Living Large in Ryazan

Oksana from the Fulbright office came to visit and I had the unfortunate dilemma of figuring out something to do in Ryazan. It's just kind of a working city without places of interest. So, of course, we went to the Ryazan Kremlin, the one place you can count on every Russian city to have. Here's the cultural lesson I gave:

Ryazan is one of the older Russian cities, among the first to be incorporated into Muskovite Russia. The first Ryazan was actually about 60 miles downriver (on the River Oka) but the Mongol-Tatars destroyed it in the 13th century. New Ryazan was Pereslavl-Ryazan. It has all the trappings of a regular Russian city: nice Kremlin, lots of blocky cement buildings with Russian neo-classical buildings interspersed, good bus service. The city itself is quite small, about the size of Iowa City but with a larger population (about 500,000). The downtown area is basically a triangle from Victory Square, where the electronics firm Eleks recently declared victory over high prices, to historic Lenin's Square, where Lenin finally admitted to himself that he was really bald, to Theatre Square, where nothing important has ever happened. It's all pretty well built up but as you get outside this area there are the Soviet style apartment buildings and older wooden houses further out. No fast food places. On Sundays the Central Market has chickens and rabbits for sale. It's famous personalities include the poet Sergey Esenin and behavioral psychologist Ivan Pavlov.

Last few weeks I've been exploring the city more, teaching, living, not posting. Here are some highlights:

-Students in Group E go nuts for the song "The Distance" by Cake, which got two encores, after which they borrow the disk to make copies and still haven't returned it two weeks later
-Students in Group E not so crazy about "Frankly, Mr. Shankly" by the Smiths or "Kate" by Ben Folds Five
-Set up on a very blind date with a high school student by a teacher at the university
-The basketball players suggest that we go to the banya to relax...and get prostitutes
-I learn how to tactfully refuse unwanted invitations
-Apartment move in finally complete with purchase of couch, shower curtain and toilet seat