Lock it up

So I finally bought a new thumb drive and will now be able to upload this post along with the last one I wrote about a week ago (yeah, check below this one for another new post. In fact, you should probably go read that one first to maintain continuity). I guess it’s fair to say that a lot has happened since then, so I’ll get right to it. Hopefully I’ll be able to remember all the important details of the last week. Tuesday was a typical day of school, as far as I can remember, and I rode the bus home from Smolniy when classes were over. A few of the Brits were on that bus to, and I found out that Amanda and Olympia were planning on going to Helsinki for the weekend, and I thought it would probably be a good idea to tag along with them. But, you can read more about that later. At home I did some homework, relaxed a little bit, you know, the usual. Then of course, as usual, left a little before nine to go down to the Red Lion for free champagne night. That’s been four Tuesday nights in a row, I believe, and I’ll most likely be making it five tomorrow. The usual gang was there as usual, except this time Stacey had brought a new group of friends (well, one friend of hers, who intern brought a couple of her own) from the same program in Denmark that the last group of friends had come from. They seemed nice, but didn’t really seem interested in talking much with us. They started getting into a deep conversation among themselves about culture and stuff, so after a bit I moved over to another table to hang with Kenny, Peter David, and the like. One of the girls was from Portland, though, so that was pretty cool. The Norwegian girl named Anikan who was there the week before came again, and we talked with her for a while. I apologized for making a lame Star Wars joke the last time I saw her (Actually, I thought it was pretty funny. Katie had said about Anikan that, “She’s really good at pool,” and I responded with, “and pod-racing.” Get it?), and she said that everbody always does and it doesn’t really bother her. I mentioned that my middle name was Luc and then we started joking about how she was my father. It was pretty fun. Oh yeah, there was this weird guy from Ghana that was hanging around our table and hitting on all the girls. His name was, get this, “0-5 New York City” (that’s how he introduced himself to everybody, at least). He danced with Katie for a bit and by the end of the night was proclaiming that she was his girlfriend and that he was going to take her back to Africa with him. It was a pretty sketchy (or dodgy, as the Brits would say) situation, but I the guy was harmless. I had told Emily before about free champagne night and she made it out this week. She brought a friend along named Mave (yeah, a lot of weird names at the Red Lion), and they sat at a table near us. They talked with Tsveti and Abby for a while, and it’s good to see my different groups of friends merge together sometimes. Olympia showed up to, even after saying that she probably wouldn’t. I knew she would. I mainly stayed at the same table the whole night, having different conversations with different people. I talked with Emily and Mave for a while. Mave told me about cheap buses to Helsinki because she had just gone the other weekend (again, read more about Helsinki later). Peter David and I had a private conversation, too. I teased Olympia about all kinds of things like usual (you can’t really have normal conversations with Olympia), and talked to others like Bryce, Matt, Stacey, etc. It was a good night, as usual. Well, for the most part anyway. Bryce ended up getting his cell phone lost/stolen because he left it out on the table and some new people came and sat there. It was a bummer, but he got a new one so it’s fine now. I left with Katie and Olympia when 0-5 New York City started getting too creepy. We got a chasnik for 200 rubles, which was really good because last time none of the drivers would go below 250. We all got home safe and sound at around 2:00-ish (I think. I can’t remember for sure). I dragged myself out of bed on Wednesday morning to go to school. School was the same as always. Again, sorry I always skip over school. It’s just become so monotonous that nothing ever really stands out from one day to the next. Not that anything we talk about would really be of interest to anybody else. Maybe one of these days I will write a post more about school, about my professors, etc. But for now, I’ll keep skipping over it for the most part. After school I went straight home and worked on my homework for a while before I had to go teach English to the professors. I had an essay do the next day about my spring break and impressions of traveling in Russia. I worked on that for a while and a few other assignments before heading out and catching a marshrutka over to the university. In class we talked more about “genius” and inventions and things like that. I think those students are starting to really like, or at least respect me. It’s always hard to figure out what to do with them because I really have no instructions or structure to go off of other than the book, so I basically just pick up from where we last left off in the book. The best part, though, and what I try to incorporate into the lesson as much as I can, is impromptu discussion about the topics in the book and about what the students think about them themselves. I think it’s a really good way for them to use and learn the language and learn more about American / English culture, and it’s good for me because it’s much more interesting that going over grammar exercises. After class I talked with Marina on the bus again. She told me about some good clubs to go to in the city. At home I finished up my homework and tried to go to bed as early as possible, because I had basically decided at that point that I would be going to Helsinki the next day and figured it would be good to get as much sleep before a long overnight bus ride as possible. I went to classes the next day and tried not to linger around at school afterwards so I could get home and pack some stuff up before heading out for the weekend. We were going to leave Thursday night because the Brits don’t have school on Friday, and besides if we left on Friday night it would only give us about one day in Helsinki, and that wouldn’t be enough. I through some close, my camera, ipod, and a few various odds and ends into my little duffle bag and around 8:15 headed out to meet up with the others. We had been trying to get Tom to come along with us and at the last minute he decided to tag along, so the plan was for the four of us (Tom, Olympia, Amanda, and me) to meet in front of the Hotel Oktyabrskaya on Ploshchad Vostannia at 9:00. This is what I had learned from Mave the other night: There are a bunch of buses that wait around right there every evening around 9:00/9:30 that go to Helsinki, and you don’t need a ticket or any kind of reservation to ride them, you just show up and pay them 350 rubles (about $13 or $14, not bad for a 250 mile or so bus ride) and you’re on your way. Mave had said that they ask you if you can hide cigarettes in your bag for them to smuggle across the border, but we were never approached about anything like that. We say an older woman holding a sign for Helsinki and she took us to the right bus and that was that. The bus finally pulled out around 10:00 and we drove through the northern suburbs and out into the countryside. There was a TV on the bus and one of the bus drivers (I think there were two operating in shifts) put on a video of some weird variety/comedy/musical concert, but I was listening to my ipod so I only watched and didn’t listen. The bus stopped in the Russian town called Vyborg, which is supposed to be pretty cool, but all we did was stop at a gas station to use the bathroom and get some snacks. A bit passed Vyborg we came to the border, and had to go through about three different check points just to leave Russia, before we even go to Finnish customs. At the first stop, a guard just got on the bus and looked at everybody’s passports, and at the next we had to get out and go through official customs where they actually check all our paper work, stamp our passports and make us chose whether or not we have anything to declare. Then there was one more guard who looked at all our passports before we got back on the bus. It all went smoothly for all of us. I kept my migration card the whole time and never let them see it, because after the last time trying to get into the Ukraine I was really paranoid that if they got it they wouldn’t give it back. They never even asked to see it, so that was no problem. After a quick stop at the duty-free shop, we went a little ways down the road to Finnish customs. It was fine for all of us except Olympia, who is a Greek citizen and has a sketchy-looking Greek passport that apparently her dad made because he works at the Greek consulate in Trieste, Italy, and has the authority to make passports. Tom, Amanda and I made it through with no hassle what so ever, and then waited around outside for about 15 minutes while the customs officers called around and checked numbers and all kinds of things because apparently the number on the passport was hard to read and they couldn’t figure something out or something. I was never really clear on why. Some Finnish officers hauled away some scrawny German guy who was definitely on something. It was kind of weird, but still felt really safe because we were in real Europe. After everything got straightened out with Olympia’s passport we got back on the bus for the final stretch to Helsinki. It was around 2:00 in the morning or so by then, so I tried to sleep but really couldn’t because I was so cramped on the bus and it was so warm that I just couldn’t get comfortable at all. I got maybe a half hour of unsatisfying sleep at the most. About a half hour outside of Helsinki it started getting light and I could see the nice forested Finnish countryside. We got into the outskirts of the city and dropped some guy off at some place he wanted, and I was able to grab his seat and stretch out a bit. The bus kept going and dropped everybody off in a parking lot next to the bus station. So there we were, dropped off in the middle of Helsinki at about 6:00 AM, exhausted with nowhere to sleep and nothing to do, so we started walking around and seeing what we could find. We were all very tired, of course, so we decided that they first course of action should be to find a place to sleep. We walked in the direction of a hostel that Tom stayed at the last time he was in Helsinki and found it pretty quick, despite our worries. We went upstairs to the reception desk and asked for a room. We told the guy that we had no reservations, and he informed us that they were all booked up. He we should go down to the train station and talk to the “hotel experts” there to try and find a good place. Back on the street we were looking through my Finnish guidebook for other hostels and stuff (I had found a Lonely Planet guidebook of Finland among the books on the shelves in my room, obviously left by a previous student. I didn’t think I was going to get the chance to need it, but now I’m glad it was there), when a weird drunk man came up to us and started talking in Finnish. We told him in English that we don’t speak Finnish and were really surprised when he wouldn’t speak English back to us, because everybody in Finland speaks English. He kept trying to tell us things, and pointed to my big blue hat and said something like “pea-pod” and thought it was really funny. He kept making all kinds of weird gestures, and at one point said something that sounded like, “fuki fuki fuki,” to which Tom replied, “that’s a pretty weird thing to say to another person,” which kind of became one of many catch-phrases from our weekend in Helsinki. We walked away from the guy and went down to the Bus station, which we had already seen and knew how to get to. The bus station is pretty cool looking (check flickr) and has a big open square right next to it. Inside we saw that the “hotel expert” kiosk was closed and wouldn’t open for a few hours, so we picked up some maps and guidebooks, made some calls and tried to find a place to stay that wasn’t too expensive. There was broken glass on the floor and some vagrant-types that these burly-looking security guards kept kicking out. I tried to convince them that it would be a good idea to get on the internet and try to find someone on Couchsurfing.com or Globalfreeloaders.com that would let us stay with them, but they thought it was a bad idea. We finally decided to check out this place called Hotelli Finn that was really close and seemed reasonably affordable. It turned out to be a really great place. It was all on the top floor of a downtown building, and had nice little comfortable rooms for 65 euro a night (80 for a room with a shower, which Olympia and Amanda took), which is more than I would have like to pay, but it was in a pinch and it isn’t that bad when you consider the fact that I was splitting it with Tom. Finland, I found, is just a pretty expensive country in general. Oh well, what can you do? Nothing, that’s what. We got our rooms and pretty much all crashed out right way. We all went to sleep at around 8:30 and didn’t wake up until about2:30 in the afternoon. We like to joke that we got three nights’ sleep out of the two that we paid for at the hotel. Once we were all up we decided to go wander around and check out the town. Helsinki is relatively small. The population is only about 530,000, which I guess is pretty comparable to Portland proper. In fact, the city reminded me of Portland in a lot of ways. It was a huge difference to see a city like this coming from St. Petersburg. The streets are very clean and well-maintained, there are very few cars on the road (much less than in Petersburg, at least) which means it is very quiet and peaceful and just very pleasant feeling all around. The people are all friendly and speak English, which is always a huge bonus. The architecture in Helsinki (yeah, like that band everybody likes) is great, and there are all kinds of cool building fronts with the occasional big church or cathedral poking out here or there. There are lots of statues and monuments everywhere too, which is one thing that I really like about a lot of European cities that I have been to and which that it was more common in American cities. We walked down to the waterfront where there was a nice little bay area with islands here and there and walkways between many of them. The water in the little bay area was still largely frozen, and there were all kinds of seagulls and ducks flying around squawking and sitting on the ice. We stopped at a little coffee stand that had tables around it. Olympia was buying drinks for everyone so I let her buy me some hot chocolate and I sat and looked out on the water. The girl working at the counter was really nice, and we were marveling at how great all the Finnish people are and how great the quality of life is. There was a blanket draped over one of the chairs next to us and we thought somebody had left it. Then we realized that there were the same blankets on almost all the chairs that people were using, and we realized that they are just left there for people to use in case they get cold! How amazing is that! I’m sure that none of them have ever been stolen too, because that’s just not something that a Finn would do. I hadn’t worn my big jacket so I was rather cold and too advantage of the Finnish hospitality. So, needless to say, we were all pretty impressed with Finland by that point. We walked around on the little islands and took some pictures before heading back to the hotel for a little break. We stopped at a little grocery store along the way for some snacks and what not. Tom got some marinated garlic cloves in olive oil, and I got a deliciously warm and soft loaf of French bread. Tom and I each got a six-pack of beer. He chose the Danish brand Carslberg (which he already knew he really liked) and I trued the cheap Finnish brand called Koff. That was all I was going to get, until I saw probably the most exciting thing that I saw the whole time I was in Helsinki: Dr. Pepper! I hadn’t had a Dr. Pepper in about three months and was really starting to miss it. I only bought one bottle, though. It was a little bit different from the American kind, but it was still undoubtedly Dr. Pepper, and I was very happy to have found it. I only saw it in that one grocery store, so I don’t think it’s really all that common in Finland. Apparently it’s more popular in Estonia. Back at the hotel we hung out in Olympia and Amanda’s room because it was so big. We snacked on bread and garlic and had a little beer. We watched a little Finnish TV, which is great because everything is subtitled instead of dubbed, so we could watch all the American movies and TV shows that they played. There was this one movie called Shortcuts that Tom was getting into, but we pulled him away from it so we could go get some dinner. We found a “Mexican” place that seemed alright, if not a little expensive, Tom and I each ordered some Chicken burritos that turned out to be insanely huge and came with rice, beans, sour cream, guacamole and lettuce on the side. I somehow managed to finish it all, while Tom barely put a dent in his. It was also really nice to get free water and chips like a normal restaurant in America. There is no such thing as free water in Russia. We were all so stuffed after our meal that we just went back to the hotel room to relax. We watched Memento on TV and that terrible Sitcom with Reba Macintyre (why would something like that be popular on Finland?). I made a fort out of the sofa cushions and the others made fun of me. The girls got tired and kicked us out of their room, so we went back to ours and went to bed. We all had a good night’s sleep and woke up in the late morning. Once we were all ready we went for some breakfast at a local fast-food chain called Hesburger, which was actually not that bad. After we ate we all decided we would like to use the internet, so we found an internet café that only had two computers and which were both being occupied. The employee informed us that there was another one across the street in the shopping center, so we went there and found that if you buy something you can get 15 minutes of free internet. I got some ice cream and the others got their own things and we took turns using one of the two computers. I just checked my email, checked facebook and that was it. Once everybody was set for the internet we had to decided what we wanted to do next. All the others really wanted to go shopping and look around the Mall area, which of course I had no interest in doing. I told them that I was going to walk around and I would meet them in an hour and a half. I headed out and walked passed the train station and around some corners and then headed for the water. I walked along the embankment for a ways until I reached this big church on a small hill I walked around that and took some pictures of the church and of the view from the hill, and then headed to the waterfront on the other side of the small peninsula that the church was on. There was a touristy crafts market there,a dn I looked at all the souvenirs and everything but didn’t buy anything. The weather was beautiful and I took lots of pictures of buildings and statues and all that. I could see the top of another church a few blocks away, so I walked towards that and found that it was a huge church right next to a big open square with a statue of Alexander II right in the middle of it. I climbed the big stairs up to the church and had a look inside. It’s a Lutheran church, I guess, and wasn’t nearly as extravagant as some of the Orthodox churches or gothic cathedrals that I have seen, but it was still pretty cool to see. I wandered around the streets a little more before it was time to meet back up with the gang. Walking around by myself is always one of the most rewarding experiences when I travel, and I’m glad I got the opportunity to do it in Helsinki. I found Tom back on the computer when I got back, and Olympia showed up soon afterwards. We waited around for Amanda for a while just outside the café, but she never came. Tom and I got in a dispute as to whether or not the University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League school, and he got back on the computer to prove me wrong. We eventually went looking for Amanda but couldn’t find her and thought maybe she went back to the hotel. We got back and saw that she wasn’t there, so we waited around just a little while before she showed up. We hung out in Tom’s and My room for a little bit before we were all ready for some dinner. Choosing a place to eat was a big hassle. After discussing it for a long time we decided on trying to find some Italia food. We went to a place called Iguana but found the menu to be rather unappetizing (well, at least I did) and decided to move on. We wandered around trying to find something else we could all agree on, and finally walked into a mall that had a decent-looking Italian restaurant. Olympia spoke Italian with the waitress so we were on their good side. This place actually had free refills, which also doesn’t exist in Russia, but you have to go up to the soda machine and refill it yourself like in a fast-food place. No biggie. The food was quite decent and came with lots of free bread. We also each got a shot of some kind of liquor that was on-the-house. After dinner we all agreed that it was time to figure out hwo we were getting home the next day. We tried calling the number on the card we had been given by the bus company we had taken there, and after some cell phone troubles finally got through, only to have it cut out before we could get all the information we needed. We tried calling some places from a pay-phone but couldn’t figure it out. We went back to the hotel and tried to use the phone in the room, but that didn’t work either, I had been trying to get a hold of Emily all day so she could give me Mave’s number so I could call her and find out how she got back. She finally got a hold of me and gave me Mave’s number, but she doesn’t have a cell phone so I could only call her host-family’s house. I didn’t get any answer on that phone, so that was a bust. Tom finally got a hold of the bus company again and talked to the women named Nina. She told us something about calling again at 8:00 the next morning or something like that, so we left it at that and decided we would figure it all out then in the morning. We relaxed around the hotel for a while before heading out to check out the nightlife. There was a little bar right downstairs from the hotel, so we decided to check that out. We actually got carded at the door (well, “passported”) but of course were let in. It was all so much more expensive here than in Russia. It was about 5 euros for a beer (well, it was a nice beer [Newcastle]) and about the same for a rum and coke. I’m used to Russia where It costs a maximum of 80 rubles (less than $3) for a good cheap beer and around 100 rubles for a shot. I only had one beer and one rum and coke, though. We sat at a table and chatted for a while and drank our drinks. Tom and I talked about music as usual while the girls had to carry on their own conversation. The bar got pretty hopping a little later on. I was pretty tired and knew I wasn’t going to be able to do a long night. There was talk of staying up all night and getting on the bus at 8:00 the next morning, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to manage that. Olympia and I were a bit hungry, so we decided to grab a quick bite at the McDonalds around the corner. I ordered a cheeseburger and they told me, “we don’t sell cheeseburgers here. You can get a double cheeseburger though,” so I had to go with the double. I thought that was a pretty weird thing to say to another person. After we finished we walked back to the bar and saw Tom and Amanda coming out. Tom was all set to go out to a club, but I definitely wasn’t feeling it (when am I ever?). I did not want to stay out really late and then have to try and sleep on the bus the next day. In fact, I was ready to go back to the hotel right then. But Tom was all set to go and trying to get us to come. Amanda and Olympia kind of wanted to go and kind of didn’t and we stood on the street corner for a long time while Tom tried to convince us to come. We decided that we would go back to the hotel for a little while, they would take a nap, and then they would go out to the club (I definitely wasn’t going to go). It became apparent after a little while that once they went to bed they weren’t going to get up to go to the club at 3:00 in the morning, and the club idea quickly lost steam. Tom was a little disappointed, but he was set to go to bed by then too. So, we all went to sleep planning on getting up early the next morning and trying to get back to St. Petersburg. Tom set his alarm and woke up around 8:00 to call Nina again. The call didn’t work or something and we just ended up going back to bed for a little while. We woke up again around 8:30 and decided that we should probably just go back to the spot where we had been dropped off the other day and hope that the same kind of bus will be there again and will be going back to St. Petersburg soon. We checked out of our hotel rooms, hit the streets of Helsinki on a cold, foggy Easter morning and walked back to that parking lot where we had been dropped of. Luckily, there was a bus waiting to go to St. Petersburg just like we had hoped. We actually met that Nina women, paid our 10 euros each, and got on the bus. After sitting around for a little while, we learned that the bus didn’t actually leave until 1:00, meaning we had gotten up really early and checked out of our hotel rooms for nothing. We could have slept in and still made it to the bus in time. Oh well. Live and learn. We decided we might as well go walk around and try to find some food. It was about 9:00 on an Easter Sunday morning, so of course nothing was open. We had a hunch that the McDonalds down on the main drag would be open, so we walked down there and sure enough, there it was, a shining beacon to our hungry eyes. We got some breakfast sandwiches and the like and sat around for a little while eating our breakfast. There were a lot of young people in there who had obviously just come back from partying in the clubs all night and were having their early morning meal before heading home to bed. One girl got up to use the bathroom and threw up on the stairs on the way their. We sat around for a while after we were finished just because there was no place else to go really. After a while all the young party animals left and soon the middle-aged tourist crowd took their place, fresh off of their long night’s sleep. After a while we decided that we might as well head back to the bus and wait around for a while before it leaves. It was pretty boring back on the bus, but at least we could relax a bit in the somewhat comfortable chairs. When 1:00 finally rolled around we were out of there. Luckily the bus was pretty empty and I was able to get two seats to myself, which proved to be key to my comfort on the way back. For the movie, this time they showed some cheesy 70’s American action movie called Sloane that I had never heard of before. It was a pretty ridiculous movie. After that one they played Once Upon a Time in American, which I had heard of before but knew nothing about. It was pretty violent and messed up from what I could tell not listening to it. The bus stopped at a fish market outside of Helsinki that had all kinds of crazy fish and sea animals for sale. I saw a stack of whole eels, for example. Pretty weird stuff. I bought some soda and that was god enough for me. Once we got to the border we stopped at a grocery store where some of the people were dropped off while the bus went back up the road just a little bit to this sketchy store that sold all kinds of things in bulk. We didn’t get out at the grocery store, but stayed on the bus and got to see everything that they were doing there. There was one building that was like an empty little warehouse that had a sign that said “importing exporting” on it, so we knew right away it was pretty sketchy. Some men started loading big bags full of strange assortments of clothes into the baggage area at the bottom of the bus. Tom was convinced that there was secret stuff hidden in the clothes that they were smuggling across the border. Who knows, maybe the bus is just offering a cheap way for this company to get their goods into Russia. Either way, it didn’t seem like it could be entirely legal, but I didn’t ask questions. Once everything was loaded up headed back to that grocery store and picked everybody else up, and again loaded some boxes of assorted good into the bottom of the bus. From there it was a few dozen yards to the border. Finnish customs were a breeze. They just glanced over our passports, stamped them, and we were on our way. Once we got to the Russian side we had to fill out new migration cards, as is required for all non-Russian citizens when entering the country. We showed them our old migration cards too and the women told us that we need photocopies of them for their records the next time we enter Russia. Whatever, at least they gave them back to us. All in all, border crossing went really quick, and after another quick stop at the duty-free shop, we were on our way back home. I bought a bar of chocolate that apparently is for men only (I don’t get it). The sides of the road were filthy as soon as we entered Russia. For the rest of the ride I listened to music and maybe even dozed off a little bit, I can’t remember. Soon we were in the northern suburbs of St. Petersburg and traffic jans became a reality again. We stopped at the metro station called Chyornaya Reka (Black River) and some people got off there. I realized that it would probably be a lot quicker if I got off here and tool the metro than if I stayed on the bus and rode it all the way back to Ploschad Vostannia. So, I said goodbye to my travel companions and hoped on the metro and before too long I was back in my apartment, safe and sound. My host-mom whipped me up a quick plate of pelmeny with sour cream, and I called home and talked to my mom, dad, sister, and grandma for a while. I didn’t really have that much homework to do, so I took a shower, watched some Family Guy on my computer and went to bed. Today after classes were over I used the internet for a while and then tried to turn in my passport to be extended. See, I’m going to travel in Russia and then in Eastern Europe for a while after the program is over, and in order to do that I need to have my visa extended for a while so I can stay in Russia past May 15th. Natasha, the woman in charge of all that at Smolniy, told me that if I turned in today (Monday) I would get it back on May 5th, which would give me plenty of time before the end of the program and would also mean I would get it back just in time to maybe make a trip to Estonia and Latvia on the weekend of the 6th/7th (Tuesday the 9th is a holiday, so I thought I might skip that Monday and take a four-day trip to the Baltic nations). I went into Natasha’s office to turn it in, and she asks me, “Do you have your photos?” Apparently, you need three 3x4 cm matte photos of yourself to get your visa extended, which she had neglected to tell me when she was explaining to me what I needed to do to get my visa extended. So, now I have to turn it in tomorrow (Tuseday), and Natasha told me that I won’t be getting it back until about the 11th, which would still get it back to me just before the program ends and it’s time to start traveling, but leaves me no hope of taking a long weekend in the Baltic nations. I was pretty bummed out about that for a while after school, but at least it means I won’t be spending more money. I can use the money I would have spent on that for the rest of my travels later this summer. So, after that disappointing blow, I went with John and Peter David to the Uzbek restaurant for a big delicious lunch to cheer myself up. The park we usually walk through is currently closed for drying, so we had to walk around. The food was amazing, as usual, and I was completely stuffed afterwards. John went home, but Peter David tagged along with me while I ran some errands. First, we stopped in at the computer store so I could by a new thumb drive. This place called “Komputer Tsentr Kei” is a chain of computer stores around the city that still operates like an old-fashioned Russian store. This means, you have to talk to the employee and tell them what you want, then they write down the product number on a piece of paper, then you bring that piece of paper to the cashier where you pay and get a receipt, which you then bring back to the employee you talked to who then gives you what you bought. It’s so complicated and pointless, but that’s basically Russia in a nutshell. So I got a pretty good deal on a 256 MB thumb drive (it’s super tiny too!), and then it was on to errand number two. I had to get those photos taken for my visa extension and Natasha had told me that there was a place across from the Chernyshevskaya metro station that would do it, and we were right around there so we went to check it out. The place is a little photo store inside of a 505 store. I told the really grumpy and unhelpful photographer what I needed, and he told me that they wouldn’t be ready until Friday, but told me the address of a place nearby that could do it today. Peter David and I looked around 505 for a little bit before I went and found this other place. He bought a Pearl Jam CD and I bought a DVD of more Gaidai films. When we were done, he took of for home while I found this other photo place. I found it pretty quick, talked to the photographer and told him what I needed, and he had me sit down right away and snapped the picture. I only had to wait about 10 minutes for my pictures. This guy was a Photoshop wiz. There were a couple other people before me and he finished touching up their pictures and printing them out before he got to mine. I watched him as he worked with mine. My hair was kind of sticking out on one side, and he Photoshoped it out and made the whole thing look nice and professional. It only cost me 100 rubles for six photos too. So, very pleased with my experience at that photo place, it was time to get over to the university to teach some English. I rode the metro to Gostiny Dvor, where I jumped on a bus that I had never taken before (route 187) that apparently went to the right place. It did, and I got to the university with plenty of time to spare. I sat and did some homework in the courtyard before it was time to start class. The teacher was sick again, so it was just me and the kids like it has been the past few times. I like it this way, actually. We went over some exercises and they took turns reading an article about a guy hiking the Appalachian Trail, and then they asked me questions about places in the US and stuff like that. During the break I hung in the room with some of my favorite students, and I tried to draw a picture of Russia on the white board. Then we took turns quizzing each other on the location of Russian cities. I know more about Russian geography than they do. There are two kids in the class who usually have a hard time focusing and staying on track, and they sat together today so it was a bit tough keeping them from talking to each other the whole class and messing around on their cell phones, but they eventually settled down. We did some work with crossword puzzles before it was time for me to go. I caught the number 7 bus right as I stepped outside and this got home very fast. My host-mom wasn’t there when I got home but arrived soon afterwards and apologized that she wasn’t already there and hadn’t made dinner yet because she had been at the dentist and thought I was coming back later. She made me a really good pasta and meat dish, though the soup was sub par. I basically started writing this post when I finished dinner, and now here I am almost four hours later and still writing. Well, not for long. Wow, this post really ranks up there with some of the longest ones. Plus there’s that other new one that I will be uploading at the same time. Well, you’ve all got your work cut out for you if you want to read it all. Though I suppose if you are reading this you already have read it all. Good for you. See you around.