Around the Town

For a research grant, the Fulbright program requires you to choose affiliations with educational institutions in the city where you plan on living. Since I knew that with my project - the more people I knew the better - I choose three different institutions to sponsor me and write letters of support to Fulbright: The National Library of Chuvashia, Chuvash State University, and the Chuvash Institute of Humanities and Sciences.

Olga Yanovna is my main contact at Chuvash State University, and she introduced me to Zoya Alekseevna, an anthropologist and researcher of Chuvash culture and history. Zoya is wonderful - she really knows Chuvashia and puts everything nto context so I can really understand the significance of Chuvash history. On Thursday, she took me on a tour of the historical part of the city. Many of the buildings were actually relocated to this area right before a dam was built up the Volga river. The center of the city flooded (controlled, I assume) and became a huge bay (seen in the first picture). After the tour, she introduced me to her friend Tatiyana, who is a researcher in the National Museum of Chuvashia! We have very similar research interests, and I'm excited to talk with her more about Chuvash. Everyone here is so hospitable and so helpful. I feel like everyone I know has introduced me to a handful of other really important people. Just keeping up with all these contacts has proved to be as time-consuming as the research itself! I'm really being taken care of here :) And it's only been two weeks!