Time to think

During dinner on Wednesday I looked up at the calendar and was stunned to see that I’ve been living with my host family for over a month. I’ve been in Russia for almost six weeks. It really doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but it never does. While I say that is hasn’t been that long, it’s hard to fathom how much I have experienced in the last six weeks. Williams, Summit and Boston have actually begun to feel like they’re on the other side of the planet, not just a ten-hour plane ride away. Every member of my group has experienced that moment when they realise they’re in Russia. Really realise. For me it happens on metro; the surroundings will slap me across the face and those once unfamiliar stimuli will again flood my senses for a moment. I’ve grown incredibly accustomed to life here, I’m falling into a routine like anywhere else in the world, and I’m realising that that’s pretty amazing.

So there were no organised excursions this weekend and I’ve been had more time to brood and ponder. To be honest, since Wednesday I’ve been doing it more than usual and it’s been great. While the words ‘finding myself’ have become so worthless among British gap year students that I want no association with them, I’m beginning to sympathise with their intended meaning. Growing up isn’t something that happens by itself and every person has to figure out how they’re going to make that leap to maturity. So here’s where I introduce my metaphor: Of modern education as a highway to success. A literal highway. No one on this highway starts with a destination and at first you’re just told to pass the other cars. But if you’re always in the passing lane and not paying attention to where you’re going then you’re probably missing the point of the highway. Highways are built to get people where they want to go, faster. And life in the passing lane is fast, any student can tell you that. But how many college students know what exit they want to take off the highway? I’m not going to count medical and law schools, a person can spend another 6 years going as fast as they can with no discernable destination. So what have I been thinking about and why have I invented this elaborate metaphor? Well I was on the highway in cruise control, spending most of my time looking straight ahead. I decided to take the exit for study abroad and that brought me to St. Petersburg. I’m in a new and exciting neighbourhood and the time off the highway is giving me a chance to stop and think.

Russia is the third country that I’ve lived in for an extended period of time. Having an impression of life in this third country is allowing me to develop wholly new impressions of the people around me and of myself. Moving back to America two years ago was a transformational experience. As I gained more of an impression of what it meant to be American, I started to contrast who I was in the US with the person I had been in England. And people change, I certainly changed. Now that I’m in Russia, I feel like this process is happening all over again, to a whole new degree. We know from science that there’s nothing to be learned from a group of two items, you need at least three to determine any meaningful common characteristics. Now that I have a third item – Russia – I feel like I can really figure some stuff out. So this weekend I’ve drifted off in thought during my history reading and gone through old stuff on my computer to remember the person that I was just four years ago. How often does a person stop and take a moment to think about the person they are, or figure out what’s really important to them? This weekend I’ve taken the time to look in my rear-view mirror and to think about the places that the highway has already taken me.

Perhaps this post is making me sound more pensive than I’ve actually been. I haven’t been sitting around thinking all weekend, I’m not a philosopher. (At least I can tell you that much!) What I’m saying is that studying abroad has been an amazing experience so far and I’ve learned as much outside the classroom as in it. Few people nowadays find somewhere that they’ll spend the rest of their life, but hopefully next time I get on the highway I’ll have some idea what exit I want to take.

My Commute - In Pictures

Exit House...

Make sure pie shop across the street is still open. Make note to save 15 roubles for a cabbage pie later. Continue on my way.

Pass Schmidt, where our orientation was held. Reminisce about the days of a 5 minute commute.

West down the river (the dockyards)

The 'annunciation bridge' which I cross to get to school. Pretty beautiful. It goes up from 1-5am, also pretty beautiful.

Schmidt, again

North Embankment from the bridge:

See unknown impressive palace. Take photo. Continue on way.

Cast a glance at the winter palace, easts down the Neva. What a sight for a Friday morning!

Head down the bridge.

Other palace. Take photo. Continue on way.

Parking on the sidewalk. That's cool here.

Turn right down Galernaya. Avoid stray dogs and stray dog poo.

Arrive Smolny...

Sorry to be so brief, but hopefully it gives you some impression of the city I'm in!

Don’t Sweat It

So I was back in the gym today for the first time in almost a week and another of my wonderful observations came to mind. Russians don’t sweat. First off, let me say that I sweat all the time. Literally all the time. So I’ll be biking in the gym, dripping with sweat, with that gross patch growing on my shirt, and I’ll get some weird looks. They immediately know I’m foreign. Because I’m sweating. I don’t know what it is about the people here, if they’ve evolved to suit the climate or whether they’re constantly dehydrated from all the vodka they drink, but I really haven’t seen anyone sweat. There will sometimes be people running on the treadmills – I even saw one guy running fast – but none of them sweat! Running down the escalator in the metro gets me hot so I’ll take off my coat. Walking fast on the street gets me hot so I’ll take off my coat. Russians don’t seem to remove clothing, even if the temperature changes substantially. I’m looking forward to the winter to see if people act any differently… Well not REALLY looking forward to it because I know I’ll be exponentially more uncomfortable. Dogs don’t have sweat glands… Is it possible that Russians don’t either...?

So I’m feeling great today and am really happy to be back in the swing of things. I started getting sick last Friday and it put a bit of a damper on my weekend. Friday night was an organized night with Russian students and we went bowling, which was actually a ton of fun. And then I went home because I wasn’t feeling well. Saturday I did some work (screenshot of purgatory featured below), went to the gym (good idea Alex, that will help you get better) and tried to have some fun in the evening, before getting to bed early. Sunday was yet ANOTHER organized trip (we are spoiled, but I love it) to Peter and Paul’s Fortress, the oldest part of the city. I’ll give you some bite-size history on the other side of this photo…

So the new fortress was built on the site of St. Petersburg in 1703 as a buttress to the border with Sweden (The war with them went on for ages, you can find lots on the internet if you’re interested). Peter the Great got really excited about building a new capital – because he hated Moscow – and as the site for this ultramodern, new-age capital he chose the swamp surrounding the fortress. He recruited French architects to help him plan the city in a European style, built everything in a European style, set up an Admiralty to build a fleet in European style, and started setting up trade links in the Baltic, in true European style. About 60000 (might be 6000 but it’s more exciting this way) people died converting the swamp to a city, but Peter persevered and by the 1720s St. Petersburg had become the Russian capital. It’s pretty amazing that the city grew so fast and that so much labor went in to making my island habitable. So back to the fortress – this was really the start of the snowball and has remained very much preserved despite the immense changes to the city around it.

The cathedral is awesome and most of the Russian tsars after Peter the Great are buried inside (so you can see most of the Russian royalty in one trip – Convenient). I’ll try to put some pictures up of the inside. Like everything else in this city it’s so grand that it’s immediately overwhelming. If you removed half of the gold from the altar-side of the cathedral it would still be breathtaking. So what’s the point? To be European, but better. 18^th Century Russia in a sentence right there.

So after the cathedral we took a quick tour through the fortress prison, where the Decembrists and other revolutionaries (e.g. members of the royal family – what a sobering reversal of fates) spent months in solitary confinement. I would go crazy in a single day so let’s hope that I never end up there. People used to communicate by tapping their bed frames on the floor; they had to type out each letter individually. Can you imagine how long that would take? Let me also point out that the walls had been specially insulated so that communication would not be possible, which is incredibly vindictive.

So enough with the prison. After that I went back to bed, stayed home in bed on Monday and read most of my book, went to class Tuesday and came back to bed, finally felt slightly better on Wednesday. As illnesses go it wasn’t that bad – I exhausted and had a headache but there was very little mucous involved. MAJOR plus.

My courses have been great so far, and I’m incredibly excited about my history class. It’s going to be a ton of work but it should be great for my Russian and should be incredibly intellectually stimulating. The professor taught at Michigan for a couple years so he speaks fluent English, which again is a MAJOR plus. Once in a while he’ll mingle English into the steam of Russian and successfully pull me back in. Understandably lost I’ll hear “… Evangelical Uprisings” and I can get back on track. I barely know what those words mean in English, how does he??

Life and Culture in St. Petersburg should be easier in terms of work and vocabulary and I’m excited to learn more about the development of the city through the ages. And then of course there are RSL courses which constitute most of my academic effort but are not really worth talking about. Unless you’re interested in hearing more about the irregularities in prefix use for verbs of motion. Likely…

So I’m getting up early tomorrow to get my workout in before class so I should probably get to bed. But before I go, check out this jar of pickles:

Cucumbers from the dacha + those herbs and what appears to be a clove of garlic = Some truly delicious pickles. I have some more random photos stored up from around the house but you’ll have to wait until next time. There can only be so much fun in one blog post.

Well that’s it from me. Hope all is well elsewhere in the world!

First winter cold...

Spent most of this weekend sleeping but will hopefully be able to put together another post soon! For now, back to bed.

Чудо

Despite their various shortcomings, Russians have some things really figured out. As you can see this is yogurt in a bottle. It’s DRINKABLE. You get half a litre for a dollar and you can consume it anywhere. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. What a beautiful creation. In fact, the guys in the dormitory literally lived off чудо for their first week here. It’s a testament to the yogurt that they are still alive. The last I heard though they had bought 5 pounds of steak and things were looking up. But anyway, it’s both delicious and convenient. America – Get to work on bottling yogurt.

Чудо also happens to be one of the only Russian foods with protein. My family hasn’t been serving me a lot of meat (a single chicken leg or medium-sized hot dog are common at dinner and there’s no protein in the oatmeal I eat for breakfast) and so I’ve been desperate to find other sources at lunch and at my other various snack times. My greatest success so far was with a Big Tasty from McDonalds, but as we all know that’s not a great road to start down… I’m working on some sort of protein supplement but it will be a while before I can find a safe one at a reasonable price. So I’m complaining about the food, but my family really has been serving me a lot. Along with said chicken morsel I’ll be given an entire plate of vegetables, a whole potato, soup, biscuits, bread and tea. They’re all healthy, hearty foods in great quantity, but they haven’t stopped me from losing ten pounds while I’ve been here. All I want in the world is a steak. Will someone send me a steak in the mail?

So I started off talking about the wonderful bits of Russia (incidentally чудо means wonder. They really thought the yogurt thing through). Here are just a couple positive observations, many of which will speak straight to my Dad. First of all, the metro stations are all made out of regularly polished marble and the ceilings are like 30 feet high. As if that weren’t appealing enough, it’s a flat rate of 75 cents and trains leave every three minutes (there’s a timer so you can track them). The unsurprising consequence is that everyone takes the metro. Rush hour is CRAZY. There’s no wasted space on the train. In fact it’s rude if you’re not shoving to make more room on the train. Escalators are the same way. The metro is way below the city (because Peter the Great built it on a swamp - great thinking – and you need to dig down to get concrete foundations) so you spend a lot of time on the escalators. On the way down you either stand to the right or run down the left. If you don’t stand to the right, it’s your fault when someone running down the left knocks you over. So that’s just the metro. But it’s unbelievably efficient.

I’m on a new paragraph but I haven’t finished with my observations. I’m just going to go with it. So change in stores: This can be ridiculous. Russians are obsessed with paying in exact amounts and will often get angry if you make them count out change. I had a woman refuse to serve me because I tried to pay with a 1000 rouble note! (That’s a little more than $30) If you pay with an amount close to the price, the cashier will ask if you’ve got a rouble or two so he can give you an even amount. This is something you go through every time you stop in at a store. It’s amazing that an issue of minor concern has caused this full-scale national preoccupation.

I’ve got to write on this blog more often so I can share everything in smaller chunks. I’ve been writing for a while so I’m going to take a break… Okay I’m back. That was way less time for you than it was for me.

So I signed up for classes this week and am hoping that they’re going to work out well. We’re all taking RSL (Russian as a Second Language) as part of the program, so we only sign up for two classes at Smolny. At the moment I’m registered for a history course and a literature course. ‘History of the Russian Empire’ and ‘Life and Culture in St. Petersburg’. If I can’t make it through the history class on Tuesday I’ll have to change both courses. It’s definitely going to be difficult. They’re both in Russian, but the history class is a 300 level with a hundred pages of Russian reading a week. Could be too much but we’ll see!

I found a gym on Wednesday so I’ve been able to get my normal workouts in. It’s about 40 minutes away on the metro, but it’s a great gym. I often forget that I’m in Russia when I’m there. Plus it’s called Alex Fitness (Destiny?). The members are an interesting crowd. Unlike the US where there’s more of an even spread, gym-goers here belong to one of two poles: noticeably out of shape or on steroids. I mean… in shape. But for realz, (Did I really just say that?) two of the trainers at my gym must be on steroids. Or if not steroids, they’re on something else. The bigger one must weigh over 300 pounds. That’s huge! But who knows, maybe the sheer terror that I experience will coax me into working harder in the gym. Really liking the gym so far, just a long commute!

We’re having a surprise birthday party for one of the girls in our group so I should get going. I haven’t been on the internet since Thursday but I should be able to post this when I get to school tomorrow (Monday).

Tomorrow’s going to be a laugh, I have class from 11:00-20:00. I’m pretty sure that would be illegal in the US. Welcome to Russia, Alex!