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.