Chapter the Sixth: Estonia

THURSDAY

It will be after Easter by the time you read this chapter. I'm starting to type it up, however, on one of the hostel computers in Tallinn, Estonia! It might surprise you to learn--it certainly surprised me--that the Estonian keyboard layout is quite different from the standard American. The QWERTY layout is the same, but many punctuation keys are located in different places, and it's really thrown me off quite a few times. For instance, where I expect there to be an apostrophe key, instead that key types the letter ä, with an umlaut.

Anyway, Thursday was quite an adventurous day! Our bus left that morning at 6:45, and we just managed to be on it when that happened. We hurried down the escalator at the metro station, down another level to the red line, grabbed the first train we saw going in the right direction, and then literally ran from the metro exit to the bus stop, where the big blue and yellow Ecolines bus was parked and nearly ready to go.

One thing I have learned in my time here is that assigned seats, in most contexts, are essentially a formality, and no one is going to come after you for sitting somewhere else. This is handy when you show up 15 minutes late for a bus ride and need to take whatever seats you can find. Liz and Corinne took a couple of seats near the front; I took a couple seats in the back, one for me and one for my bags. I have my clothes packed in my backpack, toiletries in the toiletry bag I got at the Christmas gift exchange, and of course my wallet and documents in my purse. The ride from St. Petersburg to Tallinn was about seven hours. I took a series of 45-ish minute naps on the way; by the time we got to the border and had to get off the bus to go through customs, everyone was glad of the opportunity to stand and stretch for a while.

The scenery we passed was eerie. Outside the city, it is still very much winter, despite the fact that we are on the cusp of April. Snow and ice coat the ground in vast swaths, and it was foggy, lending a ghostly air to distant trees and buildings.


Estonia is weird. We drove through about 200 miles of rural residences before reaching Tallinn, at which point we pretty much literally turned the corner and entered a maze of high-rise apartment buildings. These soon gave way to the city proper. Tallinn is even weirder, a bizarre hybrid of medieval and modern city trying to cope with heavy modern pedestrian as well as automobile traffic. Half the streets are cobblestone, and the sidewalks are narrow.

For dinner, we tried to go to this place Liz saw on lonelyplanet called Hell Hunt, Tallinn's oldest new pub (established 1993). Unfortunately, it was closed for renovation until next week, when we'll be long gone. So we went to this other restaurant instead, called Porgu or something along those lines. This place boasted the "best selection of draught beers in Estonia." They certainly had some interesting ones; Liz and Corinne tried their farmhouse ale and a chocolate porter, and I opted for some English cider. The food we got was also good: chicken in mushroom sauce with mashed potatoes, sundried tomatoes and some kind of leek-like vegetable for me and Corinne, and salmon in similar sauce with cauliflower pie, asparagus, and radishes for Liz.

We spent Thursday exploring and figuring out what we were going to do Friday. Part of the reason we came to Tallinn at all was for a music festival taking place from the 29th through the 31st, and while waiting for our dinner at Porgu, we checked the schedule and decided which acts we were interested in seeing.

FRIDAY

We woke up around noon on Friday and decided the theme of the day was Medieval, so we explored the medieval part of the city. First, we got some lunch at this medieval-themed restaurant called Ill Draakon (presumably "The Dragon"), where they have a very simple menu. Food is one euro, drinks are two, and their food options include elk soup and various savory pies, including beef/pork, elk/pork, carrot, spinach, and cabbage. They also had apple pies. It was delicious, although you do pretty much get what you pay for; one euro buys you about a cup of soup or one small pie (note: not a pie in the American sense, i.e. a large round pastry baked in a tin; more like what we would call a turnover or a homemade Hot Pocket, a small pouch of flaky dough containing filling of some kind). Two euros buys you a half-pint of house beer (light or dark), or "hot-blooded wine," which I was curious about. I ended up just getting a half-pint of dark beer with my spinach pie and bowl of soup, because Liz and Corinne got that and it sounded good by the time it was my turn to order. Everything was delicious; of course, that only makes sense. Sell your fare for cheap but make it really tasty, so people will come back and buy another portion of soup or another pie. Such tactics worked on us, anyway; we ended up buying a couple of apple pies after we finished our spinach pies and soup.

After that, we went to this old tower called Kiek in de Kök, which translates to "a peek in the kitchen," not whatever you were thinking, perv. It's called that because you can see basically everything from the tower, including peeking into the kitchens of surrounding peasant residences. We toured the old tunnels beneath the defense tower and surrounding bastion, which was really cool. They restored many of the tunnels in 2009, and they have them decorated such that as you progress through each successive room, you are transported back in time; in the 20th and 21st centuries, the tunnels were used as shelter for homeless people (the tour guide said the last homeless man living in the tunnels was kicked out something like seven years ago), hiding places for counterculture groups like punk rockers in the Soviet era (full of fleas at the time, which is why punks were able to hide there even though the tunnels weren't secret), and shelters against air raids in the early to mid-20th century. Before that, the tunnels were mainly used as prisons if they were used at all, and even further back (i.e., end of the 17th century) they were simply used as a way to move troops between defense towers.

They also have one long, straight tunnel that they converted to an exhibit on predictions of the future of Estonia. In this tunnel, guests sit on a futuristic-looking People Mover-esque contraption, which slowly trundles sideways as you view a short film about the future of the city. Then you get off and enter a room where there are some 21st-century items displayed as well as an example of what future archeologists might say about them; some of the items include a necktie, a G-string, cigarettes, platform heels, and a beer can. The predictions are sardonic in tone; for example, on the platform heels, the information blurb suggests that they were worn by prisoners, because escape would be difficult while wearing them. It made me laugh, anyway.

Mari Kalkun, an Estonian folk musician that Corinne and Liz were interested in seeing was playing at a tiny record shop on the second floor of a building in the newer part of town that afternoon, so we hurried over there and caught the second half of her set. That was basically how we spent the rest of Friday, being late to shows; eventually we just settled in at the Von Krahl theater and bar, where the acts alternated by the hour--one hour there would be someone playing a set in the bar, the next hour they would be upstairs in the theater. The bands we saw there were called Jaakko and Jay (punk rock) and Husky Rescue (alt folk).

Later, we moved to this bar that was just down the street from our hostel, where an Estonian rockabilly band called Boogie Company was playing. Estonian rockabilly is exactly as awesome as you think it is. Apparently the genre is gaining popularity in Estonia; the lead singer/bass player (he had FLAMES on his bass!) said they were just one of thousands of rockabilly bands in the country. They were awesome, though; bouncy music, funny banter, a generally upbeat atmosphere. It was, all in all, a very nice way to end the day.

SATURDAY

Each day of the Tallinn Music Week festival, there were a handful of acts in the early afternoon (1-4ish) on the "city stage," which were free to attend. These took place in a large mall called the Viru center as well as in small venues around the city (record shops, art galleries). We went to the mall for a while and parked ourselves in front of the main city stage to watch a few of the acts.

One of the acts we saw there was called Estonian Voices. This consisted of six people--three men, three women--singing a capella. It was really impressive; one of the girls had an amazing range, and they did vocal-instrument singing as well as harmony. One of the songs they did was an entirely vocal freeform jazz piece, where one of the women sang the part of a screaming trumpet. As hard as it probably is to make a trumpet make that noise, it must be just as difficult if not more so for a human to do so. They didn't speak English, but that was OK, they were still awesome to watch and listen to.

We also caught a short set by an alt-punk band from Russia called Motorama at an architecture gallery before Liz and I returned to the hostel to take a nap. (The beds there were better than our beds in Petersburg!) Corinne opted to explore the city some more; she came back later with some delicious bread and jam, among other things. There were a bunch of acts playing one right after the other that evening at a kino, so we made plans to head over there and just stay there all night.

And that is what we did. We were a bit late (as usual), but we grabbed some seats up front and enjoyed a never-ending stream of folky alternative acts. We caught the second half of Silver Sepp's set, but he also played percussion for Mari Kalkun, who followed him. A Latvian artist, Alina Orlova, followed her; Corinne and Liz were already fans, so they were extra excited about that. Alina's style is also folky and soft, kind of like Ellie Goulding but with more Eastern European flavor.

The last act of the night was an Austrian band called Diver. The band consisted of three guys with guitars. One of them also played keyboard and accordion; another also played a melodica. The lead just played his guitar and sang. I would describe their style as kind of alt-pop, sort of Owl City-like but less electronic. We liked Diver so much that Corinne bought their CD before we left, while I was busy liberating a poster from the wall downstairs. The event was over that night, and there were more posters literally all over the city, so I figured they wouldn't miss one. Hopefully the poster will survive the trip home, because it's pretty neat.

SUNDAY

Sunday morning, we woke up before noon and got our stuff together so we could check out of the hostel by 11 AM. We planned to go to this place called Kompressor, for huge pancakes, and it turns out that Hell Hunt finished their renovations early, so we wanted to go there, too! We ended up having to take all of our bags with us, but that was OK. They aren't that heavy.

We showed up at Kompressor just after it opened and decided to split a giant pancake. We opted for a blueberry-and-cream one, and when it arrived we were glad we decided to share it. It was a massive crepe; folded in quarters, one side was about seven or eight inches long. We cut it into thirds and devoured it quickly, drank our coffee and tea, and then hurried across town to Hell Hunt.

We managed to arrive about 15 minutes before Hell Hunt opened at noon, so we killed some time in this little handicraft souvenir shop next door. Liz bought socks, and Corinne got her sister some paper dolls, although they proved kind of difficult to transport. I think she maybe didn't realize that the sheets aren't perforated and you actually have to cut out the clothes with scissors.

In any case, we all got some lunch at Hell Hunt, and Liz was excited by a Scottish IPA they had on the menu. They brought it out to her and it made her entire week, I think. She loves IPAs and they are all but impossible to find in Russia, so this was the first IPA she'd had in about seven months. She drank it happily; the 9.2% alcohol content didn't hurt, either, I imagine. She bought another bottle for the road and decided to hold onto it until Tuesday, which was her birthday.

Following that, we hopped on a tram back to the bus depot and arrived with plenty of time to spare, a welcome change from the last time we boarded a bus. The bus that would take us to Latvia was a double-decker, and the three of us sat together on the top floor, which was really cool. The ride was pretty boring; they played this bizarre Russian Cinderella-like film on the way and I napped for part of it. We didn't have to stop at the border this time, because apparently Latvia's just cool with whoever wants to come over, man. Not like Russia, which monitors comings and goings at all of her borders with all the vigor and vigilance one would expect from a country symbolized by a two-headed eagle.

Chapter the Sixth: The Lost Files

I got the pictures I needed, so I'm gonna go ahead and publish my Baltic adventures. Those of you who have signed up to receive email updates will see this in your inbox as well as the Estonia post; I've decided not to publish all three at once, because they form a whole narrative and reading them out of order will only confuse you. So, go click over to the second email from There and Back Again in your inbox and laugh!

I also wanted to get these up ASAP because the most recent post (about the Blockade Tour) just bums me out every time I reread it. The Lost Files are much sillier and more lighthearted.

Chapter the Seventh: Because History

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.