After a wonderful New Year's spent together in Moscow and Tver' seeing the sights and stuffing ourselves in a 3-day food marathon with some Russian friends of mine, Jacob flew back to the U.S., leaving me to return to Ulan-Ude with fellow researcher Kate on the Moscow-Beijing train.
5,500 or so kilometers and 82 hours later, I arrived in Ulan-Ude.
I have a new appreciation for Russia's size. Flying for a long time (it takes five hours to get to Ulan-Ude from Moscow by plane) and still not being anywhere near all the way across it gives you a little sense. But actually having all of that countryside pass by your window is something entirely different. The really shocking thing is how very uniform the country is.
Mile after mile after mile, all we saw was tiny village after tiny village, interspersed with large tracts of birch and pine forest. And it was flat. We crossed the Urals at night, so I missed them, but judging from the way the train was moving, all they really are is big hills. Flat on one side, flat on the other. All the way to about kilometer 4,800 or so, when things got hilly as the approach to Lake Baikal began.
It didn't actually seem anything like 82 hours stuck in a tiny compartment, with 20-minute breaks to walk around when the train stopped every 5 or 6 hours. Four times, I woke up in the morning after a good ten hours of sleep and sat around in my pajamas drinking coffee and watching the landscape roll by for 45 minutes. Granted, it would have been better if the coffee had been something other than black Nescafe, but you make do with what you've got. Then breakfast - a difficult choice between bread and cheese, instant mashed potatoes with cheese and hot sauce, and ramen noodles. After which I was forced to make the dreadful choice of how to amuse myself: read a book (thanks to Jacob, I was working my way though Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)? read some essays (Kate's husband brought over an issue of Harper's full of trenchant political criticism)? work on my current craft project? or just stare blankly out the window? Followed by some cookies, a little chocolate, perhaps a mandarin orange or two. More tough decisions about what to do. 4:00? Beer in the lounge car. 11:00? Fall asleep gazing out the window into a landscape lit up by a full moon reflecting off of the snow. Very Dr. Zhivago.
It's amazingly easy to while away three entire days like this. After a while, it seems like there isn't anywhere else that you could possibly be other than inside the compartment or standing on a train platform. Because the car attendants lock the bathrooms at stations (Russian train toilets flush straight onto the tracks), I found myself in pretty bad shape at one station post-4-pm-beer. Kate and I dashed down the platform and found at bathroom, at which point I suddenly realized that I was inside the first actual "building" that I had been in for days. My voice echoed strangely and I felt very small and unsheltered.
When we got back to Kate's apartment this afternoon, we found out that in our absence, some sort of accident had caused hot water and heating outages to our neighborhood when the temperature was about -25, that one of her downstairs neighbors had left a window open and then disappeared for a month so that when the hot water went out, his pipes froze, causing pipes in other parts of the building to burst, and that the building superintendent, in an effort to thaw one of Kate's radiators, had plugged in a space heater and nearly burned the building down when she walked off and left it. Compared to all of that, the train car and its happy, lazy pursuits seem like heaven.
Check back - I'll be putting up pictures from the train trip.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Big Events in the Archive
A few weeks ago, the National Archive of the Republic of Buriatiia, where I spend way too much time, celebrated its 85th anniversary. This august event was accompanied by all sorts of celebrations. A couple of the senior archivists got awards for their service to the state; there was a little conference at the National Library, and a TV crew came to put together a little snippet about the archive for one of the morning news programs.
All of this happened shortly after Jacob got here. As you can imagine, I wasn't so keen to bury myself in the archives the way I normally do, so I'd told the archivists that on the big day, I wouldn't be there. Instead, I went to the university, ran a couple of errands, and made plans to meet Jacob by Lenin's head for lunch.
At 11:15, just as I was putting on my coat to go meet Jacob, I got a phone call from one of the archivists. She said that a TV crew was there doing interviews, and that Zina Fedorovna, the head of the reading room, had told them that a FOREIGNER was working there and suggested that they might want to interview me. My research success and the archive being a pleasant place for me to work all depends on how much Zina Fedorovna likes me, so I picked Jacob up at the Head and we set off for the archive.
To give you a little background, Zina Fedorovna is a force of nature. She is in her late fifties, and has been working in the archive for 30 years. She knows everything. She also looks very grandmotherly. This can be deceptive, though - if she doesn't like you, she will boss you around and terrorize you to no end, and if she does like you, she will talk to you constantly while you're trying to work, pausing every ten minutes to say, "But I should let you work", after which she leaves for two minutes and then comes back with another question. She also loves polyester pants and big grey cardigans. She simultaneously terrifies me, inspires me with awe, keeps my research running in an orderly fashion (she likes me), and makes me laugh to no end.
When we got there, Zina Fedorovna set us down together at one of the tables in the reading room and brought the TV crew in. She introduced me to them as me, and then told them that Jacob was a "very important computer science specialist from America." The crew then decided that they wanted to get some footage of me "working" in the archive. So they brought out a pile of documents that I had already decided were boring and useless, and asked me to read through them, pointing out interesting things to Jacob, who pretended to type notes for me about documents that he couldn't even read while playing chess on my laptop. So much for verisimilitude. I guess I should be greatful, though - it's not every history grad student who gets a "very important computer science specialist from America" as a research assistant.
Once all of this was done and the reporter had asked me a couple of questions, they headed upstairs to do another interview. I took care of a little paperwork that I needed to get done before heading out. Somewhere in the process of all of this, Zina Fedorovna decided that I needed to get a copy of my interview and the footage of me from the camera crew, even though I insisted that I was sure I could record it myself. Again, not wanting to disagree, I went along. We headed up an elevator into the previously mysterious interior of the archive. When we got out of the elevator, I could heard the report ask the director of the archive, whom she was interviewing in a room off the hallway, what the oldest document in the archive was. The director replied it was from some time in the 17th century, at which point Zina Fedorovna squawked out, "It's from 1658! The girl wants a copy of the interview!" The reporter and the cameraman yelled back, "You're bothering us! Go away!" Zina and I went back down the elebator, me trying to restrain my laughter while she ranted about the director's inadequacies, chief at this point being that she didn't know about 1658.
Needless to say, I didn't get my copy of the interview. I tried to tape it the next day, but when it was on TV, but due to technical difficulties with a DVR recorder, I didn't even get to watch myself, let alone make a copy. So much for my moment of fame. My Russian teacher said she saw me, though - I guess that's something.
All of this happened shortly after Jacob got here. As you can imagine, I wasn't so keen to bury myself in the archives the way I normally do, so I'd told the archivists that on the big day, I wouldn't be there. Instead, I went to the university, ran a couple of errands, and made plans to meet Jacob by Lenin's head for lunch.
At 11:15, just as I was putting on my coat to go meet Jacob, I got a phone call from one of the archivists. She said that a TV crew was there doing interviews, and that Zina Fedorovna, the head of the reading room, had told them that a FOREIGNER was working there and suggested that they might want to interview me. My research success and the archive being a pleasant place for me to work all depends on how much Zina Fedorovna likes me, so I picked Jacob up at the Head and we set off for the archive.
To give you a little background, Zina Fedorovna is a force of nature. She is in her late fifties, and has been working in the archive for 30 years. She knows everything. She also looks very grandmotherly. This can be deceptive, though - if she doesn't like you, she will boss you around and terrorize you to no end, and if she does like you, she will talk to you constantly while you're trying to work, pausing every ten minutes to say, "But I should let you work", after which she leaves for two minutes and then comes back with another question. She also loves polyester pants and big grey cardigans. She simultaneously terrifies me, inspires me with awe, keeps my research running in an orderly fashion (she likes me), and makes me laugh to no end.
When we got there, Zina Fedorovna set us down together at one of the tables in the reading room and brought the TV crew in. She introduced me to them as me, and then told them that Jacob was a "very important computer science specialist from America." The crew then decided that they wanted to get some footage of me "working" in the archive. So they brought out a pile of documents that I had already decided were boring and useless, and asked me to read through them, pointing out interesting things to Jacob, who pretended to type notes for me about documents that he couldn't even read while playing chess on my laptop. So much for verisimilitude. I guess I should be greatful, though - it's not every history grad student who gets a "very important computer science specialist from America" as a research assistant.
Once all of this was done and the reporter had asked me a couple of questions, they headed upstairs to do another interview. I took care of a little paperwork that I needed to get done before heading out. Somewhere in the process of all of this, Zina Fedorovna decided that I needed to get a copy of my interview and the footage of me from the camera crew, even though I insisted that I was sure I could record it myself. Again, not wanting to disagree, I went along. We headed up an elevator into the previously mysterious interior of the archive. When we got out of the elevator, I could heard the report ask the director of the archive, whom she was interviewing in a room off the hallway, what the oldest document in the archive was. The director replied it was from some time in the 17th century, at which point Zina Fedorovna squawked out, "It's from 1658! The girl wants a copy of the interview!" The reporter and the cameraman yelled back, "You're bothering us! Go away!" Zina and I went back down the elebator, me trying to restrain my laughter while she ranted about the director's inadequacies, chief at this point being that she didn't know about 1658.
Needless to say, I didn't get my copy of the interview. I tried to tape it the next day, but when it was on TV, but due to technical difficulties with a DVR recorder, I didn't even get to watch myself, let alone make a copy. So much for my moment of fame. My Russian teacher said she saw me, though - I guess that's something.
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