I like Ufa more and more each day. Part of me wishes I could stay here all year rather than go back to school in August. :-/
There’s been a few rough days though. It’s pretty tough when you can’t do something you want to do, no matter how small. For example, the simple act of walking into our second campus is always a guessing game. Depending on who’s working the guard shift and what activities are happening, you won’t be able to just turn left and walk into the library. Most times they’ll make you right right, go downstairs, walk through the coat room / woodshop and walk back upstairs just to get to the library. Most of the times the guards will just tell you “Girl, you can’t go that way” but I usually translate it in my head as “You can’t go that way for no good reason.” Another example is just waiting in line to pay for something. I was in the cosmetics store trying to buy mascara and some lady cut in front of me. I won’t lie – I really wanted to stab her in the face with my still unpaid for mascara. But I would at least settle for having the skills to stand up for myself and chew her out a bit. Arg.
Yesterday was a pretty epic day. I went downtown to study at a café for a few hours before meeting up with some friends at Gostinnyi Dvor’. A bunch of us were going to the riverside to meet these musicians that Glen met this week. We all took a marshrutka to Sipailovo and waited for these dudes. While we were waiting we went to a grocery store and picked up some picnic materials – bread, cheese, sausage, salad, stuff for tuna sandwiches, beer, and kvas. The uzhe. We were all ordering stuff at the deli counter when this older woman starts yelling about how long it’s taking and how she’s going to kill someone if it takes any longer (maybe I need to take a cue from her the next time someone cuts in front of me). I think maybe she felt bad about acting like such a nut job (although this didn’t really help her case) because then she got all nice and started remarking about how nice this one type of fried fish is and how you can just heat them up in the microwave and boom – they’re ready! We finally paid and went back to meet these musician dudes.
Finally, Ruslan came but I guess the others couldn’t come til later. So we all went to the riverside (the Ufa river, not the Belaya). It was pretty crowded and there were piles of empty bottles in a few spots, but otherwise it was relatively clean (even the water). After our picnic we went in the water (or waded rather. too cold to swim for me) and sunbathed. Ruslan took off for awhile because he had to pay his credit card bill but eventually he came back with his guitar. I felt bad because we had already been there a few hours and were getting tired and decided to leave to go to the park. So Glen stayed with Ruslan to meet with the other musicians and we promised to meet up later. On the way to the park we decided to stop in and say hi to Joseph’s mother, who was dying to meet some of the other Americans. I thought we were just going to pop in for tea, but Joseph’s mom was so happy that we all came over that she brought out this huge table and made pelmeni, two kinds of salads, a plate of cheese, and brought out some vermouth, juice, and champagne! She also brought out a beautiful looking cake and some homemade frozen preserves she had made. We ate, and drank, and made toasts, and chatted with her until 11PM!
Finally we went to Park Gafuri (where the Lenin statue is) to meet with Glen and the musicians. We had only really planned to hang out with them at an outdoor café or something but they just wanted to hang out by the statue and play guitar and sing (Bon Jovi, Green Day, Roy Orbison, Brian Adams, and Kino). It was the most surreal thing in the world hanging out under the Lenin statue and singing Bon Jovi! Ruslan turned out to be way nicer once we got to talk to him. He seemed a bit manic in the afternoon and I guess he calmed down once he was ten beers deep or so (Glen said, “Yeah Ruslan’s been drunk for two days.” Heh). The rest of the musicians were super nice too. The singer in the band is from Iran and had a pretty interesting story, which I won’t retell here.
At once point these guys came up to us and muttered something pretty incomprehensible. Out friends just shook their heads and said no to whatever they were asking for. Later our friends asked Karya and I if we understood what the guys wanted. I told them I thought it was cigarettes and they thought the same but weren’t sure themselves. Later the guys came back because they noticed that a lot of us were smoking and we hadn’t given them a cigarette and were offended! They started arguing with Ruslan and it got pretty intense for awhile. But within 20 minutes the show of machismo had ended and the two of them had joined our crew and were hanging out with us (only in Russia – geez). Pretty shortly after that, our new friends helped us call a cab and arranged a good price for us and I went back to Katya’s to sleep.
FYI – I started a new folder on Picasa with all my July pictures. You can find it here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/RStakun/JulyInUfa?feat=directlink
