one bloc east

After I had enough students pestering me about it, I finally joined Odnoklassniki, which is a sort of Russian Facebook. (There is another site, called vkontakte, which is closer to a Facebook/LinkedIn clone, but Odnoklassniki is much more popular with my students.) I finally relented because I’ll need student volunteers for some activities I’m planning and it’s an easy way to get in touch with them, and because I thought it would make for an interesting social experiment.

Because it’s all in Russian, the learning curve for me is a bit steep. I’ve gotten the hang of it by using my dictionary, though, and I think I understand just about everything on the site now. Odnoklassniki (the English transcription of одноклассники, ‘classmates’) is different from Facebook in a number of ways:

• You have to pay to join. It costs about $3, which you pay for by texting a phone number and the registration fee is deducted from your cell phone minutes.
• Everyone can tell when you’re online, not just your friends.
• Photos you put up are ‘rated’ by other people, on a scale of one to five, kind of like Hot or Not (who remembers that?). You can pay extra money to rate someone a ‘5+’ by the same means that you paid for your registration.
• You don’t actually have a profile where you can list The Bible, Twilight, and The Da Vinci Code as your favorite books or The Notebook as your favorite movie — your friends will have to just ask you if they want to know.

And, perhaps the creepiest part:

• People can tell when you’ve looked at their profiles.

You can upload photo albums, give status updates like on facebook, and comment on your friends’ photos and status updates; there are groups to join, games to play, a chat feature, and friend suggestions. You have to request that someone be your friend, and all your friends’ status updates and photo uploads go into a sort of news feed, called лента, which translates as ‘tape’ or ‘ribbon.’ 

Facebook is useful for a number of reasons: keeping track of friends who live far away, sharing links or videos, uploading fun photos of parties and such, event planning, long-form messaging that’s more structured than chat but less formal than e-mail, and, most importantly, ‘stalking’ potential girlfriends/boyfriends/employees. Odnoklassniki, though it has some of these capabilities, is not used for any of these reasons.

Instead, the fact that people can tell when you’ve looked at their profile ruins stalking, and the photo rating turns the whole exercise into an orgy of narcissism. None of the pictures I’ve seen on Odnoklassniki are funny in the least — instead, glamor shots rule the site, for boys and girls alike. It’s all just a contest to see who can post the most ‘frumos’ pictures, and when I’ve seen kids sign on, it’s mostly to check out how their pictures look; checking their profile visits and chatting come in second and third, respectively.

Hey everyone, I’m using social media in the former USSR! Come and see how good I look!

Saturday I went to Moldovan prom, my second. Last year, at the prom in Costesti, I understood very little about what was happening around me, and I wasn’t even sure I was supposed to be there; I was one of three ‘dates’ accompanying another volunteer’s host sister. It was a small party because it was for a small graduating class — I think there were maybe fourteen kids who were graduating from the tiny village school — and so I felt like I had crashed an intimate gathering of old friends. It was a bit awkward.

This year, I belonged. My presence was, in fact, specially requested: when I told my twelfth graders I was going to the United States for a week for a wedding, the uniform response was ‘BUT WILL YOU BE HERE FOR THE PROM?’ And I learned the day before the prom that I was specially invited by one homeroom section of the graduating class to sit at their table, an honor usually reserved only for each group’s homeroom teacher.

The program of events included a ceremony in the town square at seven, followed by a sit-down dinner for the students, their dates, and the teachers at nine, and finally, the dance party. The ceremony was unlike any American graduation ceremony you’ll ever see and the same as every other Moldovan school assembly I’ve been to in that it started late and there was a lot of marching around and speechifying and bad singing and flower-giving. All of this was repeated at least six times. At no point were diplomas distributed, I suspect because the students don’t know the results of their exits exams yet. Anyway, the ceremony lasted two hours, and in retrospect was pointless.

After the ceremony, we all lined up outside the ‘Ambassador’ Restaurant in town. The restaurant was formerly nameless, but one day a few years ago the British ambassador to Moldova and a few MPs visited my town, and in their honor they finally christened the place. It still doesn’t have a sign, however. Once the principal, Eugen had given his fifteenth speech of the evening, we went inside to the banquet room. The banquet room is used for weddings, and you can tell: it’s painted like a tacky bridesmaid’s dress. It (the room) was prepared with six tables, one for each of the sections of the graduating class and one for the teachers, and each table was already full of food. A band began playing in the corner, which was a pleasant surprise; for a country where the number of accordion players per capita is astounding, live music is a rarity. While we sat down and started eating and drinking, Eugen set to work at getting the party started, calling groups of students up to the dance floor to give toasts and dance around the room.

I knew that eventually I’d be called upon to say something, and my time came within the first hour. I haven’t spoken much Romanian in the last three weeks, and so I was a bit rusty and made a lot of mistakes. Once I was done, Eugen took the microphone from me.

‘Okay Casey, now, you should guess what comes next,’ he said.

‘What comes next?’ I asked. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Guess what comes next.’

‘You mean you want me to pick someone to speak after me?’  I was starting to get nervous — I had no idea what was supposed to come next.

‘No, just guess.’

‘I still don’t understand.’

At this point, the singer from the band said into her microphone in English that I was supposed to guess what comes next, which frustrated me: I understood the words being said to me, just not the question.

‘How about dancing?’ I suggested. I figured that would solve everything.

‘Okay, let’s dance. Is there a girl here who would like to dance with Casey?’

Two girls — one I didn’t know and another, Violeta that had been in the class I taught myself — got up and sprinted to the front of the room. Violeta beat the other girl to me, and the band started playing an upbeat song that Violeta wasn’t sure how to dance to in a pair; Moldovans don’t often dance in pairs except for slow songs. After a few awkward seconds, I grabbed her hand and twirled her, and that got the dance going. No one else joined us until the end of the song, when the dance party began in earnest. Someone grabbed a chair and put me in it, and a bunch of boys started tossing me up and down in the chair — twenty times before I fell out, landed on my feet, and high-fived the boys who were doing the tossing. The dance party went on and on, and I had to give another speech a few hours later. At about 4:30, a big group of my favorite kids took what wine was left at the party and we went to the lake to watch the sun rise. 

The biggest difference between prom in America and Moldovan prom is obviously the alcohol. Not that I can deny that American kids don’t try and succeed in getting drunk at their prom, but it’s clearly frowned upon by parents and school staff — like counting cards in a casino. In Moldova, the teachers actively encourage the kids to drink, passing around bottles of wine and vodka. The point isn’t to get drunk, but rather to have a good time; at my prom, I felt like authority figures did everything they could to prevent anyone from having a good time, as if we couldn’t handle the responsibility. (Too many American kids can’t, but that’s only because too many American kids aren’t ever given enough responsibility or accountability to learn until college.) Despite my school principals best efforts, I remember having fun at my own prom, but I can’t imagine how much more fun it would have been if it had had a little Moldovan spirit in it.

I’ll be posting pictures from prom tomorrow.