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.