We got back to Moscow at 4:30 AM. Groggy and tired, we were given the first and only opportunity to sleep in that morning and have our lecture in the afternoon instead. It was an opportunity well received, as I was able to catch up on some much-needed sleep (going on tours all day is a lot of work). I woke up around 9:30 AM and went to take a shower. To my irritated amusement, the water was remaining cold, no matter how much I turned the hot water knob. After a couple minutes of fiddling with the shower, I figured that Russia had once again delivered an unwelcome surprise into my life. It was later I learned that the heating system in Moscow is so old that the government has to shut down the hot water in order to repair it every summer. In other words, every Muscovite has to grumble through a week of cold showers each year before the government decides it is time to turn the hot water back on. After googling "How to Take a Cold Shower," I basically chose to just go with the flow and suffer through five minutes of freezing rain. Not a fun experience, but an experience nonetheless.
Today's lecture was on Russian Politics in the Media by Professor Tatyana Dobroskionskaya. She covered the major Russian newspapers and magazines and said that most Russian media is successful because it combines quality press and popular press into a form of "Mid Market" press that provides a mixture of serious articles and entertaining tabloid materials. In the Soviet days, most media was quality press, but the newspapers had to reconstruct themselves in order to stay popular. Pravda, which used to be the main paper of the government, is now a tabloid-filled newspaper that is more interested in covering scandals than in reporting accurate news stories. The professor was full of interesting tangents, but it took us a while to move from point to point. I was really interested in hearing about the television and Internet media (where most Russians get their news from), but we unfortunately didn't have enough time for that. However, we did have enough time to watch a video clip of Ukrainian parliamentarians beating each other up (literally) over a bill that would make Russian one of the official languages of Ukraine as well as a clip of T-Paine rapping to Obama's health care bill.
Next, we were to meet the Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, who Professor Dobroskionskaya had modestly described as, "like Oprah Winfrey...only white." After an hour of waiting around (the dean is a busy lady) we were seated around a table in the dean's office. She was an elderly lady, who said she had been at MSU for 51 years. It was difficult to hear her, as the window was open, cars were zooming by, and her voice was not the strongest I've ever listened to. Nonetheless, her sweet welcome to us appeared a bit...communist. Somehow, she got on the topic of how choices make us less happy and how thirty years ago, you would always be assured a good quality pair of shoes because you would just go in the store that had the longest line coming out of it. While this seemed an inefficient way to decide who to buy shoes from, to her it seemed better because she wouldn't be disappointed in her choice of shoes. After all, everyone would be wearing the same pair, so you know that you got the best bang for you buck...if not the only available bang for your buck. After talking about how she wrote about cross-cultural communication, but hated her daughter's French husband, her inner-Oprah came out when she passed around DVD's of MSU in which she was featured in an interview. She was a sweet old lady and we were all glad to have met her, despite her confusing means of communication.
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| Pravda Magazine |
Next, we were to meet the Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, who Professor Dobroskionskaya had modestly described as, "like Oprah Winfrey...only white." After an hour of waiting around (the dean is a busy lady) we were seated around a table in the dean's office. She was an elderly lady, who said she had been at MSU for 51 years. It was difficult to hear her, as the window was open, cars were zooming by, and her voice was not the strongest I've ever listened to. Nonetheless, her sweet welcome to us appeared a bit...communist. Somehow, she got on the topic of how choices make us less happy and how thirty years ago, you would always be assured a good quality pair of shoes because you would just go in the store that had the longest line coming out of it. While this seemed an inefficient way to decide who to buy shoes from, to her it seemed better because she wouldn't be disappointed in her choice of shoes. After all, everyone would be wearing the same pair, so you know that you got the best bang for you buck...if not the only available bang for your buck. After talking about how she wrote about cross-cultural communication, but hated her daughter's French husband, her inner-Oprah came out when she passed around DVD's of MSU in which she was featured in an interview. She was a sweet old lady and we were all glad to have met her, despite her confusing means of communication.
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