small wooden houses

I find myself reluctant to take the mental effort to write up another blog. I’d rather wander through everyone else’s, enjoying their stories and leaving, if only for a moment, this world that feels so small sometimes.
It feels small because, honestly, it’s only as big as the 20 Americans I came with and the Russian students we’ve met here. The way our schedule is, with the studying we have to do, keeps us on-campus pretty much all week long. I guess I could take the initiative and go exploring (I procured a map for this very purpose) but so far, it hasn’t happened.

One of my favorite things about Nizhni is the presence of 300 year old buildings that residents used to live in. Actually, some of them still function as homes, but many of them appear abandoned. They usually are brown, though sometimes it appears that they were at one time painted red or perhaps green, and are made of wood. The windows are framed by elaborate wooden boards, as are the doors and the eaves of the roofs. Many of them are leaning, or appear to be sinking. The city wants to tear them down because they are a fire hazard. This saddens me, because these buildings are so lovely and give the city a distinct feeling of age which the newer and older-but-kept-up buildings lack.

These little wooden homes force you to admit that this place is old, that it was around before Moscow was the capital, that battles were fought and barges floated down the river with humbly clothed peasants pulling them along with ropes around their worm shoulders, that Maxim Gorky was born here or at least lived here as a child. I’ve seen, just today in fact, the charred remains of the buildings that were not just a fire hazard but a blazing reality, so I know that the city probably is acting wisely in taking them down. They’ll preserve some, like the one Gorky lived in, but the city will lose neighborhoods of history that explain a bit of who Russians are without even trying.

America is so young. Russia and her people go so much further back than the three hundred years I’m mourning the loss of.

In a recent lecture a guest professor spoiled the endings of both War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the two novels I’m in the middle of. Super. Another guest speaker works in the language department and, though fully Russian, speaks American English fluently, with a touch of a Louisiana accent. Weird. This is our last week staying in the profilectorium, because this Saturday we’re moving in with our host families. Bitter sweet. I will miss the closeness of my American counterparts and, especially, my roommate Meredith. The first information packet that I received about this program said, in all caps, “FALL IN LOVE”, and I think I may be doing just that. Maybe.