First Hand Impressions

Zhao Jincai (China)

Of course it is very interesting to know about the traditions and culture you live and stay for a long time. Here I have many friends and that helps me to get much more about the culture of the country. As I have many friends here I speak very often with them and I improve the language. When I have free time I like to walk along the embankment and go to the cinema. So I enjoy both my free time and studying here.

Chang (Vietnam)

I have been to Russia for 5 years and I am a student of the faculty of Economics. I liked this faculty very much. At first it was very difficult for me because I did not know Russian but now it is much easier and I got only good and excellent marks. Thanks to my teachers of Russian I can speak Russian rather well. I have my favourite teacher who gave me much knowledge and who has been teaching me to understand Russian culture and its specificity much better.

Come to study here and you will know such an interesting language and its mysterious culture.

Babatunde Omoniy (Nigeria)

Rafael Bien (France)

Balazs Racz (Hungary)

Hello! I am Balazs. I am from Hungary. I can speak German and English. I travel a lot and I came to the conclusion that the best way to know a foreign language and another country is to come and to stay there. That is why when I started studying Russian I decided to come to Russia. I chose Samara State Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities. Samara is situated on the river Volga. This is a very big city with lots of shops, restaurants and lots of stalls. The thing which I like most of all is a beautiful embankment and a very long beach where I liked to walk.

I met with very kind, well-educated people from the International Office of the Academy who were my teachers of the Russian Language. All of them speak English, German and French fluently. They helped me not only in learning the Russian language but their culture as well. They organized excursions. We went to different museums, went skating and even had a picnic. They helped me a lot. So I can say that I really had very good and enjoyable holidays.

Milan Čermák (Czech Republic)

Drug called endless railway

It started in year 1987. That year my family moved to a newly build flat in the fifth floor with a perfect view to the railway-station in my hometown. The heart of a two year old boy was lost forever. Trains are my life, it started in my childhood with a model railway in front of the window with direct view to the railway-station and finally I reached the nirvana in Russia.

In Czech Republic townhall is usually the biggest building in the town, in Russia it can be only a railway-station. Have you ever seen this amazing phenomenon? The first railway-station which I met was called Sheremetevo airport. Have you ever seen the airport where train terminal is more beautiful than main airport terminal? Nice surprise and not to say anything about those girls from train personnel. I don’t know how it was possible but they were prettier than girls from our Airbus of Aeroflot. Now I was sure… yes this is the right country, here I have to enjoy it. I really don’t understand who can make a mistake and go from Sheremetevo by taxi :).

And than it is here. I am standing in the middle of my own space, I am standing in the middle of the square from my childhood dreams. Railway-stations where you just look. Trains going to all directions. Do you want to Ufa? Just enter the train! Do you want to Sochi, welcome on board. Do you want to Samara? Platform Nr. 6 :).

I entered my train, not the best, but the comfort of life radio in Ziguli I tried on my way back :). In front a Czech engine (from Plzen, where my university is, I was sooo proud:) behind 17 green coaches, sooo long and a samovar in every coach. What a surprise: In this train everyone has own clothes and shoes specially for traveling by train! Wow! In an hour every person is already in own train-dress, drinking own train-tea, making own train-comfort. This is a train-country!

I loved it, do you know, how you can recognize a foreigner in a Russian express train? He doesn’t have shorts and drinks lemonade instead of tea :). He doesn’t know how to climb the upper bed and he is in the morning running from one side of the coach to the other because he didn’t know that toilet would be closed one hour before Samara :).

16 hours, 900 kilometers and 5 teas (usually I don’t drink tea:). Later we crossed one huge lake… somebody calls it the Volga and we are sure, now we have to be already close to our destination. After crossing one third of the European part of Russia, which is by the way equivalent to passing twice my country from one end to the other :), we are finally ready to open doors into absolutely the same but a completely different world. We are ready for new experiences. Samara, here we go!

Summerschool Visual Anthropology in the Volga Region, 18. July – 31. August 2010, Samara

Participants: Marion Fohrer, Stefan Lassonczyk, Hanna Schroeter

Organization:

• We really enjoyed your friendly welcome and the Russian hospitality. We promise that we will never forget the true Russian soul.

• Our Accommodation was very comfortable and very good located close to the university and the Volga beach.
• Thank you for reminding us to take our swimming suits to Samara. We will not forget the great Volga beach.
• It was good that we had enough free time to choose what we want to do. We enjoyed the possibility to buy our food by ourselves, to taste different kinds of Russian food (thanks also to the big fridge).
• We really felt very comfortable during our visit.
• Lots of thanks especially to Lydia, she was always there for us, our questions and problems and always found a good solution.

Visual Anthropology:

• We got a very good impression of the (Visual) Anthropology in Russia and especially the Samara region.
• We saw a lot of interesting movies. We remarked that this topic is our teacher’s passion. We liked that a lot. It was very positive for us that she is an “insider” making her own movies and being part of the presented cultures of the Samara region.
• She put a lot of effort in translating dialogues and monologues into German and we felt comfortable to talk with her in our mother language.
• We are very thankful, that we got in contact with her Russian students and we enjoyed spending our free time with them.
• Meeting them was very lovely and an important part of our summer school. It was good that we had time to spend together with them to discover the city, the beach and the music scene of Samara.
• We also really enjoyed our trips to the countryside and especially to meet the people of the Mordwinien village was such a pleasure. Thank you for this possibility to get in contact with these people and their culture. It was really important for us to discover different sides of Russia.

Russian classes:

• We learned basic words and grammar of the Russian language, which was everything that is possible in a two week language course. All of us are thinking about to continue learning the Russian language, so we think you can call that a success.
• Very interesting for us was the cultural information about the country, the people and the Russian soul.

We want to thank you for your effort and to everybody who was involved in the preparation of this summer school. We enjoyed the time in Samara very much and we hopefully come back soon.