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!