Here's another one for the Lada taxi playlist. It's called Корабли (ships), and it's a pretty standard Russian pop love song. The chorus goes (it sounds more poetic in Russian): 

Ship depart toward the sunset

Give me your hand to touch

I'll stay here to wait for you

Ship leave in order to come back

Russians are rather tough to surprise about a lot of things. I realized this when I was riding a packed bus back to my neighborhood on a Saturday night with another one of the teachers, who was holding a toilet plunger. He was having some problems with the plumbing in his apartment and needed to borrow the American Home plunger. We though about getting a taxi so as not to been seen carrying such a thing on a crowded bus, but then his Russian girlfriend assured us that no one would find that overly strange.

That got me reflecting on all the strange things I've seen people carrying here in Vladimir. Building materials and car parts are the most commonly carried weird things. People get onto the bus with all sorts of wallpapers, moldings, and tools. The other day, a guy got onto the bus with two windshield wipers in his hands, and I saw someone lugging an exhaust manifold and a big muffler down the street just yesterday. The other day, a guy jammed up next to me on the bus had a big, grimy, black rubber o-ring seal for something that I really hoped wasn't plumbing-related.

Another strange thing you'll see is all kinds of food items. I remember seeing an old woman struggling to get off a trolleybus drop a massive fish (at least two feet long), completely unwrapped, onto the bus floor. Or I've seen many people carrying big jars of all sorts of pickled things on the bus. And, come to think of it, I've been part of this weird phenomenon--I lugged two cooked turkeys into the city center by bus when we had our Thanksgiving celebration.

As a middle class slowly arises in Russia, people are buying cars, but still a large percentage of Russians don't have access to a car, so people make due using public transportation. That results in seeing strange things like someone carrying a vacuum cleaner on a bus (seen it) or my favorite--gruff-looking old guys decked out in winter gear carrying all the tools for ice fishing on the bus (those guys usually smell terrible, too). And the cool thing is that people here are surprisingly nonchalant about it; they understand your situation.   

When you study a foreign language, you develop a mental list of favorite words. Maybe these words sound cool, or they have unique, difficult-to-capture meanings. One of my favorite Russian words is кстати (kstati). First of all, it's fun to say--that instantaneous transition from a "k" to an "st" forces my English-speaker tongue to do things it just wasn't designed to do. And кстати has a cool meaning: It's a parenthesis, meaning that it is used to lead in to a new topic of conversation. It's roughly translated as "by the way."

I love this word because something interesting always follows it--some new turn of conversation, some unexpected question, perhaps an invitation. It's a bright word that promises change and spontaneity. It's quick and fun to say--what a cool word.  

Just when we though winter was over, Vladimir got hit with a big snow storm yesterday and today. We went from brown and muddy to winter wonderland in no time, and, hey, I can't complain. It might be my last Russian snow. And it brings out what is so endearing about Russian winter--people love it, and they're calm about it. We got about three inches, which is kind of a paltry amount for a snowbelter like me, but it's enough for folks to break out the sleigh-strollers (they're like strollers, only they have runners instead of wheels). Also, a saw a group of teenage guys writing words in the snow near the Golden Gates. Whereas in the U.S. a group of guys would probably make some lewd shapes in the snow, these guys had made a giant heart and were working on writing in giant letters "Я люблю тебя" (I love you). How nice. Oh, and the Golden Gates looked stunning in the sifting snow.  

Spring has brought with it a lot of potholes and mud on Vladimir's roads and sidewalks. This one opened up the other day near my apartment. It's about three feet deep, so watch your step. 

We just had a little spring break because of International Women's Day (March 8), which is not really a very international holiday but is a really big deal in Russia. On Monday two other teachers and I went to help a friend of our director on his farm not far from Vladimir. This guy clearly has a lot of money and bought 170 acres of land to use as an area to to train hunting dogs (his hobby/business) and to relax. He has a lot of animals out there, including sheep, chickens, geese, and wild boars. The boars are in two giant enclosures and are used to train dogs. He also has a really nice guesthouse and is building a sauna and another guest house. Nice place.

We didn't really do much work--in his words, "Why would I have you guys work--today is a holiday!" We got a tour of his property and even got to go into the enclosure with the wild boars--he told us to climb a tree if they charged at us. He has a guy from Uzbekistan who works as a groundskeeper there, and this Uzbek guy made us some amazing lamb plov over an open fire. It was the best I've ever had. Also we had some awesome grilled sashlyk (kebabs). Of course, going "into nature," as the Russians would say, doesn't happen without vodka, so we had some of that too.

It was great to get out of the city for a little bit, and spring is beginning to spring here, so all the snow is melting and the birds are singing. Here are a few pictures from out day in the forest:

The sign says "Danger! Wild animals. Don't jump the fence" 

  

Americans always get a bad rap for being uninformed. And, to be honest, we often deserve it: The average American is woefully clueless about current events. Staying informed has become shorthand for checking CNN's top stories on your Iphone while waiting at a red light. That's bad--democracy demands an informed citizenry. We need to do better, America.

But the average Russian isn't any more informed. Now, Russians generally know more about world events (especially European), but that is understandable, given that those events often directly impact Russia. How does the average Russian get his or her news? Newspapers and radio exist, but by and far the most popular news source is television. There are three or four national news channels, and they all are to some degree state-controlled. For an American, at first these news programs seem to be a breath of fresh air: They are much more like The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer than CNN. These programs feature a host and short segments by reporters; there isn't any arguing or competition to bring you the latest. It's just the news.

But then you start to realize that the content, the whole way of doing news is totally different. The news takes on an almost didactic tone--this is what you should know, should believe. Also, the reporting can be almost laughable: Biases are extremely evident; stories aren't followed up on; offhand statements by loosely affiliated people are taken as official fact; and all sorts of cheap, 19-Action-News-at-11-style gimmicks are used (following people to bathroom, chasing down people in their cars to get an interview). More alarming, no attempt is made to show both sides of a story in an even light. If both sides are shown, one side is presented as correct while the other is openly criticized, leaving no doubt what the viewer is supposed to think. This tactic is employed for local stories and for national--and international--ones.

So your average Russian, who watches state TV news every evening in his or her little Soviet apartment kitchen, gets a very distilled version of current events with all the necessary conclusions already drawn. This is what is so scary to me about the Ukraine crisis. Americans and people in western European countries have a smorgasbord of news sources available, most all of which abide by high standards of journalism and present the facts in a more-or-less unbiased manner, allowing the individual to make his or her own decisions.

That doesn't exist in Russia. There is a small independent media, but the vast majority of the country doesn't use it, drawing information from just one or two state-controlled sources. People here in Russia are being fed a very biased, very alarming version of events that has fomented a lot of ill will toward the West. People are angry and aren't going to sit by and watch Ukraine leave Russia's sphere of influence. They have been whipped into a frenzy by news media that doubles as a mouthpiece of state politics. They know--and believe--what they're supposed to. It's still a very Soviet system of information delivery, and now we get to witness first-hand where this will lead. Let's hope cooler heads prevail. 

You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that some really big things are happening in Ukraine right now. The US media is giving the situation good coverage, but Ukraine is pretty much the only topic of discussion on the news here in Russia. People are obsessed with the events in Ukraine, and it's understandable why: Russia and Ukraine have a long history together, and most people in Russia have friends and family in Ukraine. This is a mini-revolution happening right at Russia's doorstep. 

The difference between Russian and Western news coverage of Ukraine is striking. Western sources report that demonstrators seized Maidan after Yanukovich snubbed the EU in favor of closer ties with Russia and that those demonstrators were killed by Yanukovich's police, proving that Yanukovich and his policies didn't represent the interests of the Ukrainian people. To Western eyes, Yanukovich's ouster was a victory for the Ukrainian people and a chance for Ukraine's nascent democracy to flower. Russia's aggression and seizure of the Crimea is portrayed as a violation of international law and proof of Russia's malicious desire to maintain its Soviet sphere of influence. 

Russian media shows a very different picture. Those demonstrators on Maidan were hired by the EU and US and in no way represented what Ukrainians want. The demonstrators were mostly criminals and hooligans who ruthlessly murdered defenseless policemen who were prevented by cowardly Yanukovich (who was afraid of what the West would say if he allowed the police to use force against the demonstrators) from taking steps to defend themselves and restore order in the center of Kiev. The protests themselves were criminal and should have been broken up immediately, allowing the government and the people of Ukraine to work. Any grievances should have been solved through political channels, not demonstration. 

The Russian media has far harsher words for what has happened in the past two weeks. According to Russia, the Ukrainian parliament had no right to fire the democratically elected president--that's not democracy. The people of real Ukraine (the eastern, Russian-speaking part of the country) don't want this change that has forcefully imposed on them by the West. Bring up the fact that western Ukraine strongly supports these new developments and you'll hear that western Ukraine, and the city of Lviv especially, has always been against Russia and is mostly made of rebels and traitors (parts of western Ukraine collaborated with the Nazis during WWII). As for the developments in the Crimea, Russians believe that territory is really part of Russia and was mistakenly given away during the Soviet Union, so Russia has a right--a duty really--to protect the ethnic Russians who live there. 

The long and the short of it is that Russians are hearing a totally different version of events than people in the West hear. As with everything, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Also, having been to Ukraine, I can appreciate how complex that country is. Lviv is a totally different city than Odessa: Lviv is solidly European, whereas Odessa is Russian. The next few weeks will be very interesting, to say the least. 

Here's a picture of me in Lviv during my trip to Ukraine last year.