Vegard

Exciting news! The Englishman has been replaced by a Norwegian student, and Emma is once again staying with her brother. The Norwegian's name, as you may have already guessed, is Vegard. Roughly. I've only seen it in Cyrillic so far. I was afraid, at first, that I was going to have to communicate with him entirely in Russian--but he's European, so of course he knows English too. That's probably an unfair generalization (though I hesitate to call any generalization which can be paraphrased "lucky bastards!" unfair); but in Norway, at least, English is taught from first grade on. So.

Vegard is here studying Russian, naturally enough, and has already taken six months' worth of it at home. I'm going to go ahead and suppose that all the studying of English taught him how to listen to foreign languages, because he already seems to be doing a lot better than I was when I got here. Not as well as I'm doing now, though. Anyway, it seems that things are coming full circle, since I will now be here just long enough to make things easier for someone else who will be living here for a while. I got to explain to what to expect from and how not to offend Emma, and I started to explain about the white nights (in connection with the question of whether or not the streets are safe at night) before I realized that he comes from the land of the midnight sun.

It should be interesting--but I'll give him until tomorrow before I start grilling him about Norway.

The Rolling Stones

They gather no moss, I hear, though it's difficult to believe. Anyway, they had a concert in Palace Square on Saturday. It appears to have taken them most of the week to assemble the stage, which is probably because it had about an acre of video screen on it, and a moving platform. Attendance was better than at the Elton John concert--possibly owing to the fact that it wasn't raining. Palace Square is, as I've mentioned, a decent chunk of space; I think there were people everywhere except in the "shadow" of the Alexandrine Column. Also there were people just beyond the barrier, and people along the sidewalks at the end of Nevsky, and a lot of people in the park across the street. As for the concert itself: I was impressed. Mick Jagger spent almost all of it dancing around the stage, and didn't die from it.

Under the conditions (which were basically ideal), I think it's fair to say that Russian crowds are pretty subdued. For 'subdued' here, you may substitute 'pathetic'. They do cheer, but they pretty much only do it at the end of songs, or after someone says something, and then they stop, and basically don't cheer again until something else happens. They can be convinced to do things like clap during songs--but for some reason it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone in the band that a crowd that mostly doesn't speak English can't be counted on to repeat lyrics in English. At the end of the concert they applauded, for a while. Not long enough to really deserve an encore, anyway; everyone pretty much just left. Applause is definitely louder, longer, and more enthusiastic at things like the opera.

Pretty much the whole crowd left by walking down Nevsky. I don't think the militsia left any other path, so we basically blocked traffic out past the first canal. And here was a strange thing: a couple times a cheer went up while we were walking down Nevsky, for no discernible reason whatsoever. Kind of like the wave, but louder, and on the street. Oh, and part of the way down the street I realized that everything looked so funny because it was dark and there were lights on; the sun sets at around 11:00 now.

I didn't go on the boat ride we had planned for after the concert, even though I haven't seen the bridges go up yet. Later, right? The next morning was an excursion to Tsarskoe Selo (aka Pushkin), and then a picnic after that.

Pushkin was all right; it has a few palaces, and a lot of parks. The one palace we saw was a summer palace--only one room thick at any given point--and not all that interesting. The park was nice, though.

The picnic, by contrast, was basically dismal. Russian parks are generally pretty good, but their idea of a park shelter doesn't include benches or a concrete surface, which worked well with the fact that the area around the shelter was sandy. Also, it was raining. It wasn't a complete waste, though--we got to play some frisbee.

Oh, and today was Navy Day. There have been big posters up along the streets all week that say "Glory to the Russian Navy" (not kidding), and then apparently they paraded some of the navy along the Neva today. We didn't get back early enough to see this (the picnic was really long), but they had the tops of the four big columns lit (they're supposed to represent the four great rivers of Russia), and there were a lot (really, a lot) of sailors and/or people dressed as sailors on the streets heading away from the river. And, for that matter, a lot of people still on the banks of the Neva, considering that the show appeared to be over. Apparently they get into their patriotic holidays.

Ok. That's it for now.

Apocrypha

This entry may disappear, if I later tell people who want to promote the program that the blog exists. With that disclaimer, I'm going to talk about money.

The program gives us a stipend, which is about $20 dollars a day (3500 roubles a week) to cover food and transportation costs. Two of our meals (breakfast and lunch) are already covered by the program, as is our housing, which leaves $20 a day for one meal, and a couple of bus trips. All of this, I'm thinking, might cost me as much as $10 a day in downtown Cincinnati. Now, I'm going to put this into perspective.

My host mom wanted--for feeding me for an entire month--between 1300 and 2500 roubles; naturally, I gave her the 2500. With this, she feeds me literally more than I can eat.

One of our teachers--at St. Petersburg St. University, which is the best in St. Petersburg and the oldest in Russia--makes about 11,000 roubles a month ($440), which is about the average salary for teachers in Russia. With this, she of course pays all of her expenses--including things like all of her food, and her housing costs. And in a month, remember, I make 14,000 or 15,000 roubles--for sitting in her classes, and going on cultural excursions. Consultation with Patrick (and Patrick's consultation with Wikipedia) reveals that Russian per capita GDP is about 14,300 roubles a month, or about 3300 roubles a week. So I'm actually making more than the average Russian--again, for nothing, and without factoring in the benefit of free housing and partial board.

And on top of this, the program pays for our excursions. Trips to museums, cathedrals, palaces, boat rides, tours of places like Peterhof, and tickets for the ballet, the opera, and concerts. These tickets aren't for cheap seats, either--we've sat in the orchestra or the boxes for pretty much everything, at a standard price of maybe 1200 roubles ($48) a head. That's fine, they're exposing us to Russian culture, which is half the point of the program.

It gets better, though: this week they gave us an extra 1500 roubles worth of stipend because we "might want to buy some souvenirs." And tomorrow we're going to a Rolling Stones concert--at the government's expense. Ludicrous.

You see why I'd want to take it down.

Beggars of St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg has a lot of beggars, after a fashion. Very few of them are actual beggars, though. The most common kind are people selling boxes of inexpensive stuff--little toys, or flowers, or small selections of produce. Fine. These are boring.

There are also street musicians. These are generally more enthusiastic and better organized than in the US. Twos and threes are almost as frequent as lone street musicians; I once saw a singer and an accordion player capitalizing on the fact that SPB is supposed to be the "Venice of the North." I have also seen people playing electric guitars, a family playing Celtic music, and--I am not making this up--a string quartet playing in a pedestrian underpass close to Red Square. So the street musicians are good.

After this are people who aren't really beggars, but aren't selling anything, either. These are mostly people with animals--usually a box full of kittens; sometimes a dog with a litter of puppies. These are almost always suckling--not just still nursing, but actively doing so when you walk by. Sometimes you'll see tourists taking pictures of this; I imagine that the people with the animals are thrilled every time someone asks to do this. These people aren't genuine beggars, of course, but you have to give them credit for being clever.

Finally there are the real beggars. They come in two varieties: old women, and cripples. They can be seen along main thoroughfares--there's a veteran missing half his arms and legs (half of each of them, not all of one arm and all of one leg) who frequents Nevsky prospekt, and I once saw an old woman on her knees in front of an icon, apparently praying for money. Mostly they gather around the churches, though; there are old women near the entrance to Kazan Cathedral and at the foot of St. Isaac's, and the walkway into Alexander Nevsky Monastery is strewn with veterans missing their legs.

It's important to point out, though, that you will almost never see old men begging in Russia. This is because there are almost no old men in Russia; I think the life expectancy for men in Russia is something like 58 (versus, I don't know, 73 for women. Wait...CIA World Factbook confirms). There are old women everywhere, though--old women whose pensions, I assume, aren't big enough or maybe aren't existent enough after the fall of the Soviet Union. Usually they are wearing galoshes and overcoats and shawls, and of course they carry their things around in plastic bags--basically everyone does. As a rule, they're pretty short, too, generally as much due to stature as the to the fact that they tend to be bent about double. I think, though, that they're probably the most distinct people in all of Russia--or at least St. Petersburg. I would take pictures to show you (I may have one--she was looking the other way), but I'm afraid that if they noticed it would just be one more insult.

Anyway. Those are the beggars of St. Petersburg, more or less.

Church on Spilt Blood

The New York Institute came to a close Friday while I was on the train, and we've since resumed movie showings. As I suspected, my initial bitterness towards this one was due to my being tired and in a bad mood. To be fair, though, from 9:30 to 6 or 7 is a long time to be at school. Especially when you have to concentrate to get any of what's going on. Anyway, that's improved--plus, the movies are more interesting for themselves now, instead of just as pieces of cultural significance. Plus, I more or less understand the lectures now.

Tuesday we went to the--let's see if I can get this right--the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, also known as the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood or just the Church on Spilt Blood. It's not a very old church--begin in the late 1800s and completed just before WWII--and it's done to look like St. Basil's, which it does. The style is Russian Revival, I'm told.

As you may have guessed, the "spilt blood" part of the name is important. The cathedral has never actually functioned as a church, and was built primarily as a memorial for Alexander II--the one who freed the serfs, and the one who was buried in the jade tomb in Peter and Paul Cathedral. Well, Alexander was going somewhere under escort one Sunday morning when someone decided to throw a bomb under his carriage. This didn't kill him, though it did a fair number on his guards, and neither did the second one. The second bomb did mortally wound him, though, and so his son decided to build a cathedral on the spot. And it only took
twenty years and a few million rubles to complete.

So, the church has in it a little canopy of jade and rhodonite over the spot where Alexander was (more or less) killed--and, since this was right next to one of the canals, the church extends a little bit into the canal. It's not particularly a particularly large building, but it does have the distinction of being the most thoroughly decorated structure I've ever seen--or heard of, for that matter. With maybe three exceptions that I can think of, literally every surface on the inside of the church was covered in mosaics. One of the exceptions was the partition before the altar (all Orthodox churches seem to have them) which was made of things like jade and rhodonite and marble and decorated with icons (er, it was--the Soviets did away with those, I'm afraid), and another was the canopy over the spot where Alexander II was killed. The third exception is for the spots on the partition where there were icons before the Soviets took them away. Even the floor is done in mosaics--relatively simple ones, with geometric designs, but they're there all the same (though mostly covered by carpet--the marble's not very thick). The rest of the mosaics are images of Christ, the saints, and filler done in floral patterns. I'll post more pictures so that maybe some of you can see at some point. So that's that.

I think the only other thing of note was that today we had our first genuinely bad lecture, which was fairly amusing for me. The topic was cultural barriers to understanding between English speakers and Russians, and it was being presented by a history professor from S. Illinois living in SPB and a Russian student from SPB studying in Canada. It was not intended to be scholarly. Mostly, it was about stereotypes Russians have of Americans (and vice versa), and what cultural differences actually do apply. It would have been helpful for people completely new to Russia but, well, at this point we're not, so it just looked like an assortment of oversimplifications. And the American professor apparently doesn't speak any Russian, so...

Somewhere in the middle of the lecture, some of the more annoyed members of our group started asking him questions about things like, mmm, what the basis for his argument was, or where it was leading, or just how it was that he had become interested in Russia in the first place. So it was amusing, in the sense that the poor fellow immediately went on the defensive, and that it showed rather clearly. As it turned out, he had first come to Russia on a Fulbright. He told us that he said to them, "I want to spend all my time in art museums, and at the opera, and in the theater, etc.", and he ended up in St. Petersburg. He also said that he really liked New York City, so we were mostly led to the conclusion that he's in St. Petersburg because New York is too expensive. He was willing to admit that SPB was a nice enough city, though--just don't go on the metro.

Er. I'm still having trouble figuring out how someone who thinks it's a bad idea to go on the SPB metro could ever have wanted to live in NYC. I'm afraid this sort of thing completely destroyed our respect for the fellow. I felt pretty bad for him, though--the people who were asking questions were trying not to be rude, but I don't think they were trying very hard. Ah well.

I figured out why the lectures have been so frustrating for me, though: not only have they generally been interesting, and a little too far above my comprehension level for me to get all the information I wanted out of them--I realized that these lectures are actually at or near the level that I wanted my college education to be, and I can't understand them properly.

That's all, I think. Tomorrow, the Russian Museum.

Moscow

Ah, so. This weekend didn't look like it was going to be very interesting, so I went to Moscow with three other students from the program: Tyler, Jenny, and Larissa. For your convenience:

Dramatis personae:

Americans

Larissa--from Washington, more or less; her life sounds crazy.

Jenny--from Nebraska; also studies Spanish, and just graduated.

Tyler--from Wisconsin; actually a math major.

Ryan--that's me.

Russians

Misha--Tyler's host brother; student of Semitic languages at the Moscow Federal something something Humanities.

Masha--Misha's girlfriend (Misha is a boy's name, Masha is a girl's name); a language student at the same university.

Marina--friend of Misha's (and Masha's); also a student at the university.

Iulia--friend of Misha's (and Masha's and Marina's); yet another student.

Sam--pensioner and part-time street artist, of sorts. His real name does actually resemble Sam.

So. The train left Friday at 1:12 from the Moscow train station in SPB (getting us out of most of a day of classes), and arrived in Moscow at the Leningrad train station at 9:05 (train times are accurate more or less to the minute). We traveled platskart (that is, cheaply) on the way there, and were pleased to discover that this meant we had an open four-person compartment, with convertible bunks/benches. We brought food, ate food, slept, and read. Conclusion: it might just be childhood bias, but I really like train travel. Compared to plane or car travel, anyway; we'll talk about boats later.

Misha and Masha met us at the train station and took us to their university to meet Marina and Iulia. We went to eat at a restaurant called Moo-Moo (transliteration correct: it was decorated with cows), and got to practice our Russian some more. All of the Russians had at least some English, and they all study languages in a way that reveals what I do for the hobby it is. Misha (Misha is a boy's name, Masha is a girl's name), if I remember correctly, said that he has so far studied English, Latin, Greek, German, Arabic, and a little bit of Hebrew. He knew at least the first three of those relatively well at some point. Anyway, they were about as excited to talk to us as we were to them--possibly more so; American students are considerably rarer in Moscow. A good time was had by all.

After they kicked us out of the restaurant (they were closing), they took us by Red Square. As you probably don't have any reason to know, the "red" in Red Square has nothing to do with bricks or communism; the Russian word for red (krasniy) used to mean "beautiful" as well as "red." And so the square is accurately named; we came in by the State Historical Museum, and going clockwise the sides of the Square (actually rectangular) is occupied by GUM (the former State Universal Store, now a vast expensive mall), St. Basil's Cathedral (you've seen pictures, perhaps?) and the Kremlin. The GUM is a nice enough building, but they light it up with white Christmas lights at night (the sun actually sets in Moscow!), so it looks a little gaudy next to St. Basil's and the Kremlin. The State Historical Museum is a pretty handsome structure, too.

So, St. Basil's and the Kremlin. I think I'll only say for St. Basil's that, like anything with substance, it's much better in person. It was the Kremlin that really impressed me, though. It's big, of course--it encloses 68 acres and has 20 towers, I think, and goes all the way down to the River Moskva, and the walls are pretty tall--but I also said that the Hermitage, for example, was big. (Vast, I think, was the word). The Kremlin's a little bit different than that, though--for one thing there's nothign to distract you from how big it is. It's a lot plainer than any of the palaces--red brick, crenellations, relatively modest towers. For another thing--I don't know. Mostly my thought was that if I were a Mongol prince, I'd have left the Muskovites alone.

(Of course, that isn't the same Kremlin the Mongols dealt with; the current one was designed by Italians at the end of the 15th C. That's not important). At the foot of the Kremlin wall in Red Square is the tomb of Lenin, which is actually a pretty modest structure. Apparently it started as a wooden structure, and was replaced by something more permanent when popular demand for visitations failed to subside. We didn't get to go see it, though; it's only open from 10 to 1. In fact, we didn't end up going inside anything in Red Square. One day in Moscow isn't really enough, I'm afraid.

What else did we see? We went by the All-Russia Exhibition Center, which consists of a number of pavilions (er, 16), arranged around a large open space and fountain (decorated with sixteen statues). Sixteen, of course, is the number of former Soviet republics; the exhibition center is a communist tribute to the common people of the member republics, and the pavilions used to house art from each of them. The buildings are quite nice, but they're mostly used as shopping centers now. Oh well.

We also walked down Arbat, which is a street dedicated to souvenir shops and expensive restaurants--a very deliberate tourist trap. We ate at another Moo-Moo there, and again stayed until closing. Some good did come of the trip to Arbat--on the way out of the Moo-Moo I was accosted by a pensioner who heard me speaking English and decided to tell me the life story of an artist whose statue we had just passed. His name was Sam, more or less, and he likes to supplement his pension by talking about local history, telling jokes, and repeating aphorisms. He said he studied English in high school, then later bought a radio to listen to British and American propaganda (you pay tax dollars, he said, and I listen); now he practices his English on tourists. He's a terrible chatterer--no real information screening at all--so his value is probably greater as a curiosity than an actual entertainer. And he kept us entertained for about half an hour as it was.

We spent the rest of the night doing things like playing cards, charades, and Russian truth or dare (no truth; only dares). As an aside on Russian education: at one point while we were playing charades, Masha (Misha is a boy's name, Masha is a girl's name) went to great lengths to act out "Pushkin" and the title of a poem, so that the other Russians would be able to get "charming" from the other things she'd been doing--he uses the word in the third line, you see.

Unbelievable.

Speaking of unbelievable: we've been talking about things like Russian culture and stereotypes for a few weeks in class now, and one of the stereotypes involves hospitality--something like the classic business about going hungry to feed your guests. Well, even assuming that Misha and Masha and Marina and Iulia are all well above average in this regard--it's true. Our only connection to any of them came from the fact that Tyler has lived with Misha's family for the past month, and Misha wasn't even there half of that time. The rest had just met us. And what did they do for us?

Misha and Masha, as I mentioned, met us at the train station. They introduced us to their friends, went to dinner with us, and showed us around town for a while. Then we went to Marina's apartment (and remember, we had just met her), where they fed us, entertained us, and put us up for the night (which meant sleeping on the floor for most of them). The next morning they fed us again, and Misha and Masha proceeded to show us around all of the next day, possibly begging off obligations at the university to do so. Then all four of them had dinner with us again, fed us again once we got back to the apartment (allowing us to buy food only because we pointed out that we were only spending the US Government's money), and entertained us again literally all night. Then, in the morning, Misha and Masha took us back to the train station, and then even went so far as to keep us company until the train left.

Er. Unfortunately, no one realized it was time for the train to leave until it started moving. Misha and Masha were in the compartment with us at the time; apparently the conductor is supposed to say something so that people like them--you know, people without tickets, who don't want to leave with the train--know to get off. This didn't happen. And, as I'm sure you realize, trains tend to take a while to get going, so that a person acting quickly could conceivably jump onto or off of the train from or to the platform, before it really got moving. This also did not happen, as the conductor refused to open the door at approximately fifteen seconds after the train started moving. So Misha and Masha were stuck on the train until the first scheduled stop two hours later, then stuck on a bus for two hours back--and them with obligations at the university in only three hours' time. We all felt terrible about that; the only good thing I can say about it is that the conductor didn't force them to pay for not having tickets after all. They were unbelievably kind to us, and they really didn't deserve that.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is this: the rest of Moscow was very impressive, but I doubt I'll remember any part this trip--the whole thing, to Russia--more than the hospitality we saw from Misha and Masha and Iulia and Marina.

As to the rest: kupye, which we took back, is better than platskart in the sense that the compartment has a door and the benches are padded, but worse in the sense that the window doesn't open and it gets incredibly hot. Larissa bought the last Harry Potter book for the way back (for $60!), and somehow managed to stay awake to read it--but the rest of us slept, like reasonable people. We got back at about 4:52, and I went to sleep again about, oh, five hours later. A trip like that's pretty tiring, as it turns out; as much as I enjoyed it, I don't think I could do it every weekend.

Once every other week for six months might be fine, though, or once a month for about the next decade.

Photos, again

Those of you who would like Snapfish invitations, please leave comments. There is, obviously, no telling when or if I'll get the photos up on Flickr.

Vasilevsky Island

So, Monday I went to Traviata at the Marinsky Theater--which is, by the way, the classiest one in St. Petersburg. It was very good--and a little unusual, I thought, for the fact that it has an unhappy ending, but everyone means well the entire way through. Also, it has a very good death scene in it. After that, as previously mentioned, I took the metro home, and then didn't get enough sleep.

Tuesday I had nothing to do, so I wandered around Vasilevsky Island--the PhilFac is on the island, but it's on the near edge. Vasilevsky Island is kind of like a large park--sort of a downtown suburb. The streets are wide, with grassy medians where Peter the Great wanted canals, and there are lots of trees everywhere. Very pleasant. In the center, there's a very large cemetery, which is entirely wooded. In fact, it's basically overgrown. It may be my favorite part of the city so far; if you just get a little ways in you can't even really hear the traffic over the noise the trees make.

The far side of that let out into a construction site, as it happens, which introduced me to the ugly part of Vasilevsky Island. Apparently the part of the island closest to the bay is prime real estate for ugly, run-down Soviet apartment complexes and ugly new high-rise apartment complexes. Oh well. I may go out that far again to look at the bay, but I think I'd just be disappointed--it looks like the area is mostly given over to docks.

Also, apparently there's a geological museum on Vasilevsky Island. It's housed in a rather massive building with the Pan-Russian Geological Institute and associated library. One of my guidebooks tells me that it has a map of the USSR done in precious metals, but the guard there told me that it's only open from 10 to 4 on weekdays, so it seems unlikely that I'll actually get to see it.

I didn't do anything worthwhile today, either.

That's all, I think.

Petals on a wet, black bough

Until yesterday, I had never used the St. Petersburg metro. It goes throughout the city, but there are only stations once every couple of kilometers, and the nearest one to me is about a mile away. It's worth using, though; the SPB metro is something else.

For one thing, it's deep. Access to the stations is by escalator, and it actually takes a couple of minutes to ride all the way down; if there are many other people on the escalator, you actually can't see the bottom.

For another thing, some communist somewhere along the line decided that SPB (and, I guess, to a lesser extent Moscow--we'll see) train stations should be monuments to the people. So where NYC subway stations tend to be small, plain, and dirty, SPB metro stations are long, clean, open spaces. You would never write a book like Neverwhere about the SPB metro. And the stations really are monuments, each one unique. One has marble facing; another is covered in red mosaic (the Revolution Square station--go figure); another has what might be a neoclassical interior. It's pretty crazy; I think we're actually trying to put together a tour of the metro stations.

Oh, and the trains are clean, too. Chris pointed out to me that there are always sunflower seeds in the NYC subway cars, but in half a dozen different trains and stations now I've seen no evidence that there's any kind of trash on the SPB metro. Apparently, Russians take their public transit pretty seriously: everyone moves at a reasonable pace and in a more or less orderly fashion, and everyone stands to the right of the down escalators so that people who want to can walk the distance.

Walking down the escalators is more difficult than you might expect, by the way. They're fairly steep, but mostly it's just that they go on forever--it's a little bit vertiginous, and I can't help but think that it would be very bad to miss a step. Going up can be a little dizzying, too--if, as I do, you like to tilt your head to watch the people on the down escalator, it's easy to lose track of what exactly is vertical.

As a last note, apparently Russians like to read: I probably saw as many or more people reading in the metro as I did playing with or talking on their cell phones, and cell phones are as common here as in America. And all ages do it, too.

That's all.

Photos

I have more photos and will eventually upload them--I promise. It's a real pain to lug my computer to a real internet connection, though.

Crosses

This entry is long, because this has been one of the more interesting weekends. (Judging from a sample size of three, as I am occasionally forced to remind myself). Chin up, what?

There was, unfortunately, no experimental Jewish music concert on Friday. I’m not sure whether this was because we couldn’t get tickets, or because the weather was terrible; it was a little disappointing either way. Instead I attended the last segment of the NYI Cogfest (back-to-back five-minute summaries of complicated linguistics papers, not always much more comprehensible for being in English), and went home. At about 10:30 my host mom came in out of the rain and poured out a couple shots of vodka—one for her and one for me, probably because vodka is the prescribed remedy for being caught in the rain and it’s better not to drink alone. There’s no telling, though.

Saturday we went to Yusupovsky Palace. The Yusupovs were a very wealthy family (ducal, I think) whose art holdings formed a substantial portion of the Hermitage’s initial collection, and their palace is (by a kind of bureaucratic luck) one of the best-preserved in Russia. The Soviets gave it over to some sort of teachers’ association for use, so the interiors and even most of the original furniture are still in great condition. I think it would be a more tolerable living place than, say, the Winter Palace—most of the rooms are almost normal-sized, and it looked like if you had to you could get up and walk to the bathroom in only, say, five or ten minutes. Oh, and Yusupovsky Palace is the place where Rasputin was murdered.

The story surrounding Rasputin is…interesting. He was very popular with the tsar’s family (and the tsar), but most people thought he had too much influence with the tsar, and that this made the tsar look weak. So the Russians pretty much hated him. Eventually, the aristocracy decided he needed to be done away with, so they conspired to kill him. Felix Yusupov invited Rasputin to meet his wife Irina, who was cousin to Nicholas II. Irina was having a party, though, so Felix kept Rasputin entertained while they were waiting for Irina by feeding him poisoned cakes and poisoned wine.

Well, actually Irina wasn’t there at all; they just had four or so other conspirators upstairs pretending to have a party. After a couple of hours this began to wear pretty thin as an excuse, but at that point Rasputin was still inexplicably not dead. (We were told that he had eaten enough cyanide to kill seven men). So Felix went upstairs to get a gun, came back down, and shot Rasputin in the back (abdomen wound—maybe not immediately fatal, but generally mortal). After a couple minutes of lying on the ground bleeding, Rasputin apparently got up, tried to strangle Felix, and then ran back outside. Then the conspirators, you know, shot him in the back three or four times, drove him to the other side of Vasilevsky Island, and dropped him in the Neva. And killed Felix’s dog, so that they could claim it had gone mad and explain to the police why shots had been fired and there was blood all over.

The qualification to all this is that it’s not really accurate to say that there’s an interesting story surrounding Rasputin’s death, since that implies a kind of unity to the accounts that just isn’t there. For one thing, all of the conspirators’ memoirs say different things. For another, Rasputin had clearly been beaten before being thrown in the river (not the kind of thing one would have expected from these gentlemen), and he somehow got shot square in the forehead, even though everyone was firing at his back. And so forth. Even a cursory search (which is what I’ve performed) reveals variations; this is just the version I heard.

So much, more or less, for Saturday. Sunday we went to the prison Kresti (Crosses), which took much longer than anticipated. We waited for about an hour for our bus to arrive; eventually we gave up on that and decided to go in gypsy cabs. No, really. Julia or Nastya or Olya (our coordinator and assistants) waved down cars, negotiated fare, and sent us off in groups of [car capacity]. That went on until an empty minibus from a hotel stopped, and the rest of us rode on that.

Gypsy cabs; ok. But who ever heard of a gypsy bus? Even Nastya and Olya were impressed by that.

Once we got to the prison, we had to wait for about another hour to arrange to get in. The bureaucracy is…significant. It gave us time to go around back, though, where we discovered that there was a kindergarten next to the prison.

I’m not kidding. I took a picture, and in the same photo you can see children playing on the slide, and barbed wire. If the quality were a little better, you could also see the sign that says ‘kindergarten’.

I don’t have any pictures after that, because no cameras and no digital devices of any kind are allowed in the prison. It was probably one of the least pleasant places I’ve ever visited. All of it is very run down, and the entire time we were there, there were inmates peering out of the windows and the peep holes of the cell doors at us, or crouching down in the corners of the courtyards to watch us go by. The cells, by the way, are probably about five feet by ten, and hold three to six people. They also have rooms with cages in them where the more dangerous inmates can consult with advocates, and little boxes that have only a bench and a single hole above the door and enough room to sit, where inmates can be confined—though never for more than an hour at the very most.

There was also a museum, which had things like photos of tattoos the inmates had done themselves, and a display of radios they had managed to construct and hide in books, and devices they had made out of newspapers to smuggle cigarettes and toilet paper between cells, and a case full of various kinds of shivs.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a very long tour.

Still with me?

Once that was done, some of us went to buy tickets to Moscow for next weekend. This process actually took two days; Saturday we harassed the people at the information windows (rotating to prevent them from becoming too exasperated), Saturday evening we double-checked, and Sunday we bought tickets—after we harassed the information people again for a while. The result, though, was good—we now have tickets to Moscow (in third class on Friday from 1:00 to about 9 or 10), and tickets from Moscow (in a compartment on Sunday from 8:00 to about 4 or 5). All of this cost only 1853 roubles a person (about $75). That doesn’t include any kind of accommodation on Friday or Saturday nights, though, so it should be interesting.

Ok. That’s all for now.

Labyrinth

Last week I discovered a courtyard next to the courtyard in the center of the philological faculty.It has a few cannons in it, a couple of benches, a handful of sculptures, and a circle of grass. The grassy space is the interesting part; at first glance, it looks a bit like a cemetery, but the stones are arranged more or less in rings instead of rows. Each stone (currently about one in every two stones) has a niche carved near the top, with a rock in it and a plaque next to it bearing the name of a university. The stones, a nearby sign explains, form a labyrinth:

LABYRINTH

Given to the Philological and Oriental Faculty on the 300-year anniversary of St. Petersburg.

The labyrinth is designed according in the classical pattern, famous for more than 40 centuries, with stones sent from the oldest and most prominent universities of the world.

In various cultures the passage of the labyrinth symbolizes a procession on various scales:

From the motion of a planet in the solar system to the path of a person’s life, the path of education, of change, and the path to the solution of a problem.

I paced out the labyrinth and was disturbed to discover that it’s a dead end; it leads only to the center. Even if (as Wikipedia suggests) it represents the attainment of a long-sought goal, it leaves nowhere to go except back. Then again, perhaps it’s meant to be liberating: once you’ve reached the center, the only other choice is to walk out between the stones.

The Labyrinth, incidentally, is also the name of the section of the Philological Faculty where we have our classes. That one’s been around a lot longer than the other labyrinth, though, and as far as I know the only thing that ought to be read into the name is that it’s a maze.

Thursday like Thursday

This morning before class I was interrupted in the middle of doing my homework by a stray cat, who climbed up on my lap in spite of the fact that there was already a notebook there. Stray animals seem to be pretty common in St. Petersburg. I see a lot of stray dogs on the streets, and other students have been telling me that they've actually seen dogs get onto the metro trains by themselves. The cats aren't so common in public, but there are a lot of them around the philological faculty. Anyway, hopefully I don't have fleas now, I guess. Of course, if I did, it would be impossible to tell, owing to all the mosquito bites.

After lecture we were supposed to go to Alexander Nevsky monastery, where people like Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Dostoevsky, Euler, and (of course) Alexander Nevsky are buried. I was looking forward to that, but it was canceled on account of bad weather (which didn't actually materialize). Instead, I went with some others to Sennaya Ploschad (where I ended up the first couple of times I got lost). Just off the square there's a bazaar (formerly the hay market, which is why it's Hay Square)--lots and lots of little stalls set up in and around a market building. It's more a fixed-price than a haggling system, though, which is disappointing in the sense that it should have disappointed me but actually just made it more feasible for me to buy things (they have a great selection of foods, and all very cheap). Next to the bazaar (directly next to it) is a mall, which looks exactly like an American mall, except that about half the signs are in Russian. Note: not a conservative estimate.

Tomorrow evening I'll be going to a concert by a group called Oi Va Voi. I originally assumed this was something I would not go to, but I looked it up on Wikipedia and, well--it's an experimental Jewish music band, and the name means "Oh dear God" in Yiddish. So that's pretty much guaranteed attendance.

That's it for now. I have a series of general-observation posts to write if I find the bored time, but we'll see how soon or if that happens.

St. Isaac's Cathedral

We went to St. Isaac’s Cathedral today. You know—big thing, golden dome, baroque design, right across from the Philological Faculty?

That’s ok; I’ve got some pictures. I’ll see if I can’t post them soon.

The history of St. Isaac’s might sound familiar. See, it goes something like this: the tsar wanted to build a cathedral in a swamp, but the first one sank, so he built a second one, and that one sank too, so he built a third one. That one burned down and then sank, but—

Well, it’s not quite that bad. The first one was wooden, so it rotted and had to be reinforced and ultimately just wasn’t big enough (really—it was quite modest). The second one actually did sink into the swamp, at least enough to collapse the roof, and the third one, as far as I can tell, just turned out to be really ugly and had to be dismantled. Also, it wasn’t one tsar—it was three or four tsars and a tsarina, over the course of about a hundred and fifty years. The final cathedral alone took forty years to build.

The cathedral is very impressive, in a different way from the Hermitage—a way that has less to do with being mind-bogglingly expansive than with having lots and lots of 100-ton granite pillars. The inside is also pretty good, but we didn’t start there. We started with the colonnade.

The colonnade is on the roof of the church, around the dome (which is the fourth-largest church dome anywhere, if you like useless facts). The staircase up has somewhat more than 200 steps—which I know because it was marked, presumably to give tourists some kind of hope. Once you’re up there’s a pretty good view of the city (which I’ll post pictures of), though there was a large crane about two blocks away obstructing a lot of stuff to the east.

The inside is, well, also impressive. The Russian Orthodox Church doesn’t believe in things like pews (I don’t know what to say to that except—typical), so there’s nothing to distract you from the amount of space there is in there. Oh, except maybe the fact that every inch of it is decorated. There are mosaics on the walls, statues and frescoes in the dome, carvings on the doors (bronzed oak), columns surfaced with things like lapis lazuli, and even a stained glass window behind the altar (rare in Russian churches—probably because you can’t put a stained glass window behind another window very effectively). It’s, ah, not bad. And it survived WWII mostly intact, too.

How this came to be, incidentally, is interesting: most of the palaces and cathedrals in St. Petersburg survived the Siege of Leningrad because bomber pilots needed them as landmarks. Unlike Peterhof, say, which is several miles outside of the city and more or less had to be completely rebuilt.

More confusing to me was how the church had survived the Soviet era, since (in addition to all the religious symbols everywhere) there are inscriptions above the doors that read along the lines of, “God save the tsar.” Well, it turns out that while Stalin was in power they turned the cathedral into—I’m not kidding—the Museum of Anti-Religious Enlightenment. Took away all the icons, covered the mosaics with ugly posters, took down the silver dove and hung a Foucault pendulum from the dome, and held anti-religious lectures.

I think that actually makes the Soviet Union more comprehensible, though. The idea of turning the city’s main cathedral into the museum of anti-religion is so obviously over the top that no Soviet fanatic would think of it—imagine, trying to turn people against religion by covering up beauty with ugliness! An idea like that could only have come from a moderate looking for an excuse to save the church that couldn’t possibly be called suspicious. I mean, when you get down to it, most people are pretty normal, right—the kind of people who see the value in not destroying their nation’s cultural heritage.

Well, maybe I lied a little. Bringing people to a cathedral to show them the wrongness of religion is probably exactly the kind of idea that could have occurred to a diehard communist. Someone decided to have the cathedral restored at the end of WWII, though.

Besides—I liked the other version better.

Etymology

In place of a real entry today, a small piece of Russian etymology:

The word for bear in Russian is 'medvyed' (roughly), which comes from the word for honey (myod) and an old word for 'to know' (vyedat). Fine--we've all seen Winnie the Pooh. But why? It was an old Slavic superstition that to name a thing was to call its attention or call it to you, and so they used a euphemism to refer to something they certainly did not want to notice them.

I don't know if there are more words like this, but I hope so.

Hermitage

The Hermitage is huge. Really, just impressively vast. Maybe I only think this because I've never been in a proper palace before, but to put it in proper perspective: it's actually four palaces and a theater (the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, the Large Hermitage, the New Hermitage, and the Hermitage Theater. I keep having to say this, but--not kidding). There are apparently more than three million works in the collection--though most of them are kept somewhere else in storage, which is so large that 200 pieces were stolen from it in the seventies and no one noticed until the eighties. So, yes. It's big.

We have an excellent guide (her name is Natasha) who's, I don't know, on retainer or something with the program. I'll have to ask about that some day, when I run out of other questions--like how exactly I'm supposed to refer to the program. I can give you the full names of about five different institutions associated with this program, but I still haven't figured out a way to tell people about it that doesn't involve using at least four of them. Anyway, Natasha gave us an overview of the Hermitage collection that took from opening at 10:30 am to about 3:30 in the afternoon. That included, I don't know, a couple of staircase, a couple of halls, a few additional notes about the architecture, the small throne room, the real throne room, the 1812 gallery...some Rembrandt, some Rubens, some Botticelli, a couple of da Vincis, some Cezanne, Monet, Matisse, van Gogh, Picasso--at some point I lost track. There was a lot. I probably learned more about art history than I knew to begin with--particularly since Natasha gave it to us in English. That would be rather a lot of Russian to concentrate on, in addition to the actual museum pieces. Apparently only full-time employees of the Hermitage can be licensed to give tours in Russian, though.

After the rest of the group left, I continued to look at the (relatively small) Far Eastern, Near Eastern, and Byzantine art collections. And some stuff from the bronze age in Central Europe, and a little bit of Greek stuff. I couldn't seem to find the main ancient world collection, though. Oh, and there's supposed to be a large prehistoric life exhibit that I couldn't find. Which reminds me--they didn't have a ton of Egyptian stuff (only one room...), but they did have a mummy, unwrapped. That was kind of cool. Unfortunately, I didn't think to buy a photographing license before going in--but those are cheap, entrance is free for students, and I need to go back anyway. Eventually I left.

I had a rather strange walk back.

First: someone approached me near Gostiniy Dvor (essentially a large shopping mall) saying something about the metro; when I explained that I couldn't make out what she was saying, she asked who I was, told me she was an English teacher, patted me on the shoulder, and left without explaining anything.

Second: there was a middle-aged to older woman lying on the bridge over the second canal with what appeared to be a large paper napkin over her torso. She may have been passed out; for all I know, she may have been dead. It seems like usually people have the courtesy to pass out on the side of the sidewalk, but no one seemed to think much of it, either.

Finally: I saw the police checking papers for the first time a couple of blocks away from the apartment. It looked like they were already bothering a couple of darker-skinned fellows, and accosted another just before I got there. Fortunately, a certain amount of deliberately ignoring the whole thing goes a long way.

After that, I pretty much stayed home and read--my feet hurt.

Tomorrow: NYI gathering at Mars Field.

My frisbee may finally see some use.

Friday

I'm in the Hermitage, but I'm not done with it yet, so I'll tell you about it later. It's pretty remarkable, though.

Friday was kind of a good news/bad news day. We'll start with the good news, because that came first.

The good news is that there was an Elton John concert in Dvortsovaya Ploschad (Palace Square, but it doesn't sound quite right in English). This is a fairly impressive venue for anything, since it's in between the Hermitage (which is vast) and some other large structure, which I can't find the name of. In the center is the Alexandrine Column, which is a tribute to Alexander I's victory over Napoleon. Also, the October Revolution started there. Anyway, the concert wasn't precisely free, but it was very easy to stand just outside the concert, or just across the street from the concert, and hear it fine. I arrived with a few others (people from the program, and a couple friends one of them had who happened to be in St. Petersburg) somewhere between Funeral for a Friend and Love Lies Bleeding, and left a few songs after Rocket Man. Not bad.

Unfortunately, it was raining, so we got pretty wet. This is not the bad news. Nevsky prospekt was full of police all day, presumably in connection with the concert, and they all looked pretty miserable. This is also not the bad news.

The bad news goes something like this: one of the girls in the program got sick on Monday or Tuesday, and went to the American clinic. I knew more about the situation than most, which was that she came to lunch with antibiotics one day for what might have been an infection, and was in the clinic the next day. That day they mentioned that she was in the clinic, and told us that everything was fine--she was doing a lot better already.

You can see, I hope, where this might have been confusing to us: most of us barely had a clue anything was wrong at all, and "she's doing a lot better already" sounds very serious. She's been in the clinic since then while they run tests to try to figure out what kind of antibiotics to use, but we hadn't heard much more about it. Anyway, on Friday the first test results came back, and apparently they were inconclusive in a way that suggested more than one kind of infection, and they've decided to send her back home--maybe today, maybe tomorrow. So after the concert we went to visit her.

It was a little depressing: the stomach trouble she's been having (apparently it was quite bad for a while) could actually be something more serious than an infection, and she's being sent home at the beginning of a good program, and none of us know her well enough to say anything really helpful. It was obvious that she was glad just to have people around, though, so it's good that we went.

...after that we went to a bar. I have now probably spent more time in bars in Russia than in America (in spite of Chris's best efforts), and have probably also consumed more beer in Russia than in America (by about a fluid ounce--I'll try anything, but damned if I'm willing to actually drink the stuff).

Ok; I think that's everything. Except the Hermitage.

Patience.

I finished off a carton of milk yesterday. The carton on the table this morning said, "still more milk!"

Nonconformist Art

Short form:

Tuesday--ballet at the Pushkin Academic Dramatic Theater (longer in Russian, I'm afraid); an adaptation of Chekhov's "Chaika," described by someone who knows about ballet as "outdated avant-gardeism." Even I could see this, and I know nothing about ballet.

Wednesday--went on one of the ubiquitous excursions "along the canals and river of SPB." This is a lie: we only saw one canal and the river. Featured some of the worst dancing I've ever seen, perpetrated by members of our group, but otherwise boring.

Thursday--went to see the Center for Nonconformist Art, which was interesting in a boring kind of way and as grungy as postmodernism; apparently, it was some sort of hotbed of political discontent. Featured a book store with more pseudo-Soviet posters; these are apparently very popular.


Beyond that, I think it's safe to say that I have a routine now, which involves getting up every morning and going to classes and activities until I can come home, read a little, and sleep. Unfortunately, this routine involves barely staying awake during my first class, and always falling asleep during the afternoon lecture. There's some continuing frustration there: the lectures are all about interesting topics, if I could just understand them a little better. And, you know, stay awake. It's not really like I'm not getting enough sleep.

And now, because I haven't said anything else interesting, a few small things:

Culture is somewhat bigger in Russia than it is in the US. Today, one of our professors was telling us about how all Russian high schools force their students to read all the great Russian classics, and a lot of other good literature besides. Also, I notice that there are more street-side ads for ballet, theater, museums, and the philharmonic than anything else. I can't say I disapprove.

Doors tend to be double, and they open out instead of inwards. By double I don't mean side-by-side, though; you have to go through one door, then open the next. Windows likewise tend to be double: two glass surfaces separated by three or four inches. This leads me to suspect that winters are as bad as advertised.

Finally,

Well, I stopped to talk to Ross for a while and forgot. Ah well.

Serendipity Theory

As if the SPBGU didn't feel enough like an old European university already...

I was wandering around after lecture today and I caught the last few phrases of a choir rehearsal (I didn't even know they had a choir), but I thought "no, it couldn't be." The next time I wandered by they had started up again, and it was: Gaudeamus Igitur.

Educational Institutions

I thought today I might write about the St. Petersburg State University, but today was also the beginning of the New York Institute, and that was certainly worth mentioning too. Let's see if both of them together make a coherent post.

Russian universities don't work quite like American universities. St. Petersburg State University (henceforth SPBGU) is probably monstrous by American standards; I can't tell, because the buildings are spread out across the city. Really, I've seen them all over the place. Instead of enrolling in the whole university, students enroll in one faculty--which is kind of like one department, but might be closer to one school. Our program, for instance, is through the philological faculty, which has its own departments for each language. And there are so many of them! I don't know if there's anything comparable in the US--I've seen French and Spanish and German and English, of course, but also Hungarian and Magyar and Turkish and Irish and I don't even know what else (sometimes literally--I don't always recognize the language names in Russian). They have a Canadian studies department.

All of this is housed in a big square building around a central courtyard. The building is probably close to as old as the city--you know, 300 years--and it shows. There are cracks in the walls and the floors are uneven and the steps are worn down and the corridors are narrow and the floor plan makes no sense at all. There are some long, straight corridors, but most of the time they tend to switch between sides of the building, the rooms aren't in any kind of uniform sizes, the floors are all done in different materials, and sometimes you have to go up stairs and then down stairs to get to places on the same level. No sense at all. Plus, that's not counting the labyrinth (where we have our classes) and the catacombs (not actually catacombs, but I'm not kidding about the name; it may house a library), which are both partially underground. The general shoddiness of the place bothered me a little at first, but I like: it has more character than any other building I've ever been in.

I've heard rumors that there are dormitories, but I don't know where they are.

So, that was that. Now, the New York Institute:

The New York Institute is about five years old, apparently, and it involves Stony Brook University bringing some professors from New York and some students from everywhere to St. Petersburg for about three weeks of seminars (and, in some cases, language classes). Since our program already occupies most of our time, we only attend one seminar MWF. Fortunately (since these seminars start at 4:00, after our normal days), the seminars are in English. I'm taking one on syntactical problems specific to Russian, because the professor was obviously very good, and because I really do love linguistics. You already knew that, though.

In that class, we had a bunch of Americans from the program (say, ten of us), a few Americans from Stony Brook (maybe half a dozen of them, with about two years of Russian between them), about ten Russians (from SPB, Moscow, and as far as three days' train ride away), six Croatians, a German, a Dane, and possibly some small change.

Speaking of small change, I found a one kopeck piece today. It is the least valuable piece of currency I've ever held.

Anyway, after the seminar, there was sort of an, I don't know, opening social. About half an hour into this some people came out into the courtyard and started singing Russian folk songs. And, after they finished some of that, they started recruiting us for what could probably be called Russian square dancing.

I'm not sure precisely who my audience is, but my suspicion is that every single one of you would have found this hilarious. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that any of us will ever see the hard evidence.

What else? There was more socialization. I got to see a direct Russian translation of the grungy-smoking-rebellious college-age daughter, who was telling us (literally) that she wasn't afraid to swear and holding forth on how Russia is no better than a prostitute if she sells her resources for money. (There ought to be a shorter way to express her stereotype, but I'm not sure what it is). I also talked for a while with some people about the differences in Russian and American politics, culture, stereotypes--topics along those lines. Plus miscellaneous introductions.

I'm going to go ahead and admit that pretty much all of this was in English. Pretty much everyone at the NYI speaks English better than I speak Russian, and they're all very excited to hear native speakers. Also, I love languages, but I like people better.

Ok. I think that's all for now.

Oh, and my host mom has started buying milk in 1.5- instead of 1-liter cartons.

That's all.

Photos

I posted some photos (see link), and some of them are even interesting. Turns out 100 MB isn't that much, though, so I had to stop about halfway through. Oh well.

On Learning Foreign Languages

My title is a little misleading: I don't precisely want to talk about learning foreign languages. It's related, though.

I studied Latin for a long time (five years), and at one point new more or less all of Latin grammar--some of the finer points, perhaps, eluded me, but with a good dictionary and some time I could essentially translate anything.

At this point, I've also studied Russian for a long time (four years), and I know a lot of Russian grammar. I also know some important idioms, and have a slightly stunted vocabulary. I can communicate a decent variety of more or less useful information.

I am so far from being fluent I might as well have just started.

For one thing, I can't make small talk--and not just for lack of practice. I don't know the words for all kinds of everyday objects (I had to ask my host mom how to say "fork" and "spoon," and still don't remember), and I don't have any idea what kinds of words and phrases are used to introduce ideas or signal that I'm still paying attention but don't really have anything to say. And when I go to write assignments, I realize that I have no idea how to express my thoughts in an aesthetically pleasing or even natural-sounding way.

This really bothers me, and I'm not sure how quickly it's going to improve.

St. Petersburg

Fine. I'll talk about St. Petersburg.

I think it would be fair to say it's a strange place. It's kind of nice on first site, then kind of grungy once you get closer, then kind of nice once you get used to it, which I kind of have. All the buildings are very large (broad, not tall) and all the streets are very wide. The influence of collectivism is obvious here; all these enormous apartment buildings are (or could have been) little self-contained islands, complete with a central courtyard. All of this is still there, but now some of the apartment space has been converted into shops, and some of the courtyards have been converted into parking. And next to all these somewhat shoddy apartment buildings are the Hermitage and the Summer Garden and the Winter Palace and the Church on Spilt Blood and, well, it's easy to see why there might have been a revolution.

Then there are other strangenesses. I've mentioned that there aren't any street signs, for instance. Well, it turns out that there are, but they're on little plaques on the corners of buildings, and they're not entirely regular. Even though it rains all the time in the summer, there actually are no storm drains at all--water essentially just sits. A lot of the smaller streets don't appear to have any kind of traffic regulation at intersections--no stop signs, or even yield signs. And the signs actually do say 'stop'--it's transliterated directly into Cyrillic.

Traffic, by the way, is crazy. Like New York City, but more so. Lights turn yellow before the turn green as well as before they turn red, and it means the same thing then, too: go faster. There's a lot of driving out into the middle of intersections when it's obviously going to block traffic. There's also a lot of parking on sidewalks, and a certain amount of parking in the middle of streets near intersections, and I don't even know what else.

Public transportation is interesting, partly because there are so many kinds of it: buses, the metro, marshrutki, trolleybuses, cabs, and gypsy cabs. The buses will serve as a good starting point, I think.

If I got onto a bus in Cincinnati, I'd pay at a set point (when I got on or when I got off, depending), and I'd pay directly to the driver--or, anymore, to a machine right next to the driver. In Russia, this is not so: sometimes, there is a conductor, and I pay him or her. The rest of the time, I take out my money and pass it to the person next to me, who passes it to the person next to her, who passes it . . . to the driver, who passes it back to the nearest person . . . to me. This is absolutely trustworthy. The same is true in the marshrutki, which are sort of taxi-buses: they're vans with lots of hard plastic seats in them, and they run set routes. They only stop, though, when someone flags them or when someone wants to get off.

And as for the gypsy cabs--I think I've explained those before. A person standing on the side of the road can flag down passing cars, who will stop to negotiate fares. The drivers of these cars are, of course, complete strangers; nevertheless, this is completely safe (with a few easy stipulations), and everyone does it--including, for instance, lone women at three or four in the morning.

So, this is probably worth noting about Russians: they're stereotypically reserved on the streets, but it turns out they actually do have a very strong community spirit.

I think that will serve as an introduction.

Saturday

Patrick sent me a comment which I think will serve as an excellent introduction. It goes something like this:

'I like the tone of your blog. Loyal to the benefits you're getting from the Program, but tired, pessimistic and beaten-down at the same time. Apparently the assimilation into Russian culture comes quickly.'

Now, I feel that the Russians and I have agreed on most of this for a while, except that usually I'm not that tired.

How tired?

I went to bed at 11:30 last night, with the idea that I would wake up at 6:30 (7 hours of sleep, right? Pretty good.) and go to that Russian-variant renaissance fair. At 6:30, I had precisely enough energy to turn off my alarm before I went to sleep for another, mmm, five hours. I'll probably regret it later, but damned if I could muster the energy to go to that thing.


Anyway, instead I decided to go for a walk around the city. Apparently my sense of direction is worse than I thought; I took a slightly more scenic route from the apartment and ended up at the Summer Garden instead of Nevsky prospekt. I made my way to Dom Knigi (Home of the Book), which is a very overpriced bookstore with a decent selection of English-language materials, a great selection of postcards, and a non-trivial amount of Soviet-style posters and placards (I got one picture of some of these, but an employee immediately came and told me to knock it off--politely). I also went to Kazan Cathedral, which is beautiful in a neoclassical kind of way, and also requests that you do not take pictures inside.

Oh, by the way, the Summer Garden contains what may be my favorite piece of sculpture ever, which is a statue of Saturn eating one of his children. Who knew?

And then more walking to get home. Turns out St. Petersburg is actually quite nice, if the weather cooperates. Also, it helps to get away from Nevsky. Fewer gaudy signs, more parks and monuments.

Later, I had a good laugh with the ladies at the grocery store deli across the street over how terrible my Russian was.

Eh heh.

Tomorrow: Peterhof, a slim chance that I'll attend a bus tour of St. Petersburg, and the probability that I'll actually start doing my homework, maybe.

Which reminds me: on Fridays we have a gathering for various English-speaking purposes. As it turns out, these purposes involve a certain number of announcements they absolutely want us to understand, and gaining feedback about the program. This, as it turned out, primarily involved ragging on the grammar teacher, who is also the only one of our teachers who doesn't speak English. I assume that's directly related to the kind of vocabulary she uses--that is, vocabulary we have no chance of knowing. She does things like write up case names in Russian, and abbreviate them. What I don't understand, though, is why she was teaching us that adjectives agree with nouns in number, gender, and case. I learned that so long ago, as far as it relates to Russian, all I remember is knowing it. (I kind of remember learning it for Latin--about, oh, nine years ago).

That said, the classes are otherwise outstanding. All of the teachers are very intelligible, and they work together so that we discuss similar things and therefore use similar vocabulary in every class. Hopefully that means I'll actually improve a lot.

Ok. I think that's all for now.