Byt - Way of Life

Being in a foreign country makes me acutely aware of differences between daily life in Russia an in America. No surprises there. But I also somehow attach more significance to the daily travails of life in the Russian Federation. So, I would like to share with you things I do/see/wonder practically every day, roughly in order of appearance.

• Knock the hanging ceiling lamp in my room. Usually happens when I’m changing or stretching. It’s right in the center of the room, I can’t help it!

• Eat oatmeal. Unfortunately, the trial period of instant oatmeals is over and I seem to be stuck with the worst brand. Yeah, it takes 0 minutes, but it’s also lumpy and bland.

•Take a multivitamin. I figure the end of the bottle will coincide with the end of my time in Russia.

• Wonder if I am using too much water when brushing my teeth. The water here is dangerous, fear-inspiring, I’m telling you.

• Struggle with the locks on the apartment doors. I’m getting better now that I’ve realized the direction that I turn the key corresponds to the direction that the bolts go. Genius.

• Pass a table piled with watermelons. There are watermelons ALL OVER this city, sold on rickety tables at bus stops, accompanied by other melons, similar to cantaloupe, but elongated. My host mom doesn’t buy watermelon because she got sick from one once, and I don’t think I can eat one quickly enough by myself. I need Sadie with me for that.

• See people drinking in public. Any given day, any given time, someone is drinking a beer on the street. For every one person I see indulging in a nine-o-clock Sunday morning beer while waiting for the bus, there’s probably1870 others. It doesn’t help that alcohol is readily available at many bus stops.

• Use public transportation. I love it. There are half a dozen buses that will get me to or from school, twice as many marshrutki (privately run vans that follow bus routes), and then the darling metro. Maybe ‘darling’ isn’t the right word. But at 14 rubles a pop, it’s magnificently affordable. P.S. I took the metro and a train to Pavlovsk on Sunday (about half an hour out of the city) and transportation for the entire trip cost a little over three dollars. Even for those people who forgot to bust out their student IDs for a discount and who shall remain nameless, it wasn’t much over four dollars. Also on Sunday I bought a bus card for about $16 which grants unlimited bus rides for the month of October. Yesss.

• Use a cell phone. That’s a new one. It’s handy, and not many people call me, so it’s not annoying either. I enjoy pounding out the occasional SMS (text message) in Russian.

• Spill change. My wallet’s change purse isn’t as secure as I’d like. Oh well.

• Look up words in a dictionary. Duh.

• Stare at a Russian woman’s impossible boots. The host mother of one woman on our program was so chagrined that her charge only had flats that she took her shoe shopping.

• Change from “outside” clothes to “inside” clothes. Usually at Lawrence, I put something on and call it a day, but here I need to look nice for school, and then be comfortable at home. Everyone does it; apparently it’s considered ‘dirty’ to lounge in the clothes you’ve been wearing out and about.

• Drink tea. As it turns out, Betsy’s tea-with-every-class was excellent preparation for life in Russia. I like khalva with my tea, or this new thing my host mom gave me – sunflower seeds stuck together with honey.

• Watch the news. It’s my favorite TV program -- I can usually figure out what’s going on thanks to the images, and if I can’t, no worries ‘cause there’ll be a new story in a couple moments. One channel even has abridged subtitles. There’s no complicated plot, and на Первом Канале (na pervom kanale – on Channel One), the intro to the top stories of the day has the best dramatic/fear-mongering theme music EVER. I'm already thinking about how I'm going to miss it once I'm back home.

Ok, I need to print out a paper for Разговорная Практика (razgovornaya praktika – conversational practice) and get some help with it. Midwesterners, enjoy your rain and thunderstorms – I'll be frolicking in a бабье лето (bab'e leto – Indian summer).