Baba Yaga etc.

I’ve had to muster up the motivation to do this blog, because I honestly don’t know how to put a lot of things that happen here into words.   So we’ll just go with whatever spills out from my brain onto this virtual page. 



Leshi



The one and only place I can begin has to be the day trip we went on last Sunday.  Our friend Svetlana arranged the opportunity for us to visit ‘Baba Yaga’.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with old Babz Yagz, this is what Wikipedia has to say about her:

"In Russian tales, Baba Yaga is portrayed as a hag who flies through the air in a mortar, using the pestle as a rudder and sweeping away the tracks behind her with a broom made of silver birch. She lives in a log cabin that either moves around on a pair of dancing chicken legs, is surrounded by a palisade with a skull on each pole, or both. The keyhole to her front door is a mouth filled with sharp teeth; the fence outside is made with human bones with skulls on top, often with one pole lacking its skull, leaving space for the hero or heroes."

So, we took a 2 ½ journey on a minibus to Kukoboy, which is the birth place of Baba Yaga and is on the Yaroslavl border.  The journey itself was good, because it’s actually quite fun feeling like you can count the seconds you are in the air when the bus flies over potholes and generally non-surfaced roads.  It’s amazing driving past all these dilapidated shacks, old houses and roads lined with forests.  As we got closer to Kukoboy, we realised how far out this place was.  With no phone signal and nobody for miles around, I was genuinely wondering who would rescue us if the bus turned over.  But luckily we didn’t have to deal with that eventuality, and we pulled up at the place. 

As per usual, I have a toilet story to report.   Basically I will never complain about the state of a toilet ever again.  Even the one in my apartment which often has a nice tray of cat poo waiting for a lucky guest.  Kukoboy hasn’t reached the era of the flushing toilet yet, so we were faced with a stinking hole in a wooden shack.   As funny as I will find this experience for years to come,  at the time I was conjuring up scenarios in my head of me slipping in my wellies and getting a leg stuck down this pit.  I’m not even going to get started on the smell. 

Anyway, back to the actual point.   We got to meet Baba Yaga and also Leshi the tree spirit.  Absolutely terrifying.  This whole thing is targeted towards to children.  Russian kids clearly have a different horror threshold, because they were loving it.  So these two people dressed up as a tree spirit and a hag were jumping around talking into microphones.  Had no idea what they were saying, so just found myself sitting and praying that they didn’t include me in their audience interaction.  The whole thing was so surreal, but brilliant at the same time because I just couldn’t really believe what I was seeing.  It’s quite frustrating  trying to explain because if you weren’t there, there is no way you can possibly fully understand how nuts it was. 

So to cut a very long story slightly shorter, we stood outside and listened  to Baba Yaga talk from her hut.  Things only got progressively weirder, when they made us stand in a circle, hold hands and dance.   Then they decided to swing beanbags on ropes at our faces and then made us jump over them.  The entire trip would have been a health and safety scandal in the UK.  Love it!  The grand finale was when Baba Yaga took a liking to our very own George, kissed him, made him wear a beard and dance with her in the middle of the circle.  To set the scene a little more accurately, take all of the above and set it to techno dance music blasting out in a forest. 

SO that’s the gist of the trip.  It was so much fun and something I will never forget for comedy’s sake.  In other news, the snow seems to be on its way.  I think it’s forecast for the beginning of October.  I’ve eaten some more classic things like onion and egg pies, cabbage soup and pizza made from cake and egg.  We went to a traditional Russian restaurant which was nice, but the Russians have a completely different idea of customer service.  I waited about an hour for a glass of apple juice, and the food always take so long! But it was quite nice anyway. 

I’m having such a good time actually.  Starting to understand things a bit better language wise and also just love the fact that I’m in RUSSIA!  I feel like a microscopic dot in this enormous country, but there’s just something about it that I really like.  Will have been here for a month on Sunday! Everyone is heading back to uni now, so hope you all have a really good time being back!

xxx

Russian Lesley Garrett

Exciting as it may sound, this week has mainly consisted of going to school.  It’s really good getting into a routine but the school is freezing.  They’re not going to put the heating on until the end of October but right now it is so cold even with my thermal socks.  Last night and today I’ve been feeling pretty ill as well, which made the cold even more miserable.  I was up all of last night with an awful headache which continued today. So I was faced with quite possibly the most helpful of activities. A singing lesson.  To tell the truth, it was absolutely hilarious and you could really hear everyone’s enthusiasm.. we had to sing two famous Russian songs, accompanied by Russian Lesley Garrett (she did actually look like Lesley Garrett) on piano.  The piano is painfully out of tune and it has a horrible echoey warble to it.  So just imagine the eight of us singing these sombre, traditional Russian songs in a minor key with this battered piano.  It would have been video gold.

On Tuesday we also had an art lesson.  We’re going to be painting Russian chopping boards (just what I need) so we had to plan our designs with the teacher.  The teacher doesn’t speak a word of English and she was telling me over and over again that I was doing something wrong but I just gave up trying to understand her.  I think she hated me a little bit actually. But at least I will have a nice bit of toot at the end of term to take home for my mum.  Don’t worry mum, that won’t be your only present.  Lessons have generally been going well though.  Apart from our reading teacher.  She’s quite odd and comes out with some really strange comments.  Today she held me back at the end of the class and told me to relax.  I felt like saying, ‘do you not realise that I have spent this entire lesson trying not to throw up on this Chekhov story?’ Rough times.

On to more pressing matters, my hostess Natasha told me yesterday, ‘If anyone asks you if you are paying to live here, say no.’  She then went on to explain to me, that the woman who lives below us is a bit of a nut job and she  cornered Natasha saying ‘you have an English person living in your house and you have to pay money to the state’ or something like that.  Basically she’s a massive anti-ladette. (that one was for my lolburgering Pollyanna Cotterill).  So anyway, it’s nice to feel legit, with a mad old bag stalking me and probably trying to get me reported to the state.  But, as Misha would say...’THIS IS RUSSIA!’

Yesterday I saw a half dead, twitching dog lying outside the gym.  Apart from that, it’s absolutely buzzing.  Tomorrow I think we’re going to go to the cinema J  Oh yes and I also started my volunteering as an English teacher.  It was really good fun actually.  I was actually the youngest one there as the students are a group of eight girls aged 21-24.  So I will be doing an hour and a half of teaching every Wednesday after school at the Yaroslavl Institute.

Hope everything’s ship shape in England.  I suggest that everyone goes to tesco and eat something normal like hovis, or coco pops, or fish fingers on my behalf.  Seeing as I’m starting to forget what stuff like that tastes like.  However, I just went and bought some grape flavour fanta and a snickers to cheer myself up.  It’s a shame that the shop smells like cheese.

Love J xxx

Я НЕ ГОВОРЮ ПО-РУССКИЙ!

I’m writing this blog on 6^th September, but who knows when it’ll end up online, seeing as I have no internet.  It’s so frustrating- I managed to connect for about 15 minutes yesterday and that was it.  It’s like living in the dark ages blerrgh! Just want a bit of contact with home.

Anyway, I started at the language school yesterday, which was good.  We were given an in depth talk about many aspects of our new lives here, including safety, bus routes, food, entertainment etc.  We might venture to the Russian student club called ‘Joy party’.  We’ve all admitted though, that the prospect of going to the club isn’t what scares us..rather the  journey home.  You basically can’t go anywhere on your own here.  And I don’t want to bump into drunk neighbour guy either.  

So after school, we took the bus into town and explored a lot.  The Volga is beautiful and the churches are SO Russian looking and amazing.  Got lots of good photos :)  We went to a cafe to get a drink, and even 7up is disgusting here.  But the supermarkets are so good.  So many different things, loads of odd flavours of juice and stuff.   When I got home, I was given omelette to eat. Although not omelette as we know it.  This was omelette made from noodles, with milk, sausage and cheese.  Natasha always cooks dinner the night before and then microwaves it the next day.  Things always seem to be luke warm which just makes it harder to tolerate!  To be fair, that omelette wasn’t bad and I did actually eat it...but what followed was nearly enough to make me say hello again to that omelette I had just eaten.  Kate had warned me that her babushka made a dessert with Кефир/Keffeer (fermented milk drink), gelatine and fruit and apparently it wasn’t all that.  Lucky for me, it was babushka recipe trading time and I got the privilege of trying this thing.  It was actually vile.  And I had to watch Natasha devouring it quite happily.  It just tasted like sour banana sloppy yoghurt.

My School

So today I went to school again. Got off to a bad start because I realised how good all the Bristol people are and how awful I am at translations.  They were telling me all about the way they’re taught and compared to Exeter, it’s no wonder I struggle.  But things started to look up when I had my grammar class because I have to say, it was the best grammar class I’ve ever had.  Just so nice to have a complete grammar expert teach you patiently and explain things to you properly.  So I have high hopes for my progress this year!  The teachers are great, but the school itself is unpleasant.  Basically, the YRLC is a small organisation for us foreign students and it takes up just a couple of classrooms of a big school for Russian children.  There’s a primary school, middle school and high school in the same building as us.  A lot of poor children go to this school.  Some of them have two alcoholic parents.  Anna told us that we are welcome to leave any clothes behind at the end of our year for the children.  This is so sad, but what’s good is that us lot are all encouraged to volunteer in teaching the children English.  A massive bonus for me is that the other language taught at the school is German! So I’ll be able to go to the German lessons and help out as well.  The school toilets are terrible.  They are unisex loos and you can see over each cubicle.  There are no toilet seats or toilet paper, none of the doors lock and no water comes out of the taps.  So, all in all, they don’t resemble toilets at all.  The canteen is like something out of ‘Oliver!’.  There are dinner ladies wearing socks and slippers and they serve up food which I, personally, cannot stomach.  Today I tried this bun which looked quite plain and safe.  However I bit into it and it just tasted so horrible, with little bits of cottage cheese in it.

 

The shops here are bizarre.  There are no ‘shop windows’ so you can’t tell at a glance what the shop actually sells.  It’s just really hard to find decent things to buy.  Can’t believe it’s so different from home.  I have spotted only three western shops.  These are Mango, United Colours of Benneton and Mcdonalds.  But we have discovered an amazing place called ‘Travellers Coffee’ which is a cafe that feels a bit starbucksy.  It’s so nice to go in there and switch off from Russian for a couple of hours..we’ve been here less than a week and are already regulars.

Now for the really, really bad news.    As people at home might have heard, a tragedy happened in Yaroslavl.  Yaroslavl had pretty much the best ice hockey team.  We were all going to go and watch a game at some point.  Yesterday, the team’s plane took off to take them to Minsk, Belarus.  The plane struck a tower mast, caught fire and crashed into the Volga river.  Forty three people were killed.  This is absolutely horrendous regardless of where it happened.  But I can’t believe the terrible coincidence that it happened in Yaroslavl just a few days after I arrived here.  Most people at home hadn’t heard of this city before but now, under terrible circumstances, it has been put on the map.  Last night a huge amount of people went to the stadium to lay flowers and light candles.   I’m hoping to go along there tomorrow with some people.

Anyway, my mind has gone blank and I can’t actually think of anything else to say!  Hope everybody is fine at home.  God, I really want some roast potatoes. Just a massive bowl of roast potatoes.

  

  

Bass and Borscht.

My Borscht

Well, I am officially in Russia! Currently sitting on my bed indulging in some itunes. God, I don’t even know where to start really. I’ll try with the beginning. The flight was absolutely fine, although I’ll try to avoid British Airways scrambled egg in future. Managed not to cry at the airport. I then thought I would cry when the plane took off, but I had a really unexpected feeling of excitement so was chuffed with that. Met the Bristol uni lot just before boarding the plane and they’re really lovely which was the first relief! So we got off the plane and waited around for a bit to meet our driver Andrei who was to take us from Moscow Domodedovo airport to Yaroslavl.

When we finally found Andrei, the eight of us got into this minibus thing. Out of nowhere came what I can only describe as Russian dance music or something. I’m not kidding, it was so loud and I just sat there thinking...how am I going to tolerate this for three hours? (Actually ended up being five hours). The minibus had inbuilt speakers which were just blasting out this surreal music, which, initially, only Andrei was appreciating. There was serious bass going on and the whole car was buzzing. I’m not gonna lie, I did get weirdly used to it after a while. A couple of hours into the journey everyone fell asleep. And it was only when we all woke up that we realised the music had gone off for a bit. Anyway, Russian driving. Oh my god. People just cut you up and swerve in front of you. You seem to always be able to see the scene of at least one minor accident at any one time. There are loads of old bangers about...some cars with their whole back window boarded up and smashed in sides. They literally look like they’re about to disintegrate. I was taking all this in and Andrei meanwhile, was driving extremely fast on the Moscow motorway whilst texting on his phone. The surroundings were so strange. There were lots of restaurants and things along the way but they were ALL deserted. It was quite unsettling. What I did like though, was watching babushkas walk along the side of the roads arm in arm. Half way through the journey, we stopped off to get something to eat. We went to a really strange restaurant which was empty, but there was a bear stuck to the wall, as you do. None of us knew what to order, but some of us got borscht (beetroot soup). It was actually really nice! We got back into the car and continued the journey.

Finally, and I mean after what seemed like days, we arrived in Yaroslavl. By this time it was very dark outside. Anna, the organiser of our language school came to meet us and she was going to take us each to our hosts. We had stopped in a little area with some apartment blocks, and the first three people were taken to their flats. At this point, I was freaking out because they were all together and I really, really didn’t want to be stranded somewhere on my own. Anna came back and said that two people were going to have to take the bus to school..and I was just thinking- please don’t let that be me. But we drove on a little further and luckily my name was called along with Kate. From the outside, our apartment block looks dreadful. There’s no denying this, it just looks a state and you really do feel like you’re stepping back in time. My host lady Natasha came to meet me outside and I immediately knew she was going to be nice. She was there with her son Misha who I think is about sixteen or seventeen. We got up to the apartment which has two doors. One of the doors is a massive metal one, and the other door is covered in leather. Yes, Leather. It’s a nice place actually. I have a nice bedroom with balalaikas on the wall. There are some quite odd aspects of the flat though. The toilet just looks like it’s going to fall over. And there is no bathroom sink. You therefore have to wash your hands in the bath and brush your teeth over the bath. Oh and the toilet paper is dark grey tracing paper. Ooooh lovely! Was so happy to discover the two cats that live here though. I think they’re called Darcy and Masyana. Darcy’s mouth is all red because she fell of the balcony four days ago apparently. Anyway, Natasha was talking to me in Russian at an incredible speed and I had no idea what she was saying. I feel like a stuck record saying “Da, da, da, da, da, harosho” all the time. Well awkward. But Natasha and Misha are really nice. It’s amazing how little I actually know how to say though. I was trying to act out “shellfish”. Unsuccessfully. Definitely going to have a dictionary on hand all the time now. It’s also massively awkward watching tv with them, because they’re both sitting there laughing and I just know that whatever I do I’m going to like an idiot. If I just keep a straight face then I look much too serious, but it’s really hard to laugh when you blatantly don’t know what’s going on. I was then presented with a huge slab of cake.

Took me ages to get to sleep because I had been awake so long and was thinking about everything that happened during the day. But when I finally did I slept through till morning. I got to try “Kasha” which is Russian porridge. I absolutely hate porridge and this wasn’t any better. It just wasn’t going down well...but I was helped by a big cup of black tea. Then I was told that I had to be ready to be shown where my school is in fifteen minutes...so I didn’t even have time to have a shower. Grim times indeed. Misha, Kate and I walked to the school and met Harry. I’m not going to remember where it is in the morning. And also really panicking about how to open and close the front doors..it’s not straightforward. Anyway, we went into town on the bus, which costs twelve roubles per journey. Everyone around you just looks deeply troubled all the time. All the old ladies wear scarves round their heads, proper babushka style. Fashion wise, it’s all very 90’s here. Small children with mullets galore and plenty of tracksuits to go around. We were walking around one part of town and there were big speakers blasting out patriotic music. Misha kindly told me and Kate that this area of Yaroslavl has the most crime (as we watched a boy walk past shooting a toy gun). I replied, “well I come from London” only to be told, “London crime, that is kindergarten.” Schweeet. He also told me never to speak to the man who lives nextdoor to us because he has a drink problem and is crazy.

So anyway, I have taken lots of photos of the town. There are some beautiful parts but also some quite depressing parts. I was so relieved to talk to Kate and Harry today because they had experienced all the same weirdness as I had. For example, Kate also doesn’t have a sink. I also visited a Russian shop for the first time. They really do know how to welcome you. The drinks counter looks like a tombola stall and you have to ask for what you want. The women behind the counters just glare at you. Quite intimidating. Misha also just goes up to guys in the street and gets cigarettes off them which is an interesting way of doing things.

So I got home and had some lunch which consisted of some form of chicken. They were like..little mini burgers. Accompanied by shredded beetroot which tasted a bit creamy, cabbage, spaghetti and tea. And that’s everything. If you’ve read up until this point, then good effort. I wouldn’t have.

I’ll be getting to school for ten tomorrow morning. I’m really looking forward to it actually. All in all, I’ve got off to a good start here. It’s all quite daunting for obvious reasons and the language barrier is very difficult. I think after a while it will do my head in, but being as hopeless as I am at Russian conversation, the only way is up. And I will improve my acting skills. I really, really like it here. Not because the area is particularly welcoming, because it’s not. But I love it because everything is just so, so different from what I know and it is oddly refreshing! I really do feel such a long way from home, but for now I’m just fine. Can’t believe I’m finally here and that I have four months of this ahead of me. It’s certainly going to make me appreciate home comforts. Good news though, I’ve spotted a few snickers bars about.