Последний день фебраля

Hi, it’s me again. Things have been kind of slow lately, so hopefully this post will be somewhat shorter than usual. I think I mentioned last time that I was feeling pretty sick on Thursday night. Well, I did end up staying home on Friday, which was nice and relaxing but also extremely boring because there really isn’t much to do here in the apartment, I messed around on the computer a lot, listening to music, watching Pete and Pete and the handful of episodes of Family Guy that I have on my computer. I really wish that I had brought more DVDs with me. I could have just put some in a little CD wallet and I would have had a lot more to occupy myself with in times like that where I have nothing to do but hang around my room. The only DVDs I brought were my Pete and Pete bootlegs. I have bought a few DVDs here, and I watched some old soviet cartoons for a while too, so that was fun. My host mom basically told me that I couldn’t go out on Friday night even though I kind of wanted to, but I probably would have felt pretty terrible if I had gone out so it was probably for the best. I got bummed out later hearing about the crazy nights other people had on Friday, staying up until all hours of the morning hanging out in bars and what not. I guess there’s always next weekend. So, Friday was spent pretty much entirely hanging out alone in my room, and most of Saturday was the same. I decided that no matter what I wanted to go out on Saturday night and do anything at all really. I was just dying of boredom in the apartment. I made a few phone calls and arranged to meet with Peter David and Matt over at Koffe Khaus. Both Kenny and Stacey showed up separately after a while, and we had a nice relaxing time just sitting with some beers and talking. I was just glad to be out of the house. We also had my favorite waitress, so that was good too. At around 11:30 we left so people could catch the metro, but first of course we had to stop at McDonalds for our late-night snack that’s kind of become the tradition for when we go out around Vasileostrovskaya. Everybody got their food in time to catch the metro and Peter David (We’ve been calling him P Diddy lately, so I think I might just start referring to him as that), Matt and Stacey headed home. Kenny wanted to stay out a little longer so I decided to hang with him. Also, seemingly out of nowhere, Brandon and Tom (not TOM Tom, of tominrussia.blogspot.com fame, but the Tom from the returning students who I don’t ever really hang out with) show up while we are at McDonalds, and so the four of us headed over to Choomadon for a while. We had some more beer as well as some grenki (the garlic-bread snack like I had had at Tsynik before). These guys are really more “guys’ guys” than the people I usually hang out with, which was kind of weird but also a nice change of pace. It was Brandon’s birthday the other night and apparently these guys and a few other guys went to a strip club, so they were talking about that a lot, and there was a lot of that general type of conversation, you know? At a table next to us there was a group of Russians – three guys and two girls – and one of the girls kept staring at Brandon the whole time and whispering and laughing to her friend and being really obvious and annoying about it. One of the guys she was with seemed like he was getting pretty mad about it, and kept raising his voice and grabbing her away. They even went outside to talk about it for a while, but she kept ogling him. At one point she held out her cell phone to him so he could just put in his number. She hadn’t even talked to him at all? Brandon (and all of us, really) was kind of freaked out by the whole thing, so we paid up and got out of there. Brandon decided to head home and I was feeling like calling it a night too. Kenny and Old Tom decided to stay out some more, but there is really nothing else open around there at that time of night, so I wasn’t really down for wandering around with them. I was going to have to take a Chasnik, and I decided that I could probably catch one for cheaper if I walked a couple blocks down to Bolshoi Prospekt instead of hoping into one of the cars that is always waiting outside of Vasileostrovskaya on Sredniy Prospekt. I got to Bolshoi and there weren’t really a lot of cars out, so I figured I’d walk down a block and then check to see if some more cars were coming and if I could flag one down. There were big piles of snow along the sidewalks that kind of blocked me from getting to the street mid-way through a block, so I woud have to wait for the intersections to try and flag a car down. I would get to one intersection and look down the street and not really see any cars coming, so I’d walk another block and try again and so on and so forth. After a while I had gone for enough blocks that it just made more sense to walk all the way home and save some money on chasnik fair. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing to do while still being a little bit sick, but I was feeling up for it and I’ve been meaning to take a walk down Bolshoi for a while. There are no less than two statues of Lenin on that street, and another really cool statue of firefighters in front of the fire station that I had always been curious about while riding by on the bus but had never gotten up close to it. I didn’t have my camera with me but I wish I had, because there were quite a lot of cool things to see. I walked by this creepy Children’s Hospital that was set back behind some trees and looked totally abandoned and haunted. Just imagine the ghosts of thousands of dead children haunting this old brick building, and imagine walking by it alone in the middle of the night and thinking about such crazy notions! It was kind of a creepy walk in general, but nowhere near as creepy as it is walking down Sredniy Prospekt where the road gets blocked off and all the Nazi graffiti starts to appear. I did see a pack of stray dogs and I was worried that they were going to attack, but luckily they left me alone. At the end of my street there is this really awesome-looking old building with weird domes on it (but not like domes on an orthodox church, it’s hard to explain) and behind it a ways are these huge red and white smokestacks that are always belching out pollution. All this is behind a brick wall, and the old building with the smokestacks together was such a cool shot against the night sky. I really need to go back with my camera sometime, considering that it’s about three blocks away. By the time I got back it was about 3:00 I think. So I just went to bed. On Saturday I was feeling pretty eager to get on the internet, so I called around to find somebody to go with me to Soiree. P Diddy was down, so we made plans to meet there at 2:00. I got there a little late because of the long bus ride, but I got there alright and P Diddy had already snagged us a table. It was in the back and I couldn’t get a wireless signal at all, so after a while we decided to move up to the main room where, after a while, I was finally able to do some surfing. There were quite a few people there, many of them with laptops, and that really slows down the router. I was surprised by how many people there were for a Sunday afternoon. I had a couple beers and some Geogrian fried cheese. My favorite waitress there was also working that day, so I’ve been on a roll as far as waitresses go. P Diddy loaded some of his pictures from his camera onto my computer to be added to his Facebook account later. He had some pretty good ones of me. He left after a while and I hung back just for a bit before I got tired of the slow connection and decided to get home. I bought a new international calling card and then hopped on a number 7 bus. I got a good seat and thought that on a Sunday afternoon the buses wouldn’t get too crowded, but boy was I wrong. It got just as jam-packed as it does any week-day, but at least I had a seat. I felt like maybe I should offer my seat to some babushkas, but then I figured that it made more sense for me to sit in the seat when it gets this crowded, because, being a big guy, I would just take up a lot more room if I were standing, making the situation in the aisles all the more crowded, where as if I am seated I am taking up considerably less room, or at least just as much room as anybody else would use where they seated. So, I figured let the babushkas stand and create a little more room for everyone. Hell, they’ve been communists most of their lives, they should understand the concept of sacrificing some of their personal rights for the good of everyone. At home I just took it easy, did some homework, and in the evening called home and even called my friends back at the Diamond, which I hadn’t done yet. I was using up my last minutes on my phone card, so I could only talk for about 14 minutes but it was still nice. Today it was back to school after what was essentially a 4-day weekend. We had a test in grammar class that I had felt like I prepared well enough for, but it seemed considerably harder once I took it. I think I did alright, though. I had to play catch up a little bit in Phonetics because I missed it in Friday, but that wasn’t too hard. Kara returned my Thumb-drive and my Kino CD and because she felt bad for having borrowed them for a long time she also brought me a bar of chocolate! How sweet of her. I did some interneting after classes and found myself with nothing to do afterwards, so I ambled my way over to the Chernyshevskaya area just for the heck of it. I decided to go looking for the American Consulate because I knew it was right around there. I figured it would at least be a good idea to know where it is, plus my old Russian teacher Josh used to work there and I thought it would be cool to see because of that. I found it and it wasn’t all that excited to see, so I headed back towards the metro. Oh yeah, on my way to the Consulate I was walking between some parked cars and my bag scrapped against this car’s hood ornament and knocked it out of place. Unfortunately for me, there was a guy sitting inside the car, and when he looked up and saw what I had done he stepped out of the car and yelled at me. I said I was sorry and tried putting it back into place, but he shooed me away and took care of it himself. I felt bad, but it was kind of funny nonetheless. I also tried to find the store that apparently sells the really cool tetradi (little notebooks that all the students use in Russia) that Sasha and John have. I found a bookstore that I thought might be the place, but I couldn’t find them inside. I wanted to get some for my sister because I know she would really like them. I guess I’ll have to keep looking. After a bit I decided to get on the metro and head over to Nevskiy for a while to kill sometime before I had to go teach English at the University. I got to Vostannia and decided to hit up CafeMax for an hour to use the internet some more and look up stuff for spring break. I’m getting really frustrated about that because it’s just over a week away and I still don’t know exactly where I’m going. Like usual, I’m trying to get in as much as I can, but I think I’m going to have to skip out on a few places I might want to go just for the sake of practicality, and it kills me that I have to do so. I want to see everything! I don’t want to talk about spring break here until I have a set plan, so look for that sometime soon. I did the internet thing for an hour and then caught a bus over to the university. I got there a little early so I looked at my Russian Road Atlas and thought more about spring break. English class was great again. I really enjoying teaching (or helping to teach, anyway) in that class, because I feel like the kids are really interested in what I have to say and all I really have to so speak with them and answer there questions. I do give them new words sometimes, and the teacher has me explain different topics about life and culture in America. Today, for example, she wanted me to explain the school system in America, so I broke it all down for them on the dry-erase board and gave them some good vocab words like “freshman,“ “sophomore,” “junior,” “senior,” “bachelor’s degree,” etc. The one girl who’s really into hip-hop had written down the lyrics to some song she liked and wanted me to explain the slang in it. It was some terrible rap song and must of the slang involved putting an “-a” at the end of words instead of an “-er” and things like that. It had some swear words in it too of course, which they all already know. The teacher always thanks me a lot at the end of class and I always leave feeling really good about it. I’m already looking forward to next week. A quick bus ride and I was back at home, and now here I am. I need to write emails to a few people and I feel like maybe I should do that now, but I’m getting really tired, so I might just have to wait until tomorrow. Oh yeah, I was invited back to Nick’s apartment by his host mom for blini tomorrow. I guess I made a good impression on her the last time I was there, because apparently she keeps asking about me all the time. The big week-long end-of-winter / beginning-of-summer holiday called maclenitsa starts this week, and basically all people do is eat blini all week long. The blini apparently represents the sun and the coming thereof. The name it self, “maclenitsa,” comes from the word for butter (“maclo”) which is a main ingredient in blini. I’m excited for it. I’ll let you all know how it goes. Over and out.

Made it up Sunday after all

So, I decided that I want to start being more concise in my blog updates, because it always takes way too long to write the way I have been writing and it usually keeps me up late. I figure I don’t really need to narrate my whole day every time, I’ll just need to mention the highlights and other important things. Today is Thursday night and I haven’t written anything since Sunday, so this will be a good time to test out how this new system will work. The main even on Monday was that I went to teach English to teenagers like I had mentioned I would be doing before. They put me with a class that only had 5 students. Most of them are around 16 or 17, but there is one 10-year-old girl in there who speaks English quite well, and she says that she’s been learning for 8 years! The teacher of the class put me at the front of the room while she sat in the back, and basically she just wanted me to get more acquainted with the students and then teach them some words and phrases that are pertinent to their current topic. They are learning about crime right now, and what they wanted to know from me were names of different crimes and offenses, as well as crime slang and drug slang even. I explained the difference between murder and manslaughter, and told them a bunch of different words for various drugs. I think of all the things I wrote on the dry-erase board, the funniest to me had to have been “possession with intent to sell.” The teacher kept saying, “this is really good, this is what they want to know.” The oldest girl in the class (17) told me that she really likes hip-hop (she’s “keen on 50 Cent,” she tells me) and “movies about addicts,” like “Blow,” “Requiem for a Dream” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” so this really is the kind of stuff they want to know about. The main teacher teaches them all the grammar and syntax and vocabulary and everything, so basically all they want me for is just to talk with them about their subjects and to give them practical things they can use in conversation. I think they really liked me, and after about 10 minutes one of them asked, “are you coming every week?” I am going to start going every week, actually. Every Monday at 6:00. I’m really looking forward to this, it really is a lot of fun. Oh, but earlier that day I found a really cool place that I want to go back to. I had heard about a bar that is supposed to be pretty cool called Fish Fabrique, and after class on Monday I went with Bryce and Peter David to try and find it. It turns out that it is actually inside this place called the “Free Arts Foundation,” which is this whole complex of art galleries and weird alternative culture. There was a bookstore, a Museum of Banned Art (or something like that) and even a door that had a plaque on it that read, “The John Lennon Monument of Peace, Love, and Music.” So, it seems like there is a lot of cool stuff going on their, and I think they have live music a lot their as well, so I really need to come back there and see what the real deal is. The bar itself wasn’t open, so instead we went to this little café around the corner that had the cheapest beer that we’ve seen yet in St. Petersburg: half liters for 45 rubles! Usually, 60 is cheap. So, that little neighborhood that we found seems to have a lot going for it. Tuesday in Gazeta class we had the most ridiculous test ever. Get this. The previous Thursday the teacher told us how the test was going to go down. The test is actually in our text books, and the answers are in the back. She wasn’t going to be there on Tuesday, so we were supposed to come in and take the test (which of course we already had and could have done at home) in the empty classroom, then look at the answers in the back of the book, correct ourselves and give ourselves a score, and then show her the scores we got next class. How ridiculous is that? So, I just did it the night before. Tuesday after school I went with Katie and Tom to the big book store called Dom Knigi (by they way, this name doesn’t make sense to me. It means “House of Book,” which I don’t think is what they want to say. It should be “House of Books,” plural, but tin Russian that would be “Dom Knig,” and that is not what the place is called. Whatever). I wanted to find a guidebook for the Ukraine because I’m fairly certain that’s where I’m going for spring break (I’ll let you know what my final plans are once I know them). I couldn’t find any guidebooks for the longest time, but I did find the English books section. They had lots of Russian literature in English, but they charge insane amounts for English-language books really for no other reason other than because they can and tourists will buy it. For example, am English copy of the book “Moscow to the End of the Line,” which I read for class last year, was selling there for about 1100 rubles, where it would probably cost 150 at the very most in Russian. What gives? I need to get good enough in Russian to be able to read Russian literature in the original Russian and pay a lot less to buy the books. Someday. I did find the literature section in Russian and had fun browsing. I was about to give up on looking for guidebooks when I discovered the little side-room on my way out that is filled with maps, atlases, and travel books. Oh boy was I in heaven there! All the guidebooks were in Russian only and there were none of the whole Ukraine, so I didn’t buy a guidebook, but I did end up staying for a long time looking at all kinds of atlases and books about geography. I ended up buying a road atlas of Russia (it’s so awesome, you don’t even understand) and a wall map that has Russia on one side and the world (all names written in Cyrillic, of course) on the other. I tried paying with a 1000 ruble bill, but they held it under a black light and apparently there was something wrong with it, because they wouldn’t accept it. A lot of places do this with 1000 ruble bills, kind of like in America how they’ll mark $20 bills with a special pen to see if it’s authentic. They showed me that there were lots of green marks all over the bill under the light, but I didn’t know what that meant. I had to pay with my credit card for the first time in Russia (I mean, I’ve used it at the ATMs here, but this was the first direct purchase I’ve made with it here yet), but it was worth it. I managed to pass the bill off on the cafeteria cashier at school the next day. The bus ride home from Dom Knigi was insanely packed and uncomfortable, and I made a vow never to ride the bus or metro between the hours of 5:00 and 6:00 (a vow which I broke the next day). On Wednesday the computer lab at the school was down, so I went with a small group to Café Max to do some interneting. The main reason I needed to go was for more research for Ukraine and Spring Break, but I didn’t find out much. After the café some of us went to find the English-only bookstore that I had heard about. I, of course, was still looking for a guidebook. They had lots of Lonely Planet guidebooks, which is my favorite, but no Ukraine. They had the Eastern Europe guidebook, but it was an older version that is not very up-to-date a didn’t even include the Ukraine. I am currently borrowing Nathan’s copy of the latest edition of the Lonely Planet Eastern Europe guide which does include the Ukraine, but I need to buy my own copy of it because his is falling apart, plus it does not belong to me and I can’t really take it with me. That book will come in very handy this summer also. There was actually another English bookstore in the same building as the other one and it too had lots of guidebooks, including a Ukraine one, but it was too expensive and was a brand that I don’t really like anyways. Bryce and Stacey left to go teach more English, so Matt and I decided to walk around for a bit to kill some time. We walked through the underground passage way that is also a 505 Store and decided to look around a little bit. They have a bunch of bootleg copies of American movies that all have these generic covers, and as I was looking through those I stumbled upon copies of Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart! Two of my favorite David Lynch movies! I almost bought both, but then decided to get only Wild at Heart because I thought that they were only in Russian and I might as well not spend too much on movies that I won’t really be able to watch like a normal movie or with other people. The cashier confirmed that it was only in Russian. After parting ways with Matt and riding another crammed bus during rush hour, I got home and put the DVD into the player to find that you can in fact watch it in English, as well as Russian, French, and German, and with lots of different subtitle options too. So, that was pretty exciting. I might have to go back and get Blue Velvet sometime after all. After hanging around at home for a while, I got in touch with some people and found out that they were hanging out at Kofe Khaus and they wanted me to come, so I went down there and met up with Tom, Katie, Vickie and Nick. We had a fun time hanging out and most of them were already pretty drunk. Tom told me this amazing story about the time he talked to Woody Allen for about 20 minutes. Apparently Tom used to work at J-Crew (is that how it’s spelled? I have no idea) in New York and lots of celebrities have come in there, but one time he was helping out Woody Allen with a jacket purchase and they got in a big conversation about topics as varied as the Vietnam War, the Bush administration, women and Mott the Hoople. The best part is that Tom didn’t know who he was until he realized it the next day! Incredible! I want to have a conversation with Woody Allen really bad now. After Kofe Khaus some of the others wanted McDonalds, so while they sat inside and ate I stood outside with a very drunk Katie. These two little boys came up to us and started asking for money, and even knew how to ask in English, and we of course said no. They started mocking us rubbing against Katie like they were trying to grab her purse. They kept giving us the finger and doing that other thing where you put one arm behind your other arm’s elbow and raising your other fist. You know what I mean. They even did both at the same time. They called us names in Russian that we didn’t understand and kept laughing like they thought we were getting really offended and pissed of by them. I kept shaking my head and telling them that I wasn’t offended, that they could say whatever they want or do whatever they want and it didn’t bother me. Eventually these two young girls came up and kind of yelled at them to go away and then started talking to us in English. They were both pretty drunk to, but were very friendly and eager to try out their English skills. The rest of our gang came out of McDonalds and we all stood in a group talking with the Russian girls. It turns out that one was 16 and the other 15, but we thought they looked a lot older. After a little while we left the girls behind and headed over to Petra for a little while. It was nice to be there in a relatively small group, because usually it’s about ten of us there and I think we really annoy the people who work there when we all go in like that. We just had a couple beers and chilled out until about 11:15 when we all went home. Today, of course, was a holiday, and so we didn’t have any school! My host mom made blini for breakfast as if it was a normal weekend, and I was so happy. Our big plan for today was to go back to that little town called Pavlovsk and go sledding in the park for the day. Vickie and I met Nick and Katie on the metro, and we rode south to the Moscovskaya metro station where we met up with Natalie. We caught a marshrutka to Pavlovsk, which is about a 15 or 20-minute ride. You have to pay a fee to get into the park, but luckily our Russian student IDs are as good as a Russian passport when it comes to admission price, and we paid as much as normal Russian adults do. We walked over to the sledding area and rented a couple of sleds for the five of us. They charged 120 rubles an hour, which isn’t too bad. They also make you leave a deposit of some sort, so Nick left his cell phone with them. We walked all over the sledding area trying out different slopes and had a total blast. Katie and Vickie left on their own pretty early on, which I thought was pretty lame, but what are you going to do? So Nick, Natalie and I stayed for our full two hours and had a wonderful time. All our close of course got soaked from rolling around in the snow and everything, and by the end of the day with all my warm clothes on I felt like I do after a day of skiing or snowboarding. There were lots and lots of other people there sledding and skiing and snowboarding and having a great time, and it really is a great atmosphere. We all agreed that it was the best way we could have spent our holiday, short of taking a bigger trip out of town or something, which we couldn’t have down without our passports. We rode another marshrutka back and had lunch at a little café near the metro station. My lunch was pretty small, so I also got a meat and rice pierogie for only 9 rubles! It was truly delicious. They aren’t anything like they kind my dad used to make, but still very good in their own right. We rode the metro back into town and I basically went straight home. I actually had started to feel pretty sick after the day of sledding, and I was really looking forward to getting home, getting warm and dry and watching Wild at Heart on my computer. Right now I’m still feeling pretty sick and I may or may not go to school tomorrow. If I don’t I bet all my teachers will think that I just ditched to have a 4-day weekend. Too bad. I probably won’t be able to post this until at least Monday, or Tuesday even. Kara asked to borrow my thumb-drive for the night on Tuesday, but now I probably won’t get it back until Monday because of the way everything worked out what with holidays and sickness and closed computer labs. I think this was a much more manageable post than usual, and I just trimmed out the minor, unimportant details of my days. I think I’ll start doing it like this more often. See you later.

The World of an Object

Today is Sunday, February 19, which means that I have been in Russia for exactly one month. Pretty crazy, huh? Well, let’s see, the last time I wrote anything was last Thursday night, and I guess a lot has happened since then. Plus, I wasn’t able to upload the post that I wrote Thursday, because on Friday at the computer lab at school blogger wouldn’t load for some reason. But, if you are reading this it means that I have uploaded that other one too, so look for that as well, if you want. Oh, I actually have something interesting that happened at school to write about. On Friday in Phonetics class we all got books from the teacher to use for an exercise we were doing. She said there was some mix-up with the school and that we were able to receive these books for free. These were only small phonetic exercise books, but all the exercises are based on scenes from three different Russian movies, one of which is a very popular new-years movie that I actually saw part of in first year Russian class called “The Irony of Fate” (how Russian). We watched a scene from this movie of a guy singing a song, then we read along with the lyrics from the book and did some exercises to go along with it. I didn’t realize until later when somebody else from the class pointed out to me that our phonetics teacher had actually written the book we were using! She hadn’t mentioned it when she gave them to us. It was kind of funny to find that out. So, I guess blog-worthy things do happen at school after all [side note: there was just a heated argument of some kind between a group of people on the street below my window, but I couldn’t tell what it was about. It didn’t even sound like Russian to me because everybody was shouting and talking really fast]. So, Friday after school a few of us got a plan together and went out for a little excursion in the afternoon. The first part was catching bus 147 down to the Hermitage to check out the Ice Palace thing that they built in the square in front of the Hermitage that everybody in St. Petersburg seems to be so obsessed with. I still haven’t even been to the Hermitage itself, which seems crazy, but I’ve still got plenty of time. The Ice Palace is this little building surrounded by sculptures, and it’s all made of ice. I see it everyday from the bus as I ride by, but I had net yet been up close to it (well, I did while it was still in progress, but I hadn’t seen it finished yet). There was a huge line of people waiting to actually go inside of it, but we figured it wasn’t worth the wait/cost to get in whatever either of them might have been. WE just walked around the perimeter of it, which was blocked off with a temporary fence and guarded by policemen. There was an ice slide shaped like two elephants that all the kids loved to slide down. All in all, it wasn’t all that exciting, at least not nearly enough as the huge crowds always gathered around it would make it seem. But, I figured that if I didn’t get a good look at it now then I’ll regret not having seen it once it’s gone, because it seemed like such a big important thing for the city right now and to me seems like a good way to commemorate the time that I am spending here once it’s over. Do you know what I mean? So, we finished up at the Ice Palace, and then headed over the bridge to Vassilevsky Island to see what we were really devoting our afternoon too. You see, stopping at the Ice Palace was really just an after thought I had had because it was so close to our final destination and I figured we could knock off the Ice Palace at the same time. Our real destination was to visit the St. Petersburg “Kuntskamera,” or as I kept referring to it as, “the Freak Museum.” “Kuntskamera” is apparently a German word meaning “oddity display” or something like that, and basically what it is is Peter the Great’s collection of human oddities that he had used to educate the public. The Kuntskamera is actually combined with the Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology, which is just a cheesy display of various world cultures, kind of like at the Museum of Modern History in New York or something, only a lot cornier. They have dummies dressed up like people from China or India or the Middle East, etc., and with lots of artifacts from each region too. The most interesting of all of this was the Native American displays, because it seemed so weird to be in Russia and to see their interpretation of Native American culture. But, None of us were all that interested in seeing this kind of stuff, and we moved fairly quickly through all these displays to get to the Kuntskamera. It’s only one room, but man, what a room it was. There are tons of display cases filled with preserved deformed infants in jars, all of which are about 300 years old. Peter the Great had purchased most of his collection of deformed infants from some Dutch physiologist back in the early 1700’s, and many of them are on display here. I can’t even really describe in words what it’s like in there. There are all kinds of siamese twins connected at various spots, babies with underdeveloped heads, deformed appendages, and all kinds of other deformities you can’t even imagine. And they all had pretty haunting expressions on their faces, which is probably the most disturbing part of it all. The fact that they are all three hundred years old really creeped me out too, thinking that they have been stuck in these positions for that long, preserved to look basically just like they did way back then (albeit without any coloration of the skin) was like a terrifying window into the past. As disturbing as it all was, it was still so intriguing that I couldn’t help but keep staring at them for a really long time, and I tried to get as many pictures as I could. Like most places in Russia, I’ve come to find, they try to get you to pay to take pictures at this museum, and, also like most places in Russia, they have old ladies who sit in every room of the museum and make sure all the rules are enforced, including, I presume, making sure that nobody takes pictures who hasn’t paid to do so. There were two old ladies in the Kuntskamera room, and I sign that specifically said no picture taking, but I figure, why not? What’s it to them whether or not I take pictures? They aren’t losing money if I do, there’s absolutely no harm done. So, at the Kuntskamera I played a round of a little game I came up with called “Taking pictures when you aren’t supposed to without getting caught.” I won this round. The two old ladies were sitting in the corner talking, but still looking around. This meant I could only really take pictures of certain things, i.e., only those which were outside of the old ladies’ lines of sight. It also meant not being able to use a flash, which wouldn’t have been good anyways because everything was behind glass and the pictures would have all had a big glare on them. All in all, I think that I, and the pictures, fared pretty well, and I encourage you to check out my flickr page to see the results (but be warned, you might get pretty freaked out by the baby mutants! Look if you dare). So, thoroughly freaked out, we all finished up the rest of the museum (including “The World of an Object”) and then we all went back home before heading out again for the evening. I chilled out at home for a while, at some Pelmeny (Russian ravioli kind of) and then met up with Vickie to head over the Vassileostrovskaya to meet with other people. We met up with Bryce and Katie and decided to go to Koffee Khaus for a little while. Vickie and Katie had some coffee while Bryce and I started in on the beer. Our waitress’s name was Aigool, and we couldn’t figure out what kind of name it was (it’s definitely not Russian). I was going to ask her but I chickened out and never did. More people showed up and we eventually had about 8 or 9 total before heading over to Petra for the usual beers and hookah. I’m actually starting to get sick of going to places in huge groups like this, because I think it’s kind of embarrassing to be in the big group of Americans who come in and just take over a place basically. Plus they all know us at Petra now, and I feel like we might be starting to get on their nerves. But, we all had a good time anyways, just like always. More people came while we were there and the group probably totaled 11 at its peak. As midnight was approaching, everyone had to make a decision as to whether or not they wanted to leave early and catch the metro / a marshrutka, or if they wanted to stay out later and ride a chasnik home. A group of us who all lived on the island (Vickie, Tsveti, Ingrid, Kara, and myself) decided that we would stay out longer and all share a chasnik when we wanted to go home. Everybody else left early. Petra closes at midnight, and starting at about 11:30 we could tell they were already starting to close up. So we paid the bill and got all our stuff together as quickly as we could and decided to head down the street to Choomadan to hang out there for a little while. All the employees of Petra came in a few minutes after we did, and it was kind of funny and we all said hi to each other. Our waitress was no friendly at all, and really messed up our order. I think only two of us ordered a beer there but she ended up bringing us four, and when we told her that we didn’t order that many she said that we had to take them because they were already opened and she couldn’t take them back. Tsveti had ordered a bottle of water and specifically asked for non-carbonated water, and of course the waitress brought carbonated. Tsveti didn’t know until after she opened it and drank it, so if course she couldn’t return that either. Kara ordered some French fries and about twenty minutes later the waitress came back and said she couldn’t bring us only a side dish without us ordering a full meal, which is totally bogus because we’ve ordered fries in there several times before. So, Kara had to go without her fires, but we had already decided to go to McDonalds afterwards anyways, so she decided she could wait. Once we got sick of Choomadan and of our waitress we decided to head out and go the McDonalds before we got our chasnik. The walk-up window is open until really late. I don’t like going to McDonalds but late at night after we’ve been drinking and we’re hungry and it’s the only thing that’s open for food it usually sounds pretty good. We all ordered and then stood around eating before we got our chasnik. There was a drunkard hanging around in front of McDonalds making everybody uncomfortable, and when he gestured for me to come talk to him I figured I probably should, just to keep him busy and away from the girls who were obviously made pretty uncomfortable by him hanging around. He kept trying to tell me something but I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and I kept telling him that I don’t speak Russian well and that he wasn’t making any sense to me. I started pointing inside my bag of food, so I figured he just wanted some food, so I was happy to spare a few French fries if it meant keeping him away from us. I handed him the fries and he seemed to accept them at first, but then he started dropping them on the ground in protest or something, I don’t know, so I figured I wasn’t willing to do anything more for him if he wasn’t going to accept my generous offering, so I walked away and joined the girls in their little circle. He kind of followed me over and started throwing the French fries he had left at my back, but I just ignored him. In the meantime Vickie was still waiting for her food, and once she got it we were ready to get a chasnik. Lots of chasniks line up on the street here because it’s right next to a metro station and a lot of people end up looking for rides here. There was one guy looking for somebody to give a ride to and Tsveti, being Bulgarian and speaking Russian pretty well, did the talking and arranged for him to take us all home for 150 rubles. The whole time we were talking with the driver the drunkard kept coming up and bothering us, and the driver kept getting mad and shoving him away. It was probably a bad sign. The plan was that Vickie and I would be dropped of last, because the girls all wanted to make sure that there was a guy with them in the chasnik at all times. This means that the driver would kind of have to go out of the way to take them first, but we explained the order to him and we thought he understood. All the other girls kind of live close to each other and he said the should take a separate one, but they remained insistent that they take the same one as me. We assured him that we could all five fit in his car, so the four girls crammed in the back and we were on our way for what we thought would be a 150 ruble ride. A few blocks away he started protesting and saying that he had to go in a big circle and that he was going to charge us 200 instead, and we didn’t put up much of a fight and agreed, 200. He dropped Ingrid, Kara and Tsveti off at their respective apartments all around the street Korablestroitelei, and then headed back to Gavanskaya to drop of Vickie and me. He started complaining about how he had to go in a big circle, and I explained how the girls all wanted me to be the last one dropped of, and he said he understood that but was still mad that he had to go out of his way. I didn’t understand everything he way saying, but I kept hearing him say the word for 1,000, and I thought he was saying that’s how much he was going to charge us for the ride. I of course go outraged and said something like, “Are you kidding? You said 200 for the ride!” He said, “No, you misunderstand me, the ride is 200. Forget it, you don’t understand what I’m trying to say.” I don’t know what the whole thing about “1,000” was, because I thought I heard him say distinctly “1,000 rubles,” but I guess I was wrong. At least I had confirmed that he was charging 200, and I thought we would be OK. We got to our stop and it was time to pay. Here is where I made my fatal mistake. I didn’t have any small bills for my share of the fare, but everybody else had given theirs to me so I figured that I would give him my 500 ruble bill and he would give me 300 in change. I had given large bills and gotten change back before in other chasniks without any problems, so I figured it would be fine, but when he saw that I was paying him with a 500 ruble bill he decided that he was only going to give me 200 in change back. I said, “You told us 200!” and he said “That was before I knew I had to go in a big circle” or something like that, which is totally bogus cause he had confirmed the 200 ruble price on the last leg of the trip. I kept insisting he give me 100 more rubles, nut he kept giving me a firm and uncompromising, “Nyet.” Vickie was getting on him at this point to, but we realized there was nothing we could really do. He had the upper hand and wasn’t going to give us any more change, so short of violence there was nothing I could have really done. We got out huffing and puffing and I slammed his door as I could and he drove off. If I had 200 in correct change I would have just given it to him and if he had asked for more we could have just gotten out (although, it was a two-door, and if that he been the case he could have theoretically driven off with Vickie in the back seat once I had gotten out, so maybe that wouldn’t have been the ideal scenario), but since I gave him 500 he had the option of giving me however much back he wanted. I learned my lesson, from now on I will try to have correction change when riding a chasnik. Vickie and I went to our apartments really pissed of, and I stayed up listening to music for a little while before going to bed. The next day promised to be better. We had a group excursion to a little town outside of St. Petersburg called Pavlovsk where there is an old Tsarist Palace and a big park. That morning I ate blini for breakfast, of course, and then Vickie and I rode bus 7 over to the meeting place at the hotel. The bus was going on a different route than it normally does for some reason, and at some point I realized that it was taking us away from the hotel, so we jumped out at some unknown stop before it got any further away from the hotel, and the hotel wasn’t to far from where we were at that point anyways. The bus driver tried to close the doors behind me before Vickie could get off, and as I heard them closing I instantly turned around and wedged my arm horizontally between the doors to keep it from closing. Vickie and I were of course still upset about the chasnik experience the night before, so we weren’t about to take any more crap from anybody like this. We walked over to the hotel and got worried for a while because we were the only ones there and it was pretty close to the meeting time, but everyone showed up eventually as did the bus, so we were soon on our way. We stopped at Kazan Cathedral on the way out to pick up our tour guides for the palace and to make sure the other group got on their bus. It was only about a 20 minute drive to Pavlovsk, and we met up with the other group and walked towards the palace. It was covered in scaffolding, as are most cool buildings I ever seem to visit. We went inside and everybody had to but slippers over their shoes to walk around the palace. Of course none of the slippers fit my feet, so I had to get the little plastic baggies. We checked out the gift shop briefly, where I considered getting a balalaika but realized that they weren’t very god quality here and probably too expensive. The palace was pretty cool, typical decadent architecture and furnishings for reach rulers, stuff that I’ve kind of seen before so I wasn’t too enthralled with everything. I did start taking a lot of pictures. At one point the tour guide asked me if I had paid to take pictures, and of course I said “no,” and she told me that I couldn’t without paying, but that if I was going to don’t let anybody see me doing it. The old ladies are in ever room, of course. So I played another round of everybody’s new favorite game and ended up with some pretty good, though “illegally” taken photographs. After the tour was over we had the option of riding the normal bus back for free, or we could stick around for a while if we wanted and ride a marshrutka back later for a small fee. We hung out in the square briefly while some of the other group members went on sleigh rides. Katie is apparently really afraid of horses, so we made fun of her as she was getting freaked out by the horses that were pulling the sleighs. I came up with a cool rhyme in Russian, it sounds like: “loshadi v ploshadi,” which means “horses in the square,” which seems so perfect I wondered why I had never heard it before. I really wanted to stay for a while and check out the huge park next to the palace, but the people I was with (Tom, Katie, Vickie and Nick) were kind of wishy-washy about whether or not they were going to leave right away. I somehow managed to get them to follow me into the park and they all ended up staying longer. We slid down an icy, snow-covered hill and their was no turning back. Natalie, fresh off of her sleigh ride, joined up with us and we walked around the park. There were small groups of people sledding here and there and we walked around a little building that had columns covered in graffiti (I found “Kino” written on a column, so I had to take some pictures). We walked on a frozen stream and then came over a hill to find tons and tons of people sledding down the other side. It looked like so much fun and I really wanted to rent an inner tube and do some sledding of my own. I think it was Nathan the program director who told us that at this park in Pavlovsk is the only place where you can find Russians being happy, and I’m starting to think that’s true. Everybody else started complaining that they were cold or hungry or whatever, and so we couldn’t stay and play. We decided, however, that on Thursday we are going to go back and spend the whole day there because it is a national holiday (Defenders of the Fatherland Day, of course) and we have the day off from school. I’m really looking forward to that. We headed back to the palace, considered eating at the cafeteria there but instead decided to eat back in St. Petersburg, and then caught a marshrutka back to town. It was 25 rubles apiece, not bad for a ride that far. It dropped us off at Moskovskaya metro station, way in the south part of the city, so we had to ride the metro back up to the city center. Everybody decided that they wanted to go to KFC for lunch, and I reluctantly joined them. I suggested trying the Russian version of fast food called “Blin-donald’s” (seriously) but nobody was interested. So, KFC it was. It was fine, just like any KFC in America only way more crowded. I had a chicken sandwich and French fries. I was still a little hungry after that, but luckily there is a Pizza Hut in the same restaurant, so I got a slice of cheese pizza to finish off lunch. It was basically the same as Pizza Hut in America too. There was talk about all of us going over to Tom’s apartment to hang out later and I had originally planned to go home for a while before going out again, but I figured I didn’t really need to and we all decided to stay out some more. Somebody had thrown out the idea of going to see a movie, and everybody seemed to be interested, so we found the nearest theater to see what was playing. Luckily there are movie theaters about every two blocks on Nevskiy, so the nearest one was about 50 feet away. Our options were limited at this theater and we had just missed the start of “Munich,” which I still haven’t seen but really want to, so we decided to settle on some Russian movie that none of us had ever heard of called “Bolshoi Lyubov” (literally “Big Love”). We bought our tickets which, of course, have assigned seating, and entered the theater. There’s a VIP section in the back where you can sit on couches, but we didn’t want to pay extra so we sat in the normal seats. There was one 30-second preview before the movie started. The movie was kind of silly but we all had a good time. It’s a romantic comedy about this military general who is a real ladies-man but for some reason is told my his commanding officer that he has to get married to somebody in two weeks, so he flies to Moscow and meets a flight attendant on the way that he ends up meeting again in Moscow and they fall in love. It looks like everything is going to work out for them, but then he finds out that his friend is also secretly in love with her and so he decides he can’t marry her and instead asks this mean, ugly bus konduktor to marry him on a whim just because he needs to marry some one (we were never sure why he had to get married). Of course the flight attendant finds out and she’s heartbroken and there’s an awkward scene on the plane where she is the flight attendant on the same flight that the general and his new “fiancée” are on, but in the end the general’s best friend finds out about everything and insists that the general go back to Moscow and marry the flight attendant. So he ditches the other girl on their wedding day and there’s a big dramatic closing scene where he meets the flight attendant on the runway after her plane has landed. Pretty cheesy and predictable over all, but it was good way to spend the afternoon and I was glad to have finally gone to the movie theater here. Afterwards we decided it was a good time to head over to Tom’s, so we call called our host moms to tell them that we wouldn’t be home for dinner and walked the 15 minutes or so it takes to get to Tom’s from Nevskiy. The second we entered the apartment we were met with a blast of piping hot air. His host-dad inside was in short-sleeves and shorts and we of course were all bundled up from being outside. It was, literally, like a sauna in there. I say that a lot as a joke but this time I’m totally serious. We went through the long and difficult process of all taking off our jackets and shoes in the tiny hallway and then made it to the back room where it was much, much cooler. It’s kind of like a living room where Tom’s host brother-sleeps because Tom sleeps in the host-brother’s regular room, which is kind of weird I guess. His host-dad kept brining us tea and pretzels and even dried and salted fish, which I didn’t have any off. He even gave us apples that he had just picked at his dacha. We had also brought some beer, so we sat around beers-drinkin’ and pretzels-eatin’ for a while. Tom’s host dad would periodically come in and show us stuff like pictures, the wood bowls that his father in-law makes, and the old bricks in the walls of the building. It was a good time for sure. I kept getting lots of calls and text messages while I was there and I felt very popular. My mom called from LA, so that was pretty cool. Most of the other calls and text messages were from various people letting us know that they were meeting to go to some bar later, and we told them that we would catch up with them even later. Eventually Nick and I did just that, so we said goodbye to everybody else who was going to hang out for a while longer and headed out. In the stairwell there was some women standing to the side to let us pass, and because it was really dark in the stairwell I didn’t see that she was holding back a huge dog. It suddenly snapped at me and I was so startled and freaked out for a second, but she held it back and I didn’t get bitten. I think it had a muzzle on anyways. Outside the metro station I bought a blini with cheese from a really unfriendly woman working at the blini stand (what else is new) and then we got on the metro to ride to Gostiny Dvor. Once we got there I got a hold of Bryce to find out where they were, and he gave me directions to a bar called the Red Lion where apparently a lot of people already were. We got outside and came to the realization that if we go this bar that we would have no hope of riding a bus or metro back home later, because it was about 10:30 and the bar was quite a walk away, which means we would have to make the same walk back and would have less than a half hour there if that was the case. So Nick thought he would call Tsveti and see what she and whoever she was with were doing and whether or not they were close by. Apparently they (her, Ingrid, Kara and Abby) were somewhere on Nevskiy, and we decided to meet up and then maybe head over to the Red Lion. We figured out which side of the street they were on and which direction they were walking, and planned to intercept them somewhere. We started walking and after a while started to wonder where they were, because by then we should have found them. Nick called Tsveti back and found out that they had gotten a chasnik and went straight to the Red Lion, which was kind of annoying because we had just walked several blocks in the opposite direction hoping to find them, but we decided to catch a bus back and meet them at the Red Lion. I suddenly remembered that route 22 should take us over to that area, so we hopped on the next one (about a one minute wait) and rode over there. The bus was packed, even at 11:00 at night. I had all my layers on and was getting pretty overheated on that bus. It dropped is off near St. Isaac’s square and it was a short walk over to the bar. The bar was basement level and really sprawling inside. It is an ex-patriot and is apparently always filled it Americans and Brits. They had a live band that was playing a medley of British and American pop and rock songs from the 60’s and 70’s and I had a good time dancing to that for a while, I joined the rest of the group at the table and found that drinks were really expense (80 rubles for a half pint of the cheapest beer. 60 rubles is the average we usually pay for that at other places), so I only ended up having one. The place was pretty raucous and loud, but we had a pretty good table to ourselves. The back room where the band was playing started playing dance music, and some people from our group went back and danced to that for a while but I wasn’t really too into it. I pretty much stayed at the table the whole time I was there, talking with various people from the group. I was pretty tired and I felt like I wasn’t really engaged in any of the conversations that were going on, so I decided to leave a little early. By this time it was about 1:30. I thought that the Red Lion was a pretty cool place and I would go there more often if the drinks weren’t so expensive. I walked alone along the river towards the bridge to Vassilevsky. After the chasnik fiasco the night before I had thought that maybe I should just try walking home again, but it started snowing pretty heavily and I knew that I probably would just get huge blisters again, so I decided that I should give chasniks another shot. I figured I would at least walk down to the bridge and cross over onto the island so the chasnik ride would be cheaper. It wasn’t all that much further, but the mental aspect of simply being on the same island seemed to make it feel a lot shorter back to the apartment. Plus, I figured there might be some chasnik drivers who prefer to stay just on the island and would probably charge less if I was already there going somewhere on the island myself. I got over the bridge and just as I stopped to hail a chasnik, one was dropping someone else off on the other side of the street and saw that I wanted one myself. I decided I was going to offer 100 up front, but would be willing to go as high as 150 if I had to. I told him I was going to Gavanskaya and he asked me “how much?” I told him 100 and it was good enough for him. I was happy too, because I knew I had a 100 ruble bill on me and could pay him exact change this time. The ride was silent like usual, and I got home without any problems for the price we had agreed upon. Maybe all chasnik drivers aren’t so bad after all. I stayed up for a while listening to music again and conked out around 2:30. Today, Sunday, was spent much like last Sunday: just hanging around the apartment. It’s nice to be able to sleep in on Sunday and just take it easy. Actually, I was getting kind of bored earlier, and tried getting a hold of some people to see what they were doing. Some people were out at some park or something, but I didn’t really want to go find them or anything, so I just stayed home all day. Oh well. Oh yeah, I got a call back about helping out in the English classes, which is good because I was starting to think that I was going to have to contact them. They set me up to help out in a class of teenagers tomorrow night at 6:00. I was kind of hoping I’d be teaching people more my own age, but I think teenagers could be a lot of fun too. They’ll probably be more interested in what I have to say and might even look up to me in some ways. So, I’ll let you know how that goes. Right now, though, I need to go take a shower and then go to sleep. So, take it easy. Later.

The thing that I had had had had a mind of it's own

It’s been about three days since I last wrote an update, so I can only imagine how long this is going to be. Settle in. Tuesday was of course Valentine’s Day, and you’ll all be happy to know that this holiday has in fact found it’s way to Russia. It isn’t as big of a deal as in the U.S. (not that it’s really that big of a deal there either) but I did see lots of people walking around with flowers. With International Women’s Day less than a month away (March 8th), though, must Russians (Russian guys, anyway) save their energy and money until then, when they basically have to show their appreciation for ever woman they know by giving them flowers, chocolates, etc. But, more on that once it happens. Around Smolniy there was little Valentines fanfare, save for the Winnie the Pooh V-day cards that Ruth gave to everyone. The real reason to celebrate on Tuesday was because it was Allison’s birthday (and Oregon’s [and Arizona’s], but you already knew that), and because turning 21 is really no big deal in Russia, and because Allison is not the kind of person who would ever go crazy (or even drink at all, as it were) on her 21st birthday were she even in the U.S., our celebration amounted to eating cake in a café with a small-ish group of people after school (how’s that for a sentence?). We went to a café near the Chernyshevskaya metro station and everybody ordered their own little thing, and of course we covered Allison’s. Cake was eaten, photographs were taken, and the birthday song was sung. Passive voice was also being used by us. A lot. We all had a fun time, and then most people had to get going because there were various meetings that they had to get to. Some went to meet with Irina Borisovna to learn about teaching English to small children (we were under the impression that they were all orphans, but apparently they weren’t) and some went to meet somewhere else about doing work in a theater. I went to neither, seeing as how I already went to the meeting about helping teach English to college students (which, by the way, I really need to talk to someone about and figure out when and where I can do it, because I haven’t heard anything from the coordinator yet). Instead, I went with Peter David, Stacey, and Matt back to the 505 store to look around some more. I’ve kind of been spending too much on CDs and DVDs lately, but it’s hard to resist when they are so cheap and plentiful. This time around, I managed to score a CD called “Cdelano v SSSR” (Made in the USSR), which is a 2-disc compilation of soviet pop songs from the 70’s and 80’s. I had been looking for something like this in Russia, because I got some similar CDs in the Czech Republic that had a bunch of what can basically be called Czech oldies on them. The songs on this compilation are from a later period and it wasn’t quite what I hopped it would be, but it’s still pretty cool. I also bought another DVD of old cartoons, because I finally found the one with the specific cartoon that I wanted. It’s called Antoshka, and I saw it in my second year Russian class. It’s just a short little cartoon that goes along with a song, but the song is great and the cartoon is awesome, and just being able to own a copy of this cartoon was worth the DVD price alone. I was very happy to finally find it. After 505 Peter David took off and I decided to follow Stacey and Matt down to Nevskiy to go to an internet café they know. We walked down a part of Mayakoskogo street that I hadn’t been down before, so I got to see some new stuff. I saw a car dealership that sold this brand of cars called Shkoda, and that was pretty exciting. Shkoda is a Czech car company, and basically every other car in the Czech Republic is a Shkoda. My host family there had two of them. They also made the street cars that operate in downtown Portland. If I lived in Europe I would totally buy a Shkoda. So we got to this internet café and it was a pretty cool place. They had tons of computers and the cost is really cheap for students (48 rubles per hour, which is 12 less than at Smolniy). I got on the internet for an hour and checked email, etc. The one bad thing about this place is that all the CPUs for all the computers are inaccessible, stuck inside the little booths that all the computers are placed in, so there is no access to a USB port, which means I can’t upload blog posts or photos from there. It’s a good place to go if I just need to look stuff up on the internet and not post anything, though. I looked up info on some more Russian bands so I can have an idea of what to keep an eye out for at the record stores. I really want to find out about as much local music as I can while I’m here. When my time was up we all headed out. Stacey and Matt both live on the mainland, closer to Nevskiy, so they took off while I caught a bus back to the island. At home I did the usual evening routine of homework, listening to music and loading new music onto the computer. I also talked to Emily on the phone and made plans to hang out the next night. I’m trying to think if there is anything more that I did Tuesday night, but I don’t think there is. So, there you guy. Wednesday was a whole new day, however, and there is definitely more to say about it than about Tuesday night. Oh wait! I just thought of a good story from Tuesday morning that I can’t really work in anywhere else, so I’ll just write it here. Vickie and I got to our bus stop in the morning like usual, and on Tuesdays there are usually more students than on other days for some reason. There were probably about nine or ten. Our bus-van comes and we see that it is one of the smaller ones that is obviously not going to accommodate everyone. It can hold six comfortably, seven tops. So, six or seven people cram in and the rest of us are left wondering what we should do. The driver tells us that another one is coming, so we wait for that one while the first bus-van takes off. A few minutes later another bus-van pulls up, but this one is one of the really big ones that can hold about 20! So, the three or four of us get in and we’re on our way. Why doesn’t the big one just come in the first place and take everyone? Why do they even need two when this one has more than enough space? That’s just the way a lot of things work in Russia. Efficiency is not a big priority. There is probably some deal worked out between the school and the drivers to have so and so be there at such and such time and another at a different time and it doesn’t matter what kind of van they drive. There are lots of little things like that here. Anyways, back to Wednesday. We finished up classes like every other day, and then about half our group made its way to Soiree to use the wireless internet. I had never gone with a group this big and it was actually kind of annoying that there were so many of us there, and probably really annoying to the employees there. The wireless internet is very fickle at Soiree, and depending on where you sit and how many people are using it the internet will either work pretty well or really terribly. We sat in the back room, so I was barely even getting a signal. I ordered a Bochkaryov (an average Russian beer) and some blini with sour cream and tried in vain to get things done on the internet, but the signal kept coming in and out and eventually faded for good. I eventually went and sat by myself in the front to be closer to the router, and once I sat there the internet started working really well. So I stayed there for a while and a few other people came and joined me at different times and I got a lot of the things done that I had hoped to accomplish on the internet. Then the battery problems started. My laptop battery is kind of messed up. It pretty much stops working at 30 percent capacity, so when I don’t have it plugged in I’ll forget and all of a sudden the screen will go black while the computer goes into sleep-mode and I can’t get it to start up again. We finally found some outlets the last time we were at Soiree, so I plugged in my computer and thought I would be fine, but then the power started coming in spurts and not really powering the computer at all. I ejected my thumb-drive and the CD that I was ripping as fast as I could before it shut down again, and then turned it off and went back to the back room defeated and frustrated. I explained what had happened when Bryce informed me that I probably didn’t need to use the power converter with my laptop like I have been, because the plug itself for the laptop should convert the electricity. So I plugged it in again and what do you know, he was right! I tried getting back online but because I was in the back room again the signal was weak, and I didn’t really want to go sit in the front room alone again, so I figured my time on the internet was over. At least I know now I don’t have to use the big bulky converter when I plug in my laptop. Everyone finished using the internet and a bunch of them decided to head back to Vassilevskiy and go to Petra for a while. I was trying to decided whether or not I wanted to go, because I had to meet Emily in a few hours and I probably wouldn’t be a good idea to go all the way out there, but then I remembered that she goes to classes on Vassilevskiy and was going to call me when she got out, so I figured I could meet her somewhere pretty easily if I was already there, so I decided to tag along. We got to the metro station and a few of us had to get in line to get tokens. The line was really long and was barely even moving, and the whole metro station was just really packed in general. It was rush-hour, in fact, and I started to think that riding the metro at that hour was not a good idea, and that I only had about two hours before Emily got out of classes and she would probably want to come back to the mainland to meet anyways, so I backed out of the Petra idea and decided to bum around Nevskiy alone for a couple hours. I had quite a bit of homework to do, so I went to one of the lame hip cafes on Nevskiy to sit by myself and work on my assignments. These kinds of places are perfect for that, because they are all really big and never too crowded, so you can almost always find a good place to sit and be anonymous while you work on homework or something, and you don’t even have to order anything if you don’t want. I was kind of worried that the security guy would see that I wasn’t ordering anything and would either kick me out or make me buy something, but the place was busy enough that the security guy didn’t even notice. He also had his hands full trying to keep this one street waif out of the café. This mangy looking kid kept coming in and going around begging for money, and the security guy would chase him back out. This happened a few times, and I kind of felt bad for the kid. But hey, what are you going to do? I remembered that I had to call my host mom to tell her that I wasn’t going to come home for dinner, and I decided that it was too loud in the café to try and call her, so I packed up my stuff and went back outside. After I talk to her on the phone I didn’t want to go back into the same café, so I went to another lame hip café just down the street and continued my homework there. At about 6;30 I got a call from Emily, half an hour earlier than I was expecting. She said her class was canceled and that she was at home, which was only a few blocks away. Boy was I glad I didn’t go to Petra with everyone. I told her I would meet her on the corner where she lives in a few minutes, and packed up my stuff and headed out. Emily lives a block away from Soiree actually, so she is pretty close to everything. It’s a great location. Right on the corner is a pub called Liverpool, which apparently plays only Beatles music. So I waited outside of Liverpool for a while when Emily showed up. We decided that it would be a good idea just to hang out in her apartment and eat dinner there, because neither of us really felt like going out. We walked to the small grocery store down the street and Emily bought a few groceries for herself and for our dinner. We also went to a cool bakery across the street that I didn’t know about. I felt bad that I couldn’t help pay for anything because I only had a 500 ruble bill, but she kept insisting that it was fine. We went back to her apartment, which is the very last door on the top floor of her building. Her apartment is really cool. It’s an old communal apartment, like the kind that were really common in the Soviet Union, where each tenant has a room off of the main hall and they all share a kitchen and a bathroom. There were four separate rooms, one of which was occupied by a host-mom or sorts who kind of takes care of the place I suppose. I met Emily’s roommates and they both seemed very nice. Her room was really cool too. It was really big and had lots of old pictures on the wall. It even had a piano in it, which I tried playing and discovered it to be horribly out of tune. Emily made some red tea and heated up some leftover lentil soup, and we had a nice little dinner in the kitchen. Aside form the soup we had a loaf of chibatta bread from the bakery and this really good spread that was kind of like cream cheese but tasted kind of like feta cheese. We also had a big plastic bottle of “White Bear” beer that we drank out of small glasses. Big bottles of beer like this are pretty popular in Russia. We talked for a long time about school and people that we both knew back in Eugene, and generally caught up on everything. I hadn’t spent time just hanging out with Emily like this for about two years, so it was pretty nice to get to do it again. After dinner we hung out in her room for a long time, talking more and trading music from our computers. It was all very relaxing and enjoyable, and I don’t think we would have had nearly as good of a time had we gone out to a bar or something. Around 11:00 I decided I should get going because I didn’t want to miss the last bus again. We made tentative plans to hang out again sometime over the weekend, and I was on my way. I walked fast because I was starting to worry about the whole bus situation, and by the time I got to the bus stop it was about 11:15. Plenty of time, I figured. After all, the busses supposedly stop running at midnight and my bus usually comes at about 30 minute intervals maximum. Plus, there were two possible routes I could ride (147 and 7, of course), so I figured I would be fine. So I stood there waiting for a while. Number 22 came. Number 27 came. Number 22 came again. Number 156 came. Number 27 came again. Number 22 came again. I kept waiting until just before midnight, and neither 147 nor 7 ever came. 22 and 27 each went by about three or four times, as well as a few others here and there, but never 147 nor 7. I was really mad. I hardly ever get mad about anything, but this was really getting to me. It was cold and I was tired and I had a lot of homework to do still, and I was running out of options. There was a glass bottle lying on the ground and I kind of kicked it around for a while. Yeah, that’s how mad I was. But seriously, it was probably the maddest I’ve been in a really long time. At about 11:55 I came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no hope of taking a bus left, so I had to suck it up and hail a chasnik. At least with those you can usually get one within about 20 seconds of holding your hand out. A guy pulled up and I told him where I wanted to go. I offered him 200 rubles, and based on my last experience with a chasnik I was sure he would ask for more, but he said 200 was fine and I was on my way. Riding in a chasnik is always awkward because you sit in the front seat but you never really talk to the driver, so I was just sitting there stewing in my anger from the bus fiasco while the driver drove in silence. At least I got home alright. I tried to do some homework when I got home and got some done, but I was too tired to finish it all, so I just crashed out at about 12:45. Of course I was very tired the next morning, but I dragged myself out of bed like always and got to school like normal. Thursday is definitely the worst day of the week as far as classes go. I have Grammar, Gazeta (newspaper reading) and Civilization lecture. It’s pretty tough to make it through the day most Thursdays. But, I did it somehow. Oh, we watched a clip from the movie White Nights where Borishykov did a crazy dance to a Vladimir Vysotskiy song that was really cool. Does anybody know this movie? It’s an American movie from the 80’s that stars Borishnykov and some other cheesy American actor, and it has a lot to do with the Soviet Union or something. I had never heard about it before, but now I want to see the whole thing. I’ve been really anxious to play some guitar. It’s been about a month since I last played, and I didn’t think it was really going to bother me but there have been times where I really wanted to play and it’s weird not to be able to play when ever I want. There is a guitar in the office of the program coordinator at school, and today I asked him if I could borrow it for the night. He said sure, but that it had some problems and didn’t work right. He thought it might just need a screw tightened or something, and I said that I had a screw driver and told him I would take a look at it at home. When I went to pick it up after school, Tom was in there talking with Nathan (program director, you remember him from the Novgorod post) and some other student. When I picked up the guitar Tom told me that he had already looked at it and determined it to be beyond repair, and that it really didn’t work at all. I didn’t believe him at first, but once he showed my I saw that he was right, that there really is no hop of fixing it, and no point either because it’s a really cheap guitar. We told Nathan that there was no hope for it and asked if we could smash it sometime, and he said sure, as long as we pick up all the pieces. So, Tom and I are going to organize a guitar smashing party sometime soon. So I was pretty bummed that I wasn’t going to be able to play guitar, especially since I had just copied a bunch of Kino lyrics and chords off of the internet and was dying to play some. I had been planning to go straight home with the guitar because I didn’t want to lug it around the city with me otherwise, but without the burden of a guitar I was free to go wherever I wanted. But, every one else in the small group that had materialized was going straight home, so I figured I might as well too. We walked to the bus stop and got on 147 (even though I was still mad at it from the night before). Tom and I sat in the way back, and when he got off before us I stayed in my spot. More people got on of course and the bus got really crowded, and my little spot in the spot got really cramped and my knees were jammed up against the plexi-glass guard for a long time. I listened to some Kino on my iPod (it’s basically all I ever listen to anymore) and enjoyed the ride as best as I could. I had a hell of a time trying to squirm past everyone as we approached my stop, but somehow made it to the door in time to get out. I reconvened with Vickie who had been sitting in the front of the bus, and we went to the cell phone store down the street from our buildings so Vickie could buy more cell phone minutes. We stopped in at Diksi (the little grocery store across the street form us) and I bought some water and snacks for my room, and then we went to our respective homes for the evening. I finished my homework pretty early and have been messing around on the computer and writing this post ever since. I’m going to write an email to my friend and former Russian teacher Josh before going to bed, so the night isn’t over yet, but soon. My real family back home is in LA right now. I actually called my mom on her cell phone right before they boarded their plane, and that was phone to talk to her and to my sister. They are going to go to Disneyland, but I suppose most people reading this already know all this. This weekend our group is taking a day-trip to a small town outside of Petersburg called Pavlovsk, where apparently there is a big Tsarist palace or something (just like every other little city around Petersburg), so, that should be fun. You can read all about it a few days from now I would suspect. Have a good weekend, everybody.

Бочкарёв и блинны со сметаной

It’s been only one day since I wrote my last update, so I figure this one should be a lot shorter than the last few. Classes were alright today. I have Grammar and Phonetics on Mondays and neither of those classes are too terrible. We have a test in Grammar on Wednesday and I think I’ll be able to do fine on it. After classes I ate lunch at Smolniy, used the computer lab and then headed out. Pretty much everyone else had left by then so I started walking alone. I like getting out on my own every once in a while anyways. I called Katie to see what she and whoever she was with were up to, and they said they were heading over to Tom’s with him because he forgot his Spravka and he figured he should get it before he does anything else, and that they would call me when they had a plan for afterwards. I started walking to the Chernyshevskaya metro station without any real plan in mind, but knowing I could take the metro somewhere from there if I decided to do that. I really like walking through the park on the way to Chernyshevskaya. There are some streams and a pretty big pond that are of course all frozen over right now and there’s usually some kind of activity going on on top of it. Today there was a group of guys playing soccer out on the ice and some kids sledding down the embankments of the streams. It all looked like a lot of fun, and I took some pictures of people enjoying the snow. There was also a spot on a little hill where all the ice on the bottom was exposed and people were taking turns sliding down it on there feet, and that really looked like fun. I kept walking through and made it to the area around Chernyshevskaya. There is another 505 store right across from it, and I figured I’d check that one out because I didn’t have anything else to do. While I was looking around, Peter David and Will came out of nowhere and said hi. Apparently they had just gotten back from lunch at Pizza Hut. Will bought some bootleg Die Hard DVDs and took off, but Peter David hung back with me and waited until I was done browsing. I ended up buying a couple things there. I got an MP3 CD of another old Soviet rock band that I had heard about named Akvarium (Aquarium), and an MP3 CD of the Cocteau Twins, which is one of my favorite bands and I was pretty surprised to find it there. It had a couple live shows and some rarities collections that I probably already had most of, butut was cheap and I figured it was worth it for the live shows. I also bought a DVD of some old Soviet children’s cartoons that are pretty bizarre but also pretty cool. Peter David and I paid for our stuff and headed outside. I hadn’t heard back from Katie yet, so I called her to see what they were up to but she didn’t answer. So we figured we’d hop on the metro right there and ride to Vostanniya Ploshchad and try to get a hold of them again there or figure something else out. It was only one stop to Vostanniya and once we got out I tried called Katie, Vickie, and Tom, but I couldn’t get a hold of any of them, so Peter David decided to just head home because he was already pretty close. Left alone again, I decided to start wandering down Nevskiy in search of something. I walked past all the usual sights and then made it to a part of Nevskiy that I don’t usually walk down, and decided to check out that store with the cool maps in the window that I always see from the bus. It was a little bookstore that had some maps and posters and stuff. One of the coolest maps they had was a huge one of St. Petersburg from a slight angle, kind of like how you can look at things on Google Earth, and it had all the streets and buildings labeled. I could even identify the building I lived in drawn on the map. It costs 1000 rubles though and it’s really big, so I probably won’t be buying it any time while I’m here. There is a smaller, much less expensive and really awesome map of Russia that I’ve seen around and that I intend to get some time before I leave. I kept walking down Nevskiy until I came to the giant bookstore that I always see from the bus called “Dom Knigi” (House of Books). I went in hesitantly, hoping that the CDs and DVD in my bag wouldn’t set off the metal detector thing, because I didn’t have the receipt. I got in fine and wandered around for a while. I didn’t see the actual literature section, like you know novels and poetry and that stuff, it was just all kinds of other general interest books. The literature section had to have been there somewhere. There were a lot of cool books on art. While wandering around the art room I hit the jackpot: There was a table that had all these different sets of old Soviet propoganda posters for sale, like the one I had bought before only a little smaller and there were a ton of them. They each came in packs of about 20 and each one had a different theme. There was one with posters about labor, one about kicking bad habits for the good of communism (including the “nyet” one I had bought earlier), one of old advertisements, and so on and so fourth. I had a really hard time deciding which one to get because they were all so cool, but I finally settled on the general “propaganda posters” set because it had a good mix of everything. I think I’ll probably go back again sometime and get some more, because they are pretty cheap (400 rubles per pack, which would come to about 20 rubles each, which is a great deal) and I imagine a lot of people back home would probably love to have some of these, and I would love to give them all out. There was another guy looking at the packs and standing in my way for the longest time comparing the contents of each one before deciding which to buy, and I can’t blame cause I had to do the same thing, but it was really getting to me cause he snuck up beside me after I had gone up to them and stood there in my way while I was obviously making my way over to look at the rest of them. Oh well, no big deal. I paid for the posters and left, glad again that I had not set off the metal detectors, and kept walking. I figured I had done enough and that I was getting a little tired, so I figured I’d just head home from there. I made it to my usual bus-waiting place next to Gostiny Dvor and waited for either the 147 or the 7. The streets seemed really crowded and I was getting a little overwhelmed by all the people. The 7 bus came first and pulled a fast one on me again by stopping further down, but I started running just in time to catch it. The bus ride home was insane. I have never seen so many people packed onto one bus before. It was standing room only and it seemed like at every stop more and more people were trying to cram in when there was no room left. There were even times when the doors would barely close because there were people in the way. It was particularly hard for me because of my height. My head pretty much scrapes the ceiling of the bus and I was jammed up against the hand railing with nowhere to put my head, so I had to keep shuffling around to find a place to just be able to stand properly. The conductor (the person who goes around collecting money and passing out tickets on all the city busses) or course had to work her way up and down the bus to collect the money from all the new people cramming in, and we’d all have to find some way to part to let her threw each time. One time she kind of pushed me aside and I had to hold my entire weight up by the railing just to prevent myself from falling onto the man sitting near where I was standing. It was getting to the point that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get out of the bus when it came to my stop, because I was blocked by so many people in either direction. As my stop was approaching I tried to push my way to the door as best as I could, but all shoving came to a stand still. Luckily, a pretty big group of people all got off at my stop, way more than I ever would have thought, and I was able to slip out once all the people had gotten off. It was quite a mess. I tell you, I really am not meant for big city life. If I ever come back to Russia to live or study or whatever (which I is very likely) I think I want to try going to a smaller city, because all the people and cars and pollution are kind of starting to get to me. It’s not the fact that it’s another country or another culture, that I can usually deal with just fine, it’s just the fact that I’m in a big city that causes me the most stress. So I was very happy to make it home alright, and I was met at the door by my host brother Sasha. My host mom was not there, it was just Sasha and a friend of his hanging out in his room. He asked me if I would drink beer, and I was a little confused by the question because of the way he worded it, and then I figured out that I was asking if I would come and have some beer with him and his friend. I was excited because I have had little to no interaction with my host brothers until now, so I put my stuff in my room and headed to the room next door to join them. This was the first time I had even seen inside of their room, and it was pretty nice. They had a really big TV with what looked like some nice stereo equipment, and there were a couple of weird couch/beds in the corner and a coffee table. It was a good set up for watching TV, which I know they do a lot of in there. They also have a computer in there that maybe is hooked up to the internet? I’m not sure, but I would kind of be afraid to ask. So I sat down with them and Sasha poured my a little glass of beer from the big 3-liter bottle that they had. He and his friend here watching the Olympics, and I was excited to see some because I hadn’t watched any yet. We watched a little skiing, some speed racing, and even some curling. We saw a Russian skier accepting a gold medal, and some others being interviewed. It was fun seeing it from the perspective of another country, because of course they are going to focus on their athletes more than on any others. Oh! Did anybody know that the town of Sochi, Russia is in the runnings to host the 2014 Winter Olympics? I didn’t know. That’s pretty cool. I might be going there over spring break, and that would be pretty cool if in fact it did host the Olympics and I could say I had been there eight years earlier before anybody else had ever really heard of it. I’m sure it won’t be chosen though, what with Chechnya and all those other hostile regions only a few hundred miles away. To me that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. But oh well. Sash must have been pretty drunk because he was asking me lots of questions about sports in the US and stuff like that, and wanted to know what were the names of some Hokey times from around where I live (of course he had never heard of the Portland Winterhawks). He also asked me what kind of cigarettes and cell phones are popular in the US. I don’t know much about either, so I did my best to try to come up with some I knew. He said that Camel cigarettes are really bad in Russia, and that Motorola and Samsung phones are no good either. Sasha, just for the record, likes Kent cigarettes and Nokia cell phones. He was showing my what I thought was his cell phone, which was really fancy and had a big color screen and a camera with 2 megapixels, but then his friend got up to leave and took the phone with him, so apparently it was his and Sasha only wished he had such a cool phone. I never talked to the friend at all, he didn’t even introduce himself. When his friend left I figured I should probably head out too, because it might be a little awkward just hanging out with Sasha. I was really glad to have gotten the chance to talk to him some more, and I am glad I finally got to see the room of mystery that is right next to mine. When I got back to my room I saw that I had missed a call on my phone. It was Katie, so I called her back and she told me that they had never left Tom’s apartment, that they had just hung out there and that his host mom had made them all food. Sounded like fun. They were going over to Vostanniya to find something to do and invited me to come meet them, but I really didn’t want to head back out during the early evening rush, so I’ve just been hanging out here ever since, doing home work and messing around on the computer. I enjoy having this sort of quiet time in the evenings. There now, that wasn’t so bad, only about half of the size of my usual updates. If I can only manage to right an update about every day so each one is a bit more manageable. That probably won’t happen, though. I might have to start skipping over some things or leaving some things out all together just to save time. We’ll see how it goes. Later.

Алюминиевные огурцы

I'm at a pretty cool hip internet cafe right now with tons and tons of computers, but none of them have accessable USB ports, so I won't be loading last night's update now. I have plans to go to Soiree tomorrow, so I should be able to do it then. Just thought I'd say something as long I was at a computer. More tomorrow.

-Austin

Для разговора время есть

It’s about 10:15 Sunday night, and the way I see it, it’s a perfect time to sit down and write a blog post. So, I guess I’ll pick up with what I did on Friday. After class I decided to take it easy for the afternoon and just go straight home. As I was leaving Smolniy I was stopped by a babushka (you know, an old lady). I love the things people call each other when they are trying to get your attention here. The old lady literally said to me, “excuse me, young person.” It was great. It was just within the Smolniy Cathedral area that she stopped me, and she wanted to know what the place was called. I told that I think it was simply called “Smolniy,” that the church was called the Smolniy Cathedral and that everything around it was simply Smolniy, and she seemed a bit confused. I told her that on the other side of the building was the “Center for Russian Language and Culture,” (the place where I study) and she shrugged it off like, “of course I know that.” I think she misunderstood me and thought that I was trying to tell her that Smolniy was a place of culture, that there simply is culture there. Duh. She told me she was from Irkutsk and that she didn’t know the city very well. If I had been thinking straight at the time I would have told her that I am from Irkutsk’s siser city (Eugene – well, I guess I’m not really from there, but I live there most of the time now). So, it was a nice little interaction and I was actually pretty proud of myself for having conducted and understood the whole thing in Russian. That pride quickly turned to regret the moment I reached the bus stop just in time to see the 147 bus pulling away, leaving me with about a half hour wait for the next one. Had I not stopped to help the babushka I would have arrived just in time to catch the bus. Shoot. So, about an hour or more later I finally made it home and had a nice little relaxed evening in my room before going out. There were big plans for the evening, and I was basically the central figure of the whole thing. See, I wanted to take everybody to the cool bar that Matt had taken me to earlier in the week (It’s called Cynic, but, in Russian, of course. The word is a cognate actually, so if I tried to transliterate it it would just look like I misspelled the word “cynic.” But, I digress), and sort of as an excuse to get everybody to come with me I started telling everybody earlier in the week that Friday was my half birthday (which was true, actually) and that they all needed to come celebrate with me at the cool bar. A half birthday isn’t something I would usually make any sort of deal about, but because it was on a Friday this year and because I had something I wanted to do with everyone I pretended like it was really something worth celebrating. Everybody else seemed to take it semi-seriously, and apparently a lot of them told their host families that they were going out to celebrate their friend’s half birthday (which was of course met with many confused reactions). The bar is kind of hard to find, of course, so I told everyone to meet me at the statue in St. Isaac’s Square at 8:00. Vickie and I got there first and waited around for all the various groups of people to show up. A lot of people didn’t actually know how to get to St. Isaac’s Square, so there were a lot of phone calls made and a lot of directions given and re-given, but eventually everyone who wanted to come made it to the statue and I took them over to the place. I was really hoping that it wouldn’t be too crowded at the bar and that there would be room for us (a pretty naïve notion, really, considering there were about 15 of us). And, of course, when we got there the place was packed. All the tables were full pretty much (And these are big tables). We milled about trying to see if there was any place that anybody could squeeze in, and most people decided to leave and try finding another place. There was hope for a few people, however, and so a group of about 5 or 6 including myself hung around and tried to sit down. See, there was a pretty big table in the back room where only three people were sitting, but they were sitting in the middle of the table. Ingrid was the first to sit down and asked one of the guys if we could squeeze in there, and he said sure, but the rest of us could tell that it probably wasn’t a good idea to sit here. The three guys were all really drunk and there was a security guy talking to them about something and the situation seemed like it was starting to get kind of tense. We all stood and watched, trying to figure out what was going on. One guy had his own bottle of Vodka that I guess he wasn’t supposed to have, and somebody tried to grab it away from him and then the three of them along with the security guard and a couple others started to get physical. One of the guys I think tried to swing at another and then the security guy held him back and somebody else held the other guy back or something. I was pretty confused by the whole thing and didn’t know who was on whose side or what was trying to be accomplished really. All I know is that there were about 4 or 5 people in a scuffle and one of them grabbed the edge of the table we were trying to sit at and lifted up the end, making all the glasses and bottle and ashtrays fall to the floor and spill beer everywhere. We all tried to get out of the way and watched from a short distance. The scuffle ended pretty quick and the people were removed, leaving the table up for grabs. We swooped in but if course the table and benches were covered with beer and there was broken glass on the floor. Luckily, the incident made some other people feel uncomfortable, and the few people sitting at the next table over got up to leave, and we moved in quick. So, we had a table with enough room for all of us, and we were happy. At this bar you have to go up to the counter and order your drinks, so some people went up and got some beers and shots for everybody. Because of the half birthday thing, everybody kept insisting that they buy me drinks! What a great scam, huh? So we all got a beer and a shot of vodka and began our night. It was Tsveti, Abby, Ingrid, John, Kara, Natalie and myself, but Kenny, Peter David (long story, but not really), and Reed showed up pretty soon too. Everybody liked the place, and I was glad to have shown it to them. We kept getting calls from the rest of the group, and they said that they had found a good place right down the street that was practically empty and that had a dance floor and that we should come over, but we felt like sticking around for a little while. Actually, I had to stick around for a while, because I had arranged to finally meet with my friend Emily that night, and she was going to meet me at Cynic. When the others started getting antsy to go next door and dance, I got them to at least wait with me until Emily showed up. So we stayed at Cynic for a while and had some more drinks and talking about this and that. Bryce showed up at one point already really drunk from next door, and kept trying to get us to come over. He was really excited that Cynic had Jagermeister shots though, and so I had one or two with him. Some people left at one point, so it was down to a core few and I kept having to reassure them that Emily was coming any minute and that we could go next door after that. Eventually, she did show up and I was so excited to see her. I hadn’t seen her since June. She had brought a friend with her named Amanda, who was very she and didn’t look like she really wanted to hang around. So I introduced Emily to some people and then we all got up to head next door. Amanda talked to Emily for a second outside the new bar and told her she felt like going home. I don’t think she was very comfortable around me or my friends, which was fine, so she took off and Emily came inside with us. Everyone was really excited to see me and they kept telling me happy half-birthday. They had gotten a little dance party going in the back room, and it looked like a lot of fun. I felt like I was spread pretty thin because I really wanted to talk to Emily but I also had to make my rounds to see everybody else who wanted to talk to the “half-birthday boy.” I had to get up and tell people directions over the phone every few minuets too, so I was kind of all over the place. Emily had called Matt and he eventually came and met us at the bar. A lot of the other people had gotten really drunk before we came to the bar, and some were in the bathroom throwing up. I had a couple beers there and even bought Abby the drink I owed her way back from the first night of orientation. Some of my friends got to talk with Emily and Matt and I think everybody hit it off pretty well. By this time it was probably about 12:30 or 1:00, and a lot of people started heading out for the evening, and after a while it was just Emily, Matt and me left. We sat around in that bar for a little while and then decided to head back to Cynic for a while. By this time it was a lot less crowded, and we managed to get a whole big table to ourselves. Matt kept buying me drinks, and Emily to even. I really have to start paying them back. I even got Matt to order us a plate of grenki, which I later found out nobody else wanted any off and I had it all to myself. Grenki is this amazing snack that I had for the first time here. It’s strips of black bread fried in a garlic and oil and topped with parmesan cheese. Cynic is apparently famous for their grenki. It was amazing. So Matt, Emily and I sat around for a while talking more about Music, Geography, and all kinds of interesting things. I found out more about how Emily’s time in Russia has been so far. Matt got in a side conversation with some Russian guy who had sat down next to us. At one point Emily got up and brought back three vodka shots. Matt said he didn’t want his, and I insisted that he drink it. Somehow the idea came up that I should arm-wrestle him for it, meaning that if I win he has to drink it and if he wins I have to drink both his and my own, which kind of seems a little backwards. I thought I had it in the bag, but I didn’t know what I was in for. Apparently Matt is like a champion arm-wrestler, and everybody who comes in to work at the paper where he works has to arm-wrestle him. He hasn’t lost a mach in St. Petersburg yet. So we start arm-wrestling and we both realize right away what we were in for. He said right away, “Oh no, this guy’s strong.” It was probably one of the longest arm-wrestling matches I have ever been in, lasting probably two or three minutes. I felt like I had an edge on him at one point, but he somehow found bursts of strength and fought back, to where eventually he had my arm about four inches above the table, and I knew he had me. I let him have it there knowing it would be better to end it there rather than hold out longer and really hurt my arm only to loose in the end anyways. My arm was still really sore afterwards and I had trouble flexing it for a while. But, I put up a good fight, and Matt told me that I was the best competition he’s had yet in Petersburg. So, I had to drink both shots, which wasn’t too bad really. After a while we decided to head to another bar that they like to go to. It had been snowing that night and when we came out there was a fresh layer on the ground. There was a spot that was untouched and I had the urge to jump into the middle of it and leave foot prints, so I jumped and of course slipped right onto my back when I landed. It didn’t really hurt, and at least I left a good mark in the fresh snow. We trudged through the snow to this place called Swiss Bar that Matt had actually showed me the other night. This place is kind of weird. It’s kind of a lesbian bar but not exclusively. The bartenders are all butch-looking lesbians and there are some who go there, but there are all kinds of other people there too. Emily is pretty bi-sexual and I guess likes butch girls, so she likes to go here. It was still pretty packed by the time we got there at around 4:00 am. They were blasting all kinds of bad American music (mainly rap), and I just stood around at the bar with Matt most of the time while Emily danced with some girl. Matt and I talked about geography some more. He told me some of his family history and how his family ended up in Oregon and I told him the same thing about myself (Everything goes back to geography! It’s great!). At some point he went to the bathroom, and Emily came back for a while and then went to the bathroom too. Maybe there was a long line or they got held up somewhere else, but neither of them came back for a while, and in the meantime I meat a guy from Northern Ireland named Brian. He was probably about 50 and had a friend with him who was much younger and just kind of stood there listening without ever really saying anything. Apparently Brian has been in St. Petersburg for about six years (I’m not sure if he meant on and off or if he’s lived there that whole time), but still doesn’t speak Russian well at all (“I’m lazy,” he told me). I’m not sure what he does, but we ended up talking about Russian music. He told me about how great this band Leningrad is, who I’ve heard of but haven’t really heard yet. I told me that I really like Kino, and he said that they’re good and all but that they’re too old and that Leningrad is better. He started trying to explain to me about some place over on the Petrograd side of the city where Viktor Tsoi (lead singer of Kino who died in a car crash in 1990) used to work shoveling coal but is now turned into some cool club or monument to him, and he even tried to draw a map of it but I don’t know that part of the city at all so I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand what it is, exactly. We talked about America and how the drinking age / driving age / voting age / age of consent are all in weird orders and how they don’t really make sense to us. Eventually Matt and Emily came back and Brian and his silent friend took off. Soon after that I decided I was pretty tired and by then the morning busses had started to run, so I said goodbye and headed out. I tried calling home to tell my dad happy birthday, but the best I could do was leave a message. I waited for a bus on my usual spot on Nevskiy near Gostiny Dvor. It took a while for a bus to show up and I started thinking about taking the Metro, but the 7 bus showed up just in the nick of time. I was so relieved. I took my seat and couldn’t really stay awake for most of the ride. I kept falling asleep and waking back up, worrying that I had missed my stop. Luckily I never missed it and I got home just fine, albeit at 7:00 in the morning. I went straight to bed. The next morning (well, later that morning) at around noon I was laying around bed kind of half-asleep, half-awake when I was fully awaken by my phone ringing. It was Natalie. She wanted to know if I would come with her to wander around some market that she had heard about. It sounded like fun and I wasn’t feeling too bad, so I decided to go. I told her to give me some time to get up and have breakfast, but that I would call her when I was headed out. I got up and wasn’t too hung-over aside for a headache (nothing a little Aleve couldn’t fix). I was correct in my assumption that my host-mom would be making me blini for breakfast. I can never get enough blini, they are just so delicious, even by themselves. After happily filling up on blini, I got my stuff together and headed out. The marked was in a part of town I hadn’t really been before, and the only way I knew how to get there was by metro, so I rode the marshrutka to Vassileostrovskaya. The trip required a transfer at Gostiny Dvor / Nevskiy Prospekt, but from there it was only one stop away. I came out of the Metro station at Cennaya Square and waited around for Natalie. I had never been here before, and I felt pretty disoriented as to where the rest of the city was. Natalie showed up and we asked around a little bit as to where the market actually was. The only thing I was really interested in buying at a market right now was some bootleg CDs, and as we walked through a little indoor plaza / mall, I found a spot where they were selling some. Boy did I find what I was looking for. The Kino MP3 CDs that were for some reason lacking at 505 where available here, and for 180 rubles (it was on two discs) I bought every Kino album all at once. I am so happy about getting that, I’m listening to them right now in fact. I’m telling you, this band is amazing. I can’t really explain what’s so great about them, but I’m so hooked right now. Luckily I can feed my addiction for a while, what with their entire catalog now loaded onto my computer. I also bought a DVD of famous Russian folk singer / actor Vladimir Vysotsky, that, according to the box, and 36 of his albums on it. I figured that meant that it was like an DVD-ROM, that I could take all those albums off of the disc and put them onto my computer. I found out when I got home that it actually is a real DVD, and it does have all those albums but you have to go through it like a DVD menu and you can’t copy any of. So I have 36 Vladimir Vysotsky albums now, but I can’t do anything with them but listen to them off of the DVD menu on TV or my computer (actually, it probably won’t even work on American DVD players). Oh well, at least it was only 90 rubles. So, I bought those, and then we headed back outside and found the big market. It really was pretty massive. There were rows and rows of booths, almost exclusively clothes and accessories, and lots of salespeople trying to draw you into buying their stuff. I wasn’t interested in buying anything, of course, and I don’t think Natalie was for the most part either, but it was fun walking around and looking at things. After a while I started getting pretty tired and I had to use the bathroom, so reluctantly I left Natalie in the market and headed home. She said it was fine but I felt kind of bad leaving her there by herself. I got back to the metro station, got back to Gostiny Dvor and transferred to the Green line to get home. I of course intended to get off at Vassileostrovskaya, but once the train stopped I was unable to get out of the train. At some of the metro stations, including Vassileostrovskaya, the trains pull right up to a set of doors, so when you get on you never actually see the train, the door opens up in front of you and the train door opens too and you walk right on. There are no open tracks like in a normal metro station. So, I was standing on the train as it approached Vassileostrovskaya anticipating getting out through the door I was standing near, but when we stopped the outside door didn’t open. I thought maybe it was some malfunction and that they would open it soon, and that surely they couldn’t leave before the door opens, so I stood there for a second. I then realized that there was a little sign on the door saying use the next one over, and I looked down the row and saw that the one at the other end of the car was open, but by this time there was not enough time to get there and there were a lot of people standing in my way, and then all the doors closed. So, I was forced to ride the train to the next stop at Primorskaya, get out and ride back one stop. It was kind of annoying, but no big deal. I got back and went outside, caught another marshrutka and relaxed at home for a while. I talked to Vickie on the phone and she said some people were meeting at Choomadan at around 8:30, so we decided to meet outside at 8:00. I had a delicious dinner of peppers stuffed with meat and rice (the same thing I ate the night before, actually) and when 8:00 rolled around I met Vickie and we caught a marshrutka over to the Vassileostrovskaya area. Vickie talked to Katie on the phone and they said that they were going to be late, so we decided to hang out in Kofe Khaus for a while to kill time. We got the really nice, really cute waitress again and sat in the back like we usually do there. I had a Banana split coffee something or other that was pretty good. It was served cold, which is the way I like it. We weren’t there for to long before the rest of the people made it to Choomadan, so we paid up and made our way over. We made sure to leave a nice tip for the waitress so she will keep being nice to us whenever we go in there. We don’t go there that often, but I think the waitress remembers us now and seemed particularly happy when we had entered the café. So, I want to make sure she stays that way whenever we go there. Tipping isn’t really customary in Russia, apparently, but we usually have a hard time not doing it so we usually try to leave at least a little bit for a tip. So we met everybody at Choomadan but there wasn’t really anywhere for us all to sit, so a few of us decided to scope out the seen at Petra just down the street. We got a smaller table there and called the others and told them to come on over. Where we were sitting was kind of like a little booth with another table attached, but there were three girls sitting at that other table. We waited for them to leave so we could all sit together, and after a while they did and we invited the rest of the group who had to find a table in the back to come join us. I had a couple beers and we ordered a hookah for everyone and had a nice relaxed night, which was just what I wanted after the night before. Everyone left at about 11:30 to make sure we could all get home before everything shut down. The marshrutkas were pretty sparse, and Vickie and I ended up waiting almost until midnight for our trusty 44 to arrive. We sat in the back for a while before it took off, and these two other guys got in while we were waiting. Something about the way we looked tipped them off instantly and right as they got in one of the them said, “Americans!” and they began to talk/mess with us a little bit. One spoke very little English and was trying to use it with me, and must if what he was trying to say in English I could barely understand. The other didn’t speak any English. They were surprised by every little word of Russian that I said, and kind of laughed and repeated it to themselves after I said them. They were kind of annoying but harmless. They jumped out before the marshrutka pulled away. Apparently they just wanted to get warm for a second. Vickie was pretty annoyed with them and tried to stay quite the whole time. I don’t blame her. We got home and I listened to music in my room for a little while before going to bed. Today I really didn’t do anything worth writing about. I woke up at noon, ate some blini and basically hung around my room all day. I did some homework, uploaded the rest of my Kino MP3s onto my computer, and that was basically it. It was pretty nice, actually. Oh, I did go through the books on the book shelf in my room and found all kinds of cool books that I would like to read but won’t be able due to time / language constraints. I found some stuff that had belonged to previous host students, like envelopes of letters sent from home and some notes and other things like that. I also went through a cupboard in my room that is filled with old notebooks from what I assume were either old students or my host brothers, or maybe both, but I’m not sure. I at some dinner (fish and potatoes) and called home for a little bit and started writing a blog post about two hours ago. Yeah, I guess that’s about how long it usually takes me. At least, for ones as long as this, which seem to be becoming the norm now, huh? IF you don’t mind I don’t mind. That’s it for now. Take it easy, everyone.