Wow! That was a tough, long haul! Friday marked the end of our semester here at the American Home, which meant grading 50+ exams, giving speaking exams, planning last classes, and figuring final grades. Russians love to do everything at the last minute (and so do I), so this last week was a bit stressful to say the least. On top of that, I've been working on graduate school applications (just finished!), and planning my trip to Rome (leaving tonight!). My seven days in Rome will be a well-deserved vacation. I'm going to take thousands of pictures, so I'll be sure to post them when I get back after the New Year. Until then, ciao! 

I've been extremely busy lately with grading exams and all the end-of-semester stuff and with preparations for my upcoming trip to Rome (ya that's right--I'm going to the eternal city on Monday!). I'll tell more about that later. Here's a shot of sunrise in Vladimir. I think it was almost 10:00am when I took this.

I had an extremely Russian experience at the post office last Sunday. I went to get a package my parents had sent and to mail a few Christmas cards. The nice thing about the Russian post office is that it is open at 5pm on Sundays. The bad thing is that it is the Russian post office.

I went to Vladimir's main post office, which is the main post office for the entire Vladimir Oblast (basically Russia's equivalent of a state). There was almost no one there, so I assumed it would be a short trip. My first stop was the package room. In Russia, packages aren't delivered to your door; you get an notice, and you have to go pick them up at the post office. There were two very bored-looking ladies sitting in the dingy room, and the calender on the wall announced that the today was December 6 (in reality, it was the eighth). I gave them my notice, and, with a sigh and an eye roll, one of the ladies went back to the storage room and retrieved a small box. She lazily put a the box on the counter, but it was addressed to someone name Ivan, so I told her that it wasn't the right package. She let out an even louder sigh, retrieved the notice from where she had tossed it, and went back to the room, all the while complaining to her coworker. She shuffled boxes around for a few minutes and then finally threw my box out of the room. The impact of it hitting the floor shook the little room. Good thing there wasn't anything too fragile in it.

I gathered up my slightly-battered package and headed to the main room to send my cards. There was one other person in the long room, and there were two ladies sitting behind the desk. I went up to one of the ladies and said I needed to send a few cards. The lady, who has served me before and has been quite friendly (for a Russian post office worker) in the past, gave me an annoyed look and told me to have a seat and she would call me when she was ready. She went back to doing absolutely nothing.

At this point the other person in the post office, an intense-looking man in his 40s or 50s, came up to me. He said, "Young man, can you swear?" I wasn't exactly sure how to answer this question because I, of course, know a good number of Russian swear words (I need them to be able to understand what anyone says at my gym), but I don't usually use them in my speech except to add some extra emphasis every once in a while. I told him yes. He then asked me if I can swear poetically or just rudely. At this point I was trying to figure out some poetic way to tell him to go away, but I said, "rudely." He then asked if it is acceptable that guys my age swear on the bus in the presence of older people. I told him that swearing is just a part of the language, which prompted him to tell me to read real Russian language like in Dostoevsky.

All the while this was happening, he was pacing the empty post office hall, which was bathed in soft illumination from old incandescent lights and the last rays of the setting northern sun. The man began to get very philosophical, posing the rhetorical question, "what is worse--swearing or smoking?" He reasoned that, while smoking harms the body, swearing harms the soul, and, while the body is transient and curable, the soul must remain pure. When I finally told him that I was foreign (I think he was so lost in his thought that he didn't notice that all my answers were very short and not exactly Russian), he huffingly declared that things must be really bad when even foreigners are using the worst parts of the Russian language.

After some more pontification, he shuffled out of the post office, and the lady finally got doing nothing and helped me send my letters. Never a dull day here in Vladimir.

With the onset of cold weather, icy-window season has returned to Vladimir's buses. The heaters on the buses can't do much when the temperature is below about 10F, so the windows frost over and stay that way until the outside temperature warms up again. Last year, that period lasted over a month. This year, though, has been warmer so far.

In all my travels, I take and share lots of pictures of the cities I visit. But recently I realized that I almost never take pictures here in Vladimir. So I went out this afternoon for a walk around the center of the city and snapped some pictures of Vladimir in all its winter glory. The city is much prettier when there's snow.

The American Home

Sledding on the centuries-old rampart

The Golden Gates

The main drag

A side street

Front of the historic main shopping center

An old church

The new-years tree on the main square

The traffic police

Walkers in Pushkin Park

Snowy historic Vladimir

Looking south onto the Klyazma River

Carriage ride anyone? 

Lenin is looking a bit forlorn  

The main post office

One of the most frustrating things about Russia is its road system and the rules that "govern" it. There are legions of jokes about Russian roads ("There are two problems in Russia: roads and idiots," and, "You don't swear--start driving and the roads will teach you."), and those jokes are not undeserved: Russia's road system is woefully bad. It is way underdeveloped and very poorly maintained. Rough winters are bad for roads--any Clevelander is well acquainted with pothole season and its beloved successor orange-barrel season--but roads here in Vladimir can't even survive the summer. This year all the locals were impressed because the roads were actually being repaired in the summer (it was an election year), but that involved scraping off the top inch of deteriorated pavement and laying an inch of new asphalt on top of that broken-up base layer. They paved one of the biggest stretches during a heavy rainstorm--the USDOT would not approve. That new pavement is already falling apart.

The rules of the road add another layer of frustration. Russia uses the European signage and the European system of priority roads, which more or less makes sense when you get used to it. The problem is that the roads are inadequate for the traffic volume and that a lot of intersections are totally overburdened. Russia is a

country of strict rules, and so a lot of traffic-aiding policies that we have in US are illegal in Russia. For example, it is illegal to make a right on red, illegal to turn left on a green light if there is no specific left-turn signal (this prevents left turning in front of on-coming traffic, which is admittedly somewhat dangerous, but we Americans seem to do okay with it), and illegal to cross a double centerline (this means that you can't make left turns into driveways or minor streets--you have to continue on until you reach a special area where U-turns are permitted and double back). Break any of these regulations and you'll risk losing your license for at least six months.

Another really draconian traffic regulation is the policy that cars that have been involved in accidents must
remain exactly where they are until the accident investigation is complete, and this goes for both serious accidents and minor fender benders.And, given the overburdened roads and Russians' propensity to throw caution to the wind, accidents are extremely common. Theoretically, the fact that vehicles remain exactly where they were makes for a more fair and complete investigation. The problem is that these damaged vehicles block roads for hours while the traffic police take their sweet time to complete their accident reports. Other drivers are forced to squeeze around these wrecks, often causing

huge traffic jams and, sometimes, other accidents. In the US, the first priority is to get damaged vehicles off the road to ensure safety and smooth road operations--the investigation comes second. Here in Russia, if you move your car before the investigation is complete, it is the equivalent of leaving the scene of the accident. No concern is given for other drivers or their--and your--safety as their try to find a way past your car. The ultimate irony is that the road police are notorious for being crooked, and accident investigations are often a bidding war between the two drivers: Who can pay the bigger bribe and get off scot-free?  

It's been snowy here!

Americans love convenience. We love to move. We love to eat and drink. So, by the associative property, we love convenient ways to eat and drink things while we move. Americans get everything possible "to go," buy fancy containers to sip hot (and cold) beverages while on the go, and have reduced meal times to the amount of time it takes to fill up a to-go container and run to the car. Why waste all that time sitting and eating when you could be doing something/going somewhere/talking to someone/buying something/checking your email while eating and drinking. And are there any doubts why we lead the world economy?

Russia, on the other hand, isn't so convenience-oriented. The idea of filling up a motor mug with coffee or tea and setting off to get something done is, well, unheard of. I can only imagine the concerned/perplexed/annoyed stares I would get on the bus if I was sipping on some coffee during my morning commute. For Russians, having tea or coffee is more of a ritual, involving sitting, waiting, eating overly sweet little candies, and gossiping. The same goes for food. Russians might derisively acknowledge that businessmen in Moscow mindlessly quaff coffee but point out that it's not something the average Russian living in "real" Russia would do. So I try to blend in and pretend that I too can do my morning commute without a nice cup of coffee, but I'm starting to have dangerous thoughts. Maybe on my next trip to Moscow I'll buy a motor mug at Starbucks and set about shocking Vladimir by enjoying coffee on the bus. Maybe I'll start a new trend.

We did it! Our Thanksgiving dinner yesterday was a success, and we did it all without a working oven at the American Home. Actually, it was a much less stressful affair than last year's dinner, and we served dinner almost on time (only 15 minutes late). We had an ample amount of food, and it all turned out really well.

We had a very traditional Thanksgiving menu year, featuring turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberries (two types: sauce and orange-cranberry relish--my grandma's recipe), biscuits, tossed salad, orange-glazed carrots, maple-walnut green beans (with real Ohio maple syrup sent from the US), cheese balls with crackers, and two pumpkin pies. We were able to get most all of the ingredients we needed here in Vladimir. There was a minor panic last week when the Russian staff told us to run to the supermarket and buy the last four turkeys because, in typical Soviet fashion, who knew where there might be turkeys again (and they were right: the turkeys haven't been restocked). We needed steak sauce for the cheese balls, and Russia doesn't have your regular AI sauce, so I ended up buying something approximating meat sauce that was made in Japan. One teacher brought pumpkin filling with her from the US because she knew that it's impossible to buy here. Cranberries are available here no problem, but I asked my Russian students, and they told me that people don't usually make any kind of sauce with them but rather boil them to make compote.

Here's a few pictures of the preparation and the feast (we decided to pay tribute to America and buy some Bud--gotta love those global corporations):