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.
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