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!