I'm in Russia...

Sunday, March 29, 2009

In less than 7 weeks I will be back in America.  I can’t believe the first quarter of the year is almost over.  I can’t believe my formal studies in Russia are almost over.  The past month has gone by faster than the rest, as I have been traveling for the past 2.5 weeks.  I’ll do my best to recap…

A few weeks ago all the Americans took the night train down to Moscow.  My first experience on the night train from Piter to Moscow was a few years ago, and I didn’t like it because I had a lot of trouble sleeping.  Now I am used to it and really enjoy being asleep on the way to Moscow because no time is wasted.  In Moscow I met up with a friend, whom I met in Nizhny Novgorod this summer and who moved to Moscow a few months ago.  It was nice to visit Moscow now that I finally know someone who lives there.  I usually dread trips to Moscow, but I noticed that I liked Moscow more this time than I have previously.

After dinner with my friend, Johanna and I took the night train to Kiev.  We road in platskart, which means that we were in a big open train car with tons of beds, as opposed to a small room with a door, a lock, and 4 beds.  Although I was nervous about the idea of platskart at first, I have now decided that I probably will not ride kupe (room with lock) ever again.  Platskart is much less expensive and everyone in platskart looks after each other’s things, so it is actually safer than riding in kupe, which cannot be locked from the outside if you have to go somewhere.  It’s also a wonderful opportunity to meet Russians and speak Russian.  Johanna and I taught a Moscow businessman how to play crazy eights, and he taught us yet another version of the Russian card game “Fool”.

We arrived to Kiev late morning, walked around and got lost, got ripped off by a cabbie, and finally made it to our hostel.  We had a very relaxing 4 days of touring a few museums (a Chernobyl museum, a Ukrainian history museum), a few cathedrals (St. Michael’s, St. Sophia’s, St. Andrew’s), the Babyn Yar memorial (where Stalin killed several Ukrainian Jews), a monastery with a maze of caves, and the “Mother Russia” of Kiev.  Having seen the first Mother Russia in Volgograd, it was very interesting to see the differences and similarities between the two memorials.  Along the walls of the memorials, both have very large carvings of soldiers.  Both memorials also have several artillery vehicles and other weapons on their premises.  The actual statues differ greatly, however, as the statue in Kiev is nowhere near the size of the statue in Volgograd, and the statue was made out of a different material, which looks like tin.  The only thing the statues have in common is that they are both of women holding swords.  This summer when I have reliable internet, I will post pictures.  My apologies for the lack of photos this year.

We also tried Ukrainian food, which for the most part was similar to Russian cuisine.  I tried authentic Ukrainian borsch, which I liked better than Russian borsch, since the meat in the Ukrainian borsch is marinated.  For the record: borsch is originally a Ukrainian dish.  Russians have a similar traditional dish called “she”.  It is made without the beetroot which along with the tomatoes gives Ukrainian borsch its red color.  I also tried authentic “chicken Kiev”, which is a flattened chicken breast, wrapped around a slab of butter, breaded, and fried – delicious.  All of the food in Kiev was very tasty, and we ate like kings.  Thank God that we walked everywhere, as I managed not to put on any weight.

I did not realize how flat St. Petersburg is until we started walking around Kiev, which is very, very hilly.  The sidewalks are all smooth, which is a nice change from the sidewalks in Piter.  The architecture was also very nice.  In some ways it was similar to the European-looking buildings of Petersburg, and some buildings looked more modern.  Kiev reminded me much more of Tallinn, Estonia, and even Cologne, Germany than it reminded me of Russia.  I was surprised to see how different Kiev is from any city I have seen in Russia, since Russian people often joke that Ukraine is just like Russia, Ukrainian language is just like Russian language, and Ukrainians are to Russians what Canadians are to Americans.  Reading Ukrainian all over the place was fun.  It was quite similar to Russian, but it did have some strong differences.  Trying to read the billboards and other advertisements was fun because it was like playing a word game.  Everyone was very kind when I asked for directions, and I didn’t feel that anyone was annoyed that I was speaking Russian and not Ukrainian, which I was a bit worried about before we arrived.  I also noticed that Ukrainians dress much more like Europeans than like Russians, and they do not make eye contact for as long as Russians do.  It was fun to be in a foreign country where I was able to use Russian.  Although Kiev is a lovely city, after a few days I was ready to return to Piter.  Russia has quite a strange hold on me.

I had one full day between my vacations in Kiev and Istanbul.  That day I had two job interviews for English teaching jobs, which went quite well.  I also taught English that night and packed.

I arrived to Istanbul Friday midday and waited in the airport for 3 hours for Christie’s flight to arrive.  We were driven to our hotel by a very attractive man who spoke only a few words of English, which I think made him even more attractive.  We walked around our neighborhood a bit to find a SIM card and called Christie’s friend Cicek, whom Christie met while studying abroad in Italy.  We had a delicious dinner in a restaurant called 360, since it had a wonderful panoramic view of the city.  That night we went home early to get some sleep.

Saturday was a beautiful day.  We met up with Cicek and ate fish sandwiches at a small outdoor café on the water.  We took a boat tour down the Bosphorus and then walked around some markets.  Christie and I had our fortunes told by a bilingual bunny, who picked out our fortunes from a small pin board.  I could tell Turkish was his first language, as his written English translations were not very good.  Cicek took us to a place which had several different cafes inside tents.  There we sat on bean bags, smoked hookah, watched football, ate fresh fruit and played backgammon.  We walked around a bit more and had the famous doner kebab for dinner, which was tasty.  We also went to a café for Turkish coffee, tea, and more fortune telling.  It was the first time I had seen tarot cards outside of a movie.  The fortune teller gave Christie and I approximately the same fortune, and it was as general as anything you can expect from someone who claims they can predict the future.  Cicek did a wonderful job translating the fortunes and everything else for the entire weekend.  We would not have survived without her.  That night we went to a few small clubs and managed to meet a few Turkish guys who had studied in America and know English.  We were very fortunate to find them, since Cicek had to return to work Monday and we would not be able to see her for the rest of the week.  She helped me with some Turkish phrases, and thanks to my year of Kazakh (in the Turkic language group) I quickly picked up a bit of Turkish.  At the club I finally tried Efes (the word for Ephesus in Turkish) beer, which is sold here in Russia and which I didn’t even know was Turkish.  I really liked it.  I would say it is about as good as Russian beer, but of course German beer is still the best.  I have lost all faith in American beer.

Sunday we met up with Cicek and saw a very beautiful fortress, which was located right on the water.  We then took an English tour of the Dolmabache Palace, which was quite unlike any of the palaces I had seen in Russia.  The biggest difference I can remember is that the Dolmabache Palace wasn’t covered in gold, as are most of the Palaces here in Russia.  After the tour Cicek had to get back to her normal, non-touristy life, so we went our separate ways.  Christie and I found a small restaurant south of our hotel and had shish kebabs for dinner.  After that, we asked the manager where we could find ice cream, so he asked his delivery boy to show us the way.  As we were led down streets we didn’t know by a person we didn’t know, I was quite glad I had my pepper spray on me.  Everything turned out well, however, and we made it to the ice cream place.  The man selling the ice cream was a riot.  He did a little show for us by picking up the ice cream on a big stick and twirling it all around.  He even gave us his business card, and he has Facebook!  After the ice cream show, Christie and I returned to the hotel to plan out our week.

Monday we spent lots of time and money at Topkapi Palace.  There were several different things to see, and we took the advice of our LonelyPlanet guidebook and didn’t plan anything else for the day.  I ordered our tickets in Turkish, and the man working the ticket desk was so happy that he asked where I was from and shook my hand.  The appreciation for someone who tries to speak the local language is not underestimated in Istanbul.  After the palace a guy our age selling carpets picked us out on the street and asked us in for tea.  He spoke English fluently, and we sat in his shop, talked, and drank tea for 2 hours.  We mentioned that we were interested in seeing the Whirling Dervishes, who do a spinning holy dance to bring themselves closer to God.  He told us of a mosque where the Dervishes dance on Mondays and he took us there.  We sat in the back of the mosque for 3 hours.  We were able to watch the singing, chanting, and praying of the men inside the mosque, and we had a great view of the Dervishes.  It couldn’t have been more authentic.

Tuesday Christie and I went to the Grand Bazaar.  We were invited in a lot of shops for free tea, and we met a shop owner who knew Russian, so we practiced with each other for a few minutes and made Christie bored.  We even met a shop owner who was a model.  He showed us a small portfolio of his, although by looking at him, I had no doubts that he was a model.  That night we went out with our carpet-selling friend to a show with Turkish folk music, folk dancing, and belly dancing.  We had dinner and drinks there and there were tons of foreigners from all over the world.  The last song was sung by a man, who knew popular songs from other countries in probably 10 different languages.  He sang in Turkish, Greek, German, French, Farsi, English, etc.  He came by our table and sang “This land is my land”, “Yellow rose of Texas”, and “When the Saints”.  The last song was quite ironic, being in a Muslim country and all.  I have to admit, I’m not always proud to be an American.  When the man sang to Christie and me, I felt embarrassed.  My embarrassment, however, has nothing to do with politics.  I’m not embarrassed by Bush or by Obama.  I am embarrassed because we live in such a wealthy country, have so many opportunities, yet manage to complain about how bad our country is.  I’m embarrassed because in school there is no emphasis on learning geography, history, or language of any country other than our own.  I often feel like America is in a bubble, and that other countries don’t like us because we are so naïve.  At the show, our table was next to a table of Iranians (each table was marked by the flag of the country where the guests were from).  Trying to avoid the rest of the crowd while the singer sang to Christie and me, I turned around and was greeted by a warm smile from an Iranian man, who was at the show with his family.  That smile made my evening.  It’s nice to think that people of different nations can be kind and civil toward each other, even if their governments cannot do the same.

Wednesday we visited the archeological museum, which was actually a set of 3 museums.  While we were looking around at the different artifacts there were art students sitting on the floor and drawing some of the statues.  Wednesday evening our Turkish friends, whom we met with Cicek, took Christie and me out to dinner at a Greek restaurant with live Greek and Turkish music.  We had a table with an unforgettable view of the Bosphorus, lots of delicious Turkish/Greek food, and unlimited drinks.  After dinner we went to the adjoining club and danced to European dance music and enjoyed more great views of the Bosphorus.

Thursday we started the day by visiting the Blue Mosque.  We had peeked inside one mosque earlier in the week, and the inside of the Blue Mosque was incredibly similar.  The carpets were similar and so were the tiles on the walls.  I did not think that the Blue Mosque lived up to its hype, but if you are ever in Turkey, I would still suggest seeing it.  Christie and I then paid for a guided tour of the Hagia Sofia.  And yes, we turned down all of the English speaking guides until we found one that was attractive enough so we would fully enjoy the tour.  Unfortunately, they have been and will be doing renovations on the Hagia Sofia for a long time.  The Hagia Sofia has been an Orthodox church, a Catholic church, and a mosque.  It was wild to see a golden fresco of the Virgin Mary and Jesus right next to a big sign in Arabic which read “Praise Allah and Muhammad”.  It had the same cold feeling that most of the Orthodox churches in Russian have, and I think that may be because the colors of the walls were all very dark and there were no carpets, but instead a plain concrete floor.  We also went to the military museum, where we saw a military band give a performance.  At night our Turkish friends took us out to a place for dinner with another beautiful view of the water.  Unfortunately, I forget if it was on the Bosphorus or on the Golden Horn.  We went to a club afterward which was more bar-like and the light-colored exposed brick gave it a very warm atmosphere.

Friday morning we went to the Turkish bath, which was the perfect way to relax after being out late the night before.  We sat in a big, steamy, marble room and dumped hot water on ourselves.  Then older ladies scrubbed us, washed us, and gave us massages.  I think that was the most relaxed I have felt in my entire life.  After getting back to our hotel for a power nap, we visited the mosaic museum, which was actually an old church.  The mosaics were made from such tiny pieces of material (around the size of a square centimeter), that I cannot imagine how long it took the artist to make them.  That night Christie and I ordered pizza and hung out with our Turkish friends again.

I really hadn’t any preconceptions about Turkey.  I assumed that more cab drivers would have known English, but after a few days that wasn’t a problem, as I could get my point across with the little Turkish I know.  Other than that, I had no idea what to expect, and to say I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement.  I liked everything about Istanbul.  The food was delicious.  The roads were smooth and clean.  Everyone was so friendly and helpful.  The hospitality was a complete shock.  I would even argue that Turkish people are friendlier than Americans, which I didn’t think possible of any nationality before I arrived to Turkey.  I’m sure the fact that Christie and I are blonde (or at least have more blonde in our hair than the Turkish women) probably helped our situation a bit.  I didn’t really think of Turkey being in the Middle East, and when we were there I still didn’t feel as though we were in the Middle East.  Parts of the city reminded me more of Germany than of anywhere else I had been.  There was some nice architecture, although on little side streets the buildings weren’t very nice.  This trip was definitely my favorite vacation, and I do plan on going back someday, hopefully soon.

Saturday morning we headed to the airport.  And of course that Saturday was the sunniest and warmest day that we had!  I arrived to Moscow at 6PM and was greeted by snow.  I arrived to Piter close to midnight, got in one cab (metro closes at midnight here) where the cab driver tried to rip me off.  I got into an argument with him, got out of the cab and threw the money at him, and walked to another cab driver who gave me a much better price.  We had a nice discussion about life in Russia (he’s from Azerbaijan) and we even exchanged numbers.  Such is the life of a foreigner in Russia.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

I guess it’s been awhile since I’ve last written.  I have been incredibly busy, which has made the time fly.  In less than 4 weeks I will be in ISTANBUL.  I, unfortunately, have not had a lot of time to get excited about the trip, and the lack of internet at home has made it difficult to communicate with Christie about trip planning.  But I have a plane ticket and a hotel room, and that is all that is important!

I found out about a week ago that I didn’t get into the advanced program for next year.  I was bummed for about 20 minutes, and then I realized that I’m quite sick of formal study and am quite excited to find a job here and start living in the real world.  I will hear about the summer scholarship in late March, and if I don’t receive that, I will be in America working and enjoying the little things (like clean drinking water from the faucet) until I return to Piter in August.

One of my closest friends here just graduated and moved back to Kazakhstan, which gives me even more of an incentive to go there.  Before she left she was nice enough to introduce me to some of her friends.  They plan on visiting her sometime in the next few months or in the fall, and hopefully I will be able to go with them.

Every Wednesday night Dave and Hannah (English couple, who are starting a church here) have our “congregation” over for a delicious Western meal.  When I started going to their place on Wednesdays about 12 people went (Tim, Rachel and their daughter, Dave, Hannah, and their 3 children, 3 girls around my age, and me).  Last Wednesday there were 33 people and we even had a handful of the “new regulars” missing.  I cannot believe how much our church family has grown in just a month.  Wednesday is only fellowship time, and on Saturdays is when we have worship.  I wonder if we will all be able to fit into Dave and Hannah’s family room tonight.

Sundays after church I have started volunteering with the Salvation Army.  I make sandwiches and then I, along with 3 other people, go around Petersburg, giving the sandwiches to the homeless and telling them about the free meals that Salvation Army offers during the week.  The homeless people here are a little different from American homeless people.  The homeless people here never refuse food, while in America I have seen homeless people refuse food when they hear it comes from a Christian organization.  The homeless here always cross themselves and hug us and tell God to bless us, it’s really an interesting experience!

School has not been quite as fun as the other aspects of my life.  My class consists of 7 students, and only 3 of the 7 always do their homework, listen to the teacher, don’t talk while the teacher is talking, etc.  It is as though the other 4 have given up, and it’s quite frustrating and embarrassing (as far as the impressions our professors must have of American students).  I have already complained to the director, so hopefully things will change soon.  I’m paying too much money to waste class time on the people who have decided that they have something more important to do here than to learn Russian.

Last weekend I saw Dima Bilan in concert.  Dima Bilan is like the Justin Timberlake of Russia.  He won a large European music competition (Eurovision) this past spring, and he is Russia’s pride and joy.  Since this was the first pop concert I had ever been to, I didn’t really have any expectations, other than the fact that I expected Johanna and I to be the oldest females there, surrounded by screaming 13 year olds dressed in pink.  The concert-goers were surprising normal.  There were a few little girls whose fathers had taken them, but there were also several couples my age and older.  Although Dima Bilan is fun to look at (something I cannot deny), his show left something to be desired.  Over the course of 3 hours, he only sang about 12 songs, excluding his very first (and most popular) hit.  Every two songs, he would go off stage to catch his breath and change outfits, while a girl DJ came on the stage and played some techno music.  I was expecting a little more from Dima, but I still had a fun time at the concert.  At the beginning of March, I plan to go see a rock group here called “Agatha Christie”.  I’m hoping for a little more of an adrenaline rush from that show.

Monday we don’t have school, as Monday is two very important holidays.  First it is Russia’s “Men’s Day”, more accurately, Day of the Defenders of the Motherland.  From what I have gathered from my Russian friends, it is a mix of Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day for men.  Everyone gets the day off of work, and women give gifts to their father, uncles, spouse, brothers, sons, male coworkers, etc.  Women’s Day is March 8^th, which is the same idea only for women.  This Monday is also the first day of Maslenitsa!!  Maslenitsa = from the Russian word for “butter”, is a Pagan festival the week before Lent starts.  There should be some events around the city this week, of course the Sunday which ends the week will be the most celebrated day.

That’s all for now.  I will try to update again before my spring break trips!

Saturday, January 31, 2009

I just finished my first week of classes.  I’m taking grammar, conversation, translation and literature.  I have 2 new teachers and 2 of the same teachers from last semester.  I don’t have class Tuesdays, which will give me an opportunity to volunteer or intern on that day.  I met two or three new kids, and they seem nice.  Most nights I work or have Bible study, so I am keeping busy and time is flying already!

My host mom has become a little sweeter about me going to church than she was during our first conversation on the topic.  Every time I return home now, she asks me if I was at church.  It’s cute.  I learned something incredibly interesting about the Orthodox religion this past week.  The Orthodox Church believes that one must suffer in order to reach Heaven.  But, but… that’s why Jesus came!  I’d be interested to find out how that belief came about.

I ran into a little snag this week.  Last semester I continued to bother the director of my program for the spring break dates, so that Christie and I could order our plane tickets ASAP.  In November, he told me the dates, and just a few weeks ago Christie and I ordered our tickets.  Then this week, I was told different dates from another director.  So I asked the first director about the dates, and he told me that they changed the dates in the middle of last semester.  Somehow that information never got to me, and 1500$ had already been spent on plane tickets.  Thinking I was going to have to buy another plane ticket (and Christie, too), made me quite upset.  Called my folks, and they just said the cheapest thing to do would be to take that week off of school (the week that I already have a plane ticket for).  So now I have the program travel week off from class, and the following week, when I will be in Istanbul.  Since I’d like to do something fun during the designated “travel week”, but still speak Russian over that period of time, my friend Johanna and I are planning a trip to Kiev!  I’m quite excited.  How wonderfully did that work out for me?

Yesterday was Friday and I had a frozen pizza for dinner.  It was like being in America!  I was instructed, however, to use the microwave (which I have to say I’ve never before used to cook a frozen pizza).  While eating semi-soggy pizza, I realized that Russians (unless baking pirozhki instead of frying them) NEVER use ovens.  This is a very interesting discovery to me, firstly, because last year I used my own oven so frequently and cannot imagine life without one, and secondly, because I had failed to notice this about Russian cooking earlier.  In each of the old wooden Russia houses I have seen in Suzdal, Gorodets, Novgorod, etc. there has always been a large oven, which was used for cooking and heating, so I’m curious as to when Russians stopped using ovens (or began to use them much less frequently).

I’m not sure if this made it into Western televised news (I myself read the article on BBC after seeing 5 seconds of the story on Russian television), but about two weeks ago in Moscow a Russian civil rights lawyer and a journalist were shot dead outside of a news conference, where the lawyer was speaking out against the early release of a Russian military figure, who was in prison for strangling a Chechen girl to death during the war.  The BBC article stated that people were shocked that this happened again (after the Politkovskaya murder in late 2006), but I don’t think anyone was shocked at all.  I think people know how things work here: if you don’t like the way the government does things, you shut up and deal with it, or you speak up and live with the fear that you could be killed any day at any time.  Having an interest in working with civil rights in this region, when I read this article I thought, “Whoa, no thank you, I don’t want to die!”  And I instantly realized (to an extent) how the Russian people feel, and how the Putin-run government even has me scared.  And with its people living in fear, Russia will never be a free country.  This saddens me greatly and, unfortunately, shrinks my hope and optimism that I can be of much help here.  But that doesn’t mean I’m about to pack up and head home!

Sunday, January 18, 2009

After suffering from about two weeks of insomnia, I finally found the cure: earplugs. My host mother and brother are night owls. They are up and about until 4am or so, and since I am a light sleeper, that means I am awake until 4am or so every morning. Last night was my first full of night sleep in awhile, and it was wonderful!

I haven’t been up to a whole lot since I’ve returned. I’ve been able to see a lot of my friends, and I’ve been getting acquainted with the area where I live now. Like I mentioned, I’m very close to the metro. I’m also a 20 minute walk to the theatre, and I can finally get there without getting lost! They have opened a new metro line here, but it currently only has one station off of another line. I have yet to stop by, but seeing as how it doesn’t lead to anything there is really no point in going (taking pictures in the metro is illegal here, unlike in Moscow).

Last week I went with my friend, Johanna, to the apartment of an English family for dinner. The father was a pastor at a church in England, and he and his family moved to Russia a year and a half ago to start a new church. A second English family was there as well, and they moved to Russia in August and work with the other family. It was pleasant to be around Christians and interesting to hear other English-speaking Christians’ viewpoints on religion in Russia. Religion in Russia is not easy to explain. From my experiences here, being Orthodox (“THE religion of Russia”) in Russia means exactly what being Catholic means in America… it’s more like a nationality than it is a religion and if you aren’t that denomination, then you aren’t a real Christian. Anywho, this morning I went with Johanna to a church service, which was held in an auditorium of some building. I’d say the atmosphere was similar to my church at home, but with a little bit of the Baptist Church thrown in (lots of alleluias and amens – which is pronounced A-meen in Russian, how cute!). Until this day, I have never walked into a room in Russia and had everyone smile at me without knowing me. It was strange! I’m still quite shaky on the religious vocabulary, but the pastor spoke about how church attendance around the world has dropped severely, but people are coming back because of the crisis, and how we can and should rely on God, etc. It’s still quite difficult for me to sit and listen to Russian speech for 30-40 minutes about a topic other than Russian grammar or phonetics, but this should definitely help me improve. After the service, I got acquainted with Johanna’s church friends, and we went to the other English couples’ apartment for lunch. We discussed language differences between “English” and “American”. In England, instead of saying “vacuum” and “to vacuum”, they call the appliance a “hoover” and they say “to hoover”. Does that sound funny to anyone else? Sometimes I have difficulty understanding the two British couples (Dave and Hannah, Tim and Rachel). It’s so interesting to me that one language could form so many different words/usages in only 233 years.

When I got home my host mom asked where I was, so I told her. Then I got to sit through a lecture about how churches that aren’t Orthodox never succeed in Russia, and other balderdash. She said Russians only pretend to be other religions, in order to receive things (i.e. Mormons go on their missions abroad for free). What a nutcase. From now on I guess I will just not tell her where I go and what I do.

My new host mom is the first person I have met over here who has a beef with religion, which I find strange, seeing as how many of my Russian and Kazakh friends here are Atheist. I’m always surprised to hear that one of my friends here is Atheist, because they are all so cheerful and not touchy, whereas the vast majority of the Atheists I know personally in America seem to be quite bitter, cynical, and easily-offended. Here, the Atheists are Atheists, the Christians are Christians, and that seems to be okay with almost everyone. It’s an unexpected surprise of tolerance. Maybe everyone is too focused on hating the immigrants to worry about religion. :-(

This week is my last week of winter break. I’m ready to start classes again, and I’m ready to get back into routine here.

January 7, 2009

I bought too many clothes, I ate too much greasy food, but I was able to spend some quality time with my real family.  And now I am back in Piter!

 
After my American Airlines Chicago-Moscow flight was delayed three hours, and after sitting in Domodedovo for four hours (where I met a very nice man from Tajikistan, who thought I was German) waiting for the second Moscow-Petersburg flight (I missed my original flight because of the delay in Chicago), I finally made it to my new home (and I think I have perfected run-on sentences).  I don’t think I will ever again take a flight that lasts 9+ hours, at least without taking a good sedative beforehand.  My flight from Moscow to Piter was pleasant, though.  I sat next to a very nice Russian male ballerina.  He is around my age, born in Ufa (city on the Urals, which separate European Russia from Asian Russia), and has been working in Perm (a bit north of Ufa) for 3 years.  He has a competition in Helsinki this week, and is staying with friends in Piter.  He invited me to go with him on Thursday to see some of his friends dance in the Nutcracker(!) for free(!!).  We split a cab home, meaning I didn’t get ripped off because of my accent.  How nice.

I arrived at my host family’s place at 11:30PM; unpacked until 1AM; called Dad; and went to bed.  I woke up at 8PM the next day (that’s 19 hours of sleep!); got up; and ate with my host family.  I have a mom, Liuba, and a 31 y.o. brother Grisha (short for the Russian form of Gregory).  Liuba has another son, Ilya, who is 40 and lives separately with his wife and son.  The older son opened an advertising company seven years ago, and the two brothers and the older brother’s wife work there.  The mom has been retired for over 15 years, but she used to teach Russian to foreigners (yay)!  She actually worked in the department where I may be studying next year.  Liuba started hosting foreigners when she retired, to give her something to do.  So hopefully that means she’ll enjoy helping me with my homework.  Her father used to be the director of engineers at Mariinsky (that’s a pretty big deal).  The apartment is very nice.  There are 4 large bedrooms.  I’m assuming during the Soviet Era, this was a communal apartment.  I live literally 3 minutes from the metro, which will be nice when the weather gets colder.  When I arrived to Piter last night, it was 15F, which sounds much colder in Celsius (-9C), but really isn’t that bad for 11PM!  I am also a few minutes from a McDonald’s, which is not exciting because of the disgusting food they serve, but because they have free wi-fi!  My apartment doesn’t have internet, which means I will have one fewer distraction from studying this semester.

Maybe I should have thought a little more about how much I was sleeping yesterday, because last night I didn’t sleep.  I didn’t fall asleep until 9AM.  Lesson learned!  It’s much easier for me to adjust from Moscow time to Michigan time, than the other way around.  I wonder if there is any science behind that.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Wow.  It’s almost 2009.  I can hardly believe it.  A week or so ago my host mom told me that they didn’t renew the contract for next semester (i.e. I’m homeless again).  Grandpa has been quite sick, in and out of the hospital for my entire stay here, and after an unsuccessful surgery, they are just waiting for him to pass away.  After he passes, Grandma will move into the room where I’m currently living.  I’m glad I didn’t do anything for them to want to kick me out.  The conversation with my mother was interesting, I felt as though I was being broken up with.  I was pretty shocked when my host mom told me that they didn’t renew the contract, but I was quite naïve to not think ahead when I knew Grandpa was sick.  I really only talked to Grandpa 2 or 3 times, so I didn’t really know him.  I understand the situation, and I don’t think it will be difficult for me to leave, but I really like my host family, and I will really miss them.  I’m tired of all the moving I’ve done in the past 4 years.  Since I started college, I’ve had 10 different residences.  It’s beginning to wear on me.  On a positive note, I get my first pick out of all the program’s host families for the second semester.

The past few weeks have flown by.  This upcoming week is exam week.  I have 4 written exams, 2 oral exams and 2 essays.  Whoa!  Thursday is my last day of exams, as well as my last night in Piter before I head home.  This will be the most grueling exam week of my life.  It’s interesting to me, how so many people are on my program as a “break” from their regular college classes.  This is by far the hardest I’ve ever had to study for anything.  Not just cramming information in my head, to be forgotten in three days, but this is information I cannot forget.  I do think, however, my goals and the goals of the students who are here for a “break” differ greatly.  I had a talk with my director the other day, and he was asking me my plans for after graduation.  I told him that in order to stay in Piter, I planned on teaching English.  He told me there was a lot that I can do with my degree (I don’t believe it, either!) and not to look past any opportunities.  It gave me a little boost of confidence.  Hopefully next semester I can find a good internship to get some real work experience here.

Last weekend I went to the Ethnographical Museum with a large group of Kazakh students and a man who works at the Kazakh Consulate here (cool!).  Became acquainted with a few of the students, and we discussed what every person I’ve met asks me “Why did you chose to study Russian?”  We then started discussing Kazakh, and the people I was talking to didn’t know Kazakh.  Currently, the education system in Kazakhstan works as follows: there are Russian schools and there are Kazakh schools.  You are able to pick which school you go to.  If you pick a Kazakh school, you’re taught in Kazakh language, while you study Russian and English as foreign languages.  If you pick a Russian school, it’s the other way around.  So several ethnically Kazakh students don’t know Kazakh, although everyone knows Russian since it’s more commonly spoken in large cities, and cities in the north of Kazakhstan (where it borders Russia).  Russian is also the “language of international business”.  It’s difficult for me to imagine what it must feel like to live in a country, where my ethnicity is the majority, but I don’t speak my native language.  I can imagine that this situation leads to some identity problems.

Anywho, this weekend I went to hear a professor give a speech about her research on Kazakhstan from foreign archives.  It was strange, I felt like I was listening the whole time, but my mind kept wandering.  I picked up most phrases that I heard, but sometimes I couldn’t put anything together.  The fact that the microphone didn’t work may also have led to my confusion.  My friend, Ainur, who I initially met at our “speed dating” event, has introduced me to a lot of her friends, and they are all so nice!  One of her friends did a work and travel program in St. Ignas, Michigan!  Small world!  I’m excited to meet Kazakh students, since I am quite interested in Kazakh culture and politics.  I really stand out in a crowd of Asians, so I’m glad that they are very open and friendly toward me.

Something that is getting to be annoying here is the racism.  And it’s not just the white trash skinhead racists, like we have in America, it’s probably the majority of people here.  I cannot count the number of times my mom has told me not to go to the market, because some Georgian or Chechen is going to pick my pockets.  Or how all the black people here or Central Asian people here are gangsters and are lazy.  I’ve heard Russians say that the Roma and people from the Caucasus don’t like working in the stores, and that is why they work in markets (when really the problem is that no one will hire them).  So many Russians talk about non-Slavic people as if they are work horses, and that doing the dirty work is all they are good for.  It makes me think of how white Americans must have talked about black people – in the 1870s.  I already know how hard life is here for an upper-middle class white family, I cannot picture how awful it must be for a lower class family from the Caucasus.  To give you an idea of what the racism is like here: in the first 6 months of 2008, over 60 non-Russians were victims of fatal hate crimes.  Last week a Tajik man was decapitated in Moscow.  Ugh.

I leave for home in 6 days!  I’m excited for family!  I’m excited for cheap clothes!  I’m excited for making Christmas cookies!  I’m excited for greasy food!  Yessssss.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

Happy Thanksgiving!  I just got home from a busy day, so I finally have some time to sit and gather my thoughts.  Since Thanksgiving is not celebrated in Russia, today did not feel any different than any other day.  I went to class, met with a friend, worked and came home.  I had chicken and noodles for dinner (chicken kinda tastes like turkey…).  After being “gone” for a holiday, I realize that I value holidays more without the traditions.  During traditional Thanksgivings, I tend to think “Yay turkey and orange rolls!”  Being without that today, however, has made me think more about giving thanks for all the amazing things that God has blessed me with, and not about the feast and American football.  With all the hustle and bustle of the holiday season in America, it is easy for me to forget what Thanksgiving and Christmas represent.  In Piter, there have been very few holiday season “distractions” thus far and that has made me appreciate these holidays for what they really are.

Three weeks from tonight I will be starting my journey home to America.  I don’t like thinking about how quickly this semester has flown by.  I’m not ready to go home yet (although I am ready for (almost) everyone else from my program to go home!).  I could really use another 2 or 3 months here before winter break.  I’m quite glad I chose to study here for the entire year.  Oddly enough, I don’t think I would have liked to return to MSU for my last semester.  I was bored with the typical college kid mentality after my sophomore year, so it’s nice to be done there and have a change in scenery.  I made some great friends at MSU, and I hope that I can keep up with them while I live here.

A few days ago, there was an explosion near a metro on the north side of town.  A man, his wife, and their 3 y.o. child were killed.  The driver of their taxi is still in the hospital.  An investigation concluded that the man had a hand grenade (power to reach a circumference of 200 meters) that exploded.  And he was planning on going inside the metro with it.  But it wasn’t an act of terror, it was just some idiot who somehow got a hold of a hand grenade.  I don’t even want to think about what would have happened, had he accidently pulled the pin inside the metro.  Thank God he only took the lives of his family.

The mentality here of “It’s pointless to have an opinion, because I’m not going to change anything” is quite confusing/strange/annoying.  Being raised in a society, where common slogans are “An Army of One”, “You Decide”, “Only you can make the difference”, etc. has clearly had an effect on me to think for myself and have an opinion, a strong opinion at that.  I always thought my generation in America was pretty pathetic in regards to the government.  The current idea of “complain about everything, but do nothing to fix it” made me respect the young people of the 1960s, who wanted something and marched, protested and boycotted until they got what it was they demanded.  Being here, however, makes me feel like the American youth of today is this strong powerful force that should not be reckoned with.  Perspective is a funny, funny thing.

Sometime in the past few weeks, there was a change to the Russian constitution.  A presidential term is now six years instead of four.  The term limit remains unlimited, although a president can only be in office for two terms at a time (which is why Putin had to step down in May).  People are already speculating that Putin will make a return to the presidency before Medvedev’s four years are up.  Either Putin will carry on as though he is helping his country, in return the people won’t mind that their freedoms are being taken away, and Russia will become more closed to the West and more open to our enemy countries, or Putin will drive the people further and further into poverty, and some day there will be a revolution.  Those are my predictions.  I’m assuming the first one is more accurate (seeing as most of it is already in the works), but I’m really hoping for the second one to pull through (I’m just hoping the revolution isn’t led by Communists this time).

Speaking of Medvedev, I wonder what it feels like to be him.  Imagine holding the most powerful position in Russia, but having no one take you seriously.  People don’t even refer to you as president.  The media, which you are indirectly in control of, gives your Prime Minister more airtime than you.  Your only job is to keep the real president’s seat warm until he returns from a four-year absence.  And if you don’t step down when he wants you to, there is a high possibility that you will be murdered.  Now why would anyone want that position?  Anyway, that’s enough about me getting into Russian politics for now.  I don’t want to get killed for making enemies with the Kremlin.

Where the Russian people lose my respect in their indifference toward the government, they make it up tenfold in their friendships.  Russian friendships are demanding, and that is something I really appreciate.  It seems to me, that the frequency you see a friend is directly proportional to the strength of your friendship.  Russians don’t put up with “being too busy” as an excuse.  You’re in a friendship, and you will make time to see each other.  If you don’t make enough time to hang out with a friend, they will most likely take notice and offense, and match you in effort.  What’s the point in being friends with someone who isn’t going to put in any effort, anyway?  It’s so logical.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Last Saturday I arrived home from Germany, but I’ll talk about Moscow first.  My trip to Moscow was just like all my other trips to Moscow, including going inside the Kremlin, walking around Red Square, etc.  But this time I went into the National Historic Museum on Red Square, which I’d never seen.  It was full of artifacts and nothing else.  It was quite boring.  Nothing more to report there!  The night before our group went to the Kremlin, my friend, Johanna, and I went to the Museum of the Revolution.  It is really a fantastic museum.  So many interesting exhibits, I could easily go see it a few more times (I actually had already gone once before this trip).  We went on November 7, which WAS a big holiday in Russia, it was the Day of the Revolution (October Revolution occurred on October 25, 1917 according to the Julian calendar, but November 7 according to the Gregorian calendar).  Today it is no longer a holiday, but the good ole’ commies still celebrate it, and Johanna and I got to see some of the celebrations.  We were given tiny paper flags from the USSR as we exited our metro stop.  There were several people just outside of the museum (by some statue that I couldn’t see very well), holding signs, waving flags, and singing along to a song, which was being played on a loudspeaker.  It was quite an interesting site, and I took a few pictures.  It’s sad to see that after twenty years of “democracy”, these people still prefer the life they had under the Soviet regime.  I hope the Russian government gets there stuff together so these people don’t have to continue to live their lives in poverty (Russia has virtually no middle class).

Sunday afternoon Meg and I flew to Germany.  We got to Germany in the evening and met up with Meg’s brother, who works as a translator.

Monday Meg and I explored the city.  We walked down the Rheine to the Lindt Chocolate Museum (which is closed on Mondays, for future reference), walked around a part of the city that has a very large outdoor mall, took a peek inside Cologne Cathedral to check tour times, bought costumes for Carnival, and had a fantastic bowl of tomato soup.  After lunch, there were a group of about 10-15 men, who where dressed in construction uniforms, but they must have been on break, because they were all playing musical instruments on the street!  How nice!

Meg’s brother, Nate, has three roommates: two girls and a guy.  One of the girls is moving out next month, so they had a competition to see who the new roommate would be.  Monday night, about 12 people came over to look at the room and get to know the roommates.  The majority of them ended up all going out together, and most of the people seemed to know each other in one way or another.  Meg and I didn’t take part in the festivities because we don’t know any German!

Tuesday was the first day of Carnival AKA the fifth season of Cologne.  Meg and I wore masks and boas.  We went out to celebrate with a few of Nate’s friends.  Nate broke his toe a week or so before we arrived, so he was on crutches the whole time and didn’t participate in the celebrations.  The whole day everyone stood around (there was hardly any room to move), drank beer, sang old German songs, and had a grand old time.  It was a lot of fun, and I learned that the tune for “The Ants go Marching”, is actually a German song!  Who knew?

Wednesday Meg and I took the train to a city about 45 minutes outside of Cologne to hike through a vineyard.  We had heard that there would be free wine along the trail and we saw the kiosk-stands, but apparently it was too late in the season for anyone to be giving out their wine.  Bummer!  It was a nice walk, though, and the scenery was gorgeous.  The train ride back took us a very long time, since we got on a few of the wrong trains.  But we made it home, without having to pay a 40 euro fine (for not having the right tickets).

Thursday we went on a tour of the Cologne Cathedral.  I have never seen so many mosaics and stain glass in my life.  It was a very beautiful church, with a very interesting history.  After the tour, Meg and I chose to climb to the top of the cathedral, which was 509 steps.  What a workout that was.  That night Nate’s former host dad (Nate lived in Germany with a host family for a year in high school) took Meg and I on a tour around the city.  It was a Roman city long ago, and the name actually came from Nero’s mother.  After our private tour, the three of us met up with Nate and Nate’s former host brother for dinner.  The Germans sure know how to eat and drink.  We then separated from Nate’s former host dad, and the four of us went to a Russian bar.  I had some great Russian beer, and I tried a new Russian vodka.  Apparently all of the workers were Russian (Nate’s former host brother said they all had horrible accents).  Nate told our waitress that we spoke Russian, and I am able to say that I “practiced” my Russian one time in Germany, although we spoke for under 20 seconds.

Friday was our last day in Germany.  Meg and I went to the Lindt Chocolate Store (we were too lazy for the museum), went souvenir shopping, and saw the Romano-Germanic museum.  Most of the artifacts weren’t anything out of the ordinary, but there were a few tombs and a very large mosaic floor that was still intact.  That night Meg and I treated her brother to dinner at a German restaurant.  I had a schnitzel, which apparently I cooked for myself all the time last year without knowing it was a German dish.

Saturday morning we left for the airport, and I arrived back at my home around 6pm.  I was quite glad that we returned on Saturday as opposed to Sunday, because I had time to recuperate from my busy week on Sunday.

I really enjoyed my time in Germany.  It is a beautiful country, and I would love to return.  From my travels within Russia, I decided that German tourists and most likely the German people as a whole, are the people that are most like Americans.  After spending a week in Germany, however, I feel as though in some ways Americans are more like Russians than Germans.  I never thought I’d say that!  Maybe it would be more accurate to say that conservative Americans like me have some more similarities to Russians than I originally thought.  And for all those crazy liberal people in our country – give Germany a shot!

I’ve already been back at school for an entire week.  I can’t believe we only have 3 weeks of classes before exams, and then we are done.  This semester has gone by too fast.  Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever said that about school before.  I really enjoy taking classes here.  My teachers are great, and I think I’m learning a lot.  I also feel that I have a lot more learning to do!

We got our first real snow on Wednesday, it was very pretty.  The weather here hasn’t gotten very cold (right now it’s right around freezing).  You wouldn’t be able to tell that, though, by the way people bundle up here.  Maybe I just think that people bundle up more here because in my typical day here I see many more people than I do in my typical day in EL.  Anywho, I am confident that I will survive this winter.  I haven’t even busted out the long johns, yet!  I want to go ice skating.

My phonetics teacher made an interesting observation the other week that I thought was worth repeating.  She told us that she thinks Russian kids are much more mature than American kids.  This struck me as odd, because I had never heard that statement, and I always thought it was quite obvious that American kids are more mature/independent.  She continued to say that of course we (Americans) all think we are mature, because we all move away to college, or get real jobs and live on our own, but in reality we are not more mature.  And in many cases I now agree with her, and I just figured out way.  The only thing I could relate to this is how kids who grow up in the ‘burbs are less mature than kids who grow up in a big city – because in several cases in the big cities, kids are forced to grow up faster because of what they are subjected to.  American children are not desensitized to the same things at the same rate as Russian children are.

Yesterday morning, I realized the government does their part to desensitize Russian children as well.  My mother had the TV turned on while I was eating breakfast.  There was a program about car accidents and the dangers of winter driving.  The special showed incredibly bloody victims of car accidents – some alive, some dead.  I think that was the first time I’d actually seen a real dead person on TV.  I was so disturbed by what the program showed, that I couldn’t even watch.  I stared at my bowl of food for the remainder of my meal, trying not to throw up.  It was by far the most disgusting thing I have seen in this country.

I’ve been thinking a lot about quitting my teaching job.  I really like my students, and I have a lot of fun teaching.  I am here to study Russian this year, however, and teaching takes out a good 4 hours a week when I could be learning Russian.  Goodbye, paycheck!

Next semester, I need to speak a lot less English.  It’s funny, because right now I don’t really speak more than 20-30 minutes of English each day in school, but once I get home I go online and read the news in English and communicate with my friends back home online in English, and I really think it is affecting the rate at which my Russian improves, because I’m obviously not thinking in Russian.  Next semester, I’m also going to try and listen in on a real lecture in the university.  Hopefully I’m allowed to, and hopefully that will help me learn more words and help me learn different types of sentence structures.

It’s Monday morning, and I’ve finally gotten around to posting this journal.  I will try and update at least once more before I head home in December.

November 3, 2008

Wow, it’s already November!  First of all, the big news – I’m coming home for Christmas!!!  My mom and dad were awesome enough to offer me a ticket home, so of course I accepted!  I will be in the US from December 19 to January 5, yay!

Halloween was not a really big deal around here.  There were just a few more creepy looking people on the metro than usual.

The weather here has surprisingly not changed since I arrived.  It has been around 50 degrees for 8 straight weeks!  I think it will drop a few degrees this week, but I have not seen any forecast of snow.  Sad!

This week there is some type of Russian holiday on Tuesday, so I have Monday and Tuesday off!  Wednesday and Thursday I have classes as usual, and Thursday night we head to Moscow.  After a few days in Moscow, my friend (Meg) and I will fly to Germany for the week!!  When I return, half of November will have passed!  Crazy!

I was recently able to go to the museum of Peter the Great’s discovers/works/etc.  It was really cool, I would like to go back and spend more time there.  The first section was all different types of Indian and Eskimo tribes, which in America wouldn’t have interested me in the least.  But the fact that we had some of the same nomadic people was really cool to think about.  The written text in the museum wasn’t too hard to understand, so I am very grateful for that!  I got to read about Eskimos, Inuits and Iroquios, who lived in Russia, cool!  The Russian word for Mohawk is the same word for Iroquios Indians.  I thought that was worth sharing.  Christie, I think you would have been interested in seeing the layout of this museum.  Remember when you showed Mom, Dad and I the old exhibits at the Field that were just plain cases and not very bright or exciting?  This museum looked just like that!

I was also able to see the part of the museum that everyone cringes over – the human parts collection.  I probably spent the most time in this area.  There were several different body parts in jars, which was really cool.  I was able to see the monthly progress of growth of a fetus from 1-9 months.  It was fascinating.  Many people think it’s gross, but I definitely don’t see it that way.  I think it’s sad that those babies died, but how else are you going to learn how the human body works without exploring it?  Think of everything we wouldn’t know about obstetrician had a dead fetus never been dissected.  I was also able to see a baby skeleton with two heads and three arms, it was weird.  Viewing that exhibit further reinforced my appreciation for the human body, and my certainty that only a higher power could make such a beautiful creation.

I stopped eating/drinking caffeine about a week ago.  In America I don’t have any caffeine in my diet, excluding the rare candy bar or hot chocolate.  Here, however, I drink about 5 cups of tea a day.  I quit cold turkey with the caffeine, and staying awake through this entire week was a giant struggle.  Hopefully in the long run this will be advantageous, because right now it sucks.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

I have some down time, so I figured I could update again.  My host mom told me that my family is trying to sell their apartment.  She said it wouldn’t be for at least another few months.  I hope it doesn’t sell until May, because I really like my current location!  My mom wants to live in a new apartment, which means living somewhere outside of the center of town.  I guess they paid for an ad in a real estate newspaper, and the ad will run for 4 Mondays.  This Monday the ad ran for the first time, and two people have already come to take a look.  It’s quite obvious that Russia is not facing the same struggle as the US in regards to buying and selling homes.  They are listing the apartment for just over half a million dollars, equaling 5000$ a square meter (465$ a square foot).  I was asking my mom more questions about international real estate (specifically here), and she offered to find me a real estate newspaper.  Sweet.

A few weeks ago I was paired up with a speaking partner (from the speed dating event).  Her name is Ana.  Her boyfriend, Jarlath (American), is one of the three people who run my program here.  She is very nice, and I understand her quite well.  She is an assistant to a Russian businessman who owns a chain of restaurants here called “Eurasia”.  The purpose of the speaking partners is for the American student to practice Russian and then the Russian student to practice English.  Ana, however, is fluent in English and therefore, we get to speak Russian the whole time.  I’m quite happy with this arrangement, because I already spend 2 hours a week teaching English when I should be practicing Russian.  Last week she invited me to a hotel where she used to work.  I met her old co-workers and we got to hang out in a conference room, watch football, and drink (half off!).  They were all fluent in English, which makes it much more difficult for me to speak in Russian.  This isn’t because I want to speak English, but because I feel inadequate.  They know my language as well as I do, why don’t I know theirs?  At the end of the night, two of her guy friends walked me home (how I love chivalry).  Saturday we are going to a hockey game (my first Russian hockey game!), to an art exhibition of an American artist (Gary Baseman), and then out to dinner.  Should be awesome, I’m excited.

Something I think is funny about learning languages is when you unintentionally say something mean or offensive.  When I make mistakes, my host sister in Vladimir taught me to say “bleen”.  It literally means “pancake”, and I was told it makes a good substitute for “rats”, the word I say in English when I mess up.  I said it in front of my mom here a few times, and she said “Don’t say that, it’s rude.”  I then learned that depending on the tone or situation, “bleen” can mean “damn it!”  I will not make that mistake again.  A few days ago my host sister sent me a video on youtube about Americans not knowing answers to simple historic and geographic questions.  She said “Don’t worry, I’m just kidding”.  And I responded, “I know you’re kidding!  But if you were serious…!”  And apparently in Russian that is incredible offensive.  I had a good laugh over it.  How embarrassing!

I think I enjoy this city more and more everyday.  On my walks to/from school, I always think that I am one of the most fortunate people alive.  I cannot wait until I find a job here.  I am getting excited for the real world.

Monday, October 20, 2008

This past weekend the whole group had an excursion to Tallinn, Estonia.  It was my first time in Europe (excluding the day I slept in a London hotel this summer because of the Lufthansa strikes).  It was easy and interesting to see the differences between Eastern Europe and Russia.  Driving through the streets of Tallinn reminded me more of Chicago than of Russia.  The architecture is quite different, even from the European look of St. Petersburg.  The downtown area has a very new feel about it, probably due to the lack of construction and how modern the office buildings are.  The traffic actually stopped for crosswalks, which is not common in St. Petersburg, or even in bigger cities in America.  But the prices for clothing were the same as in Russia if not more expensive, to my dismay.

When we arrived to the hotel we were served a delicious lunch, with the most tender chicken and meat that I had ever eaten.  After that, we went on a walking tour around the old part of Tallinn.  To sum it up: the old downtown resembled something out of a fairytale.  Hopefully I will have the time to add more pictures to Picasa soon so you can see.  Narrow brick roads, light colored buildings with red roofs.  It was a wonderful area for tourists, but I decided that if I lived there I would most likely grow tired of the fairytale-ness.  St. Petersburg is still my #1.

The nice thing about Estonia is that almost everyone there speaks either Russian or English.  It was very strange, however, to be in a country where I didn’t speak the national language.  Picking which language to use was tricky.  There was the option of using the language of the country which oppressed Estonia for a number of years, and there was the option of using the language of the country whose citizens put little effort into learning anyone else’s languages.  I used English in the restaurants, and I felt incredible uncomfortable and disrespectful.  I used Russian a handful of times, which I was specifically instructed not to do (since US and Estonian relations are currently better than Russian and Estonian relations), and in my opinion that was the easiest way to communicate for both parties.

After two days of walking around the city, sampling cinnamon beer and honey beer, and taking several pictures, we arrived back in Petersburg Sunday night.

I had an interesting conversation with my roommate this weekend.  She found a church in Petersburg and invited me to go with her.  I’m pretty excited.  Hopefully this will help me find friends who believe in God.  She is interested in opening an orphanage in Russia through her church, and since I want to adopt Russian kid(s), we seem to have a lot in common.  She is the one of the few people here who I know that I will be friends with for awhile.

In Russian there are two words for “to miss something”.  One means you weren’t there because you were ill, and one means you weren’t there because you skipped.  Today I didn’t go to class for a reason which lies somewhere between these two meanings.

I did, however, feel well enough to go on a walk with my friend from Kazakhstan.  It’s nice to know people who have lived in the city, because they can think of fun places to go outside of the Hermitage and Peterhof.  I have reasoned with myself that for the most part, hanging out with my Russian friends is more valuable than doing homework.  Don’t worry, Mom and Dad, I still finish all of my homework.  I just realized that hanging out with these friends is more valuable because if I’m going to be living in this country for awhile, I’m gonna need me some friends! (The grammar in the previous sentence was intentionally incorrect.)

I’m at a very frustrating part of language learning, and I think there are many parts like this to come!  I understand my teachers, host parents, and people on the street so well (students my age are much harder to understand, as they tend to talk faster and use more slang), but I haven’t the words to respond.  I think it’s safe to say that my passive vocabulary is about twice as large as my active vocabulary.  Hopefully the more opportunities I have to hang out with my friends will change this.  Hopefully.

I got homesick for the first time this weekend.  It stunk.  I really miss my male friends from home.  I think that is because my male friends at home respect me, their mothers, and other women.  I never feel as though I am less than human when I am with them.  The American men here, on the other hand, have fallen victim to the strong sexism in this country, and I often feel quite uncomfortable around them.  They constantly talk about women as if they are sex objects, which is something I would only imagine hearing from a drunk frat boy.  It’s quite disappointing, and I don’t think it’s going to change until they all leave in December.

I have two exams this week.  No excursion this weekend, so I will finally have some free time to study and do some exploring!  Ura!

Tuesday evening I had a planned get-together to meet some Russian students.  I dubbed it “speed dating for bisexuals”, since we had 8-10 minute conversations with about 15-20 guy and girl Russian students.  After about a minute or two it was easy to tell who was going to be interesting to talk to and who you figured you’d never see again outside of the meeting.  I met a girl who moved from Kazakhstan to Piter 6 years ago to study.  I have forgotten almost all of my Kazakh, but I was able to say my name and ask her what her name was (in Kazakh).  She was in shock and very excited that someone from America knew a little bit of Kazakh.  If I get absolutely nothing else out of Kazakh, to see how happy she was made it entirely worth studying.  The guy I talked to last, Fyodor, said he asked everyone he talked to if they wanted to live in Russia, and I was only one of two people who said yes.  I’m not sure why that surprised me, but I just assumed more people who made a commitment to live here for a semester or two were planning on living here after studying.

I taught my first class this week.  And by taught, I mean I facilitated English conversation for two hours. I have one student who is a doctor and works with children (not all are terminally ill, but I think a lot of them are), a student who is a flight attendant, a business man, and others.  About half of them are originally from St. Petersburg, the others were born in Ukraine, Georgia, and a few different cities in Russia.  I thought I was going to be really nervous, like I am when I give a speech.  After the first minute or two, however, I was very comfortable and the time flew by.  Hopefully this experience will help me with my stage fright.

I have been debating with myself whether or not I should get my TESOL certificate this year (TESOL = teaching qualification and higher pay).  If I choose not to, I will not make enough as a teacher to afford my own apartment here, meaning I would have to rent a room.  If I got my TESOL, I would be guaranteed a larger salary which would cover the cost of an apartment rental.  The only negative to getting the certificate this year is that I will have less time to put towards studying Russian.  I just don’t know what to do.

Saturday the language program students had an excursion to the palace where Rasputin was killed.  Seeing the actual chamber where Rasputin was poisoned was cool, but I didn’t feel the same way about the rest of the palace.  I have to same opinion about Russian palaces as I do about Russian cathedrals: you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.  They all look so similar, and it bothers me to see so much money being wasted, when it could have undoubtedly gone toward a better cause.

After the excursion, Steve, his friend Lena, and I went to Mariinsky Theatre and saw the opera “The Turning of the Screw”.  It was all in English, with a screen of the Russian translation.  I was glad to hear it was in English, because I thought it would be easier to understand, but I think I got more out of it from reading the Russian translation.  Lena has a “personal connection” at the opera (everyone has a personal connection somewhere in this country who helps them out, it’s interesting), so I was in the second level on the outside, overlooking the orchestra, and I only had to pay 8$!  Not bad, not bad.  Next weekend I am going to see the Brothers Karmozov in Mariinsky.  Lena had a meeting Sunday morning, so she went home after the opera.  Steve and I stayed out and got to see the bridges open.  The fountains on the Neva were also working at that time, with bright stage lights and music similar to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra playing in the background.  It was quite a production, and I think I got a few good pictures out of it.  We also went to palace square (where the Hermitage and Aleksandr Column are) and got some amazing night shots.  Thank God for digital cameras.  Since the bridges were up and Steve had no way of getting home, we found a club/bar/café and stayed there until morning.  The cafes here are great because they stay open until 5am, they are a short walk from my house, and because they have really comfortable couches to lounge on.  I love the night life/early morning life here.

This week in my conversation class we had a conversation on abortion.  It was disturbing.  Russia was the first country in the world to legalize abortion in 1920.  It was banned again from 1936-1954 (look, Stalin actually did do something good).  Currently abortions are free in Russia, while birth control costs around $25 a month.  For every 100 children born in Russia, 208 are aborted.  (US statistic is around 240 abortions per 1000 births).  So the US is killing about 25% of their kids while Russia is killing about 66%.  No wonder Russia is having a population problem.  I wanted to throw up after our discussion.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

I’ve already been in Petersburg for a month.  I feel as though I’ve only been here 2 weeks!

Last weekend we went to Peterhof.  Our excursion surprisingly didn’t cover admission into the palace, so I’m glad I was able to see that last time.  We spent a lot of time in a part of the gardens I had never seen, and we got to see Peter the Great’s bathhouse, which was also large, but on a different scale than the palace.  I made friends with Steve’s friend, Aleksei from Tyumen, Russia.  Aleksei is leaving for the army (mandatory 1 year service here) in a few weeks, so it’s nice that he was able to come hang out and see Steve before he left.  Thank God for our conversation class, because I was able to ask him about army service, which I would not have been able to do a few weeks ago.  He told me that he doesn’t know where he will go for training, yet.  I cannot imagine leaving for a year without knowing where I’m going!  We also talked about the difficulties in the English language (he’s fluent), which is something I enjoy hearing about from people who have learned or are learning English.  I think he is one of maybe three Russians I have met, who actually enjoys slapstick comedy.  He’s an interesting person, and I’m really glad I was able to meet him.

Something I really like about this program is the diversity of how people want to use their Russian.  Not everyone is hopping on the train to work for the federal government, although a few had previously thought about it, just like I did.  I have met a few people here that want to work with orphanages and international adoption (right up my ally) and other non-governmental “stuff”.  It’s nice to know that there is a future with Russian language, which doesn’t involve working for the government.

I finally got myself a job!  The place that I had written about in my previous entry never got back to me, but a friend of mine told me about another teaching opportunity.  I went to a meeting with the boss of the whole program, which is called the Communicative Language School, and Thursday I was able to sit in on the class that I will be teaching on Thursday nights.  The class has seven students, one male around 35, one boy around 15, and everyone else is around 23-27.  They have their grammar part on Tuesdays with a real teacher, and I come in Thursdays for two full hours of discussion.  At the meeting, the head woman told us not to tell our students that we speak Russian, so before I sat in on the class Thursday, I asked the teacher I’m partnered with, Tatiana, what I should say to the students.  She said it was fine if I told them I speak Russian, but when we got to class and the students asked, she jumped in and said I study English and don’t know Russian!  How strange.  Anyway, after listening in for two hours to a class taught in English and – surprisingly – a large part in Russian, the students had no problem figuring out that I understood Russian.  Next Thursday is the first time I will be teaching entirely on my own, and I’m pretty excited!

We had a very enlightening discussion in literature class Thursday.  I only understand a little bit of Pushkin and Lermontov in Russian, but our discussions and where they lead are far more interesting.  Something I’ve noticed here is that people don’t complain.  I always thought that was because the Russian people just accept what comes at them, but Thursday I learned that in the Orthodox religion, it is actually a sin to complain.  How interesting!  If only Americans thought like that, because we sure are good at complaining!  We also had a discussion on freedom and what it means to be free.  Our teacher said that freedom comes from within, and only you can determine if you are free.  She cited examples in Russian history and said that people don’t care (in her opinion) about democracy, because you can be locked up and still be free.  For an example, I would suggest reading “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” by the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  It was just one of those moments where things clicked.  It was a moment that I would never have experienced in the US in a class speaking English.  The situation made me think of a quote from my senior year political science teacher, Ms. Snow, “The only freedoms we have are the freedom to think and to believe.”

Friday night Steve and I went to a DDT concert.  DDT is a Russian rock band that has been together since 1980.  During the concert Ukrainian dancers came on stage, as well as an Orthodox priest, and a Georgian woman, who had a wonderful voice (although I don't know any Georgian and didn't know what she was singing about). The name of the tour was “Don't Shoot!”  That should give you an idea about DDT's opinion on Russia's current international problems.  As opposed to rock concerts in America, where bands typically just throw out a big (educated) "F*** BUSH!", DDT took a more mature (and appreciated) route and talked about how Ukrainians and Georgians were brothers and sisters of Russia, how the Russian people should embrace them, and gave viewers a taste of Ukrainian and Georgian culture. It was really well done.  Steve and I didn’t understand why the concert started so early (7pm), but when it ended at 10:30, we realized everyone was able to take the metro home.  Someone was thinking!

Today is the first time it’s rained here in about a week, although the weather reports always say it’s going to rain everyday.  This past week’s weather was great, and by great I mean I have adjusted myself to the St. Petersburg standard of great – 55 degrees and no rain.  I can’t believe it’s still 70 degrees in Michigan.  I keep forgetting that I am so much further north.

I finally made plans for my fall break.  In November I will be going with my friend, Meg, to visit her brother in Cologne, Germany.  Yay, a new country!

September 17, 2008

I guess I’m about due for another update.  Classes are going well, not much to report there.  This weekend the whole group went to Novgorod - not Nizhniy Novgorod “Lower New City” where I studied this summer, but Velikii Novgorod “Great New City”.  More than anything it reminded me of Suzdal, since they had a similar kremlin and a similar setup of old wooden churches and old Russian houses (Izbas included!).  We all stayed in a hotel and had ourselves a grand time being loud and obnoxious.  It happens.

This Saturday we are going to Petergof, which is more a social event for me than an excursion since: A. I have already been to Petergof, and B. I have more or less been avoiding the group as a whole, because hanging out with large groups of Americans is embarrassing and is not conducive to me learning Russian.  I think I have been dubbed the anti-social one in the group, but I am enjoying exploring on my own or in small groups and feel no need to be more social with the Americans than I am right now.

I moved into my new house last night!  First a run down on the family: Mom, Elena, is an economist, daughter, also Elena, is a 15-year-old with 1 more year of school left (in Russia the public school equivalent stops after 11 years, not 12 like ours), and I haven’t met dad yet, he’s on a business trip in Germany.  He is the head of some type of economic business, and my mom works for him, basically.

To say the least (which I just now learned how to translate into Russian!), my new host family is well-off.  They have a very nice apartment, which automatically takes me from Eastern to Western Europe every time I walk in the door.  If the lights are not turned on by motion sensors, they are controlled by remotes.  The bathroom is one room, consisting of a shower with random shower heads throughout the shower and a built-in radio, a clean toilet, and heated floors (that’s right).  The daughter’s room has a very cool design, and the kitchen looks like something out of HGTV’s House Hunters International (kind of a Spanish look).  There is no family room, which from my experiences here isn’t really more common or less common, but the kitchen is very spacious and is definitely the sitting room area.  My mom says that they moved into the apartment about 5 years ago, and she came up with most of the design then they gutted the place.  It is a hobby of hers, and it’s a pretty cool hobby.  The location of the apartment is also wonderful.  I’m one street away from Nevskii Prospekt, which is the main drag of the city.  I’m by several shops, cafes, bars, etc.  There is a Pizza Hut down the street and a bar called “Liverpool”, which has live Beatles cover bands and has already been recommended to me.  I no longer take the metro in the morning, which is kind of a bummer, but the rest of the situation makes up for it, and I’m sure I’ll be taking the metro plenty in the next 8 months.

After school we went to the main location of St. Pete State Uni (SPBSU) for opportunities to sign up for a gym membership, join a choir, etc.  I guess it costs 40$ a month to use the pool, so I’m going to have to look elsewhere.  Being directionally challenged, I got lost on my way home, but finally asked enough people with good advice to get myself home.  I was fed a massive dinner, and this is the first time I have felt satisfied with a meal.  My mom and I talked for at least an hour and a half about the economy, relations between the US, Russia, Georgia, problems with the Russian education system, which was great practice, seeing as how I have an exam on all of those topics tomorrow (minus Georgia)!  My sister came home late and we spoke a little English.  Talking to a foreigner who isn’t fluent in English (but trying to learn) made me finally realize that I do talk far too fast.  My real mom says it all the time, but to see the panicked look of a 15-year-old when I said one string of words, had a greater impact.  Speaking of people trying to learn English, I gave my contact information to the Institute of Foreign Languages this Monday.  Hopefully they will contact me soon about volunteering there.  I am really busy right now, but I need a little something something for the good ole’ resume.

I can’t think of anything else to write.  I’m sleep deprived, so I should probably go fix that!  Poka!

Sunday, August 30, 2008

I arrived to St. Petersburg/Petersburg/Piter Wednesday afternoon local time, and the group of about 55 students was taken to a small resort area called Repino, which is on the Finland Gulf and north of Petersburg by an hour or two.  We had orientation there Wednesday evening, Thursday all day, and Friday morning, which again consisted of “don’t drink the water”, “don’t get into gypsy cabs (gypsy cab = paying to hitchhike) when there is more than one person inside”, “watch out for pickpockets”, etc.  I did manage to learn one beneficial thing during orientation.  St. Petersburg has a few islands (I actually live on one), which are connected to the mainland in the south and the other area in the north by bridges.  During the summer months, the bridges go up late at night and come back down early in the morning, so if you are on the wrong side of a bridge when it goes up, you are stuck in the area for quite a long time (usually from 12/1am to 5am).

Although we stayed in a hotel in Repino and I plugged in my anti-mosquito apparatus (which was given to me by my previous host mother in Nizhny), I was eaten alive both nights.  In the morning I slightly resembled an African tribesman since there were 4-5 mosquito bites in a horizontal line in the middle of my forehead.  I must have been a sight.

I arrived to my host family around 7pm Sunday.  I have a mom, Margarita, and two host brothers, Aleksei and Igor (pronounced eager, not E-gore).  Aleksei is really quiet, and I actually haven’t seen him since he introduced himself last night.  Every student was given information about their family prior to our arrivals home, so I have not actually met my second host brother, but I’m fairly sure he exists.  According to the information, Igor is 3 years my senior and Aleksei is 5 years my senior.

My mama cooked me a delicious dinner of spicy beef cutlets and spicy noodles, and we had a long conversation.  She speaks so clearly that I managed to understand everything she said.  I am finally getting to the point where I am beginning to think in Russian, which means when people talk to me I don’t have to focus and translate.  It’s a relieving feeling.

After dinner I met up with my friend Andrew, who is also studying in Piter this year on a separate (much more advanced) program.  He came to my place, and he showed me how to get to my metro.  I live about a ten minute walk from the metro, which will be a godsend this winter.  We took the metro over one stop, and came out on a large non-car street, full of bars, restaurants, a McDonald’s, and some shops.  It was actually the same place that Rachel, Kyra (girls from my summer program) and I had found about a month ago, and it’s really a nice area.  I had completely forgotten about it, so I’m glad I stumbled upon it last night!

Andrew and I found a beer tent across the Neva from the Hermitage/Winter Palace and watched the bridges go up at 1am.  Last night the St. Petersburg football team won their match against Man U, so the streets were ridiculous.  Everyone was walking around, drinking, cheering; people in their cars were honking, waving flags and scarfs, sometimes also drinking.  I got home early in the morning and caught a couple hours of sleep before the excursion this morning.

Mid-morning my mama took me to Kazan Cathedral via the metro.  Kazan Cathedral is my favorite cathedral in Russia, and of course, the only one I’ve found where one is not permitted to take photos (usually the church charges one to use his/her camera).  I didn’t get to go inside, because I met up with the rest of the group outside of the cathedral for a bus tour of the city.  The area studies program (around 25 students) and the language program (around 30 students) were separated, so that my program (language) could have a Russian tour guide.  I was doing a darn good job of understanding and paying attention for about the first hour, but my lack of sleep soon caught up to me and I took a short nap on the bus.

After the bus tour, we were all taken to the HIV clinic to get our blood drawn in order to extend our visas.  I don’t know if we have a specific rule about not letting people into the country who have HIV, but I think it’s a wonderful idea.  (I’m thinking we don’t have that law because of our silly Bill of Rights).  Russia has an exploding AIDS epidemic, so in my opinion this is a good measure to take to prevent the spread of this disease.  After Russia sucked the life out of me, I rode the metro home and took a long nap.

I am so excited to be in this city.  I live near a metro, my campus is beautiful, the city is amazing, and I get to be here for nine months!  Everyday I get more and more happy that I chose to come here this year.  I just hope I start to improve my Russian quickly, because this summer I really felt as though I hit a plateau.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

This week has been a long one.  Thank God for my optimism, because I may not have survived this week without it!  The first day of classes everyone took a placement exam, minus the students in the Area Studies Program who haven’t studied Russian language at all (what brave souls, right?).  We had a written and oral exam, and my goal was to make it in the top group.  Tuesday I found out that I successfully reached my goal.  School is going wonderfully.  My literature class is really interesting, and I have a really nice teacher.  My conversation class is great, because we just debate or share our opinions on things the whole class, and although we make grammatical mistakes all the time, no one cares because we still all understand each other.  In phonetics I’m actually learning something, which I cannot say about the other 2 phonetics classes I have taken in other programs.  Grammar is kicking my butt (which is a good thing).  And word formation is going to be incredibly useful.

Taking the metro everyday to class makes me feel like I’m part of the real world, pushing and shoving my way through the crowds to hop on the cars in time, shuffling along with everyone else on the way to the escalators, and scurrying around underground until I finally reach my exit.

Wednesday after class I was given an opportunity to speak with one of the local leaders of the CIEE program, Irina Borisovna, about opportunities for extra-curricular activities for this year.  I told her that my main goal in the next 9 months (other than learning Russian, of course) was to find a job teaching English in St. Pete.  She got really excited and said that she had a friend who taught English at the SPbSU (St. Petersburg State University) Institute of Foreign Languages.  She said she would help me find an English teaching assistant job, and I could work on building connections and finding a job from there.

My luck with host families has run out.  This week I should be moving out of my house and going to a new family.  Right now I live with a family of hermits, which is completely awkward.  I still have not even met my second brother, because all three family members hibernate in their rooms all day.  They leave their caves so rarely, that after a week I still don’t know whose room is whose/(who’s?)!  I have been completely ignored, to say the least.  Even worse than that, my host mom, who is paid to feed me breakfast and dinner, barely cooks, and if she does, I eat alone!  Everyday this week for breakfast I had a piece and a half of bread with cheese on it.  And dinner wasn’t that bad (usually some type of meat and a starch), but sometimes no one is home to cook (I have not been given or denied access to use the kitchen) and I just starve.  I can feel the pounds dripping off of me.  I actually almost passed out in class on Friday.  Every time my mom is home, she is on the phone for hours, which prohibits me from even initiating in conversation with her.  It’s unreal.  I am so disappointed in this family, but I don’t want anyone reading this to think that this behavior is common in Russia at all.  Russians actually have a reputation for being wonderful and welcoming hosts, a reputation I have observed in all my other host families.  I hope in my new host family that I get to eat with everyone, and that I am treated like one of the family.  Otherwise, this year could get lonely.

Seeing as how I’m barely fed at home, everyday after class I have been going out to different cafes, which of course is fun but expensive.  My friend, Steve, and I found a wonderful café near the school metro which has tons of traditional Russian dishes and free wi-fi (bonus!).  I can’t believe I’ve been here for a week and haven’t had borsch or shi or blini or really any traditional Russian dishes.  Man, I’m hungry.  Haha.

Friday night I went out to a bar/cafe with Andrew and a few other kids from his program.  I met a Russian girl who said that we should swap numbers and get together to practice English and Russian with each other.  How convenient!

Yesterday the whole group went to Pavlovsk, which has a very nice palace similar to Petergof but not as large and less gold.  I received my first bee sting!  It itched horribly, and my whole ankle became red and puffy.  I am not having much luck with the insects here!

Called my parents after Pavlovsk and found out that they were taking Maggie to the vet today to have her put down.  Since I thought that physically Maggie was fine (turns out she actually had really bad arthritis) I was pretty shocked.  I’m glad I didn’t have to be home to say good-bye, but I wish I were home to adjust to her not being around, because I know when I get back in 9 months it’s going to hit me all over again.

After a long night’s sleep, I woke up this afternoon and managed to find my old stomping grounds by hotel Moskva.  I am now taking advantage of the free wi-fi that McDonald’s has to offer.  It feels good to have e-mail and BBC at my fingertips, even if only for a few hours!

July 30, 2008

I’ll do my best to recap the past few days.  On Friday we all had our final exams and a tiny award ceremony where all three groups went on stage and sang different songs and different poems.  We spent the weekend in Suzdal, with a short trip to Vladimir where we saw random churches and museums.  The Suzdal hotel was GORGEOUS.  It was so nice and clean, and there was a pool and a sauna.  Unfortunately, the pool cost $17 PER PERSON for one hour.  Madness.  We returned home Sunday night and I went right to bed.  Since classes were finished, my host mom and I spent about 4-5 hours on Monday going all over town to find a samovar.  No such luck.  I did a lot of packing, took family photos, and walked around town a little on my last night in Nizhny.  I was picked up outside of my apartment at 4AM Tuesday and we arrived to Peter around 2PM.

Our hotel in Peter has a ton of German and Portuguese tourists right now.  A few of the Portuguese tourists came into the McDonald’s yesterday while we were using the free wi-fi and ordered in English.  I think it is really strange that my native language is one of the main languages of international communication, and I think it is really strange that the Portuguese didn’t spend 2 minutes to learn to say “I want the number 2”… in Russian.

This morning we had some exit testing and now the majority of the 80 students are at different tourist attractions.  My friends are at Petergof, and I opted not to go since I have already been.  I instead found my campus where I will be studying in the fall (Smolney campus at St. Petersburg State University).  It.  Is.  BEAU-tiful.  I am SO thrilled to be going there.  In the front of campus is a beautiful old blue church, and there are several nice dirt paths lined with flowers and benches, and there are statues and at least one fountain that I could see (there were gates and security guards, so I didn’t bother to try going in).  It looks like a mini-Petergof.  How sweet.  Tomorrow I plan to go to the Hermitage for a few hours, and then I want to walk down Nevsky Prospekt.  We’ll see if my feet can handle it.  I wake up EARLY August 1^st and begin my journey home.  I can almost taste the margarita waiting for me in the Dulles airport!

July 15, 2008

Today has been a strange day.  Last night I managed to kill about four mosquitoes which were in my room and threatening to eat me alive.  Two or three remained, however, and avenged the deaths of their friends by making the time between midnight and 8am a period of a sleepless hell for me.  Since I had practically gone insane by the time 8am rolled around, I told my mom that I wasn’t going to school.  I slept in until noon and headed to university around 1, because we had a meeting with someone from the CLS program from Peter.  After we all told her the good and bad of the program, my friend, Rachel, and I headed to the beach.  The “short trek”, in Rachel’s words, was about a 30 minute or so walk to the Volga.  Since the weather was so hot and humid (about 85+ degrees F), we immediately got in the water.  After going completely under water, Rachel decided it was best that we swam across the Volga – so we did.  I’ll admit that I finished a distance second to the other shoreline and back (since Rachel is a college athlete and is in excellent physical condition) but I held my own quite well, since I can’t remember the last time I actually exercised.  After a long uphill trek back into town and a stop at the grocery store for some bottled water, I finally arrived home.  I am going to be so sore tomorrow.

Our apartment is without hot water from July 15-July 29, or in other words the remainder of my time here.  For those of you who do not know: in Russia during the summer there is a period where the hot water is turned off to do “maintenance”.  It rotates through the districts, so not everyone in the entire country has their cold water turned off at the same point in time.  I have heard from some Russians that there is no maintenance and that it is just done to save money.  I’m not sure whether there actually is maintenance, as I have heard both sides of the story.  Anyway, today I showered in the cold water after Rachel’s and my adventure, and it was probably the best feeling in the world.  I guess I need to completely exhaust myself before every cold shower in the next two weeks!

July 16, 2008

In 15 days I will be home.  How strange.  I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface of this town, that I am finally getting used to the long days from the lack of driving everywhere.  A lot of people in my group keep talking about how excited they are to go home, while I feel like I’ve barely been gone!  Some people in the group don’t fully value the experience of living in a foreign country, which is too bad.  From what I have seen in students this summer in Nizhny and last summer in Volgograd, some expect foreign countries to be just like America, but in a different language.  I’ve heard complaints about food, internet, host families, transportation, etc, and I just wonder if anyone read anything about the country or talked to any Russia people before they left.  I cannot say I’m guilt-free of complaints about the program, since they want us to give our opinions to better the program for next year, but the country is not going to change no matter how much students gripe about it, so if you don’t like it – GO HOME!  I love being abroad, and I think I would feel the same way in any country – knowing a bit of the language or not.  I appreciate the feeling of being anonymous here.  It’s fun to be the outsider looking in without too many people knowing I’m an outsider (unless I’m wearing flip-flops).

This weekend is my last weekend here.  The following weekend we are having a 2-day excursion to Vladimir and Suzdal.  I hope I can stray from the group and hang out with my mama and Tatiana.  This upcoming weekend we are visiting some monastery on Saturday.  I am hoping to buy a specific icon there, but I’m not sure how much luck I will have.

July 20, 2008

I received a comment on my journal about what a real banya is, and I decided to clarify that.  In a banya, there is a sauna-type room, which people sit in until they are dying from the heat (or maybe a few minutes after that), then they either jump in a cold pool (if one is available) or pour freezing cold water all over themselves.  Then to exfoliate the skin, people hit each other with birch branches.  Rachel’s banya had a little tank with cold water, so we used long-handled pots to pour cold water on ourselves.  It was fantastic.  I cannot wait to go to the banya in the dead of winter in Peter.

Since the past week or so has been so hot, I have not had the desire to use the banya.  Friday after class Rachel, Kyra, and I went to the beach.  When I rule the world, I am going to make escalators to and from all beaches, because walking 1000 steps to get to a beach stinks!  Anywho, the beach was quite crowded Friday.  I had never seen so many thong bathing suits in my life!  A lot of people just swam in their underwear, which I thought was pretty funny, but I guess that beats taking a long bus ride home to change into a swimsuit.

Friday night I went over to Rachel’s, where her dad continued to tell her “Russians don’t drink like that!” when she took a shot without a lemon or a pickle.  Rachel’s dad fluently speaks German and French and is trying to teach himself English.  He’s really good, too.  After a small sample of Absinth, Rachel’s dad left to go to their dacha, and Rachel and I met up with her host brother Grisha (short for Grigorii) and his friend Maxim.  We found a club where girls got in free, but Maxim – being in jogging pants – didn’t pass the dress code, so we went to another club.  The second club was not free for girls, and Maxim again did not pass dress code, but the boys opted to wait outside while Rachel and I danced for a few hours inside.  Not to offend any Russians that read this, but Americans completely dominate the dance floor, similar to how “black people dancing” dominates “white people dancing” in America.  Actually the Russian girls were fine, but the guys need to watch more MTV.  I wish I had a camera, although I don’t think I could have taken video because sometimes security guards in Russia are weird about picture-taking.

During a slow song, Rachel and I took a dance break.  Some guy came up to me and asked me if I wanted to dance, to which I responded [in English], “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Russian.”  To my dismay, he responded, “Oh, that’s ok, I know English!”  Talk about bad luck.  I refused the dance three times, which is the magic number here, and so he and Rachel went and danced together.  His friend, who unfortunately also knew English, tried his luck and also left after the magical third turn-down.  We ended up talking to the guys for a little bit after the dance.  It was really entertaining for Rachel to have to pretend translate the Russian parts, while I could understand everything that was said.  Next time someone asks me to dance, I’m going to have to start speaking Swahili or Kazakh or something.  It is ridiculous how many people know English in this city.

I cannot emphasis enough how nice the people are in this city.  People will strike up conversations on the bus, smile at each other, help me when I don’t understand something – it’s just so different from some of the other cities here.  The other day while I was skipping my culture class, I had a conversation with one of the ladies who works at the foreign book/dictionary... “kiosk” in our university.  She asked me if Russian was difficult, to which I responded (and always respond), “It’s easier than Chinese and Arabic, but harder than French or Spanish.”  I asked her where she was from, and she responded “Nizhny… do I not look Russian?”  I think she was offended and thought that since she had a darker complexion, that I figured she was from somewhere in Central Asia or the Middle East.  But I told her that I was wondering because a lot of Americans don’t live in the cities in which they were born, which was the truth.  Most of the people I met here were born and raised here.  We also talked about traveling, and she said that everyone here wants to go to France, but she wants to go see Japan.  I thought that was really cool, considering I have never heard a Russian say they want to visit any country in Asia.

I know so many people here who have lived in Nizhny during the time it was a closed city, and I haven’t asked a single one what it was like!  I cannot imagine how boring the linguistic university was without any foreign students!  It is still such a strange concept to me.  I wonder if there was a warning – “The city will not allow anyone to leave after *June 1*, so you have 3 weeks to move in or move out”, or if one day border guards came out and if you were left in or outside of the city you remained there.  So many questions!

Saturday after 3 hours of sleep, I went to a horrible excursion.  The entire trip was 13 hours, which consisted of two church visits for 30 minutes each, 30 minutes for lunch, 30 minutes to get water from a water spring, and the other 11 hours were spent on the bus.  An entire day from my last weekend in the city was ruined, and I was so tired!  At night Rachel and I slept over at Kyra’s since her folks went to dacha and she had the place to herself.  We also watched an American film in English, and it felt great.

Today we went to the beach for a few hours, and now I resemble a combination of Rudolph, a tomato, and a lobster.  Hopefully by tomorrow the redness will fade some.  A week from tomorrow will be my last night in Nizhny.  How time has flown.

July 23, 2008

Sometimes I am too caught up in my own world to value that I am in a foreign country.  I guess it’s exciting to say that I am used to life here, but then I forget to appreciate that everyone surrounding me has had an incredibly different past and has a very different mentality than my own.

I found out something about this city that makes me feel like an idiot.  During the Soviet era, Nizhny was only closed to foreigners.  Any Russian citizen could freely (or as freely as the Soviet system allowed) travel in and out of Nizhny.  My speech teacher said that she moved here in 1965, and the whole university was filled with male students, who were learning French, English, and German to later join the military.  I asked her if the foreigners got kicked out, or if they weren’t allowed to leave once the city became closed, and she said there were virtually no foreigners and left it at that, so I do not know what the few foreigners did with themselves who were living in Nizhny at the time.

Over the past few weeks I have learned many interesting things about the life of my host mother.  I learned that she was first married to a famous swimmer whom she’d only met on her wedding day.  She said he was never home because he was in competitions all over the world.  She wanted to divorce him, but during the time of the USSR if she would have divorced him, he would not have been allowed to travel out of the country to compete (quite a rule, huh?!).  They stayed married for some time and later divorced.  She married another man, but he died in a car crash – I’m not sure how many years after they were married.  She then married my current host dad, Vyacheslav.  I’m glad that with my two host families containing a mother and father, I have not witnessed any type of fight, which I have been told to expect by Americans and Russians alike.  My host folks here have never raised their voices at each other.  They flirt all the time and it is so cute.  Today I learned of another very sad event in my mother’s life.  When my host sister was in first class (so back in 1996), my mom had a miscarriage.  She said she was very healthy throughout the entire pregnancy and went into labor two weeks early.  The doctor told my dad (DIDN’T EVEN TELL MY MOM) that the baby died during the birth.  A few relatives came and everyone was able to see the baby girl as my mom helped to prepare her for the funeral.  She was crying as she told me that she had never seen such a beautiful, healthy baby girl.  The doctor refused to explain to my mom how the baby died, and to this day she still has no idea.  She assumes malpractice, but I’m pretty sure it’s not as easy for someone here to sue a doctor as it is in the US.  And I’m assuming it was even more difficult 12 years ago.

It’s frustrating to me that my small vocabulary doesn’t allow me to fully express my feelings.  I can’t express extreme happiness, extreme madness or extreme sadness.  And when someone tells you the type of story I just mentioned, some of that type of vocabulary is needed.

Now I need to transition to something happy.  I keep forgetting to mention this in my journal, and I think it is one of my top five favorite words in the Russian language.  The word for “governor” in Russian is goo-bear-NAH-tore.  And to me, gubernator and terminator sound a lot alike, so I thoroughly enjoy talking about Arnold (I’m not even going to take a stab at spelling his last name) but the governor of California from Austria!  The Russian word for governor – especially­ with the Russian accent, sounds like someone who wants to kill bad guys and blow stuff up.  I love it.

Ok I have been meaning to bring this up, and for any of my Russian readers, feel free to comment because I appreciate your views/facts.  In the three cities that I have lived in, I have heard people talk about how much better and cleaner Russia was during the Soviet Union.  They say there were no stray animals, no homeless people (which I understand since the Soviet government probably funded a program to neuter stray animals, and retired people did have pensions on which to live).  But I don’t buy the cleaner part.  I can’t imagine that when the Soviet Union broke apart, that the amount of graffiti and litter magically increased and that all of the grass disappeared.  I can’t imagine that during the Soviet era a person would find a trash can to throw their cigarette butt before getting on a bus, instead of just throwing it on the street like people do today.  Were there more policemen handing out fines for littering?  Were there more people employed as street cleaners and as painters to paint over graffiti?  Or did the Soviet mentality of such strong nationalism succeed in keeping the country clean until the USSR dissolved?  And where did the grass go?  Russians know that it isn’t “clean”, because my Russian professors say the streets are dirty and several Russians have asked (upon hearing that I have visited a few Russian cities) “Is X a clean city?  Is X cleaner than here?” which are questions I have never heard in America.

July 13, 2008

It does not seem like a week has passed since my last entry.  Time here is really flying.  I can’t believe I’ll be back home in 2.5 weeks.  I’m sure glad I’m going back to St. Petersburg for the school year, because I’m not done with this country!

I met my new Austrian sister on Monday night.  Her name is Ivana.  Her parents were born in Yugoslavia, she was born in present-day Bosnia, moved to present-day Serbia when she was 6, and moved to Austria 6 years ago.  So she speaks Serbian and Germany fluently.  She has also studied French, Spanish, and English.  I wish I were born in Europe.  Maybe I would know several languages, too.  She said that she has traveled to many different countries in Europe and that she stayed in Miami for a month with a school group.  On Tuesday we went to a large mall in the outskirts of town, and I found out that she is practically fluent in English.  She kept saying that her English was bad, but that’s impossible, considering we had a discussion on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian war in English.  I think she is one of the few people I know who knows of Slobadon Milosevic and is definitely the first person I have ever met who has defended him.  Needless to say, it was a very interesting discussion.

The Austrian group had 27 people from the same university, so Ivana had 2 friends here with whom she was very close.  After 4 days of living here, her 2 good friends hated it so much they left, and for some reason unclear to me, Ivana had to go with them.  I think it had something to do with booking tickets, but I didn’t understand.  So Ivana left to go back to Austria Friday morning, and now my Russian sister has moved back into my old room.  What a mess!  Yesterday I asked my mom if I should move back into my old room, and she said that Lena was okay with living there for the next few weeks.  I really lucked out there.

I went to a movie store this week to buy a handful of my favorite Russian films.  Some of the DVDs are 8-in-1 or 9-in-1, so you pay about 6-8$ for all of these movies, some Russian, some American.  On the 3 DVDs I bought I have 25 Russian and American films.  One of my favorite Russian films is called “Burnt by the Sun”.  The main character is Nikita Mikailkov, who is a very famous director/actor.  It takes place during the Soviet era, and I’m not going to tell you anymore, you just need to rent it.  My Russian folks were telling me a few days ago that they are making a “Burnt by the Sun 2”, and that Mikailkov is going to be in it as well.  Last night, while I was at a friend’s house, whose host dad happens to be an actor, I was informed that the filming starts in a few weeks in Garadets, which is the city we visited with the whole group one of our first weeks here!  And the girl’s host dad has a role in the film!  I really want to make a trip back there to see some of the filming, although I’m sure it is highly regulated.  I’m so excited that one of my favorite Russian actors (out of the few I know) is going to be in the village right next door!!!

Yesterday Rachel and I went to a fur store to buy our hats.  Her hat was made out of rabbit fur, which is funny to me, because she is a vegetarian.  I got a traditional dark brown shapka-ushanka made out of muskrat.  If you don’t know what a shapka-ushanka is, Google image search it, or just try to imagine a Soviet soldier during the winter.  You should end up with the same result.  The hat is so thick that after trying on a few different sizes I was sweating.  It is also quite hard to hear anything when you take down the ear flaps of the hat.  I am very happy with my purchase, and I am very excited to wear it in St. Pete’s this winter!  In Russian language, there is no equivalent to the word “excited”.  One can say “I am glad” or “I am in delight”, but my concept of excited is different than both of those words.  It stinks when a phrase or word I commonly use in English doesn’t translate properly.

I really miss my doggie.  I have even begun to enjoy the presence of the stray cats because after awhile, all fuzzy stray animals seem alike.

July 6, 2008

This week went by pretty slow, considering I was sick for the majority of it.  A friend and I celebrated our American-ness on Friday by eating frozen pizza and watching Pirates of the Caribbean.

Saturday my mom told me she had a surprise for me.  Turns out that there is a group of students from Austria here and many of the families that usually host for their program are on vacation.  Some lady called my mom and asked if she had room, so now I will have an Austrian host sister!  I moved into my Russian sister’s room today, and she is going to live with the grandma for 3 weeks (the Austrian girl is only staying 3 weeks).  So I have a door to my room!  And a modem! That means I can consider buying a month of internet, which I think is cheaper than making several trips to the internet café where I have to buy some type of food product so they don’t kick me out.

Saturday midday Kyra and I went to dacha with Rachel and her host family.  Their dacha is less like a dacha and more like a cottage.  It has a massive garden with a fountain, it is two stories tall, has two family rooms and a few rooms with 2 or more beds.  It even has its own BANYA, which I was allowed to try out.  The banya is a wooden sauna (it was about 180 degrees when we went in).  After a few minutes of sitting in the sauna, you go into another room and pour freezing cold water on yourself.  Then to exfoliate your skin, you and friends hit each other with birch branches.  It was soooooo cool, and I am going to have one in my house.  15-30 minutes in the banya feels like laying out for 8 hours on the beach – refreshing, cleansing, relaxing, tiring.

Rachel and her host sister took Kyra and I on a walk to a church, which was built during the time of Ivan the Terrible’s reign and was destroyed during the time of the Soviet era.  It was made of brick, and I can only imagine how beautiful it was 450 years ago.

After banya we had dinner with Rachel’s family.  Her mother is a pediatrician, her father is a realtor who owns his own business, her brother works for some type of website/computer company, and her sister just finished up law school.  After dinner we sat around the table and gave toasts.  The father, brother, and I tried to teach Kyra and Rachel how to play Durak (Fool), and Rachel, Kyra, and I tried to teach the father and brother how to play Egyptian Rat Slap.

After some quality sleep, the three American girls walked around the forest.  It was very pretty, but quite uncomfortable since I had on shorts and not pants.  The bugs ate me alive, but I took some good pictures.

We returned to the dacha where a large lunch was served for Rachel’s birthday.  Somehow the topic off adoption came up, and I was again given the same speech from Rachel’s mother about adoption that I had already been given by at least 3-4 Russian women: you will never be able to love an adopted child as your own and s/he will grow up to be a criminal because her/his parents were alcoholics.  This view on adoption is really sad to me, but my friends said that some people in the US have the same mentality.  I haven’t heard this back home, but I’m sure some Americans do feel that way.  Sad.

After lunch and a little bit of sun bathing in the garden, Rachel’s brother and sister brought us back into the city.

One huge culture difference I have noticed more this year than last is CLUTTER.  At my house or other people’s houses I have rarely seen an empty surface.  The kitchen table always has napkins, salt, sugar, toothpicks, bread, etc.  Bookshelves don’t just house books but are also filled with random knick-knacks, stuffed animals, etc.  Everything would look so much cleaner and larger if all of the clutter was just sorted and cleaned out, but I think for many Russians it’s just not important.  I almost think it is stranger that I have been brought up to think that leaving stuff out is more ‘weird’ than putting away things I use all the time.  The clutter, however, doesn’t stop at useful items, but also random papers and clothing that just need to be thrown away.  My houses in Volgograd and Vladimir did not have any clutter whatsoever, and there were many clear surfaces, so maybe it just depends on the person.  Many students here, however, have mentioned this difference.