"Little Boxes Made of Ticky Tacky"

 Paris, Rome, Prague. When travelers talk about their love for these and other famous cities, it always seems that they fell in love with them at first sight, as effortlessly as being struck by lightening. Beautiful architecture, vibrant artistic and literary cultures that are at once intellectually stimulating and somewhat easy to understand, delicious food, and relative hospitality towards travelers draw people in from the moment they step off the plane. These places are as easy to love as if they were created for the single purpose of being loved. At the mere mention of crepes, gelato, or romantic pseudonyms like “the City of Lights”, one can hardly control a racing heart, flushed face, and sweaty palms. When I was still under the impression that France was my “one and only”, I could barely help embodying the same blabbering idiot that emerges when talking about a childhood crush, whenever the topic came up in conversation.While Russia is not an easy place to fall in love with, once you find love for the country and the people, that love is unbelievably deep and strong, and makes fairytale lost-shoe and crowded-ballroom love seem superficial and insignificant. 

           Upon first impression, Russia is about as warm and fuzzy as a cactus. The climate in most of the country is severe for most of the year, it's enormity creates a sense of cultural disconnect, even its capital is nearly impossible to navigate, the people are not always outwardly kind or helpful, and its beauty is not always as evident as that of the Eiffel Tower or Venetian canals. A love of Russia does not sweep you off your feet, it slowly swells within you as you come to realize the impossibility of ever truly understanding a country that is still so far from understanding itself, work yourself into the hearts and minds of those around you in order to witness the deepest and most genuine expressions of emotion, and learn to find beauty in the most unexpected places.

          Although I have dealt with very little homesickness during my time here, one of the few things that made me miss home was the mind-numbing ugliness of my neighborhood in Kazan. Trees are scarce and scraggly, and the tall apartment buildings turn the streets into a life-size game of tetris. The amount of grey, blue-grey, and other colors that have faded to grey, is overwhelming, especially in the wintertime when the sky and the ground are also grey. The lack of variety in architecture, natural beauty, and personal touch that might make these giant cardboard boxes appear more like comfy, lived-in homes was suffocating at first. I missed the individuality that I associate with homes in America. A few months into my fruitless search for window planters and garden gnomes, I realized that rather than look for window hangings, I should have been observing the windows themselves. Although the flats look identical from the outside, balconies are like snowflakes--no two balconies are exactly alike. Finally, I have found the proof that individual people with individual lives inhabit these cubicles of sameness. Some families still have the original wooden window frames while others have opted to upgrade to plastic fames and plexiglass panes. However trivial this decision may seem, the window material on the balcony of an apartment affirms that a choice was made, that an individual person sat down and thought about whether or not it was worth it to improve their windows and, one way or another, came to a conclusion. Through these embodiments of personal choice, I see everything from potted plants, to sweet fair-weather sitting areas, to laundry drying on taught ropes. A mother rocks her baby to sleep, and her next-door neighbor—a flabby old man in a wife-beater—leans out of his window to inspect the passerby as he smokes his cigarette. All the while, I have born witness to a miniscule fraction of their life, and although these few minutes might not seem so important when they happen, life is nothing if not a collage of these moments.

         In the past, I have been known to discredit those who I believe place too much value on beauty. I maintain that judgement should not be passed based on external appearances, but I now better understand that beauty can mean so many different things. In my case, the Kvartl' region of Kazan is by and large void of obvious physical beauty—natural, architectural, and otherwise—but the individual lives of its inhabitants are as beautiful as any.