Ultra Slavonic

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February 12, 2005

tours by chance, cellphones

My favorite thing about traveling is the opportunity to have random encounters.

Yesterday I was working at the Gorky Institute of World Literature (ИМЛИ) and by chance met a woman compiling a list of Russian literature specialists abroad, including their phone numbers. After discussing options for how to write American phone numbers for a Russian user (we settled on "810 1 212 555 1234", with a footnotes explaining that "810" is the exit code for Russia and "1" is the country code for the US), and after I pointed her toward lists of Russian programs abroad, she gave me a private tour of the mansion ИМЛИ is located in, telling me all about the history and architecture of the building (built in the early 19th-century). It turns out that she used to work for Intourist (the Soviet tourism agency for foreigners, which offered ridiculously cheap trips to the Soviet Union) since, as a specialist in Norweigan literature, that was the only way for her to practice speaking Norweigan. So she knows all about all sorts of things you don't get on typical tours. ИМЛИ also owns a modernist buildling which we'll get to see, and she's already dreaming up more personal excursions around Moscow to places people don't usually get to see.

I'll take some pictures of the mansion later. Once I thought of doing so yesterday, there wasn't enough sunlight for the pictures to turn out well.

They used to own the stable to the left of the mansion, but that's been sold to an American bank, which is located there. They used to own the building to the right too, but now it's owned by a German bank. The mansion will be sold soon too. Such high demand for downtown real estate, and such low government support for scholarly research.

I sent and received my first SMS messages yesterday with another Fulbrighter. You see, in Russia and Europe it's much cheaper to send SMS messages than actually talk on the phone (which, I'm finding, can become quite expensive), so people communicate that way a lot. Since people only think I'm a techie, they have no idea that I'm a total cellphone novice. So, as with most text messaging systems, it guesses what word you're trying to type based on the combination of keys you press. As it turns out, mine only has a Russian vocabulary no matter what language you set the interface to. Yesterday I couldn't figure out how to override its guesses, so I had to improvise when it guessed something other than what I wanted to write. Figured it out now.

Which reminds me—since I was asked the question before leaving the US—on a Russian cellphone, keys 2 through 9 have three or four Latin letters (like in the US) as well as four Cyrillic ones. Crowded little keys!

Now I'm going to come back to the US a Euro-snob complaining that nobody uses SMS.

Going to check out more Biennale this weekend and go to a violin concert with said Fulbrighter.

Posted by kshawkin at February 12, 2005 02:30 PM

Comments

Posted by: Kate at September 1, 2005 06:22 PM