When I got home I experienced a bit of culture shock. About twelve hours after getting home I headed out on the subway to visit a friend who lives out of town. For those who know Boston, I was on the Green Line, which admittedly isn't our fastest. In fact, I found it incredibly slow and I'm convinced that at its top speed it was still slower than a Minsk subway train is running before its last car leaves the station.
Now let's talk about who was on this train with me. I felt that the only colorful clothes I saw didn't fit properly, and the few people wearing tailored clothes wore extremely plain and drab colors. Apparently you can have color or fit here, but it's unusual to find both. I'm going to shape up and stop dressing like a slob when I go to the gym.
Some of my return-home contrasts were much less jarring. My health club, for example, offers a dazzling array of facilities in a clean and modern environment unlike anything I saw in Belarus. And I sure did enjoy riding high-tech bicycle I keep at home. I don't know where I could have bought anything even approximately like it in Belarus.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Saturday, November 1, 2008
On the way home
I wasn’t sure I really knew Minsk all that well yet, but as we left the city I realized how much I recognized along the main road leading toward the airport. My subway line runs under this road and I recognized pretty much everything all the way from our apartment as far as the State Library. I watched it all go by with considerable nostalgia and longing to return. Of course I will be back; I’ve already filed my application at the University.
Alla and I are trying to speak Russian to each other now. It’s surprising how much I can talk about, and it’s also pretty painful to struggle many minutes to say something simple.
Now we’re in Frankfurt. During the cold months there’s no afternoon flight to Boston so we booked a hotel here. When we emerged into the main railway station we saw vividly the scope of choices in the western world. We probably wouldn’t have noticed it except by contrast to the place we just left. We were amazed even by the variety of sandwiches laid out at a fast-food takeout restaurant. You don’t get nearly so many choices anywhere in Belarus.
We’re enjoying our little foray into Frankfurt. We found our way to a pleasant restaurant beside a church, and we arrived just as the church bells began ringing. I wonder how many bell-ringers it took to play the change-ringing we heard before entering the restaurant. All I can say for sure is that they got our attention and stopped us in our tracks.
Having gone to bed rather late last night and still awakened at the usual time, we’re feeling pretty tired tonight. This is probably a good thing because we guessed wrong about the room we chose at our hotel. We went for a room on the first floor because the upper room facing the quiet courtyard seemed small to us. Unfortunately, the municipal services people chose tonight as the optimal time to jackhammer the streetcar line outside our window. Imagine my disappointment, then, to discover that the hotel has filled up and it’s too late now to change rooms. The woman at the desk assured me that the city workers promised to stop jackhammering after an hour. I hope they keep that promise. Looking out the window, I’d guess I’ll be wearing earplugs all night.
Alla and I are trying to speak Russian to each other now. It’s surprising how much I can talk about, and it’s also pretty painful to struggle many minutes to say something simple.
Now we’re in Frankfurt. During the cold months there’s no afternoon flight to Boston so we booked a hotel here. When we emerged into the main railway station we saw vividly the scope of choices in the western world. We probably wouldn’t have noticed it except by contrast to the place we just left. We were amazed even by the variety of sandwiches laid out at a fast-food takeout restaurant. You don’t get nearly so many choices anywhere in Belarus.
We’re enjoying our little foray into Frankfurt. We found our way to a pleasant restaurant beside a church, and we arrived just as the church bells began ringing. I wonder how many bell-ringers it took to play the change-ringing we heard before entering the restaurant. All I can say for sure is that they got our attention and stopped us in our tracks.
Having gone to bed rather late last night and still awakened at the usual time, we’re feeling pretty tired tonight. This is probably a good thing because we guessed wrong about the room we chose at our hotel. We went for a room on the first floor because the upper room facing the quiet courtyard seemed small to us. Unfortunately, the municipal services people chose tonight as the optimal time to jackhammer the streetcar line outside our window. Imagine my disappointment, then, to discover that the hotel has filled up and it’s too late now to change rooms. The woman at the desk assured me that the city workers promised to stop jackhammering after an hour. I hope they keep that promise. Looking out the window, I’d guess I’ll be wearing earplugs all night.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Cars per capita
I saw a news report today on an official government web site bragging that car ownership is growing and that Belarus now has more cars per capita than a few small countries in Western Europe. The article went on to project that at current rates Belarus would catch Germany in the foreseeable future.
This is not good news to me. One of the things I like about Minsk is that the streets aren’t choked with cars and the air isn’t particularly polluted. The city is served by an outstanding public transit system and I like the fact that so many people here seem to live well without cars.
It made me stop and wonder about goals in general. I wonder how often we set goals based on what we see working for other people without stepping back to think about the bigger matter of what works for us. Setting the right goals are key to living a good life.
Maybe I should have taken my friend Marc Wey’s course on goal setting after all.
This is not good news to me. One of the things I like about Minsk is that the streets aren’t choked with cars and the air isn’t particularly polluted. The city is served by an outstanding public transit system and I like the fact that so many people here seem to live well without cars.
It made me stop and wonder about goals in general. I wonder how often we set goals based on what we see working for other people without stepping back to think about the bigger matter of what works for us. Setting the right goals are key to living a good life.
Maybe I should have taken my friend Marc Wey’s course on goal setting after all.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Excursion to Polotsk
The University offered two free excursions yesterday, one busload going to Grodna and the other going to Polotsk. Knowing nothing, I chose Polotsk because one of my classmates had chosen it. We traveled yesterday and I had a great time.
I wouldn’t generally recommend traveling more than three hours to get to Polotsk. It’s a nice town with some excellent churches and an important monastery, but there’s just not enough in the town to justify that much travel time. I enjoyed tremendously an organ concert in a big old church built in the shape of a cube. While the organ wasn’t as big as the one at Philharmony hall in Minsk, it suited the space perfectly and I preferred this concert over the one I’d heard at Philharmony.
Our tour included a bunch of other good stuff, including a tree-by-tree narration during almost the entire trip from Minsk to Polotsk. I didn’t understand most of this narration, but was able to take note of a few specific sights such as the ski area they made by piling up a lot of dirt and the ski jump that reminds me of a high dive because the top two-thirds of it or more is just a ramp in the air.
What I really enjoyed about the trip, however, was touring with students from around the world. We had people from China, Finland, Holland, Iraq, Norway and who-knows-where. I really liked the Iraqis, and found them very warm and outgoing. I was a little apprehensive about them because America has managed to make such a mess of their country, but here we were all just students on a trip together. The guy from Holland challenged me a bit about his impression of Americans and then apologized for challenging me even though I thought he was right in his criticism. In this little microcosm, we were simply colleagues and nothing more nor less.
I wish it were so simple on a global scale.
I wouldn’t generally recommend traveling more than three hours to get to Polotsk. It’s a nice town with some excellent churches and an important monastery, but there’s just not enough in the town to justify that much travel time. I enjoyed tremendously an organ concert in a big old church built in the shape of a cube. While the organ wasn’t as big as the one at Philharmony hall in Minsk, it suited the space perfectly and I preferred this concert over the one I’d heard at Philharmony.
Our tour included a bunch of other good stuff, including a tree-by-tree narration during almost the entire trip from Minsk to Polotsk. I didn’t understand most of this narration, but was able to take note of a few specific sights such as the ski area they made by piling up a lot of dirt and the ski jump that reminds me of a high dive because the top two-thirds of it or more is just a ramp in the air.
What I really enjoyed about the trip, however, was touring with students from around the world. We had people from China, Finland, Holland, Iraq, Norway and who-knows-where. I really liked the Iraqis, and found them very warm and outgoing. I was a little apprehensive about them because America has managed to make such a mess of their country, but here we were all just students on a trip together. The guy from Holland challenged me a bit about his impression of Americans and then apologized for challenging me even though I thought he was right in his criticism. In this little microcosm, we were simply colleagues and nothing more nor less.
I wish it were so simple on a global scale.
Pilotka (Пилотка)
In class today I was learning how to use the fifth padej. This is known in English as the “Instrumental case,” and it’s used, among other things, in describing that at which somebody works. There we were with a grade-school teaching aid, a chart with pictures of a bunch of kids playing at various professions. My job was to say what they wanted to do when they grew up, applying the rules of the Tvoritelney padej (Творительный падеж) to the names of the professions.
I did OK until we got to the picture of a little girl sitting inside a toy airplane. I didn’t know if the word “pilot” would be the same for both genders or if a female pilot would be called something like “pilotka.” Elena started to think about it and then announced that the whole thing was pointless because there’s no such thing as a female pilot. Obviously this little girl wanted to work as a stewardess. I told her that we have female pilots in the USA, that I know one and that I want this little girl to be a pilot.
Elena was very amused by the idea and commented that this must be an outcome of living in a free society.
I did OK until we got to the picture of a little girl sitting inside a toy airplane. I didn’t know if the word “pilot” would be the same for both genders or if a female pilot would be called something like “pilotka.” Elena started to think about it and then announced that the whole thing was pointless because there’s no such thing as a female pilot. Obviously this little girl wanted to work as a stewardess. I told her that we have female pilots in the USA, that I know one and that I want this little girl to be a pilot.
Elena was very amused by the idea and commented that this must be an outcome of living in a free society.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Rō’ger
We had a little row in class today. The teacher was correcting almost everybody about our mispronunciations of the letter “O.” The letter is pronounced long in a stressed syllable but it’s generally pronounced as in the word “pot.” I was reading aloud a story about a bunch of foreign students, including a Spanish student named Lolita. I pronounced her name the way that was natural for me, as we hear it both in Spanish and in English. That was wrong, of course, because since the “o” is in an unstressed syllable Russians want to pronounce it more like “ah.”
Wanting to be a little ironic, I said “OK, this is a Spanish girl named Lahlita.” Tatiana insisted that that was the only way to pronounce that name. Frustrated, I reminded everybody that my brother’s name is Roger. I’d already been schooled on that one in another recitation, when I gave a report on my family to the class. It turns out that in spite of what I’ve been calling my brother his entire life, his name is actually Rō’ger. The O is long and first R is rolled though the second is not.
Sympathetic to my frustration, my friend and classmate Çağatay took the opportunity to tell Tatiana that his name is not “Chagatai,” as pronounced in class (sounding a lot like Chug-a-lug), but something like “Chaatai.” I haven’t mastered it myself, but I always try to get as close as I can. Tatiana told him that given the Russian alphabet he had to be “Chagatai.” “That’s not my name,” he objected, now in English and with supporting complaints about an identity crisis.
I thought the English-speaking world was uniquely offensive in mis-pronouncing the names of foreign cities, but now I see that this may be a wider problem. Perhaps folks in Western Europe do fairly well at respecting local pronunciation, but it appears that Russian-speakers, like English-speakers, may tend to convert pronunciations of foreign names. I wonder if Tatiana is right about this. I wonder if I’m even right about my idealized view of those Western Europeans.
Sorry Rog. I tried. I think we should all try to pronounce peoples’ names in the way the owner of the name will find familiar, and I feel the same way about foreign cities. Apparently this is a little odd.
Wanting to be a little ironic, I said “OK, this is a Spanish girl named Lahlita.” Tatiana insisted that that was the only way to pronounce that name. Frustrated, I reminded everybody that my brother’s name is Roger. I’d already been schooled on that one in another recitation, when I gave a report on my family to the class. It turns out that in spite of what I’ve been calling my brother his entire life, his name is actually Rō’ger. The O is long and first R is rolled though the second is not.
Sympathetic to my frustration, my friend and classmate Çağatay took the opportunity to tell Tatiana that his name is not “Chagatai,” as pronounced in class (sounding a lot like Chug-a-lug), but something like “Chaatai.” I haven’t mastered it myself, but I always try to get as close as I can. Tatiana told him that given the Russian alphabet he had to be “Chagatai.” “That’s not my name,” he objected, now in English and with supporting complaints about an identity crisis.
I thought the English-speaking world was uniquely offensive in mis-pronouncing the names of foreign cities, but now I see that this may be a wider problem. Perhaps folks in Western Europe do fairly well at respecting local pronunciation, but it appears that Russian-speakers, like English-speakers, may tend to convert pronunciations of foreign names. I wonder if Tatiana is right about this. I wonder if I’m even right about my idealized view of those Western Europeans.
Sorry Rog. I tried. I think we should all try to pronounce peoples’ names in the way the owner of the name will find familiar, and I feel the same way about foreign cities. Apparently this is a little odd.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
The padej (падеж) breakthrough
I think I may have the key to the mystery right here. I was forced.
One of my classmates has an excellent book in Russian and English that explains lots of Russian grammatical concepts and it includes some lucid stuff about that mysterious padej or “падеж.” I spelled it out this time because I wanted everybody to marvel over that last letter. It's not really named after a beetle, but the zhook's name starts with this six-legged beauty. The handwritten version is even fancier. Anyway, I’ve wanted the book for more than a week but my classmate can’t seem to describe where he bought it and the University bookstore has just the Russian-only version.
Last night I started doing my homework and realized that I had a big problem. Whereas all previous homework assignments were focused on a single padej at a time, this one required me to choose the right padej for the context. Oops. I still didn’t have more than a clue about that.
Let me digress to tell you something about padejs. When you want one, you want it right freakin’ now.* There you are, halfway into a sentence and suddenly you need to transform a noun into an adjective. This is a very big deal, and you don’t want to be flipping back and forth between page 136 and page 264 and then some other book trying to figure out which conjugation you want to attempt. You really need a unified chart with a few cogent examples and maybe a couple of footnotes.
Tatiana, my main teacher, attempted to give me such a chart, but it misses so many subtleties that I’d turn in a miserable homework assignment and I hate to do that on a Monday. So I went to what Tatiana says is the biggest bookstore in Minsk. It may be, but it didn’t have a single one of the books I had on my list, let alone the book with the tables I’ve been lusting after. I attempted to buy the little Падеж book they had. It was in Russian only, and would have taken a long time to read, but at least it had everything in one place. Unfortunately, I managed to come home with a different little book and was unwilling to go back today.
Instead I did another web search, this time using one word in Russian and one word in English (“падеж table”). This achieved the desired result: articles in Russian and English with tables in them. In fact, one of my hits led me to an online grammar course that I like so well I downloaded all six padej pages. If you want to see it, go to http://www.linguarus.com/ru/program/grammar/1/d/ and then click through “next topic” five times to see the rest of them.
I’ve been studying up. Now I get to attempt my homework.
____________
* For the benefit of any readers who may not be native to the English language, I would translate that phrase as прямо же сейчас. Unfortunately, this particular construction causes my overly-Russified step daughter’s brain to backfire, blasting strange sounds out of her nose and mouth. If you are Russian, I hope you were not drinking a glass of milk when you read it.
One of my classmates has an excellent book in Russian and English that explains lots of Russian grammatical concepts and it includes some lucid stuff about that mysterious padej or “падеж.” I spelled it out this time because I wanted everybody to marvel over that last letter. It's not really named after a beetle, but the zhook's name starts with this six-legged beauty. The handwritten version is even fancier. Anyway, I’ve wanted the book for more than a week but my classmate can’t seem to describe where he bought it and the University bookstore has just the Russian-only version.
Last night I started doing my homework and realized that I had a big problem. Whereas all previous homework assignments were focused on a single padej at a time, this one required me to choose the right padej for the context. Oops. I still didn’t have more than a clue about that.
Let me digress to tell you something about padejs. When you want one, you want it right freakin’ now.* There you are, halfway into a sentence and suddenly you need to transform a noun into an adjective. This is a very big deal, and you don’t want to be flipping back and forth between page 136 and page 264 and then some other book trying to figure out which conjugation you want to attempt. You really need a unified chart with a few cogent examples and maybe a couple of footnotes.
Tatiana, my main teacher, attempted to give me such a chart, but it misses so many subtleties that I’d turn in a miserable homework assignment and I hate to do that on a Monday. So I went to what Tatiana says is the biggest bookstore in Minsk. It may be, but it didn’t have a single one of the books I had on my list, let alone the book with the tables I’ve been lusting after. I attempted to buy the little Падеж book they had. It was in Russian only, and would have taken a long time to read, but at least it had everything in one place. Unfortunately, I managed to come home with a different little book and was unwilling to go back today.
Instead I did another web search, this time using one word in Russian and one word in English (“падеж table”). This achieved the desired result: articles in Russian and English with tables in them. In fact, one of my hits led me to an online grammar course that I like so well I downloaded all six padej pages. If you want to see it, go to http://www.linguarus.com/ru/program/grammar/1/d/ and then click through “next topic” five times to see the rest of them.
I’ve been studying up. Now I get to attempt my homework.
____________
* For the benefit of any readers who may not be native to the English language, I would translate that phrase as прямо же сейчас. Unfortunately, this particular construction causes my overly-Russified step daughter’s brain to backfire, blasting strange sounds out of her nose and mouth. If you are Russian, I hope you were not drinking a glass of milk when you read it.
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