Zhivyot Bogemskaya Zhizn! (3/30/2002)

I know I haven't written in a while, and a lot has happened in that interim, so here goes:

At long last, the weather in St. Petersburg has improved. We have seen the sun for about TEN (count 'em, TEN) days now in a row, and I have a feeling this is some sort of record. I have now switched to wearing my light, slightly-stronger-than-a-windbreaker jacket, which is more a psychological victory than a physical one. Temperatures are only somewhat low in the morning and only become remotely annoying when Baltic winds decide to whip in off the somewhat ice-caked sea. These, however, don't come by all that often anymore and are very brief when they do. Thank God for that. Any more winter would have been unbearable.

During the last two weeks, I have visited my beloved Mariinsky Theater four times, thrice for operas and once for ballet. Though hardly an opera buff, I was adequately satisfied with all three. The first, "La Boheme" is Puccini's tale of struggling artists living the Bohemian life in 1930s ParEE. Yes, it was Jonathan Larson's source for "Rent", the pulsating musical that geared for us X-ers. It isn't just his inspiration, though: "La Boheme" IS "Rent." The characters' names correspond directly to their modern counterparts (Marcel - Mark, Rudolf - Roger, Musetta - Maureen, and so forth). Despite the Italian libretto and my three word Italiano vocabulary, I was able to follow the plot seamlessly (One wonders why, though, Puccini had a Parisian opera set in Italian...). The second opera, Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," was also stunning, but by the fourth hour one becomes bleary-eyed and deaf to old Wolfgang's score. Ah well. The $2 I shelled out for the ticket was worth it.

After learning that Richard Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" was only 2.5 hours (rather than the regular Wagner, which I hear is something like 9), I decided to give good ol' German opera a try last night. Disappointingly, I was unable to understand much of the text (I attribute this to the singers' Russian accents as well as the fact that any tongue sung in opera-style is virtually indecipherable).

Speaking of German, a Deutsche named Sylvia has been living with my American friends in the dormitory for the past two weeks. She's from, of all places, Rostock (where I worked for a month in summer 2000), and has given me a good opportunity to practice my Teutonic language skills, even when I know I should be completely Russifying myself. A group of us went out the other night with a couple sailors that we met on the way to Murmansk in February, and trying to hold simultaneous conversations in Russian, English, and German can definitely make your cerebrum shiver. Ah well, that, of course, is the fun of it.

Teaching English for two hours once a week (Thursdays) has also provided a lot of challenge and entertainment. Trying to explain puns (such as "You can't elope!") as well as filling their crania with useless, random knowledge about the English-speaking world has been quite amusing. For exmaple, last week I told them about the error in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution ("We the people of the United States, in order to form a MORE PERFECT union..." The word "perfect" means "can't get better", and therefore nothing can be "more perfect" than anything else, meaning "more perfect" makes no sense and is therefore wrong.) Anyway, I asked them how they could correct while conveying the same idea. One student came up with "a perfect union". I responded that perhaps that could be acceptable, but that the signers of the Constitution were probably not that stupid and realized that there is no such thing as a perfect, harmonious union. (This made me hesitate, though, when I realized I was telling people born in the USSR that there is no such thing as a "perfect union.") They didn't seem to mind, though. Another point of amusement was when I brought up the saying "The customer is always right." For those of you who have been to Russia, where customer service is about as developed as human colonization of Saturn, you can relate to the blank stares I recieved.

Our civilization class has now dived into the topic of women in Russia, which has been simultaneously disturbing and enlightening. For example, American feminism (as I understand it) aims to integrate women as deeply as possible into the workforce. Russian feminism, on the other hand, maintains that women should get out of the workforce and raise the families. If nothing else, it's an interesting contrast. The more disturbing statistics were about abortion. In Soviet times, for every baby that a woman bore, she averaged betwen FIVE to SIX abortions.
Let's let this sink in: FIVE to SIX abortions. The tiny communist Ring of Power outlawed birth control (one should build the population to spread socialism to the unbelievers!) but allowed abortion. (Of course this makes no sense, but they also outlawed "The Lord of the Rings" whilst allowing "The Hobbit".") All abortions, of course, were carried out with neither anasthesia nor antibiotics, which sent the mortality rate skyrocketing. About 25 percent of women who had abortions died from them. After the procedure, women were allowed two hours to say in the room where it was performed, before having to vacate the premesis.

Five to six abortions per child. Wow. On the topic of population, Mother Russia's numbers continue to slide. The population is comprised of 47% men and 53% women, a larger difference than during WWII and the Stalinist purges. A common wisecrack over here says "All is well on the Finnish-Chinese border..." Hey, who knows?

Ah well, there are a lot of other things to write, but I think I'll leave them for now. This email is as lengthy as need be.

I hope you all are well. Let me know how things are in your respected corners of the planet.

So long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye.

Matt