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.