Greetings from Siberia…
  I am here on a Critical Languages Scholarship, a program run by the State Department, to study intensive advanced Russian in Tomsk. The program offers an amazing cultural and educational experience - we speak only Russian (you must sign a Russian-only pledge before leaving the U.S.), take classes with Russian professors at a Russian state university, live with a Russian host family, and go on weekly cultural excursions (to Novosibirsk, concerts, museums, the local beer brewery...).  
  A photo tour of my trip thus-far can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aganieszka/sets/72157620254893733  
  Tomsk is a quaint, university town, population 500,000… of which students make up about 100,000. The city is known for its historic wooden houses built from the 1700s to the early 1900s. Its located in the Tomsk Oblast’ north of Novosibirsk… pretty much in between the Ural Mountains and Lake Baikal, where 25% of the world’s fresh water resides in the deepest and largest by volume fresh water lake in the world. Tomsk was originally inhabited by Tartars, now there is a street, Tartarskaya Ulica, where many of them reside and a small cultural-preservation oriented community. The Tomsk Oblast' (or "state") is divided by the Ob River, the world's 4th longest river in the world. The land is mostly of swamp/marshlands... some ridiculous amount of the land here is shallow, standing water between spring and fall (hence Siberian mosquitoes) and covered in snow and ice during the winter.
The city of Tomsk sits on a tributary of the Ob, the Tom' River. Like much of Siberia, the Tomsk oblast is rich in natural resources- agricultural, energy (coal, natural gas), water, and peat. The city of Tomsk, founded in the 1600s, used to be on one of the main roads from China to Europe, a north route of the Silk Road. The emblem of Tomsk is a white horse, signifying trade/travel. A little known fact is that long, long ago... horse traders and travelers paid a bribe to Moscow to keep the Trans-Siberian railroad from coming through Tomsk so that it wouldn't impede on their business! The railway now bypasses the city to the south... which has preserved the small-town feel of the place. Instead it goes through Novosibirsk, which was then a little village and is now the largest city in Siberia. 		 
  If Siberia were to somehow break away from “Russia” it would still be the largest country in the world (bigger than America including Alaska AND Western Europe combined) and would be one of the wealthiest in natural resources: three of the world’s largest rivers, a lot of natural gas, huge oil reserves, and coal, as well as really rich agricultural land (the soil at my family’s dacha is black and they grow just about every fruit, berry, vegetable I can think of for this climate).  
  A Modern take on Siberian/Russian folk music:
 
I recently went to see a concert by a group of musicians, led by Pelageya... enchanting folk with some contemporary aspects. She called it art-folk. Her voice is amazing. As she is from Siberia, I thought it would be appropriate to include some links to her music.
            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rViD7ynm-Us&feature=related
            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYFGMd2PLR0&feature=related 		 
  About my host family:

I live with three of the most lovely ladies in Tomsk, spanning three generations - starting with Babushka, the root of the family, born in 1936 during Stalinist Soviet times. She’s one of the most energetic people I’ve ever met. She gardens almost every single day at their dacha, which is a 20 minute train ride away by electrichka. Her life story is pretty interesting... As she puts it: "Живём как в сказке, тем далее тем страшнее!" ("We live as if in a never-ending story, the further we get the more crazy it gets.") In the early thirties, before she was born, her parents were deported to Siberia from the south for owning their own land/horses in the country where they lived (they were labeled kulaks, which made them bourgeois according to the communist government). They were dropped off, like many, in the middle of nowhere - literally no villages or sign of human life in any direction. So they dug a hole in which they lived and hunted/gathered food until they slowly built a house out of the hole and began to farm. The others who were dropped there did the same, and that is where the village of Bakhchar now is. Three years after Babushka was born, her father (along with most of the men of the village) was taken by the NKVD one night and disappeared forever. They only found out during Khrushchev’s Thaw that he had been shot as an enemy of the state, and the whole family had been labeled as such. They have since been "rehabilitated" (meaning, they receive some government contribution for the wrong done to them) and his name has been cleared. Babushka married a man of Polish-Jewish decent, hence, Natasha, her daughter, tells me she is also of Polish descent. Natasha is in her late 30s. She comes across as very meek, quiet... but as you get to know her, you see the independent, strong-willed Siberian woman come out. She likes to joke, laugh, often takes me on walks around the city, and when I finish my homework in time, we sit in the kitchen and talk over a few drinks or watch Russian/Soviet films from the 70s together. Her daughter, Diana, is 19 years old and also studies at TGU where I am attending classes. Natasha's brother, Igor, lives in a town of about 5,000 outside of the city... in Mel'nikovo.
Natasha, like Babushka, spends a lot of time at the dacha. She's very fond of planting flowers everywhere there is soil not being used for fruit and vegetables. Every time she comes back from the dacha, there is a new assortment of fresh flowers from the garden in a vase in my room. She is also very energetic- she works at the hotel next to the train station (about a 7-10 minute walk from our apartment/flat), but she also cleans and takes care of a set of rental apartments that some company rents to travelers (for cheaper than the nearby hotel), she cooks daily, and cleans the house constantly. It’s exhausting just thinking about how much these ladies get done in a 24 hour period. 		 
  The dacha… or rural life in general.
 
At the dacha they grow enough potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, carrots, beets, lettuce, squash, more berries than I know names for, among them currants, black and raspberries, strawberries, cherries (and more) to get them through the year. What they don't eat fresh, they pickle, freeze or somehow conserve for the winter months. There is a really cute little rickety house at my family’s dacha, which they built themselves. There is a wood burning stove dividing the kitchen and living/eating/sleeping space. The house is decorated with patchwork items made by my host family mom, Natasha. There is a separate building, the banya, a wooden hut where one bathes. There is also a wood burning stove there that heats the whole room. Bathing in the banya is more like going to a sauna or steam room. You rub yourself with honey, and then steam yourself clean in 80 C (176 F). Afterwards or during the steam, you can opt to beat yourself or be beaten with birch branches... to get the blood flowing. Then you wash yourself from a bowl filled with a mixture of very hot water, being heated above the wood burning oven and cold from the hoses. This, of course, is all very healthy and good for you. It is a tradition passed down from rural peasant life - how they used to bathe once a week, every Saturday. The hotter you can get the banya, and the longer you can stand it, the healthier the experience. A girl from my program also says that one should drink beer after leaving and while in the process of cooling down. Drinking water or vodka before a banya is apparently extremely dangerous.
The second weekend here, Natasha took me to her brother's and with his family, we all visited Babu-Katya... his wife's mother. She lives another 70 km from Igor's town in a very small village. From there we went to see Dyad-Sasha (uncle Sasha), who is a bee keeper - further into the country, where there are only birch groves, grassy fields, and forests. There we ate honey from the comb, wax and all, and drank tea and samogon (homemade spirit, about 50-60%). He told us about the last time a bear came and he had to hide far up in a tree until it left. He also let me take one of the really old Lenin posters off his wall. It had been there since the last beekeeper lived there... they joked, probably since the revolution. 		 
  A bit of Polish culture in Siberia.
 
During a short tour of the city, we made a stop at a Polish Catholic Church here in town. I was told that there are many Poles here and that there is even a Catholic School where Polish language and culture is taught. Next week, Natasha and I will go visit it and take her guide book that describes Tomsk in great detail. In it, it says that the church, rectory and school were built from contributions of Poles from abroad. The second or third week here, I went to see a concert outside of the Museum of Political Repression of the NKVD. To my surprise, there were many people at the event waving Polish flags. It seems the event was actually organized by a Polish institute or organization here. I spoke briefly with a Professor of Polish language at the Pedagogical University here and met a Polish student named Asia from Wroclaw, who was studying here for the last 6 months. Songs were sung in Polish, Russian, Tartar, and Azeri. Poems and stories of the political repression under Stalin, of deportation to Siberia were told.
After I took a picture of some old men in their old uniforms, one of them approached me to show me pictures and legal documents from a recent mass grave that was found in the Tomsk Oblast. The bones were brought to Tomsk, to be properly buried and a monument was erected in memory of the unknown who were victims of Stalin's purges and buried there. As I have seen in communities of the Polish Diaspora in America, the Poles here in Siberia are also an active force. 		 
  There's lots more to write, but my time at the internet cafe is coming to an end and this email has been long in the making already. I hope you enjoy the pictures/music.  
                  Vsyo dobrovo,
                     Agnieszka
                           agnes.sekowski@gmail.com