Why I came to Russia....

I have been in Russia for about two weeks now and I decided that I have finally settled in to my surroundings enough to start blogging. I honestly could have started it earlier, but I was having an awful time trying to figure out what I wanted to write my first post about. Finally, I came to the conclusion that I would use my first post to try to answer the question that people have been asking me for months: "Why Russia?"People always wonder why I want to study Russian when, 1. It is seemingly useless 2. Russia is cold and 3. According to them, I will most likely die when I am there. However, 1 and 3 hold almost no truth and it frankly hasn't been much colder than Massachusetts since I got here.

Today, the NYT published an article about a speech just given by Joe Biden on the necessity of building a relationship with Russia instead of simply ignoring their feelings towards weapons expansion. The article and VP Biden prove a point that I have been trying to explain or a while now. That the cold war with Russia may not be as over as we think it is and in the next few years relations between Russia and the US are going to be critical in terms of the economy, military action in the former Soviet countries and a number of other issues. However, the practicality and the polotics of it are not the reasons why I study Russian and eventually came to Russia. The reason is the people.

The history of Russia is possibly the most intriguing of any counrty in the world and throughout that history there has been an amazing group of people behind it all. The realtionship between the Russian people and thier history is unlike any other in the world. When radical changes are being made all around these people they hold thier own idenity. When Catherine the Great was spending all of the money in Russia, the people held thier own thourgh thier culture and thier daily lives. The same hapened as the Soviet Union came and went. Of course, there were major changes in the lives of the people, but they always remained uniquely Russian. Whereas, I can think of no other counrty where the government does not represent the people and people do not represent the goverment and, most intresetingly, everyone is oddly content because they have all been thorugh it before.

For the next four months, I will be living with a host family in St. Petersburg and will get to experience a little bit of this life. My host mom makes her own juice from berries that she got from the dacha and makes every Jewish mother sterotype I have even seen on TV look tame. Even now, when I go out to the bars, the Russians surround me and tell me that this isn't Russia and that I need to go out and see a real Russin town.

So to answer the question, I would say that I study Russian because there is nothing else like this counrty in the world and there is no other place where the people and the language are so arbitrarily connected to the history and the polotics. Also, Rasputin and Vladimir Putin are really badass.

P.S. In the furture I promise I will not be so serious. I still have fur, techno and Russian teenagers to talk about.