Week in Review

This past week has been busy. Our Russian teachers are trying their hardest to fit two semesters of material into seven weeks, and I although on paper I am getting way better at Russian, the cashier at the local grocery store who just points to the amount on the register says otherwise. Besides language classes we have special excursions into the city, such as our Crime and Punishment walk this Monday, where we traced Raskolnikov's steps through the city on the day of the murder. Normally once a week we have a two and a half hour (standing) lecture in the Russian Museum. This week we had two. The Russian culture class, speeds along at a rate of a novel or so a week, and when you factor in eating and sleeping, it seems like I barely get a break to see the sights.

What I have seen so far is mostly up on Facebook as I'm sure most of you have seen (or if you're my parents, are rushing to see right now), but I thought I would repost a few of the pictures here, and some that aren't available on Facebook with a little better explanation of what was going on.







These are a few pictures from our trip to Pavlovsk. It's about a thirty minute train ride out of St. Petersburg and is the grounds of a royal palace that is now a public park. It's a nice place to walk around on a sunny day, but although the weather looks beautiful, it turned into a downpour about an hour after these photos were taken. Such is Russian weather. You can see the Russian couple getting their picture taken after their wedding. At first I thought that millions of people got married every day in St. Petersburg. The actual case is that when you get married, you go around with the wedding party to every single sight in and around the city and have your picture taken at each one, usually in a white stretch hummer.



This photo is of our group dinner that we ate at a Georgian restaurant. Apparently even Lynne (our program director who is talking to me in the picture) admits that Russian cuisine is nothing to write home about. In this picture she is explaining to me that there exists a Russian TV sitcom (which I have since seen with my own eyes) called "Счастливы Bместе"(Happy Together) which is an authorized copy of the American sitcom "Married with Children". They litterally take the script and translate it into Russian and then re-shoot it with Russian characters. The main character Masha, actually looks a bit like a Russian Al Bundy. I tried to find an episode with English subtitles...maybe you can if you search youtube, but it is exactly the same script.







Apparently it's one of the top rated shows in Russia.



Here is the group on a tour of the Yusupov palace, where Rasputin was famously murdered. They took us down to the room where he was fed cyanide, then shot, and then upon his waking and staggering up the stairs, shot three more times and then thrown into the the Neva. Our tour guide only spoke Russian and so Lynne did the translating. The language barrier did very little to conceal her hatred of American students. In this photo she can be seen glaring at Danny's New York Yankees shirt.





These photos are from a venue called Bubble Bar near the center of the city. We went because a Russian friend told us there would be a really good jazz band playing there. Instead, there was a pretty good Russian rock band who opened with Billie Jean in honor of Michael Jackson. I would probably say they were really good, but the audience mostly consisted of Russian teenage girls who sang along to all the words.





After Bubble Bar, our Russian friend Vitaly (black tank top) took us to the local Coffee House (the biggest chain cafe in St. Petersburg) where he "knew the owner", so that we could drink vodka, which he bought from the supermarket, as long as we drank it out of offical Coffee House cups. This is essentially like going into a crowded McDonalds in New York City with 20 people, not buying anything, and boisterously drinking. This did not bother any of the Russian patrons (maybe it was the cups?).






We ended our night at a club across the street from the Coffee House, where the bouncer's job seemed to be to keep people out who were wearing white shoes. There was a naked golden angel on the wall. All in all it wasn't too exciting.

We hailed a chasniki, which is just a random person willing to drive you home for way less than the taxis, (Dear Kelly: there were four of us, and this is extremely common practice in St. Petersburg.), and watched the sun rise at 3:45am on our ride home.