Overseas Brief

YAROSLAVL — My semester in Russia thus far has presented me with challenges both big and small. The big ones, like my upcoming term paper on “love and responsibility” in Alexander Pushkin’s Evgenie Onegin, are being handled with caution and a surprising amount of planning and forethought. The small ones, like taking a new bus route to school or figuring out how to introduce myself to the Maria Sharapova look-a-like in history class, are dealt with best with a smile and a good sense of humor, and typically leave me happy with the results, albeit lost in the middle of nowhere or holding a pencil I didn’t really need.  A good portion of my motivation to put myself “out there” and get the most out of my experience here are the experiences themselves. I hope to return to Middlebury come February with some cool local slang, a couple of fun stories from behind the Iron Curtain and maybe even some wisdom of how to live in a culture unlike my own.
But if I were to be asked about the most consistent and difficult challenge of my stay here, my answer would not be the language barrier, getting around, making friends or anything in Yaroslavl for that matter. The greatest challenge for me is always trying to find the proper answer to the question “How is Russia?” (with extra !?s added for those who REALLY want to know).
How is Russia? Well, I could objectively tell you plenty. For starters, Russia is entering into its fall/winter season. In Russia these days the sun rises around 8:30 a.m. and sets around 3:30 p.m. Russia’s population is exhibiting negative growth, marked by an accelerating decline of the small rural towns (in Russian деревня: pronounce de-REV’nya) that during the winter come closest to typifying the drunken bear-infested arctic tundra (although in reality not at all) of which many people I’ve talked to think when they imagine “Russia.” The list goes on, but it is obvious to me that a message or e-mail to anyone about the current state of Russian affairs would be incomplete no matter how much was written because it would not include my personal experience.
With that in mind, I have taken to mentally transforming “How is Russia?” into a different, more personally directed message that is along the lines of “What are your impressions of your most recent two weeks in Yaroslavl?” Those answers have been satisfying enough, but they too have an incomplete feeling to them. Too often I realize I haven’t included this or that, which may be interesting to a particular friend in relation to something we did together, or maybe I’ve already said something to someone else and don’t want to repeat for fear of sounding repetitive, even if only to myself. All the worry leaves me uneasy and less interested in writing the next reply to the exact same open-ended question.
So why is it the hardest challenge for me? For the same reason “good” almost automatically answers the question “How are you?” — because the question is so general and the actual answer so difficult to encapsulate in one quick message I couldn’t possibly do it. Each week I have plenty of responses to questions towards specific ends, but feel stymied by being asked for an “all of the above” sort of answer. I continue to write back no matter what the message, and enjoy keeping up with the people I care about, but am always hoping and wishing for the direct, narrow questions to better inform me about what my friends would actually like to hear. Regardless the type of question though, my time in Yaroslavl has been great.