Why am I here?

I can't help but notice a general confusion about why, exactly, I am here. Many people whom I talk to immediately ask why an American would be in their city. When I say I'm on exchange, they then ask what I'm studying at University. After I explain I'm still in high school they don't understand at all why I'm there. I am always asked these questions: "So, you want to study in Russia later on?," "You want to live in Russia someday?," "This is required for a language program?" It seems that the whole idea of youth exchange for the sake of experiencing a different language and culture is generally misunderstood. They are confused why a foreigner, especially an American, would want to live in their country and experience their culture. 

Last week I called up a friend of mine to come have some tea. She and I sat in my kitchen for hours drinking cup after cup of tea and eating a staggering amount of cookies. We talked until we exhausted all of her English and all my Russian, and at every lull in the conversation she would look at me and say, "Why Russia!? Why?! You are American, why Russia?!" 

Yesterday I went to dance lessons with my mom and sister. Yeah, I laughed too. Me! Dancing! Haha! I resembled something like a drunk orangutan trying to waltz. The poor boy I was dancing with! He's probably icing his feet as I write this. Anyways, it was fun, and they were awfully nice people. However, one lady said to me, "It is strange for us to see an American girl here, learning how to waltz." I wanted to ask, "Am I that bad?" But I bit my tongue and explained what I was doing there. 

On one occasion, my Australian exchange student friend, Maddy, and I went to buy coats at the huge Chinese Market here in Vladivostok. It's a massive, sprawling building packed with stall after stall of Chinese goods; mainly shoes, clothes and accessories, but you could find anything there, for next to nothing. The Chinese accents are hard to understand to begin with, but near impossible for me. That left Maddy to do the haggling, and she managed to get us some great deals on top of the deal that is the Chinese Market. It was interesting to see the community between the vendors. They hollered to each other in rapid-fire Chinese and were continually running between stalls. It never got old: the reaction of the vendors to find we were not Russian. They were impressed that Maddy was from Australia, but were even more surprised that I was American. One vendor couldn't get over the fact that we were there. I suppose they don't get many foreigners there; it's not exactly a tourist attraction. 

I count myself blessed to be able to go to church here. The congregation is incredibly warm, welcoming and kind. There is an interpreter who is there every Sunday and translates everything for me. She had a hard time understanding how the Rotary program worked and why I would want to come to Russia. The fact that I simply sit in a regular Russian school even when I don't understand Russian confused her, and many other people I talked to. There are plenty of foreigners here studying Russian (mainly from China, Japan and Korea), but they go to the international school, or the University. 

I find other people's reaction to me interesting. For the most part, they are not necessarily surprised, as there are a few other Americans in the city, but more confused. Sure, plenty of Americans visit the city, but few live here. The ones who do live here work at the consulate, or are married to Russians. The Russians, and even some of the Americans and British that I've met, are puzzled why I would choose Russia. Sometimes even I am baffled that I picked Russia, and not a beautiful place like Switzerland, or the Czech Republic. My whole life those were the places I wanted to go, or rather Europe, in general. Then, I had a chance to actually live there, and what did I do? I picked Russia. 

I didn't instantly love Russia, I am falling in love with Russia. It's a harsh place, and it's hard to love if all you see is the concrete buildings and unsmiling faces, and all you hear is a fast, undecipherable language. Now that I can understand more, and I have seen inside those concrete buildings, and I know the people more, I feel a stronger attraction to the place. It has been a lot of work. Quoting my Australian friend Maddy: "Russia doesn't give you anything, you have to take it." I feel a bit like oil in water: I am immersed, but not a part of it. I now realize how hard I will have to work to become a part of their culture. But the Russian culture is worth the work. That's part of why I picked Russia, I think. It's misunderstood and I wanted to see for myself what it was like. Now I am finding that it is a very beautiful place indeed. 

Большой Камень

We were in a small apartment in a city called большой камень, or Bolshoy Kamen. My host mom has an office there, and the family often goes there for a weekend. It was small: a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom. Anna and I shared the bed in the back room and my host parents took the other room. I fell in love with the place instantly. I can't describe how, but it was what I'd always pictured as Russian. It felt old, like it hadn't changed in the twenty years they had owned it. The floor was linoleum, the wallpaper was peeling, the doors had latches and the lights were dim. It was furnished with pull out couches, Art Deco lamps and water color prints. Old toys filled the shelves, along with family photographs, classic books and knick-knacks they had acquired.

The first night we sat around a small rolling table in the room with the television set. The table was covered in various Russian salads, black bread and cheeses. We toasted to life, love and good health. A Russian sci-fi film played on the tv (that was an interesting movie) and the night turned incredibly black outside the window, as clouds rolled in, promising rain in the morning.

After finishing most of the food on the table, we cleaned up, put on our coats and headed out to the house of a relative, for his birthday. It was black as pitch, but no one brought a flashlight. We carefully navigated the treacherous sidewalks, that are plenty dangerous in the daylight! We passed apartment building after apartment building, all of them grouped in a wide field. It was interesting to see how they clustered closely together, then abruptly ended, while the field continued on empty.

Reaching the apartment, which was the size of our own, we piled in to greet the hosts and other guests. There were already six people there, and we added four more to the party. It made for a cozy atmosphere. We ate cake and ice cream, toasted many times and watched videos of cats on the tv. The apartment was much like ours, with the rooms small and their knick knacks filling every available space. The table was crowded, with cheeses, fruit, cookies, and candy. I was dying to know what they were all saying, but the words flew by so fast, and without pause. No one spoke English, and even if they did they were not eager to try it out.

We left around ten, handing our gifts to the birthday-cousin, which consisted of a decorative ornament, a bag of candy and a pillow. The moon peaked out from behind the black clouds while we walked back to our building. There really would be rain in the morning.

The rain came in buckets the next day. It gushed down the old water pipes and ran in streams down the streets. The tracks that ran between buildings and through the town were all mud, and a heavy mist had settled in overnight. My host dad and I left the apartment at eleven to go visit my host mom at her office. It gave me a chance to see a little more of the city, not that there was much to see. It seemed to me to be a city of apartment buildings, there were a few administrative buildings here and there, and a sport complex, but most businesses were just on the ground floor of the apartment buildings. There was a "main street" that had most of the businesses and was actually paved, but other than that it was simply a city of apartments.

My host mother's office was on the edge of town, overlooking the sea. It was foggy so we couldn't see much as we dashed through the rain to the door. We walked up to the third floor. The walls were a horrid greenish-yellow pastel color, with spotless floors and black doors at intervals along the hall. We entered her office, which was painted a pink pastel with tall shelving units jutting out from the walls. "Привет!" came her familiar voice from behind one of the shelves. Her desk was tucked back against a wall. A huge map of the Primorsky Krai region hung on the wall behind her.   A huge window was opposite her, and on a clear day, she said, she can see all the way to Vladivostok. (A distance of about forty kilometers). While she made tea I tried to ask her about her work. I was so interested, but I struggled to find words and form questions.

My host mom is an Engineer, and from what I could understand, she fixes ships. When a ship (military or civilian) is broken, it is brought to this city to be fixed. My host mom works mainly on civilian ships, but there is a huge plant here for submarine repairs as well. She served me my tea, along with a hard, lightly sweetened biscuit which she told me were made for the military and were on every submarine. I found that fascinating and ate a second one just because.

We did other fun activities during the weekend. Ice skating was one of them. I learned the Russian word for "fall," nothing like hands-on learning. My pride was left smarting as a tiny girl, who seemed barely old enough to walk and was bundled to within an inch of her life, skated easily past me, as I, sweating and panting, was struggling to stand. However, by the end I wasn't clinging to the wall, and could go full circuit without even touching it. A big accomplishment for uncoordinated me!

We also went walking on the beach, and it went something like this:

Everyone gets out of the car and we walk slowly for about a minute.

Dad: "Are you cold?"

Me: "Well the wind is a little cold." (My hair blasted straight back by the howling baby-tornado)

Dad: "Let's go."

Everyone bolts for the car. Needless to say we took a little drive instead.


My time there, in Болшой Камнеь was a little surreal. I actually felt a little uncomfortable at sometimes, thinking about what it was like twenty or thirty years ago. It felt like a compound, with all the buildings the same, and all the buildings being apartments. The colors all blended together, grays and browns. It was not a pretty place, in fact it was incredibly ugly and stark. The bare, gray feel was made even more pronounced as all the leaves had fallen from the trees, and were turning black and brown on the ground. However, there was beauty to be found there. It was in the tires-turned-planters that were painted bright colors in the overgrown flower beds. It was in the colorful coats and the laughter of kids walking to school. It was in the music drifting out of cars as they drove by. You could say it was "signs of life" that made it beautiful, that people were thriving here in a place where it looked like happiness had long been forgotten.