November 29th Thanksgiving Edition

Court Garrettson carving the Thanksgiving turkey

The "Russian Queso"

Thanksgiving 2009, Воронеж style was a great success. A huge success really. One of the Russian gals we were with was overheard exclaiming about our boys, “They cook, they dance, they’re funny, and they’re going to be officers in the military. They’re too good to be true!” And I was inclined to agree. I was truly impressed by the turnout that we managed in difficult circumstances with foreign ingredients. We had two perfectly cooked turkeys with some of the best stuffing I’ve had the pleasure of eating, delicious cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, salads, sweet carrots, sweet corn, two pumpkin pies, an apple pie, several cakes (carrot and chocolate), wine, champagne, vodka, oh and I almost forgot, these potato bread rolls that Brenden made from scratch. He worked from 3 PM to 11 PM the previous night getting ingredients and just making the dough! Court Garretson, one of our seniors, got man of the match award with making one of the turkeys, the pumpkin pies and the apple pie, slaving away in the kitchen for hours before the party started. I was charged with making an appetizer so I for some odd reason settled on queso and tortilla chips. If there was going to be anything that I couldn’t make here, it would be that… So I went into improvise mode and wandered around the grocery store trying to make the best of what they had. Instead of Velveeta cheese and salsa, I ended up with two bottles of extra hot ketchup with peppers, spreadable Russian cheese, several sprigs of green onion, a clove of garlic and four bags of tortilla chips (the surprise find of the night) and two bottles of champagne (I seem to recall that whenever we do a holiday toast at home there’s always champagne involved, so I imposed this little family tradition on all present last night). I mixed in all the “salsa” with about half the container of cheese, added in about five sprigs of green onion, chopped up, then diced the entire clove of garlic into fine pieces and mixed it all. To my everlasting shock, this random concoction turned out to be a great success and it was pretty much gone by the time the food was ready. It would have been better warm, but there was a critical lack of stove space so it was a good thing I didn’t have cheese that needed to be melted! We had a Thanksgiving champagne toast, we all made beautiful speeches and it was time for the feast. The night ended with hours of dancing and laughing and just generally having a great time. I think Brenden and Rebecca (one of our USAFA gals) were DJing (and doing a great job of it) and through a computer malfunction, my iPod was the music selection- it did me proud (from hip-hop and Russian dance music to country slow dance songs and relaxing ‘70s classics, there was everything- we had people waltzing and fox-trotting on the floor at one point). Luckily for me, that meant I had home field advantage on the dance floor because there isn’t a song on there that I wasn’t familiar with. It was a wild and crazy night! To be sure, I would have loved to have been with my family on this Thanksgiving, the first I’ve ever spent away from home, but I had the next best thing: a wonderful Thanksgiving with incredible friends. People I never knew existed three months ago and will likely never see again after I leave here, but who will forever have a place in my memory as people whose combined individuality, whose strengths and faults, whose sense of humors and quirks have helped to make this the best three months of my life. I suppose have a lot to be thankful for this year.

November 28th

Well then, sorry for the delay with this post! No excuse really… It is an incredibly beautiful day today and as soon as I finish this post I’m definitely going to go outside and revel, maybe walk along the river or go to the grocery store. All the Americans in Voronezh (11 West Point and Air Force, 2 Baylor, 2 ex-pat students, assorted non-American girlfriends) are getting together today and celebrating Thanksgiving so I’ve got to do my part and grab some food from the store. It looks to be quite the feast, we somehow managed to find a turkey and there is talk of a pumpkin pie in the offing as well (I’m doubtful about the whipped cream though). Should be a good time!

Anyways, just kind of another short story about my home life here: I was in my room after school and Gina came in to my room with a basket of onions and asked me if I knew how to prepare them. Thinking he meant cook, I said no (plus I was curious to see where this took us, I’ve never been one to pass up opportunities for Gina to mock me or show me something interesting). But no, he didn’t mean cook. He meant peel, so like I do every time I open my mouth, I looked like an idiot. Who doesn’t know how to peel an onion? He took this moment of weakness to ask me if I knew how to operate matches… Thanks Gina. He then asked me if I’d ever been a “скают.” I’d understood everything he’d said up to this point, and I had to admit I had no idea what a “скают” was. He looked at me like I was a little slow and said, “Скают, you know the kids who run around in the woods and make fires.” Oh. Scout. Like Boy Scouts. Great, I managed to understand everything in the sentence except the English word. Hooray, me. It was all good though and I left that and our many exchanges recently with a warm fuzzy feeling which is nice for a change. Olga Arkeedevna is in the hospital with tuberculosis (I’m really worried about her) so it’s just the guys around the house and I think Gina is happy to have someone to talk to no matter how laughably poor their Russian might be. That’s it I think for today. I suppose I’ll deign to write some more tomorrow, but I’m burning daylight and it’s criminal to be inside on a day like today!

November 25th

The outside of the clinic

Inside of the clinic-the waiting room

The moment we almost lost Matt Faust. He's the one with the red bag three up who's pressed against the cliff for dear life. I'm behind him feeling less then thrilled. Thanks to Brenden's steely nerves for the picture.

Last Irkutsk picture I promise! Again, contemplating life. This picture isn't staged, I often look that pensive and stoic...

Story time!

A father and daughter were riding a horse through the Kafkaz when the horse trips on a stone. The father pulls out his knife and yells, “One!” Twenty minutes later, the horse trips again and the father, still brandishing his knife, yells, “Two!” An hour later, the horse trips a third time. The father yells, “Three!” and proceeds to cut the horse’s throat. As they walk away, the daughter is sobbing and wailing and asking her father why he just killed their horse. The father looks at his daughter, pulls out his knife and yells, “One!”

Got to love it. Or not, if that suits you. Don’t let me be the judge! Anyways, so, Brenden’s clinic experience with the rabies and whatnot. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I feel like throwing a few pictures up of this place will keep me from boring you, dear reader, to tears with a description of the inside of a Russian emergency room. It was wooden, Spartan, and smelt of rubbing alcohol but the staff was professional and put me at ease (of course I wasn’t the one getting stuck with unknown medicines…). So, I really was imagining that I’d have a lot to say about this whole experience, but as I’m wracking my brain, there’s really not a whole lot to tell. The shots were free (socialized health care and all that) and Brenden is still alive, so all’s well that ends well right? I think so.

Attention Reader: as my time here draws to a close, I feel like I’ve focused a lot on my day to day activities and less on broad social perspectives or other things of the sort that I’ve observed. I try to include that sort of thing on the blog, but often I don’t include things that I imagine are routine but perhaps you would have been dying to know. What I’m trying to say in way to many words is this: If you have any requests, anything you’d really like to know about Russia, Russians, or what happens when you poke a bear with a stick, please feel free to post a comment/request or just shoot me an e-mail. All those burning questions that you’ve always wanted to know about but you’ve been to afraid to ask. Like, “how many people can you fit on a 15 passenger bus and still close the door?”, or “how many times do you need to nearly die crossing the road before you become inured to fear of death by motorist?” or “how can I judge the depth of a mud puddle-lake using only basic geometric calculations and what’s the safe operating depth for stiletto heels?” I may not be able to answer (and I’ll try not to make stuff up just to sound intelligent, but I’m not making any promises) but I’ll do my best or find someone here who knows the answer. Off to watch some footy.

November 23rd

The Wooden Architecture Museum at dusk, Irkutsk

Anton proving his greatness by saving a kitten by the shore of Baikal

Admiral Kolchak on his huge pedestal looking vaguely annoyed

This is mostly an excuse to put up more photos, but I figured I could finish off the wild tales of our journey as well. So, as soon as we left the town where our hike ended we went to Taltsi, the local wooden art museum (I think I’ve misspelled museum just about every time I’ve written it for the last three months on this blog. Like misspelled so horribly that MS spell check suggests words like ‘missile’ or mausoleum. Truly frustrating…). It was really cold and we were all really tired, but we still had a great time and Anton was incredibly knowledgeable about everything, easily cementing him as world’s coolest guy ever (did I mention he saved a kitten from a tree then fed it the last of our food? The guy’s practically a saint). We finally returned to the hostel to find an utterly ridiculous Australian there from Melbourne. He’d quit his job as the guy who calls people and tells them that despite being injured they can’t get worker’s comp (I can’t imagine why he quit…) and was travelling from London to Hong Kong by train. He ended up staying four days in Irkutsk with us and I think he made it into town once at our insistence. He was supposed to leave a day before he did, but we had something of a bender the day he was supposed to leave at 5 AM to Mongolia but I’m not sure we were even back to the hostel by 5 AM and anyways, it was best that he slept that one off… Good fun anyways. He was one of several people we met on their way through Irkutsk on the Trans-Siberian railway. Oddly, most of them had quit terrible jobs and were just kind of on a train to anywhere until their money ran out. Two British girls we met actually ran out of money in Irkutsk and used the last of their money to buy their way to Japan where they were going to soy farm until they had enough money to go home. I can imagine worse things in life! It was funny because we were essentially co-owners of the place by the time we left. The owners would leave and put us in charge for whole nights because we’d been there for so long and they trusted us for some reason… Anyways, we spent the rest of our time there going to the local art museum (yep, spelled it wrong again…) which was quite nice for a city of that size and seeing the houses of the Decembrists, the exiles of the failed coup against the Tsar in the 1800s who made Irkutsk the Mecca of learning and art that it became. There was also a super intimidating statue of Admiral Kolchak, the White leader during the 1917-1921 Civil War who was executed in Irkutsk then dumped unceremoniously into a hole in the ice on the Angara River. It was erected in 2006 amid great controversy (the guy was a brute and Russia may not be communist but it certainly isn’t hankering for a return to the heartwarming Tsarist times) and the statue is on a huge pedestal to guard against vandalism. Interesting… Tomorrow: Brendan’s Hospital experience (hint: it’s not like the Orange Park Hospital emergency room).

November 22nd

Hard to have a bad morning when you wake up to this view

About the safest part of the Dog Trail

Drinking the pure water from Lake Baikal. A little cold, but delicious!

My face and hair covered in frozen sweat; happy to be done (so I thought) after the Dog Trail Part I...

Our third day, with the insistence of Anton, we decided to actually make some solid plans. We finally settled on a two day camping trip to Lake Baikal (which was part of the original plan, only that included us sleeping on the shore without even the barest necessities for sub-zero weather and snow {which, ironically probably would have been safer than what we actually did}). So, the morning of the fourth day, we packed up the YAZ truck and headed out to Baikal. It was a beautiful, almost warm (0° F about) and we were well supplied with camping equipment and adequate footwear. We were short one camping backpack so I got to find out that not only is my suitcase great for arduous journeys from Jacksonville to New York City, but also for rucking around the mountains of Siberia stuffed with food, vodka, a tent, and a sleeping bag. Not bad! Anyways, we made the three hour trek to our campsite over the mountain which was difficult, but not so terrible. We set up the tents, made the fire, chopped wood, took a terrifying and incredibly dangerous death hike and had some incredibly delicious chicken and soup that Anton cooked over the fire. So, death hike: we hiked along this tiny trail about a foot wide at the best bits and covered in snow and ice. It was about ten steep and grass covered meters from a 20 meter cliff, the bottom of which was alternately rocky or Lake Baikal. A year ago a hiker slipped and fell into the lake. Miraculously she survived the fall, but nothing kills you quicker then icy water with nowhere to get out. So, one misstep and you were literally dead. I had never faced death before, and now in a very real sense I was one slip away. On the plus side, this focuses the senses wonderfully. We finally made it, my heart beating wildly and swearing that I’d never do something that stupid or dangerous again. Peer pressure works wonders though… anyways, after that, food tasted better and you really appreciate life, so I guess it works out in the end. It got dark around 5 as usual so we sat around the campfire and we told Anton stories of all the interesting things we’ve done with our lives (it’s amazing how hard it is to make your life of leisure in a provincial Russian backwater sound interesting compared to some of the incredible people Anton has met. Us: “Yeah, then we drank a lot of vodka and played drinking Jenga and vodka checkers! Six nights in a row!” Anton: “Hmmm. Interesting. I rode a dogsled from Kamchatka to Moscow, hunting and fishing and getting food from the local tribes.” Touché, Anton, touché…). We had the most delicious chicken I’ve ever had for dinner and then we hit the hay. We woke up the next morning, broke down the gear and packed up. I was ready for a difficult but safe hike back home, but boy was I in for a rude shock. If I thought that the previous day’s trail was terrifying, I was rudely disappointed. The trail back was three miles of treacherous goat trails that sometimes disappeared into sheer cliffs that we had to scoot along with only toe holds keeping us from certain death (again, this is not creative license. If any of us fell, we would be dead). This path was called the Dog Trail because it was fit only for dogs and goats and it had been closed for a year after the local government was tired of the number of people dying on it. Hardly the words to inspire confidence in a young Floridian who regularly slips and falls on the sidewalk on the way to class in the comparatively mild New York winter. On one of the cliff bits, I was inching along behind Matt Faust who lost his footing when one of his toe holds broke off and fell into the lake 30 feet below. He miraculously held on with one hand while Anton somehow pulled him on to a wider bit. He was white as a sheet and I was hardly thrilled to follow in his footsteps. Brendan actually has a photo of this but I don’t have it right now unfortunately… Well, we finally made it and I thanked God and my lucky stars with all my might. In an unfortunate aside, I think this trip brought my tally up to about 30 Russians making fun of us for Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize for simply winning an election. I’m having trouble doing any defending and frankly it’s downright embarrassing… More later!

Tired, but truly glad to be alive! Myself, Brendan Fox, Matt Faust, Stuart Coffee, Anton Kuzmin, and Taylor Castelli at the end of the road

Some of the native wildlife we came across on Baikal's shore!