Bored at work

I've finished my projects for the moment and have tired of reading the NY Times, so now seems like a good time to give a little background for those of you who are wondering why I chose to come to Russia, of all places. It's somewhat more complicated than the simple fact that my parents teach Russian — I came in having spent considerable time here when I was younger, and having hated every minute of it. In an effort to shed some light on this, I've pasted my college essay below:

The Motherland is Calling*

I learned to crawl while living illegally with my mother and her friends in the former Soviet Union. This took me longer than most infants because the apartment floors were so filthy that my mother was afraid to set me down on them. She conceded after five months, realizing that it was the only way I could learn to crawl before my first birthday.

Ten years later, in 1998, I returned for my fifth stay with my parents and their students. My brother and I were enrolled at a local private school but had to be bribed to go. We refused to use the school’s restrooms, with their feces-smeared walls, and so had to race back to our dormitory every day to use the toilets there. Until the day we witnessed a SWAT team shoot down a man outside of our room, we thought it was better than our previous dorm in Moscow, which, built by World War II prisoners, was infested with cockroaches that crawled on the walls, on the tables, on our beds.

Our brief respite from Russia came in the form of a week-long trip to Estonia. On the overnight train ride, my family was rudely awakened as officials marched into our compartment demanded to see our passports, and lifted up the beds we were sleeping on to make sure no one was hiding beneath. Not surprisingly, when my family left St. Petersburg after those endless three months, I vowed never to return.

Once I had left, I began to forget the reasons I hated the country and started to understand why my parents kept going back. In Russia, I had learned to expect the unexpected. Only in Russia would a poverty-stricken woman buy expensive fabric to make me, a wealthy American, a fairy dress.

I knew that I would return to Russia, but it took me seven years to do so. Last summer, my mother was a guest lecturer on a cruise on the Baltic Sea; we stopped for two days in St. Petersburg. My family skipped the tour and visited familiar places. The once proudly Soviet city now masqueraded as a capitalist’s paradise. Nevsky Prospect was littered with tourist shops, restaurant menus were in both Russian and English, and the metro stop at our old dorm had turned into a Russian Las Vegas, complete with neon signs, casinos, and strip clubs.

Despite these changes, it was still Russia. We searched every grocery store on Nevsky for a popular Russian pastry, only to find it tucked away in a small deli. We tried to buy juice and candy bars at a kiosk, only to learn that although the items were featured in the window, they were not actually in stock.

When we sailed out of St. Petersburg the next day, I stood on the deck until the city had faded away, knowing that this was not my last visit. Though we have reached a temporary truce, Russian and I, it is not over between us. Years may pass before I return, but when I do, I know she will welcome me home to her grimy streets, her quirky customs, and her constant surprises.

*Slogan from the above Soviet-era propaganda poster. Incidentally, I received this poster as a gift two days ago.