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.