Animal cruelty
a very large cannon
inside peter & paul's
Peter & Paul's Fortress
When I came home Monday night, there was this huge hole in front of the apartment - it's still there and noone knows why (my host mother said they were "doing something")...On Saturday I had a pretty lazy day - I played legos with Alina (she is a pro car designer!) and just hung around for most of the day until I met with my tutor, Sasha. We met at the metro around 7:30 and then met up with her other friends that she had introduced me to at Dacha - Sasha (male version) and Anna (the Armenian) to go to Anna's apartment. It was an awesome night!
We first stopped at a big grocery store where they bought beer, food, and Jagermeister for the evening. Then we hailed a cab and drove to her apartment, which they explained to me was in, what they call a спальный район, literally the sleeping region, because it's one of those areas where lots of people just go home to sleep and then spend the day in the city center. But the apartment was beautiful! Maybe it's just because I've gotten so used to my tiny apartment, but Anna's place seemed so spacious and humongous to me - there was a huge living room, nice bathroom and kitchen, and a balcony! There, I met Anna's roommate, Lera, who I also really liked and their super friendly and adorable gray cat named Мурзырка (because cats here say "мур мур").
Then we all just basically sat in the kitchen chatting and making toasts the whole night. I asked my questions that we were required to ask 2 Russians for my politics class and that ended up being pretty funny.. The questions were about who currently was in local office in Petersburg and the purpose was really to show that most Russians don't know (or bother to know) who is in local office usually. But when I asked them, they all got really excited (I guess because they didn't know) and calling their friends who were involved with politics to see if they knew. Then Sasha, the guy, took my notebook, left the room for about 20 minutes, and returned with names. lol. I tried to explain that they could just say, "I don't know," but apparently they were not satisfied with that. The funny thing is when I gave my teacher their answers on Tuesday in class, only one of their answers were correct! But it was better than the rest of the class, whose interviewees pretty much all answered that they didn't know..
Then Sasha and I looked through a culture and entertainment magazine about current stuff going in Petersburg to see if there was anything interesting coming up that we could go to together. Now we're planning on going to a concert together on Friday! Sasha also made us some delicious bacon, cheese and tomato sandwiches halfway through the night.. We didn't end up leaving until about 2 in the morning! But they accompanied my all the way home and Sasha wouldn't even let me pay for my cab ride.. It was so refreshing to just be able to hang out at someone's home, rather than at a bar or even the dorm, and all of them were so fun to spend time with!
On Sunday, I met up with Brittany and two Russian girls that we met at one of the English-Russian discussion groups, Lena and Veronika to go to Peter and Paul's Fortress. There we got to see the tombs where all of the old tsars and the Romanovs are buried - I've never seen Brittany so excited since we've been in Russia! She's obsessed with the Romanovs so seeing their tombs was like fulfilling a life goal for her - she said that she wanted to come back every day! It was pretty awesome though. We also walked around a little bit on the frozen Neva River (everyone was doing it, so I'm pretty sure it was sturdy :-/)..
Monday was a regular class day again, but after class we had our weekly meeting with Nathan and he took our passports away :-( so we can't travel to anywhere really far away until we get them back (which probably won't be for another month or so).. Oh well. But we also found out officially that we are going to Sochi for our big trip at the end of April and meeting up with the Moscow and Vladimir groups there - that means a 46 hour train ride (which, in turn, means no shower, no modern toilets, and lots of bonding time)!
After the meeting, Max and I had "work" for our internship at Lenfilm. But on this particular day they wanted us to help with this series of old American films that they are presenting at an indie theater every week with Russian subtitles. And we didn't actually end up doing any real work - they gave us a little tour of place, where we got to see where they project the films from and meet the lady that's in charge of the theater. But then they just had us watch the movie that was being shown that week. It was called, Wings, and it was about these American soldiers that go to war and their relationships with one another and such. It was one of those movies where the entire film soundtrack is instrumental music and you have to read all of the dialogue, even in the English version. I thought it was decent, even though it felt really long - my favorite part was when one of the soldiers gets really drunk off champagne and all he can talk about is the bubbles that he keeps having visions of. Thus I learned the important Russian word, "пузырьки
(bubbles).
Welp, even though I started writing this on Tuesday, it's actually now Wednesday and we already went on our excursion to Russian museum. It was cool - just a quick little tour to see some of the older Russian works in the museum and then we went to lunch at a Japanese restaurant. We ended up staying for a really long time, I feel like it was about 3 hours, and then going to the пышки (a Russian doughnut, kind of like funnel cake) place that has 19-rouble coffee! Then I had my mid-semester evaluation meeting with Nathan. We got little report cards with comments from all of our teachers, and I'm apparently doing well, so I was glad :-).. My phonetics teacher said that I was a "well-wishing" girl that sang well, haha. I got 5's (like an A) in all of my classes, except for my elective, lingvokulturologia, which I got a 4 in. I was kind of surprised, because I feel like I'm one of the better students in that class, but she might just be a harder grader - I might ask her about it, but it's no big deal either way...
Now I've got to do some hw unfortunately - 4 hours of grammar tomorrow, yikes! But at least I can look forward to discussion group - tomorrow we're discussing body language :-). Пока!
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