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.