Russia: Day One (July 5-6)

Note: Dave cannot access Blogger directly due to Russian government internet blocker-gizmos. He is emailing me his entries for me to post. If you have any comments or want to reach him you should EMAIL him. Thanks. Now back to Dave. --Tim

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Hello everyone, and sorry I haven’t posted yet. The internet was under repair here at the school and I didn’t even get to check my email until my birthday (incidentally, thanks to those who sent me birthday wishes, burn in hell those of you who did not). Now I think I can catch up, but I want to start from the beginning. It only makes sense, and I’ve been typing on my laptop every day since I’ve gotten here – to make sure I remember all the good stuff.

The trip began with a fairly routine trip to JFK courtesy of my dad. Everything seemed to be going smoothly for my 6:40 p.m. takeoff on Aeroflot (the Russian national airline). That is, until the pilot told us – after we were on the plane mind you – that there were too many planes trying to take off and that we might expect a delay of “one and a half to two hours.” In the end, at around 9:15, I was finally in the air, bound for Moscow and its infamously ramshackle airport.

The guy sitting next to me on the plane is worth mentioning. He was a fisherman from California, who took trips to Petropavlovsk (a town/naval base on the remote Kamchatka peninsula in the Far East) to fish. Incidentally, the normal flight from Anchorage to Petropavlovsk did not run this year, so he had to go all the way around the world (California to New York to Moscow to god-knows-where, then to Petropavlovsk). He didn’t speak a word of Russian.

After the 9-hour flight, we touched down in Moscow at Sheremetyevo-2. I got myself through customs and all that without problem, and then waited for my bag. In Moscow, the airport terminals are completely separate for international and domestic flights. That is to say, you have to get on a bus to get to your connecting flight – not a walkable distance. So having exchanged some greenbacks for some fruity looking Russian rubles, I was off to the bus stop. A sea of malodorous Russian taxi drivers had descended upon the terminal, asking “Taksi pozhalsto?” to all the passing foreigners. I powerwalked my way through on to the free Aeroflot shuttle bus, paid my 15 rubles (for the free shuttle), and shuffled off to Sheremetyevo-1, ignominiously and truthfully voted the dumpiest airport in Europe.

Seriously, there were crows flying around inside the “terminal,” which looks like an inner city train station. The first thing I notice about all the Russian people is something I never thought I’d see outside the United States. Mullets. Veritable hordes of young and semi-young Russian men all business in the front, but sooooo much partying going on in back. That said though (and this is something I continue to notice), Russian people are either flat-out busted, or damn good-looking. With a few exceptions I guess.

The wait in the airport was pretty miserable, in that I sat on the floor, ate nothing but beef jerky and Honey Nut Scooters (the Malt-o-Meal generic equivalent to Honey Nut Cheerios) and occasionally slept. And even then, when I slept, I slept on top of my suitcase to ensure no hot-handed gypsy decided to relieve me of my various whatnots. I also started reading Atlas Shrugged, but I only got through around 100 pages because I kept getting distracted or sleepy. I met up with the other girls in my group, and we all went to the gate, which apparently doubled as a smokers’ lounge given the tobacco-infused haze that permeated the whole room. 7 hours after stepping off the shuttle, I was in the air again, headed for Barnaul (Bar-na-OOL – the city closest to Biysk, with what I thought was a real airport).

I tried to sleep on the flight but the fat cows next to me were chattering and giggling most of the time so not much to be had there. We were on a Russian-made plane, which in and of itself is scary enough. The seats were the smallest I have ever experienced. Max, Jack, and Tim: never take an internal Russian flight, at least not if you’re sober and miserably tired like I was. 4 hours later, touchdown in Barnaul. At this point, I had been up for 24 hours straight.

The Barnaul airport is hilarious. Whatever you imagine to be a backwoods Soviet-style airport to be, that’s the Barnaul Airport. I have pictures, I will eventually post them somewhere. The terminal is just a building near the runway. All the planes land and then you walk along the tarmac to the crummy run-down building. While walking to the terminal, a swirling maelstrom of mosquitoes assaulted my sweaty and very tired body. Inside, there are just as many mosquitoes, and one baggage claim in a dank concrete-walled room. Somehow, all my shit made it there unmolested. We met up with our program director, and our ride – a nice couple whose daughter goes to the school at which I teach. Local time is approximately 6:00 am.

We drive through Barnaul, a city that is surprisingly successful-looking. There is tons of new construction, and a bunch of new buildings – municipal and commercial alike. Granted there are also crappy Soviet parts, but I was surprised. Once we were out of Barnaul, though… yeah, it’s beyond Bumblefuck. Wild herds of cows, completely vacant fields and forests, isolated villages and some really beautiful countryside. Again, I have pictures of all of this but if I tried to put them up on the blog, it might break the internet and then no one would be happy.

We arrived in Biysk a few hours later, and met up with all the school staff and host families at Gimnasiya No. 2, my school. We had snacks and got the first workout of our Russian language skills talking with our very excited hosts. My host family is Yelena Viktorovna, the director of the Gimnasiya, and her 13-year-old son Ilya. They are currently living with Yelena’s mother, Nina (since their apartment is being renovated), and that is where I currently reside. Yelena Viktorovna does not speak English, and Ilya speaks only enough to get by. In terms of the apartment, on the outside it is straight out of whatever documentary you might have seen on any communist country. Straight up Soviet apartments. On the inside though, it’s a perfectly nice little apartment. Easily someplace you might rent in New York City on a modest salary.

Anyways, I showed some pictures and tried to explain what was going on in them. I also gave some gifts to the family (American food mostly) and to their son Ilya, an Under Armour shirt and a pair of Under Armour shorts. At 6:00 p.m. local time, I couldn’t stand it any more and took a nap. I had been up for 36 straight hours so it didn’t seem like a bad idea. I woke up shortly after. See you in hell, jet lag.

After my nap, we went down to the river Biya, from which Biysk gets its name. Here, I threw the disc a little bit with Ilya and other kids. The other teacher working here this summer is Christina, from Georgetown, and she is staying with a family whose daughter is the same age as Ilya. So we all threw the disc together, and I tried to show them how to properly throw. Pretty successful, I might add. The kids went swimming in the river, but I didn’t really want to be wet at this point. Why add “wet” to the list of horrible adjectives I was experiencing at the time?

We came back home and I was absolutely covered in mosquito bites. My blood : Siberian mosquitoes :: trans-fat-infused cupcakes : kids at fat camp. The bites made themselves very noticeable and red on Day 2. We had dinner (I don’t remember what) and thus ended my Saturday – Day One-Plus in Russia.