Adventures of a Particularly Charming Misanthrope

If there is to be no other credit to my personality, I have a wildly rampageous imagination.

2009-04-16T05:45:00.000-04:00

15 April 2009

И вот и всё. I can’t speak English anymore. Half of it comes into my head in Russian, which is good on the one hand, but bad when I am trying to extol the virtues of my study abroad program to my advisor back home, and my email is intelligible.

And as a result I am in serious fear of reverse culture shock.

What will I do when I have no one to speak Russian to? I think I may go mad. My habit of interjecting Russian phrases into my everyday speech must rapidly come to an end, lest my sister (whom I dearly love, and she would probably be right in attempting this) might kill me for what must seem such an officious affectation.

This week marks the beginning of the end. For real. Well, for Russia. Starting now, I have less than a month in country! I can’t believe it! Where has the time gone!?! Too quickly! I remember getting here, I remember all of the individual events, but it is undoubtedly unfathomable as to where the time has flown. It doesn’t feel like nine months (for which I blame the weather, winter is going on 5 months. It snowed again today; although yesterday was absolutely gorgeous). The days are getting longer, and now at 8 p.m. I can still see blue skies when the clouds break up.

Yesterday I sent off what was supposed to be one box of books, but according to Russian post office regulations, was turned into 2 5-kilo boxes, of course I use that term loosely, and since I accidentally put a false return address (I realized that about a half an hour ago, it’s a really long and rather boring story, if I was telling it to Heather, she’d being sighing by now. Hahaha, oh, I do love my sister, we torment one another quite adeptly), so I do hope that they don’t get sent back at customs because of shifty looking packaging. That would be quite disastrous. All those books. Lost. Like poor little lost….books.

But it does bear mentioning that the Pochtamt (big postal office headquarters) in St. Petersburg, is really a gorgeous building, and a short and very pleasant walk from Nevsky which skirts in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Directly across is the State Museum of Religion (which used to be the State Museum of Atheism, which used to live in Kazan Cathedral back in Soviet Times), which I will be visiting tomorrow, barring illness and getting hit by trams/marshrutkas/bikes. Back to the subject matter: the building is glorious and quite beautiful. And if you are ever in town, it is worth bopping in for a few minutes and taking it in.

Along the way, I ran into a consulate, but I had to do a double take, because it was one sad, broken little door and a flag with the obligatory policeman’s booth next to it. But on second glance, I confirmed that the depressing little place was home to the Turkish Consulate. Poor fellows.

Ah, and now it is time to tell you what I have learned lately, well, things you might find funny for that cocktail party in 20 years (in my high school U.S. History class, when the teacher would give us new information, it was often with that preamble):

The reasons Russians don’t like laughter, reason the first: if you laugh too loud, your soul will fly out of you; reason the second: laughter is what happens when the devil tickles people.

Cheery, no?

This last week in grammar we learned a construction that reaches to the heart and soul of Russia. The phrase is structured and carries the meaning that there is no hope at all for something to be done (no hope for someone to write you a letter, go to the movies, or no time, or no place, etc.). We’ve learned other constructions that can yield this to a lesser effect, and unless I am quite wrong (which is likely) or we haven’t been taught them yet (also likely, they may be saving the most depressing for when the sun comes back and spring arrives): there are no less than 4 different steps to say depressing things in Russian, and each consecutively becomes more and more depressing.

So now, I return to that mass of papers that calls for me to continue studying, as our next translation class is a test of the most recently studied material. (The last test she didn’t even bother putting our grades on, she just handed them back, dripping with red ink) It is undoubtedly my worst class.

Which, of course, would have nothing to do with my imagination running wild, as Amelia the Adventurer (or Adventuress, I suppose) battles the forces of evil and finds fantastic treasures.

Castles or Pyramids? Pyramids. No. Castles. I'm a decisive person.

2009-04-08T01:21:00.001-04:00

29 March 2009
Okay, the panic has passed; the resume has been updated and I am now officially applying for jobs. Sort of, people don’t really want to talk to you when you live 8 to 11 time zones away.

This has been an argumentative week in many regards: my bank closed me out of my accounts (just as I was buying my plane ticket from Budapest to London; CURSES), my university and I have different ideas of what qualifies as an international diversity course (because, apparently, out of my majors in Anthropology and Russian, I don’t have a course which can as of yet be applied as being internationally diverse. Really.), and my umbrella decided to break on to my face (no amount of argument helped that one; but I am honestly a little thankful that we are finally transitioning into the time when it just rains, no more of this snow stuff).

8 April 2009

Winter will never end ::glancing out the window.:: Never, never, never. ::glancing again::

I’m trying to see if reverse psychology works on nature, because, as of yet, every time I’ve confided in someone that I think winter is close to being over, it starts snowing again.

So I’ve neglected remarking anything in my journal lately for lack of anything to remark on the one hand, and finding very little time to do the remarking. I have a very busy schedule of sleeping.

Only joking! My weeks are action packed with very many things I find interesting but don’t bear repeating over and over. I continue translation work for a human rights organization, watching documents headed to the European Union, and the U.N. cross my translation table. I meet with the student club who watch English films, and give lessons to one of the women who works at the human rights organization. The Hermitage is rapidly losing its appeal to me, as all of the interesting projects are impossible.

My courses continue on as ever: Literature has us reading Mayakovsky (who the professor swears is her soul mate) and having contracted discussions on the evolution of the fairy tale in Russian history (she lectures, and I interject “how interesting;” so it’s not a real discussion). Translation has us studying gerunds and –ing participles, which is an improvement because we aren’t studying the word ‘for,’ but is also frightening, as we spent so much time on that word and my mind is still reeling. But I do so horribly in that class that I feel my confidence in the overall language slipping, which is just silly.

I fell down the escalators last Friday. Not all the way, of course, (that would be quite a horrifying prospect, considering their jagged metal edges and the sheer length of the escalator; at my stop there are 696 rotating steps) but I fell far enough to get evil looking bruises along my back. And then this morning I dropped a rock on my foot. I have no good luck left.

Sometimes Russian is very useful, and sometimes cursedly inconvenient.

The flexibility of the word order can buy you a few second to try and remember which verb you want to use (imperfective or perfective? Uni- or Mulit- directional? Prefixed?), but the down side is the case system again. There is no sure fire way to predict what case a verb will take, so when you mumble out your sentence, putting all the other words first, you really need to be sure you’ve put it all in the right case, so you don’t look like an idiot. Or you need to turn it into a complex sentence. Or just mumble it really fast and try your best to drop the endings, or always try to pick an object that is feminine (we have genders for all the nouns in this language), because in most of the cases, feminine words have similar endings.

Today, we (my travel buddy Elli) and I are looking up train to tickets to different parts of Europe, as we are trying to make our way to Budapest at the end of the semester. I really really (I could add about 50 more) wanted to visit Italy, but it looks like that country will be put on hold. For now. Drat.

Oh well, Eastern Europe has all the really neat crumbling castles. Maybe we can hit Transylvania.

I am a jelly donut.

2009-03-25T02:24:00.001-04:00

20 March 2009

Let me start with saying that I am not a crazy person.
Despite whatever you may think after reading all my wonderful adventures, all the screws are tight.

But I can’t believe only 10 days have passed!! It feels like ages. Ages and ages. Now I am back in Russia. Break was fun.

And it’s still cold here. Classes start on Monday. Back to the study books.

…

Just kidding! Muahaha, did you think that was all I was going to tell you about break? This is likely to be the longest post yet. So you might want to get that coffee before you read any farther.

We did the midnight train thing again, and since I knew what to expect, I was ready and prepared, and mercifully got to sleep for part of the way. In Moscow, we year long students were spared a second round of tours which opened up my museum time! I think I have visited more museums in the last 10 days then I have at any other time in my life.

The Pushkin Gallery of Fine Arts is the only museum I will deign to mention from Moscow (I went to the Tretyakov gallery, and well, it was interesting, but meh.:: ducks for cover::). Here’s why: The Pushkin Museum has Priam’s Gold…Schliemenn’s Treasure…in short, all the gold from Troy! This was the main aim in the museum-tripping of the day, but it lead to so much more. Imagine if you will, a massive marble staircase with a lush red carpet down the center, and columns meeting a glass ceiling. There are Greek and Roman statues in equal measure for marveling, but first is a room dedicated solely to Egyptian funerary rites for commoners, specifically in Coptic and Roman times. There were funerary shrouds, and an exploded coffin and Coptic textiles! There was room after room (after room, they really went on for ages) of statues and figurines from every era. But bah humbug to that modern art collection, because after the Trojan treasure room was the Assyrian Gallery, which was flanked by two massive statues of Man/birdy griffin things (Assyrian Mythology is a confounded weakness for me) and there is a wall solely devoted to slabs taken from temples and palaces, while there are exquisite pottery pieces, jewelry, and finery.

And then dear reader, if that wasn’t enough to make a girl’s head spin: there came the darkened room at the end: the Egypt Room. It was a replica of a temple, perhaps taking after the tomb of Ramses the Sixth, but the ceiling was painted to resemble the generic tombs of royalty and the well to do. I almost started crying.

Of course, you weren’t allowed to photograph anything in this hall. But I think my memory has been indelibly marked. There were mummies, cosmetic ornaments, and statues, even a mummy of a cat and one of a bird. There was a woman’s head mummified who had curly hair and an earring still in one ear, while next to that case was the still closed sarcophagus of a young child. There was a pair of statues that stood next to each other: a husband and wife who were priest and priestess in the temples, and they looked so at peace together. There was even a little sphinx: not for the last time, I really wished it was appropriate to hug things in museums. In the sculpture hall was a reconstructed statue of Nike like the one in Paris. It was wonderful.

But enough about Moscow. Been there (twice now, it was even more expensive this time around, funny how that works) done that.

Sunday was a wonderful adventure; in so many ways, somehow, between being trapped in a metro tunnel for half an hour, running to meet my train, and getting lost in the airport (which of course is undergoing construction) I still made my flight. Of course, it was only when my plane was landing in Berlin that I realized that I really hadn’t planned this trip, and wasn’t exactly sure what to do next. But I will spare you the small details, and rest assured I survived to meet my cousins!

And my cousins! They are wonderful! They remind me a lot of my mom’s side of the family, so I see how some parts of my personality are definitely inherited. They have these two puppies that are the sweetest things in the world (and they don’t jump on you. Baloo hasn’t quite mastered the instinct which compels him to knock people, that is, me, over). And western things! Like Lucky Charms! I was a very very spoiled little person. It was fantastic: they introduced me to late night talk shows (because the channels that they got were the same ones piped in for troops, so there are all these shows that I know and love like Jon Stewart. And Craig Ferguson, you have got to see this guy! His show is perhaps the funniest I’ve ever seen), and we got all this traditional German food (not that silly tourist stuff, I’m talking döners and chunks of meat, and vegetables! Oh sweet salad, how I missed thee. I’ve said it before, and I reassert now, that I think I may go vegetarian for a couple of months when I get back to the states, just because I can), and since they have lived in Berlin for quite some time over the years, Laurie (my cousin) showed me all of these sights that I wouldn’t have been able to see otherwise like the bridge where the east and west Germans used to trade spies, and the lake Wannsee, and this tiny hamlet, I guess you could call it, where for a time after the Berlin wall was built (that is, the ‘anti-fascist protection wall,’ oh the soviets were quirky), where servicemen lived had to be flown in and out by helicopter! And at the same time, I got to hear a lot of their stories, because they have lived everywhere! And been even more places (I know that seems like it might not be possible, but don’t worry, it is). It was awesome.

So let me break it down, because there is so much to see in Berlin:

You’ve got the leftover chunks of the Wall, with Checkpoint Charlie in its original location (the actually little building isn’t the original Checkpoint though, that one is at the allied museum). You can still follow a healthy chunk of the wall down its old location, although nowadays it’s denoted by a row of stones in the ground. By the way, unlike Russia, starbucks has taken hold in Berlin. They say that you can buy little chunks of the wall, but be forewarned, most of these are fake.

There is this massive building, the Reichstag, where nowadays the German government meets, but the real attraction is the glass dome that is perched on top, with a winding ramp on the inside so you can slowly climb up and be in some serious awe.

Just down the street is the Brandenburg Tor, which is very much like a triumphal arch, and flanking it is the American embassy (of course, the guide book I bought in Moscow was about 5 years old and did not reflect this new location). The Tor sits between Unter den Linden and another street whose name I’ve already misplaced (but it’s a date name). Anyways, this second street cuts across this massive garden complex, in the middle of which is the chick on a stick, which is really an angel or some feminine figure on top of a column, but according to my cousin, is lovingly referred to as the chick on a stick. And the reason I’ve imparted this, the vaguest of descriptions, is that this is the place that Kennedy and more recently Obama have given speeches.

Going the opposite direction, down Unter den Linden (as I then proceeded) you pass massive libraries covered in ivy (the staatsbibliothek), and Humboldt University (I can’t get over the fact that the Brothers Grimm worked here).

I spent about 8 hours a day doing tourist things. For like 5 days. Here ends day one. Of course, in Berlin all museums are closed on Mondays, so Tuesday was the beginning of the museum fest; which began with the massive Pergamon. The Pergamon is the epitome of what all museums should be. Having spent a great portion of my time here at the Hermitage, I had gotten used to its grandeur, to the fact that it is both a palace and a museum. But really it is a palace that became a museum, and it was never meant to perform that function, so the lighting isn’t that great, and most of the time you are so overwhelmed by the palace itself, or exhausted trying to follow the most insane of map systems, that you can miss a lot of the art. But the Pergamon was built it seems, with an eye for astonishment, with respect to the artifacts. The altar which serves as the main attraction takes up a room that must be a hundred feet by seventy-five and the entire altar, along with the statues of the gods and goddesses which once adorned her is laid out in a simple manner that is logical and easy to follow. The following exhibits on depiction of the gods (the exhibit was called ‘Return of the gods,’ very interesting) was flawless; it depicted the role of the deity in the common person’s life: not only different depictions of the god, but their role, their parishioners, their histories. It was wonderful. I could go on and on. I went on and on. The execution was remarkable and understandable, even introducing the idea of the liminal period (which we talk about in anthropology forever, especially when studying religion in cultures).

After so much learning, it was time for the lion to feed. And so I found KaDeWe, which is like a mecca for western goods. On the first floor were pretty things like Tiffany’s (siiiiiigh), but what was really important was the sixth floor; because that’s where all the food lived. And by all the food, I mean all the classy, healthy, exotic, familiar, fresh, baked, sautéed food that you could ever dream of (even if you haven’t been living off beets for the last 7 months). I got fat there; also met a funny German who spoke Russian but not English, as he called the English imperialist pigs (I assume he grew up is East Germany. He was nice to me either way). ‘Nuff said.

So, more museums were visited the next day: the DDR museum (worth it, it’s on the river bank just by the Radisson, some tour books don’t have it listed; it’s an entirely interactive museum! You are allowed to touch the exhibits!), Kultureform (a complex of museums all housed in the same building, the engravings museum I found the most interesting of all), the Dahlem-Dorf museum complex (must-see!!! So well done! Their Mesoamerican archaeology display is to die for. Of course, I was the only on there at the time. I did buy a pair of very cute earrings. Even though I haven’t pierced my ears yet, I was going to do that here in Russia, but decided to wait since it is very likely I would get HIV if I got that done here), and the Deutches History Museum (which is worth every penny, I was floored, this place covered German history from the earliest of Neolithic scrapings through the fall of the wall; they even had a little tribute for the American Revolution).

I shopped a bit, because even if the dollar is weak against the euro, you get more bang for you buck outside of Russia. This is when I encountered Fassbender and Rausch, Chocolate Makers since 1863. If you’ve ever read Harry Potter, it’s kind of like Honeydukes, but just for chocolate. It was glorious, there was a volcano fondue (no touching), and a scale model of the Reichstag (perhaps it was that, I was paying attention to how much chocolate there was, not the architecture in this case). I bought a little baggie of candy, a little box of chocolate, and a little basket (but the basket is edible!).

Of course, had Amelia the Adventurer (think like Calvin and Hobbes Spaceman Spiff) had her way, she would have dragged the volcano home (in a sanitary manner), and probably accidentally knocked over the 12 foot tall rabbit made out of candies. She is the same character who does gleefully hug statues in museums, and successfully pilfers all relevant Egyptian-artifact carrying museums, as well as the copies of Kepler and Galileo which the History Museum had (those would be gifts for Heather).

So, all things considered, Berlin was a wild success. I had such a wonderful time (even though I didn’t get a chance to see the bust of Nefertiti, but that is still a sore spot, or more accurately, an excuse to return) that I was more than a little sad to get back to Russia. Of course, my flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg was an adventure, as I sat in a plane where I could see the padding between the cabin wall and the outside wall of the plane, could tell that my emergency exit door had been used before, and nearly had a panic attack because the big lit up signs which recommend ‘Exit’ all lit up about half way through the flight, at which point I took to anxiously staring out my window, which led to my noticing the fact that duct tape (YES, duct tape) was holding some parts of the wing together (I understand now why people drink before they fly, on Aeroflot at least). Altogether, I was thankful that I survived that last leg of the trip; when I finally pulled myself from the metro car and carefully rolled my way to the escalator, I made it on to the moving stairway, but my bag got snagged, so I went flying backwards with it. No harm done, but when I survived that death trap, I made it out of the station into a blizzard. That’s the only word I could think of as snow whipped around at previously unseen speeds. Ah Russia, thank you for such a warm welcome home.

Now, alack! Where has the time gone? I now (it’s officially the 24th) have less than nine weeks left here. Oh dear. The future does seem to be rushing to greet me. I don’t suppose there is a repellant to keep her away.

I think I need to go update my resume.

Hooray for the Coming Spring Break!

2009-03-11T02:07:00.000-04:00

7 March 2009
So, I’ve found about 6 new bruises, and I’m not sure where they came from. And judging by the fact that I posted a poem, about peanut butter nonetheless, I am lead to assume I tripped and smacked my head and lost all reasoning for a while.

This week has been too much fun. For the last couple of weeks, I have been going to this club for Russian students who want to learn English. I don’t teach or anything, but what we do is watch movies in English, and we pick out all the idioms or unclear sayings and at the end of the movie, we talk about the ideas behind the movie and all the funny sayings. It’s really a wonderful time. This week we watched Le Miserables. And I really like that movie. So it was a nice way to round out the week.

Presently, I am working my translations, but I had to take a breather. Although its compelling work, I am looking up nearly every other word, and not because I don’t understand the meaning; half of them aren’t even in the dictionary. The work I’m doing involves a lot of military slang and such and so I’ve picked up a lot of really screwy phrases, and a lot of good terminology (which is definitely going on my resume, if I can find some legitimate way of including that). Today, I came across a place that I think has to do with guns, because it carries after the word ‘self-propelled gun,’ so the image my mind produce is a room with machine guns flying around like blimps, shooting things that move. The next phrase is some part of the extreme hazing process, I think; it’s called ‘drying the crocodile,’ and then playing ‘baby elephant.’ Or something like that. So I spend a lot of time scratching my head and hypothesizing what’s going on.

Suddenly the Russian language has taken on so many more amusing aspects; and horrifying, naturally, because this story has something to do with torture/harassment/violation of human rights.

Otherwise, my vocabulary is skyrocketing. Not fast enough, but I think I’ll just keep reading more books, and maybe buy a dictionary or two. I can’t believe how fast time is going! It’s coming to the time that I amount to send my (big) box of books home so it gets there the same time I do. I’m a little blue about how soon this adventure will be ending, but I’m sure all I need to do is ride the metro at ‘chas pik’ (‘rush hour,’ I can’t really speak English or Russian anymore, but an awkward combination of the two, so the only people that understand me are fellow study abroad students.) and I will get my foul mood back.

But, for all my sadness about that, I am riding a natural high. Winter is ending, but it is the most grudging of endings, and the season seems to be unwilling to relinquish its hold over the city. The temperature is easing up and hovering just above freezing during the day, which is practically balmy. And the birds have come back, so now I fear being attacked by crigeons as well as all the smaller birds which could conceivably get caught in my hair. Which opens up a worm can of horrific possibilities.

10 March 2009

Well today I prospal. That means I slept in really, really late. But it’s okay, because this weekend was the longest in the history of weekends. Well, perhaps not, but we did get Monday off, as it was Woman’s Day (two weeks ago it was men’s day, in some respects Russians are very gender-equal), so now it’s Tuesday and I haven’t been to school in several days, and this week (duh-duh-duuunnn) we have classes only on Wednesday and Thursday, because on Thursday night we are taking the midnight train to Moscow! Of course, the professors like to make up for this by scheduling all of our midterms in this period of time (my translation midterm only covers two topics: how to translate the word ‘it’ and ‘for’ in context. Laugh if you may, but there are no less than 18 different general uses for the word ‘for’ and even more idioms. English really is a ghastly language).

I think if/when I do the whole living in Russia again I would like to make my stead in Moscow. There is so much more to do there and it’s more centrally located; not in Siberia, although I doubt I could do Siberia for real. I do have a friend though, Elli, who wants to retire to the Lake Baikal region (she is really into the snowboarding and skiing shtick; I am not nearly so coordinated).

And now, it is past noon, and although I am showered and about half way ready to go somewhere (I haven’t decided where yet), I realize I have absolutely no desire to stir from my current position.

Russia has turned me into a lazy bum. Perhaps I just require a red bull.

Irregardless to my new and slovenly ways, I have been rather active as of late. A small group of us made our way out to Kronshtadt, which, in its heyday, well, before the fall of the Soviet Union, was a closed city because of all the military/naval servicemen who were station there, and I suppose, all the submarines which were in the surrounding waters. However, nowadays, it is an open city, and although the Naval Cathedral is quite beautiful, you can only get into the outer-outermost vestibules, as the Church is under reconstruction of some kind. Otherwise, having spend so much of its life as a closed city, there wasn’t much else to do, so we took the bus back home, and overall, it was the cheapest field trip I’ve ever taken in my life (it cost $1; for the bus fare).

I read Jane Eyre and enjoyed it a lot, although the last third of the book was a little strange, overall, it has left a pleasant aftertaste in my imagination. I’m still reading Emma, and I think understand what Austen was saying when she said that she thought no one would like this character but her. So far, I find her to be quite an interfering sort of person, although, I am only about half way through the book, so perhaps her character grows with the storyline. I’ve read quite a lot lately, not for lack of homework or extra curricular activities, I just find that all things are said and done rather quickly. Which leaves lots of time for books and the growing of one’s imagination. Fantastic.

Well, now it is time to hunt down the illusive specter, that addictive folly, that superfluous consumer of my time and energy: internet, and I suppose red bull could occupy that same sort of description. As I am leaving for Berlin on Sunday (YAY!), I need to make some last minute plans and communications!

Hooray!

The Post wherein winter ‘ends’ and peanut butter is eulogized

2009-03-02T07:11:00.000-05:00

22 February 2009
It has recently occurred to me that I’ve never told you about my upstairs neighbors. They moved in over break, and for better or for worse, they have added quite a bit to my Russian experience over the last two months.

It’s commonly conceded that none of the students live with ‘normal’ Russian families, inasmuch that we foreigners live with them, but I feel like I get little bits and pieces of what it is to be an idealistically normal Russian. This is what the upstairs neighbors (for everything I hear through my ceiling) seem to be. One of them plays the piano, and really well. Beethoven is her favorite (I assume it’s the girl that plays), but now she is doing something a little more up beat than a requiem. Her male counterpart deals with the ever popular remont, which sounds like drilling or sand blasting or leaf blowing; something to that effect.

While listening to a Russian comedian, I picked up a new idiosyncrasy of the language: Only in Russian do the word for god and the word for rich descend from the same root (бог bawg and богатый bawgati).

28 February 2009
Today is the last official day of winter. Of course, as I look out my window, snow isn’t just falling, it’s racing down as though it has somewhere it really needs to be.

I see more people with rifles on the subway now. I’m not sure if they are hunting or, well, something.

Lately, I have learned such a wealth of new things, dear reader! I write most of them down with the hope that I will be able to share some with you.

Did you know that in Russian, the word ‘lie’ (as in fib, prevarication) has no plural? I cackled at this, actually cackled right in the middle of class as I pondered the implication. It’s as though it doesn’t matter if people tell many lies, the fact that one has been told is enough information. Or perhaps, the delusion that people can’t lie repeatedly. And by people, I principally was thinking of the government. One of my quotes this week was out of the newspaper I read: “As everyone knows, Russia is a free democratic country, and therefore nobody is thrown in prison because of his political views.”

And although it wasn’t related to this story, I wonder if you have heard that the trial against Politovskaya’s killers has ended with a ‘not guilty’ verdict. It wasn’t really that clean of a trial, and they are saying now that the real killer is the cousin (or perhaps it was the uncle) of the two men on trial that pulled the trigger, and it was masterminded by someone within the government (who is naturally an enemy of the Kremlin) or by some foreign power to undermine the Kremlin (interestingly enough, this is what Stalin always said, and that type of information that was always sent to him during World War Two and in those times. The man was seriously paranoid, and reports generally had to be crazier to be believed by him.)

Back to other educational things:

In Russia, beer is not considered alcohol. Which is why it is acceptable to drink it in the morning on the metro. Apparently.

Gender roles, as I have said before, are much more defined than they are in American culture. Linguistically, this came up again this past week: there are four separate terms for the word brother-in-law, while there are three for sister-in-law. There are separate words for boy cousins and girl cousins, and no word for ‘siblings,’ just brothers and sisters. While on that subject, there aren’t any words, not really, for step-anything or for half-anything; you have to do this slightly more archaic sounding ‘daughter of my father’ or ‘son of my mother’s husband;’ it makes me feel like I am trapped in Lord of the Rings.

Otherwise, I have stumbled upon a treasure-trove of grammatical constructions lately. Namely, an idea that heralds back to my high school days (so long past) (just kidding). In Russian, there are different ways to refer to things. Hm, this is a little confusing; I will stick with the imagery that is so ingrained in my heart. Imagine like you are looking at a window with four panes. One pane represents things that both you and another person know, going counter-clockwise is a pane that represents things that only they know and you don’t, the next is things that neither of you know, and the last is things that you know and the other person doesn’t. In Saxon, we called these Johara’s Windows. Anyways, each of these panes in Russian grammar has a different pronoun (or marker, I don’t know the right word for it).

As the semester reaches its half way point, we are leaving for Moscow in less than 2 weeks and that means that in 2 weeks and a day from now I will be in Germany! Western Europe! I can’t believe it, I’m so excited.

I have many things planned so far, including bookstores and museums. I won’t tell you about my plans, because it would be so deceptive of me to tell you about something that I hope to do and then disappoint. I will tell you about a spat of bad, horrible, no-good luck I’ve had on this end though. I love archaeology. I love ancient Egypt. Ergo, I really love Egyptology. And Germans were prolific Egyptologists, and they have so many fantastic treasures, many of which live in Berlin. So it was my plan to visit the principal collection of antiquities, but as it would happen, they closed the entire Ancient Egyptian Antiquities wing on the 22nd of February as they move to a new building, and they will open it up again in October! Thankfully, there are a few certain artifacts, most well-known ones, which are still on display. But I will only tell you about them if I actually end up seeing them.

Ah, this reminds of another observation I’ve made recently. While wandering in the Hermitage, in the new exhibition on the Cave of a Thousand Buddha, many of the items were labeled as having been in Germany until 1945, at which time they were ‘acquired’ by the Russians. I suppose that all is fair in war.

Well, back to work.

1 March 2009

Oh, peanut butter. Thy creaminess astounds me.
Although I was once a healthy creature,
Thy nutted aroma is enough to forget any resolutions.
Peanut-butter by sandwiches, fingers, or simply the spoon,
I think I could eat you in any way.
In this land of clouds and abominable snowmen,
I’ve seen your fleeting glimpse, but it’s not quite the same.
Oh peanut butter.
On that fated day of my return, right after my coconut ice cream sundae,
I’m afraid that will be your end.

The fire is shooting at us!

2009-02-17T04:59:00.002-05:00

17 February 2009

Now in the middle of February, I have become intimate with one of the most inconvenient aspects of St. Petersburg winters (although I am sure that this occurs elsewhere, understand that I met this fiend here, and so it gets the credit): ice sheets. The kind that are invisible until you’ve already gone flying on it.

So, that one time I noted I’d fallen forward on the ice produced a series of the most deliciously disgusting bruises, one on my knee in particular that went through every color of the rainbow. Now, I won’t bore you with the multitude of times I’ve fallen, except to say I’ve become accustomed to losing my footing. It’s more like ‘oh dear, watch out for laura she’s about to….oop, well, can someone please help her up again.’ But this past Saturday was a new low.

It was that disgusting holiday to which I am morally opposed, so a friend and I had banded together to go see a movie and get dinner. I was testing out a new outfit whose chief notoriety was brought in it that a skirt was involved. Falling on the ice into such a compromising position is embarrassing enough; doing so in a skirt is enough to convince a girl to stick to pants until the ice melts (April).

Ah well. What have I learned lately about Russia: there are a multitude of words for foreigner and all such related things. I’ve told about the word for German meaning ‘dumb,’ but another word for foreigner, the one used to denote genres of books, has the root verb of ‘to hack; to slash into pieces.’ Yet another word I have recently discovered carries the meaning of ‘to avoid, shun, keep away from.’ Such a cheery language.

Otherwise, I have also come to notice a trend in St. Petersburg, hats. Not baseball caps or even cowboy hats; fur monstrosities that look like they have either died on the woman’s head or have eaten it. Some of them are quite practical, like you’ve seen perhaps in movies, just fuzzy looking. Ah, and then there are those with tufts of fur that stick out in odd places at odd angles. Others look like an animal has just been skinned and then draped over the head.

Thankfully I have so much hair that I can’t fit it into hats, so I feel absolutely no compulsion to bother looking for one, and my housemother gave up trying to guilt trip me into buying one.

The ruble has finally hit rock bottom according to the finance ministry, around 34.56 rubles to a dollar. Of course, they said this last Friday, and now we’re a few kopeks higher already. Either way, to put it in perspective, a red bull costs about 47 rubles, so I’m a happy little kid.

In other national news, Tom Cruise visited Moscow. Yes, this was national news. And he got a cold.

There have been protests put down and ultra-nationalists encouraged. We exist now in happy expectation of spring. Although winter seems as though it will never end, and while watching the weather forecast for St. Petersburg, I see Rome’s forecast at +11 to +13 (Celsius) and can’t help but feel a twinge of envy. Even though it’s absolutely ridiculous, because I remember trees being green here and all that, it feels incredibly as though it’s always been winter and it always will be. Ugh.

Otherwise, I am well, and I hope you are too.

I: saw Slumdog Millionaire, and loved it; discovered a new musician named Anna Ternheim and love her too; finished the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; started Jane Austen's Emma; found more horrifying words related to torture than I ever cared to learn; and am watching the Office (the fire is shooting at us!!!) Genius.

And on the other hand....there are five fingers.

2009-02-11T06:58:00.000-05:00

8 February 2009

Not much has happened lately. Although, I am sick again; I think it may have something to do with all the new kids and their western germs to which my body is now unaccustomed.

I plan, as ever, for my trip to Berlin (which is coming wonderfully soon) and my blitz across Europe (which is less than 100 days off).

In idling my time away, I have finally read Pride and Prejudice. And now besides transcribing about half the book’s quotes into my journal, I find myself in love with yet another fictional character; several, in fact. Although this book was in English, I do not frown on this indulgence, as most of the rest of my free time is spent translating true and horrific stories of torture and death in the Russian army.

We have only just returned from our trip to Novgorod, which was slightly repetitious, but also exciting, as on the repeat tours that we had, I understood everything that the guide was saying, and on the new tour that the year-long students were treated to (the dacha of Dostoevsky and a spa sort of area in a town called Staraya Rusa, which has the similar salty properties of the Dead Sea), I was delighted in that I understood nearly everything.

Being now otherwise drugged on cold medicine, I find it best to cease my ramblings. I hope that you are doing well.

9 February 2009

As it happens, The Hobbit is a perfectly enjoyable book, irregardless to the amount of cold medicine one has taken or how blurry the words may be. Suffering currently from both aforementioned symptoms, I hope this may one day be of value to you.

Interestingly enough, I have made another discovery on my journey to understanding the Russian psyche. Well, more like I have fallen into another pothole. There is no such concept as a comfort movie, or book, or what have you. You are grammatically forbidden from using dictionary-prescribed terms in such an unctuous manner. You have to say that ‘such-and-such thing is comfortable to my soul,’ which works, but is rather bulky to get around saying. So, The Hobbit was the object by which, today, my soul was comforted. Along with Harry Potter movies, and a conspicuous amount of chocolate, which quite happily, in both the world of Harry Potter and Russia, may be used for ameliorative purposes.

Note to self: Stop falling on ice.

2009-02-03T09:52:00.000-05:00

31 January 2009

Oh, dearest readers! Oh, you who have travailed all these times along side me! (At least in spirit) I can’t believe it’s already February. I can’t believe that there are at least 2 more months of winter.

Being from California and studying in the southern parts of the country for the super-majority of my life, I have never understood this term, this idea of ‘winter.’ In California, it meant my sweatshirt and jeans, and for those two or three rare days, an umbrella. Apparently, winter lasts several months. And it is cold. How do I know (thermometers aside, naturally)? I used my little technique for getting my red bull colder, and it froze!! In the time it took me to take a shower, my red bull became an ice block. But that’s really okay, because in about half an hour it’s going to become a red bull slushy!! YAY.
So, as the temperature continues to plummet to ever new and exciting lows, this week the dollar hit an all time high and is making a new record every day; we are up to about 35 rubles to a dollar, which is where the euro was about a month ago (it’s up to about 45 right now).

So what’s a girl to do in such times? Stay home. Where it’s warm. And read and translate things.

Aha! I didn’t get to tell you about my Christmas present!!!! OH YAY! I had too much fun, all this living abroad is spoiling me, because I spend about twice as much time celebrating every holiday. My mom/brother/sister unit has spoiled me with western food, and I in turn, am spreading the love with my fellow year long students. I was tempted to share the Reese’s with the newbs, but realistically, they would not yet appreciate the grandeur of American candies that are filled with peanut butter (and besides, they don’t want to touch us with a 49 and half foot pole). I have more joy from Heroes than I know what to do with, and my little brother and sister sent me a two pound box of See’s candy (mmmmmm. Now, if I eat all of that, there isn’t any way I can gain more than two pounds, right? I always hated biology; I knew it would come back to bite me.)

But, classes! And new students! Classes are wonderful. My old conversation professor from last semester now teaches my grammar class, while our new conversation professor is the funniest guy I’ve ever met (who tells fantastic stories), and our translation professor. Sigh, my translation professor is the coolest professor on staff. She is the director of the center, and she speaks very good English, and is obsessed with House, M.D. Her class will be focused on translating things from English into Russian, which is wickedly, wickedly more difficult than the other way around. So we started off with sentences and small paragraphs from things like Winnie-the-Pooh, and then, because she is awesome, we are translating bits from Poirot and the Hobbit. She is my hero.

I have to share a story that our conversation professor told us. Now, you know all about the militsia and how I generally try to avoid contact with them, the same goes for most foreigners. But the secret is that they are much more scared of us, because, as we are foreigners, they don’t know how we are going to act. Enter Chinese study abroad students. In Russia, it is easy to buy gun replicas, they sell them all over the place, even in the posh Gostiny Dvor complex on Nevsky. Apparently, such gun replicas are not allowed in China, so these two male students, studying in Russia for the year, think it would be Awesome (with a capital ‘A’) to get some of these. So, they buy them, and since this is Russia, they aren’t given bags, but what are they to do? They sling these fake AK-47s over their shoulders and head home. On the metro. The militsia tackle them on the metro and take them away. The fake nature of the guns is apparent immediately, but they keep them in custody while the cops call all of their friends and family about the crazy foreigners that they encountered. The guns were wrapped and put into bags, and the students were released.

He tells us these kinds of stories every day. Awesome.

However, in the face of what is coming, what is happening is inconsequential. And, what dear reader, is coming? Spring break!!!!!

And why is this so important? Because it is going to be a fantastic adventure. Already, all adventure-shaped elements are falling together: a somewhat far off place I’ve never been, long-lost relatives, and lots of museums (all of my favorite adventurers/adventure novels somehow involve museums; a consequence of being an adoring fan of Elizabeth Peters.)

Naturally, living in St. Petersburg, the city of museums (there are over 400 museums here. 400!), I have already had a great deal of adventures; but there is nothing like the excitement of looking forward to the next great adventure!

2 February 2009

I fell face first today on the ice. It was painful.

Crigeons, Zemfira, and Multi-lingual ditties. Oh, Russia.

2009-01-27T04:47:00.000-05:00

24 January 2009

Today I was attacked by a crigeon. I wasn’t even on ice. I was sitting in a park reading my book and this blotchy ferocious beast attacked my shoe. It had red eyes and everything. Demon bird. (Normally, I try not to think mean things about birds. I’m not a crazy person; it was just that once, I was thinking something really mean about a bird and then it crapped on my head. And have you seen my hair? It was a nightmare, so now I’m a little skittish about it.)

After this savage mauling, this ridiculous incident, I was leaving my little park and saw a phone booth with a big sign on it that read: “St. Petersburg- a city of European Standards.” I wasn’t sure what to do with that.

Most of the weeks in my calendar book have funny quotes from which ever book I was reading at the time; this week, I got mine from the St. Petersburg Times: “Owing to the harsh economic situation, it was decided to cut off the light at the end of the tunnel as a temporary measure.”

This is actually a recycled joke from the 1998 financial crisis. As the ruble crashes, some people are getting a mite jittery.

However, as my dollar is still relatively strong, I had a nice week. My pocketbook may beg to differ. That is to say, I discovered, at long last, the blessed book fair. You see, Amazon and other such companies don’t really have a strong presence out here, so the place you go for cheap books is this market that’s in the middle of nowhere, on the complete other side of my metro line.

And this is where I have good intentions, and they go horribly, horribly awry. Although I am not as fiscally conscious as I should be when it comes to buying books, I watch my spending in all other areas. So when the time came to leave for the book market, I realized I had no money on hand. And since the ATM at my metro station thinks it’s funny to give me 500 rubles and then tell my bank they gave me 1000, I’ve taken to only using authorized Citibank ATMs. And as it so happens, there is one such ATM center at the next station over. But I didn’t want to waste a metro token (oh, horror of horrors). So I decided to walk there.

Now, you may remember dear reader what happened last time I attempted to walk in between Vasilevskii Ostrova station and mine. The cemetery incident. Have no fear, grandma, I chose a much safer path. Theoretically.

I had whipped out my map and plotted a course all along thoroughfares, but as I was only just getting on my way, lo and behold, a blizzard (not really; it was just enough snow and just enough wind that it’s like you are being force fed the tiny little morsels) picks up and my friend Elle, who’d just returned from her winter travels, calls me up. So I was so not paying attention to where I was going and ended up in a snow-covered playground next to a frozen river (and since I just finished Gorky Park, I skip quickly out of abandoned snow-covered areas for fear of finding more corpses, because I really am not anxious for my corpse count to go up). That part of the adventure went off well. I found the road again, blah-de-blah, but just as I trudged into the bankomat (this is what ATMs are called) I get this aching flaring pain on my Achilles tendon (it could be that’s what it’s called, I don’t study living tissue). I hobble into the metro and whip off my ugg boot (which smells horrible because the waterproofing job I did had absolutely no effect) and I have a blister that is bleeding!!!! Bleeding! But, will such a paltry flesh wound stop me on my way to untold literary discoveries? Of course not!

When all was said and done, I found some fantastic little treasures; I bought presents for self, family, and friends. I even found seasons 1 and 2 of Buffy and they cost me less than ten dollars. Why? Because this is Russia, and the only market is the black market. And the dubbing isn’t dubbing. It’s one guy doing all the voices, but they didn’t record over the character’s, so I get the delayed Russian and the witty banter in English that I so love.

As you may have guessed by this point, in general, I like to read. And I’ve only just read the last of several articles concerning the advent of both faith-healers and church run pharmacies in Russia. The Russian government is currently licensing faith-healers, or as anthropologists call them, shamans. There is an involved application process, according to the paper I was reading, dealing with the shaman’s brain waves and a questionnaire. Along these same lines, this week, on Monday, it was a holiday that had to do with baptism. Or creation of holy water, I’m a little confused on that, but at every single church in the whole of St. Petersburg there were lines and lines of people waiting to get jugs of water blessed by the local priest. Even my house mother had a big container.

My final note (for today): I get Garrison Keillor’s news from Lake Wobegon every week delivered to my ipod, and I laughed so hard when I heard his song commemorating the crew of US Airways flight 1549, it was strangely reminiscent of the Ballad of Jayne in Firefly, which makes me want to go to the backwater planet where I’m a hero.

27 January 2009

Today is a Holiday of sorts for St. Petersburg. 65 years ago today the 900 day blockade of St. Petersburg finally ended. At the end of last semester we went to this museum of the blockade, and it was one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been.

Yesterday was also a holiday, albeit a happier one. It was Student day! And also Tatiana’s Saint Day (so, it’s like a second birthday for all people named Tatiana). So, although it was the first day of classes, and we did the same sort of class-shaped things, it was greatly improved over the beginning of last semester. Not only did I actually understand everything that people were saying this semester, and not only I did I already know the ropes, but all the year long students got free concert tickets to see this lady called Zemfira.

Now, with a name like that, and some of the posters I’d seen around town, I assumed this act would be some sort of euro-pop or folk singer. But she was awesome! All the stereotypic Russian traits, she exemplified to a positive degree. Whilst singing, she alternately had a glass of wine or a cigarette. She was such an energetic singer, and had an amazing voice. It was a lot of fun. She even sang a little ditty in English: ‘All you need is love!’

Today. Oh today has already been an adventure and the day has only yet begun. I have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of my Christmas present from my mother and brother and sister for ages, knowing all the time that it was entirely likely that it would never show up and Russian customs would have confiscated all the candy. But, at long last! Yesterday I got the package slip at school, and started walking to the nearest post office to exchange my paper for the package, naively assuming that the package would be living at the nearest post office. No. It was living at a different one. Alas.

So this morning, I headed out with my attention fixed on my goal. I was checking the hours of the office, as they were printed on the paper, and realized that my watch still thought it was 4 in the morning. Drat. Now I need remont done on my watch. Double drat. But I do find my post office (which was down one of the creepy tunnels, which are for better or worse slowly becoming less creepy and more every day), and I go through the involved process of signing for the package. And then they bring it out.

I started laughing just then (they already knew I wasn’t Russian: I had to show my passport as id), because they didn’t bring out a box, they brought out a massive white bag. And I’ve seen bags like that. The last time I saw one, I had just moved to central Texas, and one of my bags hadn’t survived the process, and in came out in a trash bag at the airport (Texas and I were doomed from the start).

But all was well, apparently, my American box had cooties. It’s sitting on the chair next to me, I’m too nervous to open it before I get home, because the weather is peskily hovering around freezing, so the streets are covered in ice that you can’t even see. Thrice drat.

I am a fountain of knowledge. Of course, it’s all useless information. But still…

2009-01-23T04:14:00.002-05:00

19 January 2009
Today, I reaped the benefits of my folly. Thankfully, this time, I didn’t get into trouble because of it. I should explain.

I have many bad habits, but one in particular; I answer questions without completely having processed what I’ve been asked. I do this in English sometimes and less so in Russian. However, the other day Ludmila, an elderly volunteer at the Hermitage, called me up and invited me to go somewhere to do gargleyfrazzle (this is the word I use when I don’t understand what has been asked of/told to/shouted at me). The stipulation was if I had the time and the interest to do it. And since I have nothing but time on my hands and am interested (at least minimally) in nearly everything, I agreed to meet her.

So this morning, I meet her at one of the central metro stations and we start walking along, and she’s explaining this organization that she’s taking me to. She has kind of a funny accent, so I still missed most of her explanation.

What we ended up coming to is an organization called ‘Soldiers’ Mothers of Saint Petersburg.’ This is a human rights NGO that has to do with helping citizens who cannot handle going into military service (physically, financially, mental health reasons, etc.) The way it works sucks and this is how it breaks down: according to the Russian constitution, there is no such thing as a compulsory army service, technically, there is alternative service but there is no law authorizing this. So if a young man does not want to serve in the army - for example because it is against his belief or because he simply refuses to live under the present conditions in the barracks - he has no alternative, although he should have according to the Constitution. (I’m quoting one of the reports that they already had translated to English.)

I can’t say anything from personal experience about the US Armed forces training, but I what little I know lends me to categorize it as intense; where a trainee is pushed to their breaking point and attempt to make them a stronger person. But there are limits; there are channels that delinquent commanders can be dealt with. And beyond that, the trainees are willing; the trainees are paid, and treated with some degree of humanity. Not so in Russia. Torture is common, and draftees die at an alarming rate. To accent this point in the organization offices in St. Petersburg there was an article from last week stating that 35 draftees had frozen to death in the snow at training (Could you imagine what would happen if something like that happened to American soldiers??? Not dying from some freak accident but because of sadistically abusive officers?). According to one of the reports, in a time of ‘peace’ (when there was no war in Chechnya), 1994-1996, there was an official survey which detailed that some 6 to 8 thousand deaths, 500 suicides, and numerous victims who had died by accident or unidentifiable causes. They have no rights; they are beaten and abused and tortured. There are some cases where the deaths of trainees are suspicious and there are sufficient grounds to believe that they were murdered in order to hide traces of other crimes. It’s horrifying and it is a system that takes young men and turns them into animals. It molds their lifestyles into ones that ignore violence or perpetrate it further after they are discharged. And it’s not like it’s actually easy to avoid. Because this is how the report broke it down, and it makes a sickening sort of sense: there is a quota of 400,000 troops that the army wants to recruit every year for a two-year term. There are not enough willing young men, so what ends up happening is that young men are literally rounded up off the street. That’s one of the reasons that police always stop men to check their papers, there are many instances that people are unwillingly recruited then and there for the army.

At this point, Ludmila and the young woman who was giving me a run down of the organization stopped, and were fervent in explaining that they were patriots, they loved their country, but this system of drafting all young men was a broken one, and this organization existed to let people know their rights and give them the tools that they need to make their cases for opting for the alternative civilian service instead of military (even then though, this alternative service lasts for four years instead of the two-year military terms). This organization is all about giving the people the tools that they need and, something Russians need a heaping dose of, self-consciousness.

And what this comes down to is that they need help. Translating; from Russian to English, which is something that I can actually handle. So, I think I will try to help. I was thinking how many friends I have in America who serve in the armed forces, and how angry I would be if they were mistreated so injudiciously. These young men have friends, families, loved ones, and they deserve a voice, they are worth helping. They deserve humanity, and furthermore Russia needs to set the record straight, because this kind of corruption, looking the other way while massive human right’s violations occur within their own borders, has slowly infected the entire system.

20 January 2009

Okay, I just had to reread about twenty pages of my own blog to realize something: I haven’t talked about the elections. At all. And what it was like, what it still is like to be an American in Russia while all this is going on. Dear me, how horribly backwards have been my priorities.

So, I have to reach into the foggy past of my memory to regale you in bits and pieces. You’ve seen all the matryoshka dolls that now have Obama on them, and tra-la-la-la-la and all that. Way back when, on the 4th of November, the Metro Newspaper had a big picture of Bush holding his dog and across the top in all capital letters was ‘Good-bye Bush,’ but not in Russian, just in Cyrillic characters so it looks like this: Гуд-бай, Буш. I saved that issue because it made me laugh and the next day’s paper as well.

I should tell you that I did, and did not, vote. I did vote, inasmuch that my ballot came, I read all the little fliers, filled in all the bubbles, and have my little ‘I have voted – have you?’ paper. I did not vote, inasmuch that my ballot didn’t come the week after the election, and I timed things just perfectly (NOT) that I missed the consulate the day that they were opened that week. At the time, I didn’t know how to explain this to my house mother in Russian, so I just said that I had voted.

I find I lie a lot in Russian. Not so much that I want to falsify information (although sometimes that is my motivation. Why yes, creepy man on the subway who is drunk at 10:30 in the morning, I am married), but usually because I just don’t have the finesse with the language as of yet to explain such a situation.

So anyways, back to the story at hand: today was the inauguration ceremony. And I’m not going to lie to you, dear readers, I cried. It was beautiful. Of course, I caught 80 percent of it, because the Russian announcers were madly trying to translate and explain everything that was going on. Interestingly enough, they did not translate anything that Rick Warren said, but while he was praying they opted to discuss why it was interesting that Obama had chosen him for the invocation. Russians in some ways are much queasier about dealing with religion than Americans. But what was fascinating is that they really showed all of it. And the coverage was pretty in-depth; they had experts explaining why the inauguration has to fall on the day that it does and interviews with people on the street. Even though I am on the other side of the world, I got to watch this happen in real time. Something Pelosi said in her speech was telling and true, she said that the whole world was watching. And really. Everyone was. So it was just that much more awesome that Obama gave an amazing speech. (But given how Russia controls her energy resources and doles them out, some parts of that speech probably won’t sit too well with the Kremlin.)

My host mother’s boyfriend was frustrated and wanted to know how many Russians were invited to the ceremony, besides reporters and embassy staff. I didn’t really know what to with that, seeing as I couldn’t explain in Russian that I think that world leaders send their congratulations, but probably don’t have time to flit around the world attending one another’s inauguration ceremonies. Oh wait; I do know how to say that in Russian. Drat. Another lost opportunity.

I was the typical over-enthusiastic American, clapping at the speech, shouting at the tv when the signal went out for about 15 seconds, and crying. I think I must be such a novelty to these stoic people around me.

So, in some ways I am sadder today than I have been any other day of my study abroad experience. Even Christmas wasn’t so bad, because at least then everyone was celebrating; everyone had a stake in the holiday. But this inauguration, the election, it belongs to Americans, of course it affects the rest of the world, but it could never mean as much to Russia as it does to us. And I suppose today, in the absence of other Americans, I value more my citizenship then ever before, I value the legacy of our country, and there is a great part of me that is anxious to be back on American soil.

On the flip side I am happier now, seeing this process from the outside, watching people react to what our leaders say and do, I think I have a greater sense of how America is seen by the rest of the world. I have a greater respect for our democratic process and how safe I feel in America. I think we still believe that people can be good, can be selfless, and can believe in something bigger than themselves. And that’s a hope that we can’t afford to lose, or we would face becoming jaded and blind to the rest of humanity. And, anthropologically speaking, that’s just a slippery slope.

So, in completely different news, I love reading Kathy Reichs in Russian, I’ve gotten farther in the week or so that I’ve had this book than I’ve gotten with that despicable Bond book which I’ve had for ages. I’ve now learned the words for ‘to jabber,’ ‘eccentric crank,’ ‘kick the bucket/die suddenly (there is a separate verb to express this idea),’ ‘tibia (which is actually expressed very strangely),’ and ‘riff-raff.’ The plot line of this book has to do with a serial killer who kills women and then dismembers them (so I’ve learned a whole slew of interesting words along those lines), so the characters come up with all these horrible names to refer to the murderer; some of which I know are real bad, because they don’t even show up in my dictionary (the proper dictionary I brought doesn’t list smutty words).

So now, we are nearing the end of break. Classes start up again next week, and I think that my break has been glorious. I’ve gone through, for the greater part, my list of things I wanted to accomplish (which included finding more constructive things to do in my free time for the coming semester). Although I think it might have been fun to run around Europe, now I will be able to say that I actually survived the entire Russian winter. That has to be worth something, and I feel as though I am becoming more fluent in the language. Alas, I have to take that dreaded placement test again, so I will see if I have learned anything over the last four and a half months.

Speaking of which, one final note (of horror, or joy, or ambivalence? I haven’t yet decided how I feel) but I am officially past the half way point of this experience. And I am on page 70 of this blog. I wonder what the final count will be. Not just blog pages and entries, but other comforting things like, how many cups of tea I’ve drank, how many times I’ve gotten past the gag reflex and eaten my entire dinner (I swear, I think I ate seaweed the other day); little things too, like how many more corpses I’ll come across (2 so far), and how many more times I’ll go flying one the ice.

Yesterday was the first time I saw someone ice skating on the frozen river by my house. I’d like to try that, but knowing my luck, the second my foot hits the ice, it will crack and I’ll fall in and freeze to death, or I’ll anger the crigeons (pigeon/crow birds) and they’ll attack me, or I’ll unintentionally awake a yeti and bring his wrath down on Petersburg. (You see, it’s not just for my own sake that I don’t ice skate, it’s really for the sake of humanity in general.)

I have met my nemesis. And it is called: pickled mushrooms.

2009-01-20T03:33:00.001-05:00

15 January 2009

I would really love to say that I have been doing constructive things the last couple of days. Lately, I have been spending a great deal of my time in a select few activities: reading, walking, and chitchatting in cafes. Or should I say, at the Hermitage (volunteering/plotting to pilfer), reading in the Russian National Library (I’m a card carrying member!) (well, also plotting to pilfer here too), and meeting up with acquaintances and chit chatting in RussoEnglish. I basically lead an aimless life. I horbgorble. That’s a real word. It means to wander around aimlessly.

So today, I had a lot on my mind and my normal solution is to walk, think, and eventually find some perspective. So, I left the internet café I’d been dawdling at and just walked. And walked and walked, up back streets and skirting around museums, trailing rivers and passing monuments. I was trying to get a sense of the city, a better sense at least. And I came to the conclusion that Russia is in a desperate sort of situation. I mean beyond the economic situation; even though I should note that the ruble just hit a six year low against the dollar (I bought a red bull to commemorate). I’ve mentioned it at least negligibly, but Russia has no sense of national identity, it’s spent the greater part of the last 300 or so years trying to decide if it’s part of the Western World or the Eastern one. And now, after all the chips have fallen, and democracy is being strangled, Russia has completely lost the pre-Soviet Russian folkways, and all that’s left is the memory of the Soviet State.

I don’t know for how much longer the state can balance on the edge like it has been, wavering in between a quasi-democracy/oligarchy/totalitarian state. We hear now about the government’s worries if the economic situation worsens how the people will react, and the plans for riot control. I don’t really know where I’m trying to go with this. Hrmph.

Russia’s situation is just depressing. I think that America is a pretty awesome country, and I think that Russia has potential, but she just can’t get over the hump, she’s too weighed down by corruption.

Along the same sort of lines, it should come as no surprise that the Politivskaya case (do you remember her? She was the journalist that was assassinated, supposedly as a birthday present for Putin). The trial of her murderers was postponed again. First the judge opened the court to journalists, and then closed it, saying that the jury feared for their lives and wouldn’t come out while there were journalists there. Then some members of the jury came out and said on local stations that this wasn’t true and it was a ploy. (The guy that came forward was later dismissed off the jury.) Then it has been one thing after another, and now it’s been postponed again, because the lawyer for one of the men being charged didn’t show up to court that day.

The reason I bring this all up is that, whilst on my walk, I came across the ‘House of Journalists.’ Which was closed; for ‘remont.’ (I utilize here the Russian snort: fu. The verb form is fricknewt. I love this language)
And I was telling my mom the other day about the Museum of Modern Democracy (I’m fairly certain that’s the right translation, I’ll have to double check), which is coincidentally in the same building as the practically state-run television station, Channel 1. I’ve not yet come across a guidebook which has bothered to mention it.

17 January 2009

Well, today was another one of those days; the kind of day that reminds me why I will always look back on my time here with some backwards kind of fondness.

I really have to go through it bit by bit.

In the before and after hours of museum operation at the Hermitage the winter palace is completely closed off to the public, meaning that the gates to the courtyard are closed and locked. Which is great and all for security, but not so much if you are a volunteer. The way that we get in and out of the museum is…adventurous. And another one of those things that makes me want to open all the inconspicuous doors I see, because I will always be half expecting something amazing to be right behind it. Or at least something unexpected.

What we do is go through one of those inconspicuous doors in the courtyard which leads into the belly of the beast. Underground passages that criss-cross the entire Hermitage, where you can’t stand up straight because of all the pipes that run along the ceiling, and even down here you can see doors leading off in all directions. There really are hundreds of cats chilling in the underground. I told you about them before; they are revered here, because they saved the Hermitage after World War II (from the rats). So we twist through the underbelly a bit and come up in an alley between the greater and lesser Hermitages, but you can’t exit through the alley after hours either, because it’s closed off too. So we enter another shabby door at the other end of the alley and climb up stone stairs, hop over cats until finally one door opens and, all of a sudden, it’s plush offices. (Have you ever read New Moon? It was exactly like that. Sans Vampires. Well, as far as I know. I was not fed to the undead.) And we were walking through all these dark paneled offices and WHAM, we pop at out at the entrance that I use to get to the Hermitage Theatre. Just using a different door.

I have this far off dream that someday I will live in a castle (not as a princess, I will be an adventurer) and there will be hundreds of doors and passage ways and musty old locked rooms and trick wall panels. And a massive library. And the statue of Nike. And maybe some of the statues from the Library of Congress. Sigh. All in good time.

So, back to the story at hand: hanging out with the Hermitage volunteer crowd is a lot like being followed by the paparazzi, because there are a couple people who take pictures of everything. Nonstop. This is a thing that some Russians just do. It’s not so much creepy as it is just strange.

We had several such people with us for the Old New Year celebration and we had just enough people that we got a driver to take us to Ropsha. Of course, we had to stop at the supermarket along the way and it took all ten of us to pick up the ingredients for Gluwein (German word, there might be a ‘h’ in there somewhere. The Estonians call it Glog). We have the entire experience documented thanks to the paparazzi.

And we finally made it to Ropsha, which is the sad neglected cousin of the Hermitage. If it had the same amount of money flowing into it as Pushkin or Pavlosk it could be beautiful, but at the moment, it is a monument to bureaucratic neglect.

But the Old New Year’s Celebration (Only in Russia could something like this happen. Really)- This was a small town affair where everyone in the audience was either involved in the production or related to the people on stage; even the mayor of the town was there.

As the day progressed through children dressed as demons from the ocean floor and dancing snowflakes, I realized that for however irritating babushkas in St. Petersburg may be, as soon as you get off the metro and out of town, and maybe give them too much to drink, they are the funniest people in the world. At the end of the proper celebration, the children all ran screaming after Ded Moroz, as he had gifts for all the children in the audience (there was a stampede, but again, it was a small enough place that he actually had multiple gifts for all the kids). And then the woman who was in charge told all the parents who had kids that they had to leave now, because it was time for the grown-up party. And that’s when the wine, champagne, and glog came out. And the Russian folk singers (all women) started singing and dancing, and the accordionist started all these folk songs that everybody knew. One of the men, who was either a very enthusiastic person or slightly drunk already, did the Russian dancing like you see in the movies and sang a song about the tragic life of a worker. Then the woman started grabbing people and we all danced, even if you were holding champagne in one hand and food in the other, you were not exempt.

Then, people were getting rather red in the face, came a set of songs called potyushkas, which is kind of a rhyming game song. There are set verses and there is a fair amount of improvisation, as long as you can keep to the meter that the accordionist sets. And so, basically, it’s double entendres, which would have been funny even if it hadn’t been sung by all the closed off women who glare at you on the street normally, or the little old ladies. There really is such a difference with Russians when you meet on the street and when you share a meal (there was a crap load of food there, too) Towards the end of these potyushkas there was a face off of sorts where these two women were trying to one up each other. It was really very funny.

We toasted to each other, to our hosts, to the Ropsha school (which is located on the same premise), its directors, to the New Year, and our Old New Year’s Celebration. It’s an abomination of Russian culture to not clink glasses during these toasts (and also to clink an empty glass, do you have to guess how I found this out?), and I took to filling my glass with mineral water after the first hour.

I am an idiot.

2009-01-13T04:07:00.002-05:00

10 January 2009

How I am an idiot! Oh, let me count the ways.

Today, I accidentally closed my hair in the dresser drawer; of course, I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t realize this until I tried to move.

Then, I trudged through the snow to school to register my passport only to realize that I’d written the wrong day down and everything was still closed (so I am an illegal alien, technically, even though the government office is closed and there’s nothing anyone can do about it). Good heavens. So much to do and it feels as though the rest of my break is slipping away from me.

Then, my hair got caught in a sign on the subway. Once again, these things I don’t realize until I try to move.

I had a bad hair day. Not so much that my hair doesn’t do what I’d like it to do (I’ve decided that my hair has become either very compliant, or I’ve given up completely on it, so it just doesn’t register that it’s acting up), but my hair has been acting out, attaching itself to things it really has no right to.

Otherwise, what a splendid day. There has been so much fresh snow fall that today, while trekking though the snow in the park, I saw about a hundred kids and their families skiing and sledding through the snow and across the little frozen lake. When I was walking yesterday (or maybe the day before that) across the Fontanka bridge, there was a man, connected to his friends by a long rope, in about the center of the river, testing the ice. When he decided he’d gone far enough, he plopped down on his back and his friends dragged him back across the ice and through the snow.

I got spectacularly lost the other day when I was trying to find this antique and book store. You see, I had the address, but that’s really only half the battle. I even found the sign on the street, but again, this really doesn’t mean very much. I tried to find the entrance and followed what looked like a hopeful path which rapidly degenerated into a creepy tunnel (where there was a bank, of all things) and an even creepier square.

I have to interrupt this story though. I discovered the other day that the reason I get lost is generally stubbornness. I refuse to turn around and back track, even if it will save me time and a headache.

In this instance, I decided that pride could succumb to rationality, and that, for the moment, antique bookstores would have to wait. To make up for it, I got a copy of Kathy Reichs’ first Temperance Brennan mystery, and have added words like “abdominal cavity,” “corpse,” and “frightened beetle” to my vocabulary. I really should’ve bought this book sooner.

Yesterday, I had a fantastic time watching cartoons as well. Generally, my late morning routine includes Spiderman and The Fantastic Four, which are both dubbed really well. Angel is sometimes on, so I opt for that when my cartoons aren’t playing. But yesterday, it was Dr. Strange! I didn’t even realize he had a cartoon. It was well drawn, and very badly dubbed. Oh Russia. And then, oh dear readers, it was Cheburashka. The Russians love this little guy like we love Mickey Mouse. It’s a stop-motion cartoon (that may or may not be the actual term), and Cheburashka is so cute! The story is that he shows up one day in a carton of Oranges, and no one knows what he is. So, the orange seller tries to take him to the zoo, but they won’t take him, because they don’t know what he is either. So he has no friends. But it’s okay: at the end of the day, when the zoo closes, all the animals are allowed to go home and the crocodile (who has a suit and a hat) is lonely and looking for friends, so he meets Cheburashka. And that’s how it all starts.

Of course, there’s also a crazy old babushka who has this little weasel thing that hides in her purse, and perpetrates evil (switching street signs with a slingshot and playing tricks on people). But the funniest thing is, after living in Russia, how many things they joke about: like the endless remont and things being closed at odd times for ‘technical breaks.’

As a note, if you ever come to Russia, and things say that they are open 24 hours. They’re not, and even things with stated hours might not be opened for those hours. Employees dictate their own schedules more or less. It’s really rather funny.

Oh! I had the most cringeworthy dream. Lately I’ve been having wickedly strange dreams, but this last one was painful. Okay, the most vivid part of the dream had to do with my teeth (I think because there’s a dentist’s office right outside the window; it’s infecting my good vibes). You know how sometimes you have that little piece of skin between you finger nail and the rest of your finger and it hurts like Hades, but you just have to get rid of it? Okay, I dreamed that my tooth splintered, and I was trying to get the splinter out of my gum. PAIN! So, I’ve gone insane and have been checking my teeth like every 20 minutes. I remember years ago, I had one dream that I broke a tooth and swallowed part of it, (this is when Heather and I were both still living with our parents) and I woke up and I told her several times that I swallowed part of my tooth. Then, months later, I had this dream that all my teeth crumbled when I tried to eat an apple. It took me ages to get the courage up to eat apples again.

13 January 2009

Well, all the snow is gone. The weather has spiked (I say this knowing that the temperature is in the 80s in California) to a whopping 3 degrees Celsius; which is enough to melt all the snow and make me feel wimpy for wearing gloves.

I’ve decided that I’m going to start celebrating New Year’s more heartily, and I have a good reason for it. With Christmas, you kind of have to take the decorations down because Christ was born, and Santa Claus stopped by and all that. But with New Year’s, you can continue celebrating the happiness of a new year. Who’s going to tell you to tone it down? I only say this because people are still celebrating here. It’s rather endearing.

Ah! I have to backtrack though. So, Saturday, the blasted school was still closed, and there was snow everywhere, right? So on Sunday, I make my way back in that direction, but since the weather had snapped, all the snow had melted and re-frozen into invisible ice sheets. Do you need to guess how I know this?

It was almost comical, cartoon-like, when I went flying. I am very thankful though, that I didn’t have my computer that day, because there was this one kid last semester that slipped on the ice with his computer in his bag, and WHAM half of his screen was no longer operational.

Christmas...Again!

2009-01-09T04:56:00.002-05:00

8 January 2009

Oh dear readers, what a day! Well, I don’t know about you (although, of course, I wish you all the best), but every so often I just have a really really good day, and the horror washes through me that I am almost half way through my time here, and eventually I’m not going to be able to spend all my time at museums, theatres, and cafes.

So, for now, allow me to gush (mmm, that made me think of gushers, those gummy candy; oh processed sugar, how I miss thee). I didn’t ever get around to telling you about my last ballet experience, did I? Splendid!

So, the Hermitage theatre is a little deal. I have told you about this: tickets are really expensive, at least for foreigners. I get in for free, so it’s all the same.

Anyways, the entrance to the theatre isn’t from Palace Square, but along the embankment, so it’s a really pretty walk, especially at night. The first night, Swan Lake, I was wearing my new dress. It’s an evening dress, and it’s gorgeous. Of course, it slipped my mind when I was buying it to pick up a pair of nylons or full length tights to go underneath it. So, I looked nice, but I nearly froze to death.

The ballet was wonderful, and wonderfully over booked. Since it was New Year’s Day, the biggest holiday in Russia, and it was the biggest ballet in all of Russia, it was packed, so for the first act I sat in an alcove from which you couldn’t see the dancers, but could hear the music and I stood in the back for the last two acts and pretended like that’s where I was supposed to be. (I have a badge, whose going to tell me to move? Muahaha.)

In the intervening week, I was at the Hermitage again, and, whilst wondering through the halls, and thinking to myself how isolated the theatre had seemed, and WHAM! All of a sudden, I was there. I didn’t realize the thing was smack dab in the middle of the Hermitage! This puts a lot of things in mischievous perspective! That is to say, there were ornamented doors all over the place, but I just assumed, I don’t know, that they lend to innocuous places. I had no idea that interesting things were actually behind them! Imagine where some of the rest of them lead!! (Alas, clearly C.S. Lewis has had a major impact on my imagination)

So, back to this evening’s performance. For someone who has grown up adoring Christmas time, seeing the quintessential Christmas Ballet in Russia, on the Russian Christmas was simply a dream come true. I couldn’t wipe the stupid grin off my face.

It was so beautiful! All the costumes; and the girls dancing on their toes and swirling around like feathers or snowflakes. And the music! Oh! I can sit through anything if the music is good, and this music defines Christmas time. When they were doing the different dance bits from around the world, I don’t know which one it’s called, and I suppose that different choreographers could add their own flair, but there were three guys and a girl doing an Egyptian tribute. This girl was amazing! I’ve never in my life seen someone move like she did! She did back flips and splits and all the normal ballerina parts too, and it was flawless.

This goes into something I’ve been musing on for a while, but just waiting for enough examples to eventually surface to make a point of it. The point is: things never change; there is nothing new under the sun. With this girl, how flexible she was; breathtaking. And it’s always been that way, we see Egyptian scenes of slave girls and entertainers at parties in ancient times, doing the same sort of thing. Another example here in Russia is one of the babushka jobs. As soon as it starts snowing, the city releases an army of little babushkas who are all armed with a broom and a little snow dustpan thing. And this broom? It’s a whole bunch of twigs tied together, like archaeologists find, like are used all over the world since the beginning of time. I’ll stop there; I think two examples will suffice.

Speaking of snow and Christmas miracles; there were actual snowflakes today! I was at a Christmas concert, and it was snowing very hard, and I was trying to move enough of my sleeve to see my watch when I caught sight of the little devils! What a day.

You know, all this fuss about not speaking enough Russian, or not thinking enough in Russian seems so silly now (although I am sure that two weeks into next semester I will be all in a tizzy again), because I speak English once a week: on Tuesday mornings, when I call my little sister, brother, and mom, and most thoughts, especially expressive ones (and curses! Nice curses, not vulgar ones. Although, thanks to James Bond, I know some vulgar ones, too) come to me first in Russian.

I’ve just realized, and I don’t know how it’s possible, but I’ve never mentioned Nashi to you. What a glaring oversight.

Oh Nashi, Oh Russia.

Nashi is a youth movement in Russia, hyper-nationalistic. They are the Russian Equivalent to Hitler Youth; which isn’t a very nice analogy, but true in important and less so ways. Nashi would like all foreigners (students, migrant workers, the whole shebang) kicked out of Russia, they advocate a history of Russia that paints Stalin as a stern father of Russia who brought out the best in his people (oh, there is the tiny point that he murdered over 11 million of his own people, but it was for the better. Of course, it’s his fault that so many Russians died in World War Two because he liquidated the entire officer corps because he was a raving paranoid power hungry little man, but really, somehow, that was the West’s fault. I get a little worked up about this. Even today, you see the remnants of this cult of the personality, that’s why NO one talks about the Gulag, that’s why I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Memorial to the Gulag in Moscow was removed for ‘construction,’ that Memorial offices were raided in St. Petersburg, and there is a law in process right now that would make it a treasonous offence to pass information essential to security – which they define however they wish – to international organizations, including human right’s groups.) Nashi membership has soared in the last several years. There are yearly summer camps, where couples are married in two waves (at the beginning and in the middle of the program) and encouraged to procreate for the better of the country (there was a James Bond movie like that, the one with the space station. See? Some of this isn’t made up, just wildly exaggerated). There are a couple of really interesting links off the wikipedia entry for that. Nashi members have also gone on to start working within higher levels of government, and it is forecasted by some that in the coming years, Nashi is either going to form it’s own ‘new and independent’ party or join up with the major party and there is going to be an influx of members into the Duma. These are the kids that protest at meetings which try to encourage a more open democracy in Russia. It’s interesting to see from the outside, but it’s not so fun when one of them hops onto the subway, gives their very loud and long speech and starts asking for donations. And a lot of people give. I pay pointed attention to absolutely nothing in particular and thank my luckiest stars that I was born with a complexion that lets me blend in here.

Oh dear. Now it’s very late at night, and I’m all worked up. I need to start doing yoga or something. It takes me forever to fall asleep.

14

2009-01-06T05:10:00.002-05:00

5 January 2009

14….according to my host mother, that’s how many degrees below zero it is right now. I didn’t bother leaving the house today. It’s strange, I expected colder weather with snow and clouds, but it seems that when the skies are clear the temperature plunges. It’s been clear for a while; even though the clouds do roll in after dark and dump snow on us. And I swear, the other day when I was walking it started snowing while the skies were perfectly clear.

I miss the desert. Weather is slightly more predictable.

So, nothing too exciting has happened recently. I have been reading. A lot. I got a tip on a link where that has all the Stephenie Meyer books in PDF form (I don’t feel bad, because I already own all of them, they just wouldn’t fit into my suitcase), and have spent the last couple of days hibernating with my computer.

I have taken to going to Hermitage several times a week, because it’s a free, warm place to hang out when I’ve gone stir crazy at home. I found a convenient, inasmuch that it is dreadfully inconvenient for everyone else, staircase back behind the Neolithic Exhibit with plush benches and classical statues that is the perfect place to relax with a book. Thankfully, the security babushkas here are not nearly as suspicious as the guards at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, so they don’t insist on walking by me every two or three minutes. (Because wait, wait, clearly I’m about to steal Saint Lucy! No one will notice me walking down 10th Street with that. Although, I’m not going to lie, there is a cup on the first floor: with the basin of it made from marble or alabaster and coming from Ancient Egypt, with gold and jewel ornamentation from Middle Ages when it was used as a chalice in Italy. Siiiigh, that would most certainly fit into my bag.)

I did make it out on Sunday. Normally, I make it a point to go to church (I really like the pastor), but, well, I over read (till 2) and overslept (till 10), so I was just a wee bit too late. But I did go to Hermitage (like Russians, I have taken to dropping ‘the’ and just acceding to the gloriousness of Hermitage) and it was dreadful. Wonderful, but dreadful. Oh, well, it happened in stages.

Weekends are not a good time to visit Hermitage. Winter Break (when most everything else is closed) is not a good time to visit Hermitage. So, Sunday afternoon the week of New Years is a death trap. But to be fair, you can’t expect tourists to know this.

Nonetheless, the line reached across the entire courtyard of the palace, and people were waiting hours to get in, and then upwards of an hour for the cloakroom (you have to check coats, bags, etc.). When I volunteer, I have a handy dandy badge with my name and little flags for the different languages that I speak, which also conveniently lets me skip all the lines and fuss; that’s beside the point. But I don’t do anything terribly interesting most of the time, just scanning tickets. I have no authority in the place, naturally dear reader, you can understand this.

The dear Italian tourists didn’t. I understand, theoretically, the need to complain. Good heavens, I live in Russia, we spend most of our time grumbling to ourselves. But really, shouting at volunteers is just callous. But, in her mind, I was at fault for Russian lines and the fact that everyone pushes and shoves with out apologizing.

After she left, shouting in English and in Italian (well, I am pretty sure she was just cursing in Italian. It must be hard for them to be in such cold climates. Poor things), I realized how very much things here don’t bother me anymore. Or at least, they don’t discourage me. Which, in and of it self, was an encouraging thought.

It’s nice to not be bothered when people shout at me, because about 20 minutes after the Italian lady, I was answering a Russian lady’s question, and it came out in RussoSpanglish. She didn’t like that.

And that’s when I met Leila! I seem to be meeting a lot of new people these days, but Leila made a sincere impression on me. We ended up talking for several hours in a tea shop (oh, how Russians love their tea) about everything: art and music, movies and plays, but real things too, like the nature of good and evil, and human beings and souls. I haven’t had such a good conversation in ages. Of course, as usual, it was done in a pigeon-speak manner. I am really quite proficient at pigeon-Russian, and waving my hands in a maniacal, most certainly Non-Russian way.

So, I take my wisdom from Tolkein today and pass it on to you:
Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.

And as I have no gruesome stories today for telling, I will release you from my psychic control and you may go about your daily business.

I think I am still a little deaf in my left ear. Oh well.

2009-01-03T07:22:00.003-05:00

1 January 2009

New Years! Happy New Year to one and all! In all honesty, I have never had a clear view of New Years, I rarely celebrate it, coming off from the high of Christmas, it was always a secondary, cheaper holiday.

No more.

Russia has opened my eyes in this respect if in none other. New Years here…it’s electric, energy and happiness, hope for the coming new year; the wishes are all the same: Happy New Year! To new Happiness, new Love, new Success, and new friends! But the Russian, for however cold an exterior there is every other day of the year, it melts for just one night, as we congratulate one another on survival and toast to the coming adventures.

New Years found me celebrating in Palace Square, in front of the Hermitage, and along the bank of the Neva. Never have I seen so many people in one place. I tried to take pictures and video on my camera, but of all nights, last night was one of the coldest and windiest, and after a while, not only could I not hold my camera straight, I couldn’t feel most of my extremities. In the Palace Square, live bands started around 10. The first act I caught was unique, but explained a few things I’d seen around town. So first, I had been seeing lots of people wearing bunny ears, which I didn’t really understand, but I think it has something to do with luck or happiness, so we’ll leave it at that. But the jazz orchestra that was the first act, were all dressed up in Bunny suits. Not the playboy skanky ones, but head-to-toe fuzz, including tails and ears. They were all really into it, though, and the night took off after that. There were different groups of dancers, and bands, even fire throwers! But between them, there were little competitions, and as the contestants were brought up on stage, the announcer was asking them what they wished for New Years. Several people admonished Petersburgers to smile more often. I laughed. We’ll see how effective that is.

As midnight approached, fireworks were being set off in earnest (unlike California, it is perfectly legal to buy your own fireworks) by people in the crowd just out side the square. The huge screens switched to President Medvedev giving his New Years wishes to his countrymen, which included his assertion that Russia was going to weather the coming crises as she had before, as long as the people could rely on one another and look to the government for direction. Or something along those lines. His speech was timed perfectly and as it ended the screens looked to the clock tower in the Kremlin just as midnight struck. Someone who was either drunk and overly friendly, or mistook me for his own friend, grabbed me by the waist and wrapped me in a bear hug. And then the fireworks over the Neva started. And the Rostral Columns at the head of Vasilievsky Island were lit on fire and there were so many people! I did get some video of the fireworks, but when I went to get a picture of the sheer magnitude of the crowd, my camera died.

Walking back down Nevsky Prospect was amazing. Nevsky is on average five lanes wide, but from the end of the street all the way down to about half a block from the metro stop was closed by the police and there were people shoulder to shoulder the whole way, singing and shouting. And of course, drinking. I think I have more glass shards in the soles of my boots than I do mud, and that’s saying something.

Of course, there was a tiny element of misinformation. And it really wasn’t my fault this time. In Washington DC, as I recall it, on New Years, the metro stays open a little bit later, until one in the morning I think, and I had seen a few poster talking about amended hours for the metro, which I read to say that it was staying open very late. No. In fact, as I rounded upon my metro station, it was quite closed, but would be opening early in another four hours. So, I meandered back down Nevsky, quite prepared to walk home (an idea that most certainly was not fully formed at that point. It’s really a long walk.) But mercifully, dear capitalism has a strong hold over some, and marshrutkas were running, with amended prices, naturally.

So finally! After hours and hours of well mannered frivolity, I made it home. Fireworks were being set off everywhere. I live nearby a river, and people were setting them off over the water; in the little yard separating my window from the dentist’s office, some kids had a massive bag of fireworks, and were setting them off well into the night. It’s now 2:30 in the afternoon, and people are still setting them off.

Another remarkable thing, two-fold really, occurred to me as I was trying to get into the Palace square. Everything was cordoned off, and there were more cops on the street than I’d ever seen. The security to get into the square was no joke, for guys at least. There were only two entry points from the main street, and the cops were letting people in groups of four, where they were getting patted down, bags searched, and all liquids had to be tossed. I had tossed all incriminating items off my person (you know, my James Bond spy kit. Just kidding.), but when I got to the barricade of cops they just waved me on. No search, nothing. Oh, Russia, you are so deliciously backwards, and it usually works to my advantage.

I am altogether astounded. I mean, I spend most of my time in idle though so I’ve come up with a lot of reasons. But for several in particular. Over the last couple of days, I’d been moping. Not really moping. But when I was in Tallinn, I’d been hoping for sunshine, and now viola! Here it is in St. Petersburg. Even today, there ware blue skies and it’s positively gorgeous. I was thinking that it’s always cloudy and raining here, and I was missing thunder and lightening. And last night as I was falling asleep, all I could hear were the fireworks, which were substitution enough.

I was too poor to afford anymore ballets, but desperately wanted to see Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker, and now, since I volunteer at the Hermitage, I am going tonight! I have things to do, and people to meet up and practice my Russian with. I do translations from Russian to English for the Hermitage, and I even get free cake and champagne. At the moment, I feel like I have settled very much into a pattern here. And it’s not a pattern to which I am wholly opposed.

Reflecting on this New Year, 2009; there are a lot of grand promises I could make to myself. There are a lot of things I hope for and things I hope I find the courage to say and do. But I think, above all, this will be a year for change. That’s a common theme nowadays, isn’t it? It’s not really a new theme though, there’s nothing really new under the sun. But it still feels as though everything is changing so fast and we are all growing up; or being beckoned to. I have decided that this year I want to move from who I am to the person I have always seen myself as, and I want to accept my shortcomings. I want my actions to reflect my passions. We can never go back to being who we were, and it’s folly to wish that, so I suppose my greatest wish is to live this year without any regrets, without any fears. Hah, not too grand a promise to myself.

So: С новом годом! С новом счастьем! (I think I spelled that right. Happy New Year!)

I've left my heart...in Taaa-aalllliiiin (admit it, it's catchy)

2008-12-29T06:01:00.003-05:00

28 December, 2008

С новом годом и с Рождеством!

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!! (I have decided that now is an ideal time to start learning to type in Russian. I have no problems with my phonetic keyboard, but with actual key layout I find myself rather frustrated.) So I spent the last couple of hours typing out all of our Choir songs. I'm really very pleased that I didn't break my keyboard, and I think I have a better grasp as far as that goes, but it's really rather difficult to teach your brain, or at least my brain, to put different letters and sounds on different keys.

So, my dears! Happy Christmas! I hope that your Christmas found you happy, among good food, friends, and family. My Christmas found me in Tallinn, which by its very association fulfilled three of my requirements for a happy time.

I have almost finished uploading pictures into my slideshow, as I was about 200 pictures behind. So Christmas greetings will soon find their way there. But what marvelous stories I now have! Let me start by saying that I viewed the entire affair as a spectacular adventure, and wanted to encourage that mindset, so I was reading Tolkein’s Hobbit (in English, but a copy of it caught my eye the other day in Russian, and it’s been added to the list of things I’d like. Of course, I have decreed that I’m not allowed to buy more books until I finish reading all the ones I’ve already got. All in good time.)

I took some pictures on the way; it’s hard to explain some things about Russia, they really must be shown. For one, how dismally dark it is during the winter! At 9:30 in the morning I took a picture out the window and for all intensive purposes it might have been 9:30 in the evening. Alas! I know it sounds ridiculous, but as soon as we crossed the border, I could have sworn up and down that the weather began to improve. I really curse Peter the Great for putting this dratted city in the middle of a swamp (we have a love-hate relationship that is entirely dependent on how long it's been since I've seen the sun).

Having booked my entire trip over the internet, I was pleased how well everything went off. Well, mostly. The hostel that I booked shall remain nameless, and to be truthful, it was very nice, and very fun, and I am glad that I stayed there. But, you see, it was really rather embarrassing to enter and exit the building. And I didn’t take a picture of this, so it is hard to explain.

The building’s entrance was in a side alley (these aren’t nearly as sketchy as they are in Russia), and there was an unassuming little plaque marking the second floor as the hostel. But the entire alleyway is overshadowed by advertisements for the strip club on the third floor. From the street there is no way to tell that the hostel is also in the building, so you can imagine some of the…we shall call them inquisitive glances, that we got.

There also used to be a sex shop on the first floor, but mercifully, that had closed some time before.

But that was the only black mark on the trip. The very first day that I was there, it was snowing. Although I am now accustomed to snow, snow in Tallinn is more than snow (that is a saying in Russia: Writers are more than writers; food is more than food, so on and so forth); because in Tallinn, oh dear reader, there were actual snow flakes!!! So far, in all the snow I’ve seen, it’s been little pebbles or tufts of cotton that melt as soon as they smack you in the face. I’d lost faith in the particular myth of unique little snow flakes. But Tallinn has put snow back in my good graces. I even tried to take a picture, but the flakes were too small, and as I may have mentioned before, I can’t hold my camera that steadily. Overall, Christmas in Tallinn was all that it was advertised to be: brightly light, cheerful, and overflowing with spiced almonds, Christmas concerts, and good cheer. If you ever get the chance to visit (and I really recommend the experience), I encourage you to visit the café attached to the Kalev Marzipan Museum, it has some curious name that I can’t pronounce (Estonian is a quaint language, with some 16-odd cases, and 4 vowels for every consonant). Oh! And of course, I would have to mention bookstores. For the greater part, buying English books outside of predominately English-speaking countries is a very difficult and expensive procedure, but for the ambiance alone, there is a massive bookstore in the mall right next to old town, with an impossible name that’s something like Raamuthid Raaa-something something. It is the entire third and fourth floor of the mall, and everything that a bookstore should be. Including two separate cafés that served hot chocolate in the biggest cups I’ve ever seen. Glorious.

So all in all, Christmas was a fascinating affair. I’ve never spent the holiday by myself, and I thought it might be depressing or overflowing with some frightful emotion, but it wasn’t so horrible. When you’re alone, the world is full of possibilities.

At one of the cultural concerts, they sang in Estonian predominately, but sometimes they would do a song in English. And now, I have supreme respect for people who try to learn languages that are not related to their own, so I tried very hard not to laugh. But alas, I snickered a tiny bit. Tiny tiny bit, but only because when he was singing "Let it Snow," he was trying to say "corn popping" and it came out "porn copping." I mean, in all fairness, I know I make the same kind of mistakes in Russian. The word for mother and the word for curses (kind of like the F-word, but it also describes the entire genre of curses) are very, very similar, 'mother' only has a soft-sign at the end which the curse lacks. And I can't pronounce soft-consonants for the life of me. So I laughed. This time it was out loud, but I was in Estonia, and it's okay to laugh out loud there.

So. Conveniently, I have lost the piece of paper on which I wrote all the notes for my trip. So that’s all I have to say about the thing until I find said paper.

In other news, it seems rather likely that I will go insane over the next few weeks, so if you have anything terribly important that you’d like to be sure I know, now is the time to tell me.

In Russia, Christmas, at least my Christmas (December 25^th), is not celebrated by most people unless they are Evangelical Christians or Catholics. As I may have told you, Russian Orthodoxy celebrates the birth of Christ on the 7^th of January. The big holiday, New Years, is the one with all the trees, and gifts, and Santa-type characters. And as a result, now is the time that people are just putting up trees and decorations. While walking around today, I saw two elephant figures wrapped in lights. There is no real explanation for the Russian fascination with elephants; suffice it to say that they think they are lucky. Anyway, back to the point, and this was something that I saw in Estonia as well, that Christmas is a blatantly religious holiday, and all the fuss in America about saying Merry Christmas or having manger scenes seems so silly. In this respect, I am of the opinion that we should copy Eastern culture, and move all the Christmas Trees (they call them yolkas) and Santa Claus to New Years, or some other day, so we can extend the gift-giving season. (I am a sucker for holidays, and if I had any legitimate claim to Hanukah, I’d probably celebrate that too) Although, to be honest, I am rather set in my ways and think it would be an awful bother to try and institute such a change.

Back home, one of our traditions (and I really don’t know how this came about) is that we always end up watching some kind of vampire movie on Christmas day (I kept that up this year and saw Twilight). There is also a James Bond marathon that we’ve enjoyed in recent years, although my sister who spoils me to a ridiculous degree bought me the entire series last year, so I have marathons rather often. Moreover, since my sister and I have gotten older, we make stockings for one another, and stuff them with all sorts of toys (as we call them) and fun things and dream up wild presents to send to our other brother and sister. And the food. Oh, all the food. It trumps all the fare that Russia could ever offer. I miss burritos, guacamole, and artichoke dip. And nachos.

Ah, now I remember something I wanted to tell you about. And now another: First, while I was waiting for my bus that would take me back to St. Petersburg, I saw the strangest movie I have ever seen (and I’ve seen some whoppers). It was in Estonian, and it was set in the 1970s, but filmed recently, and I think it must have been a tape of a play, because all the actors had big microphones strapped to their faces. I think it was about the journey of a band, and it’s the same story of success and drugs, and all that, but with flair as only cheap Eastern European productions can have. There were drugs highs, a cult of some kind, and really bad hair. And worse music.

So, the second thing is that I have realized that some things are self-fulfilling. Before coming to Russia, like most people, the greater amount of my exposure had been James Bond’s escapades in Russia, episodes of Alias, and Dostoevsky novels. So, since coming here, I have seen more references to James Bond, and more quirky things associated with Alias than can be reasonably dismissed (Rimbaldi symbols, the peculiar obsession with the number 47, the fact that half the woman are named Irina, to name the obvious ones). I think part of Russia subconsciously embraces this identity, or research going into films and T.V. shows is more comprehensive. And naturally, every day in the city of Dostoevsky is challenge enough to understand how he came to write such stories.

Oh, but the most exciting news all week (beside the fact of Christmas and joyous times and all that): Today there was sun! I woke up and was getting dressed and when I went to open my window, there was blue sky! The sky was completely clear, end-to-end blue, with actual rays of sunlight hitting the buildings. What I didn’t realize until today was how different the sun acts this far north. To be fair, it really looks like it wanted to come all the way up. But the confounded thing barely got over the horizon. Coming from the balmy weather of southern California, where the sun rises in the east, crosses over the entire sky and then sinks into the west and the ocean, imagine my surprise that the sun tries to rise, moves about six inches along the horizon, and then sets again. Irregardless, this has brightened my mood considerably.

So now, I am off to do something quite fascinating. Barring that, I might just read my James Bond book. I am still reading “From Russia with Love,” don’t judge me though, it’s hard to read! Harry Potter was easier, because I have those books memorized backwards and forwards and could more easily guess what unknown words meant from the context. But, this is the last book I have left before I am allowed to buy another one. And I really want The Hobbit (Just called Хоббит). And Twilight (Сумерки). Although I ought to read books that aren’t just translations. So, in that case, I’d also really like Master and Margarita.

Now I have to mention a few notes I found in my James Bond book: I've explained about the poor word for German, but just yesterday, I came across a different word for foreigner than what I was used to, and so I looked it up (the word is зарубежный). And the way Russian breaks it all down is that this adjective is historically, or perhaps still linked to the verb root: зарубать. And what does this word mean? I quote my dictionary: 'to hack to pieces.' Cheery, no?

29 December 2008

Aha! I found the list I was looking for. It seems I was using it as a bookmark. I really need to stop doing that. When I was crossing the border back into Russia, I had a panic attack and thought I’d lost my visa, but no; genius that I am, I’d been using it as a book mark. Note to self: STOP using your visa/passport/id as bookmarks, because, no, when the times comes, you will NOT remember which book it’s in.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that if amount of time spent engaged in an activity represents a past time, then my most dedicated past time is killing time. I’m really quite talented in that respect.

Ishka. Anyway, other things I wanted to say about Tallinn and why Estonia is such a fun place: first, the word ‘hello’ in Russia is a frightful word, also the first one you learn, which may account why so many people drop out of the language. In Cyrillic its Здравствуйте, which is pronounced something along the lines of zdravsuitye, but the Rosetta Program always honks at me and tell me that I’m saying it wrong. So who knows? In Estonian, the word for ‘hello’ is Tere, and pronounced like “G’day,” like how Australians say it. That was immensely fun.

Ah, also I made several notes about the almonds and juniper in Tallinn. The entire city has a distinct (wonderful) smell. It is possible to buy toys, kitchen utensils, pretty much anything that can be fashioned from juniper wood is; so the entire city has that comforting smell. Added to that is the heavenly aroma of the almonds. There are no words. Except that these make roasted macadamia nuts look like diarrhea pills.

A month! Certainly sufficient time to take over the world.

2008-12-20T05:49:00.002-05:00

18 December 2008

The end of the semester!!! Oh dear readers, it’s the end of the semester! I can’t believe that an entire semester has already passed. But, I suppose, going through all of my photos and journal entries, we live much more than we remember.

The last few days have been a whirlwind. Finals and concerts (I’m in the choir) and essays! Oh, as so many piroshkis. Ah, these stuffed pies are so good; I’m partial to the apple ones. More of you insane stateside kids keep have gotten married or engaged. I am actually to the point that I have more married/engaged friends than I do single ones. Therefore, I am officially in the market for new friends.

In the end, oral exams were certainly nerve-wracking, but the professors were certainly very nice about everything. Even the phonetics professor, when I completely forgot part of the poem I’d memorized. Or the literature professor, who let me ramble on as I changed my hypothesis half way through my speech; or the conversation professor, who let me extol the virtues of the Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series as I tried to convince her to read them (that was my assigned task).

So, have I learned anything? Well, of course. I didn’t realize at all how much. I have kept all of my papers from this semester; every single one (mostly because I’m not sure how Texas A&M is going to process my grades, and I needed to keep all of my work to show what I’ve learned). So, although I now a fire hazard, looking over my papers, I’ve realized: I am awesome.

Just kidding. I’ve just really improved over the semester and feel as though vocabulary is starting to stick in my little mind.

Which brings me to these discoveries:

The word for clapping: is podkhlopat’ and that’s how it kind of sounds when they clap: khlop-khlop-khlop (see it?). And another thing is that Russians all clap in unison. I suppose Americans eventually end up clapping in unison, but it takes a while. Interesting.

Ah. Kit-Kat bars are quite popular. But you can’t really use the same gimmick as in the United States (“gimme a break” doesn’t translate). Instead it plays off a different word play: the word ‘iest’ can mean either ‘to exist’ or ‘to eat.’ So it’s: Have a Break? Eat the Kit-Kat. (And on a different note, I think it says a lot about a society when the words for existence and eating are the same.)

I think I may have accidentally horrified my Russian Conversation professor. In English, as you well know, there are two meanings for ‘stuffed animal,’ one being the children’s toy and the other being the result of taxidermy. In Russian, there is no plush toy meaning. So imagine my professor’s horror when I insisted that I keep a stuffed animal in my bed; a camel at that.

In Russia, there are two iconic phrases: “Chai, budish?” Means, “you do want tea, don’t you?” I think Russians may be equal to the British in their obsession with tea. It’s everywhere.

The other phrase: “Kto vinovat?” Who is guilty? Which, as I’ve told you, everyone answers, “Not me.” Oh, Russia.

Culturally, this week, I’ve finally uncovered the secret behind Russia’s aversion to spicy food. Obesity. It’s a little backwards. Russians, as I’ve told you, don’t often stare awkwardly at others. There is one exception: obese people. My conversation professor was telling us that the first time she took her daughter with her to America, her daughter was 7 years old and had a panic attack the first time she saw a morbidly obese woman. So, anyway, this cultural oddity about spice food goes thus: Russians believe that spicy foods increase your appetite, and they are so mortified of obesity that they just avoid it wholesale.

There is a very funny advertisement on the metro. Thoroughly non-Russian affair. It consists of two players from Zenit FC, Arshavin and some other character. The ad is for a printer, and Arshavin looks so surprised that there is painted paper coming out of the machine! It’s really funny. Of course, I have to confide in you, dear reader, that I’ve developed an irrational fear that someone is going to push me in front of the metro car as it comes roaring into the station. Which, in my opinion, isn’t that much of an irrational fear because people push and shove all the time.

Now that I am at the end of the semester, I am staring at the long Russian winter and have realized. That this is going to be a long month. A Russian month. Like, mostly English free because all of my friends have gone. So, how do I plan on not going crazy?

Muahaha, dear reader. I am a genius. Well, itunes is a genius. Free podcasts are ingenious. And the two times a week I’ll be carting my computer to internet sources, I will download NPR podcasts (I am up to Car Talk, Talk of the Nation, and This American Life). Now don’t judge me, I don’t spend all my time immersing my self in English. Car Talk and This American Life are only once a week. And talk of the nation is only on four days a week. And now I am getting smarter-er.

In the world of Harry Potter, I’d love to think I’d be Hermione, but really, I think I’m Neville

2008-12-18T02:05:00.001-05:00

15 December 2008

In the English version of Harry Potter, Neville’s last name is Longbottom, it’s even funnier in Russian: Dolgapuss. Poor kid.

There are quite a few things I’ve realized are a waste of time. Plucking my eyebrows, brushing my hair, and studying for phonetics equally enrapture my attention and supreme disdain. It’s really a useless subject anyways. We had a final project of sorts, it wasn’t a real project; we just reread the same statements we’d written out at the beginning of the semester into a tape recorder. Now, I don’t want to say that the professor plays favorites, but she hates me. And loves the girl I sit next to. And this favored student went first.

Oh, how splendidly she speaks, proclaims the professor! She must’ve studied Russian much longer than the rest of us. The aforementioned hang our heads in shame, and have to follow that act. The professor informed the next student up that she was saying her own name wrong. This was not an activity I was pleased to take part it. Ah, but oh joy of joys! We are finished with this class.

On an entirely different note, I think we are an incredibly resilient group of children. In the company of Russians we push and shove in the most elegant of manners, but when it is just us Americans together, oh how we conform to lines and order! We even still manage to say “excuse me” when we bump into one another. With other Russians, that’s one of the first formalities you dispense of.

I think, largely, the Russian public transportation system has developed this resilience as it is ingenious, far-encompassing, and entirely chaotic. The most popular mode is naturally the metro, which is pretty much standard across the globe; and more tightly packed than a sardine can (but I’ve regaled you on this already, no?). Russians also have busses, trolleys, and tramvai’s; which, interestingly enough are all different. They distinguish between trains and elektrichkas, and have different verbs of motion for each kind of movement (verbs of motion are the bane of the student’s existence: whereas Russian is simple in having only three tenses, it distinguishes between unidirectional and multidirectional, perfective and imperfective verbs of motion, beyond which, there are prefixes that can entirely change the thing. It’s ridiculous, but according to one Russian, the reason verbs of motion are so varied and important is because: “Movement is very important to the Russian.” Pffffft. Sadism. And masochism. Bundled conveniently together to drive you mad). Beyond these basically public systems there are your standard taxis and then there are the authentically Russian private systems.

Marshrutkas are private buses, sort of. They’re also something close to a taxi. They run on hundreds of different established routes, but these routes aren’t necessarily fixed and are definitely up for the interpretation of the driver. You hail one by catching the driver’s attention from the side of the road, sometimes near a designated stop, and sometimes in the middle of nowhere. Once you learn how to navigate this system, you can do anything. Of course, be forewarned: they routinely break down, and the drivers only sometimes will give you your money back.

Gypsy Cabs are the final, and strangest, form of transportation for the slightly less wary passenger. Or for those caught out after the midnight. You hail a gypsy cab by simply standing in the parking lane or a little further out in the road and dangling your arm about. A willing car will pull over, you whip open the door and shout your approximate destination, if it’s in the driver’s direction, they’ll agree, and then you argue on a price. If it works out, the hailer (and company) hop in and go. If not, the door is slammed, the car moves on, and the arm continues to dangle into oncoming traffic.

So, these are some of the many interesting things that I’ve learned this semester. I’ve regaled you dear reader, and you have indulged.

We study abroad students who are graduating (and/or continuing in) the program: We aren’t nice people anymore. Compared with that naïve student who studies in Spain with its tepid winter and kind-hearted folks, we are monoliths of stoicism, and they can’t hope to compete with us; Spain is a health resort compared to the Rodina. Thanks to the dear old Mother Russia, we are heartless, argumentative, and rude. Oh, Russia, you’ve killed our souls.

Of course, you know its winter in St. Petersburg when: you have 4 hours of sunlight, you haven’t actually seen the sun in the last month, and you actually have dreams that solely consist of you sleeping in the sunshine. I miss the sun.

Above all, this semester has taught me the important art of ‘Just keep moving.’ And I think that is a very Russian trait. People will be drinking at 9 in the morning. Just keep moving. Don’t ever stare, not at the stray dogs, not at the men on the streets with guns, and certainly not at men wearing all denim. In fact, don’t react at all. Just keep moving. And under no circumstances should you ever smile. And women who wear skirts but don’t wear stockings are actually considered prostitutes, or loose women at the very least. Don’t drink the tap water, and don’t ever buy meat products off the streets. When the music on your iPod suddenly stops, odds are your battery hasn’t died: you’ve just been pick-pocketed. You can try shouting and snatching around, but it will be too late, and that toy will be long gone. Just because you are in an enclosed restaurant, that doesn’t mean that someone still won’t make off with your bag. Just because a medicine has the same name here, does not mean it’s meant for the same illness; please oh, please dear children, read the label first. Just because there are 14 different languages listed on the instructions for your newest toy or purchase, does not mean that any of them will be a language you understand. Don’t ever sit on the bare ground (or you’ll go barren), and never ever let your housemother catch you drinking cold milk or juice (obviously, you’ll get pneumonia and die). Don’t be surprised by the drunken homeless fellows at the bus stop, and don’t be surprised when they start bothering you, but especially don’t be surprised when posh businessmen will chase them away from you, brandishing briefcases like weapons.

The most important rule is two fold. Don’t panic. Just keep moving. (And as long as you can manage keeping your face emotionless: laugh it all off. Quietly. Like, inside your own head laughing.)

My love for this place may be mistaken for Stockholm syndrome, but I think I’ll chalk it all up to the indefinable, illusive, and inscrutable Russian soul.

Tea! Oh, all the tea! It's a pity I can't hold my camera steady anymore.

2008-12-08T07:04:00.002-05:00

8 December 2008

Dear reader, I hope you realize I am not an overly garrulous person. Merely, that this journal is most than just a journal for your benefit; it is the document by which I will always look back on my study abroad experience (I don’t have the fortitude to maintain a separate private diary). Furthermore, at the moment, this in the only outlet for my creative energies; because I really have no artistic talents, only the written word, and dead languages (learning dead languages is much more art than science, because you can really speak however you’d like and no one can tell you you’re doing it wrong. And you can such artistic flare to you penmanship! Oh, demotic, how I love thy modified loops and dips).

I have had such a fantastic week here! I rejoice in the weather (its hovering between freezing and not, so it just started snowing again) and have become accustomed to the temperature. Getting jostled and shoved, getting my hair (it’s very long) snagged between two other metro passengers really doesn’t bother me anymore. I daresay, if I can become accustomed to living in St. Petersburg, I could live anywhere. But that’s beside what I wanted to say today. There’s so much to say, and I’m afraid there will never be enough time to say it!

Russia has the strangest obsession with Hemingway. They would claim him as their own poet if they had any legitimate stake. In bygone decades, when people would have pictures of Stalin or Lenin up in there home, intellectuals would have a photo of Hemingway hung with even greater reverence. I think it may have had something to do with the beard.

I like to share some of the stranger occurrences that I come by in Russia, and I realize that I’ve found one that as Americans, you might look at with similar awe as I have: registration. I’ve told you about carrying papers, but I’d forgotten about the point of the papers. Every Russian citizen has a stamp in their passport detailing their current address which is signed off by some official or other. So, when the police stop people (by this, I mean men) they find suspicious, policemen check their passports to make sure that they are properly registered in the city and not vagrants.

Freedom of movement in Russia isn’t restricted so much as it is regulated. When you travel within the Rodina, if you are staying in any city outside the one you are registered in for more than 72 hours, you must, must, must register. Even if you are in a hotel, you drop off your passport with the management and they’ll take care of it for you. Thankfully, as an international student, you don’t have to reregister when you return to your city of invitation, but every time we leave the country, despite the fact that we have proper visas and ordered papers, we must reregister our passports with the institution that invited into the country. My word! Such red tape!

I can hardly tell you, that as soon as I get back to the United States, I will never again undervalue my ability to move freely about the country. The thought of American Policemen stopping citizens on the street and requesting their passports and proof of citizenship would be an anathema. At least, that is my opinion.

On to other ideas and ideals which make more sense to me now, although I was previously quite mystified: the concept of love. Oh, how I tire of that theme! Every story we read in literature class is all about love, but it’s always such a contortion on the theme, that I didn’t have a clear vision of what love was in Russia. And now. It’s been clarified (this is why I adore my Civilization professor). In Russia, the way a woman shows that she loves a man is to pity him. When he comes home: “Oh, you poor thing, you work so hard. You lay down. I will feed you and tend to you. Don’t worry about doing a thing, I will do everything for you, you poor thing.” Contrast this to America, where often, to pity someone is to degrade them, for them to be less in your eyes. My ability to stand on my own two feet defines me and is, for better or for worse, a source of pride.

Relationships between men and women are intimately linked to the very vocabulary of the language! The Russian word for marriage is different for when a man marries a woman; the case you use and the literal meaning detail the idea of a man being above the woman, higher than her. For women, the combination of prefix and preposition details that a woman, married, goes behind her husband. You see this reflected in proverbs (which are almost horrific for how they treat women) and in fairytales. The primary job of the Russian man is to be good, while the primary job of the woman is to be more than a woman: to be more than beautiful, more than wise, and more than a worker.

When taking a survey of a class of both Russian and American students, this professor also realized that the concept of a housewife is radically different in our two societies. In America, a housewife is a woman who works in the home, raising children, cooking and shopping and all that. The Russian students were stunned by this definition: for them, a housewife is a woman who doesn’t do work, and she is spoken of in hushed tones, that is to say, they don’t consider what a woman does in the home to be work. The duties of the home fall to women by birthright, and they are expected to go above and beyond them.

These were all fascinating revelations into the mindset of Russian women, especially when you realize that this is still how it is. Absolutely. You see why there are so many Russian mail-order brides?

It is remarkable to me, having been raised to strong and independent, to see a country that has never gone through a feminist revolution. So often, we pooh-pooh on the feminist revolution of the 60s, and use feminist as a dirty word, but seeing America in contrast with Russia on this point, I am ever more thankful that I am an American woman and that these same societal pressures don’t fall on me. But it is so interesting because the Soviets prided themselves on gender equality, and in their constitution, women were guaranteed completely equal rights. But this was only for economic reasons; there weren’t enough men to keep the country up and running! Women made up most of the work force, even today menial tasks like street cleaning and people-watchers on the metro (alas, a story for another day) are done by women, while less than one-third of all administrative jobs are filled by women.

Back to the original theme, the flip side of this discovery on the nature of love in the face of a society which has never experienced a feminist revolution is that the divorce rate in Russia currently stands at 65% with 75% of those divorces being instigated by the woman. It seems most women marry so that they can have a child, and then divorce the man. Don’t feel too bad for the guys though, 98% don’t pay either alimony or child support. So really, in Russia, men are basically sperm-banks. This is a country of strange contradictions, and I think I will never come to understand it.

Alas, this country befuddles the mind and ensnares the senses (I just watched Harry Potter, and I just love Alan Rickman), what is your poor writer to do?

So, that was the principal thing that I absorbed this week. I learned quite a lot more; unfortunately, it’s having a harder time sticking. For instance, (oh Russia) numerals. Numbers in Russian follow patterns that are entirely their own and are entirely confusing, because they take cases in instances which just. don’t. make. sense.

Our grammar professor told us that most Russians make mistakes with their numbers. A girl in class said that made her feel much better, to which the professor replied, “Don’t comfort yourself with it. It’s mostly politicians.” (Except Putin. He is a robot. He has perfect grammar. Which is another interesting thing I picked up on this week: the older generation of Russians loves Medvedev, but don’t really like Putin, while almost all young Russians are ga-ga in love with Putin, but don’t care for Medvedev. It’s safe to say that Putin will be back in the President’s office before long.)

Ah. So, now that we’ve discussed ideas in Russia, and people, it is now time to discuss the banal events which highlighted my week!

Alas, yesterday was the only real day of consequence. I am a member of the Avant Guard group, which means we try to only speak in Russian and go on special excursions together. Yesterday, we went to the Avant Guard Museum of Art. Which was neat, but naturally, the best part of the day revolved around food. It always does. Following the museum visit, we went en masse to this restaurant called Evrasia, which serves Eurasian food, mostly Uzbek. And a friend of a friend (you know how these things go), she is the personal assistant to the CEO of this chain of restaurants, so we were spoiled by massive amounts of amazing food and tea (oh, dear reader, the tea!! I think it was made from cherry something or other, oh, it was heavenly), and it was all free! Oh, Uzbekistani food is so good. I had a plate called Holiday Lamb. Oh, I’m not even hungry right now and my mouth is watering. It was lamb on golden rice, with cucumbers and tomatoes and topped with pomegranate seeds. And there was soup, and little pastry things! And with your tea, which they drop off in little kettles, they serve little dried pieces of fruit that you stab with those little swords.

I think I drank about 8 cups. We all sat around talking for a good three hours, and then broke off into smaller groups to head home. A small group of us decided to walk back to Nevsky Prospect, and since it had just started snowing earlier in the day, there was powder on the ground, and with the Christmas trees and lights, and then, we passed along St. Peter and Paul’s fortress and the bells were going off in Christmas songs, and there were fireworks on the far bank in front of the Kunstammer. It was magnificent. All the rest of the people I was walking with are leaving in two weeks. They are sad to go, and I am sad they are leaving. But I’m not ready to leave yet. There is still so much to learn and do here! Oh, the coming months are going to be even more wonderful.

Peanut Paste and Other Hazardous things for your health

2008-12-04T01:11:00.002-05:00

3 December 2008

At long last December is here! Russia has put up a great deal of Christmas and New Year’s decorations, and I thought they were really amazing. All the big trees and the lights and big Father Frost (or Santa) are cheery looking. Of course, this is Russia, so you have old Father Frost and his…well, mostly-dressed, daughter-helper person.

Of course, my happy little reality was shattered. Four girls went to Vienna over thanksgiving break and took pictures of the set-up there, and Vienna makes poor old Peteyburg out to be a sad looking outhouse. They have chandeliers made out of Christmas lights hanging in the streets!

Russia has endeared itself to me, tackiness and all. I don’t know how or why, because right now, we are down to about 5 and half hours of sunlight, and every week we lose another hour! I understand the primal urge to hibernate; I can’t kick the sleepiness.

The early darkness means also that I don’t feel bad if I just come home and update this log or read a book instead of walking around town more. Which is a coded way of saying I’ve finished Hunt for the Red October; I enjoyed it. I couldn’t get the mental image of Sean Connery and a very bad Russian accent, but it’s a good book.

As we are nearing the end of the semester, I understand first hand the horror of the university system out here. Now, before I start, I am a deeply patriotic person, and I think that America pretty much rocks. In a few areas, we really kick butt though. And enter the university system: granted, university educations in Russia are free for the most part, but they are heavily weighted towards lecture and memorization. There are no essays or problem sets. You just sit and listen, but this kills their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Now that we are approaching the end of the semester, one basically free of papers (except three or four really ridiculously short ones) I am a little panicked. Did I mention that exams are all oral? And in Russian?

Laura is on stage 5 panic alert. And she knows this, because stage 5 of panicking involves Laura referring to herself in the 3^rd person.

***

Okay, I’ve calmed down a bit. I have this composer that I just adore and listen to his stuff; it’s the perfect antidote to whatever foul mood encroaches. His name is Ludovico Einaudi and, well, go discover him for yourselves.

This last Sunday, I was waiting for my friend at a cafe when I ordered hot chocolate, and in my head there were little dancing visions of Nestle powder concoctions. And that was when I discovered that Russian hot chocolate is in a whole other figure-killing league. You see, when the barista lady gave me my cup and saucer with a spoon (this should have been my first warning) she asked if I needed water to go with it (Second warning). ?? No, but thanks. I get back to my table, without having actually looked at the thing I'm carrying, mostly just focused on not tripping. Ah, and then I see it: hot chocolate here is just that, liquefied chocolate. It was like they'd super heated a dark-chocolate bar to liquid form and poured it into my cup. It was so good. I mean, horribly wretchedly bad for you, but one of the best culinary discoveries I've made. And you eat it out of your cup, with a spoon. If you ever order that, make sure you ask for water with it.

I’ve now run out of constructive things to say. So here is my linguistic discovery for the week: I bought peanut butter last week (at 6 dollars for a tiny jar!!! The Russians just don’t understand a good thing when it comes along, but that’s beside the point) and it’s actually called: Паста Арахисовая which means Peanut Paste, which I understand, but just find amusing.

Don’t Eat the Snow!!!

2008-12-01T07:21:00.000-05:00

27 November 2008

….mostly because, well, this is Russia, so there is a very good chance that it’s laced with anthrax.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Well, it’s officially been three months.

In this time I have:

eaten more foods made from unidentifiable meat,

Why the word 'shortcut' is being razed from my dictionary or, how curiosity will eventually kill the lion.

2008-11-25T08:38:00.000-05:00

I have a nickname that my sister bestowed upon me (justly): the lion. Apparently I am not a very nice person in the morning. And owing to the sincerely wild nature of my hair, I resemble some of the less tame members of the cat family. To be fair, she used to call me ‘it’ until I’d showered and had a red bull, so I like being the lion.

So. In St. Petersburg the snow is coming down in droves. Which is fantastic when you are in more remote places (like my school’s courtyard), where no one walks around, because the snow is a foot deep and all classic looking. Snow is not fun, however, is when you are on a thoroughfare, where the snow is not snow at all, but muck; much that seeps through your boots and is very deceptive, looking like snow, but in fact is an ankle deep puddle of disgusting fluids.

Also, icicles have arrived. And no no no, they are not cute, they are not all homey looking. They are hazardous. They spear people. Did you see that episode of Grey’s Anatomy? Yeah, that actually happens here.

So, after a period of introspection and looking over notes I’ve jotted as the days have gone by, I realize that most of my adventures happen when I’m not paying that much attention, and then suddenly, POOF, there they are. So, really, most adventures begin with: “Aww crap…” (followed by: ‘where am I?’ or ‘what happened to the sidewalk?’ or ‘this isn’t where I should be’)

For example: I have some adventures from Moscow I haven’t told you about yet. (But first, I forgot to tell you a side note: while we were there, the world cup for swimming was on and all the national teams were around town, and ::smile:: the Japanese, Brazilian, and German national teams were all staying in our hotel. They were nice to look at.)

Anyways, one of the most exciting events for me was the chance to do some serious souvenir shopping for my family. I like buying presents, and am very bad at bartering, so, of course, I found myself at the biggest tourist trap (which did have the best prices, in my defense) in Russia. It was built to resemble, well, I don’t really know what, but the castle of ‘It’s a small world,’ looks a lot like that. There were also bears out front, performing, but they were all chained up, and it wasn’t cute, in truth it was rather depressing. Anyways, there was an entrance fee to the fair, and being the adventurer that I am, I thought I’d rather look for an unguarded entrance rather than pay the fee. So I wandered along the edge of the proper fair.

And that’s when, once again, I must’ve fallen through the space/time continuum, because I was walking through a bazaar, the kind you’d expect in Arabian nights, with people complimenting you into their stalls (‘Would the pretty lady like a jacket? Pretty jacket for a pretty lady!’). I wandered farther and farther back through there, and was struck by even odder things.

In America, we are generally pretty scrupulous about health codes and all that, but here, there was a woman pushing an old shopping cart selling tea and suspicious looking meat cakes. The farther back I went the stranger it all seemed, until finally I turned a corned and AHA, I had found a back entrance to the fair, but of course, it too, was guarded, so I bit the bullet and paid the 50 cent entrance fee.

So, I wandered through the fair, buying little trinkets that I admired. And I decided finally, that I’d killed enough time and was ready to go home. Oh, if only it were so simple as that. Predictably, I’d gotten a little turned around, going in and out of all these little culverts, and finally, I popped out of an entrance of sorts into a market. But this was not a market for tourists. At all. The butcher’s shop that opened into the street, with a hanging pig (and naturally, a smoking Russian right next to it. Quality control.) clued me into the fact that I was in the wrong place and the little voice in my head that laughingly suggests from time to time, ‘Oh yes, this is how is I die,’ was cackling away.

I didn’t die, obviously, but I did find my way (this time through an unguarded entrance) and I found the antiques section of the fair. Oh, dear reader, if I hadn’t already spent all my money fur hats and matrushka dolls, I would have blown it all there. Of course, I never would’ve made it out of the country with half of that stuff. For example, there was an entire row of stalls that were selling icons, with peeling paint and dented gold that belied centuries of worship (under the Soviets, a lot of churches and their items just disappeared). And all the books. Oh, the books. But I still have next semester, and by then I’ll be able to barter.

I went to several museums this past weekend, and while I’m generally a fairly tolerant person, I dislike being yelled at, so I just follow the little old babushkas’ orders. And that’s how I found myself herded into an auditorium, watching video about castles or palaces, but the show had a soundtrack of classical music. This museum clued me into another fantastic trait of the Russian personality. Eclecticism. Russians latch onto all different cultures, and siphon off the traits they like the most. So this palace, Mikhailovsky, was a mixture of Egyptian, Roman, Italian Renaissance, and so on and so forth.

And finally. I have become accustomed to watching American movies in Russian. The new Bond. And now Twilight! I really enjoyed that movie. It was awesome. I think I started giggling as soon as Edward walked on the screen and didn’t stop until a good hour after it had ended.

Doctored Sausages

2008-11-17T04:58:00.002-05:00

15 November 2008

Two days!!! It’s only been two days. Since I’ve not got very much to do, the last two days have sort of dragged. But they have allowed me to make several…interesting cultural discoveries.

Much as in English, in Russian you can negate a characteristic by prefixing “nje” (not) or “bjec” (without) to the word. So, ‘ugly’ can be ‘not pretty,’ and so on and so forth. But there are some words that only exist in the negative form.

Most notably among them are the words for danger and safety. But there is no concept of safety, no positive ideal, only the negative idea of ‘no danger.’ I thought that was interesting, and might speak to the history of Russia, always on guard for outside invaders (and they always did come).

The adjective for German, is nemjetskii, used to be the word that Russians used to describe all foreigners, because it derives from the word ‘to become dumb,’ and also ‘mute.’ All the other languages got normal names deriving from their respective homelands, but poor Germany got the short end of the stick.

More frivolously, the word for bologna (that utterly reprehensible substance), the Russians have the right idea in my opinion, because it translates as ‘doctored sausage.’ Who would want to eat that? So put that bologna sandwich down! Go make a turkey one instead. Oh, or roast beef…with jalapeno Monterey jack cheese, and some sliced up onions, and maybe some jalapeno mustard. Food out here is bland. Oh jalapenos, how I miss thee.

Anyways, back on this planet. Russia has just discovered Survivor, in as much that the first season of their version, called ‘Last Hero,’ or something to that effect, is about to premiere. The previews make it look like a cross between Survivor and Lost, I may just tune in. You can pick up on a lot of colloquialisms that way. But then again, that’s how I justify watching cartoons.

So, I met up with my new friend Valeria, and a group of us were planning on seeing a film that was a part of an art festival here. But, naturally, we had all the information wrong, and the film wasn’t showing that night. So we went out for Sushi at the same restaurant chain that I pass by on my way home every day, that is, the one that plays Tom and Jerry cartoons all the live-long day. All in all, the sushi was nicely priced, and didn’t make me sick, so that made the night an overall success!

Moreover, it was a lot of fun. Two of the people were German students that were teaching Valeria, and the other two girls were students to whom Valeria was teaching English. It wasn’t until the manager told us the restaurant was closed that we realized how the time had flown.

So overall, my fall break was well spent, as I have made several new friends and finally finished Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (in Russian, of course). Now on to Ian Fleming’s From Russia with Love. Yay!

….12 hours later…

Okay. So. Russians have a different idea of what it is to refrigerate things. Point the first, things kind of just live in the fridge, not so much covered or in containers, so it’s a smelly experiment, opening that pesky contraption. Point the second, the level of refrigeration is quite different. Cold, obviously, means something entirely different to a Russian. Which leads us to the current set of circumstances.

I bought a red bull the other day. From a very Soviet little get-up of a place. And although the lady pulled it out of a fridge container, it was definitely a murky warm. Eich. Jiles lesson number one: never drink red bull warm.

So, I saved it, and it’s been sitting next to my memorial red bull (that I bought my first week in Russia) since then. Until today. I just got the worst urge to drink it, but couldn’t, because it was warm. And there was no way that putting into the fridge contraption was going to help it. And Russian don’t understand the concept of making ice and saving it in your freezer, as it’s definitely not safe to drink the tap water. So that avenue of consumption was further cut off. (And then I had a flash of genius)

So. It’s cold outside. Obviously, northern Russia in mid-November is not balmy. So, I cracked my window, covered my red bull in a wet paper towel and wedged it between the screen and the glass. Ingenious! It was cold in a matter of an hour or two. Which really wasn’t that long at all.

And, why, pray tell, am I regaling you in this pointless story. Well. I am now drinking the Red Bull, oh that beautiful concoction, which I haven’t had in far too long. So, I am bouncing off the walls a little bit. A lot, if I’m to be honest. And I thought to share my joy with you. YAY. I like red bull. Probably too much.

I remember the good old days in high school. On a Saturday, with a four pack of red bull getting all frozen in the Chem lab ice maker, maybe a burrito from Antonio’s/Alberto’s/Whatever that place was actually called. And, as a super hero or a super villain, alternately saving or planning to take over the world. Ah, I love it.

Quantum of Awesomeness!!!

2008-11-17T04:57:00.001-05:00

13 November 2008

Well, as I might have clued you in, I got to see Quantum of Solace today. Ahhh, and that really was just amazing. Now, granted, I understood about 65 to 70 percent of what went on, so I got the general picture of the plot, but really, you don’t need dialogue to appreciate the awesome chase scenes. So, whenever it comes out in America, I recommend you go and see it. For Bond fanatics (such as myself) there are a lot of tributes to the Bond tradition, but I’ll say no more.

So…rewind. I spent the entire day yesterday, yes, the entire day, at the Hermitage Museum. When I first arrived, I had the wonderful intention of volunteering my day away. But the volunteer room was locked and unlit, so I had no where to go. Except that is, into the museum itself. Which was just fine by me, and for the first time, I made it farther than the Egypt Room. In fact, the entire first floor of the Hermitage was a part of my explorations for the day. But, to be honest, the first floor has the fewest exhibits. I’m saving the rest of the museum for Christmas break.

Which reminds me. I was looking for places, within Russia, where I could spend some time over Christmas break. And what’s this that I find? An article in a newspaper I snagged in Moscow, all about Dagestan. And the more I read the more I think, oh how fun! What a (crap, I can think of the word in Russian, but not English) wonderful (there it is) idea! So, I start thinking up all these plans, and wonderful adventures, until today, when I get online and see that stupid Dagestan neighbors North Ossetia, Georgia, and part of the Caucuses Region. All of which are strictly forbidden as per the instructions of program director. Drat. I’m back to square one. All the warm places in Russia are located in the same area. Stupid southern Russia. I guess I’ll just have to freeze in Siberia on a tiger cub acquirement expedition (Putin has one, so why can’t I? And besides, how fun would it be to actually have a white tiger, when that’s my dear old alma mater’s mascot?).

So today, it was back to the café for coffee (in the absence of red bull, I find I like cappuccinos, which are probably just as bad for me) and internet. So, as I am sitting there, happily typing my day away, this girl sits at the next table and asks me about the connection, so I answer and then she switched to English (which, is always fun, because most Russians speak English with British accents; its so nice to listen to). And we got to talking. And that’s when the world got a whole lot smaller.

Apparently she knew half the students in our group, and was working as a conversation partner with a friend of mine. We chatted for a while and it ends up we share a lot of interests (movies, museums, Friends, Scrubs, etc.) and so tomorrow we are heading off to a film festival! Yay!

Oh, and as another side note, do you remember the story about the girl I met on the street with whom I exchanged phone numbers? We’ll, I never heard from her again, but I found out what she gave me! It was a persimmon. They are sad looking little fruits. Or at least Russian persimmons are.

So, that was my day. Wandering aimlessly (or, as NPR would have me call it, horbgorbling) from cafes to cinemas. Ah, the life of a student abroad. Such trials and suffering. I jest.

But, oh, of all the fun things! When I was at the movie theatre, buying my ticket, there were little promotional fliers for Twilight! So I grabbed four of them and put them on my little board. Aw. So cute. Edward can just stay there forever (of course, in Russian, there isn’t a ‘w’ sound, so its Edvard). ::le sigh::

Well, now, I have to go and fill out my budget. My life is an excel spreadsheet, and I can hear it calling my name.

Veterans Day! (Not in Russia, though, its just a Tuesday for us)

2008-11-11T04:59:00.002-05:00

10 November 2008: Militsya Day! (I don’t know what the celebration of this day entails, but I do now realize it includes me sleeping all day)

Good Morning to my first day of break! I can’t believe how fast this semester has flown by! We are already staring the end of the semester in the face, with only a month of classes left!

So. Although this is a very non-Russian thing to say: I am guilty. I forgot to post that last post before I took off to Moscow. But now you get a 2-for-1! But it’s balanced all the more in your favor because of all my fantastic adventures.

Moscow. The most expensive city in the world.

Unfortunately, in the years to come, the most I will remember about Moscow will be the journey to and from. It’s true that half the adventure/fun is getting there. So allow me to regale you:

We left St. Petersburg late on Thursday night, taking the midnight train (aaaaannnyywhere. Just kidding. I love Journey and couldn’t resist). But we did take a sleeper car, which was awesome. Mostly.

The method for putting people into these different rooms is a mystery to me. On the way out I was rooming with the director of the program (who shared a lot of very funny stories) and two guys from our program, Mark and Patrick. I have to brag a little bit though, after 14 games of Gin Rummy, Patrick and I were tied at 900 points each. Then it was 2 a.m., and we opted to pick up the game on the way back.

The option of sleep did not appeal to other, less sober, members of our group in the next room over; and although I can’t say it was as good as a lullaby, but listening to drunk people argue about politics is a little funny. It turns into personal insults quite quickly. Alas, if only the conductor of the train thought it was funny. He almost arrested the students for being drunk in public and disturbing the peace, both serious offenses in Russia. Thankfully, in swooped Irina. Besides being the sweetest person I’ve ever met, Irina Borisovna, our Russian director, has radar for knowing when her students are in trouble, and she talked him out of formally charging the students.

Moscow was Amazing. The city is far more organic in its layout (it kind of runs in concentric circles out from the Kremlin in the center), and the 12 different metro lines, one of which actually just goes in a circle, reflect this. There are so many churches and government building from every style in Russian history. Unfortunately, on the first night, I missed the big military parade in Red Square, but I think I’ll plan my next trip better so that I know what is going on.

The things I did find. Oh, dear reader, what fun! I got to visit nearly everything I was hoping to! And I got souvenirs, oh the silly little things that one expects to return with from Russia, but I had a lot of fun learning to barter in Russian.

My friend Mark and I decided to find the former KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka, for several reasons. Reason the first, well, it’s the current headquarters of the FSB (which is neat) and in the same square there is the only official memorial to Gulag victims (at least that’s in Moscow), its really rather depressing, just a slab of stone.

But it WASN’T there!!! We searched for and hour and a half and couldn’t find the blasted thing. As it turns out, the construction (remont, again; I curse the institution) in the area had resulted in the necessity of either moving it or covering it. Which speaks volumes either way, as the Russians haven’t ever dealt with the Gulag, that is to say: there was never any justice for the victims and now, no one wants to remember it at all. No one will talk about it, which, as an institution that killed hundreds of millions of its own citizens, is a tragedy of almost incomprehensible proportions.

But, after much searching, we did find Gorky Park. But not the Garden of Fallen Monuments. Blast it all. And after that we worked our way clear across central Moscow back to Red Square, which is all the more magnificent at night. But I’m still miffed about missing the Gardens. All the more reason to return soon.

The train ride back (as I told you, the most I will probably remember from the trip was the ride) was entertaining. Sort of. Patrick and I had a grand rematch (I beat him. Soundly. 1050 to 800 odd points). And this ride I was rooming with two other girls from our group and a completely random stranger. Now, the randomness of the stranger would not have been so problematic, even the fact that he was a strange old guy. But oh, he snored. Oh, it was the loudest most obnoxious noise I’ve ever heard. Throughout the night, I tried several different methods (listening to music, doing sudoku, reading, anything to fall asleep) and I considered drastic measures (at one point, the cartoon me that exists in my imagination was marching around with cymbals). But alack, no such luck, and crazy Russian man deprived me of sleep for the night. In the end, it was mostly just funny. Or it will be after I’ve caught up on sleep.

So that was Moscow. I took a lot of pictures, but the internet I am feeding off of won’t let me post them right now.

Yesterday, we got in around 5:30 in the morning, but the metro doesn’t open until 6, so there was a massive crowd waiting to invade the morning trains. I slept for several hours and headed out, once again with no plan in mind. And I would love to say that everything went off without a hitch. But then, this wouldn’t be my story and that wouldn’t be my life. I decided, whilst on the metro, that I wanted to visit the Museum of Russian Political History, which is located at a certain metro stop. However, I was on the line, and, all of a sudden we were flying through a station, the station I needed, and that thing actually looked like a bomb shelter, when my memory dredged up a voice from a classmate, who was saying that they closed her local metro stop for remont. Ah. So I got off at the next stop and spent the next hour and a half tracing my way back to where I needed to be. Which lead me to a particularly (and singularly) fascinating mosque and finally back to the museum.

Now, the museum isn’t a very grand affair, its in the mansion of some famous ballerina lady, but it was hands down the most fascinating museum I’ve been in yet. It chronicles the entire Russian history, in all of its treacherous details, up to the present time, including sections on the Gulag and coping mechanisms in society, the advent of the bard musician and the cult of the personality. It was amazing.

As I was leaving, getting my coat from the nice old lady in the guardroom, I was suddenly being lectured. In her opinion, I had finished too soon! Did I see all the rooms, she asked, both floors? Yes, I answered.

Then why was I back so soon?

I gently explained to her that my Russian wasn’t enough to pick up everything, and I do read very quickly in English. She was very pleased by this, and told me I could speak well enough in Russian, so I needed to stay and talk to her for a little while. She was a sweet old lady, and we swapped stories.

Oh, Russia.

So now I am here, cradling a coveted copy of the St. Petersburg times (one of the few local papers that in English) and greedily stealing wi-fi from the nearby Radisson.

I got in an argument of sorts with my host mother’s boyfriend about politics this morning, when he was saying that Obama was going to be a horrible president and America was in the same place Russia was ten years ago, but America wasn’t going to be as prosperous as Russia is now (I must insert a literary snort here). Although I definitely understand what he is saying, and I know how to refute his arguments, unfortunately I really can’t do that in Russian yet. Blast.

Another Shirt Ruined

2008-11-11T04:52:00.001-05:00

4 November 2008: Election Day! And also, Unification Day!

Of course, in Russia, it’s not actually called Unification Day, but it’s quite possible to translate it that way; so I choose to. And if you’ve ever seen Joss Whedon’s Firefly, then you may understand I had to fight against the urge to don a brown coat and go have a friendly drink and an honest brawl of some kind. If you’ve never seen Firefly, then you have my permission to stop reading and go watch it. My ramblings can wait.

Either way, my weekend is finally at an end. What a fun time. Today, I made the mistake of leaving the house without any definite plan. Of course, I didn’t mean to do this, but it didn’t quite dawn on me that I had no plan until I was already on the Metro.

Eventually, I found myself in the Russian Ethnographic Museum. Now, as your maps/globes/atlases might have clued you in on, Russia is a rather large country. The sheer magnitude has allowed for a lot of different little cultures to spring up under the general umbrella of ‘Russia,’ this fact added to the assiduous nature of many early Russian anthropologists, means that this museum is filled with many originals. That is to say, original dresses and jewelry, housing implements, and so on and so forth. Relentlessly interesting, from my own point of view, this was compounded by the fact that they had an exhibit on Claude Levi-Strauss (a big time name in anthropology) and my own interests in anthropology.

Unfortunately, and perhaps, inevitably, some things did go wrong.

Owing to the proportions of certain parts of my anatomy, buttons sometimes don’t work the way they ought to. And owing to some people’s reluctance on addressing such subjects, I have in fact walked around for goodness knows how long with too many buttons unintentionally unbuttoned. Ridiculous. But today, a certain essential button decided it didn’t like being attached. At all. Which put an end to my adventures for the day. Unless spending an hour and a half learning how to reattach buttons to shirts counts as an adventure.

All this to say that the adventures as of late haven’t been too thrilling, but have allowed for such clarity of mind so that I can tell you of more quirks of my Russian experiences.

In Russia, people are stopped by the police rather often and asked for their papers. That is passports, visas, and spravkas. It’s a strange experience, but not one you fully realize until you’re out the door and down the street before you realize you’ve forgotten your papers, and then it’s mostly just irritating.

The police are also overly fond of harassing Americans. Although I should clarify: American men; or men in general. I don’t think I have ever seen a Russian Police officer stop a woman.

Along these lines: one of our coordinators told us a story that happened over the summer. He and his girlfriend had been picnicking on some grass by a local monument. A policeman comes by to tell them that they are in violation of the law, and need to pay the ‘on-the-spot’ fine. This is code-speak, generally, for ‘I want a bribe and you will give me one.’ In the process of paying the fine, they needed to show their identification. As soon as the policemen saw that Jarlath (that’s our coordinator) was an American, naturally, the situation became quite serious. Rather than being able to pay the find, he and his girlfriend were taken in to the local station. As they were being booked, or the Russian equivalent thereof, a nod of pride went from one cop to another, “You got an American? Way to go!”

Oh, Russia.

That story was the introduction at orientation to: “What to do if you are picked up by the police.” Useful information.

Now. I am not an entirely violent person. That is to say, I’ve seen enough cartoons that I sometimes gleefully imagine dropping anvils on, and on occasion I might throw my shoes at, people when I am annoyed. But, there are times when Russia tests my patience, and perhaps, has remolded some of my tendencies. I am a modern American student, and I hold these new truths to be quite useful:

1. Why, yes, I will use the people around me as a buffer when I am using crosswalks. Even if the light says walk, the cars don’t stop. But there is safety in numbers, and the car probably won’t be able to get all of us.

2. I will make myself quite clear; the next babushka (they really are quite vicious on the metro) that pushes me out of the train car is going to get her bag of newspapers stomped on.

3. Even though I have mastered the art of running down the 400 step escalator (with my right show untied, at that), if you don’t move your elbow, you might not get to keep it.

4. If you insist on elbowing me out of your way as you enter the metro car, which thereby results in me facing the opposite direction of the doors, then I regret to inform you that I will be using you to break my fall as I am shoved out of the metro car at the next stop.

I suppose I could continue this list, but mostly, these new tendencies are connected to my experiences on the metro and my reactions to becoming accustomed to my way of life. Which has clued me in on another Russian trait: reaction. That is to say, in public, Russians don’t react to anything. “You’re juggling flame sticks on the subway? ::cricket, cricket::” I don’t know how they have developed such resilience, but it is frequently that which gives me away as a foreigner.

I don’t know where I find these, the most random of ramblings, but I am quite sure the time has come for me to cut you off for the night. That is to say, all of my homework is done, tests studied for, so I feel quite free to curl up with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (which, naturally, is in Russian). (Although, as a post script, I must add: I write this blog with no common frequency, but since I have no internet, I keep all of my entries in a word document and update online when I can. But, thus far, I have written 32 pages. I am a chatty little creature, no?)

(Oh, and a post post script: I am going to Moscow this weekend, so if you try to call me and the mean lady yells at you in Russian, that is because my phone doesn’t work that far south. But I think I will try to see the new bond flick, as it comes out a day early in Russia! Yay!)

When I’ve suddenly disappeared: No. I’ve not been kidnapped, my nefarious plan has just gone really, really wrong.

2008-11-05T05:01:00.000-05:00

2 November 2008

What’s this! Another blog entry within a few days of the last! Oh joy of joys! (I’ve had so much time to myself over the last day and a half, and with the prospect of it just being me for the next two days, I’ve let my mind wander far and away, so as a consequence, my thoughts are in some semblance of order that lends itself to expression.)

So, today, my first day of freedom was spent for the most part at the Hermitage, which I adore. Of course, I generally only make it as far as the Egypt room, and my only worry now is that I will become too familiar with such things, and in so doing slowly convince myself that (naturally) if I had these things in my own possession, they would be far more valued. Which leads me to observing security measures (either they’re really really advanced and I just don’t recognize them or so rudimentary that, well, they’re nonexistent. And given that over the last few years over a quarter of a million objects have gone missing from Russian State museums, well, you can see the slippery slope that this y=mx+b of thought goes down).

Irregardless of my moral qualms, today a bridal party came through to take pictures in the Hermitage. I thought that was kind of cute. Although I am sure that that sort of thing also occurs in the United States, there are some things that stick out more readily, or at least, that I notice more readily, being in a foreign country.

Along those lines. I’ve noticed cell phone etiquette in Russia is vastly different than that of America. My professors get a call during the middle of class and will disappear for ten minutes or so. This happens quite regularly. And even in church, if four or five cell phones go off, the pastor, or whomever, never asks people to turn them off. Possibly, the only places that actually ask people to silence their phones were at Kazansky Cathedral and the movie theater. Interestingly, one must wonder what this says about the Russian people and their desire to stay connected. Hrm.

Irregardless of international quirks in communication, as I was walking home tonight after church, it was colder than usual. So much so, that the air had gone hazy. Which is really the only way to describe it; there wasn’t a fog, but it looked very much like a classic movie.

In telling all of my stories last entry, there was a nagging feeling I’d forgotten something. And now it’s come to me. It’s surprising it’s took so long for me to remember, given that its the best story I’ve had so far on the trip.

On my birthday, as I told you, I went to the mall. What I forgot to say is what happened on the way: About five steps outside the security door to my building, while fumbling with my headphones, a funny old man starts to talk to me. “How magnificent! We both live in the same building,” he begins. He asks me a question, but I miss it entirely. When I ask him to repeat it, I tack on that I am a student of the Great Russian language. He blanches, am I Estonian? Finnish? Swedish? German, at the very least? No, no, an American. “How wonderful!” (He was such an expressive little old man.) He asks how long I will be studying in Russia and finally, after a series of innocent questions: “May I ask you age?” I laughingly claim it’s a secret, but relent and tell him it’s my birthday. He wishes me a happy birthday, and the rest comes out in a rush.

He says he can see I am not a married woman, and so he wants to give me his home telephone number. He has two sons he’d like me to meet, aged 25 and 31, neither of them are married and would be happy to show me all around town and tell me about the history of our magnificent district (Vasilievskii Ostrov).

Oh, Russia.

My conversation professor tries to help us poor international students by explaining the quirks of the Russian reasoning, and furthermore by telling us all about Russian habits (like aforementioned matchmaking). On the metro, (and this is completely true) we read over one another’s shoulders. It’s almost acceptable to be reading your neighbor’s book, and as they turn the page: “No, no, wait. I’m not finished yet.” Or with sudoku, “You seem to be stuck. That square is a 2.”

There really are no smooth transitions in this entry. I have taken to making lists of things I want to tell you about. I gave up writing what happens on a daily basis. It’s depressingly routine. But that does deprive me of my filler material. (In Russian, I’d say this phrase: Ny vot. It kind of means Oh well, I’m just going to keep going on anyways.)

Of all things, St. Petersburg is a theatrical city of extremes. This idea is wound up with the lights I mentioned earlier. So many adventures could start here, because the adage “It was a dark and stormy night…” could apply to most nights here. I suppose its mostly the product of my overactive imagination, wandering too much down the byways and detours of my mind. I almost started laughing in class the other day: my hair was in braids and suddenly my mind drifted and in my day dream, one of my braids came to life and tried to choke me. In the real world, I grabbed a braid securely in each hand to make sure that they made no such attempt. On the other end of my rampageous imagination, I see spy novels playing themselves out, and am wary of cars that stop too close the curb to me or I suspiciously eye those people who pass by on a daily basis.

On another end of daydreaming, although St. Petersburg is, in many ways, a very dirty city; but when I stop paying attention to the little details (like the puddle I just tripped through, which I’m really hoping was just water), I look around and can’t believe how artistically minded a lot of the buildings are (minus the Soviet Abominations), and how beautifully they are lit at night. Sometimes, I think it has to be false or a fairy tale of some kind, nothing can be that intricate and just be an ordinary building. Christmas time will be truly magnificent; especially if there will be even more little lights.

And speaking of Christmas Time (oh look, a transition!). Today is November 2, 2008, and on my way home, it started snowing! Or, more accurately, little pieces of ice started falling out of the sky. And that counts in my book as snow. And snow plus November equals license to start listening to my Christmas music (which is currently one Frank Sinatra CD, because there is no internet at my house, and my main source of Christmas music is the channel on iTunes).

To celebrate this little kid spirit in me, during dinner I watched a little TV. Now, normally I watch the news, or try to. I have gotten pretty good at tuning out the Russian voices if I watch dubbed shows. But today, I watched the one thing I am capable of understanding in Russian: Children’s Shows. Cartoons, actually. Today, I found the pink panther. It’s even funnier in Russian. When people fall down holes, in English, it’s AHHHHH. But in Russian, it’s Eeeeee, Paaaaaamaaaaagite mne! It sounds funny to me.

Perennially, you guys will be informed to some of the food experiences I’ve had. 98% of the food here I really like: things like plemeni (sort of like ravioli, but no sauce, just little meat filled pasta thingies), piroshki (mmmm, pies, they can be filled with anything), and blini (thin little pancakes that you can stuff with anything; these will be the end of my girlish figure). Other food is different, but I’ve grown to like a little bit: beet salad (which is purple), ‘pizza’ (the sauce is ketchup as Russians don’t believe in marinara, and the toppings include, but are not limited to: pickles, hot dogs, corn, green beans, and mayonnaise. Sadly, I’ve actually almost gotten used to it), these little pasta things that are filled with mashed potatoes, and bell peppers which are stuffed with some mystery meat and cabbage (I didn’t know this, but you’re supposed to peel these guys, otherwise, trust me, they are disgusting).

However, there are some foods I just can’t do. Most salads in Russia aren’t what we’d call salad, and are light-years off what we’d call healthy. Typically they are covered in either mayonnaise or sour cream. But today, I met with a completely new level of salad: pickled mushrooms and onions, slathered in sour cream. From now on, I think I am allergic to all pickled things, except, well, pickles.

So it is now past ten and I am slightly pensive, but not in any way glum. Really, I am mostly just amused.

I write a lot, although very little of it do I actually let out of my sight. Most things are just whims, records of dreams or of day dreams I have, fantastic stories that resonate through my mind. I forget them for months at a time and then the thread will pick itself up unexpectedly. But everything I write is a reflection of that which I am, my twisted hopes, dreams, and deepest, darkest fears.

Along these lines, I was thinking the other day, if I wrote a fictionalized story of my life, how would I depict myself? What would I leave out, what would I embellish? Which is interesting thought pattern, because looking at my life from that angle, I produce an uncritical (mostly) assessment of myself, things that I think stick out about me or are slightly off. It also helps me to see some of what I can only call my weaknesses. Or links I suppose, rather than weakness; that is to say, the traits in my personality which either subvert one course of action or blind myself to any other, thereby linking my actions from time to time.

In thinking on these things, I have somehow come to the realization as of late that the ‘me’ I once thought I was and who I was going to be does not very much reflect who I am now. Or, at least, who I think I am now; how I see myself. I think I am much stronger than the “me” I thought I’d be, than who I used to be. That girl wouldn’t ever have made it on to a plane to a foreign country. Sometimes I look around and am astounded that I live here, it seems like such a precious gift, an opportunity well beyond anything I deserve. To that end, I am so afraid that I am going to accidentally squander my time here. This is all horribly existential, but I thought this would be a much harder experience. Don’t misunderstand, naturally, I miss my family and friends, but I thought I would be crippled by homesickness, and instead, I think I am starting to thrive here. Or, even at my very worst, my fears aren’t new menacing foes, but the same shadows that have plagued me for most of my life. Given that I have seven more months here, is an entirely encouraging realization.

The word ‘I’ appears a lot of here. Which reminds me of an exercise we once did in creative writing class (the only class I’ve ever taken twice; and that was a voluntary repetition at that) where we had to define the idea of what ‘I’ was, especially seeing as we write so much in the first person, and in doing so, connect ourselves indelibly to the products of our own imagination. Whenever the word ‘I’ sneaks into my writing (it does a lot, especially in a setting such as this), I am reminded of this assignment, and of the tremendous amount of emotion we place in the idea of ‘I.’

I just found the document on my hard drive, which cements another idea I’ve had for a while: my maturity peaked junior year of high school. Since then, I have become stupider and less mature. But here it goes:

‘I’ is the combination of me, everything, even the things that I am not. ‘I’ is me in every terrible moment of hatred, jealousy, depression, yet at the same time, it is me in every moment that I laugh and smile and let my creative side go.

‘I’ is the ultimate summation of everything, everyone, and everyplace, I have been, meet, seen, interacted. ‘I’ is the final, absolute expression of all that I wish I could be, and all that I wish I never become. In short, I love ‘I,’ I hate ‘I,’ I know every aspect of ‘I,’ yet I am lost in trying to comprehend this absolute, eternal entity of ‘I.’ But that is not all that ‘I’ has the ability the represent, it also shows the absolute imagination with which I can approach the world. ‘I’ is the summation of every aspect of my imagination, every character in my mind, every self with which I walk around throughout the day adds to my sense of who I am, that is, the different ‘I’ who I am at home, at school, from one class to the next, and from each set of friends and acquaintances.

The ‘I’ of my writing has been he, she, it, animate and inanimate, something to loathed and loved, something to hated yet hailed. It is the final pinnacle, the climax of my creativity, for with ‘I’ that I yield the strongest power over man, and with ‘I’ that I can let my cup of creative capacity overflow, drenching my entire literary being with character and meaning, which all abound and overflow from this simple, beautiful concept of ‘I.’

On the same hand however, ‘I’ is surely the most maddening of all principles and the most ubiquitous of all fiends, forever engaging and frustrating, compelling and disgusting.

Perhaps, it will be closer to the front of my mind now, as my entries here continue, to vary my patterns and use less of that wretched and magnificent pronoun. (‘I’ is a pronoun, right? Grammar never was my strongest ordered-pair.)

Alack, time has now been squandered so! But better spent in introspection than devious machinations, for it is appropriate to remind you that this time may have been wasted in drawing plans to rob various well-known museums. So, perhaps it is more appropriate to say: oh how your time has been squandered so, dear reader! My mundane mutterings and insane (and sometimes insipid) insights have capriciously captured your attention. (You see, how after eleven, alliterations amble their way throughout my wily writings.) May your time nevertheless not be wasted! Take such profligate ponderings and apply them to your life….somehow. Or, if you’d prefer, drink some Red Bull and think of me.

This is Halloween! This is Halloween!

2008-11-01T05:42:00.004-04:00

31 October 2008 Halloween.

As I have previously mentioned, Halloween is, by and large, not celebrated by Russia (except scary Goth kids), so rather than regale you with tales of such nonsense. I figure I could beguile you with several of the holidays that they do celebrate and some national past times.

The first and most important of all Russian past times is the frustrating practice of ‘Remont.’ Most of St. Petersburg is undergoing remont, and everything from the lowest of bathrooms to the Hermitage itself is undergoing reconstruction of some kind. According to the local newspaper, this is the greatest amount of construction going on in St. Petersburg since it was founded in 1703 (at that time, any one who wanted to come into the city, paid a toll in rocks. Since this place was originally a swamp, foundation material was lacking. Which is also why the metro goes so flingin’-flangin’ deep into the ground.)

I digress. This past time of remont has resulted in various amusing situations. One morning, half the ground was missing in front of my metro stop, and there was rather a trench going several feet down. Yesterday, out of nowhere, there is a hole, where I would have otherwise surmised a meteorite struck, were it not for the string and sign proclaiming it as a product of remont.

Another amusing aspect of this subject is safety, or lack thereof. With the meteorite hole, all that kept the drunks out of the hole is a shoestring about a foot off the ground six inches around the hole. When people work on buildings, there are no signs warning pedestrians to watch their heads.

A Russian joke about safety says that there are no warning signs in the country because we passed them already, or didn’t you see the sign at the border?

All in all this is a very adventurous country. You never know when you might die from something perfectly mundane.

The most present holiday on the calendar is this coming Monday or maybe Tuesday. It’s not that I’m confused. Apparently the government or someone in the Russian bureaucracy is, because they couldn’t decide which day to give us off. So our modified week involves us going to school tomorrow (Saturday), but we get Monday and Tuesday off. Then we have class on Wednesday and Thursday, but then we leave late Thursday night for the next week and a half in Moscow and on vacation.

Irregardless of the ineptitude of organized people, this holiday (whenever it’s supposed to be celebrated) is sort of a unification day, when all the Russians pushed a foreign pretender off the throne and established the Romanoff dynasty.

I may be repeating myself, but this story is worth it either way.

Shopping in Russia is an experience. Grocery shopping, especially. There are two general types of store. The first is classically Soviet. All of the products are behind a counter or under glass with their proper price tags. You tell the attendant what you want and they tally up your purchases and you pay, get your receipt and then get your things. This can be a difficult process if you don’t speak Russian that well. Which leads me to the slightly more Western type of grocery stores. Which are traps. Not to say they are bad, but it is absolutely impossible to escape without buying something.

The Russians do have a one up on the US for dealing with wasting plastic bags. That is to say, they charge you for them. Not much, it can range from 2 to 5 or so rubles per bag (7 to 19 cents, I think), but its enough to make me utilize my pocket space.

I have digressed long and far from what I meant to cover. Russian past times (some of which I may have already mentioned).

Russian television is full of many programs. Some of them are knock-offs of American TV shows like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, CSI, Married With Children (which is actually a really big hit here). There are less tasteful knock-offs, a sort of Jerry Springer show called “Let’s Talk,” but rather than addressing sexual infidelity usually involves people shouting at women who are horrible mothers and wives. There are also more touching programs, like one called “Wait for Me,” where they reunite families and siblings and so on and so forth. And for a country that has been closed and opened with people in and out of concentration camps and being expelled from the country, this show has a large pool of people to work with.

Russians are also fans, to my everlasting glee, of Soap Operas, modeled after the Spanish and Mexican style. So they are over the top. Ridiculous. But, I am developing a new side of my vocabulary (subjects like mistresses, infidelity, lying, sudden diseases, amnesia, and thievery). The final category is shows which are just dubbed, generally from English. Things like Supernatural, Law and Order, Mythbusters, CSI, etc. and all sorts of movies are on all the time, although the dubbing is a half-hearted attempt at best.

I do watch the news (or try to), but I don’t know how much I am actually absorbing versus just watching the sometimes gruesome pictures. Russians have far less compunction about showing dead and or dying people on the television. They aren’t heartless, but perhaps their news is sometimes less sensationalist than American news.

As a general rule, I enjoy watching movies; I believe that they reveal a certain spice of a culture, a particular viewpoint. Thankfully, my Russian Civilization professor agrees with this outlook on life and shows us a lot of movies. Lately, we saw a movie called “White Nights,” which in an American movie, with a very young Helen Mirren and Isabella Rossellini, and although this movie takes place in St. Petersburg and I am 90% certain it was filmed here, but I really have no idea how on Earth they managed to pull that off. It isn’t the friendliest movie towards the Soviet State, and what’s more, my Civilization professor, insists that the fear and stress of living in those times (as portrayed in the movie) was perfectly portrayed in the movie. Which is very sad in a lot of ways.

Although we have seen various other movies, today we watched a production of Socialist Realism, which, if you’ve never been exposed to, try your hardest to avoid that genre like the plague. Maudlin would be the most timid of words used to describe the genre, but in so many ways not expressive enough. This film, called ‘Circus,’ is from the 1930s, the height of the Terrors, but this film is all about how evil America is. But in a friendly sort of way. The movie starts with an American performer involved in a scandal in the Deep South of America, where she has a half-black baby. The first shot is a mob trying to kill her and her baby as she runs and jumps onto a train. (Optimistic, no?) She soon finds herself in the circus in the Soviet Union, and of course, she falls in love with an ideal Soviet Man, and, even though the evil American tries to out her secret that she has a half-black baby, the penultimate scene is a circus full of people singing about how in the Soviet Union it doesn’t matter what color you are, the state will take care of you. The ultimate scene is a classic Soviet parade on Red Square, with the hero and heroine marching along with all other proud party members, hoisting Stalin’s and Lenin’s portraits (after 1956 and Khrushchev, Stalin’s portraits were cut out of the movie). An interesting view of Soviet-U.S. relations in the 1930s.

It was particularly funny however, when the Russian Actors tried to speak English (as they were supposed to be Americans), oh. Oh. The grammar was bad. The accents were worse. Although, I am sure they laugh even harder when they watch things like Red October or the new Indiana Jones. I’m sure our Russian is just as much of an auditory offense.

Oh, the funny things that Russians do:

1. Although I’ve told you of man-purses, I recognized the other day another Russian trait. That of the shopping bag. About 70% of all people on the metro have, in addition to their purse, a plastic bag which they keep a scarf, books, and papers in. Everyone has them. It’s almost strange. Then I remember I’m in Russia and its not so strange anymore.

2.2. I’ve told you about my morning commute. But I truly believe that the metro is more of a human-sardine-can-experiment gone very, very wrong.

3.3. I was stopped yesterday, twice actually, by people asking for directions to a street I’d never heard of. I told the second girl I didn’t know; I wasn’t from around here. So we chit chat and exchange numbers to get together at another time (although Russians may never smile on the street, they really are hospitable people), and as I am turning away, she wants to give me a gift. It’s kind of like an apple. But. Sadder looking. Apparently, the national fruit of Russia. I forgot the name already; it’s sitting on my dresser. Looking very sad.

4.4. Russian men have no compunction about spitting or hawking a spit wad on the subway. The other day I actually had to get up and move to the other end of the car, this man was making a puddle on the ground trying to clear out his throat/nostril/oral cavities. Disgusting. And what with the acceleration of the metro car, the puddle was coming towards me.

5.5. There are a lot of strange of jobs that people that do here in Russia. The people at all the monuments that pose in pictures with you (for a fee), it’s a little funnier to see them on the metro on their way home. Anyways, there are a lot of little old ladies that sweep up cigarette butts, beer bottles/cans, and dirt (in that order) off the street. This morning, as I am walking over the bridge between me and the metro station and the little old lady was just kicking the bottles into the river.

So. You are a hero if you’ve read this far. The pile of things in my mind was overflowing. But there’s still more! I don’t sit down so much any more and write this blog at regular intervals. It’s more like little reports and then WHAMMO, a lot of things all at once. I blame my civilization class; we just finished our papers on our impressions of Russia. So this is all at the forefront of my mind.

Otherwise, life in Russia is alternately freezing and comfortable. I spent my afternoon working in one of the other Hermitage buildings, which is undergoing ‘remont,’ and am now moving on to my Rosetta Stone work. (And my Demotic! I found two primers for free online. It’s so pretty for doodling. And subjective. Score one for lack of artistic abilities!)

One last note! I don’t know when I will post again, but this I need to say! I will be in Moscow next week, and unless I have about 2000 rubles on my phone, it won’t work over the weekend (from Thursday to Sunday). So don’t panic if you call it and it yells at you in Russia.

So Happy Halloween America! And Happy Election Day! And Happy (almost) Birthday Cem!

With every day I get just a little bit paler. Vampirism is a week off, more or less.

2008-10-28T08:53:00.001-04:00

28 October 2008

It’s true. I’ve turned into a vampire.

Well. Maybe not entirely true. But I’m rather white and have developed a sensitivity to light. That’s a sufficient enough reason for the moment. I just forgot the English word for reason. But I knew it in Russian. That worries me somewhat.

Over the last week, I’d like to think I’ve had a renewing of the mind. All that silly frustration over my lack of progress has passed. I realize now, what I ought to have seen then. I have studied this language for a year and a half, and I have only been here for two months. If I were studying any other language, I’d be worried. But Russian is so freaking strange, I don’t feel bad anymore. Yay!

Okay, so the weekend/birthday celebrations! I went to a dance club with some friends and stayed out the whole night! It was fun, I had a vodka shot (not so fun, it wasn’t very good) and a mixed drink to celebrate the occasion. Clearly I am a wild child.

Anyways, at midnight the metro closes and around the same time, the bridges (to the island where I live) go up. So, I was stuck, but not unhappily so. Around 4 a.m. I was really tired of dancing and all that, so I took off with a friend to go watch the bridges, they look really cool when they are up and all lit up! As we were walking we passed the big square in front of the Hermitage, and it was empty. Except for one lonely soul in the square, who was playing a sad song on his saxophone.

Definitely a fun night. After all was said and done, I got home around 6:30 in the morning and as fate would have it, my dad called me about 2 hours later. I really like talking on the phone to anyone from home, and my call timer says I talked for 45 minutes, but I don’t think I said much. I was a very sleepy kid.

Saturday was wasted, more or less, and I rested. Fun times.

Oh, and then came Sunday, my birthday. Oh joy. Well, actually this year topped last year. Given, no one in my family was fleeing ginormous fires this year. So really, last year wasn’t that hard to beat. But I went back to the big Mall complex that is very not Russian, and I went shopping. Which really was pretty fun. I also got ice cream and French fries. So, vapidly unhealthy and ridiculously fun. My housemother even got me a gift! A beautiful red rose on a three foot long stem…and five bars of chocolate. Awesome.

I tripped and fell into a fairy tale

2008-10-23T08:27:00.000-04:00

23 October 2008

Okay. I’ve been putting off writing my blog for a while. And not because I dislike typing or telling my stories. Oh no, so much has happened though, that I am still trying to classify all of my adventures into those which I will share (herein posted) and those that I won’t (a girl has to keep some of her secrets).

So, as far as sharing goes.

I was sitting on the metro last Wednesday, completely minding my own business, when a man steps onto the car and starts talking very loud. In Russia, there aren’t so much infomercials as there are people who sell things on the subway or street. But they are just as annoying as any infomercial in the States. So, this guy was selling a sharpener for scissors and the like. So first he whips out a pair of scissors to demonstrate the prowess of the sharpener. And then, he whips out a 6 inch knife! Now I know what you’re thinking (pregnant woman slays five.), I started giggling uncontrollably. Which is not a Russian thing to do in public. He gave me a really strange look and moved along.

So. That was fun.

Tallinn. I am moving there. It is everything I ever hoped and dreamed that Europe would be. It started off with the longest bus ride of my life (over 8 hours, that tops Hume’s longest time), and us crossing the border (woohoo). At the border, there are two castles from medieval times, one is on the Russian side and one is on the Estonian side, and they straddle this river. It’s almost comical when you step back; it’s analogous to little kids building forts to prove who is the biggest.

When we finally got to Tallinn, we were booked at a very nice hotel and ate the best meal I’ve had since I got here. Mmmmm, it was pretty much a showcase of Estonia’s best foods, including their coffee. Oh. I don’t drink coffee, ever, but my conversation teacher had gone on and on about their coffee so I thought I’d try it. And it was so good!

What better time for a tour than after getting all fat and happy? So, off we went for a walking tour of old town. And old town, is old. And original, no post-world war two reconstructions, like most of Russia. So it is a doubly enjoyable experience. Our tour guide probably topped off the experience though. She had a store of hilarious stories, she called them ‘funny stories,’ but they weren’t so much funny stories as horribly morbid and sarcastic tales about lovers and executioners, et cetera.

Old Town in Tallinn is heaven for people who love Renaissance Fairs. Most restaurants are enthusiastically embracing the atmosphere and have some of the funniest costumes, and otherwise there are silly themed restaurants (outside old town are several American Themed restaurants). Like the Corsairs restaurant! It was actually an underground ship, with the top half of a ship for an entrance. And there were all these aquariums and, well, it was very neat.

Saturday was a free day, for the most part. It is really like a fairy tale! I have decided that I absolutely have to go back to Tallinn though, because my card wouldn’t work! (I forgot to tell my bank I’d be in Estonia, and our cell phones weren’t working so I couldn’t call the company) Eeesh. That was probably the only downside to the trip, which really only warrants a second visit, so I’m not too upset. I wandered around with a friend trying to find a restaurant for a couple of hours, until we gave up and just decided to eat at the next place we saw. Mmmm. What a happy adventure. It ended in these classically Russian/Estonian pots of some kind of stew. I really don’t know what it was, I ordered the lamb. It was good.

Our last wanderings on Sunday morning found me in a supermarket called Stockman’s, which is actually really upscale and nice inside. Irregardless, I was picking up some last minute things, and what do I spy?

Libby’s Pumpkin Pie mix. The exact same one I use in the United States. Go Globalization! I almost bought it, but then thought better and decided to pass.

The bus ride back was … arduous. After two nights of very little sleep, the bus ride was almost too much. So, we got back at about half past eleven. I get home and my cute little house mother is like “eat eat.” So we sit around chatting and eating until I was going to fall asleep in my soup. Then I was allowed to go to bed.

So, this Monday morning must have been a record low for student attendance in CIEE’s history. When Grammar started, I was the only person. Which was good I guess, because my professor told me that every single answer on the homework I’d turned in was wrong. Russia is doing wonders for my ego.

Anyways, I got to the Opera again this week! Carmen this time, which I enjoyed, but it couldn’t top Aida, for the obvious reasons, and then because there was this eight year old bouncing around in her seat right into my field of vision, so I missed most of the second act. And then I left after the third. Little kids shouldn’t be allowed at the opera.

I still got home around midnight, and my house mother still wanted to feed me. So I am chubby and exhausted little kid. All the time.

The other funny things from this week:

So, no one actually wears sandals of any kind in Russia (that I’ve seen), but when I was walking home the other day, there was a man doing construction work, ambling around in flip flops.

I had a sandwich in my pocket the other day (in a plastic bag. It wasn’t just chilling there). And as I started to walk home after school, this crazy crow started to follow me. I would walk ten feet and that stupid bird would fly over my head and right in front of me, with its scary beak and eyes. I hate birds. And this one followed me quite creepily for a while.

So. I am tired now. And I am getting ready to walk home. But it looks cold outside. OOOO. Wait. Last Thursday we had a terrible scare. That is to say, it looked like it was snowing outside. My professor actually stopped class so she could be sure. I am excited for the snow. Just not quite yet. Once it starts, apparently, it keeps going until April or so. Oh dear.

I saw a patch of blue sky today! Awesome.

2008-10-15T05:03:00.001-04:00

13 October 2008

Oh my word. Several words need to be written before my sieve of a memory forgets them. Most of these words have to do with Aida. Oh Aida. My first opera.

But first. Events: Pushkin Palace. Amber Room. Room filled entirely by paintings (which suspiciously reminded me of Harry Potter). Freezing Cold Rain. Cool stuff. I took some pictures.

Aida. (The cursor waits as I try to find the words, oh, any words that by their own poverty cannot convey adequate emotion.)

Aida…takes place in Egypt. From beginning to end I was on the edge of my seat, almost falling off the balcony, even though I knew the entire story. I was on a side balcony in the absolute front of the theatre, overlooking the orchestra pit. Oh, the music. And the costumes and the singing and the sets.

It may have been one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was in Italian with Russian subtitles, but I feel like I didn’t miss a beat. Oh and the theatre itself! It’s like it was pulled straight from Phantom of the Opera (the movie)! It was so big and grand and complete with a Crystal chandelier! Oh joy of joys. And I get to go back again! Carmen is next Tuesday!

This opera was four hours long, but it really didn’t feel like it.

On the downside, that had us out of the theatre at twenty past eleven. In a city with a public transportation system that shuts down at midnight. And with bridges that go up for the night after that. First we followed another girl from our study abroad group who insisted she knew where the bus/marshrutka (like a bus, but privately run, and very confusing, but convenient routes) picked up. Kim and I waited with her for fifteen minutes, and when no other cars drove by, we opted to head for the metro, which we could probably make it to. Our third party insisted she was right and didn’t want to come with us. So Kim whipped out her map and check we were on it, and we started heading in what we were relatively sure was the right direction.

It wasn’t.

So we stopped the first sober couple and asked for directions to the metro. They had differing opinions, but finally agreed on a route for us. And then it was 11:40. And we were running. And then speed walking (have you ever seen me run? It never works out well). We made it to the official stop with 7 minutes to spare, but had to run through that stop to its underground connection to the line we needed. We took that train for one stop and then sprinted to catch the last train on our line. Quite a lot of running for a Saturday night.

But all’s well that ends well.

And I can’t wait to go back.

Wanderings and Ponderings

2008-10-13T05:04:00.000-04:00

10 October 2008

Oh no! Another week has passed.

“Oh no,” isn’t the right sentiment, I think I am more at an “Oh My! Time sure is flying” stage. Today in class someone’s phone went off and it was a Christmas song. That was somewhat jarring. I am not quite ready for Christmas yet (I have yet to cement my scintillating plans. I will keep you posted.) What I am ready for is Halloween.

Interestingly enough, Halloween isn’t that big of a holiday here. It’s more like an anathema. There was actually a bill going through the Duma (their senate) a few months ago that was attempting to ban the Emo movement and Halloween. Oh, Russia.

These recent attempts have naturally, spurred more interest in the holiday, and the Halloween decorations I daily pass are becoming more and more tempting as the days pass. They’re so cute! If nothing else, I may be using Halloween as an excuse to buy a lot of candy (I have developed quite a sweet tooth since I’ve come here, so please don’t be surprised when I come home with several bags of candy as gifts. They have good stuff here).

Until that wonderful time comes, I will have to content myself with ice cream. Ice cream here is very good and very different. It’s much…drier, I suppose, is the right word. And cheaper, it’s only 50 cents for a tasty morsel. Mmmmm. If dinner wasn’t in 20 minutes (and I didn’t have a bag of cookies on my desk. My host mother is trying to fatten me up), I would probably walk down to the grocery store and buy one.

Speaking of shopping, and places where one does such things, I was out the other day looking for a scarf/shawl type thing for when I go to the opera (tomorrow!!!) and I wandered my way into the mall-type establishment near my metro stop. It was quite an experience.

Although there are ‘normal’ malls all over the place, this place was classically Russian, with one tiny little store for leather jackets, one for shoes, one for boots, one for hats and gloves, and so on and so forth; each stall with a single attendant who treats you with complete indifference. It was an interesting experience, but ultimately a fruitless endeavor.

The next day made up for that failure in full. I had made arrangements with my Russian friend Nastya and we were meeting at the movies. But we I had a couple of hours to kill between school and the movie. So I wandered around town and finally made my way to the mall that had the movie theater. I found a massive bookstore that had Twilight in Russian (I almost squawked with excitement, which would have been an entirely non-Russian reaction, and immediately texted my sisters)!

I met up with Nastya and we went to go and see Mamma Mia! but Russian theaters are a little different in this regard, inasmuch that they sell tickets for specific seats (like at actual plays), and by the time we got to the front of the line, Mamma Mia was all sold out. Siiiiiiiiigh. Oh well. We took a step back to look at the billboard and picked the next movie that was about to start, having absolutely no idea what it would be.

It holds that some coincidences work out for the best. The movie, called На Крючке in Russian ended up being Eagle Eye, which I thought came out a long time ago, but considering it only cost me about 4 dollars to see, I was immensely pleased. And surprised; inasmuch that the movie was entirely in Russian and I think I understood about 70 percent of it. Oh, but we saw a preview for a new Russian blockbuster that just came out, called Admiralty (more or less), and it has one of my favorite Russian Actors (the lead from Nightwatch, if you ever saw it. And if you haven’t, you really should) and a killer soundtrack. But I think that will be next week.

Otherwise, this week has been action packed and absolutely exhausting. Today I got off from the Hermitage and wandered inside Kazansky Cathedral, and it was so beautiful! I periodically remember and then promptly forget again that I wrote a paper on this cathedral for a certain class, which shall not be named. I pretty much made up the entire paper (it was very interpretive). But walking into that place, I realized that no camera could do that place justice, as no photograph could capture the solemnity and beauty of it all. Besides that, photography is actually strictly forbidden.

Alas. I am all typed out. My brain needs a rest, in between all the tests and my commitment (thus far kept to the greater extent) to stop using English (it really was a crutch), I am quite tired out. So, I will have to write another entry here in between now and the next time I get the internet, as tomorrow is our trip to Pushkin (also called Tsarkoye Tselo, which is the palace where the amber room used to be! Yay!) and the Opera is tomorrow and possibly more socializing with my new friends Nastya. For now, I think I am going to watch Arabian Nights (I know. I’m super cool. I have it on my iPod.)

I promise to post my backlog of pictures very, very soon.

Oh! One last thing, and I have a feeling I am going to have to repeat this a couple of times over a variety of mediums. Next weekend, we are going together to Tallinn, Estonia, which isn’t that far away, but far enough that my cell phone will not work. So, those who are prone to panic (::cough, cough, Dad::), please don’t, I am safe, just out of range.

Oh, the cleverness of me!

2008-10-06T05:00:00.003-04:00

3 October 2008

What a difference a few days can make! (On my mood. Not my grammar skills. It will take several years before those skills are even passable. Oh well. I’ve resigned myself to that fate.)

Most of my present good mood has to do with the good fortunes of the last few days and, better still, fun happenings. To begin with, my first batch of tests, however horrifying and humbling they were, didn’t turn out all that bad; I got 5s on both of them (5s are A’s. Woohoo, which means, if I get a 4.9, it’s still technically a five, but, you know, a mathemagnificent 5. Anyways. Moving on)

I have begun my volunteer post. I work at this little place. You may have heard of it in passing. The Hermitage. Oh yes. I work in a palace. (The Hermitage is housed in what used to be the Winter Palace on the Neva River.) There are over one thousand rooms and the collection is one of the biggest in the world, they say you’d nine years just to glance at each of the 2.8 million objects held in the museum. Beyond that, what is represented in the Winter Palace is only a tiny, tiny, sliver of the entire collection. There are warehouses of items, boxes and boxes that haven’t been opened since before the revolution in some cases (the original installments of the museum were collections of the tsars, imperial gifts and such); many boxes haven’t even been catalogued! My job is whatever I choose to make of it. I think I will be aiming for the Egyptology Department (they are all waiting for volunteers to help to somewhat banal tasks, like translating and proofreading, but really. That’s okay; I am perfectly complacent with tasks like that if I get to work alongside a mummy. Really, they have an unwrapped mummy on display. It’s beautiful, in a sad sort of way. But they also have his entire coffin doohickey, from the 2 ton stone outer case all the way down to the wrappings.)

And free things! Oh, dear reader. There is not much that the Museum can pay us with (seeing as we are volunteers), oh but they do try. There is a theatre in the complex, constructed by Catherine the Great to entertain her 50 or so closest friends. In this theatre complex, several nights a week is either a ballet or an opera of some sort. Tickets start at 200 euros. Volunteers get in for free, as long as we direct traffic before the show starts. And not only do we get free seats, we get cheap food. I mean, like 20 rubles for a buffet that includes champagne. (20 rubles is less than a dollar.) I think that the museum and I are going to get along splendidly. And I haven’t even mentioned all the opportunities for budding young archaeologists such as myself.

My first day was an introduction. So I scanned tickets. Afterwards, (museum stops selling tickets at 5, so we get off at the same time) there was a celebration as it was the last day for one of the other students. So we got champagne and chocolate!! This is altogether a new form of payment, and one to which I am not wholly opposed. The girl who was leaving was actually a German student, so as we sat around chatting, some of them were switching rapidly from Russian to English and then to German and back again. As I was called on to introduce myself (something I am a little tired of doing. But I have the sequence down fairly well), I spouted off quickly in Russian the bare facts. One of the girls, who was Russian, actually thought I was Russian and she said I spoke so well and without an accent, and accused me (laughingly) of being a spy when I told her I was from California.

So, my Friday night was already a win. As I was walking home (well, really, walking to the metro stop) I was suddenly struck by the magnitude of where I was. On the palace square (which I have mentioned before, I believe), revolutions and riots and speeches by the shakers and movers of not only my time, but of my parents and grandparents. I look to the left and can almost see the statue of the Bronze Horseman and in the wind (its always ridiculously windy) I swear I can hear the clatter of his hoofs and my mind flashes across Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Bronze Horsemen and moreover to Biely’s St. Petersburg. I cross paths with the ghosts of Dostoevsky and Rasputin, and the streets still remember the harsh winters of World War Two and the Blockade of the City.

Alas. I have become ridiculously sentimental, but I find myself in love with this city. And Russia, in all of its absurdity.

Speaking of which. My adventures took a very amusing turn that night:

I returned to the site of financial perfidy, superfluous expenditure, and budgetary burglary- in short- the bookstore. I was searching this time, for a Russian copy of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books. Alas, I have not yet found them, as there really isn’t much of an organization pattern to the store, but I haven’t lost hope. The journey wasn’t a loss though: I ran across the Russian series of Tanya Rotter (which is a very bad knock-off of Harry Potter, but, judging by the sheer volume of the series, quite popular). The Russians have different names for different sections (it’s not romance, but Sentimental Books. Hah.) They do devote parts of each of their proper sections to foreign writers. This is where I really started to have fun. I found (at snatched) several Ian Fleming books (the Russians really love Bond. However ironic this may or may not be…it works out nicely for me, considering each of the books cost me about 2 dollars. The first in my series of purchases was “From Russia With Love,” a very appropriate first title, in my humble opinion). I also saw several of Kathy Reichs’ books. I dearly love her writing, but I couldn’t remember which book was first in the series and am so holding off on purchasing her for the moment. The only disappointment for the moment was the lack of any books by Elizabeth Peters, who is, without a doubt, one of my top favorite authors of all time, while Amelia Peabody, is most definitely my favorite heroine of all time. So, I am little sore still that I couldn’t find her. And all the more determined.

Finally, an hour later, I extricated myself from the bookstore having walked away with Ian Fleming’s aforementioned title and a dictionary (only English to Russian) of American and British weaponry and military technology. I was so struck by the absurdity of the thing, I couldn’t put it down. It even has little diagrams of tanks and what there names are in English and Russian, as well as the different rankings of military officers and how you could tell who is who. Quite quaint in a Post Cold War sort of way.

I have finally remembered a note I made ages ago, a reminder to share with you.

As I leave the Metro station to walk home, I pass every day a sushi restaurant. Although I am generally very picky about my sushi, and have very little faith in the quality control of Russian restaurants, I desperately want to eat here. Because, although the interior is quite decadent, and the walls are decorated in the modern fashion (that is to say, there are flat screen tvs), they play Tom and Jerry Cartoons all day long.

However, I have found a place, an ex-pat bar that may be the most wonderful thing this side of the Atlantic. That is to say, they excel at all things American. We had a student mixer there (called a sobesedniki). Oh my. So much to say about that night. But first. There were chips and salsa. Awesome. Irregardless, we had sort of a speed dating thing with all the Russians on one side and all the American students on the other, as we met one another and tried to find friends who didn’t speak our native language. I did have success and met the nicest girl with whom I now have standing social events (Wednesday is movie night!). But there was a guy there. Well, if he was a plant from the FSB, he may have been the most obvious inquisitor ever, drilling each student with our opinions on Russia and the West, and whether or not we saw Russia as an enemy of the United States. Things that were different between the United States and Russia and things we did not like about Russia. And all this inside of 5 minutes. I equivocated and obfuscated and was sure not to list his name as one of my preferred student contacts. He was a little intense.

Quite joyously though, I have just received my tickets to the Opera and am gearing up even now for Aida this coming Saturday! Yay! And then Carmen!

We had quite spectacular adventures yesterday, touring another palace, which was gorgeous, with a library that actually had me in tears, which was connected to a marble room that was filled with the popular games of the time, which was connected to a room that was built as a shrine to the middle East, with classic arches and Arabic covering the molding and fountains (which, like most of Saint Petersburg, is covered and under construction). But, this palace is most ashamedly famous as being the place where Rasputin was poisoned and then shot (but not where he died. Although they did have a photo of his face after he was drowned in the Neva. Charming.) They did have wax statues, which were creepy in and of themselves, but a wax statue of Rasputin is doubly menacing in my opinion.

Oh my. This week in Civilization class, we have started discussing the importance of Russian literature in regards to understanding Russian People and culture. And in doing so, watched a film on the life of Pasternak, which was interspersed with clips from Doctor Zhivago. Which has now been added to my list of things I adore and must read in Russian whilst in Russia. At this rate, I am going to spend my winter vacation in a small hole, reading books. Speaking of winter travel, I am developing an ever increasing desire to travel to Egypt. Apparently, there is still an agreement of sorts in between Russia and Egypt that allows for ridiculously cheap travel in between the two. This rampageous desire is only tempered by a lack of funds at the moment, which may restrict my travels to, well, Pavlosk. Which wouldn’t be a loss by any means. But a girl whose imagination has fed on mummies and pyramids for the last 10 years is allowed to dream.

If not this break, then perhaps over winter break, I may take the chance to visit parts of Germany and Sweden over a short span of time. And maybe Finland too. In the paper several days ago, there was an advertisement to visit Santa Claus. Seriously, there is a town that considers itself to be the North Pole. Oh. But Egypt. Every day, as I wait for the bus for school, I wait under the awning of a travel agency. Every day, I see the posting for Egypt, with promises of sand and sun and pyramids. By the time December and January roll around I am going to be as pale as a ghost. Oh, Egypt, how is it that I have traveled thousands of miles and still can’t keep you out of my head? If only I had some legitimate reason to visit. And stay.

Alack. I have been reading too much Amelia Peabody lately.

Well, back on this side of reality and practicality lies the honest and quite happy truth that, at the moment, I am beginning to attain some sense of my ever increasing vocabulary and sensitivity to cultural issues. I could regale you with tales that you would with no doubt find absolutely useless, however amusing. But rest assured, I have never been happier in Russia than I am right now, for better or for worse, I am looking forward to the rest of the year, and am so pleased that I will be here until May.

Oh, and as a final note, perhaps a plug, if you will, for the Rosetta stone program. I have been working through mine quite faithfully over the last month, and am all the more impressed with it, as I have even now begun to cover prefixed and un-prefixed verbs of motion, as well as aspect. This probably means nothing to you dear reader. And that is quite alright. Take away from this discourse merely that you get what you pay for, which in this case, means a computer program that can help jumpstart you into a language or provide a comprehensive review. I highly recommend it (and further more think that it would be very fun to create a series for the program in Ancient Egyptian). Once again, alack, I have been reading too much Amelia Peabody. But this is what happens when I only get the internet twice a week, at about two hours at a time. I read. A lot. Coincidentally, if you are looking for a nice, light book to read (that is to say, it’s a thick book, but not mentally challenging), I recommend “The Temple” by Matthew Reilly. It has a bit of bad language, but it’s really very entertaining, and the story moves very quickly.

My word. This was a long entry. So much is happening! Ahh! It’s bedtime here. Which means that the rest of you crazy kids are probably just starting your day. Or in the middle of it. Irregardless. Good night.

Number of Days in Russia: 34...Days I've not seen a Wedding Party: 0

2008-09-30T03:34:00.001-04:00

29 September 2008

Well, Fall is officially over. The leaves have all fallen from the trees and in the last few days the temperature has plummeted. Thankfully, I have been able to waterproof all of my belongings before the rain/sleet/snow sets in. (The weather was negligibly mentioned in the study abroad brochure. I now see why.)

Today I have somewhat mixed feelings towards the Russian language (and through my beautiful skills as a raconteur, you will understand why.)

Monday of last week marked the beginning of the transition into fall. Sigh. I remember it so well, as if it were yesterday. It was warm enough to go out in flip-flops (thereby clearly marking me as non-Russian) and a light sweater. I spent the day at school and the afternoon trying to convince the cell phone machine to recharge the minutes on my phone (their payment plans are really quite innovative, and thereby frustrating to first time users). In the end I succeeded.

The week improved, with similarly wonderful weather on Tuesday. The most I can say about this day is what I wrote down in my planner: talked to Mom, Tyler, and Rachel; Saw Heroes Season 3 premiere.

I lead an exciting life. But that season opener was awesome.

On Wednesday I got all crazy and social and met up with a friend I’d met on Sunday for a youth group of sorts. Oh man. This place is so far from the kind of church I grew up in. I love my home church, but this was a lot of fun too; very charismatic with lots of shouting. But it got me home at 10:45 at night. And my house mother still fed me a massive dinner. Russia is just going to kill my feminine figure. Sigh. Oh well!

At this point my week took a swan dive into sickness, not to mention a particularly nasty grammar test (the beginning of my current consternation with the language).

So my weekend was blissfully uneventful. I left the house (count it) once. For church. Clearly, I’m a wild child.

To make up for the lack on interpersonal contact with real people, I settled for the imaginary ones in my books, and so spent the greater part of Sunday reading Harry Potter (in Russian) and Elizabeth Peters (in English, although, I would kill to get copies of her stuff in Russian. Although I’m really not sure how well that would translate.).

Which leads me to the dull and dreary present. Leafless. Cold. And me, with a lung that is intent on leaving my body by means of my throat.

I need to get back to my Russian studies, I find that the greatest frustration at the moment is seeing a sentence and understanding most of the parts, but currently misinterpreting the one key word, and thereby misunderstanding most of what anyone says to me. Including six year olds. Which is just entirely frustrating.

But alack. I am merely on my journey up the learning curve.

Mummies and Fountains and Cemeteries, Oh my!

2008-09-22T01:24:00.000-04:00

21 September 2008

Well, what a fantastic week it has been! This post marks the beginning of my freedom! That is to say, we are no longer on orientation, free on the weekends, and several nights of the week. Needless to say, I am very judicious in how I spend my time (read: I study. A lot. Believe me, I need it.)

As I am writing this, I don’t know if anyone has responded to my request and written me regarding travel plans and ideas. I really hope you have. I am at a loss, mostly because a pub crawl across Eastern Europe doesn’t appeal to me, and that seems to be what several people are currently planning. Right now, I am considering a tour of the Golden Ring (all the wickedly old cities in Russia) or maybe just dawdling in St. Petersburg, and by that, I mean the Hermitage. But more on that later. I must proceed in a chronological manner or not at all.

The night after I posted last, I attended something of a round table session at St. Petersburg State University (I go to school at one of the centers not on the main campus), in a library that could have been pulled out of a movie (maybe the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that library where they meet Dorian Grey). Anyways, the topic was Russia in the West, which could have been incredibly awkward. But it was fascinating! We had people there from Sweden, Italy, Germany, and Ireland, not to mention a whole group of Russians. We discussed the image of Russia, and the images and stereotypes that we retain of one another; first in English and then in Russian. It was a good vocabulary exercise, as I frantically scribbled down words in my notebook of words which mystify and escape my feeble understanding. Irregardless, I enjoyed myself very much, and am looking forward to the next opportunity to meet Russians.

Friday found me exhausted. Classes dragged on through the day and ended on the happy note of my Civilization Class. I reproduce here what we learned so you can rest at ease that I am using my time wisely:

Principally, we are examining right now the system of values that underlies Russian Culture and how these values can be contrasted to American Culture. The Russian system of values consists of nine principal values (according to my professor): 1. Stability, 2. Fatalism (hence, the aforementioned importance of fate), 3. Collectivism (the “we,” no “me” culture), 4. Dependence on Public Opinion (in the US, she explained, although public opinion is collected and analyzed, it doesn’t drive policy nearly as much as in Russia), 5. And orientation to family and family values, 6. Impracticality, 7. Nostalgia for the past, 8. Irresponsibility (Who is to blame? According to the Professor, Russians will answer, “Not Me.”), and finally 9. Deference in regard to social statues.

This same article contrasted what they saw as the principal American Values (there are thirteen, I’m not numbering them): Mobility and the willingness to change, Personal Control over one’s environment, Time and its control, Equality/Egalitarianism, Individualism/Independence and Privacy, Self-Help, Competition and Free Enterprise, Future Orientation/Optimism, Action and work orientation, Informality, Direction/Openness and Honesty, Practicality/Efficiency, and Materialism/Acquisitiveness.

Endlessly interesting. This will be our springboard for the rest of the semester as I understand it. Already, I am feeling as though I understand the Russian Soul a little more.

So, Friday classes end and I move to my computer to find things on the internet. Namely, someplace where I can catch up on my favorite TV show, Bones. To end the story quickly, I found it, watched that first episode, and realized how much I love that show. It’s ingenious.

But I felt slightly guilty after this, filling my head with English after I have spent so much of my time devoting myself to Russian. So, on my way home, I wandered into a Russian Movie store, and found, among many, many other things: Season One of Alias (except here, its just called ‘Spy’), all seasons of Lost, and most Disney movies ever made. I bought Anastasia (in Russian, but it apparently can also be watched in English! Score!). The only downside is that I can’t actually watch the darn thing on my computer without changing the region code of my DVD driver, which I can do, but only four times. So I am holding out until I can find either some way to circumvent this silly rule, or until I really really want to watch the movie. Hrm, this should be an interesting exercise in self-control.

Anyways, on to more practical matters. Yesterday, we went to Peterhof. It’s an official UNESCO world Heritage site, and hopefully, by the time you’re reading this I will have figured out how the widget works and have uploaded all of my photos to this site. When and if you see these photos, you will understand. This place is a masterpiece, with hundreds upon hundreds of fountains in every shape and size, most of them coated in Gold. There were cascades and artificial waterfalls. And there even was a palace to top it all off. Could you imagine what kind of person would come home to that? Crazy. The only thing that I could possibly compare it to (and it would be an insult to both parties, as they really are incomparable), is Hearst’s Castle in California. They are both ostentatious, but marvelous. It was an exhausting day, and I got home that night, and promptly fell asleep. (One thing I almost forgot is that I have tried Kvass, a sort of bread-root-beer drink. And I don’t like it, and furthermore don’t recommend it. Stick to tea.)

Which leads me to today (don’t you love all the minute details of my life? At least this way, I can pretend you are all here with me. And I won’t have to tell all these stories when I get back. I really am a selfish creature.). I found a couple of churches that I’d wanted to try out and see if I liked. The first one on my list had written that they meet at 11 a.m. on the top floor of a Lutheran Church, so I make it out there in time, but, lo and behold, there is construction blocking the way up to the top floor! I find someone, and squeeze out that information that the church I was looking for met there at 6 p.m. /le sigh/ So, I get out of there and decide that I would rather walk home (it was only a kilometer or two, what could possibly go wrong with this plan?) than waste another metro token. So, I take out my trusty map, and plot a course. Along my way, I was a very good student and wrote down all the words which I didn’t understand. There were a lot of them.

My plotted path took my through a park. At least, it was big green patch on the map. So I thought it was a park. No. It was cemetery.

So. Two fascinating and somewhat depressing hours later, I found my way back home. Interestingly enough, the Russians have different burial practices than we do. Mainly, each grave is surrounded by some kind of barrier, be it stone or a simple fence. But every single one is separate. And the entire area is insanely overgrown. Traditionally, as I have understood it, American Cemeteries are well-kept, with grass trimmed generally and some order followed. This cemetery was very much in the middle of a forest. So many of the graves were hidden from view and were visible only to those who searched between the foliage to see them. In a way, it was oddly peaceful, a fitting tribute to the people who were interred there. There was an unfitting tribute or two however. That is, a few homeless people had made their homes on top of raised graves. Altogether a morbid mix.

Shortly thereafter, I gladly accepted an invitation to the Hermitage and was awed. Floored, in fact, by their Ancient Egypt Room. I’m going back. More than once; in fact, there was talk about establishing a weekly Hermitage day when we would go and study at one of the several cafes. Walking around in there was awe-inspiring. Room after room of opulence. I never even dreamed that places like that existed. I mean, you see them in the movies, but I suppose I never took the time to think about how big, how grand those palaces were. (All these impressions I got from touring one small corner, and only the first two floors at that.) In that small space, I saw Rembrandt’s, a sculpture by Michelangelo, and in the prehistoric area, which I got lost in while trying to find the mummy and the Egypt room, there were all these boxes in the middle of halls as we were walking that were marked Fragile and all that, and it was a new exhibition! Just sitting there. Unguarded, whilst I reflected on how many objects go missing every year in Russian museums. But I digress.

Directly following that fascinating encounter, I made my way back to church, this time at the appointed hour. Fantastic. I walked in and sit in an out of the way corner, introducing myself in Russian to the man in the pew in front of me. I sit and listen in to the worship band practicing, and realized I knew the song, although, I only knew the melody and words in English. More people come in; the place began to fill up, and to my immense surprise: people start speaking English. Mind you, only about half of them; but still, it came as a big surprise. As the service started, we sang a lot of songs, all of them in Russian, but, as I said I knew the melodies. So let me tell you, praising God in a whole other language is pretty cool.

So the pastor comes up with his Bible and a man stands next to him. And the entire service is bilingual! The pastor teaches in Russian (by the way, I understood a good 80 per cent of it! Score one for Laura!), pausing after every sentence or so while the other man translates. It was amazing. I really enjoyed the service, and was thrilled to meet so many bilingual (well, most of them were actually trilingual) people. In that one church, I met people from Cuba, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Nigeria, and the USA. It’s a lot of fun to be able to communicate with someone from a third party country, and even though you have barely anything in common, you share this language, and the passion for studying it. The other exciting thing is that, of the Russian speakers, only half of them speak English, so it’s still really good for my speaking skills, and the other half that already do speak English just help you out for the most part; in my case, correcting my horrendous grammar. (Of the six cases in the Russian language, there are two which I routinely confuse. It’s really the most frustrating thing.)

So, needless to say, this weekend was a lot of fun. The end of orientation was too long in coming, and now that I am free to myself, I think I will finally see my practical knowledge of Russian increase. Hooray!!!

And now I am exhausted and ready for sleep again.

Russia: Land of Beautiful Women and Strange Men.

2008-09-18T06:43:00.000-04:00

18 September 2008

Okay, so this time it’s not entirely my fault that I haven’t updated in a week as the internet has been intermittently going out at school (which is the only place where I’ve found reliable and free internet), so I haven’t had the opportunity to do anything constructive.

Over the last week, I’ve been putting together a lot of future plans, but I’d love input. Anyways, that comes later.

First off, Opera! I’ve ordered tickets to Aida and Carmen! Yaaaay! I can’t wait (But, as Tyler would say, I have to); it’s going to be so much fun. But freezing, as the weather here is colder than normal (so say the natives) and we are probably in for a colder than average winter. Score.

Much to my crushing disappointment, I haven’t gotten to the Hermitage, though not for lack of trying, as we went there one day, but it was already closed. But the good news is that due to my student status, we get free tickets! So, I am going to hit that place up…soon. I am still trying to find tickets to a Zenit FC game, but seriously, I have never seen such expensive tickets! I really want to go, but I really like to eat food, too. I guess I will have to decide soon.

Anyway, I have to tell you about my classes, after all, they are why I’m here, studying and all that. My civilization and current press is interesting and much more ambiguous than even the original title could have suggested. Thankfully, it’s very much student driven, and she lets us determine the course of the content. We all sit around an oval table (there are 6 of us and about 15 chairs, so we all huddle at one end with her on the other. And then the funniest thing happens. As she teaches, she becomes more and more animated and in between walking around and lecturing she ends up playing a sort of musical chairs, hopping from one to the next. So really, her class is a two for one. Altogether quite enjoyable. One fact, which, if nothing else, I have learned from this class is that is the importance of fate for Russians.

If Eskimos have some 80-odd words for snow, then Russians have at least 100 words for fate. It’s a powerful thing for them.

In my literature class, we are reading Pushkin and opining on his deeper significance. I am pretty sure I have never felt stupider than when sitting in my phonetics saying pee-pee, poo-poo, and trying to learn how to say things correctly in Russian. It’s very aggravating, and if anyone ever walked in on that class, well, I really don’t even know what they could possibly think, its almost too absurd.

Grammar and Conversation classes are another thing entirely. My brain is about an hour away from exploding from everything which I have been learning. And my flimsy little notebook which I bought for writing down words I didn’t know is almost full. The weeks are exhausting.

The weekends, likewise, are both exhilarating and exhausting! We went this last weekend to a magical place called Novgorod, or, the place where archaeologists go to retire (if Egypt is full). First off, this place is about 3 hours from Petersburg, so we go by double decker bus. Awesome. This city was a central hub for trade and religion in the 10^th through like the 15^th or so century, so it is littered by old churches and ruins. I had too much fun buying souvenirs, but have started creating a wishlist of things that I need to pick up over the next 8 months. So if you want something, speak up now. I am not a mind reader. That’s not even on my list of preferred super powers (first is Rogue’s absorption power, second is telekinesis, third is weather manipulation).

Back to Novgorod. So, the city is old. In the center of all old Russian cities is this thing called a Kremlin, it’s a fortress of sorts, that generally has a church and old government buildings. Fascinating stuff. But this particular Kremlin was made all the more appealing by the restaurant we went into, which was inside the wall of the Kremlin. It was completely Medieval, and the most delicious food I’ve ever eaten. Which takes me to a tangent: food in Russia is so much better than I’d ever imagined, whatever weight loss I might’ve been aiming for has gone out the window. Food here is too good. And plentiful; and tended by women with mother instincts that extend to every living person who is younger than them.

I have been meeting quite a few Russians lately, spurred on by my desire to only speak in Russian (which I have been mostly keeping to, except when I talk to my family!).

Well, there is so much to tell and my hands cramp for trying to type it all! I will sum up the rest of my adventures with a list; that seems to work well for me.

So here are the interesting things I’ve seen this week:

Tuesday morning I get a text from the program director telling us to walk to school instead of trying to catch a bus into the vicinity. Ooookay. Strange. So I walk to school that morning and see why: In front of our school (the cathedral that would squish Cinderella’s castle) is an entire racetrack, and grown ups are racing around in their mini European Cars. It was entertaining to say the least.
On the metro I saw a man who had a pet monkey dressed in human clothes. I kind of wanted to steal it and run, but there was no good opportunity.
On the absolute saturation of American Pop Culture: in the market I go to for my odds and ends, there are a lot of little shops as well as the grocery part, and on my way back home, in the media stall they are playing High School Musical. I thought of my brother and sister and just laughed.
On the practicality of Russians: at the checkout line, there are the standard candies and batteries, but Russians also add condoms and pregnancy tests. I really wish that was the strangest thing that I’d seen.

Finally, I need some help. This is my first time out of the United States. But some of you have traveled more. So here is an explanation followed by a query. I have just found out that classes get out on December 20 and don’t start out again until the 21^st of January. Furthermore, I have an extra 10 days at the end of the program for free travel, and two other weeks in the semester purposely left for travel. That’s a lot of time for little Laura.

So, any and all suggestions are welcome! You can post them here or email me at JCartesia at gmail.com. Seriously. I don’t even know where to start. Also, if there is anything you want to know about Russia or my time here, email me and ask, otherwise, you’re just going to continue getting my strange outlook on life and my misadventures.

One blog that covers it all (and by all, I mean the last week).

2008-09-09T04:43:00.001-04:00

8 September 2008

Oh no! A whole week without writing! And not for lack of happenings; they have been pushing us so hard though! By the time I get home, I’m lucky if I’m not passing out over my dinner.
This leaves so much to cover! Luckily, I take notes in my daily planner to spark my memory.

Rewinding back a week; I placed in group 3 of our language program, which was fantastic considering this is my first time in Russia and all of my language experience has been over the last year.

That same day (the actual first day of classes), we visited something called Peter and Paul fortress. It was pretty neat. The entire fortress is done in an Italian style with six sides (apparently that part was important, the tour guide must have repeated that six times). It was the first official building in St. Petersburg and is situated on something called Hare Island, smack dab in the middle of the Neva. Anyways, this place was originally build to have no walkways, and all canals, and you can tell which of the pathways were later filled with stone. The biggest building in the fort is the Church, wherein are buried most, if not all of the czars after Peter the Great, including the entire Romanoff family (and a headstone for Anastasia as well). The church was beautiful, and I’ve posted the pictures on my facebook and as well as myspace. So go and check them out! There were also very many nice views from the fort, where you have an uninterrupted vista of the skyline.

Following the tour, we passed through this park on the way to the metro stop and saw the most amazing little bar I’ve ever seen. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. The doors and one wall were the only thing above ground, and the rest of it was nestled into the side of a little hill (like a hobbit house!). It was just the cutest darned thing. I was waiting for a troll or ogre to come trotting out and was vastly disappointed when none did.

That was the end of that day’s adventures.

Some time later, we met with a friend of a friend (you know how these things go), and found a espresso bar with free internet. So I order this hot chocolate, and we chit chat away in our polyglottic ways and my drink comes to me, all cute with a straw and whipped cream on top. And I took a hefty swig, the fact that it was a scalding hot beverage momentarily passing from my mind. That fact came screaming back to me about half a second later.

I stopped speaking for a while after that.

But, that day, we did learn something very interesting about the metro. Apparently, the stop on the most popular street in the city closes down from 5 to 7 pm, because there is apparently a wall, or walkway, or something to that effect that they repair for just that time frame.

So. That was the adventure for a day. Not much of an adventure, but something of a prelude for what happened later that week:

So. I walk with a friend to the trolleybus stop because she wasn’t sure where it was and I knew; I dropped her off because, ho hum, I want to get home early and rest, because I was exhausted. Genius I am, I figure I know the path well enough to press on. This works well, because the biggest landmark between school and the metro stop is this massive garden/park. So I am a few blocks down from said park. And I figure I will just trace my way along and find the park after a couple of blocks (mistake number one). These blocks come and go and I find a park. Only, oh no. It’s wrong, so I figured I was just too far east. So I kept walking to the left (mistake number two). And I figured my internal map was still working (mistake number three. I’m out). And hour and half later, after having walked through the seediest back streets which are avoided even by well-to-do mangy stray dogs, having sighted a bar/saloon/restaurant called “MONTANA” (but it’s even funnier in Cyrillic characters), and having made a two hour, six kilometer circle around the original metro stop and somehow still missing entirely two other metro stops, I am back about four blocks from where I started. What a way to start the weekend.

The weekend was by no means a loss though! On Saturday we traveled by train and metro to get to this place called Pavlosk, which was the Palace of Paul. First of all, this place is largest landscaped park in Europe, which means it’s gorgeous, and it knows it. It was something out of a fairy tale (most of my Russian stories start with such a back drop), there is a single gate across the street from the metro stop, and behind it, all you can see are endless perfect rows of pine trees which are so tall you nearly fall over trying to see them. The air itself is almost green (the healthy color green) from all the plant life crowding around you. You follow the dark and damp path along, past lakes and fields, meadows and ponds, until you bend around a curve and suddenly, the entire view opens up, and there are rolling hills, with moss covered stairs, and crumbling statues. At the bottom of one little meadow was this circular gazebo, but it wasn’t so much a gazebo as it was a solid structure with tall oak doors and muses painted around the top. On the other side of the valley, there is a lone marble statue of a woman (who ended up being Pax).

By the time we reached the palace I was already in love. This place clinched the deal though. Tragically, the place had been occupied by the Nazis during World War two, and they destroyed it on their way out. The destruction of this place was actually included in the list of crimes that the Nazis were charged with at Nuremburg. I’ve included photos of this whole area. The amount of restoration is astonishing, especially when looking at the before and after of the different rooms. From what I understood, they had enough time to clear out all the possessions of the palace before the Nazis came, so all the furnishings and pictures were authentic.

After the palace, we were free to stay and wander or to leave for Petersburg again. A group of us opted to stay and we wandered about for hours on end from one end of the park to the other. The sheer magnitude of the place is amazing, and we left being pretty sure that you could camp out in the woods for weeks at a time before anyone came across you. There was even one landmark of sorts which we found where you stood in the middle of this circle of trees (like twelve trees), and you turned in a full circle you could see that all roads led to precisely that point. We also found an old bunker from only goodness knows when, that was filled with of trash (but no bodies, we checked. Collectively, we read too many mystery novels.)

We finally trekked back to town and got yelled at (or towards, we weren’t sure exactly if they were yelling at us or just in our direction) by a lady with hair frizzier than mine. We caught a train and I got a cone of ice cream for less than fifty cents. Talk about an awesome day.

As if that wasn’t enough for one weekend, the next day we had a scavenger hunt. A real honest to goodness one across the entire city. The overall group was divided up four ways into teams and given a list of monuments and random things to find, photograph, or obtain. This list included: our negotiations with a gypsy cab drive (who wanted 150 rubles to go a block), a photograph with the militsia, dinosaur statues, kvass cans, and group photos around and about the city. We had five hours, and at the end, I was the last person (who’d been sent to ride the tramvai and come back with my ticket) and was jogging the last half-mile so I could meet up with the group to get our last group photo. The competition went to the team with the most points and my team won!!! Yay! And now, courtesy CIEE, we all get a night at the movies. And they play American films! (Interestingly enough, today I say the Mummy 3 on sale at the Russian equivalent of Target).

Today we went to the mall. Which sounds like it wouldn’t be hard. But it was a marshrutka, and the a metro, and then another bus ride away. But it was a super-mall, with an Ikea, and every high-end store you can think of. Strangely enough, they even had a Quicksilver. I really used to think that store only operated in California.

I’ve started assembling a list of things I’ve learned in/about Russia and Russians, so I will start it here and continue adding on as I go:

1. There are man purses here. Not as feminine as purses, but not as manly as messenger bags.

2. Men don’t believe in deodorant.

3. Men who wear all denim (this leads into number 4) should be avoided at all costs, they smell especially bad.

4. Russia is about 2 decades behind as far as fashion goes: mullets are in for boys and girls have this hairdo with bangs all the way around their head. And spandex is taking the city by storm.

5. Red lights are suggestions.

6. Sidewalks are only sometimes for people. Cars like them too.

Oh! But I had my first dream in Russian. That was strange. And as aggravating as well, dreaming in a foreign language can be. I was trying to buy vegetables in my dream, and I think I was trying to get the woman to cut them up, or I didn’t want them cut up. And I kept using all the wrong words. It was very frustrating.

So that’s all for now. It’s almost lunch time. But I do have a couple of very funny other stories that generally involve my inability to speak/understand Russian. Ahh, but we’ll save that for next time.

First week's Blog(s)! It's a bargain!

2008-09-02T01:18:00.000-04:00

August 26/27, 2008

Well, today was the first (sort of) day of my study abroad experience. I only say ‘sort of,’ because it was really a two day sort of day. Let’s not skip anything, so you can rejoice in my idiocy:

First, thanks to Heather, I didn’t completely miss my flight (seriously, I thought I checked in at 3. Oh no, the plane left at three.) I made it in quite safely and was waiting for my international flight from New York to Paris, and because of that crazy-fun glitch in the FAA’s system, we idled on the tarmac for two hours, thereby putting me into all of a tizzy because I thought I was going to miss my connecting flight from Paris to St. Petersburg. So, I get to Paris and realize that my connecting flight has no gate number, no terminal number, and I am watching the clock as its 5 minutes from boarding time. Lots of panic had me jogging across two terminals, hitching a shuttle to the second half of another terminal and wheezing my way over to the gate where…boarding had been delayed for an extra half-hour. So you’d think I was off the hook, what with almost missing my flight (twice) and all. No.

The nice man scanned my ticket and nothing popped up. He couldn’t figure it out, so he called two other people over, and with their walkie-talkies snapping away in French, something got resolved and I was able to get on the flight. Only, that resolution came back to bite me.

My last flight was the worst one then, as I hadn’t slept or eaten on the last two flights and was getting a little dizzy, and the high flying antics of the pilot had me sprinting for more happy barf bags. Yucko; we land in St. Petersburg Pulkovo 2 airport. And if you are ever aching to see a truly depressing example of Soviet architecture, Pulkovo would win. It is drab, dreary, and just hideously ugly. And here is where the resolution the nice French people had made came back to get me: although my antics from one end to the other of Charles De Gaulle airport had gotten me to my connection in time, the bags hadn’t been so fortunate. Although the lady was as nice as she could be in informing me of this, and bringing me to the horrific conclusion that my bags were coming, but wouldn’t be there for several more hours at the least and the bus with my study abroad program was already leaving. So, they helped me sort it out that my bag would be delivered as soon as it came in (it actually hasn’t yet). I have improvised, and never been more thankful that I packed a back up set of clothes and face wash.

But Russia is so very beautiful. Granted, I am going through what is called the ‘honeymoon’ stage with my host country; it really is putting on a dazzling show. St. Petersburg, in size, is the third largest city in Europe and besides that is closely cropped by these massive trees that are the deepest shade of green. It looks like a fairy tale land, especially as we passed small log cabins and rustic homes on the way to our orientation. The funniest things I’ve seen so far were a giant bust of Repin (an artist, although, his busts bears a striking similar to Lenin.) in the front yard of this place, (the Zarya Hotel in Repino, Russia), a KFC, and the biggest IKEA I’d ever seen. By the time I post with this, we will be back in St. Petersburg, but even at 10 p.m. there is enough light to walk by and the air is thick with smoke from burning fires. Heavenly. Or Twilight-y. Either epithet certainly fits.

August 28, 2008

Today was orientation day. Yipee. So nothing exciting to report, except that we get into the Hermitage for free with our Russian Student IDs! And you can volunteer there (as you may be able to imagine, my heart skipped a little beat. And not that I ever ever ever would, but security is notoriously, perhaps even infamously, lax in Russian museums.) So I am keeping my options open.

At our post-lunch break, my roommate and I were flipping through the channels on our TV, and came across: Scrubs, Spanish Soap Operas, and Enrique Iglesias; all of which were very poorly dubbed into Russian. Overall, it’s mostly just very funny.

After dinner and our very last batch of orientations, we headed out to the beach and watched the Gulf of Finland! It is so beautiful to see massive pines give way suddenly to sand and sea. And the cottages along the way are so quaint, I am just waiting for the Russian equivalent of Hansel and Gretel to come trotting along the path anytime now.

I can hardly believe that a week ago I was watching the sun set in California. The contrast is a glorious tribute.

So now, I am off to read and study for my upcoming placement exam for the program, as I suddenly have this horrific fear that I will fail it and get demoted to the Culture Section.

30 August 30, 2008

I missed just one day and so much has been going on! We left the resort town of Repino around 2, and spent the next 5 hours on the “orphan bus,” as we nicknamed it, seeing as we were being dropped off one by one to our new families.

I moved in with my host family, and I live with the sweetest lady on Vassilevsky Island. The thing about homes in general in Russia is that you really can’t judge anything by how it looks on the outside, or even by the hallways and stairwells, because Russians understand above all that your home is your sanctuary. So far, Russia has been pretty amazing. Today, we took a bus tour of the entire city, with a lady tour guide who gave us the run down on every statue, building, fountain, and bridge (there really are a lot of these). Unfortunately, I am rapidly realizing that my foundation in Russian is meager at most, because I think I caught about half of what this lady was saying. But that’s why I’m here.

Then we got blood drawn for another batch of HIV tests (yuck, but an essential part of the extension for our visas.). I dislike needles. A lot.

Anyways, on to happier things! We ate blini (kind of a pastry, like tortillas, but thinner and way more versatile, you can seriously put anything in these) at a little chain restaurant that is about to go global. Walking along Bolshoi Prospekt on this island, or walking anywhere in St. Petersburg is very funny as half the signs are Cyrillic transliterations of Global brands (McDonald’s; which is apparently the place for young kids to hang out. Sbarro’s, etc).

Staying with a host family really is the nicest thing. The first thing I agreed with my host mother was that she would correct any mistakes that I made with my Russian. And since she doesn’t speak any English, I can’t really cheat at this; which is good, just a little funny though when it’s me sitting in the kitchen with her and my dictionary. And speaking of kitchens and food! Oh my, people feed me like 5 times a day. It’s crazy. It’s all so good, but by the end of the day I think I may pop. Thankfully St. Petersburg is a place you can expend a lot of energy just walking around in. Oh! And, well, it’s a little hard to explain, but two Metro stops down from my (Primorskaya) stop, is Nevsky Prospekt, the main street of St. Petersburg, that has all these beautiful churches and stores and just everything. Well, first, we come up out of the metro and there is Kazansky Cathedral, and, although I wrote this long (and mostly interpretive) paper on that place, but it was just so surprising that is was right there. In the flesh, or stone, if you will. Right across the street was this store Dom Knigi “House of Books,” which is there equivalent of Barnes and Noble, but this thing is all gorgeous architecture with a state of atlas holding up the earth and angels and floor-to-ceiling windows. ::SIGH:: It was amazing.

Also, as you may gather, since I am posting all of this at the same time pretty much, that internet is somewhat scarce in ole Peter. But one place, called Coffee Haus (that’s a phonetic translation, its fun to say), has free wi-fi! Or if you pretend to be a guest at one of the nicer hotels. They have free internet too.

One last funny thing: Casino Royale was on tonight. Good movie. Almost as much fun to watch it in Russian.

1 September 2008

Today is the first day of classes for all of Russia and something of a national holiday! I didn’t get any pictures of them, but all the children dress up in their nicest clothes, and bring flowers for their teachers on the first day of school. It was the cutest thing!

I missed an update for yesterday, but we had a massive scavenger hunt of sorts across the city! We split up into groups and tried to photograph as many National Monuments and tourist sights as we could. I have (hopefully) appended such photos here, or if not, on my facebook. We did see many beautiful things, but also many stranger things as well.

As we were on our way through Alexandrevskiy Park to visit the famous statue of Peter the Great, we saw a man with a bear on a leash. Yes. Bear on a leash. It was the strangest thing, but really quite interesting. The little guy was quite sick though, so we weren’t allowed to pet him. Later on, as we were walking by the Winter Palace, and through this thing called the Arka Glavnoe Shtatov, which I think the Bolshevik’s marched through when they were revolting. But I could have the wrong army. Either way, walking through there we saw these massive eagles that look fierce enough to tear a man to shreds, and one of the two keepers also kept a monkey on his back. A strange troupe overall.

It also is true that dogs and cats are quite abundant here, although not in the feral scary way that most stray pets exist as people are still quite superstitious and feed stray cats well, so they are the smuggest animals on the continent.

After this adventure or sorts, we met as a group at the Carl’s Jr. off Nevsky Prospect, which was not very good, but the interior is beautiful, with vinyl posters of Californian scenes and MTV playing in the background. It was strange to see the scences here in Russia, but I definitely prefer Teremok’s food. Irregardless, we went our separate ways after this and I ended up in this book store called Dom Knigi (House of Books. Apt description.) And whilst I wandered around I ended up in the Kids section and bought…Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban!!!! And although I almost bought the kids version I recognize and love, I saw the adult cover for this book and bought it instead. It is way cooler (I have pictures of that lurking somewhere on my camera).

Today we had our big placement exam, and it was dreadful.

Imagine all those ridiculous standardized tests you take in school, where they ask you to substitute one grammatical clause for whichever one is the best fit. I remember not liking those in English, and now I definitely don’t like them in Russian. Thankfully though, I don’t think I’ll get demoted from the Language Program, as the interview went marginally better.

Oh yes! I haven’t even begun to tell you about where I go to school!

I go to school at this place called the Smolny Institute, which is a part of St. Petersburg State University, called the Center for Russian Language and Culture. So, this building was actually built by Catherine the Great as a school for the daughters of aristocrats and royalty. The premises are shared with the mayor of St. Petersburg, and the entire campus looks like it fell out of a fairy tale. I will post pictures as soon as I can, but this place is just so gorgeous, I doubt even photos will do it justice. It is painted sky blue for the most part, with white details and gold on the very top of the domes. And all the insides are still original! Which is both good (It’s beautiful) and bad (The stairwells are worn down by 250+ years of use. Don’t try to text and walk; it’s hazardous for your health).

Otherwise, besides my first experience with the jam-packed metro, my day was full of slightly more banal adventures, which merit no repetition here.

Education Extravaganza!

2008-08-11T18:43:00.002-04:00

I have just now registered for classes in this upcoming semester. Hurray! As I am attending CIEE's Russian Language Program, the core of my classes are in language*: Advanced Grammar, Advanced Phonetics, Advanced Conversation, Analytical Readings of 19th-Century Russian Literature, and Russian Civilization and Current Press (which, in between characters like Anna Politkovskaya and Paul Klebnikov and events of the last few days should be amazing!)

But, we also get to go on these "cultural activities," which is a nice way of saying field trips. We never went on field trips in high school (no funding), so it seems my illiteracy in sponsored adventures is rapidly coming to an end. Think of all the ballets and operas! And museums, oh. Museums. I love them.

*I have a good quote on the versatility of linguistic aptitude: "One advantage of an advanced education is that it provides you with such an extensive list of languages to swear in."

Packing Day! (or, more aptly, laundry day)

2008-08-11T12:31:00.002-04:00

Well, my schedule is about to become all kinds of hectic. Today I am doing all of my laundry and packing my bags. One bag for my trip to California (apparently my parents would like to see me at least once this year), and the other bag for Russia.

Tomorrow I leave for California! Perhaps I will take many pictures and post them. As for today, I am making plans for currency pick-ups and buying batteries and getting my second-to-last Giffords Sundae. (I'm addicted to their coconut ice cream, it's quite good. Unfortunately, unless you live in the DC area, you will be forever denied this scrumptious treat.)

So, now that packing is just about finished, I am going to play tourist for the rest of the day, and go ogle at the Sargent that they keep in the National Portrait gallery (there are times that I wish I was an unprincipled art thief. Drat.)

Step Two. One last flit across the country.

2008-08-05T16:53:00.002-04:00

Okay. Months of silence from me. Sorry. But nothing travel-related has happened much lately. Until this last week, that is!

This is the final countdown; in three weeks I will be in the air, on my way out of the country. But before that I am spending my last 10 days between my parents and two younger siblings, so before I leave for California for one last hurrah, I am starting to pack my bags for Russia, buying currency, and any last items that I might need (like a tape recorder, I think I may do some informal interviews. After all, this is a study abroad trip, not an international tour of bars and clubs. Apparently, some people like to do that.)

The only current dilemma is a combination of books and weight problems. Too many books, and not enough pounds allowed through customs. Oh well, I am glad that that is the biggest of my current problems.

Back to the studying portion of the abroad, I am going as a student first, tourist second. So I figure that I might lay down a few goals, in the spirit that if I write them down in a place where other people can see them, I will be more inclined to follow through on them:

#1: I would like to get an understanding of what it means to be Russian in today's world, in terms of nationalism, how they see Russia in the world, how they see various other countries in light of their history with them (especially: Turkey, China, Japan, United States, the UK, and Finland).

#2: I would like to see every single item in the Hermitage Museum, and visit the Anthropology and Ethnography Museum.

#3: I'd like to spend a day/weekend puttering around one of the many archaeological sites in Old St. Pete's, and pick up some of the technical jargon in Russian.

#4: I will, repeat, will, be reading Pushkin's Bronze Horseman, in Russian, at the foot of said statue. I don't care how trite that may be.

#5: I would like to go and visit the Solovetsky Islands, granted, that I can take a boat, and not a dog sled. (It gets cold and icy.)

#6: I will try at least one new Russian dish a week. (That includes desserts. Yay.)

#7: I will only write this blog (and update my facebook accordingly) in English. Otherwise, as per my agreement with CIEE, and further cemented by my promise to the IIE and NSEP, I will not be communicating via the English language.

I will also try to keep a journal, but seeing as I have 7 goals, and seven being perfectly acceptable prime number, I will leave journal-keeping as a suggestion to myself rather than a compulsory activity.

Having just finished reading my fourth travel guide on the area, I am quite thrilled that my year is about to begin in St. Petersburg. I know many people question the sanity of living in Russia for a year or so, rather than under the Mediterranean sun or on some tourist study-cruise ship, but I am fully committed and absurdly excited about the coming year, especially in light of the socio-political climate. For me, this is perfect.

Getting on my way. Sort of.

2008-05-14T14:26:00.000-04:00

Well, step one of my travels are over.

That is, I no longer live in Texas. At the moment I have gone from squatting in the middle of nowhere, to the middle of everything (DC). Seriously, when I walk straight out our door, it is a perfectly straight shot to the Museum of Natural History! And besides that, I pass the Cato Institute (think tank), the FBI building, and if I get sidetracked (which almost always happens; I run into the most interesting things), the Museum of Crime and Punishment.

I love this town. At the moment the weather is positively glamorous, the humidity is much more tolerable than Texas. And since its not so much like California (where everyday is relatively beautiful), people really appreciate and get out doors.

The downside to my own fascination with this place is that I pay less attention to where I am actually going when I start walking someplace, which, predictably, leads to extended travel time but very interesting mini-adventures. But I love the National Gallery of Art; I could, and often do, get lost in there on purpose.

I have a job for the summer, predictably, in a book store. Barnes and Noble. Not too bad at all, especially the hefty discounts, which works out for the best, because I am going to be the most informed little student before I even set foot in Russia. Yay! And besides that, who knew that a paycheck could so quickly be turned into a large pile of very good books?

Oh, I got all distracted! The point of this post is to say what my blog will cover over the next year or so! I am moving to Russia, St. Petersburg to be exact, in August, and since calling people is ridiculously expensive and I just can't seem to recall how many time zones are between me and my loved ones, I just plan on updating people over the internet! So much cheaper for Laura (especially given that I am now spending all my savings on books).

So, I will try to update with prevalent information as time goes on.