С кем ты?

So I kept putting off writing a blog post and now it’s been a week since my last one and I have a lot of catching up to do. That’s the way it goes. I’ll try to be a little more succinct than I usually am, but I always say that. After school on Monday I had to go to the US consulate to report the whole being robbed by the militsia thing. I had told my program director about it earlier that day and he said it would be a good idea to let the consulate know about it. Before the consulate, though I went with some friends to an Uzbek restaurant. The place was really close to the consulate anyways, and I had wanted to try this place before, so I thought it would be a good idea. The food was excellent and really cheap. I had a delicious soup and some meat dumplings with spicy sauce. They also had the cheapest beer I’ve seen at any restaurant or bar in St. Petersburg yet – only 35 rubles for a half liter of Baltica! Usually it’s around 50 or 60, and can go as high as 85 (coughcoughRedLioncough). I will definitely be going back there more often. So, after lunch I went to the consulate and John tagged along. The guards are Russian but speak English. They only let us in one at a time and we had to go through a few different levels of security, but everyone was really friendly and I wasn’t made uncomfortable or anything. I asked one of the guards if he remembered my friend Josh who used to work there, and he said he did. Once I got past security I made it to the counter and told the receptionist my story. She seemed very sympathetic to my story and gave me a form to fill out and said that she would have someone come talk to me about it. At this point John had gotten passed security and came and met me inside. Before I could fill out the form the fire alarm went off, and a guard told us that we had to evacuate the building. Everybody from the consulate filled out onto the street and went into a little courtyard down the street a little bit. In the courtyard I was telling John the story about the security guy and how he knew Josh. I said, “and I asked him, ‘do you remember a guy who used to work here named Josh Overcast?’”, and when I said that name a guy standing nearby looked over and asked, “did you say ‘Josh Overcast?’” His name was Misha and it turns out he was one of Josh’s really good friends from back when he worked there. He asked what Josh was up to and all that, and it turned out he also knows one of the Russian history professors from UO, Alan Kimball. So, that was really cool getting to meet him. We got permission to go back in, and after another quick security check I was back inside. John didn’t really need to stick around so he took off. I filled out the sheet explaining what had happened and then waited for some important higher-up to come talk to me. While I was waiting I met this guy named Tom who has been living in Russia for about a year and a half. He told me he was a writer, “doing the down-and-out in Russia thing.” Apparently he had lost all of his documents (Passport, visa, etc) in November one night at a bar (coughcoughRedLioncough), and so basically he’s been living under the radar of the Russian government while he lives here somewhat illegitimately. Now he’s facing deportation or something. So, he was at the consulate, as he is quite often I take it, trying to get things straightened out. Some young-ish guy in a fancy suite finally came and told me what my options were. One option was sending some sort of report somewhere that would require them to question me about the incident, for which translators would have to be arranged and everything and it sounded like a huge hassle. The other option was much simpler, and I decided to go that route. Basically they are just going to send the government a “diplomatic letter” informing them of the incident and that they aren’t happy. It isn’t going to change anything, I’m sure, but at least it won’t require a lot of my time and energy. I wasn’t even really going to report it until Nathan suggested I do anyways. So, I finished up there and so did that Tom guy, so we both walked to the metro and talked about our experiences in Russia. At the Ploshchad Vostanniya stop we parted ways, and I rode down to the Nevskiy Prospekt stop. I needed to kill some time before teaching English at 6:00. I knew some people were at Soiree, but I didn’t have enough time to get over there, plus I didn’t have my computer with me, so I decided to just walk around until it was time to go to the university. I walked down Nevskiy and down a side street I had never been down before. I found a new 505 store and went in. I ended up buying a couple MP3 CDs – one by a band called Kolibri that I already liked and had a little stuff by, and another by a band that I knew I had heard of somewhere and thought that maybe they would be pretty good based on their picture on the cover and the fact that I had heard of them before. They are called Sinyaya Ptitsa (Blue Bird). That CD turned out to be really cheesy 70’s loungy pop stuff, and I realized that the place I had heard of them was on the compilation of Soviet pop songs that I had bought a while ago. Oh well, it only cost my a few bucks. After the 505 store I ambled my way over to the university and sat around for a little bit outside because the weather was actually really nice. That was the first day here that I’ve been able to sit on a bench. I then went inside to wait for the class to start, but after about 20 minutes of sitting around outside the door I realized that nobody was coming, and so I left. I bumped into Aleksandr, the director of the English classes, and asked him where everybody was. He looked on a schedule sheet and told me that the class had apparently been canceled. Too bad nobody had told me. So, I went out front to wait for a bus home. Number 7 came by but the bus was so jam packed that there was literally no room for me to get on. After a long time of waiting I decided to hop on bus number 47, not knowing exactly where it went but hoping that maybe it wasn’t just a coincidence that it was a similar number to route 147. There was a sign on it that said “no conductor” (the person who goes around the bus collecting the money), and so I wasn’t really sure how to pay. Nobody else really seemed to be paying, so I just sat tight. The bus followed the same route for a while, but then just after Vasileostrovskaya it made an unexpected turn and I jumped off and the next stop, never having paid. I walked back down to Vasileostrovskaya and caught the 44 marshrutka home. I can’t remember exactly, but I’m sure nothing interesting happened at home that night. So, Tuesday. Classes were the same as usual, I suppose. After class I started walking with the British girls towards to bus stop. Some of them were going for hot chocolate or something, but I decided just to go home, because we had also made plans with them to go to a bar with them later that night (coughcoughRedLioncough) and I figured it would be a good idea to get home and relax a bit before heading out again. I rode the bus home, did some homework, ate some dinner, and then headed back out to meet them. I thought that a lot of people had know about the Red Lion plan and that there would be a pretty big group, but I was surprised to get there and only find Bryce and Katie with some of the British girls (Alice, Olympia, Amanda, Dawn). Everybody likes to go to the Red Lion on Tuesday nights because it’s free champagne for women night. The waiters are constantly coming around and filling up the champagne glasses, so it isn’t hard for guys to drink their fair share of champagne too. We had a great time hanging around and dancing and what not. There was a band called Soulgarden doing covers of western songs and they weren’t half bad. They did a pretty mean “Billy Jean,” I gotta say. I danced around to them for a while and danced around to the DJ later on. There was a group of Swiss bankers at the table next to us that some of the girls were talking to for a while. Katie danced with this Russian guy a lot, but apparently he got pretty creepy towards to end and grabbing her inappropriately and kept trying to get her to go home with him. Of course, Katie knows better than that. Bryce, Katie and I left around 2:30 in a chasnik. It seems kind of weird to go out and stay out late on a Tuesday night, but I never seem to have any real trouble the next day. After Tuesday was Wednesday, believe it or not. On Wednesday there was a group excursion to the Russian Museum [Note: the rest was written on the following night. Read further on about Sunday night to hear why]. I was glad to go because I still haven’t been and it’s one of those things that you have to do in St. Petersburg. We only had about an hour for the tour so our tour guide went through things really quickly. She only showed us the fine art wing. You know, portraits of old Russian aristocrats and political leaders and all that, which is interesting, but I was really more interested in seeing the more modern stuff. We did get to see some really cool stuff though, including some stuff by the same artist who I had seen the work of in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. I’m terrible with artists’ names so I can’t remember who he was, but maybe my grandma knows. Grandma, if you are reading this (which I know you are), you know that picture I put on flickr of the big painting of the apocalypse? Do you know who did that? After our tour had finished we had a little time to explore the museum on our own, so a few others and I made it up to the floor with the modern art and a lot of avant-garde stuff. I really enjoyed looking at all of those paintings, and I really want to go back and spend more time there. There was one artist in particular that I really liked. I think his name was Filinov, but I could be off a bit. After a little while Nathan found us and told us that we all needed to go and get our coats from the coatroom and leave for some reason, so we got our stuff and headed out. Peter David and I hadn’t had lunch yet so we decided to find some food on Nevskiy. We decided to go to this Russian fast-food type place called Chainaya Lozhka (tea spoon) that I hadn’t been to yet. It’s Russian cuisine with a fast-food edge. Basically you can get bliny and some side dishes, so I ended up getting a couple bliny with meat, one with cheese and a side of cheese salad, which was pretty interesting. It was all really good but really big, so I was pretty stuffed afterwards. After lunch PD and I headed to an internet café for a while, and then back to that 505 store I had found the other day. I wanted to buy an MP3 CD by this band called Grazhdanskaya Oborona that my friend Matt had to told me about. He said that they were his favorite local band and that they were playing a show soon and I should check them out. I had seen their CDs at the store the other day and tried to buy one, but the one I had picked turned out to be too expensive and I declined to purchase it. So, I went back to find a cheaper one, which I did find. I also bought a DVD with four “New Year’s Comedies” on it. Apparently it’s its own genre in Russia. The only reason I bought it was for the movie “Ironia Sudby” (The Irony of Fate) which is a hugely popular Soviet movie from the 70’s. I had seem part of it in my first year Russian class back at UO, and we had been using it for some of our phonetics lessons as well, so I figured it would be a really good movie to own my own copy of. I’m really glad I bought it, by the way. It’s fantastic. I believe PD bought a Stevie Wonder CD. Afterwards we both headed home. I had qualms about getting on a bus because it was in the middle of Chaspeek (rush hour), but the bus turned out to be not that crowded. You never know how the buses are going to be. Nothing of note happened at home that night either. Thursday at school was kind of weird because a bunch of people decided to all skip classes together and hang out of the day, and not only was I not invited to skip with them, but it was left to feel real awkward in all my classes because there were so few people in them. It was no big deal, really. After school I was trying to get some people to come with me to this big market in the south part of town I had heard about that apparently had lots of cheap CDs and DVDs for sale, but nobody was interested. I ended up following Nick, Tom, and a few of the British girls back to Alice’s apartment, where we hung out in her kitchen for a long time listening to Grand Funk Railroad on Tom’s ipod and eating toasted cheese and red pepper sandwiches. Tom and I started naming as many bands as we could from various countries / cities while nobody else could keep up (Nick later informed me that he thought it was really rude that Tom and I had our own little conversation going while we were hanging out with our British friends). I got to meet Alice’s roommate Richard and a new British girl named Lucy. People kind of left one by one and I was one of the last people to finally leave. I caught the 147 bus right outside of her apartment and rode it all the way home. And then, of course, another relaxing, unremarkable evening at home. Sorry I keep skipping over the evenings, but I really can’t think of anything that I did that would even be worth mentioning. I usually just do homework, listen to music or watch something on my computer. I don’t usually have to much interaction with my host family, everybody just kind of hides in their own rooms. I wish I was more sociable with them but they really seem to have no interest in chatting or hanging out any more than they already do. Oh well. So, Friday rolls around, and it’s finally almost the weekend. Oh, I guess one thing worth mentioning is that form must of this week Vickie and I were driven to school by some guy driving a black Volga (a Russian car company), which seems so sketchy. It’s just us two in the back of this car and we don’t talk to the guy or anything, he’s just like our personal chauffeur. I’m not sure how it works, but somebody must be paying him to drive us to school. We never know what to expect every morning when we get to the bus stop. So, anyways, school was good and everything, and then I went to Soiree to use the internet, and Vickie and Tom each showed up a little later. We stayed there for a while eating lunch and messing around on our laptops. At one point the power went out for a few minutes, which of course included the router so we were left without internet for a while, but it soon came back on and all was fine. When we were done we headed back to Nevskiy so Vickie and I could catch a bus home. So, you see, Cumbawumba was playing in town last night, and a bunch of us had decided to go. A bunch of the Brits were into the idea (of course) and a handful of people from our program as well. But, after I left Soiree I talked to Alice on the phone and it seemed that a lot of people decided that it was going to be too expensive and were thinking about going somewhere else instead (It was 600 to 800 rubles, or about $20 to $25, which isn’t all that bad in America but seems pretty steep for Russia). IT was kind of like, “we’ll still go if you want to go, but we would all prefer to do something else,” so, of course I wasn’t going to force them into doing something they didn’t want to do, so I said it was fine and we could find somewhere else to go. I was pretty excited to see Chumbawumba, though. Maybe someday. The Brits decided that we should go to this “Club” called Griboedov, which is a place that I have been wanting to go to for a while. So, we all met up at Ploshchad Vostanniya around 9:00 (Matt, Stacey, PD, Bryce, Alice, Jo, Amanda, Olympia, Richard, Lucy, and Myself) and proceeded to the place. It was a little out of the way, but not too far. It turns out that the club is basically across the street from Tom’s apartment, and Tom actually showed up a little later. The only reason this place can be considered a club is because there is a cover charge (200 rubles), but inside it’s just a cool bar with a stage/dance floor and comfortable places to sit. When we first got there there was some sort of punk show going on, and I saw quite a few Mohawks. A lot of the people in our group were pretty disappointed with the place at first, but I thought it was just my speed. We hung around at the bar until a big table opened up and we could all sit around. At one point, Bryce set his beer down and told PD to watch it while he went to the bathroom. Of course, everyone just tells people to watch their beer or whatever out of habit, and never expects that anything bad would really happen to it. Well, out of nowhere this weird Russian guy comes up and points to the beer as if he wants it. PD and I both say “no,” but he grabs it anyway and starts chugging. We’re just like, “what the hell?” He keeps chugging away at it and finally we have to pull it away from him. I asked him, “what are you doing?” and told him, “that’s not your beer,” but he just kind of smiled and mumbled something and wandered away. We were all laughing pretty hard about it and had to break the news to Bryce when he got back. He was not as amused as we were. Once the show finished the place got really empty, but after an hour or so it picked up again and a DJ started playing and people started dancing. I danced a lot and felt way more relaxed and comfortable dancing there that I usually do at bars or whatever. I guess I just felt like people were less judgmental there than at other places, and I felt like I could be myself and dance however strangely I wanted to. There was a House DJ, and the only way I know that it was House music was because he played this song that kept repeating things like, “For the love of house. For the love of beats. For the love of dance. Strictly for the love. For the love of house music,” and I kept repeating that over and over again for the rest of the night. In between dancing I would sit back down and talk with everyone. I had a few beers and a couple shots of Jagermeister, so I was feeling alright. We kind of moved around tables a little bit and finally ended up at one table near the bar where we all sat for a while. I was messing around with the candle on the table and at one point made it fall over, startling this girl Emma (another British [well, Scottish] girl who had showed up later) and making her spill her beer all over herself. I felt really bad and bought her another one. I talked to Olympia for a long time about why she hates Macedonians and Turks (typical Greek) and kept teasing her about stuff the whole night, but it was all in good fun. Tom had a dry erase pen and told me about something called “the Pen15 club,” and I didn’t get it until he wrote “PEN15” on my hand and then I realized what it spells when you write it out. Apparently it’s something a lot of people knew about back in elementary school, but I had never heard of it. At the time I thought it was hilarious and started laughing uncontrollably. Tom has that effect on me sometimes. So we got everyone to join the club and soon everybody had it written on their hand. Luckily, it was dry-erase pen and did come of very easily. Everybody was getting really tired at abut 4:00 so we all decided to leave. Bryce, Olympia, Amanda and I got a chasnik together. Bryce and Olympia live next-door to each other out around Primorskaya (which my apartment is on the way to), but Amanda lives way on the other side of town on Moskovskiy Prospekt. So we got a chasnik that would take us both places, As usual, I sat in the front, and I got to talk a lot to our driver. His name was Bugar and he was an Azerbaijani. He was super friendly and really interested in talking to us and talking about America. He told me about his two kids and assured us that the money we were paying him was going to support them. At one point he pulled into a gas station to fill up and ran into the mini-mart for a second too. He came back with Coca-cola and peanuts, which he then offered to us. We declined on the Coca-cola, but agreed to a few peanuts. He really wanted my phone number, which I was happy to give him, and he gave me his. I seem to end up with lots of strange peoples’ phone numbers, and I don’t know why it seems to happen to me all that time and never happen to anyone else. So, he drops me off at my house, but he doesn’t just drop me on the street, he insists on driving me into the courtyard and dropping me off directly in front of my door! I was a little creeped out that he now knew my phone number and the building I lived in, but I really think he’s harmless. So, I crawled into bed and called it a night. I slept until about 12:30 the next day and awoke to a delicious breakfast of bliny. I really wanted to check out that huge market on Saturday, because that’s apparently the best day to go. I called up a few people but nobody was interested in going, so I ended up just going by myself. You have to ride the blue line to the third to last stop in the south (Metro station Avtovo) and then ride a marshrutka out into the middle of the housing projects to this big outdoor market. It was totally out of the way, but totally worth the trip. This market seems to specialize in illegally copied CDs and DVDs that are sold for ridiculously cheap. The average price for a DVD is 50 rubles (under $2) and for a CD was 35 rubles (just over a dollar). And of course they have tons and tons of MP3 CDs, so I could get about 15 albums by a band for a little over a buck. Amazing! I’ve really been on the look out for good Russian music, and this was a great place to get some stuff by some bands I hadn’t heard yet. I got an MP3 CD by this rock band from the late 80’s called AlisA, and another one by this old Soviet metal band called Ariya (which, by the way, is really amazing. I don’t usually like metal or anything, but this band is really good. All their songs are really catchy, but just happen to have cheesy guitar solos and wailing vocals, all sang in Russian of course. I’m so glad I bought that CD. It was totally worth the 35 rubles to have 15 albums by them). I also go a CD of some old Soviet Bards (fold singers) and a few movies as well. The whole market was huge. I was there for quite a while and didn’t even get to see the whole thing. I had to be back at the apartment by 7:00 because my host-brother had to reheat some dinner for me, I found a marshrutka that would take me all the way back to Ploshchad Vostanniya, but it ended up taking about an hour. I got on the metro and got home just before 7:00. I was feeling pretty exhausted that evening for some reason and ended up just staying home the whole night. I talked to some people on the phone and it sounded like a lot of people were staying in to, so I didn’t have to feel so bad about not doing anything. Besides, I was pretty occupied with all the stuff I had bought that day at the market. I think I might be going back next weekend because a lot of other people want to go now. But, I finally got to bed around 2:00 on Saturday night. Sunday I woke up around noon again and had another bliny feast. Usually I like to stay in on Sundays, but because I had stayed in all Saturday night I felt like I should do something. I had been trying to get a hold of Emily the past couple days with little to no luck, so I figured I’d give her a call and see if she wanted to hang out. She was studying for midterms but said that she would be down for meeting up for a bit and doing something. She knew about some little art showing at this place near Petrogradskaya metro, which of course is over on the Petrograd side of the city, and I had never really been there before. I had been meaning to make it over there and check it out sometime, so this was the perfect opportunity to do that. We decided to meet at the Gorkovskaya metro station at 2:00. On the way there I had to transfer at Nevskiy Prospekt / Gostiny Dvor and I got to see the veterans singing and playing guitar in the tunnel again. I’m telling you, it sounds so amazing and I wish I had a recording of these guys. It would be way to awkward to try to take a picture of a video of them, because there is absolutely no way to be discreet about it. I’d like to start a band like that: 4 or 5 guys singing along to the accompaniment of two guitars playing really simple chord progressions, but the lyrics have to all by kind of shouted. It’s really powerful stuff. I got to Gorkovskaya and waited around for Emily a while because she was late, but she finally showed up and we started walking. We caught up on stuff cause we hadn’t seen each other in a while. We walked down one of the main streets on the Petrograd side until we reached the area of the metro station, and went into this movie theater that also has art on display. The art that was up was all apparently done by a friend of one of Emily’s art professors here in Petersburg. She takes all kinds of cool art classes, it’s pretty awesome. The art all looked like it was done by a younger child, but it was actually an adult. I really like it. It was pretty crowded from all the people waiting to see movies, so we decided to go find some food. Emily had heard about a good Georgian restaurant somewhere nearby, so we decided to try and find it. We kind of got lost for a while wandering down side streets, but we eventually found the place. We looked at the menu and decided it was too expensive and that it would be better to try something else. I suggested we take the metro over to Chernishevskaya and go to the Uzbek place that I went to earlier that week, and she was down for the idea. We walked back to Gorkovskaya and rode over to Chernishevskaya, walked over to the restaurant only to find that they were having some sort of exclusive dinner thing and that they could not serve us. It was a bummer, but Emily knew of another Georgian place nearby, so we walked over to there and had ourselves a meal. I’m convinced that Georgians eat nothing but cheese, cause that’s basically all that there is to every Georgian meal I’ve ever eaten. There’s the Georgian fried cheese that I sometimes get at Soiree, then at this place we ordered a “khachapura,” which is basically a little cheese pizza with cheese baked on the inside, and then I ordered what I thought were dumplings with MEAT and cheese, but when they turned out to be filled with cheese only. Don’t get me wrong, I love cheese, bought I felt that they food could benefit form a little diversity. It was a good time none the less. Emily and I talked about politics and other fun things. We each had to get back home after that, so I headed back knowing that I would be eating a whole other meal at home. I ate a big plate of rice, meat, and mushrooms (which I have to choke down every know and then whenever my host-mom feeds it to me), but was so stuffed that I couldn’t finish the whole place. That rarely ever happens. I was all set to stay at home that night and work on this blog post, do my homework, and call my parents. I started writing the post when I got a call from Ruth about meeting her, PD, Allisonn, and Stacey at Kofe Khaus near Kazanskiy Sobor to study for the phonetics test we had today. I had forgotten about the test and thought it might be a good idea to study with them, but I had to decline because of everything I had to do that night. Then they started sending me tons of text messages trying to get me to come, but I wanted to finish everything I had to do. I called my mom like I do every Sunday night and told about the text messages I kept getting and how I kind of wanted to go but felt obligated to work on stuff at home. She told me not to worry about it and that if I wanted to go I should just go. I realized that she was right, and that it was better to be out doing stuff than to be sitting at home writing about the stuff I already did. So, without telling them, I decided to show up at Kofe Khaus. I rode a marshrutka downtown and got to the place in time to catch PD in mid-text as he was writing his next crazy message to me. So, they were happy to see me, and I sat with them for a while not really studying at all but having a good time anyways. I knew all along that if I went I wouldn’t really get any studying done with them, but it seemed worth it anyways. I wasn’t there for very long before we all had to catch the metro before it closed. Allisonn and I headed out towards our island and I got off at Vasileostrovskaya. Before I caught a marshrutka home, I figured I would stop at one of the kiosks and get a soda because I was really thirsty. I was waiting behind this guy in line when he turned around and started saying, “Oh look at this huge guy! He’s more than big, he’s huge!” and all that kind of stuff. He looked just like this guy I know names Jeff Beck (yeah, like the musician). I talked to him and this other guy standing nearby for a while and they soon realized I wasn’t Russian. They asked where I was from and I told them to guess. They kept guessing lots of European countries and never bothered guessing the US. I finally told them that I was American and they got so excited. The one guy (Marat was his name) started hugging me and getting really affectionate (he was quite drunk) and started calling me his friend and this and that. He decided that he needed to buy me some Russian chocolate, and I told him that it wasn’t necessary, but he insisted. He ended up buying me three really good chocolate bars from the kiosk and handing them to me in a bag. He and the other guy (I think his name was Vasiliy) started insisting that I have a drink with them. I told them that that I couldn’t and that I had to get home and everything, but they wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. I asked them where they suggested drinking and they said something like, “It doesn’t matter. right here even!” So I decided if they just want to drink a beer right here in the street that would be fine, I could manage that. So Marat bought me a beer and we walked across the street to stand in front of the McDonalds and drink our beers. Two other teenage kids come up and start drinking with us too (by the way, Marat was probably about 25 and Vasiliy said he was 16). One of the teenagers was from the Republic of Komi, in the north of Russia. The other said he was from Buryatia, “in principle (another republic of the Russian Federation, but out in Siberia). I finished my beer and told them I had to go, but they insisted that I stick around and have another. They asked where I lived and when I told them they explained that they lived nearby too, and that if we all had a other beer then we would all catch a chasnik together afterwards. So, I figured I had to stick around for a little while, so not to disappoint my new friends. Marat kept trying to speak to me in English (which he didn’t speak very well at all) and even tried speaking to everyone else in English. Everybody kept telling him to just speak Russian to them, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He kept hugging me and shaking my hand every couple minutes too. At one point the two teenagers left and two other people showed up out of nowhere. These guys were older, probably both in their mid to late 20’s as well. One was named Gamlet (Russian for “Hamlet”) and the other was this crazy metal-head dude with long hair and a bandana who was from Yeketarinburg (a big city in the Ural mountains). I never learned his name. They were both really drunk too and the metal head was kind of belligerent. He was kind of menacing looking and I thought he might try to punch me in the face at any moment. There was some girl hanging around them too who didn’t seem to want to talk to us or even let her friends talk to us. Marat went with the metal-head down an alley for a while to talk about something, and when he returned we all decided to get a chasnik together. I got in the front while Marat, Vasiliy, Gamlet, the metal-head, and some other teenage kid I never learned the name of all crammed in the back. When Marat told the driver I was American, eh went, “Bush! Bush! Bush!” with his thumb up. Marat and I said something like, “no, he’s bad!” and the driver went, “Islam! Islam! Islam!” with his thumb down. So, that was pretty weird. I was worried that I would be dropped off last and be left to pay the chasnik fare alone, but they took me home first and I didn’t have to pay for any of it! The driver sat in the car and waited for about ten minutes while Marat, Gamlet and the metal-head got out of the car with me and tried to talk with me some more. Marat kept saying that he wanted to make sure I got home alright, but I assured him that we were right in front of my building and there was no problem. Marat really wanted my phone number (I swear, all the time!), so we each wrote down our numbers for each other. I usually like to get the other person’s number too, just so I can have it entered in my phone and see who it is when and if they ever call. So, they finally pulled away, and I literally ran to my door to get in and shut it behind me incase they decided to follow me instead. It was a pretty crazy experience, and I’m glad I had it in the end. I would have never met those guys had I not decided to go out to the Kofe Khaus. So, thanks mom. I got into the apartment, tried studying for a little bit, took a shower and finally got to bed at around 2:00. So, here we are finally to today. Today was a normal day at school. There is actually a delegation of professors who represent CIEE here to evaluate the program, and so we had a big group meeting with them today where lots of people complained about different things in the program. I really don't have any big complaints to make, so I just kept quite and listened to everybody else go off. After class Kenny and I decided to go to the Uzbek place again. James wanted to tag along again and we got Matt and Bryce to come as well. Stacey had to go meet her friend who is in town and then they both came to meet us at the restaurant. They food was excellent again. Kenny and James were going to a bannya, but I couldn't go because I had to teach english later. I do want to go to one sometime, though. I stayed back and hung around with Matt, Bryce, Stacey and her friend Megan. Megan seemed really cool, and it's a shame that she has to leave tomorrow. Once they finished eating they were heading to Soiree to meet other people, but I really didn't want to go to Soiree, plus i had to teach in an hour, so I headed off on my own to get to the university. I took the metro and then a bus from Nevskiy and got there with about 15 minutes to spare. The teacher didn't show up for the class, so I ended up teaching it on my own for the first half. It was a little scary and pretty disorganized, but I think I did alright. The teacher finally showed up and said she was subbing in a different class, but told me what the class was doing and what the students needed to do. They had to do re-tellings of this little article about how five different cities are combating traffic and pollution problems. I had a great time as always teaching this class. The other day the English class coordinator Aleksandr asked me if I wanted to teach my own class as well, and I said that I would me willing to try. Basically I will be leading my own discussion section for three hours on Wednesdays to a group of adult students. They are all Russian professors in the university who want to learn English for themselves. I got the text material and Aleksandr show me what material I would be covering with the class on Wednesday. It looks like it could be a lot of fun. It isn't actually MY own class. They have a real teacher, I would just be leading the discussion on my own without the teacher there. I'm looking forward to it, actually. So class finished up and I caught a bus home. Some kid brought a bike onto the crowded bus and the conductor was giving him a hard time for it. My favorite was when she asked him if he had any parents. I got home and had some dinner and finished up writing this blog entry just now! Finally! Now that I'm all caught up I can relax a little bit. I'll try not to go this long in between posts if I can help it. I'd rather write smaller, more frequent posts than longer, less frequent ones. So, that's it for now. Bye.