how to prepare for Russia

It’s fine, I’ll tell you plainly: I don’t really like surprises.
Yes, I enjoy getting unexpected emails…
Yes, I like to try new foods that could taste like anything (for all I know)…
Yes, I think small gatherings that accidentally turn into parties are fun.

But for the most part, I like to know about things ahead of time.
I hate waking up to my sister telling me we’re going shopping in 30 minutes…
I dislike vacations where my parents just drive us there without saying where we’re going…
I can’t really handle spontaneously driving to Chicago on a school night.

This isn’t to say I’m never spontaneous… I just enjoy things a lot better when I can plan for them. Wow I love planning. Sometimes I plan things without any intent to ever do them, just because I like piecing together information and ideas in my imagination.

So it’s probably not too big a surprise that it was rough not knowing where in Russia I’d be studying until 3 months before I was supposed to get there. In fact, if you had asked me in September whether I was excited for my semester in Russia, I would have mumbled something unintelligible about being kind of nervous but supposing it would be good for my language skills.

Then I found out I was going to St. Petersburg. Then I started to get excited. And you can only imagine my joy at receiving a beautiful, 98-page pdf student handbook! So much information! So many plans to be made!

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from the handbook:

• “The hardest things about living with my host family,” an American student wrote, “is the fact that they are always feeding me.” 
• In many parts of Russia, complete strangers will offer unsolicited advice on a wide range of topics having to do with health. 
• Many Americans who have lived in Russia have been struck by-and some put off by-how frequently people touch each other. 
• Unlike American instructors, your Russian teachers will probably not provide syllabi at the beginning of your classes, and many will not make it a point to explain their overall plans for the semester. 
• Whereas American students often bring snacks to lectures, doing so in Russia will either puzzle or offend your instructors. 
• Do not drink the water there unless it has been boiled for at least fifteen minutes. 
• If you make eye contact with a male stranger, do not smile. 
• Some host families and dorm rooms still use rotary phones (the older type of phone where you literally dial the number). 
• It rains a lot, making Seattle look like Santa Fe. 
• Do not ever think that you can win a drinking contest.

And that, friends, is my semester. In the most dramatic of terms, of course.


Note: if you’re worried about me and my inability to be spontaneous, let me put your minds at ease. I can actually do unplanned things… I just have to be ready to be unplanned. I have scheduled spontaneity times. Mom, stop laughing at me.

so I'm going to Russia

Here it is, friends. One month from today, I will be starting classes at Herzen University in St. Petersburg, Russia. One-week-short-of-one month from today, I will be leaving my sleepy little town in northeastern Ohio to go there. I'm sure I'll have lots of interesting stories then, but I really couldn't wait that long to start writing. Goodness knows if I'd ever start.

In the meantime, then... a brief history that might help explain why in the world am I going to Russia, which is a question I have heard more times in the past semester than I care to count.

(Note: it sounds formal because it is. This is the personal statement I included with my application to the program.)


I first heard of Russia when I was five years old. A family in my church had adopted two Russian girls, Anastasia and Kristina. Being an overachieving little kindergartener, I went to the library to learn about the country the girls were coming from. I was intrigued from the first “Counting to 10 in Russian” book. The number three was just “tree,” and it tickled me that a word in my language could sound the same but mean something completely different in another. Over the next few years, my childlike fascination with Russian culture grew, fed by real-life legends like those of Ivan the Terrible or the Romanovs and purely fantasy stories like those of the Firebird or Baba Yaga. There was a magic about Russia that made Russian fairytales so much more engaging than French ones, an appealing something that made Tchaikovsky a more favored accompaniment to my attempts at ballet than Debussy.

An attraction to Russian culture and history simmered for a few years, until it was turned up to a boil during my sophomore year of high school. That was the year I was introduced to the Russian Golden Age greats: Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Their writing was so engaging and the ideas so rich—I wanted to read them in Russian. I wanted to understand the context behind all of the stories, to acclimate myself to the subtleties and undertones in the literature, and to be as intimately familiar with it as I was with English literature.

My understanding of Russian culture and literary tradition has grown enormously since coming to university, but my taste for deeper knowledge has only been whetted. I cannot pursue familiarity with the literary tradition the same way I have in English, because my level of comfort with the Russian language is relatively low. I cannot intimately understand the cultural, historical, and geographical context for their art, because I have not experienced it myself. Going to Russia for an extended period of time, expressly to study and be immersed in the country itself, would put me on a trajectory to fix both of these problems. By intensive language training, I hope to grow more capable of speaking and reading in Russian. Living in the country, there will be many opportunities for me to engage with the culture from the inside. Certainly, to have as intimate an understanding of the context of Russian art and literature would take many years of living in the country, but I am looking forward to laying a foundation for my endeavor.

I also hope that a semester in Russia will prepare me for my life after college. Regardless of whether I spend any time after graduation in Russia, a better knowledge of the language will equip me to interact with native Russian speakers. Also, after spending this past summer working with English as a Second Language students, I am eager to have live in a culture that is not my own. I’ve seen this experience grow and challenge students in a way that “comfortable” academic work in their own country never could. I want to continue to mature in flexibility and perseverance, even as I familiarize myself with the context of the art that I love. Beyond this semester and graduation? I do not know what career I want to pursue, but I hope that the country and the literature that have captivated me will be a part of it.