Women's day weekend !

Aaaah another long weekend - thank you women's day! That's on Monday, so we get another day off. We were thinking about traveling some where, but our ND friends who are studying in Vladimir and Moscow decided to visit this weekend, so once again we remain in Piter.

All in all it has been a good week. On Tuesday we all went out to a bar since we didn't have class the next day and met up with some Germans that some people had met at the German bar a couple of nights ago. It turned out that they were going to the same hockey game that we were going to for our cultural excursion on Wednesday so we exchanged numbers and met up with them there for a little bit too.

The hockey game was a blast! We were right next to the super fan cheering section - i don't know how many times I heard the, "Только СКА и только победа!" (Only SKA, only victory!) The team we were rooting for ended up winning 6 to 4, I think. After the game, we all went to Dacha for a little bit since it was one of the student's 21st birthdays.

The next day we went to go and see Alice and Wonderland in Russian and I really enjoyed it, despite not really being able to understand all of the dialogue. But we saw it in 3d so the visuals were still really neat and Johnny Depp made for an entertaining Mad Hatter (Шлаппик in the russian version ;-)) .. Then I walked home with my friend Kolya and he ended up walking me all the way up to my apartment since I was kind of lost (surprise surprise). But he said something that kind of boggled my mind when we were talking about our apartments - I was telling him how my apartment was pretty small and old and there were just 3 rooms in addition to the kitchen and toilet. He then said that during Soviet times, there were probably 3 families sharing my apartment - 1 in each room! So an entire family could have been living in my tiny little room! Nutso... but really interesting!

Then Friday I gave a presentation on Woodstock for my conversation. I had been up pretty late finishing it up the night before, but I think it turned out pretty well - I played a piece of Jimi Hendrix's improv Star Spangled Banner and showed some pictures along with my powerpoint. Kaitlin did her presentation on Titanic and showed some of the dubbed Russian version of Titanic - that brought me back. And Brittany did her presentation on the Olympics.

After class I went to my internship with the film company, Lenfilm. When I told my host father where I worked, he told me that Lenfilm was like the Hollywood (but he pronounced it like Gollyvood, so I didn't understand at first) of St. Petersburg! Basically I just corrected the English part of their website and some letters they were sending out to English-speaking film makers about their summer film festival - very chill. But when we were getting ready to leave, they saw that my laptop was kind of sticking out of my purse and since they were worried about me having it stolen, they gave me a laptop bag to keep! I was sooo excited - I think they were pretty amused that I was so excited about it because they kept laughing at me when I was thanking them - but it's a really nice bag and I didn't have one here!

Then, last night after I congratulated mother on her bday, I went to a goodbye party for the Germans at one of their flats. The apartment was so cute - we all just congregated in their little yellow kitchen - it looked like a typical hipstery, city apartment with maps all hanging up on the walls and tons of homemade food everywhere! It was refreshing to go to house party again, and totally bizarre for me because I could hear Russian, English, and German all around me and kind of understand the gist of what everyone was saying! Made me feel pretty proud ;-)

And now it's a lazy Saturday morning again, going on the afternoon now actually. But my family always sleeps really late on the weekends, so I end up just relaxing a lot on weekend mornings and end up eating breakfast at like 12 :)

Today we should be meeting up with Jeff (our friend who's been in Vladimir) - he's apparently staying right across from the dorm! And I'm supposed to get together with my tutor some time tonight - yay! She wanted to get together on Thursday or Friday, but I was totally booked at that point. But I had an awesome time last time we hung out so I'm sure today will be fun too...

That's all for now - let you know how the weekend went soon!