There and Back Again

Chapter the Ninth: And Coming Back Again

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 May 2012 22:22:00 +0000

After 21 hours of being in and out of airplanes and airports, I returned victorious to the United States. I decided this blog wasn't quite finished, and so now I'm lounging on the couch in my father's house, typing up this coda to my international escapades.

My final week in Russia was spent taking care of some last-minute things, like arranging a ride to the airport, getting my transcripts in order, and finishing my term paper. My roommates and I also decided to go out the last Friday night we had together, and I did a little bit of exploring during the day, because the weather was absolutely gorgeous for a change (during the last 72 hours I was there, of course). Then, I just had to endure 21 hours of travel, and I'd be home!!

I got back to my apartment after my Moscow trip at around 9:30 Monday morning. I had some things to take care of at the university, as my phone helpfully reminded me, but I was just exhausted after Moscow, and I could wait until tomorrow and not worry about cutting things too close. So that's what I did. I woke up at about 2 in the afternoon, spending the day in front of my laptop in an effort to make more headway on this term paper. (Spoiler! I didn't.) I did go out and pick up some food for the rest of the week - ultra-healthy options like pasta sauce, ramen noodles, some eggs, milk, and two pounds of gummy candy, which was devoured by myself and my roommates over the span of the next eight days.

Tuesday was the most productive day I'd had in a long while. I went over to the university and arranged a transfer to the airport, then went to another office to request my transcripts. Apparently, on Tuesday, there are two women who work in that office and one of them was not there for her morning shift. I decided to go get some lunch and walk around the island a bit, then come back and see if the afternoon lady was there. I decided to eat at Taverna Grolle, a restaurant I walked past every time I went to class. The menu posted outside looked tasty and reasonable, so I figured why not? I got some Irish coffee (also why not?) and chicken Kiev (fried chicken cutlets) with pureed vegetables on the side. It was all quite tasty, and a most pleasant way to kill an hour or so. I still had some time before the afternoon lady was supposed to be there, so I decided to explore this shopping center and ринок (flea market sort of thing, with people selling produce, dairy, bread, as well as clothing and miscellaneous items) near the restaurant. I found a toy store full of adorable things like a giraffe pool floaty, and a Walgreens-type drug/sundries store where I got a new pair of stripedy yellow socks for the trip home, because the socks I had brought with me were too disgusting to keep at this point. I also walked around the rinok and got a few free samples of stuff like pickles and dried fruit before regretfully explaining that I couldn't buy anything today, perhaps tomorrow. Soon enough, though, it was time to go back to the facultet to try that office again.

When I got back, the lady was there, so I went into the office and got a form I needed to fill out to get my transcripts taken care of. I had to fill it out and get my teacher to record my grades manually; she was already gone by the time the lady in the registrar's office was available to give me that form, so I had to come back Wednesday to get everything together. That part went pretty smoothly, though, at least; I showed up after class on Wednesday, handed my prof the form and she filled it out without so much as a "Где была?" Then I took the completed form down to the office, handed it to the lady, and was on my way.

Wednesday, I decided to get lunch on the island again, and finally bit the bullet and went to this place that seemed like the most questionable sushi restaurant in a city literally full of sketchy-looking sushi restaurants. This place was called O'Sushi!. The exclamation point is part of the name. They do not, as the name seems to indicate, serve corned beef and cabbage alongside their cucumber maki, although they did have some lunch special bento boxes with a more European character available. I settled on the "Euro Mix" bento, which was a nice lunch of solyanka (soup made with a base of seafood broth), beef stroganoff, mashed potatoes, vegetable salad and a dessert roll (like sushi roll but with dessert ingredients instead of rice and fish). The solyanka was awesome, especially with a dollop of sour cream mixed into it. The stroganoff was pretty good, although the mushrooms were kind of overpowering everything. The mashed potatoes were delicious and garnished with dill, which only made them better because I love fresh dill. Dried dill is OK, but fresh is just awesome. The salad was field greens and chopped tomatoes and red peppers, along with marinated black olives and chunks of feta cheese. I didn't immediately realize that some of the red bits were pepper and not tomato, so that was a nice surprise. The dessert roll, though! That was unique enough to have made the visit to the dubious restaurant completely worth it. It was chunks of kiwi and banana, and creme fraiche, wrapped in a blini and drizzled with caramel sauce. Delicious and presented in a really interesting way to boot.

I spent the rest of the week plugging away at my term paper, taking breaks to walk around the city for a bit and enjoy the fabulous weather. I resolved not to sleep until the paper was done on Wednesday, got a goodly amount of work done on it and only intended to take a short nap at around 5:30 AM Thursday. A 20-minute nap turned into 7 hours of sleep, which I guess I needed anyway, but that was still six and a half hours of work time that I lost. I finished the paper Friday morning at 6:30, emailing it to Josh and promptly going to sleep until about 3 in the afternoon. I didn't know what to do with myself the rest of the day - I had no further responsibilities before it was time to leave. Apparently, my roommates felt the same way, because we decided to go over to Dumskaya (a short street with a series of bars and clubs) that night and have some fun. We stopped at a produkty and picked up beer for the walk over, then ended up going to Club Belgrad and spending a couple hours shouting and dancing and drinking there. We left and got shawarma around 3 AM, stopping to take some picturesque photos on the bridge over the Fontanka at about 3:30. Some of these are on Facebook, and the sky behind us looks like the sun is setting. It's actually rising. Staying out until the sun comes up is much easier in May than it is in March, for those who remember my post about St. Patrick's Day.

Over the weekend, suddenly faced with a ton of truly free time, I did a bit of city exploration; once, I just started walking, then about an hour later I realized I had no idea where I was. I had started taking random turns without really noting landmarks and got disoriented; even the shopfronts that I had been using as references were unreliable, because all of the prominent ones had other, basically-identical franchises within a few blocks of each other. I did eventually find my way back to Nevsky, and from there was able to find my way home. Also over the weekend, Corinne and I went over to Sadovaya to this rinok where I was able to get another suitcase; the red one escaped burial, though, because Corinne needed one. I bought a really snazzy brown/purple/yellow camo number, for 1800p (~$50), a far cry from the 4k (~$130) I had seen similar, less-cool-looking bags on sale for in luggage stores. I was all packed and ready to go by Sunday evening, for the most part; Monday was mostly spent cleaning and waiting.

Finally, 3:30 AM rolled around on Tuesday morning, and my phone rang for the last time. The guy the university hired to come take me to the airport had arrived. I put my laptop in my backpack, turned off my phone, and headed downstairs. The guy helped me load my stuff into his car, I verified that he was taking me to the correct airport, and we were on our way. When we got there I thanked him, wished him a good night and entered Pulkovo, the first of five airports I would have to navigate.

I started talking to a nice Canadian man (redundant statement, I know) leaving to renew his visa, which of course has to be done in Canada, because he ended up behind me at the check-in counter. We talked for a while, killing time before the flight; he'd been in Russia for a number of years, and was in the process of gaining residency. He had his four-year-old daughter with him, who was going to visit family. She was adorable and he was interesting to talk to; I actually ended up sitting in the row in front of him on the flight to Frankfurt. That was about three hours, and we got breakfast, which was unexpected but not unwelcome. There was an entree of what I'm told was a quiche, though it tasted more like quiche-flavored jello. There were also a couple of unimpressive rolls, butter and peach jam, and a juice box! I don't care if I am 20 years old, I love juice boxes. We arrived around 8:30 local time, and I was through passport control and customs and at my gate in about fifteen minutes. I bought a croissant, a latte and a cup of pineapple at a little cafe near the gate, because I knew I wouldn't be fed again until I was over the Atlantic. I had some time to get online and check my email while waiting for the plane, but soon enough it was time to go; we were in the air and en route to Belgium by quarter to 10, and on the ground about an hour later. Weather conditions in Brussels were overcast, so the plane had to circle for about 20 minutes before it was able to land. I made my connection, but I didn't have any real downtime, and I had to check in at the United transfer counter to ensure I would be able to pick up my luggage and get proper boarding passes. This flight was operated by United, not Lufthansa; I think I liked the Lufthansa flight better. The attendants on this flight were less attentive and just seemed less enthusiastic about their jobs.

By the time I got on the plane, there were no overhead bins near my seat to put my rolling bag in, but a nice older gentlemen a few rows back helped me put it in a bin back there. I passed this flight watching a couple of movies (Sherlock Holmes and about half of The Dark Knight) and listening to music; because we were going east to west, the trip was a bit faster (going against the rotation of the Earth) - about 7 and a quarter hours, to my first trans-Atlantic trip's 8. We got lunch (chicken and rice with an inedible salad, a roll, and a soggy apricot crumb cake) and a snack (a little ham and cheese sandwich, some chips and a Kit Kat bar--I kept this for later). When we landed, the gentleman from earlier got my suitcase down and brought it up to me. I thanked him and headed for the exit; we were shuttled from the tarmac to Passport Control.

I didn't like the American passport control office. Something about the way it was set up just felt so insincere and forced; the more austere decor of the Russian office was at least genuine. Also, I had forgotten how much American airports coddle travelers in comparison to airports in Europe and Russia. Instead of being treated like, you know, an adult, and left to figure things out on my own (like which line to stand in at passport control), there were omnipresent airport employees whose sole job appeared to be to give unnecessary directions and guidance to guests. There was a lady in the security area whose job could be done by a sign, or maybe a nice little video like in Frankfurt or Brussels, informing passengers of what articles needed to be placed in the bin. Instead, it would appear that the Washington, D.C. airport prefers to take the "unbelievably overbearing" approach to literally every facet of the air travel experience. After I got through passport/customs/security control, I emerged into a room with a Departures board and started looking for my flight, when I was accosted by an old man who was hired as one of the aforementioned overbearing superfluous employees. Not only could his job have been done by a sign, it was, and he was standing right in front of it. He pestered me into telling him what information I was looking for, then told me my gate number and how to find it just as I read it myself on the alphabetized departures board directly behind him. IAD could not possibly make it any easier to find your flight and they still feel they need people there to deliver that information. I didn't even need him to tell me how to find gate D26. There are large, brightly-colored signs leading the way every fifteen feet. At least the man has a job, I suppose, no matter how completely pointless and unnecessary. The announcements about keeping track of your bags and not accepting packages from strangers that played every five minutes are also not common at airports outside the US.

I was happy to leave DC for a multitude of reasons. Not only did it mean getting away from an airport that seemed to think it was everyone's mother, but it also meant that I would finally be going home, and I didn't have to go through all of the security BS at Orlando, because it was a domestic flight. I would be able to step off the plane, get my checked luggage, and go home, with no intermediate steps. Well, I did have to stop and hug my family, and then eat dinner at Sonny's, but those were intermediate steps that I was fine with. :)

I had started craving BBQ pork a few days before leaving, so I did some Googling and discovered there was a Sonny's just two miles from the airport, so it was decided that we would go there for dinner after I arrived. I got one of their combo plates, with ribs, pulled pork, and sliced ham, with corn and a sweet potato, and ate most of it. I hadn't eaten for about six hours at that point, and BBQ is delicious.

When I got home, I decided to weigh myself just for fun. I knew I'd lost some weight in Russia, but I wasn't sure how much, and it turns out I had severely underestimated: I lost about 15 lbs over the past 15 weeks, despite my steady diet of pasta and beer. Needless to say, I was basically thrilled. So, Tuesday was basically the best day. I made it home safe, got a good grade on my final paper for my culture class (97%!), AND lost 15 lbs since the last time I weighed myself! It was probably even more than that, really--I'm sure I gained a couple of pounds in my last few weeks, by virtue of spending basically all of my time in front of my laptop and eating stuff like a ton of gummy candy and ramen noodles at all hours. Whatever, I'm still happy with this, and readier than ever to kick things into high gear this summer.

Thus concludes my journey to the ~~center of the universe~~ opposite side of the world. I'm glad I did it, I had a lot of fun, I met some awesome people--but I'm glad to be home. I realize now that I was not in any way, shape, or form ready to do this when I left back in January, but to be fair, how do you prepare for something like this? Now I've got valuable information for next time, if there is a "next time." I'm not too sure there will be, but then again, I don't know what the future holds.

Thanks for reading my blog, everyone! I hope you liked it; I certainly enjoyed sharing my experiences with you.

Chapter the Eighth: Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 May 2012 18:36:00 +0000

It's a good thing this is the final part of Chapter the Eighth, because if I kept up with this title convention, things would get awfully silly, awfully quickly.

Anyway, right. Moscow, Day Three. As previously mentioned, all we had formally scheduled for the day was a tour in the afternoon, so Brenda and I took the day to explore solo. She's an early riser, and my knees (both of them now!) were stiff and sore after spending the vast majority of the previous two days on my feet, so I was happy for the extra hour or so of sleep. She left me a note with the name of the metro station we were meeting Josh at and went off to explore, while I napped blissfully.

After I showered and such, I grabbed my purse and decided to make a quick jaunt down to the Citibank at the end of the street where the hostel was, because (1) I was out of cash and (2) I wanted to rent a locker to store my stuff for the day. We needed to be checked out of the hostel by 11, so I needed a safe place to store my backpack full of highly rare and valuable sweat-soaked T-shirts and a 2-liter bottle of flat, discount sparkling water with lemon juice. To rent a locker required a security deposit of 500p, so I ran to the ATM to withdraw money for that as well as breakfast. I hadn't yet decided where I was going to eat that morning, and even in a very modern and metropolitan city center like Moscow, not all establishments accept plastic. When I got back to the hostel, the guy checked but none of the 8 (! seriously, that's it?) lockers were currently available, so I had to put my stuff in the luggage closet and hope for the best. Thankfully there was a space behind some other, more promising-looking luggage, so if someone did happen to steal anything from the closet they wouldn't see my stuff first.

I headed out and decided to try this cafe near the hostel for breakfast, called Coffee Mania. They offered coffee prepared dozens of ways, as well as a variety of food, but it was all really expensive (like everything else in Moscow), so I settled for the cheapest breakfast combo I could find: an apple blini and a cup of milk. It was actually pretty good; I have to say, I like how Russians do apple filling. Instead of big chunks of mushy roast apple coated in cinnamon-sugar syrup, the apple is sliced very thinly and presented on its own, without any additional sauce, inside the pirog or the blini or whatever it's filling. Maybe with a bit of cinnamon or a touch of honey. This breakfast also marks the first time I think I've ever had whole milk--I grew up drinking 2%, then recently switched to skim, and have bought mostly 0-1% milk since I've been in Russia. It was bizarre! I had no idea milk could taste so...oily.

After that, I decided I wanted to check out ГУМ (pronounced GOOM), a giant mall that generally caters to foreign tourists on Red Square that is directly opposite Lenin's mausoleum (oh the ironies). In a rare moment of not giving a [swear word], I just kind of set off from Coffee Mania in the general direction of Red Square; I knew roughly where it was and knew that the direction I was headed made it basically impossible to miss. I ended up in the gardens behind the Kremlin, recognizing where I was when I saw the Sbarro we ate at with Mikhail the previous day. I was actually pretty proud of my orienteering on Sunday; most of the time I can't navigate my way out of a paper bag. The place was crawling with tourists, of course, but it was nice getting to see a bit more of the grounds--there were some really impressive-looking fountains that we hadn't seen (or I had been too tired to notice) the day before.

Once I had determined where I was, the next step was determining how to get to the other side of the Kremlin; that is, how to get to Red Square. The Kremlin is basically a giant museum with a government building inside it, so every entrance is guarded and requires a ticket to get in. So, I basically had no choice but to walk around it. Logically, if I kept the red stone wall to my left and followed the sidewalk, I would eventually come to the square; and, indeed, this is what happened. There was still some scaffolding up around a couple of entrances to ГУМ, as they were still taking down the Victory Day decorations. I slipped in through a cafe, and was suddenly very uncomfortable.

ГУМ was nearly empty. I've played too many zombie games to ever be fully at-ease in even a bustling mall ever again (the use of the zombie as a metaphor for rampant consumerism makes malls a popular choice of setting for this genre). The main building had 3 principal sections, called lines, shaped like long, skinny ovals. Each line had 3 floors, and there were sections of some of the lines that had zero shop fronts, which is sad enough on its own. There was still plenty to see in the parts with active businesses, though, including a sprawling restaurant with four different distinct sections. I never ate there; the food didn't look too great, particularly for the prices they were charging. The decor was very colorful, though, and I think there was a baked potato bar somewhere in the complex? I never found it, anyway. I did buy an ice cream cone and a cherry-flavored Italian soda from a couple of vendors around the fountain in the mall before I left, though, and that was quite nice. I finished my beverage sitting on the curb and observing people in Red Square until it was time to head to the metro.

When I got to Taganskaya, where we were meeting Josh, I grabbed a seat on the first bench I came across with a space big enough for me on it. I wasn't sure how much walking this tour would involve and I wanted to give my feet and knees a chance to heal a little bit. I saw Brenda about 50 feet away, but she never noticed me, somehow; I decided to keep my seat and stay put, and see which one of us Josh noticed first. (Answer: Me, haha.) We were joined shortly by Rich, and Josh led us to the site of our tour: a bunker built by Stalin circa WWII, which has become a legitimate tourist attraction in present-day Moscow. He basically dropped the three of us off there, leaving us in the capable hands of Natasha, our tour guide. The tour was in English, as the tour group was comprised mainly of Brits and Aussies. Some of them were in Moscow working for their respective embassies, as we later found out while chatting after the tour. But I'll get to that.

The tour began by descending 36 flights of stairs, down a 60-meter vertical shaft. Even in the entrance corridor the air was already damp and musty, and it only became more so the deeper we ventured. A handful of women kept up with the tour guide, who must have, I don't know, teleported down there or something--she was fast. I was a few seconds behind them and a minute or two ahead of everyone else, walking down the endless switchbacking staircase alone. Everyone eventually caught up and Natasha led us into this little movie theater, where we watched a movie about the nuclear arms race which boiled down to "America is a prick, the USSR had a moral obligation to develop nuclear weapons." Then we moved on into a massive cylindrical room. 45 feet from wall to wall, the whole thing made of reinforced steel and concrete, probably 150 feet long. In this room, there was a map of the world and two control panels, as well as a bunch of models of Soviet spy planes, warheads and ICBMs. Natasha called up two volunteers, explained their roles, and then ran a simulation of the USSR blowing up America. (Hopefully that sentence doesn't get me put on any watch-lists.) The little movie that played on a screen above the control panels was set to Lux Aeterna (the Requiem for a Dream theme), which was basically the best use of that piece of music I think I have ever experienced.

The next room was full of communications equipment; the bunker's layout consists of 4 chambers, mostly used for communications with the surface. This room had several typewriters, a working (in that it still made noise if you pressed it) telegraph key, and an old telephone switchboard (which also still works and which Natasha called up another volunteer to demonstrate). There were also officers' coats people could put on to get a photo behind an official-looking desk, as well as hazmat jackets and gas masks, and AK-47s, because if you're going to tour a Soviet bunker, there have to be Kalashnikovs somewhere. This was a very hands-on exhibit - a welcome change from the museums with all the exhibits behind glass. We had about 10-15 minutes to play with stuff before moving on.

The next room we went to had actually been converted into a restaurant, and I wish I could have had the time and/or money to experience it. The group stopped for a bathroom break here; I was fine, but I did want to sit down, and I saw something that appeared to be a couch on the way down to the floor of the chamber. Now, let me preface the following with this. Lots of Russians smoke, and there are no apparent laws about smoking indoors in this country. And remember, we tourists are now 60 meters underground. Whereas a comparable American establishment would basically tell smokers to "deal with it," in Russia, the management of Bunker 42 has set up a smoking lounge in the chamber. 3 couches, made of old rail carts (the kind miners might use to haul coal--the bunker was built at the same depth as the metro and indeed included a couple of quick-escape rail tracks connecting the tunnels with the nearest metro station) with one wall removed, and trash cans for ashtrays. It was nice to sit for a while, at least, but I don't think I'll ever see such a unique smoking lounge again.

After that, we filed up into another tunnel, where Natasha suddenly stopped. After a few minutes, giving the whole group time to negotiate the stairs involved at this point, the lights suddenly shut off and a klaxon started blaring. A cloud of steam formed further down the hall, and a male voice made an announcement in Russian. After some emergency lights turned on, Natasha explained what he had said: there had been a nuclear attack, and everything on the surface was destroyed. Radiation levels were dangerously high, please stay in the bunker. Of course, it was just a drill, but if another tourist hadn't said "Is this the part where the lights go out?" I'm sure I would've jumped three feet in the air. Spoilers aren't fun for anyone, usually, but I guess in this case it worked out for the best.

Finally, we made our way through one final chamber. This one had not been restored and converted to a restaurant or an exhibit, and apparently someone had been playing with airsoft pistols down there. There were little plastic pellets everywhere, as well as a lot of oil barrels and a couple of plywood walls with slits in them to fire through. I don't know if it was a military exercise or just some bored teenagers or what, but I thought it was funny, anyway. We came out of that room and entered the first tunnel again, and started our ascent. There was an elevator, which Brenda and I decided to wait for, rather than walk back up; interestingly, while waiting for the lift, a few of the women around us noted that all of the men on the tour had decided to take the stairs. Guess they felt it would be more macho, or something. Brenda and I went up with the final group, consisting of two Australian ladies working for the embassy in Moscow, us, and Natasha. The ride up (plus the wait) took longer than it would have to simply walk, but neither of us really felt like ascending all those stairs. When we reached the top, we found Rich, chatting with this girl that had been part of the nuclear attack simulation. She was also working for the Australian embassy, and the four of us decided to go get some dinner together.

We went to this French restaurant just down the street, where the menu was available only in French and Russian. Between the four of us we had a reasonable command of both of those languages, so no one accidentally ordered anything horrific, but it was still a bit of an adventure. We got a bit of wine, and I settled on a croque monsieur (because it was the only menu item that I was certain didn't contain spooky organ meats or whole fetal birds) and a side of grilled vegetables with pesto. Among those vegetables was half a tomato, which I didn't eat, and--brace yourselves, family--a couple of mushrooms, which I ate. I decided to try them and if they had the usual effect of being squeaky, I would leave them or offer them to my friends. Somehow, they had been cooked such that they didn't squeak at all! The generous coating of pesto didn't hurt, either. And, as a bonus, the restaurant covered the tables with paper (for easy clean-up) and provided a cup of pencils for diners to doodle. I drew a little dancing person with the caption "I dance, all day, every day!"

It was a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, with good food, good wine, and good conversation. Rich and I had a spirited debate (fueled in part by generous quantities of wine) about the necessity of formal, i.e. classroom, education; he contends that anything you could learn in lecture could be learned on your own time with a book or the Internet or simply by experiencing the world, but I believe that stance discounts the value of classroom discussion. In today's world, you don't find erudite people discussing science, literature, art, and philosophy in bars or similar social settings (usually)--you find them on college campuses, or at the very least, more often in bars in college towns. Is that framework strictly necessary? No, but that's just where that sort of thing happens now.

After our linner, Brenda and I went back to Red Square; she wanted to look around ГУМ, and I wanted to explore a bit more. I tried to visit St. Basil's, but I was too late--it closes at 6 PM and I got there at something like 6:05 or 6:10. Sad. So I explored ГУМ some more, too. I actually ran into Brenda in one of the stores, but apparently I am a ninja and I disappeared before she could ask about getting dinner someplace. I wouldn't have been hungry again at that point yet, anyway, though. I wandered around a bit longer before deciding to go and collect my belongings from the hostel around 9, planning to just go on ahead to the train station and get a bite to eat there. There were cafes and snack bars in the waiting area there, after all. Our train left at 11:43, and I decided I'd much rather be at the station, cooling my heels, than rushing to get there. Turns out that was a good idea; see, the metro stop that is closest to the station dumps you out literally behind the Leningradskaya train depot...which is directly next to two other train stations. One of them goes principally south/east (as opposed to Leningradskaya, which goes principally north/west) and the other is a suburban commuter train. And, of course, as you are behind all of these buildings, there is precious little signage indicating which is which.

I eventually found Leningradskaya and made my way into the waiting area, where I purchased a mediocre sandwich and found a seat in view of the information board. A gentleman sat down next to me, offered me gum, and tried to talk to me; I admit I could probably have used the impromptu Russian practice, but I was really tired and didn't want to think that much. Thankfully, Brenda showed up at the station not too long after that, and it gave me the perfect excuse to stop talking to him. We walked around a bit to kill time; Brenda bought herself some fruity lady-beer to help her sleep on the train, and then we hung around by the door to our car so when they started boarding we'd be near the head of the line. There was a big group of Chinese tourists in our wagon this go-round; last time it had been French and German. We shared our cabin with one other Russian girl. The night passed uneventfully to the best of my knowledge, which I guess means I got a decent amount of sleep on the train; Renee specifically scheduled our train rides such that we wouldn't have to miss more than one class going on this trip, but I had no intention of going to class on Monday from the beginning. Good thing, too, because I had only enough energy left to make it back to the apartment, change into PJs and collapse into bed for another four hours. An alarm went off around 9 AM reminding me to go to the university and order transcripts; I decided I'd do that tomorrow, because it's not like it would be ready before I left, anyway. I spent the rest of Monday resting and recovering and hoping my legs would stop hurting (spoiler: they did, I'm fine now).

Chapter the Eighth: Moscow! Moscow!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:25:00 +0000

Moscow adventures, part two!

The second day, Brenda got me up bright and early, so there would be hot water available for the showers we so desperately needed. It may have been the best shower of my life - I was a hot mess by the time we got back to the hostel the night before (after realizing we had no idea when the curfew was, and practically running across town to get back as quickly as possible in the event that the curfew was something like 11:00 or 11:30 - turns out there isn't one, but we didn't know that). Sweaty and tired, with the beginnings of a sunburn on my face and blisters on my feet.

After grabbing some breakfast at McDonald's, because it was close by and cheap, we hit the metro and decided to explore the circle line. The day previous, Josh had recommended riding that line and getting off to look at the stations - several of them are very pretty, but most of the pretty ones are on that line, and given the limited timeframe we had to explore, that was our best bet to see the good ones. I linked to a couple of my favorites in the previous post. My knee, for some reason, was bothering me for most of the day Saturday, and as I mentioned before I didn't like standing on the metro anyway, so we eventually figured out that the last car or two on most trains usually had a few seats open. If we had had a bit more time and I had been in less pain, we would have also checked out the transfers - all of the stations on the circle line have transfers to other lines, which are I'm sure just as lavishly decorated, making the Moscow metro system considerably more efficient than Petersburg's, particularly if you're coming from the suburbs. But we didn't, and I wasn't, so we couldn't.

We were meeting someone for a tour of the Kremlin, as well as Novodevichy monastery and cemetery, that morning at 11:15; Brenda and I decided, figuring this tour would probably take up most of the day, to find a cafe or something outside the metro station where we would be meeting the guide and grab a coffee and a snack to tide us over until next we would be able to eat. We went to a place called Schokoladnitsa and got cappucinos and fruit cups. Let me tell you, few things feel fancier than eating a fruit salad (with mint garnish!) out of a martini glass with an iced tea spoon. It was a really good fruit salad, too - slices of strawberry, banana, pineapple, orange and grapefruit, which surprised me. I guess I was expecting something like what passes for fruit salad at Stetson, which is basically "cantaloupe and honeydew with the occasional strawberry and couple of grapes, maybe a blueberry or pineapple chunk if we have it, raspberries if we have some left over from a catering event." But, then, that's all I've had in terms of fruit cups for the past three years, so yeah.

We met our tour guide and were joined at the last minute by this guy Rich, who had been at the seminar the previous evening. The tour guide was a nice older gentleman named Mikhail. Rich started learning Russian to do translation work for the Air Force; he also speaks Farsi (Persian, the language they speak in Iran). He's currently aiming for medical school now. It's kind of intimidating, being surrounded by people so much older than me who seem to have a better handle on things than I do. They probably don't, nobody does, but it's still hard not to feel like I'm just spinning my wheels because my goals aren't nearly as clearly-defined as those of the people around me. Being younger than everyone by probably at least five years doesn't help, either; I can't even begin to compete with that. But anyway.

Mikhail took us to the Kremlin and we toured the Armory, which is much more than just arms and armor. There was a room containing spears and swords and firearms as well as the armor worn by Russian soldiers (first chainmail, later plate armor) as well as saddles and other horse accoutrements. There was also an exhibit of clothing, consisting mostly of clergy robes and a few things belonging to old czars and their wives. And a few things of Catherine the Great's. There were also some thrones, and crowns, and a room full of silver and gold dinnerware of various forms and functions, all given as ambassador gifts. And, of course, Faberge eggs. Lots of shinies! :3 The Kremlin was quite busy that day; there were many tourists in town, because summer is approaching and it's basically a holiday weekend, so our little group had to dodge much larger groups of Russian schoolchildren and foreign tourists all day, especially when we moved to Cathedral Square.

This is a place in the Kremlin surrounded on all sides by churches. In the Czarist era, this was where coronations took place; this is also where all of the czars are buried, specifically in the Cathedral of the Archangel. (Russian emperors are buried in St. Petersburg, because there wasn't an empire to be emperor of before Peter the Great.) That cathedral is a single large room, a necropolis full of graves of czars including Ivan the Terrible, who considered himself so important that he is actually buried behind the icon stand, figuring that would put him at the head of the line to get into Paradise. The walls are also covered in icons, paintings of canonized patriarchs and saints, some of whom are buried there. Among those buried in the Cathedral of the Archangel is the Czarevich Dmitry Ivanovich, "illegitimate" son of Ivan the Terrible (Dmitry was a product of Ivan's fifth or seventh marriage--records are fuzzy--and canon law only recognizes the validity of the first three marriages). The czarevich died of a stab wound under mysterious circumstances after Boris Godunov, rightful heir to the Russian throne after the death of Ivan IV, assumed power. The official story is that he was playing with a knife and had an epileptic seizure, managing to stab himself in the neck by accident. Uh-huh, that sounds plausible. But anyway, Dmitry is buried in the Cathedral of the Archangel, and was canonized after several "false Dmitrys" appeared years later to challenge Boris Godunov's claim to the throne.

We left Cathedral Square and saw the Czar Bell and the Czar Cannon, just behind the Kremlin proper. The Czar Bell weighs more than 200 tons, and was never rung. The wooden derrick that was supposed to lift the bell out of the casting pit caught fire when molten metal started leaking, and in the mad dash to put out the fire with cold water, the sudden temperature change shocked the bronze and a chunk weighing 11 tons broke off. The chunk is as tall as I am and just as wide, and the bell is about 16 inches thick. The bell and chunk are on display, as well as the massive clapper, laid under the stone platform that the bell now sits on. There are portraits on the bell that were never finished; you can see faces but the rest of the detail is obscured. The Czar Cannon is an equally impractically-huge work of bronze, a cannon almost 15 feet long and nearly two feet wide. It was never actually used in combat (though there is evidence that it was fired at least once), but it did intimidate the hell out of the Mongols when they saw it.

After that, we decided to break for lunch, to everyone's relief. I was glad I wasn't the only one tired and hungry already; my knee was still bothering me, though, so I would have been happy just to sit down for a while, food or no food. We went to Sbarro, because that was quicker than going to a proper restaurant. I got a tasty stuffed veggie pizza, some kind of salad and some green beans, and it was delicious. Over lunch we somehow started talking about serial killers and psychology. I swear, the most interesting conversations happen when Rich is around.

After that, we headed to the metro and went out to Novodevichy monastery and cemetery. This is the oldest still-functioning convent in the world, and it has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. It's got several pretty church buildings and a lovely bell tower, and we happened to be there when they started ringing the bells, which was cool to hear. Several ladies from the Russian royal families who could not or did not bear children were housed at the Novodevichy convent, including Sofia Alekseyevna and Eudoxia Lopukhina, sister and wife (respectively) of Peter the Great, and Irina Godunova, wife of Feodor I and sister of the earlier-mentioned Boris Godunov. During the Soviet era, the convent was turned into a museum and apartments, then became a theological institute, and then it was restored to a working convent in 1994, and it continues to be so.

The monastery also has a cemetery on the grounds, where many important figures of Russian art, politics, literature and theatre are buried, including Yeltsin, Khrushchev, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Mayakovsky, and hundreds of others. Apparently Mikhail's father is also buried there, I think, but we didn't see his gravesite and I don't remember exactly why he was buried there. I think he was a political figure of minor importance; I was tired and in pain and not listening much at that point in the tour. It was really cool seeing the Soviet-era graves; obviously they're not marked with crosses, so there was a bit more room for creativity. There are a lot of busts, and some of the graves of more important people--Yeltsin in particular comes to mind--are particularly unorthodox (pun totally intended). Yeltsin's grave is a massive granite sculpture that looks like a Russian flag, all red and blue and white. There was a big group of Chinese tourists checking out Khrushchev's grave the first time we came to it, so we came back later. By that time I just really wanted to go to the hostel and sleep for a while, which is what I did once we got back to the metro.

I took the key from Brenda and headed home by myself, and when I got there I found the door unlocked (!) and a frazzled-looking girl pacing about through the door on her phone. I was...less than courteous to her, because I was also not in the greatest of moods, being sunburnt and blistered and tired with a sore knee for no discernible reason, which had me quite concerned. We reconciled later; she felt better after a shower, and I after a nap, and we got along famously for the day or so we had left to share that space. Her name was Monique. She's from Holland, and has been teaching English in Thailand for five years. She came to Moscow via the Trans-Siberian Railway (and had thus spent 3 days on a train - no decent sleep, no shower), was on her way to Petersburg next (in fact, I believe she's staying in a hostel not too far from me, so maybe I'll run into her this week), and then she's going home for the first time in about three years.

We all kind of did our own thing that night; Brenda wandered around the city and specifically Red Square when it was all lit up for the night. While Monique was taking a shower, after I decided I had napped enough, I picked up Brenda's city guide to see what it recommended for restaurants. One place, called Pancho Villa, caught my eye. I decided to see how Muscovites did Mexican food. (The answer is "with a lot of onions and no discernible spice.") I ended up spending about 800p all told for the experience (150p cover because they had a live band + 650p for my enchiladas and frozen margarita), and it was worth it. I mean, I figured this would probably be the last time I would find myself in Moscow, so why not? A comparable establishment in the US would probably have come out to about the same (~$25). Anyone expecting a high-larious story about Emily and tequila is about to be disappointed; the most exciting thing I did after consuming my adult beverage was to stare down a lady on the metro on the way back, who gave me a look as I step/tripped over her bags to get to a seat. That's still pretty major, though - I don't normally stare at people on the metro, even though that's basically normal here. Staring isn't as rude in Russia as it is in America.

Anyway, I made it back to the hostel safe and sound after my dinnerventure. I drank some water and went to bed; Brenda and I had decided to continue doing our own thing on Sunday. All we had planned that day was a tour of a Cold War bunker, which was actually pretty cool, but I'll write about all of that in my next post.

Chapter the Eighth: Moscow!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:26:00 +0000

About twelve hours ago, I returned to my apartment after a 3-day whirlwind visit in Russia's sprawling metropolis of a capital city. It was 72 hours of walking, walking, eating, more walking, and sleeping, sometimes on a train. And it was great. I'm going to split the chronicle of my Moscow adventure over several posts, because we managed to cram so much into 3 days that otherwise this will reach novel length in record time. Note: All linked photos are just pulled off of Google Images, I didn't take them.

Before I begin relating my adventures, it bears mentioning that I almost didn't go at all; I asked Brenda to print my train tickets a couple weeks ago, and then proceeded to stay home working on this term paper and not go to class at all during that timeframe. It was by sheer luck that she grabbed the tickets she printed for me when she left her homestay; she was already down on the platform when I called her, around 10:30 Thursday night, so she had to run to the entrance while I ran to the station and we met up there. Luckily I didn't need to show my tickets to the security guy at the exit to the platform, but still, better safe than detained and unable to communicate with law enforcement. Presently we boarded the train, which went mercifully smoothly.

I had never been on a train like this before. Sure, we took the commuter train in Riga to the seaside, but that's not really the same thing. We were in a 4-person cabin, and apparently this was the most deluxe train Brenda had ever been on because they provided complimentary water and apples (all of which we took when getting off the next morning in Moscow, because the two gentlemen sharing our compartment didn't seem to want them). Shortly after we left the station, we went to bed, as it was after midnight already; I got the top bunk because I'm just lucky that way I suppose. It was kind of an adventure climbing up the tiny ladder - 3 steps no more than six inches wide, the bottom step is about 14 inches above the floor. I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to clamber up there 30 pounds ago, so that was kind of a self-esteem boost, that I was able to get up there at all. The bunk itself was about 18 inches wide - not much room for someone who has a tendency to splay out in her sleep. I managed to get a little sleep, though, and somehow made it through the day.

We arrived at about 8:30, and then I got to play the "figure out where you are by the landmarks around you" game with our SRAS contact, an intern named Eugenia. She's from Singapore but she studies at a US university that I don't recall the name of at this time. She took us to the metro, which was an adventure in itself, and then to our hostel--about 30 minutes all told. After the ordeal of checking in (which I'll get to in a minute), we had to almost literally fly back to the metro and then navigate the complex interchanges to meet with Josh, the SRAS director, by ourselves. We had run into a bit of a delay and Eugenia had an exam she needed to get to, so she just told us which metro station to go to and left us to find it on our own.

The Moscow metropolitan subway system is a sight to behold. Here is a map. It looks like a mutant octopus or some other Lovecraftian horror of one kind or another. Some of the stations are pretty, particularly on the circle line, but looking at the map is kind of overwhelming, because there are something like 300 stations and counting. It's actually easier to navigate than the Petersburg metro, though, to a certain degree. See, in Petersburg, the metro platforms are coded according to the station at the end of the line. For instance, the green line that I usually take has a station at one end called Primorskaya, and the station at the other end is called Rybatskaya, so the train heading in one direction is marked with a sign that says "Primorskaya" and the other train is marked "Rybatskaya," regardless of which station you are actually at. In Moscow, each platform has a sign telling you all of the stations the train is going to from that station and in what order. It makes a lot more sense. There is also a sign on the wall opposite the platform, across the tracks, telling you the direction the train is traveling and listing the names of the stations on the other lines under the names of stations with transfers. Unfortunately, the Moscow subway operators apparently have a damn schedule to keep, because the ride is much bumpier and less forgiving than in Petersburg, so I hated having to stand. I still hate standing on the Petersburg metro, but that's less of an ordeal than the involuntary game of Falling On Strangers that standing on the Moscow metro is for those who aren't used to it.

Now, the hostel! We stayed at the A La Russe hotel and hostel, smack-dab in the middle of Moscow and just a couple blocks from the Kremlin. If this was the best hostel the SRAS has used, I shudder to think what the worse ones are like; however, Moscow also has a severe dearth of accommodation for tourists, so there's no real incentive to provide an excellent customer experience. The place wasn't terribly clean, the computer was older than I am, they only had 8 lockers available to rent near the front door (as opposed to the locking cubbies in the rooms that all of the Baltic hostels we stayed in had), and apparently they only had one key to each room. That said, they still had toilets, hot water, and provided linens, so I can't complain too much. (Who am I kidding? Yes I can.) The guy who checked us in was the surliest man Eugenia had ever seen in Moscow, and he didn't seem to understand that the woman who had made the reservation was not actually present. He did warm up to us later, though. Brenda and I also never thought to inquire about a curfew, and we realized this around 10:30 the first night. Turns out there isn't one, thankfully, but that was one of only a handful of redeeming qualities about the place.

Anyway. Friday morning, Brenda and I met Josh, the SRAS director, for a walking tour of Moscow and an informative lesson about recent Russian history and politics. We met at a McDonald's and Josh allowed us to buy some food before we started walking; I devoured my Макчикен (McChicken) in short order, and Brenda did the same with her Роял Бургер (Quarter-Pounder, apparently known as a Royale everywhere outside of America), and soon enough we were trekking all over the city. We saw the bench of reconciliation, which sits at one end of a bridge with six trees covered in locks on it. Bridges hold a special place in Russian mythology; according to custom, if you lose contact with the earth, then evil spirits can get you. Crossing a bridge, then, is a dangerous undertaking, especially when the practice coincides with the arrival of another "crossing" - crossing into a new day (i.e., at midnight), or into a new stage of life (e.g., on one's wedding day). So, by Russian tradition, among the worst possible circumstances for a young woman to be in is to be a bride, standing on a bridge, at midnight - that was basically certain doom. If the route to the chapel required crossing a bridge, it was customary for the groom to pick up and carry his bride across the bridge as quickly as possible, keeping her close to him so he could protect her from the evil spirits waiting to ravage her. Now that those beliefs have passed into the realm of fairy tales rather than governing principles for everyday life, people actively seek bridges on the path to the chapel on their wedding day, and carrying the bride across a bridge is basically analogous to the Western custom of carrying the bride over the threshold (into the honeymoon suite, into the newlyweds' home, whatever). Most young grooms opt for a short, pedestrian bridge like the one in the photo, but occasionally you'll see a man decide to carry his bride over one of the larger bridges also meant for cars, to prove to everyone how strong and manly he is.

The custom of affixing a lock to a bridge and tossing the key into the water below as an expression of eternal love has existed in one form or another probably since all of those things have existed, but the ritual exploded in popularity following the Russian publication of the novel I Want You by Federico Moccia. Now, so many couples attach a lock to one of those trees each year, that the city has to remove the branches and attach new ones every six months or so. The trees were built in the first place because the weight of the thousands of locks affixed to the bridge's railings was threatening to break the structure. Unfortunately, it seems the photo I linked is too old to show an apparently-recent addition to one of the lock trees; one couple, deciding that a chintzy heart-shaped lock just didn't symbolize the strength and endurance of their commitment to one another, opted instead to attach a massive padlock the size of a small briefcase to one of the trees. When I saw it I pointed it out and said "Tanya and Pavel must be really serious," and many laughs were had.

We also walked through a couple of parks, and one of them contained an interesting art installation by artist Mikhail Chemyakin. It was unveiled in 2001 and is called "Children are the Victims of Adult Vices." That is a link to some pictures. It depicts two children, a girl and a boy, wearing blindfolds, oblivious to the thirteen figures around them. The figures stand for the aforementioned "adult vices," implicitly vices brought on by capitalism, and they stand in a semi-circle. From left to right, the figures depict drug addiction (a man holding a needle and vial, with skulls and crossbones decorating his suit), prostitution (a frog-headed woman with hundreds of baby frogs all over her--historically, toads were a symbol of venereal disease and linked with the sex trade), greed (a man with a pig's head holding a bag of money), alcoholism (a fat bearded man sitting on a barrel and holding a flask and chalice, perhaps an image of the Roman god Bacchus), ignorance (a man with a donkey's head), irresponsible science (a figure in a robe with the hood drawn over their eyes, holding a marionette of a bizarre two-headed weasel thing in one hand and a scroll of alchemical symbols in the other, next to an archaic chemistry setup), indifference (a man standing with his back to the children, with a mask on the back of his head, his fingers in his ears, and a second pair of arms that are crossed), arms dealing (a man with a large nose and an assortment of guns), sadism (a man with a rhinoceros horn, posed to look like he might attack the children), "for those without memory" - i.e., "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it" (a medieval stockade with snakes crawling up the sides), child labor (a man with a bird's head gesturing for the children to enter his factory, which has child-size handprints on the side that appear to be pressing outward from inside), poverty (an emaciated woman with a hand extended in begging), and war (a mechanico-skeletal figure wearing a gas mask and holding a bomb with Mickey Mouse's head on it). The artist says that the images are meant as a warning and a reminder to protect future generations from these vices.

Later, we stopped in front of the Bolshoi Theater, which was being restored and only reopened this year, I believe. It's a miracle the building didn't crack in half or burn down before the restoration - not only had the foundation basically dissolved (having been constructed of bricks - Moscow is just as swampy as Petersburg in that regard, and the bricks had deteriorated a lot in the wet soil), but all the plumbing and electrical wiring had been retrofitted over the course of the 20th century. They had to gut the inside, redo the whole thing, and then lift the building up, tear out the old foundation, pour a new concrete one and then put the building back down on top of it. It looks really nice now; I wish we could've gone inside to see that, but sadly we did not.

Our tour ended on a small avenue lined with cafes, all of which had their summer patio dining areas set up. Josh bid us adieu and Brenda and I got some lunch at this cafeteria-style stolovaya whose name roughly translated to Trough. I got some tasty vinigret, a sour pickle, and a cup of delicious chicken soup; I couldn't help but think that the same price in Petersburg would have gotten me an entree, side, and possibly a cookie, in addition to the soup and salad I got. Yeah, Moscow was [swear word] expensive. I spent over 1500 rubles on the second day alone. That's about US$50 - objectively not much, but on a student budget, it's pretty significant.

Walking is free, so Brenda and I decided to do just that after lunch. We navigated our way to the old Arbat, which was a long avenue lined with souvenir shops, people selling artwork, and cafes, not unlike the Champs-Elysees in Paris (according to Brenda, as I obviously have never been). After that we decided to go to the nearest metro station and try to find Gorky Park, a recently-refurbished Soviet-era amusement park. We were successful; there were a couple of rides in the part we saw, as well as people riding bicycles and these neat four-wheel pedal devices, including a two-seater model. Apparently they make recumbent tandem bikes. There were also at least 3 different Subway kiosks - Subway is bizarrely popular in Russia for some reason. Brenda and I observed the cyclists cavorting around the fountain over a shared stick of cotton candy, which was more like fiberglass candy. It was much denser than any cotton candy we'd ever had and it got sharper as we got closer to the stick in the center.

Later on, we had a seminar about living and working in Russia at a Georgian restaurant. We met Eugenia and a few other students at a metro station and walked for about half a mile in the wrong direction before realizing our mistake and backtracking. We eventually met up with Josh and found the restaurant; when we got there, Brenda and I felt even more out of place - we were dressed in jeans and T-shirts and in need of showers. But the seminar was good and informative, and I'm glad I went. I don't think I'd ever want to actually live in Russia full-time, but it's good to know what resources exist if I should ever decide otherwise. Plus, hey, free Georgian food. It was really good, because Georgian cuisine is actually pleasantly spicy and flavorful. Russians seem to fear spice and flavor, so it was a welcome change of pace.

Chapter the Seventh: Because Whyyyy?!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:03:00 +0000

-deep breath-

Oh jeez. As I write this, I've been informed by my dearest younger sister that I've only got a mere 15 days remaining in St. Petersburg. Thursday night we leave for a 3-day/4-night excursion to Moscow, giving me (practically speaking) 11 days in which to do the following:

Write and turn in a 3000-word term paper on a topic I have now chosen, but which has not been approved (and I've decided to just write it because I don't have any more time to waste waiting on Josh and/or the Stetson email server).
Finish acquiring souvenirs for all the people I love so much.
Acquire a new suitcase to replace the red one. Drink to forget the deep, heartbroken sadness in the red suitcase's face when I told it it wouldn't be coming home with me.
Give red suitcase dignified burial (read: take it out to the dumpsters).
Consider washing my clothes, decide against it. They'll get cleaner if I just wait to do it when I get home.
Request transcripts and arrange a ride to the airport through the university. (this can wait until the week after next, thankfully.)
Pack ALL the things!
Return home in one piece with all of my belongings.

The term paper is going to be the most difficult thing. I just can't seem to get the paper-writing mojo flowing this semester, probably because this has been my least writing-intensive semester of my entire college career. I have about a third of an outline completed at the time of writing this post, though, so there is that at least. I don't know why I'm having so much trouble staying focused long enough to get much significant work done, but I know I just have to grit my teeth and make it happen, like I always do. And I will.

I'm writing a half observational study, half comparative literary analysis on the role of gender in social interaction in Russia vs. America, using my own observations as well as the plays Three Sisters and A Streetcar Named Desire for points of reference. We saw an updated performance of Three Sisters a few months ago, so much of my task is in recalling the salient moments from that play--all of which were, of course, improvised or changed by the troupe, and thus not in the original text. I chose Streetcar because its ideas about men and women and how they interact, particularly along the specific lines I chose to focus, are still relevant in the 21st century. Also, I felt I needed a piece of American drama as a reference to balance the use of Three Sisters. So, we'll see how that goes. This is definitely among the more interesting topics I've written about, I think, so I'm kind of excited to see the paper in its final form. I have this condition where I'm incapable of writing an academic paper with all the thoughts and ideas in the order they ought to be presented in the first go-round, so every paper-writing attempt is an adventure in verbal Tetris, rearranging sentences, words, and paragraphs into the order they ought to be as they exit my brain.

Also at some point before I leave, we're going to an amusement park! Corinne, Liz and I went to this park outside the city center for this bubble flash mob thing that was supposed to be happening today; the crowd was huge, we didn't have bubbles nor did we know where to buy them, and it cost 50p to get into the event as it was, so we changed our minds about it later. However, when we left the metro at our destination, the first thing we saw was a roller coaster. (Link to a Youtube video of some people riding one of the four coasters in the park; you can see a few of the other rides in the background, like another Wild-West-themed coaster, one of those spinning swing rides like the Zephyr at Kings Island, one of those bungee/slingshot rides).

This park where the bubble shenanigans were happening is right across the street from what looks like a Russian Kings Island, called Wonder Island. It's not a big place, but it's got a lot of really cool rides! Admission is free--you buy tickets for specific rides at ticket counters inside the park--so we went in and had a look around, just to see if it would be worth buying the 1500p "universal" wristbands that let you ride ALL the things. We decided it was absolutely worth it, but that we wanted to come back another day, earlier than 4 in the afternoon, and with a fourth person to avoid the awkward "one lone rider" problem that happens with groups of three. We haven't decided on a day, yet, but it will probably be next Thursday. Whenever we go, I will be sure to blog about it.

I'll also be sure to blog about our Moscow trip! We leave Thursday night very late, get into Moscow early Friday morning, have a whirlwind visit so packed with stuff to do that even our free time is scheduled, then leave late Sunday night and get in early Monday morning. Renee (superstar that she is) arranged our trains such that we wouldn't have to miss any class to travel, and she also got us hostel reservations. If the Moscow hostel is half as nice as any of the hostels we stayed in during our spring break trip, it's gonna be fun. I guess Thursday will be spent deciding which clothes are clean enough to bring on a 3-day trip. I should wash some of them, but doing laundry in this apartment is a two-day affair, minimum. Whatever, I have clean underwear and none of my outerwear is stained or anything, so I'm good.

As I'm writing this post, I'm sitting in the kitchen and looking out the window, remembering when the roof of the building behind ours was covered in snow so deep they had to have a guy up there shoveling it off. Earlier today I was walking down Zhukovskogo, crossing the last intersection before getting to my block, and I remembered the three-inch-thick layer of treacherous ice that covered it when I first arrived. I haven't touched my purple down coat in weeks (which is honestly something I'm thankful for). Most days when I wear my jacket it feels more like a formality, because unless it's windy, it's warm enough that I don't need it if I wear one of my sweaters. Still too cold for just a t-shirt, but too warm for a thermal top. I'll soon be back in Florida where every day is warm enough for a T-shirt. I remember the night I arrived; I remember all the fun I've had with my roommates, and although I'm pretty much ready to go home, I find myself sad at the prospect of leaving, because St. Petersburg is fun when it's not punishing humans for continuing to live there with snow and ice and rain and floods.

Chapter the Sixth: Lithuania

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:30:00 +0000

WEDNESDAY

When we arrived in Lithuania on Wednesday afternoon, it was snowing. Hard. And it wasn't even the good kind of snow, with fat clumps of soft snowflakes drifting haphazardly from above and landing gently on you. You know, the kind of snow that makes you feel like a kid again, makes you believe in the beauty of existen--yeah, okay, I can't keep that up. It was snowing and windy and awful, is the bottom line.

Corinne, being very smart, had the foresight to copy the directions from the bus station to each hostel, as well as sketch out a rough copy of the map provided by the website. The problem was that she did this with a cheap notebook she had bought for class and ended up not really using. Notebook paper is notoriously weak against water attacks, as is the water-based ink of the fine-tipped marker she'd used to write down the directions, so things got interesting very quickly once we exited the bus.

We ended up walking up and down a 50-meter stretch of sidewalk two or three times while Corinne tried to get her bearings, as her notebook paper grew increasingly soggy and the directions increasingly illegible. We soon figured out where we needed to turn, and would occasionally stop to check the directions again, using alcoves in buildings as well as our own bodies to shield the delicate map from the ravages of wind and weather. We did, gradually, slog through the icy onslaught across the city center, and managed to find the hostel in about half an hour.

This hostel, called Jimmy Jumps House, was pretty much like the others. We booked here specifically because the owner makes and serves free waffles every morning from about 9 to noon. Not only does the whole place smell awesome every morning, but hey, free waffles. The waffle iron made heart-shaped waffles, too. Five hearts stuck together to form a circle. Delicious and adorable! Of all the things we took pictures of, I don't believe anyone took photos of the waffles, though. The only thing I didn't like about the place was that the beds were of significantly lower quality than those of Cinnamon Sally or the Monk's Bunk, but in a few days I would be returning to an even worse bed, so I guess it was better to gradually transition back to a terrible mattress and more terrible pillows.

The owner told us about a bar in town holding a karaoke night on Wednesday, so that's where we decided to go. We got lost the first time we set out to find it, which sucked because the streets were still covered in half-melted snow. All of our feet were soaked by the time we managed to locate this place, called Bix. We got some dinner and drinks, and waited for the karaoke shenanigans to begin.

I got sweet and sour chicken for dinner. I'm not sure what I was expecting; I knew it wouldn't be like whatever my idea of "sweet and sour chicken" is, but it was pretty close...which was even weirder than getting some kind of bizarre eastern European interpretation would have been. It was as if I had plunged right into the uncanny valley of sweet-and-sour chicken: almost "the real thing," but just different enough to be unsettling, without being different enough to qualify as something else altogether. The little bits of meat I was served did look and taste like they had all come from one animal, though, so there was that. The sauce was good, very garlicky and faintly reminiscent of an Asian-inspired barbecue sauce. That's something I really miss over here: Chinese food. There are Chinese restaurants around Petersburg, but they're so formal! They use things like plates and silverware. Chinese food comes in a box, gosh darn it, not attractively arranged on a tiny plate! The food is OK, but just not the same. I'm keeping a list of foods I want when I get home; right now that list consists of "Chinese food" and "bacon," because apparently I'm in some kind of God-forsaken region of the world that doesn't believe in the delicious, artery-clogging almighty Crispy Bacon.

The karaoke shenanigans began around 9 or 10; I don't really remember because I forgot my phone charger, like a chump, so it remained off for much of our Lithuanian adventure to conserve battery life. I went up a few times and didn't do too great, but most of the crowd was drunk enough for it not to be a problem. Corinne went up a few times and rocked it, even winning a free beer for her performance of You Can't Always Get What You Want. She didn't manage to actually cash in on that (I think she was supposed to give the coaster the DJ gave her to the waitress?), but later on some guy who was celebrating his birthday handed her a bottle of some kind of mystery beer, so whatever. It worked out. There were also a couple of Lithuanian girls who were absolutely amazing, and one funny guy who just hammed it up at every opportunity, death-metal growling the stuff on the intro screen and during musical interludes and stuff. He grabbed a friend and rapped in Lithuanian instead of actually singing Because I Got High, then said "I was gonna sing this song, but then I got drunk!" Because he was very clever, you see. We stayed at Bix until closing time, then made our way back to the hostel because it was still cold and slushy outside.

THURSDAY/FRIDAY

I'm lumping the last two days together because one of them was very uneventful for me.

Thursday, we did some city exploring, because the weather was amazing. It was approaching 50 degrees outside, and sunny! After a delicious lunch at an Indian restaurant, we went into town and visited this old tower on a hill. The ascent was pretty easy; walking on the old cobblestone was like a free foot massage with every step, and hey, cardio. At one point I saw a little winding path up the side of the hill next to the main path; I popped up there to see where it led, and found an awesome little semi-secluded mountain spring dribbling into a well. There was graffiti all over the rocks--mostly couple names and dates. So, yeah, I found Vilnius' Makeout Point, NBD. I'll remember it if I ever find myself back in Lithuania, which is unlikely, but who knows?

We even took off our coats because the weather was so nice, and the energy we needed to climb was enough to keep us comfortable. Inside the tower was a small museum; one floor had a model of the city in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the next had displays of arms and armor. There was one more (very steep) winding staircase that goes up to the top; we thought the door at the top of the staircase was locked at first, but then realized we just weren't trying hard enough to open the door, and felt pretty silly.

The view from the top of the tower was incredible. Practically the entire city of Vilnius was visible, in all its red-and-white glory. It was sunny, just a bit windy, and warmer than it had been in a long time for us. We hung out, took silly photos, sat and talked and generally just passed the time up there for about three or four hours before deciding to head back down. There was a mechanized lift set up to make the descent easier, but we decided we didn't want to pay for that and walked back down. The trail is very steep in some places, the cobblestones have been worn smooth over the years, and the soles of my boots have absolutely no traction whatsoever (I slip and slide on tile floors in these things), so it was kind of an adventure on the way down.

When we checked into the hostel on Wednesday, the owner guy took out a map of Vilnius and marked the location of some interesting things we might want to check out. Among those things was a bust of Frank Zappa, located across town from the hostel. The statue is there for basically no reason other than "well, why not?", and here is a page explaining it in more detail. The art on the walls in the surrounding area is pretty amazing--too amazing to call it "graffiti." It is definitely street art. But then, that's to be expected, as the bust was erected near the art academy. We went to find the statue, and were successful; many photos were taken:

And I made a snowfriend! There were just these three perfectly-sized chunks of snow lying around. I couldn't help myself. (We neglected to take pictures of the snowfriend.)

Liz had managed to leave her toiletry bag on the Riga-Vilnius bus, and got an email telling her that it had been found, but she had to go to another city, Kaunas, to pick it up. I opted not to go, figuring it would be a quick jaunt out there Friday morning and then they'd be back to explore more Vilnius by lunchtime. Everyone was operating on that assumption. Not only did Liz fail to rendezvous with Ecolines in Kaunas, but the Kaunas-Vilnius train does not run nearly as often as they were counting on, so they ended up being stuck there all day while I was left to my own devices at the hostel. I didn't get the memo until about an hour before they were due back, though, so I wasted the day on the Internet, instead of exploring a strange city in a foreign country alone, like a sensible person.

That night, two girls who worked for the hostel kept trying to get us to go with them on a pub crawl (which was a regular hostel-organized event and apparently there was a minimum number of guests required for it to actually happen; if less than 5 guests want to go, it is cancelled). We declined, on the grounds that our bus was going to leave early the next morning, and we were rapidly running out of money. So we stayed in and played drinking games with the other Americans in the hostel instead.

The other Americans were actually pretty cool. There was one guy who turned out to be a Redditor, a 22-year-old PhD student (he skipped first and second grade) who spoke Finnish. The other guy was a middle-school geography teacher; I don't remember his name, but he was more involved in talking to/hitting on the Australian and Spanish girls who were also staying at the hostel than he was in our conversation. AJ (Dr. Redditor) was kinda hitting on the three of us, but it was all pretty lighthearted and he didn't actually try to pursue any of us seriously. Liz and Corinne had a lot more to drink than I did, but we all hit the hay around 1:30-2 AM anyway, because we still remembered that we had an early bus to catch.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY

And then we proceeded to miss the bus.

No one thought to set a second alarm and Liz's alarm was inaudible, so we all overslept. In a panic, Liz scoured the internet for buses to Riga that would arrive before 10 PM, and successfully bought us bus tickets for a ride that left at 4 PM. Then we all went back to sleep and spent the day leisurely packing and saying our final goodbyes to what turned out to be our favorite country. We managed to catch the 4:00 bus (after Liz had to practically sprint to the ticket office to print our things, even though the email said all we would need was ID, but okay), and then had only about an hour and a half to kill in Riga, instead of the 10-hour layover we would have had if we had made our morning bus. Really, it worked out for the best; Latvia was expensive, after all, so we wouldn't have gotten to do much in Riga besides buy some food and walk around all day.

The final leg of our journey--the eleven-hour, three-country-spanning bus ride from Riga to Petersburg--was the most trying. It was an overnight bus ride in a vehicle badly in need of new shocks; we shook, rattled and rolled our way across Estonia, stopping around 4 AM to go through customs at the Russian border. The bus felt and sounded like it was minutes away from just falling apart, and while we did manage to get some sleep, it came in snatches and was rudely interrupted by the bus attempting to fly (at least, that's what I choose to believe was happening when the bus lurched and bounced like that).

We got back to Petersburg (where it was snowing, on Easter) around 9 AM on Sunday, setting foot back in the apartment by 9:30. I started a load of laundry, set an alarm on my phone, and took a well-deserved nap in my squeaky, pokey, generally terrible, but at least stationary, bed.

The spring break vacation was great, and I had a lot of fun with my roommates, but I'm almost glad to be back in Petersburg. The semester is more than halfway over, now, and I'm both sad and relieved. I've made some good friends here, and there are still some interesting culture-class-related things on the schedule, and I have to leave just as the weather starts to get really nice...but, at the same time, I've kind of been looking forward to coming back home since the day I left. I'm more of a homebody than I ever suspected myself to be, I suppose.

Chapter the Sixth: Latvia

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:25:00 +0000

SUNDAY

We arrived in Riga, Latvia around five-ish on Sunday evening, after leaving the Monk's Bunk early enough to make it to the bus station on time. We rode a double-decker bus, which was exciting, and all three of us had seats on the top floor! Ecolines reserves the right to randomly change your seat assignment without warning and for no discernible reason, so we were glad that the seats we bought were the seats we got, as it were.

We stayed at a hostel called Cinnamon Sally (other options in the area included the Naughty Squirrel and the Tiger Hostels). Cinnamon Sally is part of a network of backpackers' hostels in this part of the world, so they were affiliated with the Monk's Bunk. They were about the same quality, in any case; Sally was less brand-spankin'-new, but the facilities were nice and they even had a washer and a dryer available for guest use. Of course, none of us actually got around to doing laundry while we were there. But we could have, and that's the important thing.

The thing about Riga, we would soon discover, is that despite having a very active nightlife scene, not a lot of things are open on Sunday, especially in the evenings. We initially wanted to get dinner at this place called the "Folk Club Cave," which appeared to be closed, so we ended up at this UK-themed pub. Mostly because it was the first open place that wasn't deserted that we encountered, and there was a large group of loud young men wandering the streets about a block away that made us kind of nervous. Obviously none of us speak Latvian, but some of the guys were speaking in what sounded like Russian and Liz caught what she thought was something about "stupid tourists."

So, yes, we ducked into the first restaurant we came across that wasn't completely empty, called the Queens Public House and Restaurant. It was here that we discovered something else about Latvia: the beer sucks. Nearly every beer that any of us tried had an awful metallic aftertaste; one notable exception is a stout that Liz got at the Folk Club Cave, which we ended up going to twice. Riga is clearly a cocktails-and-shots kind of town. All the food was delicious, though. I got a tasty burger from the Queens place, and when we went back to Folk Club, I got this awesome bacon-wrapped stuffed chicken monstrosity of tastiness. I think it was a chicken fillet wrapped in bacon and stuffed with caramelized onions, cheese, dried plums and something else, topped with vegetable caviar, on a bed of a "potato and carrot mash." Trés gourmet!

Latvia is expensive relative to the US; they aren't on the Euro, instead still using their own currency of lati and sentami. The lat is among the strongest currencies in Europe, with one lat being approximately equal to about US$1.90. So, you know, at first you look at your check and think "OK, 14-something isn't bad for all we got," and then you remember that that's approaching US$30. At the same time, though, for the quantity and quality of food and drink that we got, at a similar place in the US, the bill would probably come out to be about the same. So, it's expensive relative to the US when you're on a student budget. I didn't buy any souvenirs in Latvia for this reason, although we're going to have ten hours to kill in Riga on the way home on Saturday, so I suppose there's still time.

----

MONDAY

A funny thing happened while we were in Latvia. As you know, if you were smart and started reading the glut of posts about my Baltic adventures with Estonia, we went to Tallinn for a music festival. Among the acts we watched there was this Austrian band called Diver. I talked about them in the last Estonia post. Anyway, it turns out that Diver inadvertently followed us to Riga, and Monday night they were playing at this little hole-in-the-wall bar in the old part of the city called I Love You. So, we decided to check it out.

First, we thought the show was at 8 PM. I don't know who misread the 24-hour time, Liz or whoever maintains the Diver Facebook page. So we all took a nap and then hauled bones to make it to the bar by 8. Upon arrival, we inspected the poster advertising that evening's entertainment, where the start time was listed as 10 PM (22:00). We were in the middle of freaking out about being 2 hours early when the band showed up. Awkward!

We went inside and decided to get some food, anyway, as long as we were here and had some time to kill. Each of us ordered a 20cm pizza and gave a slice to each other when they arrived. The bolognese I got was amazing; there was some hot sauce on it, as well as jalapeños and pickle slices. It was wonderful--see, I like spicy food, but the Russians don't, so truly flavorful spicy deliciousness is hard to come by in Petersburg. Liz's margherita pizza was good too, as was the veggie pizza Corinne opted for, but oh god the spiciness. I miss it already. Luckily, I think I can recreate it, and I'm gonna try to do so this summer.

We finished our pizzas and still had about 45 minutes to kill before the show was to begin...so we just kind of sat there and talked for a while. Eventually 10 o'clock rolled around and we went downstairs to the basement. The show was a really intimate affair--about a dozen chairs and two dozen people packed into a tiny room while three Austrian guys with guitars (plus a keyboard, accordion, and melodica) sang songs about awkward romance and drinking. Their set was longer than it was in Tallinn, and we got to hear a couple more songs from them, which was cool.

Afterward we went back to the hostel and got to bed relatively early, because the next day was Liz's birthday and we had plans to go to the seaside. But you know what they say about plans, right?

----

TUESDAY

The best-laid plans of mice and men and all that. We did manage to get up early as well as navigate the complex interaction that is "buying train tickets" without much incident.

And then we missed the train.

Twice.

Luckily, the ticket didn't specify a time; the train out to Majori (coastal town) leaves roughly every 40 minutes and you can basically hop on whenever, as long as you're at the right station, so we just waited around and got some lunch. Our original plan was to go out to the seaside in the morning, leaving time that afternoon to check out some museums; we didn't actually manage to board a train until 1 pm. But we did manage it, and we saw the Baltic sea! I've got a picture here that will look very silly to friends and family in Florida, both because I am a silly girl and because it shows me on a beach, in a long winter coat. Here:

Here's me and Corinne being silly. I think there were two other people on the beach that day, thankfully they ignored us as we ran around laughing like crazy people.

And here's Liz, being silly on a swing. It's hard to see but these swings are about 10 inches off the ground. Clearly not for young ladies such as ourselves. Did that stop us? No.

We walked around for a while after that, poking into souvenir shops and the like, before deciding to head back to the train station and return to the city center. For the return trip, the lady at the ticket counter sold us one actual ticket for three people; the lady at the Riga station gave the three of us separate tickets. They just look like receipts, and the attendants on the train just stamp the backs of them, they don't tear them or punch them or anything. So, of course Corinne pulled out her Riga-to-Majori ticket by mistake when the attendant came by on the return trip. Cue panic! I mean, why would she have sold us a ticket to Majori in Majori?! But the proper ticket was then found and all was well.

Tuesday just turned out to be a comedy of errors for everyone, really. After taking a two-hour nap in the luxuriously comfortable hostel beds (because somehow missing two trains is exhausting), Liz checked her email and saw that she had a response from one of the universities she'd applied to for grad school, a university she was really excited about. They turned her down. :( The obvious course of action was to locate the nearest pub and stay there until it closed, so that is essentially what we did, going back to the Folk Club Cave because they had beer that didn't taste like metal.

We would have stayed out later, and Liz would have ordered some whiskey and "descended into Liquor Land," as she put it, if we didn't have to get up early to catch a bus on Wednesday. But we did, so she didn't, and we called it a night around one in the morning.

Chapter the Sixth: Estonia

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:35:00 +0000

THURSDAY

It will be after Easter by the time you read this chapter. I'm starting to type it up, however, on one of the hostel computers in Tallinn, Estonia! It might surprise you to learn--it certainly surprised me--that the Estonian keyboard layout is quite different from the standard American. The QWERTY layout is the same, but many punctuation keys are located in different places, and it's really thrown me off quite a few times. For instance, where I expect there to be an apostrophe key, instead that key types the letter ä, with an umlaut.

Anyway, Thursday was quite an adventurous day! Our bus left that morning at 6:45, and we just managed to be on it when that happened. We hurried down the escalator at the metro station, down another level to the red line, grabbed the first train we saw going in the right direction, and then literally ran from the metro exit to the bus stop, where the big blue and yellow Ecolines bus was parked and nearly ready to go.

One thing I have learned in my time here is that assigned seats, in most contexts, are essentially a formality, and no one is going to come after you for sitting somewhere else. This is handy when you show up 15 minutes late for a bus ride and need to take whatever seats you can find. Liz and Corinne took a couple of seats near the front; I took a couple seats in the back, one for me and one for my bags. I have my clothes packed in my backpack, toiletries in the toiletry bag I got at the Christmas gift exchange, and of course my wallet and documents in my purse. The ride from St. Petersburg to Tallinn was about seven hours. I took a series of 45-ish minute naps on the way; by the time we got to the border and had to get off the bus to go through customs, everyone was glad of the opportunity to stand and stretch for a while.

The scenery we passed was eerie. Outside the city, it is still very much winter, despite the fact that we are on the cusp of April. Snow and ice coat the ground in vast swaths, and it was foggy, lending a ghostly air to distant trees and buildings.

Estonia is weird. We drove through about 200 miles of rural residences before reaching Tallinn, at which point we pretty much literally turned the corner and entered a maze of high-rise apartment buildings. These soon gave way to the city proper. Tallinn is even weirder, a bizarre hybrid of medieval and modern city trying to cope with heavy modern pedestrian as well as automobile traffic. Half the streets are cobblestone, and the sidewalks are narrow.

For dinner, we tried to go to this place Liz saw on lonelyplanet called Hell Hunt, Tallinn's oldest new pub (established 1993). Unfortunately, it was closed for renovation until next week, when we'll be long gone. So we went to this other restaurant instead, called Porgu or something along those lines. This place boasted the "best selection of draught beers in Estonia." They certainly had some interesting ones; Liz and Corinne tried their farmhouse ale and a chocolate porter, and I opted for some English cider. The food we got was also good: chicken in mushroom sauce with mashed potatoes, sundried tomatoes and some kind of leek-like vegetable for me and Corinne, and salmon in similar sauce with cauliflower pie, asparagus, and radishes for Liz.

We spent Thursday exploring and figuring out what we were going to do Friday. Part of the reason we came to Tallinn at all was for a music festival taking place from the 29th through the 31st, and while waiting for our dinner at Porgu, we checked the schedule and decided which acts we were interested in seeing.

FRIDAY

We woke up around noon on Friday and decided the theme of the day was Medieval, so we explored the medieval part of the city. First, we got some lunch at this medieval-themed restaurant called Ill Draakon (presumably "The Dragon"), where they have a very simple menu. Food is one euro, drinks are two, and their food options include elk soup and various savory pies, including beef/pork, elk/pork, carrot, spinach, and cabbage. They also had apple pies. It was delicious, although you do pretty much get what you pay for; one euro buys you about a cup of soup or one small pie (note: not a pie in the American sense, i.e. a large round pastry baked in a tin; more like what we would call a turnover or a homemade Hot Pocket, a small pouch of flaky dough containing filling of some kind). Two euros buys you a half-pint of house beer (light or dark), or "hot-blooded wine," which I was curious about. I ended up just getting a half-pint of dark beer with my spinach pie and bowl of soup, because Liz and Corinne got that and it sounded good by the time it was my turn to order. Everything was delicious; of course, that only makes sense. Sell your fare for cheap but make it really tasty, so people will come back and buy another portion of soup or another pie. Such tactics worked on us, anyway; we ended up buying a couple of apple pies after we finished our spinach pies and soup.

After that, we went to this old tower called Kiek in de Kök, which translates to "a peek in the kitchen," not whatever you were thinking, perv. It's called that because you can see basically everything from the tower, including peeking into the kitchens of surrounding peasant residences. We toured the old tunnels beneath the defense tower and surrounding bastion, which was really cool. They restored many of the tunnels in 2009, and they have them decorated such that as you progress through each successive room, you are transported back in time; in the 20th and 21st centuries, the tunnels were used as shelter for homeless people (the tour guide said the last homeless man living in the tunnels was kicked out something like seven years ago), hiding places for counterculture groups like punk rockers in the Soviet era (full of fleas at the time, which is why punks were able to hide there even though the tunnels weren't secret), and shelters against air raids in the early to mid-20th century. Before that, the tunnels were mainly used as prisons if they were used at all, and even further back (i.e., end of the 17th century) they were simply used as a way to move troops between defense towers.

They also have one long, straight tunnel that they converted to an exhibit on predictions of the future of Estonia. In this tunnel, guests sit on a futuristic-looking People Mover-esque contraption, which slowly trundles sideways as you view a short film about the future of the city. Then you get off and enter a room where there are some 21st-century items displayed as well as an example of what future archeologists might say about them; some of the items include a necktie, a G-string, cigarettes, platform heels, and a beer can. The predictions are sardonic in tone; for example, on the platform heels, the information blurb suggests that they were worn by prisoners, because escape would be difficult while wearing them. It made me laugh, anyway.

Mari Kalkun, an Estonian folk musician that Corinne and Liz were interested in seeing was playing at a tiny record shop on the second floor of a building in the newer part of town that afternoon, so we hurried over there and caught the second half of her set. That was basically how we spent the rest of Friday, being late to shows; eventually we just settled in at the Von Krahl theater and bar, where the acts alternated by the hour--one hour there would be someone playing a set in the bar, the next hour they would be upstairs in the theater. The bands we saw there were called Jaakko and Jay (punk rock) and Husky Rescue (alt folk).

Later, we moved to this bar that was just down the street from our hostel, where an Estonian rockabilly band called Boogie Company was playing. Estonian rockabilly is exactly as awesome as you think it is. Apparently the genre is gaining popularity in Estonia; the lead singer/bass player (he had FLAMES on his bass!) said they were just one of thousands of rockabilly bands in the country. They were awesome, though; bouncy music, funny banter, a generally upbeat atmosphere. It was, all in all, a very nice way to end the day.

SATURDAY

Each day of the Tallinn Music Week festival, there were a handful of acts in the early afternoon (1-4ish) on the "city stage," which were free to attend. These took place in a large mall called the Viru center as well as in small venues around the city (record shops, art galleries). We went to the mall for a while and parked ourselves in front of the main city stage to watch a few of the acts.

One of the acts we saw there was called Estonian Voices. This consisted of six people--three men, three women--singing a capella. It was really impressive; one of the girls had an amazing range, and they did vocal-instrument singing as well as harmony. One of the songs they did was an entirely vocal freeform jazz piece, where one of the women sang the part of a screaming trumpet. As hard as it probably is to make a trumpet make that noise, it must be just as difficult if not more so for a human to do so. They didn't speak English, but that was OK, they were still awesome to watch and listen to.

We also caught a short set by an alt-punk band from Russia called Motorama at an architecture gallery before Liz and I returned to the hostel to take a nap. (The beds there were better than our beds in Petersburg!) Corinne opted to explore the city some more; she came back later with some delicious bread and jam, among other things. There were a bunch of acts playing one right after the other that evening at a kino, so we made plans to head over there and just stay there all night.

And that is what we did. We were a bit late (as usual), but we grabbed some seats up front and enjoyed a never-ending stream of folky alternative acts. We caught the second half of Silver Sepp's set, but he also played percussion for Mari Kalkun, who followed him. A Latvian artist, Alina Orlova, followed her; Corinne and Liz were already fans, so they were extra excited about that. Alina's style is also folky and soft, kind of like Ellie Goulding but with more Eastern European flavor.

The last act of the night was an Austrian band called Diver. The band consisted of three guys with guitars. One of them also played keyboard and accordion; another also played a melodica. The lead just played his guitar and sang. I would describe their style as kind of alt-pop, sort of Owl City-like but less electronic. We liked Diver so much that Corinne bought their CD before we left, while I was busy liberating a poster from the wall downstairs. The event was over that night, and there were more posters literally all over the city, so I figured they wouldn't miss one. Hopefully the poster will survive the trip home, because it's pretty neat.

SUNDAY

Sunday morning, we woke up before noon and got our stuff together so we could check out of the hostel by 11 AM. We planned to go to this place called Kompressor, for huge pancakes, and it turns out that Hell Hunt finished their renovations early, so we wanted to go there, too! We ended up having to take all of our bags with us, but that was OK. They aren't that heavy.

We showed up at Kompressor just after it opened and decided to split a giant pancake. We opted for a blueberry-and-cream one, and when it arrived we were glad we decided to share it. It was a massive crepe; folded in quarters, one side was about seven or eight inches long. We cut it into thirds and devoured it quickly, drank our coffee and tea, and then hurried across town to Hell Hunt.

We managed to arrive about 15 minutes before Hell Hunt opened at noon, so we killed some time in this little handicraft souvenir shop next door. Liz bought socks, and Corinne got her sister some paper dolls, although they proved kind of difficult to transport. I think she maybe didn't realize that the sheets aren't perforated and you actually have to cut out the clothes with scissors.

In any case, we all got some lunch at Hell Hunt, and Liz was excited by a Scottish IPA they had on the menu. They brought it out to her and it made her entire week, I think. She loves IPAs and they are all but impossible to find in Russia, so this was the first IPA she'd had in about seven months. She drank it happily; the 9.2% alcohol content didn't hurt, either, I imagine. She bought another bottle for the road and decided to hold onto it until Tuesday, which was her birthday.

Following that, we hopped on a tram back to the bus depot and arrived with plenty of time to spare, a welcome change from the last time we boarded a bus. The bus that would take us to Latvia was a double-decker, and the three of us sat together on the top floor, which was really cool. The ride was pretty boring; they played this bizarre Russian Cinderella-like film on the way and I napped for part of it. We didn't have to stop at the border this time, because apparently Latvia's just cool with whoever wants to come over, man. Not like Russia, which monitors comings and goings at all of her borders with all the vigor and vigilance one would expect from a country symbolized by a two-headed eagle.

Chapter the Sixth: The Lost Files

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:35:00 +0000

I got the pictures I needed, so I'm gonna go ahead and publish my Baltic adventures. Those of you who have signed up to receive email updates will see this in your inbox as well as the Estonia post; I've decided not to publish all three at once, because they form a whole narrative and reading them out of order will only confuse you. So, go click over to the second email from There and Back Again in your inbox and laugh!

I also wanted to get these up ASAP because the most recent post (about the Blockade Tour) just bums me out every time I reread it. The Lost Files are much sillier and more lighthearted.

Chapter the Seventh: Because History

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 23:18:00 +0000

For those of you expecting one of my usual lighthearted, sardonic posts, you might want to go back and reread your favorite instead of reading this one. It's kind of a downer. I'm fine, it's just the subject matter isn't really something I feel comfortable cracking jokes about. Which is saying a lot, if you know anything about me and my sense of humor.

Today, we (Corinne, Alexandra, Brenda, and I) had an interactive history lesson about the Leningrad blockade of 1941-1944. I dimly recall Mr. Crile mentioning the siege of Leningrad once or twice in IB American History senior year, so I was aware that this event occurred, but you just don't appreciate the scale of something like that until you visit the city itself. It is a powerful story of human perseverance in the face of profound tragedy; there is a monument, erected in 1966, not far from the heart of St. Petersburg memorializing the struggle, and it is one of very few sites bearing Communist images, symbols and rhetoric in the city, a block or so south of the infamous statue of Lenin pointing westward on Moscow Square. That one was preserved because it has artistic and historical merit. This monument stands because the memory is that important.

On September 8, 1941, Hitler's invading troops surrounded the city. The strategy for Leningrad was a war of attrition, rather than attacking the city outright. To that end, the Nazis blockaded Leningrad and destroyed the food supply. Then they started printing up invitations to their victory banquet at the Hotel Astoria in the heart of downtown, across the square from the then-German Consulate, believing that the city would surrender within weeks. The hotel is only seven miles from the front, and the Nazis never reached it.

The city was under siege for 900 days (until January 27, 1944). It began in September, and the city's supply of oil and coal ran out within weeks, just as winter began. There was no electricity, no central heating, no running water. Food was strictly rationed; within two months, the rations were cut to 1/3 the daily requirements for an adult. By February 1942, bread rations were down to a mere 125 grams, or 1/4 pound, per person per day. Infants were the first to die, as their mothers were too malnourished to produce milk to feed them. In 900 days, it is estimated that one million civilians died. 95% succumbed to starvation and exposure; the rest were killed as a direct result of artillery fire. More people were buried every day of the siege--about 4,000 people per day--than died in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks (about 3,000). Cats, rats, pigeons, horses, dogs, and crows were all eaten over the course of the siege, because 125 grams of cellulose-bread cannot sustain anyone for long. No cats survived the blockade; after it was over, a truckload of two hundred cats was brought in and released into the city, because what is a city without cats?

Tens of thousands of people were dead by the end of 1941, but because it was winter, it was impossible to bury them. Bodies piled up in the streets; there were people whose job it was to find corpses and take them to holding centers until the ground thawed enough to bury them. As the siege went on and more and more people died, people would bring the bodies of their loved ones that had died at home to a designated collection spot, where they were loaded onto trucks and taken closer to the front. They used bombs to break through the frozen ground and tossed the bodies into mass graves. They did the same for soldiers; it is estimated that 1.5 million soldiers died defending the city from the Nazis. 500,000 people are buried at the Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery, civilians alongside soldiers, and almost all of them anonymously, in mass graves. At first people were buried individually, but very quickly there were too many dead for those tasked with digging graves to keep up. Some people, knowing they were not long for this world, would go to the cemetery and sit there, just waiting for their bodies to finally give up; at least, that way, they knew they would be buried.

But even in the face of such crippling hardship, the city worked on. The war industries continued to produce artillery and armaments; many factories had workforces made entirely of women, children, and the elderly, because all able-bodied men had been conscripted to fight at the front. The city was not immediately evacuated, because, Stalin reasoned, the soldiers would fight harder and would not retreat if they knew their mothers, wives, sisters, and children were behind them. The logic was sound, I suppose, because ultimately it worked.

The arts also survived the siege; the Philharmonic was active, and the troupe from the neighboring Comedy Theater, although they could not use their own facility, performed comedies on the stage of the Philharmonic for the people. It was during the siege that Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 7, also known as the Leningrad Symphony. New seasons at the Philharmonic still open in the fall with a performance of that piece, an impressive work on its own that is only magnified by the fact that it was produced under such circumstances. Here's the first movement on Youtube. The memorial I mentioned at the beginning of this post has a museum under it, and among the articles preserved there is a violin belonging to Shostakovich.

In that museum is also a small, unassuming notepad. This pad of paper was the diary of a young girl named Tanya Savicheva. She and her family aided the war effort; among Tanya's responsibilities were digging trenches and disarming firebombs, work undertaken chiefly by young women and girls. During air raids, it was their job to don helmets, grab fire axes and special tongs, and head up to the roofs of the buildings to grab and neutralize so-called "residual bombs" or "firebombs" before they went off. Many women died doing this. Tanya managed to survive that job, however; her record lists the dates and times of German air raids, as well as a log of when and how each of her family members died over a span of about 4 months in 1941-1942. First her sister Zhenya, then her grandmother, followed by her brother Leka, then Uncle Vasya, Uncle Lyosha, and finally her mother. The final page of her diary reads "All the Saviches are dead. Only Tanya remains." She lived long enough to be found by clean-up crews checking apartments for bodies, but succumbed to tuberculosis at age 14. Her diary was used as evidence during the Nuremburg Trials. Sergei, our tour guide, told us this story; we didn't have enough time to look at all of the things in that museum, but I'm not sure anything else would have stood out to me quite as strongly.

We also visited a memorial to the civilian, volunteer militia that worked to defend the city, situated at the very front itself; a small river (right now it's not much more than a creek) marks the boundary, and there are anti-tank obstacles adorning the site with iron plates bolted to them. The plates have the names of regiments, squads, and battalions of these civilian corps on them. It was eerie.

Our final stop for the day was at the previously-mentioned Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery. There is a small information center by the entrance; among the things in that room is a slideshow of photographs. These photographs show locations in and around modern-day St. Petersburg, overlaid by photos of Leningrad during the siege in the same location. It is one thing to merely be told all of these things about what is certainly still a huge event in the cultural memory of the city; it's quite another to see photographs of places you walk through every day from seventy years ago, full of corpses and debris. "Here is a place that is a stone's throw from your apartment building, American exchange student, a place which you see every day on your way to class," the photos seem to say. "Now there's a bar and a clothing shop there. Seventy years ago, it was full of rubble, and ashes, and emaciated bodies. Look, you can still recognize the buildings." That is a powerful statement; it certainly made an impression on me, as you can tell from the tone of this post.

Walking through the cemetery itself, though, really brought home the magnitude of the tragedy. We only walked along the main central path, between the entrance (where there is a memorial torch burning) and the back wall, which features a large sculpture depicting Mother Russia bearing a sprig of laurel, in remembrance of those buried here. On the wall behind her is a poem by Soviet poetess Olga Bergholz, which contains a line that goes approximately like this: "Many are buried here, and though we do not know your names, no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten." She helped keep morale up during the siege by reading her speeches and poetry over the city's public address system in the evenings; during the day, the sound of a metronome would be played, and that too lent the city's residents a measure of comfort. Like a pulse, the constant ticking was reassurance that the city was still alive.

The view from in front of the statue is humbling. A dozen huge rectangular mounds on either side, probably 35x20 feet, with granite plaques marked with a hammer and sickle if it is a civilian grave and a star if it contains soldiers, as well as the year. And more rows of mounds behind each of them. There are more mounds like this, only smaller, outside the cemetery, dotting the outskirts of the city in this general area. Some of them are marked. Some aren't. Somehow, the unmarked ones are more disturbing to me than the marked ones, although I was ill at ease even in the very well manicured environs of Piskariovskoye--meticulously trimmed and skeletal linden, willow, and oak trees, as well as the culled stubs of rosebushes and the first green peeps from tulips planted near the Mother Russia statue. Everything has been recently cleaned in preparation for the May 9 Victory Day celebration, which is one of three days out of the year that this place sees heavy traffic. The other two are the anniversaries of the beginning (September 8) and end (January 27) of the siege.

As I finish this post, it's around 3 AM. I returned to my apartment about eleven hours ago after this tour, and I was only just able to begin writing about it about an hour ago. The whole experience was incredibly powerful, and I just feel drained thinking about everything I learned today. History is intense, man.

Chapter the Seventh: Because Laziness

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:39:00 +0000

So, my roommates are dragging their feet in getting pictures uploaded, so for now we're skipping Chapter the Sixth. Whenever they get around to giving me the photos I requested, then I'll publish the Lost Chronicles of Emily's Baltic Spring Break Adventure.

Anyway, I've only got about 34 more days here as I'm writing this, and I could not be more conflicted about how I feel. On one hand, I've missed home a lot, and have been more or less looking forward to leaving from the moment I arrived. At the same time, though, I have had a ton of fun here. I've met some awesome people, I've done stuff that none of my friends and family can say they've done (which makes me cooler than all of you, for all time hereafter :P), and now that the weather is finally starting to get really nice, I'm faced with the prospect of having to leave. And I'm kind of sad about it. I mean, I'm going to leave right before the major tourist season begins, otherwise known as the White Nights. The days are already absurdly long as it is (sun rises at about 6, sets around 9:30) and getting longer by about five minutes every 24 hours, but the fact that I'm going to leave mere WEEKS before the sun stops setting altogether for a while is just not fair!

At some point in the next month or so (actually less than that, [expletive]), I need to produce a 3000-word term paper on a topic I have not yet chosen. I have a few ideas floating around in my head, but I'm running into this very common problem of thinking up topics that sound neat, but that really don't have much written about them. My options for sources are basically Google Scholar and whatever I can access on the library's servers from here. I'll make it happen, but ugh, around this time every year I start wishing for the power to cut to a montage just to make the grueling process of paper-writing go faster.

Term papers make me sad, so it's a good thing I've got a lot of other things happening to take my mind off of it! (That's my argument. I'm sticking to it.) Last weekend we went and toured the summer palace at Pavlovsk and got a lesson on imperial history. The palace is gorgeous--so much gilding and detail. It was painstakingly restored after the Nazis bombed it during the war, with all of the beautiful ceilings recently repainted (ca. 1950). The exhibit contains some posters with photos of the room that you're standing in as it was immediately after the bombing, as well as a few examples of unrestored furniture and the like to compare the restoration to the original. The restorers have done an amazing job, replacing painted silk panels on the walls, repainting and reupholstering chairs and sofas, and generally returning the palace at Pavlovsk to its former glory for the most part. We also walked around the grounds and tried to imagine the garden as it will be in a few months, after all the plants start growing again. There are statues and paths and even a stream all throughout the garden; it's more like a large public park than anything, which isn't surprising, because the summer palace hasn't actually functioned as a residence for quite some time.

Last night, Brenda and Holly and I attended a performance of Swan Lake at the Mikhailovsky Theater. Our seats were on the highest balcony, in the front row; I've never been so close to the ceiling of a theater before, and the Mikhailovsky is gorgeous. That's a link to the search page on Flickr for "Mikhailovsky Theater," because one photo wouldn't do it justice. The performance was good; I've never really found ballet to be compelling, but it is very impressive. Even from the top of the house I could see how strong the dancers were. The costuming at this particular show was also really cool; I liked some of the dresses they had on the female dancers.

Here's a quick run-down of the story, for those less familiar with it: Odette is a princess under a spell that makes her take the form of a swan during the day. One evening, Prince Siegfried catches sight of her after she transforms into a human again, and they begin to dance together and gradually fall in love. Odette reveals that she will be freed from the spell if she finds a man who will remain faithful to her for all time, and Siegfried pledges his eternal love, inviting her to a Royal Ball so that he can choose her as his bride. At the Ball, the evil sorcerer Rothbart, who cursed Odette, shows up with his daughter Odile, who is enchanted to look just like Odette. (This part is often danced by the same ballerina who dances the part of Odette, so the avant-garde approach of the crazy director in Black Swan is not quite as avant-garde as the movie made it out to be.) In this way, Rothbart tricks Siegfried into breaking his vow, thus sentencing Odette to life as a swan forever. Normally, this ends with both Odette and Siegfried drowning themselves in the titular lake to break the spell, but apparently this particular company decided that such an ending was just too dang depressing. So, instead, Rothbart gets a wing ripped off and promptly dies in the final showdown against Siegfried, which has the intended effect of releasing Odette from the spell. Happily ever after, etc etc.

As for upcoming events, this weekend we're being taken to the Leningrad Blockade Museum. I'm not really entirely sure what to expect from that, but I will blog about it afterward. Next weekend, weather-permitting, we're going to Sergei's dacha for an end-of-course wrap-up discussion. I hope the weather holds out for us; we nearly visited Tamara's dacha for Orthodox Easter, but she canceled because of some health issues she's been having. And at the beginning of May, we have a 4-day excursion to Moscow. We're taking a train, and I'm more excited than I should be about that, but whatever! Moscow! Trains! Yeah!

The university is also offering a few excursions to Peterhof (lovely palace, lovelier fountains), Novgorod ("Old Russia"), and Kronstadt (I don't know anything about this place). They cost between 800-1100 rubles to go, and the first one to Novgorod is next weekend. I haven't decided if I want to do any of them, but I had better decide quickly because the deadline to sign up for Novgorod is tomorrow. They're just day trips, but that's still an amazing price for a guided tour and bus ride. I think Novgorod's price includes a meal. 1000p is about US$30, to give you an idea of what figures like "800 rubles" mean. I want to go to at least Peterhof, but I've got so much to do for the end of this course, and I would actually like to come back home with *some* money in the bank. Not hurting for cash right now, but I'd like it to stay that way.

Chapter the Fifth: Thrill-A-Minute Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:50:00 +0000

Or, you know, not so much. Now that I'm rapidly approaching the halfway point of this semester, it's getting harder to find things to post about, because it's all so routine now. The most productive thing I've done in the past week is go to the grocery store/make a metric [swear word]-ton of vinigret, and that was today. This should change soon enough, though; a week from Thursday, Corinne, the Elizabeths and I leave for Estonia, and then I will have nine days' worth of thrill-a-minute adventures (if the four of us can ever get around to doing some dang research and deciding what we want to do in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius).

In my last post, I talked about visiting with Tamara, and said I was eager to go back. The second visit was even better than the first; this time she fed us, setting out chocolates, fruit, and little cakes as well as giving us tea. We all ate far too much (as is customary) and spent a solid three hours just listening to Tamara talk about Russian history as she experienced it. I love this woman so much. I just want to bring her home with me. She is the sweetest lady in the world, and tomorrow night when we go back over there, she said she'd make us dinner. The sweets were delicious, but we all kind of waddled back to the metro station afterward. It wasn't too cold that night, anyway, and we decided we all could use the exercise after gorging ourselves at Tamara's apartment. Among the spread were these candies that consisted of a walnut stuffed inside a prune, coated in dark chocolate. Probably shouldn't eat too many of those, given the prune, but they were just so good and not in the least bit difficult to make, according to Brenda.

I'm not exactly proud to admit that, as I'm typing this, 6 PM on Tuesday, I have not yet been to my language class this week. I've managed to oversleep two days in a row. Yesterday, I woke up about three minutes before my class started and decided the weather was just too crappy to endure the 40-minute commute to the faculty. Today, I forgot my Tuesday class was shifted up about an hour and a half...and just didn't want to go. I needed to go to the grocery, anyway, which is how I justified skipping again to myself. I know it's not good, and I'm gonna make it there every day until next Thursday to make up for it. Not to excuse my behavior, but most of my roommates haven't made it to class, either. Jorge has also skipped this week, and so has Corinne; their excuses aren't any better than mine. Liz hasn't gone, but she's got a more legitimate reason because she's not feeling well. This atmosphere of lethargy is just permeating the apartment and killing everyone's productivity. Maybe we all partied too hard over the weekend, who knows.

We did go out for St. Patrick's Day. First, Corinne, Brenda, Liz and I went to this Frida Kahlo-themed flamenco show, which was neat. I fell asleep for about ten minutes, but that happens to me in auditoriums. I don't know why, but I blame high school. What I could see of it was really cool; I was behind tall people so I couldn't really see the dancers' feet, but it certainly sounded impressive. Flamenco is like extreme Spanish tapdancing, equal parts performance and percussion. There were two dancers, about four musicians and a singer who sang in Spanish. One dancer portrayed Frida, the other various other people (husband Diego Rivera, the personification of Death); the show was based around Frida Kahlo's life, and her paintings were projected on a screen behind the dancers as they moved through vignettes. I thought the medium to be rather ironic; why tell this particular woman's story through flamenco dance, of all media? See, Frida Kahlo's art career began after she was involved in a serious tram accident that crippled her, so of all distinctly Spanish art forms, this is one that she would never have been able to do. But, okay. That may have been the point. It was staged at a very avant-garde sort of theater, so that irony/disconnect probably was the point.

After the flamenco show, we (minus Brenda) went back to our apartment, where a few of Jorge's friends had come over, and they decided to wait for us before hitting the clubs. Dasha and Maksim were there, as was Holly (finally! she couldn't find our apartment last time we invited her over, and her host family is a bit leery of her going out anywhere very often, because the metro closes at midnight). Those were the only guests I knew. There was also an Italian woman whose name escapes me right now, and another Maxim, this one Danish (we'll call him Max for simplicity). They were all pregaming (i.e., drinking before going out to a bar or club) when we arrived, and Alex decided we would leave for the clubs in an hour. So we chilled, made introductions, started planning the evening's activities, and generally were just killing time for a while. The smokers in the group went out to smoke, and we prepared to leave; with so many people in attendance, it should come as no surprise that we split into two groups.

Alexandra, Holly, Max, and I left together, with the others leaving and going somewhere else later. We tried to go to RadioBaby, a place I blogged about waaaay back in February. Apparently the bouncer thought Max was too drunk to be let into the club (not surprising, as by the time we left the apartment he had nearly polished off a 2-liter of Oxota, which is a brand of beer with 8% abv, all by himself), and the fact that he proceeded to argue with said bouncer (and then stumble down the stairs) didn't help. Alexandra thought the bouncer was just giving us a hard time and pulled me and Holly inside, then went back for Max, at which point he pushed her out. So, Holly went and tracked down another friend of ours, Kurt, and tried to get everything sorted. We ended up leaving and going somewhere else, because I wasn't sure I knew how to get home from RadioBaby. We went to another club a few blocks away; Kurt actually had to go back to RadioBaby to meet a friend who was running late, but he caught up with us later. I can't seem to remember the name of this club no matter how hard I try, but it's not important.

The Nameless Club is more like three clubs in one; it's got 4 stories, with the coat check on the top floor (such a cruel design, because the stairs are steep and tall, and also concrete). On each of the lower floors is a bar and a dance area; on the first floor, the dancefloor is replaced by bathrooms. And every floor of the place was absolutely packed with fellow young adults looking for a good time on a Saturday night.

The layout of the club actually turned out to be a boon. See, Max has a crush on Holly and was hitting on her relentlessly all night. The problem is that Max is also an asshole. Normally I'd censor myself, but there really is no polite term for him. He's European, and believes that this makes him somehow special, and his idea of courtship involves making fun of America and trying to jam his tongue down Holly's throat. She turned away quickly enough that he only managed to kiss her cheek, but he kept trying. Not only does Holly have a guy back home waiting for her, Max also smokes, and Holly doesn't like that. So even if she didn't have someone in mind already, she still wouldn't be interested in him. I had to rescue Holly a couple of times, with the old "come to the bathroom with me" line. We hid in the stairwell until a bouncer told us to pick a floor or get out.

After another hour or so of dealing with Max (and another "bathroom run"), we decided to just leave and go somewhere else. We found Alexandra and told her, and she tried to unload Max onto us. No, the point was to get Holly away from him because he's being rude and creepy. So, the five of us (at some point one of their classmates joined us) just all left together. We stopped for burgers at this restaurant I'll probably never manage to find again, then went home because everyone was getting tired and no one wanted to deal with Max anymore. Alexandra didn't want to keep dragging him around, we didn't want him to come with us, so we just decided we were done for the night. The original plan had been to stay out all night, i.e. until the public transportation system reopens at 6:30, but we called it quits around 3:30.

On the way home we actually ran into Jorge, Maksim and Liz; Dasha and the Italian girl had gone home because they had work in the morning, and Corinne wasn't feeling well so she didn't come out at all. Liz came with us because she never really wanted to go out anyway; she was convinced by promises of shawarma, and we caught them just as they were leaving the shawarma place, so she just walked home with us.

Annoying boys aside, it was actually a pretty fun night. I got to hang out with Holly, which was cool. I don't get to see her as often as I'd like because she's in a different class, lives way far away from us, and doesn't find out about plans far enough in advance to let her host mom know. We bonded, and that was nice, because as different as we are, I feel like I have more in common with her than I do with most of the SRAS people here. Holly is my age, a junior in college, in her university's honors program, unlike the others here through the SRAS. All my roommates are older than me; some are looking at grad schools, others are non-traditional students, and the others (Brenda and Elizabeth) aren't students at all. We're going to try to get together over the summer; she lives in North Carolina, but her family's going to Disney near the end of July. I'm pretty sure she said it was around the 21st, which is before Otakon, so we should be able to figure something out.

Chapter the Fifth: Don't You Lecture Me!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:23:00 +0000

*dusts off cobwebs*

Alright, alright, I know it's been like a week since I last posted. Nothing exciting has happened in that time! And as much as I know you're all hanging on my every word, I'm sure you'd get bored quickly if I filled this blog with posts about how I stayed inside on my computer for the entire three-day holiday weekend, then overslept and missed the make-up class on Sunday. Liz and I went out, along with Elizabeth, for a little while Friday night. We got some tasty Chinese food and later attempted to go to a gay club with Jorge and his friend Max; they wouldn't let the girls in, so we left, grabbed some snackies at a produkty and hung out in the apartment for a while. Oh, and I got my passport back, complete with shiny new multi-entry visa, from the university. They didn't lose my documents again, yay! The fact that the multi-entry visa is both larger than and not attached to the passport does kind of bother me, though. I suppose if it all stays in its pouch it'll be fine.

This evening, Brenda and Corinne and I met with a friend of Sergei's by the name of Tamara. She's the sweetest old lady, brimming with knowledge about Russian culture. We're meeting with her Friday evening, and next week on Wednesday and Friday as well. This is the kind of thing I was expecting to do for the entire Russian Psyche class, so it's cool that we're finally getting to it. I mean, I've enjoyed the other stuff we've done (making syrniki, watching movies), but this is what I was interested in in the first place. We're squeezing 8 lectures on Russian history and culture into 4 lengthy visits to this woman's apartment, and I'm already looking forward to going back.

Tonight's lectures were just a sort of overview to gauge our familiarity with the subject matter and get to know each other a little bit. Tamara has been a teacher and professor of many topics of Russian culture, as well as Russian and English language courses. She taught in the US for 12 years during the Soviet era, and was alive even during Stalin's reign, although she was just a child (she said she was 7 or 8 when he died). She basically told us about her life, things she's observed in her years of experience and travel, the disparity between common stereotypes and what she (and we) have observed, and the general features of the Russian character. According to Tamara, the main feature of the Russian psyche (~~hey! that's the title of this course~~) is a theme of duality: Russians are both atheistic and pious, both Christian and pagan, both European and Asian.

Even during the Soviet era, when everyone was nominally atheist, people would still observe religious rites (e.g., baptizing an infant), simply because that's what you were supposed to do. Baptizing an infant had little to do with anyone's personal faith; it was just part and parcel of the whole song-and-dance that accompanies a baby's entrance into this world. From what Tamara said and what I've read in the book I bought for this class, Christianity's influence on Russian culture was really more of a structural effect than anything else; it recontextualized and gave new names to many facets of the old pagan beliefs. The decision to adopt Christianity, as opposed to any other religion, came about after the Tsar sent people all over the world to learn about other cultures; upon attending a Greek Orthodox service in Byzantium, the emissaries were so taken by the beauty of it all that they "were certain they were in heaven, for nothing so beautiful could exist on earth." Yes, sometimes crucial decisions like the theology upon which a country will be governed is based on frivolous things like "who has the prettiest churches?" You do have to hand it to them, though; Russian cathedrals are gorgeous.

Evidence of Russian piety (regardless of the affiliation of their particular God or gods) is found all over the place in the language. There are a lot of words referring to successful people or people with particular attributes (being very strong, etc) that contain the root "Bog," which is the Russian (actually etymologically Ukrainian, but who's counting) word for "God." For instance, in Russian, the name by which the Virgin Mary is referred to translates literally to "mother of God." No one here calls her Mary, Saint Mary, or the Virgin; they call her the Holy Mother. In icons, she is typically pictured cradling the baby Jesus in a very maternal fashion; as opposed to many Western depictions of the Madonna and Child, where said Madonna functions more like a human-shaped chair for said Child. Whereas in Western Christian tradition, the emphasis is on Mary's spiritual (or physical) purity and the Immaculate Conception, Russian Orthodoxy places huge emphasis on the fact that she gave birth to a child, nevermind the details of the child's or her own conception. In many ways, this echoes the idea of "Mother Earth," and by extension "Mother Russia." Motherhood is huge in Russian culture; as an interesting aside, a lot of Russian profanity is centered around the womb (contrast American profanity, which is mostly sexual, or French profanity, which is mostly religious).

Russians are also incredibly superstitious. I could write an entire blog post on Russian superstitions, but I think I'd have to spend the rest of my time here researching it first. For instance, no Russian will shake your hand over a threshold--one of you must pass through the door first, or it's bad luck. An unmarried girl should not sit at the corner of a table, or else she won't be married for a certain number of years (I think it was 7); if the seating arrangement is such that someone must sit at the corner, a married woman will take that seat. A lot of the superstition comes from the influence of East and Central Asian cultures, which provides me a convenient segue into addressing the third aspect of the dual nature of the Russian psyche.

Russians attribute their love of beautiful things and refinement to their European heritage. At the same time, however, they acknowledge that they are a brutal people. Which is understandable; Russia is a brutal place. But still. Russian men, as an example, swear a lot, drink a lot, are violent, etc. These unsavory attributes are usually blamed on the influence of Asian cultures (chiefly the Tatars). Russia exists in a strange place between Europe and Asia proper; the citizens' appearance is largely European, but they are living in what is, geographically speaking, Asia. There is also a lot of prejudice against people who look Asian (or otherwise ethnic, but particularly Asians); I can't imagine what life is like here for the Chinese and Japanese students enrolled at my faculty. Presumably, they're treated with at least a modicum of respect by academics and those in the university's employ, but when venturing out into the city, I can't help but wonder what they experience.

The chat with Tamara was kind of a massive information-dump, but it was certainly informative. I'm super excited to go back. She's also got a pupil that she tutors in English by the name of Olga, who is going to talk to us (to practice her English) on Friday over tea and cakes. She likes the Beatles and old movies, and she's leaving Sunday for Prague, and that is all I know about her. Maybe we'll end up practicing our Russian, too, I don't know. But it certainly promises to be an enjoyable evening.

The rest of this week is also jam-packed with stuff. Tomorrow night we're going to see a play (performed in English by American students, because it's free and Sergei and his other Russian students are also coming), then Friday we're going back to Tamara's, then Saturday we're touring the Peter and Paul Fortress and attending some kind of Frida Kahlo-themed flamenco dance show. Maybe if I get a minute to rest on Sunday I'll post about it all. Things calm down a bit after Saturday; next week the only thing besides regular class is going back to Tamara's on Wednesday and Friday evening. We have another lecture with Sergei on the following Tuesday, and then Corinne and I leave with the Elizabeths for Estonia on the 29th, and that about does it for March.

Chapter the Fourth: Hermitages

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 07:19:00 +0000

So, I believe I mentioned in an earlier post that my language class starts at 10:40, rather than 12:20, on Tuesdays, to allow time for my culture class to meet without making the cleaning staff at the university stay too late. This morning, like ~~every~~ most Tuesday mornings, I headed over to Vasilievsky Island (running about 10-15 minutes late for class, I admit)...and upon finishing the grueling climb to the fourth floor of the faculty, I found five of my classmates chillin' in the hallway. Apparently, Valentina Semyonovna forgot she had a class this morning, or something. I put down my bags and took my coat off, just in case she showed up soon. I sat in the hall with my classmates for about 15-20 minutes...with no sign of the professor. Most of the people who passed by us seemed to ignore us, actually, which was kind of weird. One young woman kept going back and forth between the hall where our classroom was (among others) and...somewhere, casually stepping over coats and legs like we weren't even there. I know if there was a cluster of students sitting and chatting in the hallway in, say, Sampson Hall (because it's the foreign-language building! hurr i am comedy) for 40 minutes, someone would either ask who they were waiting for or tell them to get lost.

Anyway, by about 11:30, I decided that even if Valentina Semyonovna did show up eventually, I wouldn't be there long enough to make coming to class worthwhile. So, I put my coat and bags back on and left. See, this afternoon, Sergei had a friend of his take us--Corinne, Brenda, Holly and me--on a tour of the Hermitage, and I would've had to leave class early to have time to get back home, collect Corinne (she wasn't feeling well that morning, so she didn't come with me to the faculty), and figure out how to get to the Hermitage from my apartment. We stopped in the Palace Square courtyard on the walking tour with Sergei, but I wasn't paying a ton of attention to how we actually got there; my attention was fixed more on how cold it was, not slipping on the ice, and trying to hear what Sergei was saying because he's very soft-spoken.

Corinne and I checked the trolley routes and learned that trolleybus number 10 or 11 would take us where we needed to go. So we waited at the trolley stop, crammed ourselves into the first number 11 that showed up (along with what seemed like a hundred other people), paid our 21p and held on for dear life because this driver's got a schedule to keep, people! Shut up and hold on! Eventually Corinne grabbed a seat and, as soon as another one near her opened up, she helped me squeeze through the crowd to take it. I still feel weird about moving through crowds like that. I feel like I'm being rude, but I'm not. It's perfectly acceptable to brush against someone moving past them, without so much as an "excuse me, please." The only time anyone will say something to you is if there isn't enough room on either side of you to squeeze past. I mean, I'm sure there are probably some people I've encountered--especially at rush hour on the metro--who are being rude, perhaps pushing past others too brusquely, but for the most part navigating in crowds here does not require nearly the level of song and dance that it does in America.

Anyway, the Hermitage! My God, it's massive. It actually consists of several buildings connected to one another, and they are all beautiful. Most of the information we received from Yulia, Sergei's friend, was about the palace itself. The building that you will see photos of if you Google Image Search "Hermitage" or "Эрмитажа" used to be the Winter Palace, commissioned by Peter the Great. It's a striking shade of teal with white details and a whole bunch of columns. One entrance's columns consist of about a dozen huge granite Atlas-like men holding the roof over their heads. Corinne took a number of photos; if I can get them from her later, I'll post a few. Or link to her blog, if she uploads the photos there. (Aside: Speaking of Corinne's blog, she posted a photo tour of our apartment there and gave me permission to link to it so my friends and family could see where I live. Here's the link.)

Right now, the Hermitage has an exhibition called "Lomonosov in the time of Elizabeth," referring of course to the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Mikhail Lomonosov was a polymath and writer alive during Elizabeth's reign, so the exhibit is a delightful mix of drawings and portraits of the Empress and 18th-century scientific equipment. As I said, though, most of the things Yulia told us about had to do with the histories of the buildings themselves and not the art housed within them. There were a couple of reception halls; the main reception hall was all gilded with an impressive gold colonnade, and the throne room or St. George room was nearly identical, except it had very stately white marble instead of so much gold. The design on the ceiling mirrored the floor inlay, made of something like 25 different types of wood, except for one key detail: where, in the ceiling decoration, there appeared a two-headed eagle, no such symbol was to be found on the floor, because that would be stepping on the Russian empire.

Attached to the Winter Palace was a smaller building that Catherine the Great had built so that she could invite her friends over and have a more private, more personal alternative to the play-acting necessary in her court. She had a list of rules engraved on a plaque (e.g., visitors must speak only Russian, no swearing, no drunkenness, etc), and any guest who broke a rule would have to immediately drink a glass of water and recite part of a very long, very complex poem, the title of which eludes me at the moment. I thought the story was funny, but then, I haven't seen this ultra-complex poem.

There is a corridor connecting the Small Hermitage (the building I mentioned in the previous paragraph) to the New Hermitage (commissioned by Catherine specifically as a public museum, unlike the rest of the complex). This corridor is full of art. The walls are covered in little pictures of people doing things, animals being silly, etc, and the pattern never repeats itself. It looks like it does, but in fact each image is unique. It's a series of arches, and on the ceiling between each arch are four panels depicting scenes from the Bible. One end of the hall begins with creation, and it progresses from there. There is so much going on in this corridor that it would take years to see everything. It's like a microcosm of the entire Hermitage, because the whole thing is like that. Catherine was a voracious art collector, and she bought entire collections as opposed to individual paintings. Knowing that, and seeing the sheer quantity of stuff that the Hermitage houses, makes it all the more impressive to know that the palace burnt down in the late 1837. A fire started somewhere and spread throughout the house between the walls, which were very thick and had spaces between them. While working on an expansion, at one point they decided to break down the wrong wall, and by then the fire had spread so far that the building couldn't be saved. Most of the things in it, however, could be. Paintings and heavy furniture were carted out and deposited in the snow in Palace Square, and it's said that the fire could be seen for miles. The inside of the building was completely redone, although the facade remained the same.

The tour was very fast, but also very informative; I was really more interested in the history more than the paintings housed within the building, anyway, so I'm glad it wasn't an interminable slog through a hundred rooms while Yulia talked at us about people we had never heard of and didn't care about. We stopped in the cafe afterward to sit and get coffee, and ended up staying so long that they actually had to kick us out because the cafe was closing. So we retrieved our coats and left.

I actually ended up writing this post over two days, because I forgot I was working on it yesterday. xD But nothing much more happened last night. I ate too many of these frozen pelmeni that I bought and cooked, but that discomfort was temporary and the story is not at all exciting. Tomorrow is National Women's Day; Corinne wants to go explore in town and see the festivities. I don't know if I'm gonna go with. Probably, but at the same time, I have a lot of important sleeping to do. And work. I do have work to do.

Chapter the Fourth: Spring? Spring!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 18:53:00 +0000

Following last Sunday's ironic Maslenitsa snow, the weather calmed down considerably. Friday morning, for instance, it was raining, and I was excited. That meant that the temperature was finally above zero outside, or, because Fahrenheit sounds less cold: the temperature was probably like, 35! Maybe even 36! Warm enough that the snow was melting into rain well above street level, anyway. The day was uneventful; that afternoon, Corinne and I decided to go shopping, because we both were in need of some new footwear if the temperature was going to continue to climb.

We went to the Galleria, about three blocks from the apartment, because Corinne knew of a shoe store called Centro Обувь. They had some really nice, relatively cheap boots, but I fell in love with a pair that came out to just under US$45. Light tan ankle boots with some adorable little buckle details. I figured they were worth it, because I'll be able to wear them back home when it cools off some in October and November. They fit quite nicely over my ingenious double-sock setup (one pair of the fuzzy green socks I got for Christmas--thanks Bill!--over one pair of regular socks), but they aren't too loose when my feet are less padded. They're super-cute, too! At some point I'll ask Corinne to take some pictures and upload them. I could have spent days in Centro, though, as anyone who has seen me within 100 feet of a shoe store can attest. If putting on shoes weren't such a production here, what with the double layers of socks all being carefully tucked between layers of thermal leggings to keep everything in place, I would have been trying on shoes left and right (pun definitely intended).

We stopped in a few other clothing stores, including one called Be Free, where Corinne bought this adorable brown sweater dress, and saw a dress she'd bought at the same store in Irkutsk, on sale for less than half of what she paid at the time. :( Aww. Well, you win some, you lose some. We also saw some sweaters that Alex and Liz had bought; they're the strangest things, just solid-color knitted wool sweaters with random words on them in a variety of colors. If I recall correctly, the selections were "Black" (black sweater, white letters), "White" (white with black), "Blonde" (light blue with white), "Smart" (salmon-pink with white), "Perfect" (blue with light yellow), and "Cactus" (green with black). Alex has a Black sweater and Liz got a Cactus one. They were like 100p each; we'll just have to go back and see if they're on sale, because I want a Smart sweater.

I like seeing merchandise with English writing on it; in one store, they were selling pillows with strange designs on them that incorporated some English words. One pillow had a weird, Adventure-Time-esque happy face and a speech bubble with the words "Am I trendy?" in it; another said something like "Give to me please money on the beer." To be fair, that's basically a direct translation of the same statement in Russian, but that doesn't make it any less funny. I almost wanted to buy it. Almost.

A couple hours after we got home, our roommates arrived, with Elizabeth in tow; apparently they'd already gone out someplace for dinner, and also stopped at a produkty for snacks and booze. Elizabeth's dinner had consisted of a couple of drinks, so she was already rather drunk by the time the group reached our apartment...which is why she thought it was a good idea to buy a one-liter can of beer at the produkty along with her sandwich ingredients. I didn't even know they made one-liter cans of anything before I came here. They are comically large: about 12 inches tall and 4-5 inches across. Elizabeth shared her liter of beer because she really didn't need that much to herself, and it made the ensuing game a lot more interesting.

I Googled around a bit but I couldn't find a name for that game where everyone writes down a famous person's name on a card and sticks it to someone else's forehead, and then you have to guess who you are. Head Bands? Celebrity Heads? Whatever, that game, you know it. They played it in Inglourious Basterds. And we played it in our kitchen, with Elizabeth (and one of Jorge's friends, but he came later). It was only a drinking game in the sense that most of the players happened to be imbibing alcohol at the time; we didn't institute formal rules like "drink if you guess wrong" or whatever. We played three rounds; I was Anna Karenina, Amelia Pond and Sleeping Beauty (although that one was revealed by accident when Corinne blurted it out, so I didn't guess it). The names I wrote down were Batman (for Corinne), Jack Daniels (for Liz) and Salvador Dali (also Liz). I don't remember who wrote them or whose heads they were on, but some of the other names we had were Spiderman, Harriet Tubman, Dracula, Pinocchio, Henry VIII and Beowulf. So, yeah, it was an interesting game, especially watching the more intoxicated players try to keep track of the clues they'd received. Many laughs were had by all, and afterward everyone else went out somewhere. I went to bed; they all came back at around 4:30, and Elizabeth spent the night with us because the metros were closed and she was too drunk to walk home alone.

This afternoon, when everyone woke up, Liz and Corinne spent some time planning and booking things for this Baltic spring break trip they'd been talking about for a while. Elizabeth and I are also going. :) I'm excited; we're going to a music festival in Estonia for 2-3 days, then kicking around Latvia and Lithuania for the next week-ish, bringing our total trip to about 9 days. We'll all have our passports and shiny new extended multi-entry visas by the week after next, and the trip is at the end of March; I think it's the 28th/29th through April 7th-ish. We're traveling by bus and staying in some really nice-looking hostels. I haven't decided if I'm going to bring my laptop; probably not, though, because most of the hostels have computers available for general use. And it's not like the apartment will be empty for those nine days; Jorge and Alex aren't coming with us, so they'll be there. The only problem I'll potentially run into then is keeping my iPod charged, because all I have is a USB cord, but even then, Corinne's iPod charge cord might fit my iPod (I dunno how old her iPod is).

The total cost for this trip looks like it's gonna be probably close to US$550, including bus/music festival tickets ($121/$45), hostel fees ($300 total), and food (~$90). With any luck, my Stetson refund check will be processed soon and I'll have a considerable chunk of change dropped into my account. I've already set aside $466 in my savings account, so I know that I'll at least be able to pay Liz for the bus tickets/hostel booking fees, Corinne for the festival tickets and the hostel for my bed. I'm not hurting for money right now, or anything, but with a $5 non-Wells Fargo ATM fee on top of however much I withdraw, each time I withdraw some cash (usually around $70, but the exact amount fluctuates with the exchange rate), I know I need to stay on top of my spending. $5 adds up over time.

Chapter the Fourth: Maslenitsa!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 17:55:00 +0000

So, you know how in my last post I said something about only having fallen once? Yeah, looks like I jinxed myself. Pretty much the entirety of Vasilievsky Island was coated in ice on Friday, so on the way to class that morning, Corinne and I were slipping all over the place. I got tired of it within about five minutes of the walk from the metro. And shortly after that, I slipped and fell flat on my back. Well, no, not *flat* on my back; that would have destroyed the apple I had packed, as well as probably damaging my spare glasses, both of which were living in the little front pocket of my backpack (they both survived the trip). Instead, I fell on my right hip (and, to a lesser extent, elbow). There's a massive bruise there now. Nothing's broken, I can still walk, it's just sore. That happened after turning my ankle slightly on the walk to Mayakovskaya, due to misjudging the depth of a puddle. Yeah. Friday was not a good day to be my right leg.

And obviously, after hurting myself and just generally having a terrible time of it during the day Friday, I decide it would be a great idea to go out with my roommates that night! It's a holiday weekend, what the hell, right? Really, though, it was fun. We met some of Liz's friends at this really cheap bar (and Jorge discovered that a guy he went to [a very small, private, evangelical Iowa] college with is in St Petersburg now with another program), then moved to a club that was grungier and less...weird than RadioBaby. I dunno, it just seemed like the people at this club were there to party, not lean awkwardly against the walls because having fun is so mainstream. I think the bar was called Mad Dog, and the club's name was I think Belgrade or something. Belgrade's DJ seemed to have nothing in his booth but bizarre remixes of 90s-early 2000s American pop music. At one point they played Smash Mouth and that was cool, but all of the other songs were just these crazy remixes; one of them was a mashup of Ciara and the Pussycat Dolls over a reggae/bluesy guitar line. Don't you wish your milkshake was hot like me, indeed. (My girlfriend brings all the boys to the yard.) There were some others but that's the one I remember the most clearly.

We started talking to this random group of Russians who happened to have grabbed the couch adjacent to ours; there were two guys and two girls, and they had apparently gone out to celebrate the birthday of one of the guys. They were all extremely drunk and on their third or so round of rum-and-cokes by the time we started talking to them. I went to the bathroom at one point (basically a hallway with 3 small water closets and one small room full of urinals, and sinks on the opposite wall from the toilets), and ran into the two guys at the sink. They slurred at me in a combination of Russian and broken English, something to the effect of "Hey, girl! You drunk? You like vodka? Haha!" I just kind of laughed and walked away. The bar area was really crowded so I decided to backtrack and head back to my friends through the dance area, where I found the guys again. I smiled and waved at them and then moved on, but one of them yelled something at me and pulled me back up onto the dance floor. Well, okay, why not? I'm at a club, might as well. So I danced a little bit. Just my usual little semi-rhythmic wiggle, nothing crazy--it's not like I started grinding on anybody. Liz's friend accompanied us to the club and she was there, so it's not as if I was suddenly dancing in a crowd full of total strangers. I stayed for a minute or so and then slipped away, back to the couch where everyone was sitting. We chilled at that club until about 2:30-3 AM.

When we finally left (spiriting Liz's friend away from a super-sleazy guy who was too drunk to understand why Liz got all mad at him for trying to grab her drink out of her hand), Corinne tried to find the water bottle of hers that they had confiscated at the door. They threw it away or something (more likely it was stolen, probably by the bouncer), so she couldn't get it back. Sad face. :c It was a really nice steel Kleen Kanteen, too, with a sticker she really liked on it. So we went to get some shawarma to cheer Corinne up and absorb some of the alcohol in everyone's systems. I ate about three bites of mine and then I just wasn't interested anymore; I was dizzy and I had to pee and I just wanted to go home. Luckily, Jorge is a shawarma vacuum, so he finished mine in short order.

I somehow managed to make it home without falling again, although Nevsky wasn't nearly as icy as it could have been. I pretty much stayed awake long enough to put pajamas on and then collapsed into bed and didn't move for six hours. I got a sore neck for my trouble; apparently I fell asleep with my head at a weird angle. But that was the worst of it, really.

I woke up in time to go to the Russian Museum again; Sergei rescheduled the tour to Saturday because Sunday was a festival day! We explored the 20th-century art this time. Most likely due to the current political climate in Russia, all of the Soviet art that is normally on display in the Russian Museum was absent. There was art from the Soviet era, but none of the portraits of leaders or anything really ideologically-driven; just portraits of random working-class folks and abstract pieces.

I was tired after the night out and the museum tour, and my hip and ankle hurt, so I declined to go with when Corinne and Liz announced they would be meeting Elizabeth and going to this bar/club/place that had a bunch of indie bands playing Saturday night. Turns out I made a good decision; the cover charge for that place was 500p, instead of the advertised 100p, so they spent a lot of time just trying to find a bar they could get into. They all eventually came home around 4:30 in the morning on Sunday; Elizabeth spent the night at our place, rather than try to find her way back to her apartment drunk and alone. St Petersburg is a reasonably safe city, but you just never know.

Back on Thursday, when Jorge had his friend Max over, Max mentioned that he wanted to take us to a Maslenitsa festival. That was today, and it was pretty fun! The festival was next to the Peter and Paul Fortress, and they had a ton of little booths selling food and crafts, as well as a massive ice slide, zorb balls, colorfully-dressed people on stilts...you know, the stuff you'd expect to find at a festival. I regret that I never got to play around in the zorb balls, but Corinne and Liz and I did do the ice slide, and that was fun. I really need to get a pair of flat boots; I wore my sneakers today and they got soaked as I waded through snow. Yeah, it snowed today, which I thought was fittingly ironic for an end-of-winter celebration. After we'd seen and done everything we wanted to, there was still about an hour before the traditional effigy burning, so Max led us all over the freaking fortress looking for a cafe that we passed within seconds of entering the gate. It was warm and dry and I could sit down, that was all I cared about. And I got some tea and borscht, so there was also that.

When the time came, we went back outside the fortress; they had people on snowboards and skis going down the ice slide and doing tricks to entertain the crowd before the burning, which turned out to be a fireworks show instead of actually setting fire to a straw effigy of Lady Maslenitsa. But the fireworks were still neat. First, they had some sparklers attached to the edges of the ice slide, and set those off just to get some good smoke going. Then they had snowboarders and skiers ride down the slide carrying flares, followed by dancers swinging more flares on chains and one guy with a wheel o' flares spinning on his back. Then several dozen fireworks attached at various places to the ice slide structure went off. It was pretty spectacular, and (paradoxically) quite a bit safer than setting fire to dry grass in front of a crowd of hundreds. I guess they just trusted that the air would be cool and wet enough to extinguish the fireworks quickly before they fell back to earth. Alternatively, Russians don't care nearly as much about safety as Americans do; such a fireworks display in America would've taken place with all the explosives on the other side of the river and with all of the people safely within the courtyard of the fortress. Meanwhile, in Russia, they're setting off fireworks directly over the heads of a crowd standing mere hundreds of feet from ground zero and everyone's like "lol, nbd."

I'm glad I went, although I'm tired and sore and still probably have homework to do. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I do. Bluhhh. I guess I'll go be responsible and stop having fun now.

Chapter the Fourth: Shades of Gray

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:59:00 +0000

Why do you do this to me, Russia? Why do you tease me with a few sunny, clear days hovering around 0 degrees (if not even creeping up a bit!), then abruptly fall back into Hardcore Winter Mode? The sidewalk was almost DRY a week ago! Now it's rained or snowed (however lightly) pretty much constantly the past three days, and the sidewalks are all a mess of slush and miscellaneous street-goo. It's hard to judge how solid the dirty slush-pile before me on the sidewalk is; good thing I'm still basically used to walking with my head down and eyes fixed firmly on the ground in front of me. I know it's not doing my posture any favors, but it certainly helps when navigating icy, sludgy pathways.

One thing I've noticed, the few times I've left the house this week, is how many shades of gray there are in the snow on the sidewalk. The untrodden snow off to the side, between stoops where no one walks, that is pure white. As you move closer to the street, the snow quickly mixes with exhaust and miscellaneous dirt to create a gross, slate-gray slurry that coats the sidewalks. After enough people have walked on it, it's hard to even remember what color the bricks or tiles or flagstones are under the gray slush; everything is coated in a uniform layer of gray goo. It's also hard to see the patches of ice, and on certain sidewalks the slush itself can get really slippery. I've only ever actually fallen once, although I've slipped countless times. I've only seen a Russian slip once, and she handled it expertly, almost as if she intended to slide across the ice patch. Maybe they just recover more quickly than I do, being more used to navigating such environments.

I'm definitely going to buy a new pair of shoes at some point while I'm here. There are a ton of shoe stores around; I'm just not sure how expensive they are or whether I'll be able to find flat ankle boots or something similar. I can't wear my heeled boots every day; the red-and-white Converse I brought are hard to wear with two pairs of socks; and my white and green sneakers are like two huge neon signs attached to my feet that read AMERICAN. They are comfortable, even in multiple socks, though; and they're holding up surprisingly well under these conditions. My socks stayed dry, even wading through slush, until the last ten minutes or so of the walk home yesterday, because I misstepped a couple of times and plunged my foot into a solid-looking pile of gray-brown muck. I like to pretend that white sneakers are my only tell; it absolutely isn't, but it's definitely among the most conspicuous.

We're in the thick of the holiday season, as it were, now; it's Holy Week, but besides that, this week contains plenty of other holidays. Monday was President's Day; Tuesday was Pancake Day; today was Men's Day/Defenders of the Fatherland Day, and tomorrow is my grandma's birthday! Happy birthday Mamaw :) Also Good Friday, but I think the first one is more important.

This morning Corinne made blini for everyone, and even went out and got toppings; we had sweetened condensed milk (which came in a pouch like this! Food packaged like this is not out of the ordinary for Russia, though; you can find ketchup, mustard, mayo, and cheese sauce in similar packaging), apricot jam, butter, sour cream, honey, and muesli, although no one really went for the muesli (granola cereal). Liz tried it but she was the only one. With a bit more of a coordinated effort we could have had an even grander smorgasbord of toppings; other popular choices here include cream cheese, salmon, caviar, boiled eggs, and mushrooms. Being a breakfast (even if it was at 1:30 in the afternoon, because my roommates waited for me to wake up), we stuck to mostly sweet toppings instead of savory. Jorge had a Russian friend over at the time and he said the blini were perfect, and didn't believe it was Corinne's first time making them because they turned out so good.

Later, Jorge and his friend, along with Liz and Corinne, went out to see the festivities for Defenders of the Fatherland Day; I declined to go with, because I don't like navigating the slippery, slushy sidewalks. Alexandra reported that it took three times as long to get from the metro to the apartment this morning on her way home (she'd gone out with friends to a hockey game the previous night), due to the slush.

I know I need to get out and do stuff but mehhh, I don't waaaanna. I do feel better, though; no more sore throat or anything. I think it may have been an allergic reaction to the vitamin D supplement I picked up, because I didn't start feeling bad until I started taking it, and I stopped taking it and got better; I'm going to look and see if I can find a gelcap supplement instead of the gross chalky tablets that I got. They don't even dissolve in hot water; I tried dissolving one in some tea, because it's this huge nickel-sized chalky pellet of minty grossness that I hate chewing, and the tablet will break up into particles but the particles will fall out of solution and settle in the bottom of the mug. Ick. It's probably not good to suddenly stop taking a relatively large dose of a vitamin D supplement, but I feel OK; I also felt OK when my endocrinologist told me I had a severe vitamin D deficiency, though, so I guess in the worst-case scenario, I get to start hyper-dosing myself with the stuff when I get back home again. Hopefully I'll find a better supplement here. There are aptekas all over the place; one of them is sure to have something.

At some point this evening I need to sit down and pen another journal entry for this culture class; I'm going to go over the prompts we have again and see if I know enough about any of them to produce something that will meet the minimum requirements. I have no motivation to do anything of the sort, but I know I have to. Siiiigh. The next several days will be quite busy; I have my regular language class tomorrow, plus a rescheduled culture class to discuss a short story we had to read right after it, plus the second excursion to the Russian museum on Saturday, plus something Maslenitsa-related on Sunday, and I think my roommates want to go out somewhere over the weekend too. And a partridge in a pear tree.

Chapter the Fourth: Cultural Credit??

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:19:00 +0000

Talking about this semester before I left, I know I said to most (if not all) of you that if it were up to me, I'd just spend the whole four months exploring the Hermitage and other museums. Well, that was before I realized how vibrant the city itself really is, but the point still stands. We visited the Russian Museum today and explored art dating up to the 19th century. Next Sunday, we go back and look at Soviet art. Corinne and Brenda and I also took in a Bach concerto after the museum tour.

The three of us met Sergei at Gostiny Dvor, like usual for these outings. On the way to the museum we stopped and he told us about this cake shop that we passed; apparently, during the Soviet era, around Women's Day (March 8), it was not uncommon to see a queue of men a hundred meters long stretching from the door of this patisserie, in line to buy a cake or other sweet for their sweet. :) He related the experience of being sent to this shop, on his own, to buy cakes for all of the women in the factory he worked at as a young man, which made us all laugh. We stopped inside and he pointed out a few of the more popular products, and we decided to come back later, as we would have some time between the end of the tour and the start of the concert.

We arrived at the museum and, for some reason, ran a lap around the coat check area while taking off our various warms. I don't ask questions, I just follow Sergei and try not to get lost. I decided to forgo the thermal undershirt today and wore my teal blouse, just because I wanted to change up my usual t-shirt over long-sleeved thermal/turtleneck look. This was a mistake. My legs, double-insulated in two pairs of thermal leggings (I decided not to wear my boots as we'd be walking quite a bit), were nice and toasty throughout the excursion, but in some of the cooler rooms of the museum I became acutely aware of just how useless any clothing sold in Florida is when it comes to temperatures below 75 degrees. I also felt weirdly bottom-heavy, wearing three layers on the bottom and only one (flimsy) layer on top. On the plus side, that blouse has never looked so good on me, so there's that. :D

We began our tour with the икони, or religious icons, of the 11th century. I think I liked these rooms the best, because all of the other paintings are so well-preserved, it's hard to really conceive of how old they truly are. Icons, however, are much older, and something about the deterioration just makes them seem more "real." Even though that process has effectively been frozen in time, as they are now interred in a museum instead of being installed in churches and prayed to. I like the style of the medieval art, too; it's like proto-Cubism, with the different perspectives within the same painting, and if you look there are a lot of really neat things going on in some of them. And they're quite pretty, with rich and vibrant colors showing through the centuries of dirt. Lots of gold, intense blues and reds, all painted by the hands of artists who truly felt that they were not merely creating an image of a given saint, but by adorning this plank of wood with the face of that saint, they were creating a direct link to the saint and Heaven itself. (I felt extremely nerdy and kind of bad for immediately thinking "An image of a weeping angel will eventually become a weeping angel" when Sergei came to that point in his lecture about iconography.)

The first three or so rooms were full of icons ranging in size from a one-foot square facial portrait of the archangel Gabriel to full-body renditions of Peter and Paul the size of doors. After that, there was an abrupt shift to more realistic portraiture, marking the era of Peter the Great and the Europification of Russia's upper class. I thought it was neat to watch the change in women's fashion as we moved forward in time from the 17th century, as the severe conical corsets gave way to the high-waisted empire style popular by the end of the 18th century. Much of the portraiture of Catherine the Great depicts her dressed in the empire style. I liked those portraits because Catherine the Great appears to have had a body similar to mine; she may have been taller (I can't find any mention of her height in any biographies), but as far as build goes, it seems to be roughly the same. I don't know, I just like identifying with significant historical figures I guess.

In about two and a half hours, we saw about half the museum; there were a couple of rooms that we just breezed through, so depending on how expensive admission actually is, Corinne and I may go back and make a day of exploring the building. She is or was an art history major and particularly likes the artist Repin, whose work is apparently part of a traveling exhibit at the moment; she's going to try and find out where that exhibit is and when it's supposed to be back, and plan to return to the museum to see her favorite paintings in person. She was crushed when Sergei said that one of the paintings she was really looking forward to seeing (The Volga Barge Haulers, Repin) wasn't there. I'm looking forward to going back and seeing the Soviet art next week.

After we finished the tour, Sergei bid us farewell and we decided to grab some dinner before the concert. It was really windy and bitterly cold today, so we had to make a decision quickly; Brenda knew of a little столовая nearby, so we headed there. It was a cafeteria-style setup, much like the cafe that Corinne and I went to before class the other week; I got some salad Olivier, some bean soup, and some curly pasta with sauce that tasted pleasantly like Spaghetti-Os. I also got hot tea to drink, and selected a bag of "Flying Dragon" green tea, just because of the name. Everything was very tasty and really cheap; I think my final bill came to 112p.

After we finished at the stolovaya, we decided to go back to the cake shop for dessert and coffee. We bought four little pastries and shared them; two of them were tarts, one filled with whipped cream and topped with jellied fruit, and the other filled with buttercream frosting and decorated with a frosting flower. Another one was called a "kartoshka," because it resembled a potato, but was basically a fudgy rum ball. I couldn't quite place the flavor, then Brenda tried it and declared it to be "a rum ball in disguise!" The last one was, I guess, a sort of "flagship" confection, as it shared its name with the establishment - "Север," which translates to "north" and is pronounced "seh-VEHR." It was unique; none of us could really pin down the flavor of that one beyond "yummy."

We were going to get coffee, and then we saw on the menu that they served sbiten (сбитень). I flipped out because I LOVE that stuff; it's a hot drink made with honey and spices, and some recipes I've found incorporate blackberry jam or other things (chili peppers, anybody? That'll clear your sinuses right away). This version was just straight-up spiced honey, which apparently the restaurant receives in little packets (kind of like the little packets of jelly you get at diners in America) which are mixed with hot water. Doesn't matter, it was still tasty and good for my throat. We had another hour or so to kill, so we chatted some more and got some coffee because we were all full of delicious food and needed to wake up some before the concert.

The concert was nice. I felt very cultured being there, anyway, even if I did nod off a bit in parts. It was cold in the chapel, OK? And a lot of the music was very lilting and gentle. There was a choir as well as musicians, and they were quite good; the whole experience--sitting in a chapel watching people play and sing music in languages I don't speak--made me rather homesick, remembering the last time I attended a concert at Stetson (which was the Christmas Candlelight concert back in December; thanks, Galen's mom, for offering me the extra ticket :3). I miss Lee Chapel, with our two-story Beckerath organ and the slightly-more-comfortable pews.

I wish I could wrap up this post better, but it's getting late for me, and today was the busiest day I've spent in a while. I'm not used to that sort of thing, after this week! I am feeling better, though. Not quite 100%, but I'm getting there, slowly but surely.

Chapter the Third: In Which I Continue to Be Sick

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:29:00 +0000

I think if I sit down and tally everything that happened this week, I might just break even. Had fun on Valentine's Day, woke up mute the next day (and every day for the rest of the week, as it happens). Found a whole bunch of awesome mixes and mashups on Soundcloud, opened a can of worms with the director of the SRAS (more on that later). Winning at grammar in class, then lost the ability to focus on anything after about 2 PM.

Yeah, I'm still sick. I dunno what's wrong, but I've basically lost my voice completely now. I can manage a pathetic little croaking noise if I try really hard. On the plus side, I'm really close to having a perfect Christian "I Gargle with Thumbtacks and Whiskey" Bale "Batman" impression down. So, you know, today hasn't been a total waste. I ended up staying home today, too. Tonight we're supposed to go over to Elizabeth's for a Quentin Tarantino-themed party (an idea hatched at the Gal-entine's party); I don't know if I'm gonna go or not; I probably shouldn't, in any case, so it's good that I don't have any possible costumes. Maybe I'll throw some rubles at my roommates and ask them to pick me up some Strepsils or something at the apteka on their way home.

I don't feel like getting dressed or going outside, or I'd just make an apteka run myself; there are about half a dozen of them within a block of this apartment. Living in the center of the city has its perks. An apteka is basically a drugstore or small pharmacy. Some of them are at least partially self-service, but a lot still have their inventory behind glass and you have to ask the druggist to get you something. And it's not just the pharmacies; I've been in a produkty or two that had their inventory behind glass as well. I've managed so far with pointing and copious use of the word "пожалуйста," which serves the function of both "please" and "you're welcome." I dunno what it is; I can speak Russian with reasonable confidence in class, but when it comes to interacting with salespeople I freeze up and practically forget how to speak English, much less Russian.

So, about the director of the SRAS. His name's Josh. There's been this whole big folderol about the journaling requirement for the culture class. The way Josh and his assistant Molly have been approaching the journal entries has made it seem like they're actually trying to get us to write articles for the SRAS, which is not only deceptive and underhanded, but also not journaling. Uh, no, sorry. That's not how this works. I pay you to be here, so you pay me to provide content for your website. I'd have less of a problem with it if they didn't already have paid internship positions to write articles like these. That's where my concerns are, mainly, that they're trying to trick us into working for them for free. I'd be okay with publishing one or two of the journal entries I consider to be my best on the website, provided I could do so after the course is finished and my credits have transferred back to Stetson, and with the stipulation that the article goes up exactly as I wrote it. Molly, the assistant, apparently thought she'd been given license to apply the Red Pen of Justice to our blog posts. I was expecting the sort of feedback that I'd get from any professor, stuff like "I think you should develop this point more," or "you need to work on your transitions between paragraphs." What I got, however, was a word document with a bunch of proposed changes that were either purely stylistic or actually ungrammatical. Excuse me, no. If the blogs were in Russian, I'd expect to receive feedback with edits for grammar, syntax and diction. But they aren't. On top of the fact that Molly's edits were completely unasked-for, they were crap. Going beyond simply removing what I considered "my voice" from the piece, the edits she suggested made the piece feel choppy and sophomoric. I told Josh I "respectfully disagreed" with them and sent him back the "revised" blog post with all of Molly's suggestions and formatting removed.

Brenda's concerns have to do mainly with privacy, although she shares my concerns about the lack of compensation, and has her own email conversation with Josh going. I've also been exchanging emails with Josh about my concerns; I admit, I could probably have been a little less curt, but I wasn't outright rude to him or anything, and he attempted to shut me down twice. First, he tried playing the incredibly-condescending "I'm older than you, so shut up" card, pointing out that he's got six years of formal education on me. That almost works on people who are still legally minors (and it still didn't work on me as a teen); however, I'm an adult, so I'd appreciate being talked to like one. The second thing he tried was pointing out that Stetson's Bear in a Hat blog was part of the inspiration for the journaling requirement in the first place. The thing about Bear in a Hat is that it is not a publicity tool for the Stetson University Russian Studies program in the same way Josh seems to want our journal entries to be a publicity tool for the SRAS. So, you know, I appreciate the shout-out (go hatters), but the argument is still invalid. No word yet on the final verdict regarding this whole issue.

If I still have to do journal entries for this class once all this is resolved, I'll probably want to talk about the tour of the Russian museum we're doing on Sunday afternoon. I'm really looking forward to that; if you all recall, I said that if I had my druthers I'd just spend all 4 months here exploring museums. The city is fascinating in its own right, of course. But I'm so excited for the museum tour. And later on Sunday evening, we may be attending a chamber orchestra performance at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, because Sergei has a friend in the show.

It's about 4:30 now; I should probably make a decision soon about whether or not I'm going to Elizabeth's tonight, as the trip is about 45 minutes all told. If I don't go, the worst-case scenario is that I get the apartment to myself for a couple hours. I don't see a problem with this.

Chapter the Third: In Which We Celebrate Gal-entine's Day

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:01:00 +0000

Yes, Gal-entine's Day. Apparently, my roommates are Parks and Rec fans. But, you know, the word fits; we're an apartment full of girls (and Jorge) who are either single or far enough away from our men to be effectively single for the purposes of Valentine's Day. So, we had another little party and invited Brenda and Elizabeth over. We invited Holly too, but she didn't get the invitation in time to let her host mom know. It's a shame; she hasn't been able to make it to any of our get-togethers yet. We'll have to change that.

The day of February 14th was the gloomiest Valentine's Day I think I've ever seen, even thinking back to elementary school, back when I lived in a place that actually experienced winter. The sky was precisely that shade of gray that makes you want to just crawl back into bed; it was overcast like that all day, and it snowed for a while in the morning. From now on, my Tuesday language classes are an hour and a half earlier and in a different room, because of the culture class Corinne and Brenda and I are in. This room has a window that looks out over the surrounding buildings and the river. It's on the 4th floor, so the view is decent on days when the weather isn't so damned gloomy. But, you know, given the circumstances, the weather was actually perfect. I mean, I'm thousands of miles from my loved ones on a holiday that's all about spending time with those special to you. The class on Tuesday was actually all about holidays; Valentina Semyonovna encouraged us to talk about various holidays from our home countries, and it was interesting learning to talk about holidays like Independence Day and Chinese New Year in Russian. Valentine's Day is not super-popular in Russia; Men's Day (February 23, known in the Soviet era as Defenders of the Fatherland Day) and Women's Day (March 8) are more popular. St. Petersburg is Western enough to get a little more into the holiday; the ladies who sell mittens and socks near the metro station put away their warm accessories in favor of little stuffed animals and plush hearts with cutesy phrases embroidered on them. It's hard to ignore the holiday when every corner has a Valentine's-themed advertisement or somebody selling cheap gifts. Corinne ended up buying one.

After the language class, Corinne and Brenda and I met with Sergei and a cross-cultural psychologist, who talked with us about the discipline and the differences between American and Russian culture. He spoke English with the most bizarre Anglo-Germanic accent, like he learned English from the BBC and Rammstein. I don't even know. It was a bit hard to understand at times, and it was mindblowing how different he sounded when speaking in Russian. He also seemed to be stuck in "lecture mode," not "discussion mode," so despite the fact that he was speaking to three people sitting about four feet away from him, he SPOKE AS THOUGH HE WAS ADDRESSING A CROWD OF HUNDREDS OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. He moved very quickly, and if he had a plan for the talk he was going to give, he didn't care to share it with anyone else, so it was difficult to follow at times. The intonation contour for a question in Russian is different than in English (i.e., in English, we can tell when someone asks a question because their voice goes up in pitch at the end of the sentence, usually without respect to the actual content of their statement; in Russian, this is not the case), and it's hard to parse questions as such when they're asked in English with a Russian intonation contour. He would ask questions and we wouldn't be entirely sure what he said, and then there'd be an awkward silence and he'd start talking again.

All things considered, though, what information I did manage to comprehend was interesting; apparently, American students have a much higher work ethic than Russian students. If that's the case, then Russian students must just never come to class at all, because I know my classmates do a lot of the things that the psychologist said are typical of Russian students. Russian students have their own version of the old maxim "C's get degrees," and it goes like this: "It's better to have a red face and a blue diploma than a blue face and a red diploma." A red diploma means you graduated with honors, basically. The essential message of the proverb is the same: "in the end, you still get the piece of paper, so there's no sense in burning yourself out over it, and who cares if you got straight-A's or not anyway?" He said that American students learn to do two things in high school that Russian students don't, and these things put them at an advantage when it comes to studying abroad here: American students learn to skim a text, and American students learn how to defend an argument. Russians will just not read the text at all or they get bogged down in the details; and, to a Russian student, someone asking you to clarify or support a statement you make when discussing something in a class is tantamount to a personal attack. Well, okay then. I feel much more prepared now. Thanks, IB!

After we finished with the psychologist, which took much longer than I was expecting it to, Brenda and Corinne and I headed for the metro. At rush hour. That is always fun. We swung by Stockmann on the way home, once we got to our metro stop, and picked up some sweets and wine. Corinne also bought a couple bottles of Old Tom beer, because flavors like "chocolate" and "ginger" looked interesting to her. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that she has this little notebook specifically for evaluating beers that she has sampled. We got a cake, some Lindt truffles, and these little confections that were like cone-shaped fortune cookies filled with some kind of frosting. I think it might have been maple or almond-flavored? They were delicious, in any case. Walking home from the store, I joked that it was obvious to everyone that we were partying tonight, carrying cake and booze. I said, jokingly, that someone might see us and ask, "So, what are you all doing tonight?" To which we would reply, "Nobody. Hence the cake and wine." I thought Brenda was going to pee her pants laughing so hard at that.

On the way back to the apartment I got a call from Elizabeth, who had found our apartment complex and was waiting for us there. She had also brought some beverages with her; when we reached our little courtyard on Zhukovskogo, she revealed that those beverages were a bottle of shampanskaya (Russian champagne, but because it doesn't come from grapes grown in the Champagne region, it's not really champagne and the French don't like it when you call it that) and three tallboys of Baltika beer. February is shaping up to be one hell of a month for me, I gotta say.

We headed inside and I brought out the vinigret that I made the night before, which got good reviews from everyone who tried it. Even Elizabeth, who doesn't like beets. Alexandra ordered pizza from Papa John's, because they have their heart-shaped pizza gimmick here too, and they told her it would be "a long time" because they were busy. They did not specify how long, but whatever, we had cake and truffles and fortune-cookie cones and vegetables and lots of alcohol to keep us busy until then. We ended up spending three hours or so just sitting at the kitchen table, talking and eating and drinking. So much drinking. We split three bottles of wine and three tallboys and two little bottles of beer between six people, so no one had a lot of any one thing, but it divided out to quite a bit of alcohol for everyone. (To reassure my parents: this is the last time I'm doing anything like this for a while. Don't worry. I know it seems like suddenly I'm just partying it up all over the place.)

The wine wasn't anything special, although Brenda didn't realize when she bought it that the red wine was carbonated, so that was a pleasant surprise. The Baltika was just eh, but we saved that until after we'd finished the good stuff so it mattered less. I liked the chocolate beer, although the ginger one was really gingery. It sorta punches you in the face with ginger flavor. Kind of like the pretzel bites with the honey-mustard dressing they used to have at Einstein's punched you in the face with salt. I feel like the ginger beer would be really good with stir-fry, unless you put ginger in the stir-fry; in that case, you might hit some kind of Ginger Singularity and not be able to taste anything else, ever again. We decided to save the shampanskaya for when the pizza arrived, because it seemed appropriate. And, shockingly, the combination wasn't too bad. As if I know anything about pairing food with wine, but still.

All things considered, I'd say it was a pretty successful Valentine's Day. I like hanging out with Brenda and Elizabeth, and they got on well with Liz and Alex. Jorge kind of hid in his little closet-cave until the party was over, after making his appearance and saying hi to everybody. Too much estrogen or something, I guess.

Of course, for every successful night karma demands one [swear word] day. I woke up this morning and I couldn't speak, and it felt like my throat had been ripped out and replaced with velcro in the night. Thinking it was just dry mouth from the alcohol the night before, I got a drink, but it didn't help much. I made myself a cup of tea and then went back to bed, because I just felt too terrible to go to class. Walking around in the cold air would probably do more harm to my throat than good, anyway, I reasoned. I woke up around noon and made myself some scrambled eggs because I knew that would go down easier than oatmeal or granola, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that my eggs were still edible. I left them on the counter to thaw yesterday and put them in the upper half of the fridge, and they're still doing OK, not frozen again. I have no idea why they froze in the bottom compartment of the fridge; nothing else in there is frozen. Mysterious.

I'm doing slightly better now than I was this morning; my throat still hurts and I still sound like a frog, but Corinne accompanied me on a grocery run and I got some honey and more tea, plus some cough drops (20p for the little pack of square ones, at the corner produkty where Liz is practically on a first-name basis with the shop owner), so I'll at least be functional tomorrow. Once I finish this blog post I'm gonna go make another cup of jasmine green tea with honey; that seemed to soothe my throat pretty well.

Chapter the Third: In Which I Consume All the Cheese

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:13:00 +0000

I neglected to blog yesterday, so while I'm procrastinating about doing my homework I decided to make up for such a grievous oversight on my part.

Yesterday, Corinne and I went to a cooking class at Volodya's apartment. Sergei took me, Corinne, Brenda and Elizabeth to this awesome farmer's market type of thing to obtain supplies; I'm totally gonna go back at some point because they had some really good stuff there. I know how to ask for recommendations, how to ask to sample a product, and I've basically mastered the art of the monetary transaction at this point.

We were buying supplies to make syrniki, which Google will translate as "cheese cakes." That's basically what they are; pancakes made almost entirely of cottage cheese. They are delicious. I don't know if I'll be able to bring myself to eat US dairy products when I get home, because you just can't get cottage cheese and sour cream there the likes of which you can find here. The sour cream we got was so thick, you could almost chew it, and it was awesome. If any of you would like to try to make some syrniki, here's the recipe:

INGREDIENTS
- About a pound of well-drained cottage cheese/cheese curds
- 3 eggs
- Pinch of salt
- 3-4 tbsp flour, depending on how wet your cottage cheese is, plus more flour for dredging
- Oil for frying; we used sunflower
- Toppings (sour cream, jam, honey)

Put the cottage cheese in a large bowl, crack in the eggs and mix them together. Sprinkle in the salt and add a couple tablespoons of flour; the end consistency should be really similar to cream cheese. Roll them into balls about 1.5 inches in diameter, roll the balls in flour, and then flatten slightly. Fry in a pan with a little oil for 2-3 minutes per side, then transfer to a plate when finished. Eat immediately, topped with sour cream and jam or honey. Makes about 4 dozen, maybe more.

They are delicious, but they are also fried pucks of cheese, so tread carefully. We all ended up eating probably six of them apiece, because they're tasty and because Sergei kept forcing them on us. We discussed words related to food and cooking, as well as toasting and the delicate art of refusing more food (which Brenda needed, because her host mom keeps making her way too much food). Once we all just couldn't possibly eat another one, we sat around and talked for a while in Volodya's apartment. His place is really nice; I'm always astonished by how large such an objectively small space can seem. I mean, my apartment isn't huge, but it feels much bigger than it is because of the way it's laid out and stuff. His is definitely a nicer facility, though. He also has a kitty named Fanta, short for Fantasia (but the cat is Russian, so "Fantasia" has 4 syllables--fan-tah-see-yah, not fan-tay-zia). She's adorable, and spent most of the visit inspecting and guarding our shoes and bags or peering at us from around the corner.

After we took our leave from Sergei and Volodya, the four of us decided to hang out a bit because no one had anything really pressing they needed to take care of on Saturday. We went to this Irish pub (I swear, I was such a good girl until I suddenly had friends over 21!) and just chatted for a little while over beer (cider for me), then we went to a little produkty and picked up some snacks, because apparently we could still eat more after all that cheese. We got some black bread and caviar spread, some gingerbread cookies, some smoked string cheese that were reminiscent of dog treats, some pickled tomatoes and this chocolate cheese bar, because we needed more cheese. At Brenda's suggestion we also bought more beer, because we needed more of that, too. We decided to grab a few bottles and share, being fancy and drinking beer from wine glasses. We picked up two dark beers and one light beer that we bought specifically because of the name. "Redd's Velvet Fire." It was so ridiculously feminine that we simply had to try it, being firmly within the target demographic.

If Danielle Steel were a beer, she would be Redd's Velvet Fire. It is to beer what her romance novels are to literature. It was ridiculously sweet, more like a vaguely beer-flavored wine cooler. I have to wonder if there are people out there who actually like this stuff and prefer it to...you know, real beer. I wish I could bring some back with me, just because it is something that must be experienced to be truly understood, but customs would probably have a problem with that. Also, I'm not sure it's safe for my male friends to handle. Kind of like how it's not safe for women to handle certain medications designed to treat hair loss or ED.

I had a lot of fun hanging out with Elizabeth and Brenda last night, but today I can barely will myself to move, having eaten far too much. And with all that cheese, it ain't going anywhere anytime soon. The most productive thing I've done yet today has been starting my laundry and it's already 4 in the afternoon. Maybe I'll make the vinigret tonight, or something. Elizabeth and Brenda are coming over to our apartment Tuesday night, because we have so much fun eating and drinking together and our bodies are crying out for vegetables by now. And so none of us has to be alone on Valentine's Day, because even those of us with SO's are thousands of miles away from them right now.

Chapter the Third: In Which We Have a Party

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:43:00 +0000

I'm starting to write this post while everyone else is taking a smoke break in the stairwell. We're having a small party tonight for SRAS people, although the only people who've showed up have been a couple of Jorge's friends (a guy named Maksim and a girl named Dasha), so most of the party has consisted of me and Alex and Corinne eating snacks in the kitchen while Jorge, Liz, Maksim and Dasha smoke in the stairwell and wait for them to come back and chat for ten minutes or so before going back outside. I know I've eaten way too much at this party, and all we have are carbs. The spread for this evening includes a baguette and some kind of herbed cream/other soft cheese spread, pickle-flavored potato chips, Danish butter cookies and a tiny chocolate cake that comes conveniently pre-cut with each slice wrapped in wax paper. I've eaten about a third of the baguette and too many potato chips to justify; they're actually kind of disgusting, but I just can't stop eating them. And then Corinne and Liz broke out the wine. We have a Chilean cabernet sauvignon and some generic merlot, both of which are pretty good (again, as if I know anything about wine).

It is commonly agreed upon that wine-drunk is the best kind of drunk to be. I think, all told, I've had...maybe 8-10 ounces of wine (which is 2 and a half drinks, based on those posters all over the res halls at Stetson about drinking and stuff). So, you know, I'm feeling pretty good right about now. If I lay down, I ain't getting back up, in any case. I'm not drunk, but I'm getting there, and if Alex breaks out the vodka...actually, I'll probably abstain because we don't have anything to mix it with and I don't like straight vodka. Jorge is planning to go hit up the gay clubs with Dasha later; I probably won't go with. I don't want to go back outside, and I don't really know Dasha well enough to feel comfortable chilling with her while Jorge is off dancing with dudes, because I'm certainly not going to dance. I'm not at home on the dancefloor even when it's full of straight dudes, and going out there and flailing around like a frog in a blender when all the guys around me play for the other team seems almost pointless. I figure I have another 90-some days here, that's plenty of time to go experience the Blue Oyster.

Right now, I'm hiding in my room because if I stay in the kitchen I'll just eat all of the pickle chips. They're really gross, but I have this problem where if I'm sitting within arm's reach of potatoes I will consume them all, if left to my own devices. It doesn't matter how good they are. Gross vinegar-and-dill-flavored chips? Nom nom nom. Cold, soggy fries from the grill or Newton's? Give 'em here. It's a pathological addiction. The first step is admitting it I have a problem; unfortunately, it's not a problem that will be fixed while I'm here, because Russia is also addicted to potatoes. They're dirt-cheap and they're used in most dishes, especially salads. I actually bought stuff to make vinigret (Russian salad made of cooked beets, carrots, and potatoes, raw onion, sauerkraut, a little oil and balsamic vinegar--it's delicious and I love it) for tonight, although I didn't end up having time, and also Jorge made some soup that he's storing in the big pot because all the tupperware is being used. The way vinigret is made involves boiling the beets, carrots and potatoes for 45 minutes, then dicing the cooked root vegetables and putting them in a big bowl with everything else. I don't know if I can fit a whole beet, carrot, and potato into our smaller cooking pot. I'm also kind of pissed that I had to buy 450 grams of sauerkraut, as that was the smallest container they had at Stockmann; I'm going to use maybe 100 grams of it, and then I don't know what to do with the rest. Maybe buy more veggies and make more vinigret. It'll definitely get eaten.

Wine makes me sleepy, and I'm not sure I can stay awake/keep up with the conversation in the kitchen. It's after midnight now, and I don't know if Jorge has talked Dasha into going clubbing with him yet; I might just change quickly into the long johns I'm wearing for pajamas and go to bed soon. Maybe. At some point I need to throw some money at Liz, since she's paid for most of the wine consumed this evening.

Chapter the Third: In Which My Culture Class Begins

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:09:00 +0000

I really need to start stocking up on portable foods, just so I have something to eat during the break in the middle of my Russian class. Apparently, only Brenda, Corinne and I are taking the culture class, and all three of us have our language class together in the afternoon, so the culture class has to meet after that (~3:30 in the afternoon). It's so hard to budget for time when the class format is so open-ended and fluid, and Sergei and the other professors have obligations in the morning anyway; I think Sergei teaches over at the other faculty, I don't know what Volodya does, and I haven't met the psychology professors yet. I normally have a small breakfast around 10 AM, and most of you know what I'm like when I haven't eaten in several hours, so I definitely need to purchase some snackies or something. I bought a hot chocolate from the coffee machine during the break and that helped some, but by the time we were done with Sergei (~5:00) I was craving meat because practically all I'd had to eat today was chocolate (Nutella porridge this morning and hot chocolate during the break). Every few weeks or so, I'm totally OK with that. This week is not one of those weeks.

Brenda, Corinne and I met with Sergei for about an hour and a half after our language class; we started discussing cultural differences between Russia and the US, as well as talking about the first chapter of Natasha's Dance, a book about Russian culture throughout its history. The first chapter is about "European Russia," which basically means the history of St. Petersburg. Fascinating stuff, really; all about how Peter the Great picked the worst possible plot of land (a giant swamp) on which to build a new city that would jump-start Russia's modernization and catching-up with Europe, how the intelligentsia of the 19th century were more European than Russian, having been raised and educated in the European fashion and only having learned a smattering of Russian from their nannies as children (because, of course, they were taught French in school), that kind of thing.

We have to watch a film over the weekend for discussion on Monday; Brenda has it right now but she's going to watch it at home tonight and give me the flash drive that the film is on tomorrow, and then Corinne and I will watch it and return the flash drive to Sergei on Saturday. I'm still really excited for this class, even if it is almost shaping up to be like Honors 3 with field trips in terms of how organized and well-defined the curriculum is. Sergei is somehow much easier to understand than the K-team, probably because he tries so much harder to articulate himself than the K-team ever did. At least I'm not being told to read 500 pages of incomprehensibly philosophical literary criticism and distill all of that into a 3-page paper that makes sense to humans. Just 60 or so pages of a very well-written historico-cultural analysis, and then journaling about it. I need to write that journal entry and email it; eventually the whole class (all three of us) will be publishing our journal entries on a blog, and we have to write responses to each other's entries as well. Right now they're still working out the kinks of the extremely complicated and very difficult to use (</sarcasm>) Wordpress system, although I think I might suggest to Josh (head of the SRAS, in Moscow, though he'll be grading part of this course) that we just use Blogger. It's a very straightforward system, and I think we all have Google accounts of one type or another. It's what I use, anyway.

There must be something in the air at the philology faculty; there is no reason we should be so exhausted after class! I mean, Corinne got up early to Skype with a friend, but I slept in! The walk isn't that difficult! Am I working that hard to understand Valentina Semyonovna? I feel like I get the gist of what she's saying; at least, I'm not totally lost most of the time. In any case, as usual Corinne and I were tired and not looking forward to braving the metro. But we endured the subway ride back to Mayakovskaya all the same; I hate coming home during rush hour because we can never find a seat on the metro, and it's a bumpy, lurching 15-20 minutes from Vasiliostrovskaya to Mayakovskaya (with a stop at Gostiny Dvor, but since that's a shopping district more people usually get on the subway than get off at this time of day). My balance isn't the greatest anyway, and I'm leery of being crammed like sardines into a subway car with a backpack on. I can't see it if it's behind me, and I'm not sure I'd hear or feel someone trying to unzip a pocket. There's nothing worth stealing in it, but still.

Once we got out of the metro station, Corinne and I decided to explore a bit and get something to eat, because we were hungry and didn't have any food at home that appealed to us. All I had waiting for me was more leftover chili, and she had some cookies and other assorted snackfoods, so we decided to find a restaurant or cafe and get some linner. We settled on the Palmira Bistro, which apparently gets a reasonable number of tourists since the menu was in both Russian and badly-translated English. She got a margherita pizza; I opted for shawarma on a pita. They also had an extensive menu of adult beverages, including about a dozen regular cocktails (typical stuff like cosmopolitans, long island iced teas, martinis, etc) and a virgin mojito. I don't remember if they also offered a regular mojito, but it seems stupid not to, since they obviously have all the ingredients on hand (there were also menus of beer, wine, and liquor, including rum, as well as hot beverages and soft drinks). It amused me enough that I decided to get a безалкогольный мохито with my food; it was incredibly sweet, the rum having been replaced by 7-Up, but it actually went pretty well with the spicy, garlicky flavor of the shawarma.

I think I'm gonna go back to that cafe sometime, since it was pretty good and very reasonably priced. They have a business lunch special that looks good, too; unfortunately, every бизнес-ланч (pronounced "business lunch") special I've seen is only offered between noon and 4 pm, which is precisely when I am in class. Do the businesses in this city, particularly the ones near academic buildings, not realize how much money they could make if they started offering their business lunch just one hour earlier? I'd patronize the [swear word] out of any cafe or restaurant near the school that had a business lunch special that started at 11. Even 11:30. The quintessential бизнес-ланч consists of a little bowl of soup, a small salad, a bit of some kind of meat, and a beverage, and almost every eatery in the city that isn't a fancy sit-down restaurant has a special along these lines for between 100 and 200 rubles; it's a great deal. There's a shawarma place a block from the school that has a shawarma-and-beer business lunch special for, I think, something like 140p. It's Jorge's favorite shawarma place; maybe we'll check it out someday.

Chapter the Third: In Which I Finally Stop Wigging Out About Minor Things

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:21:00 +0000

Anyone who knows me knows that I like to be as absurdly prepared as possible, and I start panicking when I can't be as prepared as I think I should be. I buy my textbooks and start working out what kinds of supplies I'll need (and in what colors!) for the fall semester in July, as soon as the textbook info is available on the bookstore's website. So, of course you are all aware that I was seriously stewing over the fact that I wouldn't have my schedule until I actually got here. The page of the Stetson Abroad application where I was supposed to fill in the classes I would be taking is, in fact, most likely still blank, sitting in my file at school, because I had no way of knowing what those were until I arrived.

Well, I have the schedule now, and today after class Corinne and I walked from the foreign philology faculty (the department for foreign students learning Russian) to the филологический факултет (the department for Russian students learning foreign languages) to purchase the last of our textbooks, because the philology bookstore is housed there for what I'm sure are perfectly sensible reasons. Apparently, we can't keep the copies of one of the books we're using that Valentina Semyonovna borrowed from the library for us, and we need our own, because there is an audio CD involved. We found one copy of it at Dom Knigi yesterday, but thought we would be allowed to just use the library copies we'd been given because the second book that we needed is entirely listening exercises (thus we didn't realize the first one also had an audio component). I'm also pretty sure that she actually wrote all 3 of the books that we're using, unless I misheard her surname and/or she happens to have the same initials of her first name and patronymic as the textbook author. One book is called Слово, "word," and has writing exercises; another is called Слушать и слышать, "listen and hear," and has listening exercises; and the third has a long and complicated title but it's basically grammar.

Now I have all the books I need, in any case, so my primal need to have everything in order has been temporarily satisfied. That, plus having my visa paperwork in processing, means I have no further obligations other than homework and little domestic necessities (laundry, grocery shopping, etc). The fact that the culture class can only be reliably scheduled about a week in advance is something I'll just have to deal with; it's a young program in the first place (the SRAS as an organization isn't very old itself, maybe 10 years), and this year they're changing up the format, because apparently it is my destiny in life to be among the first batch of students in every new, experimental, or transitional stage of a program, ever. Maybe I should look for grad schools that have just revamped or are due to revamp their psychology doctorate programs. I'll be accepted on principle.

At least the coffee machine was working this morning; Corinne and I met up with Brenda in line for a cheap, tiny shot of caffeine, and then we progressed upstairs to class. Corinne finally got her mochaccino; the first time we encountered the coffee machine, she tried to get one, but for some reason the machine wouldn't accept 5-ruble coins and that was all she had (it cost 25p; she put in 20p in tens). I got another amaretto cappuccino, because them things is delicious. And later, during the break, I took my apple out of my bag to see that it had survived the trip this time! So, you know, bi-winning. There is a cafe on the third floor of the faculty; Corinne and I (and probably Brenda too) are going to go check it out tomorrow, because immediately after our language class, the culture class is meeting for an introduction/overview of the course and Russian culture. I have no idea how long that's going to go, or when I'll be able to eat next, and I don't presently have any food in the apartment that I can bring with me easily, other than my apples. And a few of those have started to go all weird, probably because they're being kept on a windowsill.

I need to do laundry but I don't know when I'm going to have time. We have a little washing machine in the kitchen, but no dryer, so I need to factor in the time it will take for my clothes to dry on the rack whenever I decide to wash them. Maybe I'll start that process Friday night and see where they are by Saturday afternoon, when we have another culture-class excursion (we're going to this lady's apartment to make cottage-cheese pancakes, which are really good according to Corinne--I wouldn't know).

In other news, it snowed today! The effect of the sun peeking through the clouds as the tiny flurries blew past us was really pretty; the snowflakes caught the light and sparkled like so much frigid glitter. The sun was in our faces for the last block or so of the walk to our university building, and the yellow light plus the flicker of snowflakes plus my fogged glasses gave the street a look reminiscent of a silent film. Everything was beige and brownish-looking, and there was the constant twinkling of the snowflakes catching the light of the sun. The image was almost enough to make the bitter cold less miserable. I'm sure I'll adjust soon enough, but in the meantime, I'll just have to suffer. On the plus side, come October when the temperature drops into the 50s for a few days, I'll be utterly unfazed and walk around in shorts and T-shirts, laughing at the Florida girls in their Uggs and useless sweaters complaining that omg it's like sooo cold!

Chapter the Third: In Which I Begin to Study Abroad

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:23:00 +0000

Chapter divisions are utterly arbitrary. I actually have a schedule and therefore a routine now, so I'm declaring this the start of another chapter of my life in St. Petersburg.

Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that my cell number has changed. It is now +7 (911) 196-0267. My old SIM card was defective, so Volodya gave me a new one. If you have a Skype account, you can buy Skype credit and call a mobile number in St. Petersburg for $0.052 per minute plus a connection fee of about 6 cents; I don't know how that compares to what it would cost any of you to call me on a regular phone, though.

So, anyway. First day of class. Right. Corinne and I decided to head out a little early and take care of starting our visa extension paperwork before class, as it takes about a month to process and neither of us is a huge fan of deportation. We had to stop at a bank to deposit 1000p into the university's account and bring them the receipt showing we paid the visa fee; while we were out and still had a little time, we stopped at a cafeteria and got some lunch because I knew if I waited until after class to eat I'd be too hungry to focus by 1:00. I got beet salad, chicken broth with dill, a chicken? шашлик (shish kebab) and some mashed potatoes; the shashlik and mashed potatoes turned out to be inedible (call me crazy, but those two things should not have the same texture; also, the potatoes were more like butter paste...but in a bad way), but the broth and salad were good, so I had that at least. I also grabbed a cookie, because...cookie. It was slightly expensive (just under 300p), but now I know that the shashlik and mashed potatoes at that place are yucky, and they were the most expensive things I got. Everything else was pretty good, and the sheer number of options is rather dizzying, but the ladies serving up the hot food were very patient with us.

We finished eating with just a few minutes to spare and encountered Liz on the way to the university. She had class on the second floor; our class was on the fourth, so we said our goodbyes and continued up the stairs. I do have to thank the designers of many of the buildings I've been in; there are a lot of stairs, but at least they're usually shallow and wide, making them easy enough to traverse (particularly in my boots). We got to class a few minutes late, but the professor hadn't really begun doing much of anything yet, so it was no big deal. Brenda is in our class as well, so the first twenty minutes or so of the class was spent with the prof asking us new girls questions about ourselves--where we come from, why we started studying Russian, what we study at our home universities, etc. She then asked the five other students in the room to offer a brief introduction for our benefit; there are three Chinese guys, one Chinese girl and one Japanese guy. The roster that was given to us when we got our timetables last week lists a few more students, mostly Chinese, though there is another American on the roll; he didn't show up today. Apparently St. Petersburg is a popular destination for Russian-as-a-foreign-language study-abroad programs among the Chinese; Corinne and I have seen a large number of Chinese students around the facultet, and there are apparently enough of them to merit having some of the more important signage around the offices in Chinese as well as Russian and English. There are a few Japanese students as well, but the vast majority of the Asian people we've seen around have been Chinese.

The class went pretty well; I was expecting it to be much more difficult, but Valentina Semyonovna is very patient with us. I could follow the lecture pretty easily; I'm sure part of that was because I understand the use and formation of the genitive case (finally, took me until last semester to get it straight in my head), and that's where we started. We began with the genitive case, and then by way of talking about food, shifted topics to the instrumental and prepositional cases (by discussing what kinds of foods are eaten with what other kinds of foods, etc). I would've appreciated more fanfare announcing topic changes, just so I knew when to start a new page of notes, but that's my OCD kicking in; the topics really aren't all that distinct from one another. Corinne and I were relieved to discover that we get a 15-20 minute break in the middle of the 3-hour block, although it was very sad when Brenda and I went down to the coffee machine on the second floor only to see that it wasn't working. The break isn't long enough to, say, leave the University to get food, but maybe I'll buy some sandwich ingredients or something and start packing a snack of some kind. I had an apple, but it got in a fight with my steel water bottle and lost, so it was all bruised up and gross by the time I went to eat it.

According to Corinne, in Irkutsk her language class had a system of two homework notebooks where you were supposed to do an assignment in one notebook, turn that notebook in in class the following day, do the next assignment in a second notebook that night, then turn the second one in and do the next assignment in the first one after you got it back in class the day after that. To that end, after going to Дом Книги (a huge bookstore on Nevsky Prospect) to find the books for our class, we stopped by the same little bookstore we went to the other night and each bought two more small notebooks to use for homework assignments. Some of the Chinese students had blue books that they used for the same purpose, although small notebooks are apparently also acceptable; a couple of them had ones similar to the ones we bought. Hers have some kind of cartoon hippo or something on them; mine have adorable pictures of baby animals (one is a polar bear with the caption "I'm a huge polar bear" and the other a zebra with the caption "I am the fastest zebra." I looked for a giraffe notebook but couldn't find one, or I would've bought it without a second thought, Jenny). Tonight's homework assignment is to write a story based on a series of images. Seems easy enough, I've done that before. My vocabulary is weak, but I have a dictionary handy, so there's that.

After class we went down to the office to take care of our visa paperwork. We got our student ID cards and our справки (certificates saying our документы--passports, visas, migration cards--are currently being processed for a visa extension and will be returned to us on a specific date), as well as copies of everything; I'm not 100% comfortable without my passport and stuff, especially given what happened the last time I applied for a visa, but I have no real choice in the matter. At least they didn't need my original health insurance card and could make do with just a copy of that. I'll feel better when all my documents are back in my hands; after that, chances are I won't need to touch them again until I leave. Sergei said that women are less likely to be stopped and asked to show their documents, though it still happens.

Now that I have a schedule and a reasonably-well-established routine, I'm starting to feel a little less homesick, although I still miss you all terribly. I keep catching myself having thoughts like "Michelle would love this store," or "I wonder what Caroline would think of the metro," or "I bet Gil would have something funny to say about that lady over there." I am pretty excited for the culture class, though; on Saturday we're meeting at a McDonald's, going to a market, and then going to this lady's apartment to meet her and her neighbors and help cook some tasty Russian food. As per the aforementioned reasonably-well-established routine, I'm going to wrap this post up now so I can take a shower; before I do that, though, here's a picture of me on a bridge over the Neva. The tiiiny church in the background is the Church of Spilled Blood I talked about in my previous post; the dark building on the left is the Singer building, built by the sewing machine company, which houses Дом Книги. Corinne took it just before we headed into the bookstore.

Me, very cold, in front of the river Neva on Nevsky Prospekt. Click to embiggen.