Jacob's Guest Entry

Our day trip to Kyakhta was a worthy microcosm of my journey so far. The town is in many ways similar to small boom-towns out West. Kyakhta is currently suffering under a state of sad and slow decline. Yet during the 18th and 19th centuries as Russians were moving eastwards into the vast hinterlands of the Russian Empire, Kyakhta was fabulously wealthy. The source of the wealth was the tea trade which provided most of Russian and some of Europe with its tea. Caravans would come out of China to this border town between Mongolia and Russia. Then with the advent of the Suez canal, the tea trade disappeared from Kyakhta. The remnants of the wealth are still visible through the decayed but once grand houses, the ruins of Churches that were once large and richly decorated and a museum, which was the main destination of our trip.

The journey to Kyakhta is also worthy of description. Most transport here is available through a fleet of privately operated vans and buses that run designated routes with fixed prices. These vehicles are known as marshrutkas and have quite a bit of character. Our marshrutka was typical. It was a van that seats 12 and was decorated with delightful trim and tassels all around the windows. The color scheme was reminiscent of the crayons with bizarre names to children, such as fuchsia, cyan and magenta. The soundtrack was nonstop Russian Euro-pop. The inside of the windows were covered in a thick layer of frost as the outside air temperature was about -20 degrees Fahrenheit. So in order to see the Asian steppe during our three hour trip, we had to scrape off frost for a 30 second view before the small hole began to fog up. The passengers were a mixture of Buryat and Russian and were generally kind and interested to find Americans in their midst. The Buryats are local people who are quite similar in language and culture to Mongolians.

Once in Kyakhta, we hurried to the museum in order to escape the cold. We used the still common outdoor pit toilets and then finally began our perusal of the museum. Jesse has explained that many Russians seldom get outdoors and hence receive much of their exposure to nature through the natural history wings of museums. Taxidermy is still much loved in Russia and this museum did not lack for stuffed animals. In particular, the museum had a large collection of natural oddities and freaks, such as five legged animals, 2 headed animals, an animal with eyes but no head (I was also confused about how this was possible) and Siamese twins. Jesse did mention a strain of Russian thought which held that through understanding the exceptions of nature, you gain a true understanding of nature. Apparently, one of the czars had a penchant for such animals and the gems of his collection are on display in St. Petersburg. There were also many 'typical' animals of Russia, such as bears, boars, wolves and nerpa seals of Lake Baikal.

After saying goodbye to the two-headed lamb, we went to another wing and were greeted by pictures and stories of the merchants and explorers who moved eastwards with the Russian Empire. There were a number of natural scientists dispatched by the czar to catalogue the flora and fauna of the new lands, map and do basic ethnographic work. Russian explorers even competed with the British for access to Tibet. I particularly liked the pictures of the merchants with their camel caravans laden with tea and of the town square filled with tea bricks. I could get a feel for the town in its heyday when the Mongolian, Chinese and Russian cultures intermingled along with their money.

The last two wings of the museum owed their richness to Stalin's religious persecution, which involved looting and then closing churches and temples. One wing held looted artifacts from the local Buryats' Buddhist tradition, which is Tibetan in origin. The colorful but fierce ceremonial masks and serene Buddhas were in stark contrast to the harshness of the surrounding steppe. The final wing held looted artifacts from the local Orthodox churches, only one of which is not now in ruins. Of greatest interest was a very nontraditional icon painting of the nativity. The painting had none of the typical stylizations of Russian iconography, but instead seemed indicative of the contemporary tastes of that day with its realistic style.

After a brief walk through the main street in town, we decided to escape the cold and hurried into a restaurant. By this time, we were quite cold, as the museum was a poorly heated large concrete and stone building. After standing for 2 or 3 hours in such a building, one can get a deeply set chill. We found two restaurants and neither of them was marked as such on the outside. After entering each restaurant, there was an empty vestibule with a number of doors from which to choose. The wrong door might lead to the kitchen, broom closet or bathroom. We only knew these buildings contained restaurants through the recommendations of people on the street. But, the restaurant we chose was warm and the food was surprisingly good.

The day ended with a three hour drive back to Ulan-Ude in a marshrutka. The conversation included some discussion with the driver's friend about American icons such as Barrack Obama and Mike Tyson, along with repeated affirmations of Russian-American friendship.

Thanksgiving

Anyone who's ever been away from home on a major holiday knows that it can be a rough time. Especially a holiday like Thanksgiving, where so much of the fun of the holiday revolves around tradition. It's impossible to duplicate the relationships that make togetherness on a holiday important, and depending on where you are, even carrying out the rituals that surround the holiday can be difficult. For example, the phone calls home this year left my mouth watering with an insatiable desire for turkey. All of this leaves you with a choice: either you try and have a real Thanksgiving, big dinner and all, or you discard tradition and make the holiday special by doing something out of the ordinary. In the past, the latter has always worked out better for me than the former, but this year has broken my streak.

In a moment of optimism and extreme ambition a few weeks ago, Kate, Carolyn and I decided that we should invite the people to whom were indebted for making our lives in Ulan-Ude much easier over for a real Thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately, when we started making a guest list, the numbers quickly hit unrealistic levels - we are very indebted. After some hard choices, we came up with a guest list of 18 people that matched our dish and seating capacities, planned out a menu, set a time and date, and got ready for a party.

That part was easy enough. The five hours of frantic cooking and ingredient-substituting that proceeded the arrival of all of our guests was the really hard part. Here's a few of the challenges that we faced.

• There is no turkey to be had in Ulan-Ude. Actually, there is one, it's just in the zoo. Seriously.
• Sage, rosemary, and thyme are equally absent. Good thing for Simon and Garfunkel that parsley is popular.
• No measuring cups or spoons. We picked a teacup and designated it the standard, and eyed everything according to it.
• The average Russian stove is about 1/3 the size of an American stove, and one of the racks from ours was missing, so it only had one shelf. In retrospect, maybe it's a good thing that we didn't find a turkey, because juggling two pies and the stuffing was hard enough.
• The average Russian kitchen, while plentiful in stock and soup pots, is sadly lacking in casserole dishes. The result: a stock pot full of cabbage braised on the bottom and barely steamed on top.
• The average Russian apartment has no interior ventilation system, relying instead on small windows. The kitchen was about 85 degrees by the time we were done. It smelled really good, though.
• Green pumpkin. Yes. The pumpkin's shell was green, which turns the part of the inside that's close to the rind a rather funny and unappetizing color.

But it all came together. Despite the fact that we ate two hours later than we had planned (but isn't that in the grand tradition of some Thanksgivings, anyway?), dinner was wonderful, and I have to say we did a damn good job. We had pumpkin soup, mushroom gravy, mashed potatoes, braised/steamed/raw cabbage, cranberry sauce, potato chips with sour cream and onion dip, stuffing, chicken (OK, we cheated and bought it from a take-out place, but how much can you really ask?), and pumpkin and apple pies with home-made pie crust. All for 16 people, who all had an excellent time. Which is good, because it made the 1 1/2 hours spent doing dishes due to the lack of a dishwasher worthwhile.

Three Things I've Learned...

The last two weeks have been very busy, so even though I haven't had much time to write, I've had several very "educational" experiences that are worth writing about. Here are a few of the things that I've learned over the last two weeks.

1) There is no night bus to Ulan-Baator.

I came to Russia on a three-month student visa that was supposed to be easily extended once I got here. Ha. My visa, and those of the other two Americans, expired November 12. The university applied for our extensions in early October, but by the time our old visas expired, there were still no new ones in sight - the local immigration office had not even processed the documents that the university had submitted to them in August, let alone ours. Being in Russia without a visa is difficult, to say the least - no traveling, no hotels, and if someone official decides to hassle you, which has been known to happen, you could have a very large problem ending with deportation, which for me could be a career-ender.

Early last week it looked like everything was going to be fine. The immigration service had told the university that our visas should be ready by the end of the week. Kate and I were elated, since both of us were planning trips to Moscow for New Year's that we'd been on the verge of calling off. Things to an abrupt turn for the worse the next day, though when the immigration service told the university that they'd have to send our documents to Moscow for further inspection and verification, and that they might be ready within several weeks. Here, those are pretty chilling words. They made us nervous, and things got worse when we contacted the Fulbright Office in Moscow to get a second opinion. They told us that they were "very concerned" and were contacting the U.S. Embassy to ask for their intervention.

We were sure that we were about to be thrown out of the country. No more work on the dissertations that we're becoming extremely attached to, no more career in Russia, possibly no more fellowship funding. Over scotch and lots of chocolate, I suggested that the only benefit to this would be a tragically romantic bus ride through the night and across the border to Ulan-Baator, Mongolia. Kate burst even this bubble by informing me that there was no night bus to Ulan-Baator.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending. I'm not sure I understand what happened, and I'm still a little confused about the "further inspection in Moscow" thing, but the people at the Fulbright Office in Moscow are evidently very persuasive, because they called the immigration service here and within three days, we had our visas. Mine still doesn't have the right date on it, but at least it doesn't end until July 10, so not only can I go to Moscow, I can afford to have my papers sit at the bottom of a pile for months on end.

2) Beauty contestants in Russia are exactly like their American counterparts.

Friday (the night that we got our visas) was the evening of the hotly anticipated Miss and Mr. University 2008 contest. You might be curious how a bunch of college students get selected as beautiful enough to participate in a beauty contest. The answer is that they don't. They volunteer. Or, as we found out later, are bludgeoned into doing so by their parents, many of whom are on the faculty.

The whole affair involved a whole bunch of costume changes (a James Bond spy thing, men in kilts, formal wear, swimming suits, the girls wearing outfits that they thought depicted women in men's occupations - most of them went for the sexy plumber look - and the funniest, the guys in flower costumes). The best part, though, was the question and answer session.

QUESTION: What should Russia do to deal with the problem of orphans?
ANSWER: I think the government should give people more money to adopt, because if people adopt, there won't be so many orphans.

QUESTION: Could you give us a mock tourist ad announcement for Buriatiia?
ANSWER: Welcome to Buriatiia, our lovely republic. The nature here is wonderful, and you should be sure to visit the industrial complex in the south. There are also many rare animals in Buriatiia, including the omul [a fish species unique to Lake Baikal]. The omul is the only fish in the lake.
QUESTION: Really?
ANSWER: Er, no, in the world.

QUESTION: What is the meaning of life?
ANSWER: The meaning of life has three components. The first component is family. As a future mother, I think that family is very important [continues on for a minute or so]. The second component is [actually, I don't remember what the second component was - I was a little bored]. The third component is... A

t this point everyone in the audience starts clapping so that she'll stop talking. This girl was acclaimed as the smartest one in the competition - I guess I'm a little confused, but given the competition.

3) What small-scale Russian pig farming looks like

Last weekend Kate and I went to Tarbagatai, a small town about 40 miles from Ulan-Ude. We'd planned to just spend Saturday walking around, and then come back that evening. On the bus there, we met an extraordinarily gregarious 19-year-old student studying to be an English teacher. She was really excited to get a chance to practice, and also to show us Tarbagatai. She invited us to come over to her family's for dinner. They taught us to make pozy, the local dumpling variation, as well as pelmeni, the more nation-wide dumpling variation, stuffed us so full of meat and dough that we could hardly walk, and then invited us to stay the night, which we did because we were having so much fun (and could hardly walk). Considering that they had to send their sons off to the neighbors' to make room for us (I didn't realize this until later), it was an extraordinarily generous gesture. They raise a few pigs, and in a further extremely generous gesture, sent us home with about six pounds of a national delicacy, salo, or pork fat back with salt and garlic, which neither of us know what to do with and is consequently sitting in my freezer awaiting a more appreciate audience.

PS-when we took this photo (me and Tanya in front of a gate to a cottage in Tarbagatai), it was -10. It's warmer now, but boy does that give me something to look forward to!

Election Day

This is the second American presidential election that I've spent in Russia, and this one was vastly better than the last one. The last one ended with tears and a desperate rush to McDonald's for milkshakes during which we got so much sympathy from our taxi driver that he actually gave us the ride for free. Celebrating was much more fun!

Although watching the results was great, even more entertaining has been the Russian TV coverage of the election. I'd estimate that out of a half-hour newscast, they've been giving at least 5 minutes of coverage to the election every night for the last few weeks, and given that the Russian government vastly favors Obama, the press, of course, does the same. The spin they've put on things has been somewhat more unexpected. So for your entertainment, I offer the following excerpts from the main Russian nightly newscast, Vesti.

1) Faceoff

Vesti has been pitching the election as a sort of championship boxing match. They show little 15-30 second pieces patched together of clips of Obama and McCain excoriating each other and looking very angry, often pointing fingers. The clips are placed side by side and running simultaneously. Kate says she saw one like this in which Vesti kindly provided taglines to point out the various oppositions between the candidates. Across pictures of the candidates flashed the following:

MCCAIN/OBAMA
Republican/Democrat
Evangelical/Protestant
Iraq/Yugoslavia

When "Iraq" and "Yugoslavia" came on the screen, pictures of exploding rockets flashed behind the candidates. What Obama, Yugoslavia, and war have to do with each other, and how that stands in opposition to McCain and Iraq, I'm not entirely sure. Not to mention this whole Evangelical/Protestant opposition.

2) Raceoff

My contribution to this lovely little bit revolves around the Russian media in general's extreme emphasis on Obama as "dark-skinned", "black-skinned", or more rarely, "African-American." Nearly every newscast about the elections starts with a sentence like, "the dark-skinned senator from Illinois strikes another blow against his opponent, John McCain." The newscast two nights ago featured the statement that

"Ninety percent of the dark-skinned population of the United States is read to support the African-American senator from Illinois. He dresses sharply [features a picture of Obama wearing a standard politician suit] and speaks well. It is no wonder that he attracts so much support in a society where image is everything."

I don't even know where to start with that one, so I'll just let you ponder.

3) Russophobia

The final nugget comes from the election-day coverage of McCain's defeat. Vesti featured biographies of both Obama and McCain. For the 45 seconds that they gave McCain's entire political career in Congress, the tag at the top of the screen read "McCain's Politics, or Russophobia."

Anyway, I guess the moral for the day is that it's good to be aware that we're often viewed differently in different parts of the world than we see ourselves. Sometimes, though, this has nothing to do with us, and everything to do with them.

Halloween, Ulan-Ude Style

Despite our dear nearly-departed president's claims to the contrary, our greatest cultural export isn't freedom/democracy/liberty. I think it might well be Halloween, which I've been able to celebrate not once, but twice so far this year (with an invitation pending for a third!). And it's not even October 31st yet.

Last Friday, Carolyn, the third in our little trio of Amerikanky, and I were invited to judge the annual Halloween competition between English classes at Buryat State University. I'll admit to a little trepidation at first, mostly because the Russians feel strongly that there always has to be a winner in something like this. Since I grew up in the warm fuzzy days of supportive education, I want everyone to win. At least everyone (including me!) got cake at the end.

The contest was amazing. And, consequently, really hard to judge. The students sang, danced, performed skits, made stunning posters, and came dressed up in extravagant costumes that demonstrated how much more goth Russian Halloween is than our Halloween. The most impressive thing that I heard was a complete rewrite of an entire verse of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In the Wall" (for obvious reasons, "We don't need no education/teacher leave those kids alone" wasn't so appropriate) sung in unison by 15 teenagers with really funny mock British accents. The most impressive thing I saw was a guy who wore an enormous jack-o-lantern on his head; it was so large that he had to have a friend lead him around the hall because he couldn't see. And then there was the trivia contest - they could name the architect of Westminster Cathedral and the capital of Wales, but the question that stumped everyone was the one about the name of the American national anthem.

The next night, Kate had Carolyn and I, a couple of her Buryat friends, and the ever-helpful head of the International Center, along with their wives and kids, over for a little party. We broke out the markers and construction paper and made decorations. Kate even found a pumpkin to carve, albeit a green one. We bobbed for apples (yours truly was first up - I did a much better job than when I was 6), and even had an ersatz trick-or-treat that resulted in my having to sing "I'm a Little Teapot," complete with gestures, in order to get my candy. There's nothing like a minor embarrassment to make chocolate taste better.

But in the middle of all the joking and laughter there were a couple of solemn moments that made me very happy to be here. Two of Kate's guests gave beautiful and classically long toasts, one in Russian and the other in Buryat. They are both academics, and their toasts impressed on me just how isolated from the world they sometimes feel living in an out-of-the-way place like this and not having the salaries or connections to get out into the wider world. That, in turn, made me feel incredibly lucky to have the opportunity that I have and the chance to meet people like them who are so eager to welcome foreigners and exchange ideas.

Still no serious snow, and still solidly above freezing in the daytime, apparently unlike both Montana and Minneapolis. And yet I keep getting chided, by everyone from my landlady to my Russian teacher to the security guard at the archive, for my "inappropriately light" coat. As I've been told, "This is Siberia, you know."

A Delighful Bit of Trivia...

It snowed for the first time yesterday. I went to the archive around noon, and the sky was sunny and it was warm outside. By the time I finished work there and headed off to a meeting, the temperature had dropped 15 degrees, the wind was blowing, and fat flakes were starting to fall. Fellow American researcher Kate and I decided that we had to go out for a beer to celebrate/mourn the arrival of winter; we ended up at a fast food place named "Happy Land." I can't say that being in Happy Land did much to fix things, but the beer certainly did.

I figured that this would be a good point at which to introduce you all to Ulan-Ude. In many respects, it looks a lot like other Russian cities that I've spent time in. It's got that same lovely mix of brightly-painted (yellow and pink are favored above all) 19th and early 20th century buildings, appallingly ugly apartment blocks, enormous decaying industrial complexes, shiny new shopping cnter that upon closer examination are blighted by crooked staircases and leaking pipes, and neighborhoods dominated by quaint old wooden houses. It also has a very standard Russian central square, an enormous cement plaza that is surrounded by government buildings (inside one of which is my archive), a giant theater that is continually closed for remodeling, and Happy Land, comically enough. Like all standard Russian central squares, at the very center, on an elevated platform, is a Lenin sculpture. This, however, is not just any Lenin sculpture

Yes, Ulan-Ude is the proud home of the world's largest disembodied head of Lenin. As opposed to the hundreds and thousands of other Lenin statues around Russia, which capture poses such as "Lenin thinking" (hands behind the back, head looking slightly down), "Lenin giving a speech" (right foot forward, right hand in the air, mouth open), and "Lenin striding purposefully into the future" (self-explanatory), Ulan-Ude just has a giant Lenin head. It's about 25 to 30 feet tall, typically serious (I have yet to see a statue with Lenin smiling), and ends halfway down the neck. The eyes are drilled holes, which can be a little eerie at times. The crown is occasionally spotted with pigeon crap. All in all, it's quite a sight to behold. And I get to walk in front of it on my way to work every day. It also makes a very convenient meeting spot - say, 7:45 at Lenin's head?

Although I won't put the Lenin head on this list, there are some peculiarly beautiful things about Ulan-Ude. The local population is part Buryat, and the Buryats are closely related to the Mongols. Some architects who try to capture a local flavor in their designs pattern their buildings after yurts, or, oddly enough, what looks to me to be a sort of hat that I've seen in pictures of turn-of-the-century Buryat dignitaries. Take, for example, the local Mongolian consuate. It's octagonal, and after going up for a couple of stories, has a hat-shaped dome resting on top of the octagon. It's also painted several very pleasant shades of purple. The city is built on a rivery valley nestled among some low mountains. The lowest point in the city is also one of the oldest, a features a large Orthodox church with a couple of extremely shiny, recently-refinished gold and blue domes. Because of the way that the city has grown up the valley sides around this point, if you're looking downhill, you're nearly always looking down at the church. I learned the other day that Ulan-Ude claims to have more sunny days every year than the Crimea, Russia's version of souther California, and because of this, the church domes are nearly always shining.

All in all, it's a pretty nice place to be.

Finally Here!

Well, I've finally made it to Ulan-Ude! And yes, there is indeed already snow here. Granted, it's on mountains that have a little elevation over the city, but still...Although according to the taxi driver who gave me a ride from the airport, they have a "very long fall" here, so maybe there's still a little hope.

Getting here went pretty smoothly, which was a good thing, considering everything that happened before I left the U.S. For those of you who I said goodbye to in mid-September, you may remember that I had quite a bit of trepidation about actually getting out by my scheduled departure date of September 18. Turned out, that was warranted, although the problem came not from the Russians, as expected, but from our very own Fellowship Office at the University of Illinois. It's a very long story, but in short they screwed up in a really spectacular fashion. Ever since then, I've been collecting horror stories about them from other people, so for the unaware, fi you ever have to deal with them, be very afraid. As a result of said screw-up and my own desire to attend a friend's wedding, I ended up leaving the U.S. on October 6, and just got to Ulan-Ude on the 9th.

I flew into Moscow and stayed there for a night before flying on to Ulan-Ude, so I got the inexpressible joy of taking a taxi all the way across town between the airport and my hostel twice in two days. The traffic there is so appalling, it took 5 hours to make the two trips. Pretty funny, considering that my flight from Chicago to Moscow took all of 9 1/2 hours. Although there was an excuse for one of the days - it was raining, and apparently Russians can't drive in the rain. OK, maybe that's a little harsh. Part of the airport was flooded, there was so much rain, but that's also very Russian. I think we passed 6 ender-benders on the way in, all of which caused traffic jams for a mile or so behind them. And in classic Russian fashion, instead of pulling over to the side of the road, they just stopped exactly where they were to wait for the police, who are hardly prompt. So the four lanes of traffic (1 1/2 of which were inevitably blocked by the accidents) that the drivers made in the road that was really only built for three lanes just oozed around the damaged cars ever so slowly and then sped up a little, until the logjam behind the next accident. It took 3 1/2 hours to go 25 miles.

I inflicted my jet-lagged self on fellow Russian history grad student Steven Jug my first night in Russia. We went out for dinner at a Mexican restaurant not too far from Red Square (Mexican - Red Square, if you're thinking that these two things should not be anywhere near each other, you're right). I went there when I was here in 2002, and left after there was no wait staff to be seen for 20 minutes. The food was OK, although if it was an enchilada, I'm a frog. The real winner, though, was the decor, which I must have missed during my previous visit. You know those super-idealized posters of Native Americans that inevitably involve lots of beads, feather, fringed deerhide, long black hair blowing in the wind, and pastels? That's Mexican on Red Square. And then it turned 8:30. They played Madonna's greatest hits album straight through, and then a waitress dressed in a black tank top and hot pants with - wait for it - a suede gunbelt that looked like it might have been sold with a 6-year-old's Halloween costume kit but which was full of shot glasses came out and started offering tequila around. For those of you who know him, imagine the look (or studious lack thereof) on Steve's face.

Other than that little slice of the surreal, things have been really pretty uneventful. I'm here, settled in, de-jetlagged (14 hours of time difference!) and now trying to deal with all the paperwork surrounding getting myself registered here in Ulan-Ude and my visa extended. Once that's taken care of, I'm ready to plunge into the archives! So after months of waiting, it's finally here....