By Hannah Feustle Abroad writer
When I moved the pictures of my first month in Russia off my phone the other day, I couldn’t help but be amazed by the difference between what I had captured and what had been going on. Maybe my pictures from the bus tour during the first weekend are accurate; they’re of all the beautiful tourist destinations.
After that the pictures and reality diverge. As I look through the pictures, I can remember on some of the days being tired, homesick and frustrated with the people I went to museums with. I remember that some days I just didn’t have a good time, like the day I couldn’t find the metro station, the day I took a language proficiency exam and did horribly and all the days I wasn’t able to tell my host mother anything that I wanted to say.
For a while, I wondered why no one had ever warned me about this. I had heard it can be hard, but never anything to this extent.
As I watched photos copy to my laptop, it occurred to me that these were the only parts of my trip that anyone else sees. The onion domes and gilded interior of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, the view of the city from the top of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral and my endless pictures of the sky blue cathedral that I can see through the windows in all of my classrooms—these are what are left.
It’s not all as dark as that sounds. The pictures don’t capture the best parts either. There aren’t any pictures of me getting pulled out to dance with strangers at a Maslenitsa festival, or the snowball fight our group had with some Russian students afterward. There aren’t pictures of the first time I said something coherent enough to make my host mom laugh or pictures of how good it felt to pull off a transaction in Russian without having to admit that I didn’t speak it very much.
And I think that some of the days that were bad when I was living them might turn out to be better in hindsight.
On one of those days, my snow boots had started scraping my ankles, so I limped down the street to the pharmacy. It was sleeting, I was in a hurry and when I walked in everything was behind glass.
I pretended to be busy while I watched a Russian woman at the counter. She told the clerk at the register what she wanted, and the clerk went and got it. I found the Band-Aids and picked out a word that I was sure had to be “bandage,” since it came right after what I could translate as “standard.”
The store had started to fill up behind me, and when it was my turn, I was blushing and embarrassed and pointed to the box and read from it. “Vlagostoykiy,” I told the clerk. She looked at me for a moment, then pointed to each box in the case in turn, while the Russians behind me fidgeted and I kept shaking my head.
When she finally touched the right one, I nodded and was so eager to get out that I blurted out yes in English. I paid and left and went back to the apartment.
It was a couple days later when I had the box out again, putting more Band- Aids onto my now perpetually sore ankles, that I noticed another word, further down—”plastir,” it said, like “adhesive plaster.” Shouldn’t that word be bandage, I thought, pulling out Google Translate and typing in the word I had put so much effort into reading. It said “standard waterproof.” I started laughing. I couldn’t help it.
How crazy must I have looked? How did I pick that word out of all the words on the box? I think if I had found that out on the day it happened, I might have cried, but with the distance, it was funny.
I’ve told everyone this story now, and I had this conversation with another girl in the program. We decided that overall, the trip’s going to be good. And for the days that don’t get there, it’s just a matter of waiting for the hindsight.
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