Жизнь

Hi friends,

Sorry I’ve been MIA recently…. The past few weeks have been busy and I’m slowly losing interest in the blog. I guess it’s good timing since I leave Moscow in only five days.

Anyways, I’ll pick up where I left off. This week I’ve been working with Nastya. On Monday, a girl named Nicole came (she’s a heritage Russian speaker but lives in Scotland) and has been here the whole week. I like her a lot. She speaks Russian with her parents, but says that she speaks English much better than Russian. She’s bilingual by any sense of the term.  She’s spunky and around my age (a little younger), and we bond over cute animals; and it’s nice because I can speak free English with her. I also speak Russian with her, but it’s nice to have fuller conversations as well.

This week we’ve done a bajillion Western Blots, gel electrophoreses, PCR, bacteria cultures, etc etc. It’s been a full week and I’ve done basically everything by myself, which is awesome. I feel like I really understand the processes and why everything happens the way it does.

Honestly, I had no idea what to expect from this experience. Obviously I wanted to work a lot, but I had doubts that I would be given any responsibility at all. I’m so happy and pleased that I was proved wrong on this account.

Insert. I was just thinking today about my favorite days/moments of my time here…. And surprisingly (maybe unsurprisingly) very few contain just science. If I had wanted to only do science this summer, I wouldn’t have travelled all the way to Moscow to do it. There are better programs, better teachers, and better equipment right in my backyard (ie Boston, NYC, etc). I didn’t come here just for science. I came here for culture, discovery, people, language, nuance, slang, celebration, life…. Science was one part of what I wanted to do here, and I think these facts are very representative not only of what I study at Conn, but of who I am as a person.

Maybe I’m interested in too much. Maybe I’m scattered. Maybe I don’t have a focused scope.

Why am I supposed to?

I can’t believe today is Friday and that I only am working Monday and Tuesday before my flight leaves on Wednesday morning. I need to get the people at the lab presents. And cake maybe. I’ll bake banana bread too, since they’ve never heard of it.

I guess I’m ready to leave, but I know as soon as I get home I’ll want to come back. I don’t know when I’ll ever get to come back to Russia…. However, I do plan to visit Russian grocery stores and the Banya in NYC to curb my desires. It’ll be nice to be a true part of the Russian department at Conn, too. Since declaring the major, I’ve felt very included.

Hm, what else. Oh I saw a lady on the metro reading the Moscow Times in English. As Lesha from the lab says, it’s a newspaper known for being anti-Russia, so I was surprised to see her reading it. I wondered who she was and what she did.

Oh, one funny thing. I had heard in St. Petersburg a story about how an institute was presented to be called something completely wrong thanks to translational errors, and I actually SAW the institute at Pushino! The institute is called “Institute of Protein,” or in Russian, “Институт Белка,” however, the word, “белка” can either mean “of protein” or “squirrel.” Hilariously, some English company translated the name to “Squirrel Institute” and presented it as such at some huge science conference. Even as I explain the story now, I am cracking up. It’s hard to explain if you don’t know Russian, so please just take my word that it is funny. Anyways.

Another funny thing that happened at Pushino: People were talking, and of course I am slow and there are multiple conversations, and so when someone asked if I had been to Кремль (the Kremlin, but in Russians it sounds like “kr-eh-mel”), I answered “yes.” Unfortunately, they did not say Кремль but rather Крым (Crimea). They sound alike in Russian since the “l” of Kreml is very soft. Anyways, there were laughs as I finally figured out that they were asking about Crimea and that I had not in fact been there. Oops.

What else? Oh! This week I saw Grace! Grace and I studied together in St. Petersburg. She spent the last semester in Lithuania and is now taking classes via SRAS at MGU. We had dinner and then walked around Park Sokolniki, which I was very happy about since I had wanted to visit the park before leaving Moscow. It was gorgeous and we had a great time catching up. She is very much the same Grace that I remember.

Another random thing (sorry, very sporadic post!): I was talking with Nicole and Yulia and maybe another person about Nicole’s grandmother, who’s lived in Crimea her whole life and how she feels like she is actually Russian. According to the grandmother, the referendum was accurate, there were Russian flags everywhere, and people truly wanted to rejoin Russia. They say that now, being a part of Russia, life is better, and money has been put into the city to make it livelier.

To be honest, I have never truly understood why Americans and Europeans chose not to recognize the referendum. If the Crimean people really feel like they were Russian then why should “we” (ie Americans/Westerners) tell them otherwise? Who are we to judge their voting system or their “democracy,” when this system of government has been in place barely 30 years. England is 600 years old! Don’t you think in the beginning they had questionable elections as well? I guess it’s difficult when half of a country wants to be one thing while the other half wants to be something else…. (ie W vs E Ukraine), but idk.

I feel like so many issues of world politics boil down to fear and power. We all think that “our way” is the “right way.” Communism is “wrong,” capitalism is “evil,” etc. But who says who is wrong?! And then after all of that, we just end up mindlessly backing whichever team we’re on without even criticizing it!

I just feel like we have to think critically and skeptically about the world. We can’t just become these mindless drones, as so many already are. WHY do we think the way we do? And if we can’t defend it, maybe it’s time to think differently. And even if we CAN defend it, maybe it’s still time to open our ears and see different points of view. High horses do no one any good.

Sigh. Ok end rant. Hi I’m back.

I’m trying to think of what else happened this week. Oh I had tea with Balaban – actually we talked about the important of thinking critically in science as well. Unfortunately this is a skill many lack.

Hm what else. I think Nastya will genuinely miss me. I will also. I think we are going to do group yoga at a park this weekend with Masha. That would be very nice :) I really enjoy them both.

Tomorrow morning (Saturday), I’m meeting up with a former Conn and CISLA student, who now lives in Moscow. I don’t know what her story is, but I’ll letcha know.  

I feel like that’s it. It’s hard to keep track of everything! But I’m loving life and also excited to head to BUDAPEST (WEEEEEEE!) with my mom in a mere 5 days. After that I’m excited to be home and see my sister, Alec, Steven, Marissa, hopefully Conn dancers, and anyone else….. 

What is life.

Until next time. Xo.