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.
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