So, you know how in my last post I said something about only having fallen once? Yeah, looks like I jinxed myself. Pretty much the entirety of Vasilievsky Island was coated in ice on Friday, so on the way to class that morning, Corinne and I were slipping all over the place. I got tired of it within about five minutes of the walk from the metro. And shortly after that, I slipped and fell flat on my back. Well, no, not *flat* on my back; that would have destroyed the apple I had packed, as well as probably damaging my spare glasses, both of which were living in the little front pocket of my backpack (they both survived the trip). Instead, I fell on my right hip (and, to a lesser extent, elbow). There's a massive bruise there now. Nothing's broken, I can still walk, it's just sore. That happened after turning my ankle slightly on the walk to Mayakovskaya, due to misjudging the depth of a puddle. Yeah. Friday was not a good day to be my right leg.
And obviously, after hurting myself and just generally having a terrible time of it during the day Friday, I decide it would be a great idea to go out with my roommates that night! It's a holiday weekend, what the hell, right? Really, though, it was fun. We met some of Liz's friends at this really cheap bar (and Jorge discovered that a guy he went to [a very small, private, evangelical Iowa] college with is in St Petersburg now with another program), then moved to a club that was grungier and less...weird than RadioBaby. I dunno, it just seemed like the people at this club were there to party, not lean awkwardly against the walls because having fun is so mainstream. I think the bar was called Mad Dog, and the club's name was I think Belgrade or something. Belgrade's DJ seemed to have nothing in his booth but bizarre remixes of 90s-early 2000s American pop music. At one point they played Smash Mouth and that was cool, but all of the other songs were just these crazy remixes; one of them was a mashup of Ciara and the Pussycat Dolls over a reggae/bluesy guitar line. Don't you wish your milkshake was hot like me, indeed. (My girlfriend brings all the boys to the yard.) There were some others but that's the one I remember the most clearly.
We started talking to this random group of Russians who happened to have grabbed the couch adjacent to ours; there were two guys and two girls, and they had apparently gone out to celebrate the birthday of one of the guys. They were all extremely drunk and on their third or so round of rum-and-cokes by the time we started talking to them. I went to the bathroom at one point (basically a hallway with 3 small water closets and one small room full of urinals, and sinks on the opposite wall from the toilets), and ran into the two guys at the sink. They slurred at me in a combination of Russian and broken English, something to the effect of "Hey, girl! You drunk? You like vodka? Haha!" I just kind of laughed and walked away. The bar area was really crowded so I decided to backtrack and head back to my friends through the dance area, where I found the guys again. I smiled and waved at them and then moved on, but one of them yelled something at me and pulled me back up onto the dance floor. Well, okay, why not? I'm at a club, might as well. So I danced a little bit. Just my usual little semi-rhythmic wiggle, nothing crazy--it's not like I started grinding on anybody. Liz's friend accompanied us to the club and she was there, so it's not as if I was suddenly dancing in a crowd full of total strangers. I stayed for a minute or so and then slipped away, back to the couch where everyone was sitting. We chilled at that club until about 2:30-3 AM.
When we finally left (spiriting Liz's friend away from a super-sleazy guy who was too drunk to understand why Liz got all mad at him for trying to grab her drink out of her hand), Corinne tried to find the water bottle of hers that they had confiscated at the door. They threw it away or something (more likely it was stolen, probably by the bouncer), so she couldn't get it back. Sad face. :c It was a really nice steel Kleen Kanteen, too, with a sticker she really liked on it. So we went to get some shawarma to cheer Corinne up and absorb some of the alcohol in everyone's systems. I ate about three bites of mine and then I just wasn't interested anymore; I was dizzy and I had to pee and I just wanted to go home. Luckily, Jorge is a shawarma vacuum, so he finished mine in short order.
I somehow managed to make it home without falling again, although Nevsky wasn't nearly as icy as it could have been. I pretty much stayed awake long enough to put pajamas on and then collapsed into bed and didn't move for six hours. I got a sore neck for my trouble; apparently I fell asleep with my head at a weird angle. But that was the worst of it, really.
I woke up in time to go to the Russian Museum again; Sergei rescheduled the tour to Saturday because Sunday was a festival day! We explored the 20th-century art this time. Most likely due to the current political climate in Russia, all of the Soviet art that is normally on display in the Russian Museum was absent. There was art from the Soviet era, but none of the portraits of leaders or anything really ideologically-driven; just portraits of random working-class folks and abstract pieces.
I was tired after the night out and the museum tour, and my hip and ankle hurt, so I declined to go with when Corinne and Liz announced they would be meeting Elizabeth and going to this bar/club/place that had a bunch of indie bands playing Saturday night. Turns out I made a good decision; the cover charge for that place was 500p, instead of the advertised 100p, so they spent a lot of time just trying to find a bar they could get into. They all eventually came home around 4:30 in the morning on Sunday; Elizabeth spent the night at our place, rather than try to find her way back to her apartment drunk and alone. St Petersburg is a reasonably safe city, but you just never know.
Back on Thursday, when Jorge had his friend Max over, Max mentioned that he wanted to take us to a Maslenitsa festival. That was today, and it was pretty fun! The festival was next to the Peter and Paul Fortress, and they had a ton of little booths selling food and crafts, as well as a massive ice slide, zorb balls, colorfully-dressed people on stilts...you know, the stuff you'd expect to find at a festival. I regret that I never got to play around in the zorb balls, but Corinne and Liz and I did do the ice slide, and that was fun. I really need to get a pair of flat boots; I wore my sneakers today and they got soaked as I waded through snow. Yeah, it snowed today, which I thought was fittingly ironic for an end-of-winter celebration. After we'd seen and done everything we wanted to, there was still about an hour before the traditional effigy burning, so Max led us all over the freaking fortress looking for a cafe that we passed within seconds of entering the gate. It was warm and dry and I could sit down, that was all I cared about. And I got some tea and borscht, so there was also that.
When the time came, we went back outside the fortress; they had people on snowboards and skis going down the ice slide and doing tricks to entertain the crowd before the burning, which turned out to be a fireworks show instead of actually setting fire to a straw effigy of Lady Maslenitsa. But the fireworks were still neat. First, they had some sparklers attached to the edges of the ice slide, and set those off just to get some good smoke going. Then they had snowboarders and skiers ride down the slide carrying flares, followed by dancers swinging more flares on chains and one guy with a wheel o' flares spinning on his back. Then several dozen fireworks attached at various places to the ice slide structure went off. It was pretty spectacular, and (paradoxically) quite a bit safer than setting fire to dry grass in front of a crowd of hundreds. I guess they just trusted that the air would be cool and wet enough to extinguish the fireworks quickly before they fell back to earth. Alternatively, Russians don't care nearly as much about safety as Americans do; such a fireworks display in America would've taken place with all the explosives on the other side of the river and with all of the people safely within the courtyard of the fortress. Meanwhile, in Russia, they're setting off fireworks directly over the heads of a crowd standing mere hundreds of feet from ground zero and everyone's like "lol, nbd."
I'm glad I went, although I'm tired and sore and still probably have homework to do. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I do. Bluhhh. I guess I'll go be responsible and stop having fun now.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Chapter the Fourth: Shades of Gray
Why do you do this to me, Russia? Why do you tease me with a few sunny, clear days hovering around 0 degrees (if not even creeping up a bit!), then abruptly fall back into Hardcore Winter Mode? The sidewalk was almost DRY a week ago! Now it's rained or snowed (however lightly) pretty much constantly the past three days, and the sidewalks are all a mess of slush and miscellaneous street-goo. It's hard to judge how solid the dirty slush-pile before me on the sidewalk is; good thing I'm still basically used to walking with my head down and eyes fixed firmly on the ground in front of me. I know it's not doing my posture any favors, but it certainly helps when navigating icy, sludgy pathways.
One thing I've noticed, the few times I've left the house this week, is how many shades of gray there are in the snow on the sidewalk. The untrodden snow off to the side, between stoops where no one walks, that is pure white. As you move closer to the street, the snow quickly mixes with exhaust and miscellaneous dirt to create a gross, slate-gray slurry that coats the sidewalks. After enough people have walked on it, it's hard to even remember what color the bricks or tiles or flagstones are under the gray slush; everything is coated in a uniform layer of gray goo. It's also hard to see the patches of ice, and on certain sidewalks the slush itself can get really slippery. I've only ever actually fallen once, although I've slipped countless times. I've only seen a Russian slip once, and she handled it expertly, almost as if she intended to slide across the ice patch. Maybe they just recover more quickly than I do, being more used to navigating such environments.
I'm definitely going to buy a new pair of shoes at some point while I'm here. There are a ton of shoe stores around; I'm just not sure how expensive they are or whether I'll be able to find flat ankle boots or something similar. I can't wear my heeled boots every day; the red-and-white Converse I brought are hard to wear with two pairs of socks; and my white and green sneakers are like two huge neon signs attached to my feet that read AMERICAN. They are comfortable, even in multiple socks, though; and they're holding up surprisingly well under these conditions. My socks stayed dry, even wading through slush, until the last ten minutes or so of the walk home yesterday, because I misstepped a couple of times and plunged my foot into a solid-looking pile of gray-brown muck. I like to pretend that white sneakers are my only tell; it absolutely isn't, but it's definitely among the most conspicuous.
We're in the thick of the holiday season, as it were, now; it's Holy Week, but besides that, this week contains plenty of other holidays. Monday was President's Day; Tuesday was Pancake Day; today was Men's Day/Defenders of the Fatherland Day, and tomorrow is my grandma's birthday! Happy birthday Mamaw :) Also Good Friday, but I think the first one is more important.
This morning Corinne made blini for everyone, and even went out and got toppings; we had sweetened condensed milk (which came in a pouch like this! Food packaged like this is not out of the ordinary for Russia, though; you can find ketchup, mustard, mayo, and cheese sauce in similar packaging), apricot jam, butter, sour cream, honey, and muesli, although no one really went for the muesli (granola cereal). Liz tried it but she was the only one. With a bit more of a coordinated effort we could have had an even grander smorgasbord of toppings; other popular choices here include cream cheese, salmon, caviar, boiled eggs, and mushrooms. Being a breakfast (even if it was at 1:30 in the afternoon, because my roommates waited for me to wake up), we stuck to mostly sweet toppings instead of savory. Jorge had a Russian friend over at the time and he said the blini were perfect, and didn't believe it was Corinne's first time making them because they turned out so good.
Later, Jorge and his friend, along with Liz and Corinne, went out to see the festivities for Defenders of the Fatherland Day; I declined to go with, because I don't like navigating the slippery, slushy sidewalks. Alexandra reported that it took three times as long to get from the metro to the apartment this morning on her way home (she'd gone out with friends to a hockey game the previous night), due to the slush.
I know I need to get out and do stuff but mehhh, I don't waaaanna. I do feel better, though; no more sore throat or anything. I think it may have been an allergic reaction to the vitamin D supplement I picked up, because I didn't start feeling bad until I started taking it, and I stopped taking it and got better; I'm going to look and see if I can find a gelcap supplement instead of the gross chalky tablets that I got. They don't even dissolve in hot water; I tried dissolving one in some tea, because it's this huge nickel-sized chalky pellet of minty grossness that I hate chewing, and the tablet will break up into particles but the particles will fall out of solution and settle in the bottom of the mug. Ick. It's probably not good to suddenly stop taking a relatively large dose of a vitamin D supplement, but I feel OK; I also felt OK when my endocrinologist told me I had a severe vitamin D deficiency, though, so I guess in the worst-case scenario, I get to start hyper-dosing myself with the stuff when I get back home again. Hopefully I'll find a better supplement here. There are aptekas all over the place; one of them is sure to have something.
At some point this evening I need to sit down and pen another journal entry for this culture class; I'm going to go over the prompts we have again and see if I know enough about any of them to produce something that will meet the minimum requirements. I have no motivation to do anything of the sort, but I know I have to. Siiiigh. The next several days will be quite busy; I have my regular language class tomorrow, plus a rescheduled culture class to discuss a short story we had to read right after it, plus the second excursion to the Russian museum on Saturday, plus something Maslenitsa-related on Sunday, and I think my roommates want to go out somewhere over the weekend too. And a partridge in a pear tree.
One thing I've noticed, the few times I've left the house this week, is how many shades of gray there are in the snow on the sidewalk. The untrodden snow off to the side, between stoops where no one walks, that is pure white. As you move closer to the street, the snow quickly mixes with exhaust and miscellaneous dirt to create a gross, slate-gray slurry that coats the sidewalks. After enough people have walked on it, it's hard to even remember what color the bricks or tiles or flagstones are under the gray slush; everything is coated in a uniform layer of gray goo. It's also hard to see the patches of ice, and on certain sidewalks the slush itself can get really slippery. I've only ever actually fallen once, although I've slipped countless times. I've only seen a Russian slip once, and she handled it expertly, almost as if she intended to slide across the ice patch. Maybe they just recover more quickly than I do, being more used to navigating such environments.
I'm definitely going to buy a new pair of shoes at some point while I'm here. There are a ton of shoe stores around; I'm just not sure how expensive they are or whether I'll be able to find flat ankle boots or something similar. I can't wear my heeled boots every day; the red-and-white Converse I brought are hard to wear with two pairs of socks; and my white and green sneakers are like two huge neon signs attached to my feet that read AMERICAN. They are comfortable, even in multiple socks, though; and they're holding up surprisingly well under these conditions. My socks stayed dry, even wading through slush, until the last ten minutes or so of the walk home yesterday, because I misstepped a couple of times and plunged my foot into a solid-looking pile of gray-brown muck. I like to pretend that white sneakers are my only tell; it absolutely isn't, but it's definitely among the most conspicuous.
We're in the thick of the holiday season, as it were, now; it's Holy Week, but besides that, this week contains plenty of other holidays. Monday was President's Day; Tuesday was Pancake Day; today was Men's Day/Defenders of the Fatherland Day, and tomorrow is my grandma's birthday! Happy birthday Mamaw :) Also Good Friday, but I think the first one is more important.
This morning Corinne made blini for everyone, and even went out and got toppings; we had sweetened condensed milk (which came in a pouch like this! Food packaged like this is not out of the ordinary for Russia, though; you can find ketchup, mustard, mayo, and cheese sauce in similar packaging), apricot jam, butter, sour cream, honey, and muesli, although no one really went for the muesli (granola cereal). Liz tried it but she was the only one. With a bit more of a coordinated effort we could have had an even grander smorgasbord of toppings; other popular choices here include cream cheese, salmon, caviar, boiled eggs, and mushrooms. Being a breakfast (even if it was at 1:30 in the afternoon, because my roommates waited for me to wake up), we stuck to mostly sweet toppings instead of savory. Jorge had a Russian friend over at the time and he said the blini were perfect, and didn't believe it was Corinne's first time making them because they turned out so good.
Later, Jorge and his friend, along with Liz and Corinne, went out to see the festivities for Defenders of the Fatherland Day; I declined to go with, because I don't like navigating the slippery, slushy sidewalks. Alexandra reported that it took three times as long to get from the metro to the apartment this morning on her way home (she'd gone out with friends to a hockey game the previous night), due to the slush.
I know I need to get out and do stuff but mehhh, I don't waaaanna. I do feel better, though; no more sore throat or anything. I think it may have been an allergic reaction to the vitamin D supplement I picked up, because I didn't start feeling bad until I started taking it, and I stopped taking it and got better; I'm going to look and see if I can find a gelcap supplement instead of the gross chalky tablets that I got. They don't even dissolve in hot water; I tried dissolving one in some tea, because it's this huge nickel-sized chalky pellet of minty grossness that I hate chewing, and the tablet will break up into particles but the particles will fall out of solution and settle in the bottom of the mug. Ick. It's probably not good to suddenly stop taking a relatively large dose of a vitamin D supplement, but I feel OK; I also felt OK when my endocrinologist told me I had a severe vitamin D deficiency, though, so I guess in the worst-case scenario, I get to start hyper-dosing myself with the stuff when I get back home again. Hopefully I'll find a better supplement here. There are aptekas all over the place; one of them is sure to have something.
At some point this evening I need to sit down and pen another journal entry for this culture class; I'm going to go over the prompts we have again and see if I know enough about any of them to produce something that will meet the minimum requirements. I have no motivation to do anything of the sort, but I know I have to. Siiiigh. The next several days will be quite busy; I have my regular language class tomorrow, plus a rescheduled culture class to discuss a short story we had to read right after it, plus the second excursion to the Russian museum on Saturday, plus something Maslenitsa-related on Sunday, and I think my roommates want to go out somewhere over the weekend too. And a partridge in a pear tree.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Chapter the Fourth: Cultural Credit??
Talking about this semester before I left, I know I said to most (if not all) of you that if it were up to me, I'd just spend the whole four months exploring the Hermitage and other museums. Well, that was before I realized how vibrant the city itself really is, but the point still stands. We visited the Russian Museum today and explored art dating up to the 19th century. Next Sunday, we go back and look at Soviet art. Corinne and Brenda and I also took in a Bach concerto after the museum tour.
The three of us met Sergei at Gostiny Dvor, like usual for these outings. On the way to the museum we stopped and he told us about this cake shop that we passed; apparently, during the Soviet era, around Women's Day (March 8), it was not uncommon to see a queue of men a hundred meters long stretching from the door of this patisserie, in line to buy a cake or other sweet for their sweet. :) He related the experience of being sent to this shop, on his own, to buy cakes for all of the women in the factory he worked at as a young man, which made us all laugh. We stopped inside and he pointed out a few of the more popular products, and we decided to come back later, as we would have some time between the end of the tour and the start of the concert.
We arrived at the museum and, for some reason, ran a lap around the coat check area while taking off our various warms. I don't ask questions, I just follow Sergei and try not to get lost. I decided to forgo the thermal undershirt today and wore my teal blouse, just because I wanted to change up my usual t-shirt over long-sleeved thermal/turtleneck look. This was a mistake. My legs, double-insulated in two pairs of thermal leggings (I decided not to wear my boots as we'd be walking quite a bit), were nice and toasty throughout the excursion, but in some of the cooler rooms of the museum I became acutely aware of just how useless any clothing sold in Florida is when it comes to temperatures below 75 degrees. I also felt weirdly bottom-heavy, wearing three layers on the bottom and only one (flimsy) layer on top. On the plus side, that blouse has never looked so good on me, so there's that. :D
We began our tour with the икони, or religious icons, of the 11th century. I think I liked these rooms the best, because all of the other paintings are so well-preserved, it's hard to really conceive of how old they truly are. Icons, however, are much older, and something about the deterioration just makes them seem more "real." Even though that process has effectively been frozen in time, as they are now interred in a museum instead of being installed in churches and prayed to. I like the style of the medieval art, too; it's like proto-Cubism, with the different perspectives within the same painting, and if you look there are a lot of really neat things going on in some of them. And they're quite pretty, with rich and vibrant colors showing through the centuries of dirt. Lots of gold, intense blues and reds, all painted by the hands of artists who truly felt that they were not merely creating an image of a given saint, but by adorning this plank of wood with the face of that saint, they were creating a direct link to the saint and Heaven itself. (I felt extremely nerdy and kind of bad for immediately thinking "An image of a weeping angel will eventually become a weeping angel" when Sergei came to that point in his lecture about iconography.)
The first three or so rooms were full of icons ranging in size from a one-foot square facial portrait of the archangel Gabriel to full-body renditions of Peter and Paul the size of doors. After that, there was an abrupt shift to more realistic portraiture, marking the era of Peter the Great and the Europification of Russia's upper class. I thought it was neat to watch the change in women's fashion as we moved forward in time from the 17th century, as the severe conical corsets gave way to the high-waisted empire style popular by the end of the 18th century. Much of the portraiture of Catherine the Great depicts her dressed in the empire style. I liked those portraits because Catherine the Great appears to have had a body similar to mine; she may have been taller (I can't find any mention of her height in any biographies), but as far as build goes, it seems to be roughly the same. I don't know, I just like identifying with significant historical figures I guess.
In about two and a half hours, we saw about half the museum; there were a couple of rooms that we just breezed through, so depending on how expensive admission actually is, Corinne and I may go back and make a day of exploring the building. She is or was an art history major and particularly likes the artist Repin, whose work is apparently part of a traveling exhibit at the moment; she's going to try and find out where that exhibit is and when it's supposed to be back, and plan to return to the museum to see her favorite paintings in person. She was crushed when Sergei said that one of the paintings she was really looking forward to seeing (The Volga Barge Haulers, Repin) wasn't there. I'm looking forward to going back and seeing the Soviet art next week.
After we finished the tour, Sergei bid us farewell and we decided to grab some dinner before the concert. It was really windy and bitterly cold today, so we had to make a decision quickly; Brenda knew of a little столовая nearby, so we headed there. It was a cafeteria-style setup, much like the cafe that Corinne and I went to before class the other week; I got some salad Olivier, some bean soup, and some curly pasta with sauce that tasted pleasantly like Spaghetti-Os. I also got hot tea to drink, and selected a bag of "Flying Dragon" green tea, just because of the name. Everything was very tasty and really cheap; I think my final bill came to 112p.
After we finished at the stolovaya, we decided to go back to the cake shop for dessert and coffee. We bought four little pastries and shared them; two of them were tarts, one filled with whipped cream and topped with jellied fruit, and the other filled with buttercream frosting and decorated with a frosting flower. Another one was called a "kartoshka," because it resembled a potato, but was basically a fudgy rum ball. I couldn't quite place the flavor, then Brenda tried it and declared it to be "a rum ball in disguise!" The last one was, I guess, a sort of "flagship" confection, as it shared its name with the establishment - "Север," which translates to "north" and is pronounced "seh-VEHR." It was unique; none of us could really pin down the flavor of that one beyond "yummy."
We were going to get coffee, and then we saw on the menu that they served sbiten (сбитень). I flipped out because I LOVE that stuff; it's a hot drink made with honey and spices, and some recipes I've found incorporate blackberry jam or other things (chili peppers, anybody? That'll clear your sinuses right away). This version was just straight-up spiced honey, which apparently the restaurant receives in little packets (kind of like the little packets of jelly you get at diners in America) which are mixed with hot water. Doesn't matter, it was still tasty and good for my throat. We had another hour or so to kill, so we chatted some more and got some coffee because we were all full of delicious food and needed to wake up some before the concert.
The concert was nice. I felt very cultured being there, anyway, even if I did nod off a bit in parts. It was cold in the chapel, OK? And a lot of the music was very lilting and gentle. There was a choir as well as musicians, and they were quite good; the whole experience--sitting in a chapel watching people play and sing music in languages I don't speak--made me rather homesick, remembering the last time I attended a concert at Stetson (which was the Christmas Candlelight concert back in December; thanks, Galen's mom, for offering me the extra ticket :3). I miss Lee Chapel, with our two-story Beckerath organ and the slightly-more-comfortable pews.
I wish I could wrap up this post better, but it's getting late for me, and today was the busiest day I've spent in a while. I'm not used to that sort of thing, after this week! I am feeling better, though. Not quite 100%, but I'm getting there, slowly but surely.
The three of us met Sergei at Gostiny Dvor, like usual for these outings. On the way to the museum we stopped and he told us about this cake shop that we passed; apparently, during the Soviet era, around Women's Day (March 8), it was not uncommon to see a queue of men a hundred meters long stretching from the door of this patisserie, in line to buy a cake or other sweet for their sweet. :) He related the experience of being sent to this shop, on his own, to buy cakes for all of the women in the factory he worked at as a young man, which made us all laugh. We stopped inside and he pointed out a few of the more popular products, and we decided to come back later, as we would have some time between the end of the tour and the start of the concert.
We arrived at the museum and, for some reason, ran a lap around the coat check area while taking off our various warms. I don't ask questions, I just follow Sergei and try not to get lost. I decided to forgo the thermal undershirt today and wore my teal blouse, just because I wanted to change up my usual t-shirt over long-sleeved thermal/turtleneck look. This was a mistake. My legs, double-insulated in two pairs of thermal leggings (I decided not to wear my boots as we'd be walking quite a bit), were nice and toasty throughout the excursion, but in some of the cooler rooms of the museum I became acutely aware of just how useless any clothing sold in Florida is when it comes to temperatures below 75 degrees. I also felt weirdly bottom-heavy, wearing three layers on the bottom and only one (flimsy) layer on top. On the plus side, that blouse has never looked so good on me, so there's that. :D
We began our tour with the икони, or religious icons, of the 11th century. I think I liked these rooms the best, because all of the other paintings are so well-preserved, it's hard to really conceive of how old they truly are. Icons, however, are much older, and something about the deterioration just makes them seem more "real." Even though that process has effectively been frozen in time, as they are now interred in a museum instead of being installed in churches and prayed to. I like the style of the medieval art, too; it's like proto-Cubism, with the different perspectives within the same painting, and if you look there are a lot of really neat things going on in some of them. And they're quite pretty, with rich and vibrant colors showing through the centuries of dirt. Lots of gold, intense blues and reds, all painted by the hands of artists who truly felt that they were not merely creating an image of a given saint, but by adorning this plank of wood with the face of that saint, they were creating a direct link to the saint and Heaven itself. (I felt extremely nerdy and kind of bad for immediately thinking "An image of a weeping angel will eventually become a weeping angel" when Sergei came to that point in his lecture about iconography.)
The first three or so rooms were full of icons ranging in size from a one-foot square facial portrait of the archangel Gabriel to full-body renditions of Peter and Paul the size of doors. After that, there was an abrupt shift to more realistic portraiture, marking the era of Peter the Great and the Europification of Russia's upper class. I thought it was neat to watch the change in women's fashion as we moved forward in time from the 17th century, as the severe conical corsets gave way to the high-waisted empire style popular by the end of the 18th century. Much of the portraiture of Catherine the Great depicts her dressed in the empire style. I liked those portraits because Catherine the Great appears to have had a body similar to mine; she may have been taller (I can't find any mention of her height in any biographies), but as far as build goes, it seems to be roughly the same. I don't know, I just like identifying with significant historical figures I guess.
In about two and a half hours, we saw about half the museum; there were a couple of rooms that we just breezed through, so depending on how expensive admission actually is, Corinne and I may go back and make a day of exploring the building. She is or was an art history major and particularly likes the artist Repin, whose work is apparently part of a traveling exhibit at the moment; she's going to try and find out where that exhibit is and when it's supposed to be back, and plan to return to the museum to see her favorite paintings in person. She was crushed when Sergei said that one of the paintings she was really looking forward to seeing (The Volga Barge Haulers, Repin) wasn't there. I'm looking forward to going back and seeing the Soviet art next week.
After we finished the tour, Sergei bid us farewell and we decided to grab some dinner before the concert. It was really windy and bitterly cold today, so we had to make a decision quickly; Brenda knew of a little столовая nearby, so we headed there. It was a cafeteria-style setup, much like the cafe that Corinne and I went to before class the other week; I got some salad Olivier, some bean soup, and some curly pasta with sauce that tasted pleasantly like Spaghetti-Os. I also got hot tea to drink, and selected a bag of "Flying Dragon" green tea, just because of the name. Everything was very tasty and really cheap; I think my final bill came to 112p.
After we finished at the stolovaya, we decided to go back to the cake shop for dessert and coffee. We bought four little pastries and shared them; two of them were tarts, one filled with whipped cream and topped with jellied fruit, and the other filled with buttercream frosting and decorated with a frosting flower. Another one was called a "kartoshka," because it resembled a potato, but was basically a fudgy rum ball. I couldn't quite place the flavor, then Brenda tried it and declared it to be "a rum ball in disguise!" The last one was, I guess, a sort of "flagship" confection, as it shared its name with the establishment - "Север," which translates to "north" and is pronounced "seh-VEHR." It was unique; none of us could really pin down the flavor of that one beyond "yummy."
We were going to get coffee, and then we saw on the menu that they served sbiten (сбитень). I flipped out because I LOVE that stuff; it's a hot drink made with honey and spices, and some recipes I've found incorporate blackberry jam or other things (chili peppers, anybody? That'll clear your sinuses right away). This version was just straight-up spiced honey, which apparently the restaurant receives in little packets (kind of like the little packets of jelly you get at diners in America) which are mixed with hot water. Doesn't matter, it was still tasty and good for my throat. We had another hour or so to kill, so we chatted some more and got some coffee because we were all full of delicious food and needed to wake up some before the concert.
The concert was nice. I felt very cultured being there, anyway, even if I did nod off a bit in parts. It was cold in the chapel, OK? And a lot of the music was very lilting and gentle. There was a choir as well as musicians, and they were quite good; the whole experience--sitting in a chapel watching people play and sing music in languages I don't speak--made me rather homesick, remembering the last time I attended a concert at Stetson (which was the Christmas Candlelight concert back in December; thanks, Galen's mom, for offering me the extra ticket :3). I miss Lee Chapel, with our two-story Beckerath organ and the slightly-more-comfortable pews.
I wish I could wrap up this post better, but it's getting late for me, and today was the busiest day I've spent in a while. I'm not used to that sort of thing, after this week! I am feeling better, though. Not quite 100%, but I'm getting there, slowly but surely.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Chapter the Third: In Which I Continue to Be Sick
I think if I sit down and tally everything that happened this week, I might just break even. Had fun on Valentine's Day, woke up mute the next day (and every day for the rest of the week, as it happens). Found a whole bunch of awesome mixes and mashups on Soundcloud, opened a can of worms with the director of the SRAS (more on that later). Winning at grammar in class, then lost the ability to focus on anything after about 2 PM.
Yeah, I'm still sick. I dunno what's wrong, but I've basically lost my voice completely now. I can manage a pathetic little croaking noise if I try really hard. On the plus side, I'm really close to having a perfect Christian "I Gargle with Thumbtacks and Whiskey" Bale "Batman" impression down. So, you know, today hasn't been a total waste. I ended up staying home today, too. Tonight we're supposed to go over to Elizabeth's for a Quentin Tarantino-themed party (an idea hatched at the Gal-entine's party); I don't know if I'm gonna go or not; I probably shouldn't, in any case, so it's good that I don't have any possible costumes. Maybe I'll throw some rubles at my roommates and ask them to pick me up some Strepsils or something at the apteka on their way home.
I don't feel like getting dressed or going outside, or I'd just make an apteka run myself; there are about half a dozen of them within a block of this apartment. Living in the center of the city has its perks. An apteka is basically a drugstore or small pharmacy. Some of them are at least partially self-service, but a lot still have their inventory behind glass and you have to ask the druggist to get you something. And it's not just the pharmacies; I've been in a produkty or two that had their inventory behind glass as well. I've managed so far with pointing and copious use of the word "пожалуйста," which serves the function of both "please" and "you're welcome." I dunno what it is; I can speak Russian with reasonable confidence in class, but when it comes to interacting with salespeople I freeze up and practically forget how to speak English, much less Russian.
So, about the director of the SRAS. His name's Josh. There's been this whole big folderol about the journaling requirement for the culture class. The way Josh and his assistant Molly have been approaching the journal entries has made it seem like they're actually trying to get us to write articles for the SRAS, which is not only deceptive and underhanded, but also not journaling. Uh, no, sorry. That's not how this works. I pay you to be here, so you pay me to provide content for your website. I'd have less of a problem with it if they didn't already have paid internship positions to write articles like these. That's where my concerns are, mainly, that they're trying to trick us into working for them for free. I'd be okay with publishing one or two of the journal entries I consider to be my best on the website, provided I could do so after the course is finished and my credits have transferred back to Stetson, and with the stipulation that the article goes up exactly as I wrote it. Molly, the assistant, apparently thought she'd been given license to apply the Red Pen of Justice to our blog posts. I was expecting the sort of feedback that I'd get from any professor, stuff like "I think you should develop this point more," or "you need to work on your transitions between paragraphs." What I got, however, was a word document with a bunch of proposed changes that were either purely stylistic or actually ungrammatical. Excuse me, no. If the blogs were in Russian, I'd expect to receive feedback with edits for grammar, syntax and diction. But they aren't. On top of the fact that Molly's edits were completely unasked-for, they were crap. Going beyond simply removing what I considered "my voice" from the piece, the edits she suggested made the piece feel choppy and sophomoric. I told Josh I "respectfully disagreed" with them and sent him back the "revised" blog post with all of Molly's suggestions and formatting removed.
Brenda's concerns have to do mainly with privacy, although she shares my concerns about the lack of compensation, and has her own email conversation with Josh going. I've also been exchanging emails with Josh about my concerns; I admit, I could probably have been a little less curt, but I wasn't outright rude to him or anything, and he attempted to shut me down twice. First, he tried playing the incredibly-condescending "I'm older than you, so shut up" card, pointing out that he's got six years of formal education on me. That almost works on people who are still legally minors (and it still didn't work on me as a teen); however, I'm an adult, so I'd appreciate being talked to like one. The second thing he tried was pointing out that Stetson's Bear in a Hat blog was part of the inspiration for the journaling requirement in the first place. The thing about Bear in a Hat is that it is not a publicity tool for the Stetson University Russian Studies program in the same way Josh seems to want our journal entries to be a publicity tool for the SRAS. So, you know, I appreciate the shout-out (go hatters), but the argument is still invalid. No word yet on the final verdict regarding this whole issue.
If I still have to do journal entries for this class once all this is resolved, I'll probably want to talk about the tour of the Russian museum we're doing on Sunday afternoon. I'm really looking forward to that; if you all recall, I said that if I had my druthers I'd just spend all 4 months here exploring museums. The city is fascinating in its own right, of course. But I'm so excited for the museum tour. And later on Sunday evening, we may be attending a chamber orchestra performance at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, because Sergei has a friend in the show.
It's about 4:30 now; I should probably make a decision soon about whether or not I'm going to Elizabeth's tonight, as the trip is about 45 minutes all told. If I don't go, the worst-case scenario is that I get the apartment to myself for a couple hours. I don't see a problem with this.
Yeah, I'm still sick. I dunno what's wrong, but I've basically lost my voice completely now. I can manage a pathetic little croaking noise if I try really hard. On the plus side, I'm really close to having a perfect Christian "I Gargle with Thumbtacks and Whiskey" Bale "Batman" impression down. So, you know, today hasn't been a total waste. I ended up staying home today, too. Tonight we're supposed to go over to Elizabeth's for a Quentin Tarantino-themed party (an idea hatched at the Gal-entine's party); I don't know if I'm gonna go or not; I probably shouldn't, in any case, so it's good that I don't have any possible costumes. Maybe I'll throw some rubles at my roommates and ask them to pick me up some Strepsils or something at the apteka on their way home.
I don't feel like getting dressed or going outside, or I'd just make an apteka run myself; there are about half a dozen of them within a block of this apartment. Living in the center of the city has its perks. An apteka is basically a drugstore or small pharmacy. Some of them are at least partially self-service, but a lot still have their inventory behind glass and you have to ask the druggist to get you something. And it's not just the pharmacies; I've been in a produkty or two that had their inventory behind glass as well. I've managed so far with pointing and copious use of the word "пожалуйста," which serves the function of both "please" and "you're welcome." I dunno what it is; I can speak Russian with reasonable confidence in class, but when it comes to interacting with salespeople I freeze up and practically forget how to speak English, much less Russian.
So, about the director of the SRAS. His name's Josh. There's been this whole big folderol about the journaling requirement for the culture class. The way Josh and his assistant Molly have been approaching the journal entries has made it seem like they're actually trying to get us to write articles for the SRAS, which is not only deceptive and underhanded, but also not journaling. Uh, no, sorry. That's not how this works. I pay you to be here, so you pay me to provide content for your website. I'd have less of a problem with it if they didn't already have paid internship positions to write articles like these. That's where my concerns are, mainly, that they're trying to trick us into working for them for free. I'd be okay with publishing one or two of the journal entries I consider to be my best on the website, provided I could do so after the course is finished and my credits have transferred back to Stetson, and with the stipulation that the article goes up exactly as I wrote it. Molly, the assistant, apparently thought she'd been given license to apply the Red Pen of Justice to our blog posts. I was expecting the sort of feedback that I'd get from any professor, stuff like "I think you should develop this point more," or "you need to work on your transitions between paragraphs." What I got, however, was a word document with a bunch of proposed changes that were either purely stylistic or actually ungrammatical. Excuse me, no. If the blogs were in Russian, I'd expect to receive feedback with edits for grammar, syntax and diction. But they aren't. On top of the fact that Molly's edits were completely unasked-for, they were crap. Going beyond simply removing what I considered "my voice" from the piece, the edits she suggested made the piece feel choppy and sophomoric. I told Josh I "respectfully disagreed" with them and sent him back the "revised" blog post with all of Molly's suggestions and formatting removed.
Brenda's concerns have to do mainly with privacy, although she shares my concerns about the lack of compensation, and has her own email conversation with Josh going. I've also been exchanging emails with Josh about my concerns; I admit, I could probably have been a little less curt, but I wasn't outright rude to him or anything, and he attempted to shut me down twice. First, he tried playing the incredibly-condescending "I'm older than you, so shut up" card, pointing out that he's got six years of formal education on me. That almost works on people who are still legally minors (and it still didn't work on me as a teen); however, I'm an adult, so I'd appreciate being talked to like one. The second thing he tried was pointing out that Stetson's Bear in a Hat blog was part of the inspiration for the journaling requirement in the first place. The thing about Bear in a Hat is that it is not a publicity tool for the Stetson University Russian Studies program in the same way Josh seems to want our journal entries to be a publicity tool for the SRAS. So, you know, I appreciate the shout-out (go hatters), but the argument is still invalid. No word yet on the final verdict regarding this whole issue.
If I still have to do journal entries for this class once all this is resolved, I'll probably want to talk about the tour of the Russian museum we're doing on Sunday afternoon. I'm really looking forward to that; if you all recall, I said that if I had my druthers I'd just spend all 4 months here exploring museums. The city is fascinating in its own right, of course. But I'm so excited for the museum tour. And later on Sunday evening, we may be attending a chamber orchestra performance at the Peter and Paul Cathedral, because Sergei has a friend in the show.
It's about 4:30 now; I should probably make a decision soon about whether or not I'm going to Elizabeth's tonight, as the trip is about 45 minutes all told. If I don't go, the worst-case scenario is that I get the apartment to myself for a couple hours. I don't see a problem with this.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Chapter the Third: In Which We Celebrate Gal-entine's Day
Yes, Gal-entine's Day. Apparently, my roommates are Parks and Rec fans. But, you know, the word fits; we're an apartment full of girls (and Jorge) who are either single or far enough away from our men to be effectively single for the purposes of Valentine's Day. So, we had another little party and invited Brenda and Elizabeth over. We invited Holly too, but she didn't get the invitation in time to let her host mom know. It's a shame; she hasn't been able to make it to any of our get-togethers yet. We'll have to change that.
The day of February 14th was the gloomiest Valentine's Day I think I've ever seen, even thinking back to elementary school, back when I lived in a place that actually experienced winter. The sky was precisely that shade of gray that makes you want to just crawl back into bed; it was overcast like that all day, and it snowed for a while in the morning. From now on, my Tuesday language classes are an hour and a half earlier and in a different room, because of the culture class Corinne and Brenda and I are in. This room has a window that looks out over the surrounding buildings and the river. It's on the 4th floor, so the view is decent on days when the weather isn't so damned gloomy. But, you know, given the circumstances, the weather was actually perfect. I mean, I'm thousands of miles from my loved ones on a holiday that's all about spending time with those special to you. The class on Tuesday was actually all about holidays; Valentina Semyonovna encouraged us to talk about various holidays from our home countries, and it was interesting learning to talk about holidays like Independence Day and Chinese New Year in Russian. Valentine's Day is not super-popular in Russia; Men's Day (February 23, known in the Soviet era as Defenders of the Fatherland Day) and Women's Day (March 8) are more popular. St. Petersburg is Western enough to get a little more into the holiday; the ladies who sell mittens and socks near the metro station put away their warm accessories in favor of little stuffed animals and plush hearts with cutesy phrases embroidered on them. It's hard to ignore the holiday when every corner has a Valentine's-themed advertisement or somebody selling cheap gifts. Corinne ended up buying one.
After the language class, Corinne and Brenda and I met with Sergei and a cross-cultural psychologist, who talked with us about the discipline and the differences between American and Russian culture. He spoke English with the most bizarre Anglo-Germanic accent, like he learned English from the BBC and Rammstein. I don't even know. It was a bit hard to understand at times, and it was mindblowing how different he sounded when speaking in Russian. He also seemed to be stuck in "lecture mode," not "discussion mode," so despite the fact that he was speaking to three people sitting about four feet away from him, he SPOKE AS THOUGH HE WAS ADDRESSING A CROWD OF HUNDREDS OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. He moved very quickly, and if he had a plan for the talk he was going to give, he didn't care to share it with anyone else, so it was difficult to follow at times. The intonation contour for a question in Russian is different than in English (i.e., in English, we can tell when someone asks a question because their voice goes up in pitch at the end of the sentence, usually without respect to the actual content of their statement; in Russian, this is not the case), and it's hard to parse questions as such when they're asked in English with a Russian intonation contour. He would ask questions and we wouldn't be entirely sure what he said, and then there'd be an awkward silence and he'd start talking again.
All things considered, though, what information I did manage to comprehend was interesting; apparently, American students have a much higher work ethic than Russian students. If that's the case, then Russian students must just never come to class at all, because I know my classmates do a lot of the things that the psychologist said are typical of Russian students. Russian students have their own version of the old maxim "C's get degrees," and it goes like this: "It's better to have a red face and a blue diploma than a blue face and a red diploma." A red diploma means you graduated with honors, basically. The essential message of the proverb is the same: "in the end, you still get the piece of paper, so there's no sense in burning yourself out over it, and who cares if you got straight-A's or not anyway?" He said that American students learn to do two things in high school that Russian students don't, and these things put them at an advantage when it comes to studying abroad here: American students learn to skim a text, and American students learn how to defend an argument. Russians will just not read the text at all or they get bogged down in the details; and, to a Russian student, someone asking you to clarify or support a statement you make when discussing something in a class is tantamount to a personal attack. Well, okay then. I feel much more prepared now. Thanks, IB!
After we finished with the psychologist, which took much longer than I was expecting it to, Brenda and Corinne and I headed for the metro. At rush hour. That is always fun. We swung by Stockmann on the way home, once we got to our metro stop, and picked up some sweets and wine. Corinne also bought a couple bottles of Old Tom beer, because flavors like "chocolate" and "ginger" looked interesting to her. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that she has this little notebook specifically for evaluating beers that she has sampled. We got a cake, some Lindt truffles, and these little confections that were like cone-shaped fortune cookies filled with some kind of frosting. I think it might have been maple or almond-flavored? They were delicious, in any case. Walking home from the store, I joked that it was obvious to everyone that we were partying tonight, carrying cake and booze. I said, jokingly, that someone might see us and ask, "So, what are you all doing tonight?" To which we would reply, "Nobody. Hence the cake and wine." I thought Brenda was going to pee her pants laughing so hard at that.
On the way back to the apartment I got a call from Elizabeth, who had found our apartment complex and was waiting for us there. She had also brought some beverages with her; when we reached our little courtyard on Zhukovskogo, she revealed that those beverages were a bottle of shampanskaya (Russian champagne, but because it doesn't come from grapes grown in the Champagne region, it's not really champagne and the French don't like it when you call it that) and three tallboys of Baltika beer. February is shaping up to be one hell of a month for me, I gotta say.
We headed inside and I brought out the vinigret that I made the night before, which got good reviews from everyone who tried it. Even Elizabeth, who doesn't like beets. Alexandra ordered pizza from Papa John's, because they have their heart-shaped pizza gimmick here too, and they told her it would be "a long time" because they were busy. They did not specify how long, but whatever, we had cake and truffles and fortune-cookie cones and vegetables and lots of alcohol to keep us busy until then. We ended up spending three hours or so just sitting at the kitchen table, talking and eating and drinking. So much drinking. We split three bottles of wine and three tallboys and two little bottles of beer between six people, so no one had a lot of any one thing, but it divided out to quite a bit of alcohol for everyone. (To reassure my parents: this is the last time I'm doing anything like this for a while. Don't worry. I know it seems like suddenly I'm just partying it up all over the place.)
The wine wasn't anything special, although Brenda didn't realize when she bought it that the red wine was carbonated, so that was a pleasant surprise. The Baltika was just eh, but we saved that until after we'd finished the good stuff so it mattered less. I liked the chocolate beer, although the ginger one was really gingery. It sorta punches you in the face with ginger flavor. Kind of like the pretzel bites with the honey-mustard dressing they used to have at Einstein's punched you in the face with salt. I feel like the ginger beer would be really good with stir-fry, unless you put ginger in the stir-fry; in that case, you might hit some kind of Ginger Singularity and not be able to taste anything else, ever again. We decided to save the shampanskaya for when the pizza arrived, because it seemed appropriate. And, shockingly, the combination wasn't too bad. As if I know anything about pairing food with wine, but still.
All things considered, I'd say it was a pretty successful Valentine's Day. I like hanging out with Brenda and Elizabeth, and they got on well with Liz and Alex. Jorge kind of hid in his little closet-cave until the party was over, after making his appearance and saying hi to everybody. Too much estrogen or something, I guess.
Of course, for every successful night karma demands one [swear word] day. I woke up this morning and I couldn't speak, and it felt like my throat had been ripped out and replaced with velcro in the night. Thinking it was just dry mouth from the alcohol the night before, I got a drink, but it didn't help much. I made myself a cup of tea and then went back to bed, because I just felt too terrible to go to class. Walking around in the cold air would probably do more harm to my throat than good, anyway, I reasoned. I woke up around noon and made myself some scrambled eggs because I knew that would go down easier than oatmeal or granola, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that my eggs were still edible. I left them on the counter to thaw yesterday and put them in the upper half of the fridge, and they're still doing OK, not frozen again. I have no idea why they froze in the bottom compartment of the fridge; nothing else in there is frozen. Mysterious.
I'm doing slightly better now than I was this morning; my throat still hurts and I still sound like a frog, but Corinne accompanied me on a grocery run and I got some honey and more tea, plus some cough drops (20p for the little pack of square ones, at the corner produkty where Liz is practically on a first-name basis with the shop owner), so I'll at least be functional tomorrow. Once I finish this blog post I'm gonna go make another cup of jasmine green tea with honey; that seemed to soothe my throat pretty well.
The day of February 14th was the gloomiest Valentine's Day I think I've ever seen, even thinking back to elementary school, back when I lived in a place that actually experienced winter. The sky was precisely that shade of gray that makes you want to just crawl back into bed; it was overcast like that all day, and it snowed for a while in the morning. From now on, my Tuesday language classes are an hour and a half earlier and in a different room, because of the culture class Corinne and Brenda and I are in. This room has a window that looks out over the surrounding buildings and the river. It's on the 4th floor, so the view is decent on days when the weather isn't so damned gloomy. But, you know, given the circumstances, the weather was actually perfect. I mean, I'm thousands of miles from my loved ones on a holiday that's all about spending time with those special to you. The class on Tuesday was actually all about holidays; Valentina Semyonovna encouraged us to talk about various holidays from our home countries, and it was interesting learning to talk about holidays like Independence Day and Chinese New Year in Russian. Valentine's Day is not super-popular in Russia; Men's Day (February 23, known in the Soviet era as Defenders of the Fatherland Day) and Women's Day (March 8) are more popular. St. Petersburg is Western enough to get a little more into the holiday; the ladies who sell mittens and socks near the metro station put away their warm accessories in favor of little stuffed animals and plush hearts with cutesy phrases embroidered on them. It's hard to ignore the holiday when every corner has a Valentine's-themed advertisement or somebody selling cheap gifts. Corinne ended up buying one.
After the language class, Corinne and Brenda and I met with Sergei and a cross-cultural psychologist, who talked with us about the discipline and the differences between American and Russian culture. He spoke English with the most bizarre Anglo-Germanic accent, like he learned English from the BBC and Rammstein. I don't even know. It was a bit hard to understand at times, and it was mindblowing how different he sounded when speaking in Russian. He also seemed to be stuck in "lecture mode," not "discussion mode," so despite the fact that he was speaking to three people sitting about four feet away from him, he SPOKE AS THOUGH HE WAS ADDRESSING A CROWD OF HUNDREDS OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS. He moved very quickly, and if he had a plan for the talk he was going to give, he didn't care to share it with anyone else, so it was difficult to follow at times. The intonation contour for a question in Russian is different than in English (i.e., in English, we can tell when someone asks a question because their voice goes up in pitch at the end of the sentence, usually without respect to the actual content of their statement; in Russian, this is not the case), and it's hard to parse questions as such when they're asked in English with a Russian intonation contour. He would ask questions and we wouldn't be entirely sure what he said, and then there'd be an awkward silence and he'd start talking again.
All things considered, though, what information I did manage to comprehend was interesting; apparently, American students have a much higher work ethic than Russian students. If that's the case, then Russian students must just never come to class at all, because I know my classmates do a lot of the things that the psychologist said are typical of Russian students. Russian students have their own version of the old maxim "C's get degrees," and it goes like this: "It's better to have a red face and a blue diploma than a blue face and a red diploma." A red diploma means you graduated with honors, basically. The essential message of the proverb is the same: "in the end, you still get the piece of paper, so there's no sense in burning yourself out over it, and who cares if you got straight-A's or not anyway?" He said that American students learn to do two things in high school that Russian students don't, and these things put them at an advantage when it comes to studying abroad here: American students learn to skim a text, and American students learn how to defend an argument. Russians will just not read the text at all or they get bogged down in the details; and, to a Russian student, someone asking you to clarify or support a statement you make when discussing something in a class is tantamount to a personal attack. Well, okay then. I feel much more prepared now. Thanks, IB!
After we finished with the psychologist, which took much longer than I was expecting it to, Brenda and Corinne and I headed for the metro. At rush hour. That is always fun. We swung by Stockmann on the way home, once we got to our metro stop, and picked up some sweets and wine. Corinne also bought a couple bottles of Old Tom beer, because flavors like "chocolate" and "ginger" looked interesting to her. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that she has this little notebook specifically for evaluating beers that she has sampled. We got a cake, some Lindt truffles, and these little confections that were like cone-shaped fortune cookies filled with some kind of frosting. I think it might have been maple or almond-flavored? They were delicious, in any case. Walking home from the store, I joked that it was obvious to everyone that we were partying tonight, carrying cake and booze. I said, jokingly, that someone might see us and ask, "So, what are you all doing tonight?" To which we would reply, "Nobody. Hence the cake and wine." I thought Brenda was going to pee her pants laughing so hard at that.
On the way back to the apartment I got a call from Elizabeth, who had found our apartment complex and was waiting for us there. She had also brought some beverages with her; when we reached our little courtyard on Zhukovskogo, she revealed that those beverages were a bottle of shampanskaya (Russian champagne, but because it doesn't come from grapes grown in the Champagne region, it's not really champagne and the French don't like it when you call it that) and three tallboys of Baltika beer. February is shaping up to be one hell of a month for me, I gotta say.
We headed inside and I brought out the vinigret that I made the night before, which got good reviews from everyone who tried it. Even Elizabeth, who doesn't like beets. Alexandra ordered pizza from Papa John's, because they have their heart-shaped pizza gimmick here too, and they told her it would be "a long time" because they were busy. They did not specify how long, but whatever, we had cake and truffles and fortune-cookie cones and vegetables and lots of alcohol to keep us busy until then. We ended up spending three hours or so just sitting at the kitchen table, talking and eating and drinking. So much drinking. We split three bottles of wine and three tallboys and two little bottles of beer between six people, so no one had a lot of any one thing, but it divided out to quite a bit of alcohol for everyone. (To reassure my parents: this is the last time I'm doing anything like this for a while. Don't worry. I know it seems like suddenly I'm just partying it up all over the place.)
The wine wasn't anything special, although Brenda didn't realize when she bought it that the red wine was carbonated, so that was a pleasant surprise. The Baltika was just eh, but we saved that until after we'd finished the good stuff so it mattered less. I liked the chocolate beer, although the ginger one was really gingery. It sorta punches you in the face with ginger flavor. Kind of like the pretzel bites with the honey-mustard dressing they used to have at Einstein's punched you in the face with salt. I feel like the ginger beer would be really good with stir-fry, unless you put ginger in the stir-fry; in that case, you might hit some kind of Ginger Singularity and not be able to taste anything else, ever again. We decided to save the shampanskaya for when the pizza arrived, because it seemed appropriate. And, shockingly, the combination wasn't too bad. As if I know anything about pairing food with wine, but still.
All things considered, I'd say it was a pretty successful Valentine's Day. I like hanging out with Brenda and Elizabeth, and they got on well with Liz and Alex. Jorge kind of hid in his little closet-cave until the party was over, after making his appearance and saying hi to everybody. Too much estrogen or something, I guess.
Of course, for every successful night karma demands one [swear word] day. I woke up this morning and I couldn't speak, and it felt like my throat had been ripped out and replaced with velcro in the night. Thinking it was just dry mouth from the alcohol the night before, I got a drink, but it didn't help much. I made myself a cup of tea and then went back to bed, because I just felt too terrible to go to class. Walking around in the cold air would probably do more harm to my throat than good, anyway, I reasoned. I woke up around noon and made myself some scrambled eggs because I knew that would go down easier than oatmeal or granola, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that my eggs were still edible. I left them on the counter to thaw yesterday and put them in the upper half of the fridge, and they're still doing OK, not frozen again. I have no idea why they froze in the bottom compartment of the fridge; nothing else in there is frozen. Mysterious.
I'm doing slightly better now than I was this morning; my throat still hurts and I still sound like a frog, but Corinne accompanied me on a grocery run and I got some honey and more tea, plus some cough drops (20p for the little pack of square ones, at the corner produkty where Liz is practically on a first-name basis with the shop owner), so I'll at least be functional tomorrow. Once I finish this blog post I'm gonna go make another cup of jasmine green tea with honey; that seemed to soothe my throat pretty well.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Chapter the Third: In Which I Consume All the Cheese
I neglected to blog yesterday, so while I'm procrastinating about doing my homework I decided to make up for such a grievous oversight on my part.
Yesterday, Corinne and I went to a cooking class at Volodya's apartment. Sergei took me, Corinne, Brenda and Elizabeth to this awesome farmer's market type of thing to obtain supplies; I'm totally gonna go back at some point because they had some really good stuff there. I know how to ask for recommendations, how to ask to sample a product, and I've basically mastered the art of the monetary transaction at this point.
We were buying supplies to make syrniki, which Google will translate as "cheese cakes." That's basically what they are; pancakes made almost entirely of cottage cheese. They are delicious. I don't know if I'll be able to bring myself to eat US dairy products when I get home, because you just can't get cottage cheese and sour cream there the likes of which you can find here. The sour cream we got was so thick, you could almost chew it, and it was awesome. If any of you would like to try to make some syrniki, here's the recipe:
INGREDIENTS
- About a pound of well-drained cottage cheese/cheese curds
- 3 eggs
- Pinch of salt
- 3-4 tbsp flour, depending on how wet your cottage cheese is, plus more flour for dredging
- Oil for frying; we used sunflower
- Toppings (sour cream, jam, honey)
Put the cottage cheese in a large bowl, crack in the eggs and mix them together. Sprinkle in the salt and add a couple tablespoons of flour; the end consistency should be really similar to cream cheese. Roll them into balls about 1.5 inches in diameter, roll the balls in flour, and then flatten slightly. Fry in a pan with a little oil for 2-3 minutes per side, then transfer to a plate when finished. Eat immediately, topped with sour cream and jam or honey. Makes about 4 dozen, maybe more.
They are delicious, but they are also fried pucks of cheese, so tread carefully. We all ended up eating probably six of them apiece, because they're tasty and because Sergei kept forcing them on us. We discussed words related to food and cooking, as well as toasting and the delicate art of refusing more food (which Brenda needed, because her host mom keeps making her way too much food). Once we all just couldn't possibly eat another one, we sat around and talked for a while in Volodya's apartment. His place is really nice; I'm always astonished by how large such an objectively small space can seem. I mean, my apartment isn't huge, but it feels much bigger than it is because of the way it's laid out and stuff. His is definitely a nicer facility, though. He also has a kitty named Fanta, short for Fantasia (but the cat is Russian, so "Fantasia" has 4 syllables--fan-tah-see-yah, not fan-tay-zia). She's adorable, and spent most of the visit inspecting and guarding our shoes and bags or peering at us from around the corner.
After we took our leave from Sergei and Volodya, the four of us decided to hang out a bit because no one had anything really pressing they needed to take care of on Saturday. We went to this Irish pub (I swear, I was such a good girl until I suddenly had friends over 21!) and just chatted for a little while over beer (cider for me), then we went to a little produkty and picked up some snacks, because apparently we could still eat more after all that cheese. We got some black bread and caviar spread, some gingerbread cookies, some smoked string cheese that were reminiscent of dog treats, some pickled tomatoes and this chocolate cheese bar, because we needed more cheese. At Brenda's suggestion we also bought more beer, because we needed more of that, too. We decided to grab a few bottles and share, being fancy and drinking beer from wine glasses. We picked up two dark beers and one light beer that we bought specifically because of the name. "Redd's Velvet Fire." It was so ridiculously feminine that we simply had to try it, being firmly within the target demographic.
If Danielle Steel were a beer, she would be Redd's Velvet Fire. It is to beer what her romance novels are to literature. It was ridiculously sweet, more like a vaguely beer-flavored wine cooler. I have to wonder if there are people out there who actually like this stuff and prefer it to...you know, real beer. I wish I could bring some back with me, just because it is something that must be experienced to be truly understood, but customs would probably have a problem with that. Also, I'm not sure it's safe for my male friends to handle. Kind of like how it's not safe for women to handle certain medications designed to treat hair loss or ED.
I had a lot of fun hanging out with Elizabeth and Brenda last night, but today I can barely will myself to move, having eaten far too much. And with all that cheese, it ain't going anywhere anytime soon. The most productive thing I've done yet today has been starting my laundry and it's already 4 in the afternoon. Maybe I'll make the vinigret tonight, or something. Elizabeth and Brenda are coming over to our apartment Tuesday night, because we have so much fun eating and drinking together and our bodies are crying out for vegetables by now. And so none of us has to be alone on Valentine's Day, because even those of us with SO's are thousands of miles away from them right now.
Yesterday, Corinne and I went to a cooking class at Volodya's apartment. Sergei took me, Corinne, Brenda and Elizabeth to this awesome farmer's market type of thing to obtain supplies; I'm totally gonna go back at some point because they had some really good stuff there. I know how to ask for recommendations, how to ask to sample a product, and I've basically mastered the art of the monetary transaction at this point.
We were buying supplies to make syrniki, which Google will translate as "cheese cakes." That's basically what they are; pancakes made almost entirely of cottage cheese. They are delicious. I don't know if I'll be able to bring myself to eat US dairy products when I get home, because you just can't get cottage cheese and sour cream there the likes of which you can find here. The sour cream we got was so thick, you could almost chew it, and it was awesome. If any of you would like to try to make some syrniki, here's the recipe:
INGREDIENTS
- About a pound of well-drained cottage cheese/cheese curds
- 3 eggs
- Pinch of salt
- 3-4 tbsp flour, depending on how wet your cottage cheese is, plus more flour for dredging
- Oil for frying; we used sunflower
- Toppings (sour cream, jam, honey)
Put the cottage cheese in a large bowl, crack in the eggs and mix them together. Sprinkle in the salt and add a couple tablespoons of flour; the end consistency should be really similar to cream cheese. Roll them into balls about 1.5 inches in diameter, roll the balls in flour, and then flatten slightly. Fry in a pan with a little oil for 2-3 minutes per side, then transfer to a plate when finished. Eat immediately, topped with sour cream and jam or honey. Makes about 4 dozen, maybe more.
They are delicious, but they are also fried pucks of cheese, so tread carefully. We all ended up eating probably six of them apiece, because they're tasty and because Sergei kept forcing them on us. We discussed words related to food and cooking, as well as toasting and the delicate art of refusing more food (which Brenda needed, because her host mom keeps making her way too much food). Once we all just couldn't possibly eat another one, we sat around and talked for a while in Volodya's apartment. His place is really nice; I'm always astonished by how large such an objectively small space can seem. I mean, my apartment isn't huge, but it feels much bigger than it is because of the way it's laid out and stuff. His is definitely a nicer facility, though. He also has a kitty named Fanta, short for Fantasia (but the cat is Russian, so "Fantasia" has 4 syllables--fan-tah-see-yah, not fan-tay-zia). She's adorable, and spent most of the visit inspecting and guarding our shoes and bags or peering at us from around the corner.
After we took our leave from Sergei and Volodya, the four of us decided to hang out a bit because no one had anything really pressing they needed to take care of on Saturday. We went to this Irish pub (I swear, I was such a good girl until I suddenly had friends over 21!) and just chatted for a little while over beer (cider for me), then we went to a little produkty and picked up some snacks, because apparently we could still eat more after all that cheese. We got some black bread and caviar spread, some gingerbread cookies, some smoked string cheese that were reminiscent of dog treats, some pickled tomatoes and this chocolate cheese bar, because we needed more cheese. At Brenda's suggestion we also bought more beer, because we needed more of that, too. We decided to grab a few bottles and share, being fancy and drinking beer from wine glasses. We picked up two dark beers and one light beer that we bought specifically because of the name. "Redd's Velvet Fire." It was so ridiculously feminine that we simply had to try it, being firmly within the target demographic.
If Danielle Steel were a beer, she would be Redd's Velvet Fire. It is to beer what her romance novels are to literature. It was ridiculously sweet, more like a vaguely beer-flavored wine cooler. I have to wonder if there are people out there who actually like this stuff and prefer it to...you know, real beer. I wish I could bring some back with me, just because it is something that must be experienced to be truly understood, but customs would probably have a problem with that. Also, I'm not sure it's safe for my male friends to handle. Kind of like how it's not safe for women to handle certain medications designed to treat hair loss or ED.
I had a lot of fun hanging out with Elizabeth and Brenda last night, but today I can barely will myself to move, having eaten far too much. And with all that cheese, it ain't going anywhere anytime soon. The most productive thing I've done yet today has been starting my laundry and it's already 4 in the afternoon. Maybe I'll make the vinigret tonight, or something. Elizabeth and Brenda are coming over to our apartment Tuesday night, because we have so much fun eating and drinking together and our bodies are crying out for vegetables by now. And so none of us has to be alone on Valentine's Day, because even those of us with SO's are thousands of miles away from them right now.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Chapter the Third: In Which We Have a Party
I'm starting to write this post while everyone else is taking a smoke break in the stairwell. We're having a small party tonight for SRAS people, although the only people who've showed up have been a couple of Jorge's friends (a guy named Maksim and a girl named Dasha), so most of the party has consisted of me and Alex and Corinne eating snacks in the kitchen while Jorge, Liz, Maksim and Dasha smoke in the stairwell and wait for them to come back and chat for ten minutes or so before going back outside. I know I've eaten way too much at this party, and all we have are carbs. The spread for this evening includes a baguette and some kind of herbed cream/other soft cheese spread, pickle-flavored potato chips, Danish butter cookies and a tiny chocolate cake that comes conveniently pre-cut with each slice wrapped in wax paper. I've eaten about a third of the baguette and too many potato chips to justify; they're actually kind of disgusting, but I just can't stop eating them. And then Corinne and Liz broke out the wine. We have a Chilean cabernet sauvignon and some generic merlot, both of which are pretty good (again, as if I know anything about wine).
It is commonly agreed upon that wine-drunk is the best kind of drunk to be. I think, all told, I've had...maybe 8-10 ounces of wine (which is 2 and a half drinks, based on those posters all over the res halls at Stetson about drinking and stuff). So, you know, I'm feeling pretty good right about now. If I lay down, I ain't getting back up, in any case. I'm not drunk, but I'm getting there, and if Alex breaks out the vodka...actually, I'll probably abstain because we don't have anything to mix it with and I don't like straight vodka. Jorge is planning to go hit up the gay clubs with Dasha later; I probably won't go with. I don't want to go back outside, and I don't really know Dasha well enough to feel comfortable chilling with her while Jorge is off dancing with dudes, because I'm certainly not going to dance. I'm not at home on the dancefloor even when it's full of straight dudes, and going out there and flailing around like a frog in a blender when all the guys around me play for the other team seems almost pointless. I figure I have another 90-some days here, that's plenty of time to go experience the Blue Oyster.
Right now, I'm hiding in my room because if I stay in the kitchen I'll just eat all of the pickle chips. They're really gross, but I have this problem where if I'm sitting within arm's reach of potatoes I will consume them all, if left to my own devices. It doesn't matter how good they are. Gross vinegar-and-dill-flavored chips? Nom nom nom. Cold, soggy fries from the grill or Newton's? Give 'em here. It's a pathological addiction. The first step is admitting it I have a problem; unfortunately, it's not a problem that will be fixed while I'm here, because Russia is also addicted to potatoes. They're dirt-cheap and they're used in most dishes, especially salads. I actually bought stuff to make vinigret (Russian salad made of cooked beets, carrots, and potatoes, raw onion, sauerkraut, a little oil and balsamic vinegar--it's delicious and I love it) for tonight, although I didn't end up having time, and also Jorge made some soup that he's storing in the big pot because all the tupperware is being used. The way vinigret is made involves boiling the beets, carrots and potatoes for 45 minutes, then dicing the cooked root vegetables and putting them in a big bowl with everything else. I don't know if I can fit a whole beet, carrot, and potato into our smaller cooking pot. I'm also kind of pissed that I had to buy 450 grams of sauerkraut, as that was the smallest container they had at Stockmann; I'm going to use maybe 100 grams of it, and then I don't know what to do with the rest. Maybe buy more veggies and make more vinigret. It'll definitely get eaten.
Wine makes me sleepy, and I'm not sure I can stay awake/keep up with the conversation in the kitchen. It's after midnight now, and I don't know if Jorge has talked Dasha into going clubbing with him yet; I might just change quickly into the long johns I'm wearing for pajamas and go to bed soon. Maybe. At some point I need to throw some money at Liz, since she's paid for most of the wine consumed this evening.
It is commonly agreed upon that wine-drunk is the best kind of drunk to be. I think, all told, I've had...maybe 8-10 ounces of wine (which is 2 and a half drinks, based on those posters all over the res halls at Stetson about drinking and stuff). So, you know, I'm feeling pretty good right about now. If I lay down, I ain't getting back up, in any case. I'm not drunk, but I'm getting there, and if Alex breaks out the vodka...actually, I'll probably abstain because we don't have anything to mix it with and I don't like straight vodka. Jorge is planning to go hit up the gay clubs with Dasha later; I probably won't go with. I don't want to go back outside, and I don't really know Dasha well enough to feel comfortable chilling with her while Jorge is off dancing with dudes, because I'm certainly not going to dance. I'm not at home on the dancefloor even when it's full of straight dudes, and going out there and flailing around like a frog in a blender when all the guys around me play for the other team seems almost pointless. I figure I have another 90-some days here, that's plenty of time to go experience the Blue Oyster.
Right now, I'm hiding in my room because if I stay in the kitchen I'll just eat all of the pickle chips. They're really gross, but I have this problem where if I'm sitting within arm's reach of potatoes I will consume them all, if left to my own devices. It doesn't matter how good they are. Gross vinegar-and-dill-flavored chips? Nom nom nom. Cold, soggy fries from the grill or Newton's? Give 'em here. It's a pathological addiction. The first step is admitting it I have a problem; unfortunately, it's not a problem that will be fixed while I'm here, because Russia is also addicted to potatoes. They're dirt-cheap and they're used in most dishes, especially salads. I actually bought stuff to make vinigret (Russian salad made of cooked beets, carrots, and potatoes, raw onion, sauerkraut, a little oil and balsamic vinegar--it's delicious and I love it) for tonight, although I didn't end up having time, and also Jorge made some soup that he's storing in the big pot because all the tupperware is being used. The way vinigret is made involves boiling the beets, carrots and potatoes for 45 minutes, then dicing the cooked root vegetables and putting them in a big bowl with everything else. I don't know if I can fit a whole beet, carrot, and potato into our smaller cooking pot. I'm also kind of pissed that I had to buy 450 grams of sauerkraut, as that was the smallest container they had at Stockmann; I'm going to use maybe 100 grams of it, and then I don't know what to do with the rest. Maybe buy more veggies and make more vinigret. It'll definitely get eaten.
Wine makes me sleepy, and I'm not sure I can stay awake/keep up with the conversation in the kitchen. It's after midnight now, and I don't know if Jorge has talked Dasha into going clubbing with him yet; I might just change quickly into the long johns I'm wearing for pajamas and go to bed soon. Maybe. At some point I need to throw some money at Liz, since she's paid for most of the wine consumed this evening.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Chapter the Third: In Which My Culture Class Begins
I really need to start stocking up on portable foods, just so I have something to eat during the break in the middle of my Russian class. Apparently, only Brenda, Corinne and I are taking the culture class, and all three of us have our language class together in the afternoon, so the culture class has to meet after that (~3:30 in the afternoon). It's so hard to budget for time when the class format is so open-ended and fluid, and Sergei and the other professors have obligations in the morning anyway; I think Sergei teaches over at the other faculty, I don't know what Volodya does, and I haven't met the psychology professors yet. I normally have a small breakfast around 10 AM, and most of you know what I'm like when I haven't eaten in several hours, so I definitely need to purchase some snackies or something. I bought a hot chocolate from the coffee machine during the break and that helped some, but by the time we were done with Sergei (~5:00) I was craving meat because practically all I'd had to eat today was chocolate (Nutella porridge this morning and hot chocolate during the break). Every few weeks or so, I'm totally OK with that. This week is not one of those weeks.
Brenda, Corinne and I met with Sergei for about an hour and a half after our language class; we started discussing cultural differences between Russia and the US, as well as talking about the first chapter of Natasha's Dance, a book about Russian culture throughout its history. The first chapter is about "European Russia," which basically means the history of St. Petersburg. Fascinating stuff, really; all about how Peter the Great picked the worst possible plot of land (a giant swamp) on which to build a new city that would jump-start Russia's modernization and catching-up with Europe, how the intelligentsia of the 19th century were more European than Russian, having been raised and educated in the European fashion and only having learned a smattering of Russian from their nannies as children (because, of course, they were taught French in school), that kind of thing.
We have to watch a film over the weekend for discussion on Monday; Brenda has it right now but she's going to watch it at home tonight and give me the flash drive that the film is on tomorrow, and then Corinne and I will watch it and return the flash drive to Sergei on Saturday. I'm still really excited for this class, even if it is almost shaping up to be like Honors 3 with field trips in terms of how organized and well-defined the curriculum is. Sergei is somehow much easier to understand than the K-team, probably because he tries so much harder to articulate himself than the K-team ever did. At least I'm not being told to read 500 pages of incomprehensibly philosophical literary criticism and distill all of that into a 3-page paper that makes sense to humans. Just 60 or so pages of a very well-written historico-cultural analysis, and then journaling about it. I need to write that journal entry and email it; eventually the whole class (all three of us) will be publishing our journal entries on a blog, and we have to write responses to each other's entries as well. Right now they're still working out the kinks of the extremely complicated and very difficult to use (</sarcasm>) Wordpress system, although I think I might suggest to Josh (head of the SRAS, in Moscow, though he'll be grading part of this course) that we just use Blogger. It's a very straightforward system, and I think we all have Google accounts of one type or another. It's what I use, anyway.
There must be something in the air at the philology faculty; there is no reason we should be so exhausted after class! I mean, Corinne got up early to Skype with a friend, but I slept in! The walk isn't that difficult! Am I working that hard to understand Valentina Semyonovna? I feel like I get the gist of what she's saying; at least, I'm not totally lost most of the time. In any case, as usual Corinne and I were tired and not looking forward to braving the metro. But we endured the subway ride back to Mayakovskaya all the same; I hate coming home during rush hour because we can never find a seat on the metro, and it's a bumpy, lurching 15-20 minutes from Vasiliostrovskaya to Mayakovskaya (with a stop at Gostiny Dvor, but since that's a shopping district more people usually get on the subway than get off at this time of day). My balance isn't the greatest anyway, and I'm leery of being crammed like sardines into a subway car with a backpack on. I can't see it if it's behind me, and I'm not sure I'd hear or feel someone trying to unzip a pocket. There's nothing worth stealing in it, but still.
Once we got out of the metro station, Corinne and I decided to explore a bit and get something to eat, because we were hungry and didn't have any food at home that appealed to us. All I had waiting for me was more leftover chili, and she had some cookies and other assorted snackfoods, so we decided to find a restaurant or cafe and get some linner. We settled on the Palmira Bistro, which apparently gets a reasonable number of tourists since the menu was in both Russian and badly-translated English. She got a margherita pizza; I opted for shawarma on a pita. They also had an extensive menu of adult beverages, including about a dozen regular cocktails (typical stuff like cosmopolitans, long island iced teas, martinis, etc) and a virgin mojito. I don't remember if they also offered a regular mojito, but it seems stupid not to, since they obviously have all the ingredients on hand (there were also menus of beer, wine, and liquor, including rum, as well as hot beverages and soft drinks). It amused me enough that I decided to get a безалкогольный мохито with my food; it was incredibly sweet, the rum having been replaced by 7-Up, but it actually went pretty well with the spicy, garlicky flavor of the shawarma.
I think I'm gonna go back to that cafe sometime, since it was pretty good and very reasonably priced. They have a business lunch special that looks good, too; unfortunately, every бизнес-ланч (pronounced "business lunch") special I've seen is only offered between noon and 4 pm, which is precisely when I am in class. Do the businesses in this city, particularly the ones near academic buildings, not realize how much money they could make if they started offering their business lunch just one hour earlier? I'd patronize the [swear word] out of any cafe or restaurant near the school that had a business lunch special that started at 11. Even 11:30. The quintessential бизнес-ланч consists of a little bowl of soup, a small salad, a bit of some kind of meat, and a beverage, and almost every eatery in the city that isn't a fancy sit-down restaurant has a special along these lines for between 100 and 200 rubles; it's a great deal. There's a shawarma place a block from the school that has a shawarma-and-beer business lunch special for, I think, something like 140p. It's Jorge's favorite shawarma place; maybe we'll check it out someday.
Brenda, Corinne and I met with Sergei for about an hour and a half after our language class; we started discussing cultural differences between Russia and the US, as well as talking about the first chapter of Natasha's Dance, a book about Russian culture throughout its history. The first chapter is about "European Russia," which basically means the history of St. Petersburg. Fascinating stuff, really; all about how Peter the Great picked the worst possible plot of land (a giant swamp) on which to build a new city that would jump-start Russia's modernization and catching-up with Europe, how the intelligentsia of the 19th century were more European than Russian, having been raised and educated in the European fashion and only having learned a smattering of Russian from their nannies as children (because, of course, they were taught French in school), that kind of thing.
We have to watch a film over the weekend for discussion on Monday; Brenda has it right now but she's going to watch it at home tonight and give me the flash drive that the film is on tomorrow, and then Corinne and I will watch it and return the flash drive to Sergei on Saturday. I'm still really excited for this class, even if it is almost shaping up to be like Honors 3 with field trips in terms of how organized and well-defined the curriculum is. Sergei is somehow much easier to understand than the K-team, probably because he tries so much harder to articulate himself than the K-team ever did. At least I'm not being told to read 500 pages of incomprehensibly philosophical literary criticism and distill all of that into a 3-page paper that makes sense to humans. Just 60 or so pages of a very well-written historico-cultural analysis, and then journaling about it. I need to write that journal entry and email it; eventually the whole class (all three of us) will be publishing our journal entries on a blog, and we have to write responses to each other's entries as well. Right now they're still working out the kinks of the extremely complicated and very difficult to use (</sarcasm>) Wordpress system, although I think I might suggest to Josh (head of the SRAS, in Moscow, though he'll be grading part of this course) that we just use Blogger. It's a very straightforward system, and I think we all have Google accounts of one type or another. It's what I use, anyway.
There must be something in the air at the philology faculty; there is no reason we should be so exhausted after class! I mean, Corinne got up early to Skype with a friend, but I slept in! The walk isn't that difficult! Am I working that hard to understand Valentina Semyonovna? I feel like I get the gist of what she's saying; at least, I'm not totally lost most of the time. In any case, as usual Corinne and I were tired and not looking forward to braving the metro. But we endured the subway ride back to Mayakovskaya all the same; I hate coming home during rush hour because we can never find a seat on the metro, and it's a bumpy, lurching 15-20 minutes from Vasiliostrovskaya to Mayakovskaya (with a stop at Gostiny Dvor, but since that's a shopping district more people usually get on the subway than get off at this time of day). My balance isn't the greatest anyway, and I'm leery of being crammed like sardines into a subway car with a backpack on. I can't see it if it's behind me, and I'm not sure I'd hear or feel someone trying to unzip a pocket. There's nothing worth stealing in it, but still.
Once we got out of the metro station, Corinne and I decided to explore a bit and get something to eat, because we were hungry and didn't have any food at home that appealed to us. All I had waiting for me was more leftover chili, and she had some cookies and other assorted snackfoods, so we decided to find a restaurant or cafe and get some linner. We settled on the Palmira Bistro, which apparently gets a reasonable number of tourists since the menu was in both Russian and badly-translated English. She got a margherita pizza; I opted for shawarma on a pita. They also had an extensive menu of adult beverages, including about a dozen regular cocktails (typical stuff like cosmopolitans, long island iced teas, martinis, etc) and a virgin mojito. I don't remember if they also offered a regular mojito, but it seems stupid not to, since they obviously have all the ingredients on hand (there were also menus of beer, wine, and liquor, including rum, as well as hot beverages and soft drinks). It amused me enough that I decided to get a безалкогольный мохито with my food; it was incredibly sweet, the rum having been replaced by 7-Up, but it actually went pretty well with the spicy, garlicky flavor of the shawarma.
I think I'm gonna go back to that cafe sometime, since it was pretty good and very reasonably priced. They have a business lunch special that looks good, too; unfortunately, every бизнес-ланч (pronounced "business lunch") special I've seen is only offered between noon and 4 pm, which is precisely when I am in class. Do the businesses in this city, particularly the ones near academic buildings, not realize how much money they could make if they started offering their business lunch just one hour earlier? I'd patronize the [swear word] out of any cafe or restaurant near the school that had a business lunch special that started at 11. Even 11:30. The quintessential бизнес-ланч consists of a little bowl of soup, a small salad, a bit of some kind of meat, and a beverage, and almost every eatery in the city that isn't a fancy sit-down restaurant has a special along these lines for between 100 and 200 rubles; it's a great deal. There's a shawarma place a block from the school that has a shawarma-and-beer business lunch special for, I think, something like 140p. It's Jorge's favorite shawarma place; maybe we'll check it out someday.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Chapter the Third: In Which I Finally Stop Wigging Out About Minor Things
Anyone who knows me knows that I like to be as absurdly prepared as possible, and I start panicking when I can't be as prepared as I think I should be. I buy my textbooks and start working out what kinds of supplies I'll need (and in what colors!) for the fall semester in July, as soon as the textbook info is available on the bookstore's website. So, of course you are all aware that I was seriously stewing over the fact that I wouldn't have my schedule until I actually got here. The page of the Stetson Abroad application where I was supposed to fill in the classes I would be taking is, in fact, most likely still blank, sitting in my file at school, because I had no way of knowing what those were until I arrived.
Well, I have the schedule now, and today after class Corinne and I walked from the foreign philology faculty (the department for foreign students learning Russian) to the филологический факултет (the department for Russian students learning foreign languages) to purchase the last of our textbooks, because the philology bookstore is housed there for what I'm sure are perfectly sensible reasons. Apparently, we can't keep the copies of one of the books we're using that Valentina Semyonovna borrowed from the library for us, and we need our own, because there is an audio CD involved. We found one copy of it at Dom Knigi yesterday, but thought we would be allowed to just use the library copies we'd been given because the second book that we needed is entirely listening exercises (thus we didn't realize the first one also had an audio component). I'm also pretty sure that she actually wrote all 3 of the books that we're using, unless I misheard her surname and/or she happens to have the same initials of her first name and patronymic as the textbook author. One book is called Слово, "word," and has writing exercises; another is called Слушать и слышать, "listen and hear," and has listening exercises; and the third has a long and complicated title but it's basically grammar.
Now I have all the books I need, in any case, so my primal need to have everything in order has been temporarily satisfied. That, plus having my visa paperwork in processing, means I have no further obligations other than homework and little domestic necessities (laundry, grocery shopping, etc). The fact that the culture class can only be reliably scheduled about a week in advance is something I'll just have to deal with; it's a young program in the first place (the SRAS as an organization isn't very old itself, maybe 10 years), and this year they're changing up the format, because apparently it is my destiny in life to be among the first batch of students in every new, experimental, or transitional stage of a program, ever. Maybe I should look for grad schools that have just revamped or are due to revamp their psychology doctorate programs. I'll be accepted on principle.
At least the coffee machine was working this morning; Corinne and I met up with Brenda in line for a cheap, tiny shot of caffeine, and then we progressed upstairs to class. Corinne finally got her mochaccino; the first time we encountered the coffee machine, she tried to get one, but for some reason the machine wouldn't accept 5-ruble coins and that was all she had (it cost 25p; she put in 20p in tens). I got another amaretto cappuccino, because them things is delicious. And later, during the break, I took my apple out of my bag to see that it had survived the trip this time! So, you know, bi-winning. There is a cafe on the third floor of the faculty; Corinne and I (and probably Brenda too) are going to go check it out tomorrow, because immediately after our language class, the culture class is meeting for an introduction/overview of the course and Russian culture. I have no idea how long that's going to go, or when I'll be able to eat next, and I don't presently have any food in the apartment that I can bring with me easily, other than my apples. And a few of those have started to go all weird, probably because they're being kept on a windowsill.
I need to do laundry but I don't know when I'm going to have time. We have a little washing machine in the kitchen, but no dryer, so I need to factor in the time it will take for my clothes to dry on the rack whenever I decide to wash them. Maybe I'll start that process Friday night and see where they are by Saturday afternoon, when we have another culture-class excursion (we're going to this lady's apartment to make cottage-cheese pancakes, which are really good according to Corinne--I wouldn't know).
In other news, it snowed today! The effect of the sun peeking through the clouds as the tiny flurries blew past us was really pretty; the snowflakes caught the light and sparkled like so much frigid glitter. The sun was in our faces for the last block or so of the walk to our university building, and the yellow light plus the flicker of snowflakes plus my fogged glasses gave the street a look reminiscent of a silent film. Everything was beige and brownish-looking, and there was the constant twinkling of the snowflakes catching the light of the sun. The image was almost enough to make the bitter cold less miserable. I'm sure I'll adjust soon enough, but in the meantime, I'll just have to suffer. On the plus side, come October when the temperature drops into the 50s for a few days, I'll be utterly unfazed and walk around in shorts and T-shirts, laughing at the Florida girls in their Uggs and useless sweaters complaining that omg it's like sooo cold!
Well, I have the schedule now, and today after class Corinne and I walked from the foreign philology faculty (the department for foreign students learning Russian) to the филологический факултет (the department for Russian students learning foreign languages) to purchase the last of our textbooks, because the philology bookstore is housed there for what I'm sure are perfectly sensible reasons. Apparently, we can't keep the copies of one of the books we're using that Valentina Semyonovna borrowed from the library for us, and we need our own, because there is an audio CD involved. We found one copy of it at Dom Knigi yesterday, but thought we would be allowed to just use the library copies we'd been given because the second book that we needed is entirely listening exercises (thus we didn't realize the first one also had an audio component). I'm also pretty sure that she actually wrote all 3 of the books that we're using, unless I misheard her surname and/or she happens to have the same initials of her first name and patronymic as the textbook author. One book is called Слово, "word," and has writing exercises; another is called Слушать и слышать, "listen and hear," and has listening exercises; and the third has a long and complicated title but it's basically grammar.
Now I have all the books I need, in any case, so my primal need to have everything in order has been temporarily satisfied. That, plus having my visa paperwork in processing, means I have no further obligations other than homework and little domestic necessities (laundry, grocery shopping, etc). The fact that the culture class can only be reliably scheduled about a week in advance is something I'll just have to deal with; it's a young program in the first place (the SRAS as an organization isn't very old itself, maybe 10 years), and this year they're changing up the format, because apparently it is my destiny in life to be among the first batch of students in every new, experimental, or transitional stage of a program, ever. Maybe I should look for grad schools that have just revamped or are due to revamp their psychology doctorate programs. I'll be accepted on principle.
At least the coffee machine was working this morning; Corinne and I met up with Brenda in line for a cheap, tiny shot of caffeine, and then we progressed upstairs to class. Corinne finally got her mochaccino; the first time we encountered the coffee machine, she tried to get one, but for some reason the machine wouldn't accept 5-ruble coins and that was all she had (it cost 25p; she put in 20p in tens). I got another amaretto cappuccino, because them things is delicious. And later, during the break, I took my apple out of my bag to see that it had survived the trip this time! So, you know, bi-winning. There is a cafe on the third floor of the faculty; Corinne and I (and probably Brenda too) are going to go check it out tomorrow, because immediately after our language class, the culture class is meeting for an introduction/overview of the course and Russian culture. I have no idea how long that's going to go, or when I'll be able to eat next, and I don't presently have any food in the apartment that I can bring with me easily, other than my apples. And a few of those have started to go all weird, probably because they're being kept on a windowsill.
I need to do laundry but I don't know when I'm going to have time. We have a little washing machine in the kitchen, but no dryer, so I need to factor in the time it will take for my clothes to dry on the rack whenever I decide to wash them. Maybe I'll start that process Friday night and see where they are by Saturday afternoon, when we have another culture-class excursion (we're going to this lady's apartment to make cottage-cheese pancakes, which are really good according to Corinne--I wouldn't know).
In other news, it snowed today! The effect of the sun peeking through the clouds as the tiny flurries blew past us was really pretty; the snowflakes caught the light and sparkled like so much frigid glitter. The sun was in our faces for the last block or so of the walk to our university building, and the yellow light plus the flicker of snowflakes plus my fogged glasses gave the street a look reminiscent of a silent film. Everything was beige and brownish-looking, and there was the constant twinkling of the snowflakes catching the light of the sun. The image was almost enough to make the bitter cold less miserable. I'm sure I'll adjust soon enough, but in the meantime, I'll just have to suffer. On the plus side, come October when the temperature drops into the 50s for a few days, I'll be utterly unfazed and walk around in shorts and T-shirts, laughing at the Florida girls in their Uggs and useless sweaters complaining that omg it's like sooo cold!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Chapter the Third: In Which I Begin to *Study* Abroad
Chapter divisions are utterly arbitrary. I actually have a schedule and therefore a routine now, so I'm declaring this the start of another chapter of my life in St. Petersburg.
Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that my cell number has changed. It is now +7 (911) 196-0267. My old SIM card was defective, so Volodya gave me a new one. If you have a Skype account, you can buy Skype credit and call a mobile number in St. Petersburg for $0.052 per minute plus a connection fee of about 6 cents; I don't know how that compares to what it would cost any of you to call me on a regular phone, though.
So, anyway. First day of class. Right. Corinne and I decided to head out a little early and take care of starting our visa extension paperwork before class, as it takes about a month to process and neither of us is a huge fan of deportation. We had to stop at a bank to deposit 1000p into the university's account and bring them the receipt showing we paid the visa fee; while we were out and still had a little time, we stopped at a cafeteria and got some lunch because I knew if I waited until after class to eat I'd be too hungry to focus by 1:00. I got beet salad, chicken broth with dill, a chicken? шашлик (shish kebab) and some mashed potatoes; the shashlik and mashed potatoes turned out to be inedible (call me crazy, but those two things should not have the same texture; also, the potatoes were more like butter paste...but in a bad way), but the broth and salad were good, so I had that at least. I also grabbed a cookie, because...cookie. It was slightly expensive (just under 300p), but now I know that the shashlik and mashed potatoes at that place are yucky, and they were the most expensive things I got. Everything else was pretty good, and the sheer number of options is rather dizzying, but the ladies serving up the hot food were very patient with us.
We finished eating with just a few minutes to spare and encountered Liz on the way to the university. She had class on the second floor; our class was on the fourth, so we said our goodbyes and continued up the stairs. I do have to thank the designers of many of the buildings I've been in; there are a lot of stairs, but at least they're usually shallow and wide, making them easy enough to traverse (particularly in my boots). We got to class a few minutes late, but the professor hadn't really begun doing much of anything yet, so it was no big deal. Brenda is in our class as well, so the first twenty minutes or so of the class was spent with the prof asking us new girls questions about ourselves--where we come from, why we started studying Russian, what we study at our home universities, etc. She then asked the five other students in the room to offer a brief introduction for our benefit; there are three Chinese guys, one Chinese girl and one Japanese guy. The roster that was given to us when we got our timetables last week lists a few more students, mostly Chinese, though there is another American on the roll; he didn't show up today. Apparently St. Petersburg is a popular destination for Russian-as-a-foreign-language study-abroad programs among the Chinese; Corinne and I have seen a large number of Chinese students around the facultet, and there are apparently enough of them to merit having some of the more important signage around the offices in Chinese as well as Russian and English. There are a few Japanese students as well, but the vast majority of the Asian people we've seen around have been Chinese.
The class went pretty well; I was expecting it to be much more difficult, but Valentina Semyonovna is very patient with us. I could follow the lecture pretty easily; I'm sure part of that was because I understand the use and formation of the genitive case (finally, took me until last semester to get it straight in my head), and that's where we started. We began with the genitive case, and then by way of talking about food, shifted topics to the instrumental and prepositional cases (by discussing what kinds of foods are eaten with what other kinds of foods, etc). I would've appreciated more fanfare announcing topic changes, just so I knew when to start a new page of notes, but that's my OCD kicking in; the topics really aren't all that distinct from one another. Corinne and I were relieved to discover that we get a 15-20 minute break in the middle of the 3-hour block, although it was very sad when Brenda and I went down to the coffee machine on the second floor only to see that it wasn't working. The break isn't long enough to, say, leave the University to get food, but maybe I'll buy some sandwich ingredients or something and start packing a snack of some kind. I had an apple, but it got in a fight with my steel water bottle and lost, so it was all bruised up and gross by the time I went to eat it.
According to Corinne, in Irkutsk her language class had a system of two homework notebooks where you were supposed to do an assignment in one notebook, turn that notebook in in class the following day, do the next assignment in a second notebook that night, then turn the second one in and do the next assignment in the first one after you got it back in class the day after that. To that end, after going to Дом Книги (a huge bookstore on Nevsky Prospect) to find the books for our class, we stopped by the same little bookstore we went to the other night and each bought two more small notebooks to use for homework assignments. Some of the Chinese students had blue books that they used for the same purpose, although small notebooks are apparently also acceptable; a couple of them had ones similar to the ones we bought. Hers have some kind of cartoon hippo or something on them; mine have adorable pictures of baby animals (one is a polar bear with the caption "I'm a huge polar bear" and the other a zebra with the caption "I am the fastest zebra." I looked for a giraffe notebook but couldn't find one, or I would've bought it without a second thought, Jenny). Tonight's homework assignment is to write a story based on a series of images. Seems easy enough, I've done that before. My vocabulary is weak, but I have a dictionary handy, so there's that.
After class we went down to the office to take care of our visa paperwork. We got our student ID cards and our справки (certificates saying our документы--passports, visas, migration cards--are currently being processed for a visa extension and will be returned to us on a specific date), as well as copies of everything; I'm not 100% comfortable without my passport and stuff, especially given what happened the last time I applied for a visa, but I have no real choice in the matter. At least they didn't need my original health insurance card and could make do with just a copy of that. I'll feel better when all my documents are back in my hands; after that, chances are I won't need to touch them again until I leave. Sergei said that women are less likely to be stopped and asked to show their documents, though it still happens.
Now that I have a schedule and a reasonably-well-established routine, I'm starting to feel a little less homesick, although I still miss you all terribly. I keep catching myself having thoughts like "Michelle would love this store," or "I wonder what Caroline would think of the metro," or "I bet Gil would have something funny to say about that lady over there." I am pretty excited for the culture class, though; on Saturday we're meeting at a McDonald's, going to a market, and then going to this lady's apartment to meet her and her neighbors and help cook some tasty Russian food. As per the aforementioned reasonably-well-established routine, I'm going to wrap this post up now so I can take a shower; before I do that, though, here's a picture of me on a bridge over the Neva. The tiiiny church in the background is the Church of Spilled Blood I talked about in my previous post; the dark building on the left is the Singer building, built by the sewing machine company, which houses Дом Книги. Corinne took it just before we headed into the bookstore.
Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that my cell number has changed. It is now +7 (911) 196-0267. My old SIM card was defective, so Volodya gave me a new one. If you have a Skype account, you can buy Skype credit and call a mobile number in St. Petersburg for $0.052 per minute plus a connection fee of about 6 cents; I don't know how that compares to what it would cost any of you to call me on a regular phone, though.
So, anyway. First day of class. Right. Corinne and I decided to head out a little early and take care of starting our visa extension paperwork before class, as it takes about a month to process and neither of us is a huge fan of deportation. We had to stop at a bank to deposit 1000p into the university's account and bring them the receipt showing we paid the visa fee; while we were out and still had a little time, we stopped at a cafeteria and got some lunch because I knew if I waited until after class to eat I'd be too hungry to focus by 1:00. I got beet salad, chicken broth with dill, a chicken? шашлик (shish kebab) and some mashed potatoes; the shashlik and mashed potatoes turned out to be inedible (call me crazy, but those two things should not have the same texture; also, the potatoes were more like butter paste...but in a bad way), but the broth and salad were good, so I had that at least. I also grabbed a cookie, because...cookie. It was slightly expensive (just under 300p), but now I know that the shashlik and mashed potatoes at that place are yucky, and they were the most expensive things I got. Everything else was pretty good, and the sheer number of options is rather dizzying, but the ladies serving up the hot food were very patient with us.
We finished eating with just a few minutes to spare and encountered Liz on the way to the university. She had class on the second floor; our class was on the fourth, so we said our goodbyes and continued up the stairs. I do have to thank the designers of many of the buildings I've been in; there are a lot of stairs, but at least they're usually shallow and wide, making them easy enough to traverse (particularly in my boots). We got to class a few minutes late, but the professor hadn't really begun doing much of anything yet, so it was no big deal. Brenda is in our class as well, so the first twenty minutes or so of the class was spent with the prof asking us new girls questions about ourselves--where we come from, why we started studying Russian, what we study at our home universities, etc. She then asked the five other students in the room to offer a brief introduction for our benefit; there are three Chinese guys, one Chinese girl and one Japanese guy. The roster that was given to us when we got our timetables last week lists a few more students, mostly Chinese, though there is another American on the roll; he didn't show up today. Apparently St. Petersburg is a popular destination for Russian-as-a-foreign-language study-abroad programs among the Chinese; Corinne and I have seen a large number of Chinese students around the facultet, and there are apparently enough of them to merit having some of the more important signage around the offices in Chinese as well as Russian and English. There are a few Japanese students as well, but the vast majority of the Asian people we've seen around have been Chinese.
The class went pretty well; I was expecting it to be much more difficult, but Valentina Semyonovna is very patient with us. I could follow the lecture pretty easily; I'm sure part of that was because I understand the use and formation of the genitive case (finally, took me until last semester to get it straight in my head), and that's where we started. We began with the genitive case, and then by way of talking about food, shifted topics to the instrumental and prepositional cases (by discussing what kinds of foods are eaten with what other kinds of foods, etc). I would've appreciated more fanfare announcing topic changes, just so I knew when to start a new page of notes, but that's my OCD kicking in; the topics really aren't all that distinct from one another. Corinne and I were relieved to discover that we get a 15-20 minute break in the middle of the 3-hour block, although it was very sad when Brenda and I went down to the coffee machine on the second floor only to see that it wasn't working. The break isn't long enough to, say, leave the University to get food, but maybe I'll buy some sandwich ingredients or something and start packing a snack of some kind. I had an apple, but it got in a fight with my steel water bottle and lost, so it was all bruised up and gross by the time I went to eat it.
According to Corinne, in Irkutsk her language class had a system of two homework notebooks where you were supposed to do an assignment in one notebook, turn that notebook in in class the following day, do the next assignment in a second notebook that night, then turn the second one in and do the next assignment in the first one after you got it back in class the day after that. To that end, after going to Дом Книги (a huge bookstore on Nevsky Prospect) to find the books for our class, we stopped by the same little bookstore we went to the other night and each bought two more small notebooks to use for homework assignments. Some of the Chinese students had blue books that they used for the same purpose, although small notebooks are apparently also acceptable; a couple of them had ones similar to the ones we bought. Hers have some kind of cartoon hippo or something on them; mine have adorable pictures of baby animals (one is a polar bear with the caption "I'm a huge polar bear" and the other a zebra with the caption "I am the fastest zebra." I looked for a giraffe notebook but couldn't find one, or I would've bought it without a second thought, Jenny). Tonight's homework assignment is to write a story based on a series of images. Seems easy enough, I've done that before. My vocabulary is weak, but I have a dictionary handy, so there's that.
After class we went down to the office to take care of our visa paperwork. We got our student ID cards and our справки (certificates saying our документы--passports, visas, migration cards--are currently being processed for a visa extension and will be returned to us on a specific date), as well as copies of everything; I'm not 100% comfortable without my passport and stuff, especially given what happened the last time I applied for a visa, but I have no real choice in the matter. At least they didn't need my original health insurance card and could make do with just a copy of that. I'll feel better when all my documents are back in my hands; after that, chances are I won't need to touch them again until I leave. Sergei said that women are less likely to be stopped and asked to show their documents, though it still happens.
Now that I have a schedule and a reasonably-well-established routine, I'm starting to feel a little less homesick, although I still miss you all terribly. I keep catching myself having thoughts like "Michelle would love this store," or "I wonder what Caroline would think of the metro," or "I bet Gil would have something funny to say about that lady over there." I am pretty excited for the culture class, though; on Saturday we're meeting at a McDonald's, going to a market, and then going to this lady's apartment to meet her and her neighbors and help cook some tasty Russian food. As per the aforementioned reasonably-well-established routine, I'm going to wrap this post up now so I can take a shower; before I do that, though, here's a picture of me on a bridge over the Neva. The tiiiny church in the background is the Church of Spilled Blood I talked about in my previous post; the dark building on the left is the Singer building, built by the sewing machine company, which houses Дом Книги. Corinne took it just before we headed into the bookstore.
 |
| Me, very cold, in front of the river Neva on Nevsky Prospekt. Click to embiggen. |
Monday, February 6, 2012
Chapter the Second: Of Crossroads and Crowds
Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook may have seen my status today, which read "First day of class today!" It was supposed to be my first day of class, anyway. I left with Liz, because I still don't quite have my bearings entirely and she has a class at the same time. We get just over halfway to the metro station and I realize I don't have my timetable, which tells me what room to go to, and I don't remember. I ended up walking back to the apartment alone (I took care to memorize the turns and stuff that time) to retrieve it, and then once I got inside I 1) didn't want to go back outside again and 2) realized I wouldn't make it to school before the class was half over, so I just decided to stay home and go tomorrow. I figure, for the time I would have been there today, it won't make a difference as far as catching up goes. I would have been just as lost sitting there for half the three-hour block today as I will sitting there for the entire three-hour block tomorrow. Besides that, Corinne wasn't feeling well, so she also stayed in, and I didn't want to interrupt a class alone. I'm shy like that, you know.
At least I made good use of my time; I managed to make the chili, and it turned out pretty tasty. If my calculations are correct, it's also about 280 calories for a bowl. Winning! I'm probably going to go heat myself up some more of it for dinner in a few minutes, when I finish this post.
Corinne was feeling better by the time 3:30 rolled around, and our cell phones were having some problems, so we headed to the metro for the supermarket tour and met Brenda, Holly and Elizabeth at Vasiliostrovskaya, along with Volodya. The supermarket we went to has a name that translates to Crossroads, although I don't recall its Russian name at present. It was multisyllabic and complicated. Volodya took us through each section--produce, dairy, meat/fish, prepared food/deli, cheese, bread--and talked about Russian food, teaching us some vocabulary and talking about some cultural things like what specific foods are associated with specific situations (e.g., you're not really cooking out if you don't make shashlik/shish kebabs, it's not really New Year's Eve unless someone brings herring-under-a-blanket salad, etc, just like it's not Thanksgiving without a turkey, or not Christmas without green-bean casserole in America) and pointing out the differences in the types of food you can find in Russian supermarkets versus American (e.g., the only skim milk to be found was Swedish and imported, because the stuff isn't very popular here).
Once Volodya got my and Corinne's cell phones working, he left and Corinne and I decided to go back into the market to look for Nutella and a few other things. Earlier today I found a recipe for browned-butter Nutella-chip cookies; if I can find the rest of the ingredients cheaply enough, I'm making them here. Otherwise, I'll just keep the recipe bookmarked until I get home. She picked up some laundry detergent and more dish soap for the apartment; I managed to find a little jar of Nutella that was cheaper than I was expecting it to be at just below 100p, or US$3. I got that and a 20-oz bottle of kvas for myself. Kvas is bread soda, basically made by fermenting rye bread with a few other things. It's bitter, but as we've already established, I'm into that sort of thing. Most of the informal Russian Studies events at Stetson (the yearly pelmeni-making party, the Maslenitsa party) involve a bottle or two of kvas.
We headed back to the metro station...and apparently hit rush hour. Not surprising, really; we were leaving around 5:30, so I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised by the sea of people slowly pushing their way into the metro. Corinne and I edged into the crowd and were absorbed almost immediately; we were mere minutes from being dissolved completely into the Hivemind, when luckily the stairs appeared and from there the progress to the door was much faster and less claustrophobic. There is no rush hour like public transportation rush hour, especially in this country (make your own Russia puns). See, as I mentioned before, people here don't think too much of just pushing past you if you happen to be in their way. If you're directly in front of them, they'll either push around you or actually ask you to step aside rather than just mowing you down, which is nice, but otherwise your personal space pretty much ends at the inside of your coat. I kept hold of my purse and just hoped everyone around me was also a commuter and not a pickpocket (as I had a handful of change from the supermarket in one of my coat pockets), slowly pushing as I was being pushed toward the door. Corinne and I were separated for a few minutes, but found each other on the escalator going down to the platform; a few people managed to wedge between us as we went through the turnstile, including one guy who decided to crawl under the spinning part because he apparently didn't have a token. No one saw him. Okay, whatever, everyone's just eager to go home. We stood for the entire ride back to Mayakovskaya because the train was packed, and the walk back to the apartment from the metro seemed to go on forever. But we made it all the same, and I'm starting to memorize the landmarks on the route between the apartment and the metro.
When we got home, Jorge had a Russian friend over; his name is Maksim, and Liz was practicing her Russian with him when we arrived. I said hi while I was putting my kvas in the fridge, but I was too tired to really start engaging him in conversation or anything.
At least I made good use of my time; I managed to make the chili, and it turned out pretty tasty. If my calculations are correct, it's also about 280 calories for a bowl. Winning! I'm probably going to go heat myself up some more of it for dinner in a few minutes, when I finish this post.
Corinne was feeling better by the time 3:30 rolled around, and our cell phones were having some problems, so we headed to the metro for the supermarket tour and met Brenda, Holly and Elizabeth at Vasiliostrovskaya, along with Volodya. The supermarket we went to has a name that translates to Crossroads, although I don't recall its Russian name at present. It was multisyllabic and complicated. Volodya took us through each section--produce, dairy, meat/fish, prepared food/deli, cheese, bread--and talked about Russian food, teaching us some vocabulary and talking about some cultural things like what specific foods are associated with specific situations (e.g., you're not really cooking out if you don't make shashlik/shish kebabs, it's not really New Year's Eve unless someone brings herring-under-a-blanket salad, etc, just like it's not Thanksgiving without a turkey, or not Christmas without green-bean casserole in America) and pointing out the differences in the types of food you can find in Russian supermarkets versus American (e.g., the only skim milk to be found was Swedish and imported, because the stuff isn't very popular here).
Once Volodya got my and Corinne's cell phones working, he left and Corinne and I decided to go back into the market to look for Nutella and a few other things. Earlier today I found a recipe for browned-butter Nutella-chip cookies; if I can find the rest of the ingredients cheaply enough, I'm making them here. Otherwise, I'll just keep the recipe bookmarked until I get home. She picked up some laundry detergent and more dish soap for the apartment; I managed to find a little jar of Nutella that was cheaper than I was expecting it to be at just below 100p, or US$3. I got that and a 20-oz bottle of kvas for myself. Kvas is bread soda, basically made by fermenting rye bread with a few other things. It's bitter, but as we've already established, I'm into that sort of thing. Most of the informal Russian Studies events at Stetson (the yearly pelmeni-making party, the Maslenitsa party) involve a bottle or two of kvas.
We headed back to the metro station...and apparently hit rush hour. Not surprising, really; we were leaving around 5:30, so I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised by the sea of people slowly pushing their way into the metro. Corinne and I edged into the crowd and were absorbed almost immediately; we were mere minutes from being dissolved completely into the Hivemind, when luckily the stairs appeared and from there the progress to the door was much faster and less claustrophobic. There is no rush hour like public transportation rush hour, especially in this country (make your own Russia puns). See, as I mentioned before, people here don't think too much of just pushing past you if you happen to be in their way. If you're directly in front of them, they'll either push around you or actually ask you to step aside rather than just mowing you down, which is nice, but otherwise your personal space pretty much ends at the inside of your coat. I kept hold of my purse and just hoped everyone around me was also a commuter and not a pickpocket (as I had a handful of change from the supermarket in one of my coat pockets), slowly pushing as I was being pushed toward the door. Corinne and I were separated for a few minutes, but found each other on the escalator going down to the platform; a few people managed to wedge between us as we went through the turnstile, including one guy who decided to crawl under the spinning part because he apparently didn't have a token. No one saw him. Okay, whatever, everyone's just eager to go home. We stood for the entire ride back to Mayakovskaya because the train was packed, and the walk back to the apartment from the metro seemed to go on forever. But we made it all the same, and I'm starting to memorize the landmarks on the route between the apartment and the metro.
When we got home, Jorge had a Russian friend over; his name is Maksim, and Liz was practicing her Russian with him when we arrived. I said hi while I was putting my kvas in the fridge, but I was too tired to really start engaging him in conversation or anything.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Chapter the Second: Of People and Pies
Those of you who have seen Sweeney Todd and got all excited about the title of this post, I'm sorry to disappoint you, because this post more than likely has nothing to do with the, ah, "human resources" side of shady pie manufacturing.
Today was the walking tour of the city, as noted in the previous post. Once I dragged myself out of bed and got ready (around 12:30), Corinne and I headed for the metro station, where we rode to Gostiny Dvor and promptly realized we had no idea who we were meeting. Sergei had sent us a photo of himself...in the summer, dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. You know, just so we knew what he looked like under the heavy coat and hat he'd be wearing. The photo wasn't the greatest quality, so it was kind of hard to make out his face exactly, but he eventually found us loitering on some steps on the way to the exit/into the mall proper. We were also met by a woman Corinne knew from her semester in Irkutsk, a really nice middle-aged Canadian lady named Brenda. She's touring Russia basically for fun, and has a friend who stays in St. Petersburg every February; she's going to try to join the Russian Psyche class last-minute, and I really hope she does. Two other girls joined us; Holly, from North Carolina, and Elizabeth, from Nebraska. (Elizabeths: they are everywhere. Just like Emilys. We are legion.) They're also in the program.
We left the metro because everyone was still bundled up and thus getting very warm, and started making our way around the city. Sergei took us around to various cultural locations, such as the park containing the statue of Catherine the Great, and we discussed the history and started talking about a few of the questions the culture class would cover. We also visited the statue of Pushkin, who was a well-beloved author of the 19th century; I think an English-language equivalent might be Shakespeare in terms of influence on the language and literature, although Shakespeare was far less political. Being a writer in 19th-century Russia was really a political profession more than anything, which is quite different from the role of the writer in Western society. Other places we stopped to chat included the courtyard before the Hermitage, which is painted the prettiest shade of teal I think I've ever seen, and around the Church of the Spilled Blood (colloquial name, so named because the Czar Alexander II was killed there in the mid-19th century; proper name is Church of Christ the Savior).
Russian cathedrals are so pretty. I've considered attending services here just to admire the inside of the cathedral and hear the choir; then again, Russian Orthodox services can be up to 4 hours long, and there is no sitting. Only standing or kneeling. So, you know, maybe I won't. At one point, we popped inside a theater to warm up a bit before continuing on; part of the course includes a visit to a cultural event of some kind, and the five of us didn't take long to agree upon a Russian ballet. I don't know when we'll go to that, but you bet I'll blog about it. We also went into another cathedral after lunch to quietly observe people and talk a little more about the role of the Church in the Czarist and Soviet eras. This one was interesting because it had an icon of the Czar Nicholas II and his son Alexei, the only czar to have been canonized by the Russian Orthodox church, as a reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union.
For lunch, we visited this place called (I think) Щтолле (approximate pronunciation: Shtollye), a chain of restaurants that serves both sweet and savory pies and nothing else. That is a solid business model right there. Well, they have drinks and stuff, but you know what I mean. The chain was originally owned by Germans, but it shut down (for obvious reasons) when WWII broke out; following the war, some enterprising Russians decided to bring it back, and it's doing pretty well for itself now. The SRAS budgeted for each of us to get two slices of whatever pie we liked and a drink; I got a slice of пирог с мясом and a slice of пирог с яблоками (meat pie and apple pie) and a cup of black tea. I have no idea what kind of meat it was, and I don't care because it was delicious. Welcome to Russia, where meat of indeterminate origin wrapped in some kind of bread exists in innumerable forms for your consumption. The apple pie was really interesting; it was made with green apples, which is a unique flavor in itself for apple pie, but the apples were sliced really thinly and there wasn't a lot of...I don't know what you call it, sauce? Rendered juice-glaze-stuff? Pie...goo? Just a little bit of the delicious pie-goo holding it together. That, plus the stacked thin slices, gave the pie a pleasantly different texture. Other flavors of pie that they had included cabbage, spinach+egg, green onion, cream cheese, lemon, and a few other fruit pies that I couldn't identify because I couldn't remember what the words for them meant. Berry/red fruit of some kind for a couple of them, definitely.
I'm really excited for this class. It seems like we're going to be doing a lot of really cool things. It'll be challenging--because I'm not as familiar with Russian history and literature as I probably should be--but I'm prepared to rise to that challenge. I can still access Wikipedia from here, after all. There's a bigger psychology component than the description of the program on the website lets on, examining the psychology underlying cultural differences. Things like smiling at strangers, which is a standard signal of polite acknowledgement in the US. You don't do that in Russia; and, in fact, there is no "polite acknowledgement" signal that I've discovered, as people will just push past you to get where they need to go if you're in their way. Smiling indicates familiarity or amusement, and also can be taken as flirting in certain contexts. It's a tough habit to break, honestly, and I have to be consciously aware of my facial expression or else it just kind of settles into a scowl. It's one of the perils of having Chronic Bitchface; when I explained to Jorge last night on the metro that I wasn't mad at him or anything, I just have this condition where I look like I'm pissed off at the world no matter how I'm really feeling most of the time, I thought he was going to pee his pants laughing so hard.
Shortly after the visit to the cathedral, Sergei bid us adieu (or до свидания, whichever you like), and the five of us--myself, Corinne, Brenda, Holly and Elizabeth--decided to get some coffee and talk for a little while longer before going our separate ways. We went to the Gamma Cafe, which is a combination cafe-bar-restaurant-hookah...quite an interesting place. I just got a mocha latte (delicious); Corinne and Elizabeth opted for Irish coffees, Brenda got a hot chocolate (which was slightly-diluted melted chocolate in a cup--problem? nope) and Holly decided to be all different and got a Cosmopolitan. The smoke didn't bother me as much here, probably because it was flavored tobacco/hashish.
On the way back Corinne and I decided to look for a bookstore before heading home; she needed a Russian-English dictionary, and I reasoned that a bookstore might have notebooks and pencils, which we both needed for class. Luckily, we found such a store; I picked up a notebook and three adorable mechanical pencils with bunnies on them and the word "happy" printed on the clip (or нарру, pronounced "narru," if you want to read it in Cyrillic as opposed to English; I'm honestly not sure which it is). I also got myself a huge wall calendar with gorgeous photos of palaces and parks, currently hanging on my wall above an IKEA poster frame without a poster in it. I thought about looking around for a poster or something to put in the frame, but I kind of like the statement that it makes as-is. It questions the line between mere packaging and art, blurring the dichotomy of utility versus frivolity, or something equally pretentious-sounding. Quite.
Today was the walking tour of the city, as noted in the previous post. Once I dragged myself out of bed and got ready (around 12:30), Corinne and I headed for the metro station, where we rode to Gostiny Dvor and promptly realized we had no idea who we were meeting. Sergei had sent us a photo of himself...in the summer, dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. You know, just so we knew what he looked like under the heavy coat and hat he'd be wearing. The photo wasn't the greatest quality, so it was kind of hard to make out his face exactly, but he eventually found us loitering on some steps on the way to the exit/into the mall proper. We were also met by a woman Corinne knew from her semester in Irkutsk, a really nice middle-aged Canadian lady named Brenda. She's touring Russia basically for fun, and has a friend who stays in St. Petersburg every February; she's going to try to join the Russian Psyche class last-minute, and I really hope she does. Two other girls joined us; Holly, from North Carolina, and Elizabeth, from Nebraska. (Elizabeths: they are everywhere. Just like Emilys. We are legion.) They're also in the program.
We left the metro because everyone was still bundled up and thus getting very warm, and started making our way around the city. Sergei took us around to various cultural locations, such as the park containing the statue of Catherine the Great, and we discussed the history and started talking about a few of the questions the culture class would cover. We also visited the statue of Pushkin, who was a well-beloved author of the 19th century; I think an English-language equivalent might be Shakespeare in terms of influence on the language and literature, although Shakespeare was far less political. Being a writer in 19th-century Russia was really a political profession more than anything, which is quite different from the role of the writer in Western society. Other places we stopped to chat included the courtyard before the Hermitage, which is painted the prettiest shade of teal I think I've ever seen, and around the Church of the Spilled Blood (colloquial name, so named because the Czar Alexander II was killed there in the mid-19th century; proper name is Church of Christ the Savior).
Russian cathedrals are so pretty. I've considered attending services here just to admire the inside of the cathedral and hear the choir; then again, Russian Orthodox services can be up to 4 hours long, and there is no sitting. Only standing or kneeling. So, you know, maybe I won't. At one point, we popped inside a theater to warm up a bit before continuing on; part of the course includes a visit to a cultural event of some kind, and the five of us didn't take long to agree upon a Russian ballet. I don't know when we'll go to that, but you bet I'll blog about it. We also went into another cathedral after lunch to quietly observe people and talk a little more about the role of the Church in the Czarist and Soviet eras. This one was interesting because it had an icon of the Czar Nicholas II and his son Alexei, the only czar to have been canonized by the Russian Orthodox church, as a reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union.
For lunch, we visited this place called (I think) Щтолле (approximate pronunciation: Shtollye), a chain of restaurants that serves both sweet and savory pies and nothing else. That is a solid business model right there. Well, they have drinks and stuff, but you know what I mean. The chain was originally owned by Germans, but it shut down (for obvious reasons) when WWII broke out; following the war, some enterprising Russians decided to bring it back, and it's doing pretty well for itself now. The SRAS budgeted for each of us to get two slices of whatever pie we liked and a drink; I got a slice of пирог с мясом and a slice of пирог с яблоками (meat pie and apple pie) and a cup of black tea. I have no idea what kind of meat it was, and I don't care because it was delicious. Welcome to Russia, where meat of indeterminate origin wrapped in some kind of bread exists in innumerable forms for your consumption. The apple pie was really interesting; it was made with green apples, which is a unique flavor in itself for apple pie, but the apples were sliced really thinly and there wasn't a lot of...I don't know what you call it, sauce? Rendered juice-glaze-stuff? Pie...goo? Just a little bit of the delicious pie-goo holding it together. That, plus the stacked thin slices, gave the pie a pleasantly different texture. Other flavors of pie that they had included cabbage, spinach+egg, green onion, cream cheese, lemon, and a few other fruit pies that I couldn't identify because I couldn't remember what the words for them meant. Berry/red fruit of some kind for a couple of them, definitely.
I'm really excited for this class. It seems like we're going to be doing a lot of really cool things. It'll be challenging--because I'm not as familiar with Russian history and literature as I probably should be--but I'm prepared to rise to that challenge. I can still access Wikipedia from here, after all. There's a bigger psychology component than the description of the program on the website lets on, examining the psychology underlying cultural differences. Things like smiling at strangers, which is a standard signal of polite acknowledgement in the US. You don't do that in Russia; and, in fact, there is no "polite acknowledgement" signal that I've discovered, as people will just push past you to get where they need to go if you're in their way. Smiling indicates familiarity or amusement, and also can be taken as flirting in certain contexts. It's a tough habit to break, honestly, and I have to be consciously aware of my facial expression or else it just kind of settles into a scowl. It's one of the perils of having Chronic Bitchface; when I explained to Jorge last night on the metro that I wasn't mad at him or anything, I just have this condition where I look like I'm pissed off at the world no matter how I'm really feeling most of the time, I thought he was going to pee his pants laughing so hard.
Shortly after the visit to the cathedral, Sergei bid us adieu (or до свидания, whichever you like), and the five of us--myself, Corinne, Brenda, Holly and Elizabeth--decided to get some coffee and talk for a little while longer before going our separate ways. We went to the Gamma Cafe, which is a combination cafe-bar-restaurant-hookah...quite an interesting place. I just got a mocha latte (delicious); Corinne and Elizabeth opted for Irish coffees, Brenda got a hot chocolate (which was slightly-diluted melted chocolate in a cup--problem? nope) and Holly decided to be all different and got a Cosmopolitan. The smoke didn't bother me as much here, probably because it was flavored tobacco/hashish.
On the way back Corinne and I decided to look for a bookstore before heading home; she needed a Russian-English dictionary, and I reasoned that a bookstore might have notebooks and pencils, which we both needed for class. Luckily, we found such a store; I picked up a notebook and three adorable mechanical pencils with bunnies on them and the word "happy" printed on the clip (or нарру, pronounced "narru," if you want to read it in Cyrillic as opposed to English; I'm honestly not sure which it is). I also got myself a huge wall calendar with gorgeous photos of palaces and parks, currently hanging on my wall above an IKEA poster frame without a poster in it. I thought about looking around for a poster or something to put in the frame, but I kind of like the statement that it makes as-is. It questions the line between mere packaging and art, blurring the dichotomy of utility versus frivolity, or something equally pretentious-sounding. Quite.
Chapter the Second: Of Stout and Shawarma
I spent most of my Saturday in bed. Went to sleep at about 3:30 AM, woke up at 2 in the afternoon or thereabouts, and then spent the rest of the day blogging, Redditing and generally screwing around online for lack of a desire to do much of anything else. Round about 10:30, Alex announces that she's meeting some friends at a bar across town to watch a rugby match and opens the invitation to the rest of us; all five of us decide to go, calling it a roommate bonding experience.
So we all get bundled up and head out the door. I'm glad I had the foresight to cram my doubly-sockéd feet into my tennis shoes instead of trying to keep up with everyone in my 3-inch heeled boots; I lagged behind anyway, not quite having got the hang of this whole "walking on slippery sidewalks" thing. I'll get my ice-legs soon, I hope. In any case, we head down to the metro station together and Jorge, nice guy that he is, pays my fare, just so we don't have to wait for me to buy a token. Down we go, riding from Mayakovskaya to Gostiny Dvor (a shopping mall with a metro stop in it), then switching to another line and riding to Sennaya Ploshchad.
We emerge into the frigid night air hastily pulling on gloves and hats, and then follow Liz and Alex as they strike off in a direction that turned out to be wrong. We walked in the snow, in subzero weather, for 25 minutes trying to find this place, and eventually we find it; Dickens Pub, tucked away around a corner in a part of town that's clearly more geared toward tourists (an observation based, perhaps, on the existence of an English pub in the middle of [swear word] St. Petersburg). Alex's friends are nice enough; one's an American guy, and the other is British. We get to talking about all kinds of stuff; I was only half paying attention at any given time, as the decor around the pub was rather distracting - scarves and tiny banners of various football teams were hung everywhere, and they were very colorful. Also, Russia evidently has no laws about smoking in public places, so Liz and Jorge smoked at the table and that, coupled with the smoke from all the other smoking patrons, kind of made my head hurt.
I'm old enough to drink in this country, so I did. I decided to try a Welsh stout, just because I know I like bitter drinks, and with a name like Brains Stout, what can go wrong? I mean, honestly. It was actually not bad (as if I know absolutely jack [swear word] about beer and related fermented beverages). Definitely bitter, but not in an unpleasant way. I liked it, in any case; Corinne tried the same thing and I don't think she was quite as much of a fan. Liz doesn't particularly like any of the beers she's come across in Russia, but then again, she grew up in Michigan, where there are a ton of microbreweries and the like, so she's kind of been spoiled for beer anywhere else. She was enthusiastic when someone pointed out that the pub served French fries, though, and we ended up getting two orders and nomming on them as we all finished our drinks. At that point, Alex's friends said they were going to a club a few blocks over called RadioBaby; after they left, we decided to meet up with them there.
RadioBaby itself was an interesting enough place, but first, I must relate the manner in which we got there. I don't know if this guy drove an actual taxicab and I just didn't see the rate information and stuff which would have marked his car as such, or if this was one of those informal "loose coalition of guys with vans" sort of deals, but Alex talked a guy into giving us a lift to the club, in any case. Four people crammed into the backseat of a tiny car is an adventure no matter where you're going; Corinne ended up on Liz's lap, and Liz ended up squeezed between myself and Jorge, as Alex took shotgun. Luckily, Corinne is tiny. We got to the club quickly enough; this was another place tucked away off the main road, and admission is free for foreigners.
The whole club is kind of geared toward foreigners, with a very "hipster" vibe. There's a bar at the back, and a tiny dance floor, and a few rooms with places to sit and yell at each other over the music. You know, just like any typical nightclub. Jorge insisted I get something to drink and convinced me by saying he'd pay for it; he and Corinne and I ended up getting White Russians. They're like chocolate milk for grownups, and, hell, I'm a grownup! That was the last drink for me; Liz had three beers while we were at the club, and Alex had a couple of mixed drinks (not sure what they were, I think one was a screwdriver). We sat andtalked shouted at one another for a while; the combination of dehydration, the smoky atmosphere and this cold led to me becoming so hoarse that it became nearly impossible to hear me because I couldn't speak any louder. So we got up to leave and headed over to the coat check. By the time Corinne retrieved my and her coats, another group of people had arrived and inadvertently trapped us in the lobby; we had to fight our way through the crowd before we could put our coats on, which we had to do outside. On the way back to the main drag, I slipped on a large patch of ice and fell hard on my butt; luckily, I've still got a considerable amount of padding, so I was OK. It hurt for a little while, but I'm fine now.
At this point, it was getting close to 3 AM and the metros were closed, so our options for getting home were "walk" or "take another cab." Jorge declared that tonight would be the night Corinne and I experienced shawarma, so we ended up walking to this little продукти/cafe that served it. A shawarma is kind of like a gyro; it's meat and vegetables and sauce wrapped in a tortilla and grilled in a panini press. And it is delicious. I can understand why Jorge loves it so much. It's cheap, it's filling, and it's super-tasty. Then we headed home. Alex ran home, for some reason, but we just let her go because she's been here longer and knows her way around. Corinne and Liz followed her at a brisk pace; I went more slowly, in the interest of not falling again. I'd rather stay outside a little longer than keep slipping every three steps. Jorge stayed with me and pointed out landmarks and statues and stuff on the way home; the walk was about 4 or 5 blocks, not too far, but damn was it cold. I don't even want to think about how cold it was; by the time we got back into the apartment, I couldn't even feel my legs. Not wearing my boots meant that my lower legs didn't have that extra layer of warmth, and they were all tingly. Next time I decide to wear tennis shoes I'm putting on another pair of long johns under my jeans; this will probably be tomorrow, which is when the walking tour of the city is (I was mistaken in my last post).
So we all get bundled up and head out the door. I'm glad I had the foresight to cram my doubly-sockéd feet into my tennis shoes instead of trying to keep up with everyone in my 3-inch heeled boots; I lagged behind anyway, not quite having got the hang of this whole "walking on slippery sidewalks" thing. I'll get my ice-legs soon, I hope. In any case, we head down to the metro station together and Jorge, nice guy that he is, pays my fare, just so we don't have to wait for me to buy a token. Down we go, riding from Mayakovskaya to Gostiny Dvor (a shopping mall with a metro stop in it), then switching to another line and riding to Sennaya Ploshchad.
We emerge into the frigid night air hastily pulling on gloves and hats, and then follow Liz and Alex as they strike off in a direction that turned out to be wrong. We walked in the snow, in subzero weather, for 25 minutes trying to find this place, and eventually we find it; Dickens Pub, tucked away around a corner in a part of town that's clearly more geared toward tourists (an observation based, perhaps, on the existence of an English pub in the middle of [swear word] St. Petersburg). Alex's friends are nice enough; one's an American guy, and the other is British. We get to talking about all kinds of stuff; I was only half paying attention at any given time, as the decor around the pub was rather distracting - scarves and tiny banners of various football teams were hung everywhere, and they were very colorful. Also, Russia evidently has no laws about smoking in public places, so Liz and Jorge smoked at the table and that, coupled with the smoke from all the other smoking patrons, kind of made my head hurt.
I'm old enough to drink in this country, so I did. I decided to try a Welsh stout, just because I know I like bitter drinks, and with a name like Brains Stout, what can go wrong? I mean, honestly. It was actually not bad (as if I know absolutely jack [swear word] about beer and related fermented beverages). Definitely bitter, but not in an unpleasant way. I liked it, in any case; Corinne tried the same thing and I don't think she was quite as much of a fan. Liz doesn't particularly like any of the beers she's come across in Russia, but then again, she grew up in Michigan, where there are a ton of microbreweries and the like, so she's kind of been spoiled for beer anywhere else. She was enthusiastic when someone pointed out that the pub served French fries, though, and we ended up getting two orders and nomming on them as we all finished our drinks. At that point, Alex's friends said they were going to a club a few blocks over called RadioBaby; after they left, we decided to meet up with them there.
RadioBaby itself was an interesting enough place, but first, I must relate the manner in which we got there. I don't know if this guy drove an actual taxicab and I just didn't see the rate information and stuff which would have marked his car as such, or if this was one of those informal "loose coalition of guys with vans" sort of deals, but Alex talked a guy into giving us a lift to the club, in any case. Four people crammed into the backseat of a tiny car is an adventure no matter where you're going; Corinne ended up on Liz's lap, and Liz ended up squeezed between myself and Jorge, as Alex took shotgun. Luckily, Corinne is tiny. We got to the club quickly enough; this was another place tucked away off the main road, and admission is free for foreigners.
The whole club is kind of geared toward foreigners, with a very "hipster" vibe. There's a bar at the back, and a tiny dance floor, and a few rooms with places to sit and yell at each other over the music. You know, just like any typical nightclub. Jorge insisted I get something to drink and convinced me by saying he'd pay for it; he and Corinne and I ended up getting White Russians. They're like chocolate milk for grownups, and, hell, I'm a grownup! That was the last drink for me; Liz had three beers while we were at the club, and Alex had a couple of mixed drinks (not sure what they were, I think one was a screwdriver). We sat and
At this point, it was getting close to 3 AM and the metros were closed, so our options for getting home were "walk" or "take another cab." Jorge declared that tonight would be the night Corinne and I experienced shawarma, so we ended up walking to this little продукти/cafe that served it. A shawarma is kind of like a gyro; it's meat and vegetables and sauce wrapped in a tortilla and grilled in a panini press. And it is delicious. I can understand why Jorge loves it so much. It's cheap, it's filling, and it's super-tasty. Then we headed home. Alex ran home, for some reason, but we just let her go because she's been here longer and knows her way around. Corinne and Liz followed her at a brisk pace; I went more slowly, in the interest of not falling again. I'd rather stay outside a little longer than keep slipping every three steps. Jorge stayed with me and pointed out landmarks and statues and stuff on the way home; the walk was about 4 or 5 blocks, not too far, but damn was it cold. I don't even want to think about how cold it was; by the time we got back into the apartment, I couldn't even feel my legs. Not wearing my boots meant that my lower legs didn't have that extra layer of warmth, and they were all tingly. Next time I decide to wear tennis shoes I'm putting on another pair of long johns under my jeans; this will probably be tomorrow, which is when the walking tour of the city is (I was mistaken in my last post).
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Chapter the Second: Of Rice and Relaxation
I told you all to stay tuned for a post about cooking, and here it is. The stove lighter is very simple to use, kind of like a taser, although I admit I did derive a little too much joy out of watching the gas burner burst into such pretty blue flames. I made myself a hearty batch of Daddy Rice; most of it is currently in the fridge, waiting to be eaten. It isn't quite the same as home, but it's close enough.
We have some Tupperware now, but I don't think we have enough at the moment to store the vast quantity of chili that the supplies I've purchased will make. Maybe after I finish off the rice, or after Liz finishes the tasty-looking щи (cabbage soup) she made and is storing in what looks like a large Chinese takeout soup container. As far as food goes, there's not a lot of sharing that goes on here; my roommates did allow me to nibble at their food supplies until I managed to go grocery shopping, though.
I woke up at around 2 in the afternoon and I've hardly left my bed all day. I feel fine, no worries--just spending a lazy day before I have to start going to class. I mentioned in my last post that Corinne and I got our classes finalized; we're in the same Russian language class, which meets 5 days a week from 12:20-3:30 PM (which is 3:20-6:30 AM for you guys). I don't know when my culture class meets, as that's done through the SRAS, and I believe that particular class begins Tuesday. There's a walking tour of the city on Monday and a supermarket excursion following it, although I think I have to miss class to attend the walking tour. I feel like the tour would be a better use of my time, but eh, we'll see what happens.
Liz and Alex went out to see the political protest that happened in town today; apparently at one point it marched right past our apartment building, but I guess it was either an extraordinarily silent protest or I just pay absolutely no attention to anything, because I never heard a thing. I didn't want to get dressed, so I didn't go, which was probably a better decision. Liz and Alex made it back OK, but you just never know with this kind of thing.
We have some Tupperware now, but I don't think we have enough at the moment to store the vast quantity of chili that the supplies I've purchased will make. Maybe after I finish off the rice, or after Liz finishes the tasty-looking щи (cabbage soup) she made and is storing in what looks like a large Chinese takeout soup container. As far as food goes, there's not a lot of sharing that goes on here; my roommates did allow me to nibble at their food supplies until I managed to go grocery shopping, though.
I woke up at around 2 in the afternoon and I've hardly left my bed all day. I feel fine, no worries--just spending a lazy day before I have to start going to class. I mentioned in my last post that Corinne and I got our classes finalized; we're in the same Russian language class, which meets 5 days a week from 12:20-3:30 PM (which is 3:20-6:30 AM for you guys). I don't know when my culture class meets, as that's done through the SRAS, and I believe that particular class begins Tuesday. There's a walking tour of the city on Monday and a supermarket excursion following it, although I think I have to miss class to attend the walking tour. I feel like the tour would be a better use of my time, but eh, we'll see what happens.
Liz and Alex went out to see the political protest that happened in town today; apparently at one point it marched right past our apartment building, but I guess it was either an extraordinarily silent protest or I just pay absolutely no attention to anything, because I never heard a thing. I didn't want to get dressed, so I didn't go, which was probably a better decision. Liz and Alex made it back OK, but you just never know with this kind of thing.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Chapter the Second: Of Classes and Comestibles
Corinne and I returned to the university today to finalize our classes; apparently the woman working there today decided to treat herself to an extra-long lunch, because we were there shortly after 1:30 and the office was still closed (on Fridays it opens at 12:30, closes for lunch from 1:00 to 1:30, and reopens again until 5:30). We bought some more hot beverages from the coffee machine downstairs and waited it out, after getting some photos taken for our visas (which we weren't told we'd have to pay for, but okay, whatever). I got an amaretto cappuccino and she got some hot tea that apparently had berries or something in it, as it was very fruity and sweet. I want one of those coffee machines, just so I have something that will make me a tiny latte on demand. The coffee really isn't bad, either, for what you pay (average of about 25p).
I laughed last spring when Rachel said on her Russia blog that she was considering taking up smoking, just so she'd have a little fire to huddle around. I laughed at that...and then I came here. I now see the logic in that statement. Not that I'm about to run out and buy a pack at the продукты (it's like a quickie-mart) down the street, or anything. If I could even get cigarettes there.
That's something else I'm beginning to realize. There must be a thousand shops within a mile radius of my apartment, but they're all so specialized that I have no idea where I can find some things I've taken for granted in America, like tupperware and spiral notebooks. Liz says she might know where to find tupperware, and will spring for it if she finds it because we have so many people now. With 3 people in the apartment, it was easy enough to just use the bowls, but now space is running out.
Corinne and I went grocery shopping at this huge grocery store a couple blocks from the apartment, but all they had was food and like two aisles of toiletries. I bought some supplies to make enough chili to feed myself for a week; I just can't make it until I have something to store my leftover chili in. I suppose we have a few spare bowls, but at the same time, fridge space is at a premium, which is why I'm considering storing my hardier perishables in the space between the windows in my room. In Russia, they have inner and outer windows with a bit of space between them, I suppose to avoid cracking the glass due to the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the building. There's about three inches of space between my windows; that'll fit a carton of juice or a few cups of yogurt, if we run out of room in the tiny refrigerator. It was starting to get full by the time I finally got around to buying food for myself, so I just put the stuff that absolutely needed refrigeration in there (juice, yogurt, meat) and I'm storing all the nonperishables in my room. I bought some apples, an onion for the chili and some bread, and I'm keeping those on my windowsill because it's cool enough to keep them from spoiling too fast; I also got a few cans of beans and crushed tomatoes for the chili, and some cream of mushroom soup and rice with which to make Daddy Rice, because the ingredients were cheap and one canful of uncooked rice makes a [swear word] TON of Daddy Rice. Also, it's a taste of home.
Stay tuned for the post about me cooking for the first time here; we have to light the gas stove manually, and I'm not 100% sure how to do that without setting fire to the whole kitchen. I'll get Liz or Alex or Jorge to show me how to use the stove lighter.
I laughed last spring when Rachel said on her Russia blog that she was considering taking up smoking, just so she'd have a little fire to huddle around. I laughed at that...and then I came here. I now see the logic in that statement. Not that I'm about to run out and buy a pack at the продукты (it's like a quickie-mart) down the street, or anything. If I could even get cigarettes there.
That's something else I'm beginning to realize. There must be a thousand shops within a mile radius of my apartment, but they're all so specialized that I have no idea where I can find some things I've taken for granted in America, like tupperware and spiral notebooks. Liz says she might know where to find tupperware, and will spring for it if she finds it because we have so many people now. With 3 people in the apartment, it was easy enough to just use the bowls, but now space is running out.
Corinne and I went grocery shopping at this huge grocery store a couple blocks from the apartment, but all they had was food and like two aisles of toiletries. I bought some supplies to make enough chili to feed myself for a week; I just can't make it until I have something to store my leftover chili in. I suppose we have a few spare bowls, but at the same time, fridge space is at a premium, which is why I'm considering storing my hardier perishables in the space between the windows in my room. In Russia, they have inner and outer windows with a bit of space between them, I suppose to avoid cracking the glass due to the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the building. There's about three inches of space between my windows; that'll fit a carton of juice or a few cups of yogurt, if we run out of room in the tiny refrigerator. It was starting to get full by the time I finally got around to buying food for myself, so I just put the stuff that absolutely needed refrigeration in there (juice, yogurt, meat) and I'm storing all the nonperishables in my room. I bought some apples, an onion for the chili and some bread, and I'm keeping those on my windowsill because it's cool enough to keep them from spoiling too fast; I also got a few cans of beans and crushed tomatoes for the chili, and some cream of mushroom soup and rice with which to make Daddy Rice, because the ingredients were cheap and one canful of uncooked rice makes a [swear word] TON of Daddy Rice. Also, it's a taste of home.
Stay tuned for the post about me cooking for the first time here; we have to light the gas stove manually, and I'm not 100% sure how to do that without setting fire to the whole kitchen. I'll get Liz or Alex or Jorge to show me how to use the stove lighter.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Chapter the Second: Of Blisters and Blini
Oh. My. Goodness. My legs better be toned as hell by the time I get home or this entire trip will have been a massive waste. Liz took Corinne and me to meet with Volodya, a SRAS employee who gave us an orientation. This involved a walk to a metro station, a ride on said metro, and another walk to the Russian language and culture department building. SPbSU is very much an urban campus, with buildings scattered throughout the city (the math department, Volodya said, is actually outside the city proper, in the suburbs!), but this building should be the only one I'll need to worry about while I'm here.
I arrived in Russia without a ruble to my name. The currency exchange kiosk in Charlotte didn't have rubles, and the exchange kiosk in Munich's credit card swipe thingy was broken. They would have taken more than half of the $9 in grungy bills I had in commission, anyway. Luckily, I've notified my bank of my travel plans and my debit card does work in Russian ATMs.
We were running a little late by the time Liz, Corinne and I arrived at the Mayakovskaya metro station, so I didn't have time to withdraw any money from the bank of ATMs there. Corinne covered my fare today, because she's really nice. After a three-minute escalator ride, we emerged into the tunnel where you board the metro. The walls were covered in a red tile mosaic, the design of which included a silhouette of the face of the modern poet Mayakovsky, for whom this station is named. It was surprisingly pretty, especially given the no-frills, very utilitarian Russian aesthetic throughout the rest of the building and in most of the city. The mid-20th century urban architecture is pleasing in its orderliness, but at the same time the lack of any real ornamentation is both boring and kind of depressingly faceless (and it makes landmarks a little difficult to discern).
The three of us boarded the metro; Corinne was quick enough to score a seat, while Liz and I stood and held onto the rail. Heeled boots were probably, in retrospect, a really bad idea, but I'm not sure I could reach the handrail in the metro without them, honestly, and the acceleration and braking isn't as smooth as my delicate American sense of balance is used to, so I need to hold on to something. And thus comes into play the title of this post: blisters. Turns out the boots aren't quite as perfect as initially thought; my left foot is blistered up something fierce. I don't really have anywhere else I need to go today, though, so I can let it rest for a while. The boots are very warm, though, and I'm glad to have them--it beats walking around in this freezing weather with my thin-canvas Converse or my white tennis shoes, which are apparently among the telltale marks of the American tourist. I slipped a couple of times on the ice and dirty slush-slime coating the sidewalks and roads, but I kept my balance.
There was a stop between Mayakovskaya and our destination (Vasiliostrovskaya, because the station is on Vasily Island), and lots of people got off there, so Liz and I seized the opportunity and sat down. A helpful sign on the opposite window announced that seats are for passengers with small children and the disabled, but of course in the absence of either of those things, no one looks at you askance for sitting down. When we arrived, there was another three-minute escalator ride up to ground level, where we met Volodya and received our cell phones. Liz left us to go buy gloves and go to class, and Volodya took us to the appropriate university building so we could sit and chat someplace warmer than outside. On the way he told Corinne and me to pay attention to our surroundings, because we would have to find our way back home by ourselves. He pointed out a huge pink church we could use as a landmark to remember where to turn to get back to the metro.
Once we found a small lobby on the third floor of the building, Volodya sat down with us and explained the important things like how to extend our visas (which we'll have to do next week, since we need to start the process 20 business days before it expires; both of our visas expire in March), where to go to take the placement test and get our schedule finalized, and how to put money on our new cell phones. Nothing fancy, just a basic Nokia brick that doesn't appear to have a lock button, so butt-dialin' ahoy! Which is kind of a problem, as it is a pay-as-you-go sort of thing. I put some money on it after withdrawing some from an ATM. I'm not entirely clear on the terms of use for the cell phone, so if you need to get in touch with me just email me (elondon@stetson.edu) or message me on Facebook. If it's really urgently important you can call; the number is +7 (898) 112-9014. Remember the plus sign. I know it doesn't cost me anything to receive calls but I don't know if that applies to international calls or not.
Volodya left us after taking us to the office and helping to translate for us and the secretary who made copies of our passports, visas and migration cards. The other office ladies took care of the paperwork and had us sign it, and then they sent us to another room to take a placement test. The office was closed for lunch, so we bought some coffee and went back to the lobby where we talked to Volodya to kill time until it reopened at 2. The building has one of those coffee machines they have at rest stops, where you can buy a cappuccino or hot chocolate or some similar hot beverage; we each bought a small latte. Or, rather, Corinne bought us each a small latte; I still had no Russian money on my person. The cup was itty-bitty, about 6 oz, and the machine dispensed about 4 oz of coffee, but it was hot and very strong.
Soon enough it was 2 o'clock and we went back downstairs to the office. After stumbling through a conversation with the secretary there, it was eventually articulated that we were new foreign students and needed to take a language placement exam. She had us fill out some more paperwork and then gave us the test and told us we had one hour to finish it; we both finished in about 40 minutes, and the test was very quickly scored and our results given to us. Unfortunately, the office where we would have our schedules finalized was closed by the time we were finished taking that exam, so we have to go back tomorrow. We need to go back tomorrow with photos so we can get student IDs, anyway; for as much walking as it involves, and as cold as it will be, we might as well make the visit worthwhile.
Corinne's Russian is about as poor as mine; hopefully we'll both get better over the coming weeks. She scored a 55% on the placement test; I got a 69% (hurr hurr), but only by the grace of God. I suppose I guessed right on a few things, or something. She's only been studying the language for one semester, but she learned it by going to Irkutsk and immersing herself in it. (Knowing I would probably not ace this exam and not wanting to artificially raise expectations, I told the secretary I'd also been studying the language for one semester.) There you have it, folks; it's possible to learn five semesters' worth of Russian in a single semester by immersion. We should both improve quite a bit by the time we leave, then. She leaves May 21st; I wish it would have worked out that we could leave together.
Trying to navigate the streets of the island to find our way back to the metro station was quite an adventure. We stopped at a cafe and got lunch, because we were hungry and I needed to break the 1000-ruble note I got from the ATM. The cafe served sandwiches on blini (savory crepes, basically); she got mushroom, I opted for ham and cheese. I have said in the past that there are few sandwiches that can't be improved by serving them on pancakes instead of bread, and lunch today confirmed that assertion. Then we decided to just go back to the metro station and find our way home. We stopped at a drugstore to see if we could find any vitamin D supplements; maybe I'm just domestically blind, but I can't seem to find the bottle of supplements Mom said she bought for me. Hopefully I find it or can buy more; it's probably not good to go from taking 1000 units of vitamin D per day, in sunny Florida, to 400 units as part of a daily multivitamin (f*** yeah gummy vites!), while living in a place that doesn't get a lot of sunlight. The only vitamin D supplements Corinne or I saw were pretty expensive, so we're going to look around a little more; there are little drugstores all over the place here. I'm gonna search my luggage again before spending money on something I may already have, too.
I almost wish I wore contacts (or could afford Lasik or something), as much as I like how I look with glasses on, because I can't cover my nose and mouth while outside without fogging up my glasses. And it's so cold out that the condensation on the lenses will actually freeze, making it exponentially more difficult to clear them off; I have to unzip my coat and wipe the lenses with my sweater, because it's warm enough to melt the frost. My sweater isn't 100% cotton, but my lenses aren't scratched or anything. Just linty. It occurred to me somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic that it probably would've been a good idea to toss my cleaning cloth and lens cleaner into my bag, but there's nothing I can do about that now other than buy replacements. There are opticians all over the place; I'm sure I can find a cleaning cloth in town. As a result of the cold, my nostrils and lips are all dry and starting to crack; I've made mental notes to move certain little essentials like my Blistex and my phrasebook (thanks Heather!) into the pockets of my coat (thanks Mamaw!). It started snowing a little bit on the way to the university with Volodya, but thankfully it was done by the time we left.
Corinne and Liz are going grocery shopping at the moment; every time I stand up my left foot cries out in protest, so I think I'm basically in for the night at this point, unless we all decide to go get shawarma or go do something fun this evening. Jorge and Alex have decided that, because Corinne and I have never had shawarma, that they need to correct this injustice as soon as possible. Shawarma is quintessential Russian street food. It's meat, and that's all they'll tell me about it. I don't know what kind of meat it is, how it's prepared, or what it looks like; I suppose I could Google it, but I hate to ruin Jorge and Alex's fun. If something like that comes up this evening, then I might be persuaded to get dressed again. It's already after 6:00 here, and it's not even quarter after 9 AM at home--that's crazy to me, that my day is basically over and none of y'all have even had lunch yet. In the case of most of my Stetson friends, I know most of you aren't even awake yet.
I should have my schedule finalized by tomorrow, and then I have the weekend (probably, Saturday classes aren't unheard of here) to party it up before having to put my poor chapped nose back to the grindstone on Monday. Apparently classes have already started, even though the SRAS webpage for my program says the program begins on the 8th...maybe it's just Russian language classes, I don't know. Much as I'm dreading the language classes (Russian is hard, and last semester was pretty rough for me), I'm actually pretty excited to be going to class at all. I'll have something to do, finally! Corinne and I will probably end up in the same Russian class, and we're both doing the Russian Psyche program, so I'm thinking we'll just go to class together all the time. I wouldn't mind that, she's pretty cool. Alex is in the program too; I'm not sure if Jorge is, I don't remember if he said so. He and Alex have the same Russian class, at least. I know nothing about Liz's schedule other than that she had a class today at 12:20 and was done by the time we got back (4:30ish).
I arrived in Russia without a ruble to my name. The currency exchange kiosk in Charlotte didn't have rubles, and the exchange kiosk in Munich's credit card swipe thingy was broken. They would have taken more than half of the $9 in grungy bills I had in commission, anyway. Luckily, I've notified my bank of my travel plans and my debit card does work in Russian ATMs.
We were running a little late by the time Liz, Corinne and I arrived at the Mayakovskaya metro station, so I didn't have time to withdraw any money from the bank of ATMs there. Corinne covered my fare today, because she's really nice. After a three-minute escalator ride, we emerged into the tunnel where you board the metro. The walls were covered in a red tile mosaic, the design of which included a silhouette of the face of the modern poet Mayakovsky, for whom this station is named. It was surprisingly pretty, especially given the no-frills, very utilitarian Russian aesthetic throughout the rest of the building and in most of the city. The mid-20th century urban architecture is pleasing in its orderliness, but at the same time the lack of any real ornamentation is both boring and kind of depressingly faceless (and it makes landmarks a little difficult to discern).
The three of us boarded the metro; Corinne was quick enough to score a seat, while Liz and I stood and held onto the rail. Heeled boots were probably, in retrospect, a really bad idea, but I'm not sure I could reach the handrail in the metro without them, honestly, and the acceleration and braking isn't as smooth as my delicate American sense of balance is used to, so I need to hold on to something. And thus comes into play the title of this post: blisters. Turns out the boots aren't quite as perfect as initially thought; my left foot is blistered up something fierce. I don't really have anywhere else I need to go today, though, so I can let it rest for a while. The boots are very warm, though, and I'm glad to have them--it beats walking around in this freezing weather with my thin-canvas Converse or my white tennis shoes, which are apparently among the telltale marks of the American tourist. I slipped a couple of times on the ice and dirty slush-slime coating the sidewalks and roads, but I kept my balance.
There was a stop between Mayakovskaya and our destination (Vasiliostrovskaya, because the station is on Vasily Island), and lots of people got off there, so Liz and I seized the opportunity and sat down. A helpful sign on the opposite window announced that seats are for passengers with small children and the disabled, but of course in the absence of either of those things, no one looks at you askance for sitting down. When we arrived, there was another three-minute escalator ride up to ground level, where we met Volodya and received our cell phones. Liz left us to go buy gloves and go to class, and Volodya took us to the appropriate university building so we could sit and chat someplace warmer than outside. On the way he told Corinne and me to pay attention to our surroundings, because we would have to find our way back home by ourselves. He pointed out a huge pink church we could use as a landmark to remember where to turn to get back to the metro.
Once we found a small lobby on the third floor of the building, Volodya sat down with us and explained the important things like how to extend our visas (which we'll have to do next week, since we need to start the process 20 business days before it expires; both of our visas expire in March), where to go to take the placement test and get our schedule finalized, and how to put money on our new cell phones. Nothing fancy, just a basic Nokia brick that doesn't appear to have a lock button, so butt-dialin' ahoy! Which is kind of a problem, as it is a pay-as-you-go sort of thing. I put some money on it after withdrawing some from an ATM. I'm not entirely clear on the terms of use for the cell phone, so if you need to get in touch with me just email me (elondon@stetson.edu) or message me on Facebook. If it's really urgently important you can call; the number is +7 (898) 112-9014. Remember the plus sign. I know it doesn't cost me anything to receive calls but I don't know if that applies to international calls or not.
Volodya left us after taking us to the office and helping to translate for us and the secretary who made copies of our passports, visas and migration cards. The other office ladies took care of the paperwork and had us sign it, and then they sent us to another room to take a placement test. The office was closed for lunch, so we bought some coffee and went back to the lobby where we talked to Volodya to kill time until it reopened at 2. The building has one of those coffee machines they have at rest stops, where you can buy a cappuccino or hot chocolate or some similar hot beverage; we each bought a small latte. Or, rather, Corinne bought us each a small latte; I still had no Russian money on my person. The cup was itty-bitty, about 6 oz, and the machine dispensed about 4 oz of coffee, but it was hot and very strong.
Soon enough it was 2 o'clock and we went back downstairs to the office. After stumbling through a conversation with the secretary there, it was eventually articulated that we were new foreign students and needed to take a language placement exam. She had us fill out some more paperwork and then gave us the test and told us we had one hour to finish it; we both finished in about 40 minutes, and the test was very quickly scored and our results given to us. Unfortunately, the office where we would have our schedules finalized was closed by the time we were finished taking that exam, so we have to go back tomorrow. We need to go back tomorrow with photos so we can get student IDs, anyway; for as much walking as it involves, and as cold as it will be, we might as well make the visit worthwhile.
Corinne's Russian is about as poor as mine; hopefully we'll both get better over the coming weeks. She scored a 55% on the placement test; I got a 69% (hurr hurr), but only by the grace of God. I suppose I guessed right on a few things, or something. She's only been studying the language for one semester, but she learned it by going to Irkutsk and immersing herself in it. (Knowing I would probably not ace this exam and not wanting to artificially raise expectations, I told the secretary I'd also been studying the language for one semester.) There you have it, folks; it's possible to learn five semesters' worth of Russian in a single semester by immersion. We should both improve quite a bit by the time we leave, then. She leaves May 21st; I wish it would have worked out that we could leave together.
Trying to navigate the streets of the island to find our way back to the metro station was quite an adventure. We stopped at a cafe and got lunch, because we were hungry and I needed to break the 1000-ruble note I got from the ATM. The cafe served sandwiches on blini (savory crepes, basically); she got mushroom, I opted for ham and cheese. I have said in the past that there are few sandwiches that can't be improved by serving them on pancakes instead of bread, and lunch today confirmed that assertion. Then we decided to just go back to the metro station and find our way home. We stopped at a drugstore to see if we could find any vitamin D supplements; maybe I'm just domestically blind, but I can't seem to find the bottle of supplements Mom said she bought for me. Hopefully I find it or can buy more; it's probably not good to go from taking 1000 units of vitamin D per day, in sunny Florida, to 400 units as part of a daily multivitamin (f*** yeah gummy vites!), while living in a place that doesn't get a lot of sunlight. The only vitamin D supplements Corinne or I saw were pretty expensive, so we're going to look around a little more; there are little drugstores all over the place here. I'm gonna search my luggage again before spending money on something I may already have, too.
I almost wish I wore contacts (or could afford Lasik or something), as much as I like how I look with glasses on, because I can't cover my nose and mouth while outside without fogging up my glasses. And it's so cold out that the condensation on the lenses will actually freeze, making it exponentially more difficult to clear them off; I have to unzip my coat and wipe the lenses with my sweater, because it's warm enough to melt the frost. My sweater isn't 100% cotton, but my lenses aren't scratched or anything. Just linty. It occurred to me somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic that it probably would've been a good idea to toss my cleaning cloth and lens cleaner into my bag, but there's nothing I can do about that now other than buy replacements. There are opticians all over the place; I'm sure I can find a cleaning cloth in town. As a result of the cold, my nostrils and lips are all dry and starting to crack; I've made mental notes to move certain little essentials like my Blistex and my phrasebook (thanks Heather!) into the pockets of my coat (thanks Mamaw!). It started snowing a little bit on the way to the university with Volodya, but thankfully it was done by the time we left.
Corinne and Liz are going grocery shopping at the moment; every time I stand up my left foot cries out in protest, so I think I'm basically in for the night at this point, unless we all decide to go get shawarma or go do something fun this evening. Jorge and Alex have decided that, because Corinne and I have never had shawarma, that they need to correct this injustice as soon as possible. Shawarma is quintessential Russian street food. It's meat, and that's all they'll tell me about it. I don't know what kind of meat it is, how it's prepared, or what it looks like; I suppose I could Google it, but I hate to ruin Jorge and Alex's fun. If something like that comes up this evening, then I might be persuaded to get dressed again. It's already after 6:00 here, and it's not even quarter after 9 AM at home--that's crazy to me, that my day is basically over and none of y'all have even had lunch yet. In the case of most of my Stetson friends, I know most of you aren't even awake yet.
I should have my schedule finalized by tomorrow, and then I have the weekend (probably, Saturday classes aren't unheard of here) to party it up before having to put my poor chapped nose back to the grindstone on Monday. Apparently classes have already started, even though the SRAS webpage for my program says the program begins on the 8th...maybe it's just Russian language classes, I don't know. Much as I'm dreading the language classes (Russian is hard, and last semester was pretty rough for me), I'm actually pretty excited to be going to class at all. I'll have something to do, finally! Corinne and I will probably end up in the same Russian class, and we're both doing the Russian Psyche program, so I'm thinking we'll just go to class together all the time. I wouldn't mind that, she's pretty cool. Alex is in the program too; I'm not sure if Jorge is, I don't remember if he said so. He and Alex have the same Russian class, at least. I know nothing about Liz's schedule other than that she had a class today at 12:20 and was done by the time we got back (4:30ish).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)