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.
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