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!!!!