Here is the interior of a reconstructed village-style wooden church in Suzdal. The building itself is quite small--room enough for maybe 40 people if you packed them in tight. There are two rooms in this church: an  anteroom and the sanctuary, and these rooms are about the same size. The sanctuary features a wooden alter, and in keeping with the tradition of the Orthodox faith, only men are allowed behind the alter, and parishioners would only go behind the alter on special occasions. In many little villages, the church was the center not just of religious life but of all community life, and so the church doubled as a meeting space and a place for relaxation. So, the anteroom was often used for card games, parties, and other non-church events. Imagine a bacchanalian night of booze-fueled card games taking place in the room next to the sacred alter.

  

I'm worn out from a long day of teaching and slogging around in the cold rain, so I'll let Mark Twain do the talking for me tonight. I stumbled upon this essay quite unexpectedly (my host sister asked me for some poetry recommendations, and the internet is a wonderful way to find all sorts of somewhat-related articles and cultural productions), and it sums up a lot of my experience in learning a foreign language, and I'm sure my poor students, troopers that they are, would agree that verbs are the roughest part speech. Here are the first two paragraphs of Twain's "Italian with Grammar."

I found that a person of large intelligence could read this beautiful 
language with considerable facility without a dictionary, but I presently 
found that to such a parson a grammar could be of use at times. 
It is because, if he does not know the WERE'S and the WAS'S and the 
MAYBE'S and the HAS-BEENS'S apart, confusions and uncertainties 
can arise. He can get the idea that a thing is going to happen next 
week when the truth is that it has already happened week before last. 
Even more previously, sometimes. Examination and inquiry showed 
me that the adjectives and such things were frank and fair-minded 
and straightforward, and did not shuffle; it was the Verb that mixed 
the hands, it was the Verb that lacked stability, it was the Verb that 
had no permanent opinion about anything, it was the Verb that was always 
dodging the issue and putting out the light and making all the trouble. 

Further examination, further inquiry, further reflection, 
confirmed this judgment, and established beyond peradventure the 
fact that the Verb was the storm-center. This discovery made plain 
the right and wise course to pursue in order to acquire certainty 
and exactness in understanding the statements which the newspaper 
was daily endeavoring to convey to me: I must catch a Verb and 
tame it. I must find out its ways, I must spot its eccentricities, 
I must penetrate its disguises, I must intelligently foresee and 
forecast at least the commoner of the dodges it was likely to try 
upon a stranger in given circumstances, I must get in on its main 
shifts and head them off, I must learn its game and play the limit. 

Sometimes you just need a quiet weekend. That was this weekend. I went with my host family to Suzdal and relaxed there. My host family has a tradition of getting a hotel room in Suzdal and inviting some relatives to join them every year, and this year I tagged along. We went there in the morning on Saturday, walked around the little town, poked into some museums, and saw some churches--Suzdal is a city of dozens of old churches. Unfortunately, the weather took a turn for the worse just as we got to the hotel, and it stayed cold, windy, and rainy the whole time we were there. So we were a bit stuck in the hotel room, which fortunately was a nice, cabin-like thing. This morning, we got up early, had the hotel's decent breakfast buffet (which is called a Swedish table in Russian), and went for a swim in the hotel pool. The main building of the hotel is a big old Soviet creation, and the Soviet mentality of relaxation (very controlled, under the advisement of "experts," somewhat like a sanitarium) reigns--along with Soviet-era attitudes toward customer service.

The pool is open from 9-12 daily, and you are supposed to bring your own towel, sandals, and bathing cap. We didn't bring towels or bathing caps, so we had to pay a 200-ruble fee. I misunderstood the whole conversation and thought that the weird plastic thing the unhappy attendant gave me was a shoe covering (if you've been to Russia, you know what I'm talking about) and promptly decided to not use it. So I get into the pool sans bathing cap and have a great old time swimming, and just as we were about to get out, my host dad noticed that the ladies in charge of the pool were angrily gesturing and pointing at me. My lack of bathing cap was apparently a violation of some sanitary principle, even though I had just showered. And oh did the lady give it to me when I walked past her as I was leaving. If you've never been yelled at by an angry old Russian woman, you are missing out; it is an experience you won't forget. I tried not to chuckle and said that I simply forgot; my host family said I should have just responded to her in English.

Anyway, it was a great time in Suzdal. Like I said, sometimes you just need a quiet break from the craziness, and I got the extra benefit of speaking only Russian all weekend. Although as we were leaving the hotel this morning, I heard our neighbors speaking perfect American English--funny that I spent the night next to a bunch of Americans in a hotel in Russia. It's a small world.

Speaking of it being a small world, I was working out at my gym this evening, and a guy about my age walks in wearing an Ohio State shirt. I didn't believe my eyes at first. I watched the guy for a second and immediately realized that he was Russian--no American would wear sandals and a short bathing suit to the gym, and he had a small mullet, which is something that no American would have. So, at this point, I'm thinking that either he studied at OSU as a foreign student, or someone gave him the shirt. I eventually went up to this guy, said hi, and mentioned that I have exactly that same shirt and that Ohio State is the name of my university. He was a bit surprised and said that he bought the shirt in Turkey and has never heard of OSU. We chuckled about that, and no I'm on handshake terms with another person at the gym. I don't know if my little gym in Dobroe, Vladimir, Russia, could have handled another Buckeye, anyway.

Here's some pictures of Suzdal from this weekend. There was a farmers'/souvenir market going on when we got there, so that's what the first two pictures are. The others are from walking around, and the last picture is of our hotel. 

  

Today several students in my teenager class brought in cameras and said they really wanted to take pictures with me and the whole group. I told them that if the class went well--no behavior problems, no cheating on the quiz (well that's pretty much a lost cause, but I can hope anyway)--we could take pictures at the end. And it worked out well; I finished everything I wanted to do with about five minutes left--a perfect amount of time for a group photo. Here's what turned out. This is my Monday-Thursday 4:00-5:30 group, and they are special because they are the first group I ever taught.

Each city has its local slang, its terms for places and roads that aren't immediately obvious to non-locals. I've been living in Vladimir now for almost 2 months, and I finally learned a bit of the local slang today. Pekinka (Пекинка)--it's a word I've heard thrown around by my host parents and my students, but I never could understand what it meant. Finally, tonight I was chatting with one of my students on Vkontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook), and the word came up in conversation. I took the opportunity to do a quick Yandex (the Russian search engine) search of the word. It turns out that Pekinka is the slang term for the highway I live right next to. Why this funny name? Well, this highway supposedly runs all the way to Beijing, which is called Pekin in Russian. Add a little cute Russian diminutive form, and you get Pekinka, the road I live next to. I'm starting to feel like a local! 

I was thinking about what to muse about on this blog today when it occurred to me that something is missing in my life. No, I don't mean love or world peace or any of that token stuff. I'm talking about sirens. You don't realize it, but we are surrounded by sirens in the USA. Fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, volunteer fire fighters, tornado sirens, useless noon-on-Wednesdays emergency siren tests, police impersonators trying to pull people over--whatever it is, it's the rare hour that passes without a siren sounding in the background. 

Here in Russia, there just aren't sirens. I mean, every once in a while, I a feeble little siren sound for a second while a highway patrol officer (гаишник) pulls someone over, but that is rare. Also, sometimes an ambulance will go by with its siren on, but no on pulls over or even lets the ambulance through. And there most certainly isn't any kind of weekly emergency siren test; shoot, there aren't even fire alarms in most apartment buildings (that always scared me when I was living in a 12-story apartment building in Moscow that had just one door and no kind of fire alarm of sprinkler system. Fortunately, my building here in Vladimir is new and has alarms). 

It's strange how little things that you take for granted and relegate to the back of your consciousness take on a new importance when you suddenly are without them. Although I must say, for someone who has studied city planning and tries to keep abreast of local news and procedures, I've never understood why it is necessary to test tornado sirens every week, and I have no idea what the different signals mean and doubt anyone else does either. I mean, really, who sits around and times out an emergency siren and says to themselves, "Oh that was two 30-second sirens followed by a 15-second siren--that means we're doomed."?     

It feels great to be totally isolated from all the blather and insult hurling of election season in America, but occasionally some election news filters over here to Russia. The other morning, I was watching the news before I left for work, and just as I was about to turn the TV off, Mitt Romney's face flashed across the screen. I won't betray my political leanings, although I must say I was hoping for some good (bad) news. Anyway, Mitt's comment about planes needing windows that open was the centerpiece of a little story about the US elections. This story was complete with a cartoon depiction of the real scientific reasons that plane windows don't open and was rounded out with a few clips from old movies of flight attendants getting sucked out of holes and open windows in planes. And having seen on Russian TV what in US would be considered a mild political attack ad, I went off to work with a little smile that surely was completely baffling to all the morose passengers on the bus. Thanks for that Mitt....