June 16, 2007 || Nora and Danya

June 16, 2007

Spent most of my day avoiding homework and playing with Danya and Nora. We played a board game, dominoes, and checkers in the morning (checkers is slightly different—you HAVE to jump or you lose that piece; unkinged pieces can jump backwards when they must; and kings can jump along their whole diagonals—Nora almost beat me the first time around, until I got the hang of the rules).

Marina did my laundry (I’m SO grateful, considering I’m out of underwear). My clothes are hanging all in the bathroom, and in the kitchen and along the window seats in my room, too. The washing machine is small but fierce—it’s tiny, but shakes like mad so the dishes rattle when it hits the spin cycle.

Nora also had a nosebleed today, which she was kinda embarrassed by, but I said how I get them all the time and helped her clean up. The kids really liked my camera and laptop (a “notebook” in Russian), so they wanted to take lots of pictures and listen to music. We also played a few games with a tennis ball and some ping pong paddles (every free second, Danya spent today bouncing the ball on his paddle which totally wouldn’t have been allowed in our house—in the kitchen while Marina was cooking, in the hallway by the table, in the main room while we were watching TV). First Nora laid down on the carpet to watch a movie (an old black-and-white American film that we put on after Charlie Chaplin) and Danya and I bounced the ball over her (she was our net)—and if we accidentally hit her, she would get up and flick us on the forehead. Also we played where the “line” person would move their legs up and down and the other two had to take turns rolling the ball under them. Whoever missed became the next line person.

Kids are the same everywhere. After breaking the “touch” barrier by tickling her until she dropped the tennis ball, Nora holds my hand everywhere, sits real close on the couch, and feels confident enough to play with some of my things—my hairbrushes, my headbands, etc. She really liked my Che Burashka, and my moose, too (which Danya accidentally asked if it was from my husband, giving us all a good laugh). At dinner, those two started talking about big numbers, billions and trillions and other made-up numbers. Then talk turned to what you could buy with that much money, and Marina said you could buy anything. “Anything? What about a house? Cards? A store? A planet? President Putin?”—No, he and planets aren’t for sale. Even though things will be harder in class tomorrow for it, I’m glad I spent most of the day with them. I really really like the kids, and it makes me wish I had a little brother or sister (which, of course, reminds me of Mark, who cares more about his little sister than anyone I know, and was the first person to ever make me wish I had a much younger sibling). Thankfully, even though I don’t have any brothers or sisters, I have enough younger cousins to make up for it, from all different ages. Not only are they always fun (well, almost always), but I’ve never had to do the dirty work for them—punish them, baby-sit them for free, change their diapers (okay, so that’s not entirely true for KPW or KEW, but I can forgive them that—it’s not like they could control their poopy selves).

Last night was so great. The weather was beautiful, and Liza, Trisha and I talked about SO much—religion, Russia, culture, our futures, the past, responsibility, Russia, our host fams, the war in Iraq, feminism, Russia, AIDs, education, Westernization, affirmative action/reverse discrimination, Russia… it was the kind of talk that left me happy and sad and confused and confident all at once. And I think everyone needs one of those talks every once in a while (the fact that we were in a foreign country made me feel very ex-pat-ish and Hemingway-esque).

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Neil’s Story (as best as I can remember)…told after I mentioned a few of my embarrassing word mix-up stories in order to show that EVERYONE messes up in Russia and it’s not a big deal:

Pre-Req Class: Banya = a bath house; very popular in Russia, to have both public and private ones; you attend these naked

Dacha = a very small cottage kept by urbanites outside the city; they’re frequented on weekends and are typically cheaply made and packed with trinkets and such

“Понил!” = “I understand!”

“So, I went up to my friend Olga’s dacha for the weekend. This was after I’d had like 6 months of Russian, right? And it was my first time ever using a banya. Now, their banya was brand-spanking new, beautiful wood everywhere—the dacha was your regular crumbling old dacha, but the banya was beautiful. So I got naked, right, like you do in a banya, and Olga’s father opened the door and put in two buckets of water, a rag, and shampoo, which was fine. Now, I’ve done this before, I know how to take a bucket bath, right? But I’m looking at this banya and it’s just GOT to be too nice to be splashing water all over and getting the wood all wet and everything. So I climbed into the bucket. And I’m splashing water from the other bucket onto me, awkwardly naked standing in this bucket, taking my shower. And Olga’s father is out in the yard and he’s planting something or—I don’t know what he’s doing, but he sees me through this one window set at the very top of the banya, standing naked in this bucket, and the door bangs open and he lifts me out of the bucket and dumps the over one over my head, pours the shampoo on my head, splashing everywhere, scrubbing my hair—did I mention I was NAKED? Him, not so much, but me, definitely naked, and being WASHED by my friend’s DAD. “Понил! Понил!” …so basically, don’t worry if you do something embarrassing in front of your host family—Russians like to laugh and get over that stuff pretty quick.”