Бени, Форест, беги!!

Oh what a night. I went into the day yesterday thinking that I was going to have nothing to do last night and then didn't end up coming home until around 5 in the morning... I had work after school at Lenfilm, but it was kind of just a joke, because he basically just gave each of us a simple task and then left the room, without giving us anything to do when we were finished. So we ended up just getting to know the German girl that is also interning there - she is from Leipzig and also studying in St. Petersburg for the semester.

Then later as I was going home I got a text from my tutor asking if I wanted to come and hang out at Anna's apartment to watch a Soviet film. We'd been planning to do that at some point and I had no plans, so I said sure! Then when I met up with them we went to the store and she bought a bunch of "supplies" for the evening. When we got to the apartment, I saw my first chihuahua in Russia - Sasha was not impressed haha - I'm pretty sure she asked its owner how he could stand its high-pitched voice, and he was like awww, but she so pretty! At the apartment, Sasha made us these insanely delicious and massive portiongs of spaghetti with cheese and mushrooms. She also made a 3-layer chocolate cake, but we were unfortunately way too full to eat it. For most of the time we were just sitting in the kitchen talking, but when we eventually tried to watch the movie, we found out that it didn't have english subtitles and the language was too advanced for my meager "group 6" level russian :) so we agreed to find a different version with subtitles later and just hung out. Then Sasha got a call from a friend that wanted them to check out a new bar/club that had just opened, so they picked us up and drove us. I'm pretty sure that they told me the place was called "Alleluia," but I'm not sure, because when I asked one of their friends (also named Sasha, surprise surprise) what the name was, I couldn't understand what he said, but it was pretty loud in there, so that's forgivable. Had a bit of a headache when I woke up the next morning, but it was a fun night - never seems to be a dull moment with Sasha ;)

SO, it seems that yet again, another week has passed since I began writing this and I need to play catch up a little bit. On Wednesday, we went to Gatchina, a city about an hour away that at one time was named the greatest city in Russia during one of the World Fairs, apparently.. We mostly just explored the castle and surrounding park when we were there, but I really enjoyed it. The weather was nice for park weather and we got to walk through into this neat underground tunnel underneath the castle. I think my favorite part of the castle were the rooms that still hadn't been restored, so they were basically still in ruins, all stone and crumbly.. but you could still see where old paintings had hung and envision how it used it be.

I also started running this week, which has been an adventure unto itself. I've only seen one other person out running ever here, so I get a lot of funny looks from people on the streets and in the park.. one guy grabbed his girlfriend and "protected" her from me as I ran past and this morning, and a guy actually blocked me from passing him and asked me if I ran every morning and if he could run with me, but when I told him that I usually started at 7 in the morning, he reconsidered. I'm usually chased by an average of 2 or 3 stray dogs on my route as well, but I haven't been bitten yet (knock on wood)!

I've been getting really excited about travel as well! We are leaving for Sochi next Sunday and a small group of us also just bought our train tickets to go to Moscow for the weekend after we come back from Sochi (we have Monday off that weekend) :) Plus Grace and I have been planning our Eastern Europe trip for in between the Summer and Spring semesters - right now we are thinking Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine! We'll be roughin' it with mostly all bus rides and hostels, but it will be an adventure! All soooo exciting!!

Today we are going to the Museum of Politics and Religion and tonight I'm going to hang out with Sasha again, but other than that, no major plans this weekend. Next week is my host sister's bday (she'll be 8!) so I need to find a gift for her and I have to decide what to bring to Sochi as well- I've never packed for a 46 hour train ride before - wish me luck ;)

update - long overdue

At the Baltika Brewery
Find me in da club... (that's Lena...)
Deformed fetuses (feti???)
Church of Spilled Blood - worm's eye view
My host sisters discovered my photo booth

Oh dear - I've been quite a slacker blogger, but I've had so little time that it's been difficult to find moment to blog.. and suddenly 2 weekends have passed! so here's an update, best as I can remember...

Last week, Thursday night

I went with my friend, Lena, that I met at The Other Side (a meeting with Russians students going to work in the US this summer) to a Russian dance club. In a strange way, it reminded me a little bit of an American prom! Not in the way people were dressed (it was very casual), but in that her university had rented the club for the night and there was a mini-competition between a bunch of girls to be Miss (Name of Lena's University goes here), like our competitions for prom queen! The club was really nice though - 2 floors, with a rap and r&b as well as a rock & electronic music floor. But we ended up staying out until the metro opened at 6 am, so needless to say, I was very tired the next day...

Friday

After class we met up with some newly arrived students from England that are studying Russian at Herzen and hung out with them for a while.. They are actually living in an apartment with other Russians, which sounds like will be a lot of fun for them! Later in the evening they led us to this hidden underground that has no sign or name, it's basically just this discreet door in an alley, but when you open it, there's this secret, happenin' party inside - very Russian :-)

Saturday

On Saturday, I met up with a different Russian friend named Lena, and we went to Kunstkamera - a famous anthropology museum, and also the first museum in Russia! It's famous for its exhibit on deformed fetuses and monsters, but it's also got a bunch of models of people from different cultures from around the world and various artifacts and such - very cool! Then she invited me to a Turkish dance class! It was at this Turkish cultural center where they also taught Turkish cooking, art, language, and music. Something I never would have thought of learning myself, but turned out to be really fun! All the people that worked there were really enthusiastic and gave us a tour of the center and such. I might go again to day, if I have time - classes are free!

Saturday night, a group of us went to the German bar near the dorm. While Kaitlin and I were hanging out at the bar, one of the Russian guys at the table near us heard us speaking English and awkwardly turned around and just started watching us. When we asked him why, he said that he just wanted to hear the "English lexicon," because it'd be good practice for him.. We told him that if he wanted to practice, he should join in the conversation, rather than just listen to it, but then we ended up just talking with him in Russian. Despite his initial creeper-ness, he ended up being pretty cool and I ended up interviewing him about Stalin for my politics class. When we were talking his friend came up behind him and said to us in English, "Be careful! He is a very hairy man!" And it made my night. We exchanged kontakt (Russian facebook) info when we were leaving. Hooray new friends! After that we went back to the Irish bar and played darts for most of the night - I surprised myself and ended up playing pretty impressively - even got a bulls eye!

Sunday

Can't for the life of me recall what I did during the day, but in the evening I went to Palm Sunday mass in Russian and I was going to meet with my tutor, but my phone was being screwy so I couldn't get in touch with her after. I did buy a cheap book of Boris Pasternak poems in Russian though, so the night wasn't a total waste.

Tuesday (skipping Monday, because I don't remember anything significant)

Not too much interesting, except when we were crossing the street going back to school from lunch, we ran into our friend, Slava, from the German bar. I found out later that he works just a couple of buildings down from where we study - small world!

In the evening I met my tutor and Anna at a sushi bar and when I got there, they were having a contest to see who had the the most tear shed after eating wasabi - looked pretty painful, but funny. Later on I had a Jaime-moment and spilled my beer all over everything so we had to switch tables. But I still had a really fun time hanging out with them, as always.

Wednesday

On Wednesday morning, I met Nathan at the dorm so I could go and pick up my package. It was really easy to do, but it ended up not being the package that I had expected. I thought that it was going to be the package with the gifts for my family and such, but it turned out to just be my computer battery and some melted chocolate - which was also useful, but not what I was expecting, nonetheless...

Then we had our weekly excursion to Cpas na Krovi (Church of Spilled Blood) which was gorgeous, but our tour guide was just kind of so-so. She spoke very softly and just looked kind of bored the whole time. But oh well, it was nice to look around and see the inside of it anyway. Afterwards we went to lunch at Dve Polachki (2 sticks - as in chopsticks) and my friend Max got 6 scoops of ice cream - I never seen this kid more stoked than when he eats dve polachki's ice cream - he could do a commercial for them.

Thursday

After class, we had a - aww pause for second - my host mom just brought me ice cream!!! <333

OKay - i'm back from my euphoria. So after class, we had a mini-celebration of Spring - all the groups (minus the Chinese students) presented either skits or songs or poetry for each other and in between we played little games, kind of so we could get to know some of the other people at Herzen. My group sang three Russian songs that we learned in our phonetics class - I even learned a little of the harmony part for one of the songs, so I think it turned out pretty nice. We could hear our phonetics teacher singing along the harmony when we sang Vecherniy Zvon :). She is so adorable. I also represented my group that I had been split up into for one one of the games and had to race the other students to eat an entire paper plate of the most foul, sour berries that I've ever tasted. Thanks to my less than refined sense of taste, I won. All in all it turned out to be pretty fun and it was nice to meet some of the other foreign students studying Russian there. Then as we were leaving school I had another random run-in with Slava again while we were on the streets. Must be fate :-P

Friday

In the morning I did a presentation on Russian rock music for my conversation class, which I felt slightly unprepared for, but it ended up going alright anyway. My teacher knew enough about the topic already to fill in the blanks for me, when I wasn't sure how to explain something about it, so it worked.

For our third class on Fridays we usually have phonetics, but this particular day our teacher took us to an Russian orthodox church service for Good Friday. It was soooo beautiful! It reminded me so much of mass in Ukraine - people stand the whole time, and the entire mass is sung/chanted. By the end of it, I'm usually a little tired, but I feel somewhat cleansed as well. Kind of like the same way I feel after I do yoga.

After that I went to work at my internship for a while. This time there was also a german girl working there that we got to meet and she was super friendly. After work, we went and met up with a couple of people to visit a park, but I didn't stay very long, because I was still carrying around my laptop and wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be carrying it around the whole night. But then when I got home I discovered that my modem had run out of money, so I had to go back out to the store in order to get internet. I had a pretty cool moment when I got there though, because there was an African man trying to speak to the cashier girl in English, but the girl couldn't understand, so I translated for them, and actually solved the problem! It's nice to feel useful sometimes ;-)

Welp.. more has happened, but I am tired, and I think I will have to finish out the rest of the update tomorrow.. But I will post this one as is, because I don't want to delay it any longer - gotta be more disciplined about this!

Happy Paskha to all!!!!