sunniness

I met a new exchange student from Latvia today who was already aware of my blog through his friend's researching of Petrozavodsk before he came. So despite my still comically-low readership (and no I'm not just saying that--I've got proof from Google Analytics), I have reached the first rung of blogging fame.  Which is to say, someone knew about my blog before he met me.  Or at least that's how I'm choosing to define it; it's my blog, after all.

Anyway, let's resume our tour of all things Rrrrrrrrrrrossiya.  (If you didn't get that last part, the letter "r" is rolled in Russian.  Sometimes I like to exaggerate it; apparently this habit extends to text-based media as well.)  Today I'm going to talk about something slightly more targeted to my personal situation vis-a-vis my fellow Fulbright teachers, which is sunlight.  Well, I should say lack thereof, as naturally the sun shines everywhere in Russia just as it does most places--except for Murmansk during December I should say, before I get more angry emails from all you sticklers out there.  I'm the only Fulbright ETA in the north of Russia (okay, technically there's another on the same latitude as me, but it sounds more dramatic if I'm the only one, so just go with me), which means mucho dark hours for me during December and January.

I've noticed that despite my years-long studies of the country, I routinely forget just how far north the entire country of Russia is.  Maybe it's from years of comparisons between the U.S. and Russia that I subconsciously picture the two across from each other; maybe I just have a poor sense of spatial geography (ding ding!).  To give you an idea, Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, was the summer resort city for the party elite during the Soviet Union.  It is one of the southernmost cities in Russia.  It is on the same latitude as Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

First, picture yourself going to a summer resort in Milwaukee.  Got that in your head?  Good.  Now get behind your imaginary dogsled and hoof it approximately 1200 miles north.  Welcome to my frosty world.  According to the "I'm feeling lucky" website I found through Google, Petrozavodsk averages 4.7 hours of sunlight a day over the course of a year.  In other words, I had a lot of short days in December.

I've never been one for seasonal depression, but it really was quite a dramatic departure from "short" winter days in Ohio.  On the shortest day of the year, for instance, the sun rose at 10:05am and set and 3:18pm.  But wait!  There's more!  We're so far north, that even when the sun does rise, it does so like a crotchety old man reaching for his walker in the middle of the night.  If that simile isn't doing anything for you, what I mean is at its highest point the sun barely inches over the rooftop of the highest building in town (which is about five stories).

High noon in Karelia (recreation).

The flip side is that I'm going to experience the opposite effect in June during the famed White Nights, when the sun goes down for only a few hours and it never actually gets dark.  It should be a lot of fun, though those mangy kids are liable to keep me up half the night with their loud music and their Dan Fogelberg.  Humbug!  Anyways, it actually hasn't been that bad coping with the lack of sunlight, though it's definitely not something I'd want to do every year.  I figured that the fine citizens had come up with ways of dealing with it year after year, so I went ahead and asked one of my friends.  It went something like this (translated for your convenience):

Me: "How do you put up with it being dark all the time?"

Friend: "We don't.  It sucks every year."

So there you go.