Italian flatmates are a riot. They gave the suite a thorough cleaning, scrubbed the floors, replaced the shower curtain, even bought a toilet-bowl air freshener and new sponges for the kitchen. Everything was squeaky clean within a matter of hours after they'd moved in. I see them around the Philology Department at SPBGU, looking glamorous in their big black sunglasses and leather jackets, two classic blonde Italian babes, Consuelo at least a head shorter than Anatolia. They go everywhere together. Every time I step out of the elevator I see them smoking cigarettes together in the stairwell. They yell at each other in Italian and I hear it through the wall, always wondering if they're really angry at each other or just passionate, because it seems like that's the only way to speak Italian, with the full strength of your voice so that your mouth gets to cherish the vowels and consonants rolling around and flipping off your tongue. They speak to me in a mixture of three languages, and somehow our messages get through. They make my flat a little less empty and a little more like a home.
Tomorrow's my day off, and I'm looking forward to filling it with art: there's a contemporary art festival in P-burg right now, with installations scattered across the map of the city, and I've been to a few but they're far apart and I didn't get to all of them on Saturday. At 1:30 I have an appointment with Anna Pushina, the volunteer coordinator at Pushkinskaya 10 Art-Centre, so I can finally start my internship there (which will last throughout the month of October, as far as I can tell). They need English-speaking volunteers to help with an international festival they're holding in October, but I really hope it's a chance to practice my Russian as well.
But now, I'm due to meet some friends in the metro for our guilty little treat of American culture--the new Tim Burton movie, "9", is playing, and if we're lucky we might get the original sound track + subtitles instead of dubbed awfully into Russian. An early night on Nevsky Prospekt, a break from my usual Tuesday night debauchery. I've got things to do!
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Боже мой!
I had my first violin lesson! It was lovely to get some guidance again. I miss taking lessons. It was difficult because I only understood half of what he was saying (Igor Dmitrivich, my teacher), but like my printmaking class it was made easier by sensory communication--showing, playing, listening, watching, and finally understanding. He's a great guy! He calls me "Nadyushka", the ultra-diminutive of Надежда, the Russian word for Hope. No, Nadya isn't diminutive enough for him, it's not a high enough level of cute. He needs to be absolutely sure that I understand how seriously little and sweet he thinks I am. You know, in English it'd seem unbelievably condescending, but in Russian it's just...it's just how it is.
My language skills are improving. My accent feels more natural every day, my tongue is getting used to the gymnastics of Russian pronunciation (thanks to a little help from my Phonetics class with Svetlana Borisovna), and I think I could honestly say I'm learning no less than one new word a day just in conversation, not to mention the vocabulary I pick up in class. Замечательно! That is to say, right on!
And life here goes on: Tuesday night I went to a rehearsal of the SPBU choir and afterward had tea with a girl from choir and her roommate, both named Dasha, both very sweet wholesome-seeming girls. They're a pair predestined: they grew up in the same city, have the same name, both study sociology at SPBU, and while I was visiting both of their mothers called them--and yet they didn't know each other before they became roommates. They invited me to...a concert? I'm not really sure what they invited me to, but it seems to me it could be fun. And I didn't have class yesterday so I stayed out late. I walked from bar to bar with what could turn out to be my regular Tuesday night crew, starting at an Irish-themed bar the size of our kitchen where they were watching German girls mud-wrestle on TV. Then, we went to the only Mexican restaurant I've seen in this country. We couldn't just pass it by without checking it out--Mexican food is like the Holy Grail here: many search for it, but it remains hidden or perhaps even mythical. Every so often somebody claims that they serve a taco or burrito, but the first ketchup-and-sour cream-smothered bite proves it to be a hoax. So we got what turned out to be passable, even tasty, chips and salsa and the bartender gave me a free experimental drink (who would have thought that Baileys, mint, vermouth, and grenadine would be good together? Let me amend that--who would have thought that any drink tastes amazing if you set it on fire first?). Then, onward in the rain to a Soviet kitsch-themed bar where I played chess with a guy named Maxim and lost spectacularly (I thought his queen was his king! The cultural barrier extends to the gender of chess pieces, I guess).
I have new flatmates. Xoi Shun, the Taiwanese girl who lived next door, moved out several weeks ago and now the room that shares a kitchen and bathroom with mine is occupied by two Italian girls, Consuela and Anatolia, whom I barely met Tuesday night on my way out the door. They seem nice, and they'll be my motivation to clean up and do my dishes (no longer will I live in squalor!). Yesterday we met more in-depth, and it turns out they cleaned the whole apartment, bought air freshener and paper towels, scrubbed the toilet. Thanks, ladies--only now am I acutely aware of how grubby my own room is. Some things will never change--I put everything in order and and and and a moment later my desk is invisible under a landscape of papers once more.
Thursday already! I can't believe how quickly time is flying. Before I know it I'll be on the plane back home. I'm already compiling a list of things I miss, and things I will miss.
My language skills are improving. My accent feels more natural every day, my tongue is getting used to the gymnastics of Russian pronunciation (thanks to a little help from my Phonetics class with Svetlana Borisovna), and I think I could honestly say I'm learning no less than one new word a day just in conversation, not to mention the vocabulary I pick up in class. Замечательно! That is to say, right on!
And life here goes on: Tuesday night I went to a rehearsal of the SPBU choir and afterward had tea with a girl from choir and her roommate, both named Dasha, both very sweet wholesome-seeming girls. They're a pair predestined: they grew up in the same city, have the same name, both study sociology at SPBU, and while I was visiting both of their mothers called them--and yet they didn't know each other before they became roommates. They invited me to...a concert? I'm not really sure what they invited me to, but it seems to me it could be fun. And I didn't have class yesterday so I stayed out late. I walked from bar to bar with what could turn out to be my regular Tuesday night crew, starting at an Irish-themed bar the size of our kitchen where they were watching German girls mud-wrestle on TV. Then, we went to the only Mexican restaurant I've seen in this country. We couldn't just pass it by without checking it out--Mexican food is like the Holy Grail here: many search for it, but it remains hidden or perhaps even mythical. Every so often somebody claims that they serve a taco or burrito, but the first ketchup-and-sour cream-smothered bite proves it to be a hoax. So we got what turned out to be passable, even tasty, chips and salsa and the bartender gave me a free experimental drink (who would have thought that Baileys, mint, vermouth, and grenadine would be good together? Let me amend that--who would have thought that any drink tastes amazing if you set it on fire first?). Then, onward in the rain to a Soviet kitsch-themed bar where I played chess with a guy named Maxim and lost spectacularly (I thought his queen was his king! The cultural barrier extends to the gender of chess pieces, I guess).
I have new flatmates. Xoi Shun, the Taiwanese girl who lived next door, moved out several weeks ago and now the room that shares a kitchen and bathroom with mine is occupied by two Italian girls, Consuela and Anatolia, whom I barely met Tuesday night on my way out the door. They seem nice, and they'll be my motivation to clean up and do my dishes (no longer will I live in squalor!). Yesterday we met more in-depth, and it turns out they cleaned the whole apartment, bought air freshener and paper towels, scrubbed the toilet. Thanks, ladies--only now am I acutely aware of how grubby my own room is. Some things will never change--I put everything in order and and and and a moment later my desk is invisible under a landscape of papers once more.
Thursday already! I can't believe how quickly time is flying. Before I know it I'll be on the plane back home. I'm already compiling a list of things I miss, and things I will miss.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
A toast to Tuesday night! A plague on Wednesday morning!
Having no class on Wednesdays almost but not quite makes up for having class at noon every Saturday. While nothing can take the place of the freedom afforded by two days off in a row, Wednesday morning rolls around and every week I'm more relieved than I expected to be when I hear my hallmates scuttling off to class and I don't have to go with them.
Tuesday night I was prepared to make up for my relatively tame weekend (home by 1 AM every night). With David and Paul from U Chicago, Lila from Reed, and Rachel from Lawrence, I was lured to "MOD club", an apparently foreigner-friendly club with no cover charge on weeknights, by the promise of live "funk-brit-pop" and cheap drinks. And funk-brit-pop there was, more or less, made funnier by the fact that all the lyrics were in Russian and that we couldn't figure out what was British about it. All the same, live music is live music, and the rumbling bass is the same in every language. You don't have to translate the beat of a drum.
Wednesday I finally made it to the Hermitage! Even without any fine art, the Winter Palace is astounding. Many of the rooms are simply recreations or preservations of 19th century Russian royal style, with furniture, decoration, and brocade in place. One small ("small") hall was lit by three enormous crystal chandeliers, probably 10 feet in diameter at least, which reflected off the pale marble pillars and life-size solid gold sculpture of a peacock perched on a branch surrounded by smaller wilderness animals.
The museum was easy to get lost in, as it's somewhat haphazardly organized, and I wandered from room to room following the pull of certain colors or paintings that caught my eye. But I was tired, carrying in my limbs and clouded head the weight of another night out. It made itself known in the throbbing of my soles and shadows of fatigue on my face, drew my mind from the museum, my legs dragging like sandbags, my eyes drooping past Matisse. So I left the rest for another day (another several) and sat in the courtyard to absorb how good it felt to be surrounded with art. I get wrapped up in this gloomy idealist perfectionism--or perfectionist idealism?--and museums sometimes help to lift it. I love to watch an artist's work progress as they move away from what was accepted, standard, and into their own style, pursuing not perfection but their own voice, a mode of expression that translates their souls or spirits or intellect. It's refreshing, I come to adore the "flaws" in composition and representation, feeling the artist as a real person at the moment they pressed their brush to the canvas.
I just love art.
Tuesday night I was prepared to make up for my relatively tame weekend (home by 1 AM every night). With David and Paul from U Chicago, Lila from Reed, and Rachel from Lawrence, I was lured to "MOD club", an apparently foreigner-friendly club with no cover charge on weeknights, by the promise of live "funk-brit-pop" and cheap drinks. And funk-brit-pop there was, more or less, made funnier by the fact that all the lyrics were in Russian and that we couldn't figure out what was British about it. All the same, live music is live music, and the rumbling bass is the same in every language. You don't have to translate the beat of a drum.
Wednesday I finally made it to the Hermitage! Even without any fine art, the Winter Palace is astounding. Many of the rooms are simply recreations or preservations of 19th century Russian royal style, with furniture, decoration, and brocade in place. One small ("small") hall was lit by three enormous crystal chandeliers, probably 10 feet in diameter at least, which reflected off the pale marble pillars and life-size solid gold sculpture of a peacock perched on a branch surrounded by smaller wilderness animals.
The museum was easy to get lost in, as it's somewhat haphazardly organized, and I wandered from room to room following the pull of certain colors or paintings that caught my eye. But I was tired, carrying in my limbs and clouded head the weight of another night out. It made itself known in the throbbing of my soles and shadows of fatigue on my face, drew my mind from the museum, my legs dragging like sandbags, my eyes drooping past Matisse. So I left the rest for another day (another several) and sat in the courtyard to absorb how good it felt to be surrounded with art. I get wrapped up in this gloomy idealist perfectionism--or perfectionist idealism?--and museums sometimes help to lift it. I love to watch an artist's work progress as they move away from what was accepted, standard, and into their own style, pursuing not perfection but their own voice, a mode of expression that translates their souls or spirits or intellect. It's refreshing, I come to adore the "flaws" in composition and representation, feeling the artist as a real person at the moment they pressed their brush to the canvas.
I just love art.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The week: a summary
This is about as brief a summary as will ever exist of all the sweet things that happened this week, from last Saturday to this Sunday.
Saturday I had my first Printmaking class, noon to 4 PM, which is a shame because it means that my Friday nights are cut out early, but honestly this class is not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon. I had a hard time finding it last weekend--it's in the studio that the "professor" shares with another artist, which is on the fourth floor of a standard apartment building off of the Sennaya Ploschad metro station. One of the uniquely Russian things about St. Petersburg is the courtyards--you often have to walk through an archway and away from the street, where it opens up into a courtyard that's shared by all of the businesses or homes around it. It's interesting but it makes it difficult to find certain places, especially on a Saturday morning after 3 hours of sleep and dancing all night.
But when I walked into Yuri Shtapakov's studio I suddenly felt so good, energized and awake and peaceful surrounded by so many objects of creativity and artistic tools. Yuri's enthusiasm was infectious as he invited us to make some tea (his) and have a cigarette (our own, if we had them). He didn't speak slowly, nor did he speak simply, but something in the clarity of his voice and his accompanying movements made him perfectly understandable. I was conscious that he was speaking Russian, but most of the time I stopped translating and just absorbed the meaning of what he was saying. He said that his favorite pieces of art are those done by people who "know nothing" about art, people who have never studied it and just let their creative ideas take control, because he sees an honesty in their work that is absent in a lot of experienced artists. We sat on mismatched couches in the corner of his studio, drinking tea and chain smoking (well, not me) while he flitted around and every few moments would jump up and say "Я сейчас вам покажу...--I will now show you..." and pull out another old piece of his to illustrate a point, or a work in progress, or a model for an installation that has yet to happen.
Then, Saturday night I accidentally stayed out all night--again, two nights in a row. I had meant to go home after the first wave and be home by 1 AM, but before I knew it the clock said 12:30 and I was still drinking and dancing with Megan, Joe, David, Lila, and Pasha & Roman, the guys we met on Friday night. Details are hazy, but 4:00 AM found me alone on the far end of Nevsky Prospekt, the only person on the street except for the bored taxi drivers and night owls who sometimes yelled down the street me, "Do you need a ride? Directions? You lost?", walking past the empty 24-hour cafés where the attendants were all asleep with their heads propped up on their hands behind the counter. I walked all the way up Nevsky, from end to end. I felt like a Dostoevsky character, tired and hungry, alone in this city where smiles must be earned. It took me over an hour, and along the way I ran into Roman, who did a double take and said "Why are you here?" and bid me goodnight after making sure I wasn't lost. At the other end I met up with my group and we got blini and tea at Chainaya Loshka, the Tea-Spoon, and took the first bus home to our dorm in Primorskaya at 6:03.
Sunday: we had an excursion to St. Isaac's Cathedral, which meant another night of sleep cut short. I met some excellent Russian girls--Olya, Tanya, Natasha, and Nadya, students at Smolny. The nap I had when I got home was on par with finding a bathroom after a pot of coffee and a long walk, in terms of relief gained.
Monday: I walked into my Impressionism & Postimpressionism class with Sarah and sat down to wait with anticipation while all the other students filed past us, late as are all Russian students (and Russians in general). The professor began talking in a low and fast tumble of words I didn't understand, and I began to feel a little panic rising in my throat. I'd expected to be able to hear at least a few words I knew--painting, artist, creativity, or even "Impressionism"--but it didn't seem that she would get around to that right away. I managed to pick out "Hegel" and then something about Lacanian analysis and the panic hardened into a little knot--Wow, I thought, unaware that there even were Lacanian undertones in Monet's Water Lilies and Van Gogh's Starry Night. About a half-hour into the class my eyes were glazed over and I was considering how to meet my Art History credit requirements without taking any Art History classes this semester when Sarah jabbed a piece of paper onto my desk. Do you also think we're in the wrong class?
And then the professor started talking about Marxism and I knew we were in the wrong place--there's just nothing Marxist about Degas' ballerinas! But we were too afraid to leave, so we just sat, fidgeted, and passed notes back and forth for another half-hour until the coffee/bathroom break midway through the four-hour period.
It turned out that our Art History class was a floor below us, and the one we'd been in was an upper level philosophy class called "Contemporary problems in ideology and knowledge" or something like that. That made me feel a little better about not understanding what the professor was saying, considering that I probably wouldn't have been able to follow it in English either.
Tuesday nothing interesting happened. I think I got some Uzbek bread for lunch, which was fantastic--they have these steaming hot little bread pockets filled with meat or cheese or chicken and tomatoes, like a hot pocket but fresh from a clay oven, for 50 rubles and only a 7-minute walk from the main Smolny building. It's my lunch just about every day.
Wednesday I had no class all day, so Joe and I walked around St. Petersburg, museum-hopping. We started at the museum in Dostoevsky's apartment off Sennaya Ploschad (and I don't know what Dostoevsky was bitching about--he had a pretty kushy place) and walked up the Fontanka to the museum in Anna Akhmatova's apartment, which was my favorite in terms of museum quality, while Dostoevsky's was my favorite apartment. Then we went to Pushkin's apartment on the Moika Canal, where our tourguide had a habit of spontaneously reciting Pushkin's poetry (in Russian, of course) with a grave face.
We had planned to go to the Nabokov museum as well, but it was almost closing-time by then and, as Sarah later said, we'd already made it through "The Trifecta" of Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, and Pushkin. We got some blini on Nevsky Prospekt and then I took the metro out to Sarah's apartment off Kirovsky Zavod to make a tart and eat dinner with her, her boyfriend Andrey, and our classmate Misha/Michael. It was a grand old time, as it tends to be with Sarah and Andrey. Aw friends! ^_^
Friday: we had a group outing to a bowling alley, where I won the first round (with a score of 100, probably among my highest ever!). Afterwards--details again are hazy, but I ended up in a karaoke bar by the Smolensky Canal that runs through Primorskaya, my neighborhood, a bar that resembled something between an old-west line-dancing hall and a day-camp cafeteria, more a tent than a building, filled exclusively with middle-aged people dancing waltzes and singing karaoke to Russian popular folk songs. We got a bottle of vodka between the 10 or so of us and somebody decided to sing "A Whole New World", which of course we all got roped into. We stuck around and possibly annoyed the regulars, and ran home at 12:50 to get inside the dorm before the curfew.
Saturday: printmaking class, which was again fantastic. We made our first attempt at printing, each creating our own templates and pressing them ourselves. It was fantastic. Partial results:
(mine is the metaphysical teacup)
Saturday for dinner we had a gigantic blini party, which meant I stood in front of the stove and cooked everybody blini for two hours, and after that we sat on the concrete shore of the Gulf of Finland in the fading light, playing music (a mandolin, violin, and guitar trio), singing, and drinking until just before the 1 AM curfew.
And today we had another cultural excursion to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where we saw the sarcophagi of most of the Romanovs from Peter the Great on down the line, and the prison cell where Maxim Gorky was held (among other things). We had lunch at a vegetarian cafe run by a religious cult (kind of like The Maté Factor!) and then I walked an hour back to the bus stop. Now I'm at Café Dubai for the free internet, drinking the last dregs of my Turkish Coffee (Кофе в Турке) and using this blog post as a distraction from my 30 pages of reading about the origins of the Impressionist movement, in Russian, for tomorrow afternoon's class. Thanks!
Saturday I had my first Printmaking class, noon to 4 PM, which is a shame because it means that my Friday nights are cut out early, but honestly this class is not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon. I had a hard time finding it last weekend--it's in the studio that the "professor" shares with another artist, which is on the fourth floor of a standard apartment building off of the Sennaya Ploschad metro station. One of the uniquely Russian things about St. Petersburg is the courtyards--you often have to walk through an archway and away from the street, where it opens up into a courtyard that's shared by all of the businesses or homes around it. It's interesting but it makes it difficult to find certain places, especially on a Saturday morning after 3 hours of sleep and dancing all night.
But when I walked into Yuri Shtapakov's studio I suddenly felt so good, energized and awake and peaceful surrounded by so many objects of creativity and artistic tools. Yuri's enthusiasm was infectious as he invited us to make some tea (his) and have a cigarette (our own, if we had them). He didn't speak slowly, nor did he speak simply, but something in the clarity of his voice and his accompanying movements made him perfectly understandable. I was conscious that he was speaking Russian, but most of the time I stopped translating and just absorbed the meaning of what he was saying. He said that his favorite pieces of art are those done by people who "know nothing" about art, people who have never studied it and just let their creative ideas take control, because he sees an honesty in their work that is absent in a lot of experienced artists. We sat on mismatched couches in the corner of his studio, drinking tea and chain smoking (well, not me) while he flitted around and every few moments would jump up and say "Я сейчас вам покажу...--I will now show you..." and pull out another old piece of his to illustrate a point, or a work in progress, or a model for an installation that has yet to happen.
Then, Saturday night I accidentally stayed out all night--again, two nights in a row. I had meant to go home after the first wave and be home by 1 AM, but before I knew it the clock said 12:30 and I was still drinking and dancing with Megan, Joe, David, Lila, and Pasha & Roman, the guys we met on Friday night. Details are hazy, but 4:00 AM found me alone on the far end of Nevsky Prospekt, the only person on the street except for the bored taxi drivers and night owls who sometimes yelled down the street me, "Do you need a ride? Directions? You lost?", walking past the empty 24-hour cafés where the attendants were all asleep with their heads propped up on their hands behind the counter. I walked all the way up Nevsky, from end to end. I felt like a Dostoevsky character, tired and hungry, alone in this city where smiles must be earned. It took me over an hour, and along the way I ran into Roman, who did a double take and said "Why are you here?" and bid me goodnight after making sure I wasn't lost. At the other end I met up with my group and we got blini and tea at Chainaya Loshka, the Tea-Spoon, and took the first bus home to our dorm in Primorskaya at 6:03.
Sunday: we had an excursion to St. Isaac's Cathedral, which meant another night of sleep cut short. I met some excellent Russian girls--Olya, Tanya, Natasha, and Nadya, students at Smolny. The nap I had when I got home was on par with finding a bathroom after a pot of coffee and a long walk, in terms of relief gained.
Monday: I walked into my Impressionism & Postimpressionism class with Sarah and sat down to wait with anticipation while all the other students filed past us, late as are all Russian students (and Russians in general). The professor began talking in a low and fast tumble of words I didn't understand, and I began to feel a little panic rising in my throat. I'd expected to be able to hear at least a few words I knew--painting, artist, creativity, or even "Impressionism"--but it didn't seem that she would get around to that right away. I managed to pick out "Hegel" and then something about Lacanian analysis and the panic hardened into a little knot--Wow, I thought, unaware that there even were Lacanian undertones in Monet's Water Lilies and Van Gogh's Starry Night. About a half-hour into the class my eyes were glazed over and I was considering how to meet my Art History credit requirements without taking any Art History classes this semester when Sarah jabbed a piece of paper onto my desk. Do you also think we're in the wrong class?
And then the professor started talking about Marxism and I knew we were in the wrong place--there's just nothing Marxist about Degas' ballerinas! But we were too afraid to leave, so we just sat, fidgeted, and passed notes back and forth for another half-hour until the coffee/bathroom break midway through the four-hour period.
It turned out that our Art History class was a floor below us, and the one we'd been in was an upper level philosophy class called "Contemporary problems in ideology and knowledge" or something like that. That made me feel a little better about not understanding what the professor was saying, considering that I probably wouldn't have been able to follow it in English either.
Tuesday nothing interesting happened. I think I got some Uzbek bread for lunch, which was fantastic--they have these steaming hot little bread pockets filled with meat or cheese or chicken and tomatoes, like a hot pocket but fresh from a clay oven, for 50 rubles and only a 7-minute walk from the main Smolny building. It's my lunch just about every day.
Wednesday I had no class all day, so Joe and I walked around St. Petersburg, museum-hopping. We started at the museum in Dostoevsky's apartment off Sennaya Ploschad (and I don't know what Dostoevsky was bitching about--he had a pretty kushy place) and walked up the Fontanka to the museum in Anna Akhmatova's apartment, which was my favorite in terms of museum quality, while Dostoevsky's was my favorite apartment. Then we went to Pushkin's apartment on the Moika Canal, where our tourguide had a habit of spontaneously reciting Pushkin's poetry (in Russian, of course) with a grave face.
We had planned to go to the Nabokov museum as well, but it was almost closing-time by then and, as Sarah later said, we'd already made it through "The Trifecta" of Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, and Pushkin. We got some blini on Nevsky Prospekt and then I took the metro out to Sarah's apartment off Kirovsky Zavod to make a tart and eat dinner with her, her boyfriend Andrey, and our classmate Misha/Michael. It was a grand old time, as it tends to be with Sarah and Andrey. Aw friends! ^_^
Friday: we had a group outing to a bowling alley, where I won the first round (with a score of 100, probably among my highest ever!). Afterwards--details again are hazy, but I ended up in a karaoke bar by the Smolensky Canal that runs through Primorskaya, my neighborhood, a bar that resembled something between an old-west line-dancing hall and a day-camp cafeteria, more a tent than a building, filled exclusively with middle-aged people dancing waltzes and singing karaoke to Russian popular folk songs. We got a bottle of vodka between the 10 or so of us and somebody decided to sing "A Whole New World", which of course we all got roped into. We stuck around and possibly annoyed the regulars, and ran home at 12:50 to get inside the dorm before the curfew.
Saturday: printmaking class, which was again fantastic. We made our first attempt at printing, each creating our own templates and pressing them ourselves. It was fantastic. Partial results:
(mine is the metaphysical teacup)
Saturday for dinner we had a gigantic blini party, which meant I stood in front of the stove and cooked everybody blini for two hours, and after that we sat on the concrete shore of the Gulf of Finland in the fading light, playing music (a mandolin, violin, and guitar trio), singing, and drinking until just before the 1 AM curfew.
And today we had another cultural excursion to the Peter and Paul Fortress, where we saw the sarcophagi of most of the Romanovs from Peter the Great on down the line, and the prison cell where Maxim Gorky was held (among other things). We had lunch at a vegetarian cafe run by a religious cult (kind of like The Maté Factor!) and then I walked an hour back to the bus stop. Now I'm at Café Dubai for the free internet, drinking the last dregs of my Turkish Coffee (Кофе в Турке) and using this blog post as a distraction from my 30 pages of reading about the origins of the Impressionist movement, in Russian, for tomorrow afternoon's class. Thanks!
Monday, September 7, 2009
Night life
I'm tired, still, woozy from fatigue and fighting to keep my eyes open. I don't think I slept more than 7 hours the From Friday to Sunday. What a weekend!
St. Petersburg is full of inconvenient time limits, deadlines and curfews. The bridges go up at around 2:30 AM to allow boat traffic through, so if you live on Vasilevsky Island (I do) or one of the other islands, you have to be across the bridge before then or wait until 6:00 in the morning. Then, the dormitory where I live locks its doors at 1:00 AM, as a safety precaution in a neighborhood where serial rapists have been known to lurk, which means that you have to be back inside by 1 or wait until they open again at 6:00. Finally, the last trains on the metro lines leave at midnight (buses stop running at 11), so unless you want to take a gypsy cab--or a real cab, for a much higher price--you have to make it back to the metro at midnight. All this combines to create a really interesting night culture in St. Petersburg. People generally either go out early and come back home around midnight or 1 AM, or go out on the last train and stay out until the wee hours of the morning. 12:00 AM is a really interesting time to be on the metro, because the early birds are raucous, rumpled, and swaying on the up-escalator, while the night owls are groomed and alert, ready for a night out that starts on the down-escalator into the station.
Friday I was ready for a night out. I had good company: a group consisting of Andrea, Alisa, and Gabby, my neighbors across the hall; Alesia, Dorian, Christina, and Lena, others from our program; and three internationals we picked up at the dorm. We left at 11:30 to walk to the metro, 20 minutes away. We were meeting our friends (Megan, Joe, David, Rachel, Paul and his girlfriend Ella, Cait, Alex, and Lila) at Fish Fabrique, the famous artsy bar of the Petersburg Avant-Garde--but word came down the line that there was an exorbitant cover charge (ha!) in the realm of 6 dollars, or 200 roubles, so we diverted ourselves and the two groups didn't cohere. Alex and Cait met us on Liteniey Prospekt and we walked to Griboyedev, a famous [infamous] club in the neighborhood. It wasn't raining, but it had been, and my toes were wet in my culturally-appropriate high heels by the time we got there. We managed to haggle the cover charge down from 300 roubles and went inside and downstairs into the dark, thumpingly loud basement club, where the walls were plastered with magazine cut-out collage and the luxurious couches occupied by beautiful young Petersburgers with legs crossed and shoes dangling, or smoking cigarettes and in animated conversation, or heads close together with secret smiles, whispering in each other's ears. On a whim I told the bartender it was my birthday and got a free shot of absinthe! It's a trick I plan on trying out every time I go somewhere new, because they generally don't ask for any sort of identification. This way it can be my birthday every weekend! (Isn't that the best way to do it, Katie?)
After having a dance-off (I think that's what was going on?) with a well-dressed, serious dark young man, I went up to the roof and met some linguistically confused Finns who were smoking there. The three of them wouldn't believe that my friend Cait and I weren't Russian and kept repeating "Oh! Bez accenta, bez accenta!" ("No accent!") until we broke down and admitted that we're actually from Moscow. One of them couldn't decide which language was best to speak in and slurred between Russian, French, English, and Spanish. He would ask a question in one language, then switch to another as soon as I'd answer in that language.
When that got old, about 3 AM, we took a gypsy cab to Dacha, a club in the international-nightlife district where a lot of Americans hang out (I don't know why, it's awful, and I don't know why everyone wanted to go.) to dance more. There I met Pasha and Roman, roommates who told me they were brothers and who I later found out were really just roommates. We talked a bit about music and decided to meet up the next night at another club where they were having a Beatles, Doors, and Rolling Stones themed dance party.
By the time 5:00 rolled around, my friends were all worn out, sitting in a 24-hour cafe around the corner from the club district, picking listlessly at their shashlik (shish-kabobs) and shverma (like gyros, with lamb and mayonnaise). We finally connected with Megan, Rachel, Joe, and Lila and walked to Chainaya Loshka, "The Tea Spoon", a chain tea-and-blini place next to the bus stop, to wait for the first bus to roll in at 6:03.
And it did, and we got on it, and went home. But now it's Monday evening and I have homework to do and a nap to take, so Saturday will have to be documented another time.
St. Petersburg is full of inconvenient time limits, deadlines and curfews. The bridges go up at around 2:30 AM to allow boat traffic through, so if you live on Vasilevsky Island (I do) or one of the other islands, you have to be across the bridge before then or wait until 6:00 in the morning. Then, the dormitory where I live locks its doors at 1:00 AM, as a safety precaution in a neighborhood where serial rapists have been known to lurk, which means that you have to be back inside by 1 or wait until they open again at 6:00. Finally, the last trains on the metro lines leave at midnight (buses stop running at 11), so unless you want to take a gypsy cab--or a real cab, for a much higher price--you have to make it back to the metro at midnight. All this combines to create a really interesting night culture in St. Petersburg. People generally either go out early and come back home around midnight or 1 AM, or go out on the last train and stay out until the wee hours of the morning. 12:00 AM is a really interesting time to be on the metro, because the early birds are raucous, rumpled, and swaying on the up-escalator, while the night owls are groomed and alert, ready for a night out that starts on the down-escalator into the station.
Friday I was ready for a night out. I had good company: a group consisting of Andrea, Alisa, and Gabby, my neighbors across the hall; Alesia, Dorian, Christina, and Lena, others from our program; and three internationals we picked up at the dorm. We left at 11:30 to walk to the metro, 20 minutes away. We were meeting our friends (Megan, Joe, David, Rachel, Paul and his girlfriend Ella, Cait, Alex, and Lila) at Fish Fabrique, the famous artsy bar of the Petersburg Avant-Garde--but word came down the line that there was an exorbitant cover charge (ha!) in the realm of 6 dollars, or 200 roubles, so we diverted ourselves and the two groups didn't cohere. Alex and Cait met us on Liteniey Prospekt and we walked to Griboyedev, a famous [infamous] club in the neighborhood. It wasn't raining, but it had been, and my toes were wet in my culturally-appropriate high heels by the time we got there. We managed to haggle the cover charge down from 300 roubles and went inside and downstairs into the dark, thumpingly loud basement club, where the walls were plastered with magazine cut-out collage and the luxurious couches occupied by beautiful young Petersburgers with legs crossed and shoes dangling, or smoking cigarettes and in animated conversation, or heads close together with secret smiles, whispering in each other's ears. On a whim I told the bartender it was my birthday and got a free shot of absinthe! It's a trick I plan on trying out every time I go somewhere new, because they generally don't ask for any sort of identification. This way it can be my birthday every weekend! (Isn't that the best way to do it, Katie?)
After having a dance-off (I think that's what was going on?) with a well-dressed, serious dark young man, I went up to the roof and met some linguistically confused Finns who were smoking there. The three of them wouldn't believe that my friend Cait and I weren't Russian and kept repeating "Oh! Bez accenta, bez accenta!" ("No accent!") until we broke down and admitted that we're actually from Moscow. One of them couldn't decide which language was best to speak in and slurred between Russian, French, English, and Spanish. He would ask a question in one language, then switch to another as soon as I'd answer in that language.
When that got old, about 3 AM, we took a gypsy cab to Dacha, a club in the international-nightlife district where a lot of Americans hang out (I don't know why, it's awful, and I don't know why everyone wanted to go.) to dance more. There I met Pasha and Roman, roommates who told me they were brothers and who I later found out were really just roommates. We talked a bit about music and decided to meet up the next night at another club where they were having a Beatles, Doors, and Rolling Stones themed dance party.
By the time 5:00 rolled around, my friends were all worn out, sitting in a 24-hour cafe around the corner from the club district, picking listlessly at their shashlik (shish-kabobs) and shverma (like gyros, with lamb and mayonnaise). We finally connected with Megan, Rachel, Joe, and Lila and walked to Chainaya Loshka, "The Tea Spoon", a chain tea-and-blini place next to the bus stop, to wait for the first bus to roll in at 6:03.
And it did, and we got on it, and went home. But now it's Monday evening and I have homework to do and a nap to take, so Saturday will have to be documented another time.
Friday, September 4, 2009
A new rhythm
A new rhythm's taking hold of me here, or maybe I'm just trying to grab hold of it. Finding my balance is hard, keeping my feet is harder.
Not counting RSL (Russian as a Second Language) classes, which have been going on for two weeks, I have my first class in Russian today! Yesterday I had my first non-RSL class of the semester, Russian & Eastern European Film. The class is conducted in English, but there are a few Russian students in the class. It's also over 3 hours long, from 4:40 until 8 PM on Thursday nights...we watched Man with a Movie Camera during the class and then discussed it. I was in awe and humiliated to discover that the Russian students were not only extremely good at English, but more articulate than any of the English students in the class. They led and dominated the discussion while the rest of us dumbly conceded our first language to them.
On Wednesday I had a free afternoon and the weather was phenomenal, so I walked around the city, first with my friend Joe--we went to St. Isaak's Cathedral (but it was closed) and Nevsky Prospekt, and then found a little café where we got the best espresso we've managed to find in the city so far. Coffee is a cultural import here, and drip coffee doesn't exist--if you order "coffee" you get NesCafé or an Americano if you're lucky. We also went to the Mikhailovsky Garden, where we managed to find a (rare) bench and sit for awhile in the gathering chill. Later, I met up with Nikolai, a boy I met at the dormitory last weekend when I was being harassed by the Kommandant. Our pass-cards are formatted so that when you swipe them your picture comes up on a screen for te Kommandant to see, but for some reason my pass-card was connected to the image of a gruff-looking young man instead of my face. Nikolai helped me find the office to get my card fixed and waited while I attempted to explain the problem in patched-together Russian. He speaks English and did foreign exchange in high school, so we decided to get together to practice our respective second languages. Nikolai and I met at Palace Square, walked around Peter and Paul Fortress, across the Neva (twice!), and finally ended up on Nevsky Prospekt as it was getting dark. He treated me to dinner at Subway, the other American fast-food import besides McDonald's. Unfortunately, other than our languages we don't have anything else in common, so once we'd gotten past introductions, it was pretty funny.
ME (in Russian): What kind of music do you like?
NIKOLAI (English): Oh, I like rock a lot. Do you know Limp Bizkit? I like them a lot. And Blink 182. And Linkin Park. And Metallica. Do you like electronica?
Anyway. Off to my Photography class! I'm a little nervous, but I have a pocket dictionary and every day my comprehension skills improve. This is what I came here to do--learn Russian, in Russian (in RUSSIA!), so...here goes!
Not counting RSL (Russian as a Second Language) classes, which have been going on for two weeks, I have my first class in Russian today! Yesterday I had my first non-RSL class of the semester, Russian & Eastern European Film. The class is conducted in English, but there are a few Russian students in the class. It's also over 3 hours long, from 4:40 until 8 PM on Thursday nights...we watched Man with a Movie Camera during the class and then discussed it. I was in awe and humiliated to discover that the Russian students were not only extremely good at English, but more articulate than any of the English students in the class. They led and dominated the discussion while the rest of us dumbly conceded our first language to them.
On Wednesday I had a free afternoon and the weather was phenomenal, so I walked around the city, first with my friend Joe--we went to St. Isaak's Cathedral (but it was closed) and Nevsky Prospekt, and then found a little café where we got the best espresso we've managed to find in the city so far. Coffee is a cultural import here, and drip coffee doesn't exist--if you order "coffee" you get NesCafé or an Americano if you're lucky. We also went to the Mikhailovsky Garden, where we managed to find a (rare) bench and sit for awhile in the gathering chill. Later, I met up with Nikolai, a boy I met at the dormitory last weekend when I was being harassed by the Kommandant. Our pass-cards are formatted so that when you swipe them your picture comes up on a screen for te Kommandant to see, but for some reason my pass-card was connected to the image of a gruff-looking young man instead of my face. Nikolai helped me find the office to get my card fixed and waited while I attempted to explain the problem in patched-together Russian. He speaks English and did foreign exchange in high school, so we decided to get together to practice our respective second languages. Nikolai and I met at Palace Square, walked around Peter and Paul Fortress, across the Neva (twice!), and finally ended up on Nevsky Prospekt as it was getting dark. He treated me to dinner at Subway, the other American fast-food import besides McDonald's. Unfortunately, other than our languages we don't have anything else in common, so once we'd gotten past introductions, it was pretty funny.
ME (in Russian): What kind of music do you like?
NIKOLAI (English): Oh, I like rock a lot. Do you know Limp Bizkit? I like them a lot. And Blink 182. And Linkin Park. And Metallica. Do you like electronica?
Anyway. Off to my Photography class! I'm a little nervous, but I have a pocket dictionary and every day my comprehension skills improve. This is what I came here to do--learn Russian, in Russian (in RUSSIA!), so...here goes!
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
С днём знаний!
Today is the traditional Russian holiday День Знаний, the Day of Knowledge, which means that little kids come to school with bouquets of flowers for their schoolteachers, and a band plays in front of the school, and bus fare is free (or maybe they just don't care enough to check your pass). School has never been this big a deal in the United States!
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