Day 17

A brief vignette of my host family:

Olga Arkadevna and Evgeny (still havn’t asked about the patronymic plus I don’t know the last name, but that’s pretty unimportant). A cultural note: If I’m addressing an elder, where we would say Mr. or Mrs./Ms. and the last name, here it is first name and patronymic. Thus, I refer to my host mom as Olga Arkadevna, my teachers as Anatoly Ivanovich and Raisa Andreevna, etc. Thus the reason I don’t know the last name of my family and also the reason I need to find out Evgeny’s patronymic posthaste. That being said, I know Evgeny is 63 years old (I’m guessing Olga Arkadevna is about the same, but I’m not asking). Evgeny is Ukrainian by birth and Olga is a Voronezh native. Right now, Olga works at the BMW dealership doing some unknown job (it’s not that she hasn’t told me, I just didn’t understand) and Evgeny is an electrician at the local contemporary art theater. Evgeny has some sickness in the head that may be a tumor or cancer or something of the sort, but I do know that he doesn’t sleep well because of it and sometimes spends the whole day in bed. It’s really too bad because he’s a very interesting and quite entertaining man. He’s on vacation for a couple weeks this month and he eats breakfast with me, I can barely understand him for some reason but our conversations are still usually pretty fun. He’s under no illusions about what a bunch of 20-21 year olds are doing in the city until three in the morning so we’ve had some pretty fun chats. Olga is a geologist by trade and she spent quite a bit of time in Siberia doing whatever it is that geologists do (She’s also a Hilary Clinton fan; reason: she’s just so beautiful!). She has a son and a daughter and a sister. Her son lives here in Voronezh and the grandkids, Illysha, 6, and Dana, 1, are over every Saturday (they’re pretty awesome). Her daughter is the pride of the family, clearly. She learned business management in graduate school at Syracuse University. She’s had jobs in Melbourne, Australia, New York, Chicago, Texas, Germany, and she’s currently in Vienna. She speaks English, Italian, German, and Russian. I’m pretty sure I get to meet her in October so that’ll be rather interesting. Olga’s sister is an architect living in Manhattan and she hasn’t been back to Russia in quite some time apparently… So, anyways, that’s the host family, I hope you appreciate the great lengths I’ve gone to to get this information!

Voronezh Moment of the Day

This actually happened about a week ago, but it’s still a good cultural point. So, I was at the breakfast table when Evgeny walked in and said that 5 people had died the day before in Voronezh in mushroom related circumstances. I was appalled, but apparently this wasn’t big news. I asked if kids were involved, but Evgeny didn’t seem to know. At that point he went to his bookcase and grabbed his big book of mushrooms and we went through page by page and looked at all of Evgeny’s favorite mushrooms. He also pointed out which ones were poisonous, which ones were best grilled and which ones were, with a flick of the throat (the Russian symbol for drunkenness or simply getting messed up) and a huge wink, the narcotic mushrooms. This country has an almost unhealthy obsession with mushrooms and during the mushroom season there are crowds of people out in the forest harvesting the delicacies. I’m a big fan of mushrooms so I feel like I’m the winner in this scenario. Anyhow, we discovered mushrooms together for almost an hour until I had to go to school, despite the fact that I was getting about 10% of what was being said. Oh well!