At Long Last

I'm back home in Vytegra. I have bathed, eaten, changed into dry clothes, and checked my email. I feel sane again.

Our hostess last night in Nemzha is the reason we got back. Her name is Galina. She teaches Russian grammar at the middle school and is a single mother of two: Sasha, 13, and Dasha, 10. Despite numerous hardships, she has done very well for herself. She has a modern two-story home and a car of her own. Venya and I met her when we stopped to ask her for directions, and she offered us a place to stay for free. She fired up the banya for us to bathe in and even let me sleep in her bed, while she shared a bed with her daughter.

I felt I had to do something to repay all the hospitality, and when I learned that her children needed help with English, I knew exactly what to do. I started talking to them, half in Russian and half in English. Dasha was much braver about answering in English than her older brother, so I asked her to go get her English workbook. For the rest of the night, Dasha and I worked together on English pronunciation and vocabulary while Sasha sulked nearby and made sarcastic comments, like a normal teenager.

I'm proud of one exercise I came up with to practice the English “th” sound. This is a difficult sound for Russians, and they usually approximate it with an “f” instead. To break Dasha of this habit, I told her to hold onto her lower lip, stick her tongue between her teeth, and, without letting go of her lip, repeat after me: “think, thought, through, lather, nether, death, tooth...” She thought it was a fun and silly game, and it actually worked. So there's linguistics for you, replacing a labiodental with an interdental by brute force.

Galina was so happy to see us working together and was especially interested in my pronunciation exercise. Before I knew it, she had brought me a grammar book as a gift, and she and I worked on my Russian for a little while, a useful refresher for me. She helped me practice the Russian soft “L”, which I have never pronounced right before. I think I finally got it, though it will require more practice before I consistently get it right in speech.

We were so absorbed in our bidirectional language lesson that no one wanted to go to bed (except Venya, who felt left out). We finally went to bed around 2, so we all slept in late. When we finally woke up, Galina made a delicious, fresh breakfast and told Venya and I that, as payment for Dasha's English lesson, she would drive us to the bus station in Vinnitsy so we could finally get home.

When we got to Vinnitsy, I was surprised by the museum director, who wanted to give me a tour of the Veps museum there. She apologized for being too busy to talk with me during the holiday on Sunday. The museum itself had nothing I hadn't already seen at other museums, but the director told me a lot about the Veps people of the Leningrad Oblast, which I didn't know much about.

When Venya and I left the museum, Galina was waiting for us outside with another car. She had found us a driver who would take us to the crossroads some 25 km away. At the crossroad, we could easily hitchhike back to Vytegra and get there much faster than by bus, which wouldn't arrive until tomorrow morning.

So that's what we did. We wound up riding with lumber truck driver all the way back to Vytegra. His cabin was terribly uncomfortable, but we got here quickly, without paying a kopeck, and without me getting carsick on an old, shaky bus. So I'm happy.

Of course, we could have just as easily hitchhiked home from Vinnitsy on Sunday, so I'm still annoyed with Venya for leading me all across the countryside for no reason. But that's all over now, anyway.

I'm so glad to be back in Vytegra. Before my little trip, I had thought of Vytegra as a small, rural town in the middle-of-nowhere. Now it suddenly seems like a lively center of urban life. I can't imagine how I'll react when I get back to Ann Arbor after this.