Jan 30

So, I’m pretty tired, but I want to write a blog update anyways. Sunday morning after I wrote my last update I met up with Katie and Brice and Vasileostroskaya metro station and we rode to Mayakovskaya to go to Soiree. Tom met up with us there about a half hour later. The blisters on my feet hurt so bad that I could barely walk. I was happy to sit and hang out in Soiree for a long time since I didn’t have to walk around at all. We were there for a while, enough time for me to have two sodas, three beers and an appetizer of Georgian fried cheese (it’s pretty much what you would expect it to be). The internet started working a lot better than it had the time before, but after a while it started puttering out on me and soon there after my computer battery ran out of juice, so I was left without a computer for the rest of the time. We sat around and took turns using Tom’s computer and showing each other pictures on Facebook. Oh, get this. Tom started a blog right before he came to Russia too. Guess what it’s called. Go on. That’s right, tominrussia.blogspot.com. How funny is that? At some point Stacy showed up out of nowhere and sat and talked with us, We were getting bored with Soiree and decided it would be fun to go to a hookah bar. Apparently there is one back near Vasileostrovskaya, and we were almost going to go there, but Tom and Stacy both live on the mainland side of town and didn’t want to ride all the way out there. Luckily, Tom knew of a different hookah bar right on Nevskiy Prospekt a few blocks away. I stuck it out through the pain of walking down Nevskiy and we finally made it. The place was called “Stars Only” and is a very hip cafe/bar/restaurant that has hookahs on the menu. They have a guy in a pirate suite standing outside the door to lure people inside. I hate to even have to mention it, but the guy in the pirate suit was in fact African-Russian, if that is what you might call it. It’s kind of weird seeing black people in Russia, and especially hearing them speaking Russian. I see them around every once in a while, but not too often. The Soviet Union was big into extending a hand to Third World Countries, teaching people the language and inviting them to come to Russia and I guess a lot of them made it to Russia that way and a small African community has thrived since then, which is great, but it still throws me a little bit. I know they must get a lot of crap from a lot of Russians, and I know there is a strong anti-foreigner sentiment among a lot of younger Russians, but many African-Russians endure it. More power to them. Anyway, back the “Stars Only.” We got a table and ordered a water hookah with orange tobacco. Some people ordered dinner too. I got a small order of French fries to tide me over until dinner. Nick showed up to meet us right as our hookah arrived and we all had a good time sitting, eating, and smoking the hookah. During the last school year our friend Tristan bought a hookah and has left it at our house ever since, so I’ve had some experience with the hookah before. It can’t be as bad for you as cigarettes, because they don’t add all those crazy chemicals like they do to cigarettes. I think it’s a fun and relaxing thing to do with your friends, and that’s just how it was at Stars Only. There was a TV screen near our table that was playing a continuous loop of footage from some crazy dance club called Club Infiniti that just had lots of naked people dancing all over the place. It was kind of weird that it was just on in the background, and we all couldn’t help but watch it. So, we sat and talked a while and everyone had a good laugh when I told them about my dream with the “bleach torch” (I’d have to explain it to you), and when we were all done Katie, Bryce, Nick and I caught the 147 bus back to the Island. This is the most amazing bus route ever. Bus 147 starts about 3 blocks from the Smolniy campus, goes down Suvarovskaya Street, all the way down Nevskiy, over the Vasilevskiy Island and eventually stops right in front of my apartment. It’s a dream come true. I think I’m going to start using that a lot more than the metro. It takes longer but it will ultimately be cheaper and less stressful. Anyway, I got home and stayed up until midnight working in homework. Today (Monday) it was back to school. Classes are pretty interesting, I’ll probably elaborate on them more sometime. In Phonetics I think the teacher kind of likes me because there is this one letter in the Cyrillic alphabet that is hard for a lot of people to pronounce but I can pronounce it well (There’s no equivalent of it in English, but it kind of sounds like an “ee” with an “ui” at the beginning of it, but not really. Written out it looks kind of like “bl” just so you know). After class I got on the internet for a while and decided it would be fun to explore. It was actually sunny today, so it was the perfect time to wander around the city. I talked Vickie and Natalie into coming along, but once we got on the bus (yeah, 147) they decided they were just going to keep riding it to their respective homes. When I got off Vickie kept riding, but Natalie got off when I did and told me that she had missed her stop back a ways, and not wanting to turn immediately back she decided to come exploring with me. We walked pass the Hermitage down a side street and over a nice canal and ended up back at the Church on Spilled Blood that I had mentioned earlier. It was cool seeing it up close in the daylight and sunshine this time. There was a souvenir market in front that had all the typical Russian stuff for sale: hats, matryoshka dolls, fake soviet metals, and even some balalaikas. I might have to go back later and get some cool stuff, although I might be able to get the same stuff a lot cheap at some of the big out door markets, and it will probably be better quality too. We’ll see. After a moment of debate we decided to go inside the church. If it’s that amazing on the outside it must be equally stunning on the inside, we figured. The price said 170 rubles for students, so we each asked for student tickets and they ended up charging us only 50 rubles each! I think the 170 was meant for foreign students, but since we have our Russian student Ids we got the local student price. It might have also been that we tricked them into thinking we were Russian. You see, in Russia there is a dual pricing system for most museums and things like that. There is a Russian price and a foreigner price. The student price is cheaper, but still more expensive than the normal Russian price. Natalie is a heritage speaker, meaning she speaks Russian at home but doesn’t really know how to read or write in Russian (She was born in Odessa and moved to New York with her family when she was five), so she could easily have tricked the ticket lady when she asked for a ticket, and all I said was, “Student, please” and showed them my ID, so maybe I passed for Russian to and avoided the much larger foreigner fee. Things got more interesting inside. When we gave our tickets to them women inside, she looked at mine and saw that I had a Russian ticket, and she literally asked, “are you one of us?” I somehow must not have looked Russian enough for her, or else why else would she have questioned it? I didn’t understand what she was trying to say at the time, so after a few confused looks Natalie jumped in and explained that we were studying at the university here, and that was good enough for her, so she gave us the little baggies to put on our feet and we waited for our small tour group to start. The church isn’t really big inside, maybe about the size of a gymnasium, but they still make you go on a guided tour. We would walk a few feet each time and the tour guide would explain something new about the specific spot where we would be standing. It all in Russian and of course not dumbed down like the Russian that my teachers speak, so I didn’t catch a lot of what she said. Plus I stood in the back as much as possible so as not to stand out and be identified as a foreigner, so I couldn’t really hear her that well. The inside was absolutely amazing. Every square inch of wall is covered with mosaics of bible scenes and various religious images. From far away it all looks like paintings, but it is in fact all made of pieces of dyed glass! Incredible. Of course, I had to take pictures, but here’s where things got even more interesting. There are signs posted all over that says it costs 50 rubles to take pictures and 100 rubles to take video, but everyone was doing it so I figured it would be fine. While I was taking pictures, the ubiquitous babushka that haunts virtually every museum and monument or point of interest in Russia came up to me and pointed to my camera and said something to me, which of course I didn’t understand. She pointed back towards the door so I think she was trying to explain that I had to pay the 50 rubles on the way out, and then she just walked away. The tour finished up and I didn’t se the babushka anywhere so I thought I was home free, but there she was right in front of the exit. Either she forgot about me or wasn’t even talking about me paying in the first place, because I slipped out without so much as a word from her, and I got away with 50 rubles still in my possession. So, all told, what might have cost me a total of about 220 rubles (foreigner ticket and picture fee) only cost me 50, thanks to a little sneakiness and some help from Natalie. We decided to head back to Nevskiy where we could each catch busses home. Oh yeah, and we came up with a great idea for a small trip in about a month, Apparently February 23rd is a national holiday in Russia, and we have school off. This is on a Thursday, and we thought that it would be totally worth it to skip classes the following Friday and have a 4-day weekend, during which we could take a trip to the Baltic Nations (Estonia, Latvia, and maybe Lithuania if there was enough time). I proposed the Idea and Natalie really liked it. She really loves Lithuania, apparently. I want to see who else might be interested in taking a trip like this, because that would be really great if we could get a group together. The only problem might be that we might not have our Passports back by then. They collected them all last week to be registered and for longer, multiple-entry visas to be put in them. But if we got them back in time it would be perfect. So, we’ll see how that turns out. Natalie left to catch her bus and I hopped on 147, of course, and rode all the way home with no problem. And here I am now. I did my homework earlier and now it’s getting late. I have to take a shower and go to bed. Peace out.