The busy teacher is busily at work. When these last exams are graded, my work as a teacher here in Vladimir is pretty much complete. Time has flown!

I found this ancient mineral-water vending machine in the basement of the business institute we use to hold some of our overflow classes. I have a feeling this hasn't served anyone since the Soviet Union.

Yesterday, one of my students invited another teacher and me to his dacha outside of town. We were lucky enough to get a warm, sunny day (around 70F yesterday), and so we hung out outside and grilled. My student has a gorgeous, large property, and he has built several log-cabin-style buildings. He's got a big garden, chickens, and beehives--it's a regular country estate. In the evening, we went to the banya, where we got the full--or, as my student called it, the textbook--banya experience, complete with whipping with branches and lots of aromatic herbs. Russians take the banya very seriously, and it is believed that steaming regularly in a banya is a cure for allsorts of ailments. I can't attest to the banya's long-term health benefits, but I sure felt great afterward. Here are a few pictures:

The chicken coop

They're building a new banya using some very old-school techniques. This is flax and moss used as chinking between the logs. 

The new banya will be really nice. 

Lunchtime 

That's a bottle of homemade vodka--it tasted a lot better than the stuff they sell in stores.

 A very Russian scene 

Having some tea from a wood-fired samovar 

Getting my banya on

Summer is approaching (or at least it should be), and summer in Russia is a special time. It's light from 4am to midnight, and people take full advantage of the brief respite from the cold and snow. Everyone wants to be outside as much as possible, and people go to their dachas or just hang out in parks in the cities. Summer here is really unique, and I'm sad that I'll miss it.

Here's a song that really reminds me of summer in Russia. It's called Жить в Кайф (roughly "Live in Bliss") by the Belorussian artist Max Korzh. Max is a year older than me, and he makes a lot of pop hip-hop songs that relate to life for average young Russians. This song tells Max's own story of choosing to drop out of university to chase his dream of making music, and I really like the song's themes of freedom and dreams. Dreams are very important to Russians--I've been asked many times by students and just people I meet, "What is your dream?" which is not an easy question to answer on the spot. I remember the professor in a Russian culture class at Ohio State saying that Americans have plans; Russians have dreams. When I listen to this song, I feel the unbridled thrill of throwing caution to the wind and chasing a dream. See what you think.

I've been in Vladimir for almost two years, and last night was the first time someone gave me flak for not being Russian. We had a party for our adult students at an event hall near the American Home, and then most of the teachers and about ten students went to a nice restaurant with a karaoke bar in the center of town. We ordered some food and drinks and sang a few songs (no mastery from me this time) and were just hanging out. We had been there for a while when the lady at the table in front of us turned around and gave us the one-finger salute. We looked at her incredulously, and I said, "Same to you." She did this a few more times. Her complaint was that we were talking while her husband was singing, but everyone in the place was talking--it's a bar, after all. 

Things escalated pretty fast. Her husband finished his song, threw down the microphone, and stormed over to our table. He said that he shouldn't have to listen to people speaking a foreign language in his country and demanded that we leave. His wife chimed in and claimed that we were being discourteous and exclaimed that our parents didn't raise us right. Well, that was about as much as I was going to listen to. I stayed sitting down, but I challenged them to say what we had done wrong exactly ("Объясните мне--что мы здесь делаем неправильно") and told them if they wanted a quiet concert they should have gone to a theater ("хотели концерт сходили бы в театр"). 

By this time the whole bar was watching us. It looked like things might turn ugly in a hurry: The guy was obviously gearing up for a fight, and he was saying incendiary things like "Россия для русских" (Russia is for Russians). We were sitting at a different table from the main bulk of our group, and so it looked like there were only three of us. Pretty soon, however, the guys--Russian and American--from the other table came up and made their presence known. The two rabble-rousers now saw how outnumbered they were, and the bouncer made it clear that it was time for them to leave. The situation ended without a fight, and we stayed at the bar for a little while longer. 

But that made me so mad. I'm normally a calm person, but there are some things I won't tolerate, and listening to some primped-up 30-something lady say "get the hell out of here Yankees" while her water-heater-build husband spews nationalist garbage is one of those things. The support my Russian friends gave me made me feel better--they said they were embarrassed by those people and that they were with me one hundred percent--but I was still all tense and angry for the rest of the night. 

The situation bothered me so much because it was the first time in my life that I've been accosted not for something I did but simply for who I am. Once I got home, I did some reflecting and realized that last night was an important lesson--it showed another side of the immigrant experience. Immigrants aren't always welcomed with open arms and smiles like we usually are here in Vladimir, and the experience of being a foreigner would be incomplete without seeing the other side of the coin. Also, I reflected on the fact that the Uzbek cabby who drove us home or the Angolan university student who attends the American Home probably face this sort of situation with regularity. As a tall, white male from the United States, I'm not the recipient of much discrimination, and so it's instructive to feel how lousy and aggravating it is. Most people who face discrimination also don't have a whole bar to back them up and usually have to shut up and take it, which must feel incredibly dehumanizing. 

This situation further reinforced my feeling that it's time to go back home. We haven't had any problems related to the situation in Ukraine, but there's been a general upswing in Russian patriotism verging on nationalism, and that has produced an equal and opposite reaction in me. I've been much more on edge and defensive lately, ready to call anyone out on the smallest slight against America. I shouldn't let that sort of stuff affect me, but it does, and for my own sanity and well-being I need to remove myself from the situation. Last night was instructive, and I'm glad that it happened with only a little more than two weeks left in my time here in Russia.    

I try to stay up-to-date on news in the world of urban planning, and I came across an interesting article this morning. It's in The Atlantic Cities blog--one of my favorite sources for planning news--and the article looks at a recent analysis of walkability and access to food in American cities. The analysis considered how many Americans live within a five-minute walk of a store selling quality food. It isn't surprising that very few Americans can take a quick stroll to a store, and those Americans mostly live in major urban centers like New York and San Francisco. The worst major cities included such towns as Indianapolis and Charlotte, where only five percent of residents live within a walkable distance from a grocery store. I fear my native Cleveland wouldn't score much better. Here's the article: In the U.S., a Quick Walk to the Store Is a Rare Thing Indeed

Vladimir, on the other hand, would actually score very well. There's a store right next to my apartment building, and there are many stores and two bus stops within a five-minute walk. That's compact urbanism at work. That said, many Americans would be disappointed at what they'd find at those stores. I remember the first time I went into a Russian grocery store--I realized that there isn't much of anything appealing on all those shelves. At the nearest grocery store--a place called Pyatyorichka--you'll find an isle devoted to little candies, an isle with bleach-white pasta and other cheap grains, a huge alcohol section, and a freezer full of pelmeni and other frozen foods. There's a small case of meat (often dangerously close to the expiration date), a larger case full of sausages (probably a safer, if less healthy, bet), and a section with vegetables. Those vegetables are really hit-or-miss: The only safe options are potatoes, onions, and carrots; the peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes are often all mushy and shriveled. My roommate have invented a new slogan for that grocery store: "Pyatyorichka--where we couldn't care less."

Griping aside, it is really nice to have a place close by when I need some milk or eggs or something else basic. At my house in America, the nearest store is a five-minute drive away, and, while I love driving, it's nicer and healthier to be able to take a little walk and get what I need instead of burning fossil fuel and risking getting hit by a truck out on the roads.    

I've always loved running, and, although I've taken a break from long-distance running in the past few years to focus more on bodybuilding, long runs hold a special place in my heart. Lately distance running has been calling my name, so I decided to train for the Blossom Time run, a five-mile run in my hometown on Memorial Day. I've been running a few times a week to build up my base again, and that means I've been running around my neighborhood, which can be a funny experience. 

Running for fitness is a lot common in Russia than in the US, although you do occasionally see runners out pounding the pavement (there's a small cadre of runners in my neighborhood). The sidewalks in my neighborhood are very wide (maybe about ten feet in width), so there's plenty of room for runners and walkers to mix, but people are often surprised to see someone out running, and I've definitely gotten some strange looks. Also, Russians are, on the whole, deathly afraid of cold, so people wear winter coats and hats on 55-degree, sunny days, and I got some really disapproving glares from old ladies when I went running on one of the few warm days we've had. In fact, one lady clucked at me and muttered, "Не холодно, что ли?" (not cold, is it?), and another looked at my short sleeves and athletic pants and said, "Рано еще" (it's too early). 

I love to have music when I'm running, and I feel like Russian rock is ideal for running around my neighborhood of Soviet apartment blocks. Here's a song from my running playlist by the legendary rock group Ariya. It's called Раскачаем этот мир (we rock this world), and it definitely is a great pump-up song. See what you think. 

 

The penny gets a bad rap. People say the little copper coin is worthless, a drag on the economy, and a waste of time and effort. Admittedly, the penny is pretty worthless, but there are far more worthless coins in the world. The Russian kopeck is a great example.

At current exchange rates, the kopeck is worth .02 cents, which is pretty much nothing. Russia stopped making 1-kopeck and 5-kopeck coins a few years ago, but they still make 10- and 50-kopeck coins. Prices at stores are rounded off to the nearest 10 kopecks, and so you can build up a pretty good collection of worthless coins pretty quickly.

This leads to the kopeck economy. No one wants kopecks, so everyone tries to unload them whenever possible. The most obvious target is the bus conductor, and I usually make at least one of my 16 rubles for the bus fare out of kopecks. But bus conductors grumble a lot when you give them a big handful of kopecks, and, although they technically have to take them, sometimes they refuse. So the big kopeck shuffle continues.

And so begins my last month in Vladimir. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to get back to the USA. I'm ready to get back--actually, let me restate that--every fiber of my body is longing to go back home and see the people and places that I love. This has been like a great and very long vacation, and one sign of a successful vacation is being ready to get back to real life by the end of the trip.

But I did get a little pang of emotion when I flipped over the page of my calendar last night. I've been in Russia for quite a while--this is my twentieth month here--and I've gotten pretty used to the pace, rhythm, and customs of life here. I know that a lot of things about America will surprise me when I get back; I'll look at my own culture through a new lens. For example, a group of American college kids came to Vladimir a few weeks ago on an alternative spring break program, and I couldn't help noticing how sloppily they were dressed--baggy jeans, hooded sweatshirts, and beat-up tennis shoes. Vladimir isn't exactly Rome, but people here care about how they dress and always want to put their best foot forward. It will be strange to go back to the land of hoodies and white tennis shoes.

Before I go, though, I have a lot of people I need to say goodbye to. Russians are very keen on gift-giving, dramatic partings, and well-wishing, so I've been making a list of people to visit and gifts to buy. I looks like my April will involve a lot of parties and pictures, and that is definitely the most по-русски way to leave.