked its magic bringing us back to life.

Wilted Me with Basic Necessities: Water, Mask and Delectable Piroshki

And when we were sufficiently revived, we delighted in the delicious bits of food served up to us with a bow on bone white porcelain plates. Perched at our table amongst the elite now untouched by the elements but still wary of fire tornadoes, uranium laced smog, diminishing levels of oxygen relative to carbon monoxide and other potential plagues to come, Miriam commented that she felt like Americans ejoying their last palatial meal before the fall of Saigon. By the time Miriam's two friends from the other night came to join us, Miriam and I were fully revitalized and had somewhat inappropriately taken over our corner of Café Pushkin despite the fact that we had really only ordered bottles of water and the occasional piroshok for the past few hours. Full of banter and energy we’d been exchanging computers to watch new youtube footage of the fires, laughing loudly at shared jokes and hushing ourselves as more respectable diners turned to stare. The waiters had been lovely in humoring us with our laptops spread across the table, plugged into sockets at the side of the grand dining room, their cords just waiting to trip an unsuspecting oligarch’s mistress in her spiked Prada heals. Miriam's British friend Amie didn’t help our cause as she, also without air conditioning in her apartment and having walked there in her mask, slouched up to the table devastated and sweating in a tank top and short shorts that she was having trouble keeping up because she’d lost so much weight from the sauna-like heat. Miriam's guy friend just looked mortified to be seen with the unseamly lot of us. Luckily, however, they both ordered food and helped us drag out our stay for the last hour we needed before heading over to Catherine’s.

Very Civilized from Afar

Ever Slightly Less So From Up Close

Albeit Well Connected

From air conditioned café to air conditioned taxi to air conditioned expat apartment in a building designed and owned by a Western company, life in the smog had significantly improved. Catherine had made a delectable lasagna that we ate with a chilled rosé and it was almost as if everything had righted itself, except for the fact that we couldn’t open the windows or leave the apartment. After watching the preposterous apocalyptic John Cusack film 2012 in which sun spots cause natural disasters that flood the earth and end the human race, which seemed only appropriate given our plight, the floods in Pakistan, landslides in China and current reports of heightened sun spot activity, I took the top of a queen sized bunk bed and another colleague of Catherine’s escaping the heat took the bottom as Miriam had passed out on the sofa 10 minutes into the movie. I arranged with Catherine to be woken at 8:30 because all of my stuff was still at Miriam’s and technically I was supposed to leave Moscow the next day on a 1:00pm flight to Kazan, that is, if the planes were flying.

After another delicious hunk of lasagna and smoky black tea for breakfast and the lovely company of girls around the kitchen table in Catherine’s palatial apartment, I could not bear to insert myself into the news reports that were coming from the airport. Flights had been grounded at Domodedovo due to visibility issues since the day before and one blogger who had slept on the floor there waiting for her flight reported temperatures well over 100 degrees and over 4,000 people cramming into the waiting areas, most of whom were trying to get on new flights. Moreover, I was still not entirely sure that I should go to Kazan at all. What if I got myself out there and conditions worsened and it made it that much harder for me to get out of the country? Again, it seems a silly concern in retrospect, but at the time most Western Embassies including the US were evacuating all family members and non-essential staff from Moscow. Meanwhile, the news was reporting that levels of carbon monoxide had reached 7 times the “natural level” the day before. The four of us sat on wikipedia trying to interpret what that might mean—whether the air itself could become toxic enough to put us slowly to sleep, whether these fires could act like a giant carburetor in the sky blowing fumes into the closed garage of Moscow killing us all.

And it was soon thereafter that Catherine went over to the window ledge to see why her little song birds were making such a racket only to find one dead on the bottom of the cage and another having a hard time flying. Miriam has since said that this was the point at which she was closest to panicking, although it was not obvious to me at the time. Catherine was of course devastated over losing her little finch and worried for the other two, but we were both wide-eyed with fear that the poor finches were like canaries in the coal mine indicating that the air was becoming too toxic to breathe. For the rest of the morning Miriam and I watched the birds—I can’t help the pun—like hawks, monitoring their behavior and breathing. The one recovered all flying abilities and the other showed no signs of ill health so we gradually came around to the idea that the finch had died of a cause other than carbon monoxide poisoning. However given our tenuous grasp of the situation at hand, even though my flight was not technically canceled that Sunday, I called up Siberian Airlines and rescheduled for Tuesday hoping to have enough information to make a smart decision by then.

The next few days at Catherine’s were surreally lovely, (minus the tragedy of the bird death of course and the fact that the poor little guy was laid to rest in an ice cream container coffin on a pillow in the hall so that every time I passed it my mind would play the same nasty trick on me in which it would first think “oh yay, ice cream!” and then plummet back to the reality of “oh no, dead bird”). Each night Catherine insisted on cooking wonderful meals for us and so we sat with wine and great conversation around the spacious kitchen table, eating and chatting, listening to a great soundtrack of music including the newest National album, clearing the table and each taking up our laptops to work and play and share things from the outside world in what Catherine dubbed “a modern day sewing circle.”

Modern Day Sewing Circle

We took an elaborate photo series of ourselves in our masks playing musical instruments, doing yoga, posing with a life-sized Soviet boxing dummy, though those have not been released to the greater public as they are quite embarrassing. Miriam started doing live television interviews that we would watch on our computers. Eventually, Amie came to join us with her cat Frederick who recovered quickly from his heat lethargy after a few minutes in the air conditioning and began stalking the bathroom doors behind which Catherine had cordoned off her birds. That last night Catherine invited another writer friend to join the festivities, who was full of great travel stories and tangentially appears in my first Kazan blog entry as the purveyor of the cognac that incapacitated me on my flight out of Moscow. And it was if we were in a space bubble hovering just above Moscow close enough to see the tragedy unfolding but protected enough not to have to live the worst parts of it ourselves.

It was a wonderful 3 day party at Catherine’s and yet in the same way that we could sit in Café Pushkin and pay $10 per bottle of water and use of an air conditioned space, there was something vaguely colonialist and disconnected about the experience. It’s exactly this conundrum that keeps me up at night, often quite literally, and motivated me to do the PhD rather than settling into my well paid OSCE job in Kosovo after SAIS. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m any closer to formulating, let alone answering, the research question that will shed sufficient light on why my friends and I get all the good things in life while other people suffer. And even more problematically, why my friends and I get paid exorbitant amounts of money to be flown around from place to place in our hovering Western air bubbles of comfort to “help” the other people suffering when most of us are never actually exposed to what they are going through in a way that might make us capable of helping. Well, I’m actually quite tired right now surrounded by decorative stuffed animals in my bed in Kazan so I suppose I will save further reflections on global inequality and my culpability therein for a significantly more sleepless night and clearer mind. Or maybe since I am after all now studying at the university that brought us Vladimir Ilyich Lenin I will leave you with the ever pressing question that he in the end answered incorrectly but remains worth posing: "What is to be Done?"

Memories from Moscow -- Part 1

Ok, I lied. Before I bring you any new stories from Kazan I want to pause and return to stories from the chaos of Moscow upon my arrival in Russia before I get blurry on the details. My plan was to land in Moscow on a Friday, stay two nights in the city with my friend Miriam, a freelance journalist who’s been in Moscow since we graduated SAIS together in 2006 and who’d even spent a few years there as a journalist before that. This would be my last big hoorah with her and her glitzy, sophisticated journalist friends before heading off to the significantly less cosmopolitan city of Kazan and onto even more remote provinces of the Volga region for the year. I knew in the lead up to my arrival that there had been an intense and completely aberrant heatwave across “European” Russia that had been decimating crops and cattle and caused a huge spike in the mortality rate due to drownings as people were trying to keep cool in all the wrong places and often with ill-advised amounts of alcohol in their systems. Temperatures were literally off the charts as Russia had never in its thousand years of weather archiving seen temperatures over 100 degrees, let alone temperatures over 100 degrees consistently over the course of days and weeks and months. This heat wave then led to a series of fires, both forest fires above ground across huge swathes of territory and peat bog fires burning underground in areas surrounding Moscow. And this all sounds very blasé. California has forest fires every year. They tragically destroy people’s homes and get put out over the course of a few weeks. We feel bad in the abstract but that's about it. Forest fires don’t evoke the same kind of visceral reaction as more glamorous natural disasters like earthquakes or tornadoes. And yet, if you see the videos of these fires from the ground, it is a completely different story. It literally looks like armageddon, with walls of flame as far as the eye can see shooting high above the structures they’re destroying and ripping through villages and towns at impossible speeds. It literally looks like hell on earth. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttBbMqosm8Y&feature=player_embedded

(this video properly evokes the *terror* of the situation)

Just before I arrived in Moscow, Miriam had gone out to villages in a region outside of Moscow with two journalist friends to report on the fires. The pictures and stories she brought back were heart-breaking.  Her photos from the aftermath of these forest fires look as bad if not worse than the devastation of war I’ve witnessed in any post-conflict country. Displaced peoples with nothing but the clothes on their backs crammed into awkward communal spaces, desperate, poor, their lives in ruin. And yet still the sound of “forest fires in Russia” or the even more obscure “peat bog fires in Russia” does not evoke a sense of global tragedy and with it donations of various resources from around the world to help these people.

Remains of a Village

(photo courtesy of Miriam)

Displaced Couple in Their 70s

(photo courtesy of Miriam)

The Fire Brigade??

(photo courtesy of Miriam)

As soon as I landed in Moscow I was made immediately aware of the level of crisis across Russia. I took one step off of the plane and not only was the heat overwhelming, as if I’d walked directly into the dry baking air of a cedar sauna with all of my clothes on, but the air was so full of a thick ashy smoke that everyone on the gangplank to the airport almost immediately started coughing. It’s so hard to describe because it wasn’t just a smell. There was of course the smell of ash and fire, acrid and thick like bad cigar or cheap cigarette smoke. But beyond that there was a tactile sensation of suddenly being made aware of your entire respiratory system—the inner lining of your nose and throat, chest and lungs—places in your body you don’t usually sense things physically. It’s as if they had all suddenly woken up from a dormant state in the stasis of my body in a panic and had begun sounding the alarm that they were under attack from invading particulate matter. “Get us out of here,” they screamed. And yet there I was in the Moscow airport with the air as thick with smoke and smog inside as out, with nowhere to escape. I was met at the airport by a driver friend of Miriam’s and as we made our way through the mid-day traffic it looked strangely like I had arrived in Moscow in the dead of winter. All around there was that gauzy romantic haze that blankets a city in the midst of its first snowfall of the year. Buildings blur into the muddled white of falling snowflakes so that it’s impossible to make out detail and your vision adjusts to a softer point of view. The scenes of the city as we drove along were exactly like that first enveloping of winter and would have been lovely had I arrived at the beginning of December but dotted with women sweating through sleeveless shirts and men having stripped themselves down to their bare chests at the beginning of August in temperatures the likes of which I’d only experienced in Tajikistan, these Christmas scenes were extremely alarming (think nuclear winter).

A Church Amidst the Smog

I arrived at Miriam’s apartment and she hobbled to the door to greet me and my massive bags. Over tea she explained that while going out to get the story in the villages, she had had a more intimate experience with the fires than intended. Setting herself up to take a photograph of the ruins of a house, she had stepped backward into what she said felt like a sand pit closing around her feet. Immediately her shoes started melting into her skin and she instinctively jumped out of them. But one foot was more fortunate than the other in its landing and the result was first degree burns to the right and third degree burns to the left. She had the less fortunate foot wrapped tightly in gauze and had been to two of the “international” medical centers, which were apparently only international in their pricing structures. At the Swiss medical center, where the Russian interpretation of “Swiss” was a musician plucking a large harp in the lobby, they had popped the blisters which Miriam had since read on the internet was the worst thing to do. Meanwhile, at the European Medical Center, her Chechen doctor had charged her $125 for re-wrapping the foot in gauze and telling her to stay off of it for a few weeks. The foot when she unwrapped it to change the bandages was melted and misshapen like the foot of a wax dummy held over a flame. The upside to the third degree burns however was that her nerve endings had been destroyed and she didn’t feel any pain.

Poor Miriam!

Poor Foot!!

Miriam’s apartment, technically her émigré father’s apartment that she has inhabited for the last few years, was lovely, spacious and homey with only one drawback—it had no air conditioning. This was the norm across Moscow she informed me. Summer in Russia for the last five years had generally involved light sweaters and required at most open windows and a fan. She said that she couldn’t remember a day before this heatwave that she had even thought of getting an air conditioner for the place. Worse yet, because of the smog, which was still palpable inside her apartment but significantly less so than out in the open air, we had to keep all of the windows completely shut. And so the math went something like this: 105 degree weather, 10 closed windows, 2 girls, 1 fan. She had thought about checking us into a hotel but rumor was they were all booked and at astronomical prices that in brutally capitalist Russia had started rising and then soaring with demand.  

Miriam started calling around to restaurants to make sure that their air conditioning was working before we picked one as our evening refuge from the heat. The brief conversation with the proprietor of the first restaurant, “Scandinavia,” which sounded like a sure bet, went something like this loose interpretation from the Russian: “Is your air conditioning working?” “Yes, but not successfully.” “Ok, so is it warm or hot in the restaurant?” “Hot. Would you like to reserve a table” “Thank you, no.” The next effort bore more fruit and Miriam booked us a table directly under the air conditioning unit" at the stylish Apartment 44. We donned the construction masks that I had luckily bought from CVS almost as a gimmick the day before leaving the States and went out into the ashen night.

Forlorn in Our Masks

There was something terrifying about going out into the streets in our masks.  Usually packed with cars and people the streets of Moscow were empty and the headlights of the few people still on the road were muted by smog. It was like a Cold War nightmare of nuclear winter. The restaurant when we arrived was lovely, made to look like a homespun apartment with thick wooden chairs and tables, victorian wallpaper and long patterned curtains all slightly mismatched for romantic effect, however, it was not air conditioned. The one sad wall unit was pumping away on full blast but just barely eased the heat into the low 90s. Moreover, the seat under the air conditioner we’d been promised had been taken and we were offered a nice table on the terrace with a breeze. “Was that a joke?” Miriam asked appalled, our masks still dangling around our necks. But that was the first of many blasé reactions to the ash-laden air that we would hear from the Muscovites who denied it was a problem. We sat ourselves at a sweaty table in the middle of the room and ordered bottle after bottle of water and had the waitress bring us cupfuls of ice some of which to put in our drinks and the rest for cooling off wrists, palms and the backs of our necks. We were joined by two of Miriam’s charming journalist friends, one a guy who had dated a friend of mine a few years back and who didn’t seem as concerned with the state of the city as the rest of us, likely because he had air conditioning in his apartment which he very generously offered to share, and another a British girl who joined me and Miriam in our panic not only because her single fan was not enough to combat the heat for herself but because her poor otherwise healthy young cat Frederick had taken to lolling on his back with his feet in the air and his tongue out in response to the soaring temperatures in her apartment. The vet had recommended that she wrap him in a cool wet towel and in very uncharacteristic cat response the wet towel had elicited much purring.

And now that we have all survived, our panic over the “crisis” that weekend and particularly our conversation at the table over dinner and drinks seems a bit unfounded, perhaps even hysterical. But this is the power of fear. In the moment, it is real. It is the most real, present and pressing “fact” in the landscape of reality. And in this case it was driven not just by assessments of our environment—anomalous inescapable smoke choking the city—and rumors of worse to come as in the reports that the fires were heading for the dry toxic ground around Chernobyl and would send nuclear material into the thick of the smog and the predictions of “fire tornadoes” or swirls of fire whipping across the city that had once wiped out a city of 30,000 in Japan but most of all by our inability to trust the information coming from the Russian government. At that point they were being completely silent. Any announcements they had made about the air conditions were deliberately crafted to assuage panic. But there was absolutely no faith that we had all of the information on the table in front of us with which to make informed decisions about whether to wait this out or flee the city. This was particularly difficult for me because I’d just arrived, had no priors other than that the fires were sweeping across many of the republics I had wanted to stay in and study over the course of the year and could not determine if we were all just fanning the flames of fear for the fun of it like a good ghost story or a scary movie and I needed to put the hysterics aside, calm myself and proceed with my plans for the year or if this was a case in which it was actually quite stupid to proceed with half-baked plans I’d hatched in the ivory tower of academia and stubbornly following through with them would be a suicide mission, would push me deeper into a hell that was not my own, not my responsibility, not necessary for me to experience and might possibly require sacrificing my life to.

Mugging Panic for the Camera

Back out in the apocalyptic city, masks securely fastened, we got into a taxi and instructed the driver to make three stops and to roll up the window and turn on the air-conditioning. “That will be 30% extra for the air-conditioning,” he dead-panned. Miriam flew into a rage at the driver over this latest extortion in the midst of a security and health crisis. The driver called his superiors to confirm that indeed it was company policy that air-conditioning would now cost 30% in addition to the already high cab fares across Moscow. I tried to re-focus Miriam from her escalating rage at the driver to the plight of our return to her single-fanned apartment and how it might be better to stay at the air-conditioned flat of her friend who'd invited us to stay, even though this regrettably would mean sleeping on the floor since his roommate had a friend in town on the sofa. We made a deal that we would give sleeping at her place a try and if it was too intense we would retreat to the friend’s floor.

Unfortunately, this bargain went in different directions. After we had positioned ourselves on her bed with fair allotments of the fan breeze, Miriam, accustomed to and worn out by the heat, immediately passed out. I, on the other hand, jet-lagged and full of nerves, started sweating and slowly crying. I remembered a completely unrelated conversation I had had with my father a few weeks ago. We had been talking about a heatwave in Philadelphia and he’d said, “the problem is that these little old ladies are scared of a draft so they shut their windows and think that turning on a fan will be enough to cool them off but they’ve basically just shut themselves in a convection oven and are slowly baking to death.” This wasn’t how I wanted to go. I looked at my skin and I swear it looked pinker, like I’d acquired a sun burn without being in the sun—surely, evidence that I was baking in Miriam’s convection oven of an apartment. The choice was impossible—open a window, choke on the smog and die from carbon monoxide poisoning or sit here and slowly overheat all my organs like a frog who gets lulled to sleep in a pot of slowly boiling water that he would have immediately jumped out of if thrown into at its end state of boiling. The crying continued. Miriam snored. I grabbed my laptop and went to the bathroom. Now Miriam’s apartment is in no way ostentatious other than the somewhat out of place 5 person jacuzzi in her bathroom. I climbed in, balanced my laptop securely along the ledge and set the faucets to settings as cold and strong as they got. Soothed by the cool water on my limbs despite the fact that the tub was filling at such a slow rate that I had only an inch or two to sit in after an hour, I scanned the news of the day across the world and across the lives of my friends on facebook to distract myself. Eventually, around 5am I crawled into bed wet. I looked over at Miriam and for a moment wasn't sure if she was breathing but completely overwhelmed, I too could do nothing but succumb to sleep myself even if it might have been my last.

A Meta-Note on Blogging

So I have to pause and express my deep discomfort with the blogging endeavor. It’s not the blog per se, I remember having this feeling the last time I sent out a mass email from the remote town I’d been deployed to in Eastern Albania. On the one hand, here I am with this ultimately unique set of experiences and it seems almost my social obligation to document and share them with friends, family, anyone who might have any interest in them, derive any pleasure of recognition in them from their own experiences or learn something new from them. On the other hand, there is something so deeply self-involved, even self-obsessed, with the project of cataloguing one’s own experiences. There is an arrogance to assuming the social worth of one’s own particular voice. It brings to mind an image from a Kundera book—I can’t remember if it’s the Unbearable Lightness of Being or the Book of Laughter and Forgetting—but the image is of all these pink flamingoes at the zoo rushing up to people in a crowd, urgently wanting to tell their own story, all straining their necks to get around and ahead of the others, each trying to have its own voice heard over everyone else’s. Kundera wrote so far before the Internet revolutionized social communication but his image of this tangle of desperate flamingoes with their craning necks and ultimately drowned out and non-sensical voices seems a perfect description of the Blogosphere. There is a desperation, competition and seeking of validation inherent in just putting oneself out their, in deciding that there is an audience for your stories that I find completely distasteful and want no part of. But again, the pull from the other side is equally strong and ultimately it’s winning out. I am in this crazy place. I am about to meet new people, learn new things about the world, confirm some prior beliefs, disconfirm others. And while I would like to think that somehow my dissertation will be a distillation of all that I’ve learned over the course of the year, I am absolutely certain that won’t be the case. The longer I’ve fought to push myself upstream against the currents of grad school, the more it’s become clear that the academic world is not my natural environment, not the forum for expressing my truest or clearest voice and that it really is in these (somewhat worthless) vignettes that I think I’m able to convey what I’ve learned about the world. So with this slight disclaimer, here I go, taking up my flamingo suit to bring you stories from Kazan.

Oh and also, I would hope that anyone reading this would feel free to comment. Not only so that I know I am not sending these blatherings into the universe to no end, but more so that my self-obsession can be kept in check. If something I write seems overly self-indulgent, florid, just plain wrong or otherwise distasteful, PLEASE call me on it by commenting or shooting me an email. Also, I’m a bit curious what people think about the insertion of pictures into the text. I know that when I read something there is a certain intensity of my own image-building and to the momentum of the journey I’m on with the author that pictures might actually disrupt rather than enhance. I’d be curious to know whether people think it would be better to post links to pictures elsewhere or to keep inserting them into the middle of stories.

Another question/note is the issue of names. I’m not sure what common practice is about protecting people’s anonymity or even privacy so I’m kind of improvising. When talking about the local people here I’ve changed the names and information completely because it seems like a human subjects concern. That is, I do not actually live on the 19^th floor here and my landlady while Tatar is not named Aygul and the guy who picked me up at the airport had a Ukrainian last name but it wasn’t Shupenko. As for friends, I think my policy will be to use the name when all references are completely innocuous and maybe use letters or even different letters when they are involved in more sensitive activities. Feedback on naming policy is welcome. I guess I’ll also google around and see what other people do.

Correction: I now seem to remember that they were ostriches or emus without voices in the Kundera book, but straining just the same

A Trip to Kazan State University

The morning light woke me and despite the sweat pooled around my neck, I lay in bed with that satisfied feeling of being “somewhere else” before it has simply become here. I could make out patterns of laundry hanging on the balcony and wondered when Aygul would wake up. I was expected at the university at 9:00am and she expected to take me. I tried putting the conditioner in different positions to no improved end. It was disgustingly hot and there was nothing I could do about it but suffer. This was the difference between American and post-Soviet life, I thought. In America we do everything to soothe and comfort the body, to create conditions so that it’s stable and not crying out about physical conditions to our cognitive distraction. If this kind of heat wave hit a typically temperate American clime we the industrious and entitled people of America would go out and buy air conditioners en masse. If we couldn’t afford them we would put them on credit cards. But we wouldn’t choose to suffer. Worst case scenario, we would walk through the Walmart shelves packed with $10 fans from China and buy multiple versions to put in the windows, point at different angles, create cross breezes with. If my mother were hosting a student from abroad she’d surely buy an additional fan, not give the only one in the house to the student and suffer without one herself as Aygul had opted to do. Was this a problem of economics or culture? Were air conditioners and fans sold out across the country? And if so, why hadn’t more been flown in from China? Was Aygul opting to suffer or unable to afford a life without suffering? How much could an air conditioner really cost? And how is it not worth buying one at any price when these sweltering nights have continued for 2 months without a sign of breaking? I couldn’t wrap my head around it and apparently drifted back to sleep.

I re-awoke to Aygul standing over the bed looking at me in a small robe opened to fully reveal her bra and underwear. “Hot isn’t it. What a nightmare,” she said, “I slept on the floor because it was too terrible on the couch.” I rubbed my eyes. Was this a passive aggressive way to reclaim her bed and/or bedroom? I couldn’t tell but stumbled out to the bathroom to shower regardless. In the shower I found a creepy old baby doll naked amidst the shampoo that I tried to ignore and finally rationalized away that maybe Aygul’s daughter had a child who came to visit occasionally.

baby doll in the shower

Once clothed in the most ephemeral dress I own I sat down to breakfast. Aygul appeared still in her underwear revealing ensemble and cried out that I had dressed too soon. “Take your dress off!” She made a motion as if she were about to do it for me herself, “There is no man here. Be comfortable.” Yes, no man, but comfortable is culturally defined and I could not imagine being comfortable sitting at the breakfast table with a recent acquaintance in our underwear. “I’m fine, no need.” I said and ignored her protests. She was further insulted by my insistence that I only wanted cereal for breakfast. I ceded her a handful of grapes and more jam in my tea and the revelation that my mother too was a nurse like her and my father too had a garden like hers, which made her quite happy.

We left the house around 8:30 and Aygul had me lock the doors and gates myself for practice. The streets were dusty and the breeze was warm as people made their way from their blocs to work. Every time we crossed a street she grabbed my wrist like I were a child in need of protecting. This was slightly endearing at first but increasingly seemed pathological. Who was this woman who opened her home full of creepy children’s toys from the 80s to students? What was she after? Was she lonely? Was she a lesbian? Did she want her daughter back in a way that infantilizing language students satisfied? I hated to be rude, ungrateful but the denial of my independence was beginning to chafe. Oh dear, this is only day 2, I thought, what does this look like on Day 32? Will I have turned into a monstrous brat who refuses communication beyond necessity, a sullen teenager who shuts herself in her room and takes all of her meals outside the home? She dragged me onto the bus by my wrist, sat me in the last seat and paid for my 15 ruble ticket.

The ride was hot with few aesthetic attractions. Crossing the Kazanka with its beds dry and only a thin stream left in the center, I saw this beautiful palace of ornate brick. “What’s that?” I exclaimed to Aygul. “A private home” she said. “No, that!” I said pointing again at the multi-tiered palace that had to be a city attraction. “Yes, a private home” she nodded and then turned and whispered in my ear: “Oligarchs.” “Oh” my eyes lit up and I whispered back, “Are oligarchs and the government the same?” Aygul nodded in silence.

Eventually we came to an unimpressive stop with a few shops around it and departed the bus. All in all it must have taken nearly an hour from the bloc. Realism, I reminded myself yet again. We climbed up to a tall brutalist building and Aygul explained that this was where her daughter had studied, in the philology institute of the university. She’d studied English and Spanish in addition to Russian and Tatar and had been to America on a program Aygul tried to explain that improbably involved working and studying in Virginia. She led me down a winding path to a small park with a statue of Lenin, KSU’s most famous alumnus, encircled by benches. “The university students call this the skillet” she explained, “If someone tells you to meet them in the skillet come here.” Vera then came out to meet us, tall, dark haired with big features in a pretty dress she told her mother she’d just bought the day before. She took up her mother’s cause in leading me into the bowels of the institution and delivered me up to the room for international students.

No post-Soviet experience is complete without entering the office of a small balding man who shuffles his papers around and claims that he can’t help you. Luckily for me Mr. Azhat Arzlanovich fulfilled this important role for me on my first day at the university. He was at first too busy to see me and sat me in a corner. A wave of thin, young beautiful Tatar women walked in and out of the office each dressed more elegantly than the one before. And finally, Mr Azhat Arzlanovich appeared with his papers, “One moment” he looked vexed if not full on worried, “One moment.” He sat me down with his papers and read from them as if it were the first time he was seeing them. “Leslie Hok, 30 hours per week, individual courses for 10 weeks.” “Right,” I smiled. “You are sure you want to take 30 hours of courses per week.” “Yes,” I said. “And for 10 weeks?” “Yes” “One moment,” he said and left me again. He came back and said, “Ok, so good news! There is a group class that just started last week and will go until the end of August. You will join them, good?” “No,” I looked at him bewildered. “Why no?” “Because I am here for individual courses. You just read that from the sheet.” “But the group class is better. 30 hours per week is too much.” “But I paid for 30 hours per week of individual courses,” I insisted. “Yes, yes, but that may not be possible” he shook his head and wiped his brow. And I should not be too hard on Mr Azhat Arzlanovich because the next piece of news that he had for me, that is, after telling me that my teacher who may or may not be able to oversee my 30 hours of coursework per week was in her village today and would not see me until tomorrow, was that it was in fact possible to get a research visa through Kazan State University for the remainder of my stay in the region, for a not completely insubstantial fee of $600. He gave me the application forms for affiliation with KSU and there I sat for the next hour pushing through them, stopping only to send a pleading email to professors to write a short recommendation on my behalf, and when I was introduced to another American who entered the room. This was Kai, a Hawaiian who’d studied Russian in Kazan for an entire year and had since returned as the ACCELS program coordinator for Americans studying in Kazan on US government issued grants. Cute, young, tanned with a wedding ring almost definitely indicating his marriage to a Tatar girl, Kai informed me that the last round of American students on the Critical Language program, many of whom a friend in Moscow had reported seeing out in a bar dancing on tables during her trip to Kazan the week prior, had left two days ago. Translation: no fling with a hot marine in my immediate future. I was disappointed by the news, but reminded myself once again that I’m here to live the Russian life and can pause my expat dalliances for the year or at least reserve them for emergency trips to Moscow every few months. I completed my application and left Mr Azhat Arzlanovich’s office as he still shook his head saying that 30 hours a week of individual coursework was just going to be impossible. So then don’t offer it as an option on your website!

Wandering out of the building I headed through the heat in the direction of the Kazan Kremlin hoping to find a place to buy a SIM card on the way. The trip was unsuccessful in the latter sense but I did get to peep through the Kremlin and see its famous mosque and church from a distance.

the Kazan Kremlin

the plight of the Tatars??

the mosque inside the Kremlin (reminder "Kremlin" means fortress)

National Museum in Kazan

Heading back I tried to take a scenic route that ended with construction and perhaps biased by the heat I concluded that Kazan was indeed the Kutaisi of Russia. For those of you who have no experience with Kutaisi, please look back through my old emails as I described the tedious existence I led amidst the bleak architecture of Georgia’s second city, or well if you count Batumi, third. Only this time I’m not living in a gangster’s house funded by an OSCE salary!

I did procure the SIM card and made it back to the apartment ready to enjoy some time on my own before Aygul arrived home from work. Instead she opened the door in her underwear and immediately forced food on me. I annoyed her to no end by eating only pickles and some cheese and then sat down at my computer to do “work,” i.e. start writing this blog. The work concept seemed to stave off her advances for awhile. Eventually I submitted to her passive aggressively prancing in front of my door and agreed to go to the supermarket with her. She gave me a quick tour of the neighborhood. Bleak, hot, row after unexceptional row of insect hive complexes passed as far as the eye could see along with a few bus stops for getting out in the morning.

more of my neighborhood

The supermarket or hyper-market as they’re now often called in this part of the world when they offer more than one type of cheese and sausage, was sprawling. I wanted the things I really treasure in non-American form: yogurt, cherry juice, rye crackers and while Aygul allowed me to put them in the cart she was not pleased with my purchases, which made it even more awkward when I went to pay and she insisted that I was not allowed. My food was full of chemicals and unnecessary but *she* was going to buy it for me anyway. I cringed as she put down her paper rubles and then pulled out an old sour cream package that she was using as her coin purse to give the cashier exact change.

a scene from the hyper-market

While the trip was uneventful along the way I found out interesting information about Aygul’s life. She had in fact been married to Vera’s husband. He was a Russian and had died twelve years ago when Vera was 14 of an “insult” which she tried to describe as something sudden but not a heart attack that affects the heart and the brain. My dictionary did not have the term but I’ve since reasoned out that it must have been a stroke. She then went on to say that she was much happier without a man and had no intention to marry again. You don’t say.

After yet another awkward meal together, we watched the news. I asked if she liked Medvedev. She shrugged. He has nothing to do with me. “Putin?” “The same. They’re all the same. They do what they do and it never affects my life.” “What about local government?” “Oligarchs,” she said, “they have all the money. They spend all the money on themselves. They have nothing for me. I have nothing to do with them. They don’t obey the laws. But it’s not my problem.” We continued watching the national news so that I could hear the latest on the smog in Moscow. This was I think the first time that I’d sat down to watch a Russian news program from start to finish and it was beyond inane. It began with a human interest story about a 2 month old baby girl left by her mother in the sun and rescued by police. Most of the shots were of the baby being held by various pretty nurses and a female police officer with a professional opinion from a male doctor. This took up the first 7 minutes of the news despite the fires raging across the country and the smog choking the capital. The next story was about Medvedev’s uneventful trip to Dagestan. Then finally the fires got some coverage but only to praise the response of the authorities who, I shit you not, were shown flying a helicopter with a large bucket trailing off of its tail, lowering the bucket into a lake beside swimming children and then flying over a fire and releasing the bucket. They then went on to talk about the astronomical levels of volunteerism that have burgeoned in response to the fires, showing a lady in South Ossetia who had opened her home to refugees from Voronezh, flipping to a call center where young attractive volunteers were sitting at computers fielding pledges of aid from concerned citizens and then finally going to a bank where the anchorwoman herself was donating cash to the relief efforts through a plastic window. The next report was of the smog. It included a public service announcement demonstrating what the ash particles will do in your lungs through a very graphic visual and for some reason showed an “experiment” with white rats carried out by a bespectacled man in a lab coat who gave results I did not understand. Finally, they warned people to wear their masks and surprise surprise congratulated the government on its quick response. On that grim note, I’m off to bed.

Notes from the 19th floor

On Tuesday I made it to Kazan just barely. My beyond lovely host in Moscow woke me up, made me toast and helped to strap the 50 pounds of books I was certain I’d need to my back. I wobbled my way to the taxi dragging my overstuffed suitcase in a deeply sleep deprived and over-cognaced state. Only once I’d crashed into the back of the cab and was hurtling through the busy streets did I realize just how teetering on the brink of sick I might be. The smog seemed to have lifted a bit so there was far more traffic than the previous days. I looked at the clock and relaxed into the seat having timed the trip just right. That is, until the driver got a phone call. On his end I heard in Russian, “A girl, to the airport, no, no, shit.” He looked back at me snarling as he wheeled the car down the next side street, “Did you call this cab?” “My friend called this cab.” “Well, this cab was for Patrick Bowman. Are you Patrick Bowman” “No, but my friend called. Is this Prestige taxi?” “No” he glared and handed me a card for “Triumph taxi.” “We have to go back.” “But we’re half way to the airport already. I’ll miss my flight” “This is not your cab. I’m now 30 minutes late to get Patrick Bowman.” Perfect, I thought, I had no cell phone, no entry back to where I’d been staying and was now going to have to battle the traffic back to the center only to endure it all over again on a redundant trip to the airport. Stopped at a traffic light poised to retreat the driver looked at me in the rear view mirror. I did not have to make any effort to give him a pathetic stare back. “Decyat-pyat-tisyach rublei” he said. “What?” I said. He took out a pad and scrawled out “1500 rubles” “to the airport” he said. “Yes, yes, of course” I said, pleased that for once the Russian hyper-capitalism in which everything has a price was about to work in my favor.


The taxi dropped me at the airport where I wobbled through the bureaucratic endeavor of registering and checking my luggage for my Siberian Airlines flight to Kazan. I’d paid twice as much for this ticket on the tip that Siberian Air, or S7 as it’s marketed, had a far better crash record than any other domestic Russian airline due to the fact that they chiefly employ fighter pilots who survived the Afghan war. I got to the gate without incident but once there realized that the world was spinning. The cognac and conversation with the writer from a well-healed monthly I don’t read the night before had been a huge mistake, not only for the state in which it’d left me but more so for the embarrassing 6am intervention from my bleary-eyed hostess it’d required to put an end to his unwelcome advances. Thinking back on it as I fought off sleep at the S7 gate, afraid of nodding off so deeply that the plane would leave me behind, I shuddered with mortification. I vaguely remembered mouthing off to the writer about the past year’s elections in Albania and UN Resolution 1244 among other pedantic things thinking I was being supremely interesting while he must have in all actuality been staring at me like a cartoon coyote with a flank of meat in the bubble above his head not listening to a word of my half-baked political rantings. I’d proceeded to call W— on skype in my delirium though I couldn’t recall a word of our conversation and then sat in the bathroom on the cool tile in front of the toilet for an hour hoping I’d regurgitate at least part of the alcohol coursing so potently through my veins, all the time watched closely by my hostess’s two owls who’d been moved into the bathroom to accommodate Frederick the visiting cat. The apartment had been packed full of expat refugees from the smoke and heat of Moscow’s aberrant heat wave and the ensuing forest and peat bog fires that had left a cloud of ash to shroud the city and I was the only one who’d managed to abuse the vast generosity of our hostess by making a drunken nuisance of myself.


Following the thunderous applause for our pilot upon landing, I restrapped the dead weight of my backpack to my person and made my way to find Vanya Shupenko holding a Kazan State University sign for me. He was tall and lean with big olive eyes and wiping back streams of sweat from the back of his neck with his handkerchief amid the crowd of passengers and their waiting relations also sweating profusely and stinking up the small box of the low ceilinged airport. I shook his hand and he apologized for the inadequacy of the airport claiming that within a year Kazan would have an A class airport and international flights to match the stature of the city. We made our way through the dry hundred degree heat unheard of in temperate Kazan until this year. I sat in the front seat and attempted to reign in and buckle a six foot long slack seatbelt around me until Vanya shooed me into the back seat saying that he was replacing the seatbelt tomorrow. We rolled down all the windows and the hot air assailed my face as refreshing as a hair dryer and made such thwappingly loud noise along the highway that I learned no more about Vanya than that he did odd jobs for the university. We passed grey beehives of bloc housing repeating themselves and billboards filled with MacDonald’s advertising which for some unseemly reason looked unbelievably appealing. It was a long unscenic drive to the center. Vanya pointed out the metro that had been built for the millennium anniversary of the city of Kazan in 2005. It had six stops none of which according to the map he’d given me would help at all in my getting to the university in the morning. You wanted to live like a real Russian, Leslie, I reminded myself as the whining voice in my head started protesting how remote my own beehive bloc was going to be as we bypassed the center of town and continued north over the dry Kazanka river. “Do you know anything about my host family?” I asked. He took his eyes off the road to consult a sheet of paper and said “Her name is Aygul. Her father’s name is Ayratova.” This complied with but did not add to the information given to me by the Swedish company who’d arranged for my stay. “You should probably ask for another family,” Vanya deadpanned, “This one lives very far away.”

the neighborhood

Eventually Vanya’s car limped up to the stand-alone bloc that would be my home for the next ten weeks. Adequately grey and Soviet with crumbling stairs and a thick metal door covered in non-sensical graffiti, it certainly met my “live like the Russian everyman” standards.

my new home

Vanya rang up to Aygul and thus begun the full frontal Russian assault that is immersion by home stay. Chatter chatter chatter, nonsense nonsense nonsense, eat eat eat, eat more eat more eat more is pretty much how it goes on an unending loop from waking til sleeping. This is to say nothing against Aygul herself who is a lovely woman somewhere in her late-40s to mid-50s, thin and brown-haired with big Tatar cheeks and blue eyes framed with Asian lids. She bustled me into the house and had me deposit my bags on an enclosed balcony off of the living room then sat me down on a sofa and gave me homemade compote when I asked for water. I reached out to pet a very petite long-haired black cat who’d sidled up in front of me but she exclaimed “Don’t touch Blanche, she doesn’t love anyone but me” just as the cat let out a tortured howl in my direction.

Blanche, the cat who hates me

Aygul proceeded to show me the shelves of the TV cabinet in the living room where I would put my things and it only then occurred to me that I would be inhabiting the living room with its thick green covered sofas and decorative stuffed animals and would be sharing this small one-bedroom with only Aygul, that is, living like a normal Soviet, ahem, I mean Russian. I scanned the shelves for photos of a potentially dead husband among the stuffed animals but found none. Aygul bemoaned the heat and pointed a tiny cylinder of a fan that she called a “conditioner” as if it promised more than the hair dryer effect at me, which provided very little relief and certainly no “conditioning” in the western sense.

the "conditioner"

She then went about the business of host-mothering which revolves primarily around food and overfeeding. She cut a fresh salad of cucumber and onions from the garden of her dacha where she explained her 26 year old daughter Vera who works at the university would be living during my stay and threw in with them homemade pickles and store bought tomatoes. She then heated up a plate of rice and cutlet, a surprisingly delicious lump of grey meat somewhere between a hamburger and a meatball, not unlike the McDonald’s version thereof I’d coveted on the way in. She rattled on about different students she had hosted and after mentioning a German girl who had not wanted her to watch her eat she left me in the kitchen somewhat awkwardly alone to enjoy my meal. Ten minutes later she returned to begin the process of making tea and laying the table with candies, cookies and chak-chak, a kind of sickly sweet honey covered rice cookie I’d had in both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that looks not unlike the post-Soviet Turkic equivalent of a rice crispie treat. I of course disappointed her with my inability to consume everything on the table but scored points by accepting some of her homemade currant jam into my tea.


I actually felt a bit better after the meal and the tea but given the intensity of the heat and the hangover I begged for the possibility of putting a little sleep on the agenda. She shuffled me back to the living room where I assumed I would be staying but then we just sat awkwardly again on the couch. Finally she said “you should sleep in the comfortable bed with the conditioner” and led me to the small bedroom also decorated with stuffed animals including a massive puppy dog with a furrowed plush brow sitting atop the (faux) gold lame bedspread. I couldn’t imagine how a man had ever lived in this apartment and simultaneously understood why one might leave it. I was still unclear whether this would be my permanent bedroom and found it particularly inconvenient that all of my belongings were now on a balcony off of the other side of the house rather than within arms reach on the balcony off of the bedroom.

"my" bedroom replete with stuffed dog

Aygul encouraged me for the second time to take my bra off because there was no man around in front of whom to be embarrassed as if this were the ultimate state of affairs. I complied only after she left the room, around 5:30pm and fell into a very deep almost fever-ridden sleep that lasted until the sun came in through the window the next morning.