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.
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| Me, very cold, in front of the river Neva on Nevsky Prospekt. Click to embiggen. |
You look great! I love this picture. Miss you, Love Mom
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