Valeri the Balalaika Man

I’ve never been a big fan of superlatives, and as a result I always struggle more than necessary with “what’s your favorite ___” questions. I seem to be facing these kinds of questions very often here. Some popular variations from Russian students include “What’s your favorite American movie? What’s your favorite rock band? What is your favorite football club? What’s your favorite Russian food? What is your favorite night club?  Who is your favorite student?” I don’t believe I have yet answered such a question in a satisfactory manner during my two months here.  But if someone were to ask me who my favorite Russian person is, I would, as of today, be able to answer this question immediately and precisely. His name is Valeri Viktorovich and he teaches balalaika at the Novosibirsk Music College. I met him today due to the kind efforts of my second favorite person at the moment, my friend Zina.  She, knowing that I was interested in studying some kind of Russian folk instrument, tracked this guy down and set up a meeting for me. So today, Zina and I showed up at the Music College at 4. I was a bit nervous, and quite unsure of what exactly was going to happen. Zina hadn’t told this guy that I was American, spoke broken Russian, had no true musical training, couldn’t read music, etc. Luckily for me Valeri turned out to be perhaps the nicest, most energetic, least intimidating person I’ve met here in Russia. Not only did he agree to give me balalaika lessons, he gave me a balalaika to take home to practice, refused my money, and then, best of all, told Zina and I this story all about how he used to have a huge beard when he was in college. So, check it out! I’m now learning to play the balalaika! And my teacher is my favorite person in all of Russia…

 

Yesterday I made my first foray into traditional Russian cuisine with a valiant attempt at Borsch soup. For those who don’t know, Borsch is a soup with beet, cabbage, potato, carrot, and (optionally) some meat. Throw in a dollop of sour-cream and eat it with some black bread. It is freaking tasty. My friend Lena gave me her recipe, and I must say that it turned out quite delicious. I was actually quite surprised, considering that I am quite an amateur when it comes to cooking anything more complicated than fried potatoes and eggs. The soup, although perfect in taste, had a bittersweet emotional aftertaste. It made me miss getting together with my friends to cook dinner, drink beer, and make wildly inappropriate jokes. The main reason I haven’t attempted any exciting culinary experiments before this time, is because cooking alone sucks, and all of the Russian kids I know here don’t understand the appeal of such  dinner gatherings.

 

I’ve taken up chewing gum.

 

Among other exciting news, we now have another native English speaker working and living here at the Academy! His name is Nick and he is from Manchester. This is his second year teaching English here. Nick enjoys night clubs, bad euro-pop/electro music, and Russian women. He works as little as possible but dresses like a true English dandy. Predictably, he loves James Bond and plays cricket. Although we are in many ways quite different people we get along wonderfully and laugh our asses off on a regular basis. We complain to each other about poor students, wonder aloud about illogical actions of co-workers, amuse each other with expressions specific to our respective countries, and play table tennis. We make quite the anglo-superhero  duo.  If I could just think of some cool names for our super hero characters I would feel obliged to start writing a comic about our adventures in a hostile land, working together to thwart our mortal enemy – incorrect English grammar!

 

I carved a jack-o-lantern, but still have no Halloween costume…

 

Oh yeah so two weekends ago I went to a place called MEGA. It was strange. MEGA is basically an enormous, modern, American shopping mall in Siberia. I really felt like I was in the U.S. If I had been wearing earplugs I wouldn’t have known the difference. A mall like this is probably the last place I would want to go if I was back home, but for lots of young Russians MEGA is freaking awesome. They love it. And I suppose from their perspective, a clean, shiny shopping mall, with trendy clothes, enormous all-in-one Wal-Mart inspired stores, food court, and ice-skating rink is something new, different, and exciting. I suppose found MEGA so strange and disconcerting because, although there is a lot of money in Russia, the average salary is so much lower here than it is in the U.S. I find it hard to understand how a mall full of fancy shops, selling fancy things, stays afloat when there is really no middle class to support it. Even outside of the mall, so many things here in Novosibirsk are as expensive, and often times more expensive, than they are in either Oklahoma or Portland. I’m really amazed at how people manage to live as they do when living costs are equal with those back home, and yet the average rate of pay is so much lower. I may have already mentioned this before, but one of my friends and co-workers, who works 5 days a week in the office of international relations, earns 4,000 rubles a month. This is less than 200 u.s. dollars. Without her husband there is no way she could live off this sum of money.  I think I’ll try to see if I can’t find some official numbers about the average salary here.  Anyways, at MEGA I bought some stuff for my room from IKEA and a DVD player, because I’m a rich American boy with money to burn…

 

So I more or less accidentally began attending French classes three days a week. I was working one day at the International Relations office, sitting behind a computer, when suddenly I found myself sitting with a small group, looking at a sheet of pronunciation rules, and struggling to make some strange, guttural, “r” like sound come out of my comically contorted mouth. So anyway, free French classes three days a week. It’s quite difficult to receive foreign language training in a foreign language. The vocab is easy enough from my mediocre knowledge of Spanish, but I suck at pronouncing this ridiculous language. During the lessons I find myself thinking in Russian, English, and even Spanish.  This is pretty cool, but usually, by the time I am able to sort through all the different mental flashcards, find the right one, dust it off, and then try to answer the question the class is already over and everyone else has left…

Last second costume ideas?

Oh yeah…

Fulbright has requested that I write a disclaimer stating (more or less) the following:

Attention! Friends, family, and misguided web-surfers! This blog and the words, phrases, and thoughts contained within the combination of those words and phrases are those of one, Matthew Brian Nelson. They do not in any way represent the ideas, theories, policies, political affiliation, sexual orientation, or ontological philosophy of the Fulbright Foundation!

p.s. If this wasn’t already obvious to you, you probably should stop reading my blog.

Tomsk

So this last weekend I went to visit my homie Jason up in the wonderful city of Tomsk. Jason is also a Fulbright ETA, he teaches at the Polytechnic Institute in TOmsk. Tomsk is located about 3-4 hours by car away from Novosibirsk. By Siberia’s standards, this is incredibly close. It’s really a stroke of amazing luck that Jason and I are in cities so close to each other. I am also lucky to be friends with a group of people (2 Germans and 1 Ukrainian) who wanted to visit Tomsk over the weekend. And the best part is that the German guy has a really nice Volvo. I had never dreamed of traveling in such luxury in Siberia. So on Saturday the 4 of us drove up to Tomsk where we met Jason beside the world’s largest wooden ruble. Jason and a Russian guy, who claimed his name was Mark, played tour guide as we walked around Siberia’s oldest city. Tomsk has a reputation of being the “St. Petersburg” of Siberia. In the Lonely Planet Guidebook for Russia, it will tell you that Novosibirsk is the largest city in the area, but you’re much better off going to Tomsk. It’s old, historic, and pretty. Lots of nice brick and wooden architecture. It’s also about 1/3 the size of Novosibirsk so it feels a bit calmer. Yesterday, as we walked around we were treated to the most beautiful weather. I never would have thought that in mid-October in Siberia the weather could be so wonderful. Due to the great weather and the weekend everyone and their mothers were out walking around, hanging out in the parks, hang-gliding, and getting married. It was wonderful. I had the feeling that everyone in the city had secretly received a notice that morning that this would be the last and final day of autumn so they had damn-well better get out and enjoy it. (Sure enough, today the barometer has dipped near 0 Celsius). Our day of walking was followed by much beer drinking and chit-chatting at Jason’s apartment. He has a really sweet place, right in the center. I was quite jealous… How I would like to have a nice apartment of my own… He has a roommate from Belgium who was mostly absent…. Me, Jason, “Mark, and Jason’s friend “Sveta” drank beer, talked, ate smoky/stringy cheese braids and pumpkin seeds, played/listenedto banjo while the others were at a cafe. Later Jason and I went to the park, drank more beer, and violated Russian taboo by sitting down ass-on-grass. We night-capped with another 1.5 liter of delicious, fresh, local beer and made it to bed by 4. The best part of this day was being able to talk with someone who is from the United States who is also teaching English in Russia on the same program I am on. It was so great to have someone who could fully understand all of the numerically endless things that make living and teaching in Russia so different/interesting/strange/similar/frustrating/amusing/enthralling/enigmatic. No one in the U.S. can fully understand it (not only due to my inability to articulate), and certainly no Russian can… So this was really nice, and I think even beneficial for my mental health.I hope that in another month or two, when I’m crazy and perpetually snow-blind, we’ll be able to meet up again to share more impressions, high-fives, and beer.

Written 2 weeks ago, posted… Now!

30/09/08

Wow, what a day. Today was definitely the busiest work-day of my short teaching career, but also probably the most fulfilling as well. Perhaps it just seems that way to me right now because I’m still on a bit of a high from the success of my first English Club Meeting. I showed up without much idea of what I was going to do, how many people would be there, what their expectations were, etc… I didn’t have any idea of how the English Club had been run previously. I wasn’t sure if I should give a presentation, make it like a casual open-topic conversation table, or run it like one of my classes. I had prepared a small PowerPoint presentation about myself, Oklahoma, Portland, LewisandClark, my fams, etc… I showed up, having come directly from my private lesson with Nikita and Sasha, and was surprised to find the designated room literally overflowing with peeps. We had to move the “meeting” to a larger room. All in all there were probably 35ish people there. It was pretty crazy. After the tech dude showed me how to hook up my computer to the t.v. (something I’ve been fruitelessly trying to figure out for the last month), I began the meeting by introducing myself and talking about myself with the aid of powerpoint pictures. Before I came here and began teaching I never knew I could be so comfortable/calm/silly/funny (or at least attempting to be)/voice-projecting/interest-holding/tangent-making-taking/etc. in front of a crowd of people. But that’s how it went (from my point of view). They had tons of questions for me which sparked all kinds of random conversations. However, it was really quite impossible to turn it into an open conversation because there were so many people there, so I found myself answering and asking almost all of the questions myself. I hope that in the future I am able to maximize participant involvement, after all these people aren’t coming just to hear me talk about the U.S. (that’s certainly part of it), but also to practice their English. So I think for next time I will run it more like one of my classes, only it will be completely open. I will present myself not as authority figure (not that I am that authoritative in class, only so much as is necessary), but just as a coordinator/organizer/guider of discussion. And I won’t include any grammar or phonetics, just pure conversation. I want to show lots of video clips and play all kinds of songs. I actually want to make mix cds for everyone to truly illustrate the diversity of music that I listen to and that we have in the U.S. So yeah, I’m pumped about English Club. It’s like taking all of the good things about my classes and removing the things I don’t like (constant reprimanding and correcting). Also at this meeting I felt like more of a celebrity than ever before. It’s strange, but I am beginning to enjoy standing at the center of many people’s attention (for short periods of time).

Well, before I go play banjo I’ll tell briefly about my conversation with Anatoli, the security guard. He works at the desk located in the corridor that connects the “hostel” to the school. There he sits and checks the passes of people going into the “hostel” part of the complex. Anatoli gets very bored at work and so often creates his own security measures in order to stop people and talk to them. Every once in a while, as I pass his desk he engages me in short little conversations. Today as I was going to my room from the meeting, he asked me where I was coming from. Anyway, we ended up talking for quite a while about a few different things, but mostly fishing. This dude loves fishing. He is a pensioner, he worked at some sort of aluminum factory for 30 years, he goes to the theater twice a year, and he loves fishing and talking about fishing. So now I know all of the best spots to go fishing at Lake Baikal. Seriously.