Summer in Russia is a beautiful time. Temperatures are fairly mild, and the sun stays up until 10 or 11pm. Everyone wants to be outside. And, unfortunately, everyone includes some nasty bugs. Being in a high-latitude country, Russia has the same kind of huge mosquito and black fly populations as Canada and the northern US. Mosquitoes here are just as annoying as in the US, and there are a lot of them, but the worst are the black flies (in Russian мошки).

Black fly season started about a week ago. I noticed these little black insects on my walk to the bus stop one morning, and at first I didn't recognize them. They don't fly like mosquitoes, and they kind of swarm and crawl on your exposed skin. And then one bit me, and I understood what I was dealing with. They are pretty much everywhere right now, and they really like buses. Bus windows are covered with slowly moving flies that occasionally take interest in the passengers and bite them. It really adds a whole new dimension to my morning commute. People tell me that the black flies are around for about a month and that a good hot spell will kill them off sooner. Here's to hoping for some hot weather.

Also, here's what might be the most revolting picture of a black fly on the internet.

It's a Russian clothes dryer--aka a low-tech drying rack. American-style dryers don't exist in Russia (well, maybe someone somewhere has one, but I've never seen a dryer in a Russian household). So, people hang their clothes on a rack to dry. In the warmer months, this rack goes out on the balcony, but in the winter, all your wet clothes will just freeze if you put them on the balcony, so that whole drying rack has to fit somewhere in your tiny Soviet apartment. Fortunately, my apartment is huge by Russian standards, so the drying rack fits nicely in the hallway during the winter. Also, in the winter, the air was good and dry, so clothes dried overnight.

Well, now that it's warm and humid, clothes don't dry so well. I hung my shirts and shorts out to dry after washing them a few days ago, and they were still dampish even today. I'm a patient guy, so I can wait a little bit for my clothes to dry, but there is another problem with that long dry time. What happens when a bunch of damp clothes hang on a shady balcony for a few days? Let's just say that I used a wide selection from my vocabulary of English and Russian curse words when I realized that the shirt I wanted to wear today smelled like a musty basement. If the USPS makes a flat-rate box big enough for a Maytag dryer, I would gladly pay the shipping....

Sometimes you don't realize how good you have it until you don't have it anymore. I've come to realize lately how good Americans in general and Clevelanders in specific have it in terms of parks and recreational amenities. I love running and riding my bike, and I'm really spoiled to have the amazing Cleveland Metroparks and Geauga Park District  systems at my disposal. There are several gorgeous parks complete with excellent trails and all sorts of other recreational amenities within a ten-minute drive of my home, and the number of acres of parkland--all free, well-maintained, developed for recreation, and protected with a reverence for conservation--in Northeast Ohio is mind boggling. I can go mountain biking on professionally designed trails, running on trails made of finely crushed gravel through blossoming meadows, hiking to waterfalls in hemlock-filled glens, or swimming at beaches along one of the Great Lakes--all within an hour of my house.

So that's a bit of a shameless plug for the Cleveland area, but Northeast Ohio isn't too unique for the United States in its richness of recreational amenities. Our national park system conserves some of the world's most beautiful natural sites and has made them accessible for generations of Americans. Our parks and public spaces--and that's everything from the grandest national parks to humble local ball fields--are protected, maintained, and facilitated with infrastructure that enables people to learn about the natural world and engage with it in a responsible way.

Just how well we do conservation is starkly evident in comparison to Russia. There are few parks here in Vladimir, and most of them are small and have no emphasis on anything natural. They are places for drunks to gather, and those drunks leave all their trash in the parks. Once you get out the city, you don't find big parks or places for recreation like you would in America. A lot of Russia is forest, and this forest is theoretically protected and is open for anyone to access, but there is no kind of trail system and definitely no visitors' centers or lodges.

Also, in true tragedy-of-the-commons style, because "everyone" owns the forest, no one takes responsibility for it. So many places are just trashed with the remains of parties and campsites--bottles, bags, and home refuse litter the woods.I really noticed this on my trip to Baikal. We were in a national park, but there was trash and junk everywhere. We happened to hike (along a "trail" that was really tire tracks made by garbage trucks) through an acres-large dumpsite in the forest just outside of Huzhir on Olkhon Island, and it was attention getting. There, on the shores of one of the world's natural treasures, stands a monument to mankind's slovenly sloth. And this is everywhere: People toss bottles and bags of trash out of car windows without a second though, meaning that all roads are lined with garbage.

Last weekend, I tried to ride my bike in Vladimir's major park, and found that there isn't a single decent, marked trail in the place. After an hour of dodging broken glass (it's everywhere) and slogging though mud mires, I realized how good we Americans have it.      

The Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath--one of  thousands of recreational trails in the US 

 A waterfall in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park

 A bride that carries the Towpath trail over a busy road

 Garbage littering the forest on Olkhon Island 

More garbage 

Russian drivers are crazy. There's just no way to ignore that fact. Speed limits are a mere suggestion; it's not unusual to pass a car that's doing 40mph on a 25mph residential street while barreling into head-on traffic; and if you haven't hit the car in front of you, you're not tailgating. In spite of all this dangerous driving, few people take one of the simplest safety precautions--wearing a seat belt. Russian law dictates that front-seat passengers must wear seat belts, so people buckle when they drive in areas where police are likely to be. And only front-seat passengers wear seat belts; I've been laughed at for trying to put on a seat belt while riding in the back seat (people remind me that I'm not in America and that it's legal not to wear a seat belt in the back seat). 

There's a joke that Americans buckle up because they're afraid of getting into an accident, whereas Russians buckle up because they're afraid of getting a fine from the police. For me, putting on a seat belt is automatic: I sit down and immediately reach for the seat belt. I don't wear a seat belt because I'm afraid of getting a ticket; that doesn't even cross my mind. Actually, I'm even against mandatory seat belt laws; if you need a law to make you wear a seat belt, maybe you deserve to get into an accident. My self-preservation instinct won't let me ride in a car--much less one driven on Russian roads by a Russian driver--without a seat belt, and I don't need a law to make me think that way. Maybe that's my American upbringing at work. 

  

There are still several parts of my Baikal trip I haven't written about, and, partly because it's interesting and partly because I will forget about certain elements of the trip if I don't write them down, here is another installment my Baikal travel notes.

Irkutsk is a really cool city and might actually be the second nicest city I've visited in Russia (St. Petersburg is definitely in first place). Irkutsk isn't really a big city; the population is somewhere around 600,000, which is like two Vladimirs, but it feels much bigger. It is and has long been an important political center and hub of commerce; the city's emblem pays homage to the sable, the animal whose pelts were Siberia's first great natural resource to be exploited on a massive scale. The city center is nice and well taken care of--the sidewalks are paved with bricks, there is decorative lighting, there are benches and decent looking trash cans (being in Russia makes one starve for the most mundane of amenities). The roads are also in excellent condition for Russia, and actually are on par with roads in the US; this is in contrast to Vladimir where your daily commute involves doing slalom to avoid the chasms that seemingly could swallow a Lada--or at least mangle a tire. There was even a new and fairly well designed town-center-style commercial area blended into the historic city center. My inner urban planner was feeling indulged.

Here are some pictures of Irkutsk:

Irkutsk's airport

 Lenin Street

 A big bank 

The headquarters of a coal company 

A fountain on a big square in the center of town 

 A statue of some dead guy--I can't remember who 

The Angara River, which flows out of Lake Baikal

Where local kids gather  

OK so not all of Irkutsk is shiny and new 

It wouldn't be Russia without some military equipment sitting around  

The main commercial street. It's closed to cars. 

Some Russian ingenuity--using a radiator as a counterweight to hold a gate open 

Lenin Street again 

The city emblem in statue form. Note the sable in the lion's mouth 

Ohh pedestrian-friendly commercial area ingrained into the fabric of the city--cool

Looks like a suburban American town-center-style mall thing. Well, sort of  

"New City--a city in which expectations come to reality" 

 A statue to Kolchak, the one-time ruler of Siberia during the Russian civil war

A nice fountain 

Tsar Alexander III

 This embankment needs a little sprucing up, but it gets the job done  

Yesterday a group of American college students arrived in Vladimir. They'll be studying Russian at the American Home for a few weeks. It was really fun and interesting to meet these students because they are basically the only other Americans (besides my colleagues) who I have met in in almost a year. We went to a cafe after work and had a few drinks, and it was so refreshing to speak English freely and without having to monitor the complexity of my speech. Of course, it's not that I'm starved for conversations in English--my colleagues and I always speak regular, fast-paced English--but that's only seven other people. These new Americans have their own slang (including some phrases I had never heard before), and they are in touch with popular culture back in the US of A.

It's amazing what happens to your language after a long period abroad. While my Russian has gotten stronger, I feel like my English has gotten rusty. A lot of words have fallen out of my active vocabulary, and I even catch myself making stupid mistakes in my speech. Our TEFL course noted that you may find yourself making your students' errors after a while, and I sometimes screw up subject-verb agreement just like my students do. I make it a point to listen to NPR and read news articles, and now I get a thrill out of listening to native speakers of English. When listening to them, I don't have to subconsciously wince at butchered articles   and strange vocabulary choices or try to decipher what they are attempting to say. I often find myself translating my students' or friends' speech back into Russian to make sense of it; now, I totally understand word-salad sentences like "In how much time should we to meet tomorrow?" or "My friend very like to tell with you about you travel in Baikal." On a side note, that brings up one my favorite ESL mistakes: "My friend very beautiful girl--she have a long, black hair." The poor girl...

Anyway, here is a great song by the legendary rock musician Viktor Tsoi:

An interesting thing I noticed in Siberia is that many, if not most, cars are right-hand drive. These cars are imported directly from Japan. This is strange because Russian drivers drive on right (like Americans do). I can't imagine driving a car with the steering wheel on the right side in right-side traffic--it would be like driving from the passenger's seat. It would be especially difficult to pass another car on right because you would have to nudge pretty much all of your car into the opposing lane before you could see if it's safe to pass. This is really dangerous considering that Russian drivers constantly pass other vehicles in all sorts of unsafe places (blind corners, through intersections, directly in the face of oncoming traffic). Basically, it's best not to watch when you're riding with a Russian driver. Russia tried to ban right-hand-drive cars a few years ago, but there was too much protest from drivers in Siberia and the Far East, so those cars are still legal. Actually, almost all the cars in Irkutsk were made in either Japan or Korea, which was noticeably different that in Vladimir, where there is a mix of German, French, Japanese, Korean, American, and Russian cars. 

It's almost been a year since I graduated from college. I can't believe I just typed that sentence. It's true that my first post-college job isn't exactly traditional, but it's a job. I'm at work nine or ten hours a day, five or six days a week; I've got a group of colleagues; I've got to figure out how to live on a skimpy paycheck each month (converting my salary into dollars is downright depressing--it's well below U.S. minimum wage).

I've been a bit frustrated lately. I've been on great trips, met tons of cool people, and generally enjoy my job, but life has become pretty routine and a bit boring compared to college life. Each day is more or less like the day before it, and it has me missing learning and studying (I even had a strange pang to write a course paper--must have been something I ate). This feeling of mundaneness has had me down, but just this evening I watched a great video that changed my outlook. I realized that routine is a part of adulthood. Okay that sounds depressing. Adult life doesn't have to and shouldn't be a boring repetition of the same grey day, but a certain amount of tedious iteration is inevitable.

I've never been affected by this before, but Russia, of course, is a tough place to live. People are all struggling to get by, and the Soviet-era fight-for-everything mentality still reigns (people will shove you out of the way to get what they need in the grocery store, for example). Cashiers are unfriendly; the buses are crowded and smelly; and everything always breaks. If you let start letting all that bother you, you will get frustrated fast. It's very easy to let the general suckiness of this repetitive crap affect your mood. It's very easy to get self centered and frustrated. "Why the **** is some fat **** sitting in my seat on the bus?? I sit there every day." These are the kind of toddler emotions that start to take over when you let routine get the better of you. Little, mundane details start to frustrate and annoy. But every person has the choice to rise above the day-to-day slog and decide what we let affect us. Watch this video and see what you think:

  

Russians don't do manicured lawns. Sure, there are some nice green, grassy lawns in Russia, but they are few and far between. Russians definitely embrace a more natural approach when it comes to public spaces, and most places are left to go more or less wild. With the quick onset of warm weather here in Vladimir--we had a few days with temperatures in the upper 80s--all the trees and flowers burst into bloom. Dandelions are everywhere, and people actually don't hate them. The grass in public spaces is long and shaggy and is full of other plants and wildflowers. Also, when these lawns eventually get mowed, the poor city workers usually use weed wackers to mow big swaths of grass--I've only seen a decent lawn mower once or twice in Russia.

For an American who is used to wide swaths of sterile, buzzed, fertilizer-soaked green grass, Russia's lack of manicured grass was a little bit of a shock at first. The shaggy, weed-filled public spaces definitely contribute to the feeling that the country is in disarray. But that is looking at it from an American perspective with American assumptions about aesthetics. Our acres of chemical-drenched fescue are totally artificial, and think of how much effort and money we expend to keep them maintained (I can't complain--lawn mowing was my source of spending money throughout high school). What's so wrong with dandelions, anyway?      
Here's a shot of my street:

Also check out this local news coverage of our trip to Murom's university.

Suzet vlgu priezd amerikancev

English truly is the 21st-Century lingua franca. During my trip to Lake Baikal, we stayed at hostels and met people from all around the world. There were lots of French people, some guys from German, a Finn, a Serbian couple, and a few Russians and Ukrainians. But we were all able to communicate because everyone knew at least some English, and most people spoke it quite well.

When I was thinking about how to teach English last summer before I arrived in Russia, I thought that English would be so hard to teach and learn. Yes, there are some tough elements of English that a non-native speaker can never fully grasp (like articles or phrasal verbs), but English really is a simple language. We don't have grammatical gender or a case system, and our words don't have special endings that mark their function. Therefore, English is a very free language that is great at absorbing foreign words.

Also, non-native speakers of English outnumber native speakers. English is the language of international business and travel, enabling people from all over the world to communicate with each other. Imagine two Americans, a German, a Finn, and a Russian sitting in a kitchen in Irkutsk, Russia, having a conversation--without English this wouldn't have been possible. Here's a shot of an international group at our hostel in Listvyanka:

One of the coolest parts of my trip to Baikal was the time I spent in the village of Huzhir on Olkhon Island. This little, shabby village is the largest settlement on the island, and, in the absence of good jobs that the fishing industry used to provide, it is trying to reinvent itself as a tourist destination. It's going to take some serious work and a lot of time, though, before Huzhir is a resort town, but it's remoteness and uncivilized atmosphere are the things that I'll remember the most. It isn't easy at all to get to Huzhir; it's a five-hour ride in an uncomfortable minibus, plus a ferry or hovercraft transfer across the straight that separates the island from the mainland. There isn't a paved road on the whole island, and there are more cows than people roaming the dusty streets of Huzhir. We actually saw a stray dog chase a pair of cows down an alley without a single other person in sight. Here are a few pictures of the strange little town that is Huzhir.

One of the wide streets 

The street our hostel was on 

 A store

Trying out a Russian pose 

The local hospital. Not a place I would want to go. 

The fish factory. It doesn't look to prosperous.  

A nice street.... 

Huzhir--where cars go to die. 

Some locals 

 An inviting cafe that also rents rooms

View toward the Little Sea 

 The post office

The library

I just got back from a rafting trip with my host family and their friends. I'm totally sunbaked and a bit worn out, but it was a great time. My host dad woke me up at 6:00am on Thursday (when a big Russian guy wearing an МВД России shirt comes into your room and says "подъем," you don't waste any time getting out of bed). We piled into a jam-packed Volga sedan and picked up a few other people, transferred our things to a beat-up Gazelle van and set off to the Kolp River near the village of Kopreevo (if you put the Russian река колпь владимирская область into Google Maps you can see where we were). We arrived, assembled our four boats (they are collapsible canoe-type things made of canvas stretched over an aluminium frame), and hit the water. We went down the river for about two hours and reached our stopping point. There was a nice pavilion and plenty of room to pitch tents. We spent all day Friday there just relaxing. This involved eating, sunbathing, playing volleyball, and drinking vodka (a lot of that last thing). Then this morning we set off again and rowed down the river for about three hours to the village of Kolp, where our Gazelle was waiting for us. After disassembling our boats while getting eaten alive by clouds of mosquitoes, we took off for Vladimir. It was a great trip, and it was really relaxing to be totally disconnected from the world and surrounded by nature. I didn't bring any book or any electronic device (that's what happens when you toss stuff into a bag at 6am while someone tells you to hurry up in Russian), and, although I was a bit panicked at the thought of how I was going to occupy myself for 72 hours with some people who are old enough to be my parents and who don't speak any English, it turned out to be really fun.

On a different note, I can't ignore the news coming out of my hometown--the rescue of three girls who had been kidnapped and held hostage for ten years. The story is one part miraculous and uplifting and one part horrifying and chilling. I learned about the girls' rescue on Tuesday while I was killing time using the wifi in a Moscow mall while waiting for the train to Vladimir. I remember when Gina DeJesus's and Amanda Berry's kidnappings happened (I've always been a lover the Metro section of the Plain Dealer), and I've seen the missing person's posters hanging on telephone poles on humble corners on the west side. I think I've even driven down Seymour Avenue, not knowing the hell lurking inside one of the little wooden houses. It's heartening that these girls were returned to freedom, that the unspoken popular opinion that these girls were gone forever was rebutted. Justice won in the end.

As I was reading through the coverage, I realized that Gina DeJesus and I are the same age. That brought the heinousness of the the crime into sobering reality. All that I've experienced in the last ten years--the places I've traveled, the things I've learned, the people I've met, the sights I've seen--those girls were deprived of the freedom to experience any of that. My friend is studying to work in the Russian prison system, to work with the dregs of Russian society, and he once told me his philosophy that there is only a thin barrier between the comfortable life most of us live and hell on Earth and that everything can change in an instant. How many times did those girls play back in their minds the moment that the got into their kidnapper's car? I can't say that I believe in fate, but life is certainly a fickle thing. One little decision, one little pause can change everything. I'm thankful for all the opportunities I've had, and I wish the girls and their families all the best.

Here are few pictures from my rafting trip: