Day 21-22

I was walking home tonight after an enjoyable liaison with some Russian friends of mine (discussion topics for this evening: stereotypes, esoteric science, the quantum physics behind the world being a hologram, and the evils of consuming alcohol. You’d like them mom…) and I was thinking about how much I enjoy the city centre here in Voronezh. It’s really quite pleasant, many boutiques, restaurants, parks, etc. In a word, everything that should be in a city’s downtown. It’s all very Western; tree-lined avenues, McDonalds, beautiful architecture, the works. However, when one gets on a bus and goes not five minutes in any direction, it’s a different world. The third world, really. The roads begin getting worse and the parks more poorly maintained, the shops less inviting and the apartments go from Russian to Soviet. My tour book of Russia has this to say about Voronezh, “There’s little to draw you to this city on the Don River, unless you are a motorist in need of a break on the long journey south to the Crimea. The city center is pleasant, but stay for more than an hour and the industrial underbelly of Voronezh will become readily apparent.” Well, it took me more than an hour, but on a few of my runs and on my most recent excursion to find a decent football match in this city, I feel that I’ve truly discovered the “industrial underbelly” of this city. But I feel that I’m misrepresenting Voronezh. It isn’t industrial in the sense that there are factories everywhere belching smoke, etc. It’s simply a giant economically depressed ring around the façade that is the beautiful city center. It’s always hard to tell in Russia what is poor and what is middle class but ridiculously dirty and poorly maintained. Take my family for example: I’m not one to enquire about these things, but I feel as if I am living in an upper middle class environment (I mean, we’ve got Tupperware and a washing machine, let’s be real here). However, the street I live on is like the surface of the moon only with large piles of trash and sand every 20 or so meters (and the biggest and most intimidating pack of stray dogs I’ve ever seen). An odd juxtaposition. Likewise, almost all of my classmates live in Soviet style apartment buildings that make you want gouge out the eyes of the architect who imposed them on society. However, you walk inside and you step into beautifully furnished, quasi-modern apartments. It’s most bizarre. So, I suppose the point I’m trying to make here is that outside of the city, it resembles what I imagine the area surrounding Chernobyl looks like: rotting infrastructure, packs of stray dogs, heinously deteriorating block apartments, bizarre statuary. However, I couldn’t pass judgment on the economic climate of this place with any certainty whatsoever. Sorry for the lack of a point in this post, but it happens.

Voronezh Moment of the Day

So, somewhat tired of walking the mile and a half to meet my friends every day, I decided yesterday to take the marshrutka or little yellow 15 passenger buses that are so ubiquitous in the city, making up the majority of its public transit system. It’s only eight rubles, about 30 cents, and they go literally everywhere. So, first, I utterly fail to open the bus door (Ok, there’s two handles on the outside and when the one I grabbed totally failed to open the door, I panicked and just yanked repeatedly on it instead of trying the other one. It had to be opened from the inside by a totally NOT amused passenger). At the next stop, an old man gets on and a few minutes later asks me for the time. Now, beyond the hours and thirty minute intervals (4 o’clock, 4:30, etc.) Russian time telling is my kryptonite. I stumble through telling him it’s 6:41, in the process completely exposing myself as a foreigner (bear in mind he wasn’t there for the door incident). So, he asks me where I’m from and I reply: America. Of course, he’s a retired teacher of English and he gets really excited. He speaks very good English and is VERY excited about meeting an American. We get off the bus and he explains that he’s going to the theater and asks if I wouldn’t walk him there. Of course I acquiesce and I walk the distance to the theatre with this tiny old Russian man gripping my arm like a drowning man to a life ring. All the while he’s telling me not to go out at night alone, not to drink or smoke, and not to hang out with those bad Russian boys. I bring the man to the theatre and he insists that I come to see a play with him some time. I give him my number (the man doesn’t have a telephone, only his neighbor’s…) and we part ways with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. We’ll see where this ends up! I am incapable of doing anything here without making friends it seems.