December 1st, 2007

I’m disappointed that I’m leaving Nizhnii Novgorod without ever visiting the women’s monastery. Which I don’t think is actually called a monastery. It must be a convent. Anyway, its domes look like candy, and I’m sure it’s beautiful, because maybe it wasn’t closed down during the Soviet period, and if it wasn’t then that means that it still has beautiful mosaics everywhere inside, and I really want to see if this is the case. I also want to explore the men’s monastery more, because I still haven’t been through the gates. But I don’t think I have time for that today.

All the time that I’ve been here in Nizhnii I’ve wanted to take a day and visit all the churches. But I think that even if I had another day in this place it would be impossible. There are so many churches here! Literally from anywhere you are in the city you can see church domes. And it’s unusual that you can only see the domes of one church. The only place I can think of where I remember not being able to see a church is in this one district that is unusual anyway. Let me give you an interesting tid-bit of history.

When the depression hit the U.S. back in the 1920’s, Henry Ford had to look for new markets for his automobile industry. And guess where he took 600 American workers to build and run a new car factory? Nizhni Novgorod. Yep. How random is that? Henry Ford went to Russia and started a car industry here. I don’t think I ever learned that when I learned that he is responsible for the development of the assembly line. Anyway, there’s this huge building, miles long, called the Gorky Automobile Factory (but really it’s the Gorkovo Avtomachine Plant) and it’s Russian initials are GAZ, so my classmates and I refer to is as ‘the gas district’ or something similar. When you’re there, the only thing you can see is this monstrosity of a building; hence, no church domes. Somewhere over there stands The American House, where all of Fords imported workers lived back in the day. I think Russians live there now. Maybe that’s why we didn’t visit it.

At the same time though, I can’t wait to leave Nizhnii. Living with another family is stressful, no matter how kind they are. And when you don’t speak the same language, you can’t just say things like, “Hey, I’d like to do this, what’s the best way for that to happen? I don’t want to get in your way.” Or, like what happened (or didn’t happen, really) a few weeks ago, “I brought two friends home with me. But because I didn’t ask you in advance if they could come over, we bought our own lunch at the store. Can they come in and eat before we have to go to the museum this afternoon?” Because I didn’t know how to say all this to my host mom, my friends ended up eating their lunch in our super super dirty stairway, because all I said was, “Can my friends eat with us?” and my mom said no because she only cooked for three- herself, my sister and me. As a side-note to this story, you should know that Russians don’t let people come over to their house if they don’t know them already. Makes sense, I guess. So host families have to be really flexible when they let American students have American friends over. But American students can’t have Russian friends come over, because their host parents don’t know them. This just seems weird to me, but I guess I see where they’re coming from. Also, you should know that when, after lunch, my host mom discovered that my friends were in the stairway and were eating food, she was incredulous. “Tereza! You should have said, ‘(things I don’t know how to say, even now)’.” But to her credit she would have let them eat with us had she known the situation.