Finally, I Have Friends, Though Limited Internet Access...

Oh, so much has happened and I’m sitting here in my toxic colored orange sofa bed with its noticeable divot down the middle that I always fall into in the middle of the night, laid up with a noxious cold, which at least gives me a reprieve from the lingering smell of cigarette smoke that pervades Valeria’s apartment, but isn’t doing much to motivate me to 1) work on my prospectus and qualifying paper, both due soon or I face some bureaucratically worded version of academic probation, 2) do my Russian homework, which consists of switching past passive participles to clauses with transitive verbs and back, or 3) write this blog entry. Obviously, I am picking the least of these three evils but I warn that my heart and head are not quite in it. I am also currently at war with a single mosquito who has managed to survive the cold by taking up residence in my bedroom. I have been on the verge of squelching him all night as he nosedives toward me in his quest for blood and until I do must remain vigilant over all exposed skin lest I wind up with another bite on the bridge of my nose.

My New Abode (somewhere in there)

Building across the Street Strangely Reminiscent of OSCE HQ in Pristina

Boogie Woogie Pizza down the Street -- My New Destination of Choice

My internet has been acting up, i.e. it loads pages at such a creepingly slow sub-dial-up speed that they never actually surface on my screen and for some reason I have not yet learned to just turn it off when this happens and instead sit there hurling endless hours and expletives into a void of hitting the refresh button and cursing when it doesn’t work. I have at least learned to stop throwing money at the problem, a lesson which took awhile to sink in.

When I first went into the clean, air-conditioned Western looking Megaphon store they sold me a wireless “high speed” 700 Megabytes per second modem for something like $30—“2 months, without limits!” they said. I gorged on skype calls home and addictively bad American television that night and the next morning the internet barely worked. I had to switch my gmail over to html format and even that was not guaranteed to load. I managed to get onto one of those sites that tests your internet speed and it sputtered through the test, spitting out that my connection was downloading at .04 Megabytes per second. I went into the Megaphon store the next day, infuriated, with these statistics in hand. It was a different manager working, a rather rotund and unfriendly Russian girl, obviously put out by the two lithe but vacuous Tatar girls flitting about the store in their short skirted uniforms but not doing much to assist her at the sole computer on the premises. I walked up and made the mistake of trying to be friendly as I began explaining that my internet was downloading at only .04 Mps when I had just paid for 2 months of high speed service at 700Mps. It’s still deeply engrained in me to smile, make eye contact and bob my head about in a non-threatening manner in approaching people in the service industry, a trick that is rewarded with pleasant and efficient interactions in the States but only seems to provoke ire and disgust in Russia where smiling is a sign of stupidity. “700Mps?” she scoffed. “That service doesn’t exist in Tatarstan,” she said taking a passport from the hand of a customer who had come in after me and typing his information into the computer. “Then why did I pay for it?” I asked slightly exasperated. “And why is it right here as an option among your service plans?” I picked up the laminated sheet from which I’d picked my plan the day before. She shrugged without taking her eyes of the computer. “It was working at high speed, or at least at normal speed last night, and this morning it went dead,” I continued, “Can’t I at least get it back to that normal speed?” She ignored me.

I continued to stand there waiting for her to finish with the customer she’d in my mind very rudely taken instead of me. I tapped my foot. I tried to puff up my chest and look tall and menacing. I waited. I planned out the Russian of what I was going to say to her. And when she had finished selling mobile phone service to the guy, I was ready to make my move. However, the guy pushed past me and without even looking up, the sour faced manager reached out to take the passport of a Russian blond beside me. “Noooo. That’s not fair” I screeched, the pitch of my voice unbearable even to my own ears. She looked disgusted, but she did at least look up. “What? What do you want?” she said, still typing into the computer with one eye on the screen. “I want my internet to work!” I said. “I want to communicate with my friends and family. I want to read the news and watch crappy American television.” “Oh you watched television?” she said shaking her head and blowing air out through her pursed lips, “That’s why your internet is now slow.” “What do you mean?” I pleaded. “You can only download 2 gigabytes of information at high speed and then your internet will go to basic speed which is slow.” She shook her head again and scowled, deeply tired of me. “But what do you mean? I paid for the service ‘without limits’” I whined. “You have internet service without limits for 2 months,” she explained to me as if I was the slow six year old that my Russian likely made me out to be, “But after you download 2 gigabytes of information, it will be very slow internet service for the rest of the 2 months. You shouldn’t have used it all so quickly.” “But the guy here yesterday told me that the service was without limits.” She rolled her eyes as she clacked at the computer. “If you want another 2 gigabytes it will be 300 rubles,” she said. I very eagerly opened my wallet and after she had finished with the blond handed over my credit card to add a new 2 gigabytes to my account. “We don’t take credit cards,” she scowled, now forced to deal with me as I was the sole customer in a store with three employees. “What do you mean? I paid for my modem yesterday with a credit card!” She shook her head as if *I* was the crazy one, “You can use your credit card for hard things in the store but not for things you cannot touch.” “So what if I buy a phone charger too,” I said picking one off the shelf with a smirk. “Here, I’ll buy this and the 2 gigabytes on my card.” “You can buy the phone charger on the card” she deadpanned “but you will have to pay for the gigabytes in cash.” “How do you people do any business?” I screeched and breaking into English gestured madly “This is crazy. You are all crazy!” The three girls all started laughing and pointing at me, the stolid manager included. “Craaaazzzy Russia” she said in a thick accent as I threw my hands up and exited in a huff. This was my first attempt to throw money at the internet problem. I went back with cash and bought an additional 2 gigabytes multiple times over the course of the next few weeks. And while the internet service would seem to work for at least a night after the purchase, it was only after another manager sold me 20 gigabytes for an exorbitant sum and I still could only get regular speed service intermittently that I admitted defeat and stopped going into the Megaphon store to try to “fix” the issue.

What I have realized in all this is how ridiculously internet-dependent I am, in a way that I can see from a detached point of view is completely counterproductive to why I am here. I keep comforting myself with the banalities of home. And at the time it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, to unwind after a hard day of grammar with a little television or a movie, to listen to an NPR podcast on the long cold walk to the university. But that temporary “relief” keeps me in this English language headspace, this bubble of comfort I know that I am going to have to leave behind if I really want to get under the surface of things and understand what is going on here. It’s an odd thing to realize how far I have come from the petulant little creature I was living in Tbilisi with a Georgian boyfriend completely embedded in local society with a chip on her shoulder pointed menacingly like an AK-47 of 22 year old contempt at all the Americans living up the hill in western comfort, frequenting expat bars and hanging out with only those Georgian sell-outs who spoke English and worked for NGOs or the Embassy. Now I’m sitting here, yes in my “homestay” with mad Valeria throwing back as much vodka as she can between cigarettes, the polar opposite of the smothering mothering Aygul (I’ll get to that in another entry), but still cushioned from the life of the city and the people buzzing around within and below my new apartment block.

This realization hit hard the other day when I met up with Daniel, the other Boren Fellow in Kazan for the year, hoping to discuss potential research projects with him and his Tatar wife at a tea house on Baumana street. We’d met briefly in the international students’ office while waiting for Azhat Arzlanovich to attend to us and in our few minutes of conversation he had managed to convey that he had been in Kazan 6 years ago on a Fullbright when he had taught at the university and met his now wife who was studying there at the time and that this was like “coming home” for them. He quickly left me when two buff 20-something Australian Tatars, that is members of the Tatar diaspora who’ve grown up in Australia and now come to Kazan for a semester to study their “mother tongue,” walked into the office, and I overheard him attempting to butter these far more interesting friend prospects up with talk of his connections all over town and ability to hook them up with free theatre tickets. Basically imagine the snotty 22-year old Leslie described above had the marriage to Dato been more official (i.e. not kept secret from all friends and family, with particular attention to keeping parents and ex-boyfriends in the dark) and worked out, returning to Tbilisi with 6 more years of the anti-ex-pat chip embedded more deeply in her shoulder and you can begin to image the level of smug that approximates Daniel. And in a way that isn’t a fair description at all because it makes him seem like the bad guy. No. He literally is who I would be if I were in a place that I considered “my own.” And he was gracious in meeting me at the tea house, introducing me to his wife with her broad pretty features and their adorable 6 year old trilingual son in his snappy red polo shirt. But our conversation was in Russian at a level too quick paced and high vocabularied for me to understand exactly what was being said. I floundered. I saw the way they both looked at me with a mix of sympathy and disdain. I was that terrible American academic that I would myself normally love to hate, out of place, trying to do “research” on a question not clearly established on a society in which she has no roots or footholds, tossing about overly theoretical ideas that don’t resonate with anyone on the ground. It was humbling to say the least.

Which is why I was completely surprised when that evening Daniel called and even spoke in English to tell me that a friend of theirs had said he would be happy to speak with me about ethnic identities, also in English, and then gave me an address where I could meet him for the breaking of the Ramadan fast at sunset. It was already 7:00 so I wheeled over to the grocery store to buy an oversized box of chocolates and with a head scarf in hand just in case I raced off to the Tatar Cultural Center. Finally, this felt good. I walked into the small building on Karl Marx street with the name of Daniel’s friend on a scrap of paper—Azat Timorov—and attempted to communicate why I was there to the old woman in the small lobby who was either hard of hearing or didn’t speak Russian but gestured up toward the second floor. I wound my way up the stairs where I was met by a girl in a full hijab including an almost Afghan looking blouse to her thighs over flowing pants. She was unbelievably kind and gentle as she led me to a couch where others had gathered, the rest of the girls in western dress without headscarves and the boys looking slightly scrawny and malnourished. I said again that I was looking for Azat Timorov and they still looked puzzled. Apparently my pronunciation must have been off enough for them to not realize that I was referring to the guy in the corner bent over a computer next to a reedy thin blond, both of whom looked out of place in the environment. The headscarved girl in the role of hostess walked me over to Azat and even though he could not remember meeting Daniel or his wife and claimed to have not talked to them this afternoon, he did in fact speak English and was happy to immediately start gabbing with me. He was 27 with light blue eyes, sandy hair and freckles across his face but claimed to be Tatar through and through as did his very fair blond friend Diana. They were more interested in showing me video clips on you tube of Tatar music dubbed over British hip hop videos than talking about ethnic identity but this seemed to be a better window into what I was after anyway. “If you want to talk politics,” Azat joked, “we’ll have to go underground.”

We broke the fast with tea and a rather sad assortment of sweets to which my chocolates actually made a noticeable contribution. The “emcee” of the cultural center bowed as he introduced himself and invited me to join them at the conclusion of Ramadan for an excursion to the historic Tatar city of Bulgar on the Volga River. As I accepted the invitation gratefully with a bow of my head I attempted to hide all dismay at the thought of returning to Bulgar. The 3 hour journey by boat each way to the historic town of Bulgar, the seat of the Bulgar civilization who adopted Islam in 10 AD and would later become Tatars after being conquered by and mixing with the Golden Horde, was the one excursion that I had taken with the other international students at Kazan State University, (a group of literally 20 year old, chiefly German, college students studying abroad with one lovely British girl I quickly befriended despite our 13 year age gap and the fact that she refuses to speak English with me or anyone else, which while laudable still makes our conversations somewhat stilted and reliant on an exchange of bubbly energy and smiles to convey our good intentions). It was perhaps one of the most boring field trips of my life. We arrived at the “town” of Bulgar, which consists of a few remodeled buildings, some ruins and a shoddy Soviet era museum all widely spread out over an endless uninspiring piece of land. The thing of greatest note while there was the sickly arid yellow color of all grass and plant life that stretched for miles in all visible directions and drove home the extent to which the Russian land had been decimated by the summer heatwave even in places where the fires had not flared up, and the fact that despite this land having been turned into a sad and obvious tinderbox just waiting for a spark to incite the horror shown in warning posters plastered in the visitors’ center and on all television news programs across the country, there were still cigarette butts casually strewn all along the long rambling desiccated paths between buildings.

Off to Bulgar on the Boat

3 Hours Each Way 

We Arrive

Historic Bulgar

View from the Tower

Another View This One with the Start of 'Rustam's Name Etched into the Glass

Note the Stunning Desiccation in All Directions

As I said, I accepted the invitation despite my deep lack of desire to return to Bulgar because it was so nice to finally be in the thick of things. Each of the students went around and introduced themselves. They seemed a bit downtrodden and sad though some were eager to use the English they’d learned in school. There was no overt reference to Tatar culture or politics. We simply shared a meal. Azat later explained as he, Diana and I made our way to a bar just off Baumana street that things were calm now, that there was no real threat to talking about Tatar politics these days because there was really nothing to say. All of the major Tatar activists from the early 90s had been killed off. The Cultural Center, which he said had been a hub of activism back then had dwindled into a kids’ club, with a lot of the students from the university with nothing better to do coming over to hang out but not discussing contentious politics or for that matter Tatar culture at all. “There are no intellectuals left to have discussions with,” he shrugged, “all these kids are from the village.”  He himself had made it out of Tatarstan and was working at a well-paid job in Turkey to which he’d be returning in a few weeks. Diana, a recent graduate of the university, was even less interested in politics but was still very bright spirited, happy to meet me and having majored in German at the university was even more enthralled with the prospect of gaining entry into the community of German students on the fringes of which I’d found myself socially.

In order to facilitate this, I took Gemma, the young lovely British girl I had befriended up on her offer to meet up with Fritz, a Swiss German she admired for his elevated Russian language abilities who was among the new boatload of young German speakers matriculating into the university with the start of the fall semester who were said to be convening en masse at a bar downtown. Normally, when Gemma had texted to express that since the buses had stopped running she would not be joining us, I would have headed home as well. But since I had earnest Diana now eager to meet the new pool of Germans with me, I got in touch with Fritz to make this social exchange happen. And amazingly it was not at all awkward to have my two blind friend dates via Daniel and Gemma join forces in a low key pub where we ate peanuts and pistachios and drank beers that were poured from the tap as more foam that body. Sadly for Diana the remaining horde of German students had wandered off without Fritz who seemed quite eager to ditch them and meet people who actually lived in the city. After only one round my new Tatar friends went on their way with the promise to meet up soon and give us an insider’s tour of Kazan.

As it was still early the dapper young Fritz and I headed on to another drink at the “Beer House,” where he first ordered a tea explaining that he was coming down with a head cold as he often does as a result of his weak constitution. With his round little spectacles, well tailored apparel and posh British accent belying his baby face, Fritz and I became fast friends talking of our unabiding love for, frustrations with and addictions to the discomforts of Russia and how endlessly boring it made the return to the predictability of transparent economic exchanges and clean public bathrooms that provided both toilet bowls and toilet paper seem upon arrival home, as well as sharing stories from our favorite cities around the world, the cracks of his 20 year old veneer of nostalgia only showing through, and charmingly so, when he’d mention where he and his parents’ had dined or had trouble catching a taxi. Unfortunately, somewhere in the matrix of my lungs adjusting to the smoke-laden air at Valeria’s apartment, the abrupt cold snap in Kazan and the fact that my weather appropriate clothes are currently residing in a suitcase at Miriam’s house in Moscow, the germs of Fritz’s latest malady capitalized on my weakened immune system and have rendered me bed-ridden with a hacking cold. In better news, I did manage to kill the mosquito (though only after a bite to the left temple) and book a flight to Moscow to retrieve said clothes and help celebrate a friend’s birthday with a heavy drinking, age appropriate social cohort next weekend.