Peter and Paul Fortress

I said I was going to talk about St. Petersburg next, but I was lying. But you see, they haven't gotten to taking us around the city, and they haven't given us any time to do it ourselves, either. If you'll just wait till Sunday, I think I'll be able to give you a much more informed post. Also, on Monday I'm going to try to post some (maybe a lot) of pictures to the flickr site, which there should be a link to somewhere on this page.

Anyway, today we went to Peter and Paul Fortress, which was built on an (artificial, I think) island in the Neva by Peter the Great during some kind of 21-year war with the Swedes. The fortress is essentially a large wall around the perimeter of the island, with a cathedral in the center. More buildings have since been added, but none of them seemed particularly interesting.

Peter and Paul Cathedral, on the other hand, has some great stuff in it. For instance, the remains of every tsar from Peter I to Nicholas II (and the rest of his family, too). Here are two stories that go along with it:

The spire of Peter and Paul Cathedral is 122 meters tall, and gilded, with an angel on the top that acts as a weathervane. For one thing, Peter decreed that no building in St. Petersburg could be built taller than the spire, which has something to do the fact that, well, the buildings are pretty short by big-city standards. For another thing, the scaffolding was so expensive that when the angel needed to be repaired, they instead found someone to climb the spire (no mean feat, as you'll see once I get the picture posted). As payment, he was given a mug embossed with the double-headed eagle, which entitled him to drink whatever he wanted anywhere in Russia for free. Apparently a gesture derived from this story is still in use, and means something along the lines of "hit me with another." That part of it was explained rather early in the morning, though, so I'm still unclear on the details.

The first thing to see when you go into the cathedral is on the left, under the stairs to the belfry: it's the tomb of Peter the Great's son, Alexei. Peter had him tortured to death in the cathedral on treason charges, then buried him under the stairs to the belfry. All the other tombs are raised, so that no one can walk over them: to do so would be a great sign of disrespect. Wikipedia further reveals that Alexei was only being tried for treason because he mysteriously decided to flee to Italy. After Peter had convinced him to come back to Russia, Alexei was tortured until he admitted to some kind of conspiracy. Then Peter had most anyone associated with him impaled and/or broken on the wheel, and Aleksei was sentenced to death.

Take that with a grain of salt, though. I was only skimming.

Also, Alexander II is buried in a jade tomb instead of white marble like everyone else, owing to the fact that he freed the serfs.

After we were done with that, we went to a concert by the St. Petersburg Men's Choir. They were fantastic. Then I walked home along the Neva, which also took a long time.

Tomorrow, if I can convince myself to wake up at 6:30, I'll be going to the Russian renaissance fair.

I'm not kidding.

I am very tired.

Not to complain, but...

Which is to say, I'm going to complain now. I think I've mentioned some of the positives of this program--namely, that it's the holy grail--but it also has a few flaws, the foremost of which is the fact that we have ten hours of activities planned every day.

That's sort of an exaggeration. We have three hours of class in the morning, and an hour and a half of lecture in the afternoon, and then usually two or three hours worth of something after that.

It is, however, also not an exaggeration: I leave at 8:45 in the morning, and have so far returned at times like 9:15, 10:00, and 5:15. Part of this is because I tend to walk home, but I feel that it's fair to include that: it takes a long time.

And some of the activities they plan for us--

We have movie days; there are supposed to be seven of them. It starts with a lecture by a student of international film, continues to a movie, and then finishes with a small amount of additional discussion about the movie. It may just be that I'm in a bad mood today, but everything I just said is a terrible idea.

By the time four o'clock rolls around--and that's when these movie things start--we've all been concentrating on Russian for, oh, eight hours or so. This, as it turns out, is actually very difficult, and I don't think any of us get enough sleep, so it's probably fair to say that we not only don't give a damn about Russian film at that point--most of us are actually against it. And then, as I mentioned, the first film was silent. And boring. Very good for our Russian.

The second film was Ballad of a Soldier, which was a 1959 war/love story. Maybe I don't understand classic film or, again, maybe I'm in a bad mood, but this was probably the cheesiest film I've ever seen. Some films try for this status, and fall short because of it: this one was sincere. It goes something like this: Alyosha is a 19-yr old signal corps member, and he is going to die alone in a foreign country.

Alyosha begins by single-handedly eliminating a pair of German tanks in a moment of panic. In place of commendation for these heroics, he asks for a day's leave to go home to see his mother, because he didn't get to say good-bye and he wants to repair a hole in the roof. On the way home, boy meets girl who just happens to sneak a ride on the same train, and they fall not-quite-instantly in love. Eventually they separate, Alyosha gets home long enough to visit his mother for about five minutes, and then heads back off to the war.

That's a little cheesy, but it could be well done. The things they do along the way, though! Before he gets to the train, Alyosha encounters a friendly happy soldier who wants him to take a message to his wife while he's between trains; the rest of his friendly happy platoon overhears this and pesters the sergeant until he agrees to let Alyosha take their two cakes of soap as a gift to the wife. At the train station he helps out a crippled soldier going home, and convinces him to go back to his wife. Not all of these have to do with wives, but do you see where this is going? There are probably a dozen or more scenes that are included as obviously sentimental slice-of-life deals. And I don't want you to think the acting is good, either, but you'd have to see that for yourself. Another day, I probably would have called it so bad it was good.

Also, this was preceded by half an hour of the lecturer telling us how much he liked this move, and 15 minutes of interview with the director, who was talking about how the movie was his magnum opus.

None of that was strictly relevant, though. The relevant thing was that it had subtitles in English, so we weren't really learning much Russian from it anyway, were we? Couldn't we have just gone home?

I'm being unfair, I know. But I really wanted to sleep.

Ok. I think that's enough of that. Next time I'll actually talk about St. Petersburg; I promise.

long days

This is stacking up, so I'll keep it short.

Monday:
long placement exam--three hours; more difficult than anything I've ever taken, ever
lunch--apparently it's not assumed that everyone needs to drink while they're eating
long lecture--on economics, in a hot room, in Russian (like everything); fell asleep after it was clear this would not affect my comprehension
walk home--took me two and a half hours, which is two much by an hour and change; I could have gotten help, but refuse to ask for directions to Broadway, which Nevsky prospekt is. Why aren't there any street signs?

Tuesday:
placement--into groups amusingly code-named by preci0us stone, presumably so they wouldn't have to tell us how we ranked. Dad's a geologist; I placed in the low advanced (low, high intermediate; low, high advanced) group, which is better than expected.
class--finally, I understand what's going on. Professors claim they'll speak slowly; some stick to it longer than others.
lunch--again, no water. Why, God?
lecture--on linguistics; again, finally something I understand. I keep saying "finally" like it's been a long time, but this is only true subjectively.
movie--we may or may not have had the entire history of Russian film explained to us beforehand; couldn't tell. Movie was mercifully silent.
dinner--at a Turkish restaurant; highly recommended

Wednesday:
walk to university--bad decision; normally I take the marshrutka (taxi-bus). Took longer than I thought, and was raining harder than I wanted by the end of it.
more class--I could get used to this
lunch--they begin to understand that we will always want water; provide us with 4 oz. glasses
lecture--cancelled; updated blog instead

Next: some kind of actual description of St. Petersburg?

Intro to St. Petersburg, pt II

I’m living with Emma Fyodorovna, who is old enough to be balding, doesn’t speak a lick of English, and, like most Russian professors, ends all of her sentences (to me, anyway) with понятно, да? (That is, “understood, yes?” I don’t mean to imply that she’s a Russian professor, though). She won’t actually be living in the apartment for the next ten days, though, because there’s another student of some description (I was told not to expect him back until early in the morning) living in the other bedroom. Instead she’ll be staying with her brother, who I also met, I think. That is to say, I got introduced to some male acquaintance of hers, who may have been her brother but looked young enough to be her son. He asked me a number of questions which I understood well enough to answer after they had been repeated and explained only a few times, if I was lucky. Eventually Emma Fyodorovna told me I should go rest before he talked my ear off.

The apartment is near (within) the edge of the center of town, and if you visited it while you were looking for apartments, you would turn around and leave at the stairwell. The actual apartment is nice enough, though. It has two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a small hall connecting them. The stove and range are gas, and have to be lit manually, and the boiler has to be lit any time you want hot water—but it is there; apparently hot water is unavailable in most homes for a month or so in the summer. My room is about 8’x16’ or so, and (like all the rooms) overlooks the apartment building courtyard and Suvorovsky prospekt. This last is my only real complaint so far: Suvorovsky prospekt is a large street just off of Nevsky prospekt, which is the St. Petersburg equivalent of Broadway. It’s a bit noisy, unless I’m willing to close the window. I haven’t seen much of the city yet (until I get my registration, long walks are inadvisable), but I took a walk around the area nearby, and I think it would be fair to describe it as basically dilapidated: cheap neons signs, beat-up cars everywhere, facades crumbling—that kind of thing. We’ll see how it is closer in.

Intro to St. Petersburg, pt I

Enough said about travel, I hope? We arrived in St. Petersburg on Saturday at about 1:20 pm local time—that is to say, 5:20 am where it counts. And sleep on planes, I couldn’t help but notice, does not count.

There’s a Russian-only policy on the program, which is to say that if we insist on speaking English we’re to keep it to or, occasionally, amongst ourselves. This went into effect immediately. While I approve of this policy, it’s more of an annoyance than anything when you’re eight hours jet-lagged. And, also, there are some things you just want to be told how to do in English—like how to make an international phone card with a Russian calling card on a phone you’ve just been given. Seriously. That one took me about an hour and a half and some help from someone who had already been to Russia a few times. Anyway, that kept me from going to sleep immediately. I had some difficulty explaining to my mother that yes, I had arrived safe but, no, I didn’t want to talk; I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours.

I did eventually call her back; it just took until I had my brain working again (going on thirty hours without sleep—go figure). I went to bed at about midnight, when it was about as bright as Cincinnati would be at, say, 8:00 pm, and woke up briefly at four in the morning, when it was about as bright as Cincinnati would be at, say, 5:30 am. That’s pretty cool.

Orientation (Sunday) took about three hours, and was of course in Russian, with the result that I probably got about 80% of the beginning and about 20% of the end. Naturally, we all nodded our heads and claimed that we understood everything the whole way through, even though they said they’d repeat in English if they had to. There was a lot of information in that, but I think the most important things were: always carry your passport (and registration, and migration card), and: if you need help, don’t ask the police. Then we had lunch, and went to meet our families.

Travel

I think I might like international flying, if it weren't for the part with the airplanes.

This makes sense: on the way to NYC, I sat next to a fellow from Mumbai, India; the flight attendant on the flight to Frankfurt looked like Mr. Jaworek and offered me a beer "better than anysing se have in se States;" and on the flight to St. Petersburg I sat next to a gynecologist from Singepore and her husband, who were going to the World Stamp Exhibition.

Jet lag was tremendous, but it's beginning to look like we have to check out, so I'll talk about actual Russia later.

Orientation

So.

Orientation was today. It was pretty long. Unlike the program, I'll try to keep it to the relevant information.

Hmmm, relevant. Ok: hitchhiking is cheap, easy, and practiced by everyone. Drivers cruise around looking for a few extra bucks, so if you stick your hand out it's basically guaranteed that someone will stop to negotiate fare. How cool is that?

Oh, yeah. I'll be living with a woman of unspecified age, apparently nowhere near any of the other participants. That's ok; mostly we're all scattered. There will, as expected, be a lot of language and culture classes, but there will also be three weeks of seminars in English with Russian students at the university. There are also going to be concerts, performances, plays, etc. 2-3 times a week, plus more (sometimes optional) stuff on the weekend, including a certain amount of the touristy stuff. The excursion at the end will apparently be a cruise up towards the north of Russia, which is apparently beautiful territory--if disappointingly not Moscow. I'm actually excited now--something which does, admittedly, tend to come more with imminence than anything else for me.

Also, there was a bunch of other stuff: a (probably obligatory) speech by someone from the Department of State, a bunch of background on culture (in a very abstract way) and politics, some (very little) information from other students who have visited Russia, a career panel, and an ok lunch. The career panel was essentially a pitch for the Fulbright Scholars program and the US Foreign Service, which sounds interesting but is probably depressingly governmental. Oh well.

Phone cards are reasonably priced in St. Petersburg, I'm told, so let me know if I ought to give you a call--and let me know when, too. The time difference is kind of a lot.

Lots of flying tomorrow. And lots of flying the next day, too.



Edit: Some people from the Russian Consulate also came to talk to us. They told us about things like the way the media shapes the way the US is perceived in Russia and vice versa. Then someone asked them what they thought of Putin, and we all had a good laugh.

A couple of the professors started studying Russia in the early 80s. Apparently studying in Russia was a very different business then--something about being followed around by men in suits.

Time to pack up and go.

NYC

I've made it to NYC in fairly good condition, and spent most of the day hanging out with Chris. This has been a good move: it was entertaining, and saved me a small bundle of the government's money. Also, I had lunch in Chinatown.

The flight was a little delayed, but otherwise I can't complain: I didn't get airsick.

I have a page set up for photos. It only has one or two right now, and those just for the sake of form.

That's all. Orientation tomorrow.

I'm going to be in Russia soon, and if I find I have time I may use this to talk about it. Look for posts in the future--maybe.