What to say...

I can't really think of much that happened yesterday... oh wait! Am I going insane?

I forgot until this moment that yesterday was weird and busy.

It was the launch day of our second week, yay, and also of the New York Institute, which is a program that brings students from all over Russia, and a few from other slavic countries, Europe, and the US, to this school to study culture and cognitive sciences related to linguistics, in English. They NYI students take three lectures a day, three days a week, for four weeks- or something like that- and we got to choose a lecture to take with them.

I chose to take a lecture on images of homeland in Russia and America, because it would be good for me. But what I really wanted was to take the "Puzzles of Russian Syntax" lecture. And the longer I was in Russia, the more I realized that I would learn plenty about homeland identity just by dinner conversation with my host. And there was generative grammer- GENERATIVE GRAMMAR- getting ready to be taught just a few rooms away. It was like a giant magnet, pulling, pulling, and I resisted, resisted, resisted-

Ten minutes before the start of the lectures, where was I? You guessed it! Chasing down the Syntax teacher and begging to get into his lecture. Which I did!

Ohhhhh glorious hours of proforms, noun phrases, heirarchical structure and recursion. It was like being in a brain spa. And it all pertains to Russian, despite being taught in English (really, the point is to introduce the concept of generative grammar to Russia), so I'm learning useful things! It's like finding a healthy candy, for free.

Then, after the lectures, there was a reception with champagne- which I still think is foul and traded for orange juice as soon as politely possible- and folk music!

It was a surprise for the NYI students, but we had it on our schedules: "Surprise: folk music with dancing and instruments." Big surprise, eh?

Anyway, we were all expecting that it was going to be an exibition of dancers, and sure enough out they came, singing and wearing lots of ribbons and kerchiefs and things. But then about twenty seconds into the first dance, they all dispersed and dragged an audience member with them. I was one of them- everyone else on my bench wouldn't go, so I said what the hell. Then they sent us all out to get another person ourselves, and then all of that group had to go find new partners, until we had enough people to take up the whole middle of the courtyard. Luckily, the dances were self explanatory enough that I didn't have to understand too much of the direction. (I was really grateful for the square dancing I did in school.) It was FUN. I danced the whole entire time, as did many of the people from my scholarship- as soon as the men had to separate out, it became clear that all but about three of them were from our group. About half the women were, too. That's sort of the dynamic with us- we've already been dropped in the middle of a foreign culture, so why the hell not do it all?

Then after the dancing ended, Patrick and Ryan and I talked to Polina, a very nice Russian girl, and set each other straight on stereotypes and things. She had been taught in class that all Americans leave their parents' houses at 16. Imagine.

Then I left fairly early and went home, where Lyuba forced an enormous dinner on me, and I did homework all evening.