two

Boy, there’s just so much to write about that I don’t even know where to begin. I guess I’ll pick up from where I left off before and try to be brief about everything. Today is Monday, and yesterday I met with a bunch of people from the group and we all got cell phones. This is the first real cell phone I’ve ever had, and so far it’s been pretty exciting. It took us forever to all choose out our phones and get them all set up. We filled up this little cell phone store and they had to turn away a lot pf other people who came in. After the cell phones and calling cards were taken care of a bunch of us went to a nice café and hung out for a while before heading home. I live right next door to one of the other program members, Vickie, and together we tried walking back to our apartments. The cell phone place and café were both near the Vasileostrovskaya metro station, which is the closest metro station to Vickie and my apartments but it’s still about a mile and a half away. We had ridden a Martrushka (I’ll explain what those are another time) earlier to meet the rest of the group at the McDonalds near the metro station, but we decided to try walking back home despite the cold, just so we could get a better idea of our surroundings. It was a straight shot down Sredniy Prospekt (Middle Street) back to our apartments on Gavanskaya, but we found out quickly that a few blocks beyond the metro station Sredniy becomes a very sketchy street with very few street lamps and hardly anybody out on the streets. At one point the road was all ripped up as if it were under construction, but it looked like there had been no construction taking place for months, I also saw Nazi / Russian nationalist graffiti on the fences (it said “slava Rossia”, or “long live Russia,” which I’ve heard is their slogan). All in all, it was not a good place to be after dark, and we were debating heading back and trying to catch another martrushka home, but we pushed onward and eventually came upon our street. We are definitely going to avoid walking down Sredniy as much as possible from now on. This morning we had to get all set up for our classes, so in order to get to the campus all the way across town at Smolniy, my host mom had to escort me to the hotel where the mini-van for foreign students picks everyone up and takes them to campus. It was relatively easy and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to do it by myself (well, with Vickie I guess) every day from now on. At the campus we were all taken to a big hall where they administered our language placement tests. This consisted of a few short answer questions and a 140-question exam that was supposed to test our grammar. The written answers were easy enough, and the grammar exam started out easier enough but it got really hard really fast, and I ended up guessing on many of the questions. It’s kind of unfair, though, because the reason I didn’t know a lot of the answers was because I didn’t know some of the words they were using, which would just be testing my vocabulary knowledge and not so much my grammar skills, Oh well. The other part of the placement test was a brief interview with a couple of the staff members. I was a little nervous going in, but it proved to be really easy. They asked simple questions about where I’m from, where I go to school, family, etc. I felt like I did pretty well over all, and the graders must have thought so to, because when we got our class assignments I found myself in Group 2, or the second highest group. Group 1 is mainly for the students who were here in the fall and are continuing with a second semester (only three us “new” students were placed in Group 1), so I feel pretty good about my placement. Hopefully I can live up to it. We got a tour of the facilities and the area around the campus (there are some amazing cathedrals that are part of the Smolniy complex, check the flickr account), and were then able to head out on our own for the day. I followed a group down to Nevskiy Prospekt, the big main street in St. Petersburg. We stepped inside the Vosstania metro station to get warm for a second and almost became the victims of a street scam, but luckily they warned us all about this kind of stuff at our orientation. A guy came up to us and started speaking to me in particular. I still don’t know Russian well enough to understand what he was saying, but it didn’t matter because we all knew he was up to no good and we weren’t about to fall victim to his trick. I told him that we didn’t understand him and then we all walked back outside while he stood there with a disappointed look on his face. It had become blatantly obvious to all of us that the man standing against the wall on the other side of us was his partner, and was waiting for us to be distracted by the first guy so he could pick out pockets or take things from our bags, but we are all too paranoid after the horror stories about street crimes that the program directors had told us, so we knew what was going on (Speaking of scams, I also had my ATM / Debit card account breached after my first try using a Russian ATM at the airport the first day I arrived. I talked to the program director about it and he said it’s actually pretty common for this to happen at airport ATMs, and it happened to him at the airport in Burlington, Vermont of all places. Apparently members of Bulgarian or Romanian crime syndicates places sensors on ATMs that pick up PINs and allow them to get into peoples’ accounts, and they especially target airport ATMs because there are always lots of people coming and going from all over the world and it’s really hard to track the people who do it. No money was lost luckily, and everything should work out fine, but it’s pretty annoying). After the incident at Vosstania we ducked into a café on Nevskiy where I had an espresso and a bon-bon, and after our little rest we broke up into smaller groups. I went with a group to try and find the café with free wireless internet called “Soiree.” It’s only a couple blocks off of Nevskiy at the corner of Vosstania and Zhukovskogo. We peeked inside and it looked really great. A nice, quiet atmosphere that wasn’t too crowded, all sunken below the sidewalk. I think I’ll probably end up spending a lot of time there with my laptop. After that the group split up again and again it was just down to Vickie and me. We’ll probably end up hanging out a lot because at the end of the day with both need to end up at the same place and it’s a lot better to get back home with somebody else than it is alone. She followed my to help me find the apartment where my friend Emily supposedly lives. I know Emily from school, where we met the first week of freshman year in our Russian class of course, and we’ve been pretty good friends since then. She has been living and studying in St. Petersburg since August and, as I understand it, now lives in an apartment with circus performers. I had copied down her address from Facebook.com and discovered that it was about a block away from Soiree, so Vickie and I went looking for it. We got to the area where the building should be when I realized that I don’t really know how to find the exact building or apartment, and since it was really cold out and we were both really tired we decided to just head home. I’ll have to get a hold of Emily through email soon. We decided to try riding the metro for the first time, and it was pretty intimidating. It was right during the 5 to 6 o’clock rush and the station was way crowded. We stood around looking at the map trying to figure out which line to board and where until we finally figured it out and made it safely to Vasileostrovskaya station. We didn’t want to walk down Sredniy again like the night before, so we caught the Marshrutka and despite our anxiety about not knowing when or where to get off we made it home just fine, and here I am now. I still haven’t gotten on the internet yet so I have to keep writing entries in word and then pasting them into blogger later, but it seems like it’s working fine that way. I have so many other little observations and small anecdotes that I want to tell but that would take forever. I guess all the best stuff will find its way to the blog eventually. As far as pictures go, I haven’t really been taking that many. I guess I just feel weird taking out my camera and taking pictures of everything like a tourist when there are so many people around, plus I’m afraid of letting everyone around me know that I have a camera and becoming a target for theft (see what horrible those stories of street crimes has done to me?!), but I have taken some and there should be some up on flickr by the time anyone reads this. I will start taking more soon, I promise. Tomorrow we start our classes and I’m a little nervous but I think it’ll be just fine. I have to get myself to campus without my host mom’s help, but I think that will be fine too. I am going to stop typing now, I’ve gone way longer than I had anticipated. I hope nobody minds. Bye bye for now.


-Austin