It's Been Awhile!

Me with the Garden King/Poseidon/I really don't know what it is, but it's funny in Vyborg.

Wow! I guess it has really been quite a while since I have written. Sorry about that. I just get caught up in what I'm doing here sometimes and forget. Everything has been going well since I last wrote to you all. There really hasn't been too much exciting going on, just alot of studying and trying to improve my Russian.

A few weeks ago we went to see the Nutcracker. It was at the end of October, so it was a little weird. I usually think of the Nutcracker as a very Christmasy ballet, and therefore it was odd to see it so far before Christmas. It was really good though. I liked it alot. It was quite different from the versions I've seen in America though. Mainly the ending was different. Instead of Clara waking up at the end and everything having been a dream, the ballet just simply ended after the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. So, that was kind of odd. I was also somewhat disappointed by the Russian dance. I guess I was expecting something really spectacular since I was in Russia, and it just wasn't really anything that special.

T weeks ago we had a very nice 5 day weekend. Thursday, November 4 was a national holiday. I think, roughly translated, it was the Day of National Unity, but I'm not really sure what the holiday was supposed to be commemorating. But anyway, we got that Wednesday off because we never have school on Wednesdays, then Thursday was the holiday, and Friday was given off to us as a "gift" from the Russian government. However, that "gift" wasn't really a good one since we had to make up that Friday by going to school yesterday (on Saturday). However, I enjoyed the long weekend. On that Wednesday some friends and I went to the banya again. That was a really fun time and a nice way to relax. On Thursday we went to another hockey game, and on that Friday I volunteered at the Hermitage. I've been volunteering at the Hermitage regularly now. The Hermitage is the most famous museum in St. Petersburg and probably the most famous one in all of Russia. I've been helping out there with various things, often working with the public. It's a nice way to work on my Russian skills. They've also asked me to help edit their English language newspaper.Me at the top of Vyborg castle with the town in the background.

On that Saturday, some of my friends and I traveled to Vyborg, a town on the Finnish border. It was really nice to get out of the big city for a while and enjoy the fresh air. We travelled there by elektrichka (commuter train), and it took about 2.5 hours. There we saw the Vyborg Castle, a clocktower, the market, and just did alot of walking around the city. The weather was great, so it was a really good time.I believe somewhere there in the distance is Finland.

Church in Vyborg.

This past week, as I said, was a long week. We had to go to school yesterday to make up for the Friday before. So, that really wasn't fun. Nothing else too exciting has really happened. It's getting very dark here and it's raining alot. When I first got here people told me that it would rain every day in November. I thought they were exaggerating, but it really has rained every day this month. It's pretty ridiculous. I've realized that St. Petersburg really has horrendous weather, and because of that I would probably never want to live here permanently, but I'm enjoying the city while I'm here.

Coming up this week we are trying to find a place to go see the new Harry Potter movie in English. In Russia they dub all of their movies, so this is proving to be a hard task. You'd think in such a big city that there would be at least one theater that would show it in English with subtitles, but it's seeming more and more like that might not be the case. We'll see. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Well, that's about it for now. I hope everything is going well with everyone in the States. I'll try to not wait so long before I update again.

Volga, Volga, Mother Volga

Certainly the tastiest hedgehog I ever ate!

So, we just got back from our big trip down the Volga River on Sunday. We saw and did alot of really cool stuff. First we took a train to the city Nizhny Novgorod. We took an overnight train because it was about a 14 hour trip. I was actually pretty impressed by the Russian train system. We were on time and the train was pretty clean and modern. We did a bit of touring around the city and then that evening we got on our boat for our cruise down the Volga. The ship was really nice and we got some pretty tasty gourmet meals (see hedgehog above). Mosque in Kazan

The first day we sailed to Kazan. Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, and alot of Muslims live there. It is home to many beautiful mosques and churches. Unfortunately, because we were delayed in the morning by fog, we didn't get to see Kazan until nighttime. By then it was so dark out that it was hard to see everything. It was still pretty cool though.
Monument to the Cyrillic letter "ё" in Ulyanovsk.

Our next stop was Ulyanovsk. Ulyanovsk was the city where Lenin was born, and therefore basically everything in the city is centered around Lenin. It's even named after him! (Ulyanov was Lenin's last name until he changed it to Lenin) We saw his school and several of his houses in the city. We also got to see the monument to the letter "ё". Oh, Russia is so weird sometimes. Then we were back to the river.
Me sitting at Stalin's desk.

The next day we saw Samara, home of the Stalin bunker. Samara was the city where the government planned to evacuate to during WWII in case the Nazis got too close to Moscow. Therefore, they built a secret bunker for the government officials there. It was pretty cool. We got to sit at Stalin's desk there and visit the war room!
Clearly Stalin thought alot of himself...

Next was the city of Saratov. We really didn't do much there. We saw a few monuments and things, but nothing too exciting. "Death to the fascists!" Russians really don't like fascists...

The cruise ended in Volgagrad (formerly known as Stalingrad). This city was probably my favorite. Because the whole city was basically leveled during the Siege of Stalingrad in WWII, everything in the city was really nice and modern. Me at the memorial in Volgagrad. The Mother Russia statue is the one way in the backgroound.

There was also this really awesome memorial to the siege. It's really big, practically the size of the National Mall, and it's on a hill and on the top of the hill is this enormous statue that is supposed to represent "Mother Russia". It's apparently the tallest figure statue in the world, meaning it is taller than the Statue of Liberty.
The Mother Russia statue from behind.

After Volgagrad we hopped on a train back to Moscow, this time it was for 18 hours. Most of the other students and I decided to stay in Moscow for the weekend. We stayed at the Godzilla Hostel there. It was by far the nicest hostel I have ever been in. It was really clean, had a great location, and lots of perks like free wi-fi. While in Moscow we saw lots of sights. We visited Red Square and saw St. Basil's Cathedral. St. Basil's

It was nice, but I would have to say that I like the Church of Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg better. We also went to the Kremlin and visited the Armory. They have tons of cool old stuff there like suits of armor, thrones, and really neat metalwork. We also got to see Lenin, which was a very odd experience. For some of you who may not know, Lenin has been on display in a mausoleum in Red Square since his death in 1924. He is only open to visitors a few days a week for a couple of hours. So, we had to wait outside in the cold at 9 in the morning to make sure we were able to see him. Lenin is very carefully guarded. You're not allowed to take anything into the mausoleum, and once inside you cannot make any noise, put your hands in your pockets, stop walking, or walk too fast. He looked alot different than I expected. He was not quite as old looking as I had thought he would be. Some people say that it's not really Lenin's body that's in there. That could be the case because he does look kind of waxy and fake, but on the other hand, how does anyone know what a body preserved for 86 years would look like? Either way it was a pretty cool experience. I came back to St. Petersburg on Sunday morning. A couple other students and I rode the Sapsan train. The Sapsan is a high-speed train which goes up to 200 km/hr and cuts down the travel time between Moscow and St. Petersburg from 8-10 hours to just under 4. It was by far the nicest train I have ever seen. The economy class section which we were in was as nice or nicer than most business class sections I've seen in other trains. I was really impressed, and it only cost about $45, which was pretty cool as well.
Red Square: St. Basil's, Lenin, and the Kremlin.

Now I'm back in St. Petersburg just going to school and hanging out. Today we are going to a hockey game to see СКА from St. Petersburg play ЦСКА from Moscow. It should be a pretty fun time. I'm very interested to see what a Russian hockey game is like. Well, I'll update you guys more when I have some more to talk about. That's all for now!

Life in the USSR...errrr...I Mean Russia

Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to fit this souvenir in my bag :(

So, sorry it's been awhile since my last post. I just have so much to do here all the time that I never really have a chance to sit down and write. I don't feel like there has been a lot of really exciting stuff going on since I last posted.

Two weeks ago our group went on an excursion to the Nut Fortress. It is a fortress that is on an island close to St. Petersburg that was originally built by the Swedes but is now part of Russia. The fortress was supposedly named the Nut Fortress because it looks like a nut. I'm not really sure that that's true though. It was basically your standard medeival fortress, which was pretty cool. I'm not sure you can get much more medeival fortressy than this

Most of it has been destroyed though. Also, the fortress was integral in keeping open the Road of Life during the seige of Leningrad, which was a major factor in St. Petersburg's ability to survive the seige.If you didn't know, I was there fighting in WWII

Last weekend I went to Pavlovsk with my host mom and host sister. Pavlovsk is another palace of Pavel I. The palace was really cool, and again the grounds were nice. I really feel like all these palaces are pretty much the same though. They're ridiculously gaudy with their own private parks. I guess they are pretty cool though.Me at Pavlovsk with Pavel I

On Wednesday this week we didn't have school or an excursion, so me and some other people from our group went to the banya. The Russian banya is essentially the same as a Finnish sauna. You have a really hot room that you sit in, and then you jump into some really cold water. Repeat. Whenever I tell Russians that the banya is the same as the sauna they always try to argue with me and tell me that it is different. But I really could not see any difference at all. They are exactly the same and the Russians just don't want to admit it. It was a really good time though. There was a separate room with couches and a tv where you could sit and relax in between sessions in the banya. So, it was pretty cool, and a nice way to spend the free day.

Since there's not a whole lot else to update you all on, I thought I would take a moment to comment on where I live in Russia. Before I came to Russia, I didn't really grasp how in some ways Russia is still very much stuck in the past i.e. the Soviet Union. For example, my apartment building pretty much looks like it is straight from 1960's USSR, or the south side of Chicago you can take your pick.Silly ACTR, I wanted to go to Russia, not the USSR

My school is another example. It is located in an alleyway behind a large (as in like 10 ft tall) iron door that looks like it leads to a maximum security prison. These kinds of things would be very odd in America, but here they seem like totally normal remnants of the Soviet Union. I think my favorite remnant of the USSR, however, is the heating system. All buildings that were built before like 5 years ago in St. Petersburg are on the same heating system. The buildings are heated by hot water that runs through the pipes in the radiators. Because the system is very old, they turn the whole thing on at once, so the entire city gets heat at the same time. So, essentially, the government controls all the heat in the city. And for some reason, the government is of the opinion that until we have 5 days in a row where the high is below 45 degrees, heat inside buildings is completely unnecessary. Who cares if it's 35 degrees overnight, people don't need heat in their homes. So, basically the past week everyone in St. Petersburg has been freezing. In school everyone wears their coats inside and I've several times considered putting my gloves on at home. So, hopefully the heat comes on soon before we all freeze to death. And until then, I guess I have the ingeniousness of the Soviet Union to thank for being cold.

See, the leaves are on the ground, which means it's fall, which means it's cold!

Well, that's all for now. This Thursday our whole group is leaving for a cruise down the Volga River. So, I probably won't update again for awhile, but I'm sure I'll have lots of adventures to tell about then.

Gatchina and Other Adventures

Ridiculously adorable kittens that live at my school.

So, this week was full of fun and interesting adventures. On Tuesday I had my first encounter with the infamous Russian militsia (aka the police). The Russian militsia are not necessarily the most honest police in the world. The militsia are known for stopping people at random, especially if they look foreign, and demanding to see their papers. Then, even though you are likely completely legally in the country, they will claim you are illegal and that you have to pay a fine. Usually the fine ends up being approximately how much cash you have on you at the time. That is one reason why you don't ever carry alot of cash on your person here, as well as why you avoid the militsia at all costs. Luckily, my encounter was not anything like this. On Tuesday I went out for a run and while I was gone my host grandmother left, and therefore turned the alarm system on. When I came back and tried to turn the alarm off it didn't work. I kept putting in the code, but the alarm just kept on beeping. I called my host mom at work, and she told me that I must be doing the code wrong. So, she told me the code again, and I put it in again, but it just kept on beeping. So she called my grandmother so she could come home and fix it. Meanwhile, the militsia decided to actually do their job for once, and about 5 minutes into all of this one of them showed up at my door. He asked me for my documents, which I gave him. I explained to him that I was an exchange student living in the apartment. He was talking to someone on his radio trying to tell them who I was. However, instead of looking at my name spelled in Russian on my visa, he was trying to read my name in English off my passport. It became very clear that he had no idea how to read the English alphabet. After a few minutes of me trying to show him my name on my visa and him completely not listening to me, he finally found it and read it to the guy on the other end of the radio. Apparently at some point during all of this someone had gotten in touch with my host family and they had explained that it was ok that I was there and that my host grandmother was on her way home. So, finally he just left very flustered and confused. It was really all quite funny. I feel like maybe he had never met a foreigner before in his life. Anyway, this was a quite comical encounter with the militsia, and I hope it's the only one I ever have. Gatchina

On Wednesday we went on our first excursion as a group which was to the palace in Gatchina. Gatchina is a palace located in the suburbs of St. Petersburg that was built by Catherine the Great and then later expanded upon by her son Pavel I.

Pavel I

The palace was interesting, but really, in my opinion, a palace is a palace is a palace. They really all look the same. We had a tour of the palace, which was in Russian. Our tour guide talked really fast and was really boring, so no one really paid attention. After the tour of the palace we toured the grounds, which were actually very pretty and it was a beautiful day. The palace grounds

On Friday I did a lot of walking and saw some pretty cool stuff around the city. I am taking a literature class and our professor decided to take us to see Alexander Pushkin's apartment in St. Petersburg. We basically walked around the whole city to get there. I think it almost took us an hour. We also stopped in the church where his last rites were read, which was really cool. It was in this building right by the Church of Spilled Blood. It was very strange. The building didn't even look like a church, and if there hadn't been a plaque outside you would never have known it was there. The inside, however, was very beautiful. I thought it was a really cool experience, because it was a place that most people don't know about and will probably never see. The sign marking the church where Pushkin was taken after he died.

On Saturday I had another castle adventure with some friends to Peterhof. Peterhof is a palace that was built by Peter the Great and it is known for its beautiful grounds and especially its fountains. Peterhof

This weekend is one of the last weekends that the grounds are open, so we wanted to go see it before it closed. I went with some friends from the group and some of their friends from Germany. The Germans claimed they knew how to get to Peterhof, but they really had no clue. After we rode with them for about 45 minutes on the metro, and wound up in the middle of nowhere with no way to get to Peterhof, my friends Kelsey, Alex, and I broke off on our own since Kelsey actually knew how to get to Peterhof. A 45 minute metro ride and an hour bus ride later we were finally there. We entered into the front yard, which was free, and took tons of pictures. The weather was gorgeous, and the park was really very nice. Then we made our way to the backyard, which is the really famous part and you have to pay to get into it. However, when we went up to buy our tickets we discovered that the ticket places had literally closed ten minutes earlier and wouldn't be opening back up for another 3 hours. This was because they were having a festival that night and needed to set up for it. We also discovered that because of the festival we would not be able to see the inside of the palace or be able to ride the boats back to the city like we had planned. We were pretty disappointed, but because it had been such an ordeal getting there and we didn't really want to come back another day we decided to just wait for the ticket places to reopen. Peter the Great really liked his golden man statues...

At 6 we finally got in to see the backyard, and it really was beautiful. We walked around for about 2 hours, and then decided to leave. We had wanted to stay for the festival, but it didn't start until 9:30 and we were worried about making it back to the metro before it closed. All in all it ended up being a pretty good day, even if it didn't go quite as planned. He also had a bird sanctuary. This duck's ancestors were probably friends with Pete. The grounds

Well, that's all for this week. Hopefully there will be more exciting adventures next week!

The First Week

Hello everyone!

I know I promised you all a blog while I was in Russia, so here it is. Sorry it took me so long, but I was unable to get internet on my computer until just a couple of days ago. Wireless internet, although it can be found in many cafes here, is not very prevalent in homes. In fact, my family doesn't even have a computer. But more about that later. I'll start from the beginning.

Our group of about 20 American students arrived in St. Petersburg last Thursday. On Sunday we met our host families. I am living with a host grandmother, mother, and 6 year old sister on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, to the north of the city. They live in an apartment building like most Russians that live in the city. I have my own room and so does the grandmother. The mother and the sister both sleep in the living room. We all sleep on couches except for the grandmother. Although this sounds weird, it seems pretty common in Russia. Alot of people sleep on couches here instead of beds. My host family is really nice. My grandmother does all the cooking, and she is an excellent cook. It's a very nice change from me making pasta in my room every night! I also, as I said before, do not have internet in my house. It doesn't seem to be that common here. I had to go to the phone store and buy a mobile modem so that I could get internet. It works really well though, so I'm pretty happy about that.

School is going well. We had our first week of classes last week. I have a 40 minute commute to school every day, which is pretty average for most people in my group. Some people are lucky and live pretty close to the school, which is in the center of the city. But I would say the majority of us live pretty far away. At school I am taking 5 classes: grammar, phonetics, conversation, politics, and literature. I think the politics class will be really interesting. It's basically the history of Russia during the 20th Century, which I really don't know much about. Plus, the teachers seem pretty cool.

So, far, in my free time I've just done alot of walking around the city. Yesterday my friend and I went to the Bread and Milk Festival. It was pretty fun. There were lots of stands selling bread and milk products. We got to sample alot of bread. I found out that they even have Finnish bread here, so I of course went and bought some today. I am very excited to have it for lunch tomorrow!

Well that's about all for now. I'll update some more when I have more interesting stuff to talk about. And I'll try to put up as many pictures as I can. For some reason right now it's not uploading my pictures, but hopefully I can get that to work in the future.