Entry 15: September 9, 2011
Friday. The big day of the Freshman party. The festivities were to commence at 1:30. I had helped in writing at least two of the skits, but I didn't really know if I was helping or doing anything during the party, which could be better described as a welcome/concert/variety show...not that that is really any more specific. There had been talk of my singing a rewritten spoof of “Mama's Good to You” from Chicago retitled “Teachers are Good to You” (where the tag line is, of course, “When you're good to teachers, We'll be good to you”), but Anton, who is one of the professors, had mentioned the day before that he hadn't been successful in finding the accompaniment.
However, I found out Friday morning around 10:30am that accompaniment had been found, and I was given the words. Although I had heard the song before, I didn't really know it, so I did some studying up on youtube (to which my mother, who I was facebook chatting with at the time, remarked that she didn't know that youtube could be used for studying, only for distracting. Youtube – a student's best friend and worst enemy). Naturally, as I needed my computer to be able to practice, I had left it at the dorm. Luckily it's just next door to the university, so I ran back to get it. On my way, I was stopped by a student I have spoken with some in the American Center. He joked that it was still early in the morning, and I was already leaving the school. He invited me to come to the Freshman Party, and I had to hold back a laugh as I said I would definitely be there as I'd be singing at it. When I got back, Yuliya gave me the key to a room on the third floor where I could go practice. Some of the stanzas, according to Anton, had been written hastily the night before and might now work rhythmically. Therefore, there were a few edits I did in the process.
After I felt like I knew the material well enough, I returned to the American Center. There were no students there, so Anton shut the door and cranked the music. This is when I learned that I wouldn't be singing alone, which was comforting as I didn't know how well I was going to have it all memorized in the next hour and a half or so. The song is very jazzy, being from Chicago, and Anton was telling Yuliya she should be one of the back up dancers. The run-through that preceded that comment was inhibited Nadia, Yuliya, and I laughing hysterically at Anton's Fosse antics.
Around noon thirty, one of the fifth year students, who is doing a practicum (meaning she's sort of like a graduate teaching assistant), arrived to draw and paint some of the props for the “12 Little Freshman” sketch. It was literally a race against the clock to get everything together. Pressure does wonders for results however. At one o'clock, our resident artist and I were called upstairs to practice. We walked into the room and Olga (the professor for whom I'm doing the recordings and who was the leader in writing the song and the poem) and Anton were practicing the song. Ludmila was one of the backup dancers. I noticed they had changed a few stanzas, and I thought to myself, What is it with me and last minute vocal performances in this country? When I was in Moscow several years ago, our little American group found out we had about two days to get something together for the international talent show, involving 36 countries, so we didn't shame the USA. The only tool at our disposal for said task was the piano book of Disney songs Alisha had brought along. Therefore, she had to relearn it on the piano, and two days later I sang Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid in front of nearly 300 people from 36 different countries of the world. I figured that singing with two other people in front of the American English students, most of whom I had already met, was not nearly as daunting.
Olga, Anton, and I sang, and Ludmila and the fifth year student just helped with the dance part, which consisted of walking in a circle between the stanzas. If you've heard the song, a jazzy circle is the perfect between-stanza choreography. The fancy part of our choreography was the part of the song where the break is twice as long. In that case we did two circles. One to the right, and then one to the left. Just to keep everyone on their toes...including ourselves as we had to remember it. The rest of the dancing we just improved as we went. It was a blast.
Two of the third students, Olya and Anya, who have invited me to make muffins with them this coming Wednesday, were the MCs for the event. They began with an opening and introduced the first act from four fifth year students. They sang a song dedicated to the teachers, and it was comical. It started out with them not wanting to listen to anything the teachers said, and eventually they realized their error and righted their ways. Then a group of third year students reenacted Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss. Olga, the professor, is brilliant. She is using Dr. Seuss to teach American phonetics. Take note all of you ESL teachers and teachers-to-be! If you are not familiar with this particular Seuss book, I would encourage you to youtube it, and watch the one that has the Dr. Seuss pictures. It's crazy, and they recited it as fast as the recording does. Very comical, very clever...very articulatorally challenging.
Then another group of third year students performed a dance that went through all five years of university, which was really good. I could tell there were a few girls who were the dancers/choreographers of the group, but the group as a whole was ten people or so, and I was impressed in how enthusiastic everyone was. As a whole, I just thought it was really cool at everyone was ok with performing something. I feel like to get something similar to occur in America you'd have to pull teeth.
After that, the skit that I had helped write about the sorting of the languages by the “sorting hat” occurred. I learned that group was all second year students, and several of them came up to me just before the proceedings to check pronunciation with me. The freshman group then performed a sort dance they had come up with that morning. After they were done, they were asked to stay up at the front, and twelve chairs were set up...in front of them. Poor things, they were caged in and didn't know what was going on. After all the chairs were set up, Anton told them they could sit in them, and some moving had to ensue for this to occur. The teachers then did the “12 Little Freshman” skit. They had split up the stanzas so they all kept coming from the audience and walking up. It was very well done...especially as no practicing had occurred...at all. At the end of each stanza, one freshman was sent back to his or her seat. The final lines of the poem were “The teachers firmly told them, “There's one thing you must do. You be good to teachers, and we'll be good to you” (which was my contribution to the poem, by the way). Naturally, this lead into the song, and then that was pretty much the end of it.
Nadia recorded the whole thing, and it may go on the American Center website. If it does, I'll post the link here so you can see it. It's all in English, so you'll be able to understand it. The whole event was really fun. I really enjoyed it. I was also really encouraged to see that I recognized the majority of the students in the room.
Veronika came up to me when it was done, and we decided to go do something together. It was a nice day, so we decided to not do something indoors. She was hungry so we went to a store and two different cafeterias before we found something satisfactory. I wasn't too terribly hungry, and I hadn't seen anything that appealed to me, so I just decided to have a big dinner when I got back. Veronika took me to the city's Central Park. It was about a 40 minute bus ride to get there...and there were so many people on the bus. Russian buses are much smaller than the ones we have in America, and I think they usually hold twice the amount of people. It was so crowed you literally could hardly move. Veronika seemed a little embarrassed and commented that she bet nothing like that every happened in America, but I said I didn't really mind it. I know from experience that Russian buses can be quite crowded, and it didn't really bother me. In coming back to Russia I don't feel I've undergone culture shock. I sort of know what to expect this time, and sometimes, in retrospect, it strikes me as odd how easily I accept a lot of “only in Russia” scenarios. I think the trick to traveling in foreign countries is to look at every moment as a new adventure.
The park was absolutely beautiful. I have some lovely pictures of the Russian “Zolotaya Osen” or “Golden Autumn.” Tall, skinny white birch trees, with branches only at the very top were decked out in their fall colors, which contrasted the green of the grass below. We walked until we were tired. It's a big park. Then we took the bus back...and it was nearly as crowded as coming. I was thinking that I needed to go to the store, but I didn't really want to walk to it after I got home as I was pretty tired by that point. Luckily, the bus went right by the store. We hoped off there and parted ways. I grabbed the few things I needed, went home, ate, and went to bed thoroughly exhausted but quite satisfied.
On Saturday, Jackie came over to make lunch. After eating our fill, we went back to my room, and Jackie helped me with some of the recordings for LUNN. There were several dialogues that I needed to record. I had already done several of them myself, but it feel a little silly having endless conversations with yourself. In addition to being thankful to having a dialogue partner, I was really glad Jackie helped me out because she does better fast speech reductions than I do. I think that because I'm aware of the phonetic processes that the exercise are going for, I have a tendency to want to over correct...which is bad. The dialogues gave us a lot of amusement as they tended to be really funny. I won't write any of them here as they are copyrighted, but usually the last line was snappy or just terribly amusing to us in some way. We would read through them once before recording, and at times it took several minutes of laughing and wiping tears away before we could record them. Needless to say, there were a few dialogues we had to try to record several times.
When that was done, we decided to go back to Jackie's place. We took our time getting there, stopping to do some photography and to go into a second hand store. Originally we were going to watch Russian TV at her place, but earlier that morning I had discovered a really awesome film that I had on my computer and had not yet watched. It's called “Chyornaya Molniya” which means “Black Lightning” and, as best as I can describe it without giving too much away, it's like Batman meets Spiderman, Iron Man, and Herbie the Lovebug in Russia. Very good film. It was made in 2009, and the quality is really good. I had watched part of it earlier, but didn't watch til the end so that we could watch it together. We both really liked it. I was also proud of myself in that the whole thing is in Russian with no subtitles, and I understood everything. I found though that I don't remember details quite as well as when watching an English movie. You know how movies will sometimes voice over an earlier conversation to bring it to mind as if to say, “Remember when we told you this about a half hour ago? Well that was the foreshadowing for what's going to happen next. We're telling you again so that you get the symbolism.” Usually in an English movie, my thought to myself when they do that is, “Well, duh, I thought that was extremely obvious.” However, there was one point in this film when that happened, and Jackie and I both went, “Ooooooh” simultaneously, which naturally led to laughter. When you have to pay more attention every minute to understand what's happening, you appreciate the method better I suppose.
I rewatched the film on Sunday, seeing if I could translate it as I went, as I'd like to show it to my family when I get back. I was pretty successful, so if you're intrigued, you can come and put up with my simultaneous translation from Russian to English. If you want the translation into any other language you have to bring your own translator.
After the film, we were hungry and decided to go to Shokoladniza for some dinner. When we finished it was around 8:30 and we parted ways to go home. It's about a half hour walk from Minina square to our respective abodes. Later in the evening I started to not feel super great. I had been feeling a little weird for a few days, but hadn't thought anything of it until late Saturday night.
Sunday I just laid low and tried to recoup. I wasn't feel too terrible, but I decided I'd rather kick something before it got bad. I did some reading and, as previously stated, rewatched the film to translate it. Although I had been getting fresh air from my open window, I decided to go get some things at a nearby produkty. They had some Activia drinkable yogurts, so I grab one, thinking that might be prudent. Some combination of my “get better” snacks and being outside seemed to do me good, as I felt fine come mid-afternoon.
Aliza (my Korean neighbor) knocked on my door sometime after dinner. She had downloaded some games on her iTouch to play. I've never really played iPhone games before...but we got really into some of them and were laughing really hard and having an all out good time. Some of the games were in English, others were in Korean. Artyom (the other Korean I'd had curry with) knocked on my door after a while, and I invited him in. He wondered at few things I had with me. My room seemed very clean to him, which, I guess, is good. All I really brought with me was clothes, gifts, my Bibles (English and Russian), and my Russian grammar books. Thus I have a pretty sparse room. I showed him my pictures from home. He says my boyfriend is tall and my family is beautiful (which he says is a compliment to my parents. So parents, that's for you).
It's interesting to have a conversation with Artyom and Aliza. Artyom speaks Russian to me, as his English is very minimal. Aliza speaks mostly English to me, as her Russian is very minimal. So I can speak to either one of them, but not so where they will both understand me at the same time. They can then speak Korean to each other. So between the three of us, we end up doing a lot of translating back and forth. It's a interesting conversation triangle. We can each communicate with each other fairly well in one language, but that language is not shared by the third member. We'll probably do something together later this week. It's been interesting to me to learn about their worldview and perspective on Korea, Russian, China, and America. They seem to really like America, which is great for me, and I'm learning a lot about them and their culture.
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