A candy colored clown they called the Sandman

Time to write. Some pretty fun things have happened in the past few days. Let me tell you about them. Tuesday, of course, I had been invited over to Nick’s apartment by his host-mother to eat blini for Maslenttsa, the big blini-eating holiday that is going on this week. We rode 147 all the way out to his part of the island with some of the other students that live near him. I was expecting just a few blinis, just something small, but his host-mom pretty much had a whole meal waiting for us. It started out with a bowl of borshch, then two blinis with meat and rice for each of us, then a little “salad” of pickled carrots and cabbage with garlic, and then a huge stack of more blinis for Nick and I to share and eat with jam. We couldn’t finish the stack, that’s how much it was. We also had water, apple juice, and tea to drink with it. It was all very delicious. After our feast we sat in the living room with his host-mom and chatted for a while. I’ve said it before, but I really like Nick’s host-family situation. His apartment is very nice and his host-parents are really friendly and eager to talk and help Nick with his Russian (his host-mom anyway) Just the little bit of talking I did with her there made me feel like I was really learning to converse better in Russian. It makes me wish that my host-mom was more eager to have conversations and more willing to help me with my Russian. Tonight at dinner I tried asking her more questions than usual but she would usually just give a short response and then get sucked back into the TV. TV really does dominate her life and the lives of my host-brothers (when they are here, anyway) and she really doesn’t seem to know much about culture beyond the things she sees on TV. It’s kind of sad, actually. But anyway, Nick’s place was a lot of fun but I had to get going so I could stop in at home for a little while before going out again. Tuesday was Ingrid’s birthday, so there was a big “surprise” party planned for her at the Red Lion pub at 9:30. I also wanted to get a hold of Matt and/or Emily, because I knew it was Matt’s “free” night. At home I had to tell my host-mom that I didn’t want a big meal because I already ate a lot at Nick’s place. She seemed a little annoyed but I don’t think it was a big deal. She just didn’t give me any soup with my dinner. Afterwards I tried getting a hold of Matt and Emily but had no luck, so before it got too late I caught a marshrutka down to Nevskiy. I even managed to catch the same one Bryce and Katie were already in. After a bumpy ride we got off on Admiraltaya Naberezhnaya and walked down to the Red Lion. We were the first ones there so we grabbed a couple big tables in the back. More and more people kept showing up and eventually Ingrid and her little crew arrived and the real party got going. Tuesdays girls get free champagne all night long, so the bartenders kept coming around and refilling all the champagne glasses. Quite a few of us were there, including some people who have yet to go out to the bars here and it was a lot of fun to get a chance to hang out with them outside of school. Kelly and Michelle showed up and I think neither of them have drank in a while, and while Michelle kind of took it easy and didn’t really get too drunk, Kelly went all out. She must just have a really low tolerance to alcohol after not drinking for such a long time, because after a few free champagne’s she was completely wasted and saying the most hilarious things ever. She’s usually very quiet and shy in school, but she just went crazy and was talking with everybody and being really loud and a lot of fun. She kept telling everybody that they were “too sexy” like that Saturday Night Live sketch where Christ Katan would play Antonio Banderas. She also kept going off about how the orange zest (peel scrapings) is the most expensive part of an orange. She was just hilarious. Michelle seemed to be loosening up and having a good time too, so I’m glad they were finally able to come out to the bars with everyone and I hope they get the chance to do so more in the future. But, all in all, I think everybody had a really great time at the bar. I got a call from Matt at one point and he said he was meeting with someone and that he might swing by and meet me at the bar later, but he never did. A lot of people (yes, including me) got pretty darn drunk from all the free champagne floating around. I certainly drank my share. There were a fe champagne glasses on our table and I would have one of the girls get it refilled for me and just drink that all night. I had two beers but mostly it was just champagne, even though I don’t think that guys were even supposed to be drinking it. One of the waiters caught James drinking some and got mad at him, but luckily nobody saw me. There was a dance floor and we all went dancing for a while. Wednesday was Peter David’s birthday, so at midnight we all yelled “happy birthday” for him and the party kind of became for him too. I had a really fun conversation about sports with him, which was really fun because I don’t know anything about sports and all I was really doing was trying to convince him that all the sports teams from the state of Michigan (where he’s from) suck. Of course I didn’t mean it and he took it all in great fun and played back at me. I remember him saying, “at least admit that the Detroit Pistons are the greatest basketball team of all time. At leat admit that!” and I thought it was hilarious. It was one of the craziest Tuesday nights I’ve probably ever had, and I really did have a good time. I didn’t bring my camera for some reason but I really wish I had, because a lot of other people took a lot of good pictures and I wish I had some of my own. At about 3:00 those of us who still remained decided to finally go home, so after getting everyone together and figuring out everybody’s rides I finally got into a chasnik with some other people from the island, and by the time I got home it was close to 4:00 and I was still pretty drunk. But, I was still determined to get up and go to school like normal the next morning, and I’m happy to say I managed just fine. A bit hung-over, but I got up and could function just fine off of the 3 and a half hours of sleep I got. It was pretty hard to get through classes on Wednesday, though. We all gout our passports back on Wednesday too, which means we are now free to travel anywhere we please. We got our multiple-entry visas, which allow us to come and go across the Russian border as many times as we want until it expires. Unfortunately the new visas are not pasted into our passports like our first visas, but these inconvenient separate forms that we have to keep with our passports. It’s kind of annoying, actually. At least I have the one already in there, and hopefully by the time I get back to the U.S. my passport will have all kinds of crazy stamps and such in it. After classes we had a scheduled group excursion to the Yusupov Palace. I wasn’t all that excited about it, but I have to admit it turned out to be pretty cool. The Yusupovs were one of the rich noble families in Tsarist Russia, and this was their main residence in St. Petersburg. You can imagine the opulence. Crazy chandeliers, statues, furniture, artwork, decorations, etc. It was all pretty darned impressive if you ask me. The most interesting part, however, was the fact that this is the palace where Rasputin was killed. We got a little background from the tour guide, and apparently the Prince Felix Yusupov and some co-conspirators thought that Rasputin was getting too powerful and had a plot to murder him. I remember hearing about this in 7th grade. They poisoned him and shot him but he wouldn’t go down, so they finally drowned him in the Moika canal across the street. It was pretty neat to see the place where that all went down. Of course you had to pay to take pictures here, but I felt like it was too risky to play my little game this time, because I group was pretty small and the babushkas were well proliferated throughout the palace. I did manage to get one picture of the wax figures of Felix and Rasputin in the cellar. Peter David got a little more adventures and played a round of the game himself, but lost the game at the last minute when a babushka approached him and asked if he had paid, and he played dumb and said he didn’t know you had to. The babushka was mad but couldn’t really do anything about it, so I guess P Diddy came out the winner in the end still. A lot of us wanted to head back to Smoliny after the excursion because we heard there was supposed to be a Maslenitsa party. The bus took forever to get there and by the time we got back all the blini was gone, but we did get there just in time to see them burning the effigy of Old-Lady Winter. Actually, by the time we got there most of the effigy had already been burnt away and it just looked like a flaming cross, which is funny because it was right in front of a cathedral. I took some good pictures. I had promised to Peter David that if the blini was gone when we got there that I would go with him to KFC, so of course that’s what we did. We stopped in at a 505 store afterwards where I was determined to buy a bootleg copy of Blue Velvet after having passed up the opportunity before. Not only did I find a copy of that, but they also had a bunch of copies of “Industrial Symphony No. 1” the weird performance-art piece that David Lynch had directed and produced that I think was only ever performed once but was filmed and released on video. It’s only available on VHS and really hard to come by in the USA, but there they were, about 5 bootleg copies on DVD right there in the 505 store. How could I turn that down? So, I bought those, parted ways with P Diddy and Matt (oh yeah, Matt [not from Oregon] was there too) and rode the bus back home. I was so tired at this point that I was falling asleep on the bus. Luckily it wasn’t too crowded and I could find a seat alright. At home I watched Blue Velvet and did a little homework before taking a shower and going to bed. Today was Thursday, which means it was the worst day of classes. In gazeta class our teacher got mad at us because none of us had read the text that we had had for homework while consulting a dictionary for the new words. If I were to look up every word I didn’t know it would take me about two hours to read that text. Does she think we don’t have anything better to do? We were all pretty annoyed by that, but she was pretty pissed. I kind of got a dirty look from her in the hallway later. In civilization class we watched a documentary about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova that was pretty cool. It talked some about the Siege of Leningrad in WWII and made me want to read more about it. After classes I went with some people to Soiree so we could discuss our spring break plan. After not knowing where or with whom I would be traveling, I decided it would probably be best to stick with a group at least for the beginning of the trip, so I went with the Sochi group. This is the basic plan as it stands right now: when we get to Moscow we will all buy train tickets to Sochi. Once we get to Sochi we will decided where we each want to go from there. The group consists of John, Reed, Ingrid, Abby, Kara, and Myself. One member of the group (Reed) had some visa issues and as a result was not able to get a multiple-entry visa, so he can’t leave Russia and get back in, therefore he has to stay in the country. I had the idea of going down to Georgia for a little bit and I think some of the others would be interested too, but then most of us want to head over to either Odessa or the Crimea after Sochi, so we have to leave time for that too. Ideal I would like to go to Tbilisi, Sochi, and Odessa, but in order to do all of those you would have to start either in Odessa or Tbilisi because Sochi is in the middle, but we have to start there because not everyone can go to Georgia or the Ukraine. So, I’ll be happy if I get to see at least some of both Georgia and Ukraine, though it looks like I probably won’t be able to make it all the way to either Tbilisi or Odessa. But you never know, Some of the people in the group are pretty adventurous and are really into the idea of playing it by ear, so we may even end up going somewhere completely different. The only thing we know for sure is that we are starting in Sochi. You’ll have to wait for a few weeks or so to find out where we really end up. Pretty exciting, huh? So, after Soiree most of us went to Gostiny Dvor to meet up with some other people to eat some blini. I guess there had been an invitation to our group from these two Russian girls who had helped out at our orientation to go out for blini today, so there were about 8 of us total who met with them and they took us to the blini place. I thought it was going to be some cool little place that only locals know about, but instead they took us to this place called Chainaya Lozhka (it means “tea spoon”) that’s basically a Russian fast-food place. It was really packed, so instead they took us to this other Russian fast-food place called Teremok (I don’t think it means anything). This is actually the same company that runs a lot of the blini stands around the city that I sometimes eat at. We all got some blini and sat and chatted with the Russian girls for a while. The one who was sitting at the same table as me (Olga) said that Sochi is a really good spot for spring break. She spoke English really well so it was easy to communicate. After a while we all headed out, and Bryce and I caught the number 7 bus right outside of the restaurant. Right now I’m just chilling in my room and I really want to watch Blue Velvet again but it’s getting kind of late, so I might just go through and watch the scenes with Dennis Hopper in them because he is so brilliantly horrible in that movie, and I’ve been thinking about some of his lines all day. There’s some fun stuff planned for this weekend, and I promise I will get at least one more post up before I take off for Moscow next Tuesday night. Between the Moscow trip and travel week I will be gone for about two weeks and therefore will not be able to make any big posts like these for that time. I’m sure I’ll be able to stop in to an internet café somewhere along the way, but I certainly won’t be able to right any of my normal long-winded entries. I’ll try to make some short updates if I can to let everybody know where I am at least. I can’t believe how soon that whole trip is. Anyways, take care for now. Catch on the flip side.