A very long post about Harry Potter and other things

July 21, 2009

So, as you can see, I was finally able to post photos! I will, of course, post more soon. Right now I am sitting in my room listening to Karina snore. It is 2:21 in the afternoon and today we were supposed to go to her mother’s house to help her in the garden, but then she didn’t need us to. Karina only has one lesson today in the evening, so it seems that she has taken advantage of the day to catch up on sleep. I don’t blame her. She works hard all week and then helps her mother in the garden and do housework on the weekends. I was really hungry though and there really wasn’t anything easily accessible to eat for breakfast. Breakfast isn’t really breakfast, as we imagine it in the United States, here. We eat a lot of leftovers in the morning, or sometimes some ham and cheese on a piece of black bread. Right now I would love some pancakes or eggs and bacon.
Last week and this weekend were very busy. Camp ended last week and we spent a few days celebrating Karina’s birthday. On Friday, I met up with Tanya and we went to a café. I have slowly but surely begun to like her less and less. To say that I hate her would be too harsh, but to say that I hate spending time with her would probably be accurate. I realized that the stuff she told me about on the first day that I met her is actually all she talks about ever: her boyfriend, Barnaul (a larger city nearby where she goes to school), drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes.
I went to the café with her on Friday because her boyfriend (who, by the way, she had only been “dating” for a week before she came back to Belokurikha for the summer) had broken up with her and, she said, “I just want to go out and drink and smoke.” She proceeded to tell me that I am her only friend in Belokurikha and that I made her feel so much better (I pretty much just sat there are nodded occasionally). She then, uninvited, came with me to the train station to meet Ted, who visited for the weekend, and back to Karina’s apartment. It took us several hours to shake her, but finally she went home and Ted and I hung out with Karina.
The next day the other volunteers came to Belokurikha and we walked into the mountains in the rain to have a picnic. It was great to see everyone but unfortunately we didn’t get to spend very much time together as a group. Sara, Wilson and Devon had to leave after the picnic, but Alfred, Brett, Ted and Dasha (one of the people the organizes things for the program here in Russia) stayed. We walked around Belokurikha for a long time and did something called the health walk where you take off your shoes and walk on different materials (sand, pebbles, pine cones, etc.) We waited in the resort part of Belokurikha for the nightclubs to open because Dasha really wanted us all to go to one.
We ended up at a club called “Odikh” and were the first people there. People started to trickle in and eventually it became more club-like and people started dancing. Apparently in Russia people don’t dance anything like they do in clubs in the US. Dancing in male-female pairs barely exists, and if a man and woman do dance together they don’t touch. Brett and Dasha brought the tradition of dirty American dancing to the club, which definitely got some stares. We spent a lot of the time just watching different Russian men dance very, very awkwardly. Also, pretty much every club in Belokurikha offered some kind of stripping, at least on the weekends. There were two strippers, one woman and one man, who stripped in a way that was more theatrical than lewd. It was actually really enjoyable because in one of their “acts” the woman was dressed as an angel and the man as a devil and he drew a ring around her with lighter fluid and light it on fire. At the end they lit some things that looked like giant sparklers.
Dasha and Alfred had to go back to Novoaltaysk on a bus that left at 5:45 in the morning and they wanted to stay out all night. We got back to Karina’s apartment (which is right by the bus station) at 3:30 because they needed to get their bags and we didn’t know how long it would take us to get into the apartment building because we didn’t have a key. Karina had only given me a key to her door and not one for the building. However, we made it in right away because there were some people leaving as we arrived and we slipped in the door. We slept for an hour, then they woke up and left for the station. That left Brett, Ted and I in the apartment to sleep for a few hours and then wake up to go meet some Russian strangers that Karina knew and who wanted to meet us. Tanya, of course, showed up even though I didn’t realize that she was invited.
Another thing about Tanya that I forgot to mention… she has decided to come visit me in America without me actually inviting her to visit me. One day when I was hanging out with Tanya, Vika and Karina she told Karina that next summer she was going to go to America. Karina asked if she knew how much it costs to go to America and she replied, “My mother is prepared to take care of everything.” First of all, people seems to make about 7 or 8 thousand rubles a month here. Just my plane and train tickets cost $29,000 rubles, so even if she expects to stay with me and have me pay for everything, that is a lot of money. Also, visas are apparently very expensive and difficult to get here and you have to travel a long way to get them. The main thing obviously is that I don’t want her to come and stay with me next summer, and even if I did I do not have the money or the space to put her up.
Anyway, enough about my Russian “friend.” Ted tried to take the bus back to Altayskoe but the next one didn’t leave until 6:30. We all decided to go to meet the random Russians, who actually turned out to be very nice. Ted headed home and Brett and I decided to make Huevos Rancheros for Karina. It was really fun to try to recreate a Mexican dish in Russia. It actually turned out incredibly well. The beans were the hardest things to find, but we found some cans of kind of grossly flavored pinto beans, washed them, and then cooked them with some chicken and salt. We used lavash, a Russia/Eastern European flatbread, as the tortilla and made plain white rice and a sort of “salsa” from tomatoes, onions and garlic. We threw in some sour cream and that was it. Karina liked them and I was pleasantly surprised by the results.
Yesterday I Karina with two of her lessons. We sang The Beatles’ song “I’m Looking Through You” with a group of girls and for next week they need to translate it and we will talk about the different verb tenses. Then, with a girl named Anna, we listened to and talked about The Magnetic Fields’ song “Grand Canyon” to demonstrate how to use the Conditional and I did some exercises where we debated where to go for my birthday party and she tried to buy computer games from me.
This morning besides eating too much bread, I was finally able to send a text message to Amy. I missed her so much and it was great to talk to her, even via text message. It just made me remember how much a love her and miss her. I miss all of my friends of course, but Amy always brightens my day when I talk to her. I also tried to read some Harry Potter in Russian. I noticed a few things about Harry Potter, or Garry Potter, in Russian.

1. Funny Harry Potter title translations:
· Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone -> Garry Potter and the Philosophy Stone
· Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets -> Garry Potter and the Secret Room
· Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince-> Garry Potter and the Prince-Half blood
· Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows-> Garry Potter and the Gift/Donation/Grant of Death

2.In Russian, for some reason, Severus Snape is translated as “Severus Snegg.”

3. I kept staring at the phrase “Ты-Знаешь-Кто” until I realized that it means, very literally, “You-Know-Who.”

4. Puffendui, Пуффендуй, is the word for Hufflepuff (or however it is spelled), which is funny because neither word means anything in either language and yet they changed the name anyway.

5. Garry, Гарри, and Isabel, Изабель, are both indeclinable in Russian because they are foreign and because Гарри is grammatically plural and Изабель is grammatically male/just a weird name. This means that both of our names always stay the same and do not take on different endings for different cases.

6. I am pretty sure the books here have the American covers instead of the British ones.