For those of you expecting one of my usual lighthearted, sardonic posts, you might want to go back and reread your favorite instead of reading this one. It's kind of a downer. I'm fine, it's just the subject matter isn't really something I feel comfortable cracking jokes about. Which is saying a lot, if you know anything about me and my sense of humor.
Today, we (Corinne, Alexandra, Brenda, and I) had an interactive history lesson about the Leningrad blockade of 1941-1944. I dimly recall Mr. Crile mentioning the siege of Leningrad once or twice in IB American History senior year, so I was aware that this event occurred, but you just don't appreciate the scale of something like that until you visit the city itself. It is a powerful story of human perseverance in the face of profound tragedy; there is a monument, erected in 1966, not far from the heart of St. Petersburg memorializing the struggle, and it is one of very few sites bearing Communist images, symbols and rhetoric in the city, a block or so south of the infamous statue of Lenin pointing westward on Moscow Square. That one was preserved because it has artistic and historical merit. This monument stands because the memory is that important.
On September 8, 1941, Hitler's invading troops surrounded the city. The strategy for Leningrad was a war of attrition, rather than attacking the city outright. To that end, the Nazis blockaded Leningrad and destroyed the food supply. Then they started printing up invitations to their victory banquet at the Hotel Astoria in the heart of downtown, across the square from the then-German Consulate, believing that the city would surrender within weeks. The hotel is only seven miles from the front, and the Nazis never reached it.
The city was under siege for 900 days (until January 27, 1944). It began in September, and the city's supply of oil and coal ran out within weeks, just as winter began. There was no electricity, no central heating, no running water. Food was strictly rationed; within two months, the rations were cut to 1/3 the daily requirements for an adult. By February 1942, bread rations were down to a mere 125 grams, or 1/4 pound, per person per day. Infants were the first to die, as their mothers were too malnourished to produce milk to feed them. In 900 days, it is estimated that one million civilians died. 95% succumbed to starvation and exposure; the rest were killed as a direct result of artillery fire. More people were buried every day of the siege--about 4,000 people per day--than died in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks (about 3,000). Cats, rats, pigeons, horses, dogs, and crows were all eaten over the course of the siege, because 125 grams of cellulose-bread cannot sustain anyone for long. No cats survived the blockade; after it was over, a truckload of two hundred cats was brought in and released into the city, because what is a city without cats?
Tens of thousands of people were dead by the end of 1941, but because it was winter, it was impossible to bury them. Bodies piled up in the streets; there were people whose job it was to find corpses and take them to holding centers until the ground thawed enough to bury them. As the siege went on and more and more people died, people would bring the bodies of their loved ones that had died at home to a designated collection spot, where they were loaded onto trucks and taken closer to the front. They used bombs to break through the frozen ground and tossed the bodies into mass graves. They did the same for soldiers; it is estimated that 1.5 million soldiers died defending the city from the Nazis. 500,000 people are buried at the Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery, civilians alongside soldiers, and almost all of them anonymously, in mass graves. At first people were buried individually, but very quickly there were too many dead for those tasked with digging graves to keep up. Some people, knowing they were not long for this world, would go to the cemetery and sit there, just waiting for their bodies to finally give up; at least, that way, they knew they would be buried.
But even in the face of such crippling hardship, the city worked on. The war industries continued to produce artillery and armaments; many factories had workforces made entirely of women, children, and the elderly, because all able-bodied men had been conscripted to fight at the front. The city was not immediately evacuated, because, Stalin reasoned, the soldiers would fight harder and would not retreat if they knew their mothers, wives, sisters, and children were behind them. The logic was sound, I suppose, because ultimately it worked.
The arts also survived the siege; the Philharmonic was active, and the troupe from the neighboring Comedy Theater, although they could not use their own facility, performed comedies on the stage of the Philharmonic for the people. It was during the siege that Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 7, also known as the Leningrad Symphony. New seasons at the Philharmonic still open in the fall with a performance of that piece, an impressive work on its own that is only magnified by the fact that it was produced under such circumstances. Here's the first movement on Youtube. The memorial I mentioned at the beginning of this post has a museum under it, and among the articles preserved there is a violin belonging to Shostakovich.
In that museum is also a small, unassuming notepad. This pad of paper was the diary of a young girl named Tanya Savicheva. She and her family aided the war effort; among Tanya's responsibilities were digging trenches and disarming firebombs, work undertaken chiefly by young women and girls. During air raids, it was their job to don helmets, grab fire axes and special tongs, and head up to the roofs of the buildings to grab and neutralize so-called "residual bombs" or "firebombs" before they went off. Many women died doing this. Tanya managed to survive that job, however; her record lists the dates and times of German air raids, as well as a log of when and how each of her family members died over a span of about 4 months in 1941-1942. First her sister Zhenya, then her grandmother, followed by her brother Leka, then Uncle Vasya, Uncle Lyosha, and finally her mother. The final page of her diary reads "All the Saviches are dead. Only Tanya remains." She lived long enough to be found by clean-up crews checking apartments for bodies, but succumbed to tuberculosis at age 14. Her diary was used as evidence during the Nuremburg Trials. Sergei, our tour guide, told us this story; we didn't have enough time to look at all of the things in that museum, but I'm not sure anything else would have stood out to me quite as strongly.
We also visited a memorial to the civilian, volunteer militia that worked to defend the city, situated at the very front itself; a small river (right now it's not much more than a creek) marks the boundary, and there are anti-tank obstacles adorning the site with iron plates bolted to them. The plates have the names of regiments, squads, and battalions of these civilian corps on them. It was eerie.
Our final stop for the day was at the previously-mentioned Piskariovskoye Memorial Cemetery. There is a small information center by the entrance; among the things in that room is a slideshow of photographs. These photographs show locations in and around modern-day St. Petersburg, overlaid by photos of Leningrad during the siege in the same location. It is one thing to merely be told all of these things about what is certainly still a huge event in the cultural memory of the city; it's quite another to see photographs of places you walk through every day from seventy years ago, full of corpses and debris. "Here is a place that is a stone's throw from your apartment building, American exchange student, a place which you see every day on your way to class," the photos seem to say. "Now there's a bar and a clothing shop there. Seventy years ago, it was full of rubble, and ashes, and emaciated bodies. Look, you can still recognize the buildings." That is a powerful statement; it certainly made an impression on me, as you can tell from the tone of this post.
Walking through the cemetery itself, though, really brought home the magnitude of the tragedy. We only walked along the main central path, between the entrance (where there is a memorial torch burning) and the back wall, which features a large sculpture depicting Mother Russia bearing a sprig of laurel, in remembrance of those buried here. On the wall behind her is a poem by Soviet poetess Olga Bergholz, which contains a line that goes approximately like this: "Many are buried here, and though we do not know your names, no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten." She helped keep morale up during the siege by reading her speeches and poetry over the city's public address system in the evenings; during the day, the sound of a metronome would be played, and that too lent the city's residents a measure of comfort. Like a pulse, the constant ticking was reassurance that the city was still alive.
The view from in front of the statue is humbling. A dozen huge rectangular mounds on either side, probably 35x20 feet, with granite plaques marked with a hammer and sickle if it is a civilian grave and a star if it contains soldiers, as well as the year. And more rows of mounds behind each of them. There are more mounds like this, only smaller, outside the cemetery, dotting the outskirts of the city in this general area. Some of them are marked. Some aren't. Somehow, the unmarked ones are more disturbing to me than the marked ones, although I was ill at ease even in the very well manicured environs of Piskariovskoye--meticulously trimmed and skeletal linden, willow, and oak trees, as well as the culled stubs of rosebushes and the first green peeps from tulips planted near the Mother Russia statue. Everything has been recently cleaned in preparation for the May 9 Victory Day celebration, which is one of three days out of the year that this place sees heavy traffic. The other two are the anniversaries of the beginning (September 8) and end (January 27) of the siege.
As I finish this post, it's around 3 AM. I returned to my apartment about eleven hours ago after this tour, and I was only just able to begin writing about it about an hour ago. The whole experience was incredibly powerful, and I just feel drained thinking about everything I learned today. History is intense, man.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Chapter the Seventh: Because Laziness
So, my roommates are dragging their feet in getting pictures uploaded, so for now we're skipping Chapter the Sixth. Whenever they get around to giving me the photos I requested, then I'll publish the Lost Chronicles of Emily's Baltic Spring Break Adventure.
Anyway, I've only got about 34 more days here as I'm writing this, and I could not be more conflicted about how I feel. On one hand, I've missed home a lot, and have been more or less looking forward to leaving from the moment I arrived. At the same time, though, I have had a ton of fun here. I've met some awesome people, I've done stuff that none of my friends and family can say they've done (which makes me cooler than all of you, for all time hereafter :P), and now that the weather is finally starting to get really nice, I'm faced with the prospect of having to leave. And I'm kind of sad about it. I mean, I'm going to leave right before the major tourist season begins, otherwise known as the White Nights. The days are already absurdly long as it is (sun rises at about 6, sets around 9:30) and getting longer by about five minutes every 24 hours, but the fact that I'm going to leave mere WEEKS before the sun stops setting altogether for a while is just not fair!
At some point in the next month or so (actually less than that, [expletive]), I need to produce a 3000-word term paper on a topic I have not yet chosen. I have a few ideas floating around in my head, but I'm running into this very common problem of thinking up topics that sound neat, but that really don't have much written about them. My options for sources are basically Google Scholar and whatever I can access on the library's servers from here. I'll make it happen, but ugh, around this time every year I start wishing for the power to cut to a montage just to make the grueling process of paper-writing go faster.
Term papers make me sad, so it's a good thing I've got a lot of other things happening to take my mind off of it! (That's my argument. I'm sticking to it.) Last weekend we went and toured the summer palace at Pavlovsk and got a lesson on imperial history. The palace is gorgeous--so much gilding and detail. It was painstakingly restored after the Nazis bombed it during the war, with all of the beautiful ceilings recently repainted (ca. 1950). The exhibit contains some posters with photos of the room that you're standing in as it was immediately after the bombing, as well as a few examples of unrestored furniture and the like to compare the restoration to the original. The restorers have done an amazing job, replacing painted silk panels on the walls, repainting and reupholstering chairs and sofas, and generally returning the palace at Pavlovsk to its former glory for the most part. We also walked around the grounds and tried to imagine the garden as it will be in a few months, after all the plants start growing again. There are statues and paths and even a stream all throughout the garden; it's more like a large public park than anything, which isn't surprising, because the summer palace hasn't actually functioned as a residence for quite some time.
Last night, Brenda and Holly and I attended a performance of Swan Lake at the Mikhailovsky Theater. Our seats were on the highest balcony, in the front row; I've never been so close to the ceiling of a theater before, and the Mikhailovsky is gorgeous. That's a link to the search page on Flickr for "Mikhailovsky Theater," because one photo wouldn't do it justice. The performance was good; I've never really found ballet to be compelling, but it is very impressive. Even from the top of the house I could see how strong the dancers were. The costuming at this particular show was also really cool; I liked some of the dresses they had on the female dancers.
Here's a quick run-down of the story, for those less familiar with it: Odette is a princess under a spell that makes her take the form of a swan during the day. One evening, Prince Siegfried catches sight of her after she transforms into a human again, and they begin to dance together and gradually fall in love. Odette reveals that she will be freed from the spell if she finds a man who will remain faithful to her for all time, and Siegfried pledges his eternal love, inviting her to a Royal Ball so that he can choose her as his bride. At the Ball, the evil sorcerer Rothbart, who cursed Odette, shows up with his daughter Odile, who is enchanted to look just like Odette. (This part is often danced by the same ballerina who dances the part of Odette, so the avant-garde approach of the crazy director in Black Swan is not quite as avant-garde as the movie made it out to be.) In this way, Rothbart tricks Siegfried into breaking his vow, thus sentencing Odette to life as a swan forever. Normally, this ends with both Odette and Siegfried drowning themselves in the titular lake to break the spell, but apparently this particular company decided that such an ending was just too dang depressing. So, instead, Rothbart gets a wing ripped off and promptly dies in the final showdown against Siegfried, which has the intended effect of releasing Odette from the spell. Happily ever after, etc etc.
As for upcoming events, this weekend we're being taken to the Leningrad Blockade Museum. I'm not really entirely sure what to expect from that, but I will blog about it afterward. Next weekend, weather-permitting, we're going to Sergei's dacha for an end-of-course wrap-up discussion. I hope the weather holds out for us; we nearly visited Tamara's dacha for Orthodox Easter, but she canceled because of some health issues she's been having. And at the beginning of May, we have a 4-day excursion to Moscow. We're taking a train, and I'm more excited than I should be about that, but whatever! Moscow! Trains! Yeah!
The university is also offering a few excursions to Peterhof (lovely palace, lovelier fountains), Novgorod ("Old Russia"), and Kronstadt (I don't know anything about this place). They cost between 800-1100 rubles to go, and the first one to Novgorod is next weekend. I haven't decided if I want to do any of them, but I had better decide quickly because the deadline to sign up for Novgorod is tomorrow. They're just day trips, but that's still an amazing price for a guided tour and bus ride. I think Novgorod's price includes a meal. 1000p is about US$30, to give you an idea of what figures like "800 rubles" mean. I want to go to at least Peterhof, but I've got so much to do for the end of this course, and I would actually like to come back home with *some* money in the bank. Not hurting for cash right now, but I'd like it to stay that way.
Anyway, I've only got about 34 more days here as I'm writing this, and I could not be more conflicted about how I feel. On one hand, I've missed home a lot, and have been more or less looking forward to leaving from the moment I arrived. At the same time, though, I have had a ton of fun here. I've met some awesome people, I've done stuff that none of my friends and family can say they've done (which makes me cooler than all of you, for all time hereafter :P), and now that the weather is finally starting to get really nice, I'm faced with the prospect of having to leave. And I'm kind of sad about it. I mean, I'm going to leave right before the major tourist season begins, otherwise known as the White Nights. The days are already absurdly long as it is (sun rises at about 6, sets around 9:30) and getting longer by about five minutes every 24 hours, but the fact that I'm going to leave mere WEEKS before the sun stops setting altogether for a while is just not fair!
At some point in the next month or so (actually less than that, [expletive]), I need to produce a 3000-word term paper on a topic I have not yet chosen. I have a few ideas floating around in my head, but I'm running into this very common problem of thinking up topics that sound neat, but that really don't have much written about them. My options for sources are basically Google Scholar and whatever I can access on the library's servers from here. I'll make it happen, but ugh, around this time every year I start wishing for the power to cut to a montage just to make the grueling process of paper-writing go faster.
Term papers make me sad, so it's a good thing I've got a lot of other things happening to take my mind off of it! (That's my argument. I'm sticking to it.) Last weekend we went and toured the summer palace at Pavlovsk and got a lesson on imperial history. The palace is gorgeous--so much gilding and detail. It was painstakingly restored after the Nazis bombed it during the war, with all of the beautiful ceilings recently repainted (ca. 1950). The exhibit contains some posters with photos of the room that you're standing in as it was immediately after the bombing, as well as a few examples of unrestored furniture and the like to compare the restoration to the original. The restorers have done an amazing job, replacing painted silk panels on the walls, repainting and reupholstering chairs and sofas, and generally returning the palace at Pavlovsk to its former glory for the most part. We also walked around the grounds and tried to imagine the garden as it will be in a few months, after all the plants start growing again. There are statues and paths and even a stream all throughout the garden; it's more like a large public park than anything, which isn't surprising, because the summer palace hasn't actually functioned as a residence for quite some time.
Last night, Brenda and Holly and I attended a performance of Swan Lake at the Mikhailovsky Theater. Our seats were on the highest balcony, in the front row; I've never been so close to the ceiling of a theater before, and the Mikhailovsky is gorgeous. That's a link to the search page on Flickr for "Mikhailovsky Theater," because one photo wouldn't do it justice. The performance was good; I've never really found ballet to be compelling, but it is very impressive. Even from the top of the house I could see how strong the dancers were. The costuming at this particular show was also really cool; I liked some of the dresses they had on the female dancers.
Here's a quick run-down of the story, for those less familiar with it: Odette is a princess under a spell that makes her take the form of a swan during the day. One evening, Prince Siegfried catches sight of her after she transforms into a human again, and they begin to dance together and gradually fall in love. Odette reveals that she will be freed from the spell if she finds a man who will remain faithful to her for all time, and Siegfried pledges his eternal love, inviting her to a Royal Ball so that he can choose her as his bride. At the Ball, the evil sorcerer Rothbart, who cursed Odette, shows up with his daughter Odile, who is enchanted to look just like Odette. (This part is often danced by the same ballerina who dances the part of Odette, so the avant-garde approach of the crazy director in Black Swan is not quite as avant-garde as the movie made it out to be.) In this way, Rothbart tricks Siegfried into breaking his vow, thus sentencing Odette to life as a swan forever. Normally, this ends with both Odette and Siegfried drowning themselves in the titular lake to break the spell, but apparently this particular company decided that such an ending was just too dang depressing. So, instead, Rothbart gets a wing ripped off and promptly dies in the final showdown against Siegfried, which has the intended effect of releasing Odette from the spell. Happily ever after, etc etc.
As for upcoming events, this weekend we're being taken to the Leningrad Blockade Museum. I'm not really entirely sure what to expect from that, but I will blog about it afterward. Next weekend, weather-permitting, we're going to Sergei's dacha for an end-of-course wrap-up discussion. I hope the weather holds out for us; we nearly visited Tamara's dacha for Orthodox Easter, but she canceled because of some health issues she's been having. And at the beginning of May, we have a 4-day excursion to Moscow. We're taking a train, and I'm more excited than I should be about that, but whatever! Moscow! Trains! Yeah!
The university is also offering a few excursions to Peterhof (lovely palace, lovelier fountains), Novgorod ("Old Russia"), and Kronstadt (I don't know anything about this place). They cost between 800-1100 rubles to go, and the first one to Novgorod is next weekend. I haven't decided if I want to do any of them, but I had better decide quickly because the deadline to sign up for Novgorod is tomorrow. They're just day trips, but that's still an amazing price for a guided tour and bus ride. I think Novgorod's price includes a meal. 1000p is about US$30, to give you an idea of what figures like "800 rubles" mean. I want to go to at least Peterhof, but I've got so much to do for the end of this course, and I would actually like to come back home with *some* money in the bank. Not hurting for cash right now, but I'd like it to stay that way.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Chapter the Fifth: Thrill-A-Minute Adventures
Or, you know, not so much. Now that I'm rapidly approaching the halfway point of this semester, it's getting harder to find things to post about, because it's all so routine now. The most productive thing I've done in the past week is go to the grocery store/make a metric [swear word]-ton of vinigret, and that was today. This should change soon enough, though; a week from Thursday, Corinne, the Elizabeths and I leave for Estonia, and then I will have nine days' worth of thrill-a-minute adventures (if the four of us can ever get around to doing some dang research and deciding what we want to do in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius).
In my last post, I talked about visiting with Tamara, and said I was eager to go back. The second visit was even better than the first; this time she fed us, setting out chocolates, fruit, and little cakes as well as giving us tea. We all ate far too much (as is customary) and spent a solid three hours just listening to Tamara talk about Russian history as she experienced it. I love this woman so much. I just want to bring her home with me. She is the sweetest lady in the world, and tomorrow night when we go back over there, she said she'd make us dinner. The sweets were delicious, but we all kind of waddled back to the metro station afterward. It wasn't too cold that night, anyway, and we decided we all could use the exercise after gorging ourselves at Tamara's apartment. Among the spread were these candies that consisted of a walnut stuffed inside a prune, coated in dark chocolate. Probably shouldn't eat too many of those, given the prune, but they were just so good and not in the least bit difficult to make, according to Brenda.
I'm not exactly proud to admit that, as I'm typing this, 6 PM on Tuesday, I have not yet been to my language class this week. I've managed to oversleep two days in a row. Yesterday, I woke up about three minutes before my class started and decided the weather was just too crappy to endure the 40-minute commute to the faculty. Today, I forgot my Tuesday class was shifted up about an hour and a half...and just didn't want to go. I needed to go to the grocery, anyway, which is how I justified skipping again to myself. I know it's not good, and I'm gonna make it there every day until next Thursday to make up for it. Not to excuse my behavior, but most of my roommates haven't made it to class, either. Jorge has also skipped this week, and so has Corinne; their excuses aren't any better than mine. Liz hasn't gone, but she's got a more legitimate reason because she's not feeling well. This atmosphere of lethargy is just permeating the apartment and killing everyone's productivity. Maybe we all partied too hard over the weekend, who knows.
We did go out for St. Patrick's Day. First, Corinne, Brenda, Liz and I went to this Frida Kahlo-themed flamenco show, which was neat. I fell asleep for about ten minutes, but that happens to me in auditoriums. I don't know why, but I blame high school. What I could see of it was really cool; I was behind tall people so I couldn't really see the dancers' feet, but it certainly sounded impressive. Flamenco is like extreme Spanish tapdancing, equal parts performance and percussion. There were two dancers, about four musicians and a singer who sang in Spanish. One dancer portrayed Frida, the other various other people (husband Diego Rivera, the personification of Death); the show was based around Frida Kahlo's life, and her paintings were projected on a screen behind the dancers as they moved through vignettes. I thought the medium to be rather ironic; why tell this particular woman's story through flamenco dance, of all media? See, Frida Kahlo's art career began after she was involved in a serious tram accident that crippled her, so of all distinctly Spanish art forms, this is one that she would never have been able to do. But, okay. That may have been the point. It was staged at a very avant-garde sort of theater, so that irony/disconnect probably was the point.
After the flamenco show, we (minus Brenda) went back to our apartment, where a few of Jorge's friends had come over, and they decided to wait for us before hitting the clubs. Dasha and Maksim were there, as was Holly (finally! she couldn't find our apartment last time we invited her over, and her host family is a bit leery of her going out anywhere very often, because the metro closes at midnight). Those were the only guests I knew. There was also an Italian woman whose name escapes me right now, and another Maxim, this one Danish (we'll call him Max for simplicity). They were all pregaming (i.e., drinking before going out to a bar or club) when we arrived, and Alex decided we would leave for the clubs in an hour. So we chilled, made introductions, started planning the evening's activities, and generally were just killing time for a while. The smokers in the group went out to smoke, and we prepared to leave; with so many people in attendance, it should come as no surprise that we split into two groups.
Alexandra, Holly, Max, and I left together, with the others leaving and going somewhere else later. We tried to go to RadioBaby, a place I blogged about waaaay back in February. Apparently the bouncer thought Max was too drunk to be let into the club (not surprising, as by the time we left the apartment he had nearly polished off a 2-liter of Oxota, which is a brand of beer with 8% abv, all by himself), and the fact that he proceeded to argue with said bouncer (and then stumble down the stairs) didn't help. Alexandra thought the bouncer was just giving us a hard time and pulled me and Holly inside, then went back for Max, at which point he pushed her out. So, Holly went and tracked down another friend of ours, Kurt, and tried to get everything sorted. We ended up leaving and going somewhere else, because I wasn't sure I knew how to get home from RadioBaby. We went to another club a few blocks away; Kurt actually had to go back to RadioBaby to meet a friend who was running late, but he caught up with us later. I can't seem to remember the name of this club no matter how hard I try, but it's not important.
The Nameless Club is more like three clubs in one; it's got 4 stories, with the coat check on the top floor (such a cruel design, because the stairs are steep and tall, and also concrete). On each of the lower floors is a bar and a dance area; on the first floor, the dancefloor is replaced by bathrooms. And every floor of the place was absolutely packed with fellow young adults looking for a good time on a Saturday night.
The layout of the club actually turned out to be a boon. See, Max has a crush on Holly and was hitting on her relentlessly all night. The problem is that Max is also an asshole. Normally I'd censor myself, but there really is no polite term for him. He's European, and believes that this makes him somehow special, and his idea of courtship involves making fun of America and trying to jam his tongue down Holly's throat. She turned away quickly enough that he only managed to kiss her cheek, but he kept trying. Not only does Holly have a guy back home waiting for her, Max also smokes, and Holly doesn't like that. So even if she didn't have someone in mind already, she still wouldn't be interested in him. I had to rescue Holly a couple of times, with the old "come to the bathroom with me" line. We hid in the stairwell until a bouncer told us to pick a floor or get out.
After another hour or so of dealing with Max (and another "bathroom run"), we decided to just leave and go somewhere else. We found Alexandra and told her, and she tried to unload Max onto us. No, the point was to get Holly away from him because he's being rude and creepy. So, the five of us (at some point one of their classmates joined us) just all left together. We stopped for burgers at this restaurant I'll probably never manage to find again, then went home because everyone was getting tired and no one wanted to deal with Max anymore. Alexandra didn't want to keep dragging him around, we didn't want him to come with us, so we just decided we were done for the night. The original plan had been to stay out all night, i.e. until the public transportation system reopens at 6:30, but we called it quits around 3:30.
On the way home we actually ran into Jorge, Maksim and Liz; Dasha and the Italian girl had gone home because they had work in the morning, and Corinne wasn't feeling well so she didn't come out at all. Liz came with us because she never really wanted to go out anyway; she was convinced by promises of shawarma, and we caught them just as they were leaving the shawarma place, so she just walked home with us.
Annoying boys aside, it was actually a pretty fun night. I got to hang out with Holly, which was cool. I don't get to see her as often as I'd like because she's in a different class, lives way far away from us, and doesn't find out about plans far enough in advance to let her host mom know. We bonded, and that was nice, because as different as we are, I feel like I have more in common with her than I do with most of the SRAS people here. Holly is my age, a junior in college, in her university's honors program, unlike the others here through the SRAS. All my roommates are older than me; some are looking at grad schools, others are non-traditional students, and the others (Brenda and Elizabeth) aren't students at all. We're going to try to get together over the summer; she lives in North Carolina, but her family's going to Disney near the end of July. I'm pretty sure she said it was around the 21st, which is before Otakon, so we should be able to figure something out.
In my last post, I talked about visiting with Tamara, and said I was eager to go back. The second visit was even better than the first; this time she fed us, setting out chocolates, fruit, and little cakes as well as giving us tea. We all ate far too much (as is customary) and spent a solid three hours just listening to Tamara talk about Russian history as she experienced it. I love this woman so much. I just want to bring her home with me. She is the sweetest lady in the world, and tomorrow night when we go back over there, she said she'd make us dinner. The sweets were delicious, but we all kind of waddled back to the metro station afterward. It wasn't too cold that night, anyway, and we decided we all could use the exercise after gorging ourselves at Tamara's apartment. Among the spread were these candies that consisted of a walnut stuffed inside a prune, coated in dark chocolate. Probably shouldn't eat too many of those, given the prune, but they were just so good and not in the least bit difficult to make, according to Brenda.
I'm not exactly proud to admit that, as I'm typing this, 6 PM on Tuesday, I have not yet been to my language class this week. I've managed to oversleep two days in a row. Yesterday, I woke up about three minutes before my class started and decided the weather was just too crappy to endure the 40-minute commute to the faculty. Today, I forgot my Tuesday class was shifted up about an hour and a half...and just didn't want to go. I needed to go to the grocery, anyway, which is how I justified skipping again to myself. I know it's not good, and I'm gonna make it there every day until next Thursday to make up for it. Not to excuse my behavior, but most of my roommates haven't made it to class, either. Jorge has also skipped this week, and so has Corinne; their excuses aren't any better than mine. Liz hasn't gone, but she's got a more legitimate reason because she's not feeling well. This atmosphere of lethargy is just permeating the apartment and killing everyone's productivity. Maybe we all partied too hard over the weekend, who knows.
We did go out for St. Patrick's Day. First, Corinne, Brenda, Liz and I went to this Frida Kahlo-themed flamenco show, which was neat. I fell asleep for about ten minutes, but that happens to me in auditoriums. I don't know why, but I blame high school. What I could see of it was really cool; I was behind tall people so I couldn't really see the dancers' feet, but it certainly sounded impressive. Flamenco is like extreme Spanish tapdancing, equal parts performance and percussion. There were two dancers, about four musicians and a singer who sang in Spanish. One dancer portrayed Frida, the other various other people (husband Diego Rivera, the personification of Death); the show was based around Frida Kahlo's life, and her paintings were projected on a screen behind the dancers as they moved through vignettes. I thought the medium to be rather ironic; why tell this particular woman's story through flamenco dance, of all media? See, Frida Kahlo's art career began after she was involved in a serious tram accident that crippled her, so of all distinctly Spanish art forms, this is one that she would never have been able to do. But, okay. That may have been the point. It was staged at a very avant-garde sort of theater, so that irony/disconnect probably was the point.
After the flamenco show, we (minus Brenda) went back to our apartment, where a few of Jorge's friends had come over, and they decided to wait for us before hitting the clubs. Dasha and Maksim were there, as was Holly (finally! she couldn't find our apartment last time we invited her over, and her host family is a bit leery of her going out anywhere very often, because the metro closes at midnight). Those were the only guests I knew. There was also an Italian woman whose name escapes me right now, and another Maxim, this one Danish (we'll call him Max for simplicity). They were all pregaming (i.e., drinking before going out to a bar or club) when we arrived, and Alex decided we would leave for the clubs in an hour. So we chilled, made introductions, started planning the evening's activities, and generally were just killing time for a while. The smokers in the group went out to smoke, and we prepared to leave; with so many people in attendance, it should come as no surprise that we split into two groups.
Alexandra, Holly, Max, and I left together, with the others leaving and going somewhere else later. We tried to go to RadioBaby, a place I blogged about waaaay back in February. Apparently the bouncer thought Max was too drunk to be let into the club (not surprising, as by the time we left the apartment he had nearly polished off a 2-liter of Oxota, which is a brand of beer with 8% abv, all by himself), and the fact that he proceeded to argue with said bouncer (and then stumble down the stairs) didn't help. Alexandra thought the bouncer was just giving us a hard time and pulled me and Holly inside, then went back for Max, at which point he pushed her out. So, Holly went and tracked down another friend of ours, Kurt, and tried to get everything sorted. We ended up leaving and going somewhere else, because I wasn't sure I knew how to get home from RadioBaby. We went to another club a few blocks away; Kurt actually had to go back to RadioBaby to meet a friend who was running late, but he caught up with us later. I can't seem to remember the name of this club no matter how hard I try, but it's not important.
The Nameless Club is more like three clubs in one; it's got 4 stories, with the coat check on the top floor (such a cruel design, because the stairs are steep and tall, and also concrete). On each of the lower floors is a bar and a dance area; on the first floor, the dancefloor is replaced by bathrooms. And every floor of the place was absolutely packed with fellow young adults looking for a good time on a Saturday night.
The layout of the club actually turned out to be a boon. See, Max has a crush on Holly and was hitting on her relentlessly all night. The problem is that Max is also an asshole. Normally I'd censor myself, but there really is no polite term for him. He's European, and believes that this makes him somehow special, and his idea of courtship involves making fun of America and trying to jam his tongue down Holly's throat. She turned away quickly enough that he only managed to kiss her cheek, but he kept trying. Not only does Holly have a guy back home waiting for her, Max also smokes, and Holly doesn't like that. So even if she didn't have someone in mind already, she still wouldn't be interested in him. I had to rescue Holly a couple of times, with the old "come to the bathroom with me" line. We hid in the stairwell until a bouncer told us to pick a floor or get out.
After another hour or so of dealing with Max (and another "bathroom run"), we decided to just leave and go somewhere else. We found Alexandra and told her, and she tried to unload Max onto us. No, the point was to get Holly away from him because he's being rude and creepy. So, the five of us (at some point one of their classmates joined us) just all left together. We stopped for burgers at this restaurant I'll probably never manage to find again, then went home because everyone was getting tired and no one wanted to deal with Max anymore. Alexandra didn't want to keep dragging him around, we didn't want him to come with us, so we just decided we were done for the night. The original plan had been to stay out all night, i.e. until the public transportation system reopens at 6:30, but we called it quits around 3:30.
On the way home we actually ran into Jorge, Maksim and Liz; Dasha and the Italian girl had gone home because they had work in the morning, and Corinne wasn't feeling well so she didn't come out at all. Liz came with us because she never really wanted to go out anyway; she was convinced by promises of shawarma, and we caught them just as they were leaving the shawarma place, so she just walked home with us.
Annoying boys aside, it was actually a pretty fun night. I got to hang out with Holly, which was cool. I don't get to see her as often as I'd like because she's in a different class, lives way far away from us, and doesn't find out about plans far enough in advance to let her host mom know. We bonded, and that was nice, because as different as we are, I feel like I have more in common with her than I do with most of the SRAS people here. Holly is my age, a junior in college, in her university's honors program, unlike the others here through the SRAS. All my roommates are older than me; some are looking at grad schools, others are non-traditional students, and the others (Brenda and Elizabeth) aren't students at all. We're going to try to get together over the summer; she lives in North Carolina, but her family's going to Disney near the end of July. I'm pretty sure she said it was around the 21st, which is before Otakon, so we should be able to figure something out.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Chapter the Fifth: Don't You Lecture Me!
*dusts off cobwebs*
Alright, alright, I know it's been like a week since I last posted. Nothing exciting has happened in that time! And as much as I know you're all hanging on my every word, I'm sure you'd get bored quickly if I filled this blog with posts about how I stayed inside on my computer for the entire three-day holiday weekend, then overslept and missed the make-up class on Sunday. Liz and I went out, along with Elizabeth, for a little while Friday night. We got some tasty Chinese food and later attempted to go to a gay club with Jorge and his friend Max; they wouldn't let the girls in, so we left, grabbed some snackies at a produkty and hung out in the apartment for a while. Oh, and I got my passport back, complete with shiny new multi-entry visa, from the university. They didn't lose my documents again, yay! The fact that the multi-entry visa is both larger than and not attached to the passport does kind of bother me, though. I suppose if it all stays in its pouch it'll be fine.
This evening, Brenda and Corinne and I met with a friend of Sergei's by the name of Tamara. She's the sweetest old lady, brimming with knowledge about Russian culture. We're meeting with her Friday evening, and next week on Wednesday and Friday as well. This is the kind of thing I was expecting to do for the entire Russian Psyche class, so it's cool that we're finally getting to it. I mean, I've enjoyed the other stuff we've done (making syrniki, watching movies), but this is what I was interested in in the first place. We're squeezing 8 lectures on Russian history and culture into 4 lengthy visits to this woman's apartment, and I'm already looking forward to going back.
Tonight's lectures were just a sort of overview to gauge our familiarity with the subject matter and get to know each other a little bit. Tamara has been a teacher and professor of many topics of Russian culture, as well as Russian and English language courses. She taught in the US for 12 years during the Soviet era, and was alive even during Stalin's reign, although she was just a child (she said she was 7 or 8 when he died). She basically told us about her life, things she's observed in her years of experience and travel, the disparity between common stereotypes and what she (and we) have observed, and the general features of the Russian character. According to Tamara, the main feature of the Russian psyche (hey! that's the title of this course) is a theme of duality: Russians are both atheistic and pious, both Christian and pagan, both European and Asian.
Even during the Soviet era, when everyone was nominally atheist, people would still observe religious rites (e.g., baptizing an infant), simply because that's what you were supposed to do. Baptizing an infant had little to do with anyone's personal faith; it was just part and parcel of the whole song-and-dance that accompanies a baby's entrance into this world. From what Tamara said and what I've read in the book I bought for this class, Christianity's influence on Russian culture was really more of a structural effect than anything else; it recontextualized and gave new names to many facets of the old pagan beliefs. The decision to adopt Christianity, as opposed to any other religion, came about after the Tsar sent people all over the world to learn about other cultures; upon attending a Greek Orthodox service in Byzantium, the emissaries were so taken by the beauty of it all that they "were certain they were in heaven, for nothing so beautiful could exist on earth." Yes, sometimes crucial decisions like the theology upon which a country will be governed is based on frivolous things like "who has the prettiest churches?" You do have to hand it to them, though; Russian cathedrals are gorgeous.
Evidence of Russian piety (regardless of the affiliation of their particular God or gods) is found all over the place in the language. There are a lot of words referring to successful people or people with particular attributes (being very strong, etc) that contain the root "Bog," which is the Russian (actually etymologically Ukrainian, but who's counting) word for "God." For instance, in Russian, the name by which the Virgin Mary is referred to translates literally to "mother of God." No one here calls her Mary, Saint Mary, or the Virgin; they call her the Holy Mother. In icons, she is typically pictured cradling the baby Jesus in a very maternal fashion; as opposed to many Western depictions of the Madonna and Child, where said Madonna functions more like a human-shaped chair for said Child. Whereas in Western Christian tradition, the emphasis is on Mary's spiritual (or physical) purity and the Immaculate Conception, Russian Orthodoxy places huge emphasis on the fact that she gave birth to a child, nevermind the details of the child's or her own conception. In many ways, this echoes the idea of "Mother Earth," and by extension "Mother Russia." Motherhood is huge in Russian culture; as an interesting aside, a lot of Russian profanity is centered around the womb (contrast American profanity, which is mostly sexual, or French profanity, which is mostly religious).
Russians are also incredibly superstitious. I could write an entire blog post on Russian superstitions, but I think I'd have to spend the rest of my time here researching it first. For instance, no Russian will shake your hand over a threshold--one of you must pass through the door first, or it's bad luck. An unmarried girl should not sit at the corner of a table, or else she won't be married for a certain number of years (I think it was 7); if the seating arrangement is such that someone must sit at the corner, a married woman will take that seat. A lot of the superstition comes from the influence of East and Central Asian cultures, which provides me a convenient segue into addressing the third aspect of the dual nature of the Russian psyche.
Russians attribute their love of beautiful things and refinement to their European heritage. At the same time, however, they acknowledge that they are a brutal people. Which is understandable; Russia is a brutal place. But still. Russian men, as an example, swear a lot, drink a lot, are violent, etc. These unsavory attributes are usually blamed on the influence of Asian cultures (chiefly the Tatars). Russia exists in a strange place between Europe and Asia proper; the citizens' appearance is largely European, but they are living in what is, geographically speaking, Asia. There is also a lot of prejudice against people who look Asian (or otherwise ethnic, but particularly Asians); I can't imagine what life is like here for the Chinese and Japanese students enrolled at my faculty. Presumably, they're treated with at least a modicum of respect by academics and those in the university's employ, but when venturing out into the city, I can't help but wonder what they experience.
The chat with Tamara was kind of a massive information-dump, but it was certainly informative. I'm super excited to go back. She's also got a pupil that she tutors in English by the name of Olga, who is going to talk to us (to practice her English) on Friday over tea and cakes. She likes the Beatles and old movies, and she's leaving Sunday for Prague, and that is all I know about her. Maybe we'll end up practicing our Russian, too, I don't know. But it certainly promises to be an enjoyable evening.
The rest of this week is also jam-packed with stuff. Tomorrow night we're going to see a play (performed in English by American students, because it's free and Sergei and his other Russian students are also coming), then Friday we're going back to Tamara's, then Saturday we're touring the Peter and Paul Fortress and attending some kind of Frida Kahlo-themed flamenco dance show. Maybe if I get a minute to rest on Sunday I'll post about it all. Things calm down a bit after Saturday; next week the only thing besides regular class is going back to Tamara's on Wednesday and Friday evening. We have another lecture with Sergei on the following Tuesday, and then Corinne and I leave with the Elizabeths for Estonia on the 29th, and that about does it for March.
Alright, alright, I know it's been like a week since I last posted. Nothing exciting has happened in that time! And as much as I know you're all hanging on my every word, I'm sure you'd get bored quickly if I filled this blog with posts about how I stayed inside on my computer for the entire three-day holiday weekend, then overslept and missed the make-up class on Sunday. Liz and I went out, along with Elizabeth, for a little while Friday night. We got some tasty Chinese food and later attempted to go to a gay club with Jorge and his friend Max; they wouldn't let the girls in, so we left, grabbed some snackies at a produkty and hung out in the apartment for a while. Oh, and I got my passport back, complete with shiny new multi-entry visa, from the university. They didn't lose my documents again, yay! The fact that the multi-entry visa is both larger than and not attached to the passport does kind of bother me, though. I suppose if it all stays in its pouch it'll be fine.
This evening, Brenda and Corinne and I met with a friend of Sergei's by the name of Tamara. She's the sweetest old lady, brimming with knowledge about Russian culture. We're meeting with her Friday evening, and next week on Wednesday and Friday as well. This is the kind of thing I was expecting to do for the entire Russian Psyche class, so it's cool that we're finally getting to it. I mean, I've enjoyed the other stuff we've done (making syrniki, watching movies), but this is what I was interested in in the first place. We're squeezing 8 lectures on Russian history and culture into 4 lengthy visits to this woman's apartment, and I'm already looking forward to going back.
Tonight's lectures were just a sort of overview to gauge our familiarity with the subject matter and get to know each other a little bit. Tamara has been a teacher and professor of many topics of Russian culture, as well as Russian and English language courses. She taught in the US for 12 years during the Soviet era, and was alive even during Stalin's reign, although she was just a child (she said she was 7 or 8 when he died). She basically told us about her life, things she's observed in her years of experience and travel, the disparity between common stereotypes and what she (and we) have observed, and the general features of the Russian character. According to Tamara, the main feature of the Russian psyche (
Even during the Soviet era, when everyone was nominally atheist, people would still observe religious rites (e.g., baptizing an infant), simply because that's what you were supposed to do. Baptizing an infant had little to do with anyone's personal faith; it was just part and parcel of the whole song-and-dance that accompanies a baby's entrance into this world. From what Tamara said and what I've read in the book I bought for this class, Christianity's influence on Russian culture was really more of a structural effect than anything else; it recontextualized and gave new names to many facets of the old pagan beliefs. The decision to adopt Christianity, as opposed to any other religion, came about after the Tsar sent people all over the world to learn about other cultures; upon attending a Greek Orthodox service in Byzantium, the emissaries were so taken by the beauty of it all that they "were certain they were in heaven, for nothing so beautiful could exist on earth." Yes, sometimes crucial decisions like the theology upon which a country will be governed is based on frivolous things like "who has the prettiest churches?" You do have to hand it to them, though; Russian cathedrals are gorgeous.
Evidence of Russian piety (regardless of the affiliation of their particular God or gods) is found all over the place in the language. There are a lot of words referring to successful people or people with particular attributes (being very strong, etc) that contain the root "Bog," which is the Russian (actually etymologically Ukrainian, but who's counting) word for "God." For instance, in Russian, the name by which the Virgin Mary is referred to translates literally to "mother of God." No one here calls her Mary, Saint Mary, or the Virgin; they call her the Holy Mother. In icons, she is typically pictured cradling the baby Jesus in a very maternal fashion; as opposed to many Western depictions of the Madonna and Child, where said Madonna functions more like a human-shaped chair for said Child. Whereas in Western Christian tradition, the emphasis is on Mary's spiritual (or physical) purity and the Immaculate Conception, Russian Orthodoxy places huge emphasis on the fact that she gave birth to a child, nevermind the details of the child's or her own conception. In many ways, this echoes the idea of "Mother Earth," and by extension "Mother Russia." Motherhood is huge in Russian culture; as an interesting aside, a lot of Russian profanity is centered around the womb (contrast American profanity, which is mostly sexual, or French profanity, which is mostly religious).
Russians are also incredibly superstitious. I could write an entire blog post on Russian superstitions, but I think I'd have to spend the rest of my time here researching it first. For instance, no Russian will shake your hand over a threshold--one of you must pass through the door first, or it's bad luck. An unmarried girl should not sit at the corner of a table, or else she won't be married for a certain number of years (I think it was 7); if the seating arrangement is such that someone must sit at the corner, a married woman will take that seat. A lot of the superstition comes from the influence of East and Central Asian cultures, which provides me a convenient segue into addressing the third aspect of the dual nature of the Russian psyche.
Russians attribute their love of beautiful things and refinement to their European heritage. At the same time, however, they acknowledge that they are a brutal people. Which is understandable; Russia is a brutal place. But still. Russian men, as an example, swear a lot, drink a lot, are violent, etc. These unsavory attributes are usually blamed on the influence of Asian cultures (chiefly the Tatars). Russia exists in a strange place between Europe and Asia proper; the citizens' appearance is largely European, but they are living in what is, geographically speaking, Asia. There is also a lot of prejudice against people who look Asian (or otherwise ethnic, but particularly Asians); I can't imagine what life is like here for the Chinese and Japanese students enrolled at my faculty. Presumably, they're treated with at least a modicum of respect by academics and those in the university's employ, but when venturing out into the city, I can't help but wonder what they experience.
The chat with Tamara was kind of a massive information-dump, but it was certainly informative. I'm super excited to go back. She's also got a pupil that she tutors in English by the name of Olga, who is going to talk to us (to practice her English) on Friday over tea and cakes. She likes the Beatles and old movies, and she's leaving Sunday for Prague, and that is all I know about her. Maybe we'll end up practicing our Russian, too, I don't know. But it certainly promises to be an enjoyable evening.
The rest of this week is also jam-packed with stuff. Tomorrow night we're going to see a play (performed in English by American students, because it's free and Sergei and his other Russian students are also coming), then Friday we're going back to Tamara's, then Saturday we're touring the Peter and Paul Fortress and attending some kind of Frida Kahlo-themed flamenco dance show. Maybe if I get a minute to rest on Sunday I'll post about it all. Things calm down a bit after Saturday; next week the only thing besides regular class is going back to Tamara's on Wednesday and Friday evening. We have another lecture with Sergei on the following Tuesday, and then Corinne and I leave with the Elizabeths for Estonia on the 29th, and that about does it for March.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Chapter the Fourth: Hermitages
So, I believe I mentioned in an earlier post that my language class starts at 10:40, rather than 12:20, on Tuesdays, to allow time for my culture class to meet without making the cleaning staff at the university stay too late. This morning, like every most Tuesday mornings, I headed over to Vasilievsky Island (running about 10-15 minutes late for class, I admit)...and upon finishing the grueling climb to the fourth floor of the faculty, I found five of my classmates chillin' in the hallway. Apparently, Valentina Semyonovna forgot she had a class this morning, or something. I put down my bags and took my coat off, just in case she showed up soon. I sat in the hall with my classmates for about 15-20 minutes...with no sign of the professor. Most of the people who passed by us seemed to ignore us, actually, which was kind of weird. One young woman kept going back and forth between the hall where our classroom was (among others) and...somewhere, casually stepping over coats and legs like we weren't even there. I know if there was a cluster of students sitting and chatting in the hallway in, say, Sampson Hall (because it's the foreign-language building! hurr i am comedy) for 40 minutes, someone would either ask who they were waiting for or tell them to get lost.
Anyway, by about 11:30, I decided that even if Valentina Semyonovna did show up eventually, I wouldn't be there long enough to make coming to class worthwhile. So, I put my coat and bags back on and left. See, this afternoon, Sergei had a friend of his take us--Corinne, Brenda, Holly and me--on a tour of the Hermitage, and I would've had to leave class early to have time to get back home, collect Corinne (she wasn't feeling well that morning, so she didn't come with me to the faculty), and figure out how to get to the Hermitage from my apartment. We stopped in the Palace Square courtyard on the walking tour with Sergei, but I wasn't paying a ton of attention to how we actually got there; my attention was fixed more on how cold it was, not slipping on the ice, and trying to hear what Sergei was saying because he's very soft-spoken.
Corinne and I checked the trolley routes and learned that trolleybus number 10 or 11 would take us where we needed to go. So we waited at the trolley stop, crammed ourselves into the first number 11 that showed up (along with what seemed like a hundred other people), paid our 21p and held on for dear life because this driver's got a schedule to keep, people! Shut up and hold on! Eventually Corinne grabbed a seat and, as soon as another one near her opened up, she helped me squeeze through the crowd to take it. I still feel weird about moving through crowds like that. I feel like I'm being rude, but I'm not. It's perfectly acceptable to brush against someone moving past them, without so much as an "excuse me, please." The only time anyone will say something to you is if there isn't enough room on either side of you to squeeze past. I mean, I'm sure there are probably some people I've encountered--especially at rush hour on the metro--who are being rude, perhaps pushing past others too brusquely, but for the most part navigating in crowds here does not require nearly the level of song and dance that it does in America.
Anyway, the Hermitage! My God, it's massive. It actually consists of several buildings connected to one another, and they are all beautiful. Most of the information we received from Yulia, Sergei's friend, was about the palace itself. The building that you will see photos of if you Google Image Search "Hermitage" or "Эрмитажа" used to be the Winter Palace, commissioned by Peter the Great. It's a striking shade of teal with white details and a whole bunch of columns. One entrance's columns consist of about a dozen huge granite Atlas-like men holding the roof over their heads. Corinne took a number of photos; if I can get them from her later, I'll post a few. Or link to her blog, if she uploads the photos there. (Aside: Speaking of Corinne's blog, she posted a photo tour of our apartment there and gave me permission to link to it so my friends and family could see where I live. Here's the link.)
Right now, the Hermitage has an exhibition called "Lomonosov in the time of Elizabeth," referring of course to the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Mikhail Lomonosov was a polymath and writer alive during Elizabeth's reign, so the exhibit is a delightful mix of drawings and portraits of the Empress and 18th-century scientific equipment. As I said, though, most of the things Yulia told us about had to do with the histories of the buildings themselves and not the art housed within them. There were a couple of reception halls; the main reception hall was all gilded with an impressive gold colonnade, and the throne room or St. George room was nearly identical, except it had very stately white marble instead of so much gold. The design on the ceiling mirrored the floor inlay, made of something like 25 different types of wood, except for one key detail: where, in the ceiling decoration, there appeared a two-headed eagle, no such symbol was to be found on the floor, because that would be stepping on the Russian empire.
Attached to the Winter Palace was a smaller building that Catherine the Great had built so that she could invite her friends over and have a more private, more personal alternative to the play-acting necessary in her court. She had a list of rules engraved on a plaque (e.g., visitors must speak only Russian, no swearing, no drunkenness, etc), and any guest who broke a rule would have to immediately drink a glass of water and recite part of a very long, very complex poem, the title of which eludes me at the moment. I thought the story was funny, but then, I haven't seen this ultra-complex poem.
There is a corridor connecting the Small Hermitage (the building I mentioned in the previous paragraph) to the New Hermitage (commissioned by Catherine specifically as a public museum, unlike the rest of the complex). This corridor is full of art. The walls are covered in little pictures of people doing things, animals being silly, etc, and the pattern never repeats itself. It looks like it does, but in fact each image is unique. It's a series of arches, and on the ceiling between each arch are four panels depicting scenes from the Bible. One end of the hall begins with creation, and it progresses from there. There is so much going on in this corridor that it would take years to see everything. It's like a microcosm of the entire Hermitage, because the whole thing is like that. Catherine was a voracious art collector, and she bought entire collections as opposed to individual paintings. Knowing that, and seeing the sheer quantity of stuff that the Hermitage houses, makes it all the more impressive to know that the palace burnt down in the late 1837. A fire started somewhere and spread throughout the house between the walls, which were very thick and had spaces between them. While working on an expansion, at one point they decided to break down the wrong wall, and by then the fire had spread so far that the building couldn't be saved. Most of the things in it, however, could be. Paintings and heavy furniture were carted out and deposited in the snow in Palace Square, and it's said that the fire could be seen for miles. The inside of the building was completely redone, although the facade remained the same.
The tour was very fast, but also very informative; I was really more interested in the history more than the paintings housed within the building, anyway, so I'm glad it wasn't an interminable slog through a hundred rooms while Yulia talked at us about people we had never heard of and didn't care about. We stopped in the cafe afterward to sit and get coffee, and ended up staying so long that they actually had to kick us out because the cafe was closing. So we retrieved our coats and left.
I actually ended up writing this post over two days, because I forgot I was working on it yesterday. xD But nothing much more happened last night. I ate too many of these frozen pelmeni that I bought and cooked, but that discomfort was temporary and the story is not at all exciting. Tomorrow is National Women's Day; Corinne wants to go explore in town and see the festivities. I don't know if I'm gonna go with. Probably, but at the same time, I have a lot of important sleeping to do. And work. I do have work to do.
Anyway, by about 11:30, I decided that even if Valentina Semyonovna did show up eventually, I wouldn't be there long enough to make coming to class worthwhile. So, I put my coat and bags back on and left. See, this afternoon, Sergei had a friend of his take us--Corinne, Brenda, Holly and me--on a tour of the Hermitage, and I would've had to leave class early to have time to get back home, collect Corinne (she wasn't feeling well that morning, so she didn't come with me to the faculty), and figure out how to get to the Hermitage from my apartment. We stopped in the Palace Square courtyard on the walking tour with Sergei, but I wasn't paying a ton of attention to how we actually got there; my attention was fixed more on how cold it was, not slipping on the ice, and trying to hear what Sergei was saying because he's very soft-spoken.
Corinne and I checked the trolley routes and learned that trolleybus number 10 or 11 would take us where we needed to go. So we waited at the trolley stop, crammed ourselves into the first number 11 that showed up (along with what seemed like a hundred other people), paid our 21p and held on for dear life because this driver's got a schedule to keep, people! Shut up and hold on! Eventually Corinne grabbed a seat and, as soon as another one near her opened up, she helped me squeeze through the crowd to take it. I still feel weird about moving through crowds like that. I feel like I'm being rude, but I'm not. It's perfectly acceptable to brush against someone moving past them, without so much as an "excuse me, please." The only time anyone will say something to you is if there isn't enough room on either side of you to squeeze past. I mean, I'm sure there are probably some people I've encountered--especially at rush hour on the metro--who are being rude, perhaps pushing past others too brusquely, but for the most part navigating in crowds here does not require nearly the level of song and dance that it does in America.
Anyway, the Hermitage! My God, it's massive. It actually consists of several buildings connected to one another, and they are all beautiful. Most of the information we received from Yulia, Sergei's friend, was about the palace itself. The building that you will see photos of if you Google Image Search "Hermitage" or "Эрмитажа" used to be the Winter Palace, commissioned by Peter the Great. It's a striking shade of teal with white details and a whole bunch of columns. One entrance's columns consist of about a dozen huge granite Atlas-like men holding the roof over their heads. Corinne took a number of photos; if I can get them from her later, I'll post a few. Or link to her blog, if she uploads the photos there. (Aside: Speaking of Corinne's blog, she posted a photo tour of our apartment there and gave me permission to link to it so my friends and family could see where I live. Here's the link.)
Right now, the Hermitage has an exhibition called "Lomonosov in the time of Elizabeth," referring of course to the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Mikhail Lomonosov was a polymath and writer alive during Elizabeth's reign, so the exhibit is a delightful mix of drawings and portraits of the Empress and 18th-century scientific equipment. As I said, though, most of the things Yulia told us about had to do with the histories of the buildings themselves and not the art housed within them. There were a couple of reception halls; the main reception hall was all gilded with an impressive gold colonnade, and the throne room or St. George room was nearly identical, except it had very stately white marble instead of so much gold. The design on the ceiling mirrored the floor inlay, made of something like 25 different types of wood, except for one key detail: where, in the ceiling decoration, there appeared a two-headed eagle, no such symbol was to be found on the floor, because that would be stepping on the Russian empire.
Attached to the Winter Palace was a smaller building that Catherine the Great had built so that she could invite her friends over and have a more private, more personal alternative to the play-acting necessary in her court. She had a list of rules engraved on a plaque (e.g., visitors must speak only Russian, no swearing, no drunkenness, etc), and any guest who broke a rule would have to immediately drink a glass of water and recite part of a very long, very complex poem, the title of which eludes me at the moment. I thought the story was funny, but then, I haven't seen this ultra-complex poem.
There is a corridor connecting the Small Hermitage (the building I mentioned in the previous paragraph) to the New Hermitage (commissioned by Catherine specifically as a public museum, unlike the rest of the complex). This corridor is full of art. The walls are covered in little pictures of people doing things, animals being silly, etc, and the pattern never repeats itself. It looks like it does, but in fact each image is unique. It's a series of arches, and on the ceiling between each arch are four panels depicting scenes from the Bible. One end of the hall begins with creation, and it progresses from there. There is so much going on in this corridor that it would take years to see everything. It's like a microcosm of the entire Hermitage, because the whole thing is like that. Catherine was a voracious art collector, and she bought entire collections as opposed to individual paintings. Knowing that, and seeing the sheer quantity of stuff that the Hermitage houses, makes it all the more impressive to know that the palace burnt down in the late 1837. A fire started somewhere and spread throughout the house between the walls, which were very thick and had spaces between them. While working on an expansion, at one point they decided to break down the wrong wall, and by then the fire had spread so far that the building couldn't be saved. Most of the things in it, however, could be. Paintings and heavy furniture were carted out and deposited in the snow in Palace Square, and it's said that the fire could be seen for miles. The inside of the building was completely redone, although the facade remained the same.
The tour was very fast, but also very informative; I was really more interested in the history more than the paintings housed within the building, anyway, so I'm glad it wasn't an interminable slog through a hundred rooms while Yulia talked at us about people we had never heard of and didn't care about. We stopped in the cafe afterward to sit and get coffee, and ended up staying so long that they actually had to kick us out because the cafe was closing. So we retrieved our coats and left.
I actually ended up writing this post over two days, because I forgot I was working on it yesterday. xD But nothing much more happened last night. I ate too many of these frozen pelmeni that I bought and cooked, but that discomfort was temporary and the story is not at all exciting. Tomorrow is National Women's Day; Corinne wants to go explore in town and see the festivities. I don't know if I'm gonna go with. Probably, but at the same time, I have a lot of important sleeping to do. And work. I do have work to do.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Chapter the Fourth: Spring? Spring!
Following last Sunday's ironic Maslenitsa snow, the weather calmed down considerably. Friday morning, for instance, it was raining, and I was excited. That meant that the temperature was finally above zero outside, or, because Fahrenheit sounds less cold: the temperature was probably like, 35! Maybe even 36! Warm enough that the snow was melting into rain well above street level, anyway. The day was uneventful; that afternoon, Corinne and I decided to go shopping, because we both were in need of some new footwear if the temperature was going to continue to climb.
We went to the Galleria, about three blocks from the apartment, because Corinne knew of a shoe store called Centro Обувь. They had some really nice, relatively cheap boots, but I fell in love with a pair that came out to just under US$45. Light tan ankle boots with some adorable little buckle details. I figured they were worth it, because I'll be able to wear them back home when it cools off some in October and November. They fit quite nicely over my ingenious double-sock setup (one pair of the fuzzy green socks I got for Christmas--thanks Bill!--over one pair of regular socks), but they aren't too loose when my feet are less padded. They're super-cute, too! At some point I'll ask Corinne to take some pictures and upload them. I could have spent days in Centro, though, as anyone who has seen me within 100 feet of a shoe store can attest. If putting on shoes weren't such a production here, what with the double layers of socks all being carefully tucked between layers of thermal leggings to keep everything in place, I would have been trying on shoes left and right (pun definitely intended).
We stopped in a few other clothing stores, including one called Be Free, where Corinne bought this adorable brown sweater dress, and saw a dress she'd bought at the same store in Irkutsk, on sale for less than half of what she paid at the time. :( Aww. Well, you win some, you lose some. We also saw some sweaters that Alex and Liz had bought; they're the strangest things, just solid-color knitted wool sweaters with random words on them in a variety of colors. If I recall correctly, the selections were "Black" (black sweater, white letters), "White" (white with black), "Blonde" (light blue with white), "Smart" (salmon-pink with white), "Perfect" (blue with light yellow), and "Cactus" (green with black). Alex has a Black sweater and Liz got a Cactus one. They were like 100p each; we'll just have to go back and see if they're on sale, because I want a Smart sweater.
I like seeing merchandise with English writing on it; in one store, they were selling pillows with strange designs on them that incorporated some English words. One pillow had a weird, Adventure-Time-esque happy face and a speech bubble with the words "Am I trendy?" in it; another said something like "Give to me please money on the beer." To be fair, that's basically a direct translation of the same statement in Russian, but that doesn't make it any less funny. I almost wanted to buy it. Almost.
A couple hours after we got home, our roommates arrived, with Elizabeth in tow; apparently they'd already gone out someplace for dinner, and also stopped at a produkty for snacks and booze. Elizabeth's dinner had consisted of a couple of drinks, so she was already rather drunk by the time the group reached our apartment...which is why she thought it was a good idea to buy a one-liter can of beer at the produkty along with her sandwich ingredients. I didn't even know they made one-liter cans of anything before I came here. They are comically large: about 12 inches tall and 4-5 inches across. Elizabeth shared her liter of beer because she really didn't need that much to herself, and it made the ensuing game a lot more interesting.
I Googled around a bit but I couldn't find a name for that game where everyone writes down a famous person's name on a card and sticks it to someone else's forehead, and then you have to guess who you are. Head Bands? Celebrity Heads? Whatever, that game, you know it. They played it in Inglourious Basterds. And we played it in our kitchen, with Elizabeth (and one of Jorge's friends, but he came later). It was only a drinking game in the sense that most of the players happened to be imbibing alcohol at the time; we didn't institute formal rules like "drink if you guess wrong" or whatever. We played three rounds; I was Anna Karenina, Amelia Pond and Sleeping Beauty (although that one was revealed by accident when Corinne blurted it out, so I didn't guess it). The names I wrote down were Batman (for Corinne), Jack Daniels (for Liz) and Salvador Dali (also Liz). I don't remember who wrote them or whose heads they were on, but some of the other names we had were Spiderman, Harriet Tubman, Dracula, Pinocchio, Henry VIII and Beowulf. So, yeah, it was an interesting game, especially watching the more intoxicated players try to keep track of the clues they'd received. Many laughs were had by all, and afterward everyone else went out somewhere. I went to bed; they all came back at around 4:30, and Elizabeth spent the night with us because the metros were closed and she was too drunk to walk home alone.
This afternoon, when everyone woke up, Liz and Corinne spent some time planning and booking things for this Baltic spring break trip they'd been talking about for a while. Elizabeth and I are also going. :) I'm excited; we're going to a music festival in Estonia for 2-3 days, then kicking around Latvia and Lithuania for the next week-ish, bringing our total trip to about 9 days. We'll all have our passports and shiny new extended multi-entry visas by the week after next, and the trip is at the end of March; I think it's the 28th/29th through April 7th-ish. We're traveling by bus and staying in some really nice-looking hostels. I haven't decided if I'm going to bring my laptop; probably not, though, because most of the hostels have computers available for general use. And it's not like the apartment will be empty for those nine days; Jorge and Alex aren't coming with us, so they'll be there. The only problem I'll potentially run into then is keeping my iPod charged, because all I have is a USB cord, but even then, Corinne's iPod charge cord might fit my iPod (I dunno how old her iPod is).
The total cost for this trip looks like it's gonna be probably close to US$550, including bus/music festival tickets ($121/$45), hostel fees ($300 total), and food (~$90). With any luck, my Stetson refund check will be processed soon and I'll have a considerable chunk of change dropped into my account. I've already set aside $466 in my savings account, so I know that I'll at least be able to pay Liz for the bus tickets/hostel booking fees, Corinne for the festival tickets and the hostel for my bed. I'm not hurting for money right now, or anything, but with a $5 non-Wells Fargo ATM fee on top of however much I withdraw, each time I withdraw some cash (usually around $70, but the exact amount fluctuates with the exchange rate), I know I need to stay on top of my spending. $5 adds up over time.
We went to the Galleria, about three blocks from the apartment, because Corinne knew of a shoe store called Centro Обувь. They had some really nice, relatively cheap boots, but I fell in love with a pair that came out to just under US$45. Light tan ankle boots with some adorable little buckle details. I figured they were worth it, because I'll be able to wear them back home when it cools off some in October and November. They fit quite nicely over my ingenious double-sock setup (one pair of the fuzzy green socks I got for Christmas--thanks Bill!--over one pair of regular socks), but they aren't too loose when my feet are less padded. They're super-cute, too! At some point I'll ask Corinne to take some pictures and upload them. I could have spent days in Centro, though, as anyone who has seen me within 100 feet of a shoe store can attest. If putting on shoes weren't such a production here, what with the double layers of socks all being carefully tucked between layers of thermal leggings to keep everything in place, I would have been trying on shoes left and right (pun definitely intended).
We stopped in a few other clothing stores, including one called Be Free, where Corinne bought this adorable brown sweater dress, and saw a dress she'd bought at the same store in Irkutsk, on sale for less than half of what she paid at the time. :( Aww. Well, you win some, you lose some. We also saw some sweaters that Alex and Liz had bought; they're the strangest things, just solid-color knitted wool sweaters with random words on them in a variety of colors. If I recall correctly, the selections were "Black" (black sweater, white letters), "White" (white with black), "Blonde" (light blue with white), "Smart" (salmon-pink with white), "Perfect" (blue with light yellow), and "Cactus" (green with black). Alex has a Black sweater and Liz got a Cactus one. They were like 100p each; we'll just have to go back and see if they're on sale, because I want a Smart sweater.
I like seeing merchandise with English writing on it; in one store, they were selling pillows with strange designs on them that incorporated some English words. One pillow had a weird, Adventure-Time-esque happy face and a speech bubble with the words "Am I trendy?" in it; another said something like "Give to me please money on the beer." To be fair, that's basically a direct translation of the same statement in Russian, but that doesn't make it any less funny. I almost wanted to buy it. Almost.
A couple hours after we got home, our roommates arrived, with Elizabeth in tow; apparently they'd already gone out someplace for dinner, and also stopped at a produkty for snacks and booze. Elizabeth's dinner had consisted of a couple of drinks, so she was already rather drunk by the time the group reached our apartment...which is why she thought it was a good idea to buy a one-liter can of beer at the produkty along with her sandwich ingredients. I didn't even know they made one-liter cans of anything before I came here. They are comically large: about 12 inches tall and 4-5 inches across. Elizabeth shared her liter of beer because she really didn't need that much to herself, and it made the ensuing game a lot more interesting.
I Googled around a bit but I couldn't find a name for that game where everyone writes down a famous person's name on a card and sticks it to someone else's forehead, and then you have to guess who you are. Head Bands? Celebrity Heads? Whatever, that game, you know it. They played it in Inglourious Basterds. And we played it in our kitchen, with Elizabeth (and one of Jorge's friends, but he came later). It was only a drinking game in the sense that most of the players happened to be imbibing alcohol at the time; we didn't institute formal rules like "drink if you guess wrong" or whatever. We played three rounds; I was Anna Karenina, Amelia Pond and Sleeping Beauty (although that one was revealed by accident when Corinne blurted it out, so I didn't guess it). The names I wrote down were Batman (for Corinne), Jack Daniels (for Liz) and Salvador Dali (also Liz). I don't remember who wrote them or whose heads they were on, but some of the other names we had were Spiderman, Harriet Tubman, Dracula, Pinocchio, Henry VIII and Beowulf. So, yeah, it was an interesting game, especially watching the more intoxicated players try to keep track of the clues they'd received. Many laughs were had by all, and afterward everyone else went out somewhere. I went to bed; they all came back at around 4:30, and Elizabeth spent the night with us because the metros were closed and she was too drunk to walk home alone.
This afternoon, when everyone woke up, Liz and Corinne spent some time planning and booking things for this Baltic spring break trip they'd been talking about for a while. Elizabeth and I are also going. :) I'm excited; we're going to a music festival in Estonia for 2-3 days, then kicking around Latvia and Lithuania for the next week-ish, bringing our total trip to about 9 days. We'll all have our passports and shiny new extended multi-entry visas by the week after next, and the trip is at the end of March; I think it's the 28th/29th through April 7th-ish. We're traveling by bus and staying in some really nice-looking hostels. I haven't decided if I'm going to bring my laptop; probably not, though, because most of the hostels have computers available for general use. And it's not like the apartment will be empty for those nine days; Jorge and Alex aren't coming with us, so they'll be there. The only problem I'll potentially run into then is keeping my iPod charged, because all I have is a USB cord, but even then, Corinne's iPod charge cord might fit my iPod (I dunno how old her iPod is).
The total cost for this trip looks like it's gonna be probably close to US$550, including bus/music festival tickets ($121/$45), hostel fees ($300 total), and food (~$90). With any luck, my Stetson refund check will be processed soon and I'll have a considerable chunk of change dropped into my account. I've already set aside $466 in my savings account, so I know that I'll at least be able to pay Liz for the bus tickets/hostel booking fees, Corinne for the festival tickets and the hostel for my bed. I'm not hurting for money right now, or anything, but with a $5 non-Wells Fargo ATM fee on top of however much I withdraw, each time I withdraw some cash (usually around $70, but the exact amount fluctuates with the exchange rate), I know I need to stay on top of my spending. $5 adds up over time.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Chapter the Fourth: Maslenitsa!
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.
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.
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