one

I’m here in St. Petersburg now. I got to my host family’s apartment yesterday afternoon. I am writing this in a Word document, which I will put on my thumb drive and upload to the blog later, and this is how I suspect I will be writing most of my entries. Actually, maybe not, because apparently all I have to do is buy a special card and get a phone cable and I can get on the internet from the apartment. I’m going to have to look into that. Well, what can I say about Russia so far? I guess I haven’t really done enough to really comment on it. All the students met in a big group at the airport and we were whisked of to a small town outside of the city called Repino for our orientation. The town is northwest of the city and used to be part of Finland. The temperature has been hovering steadily around –20 C, which is somewhere just below –5 F, so, it’s cold. The group stayed in a hotel in Repino and we all got to know each other. I have to say that I really like the group I’m with. Everyone is really nice and cool and easy to get along with for the most part. The program directors are great too. At night we would go to the small bar on the hotel grounds and hang out and drink Russian beer. There was a “disco” Friday night which basically consisted of a few members from our group and a handful of older Russians hanging around. All in all, the orientation was a great first experience of Russia and a great way to get acquainted with the group. On Saturday after lunch we packed up all our things and were loaded on to minivans and brought back to St. Petersburg to be dropped off at our host families, whom we had just learned about the day before. I’m living in an apartment on Vasilevskiy Island, which makes up a major chunk of the city. The street I live on is called Gavanskaya, which I discovered is derived from the word “gavan” which means harbor (the Gulf of Finland is only a few blocks away). My host mother’s full name is Svetlana Alekseevich Belova. I have no host father. The program director told me a little bit about the family situation. Apparently, my host mother is a widow whose husband was a fisherman and died in a boating accident (much like my uncle, so I’ll have something to talk about). Svetlana has two sons, Aleksandr and Aleksee, but I guess only one of them lives here in the apartment. The director told me that they too are fisherman, but once I met my host brother I realized this had to be false. He is a very hip looking young man who apparently had a bunch of friends over last night while I was sleeping (I could here them coming and going until about 4 in the moning). I’m not even sure which host brother this is yet, and in general I’m still kind of confused about the whole family situation. I’m sure it will become clear soon enough. They host students a lot apparently, but the mother speaks no English and I’m not sure about the son(s) yet, so it’s been a little difficult communicating so far but all in all I think I’m doing OK with my Russian. I was so exhausted from my trip and not getting much sleep in Repino that I went to bed at 8:00 without even really saying goodnight. I hope I didn’t offend anyone. I didn’t get up until I heard my host mom up and about, which was about 10:00, so I was in bed for quite a while. I had breakfast (blini, which were delicious) and took a shower and now I’m writing this. I think my host brother is up now, or someone else is here, so I should probably go out and be a little more social. So, that’s everything so far. More as it develops.


-Austin