Today I ate the Soviet Union...

Apparently communism tastes good?

... and it was chocolate-covered and delicious! I had an ice cream bar that is advertised as the kind that used to be popular in the USSR.

This week was really crazy, but I'm finally starting to get the hang of riding the bus and walking everywhere. Classes are starting the pick up and the pace seems pretty good, but I'm not sure what their focus really is yet. We have four courses, phonetics, grammar, Russian language and vocabulary, and Russian press and media, all conducted in Russian, with the occasional English word thrown in for translation's sake. They all have their ups and downs, but my favorite course by far is phonetics, which is basically practicing pronunciation. We spend some time just practicing making the sounds, then learn rhymes and songs. Its great! Although I hope that I find some more time to do some reading on my own - I'm trying to read "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," but we have so much homework, that I haven't really gotten started yet. Besides regular classes, we have 'field trips' to museums, plays, mosques, churches, etc... Tomorrow we're touring the religious sites around Ufa - I'm pretty pumped.

We also have some smaller projects that are more open ended. I will have to do a short presentation on Belarussian culture and Belarussians in Russia  and I think I'm going to focus on religion, since it seems like Belarussians are more observant of the Orthodox Church than Russians. We also have another cultural project that I haven't really decided on yet. I would like to do something related to the Bashkir (or Bashkort) language, which is the language of an Islamic (for lack of a better word) ethnic group in the state I'm living, Bashkortostan. I'm especially interested in the language politics here, since although the Bashkir group is relatively small in numbers, the Bashkir language (which is related to Turkish, but written with Cyrillic letters) is written right next to Russian on almost every sign - bus stops, grocery stores, and what not. Also, the Bashkir language is taught in schools and is considered a state language in Bashkortostan, while Tatar (also a Turkic language) is not, even though there are more speakers. In general, the Bashkiri people seem to be highly respected here, which is refreshing. How bad is it that I'm surprised when a minority ethnic group is held in esteem? I guess studying ethnicity and nationalism so much just has that effect.

Statue for the Bashkortostan hero Sulavat Yulaev in Ufa - he lead the region in an uprising for independence from the Russian Empire. And the city's hockey team is named after him.

Anyways, I'm keeping busy. On Friday we went and saw a play about the effects of perestroika in a small community. It was depressing - quite a few people died - and I almost cried even though I understood less than 50% of the dialog. Nonetheless, it was more a play about change and an individual's choices than anything else, not nostalgia or praise for the time prior to perestroika. We saw another play Monday night, but this one was a student group's production. It was ok, but it was a romantic comedy, a bit silly, and way longer than it needed to be. Otherwise, I've been hanging out with my tutor an her sister a lot and walking around the city. Each CLS participant is matched up with a Russian student to help them get comfortable with the language and the city. I love talking to my tutor and her twin sister. They both study Translation (English and German) at the Pedagogical University which is hosting us and they are wonderfully patient when I have trouble remembering vocabulary or explaining something. Also, we talk about everything, so my Russian really gets a work out! 

By the way, the local television came to our classes to interview us for a story last week. Its mostly in Russian, but check it out: