When it Rains, It Pours

Yup.

Yesterday was my test of steeled nerves. I had to go out into the city of Petropavlovsk all by myself, on buses, to meet the Itelmen woman who wrote me my visa letter so I could get registered with the Federal Migration Bureau. I had everything with me - my passport, visa, migration card, copies of everything, my tablet that has the downloaded version of Google Translate in Russian in case things went south... I was ready.

The world was just as ready for me, though.

I got on the bus out of Yelizovo, with some directions given to me by the woman I was meeting over the phone via my host. I had to change buses at X, get on the Y till "Rospirioda".

I get on my 2nd bus, and I ask the driver to tell me when we arrived at the "10th kilometer" stop. (This line is measured by how far it is from the P-K bus station.) He said he'd tell me. The woman next to me asked me where I was headed, since I prefaced my request to the driver that my Russian isn't very good (regardless of  the truth of that assessment, I find it helps make people take you seriously). I told her and she gave me a really strange look. She didn't recognize the stop, but she agreed I should get on the bus I had been told to. She offered to let me use her phone to call the person I was meeting so she could talk to them and make sure I was going where I needed to. I was like... holy crap, is this for real? Something must be fishy; these folks are FAR too kind. Some of the other women around me (all women, mind you) took interested and decided it was their mission to help me get to where I'm going. Not in a nosy way - but in a genuinely concerned you're-a-young-woman-you-need-us kind of way. It was so kind of them.

I got off at my transfer stop, and one of the women who'd been listening to me pulled me over to the bus I needed to get on. Another women  who was also getting on this bus asked me more about the stop I needed to get off at. I showed her what I had written down but it was in English and she couldn't read it. She pulled out her smartphone and furiously began trying to find "Rospriroda". She found a similar sounding stop, and once she said it out loud, it dawned on her and the bus driver that it HAD to be where I needed to go. I told them I trusted them. Then I got the brilliant idea to text Yulia, who I was meeting, about the stop name. They were right. I gave the ladies some postcards from Santa Barbara I had with me (Santa Barbara was the title of a soap opera that was insanely popular in Russia in the 80s). They didn't seem to think they were going out of their way at ALL for me, and were floored by how thankful I was.

I met Yulia, and we had a traditional Itelmen meal (potatoes with caviar mixed in and raw salmon slices) while she filled out these crazy forms for me. It was super lovely.

Here's where it starts to swiftly slide downhill.

She told me that there was an extra document I needed to fly to Palana, and it wasn't ready yet. My reservation was for Monday, so she suggested I go to the office and change it to Wednesday. She got me on a bus to there, and I had to cross the street and walk across the construction site of a church that was being built.

I was walking up some stairs (they were like wooden park stairs), and suddenly, I was on the ground. When I got up, I had to pull my foot off of a rust iron fence spike (like those garden fences you just stick in the ground, or like tomato plant cage). The difference was the bars on this fence thing were really rusty, and there was literally a hole in my foot about 1cm in diameter. My foot had been impaled, and this tripped me and I had fallen, slicing open my right shin and banging both my knees badly on the gravel. I was in shock. Tons of blood started shooting out of my foot, but I knew that was a good thing - my dad had taught me well how to treat puncture wounds. I made it bleed a lot in case there was bacteria or rust in the wound, and it bled. And bled, and bled and bled. It didn't stop. I didn't know how deep it went, but I could see the fat underneath the flap of skin and my tendon underneath. It missed my hallus, but went between my 2nd and 3rd metatarsals. It had definitely gone right through two of the veins on the top of my foot. I was freaking out - was I really this dumb? How did I miss this? How did I manage to injure myself this badly my second day?

Well, this was gonna have to wait so I soldiered on to the ticket office. God, there was just blood EVERYWHERE. It wouldn't stop bleeding! I had to take my coat off and keep wiping the blood running down the front of my foot every minute or so. It was quite embarrassing, and I hoped no one saw it. So I got to the ticket office, and long story short, they told me they couldn't change my reservation because everything was booked. The woman I talked to was definitely on her last nerve for the day, and she had zero patience to talk to me slowly. She told me to call tomorrow to see what could be done, but I'm pretty sure it was because she wanted me to go away. So I went away, defeated. I had hope that SOMETHING could happen, because my field site was Palana! I had people waiting there for me! Nice people! Koryak people! This was my research, going right out the window.

And my blood coming right out my foot.

I got back on the buses, and it took me about two hours to get back to Yelizovo. I had to keep wiping the blood off and hide my mangled foot from people on the bus. I didn't want any attention. My foot had started to hurt really bad, and there was a giant blood bubble pooling underneath the skin whenever I was standing or didn't have my foot elevated above my shin. Every few minutes I had to "milk" the blood out from under the skin so it didn't clot and cause problems. I was reasonably successful, but the last small walk to my B&B was pretty awful, and I spent a good half hour squeezing more blood out of my foot, and another hour later, it was still bleeding.

So, I was without a ticket to my field site, and I had a gaping hole through my foot. The bleeding finally slowed down, so I put some Neosporin on it and a pressure bandage. I ran through a list of things I could've, should've, would've done, how I could have prevented all of this by being Wonder Woman and omniscient and omnipotent. After a Skype call to Jason, I was a little back down to Earth. It wasn't an easy night. My toes looked like little sausages, and now my fore foot is just filled with edema. I'm hoping it's going to be okay.

When it rains, it pours - that's what I was thinking while I was out trying to get home from the city.

Shit happens - This is what I'm thinking now, and trying to figure something out.

Fishermen; Fishermen everywhere.

I was told I'd be picked up by the woman who's hosting me at her B&B in Yelizovo (Martha, for future reference) along with other fishermen coming in.

After staying in a crappy hotel in Anchorage for a piddly 3 hours of sleep, I went to the Ted Stevens International terminal for my flight to Petropavlovsk. I figured I should look for some fishermen and we'd go find Martha together after the plane ride.

There was exactly one ticketing counter open at 5:30am, and it was for my flight. And literally every single other person in the line except me was a fisherperson (lots of women too).

All of them.

I asked around if anyone was with Explore Kamchatka, but everyone said no. I ended up chatting with several groups of people, who were interested in making sure I found my group. Everyone was so nice! And coffee at Ted Stevens was $1 per cup with free refills. True story.

I was really nervous about going through customs, since I've heard horror stories and if you're not super fluent it can be hair-raising. The verbatim impression I got from several people who'd been to the Kamchatka before was "no one gives a shit". Well, alright. At least there's not dudes with guns.

The flight was nice (Yakutia was a really nice airline!), but once we got to passport control, it became clear that they didn't give a shit about TOURISTS. Folks with three year multi-entry visas were suspicious. My heart almost stopped when the passport customs lady stopped me and asked "Вы говорите по-русски?" (Do you speak Russian?) I answered yes, and feared what would come next, because it was clear she had serious questions for me she didn't know how to ask in English. Luckily, it was a question I understood AND it was about a document I was told I didn't need but I brought with me on a whim anyhow. Thank goodness I did, since she furiously typed stuff into the computer before stamping me and letting me through.

But I got through. I was worried about finding Martha since my phone didn't have any signal and I couldn't even text her.

I found Martha, and several people who said they weren't with her while I was in the terminal at Anchorage turned out to be with her. Rrrr. Part of me hopes they felt bad. I suppose it's a good idea to have a picture of my face as my Gmail icon since I'm pretty sure that's how she recognized me.

Then we were off! I was put into The Orange Room (totally not by my request, but by fortune), and I'm trying to get myself ready for the next day, when I had to go register my visa.

Whew.

The Kamchatka

The Kamchatka is a lovely place. Here I'm going to write a little bit about it for those of you who don't know much about it.

All following photos are linked from their originals on the Internet; if it's my own photo, I'll specify.

If you don't exactly know where it is, it's across the Pacific Ocean from the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska. It's a 5.5 hour flight from Anchorage, for those Michiganders who measure distance as time. (NB: I'll be letting you know if you can see Alaska from Russia.) It is here:

Usually if someone asks where the Kamchatka is, I ask if they've played RISK. I then tell'em it's how you invade Russian from Alaska. Works every time.

The temperature band for the Kamchatka is very similar to Michigan, actually, since it's a peninsula too. (Makes sense, right?) It just gets colder earlier in the year

The Kamchatka is extremely volcanically/tectonically active. It has bazillions of volcanos:

Two of them are right outside my window! Here's a picture of mine:

The plants here are extremely similar to plants in Michigan. They've got native rhododendrons, pines, crabgrass, and tons of tiny flowers. I'll post pictures soon - I don't have a great internet connection, or else I'd be here all day uploading stuff.

It's really beautiful here, to say the least. The weather has been very Santa-Barbara-like - about 75, clear, low humidity. The sun isn't as strong of course, but I seem to be maintaining my tan. That being said, I'm still much darker than most people here.

More to come!

What am I doing?

I want to believe I'm ready. I want to. When I get nervous, I try and steel my nerves and at least say to myself, "Well, you already bought the tickets. No going back now."

This is my blog about doing linguistic fieldwork in the Kamchatka. Soon. Like, next week soon. I suppose I should introduce myself a little bit and what the heck I'm doing. I'm Di, and I'm a grad student at UC Santa Barbara. I study the indigenous languages of Siberia, and I look at language change over time (historical linguistics). I did my undergrad degree at the University of Michigan... and thus I am now and forever a Wolverine. Hence the title. Get it? Because wolverines live in Siberia? The language (or dialect group - this distinction is kinda sorta looking like my dissertation topic) I'll be working on is called Koryak. Supposedly there's about (only) 3,000 speakers of various dialects left, and I'm going to working to help document these varieties of the language. The URL is (or rather, is my best guess at) Koryak for 'Michigan Wolverine'. The best English transliteration is 'nuh-Michigan-uh-kin kapay' (or in IPA: /nəmitʃiɣanəqin qapaj/). We'll see if this pans out.

In subsequent posts I'll write a little bit about Koryak and other Kamchatkan languages, as well as the Kamchatka itself.

It has been the biggest nightmare to get my three-year, multi-entry scientific-technical visa to Russia. Such a nightmare it practically gives me PTSD flashbacks to talk about it, so I won't bore you with the details. Ed Snowden got a visa quicker than I did. However, it's good for three years and I can kind of come or go as I please.

My biggest worry right now is my Russian. I have good days and bad days, where my listening is good, but my speaking is trash; where my speaking is fine, but I can't understand anything. I've heard the folks where I'm going are easygoing and pretty chill about this part, and I feel like I can explain my immediate linguistic work well enough. Let's... hope that last sentence is true.

Last but not least, can we have a round of applause for friends and networks? Goodness knows I wouldn't be where I am right now, with these opportunities and all, without some of the most wonderful folks in existence. I gotta thank Kate and her fiance Andrey for their invaluable help in physically obtaining my visa. Yulia, who wrote my letter of invitation and gave it such forethought and endured "my" panicked phone calls first thing in her morning, is someone who I owe this trip to. And of course there is Alex, who basically told me who to call, how to get there, what to say, how to do everything, and pretty much everything else. Literally. And a big thanks to the UCSB Linguistics department for the partial funding they gave me. I have a zillion other folks who need to be thanked too, and I'm not any less grateful for anyone not immediately listed.