One of the great posts of our generation

Hey! It’s that time again. You know. So, let’s see, Friday. Friday I went to school like normal. I brought my laptop because I was going to meet Emily at Soiree at 3:15, and I figured I might as well get some internet time in as long as I was there. I was still kind of sick like the day before, but definitely feeling well enough to be out and about. So, I was kind of just assuming I would go straight to Soiree after school, but then I found out that there was an excursion planned to go visit Pushkin’s apartment. I wasn’t really that interested, but in the end I figured I may as well go, seeing as how all those excursions have already been paid for. Plus, it would still give me plenty of time to get back to Soiree in time to meet Emily. We rode a van-bus over to a spot along the Moika and walked through a tiny doorway into a courtyard and into the apartment that has now been turned into a museum about Pushkin. I wish I had actually read some Pushkin or something before having gone, because it turned out to be pretty boring as I had expected. The furniture in the apartment wasn’t even his, just furniture “from his time.” I did see the actual couch he died on after being shot in a duel, though, and the vest he was wearing. So I guess it wasn’t a total bust. I would like to read some Pushkin anyways, though. After the tour, which only took about 25 minutes or so, we were free to go. Kenny and Rob had to head back up Nevskiy too, so I walked with them to the Gostiny Dvor metro station and we parted ways from there. We talked about Street Fighter on the way. I rode just one stop to Mayakovskaya and made the short walk to Soiree. Emily was caught in traffic, so she was a little late while I sat and tried using the internet for a while. It was going incredibly slow and I could barely get anything done. I listened to the two Americans sitting behind me. The one girl is apparently in Russia teaching English, and she seemed so ditsy. She kept talking about how she can’t wait to get back to America so she can get hair extensions. Emily showed up after not too long and we sat and chatted for a while. We had met so I could lend her something, but I’m not allowed to say what it is because it is in connection with something that is apparently bad luck to talk about. Sorry, Emily asked me not to talk about it, so I guess I’ll just have to leave it at that. Don’t worry, it’s nothing bad or weird. She tried using her computer too but it was having troubles and wouldn’t start up or something. I hope it’s OK now. After a couple hours of being there we headed out. I rode the bus home to relax for a bit before heading out again. There was a plan to meet outside of Gostiny Dvor at 9:30 and then go to this bar called Money Honey. Some people wanted to go to this place called Club Revolution instead, but other people said that it sucked, so we did end up going to Money Honey, thank goodness. There was some miscommunication with Vickie and e ended up meeting outside of the Vasileostrovskaya metro station instead of right outside our apartments. We met up with Katie, Bryce, Matt, and Tom and walked to Money Honey. We had to walk along the side of Gostiny Dvor, and the building is huge and takes forever to walk down. Maybe I haven’t explained what Gostiny Dvor is yet. It’s basically a huge department store / mall with lots of expensive stores. I haven’t actually been inside, but walking around the outside of it is good enough for me. At one point while we were walking I was looking over at Tom and Matt, I think, and didn’t see that somebody had opened the door from the building right into me, and I smashed my shoulder into the door. It was two older women who were coming out of the building, and they just gave me a weird look and walked away. Of course, had something like that happened in the US, the person who had opened the door into the other person would have been really apologetic, but not in Russia. Forget it. Anyway, Money Honey was really close, so we get in and pay the cover and get checked with a phony-metal detector (I swear it was) and were let in. This place is pretty crazy. There’s a big confederate flag out front, and the bottom floor is like a western-themed bar that plays rock ‘n roll and country music, while the second and third floors are more like a bar / club / whatever, but all really laid back and with lots of room to sit and relax. They also have some really weird things there, like a little shooting range where you can shoot these weird pellet-gun things at cans and stuff for 50 rubles. It seemed like a really bad idea to mix alcohol and guns, but I guess they had it all under control there, and the things that you shoot from the gun probably couldn’t really hurt anybody anyways. They’re like these little metal tip things that are maybe about the size of a BB, but weigh a lot less. There was a band playing when we got there, and another one was on after them. Neither were that great. We got a big table and sat around for a bit. Vickie somehow won a free Heiniken T-shirt. Ruth, Kenny, Nick, and Allisonn showed up a little later. They had been sitting in KFC drinking for a while before and were already pretty drunk. Especially a certain person in the group, but I shouldn’t really talk about it I guess. There’s a lot of “drama” surrounding some certain people in our group and I don’t want to talk about who it is or what it is, but that means that I can’t really explain a lot of our time spent at Money Honey cause it all kind of centered around that. Let’s just say some things were said and some people left and some people are mad at other people and blah blah blah. I try to stay out of all that stuff as much as possible. But anyways, some people left relatively early, but some of us decided to stay. The remaining group consisted of Nick, Ruth, Allisonn, Kenny, and Me. After hanging around for a while we decided to go to KFC (back to KFC for some of us) because we were hungry and KFC is open 24 hours. On the walk over Kenny and Ruth went the wrong way and walked for quite a while before they realized that they were walking the wrong way by themselves, and the rest of us tried to get a hold of them and waited around while they came back to meet us. Some weird guy started walking with us on the way there, and came in with us to the restaurant. He ordered a beer and sat with us while we ate our chicken. He said he was really into old American rock ‘n roll, like Carl Perkins, Eddy Cochran, Elvis, and all that, though his favorite band is the Stray Cats. He would keep breaking into song every now and then, singing songs like, “Hello, Mary Lou.” He wanted us to come with him to some music club, and some of us thought it would be fun to go with him at first, but he started getting creepier and weirder and we soon realized that we didn’t want to go with him. He kept telling Allisonn how beautiful she was, kissing her hand, and then pulled out a bad of paper and drew her portrait. He wrote “So beauty girl!” at the top of it. When it was time to leave they all kind of wanted me to tell him that we weren’t going to go with him to the club, so when we got out the door I told him that we were all tired and were just going to go home. He seemed fine with it, shook our hands and crossed the street and finally got away from us. He then kind of lingered for a while and we felt like he was trying to follow us or watch us or whatever, so we slipped down that side street that loops around and comes out on Palace Square in front of the Hermitage. We wanted to go to Kofe Khaus for Ice cream, but we had to go this round-about way to avoid this guy. Luckily we were able to loose him and made it to Kofe Khaus. It was about 4:45 in the morning at this point. We sat down, relaxed, and had some ice cream, but by the time we were done it was still only about 5:30 and all the public transportation of course doesn’t open until 6:00. So, we decided to take a cue from all the Russian teenagers that were still hanging around in there and sat on the sofa-type seats to take a nap for a half-hour. The manager didn’t seem to mind really, until it got close to 6:00 and he started waking everybody up so they could get out and ride the metro home. I was so read t get home and sleep for real at that point. Everybody else headed for the metro, but it’s better for me to ride the bus, of course, so I walked to the bus stop just in front of the Hermitage and waited for a little while until the number 7 came. I got home and went right to sleep in my bed, not even bothering to get under the covers. I slept that way all through the next morning (well, early afternoon I guess). I had my usual weekend bliny breakfast with that delicious carmely sauce. There was a gathering of sorts going on that day at Nathan and Mila’s (the program directors [they’re married]) apartment. They had someone there cutting hair, but a lot of other people were going over there just to hang out and watch movies. We were supposed to go at 2:00 but I was going to be late, so I just met up with them there. I rode the number 7 bus from outside my building down to the Gostiny Dvor area. For some reason I couldn’t figure out, the bus was completely packed. It was about 2:30 on a Saturday afternoon. Why were there so many people on this bus? It’s so unpredictable, whether or not a bus is going to have a lot of people on it or not. So I got really hot wearing my big jacket on the hot crowded bus, and by the time I got off my hair was all gross and sweaty. I walked down the street to where the apartment supposedly was. It was in an area I hadn’t been before, and it was incredibly nice right around there. It’s right next to the Fontanka and some other canal, so there are all these nice bridges everywhere and some palace was nearby and a great church and all this stuff was right outside of their apartment. I couldn’t figure out how to get in, so I called Bryce and he explained. I got in the building and made it up to the 5th floor where their apartment is and came in to find a pretty big group there already. Oh man, this apartment is absolutely amazing. Apparently Nathan and Mila bought it back around 1989 for super cheap and fixed it up and everything, and now Nathan says it’s definitely valued at over a million dollars. Mila did all the interior design, and it has been featured in Russian home and garden-type magazines. The place is just huge, way bigger than my house in Corvallis even. I’m not even sure how many rooms this thing has. I don’t think I even found them all. There are lots of rooms off of rooms that loop around other rooms and seem to go forever. There are at least 3 bathrooms, a huge open kitchen and dining room, various family-type rooms and guest rooms, and the best part, an entertainment room, that’s basically like a little movie theater. There’s a big pull-down screen with a projector and a big media center with DVD and VHS and a stereo and all that, with surround-sound speakers. Incredible! So, we all hung out there for the day not getting haircuts and watching “Indiana Jones: the Last Crusade” and “Wedding Crashers,” drinking soda and ordering pizza. It was pretty fun and relaxing, I have to say. After the last movie we all left, and I headed home with Vickie. I ended up staying in the whole rest of the night. It sounded like a lot of people were staying in, and I was pretty tired and still a little sick, so it seemed like the thing to do. I don’t even remember what I did the whole night. Just listening to music and messing around on the computer, I guess. Sunday morning I woke up to the most gorgeous sunny day I had seen in a long time. The temperature was up to around positive 10 Celsius (about 50 Fahrenheit), which felt so warm. I ate some quick bliny, and then went with Vickie to meet up with Katie and Tom down on Nevskiy to walk around and take advantage of the beautiful weather. It was my first day in St. Petersburg where I left the house without my big green jacket. I just wore a light jacket-thing and I didn’t feel cold at all the whole day! The three of them wanted to go walk around the Church on Spilled Blood because they hadn’t seen it up close yet. We walked around and took some picture and ended up in that little souvenir fair behind the church. There was a guy selling all kinds of old soviet pins and buttons that all looked pretty cool, and I’d like to go browse there some more and maybe buy some. He did talk me into buying one thing, though. There was a little pack of old police Identification cards, drivers licenses, and carious other official documents, all confiscated or stolen or something at some point in the 70’s or 80’s and they somehow found their way to this souvenir stand. They seemed kind of cool but neither Tom nor I were really that interested. The guy said 300 for the set at first, and we definitely didn’t want to pay that much for it. He kept working it down and I still wasn’t all that interested. I finally took him up on it when he gave me the price of 100 rubles, plus he threw in two pins of a red star with the hammer and sickle in the middle of them. It was a pretty good deal, I think. We browsed for a little while longer, but we didn’t really want to by anything more right now. We were all getting a little hungry and I convinced everyone to come with me to try this Russian chain-restaurant place called Yolki Palki right off Nevskiy. In front of the restaurant, gathered around a statue of Gogol, there was a pro-Chechnya demonstration going on. We picked up some literature from them and headed into the restaurant. It was a little bit corny inside, but the food was pretty good if not small. I got some pelmeny with sour cream that was really good. The others got some shish kebabs and French fries. After lunch I got the guys to follow me onto the metro and two stops away to go check out the Alexander Nevskiy Monastery at the far end of Nevskiy Prospekt where nobody ever goes. We got some ice cream before he went in the monestary, of course. There were all kinds of crazy limbless beggers inside the monastery walls that we had to skirt by, and then found out that you had to pay a fee to get into the real part of the monastery, so we walked around in the free part for a while but it wasn’t very interesting, so we headed up Nevskiy back to Ploshchad Vostanniya. I had never been on this part of Nevskiy before. It’s the part that nobody ever bothers checking out, but it was pretty nice, especially on a day like that. We walked by a music and movie store called Titanik and decided to check it out. They had a lot of good stuff, and I ended up buying an official copy of that big popular Russian movie Dnevnoi Dozor and a movie that I saw on the shelf staring my idol Viktor Tsoy from Kino. I had no idea what they movie was about or if it was any good, but come on, it’s a movie staring Viktor Tsoy. That’s all that needs to be said. It’s called “Igla” (Needle). I can’t wait to watch the whole thing. Vickie and Katy bought some things too and after a big long hassle of the cashier trying to make change for Katie’s 500 and trying to figure out how to use the credit card machine, we were off. Tom and Vickie went to study for a test, so Katie and I rode the metro home. I caught up on all my homework, watched Dnevnoi Dozor (though I had to find a way around the fact that it is an official DVD and my computer was giving me a hard time about trying to play DVDs that are formatted for a different region) and talked to the family on the phone for a while. It was cool to watch that movie because a pretty large portion of it was filmed at / takes place in and around the hotel I stayed at in Moscow. I don’t remember what time I got to bed at, but it was probably pretty late. Today they weather turned a complete 180 from yesterday, and on the way to school it was like a blizzard, with huge and heavy snowfall and howling, bone-chilling winds. At school I got my grammar test back (B+) and had a strange phonetics class with only a few of us in there. That teacher definitely likes me the most because I can usually pronounce all the different sounds and emulate her sounds pretty well, but I know everybody else really hates that class and can’t stand her. Luckily, after class the weather got a little better. The skies were pretty cloudy, but not completely overcast. We got a few brief sun breaks here and there. I was thinking about finally going to the Hermitage because it is on my way to the university where I teach English, but I talked to Kenny and he said he was going for a walk to find some cool stuff, so I decided to tag along with him. He wanted to find the building that used to house the Leningrad KGB offices and now houses some other police group or whatever. We walked down I street I hadn’t been down before and saw some pretty cool stuff. The weather was pretty cold, but not too bad at all. That one building was actually pretty boring to look at, but we kept going to find some other buildings that Kenny had wanted to see. We walked right by where Nathan and Mila’s apartment is, and then through a park-ish area and saw an eternal flame burning. We warmed up by it for a bit and took some pictures. We found a broom in the bushes, the kind a witch would ride on, so I took a picture of Kenny riding on it like a witch, He carried it around with us for a bit but then got sick of it and threw it in another bush. We went to this place called the Marble palace but didn’t go in. Apparently it’s a branch of the State Russian Museum. There was a really cool monument to Aleksandr III out front. We then tried to check out this place called the Summer Palace, but it was in this park that we discovered to be “closed for drying,” so we headed on down towards the Hermitage instead. Kenny took off to head home, but I still had to kill some time before my English class. I thought I might as well check out the Hermitage finally just for a bit before the class, but quickly discovered / realized that, like almost all museums in Russia, it is closed on Mondays. So, I stood around in Palace Square for a bit, looking at the pillar and imagining what the place must have looked like back on Bloody Sunday 101 years ago. I heard recently that the huge pillar in the middle of the square isn’t attached to its pedestal by anything, it’s just resting on it. It’s kind of a scary thought, actually. I had never really hung around in Palace Square before, or at least not since all the snow melted away. It really is an amazing square, considering all the things that surround it. It’s so big and open that when you walk around you can’t really hear your own footsteps, because there really is nowhere for the sound to echo. It’s just so quite and solitary walking around there, it’s eerie. I used a pay toilet and then sat on a bench for a little while watching some people feed birds. I was getting cold and decided to walk around some more. So I headed for the bridge to Vasilevsky Island and the university. As I was crossing the bridge, I was lucky enough to see some of the alst big chunks of ice on the river below slip free and drift away under the bridge and away to the gulf. I thought that all the big chunks right there were going to slip away, but they kind of wedged themselves together and stuck for a while. I got bored waiting for them to free themselves so I moved on. I bet they’ve broken free by now. There was a group of guys walking around and standing on some chunks or ice near the edge and taking pictures of each other. It looked dangerous. I walked around on the tip of the Streltsy (the “nose” of Vasilevsky Island) and took some pictures of the river, the ice, and the buildings in all directions. I then headed over to the university the back way and entered through the back too. Some bad-ass security guard tried to stop me from getting in, but I just flashed my student ID and he had to let me in. That ID wields a lot of power sometimes. I got lost on the university grounds down these were back lots and dilapidated buildings. I heard marching troops or something in the distance. It was really eerie. Some women stationed at some sort of booth asked me what I was doing and I said I didn’t know where I was. She kindly guided me back to the main university area, and after making a few more wrong terms I finally found the right building. I still had a little time to kill, so I sat on a bench outside for a while and listened to a little music. It turned out that the teacher of my class was subbing for another one again today, so I had to teach the class on my own for the first part again. They gave me a re-telling of a little text about Valentine’s day, and we did some grammar exercises from the book. They asked me some questions, I told them about my run-in with the militsia and showed them my passport. They were very interested in looking at it, and were baffled by the concept of a middle name (They have them in Russia, but they are much more important than in America and are always derived from the father’s first name). They wanted to play some games, so we did a round of hang-man, then the game where you name a word that starts with the letter that ended the word before it, then a round of the game where you say, “We are going on a picnic and we are bringing…” and you have to foods for each letter of the alphabet and keep going all the way through. That brought us up through the end of class. I think they really enjoyed playing games instead of having a real class period. Who wouldn’t? I left around 8:00, took the bus home, ate some dinner, did some homework and started writing this update. Next thing you know, it’s almost 12:30 and it’s time for me to go to bed. I’m not sure when or how I will get this post up. Soon and somehow, are the answer’s I’m shooting for. See you later.