Of Blini and Blisters

Entry 8: September 27, 2011

            Somehow, despite my intention to have written days ago, it seems that I’ve been to busy doing more to write about. You will be glad, however, to know that I have decided to not bombard you with one horrendously long entry and will instead write two covering the last few days.

            The school day on Friday progressed fairly usually. One of the students who had attended the idioms club and in whose class I had spoken in earlier in the week approached me to see if I would like to hang out and get coffee sometime. We planned to meet at noon the following day. At three o’clock Veronika came and found me in the American Center to go walk about the city. Veronika is a tourism major, so I got a history lesson of the city as we went along. Nizhny Novgorod (formerly known as Gorkiy to all you Soviet Geography history buffs if you are out there and reading this) was home to a whole lot of rich merchants who all built large houses to live in, show off their wealth, and conduct business. One of my favorites was the home of an Old Believer who wanted a big fancy mansion, but he also had to follow the rules of his beliefs (which I myself do not really know). The result was that he built a wooden cabin like home inside his big fancy mansion. Apparently the walls of the wooden house could be moved around so that it didn’t get in the way.

            After a bit Veronika got a phone call from Lena (the other girl that originally went sim card searching with me in the first week), and she came and joined us as we walked about. We went and walked through the Kremlin, which I had only walked around before. Each of the 13 towers of the Kremlin has its own name, and there are two different types of towers. The rounded towers are for military defense, and the square towers were for storing supplies and ammunition. There are far more defensive towers than storage ones. Some of the towers also have a legend associated with them. My favorite was one called the Yoke Tower. In older Russia, peasants would carry two buckets of water by means of a short of yoke one laid across one’s shoulders. The legend says that during the tartar invasion a young girl left the protection of the Kremlin to go down to the river to draw water. Upon her return, she was ambushed by a group of tartars. She took the yoke and used it to defend herself, killing several of the ambushers in the process. Unfortunately, they ended up killing the girl, but they said to each other that if one young Russian girl had the ability to kill three or four of their fighters, the Russian warriors must be too fearsome and terrible to be able to beat. Therefore they left and did not attack.

            Veronika and Lena had a lot of really good legends that they knew associated with certain places and it gave me an idea for my Capstone project that I’ll be working on with Jackie. I thought it would be fun to collect some of these stories to write up into a small book. Jackie and I had talked about doing a book on the history of Nizhny Novgorod, but it’s kind of hard to find a lot of information on the city because it was a closed city for a long time. Also, it’s a old city, and we wanted more of a focus.

            Here’s another fun little story: Bolshaya (which means big) Prokovskaya is one of the main streets in my section of the city, and there is a large portion of it that is only for walking on. It’s the street similar to Arbat in Moscow, for those of you who have visited there. There is a clock tower that stands up against what was once just an apartment building or housing, and it seems a little out of place. The legend has it that Tsar Nikolai II was coming to Nizhny Novgorod, and the city was preparing for his arrival. One man, who lived in one of the apartments of the building where the clock tower now stands, had a balcony filled with junk and garbage. The city had come to him several times and asked him to clean up his balcony, as it was right in the path that the tsar would take through the city. Despite their continued requests, the man was disinclined to clean his balcony. Not knowing what else to do, the city built the clock tower in front of the man’s flat so that the balcony was safely hidden from sight. My thought was that, if the municipality gets super angry at the man who builds Snowzilla again, maybe they should just built a giant clock tower in front of his home. J

            Around five o’clock, Lena had to leave to go home, and Veronika and I found a bench to rest our feet awhile. I learned a new word in Russian: mazol (second syllable stressed). It means blister. Even though I had worn flats and not heels that day, endless hours of walking through Russian construction sides and along paths with uneven stairs and uneven sidewalks takes a toll on ones feet. We eventually made our way back to the university, and then I went to the store. Thus I finally got back to my room around 7:30, and luckily it didn’t begin to rain until I got inside.

            The next day I met up with Oksana outside of the Linguistics University around noon and we walked to Minina square, which is by the Kremlin. I learned that she is from Sarov which she jokes is the “super secret city.” Apparently it used to be a monastery town, and the monks built a city under the city. Stalin decided that it would be a perfect place for a nuclear weapons facility, and that is what it became. Even today, she said it’s impossible for her parents to get permission to visit countries outside the former Soviet bloc. Oksana herself did an exchange in UP Michigan, and her boyfriend has come from there to visit her in Nizhny. Long distance relationships are a great commiserating factor.

            We went to a little café called Shokoladnitsa (essentially, “The Chocolate Lady”). We each got coffee (I had a latte that was actually not bad. It was better than Starbucks, at least, which was better than I was expecting) and had blini which are the Russian version of crepes. Mine had some sort of blueberry cream cheese and a blueberry glaze with actual blueberries that tasted just like the wild berries from home. It was very good. After we ate we just sat and talked for a while. We talked a lot about stereotypes we had had of each other’s countries before we visited, and what people told us that either scared us or gave us an impression that was completely false. I found out that in Russia you usually don’t tip. Or, if you do tip, you tip a lot. For just a normal outing with friends, you wouldn’t give a tip.  

            After a while, we went walking (every day I learn the true meaning of gulyat more and more), and met up with Oksana’s roommate Sasha. We switched into Russian with Sasha, who doesn’t really like to speak in English. This, of course, was good for me, and I had a good time.

            Later in the evening, the girl who I have been helping with homework who lives in the dorm came and knocked on my door with her roommate. They brought me a piece of a cake they had made which was absolutely delicious. They also have been helping me with my internet problem. They said that they would call the provider for me (apparently I was supposed to receive a whole packet of information when I arrived, but I did not), but until then, they’ve given me a little USB uplink that I can use. I don’t get really great connectivity, not enough to voice skype, but it sure is better than nothing. I gave them some of the candy I had brought with me in return.

            So now I had a way to get online…and therefore, as I had a temporarily solution to one technological problem, another one ensued. My computer would not charge. I had left it plugged in all night to see if that would do anything, but it did not. I realized that the surge protector was not being friendly with my power converter, and thus, my poor box was getting no power. This was a problem because I only had a converter with a built in adapter, and not an adapter alone. I knew that Jackie had an adapter, and I decided to take my computer with me the next day to her place to try to give some life back to my netbook. Thus, I went to bed, glad that I had somewhat of a solution and frustrated that I had developed another. I felt like I was catching computer issues like the common cold.