Благодаря Виталию!

Thanks to Vitaly!

Aboard one of the tall ships at the regatta, a week and a half ago.

It's been over a week now since I last updated, but I'm sitting now blogging from some great luck! A very kind and awesome gentleman who works in the university building where we have class has lent me his computer, so in a glorious cascade of good luck, I am blogging from a computer that looks, feels, and acts like my own--but isn't. Thanks to Vitaly! As for my own computer, after extensive testing, I've concluded that it is 99.99% a failing motherboard, whatever that means specifically, which means I'll have to find a way to get a new computer when I return to California. It's annoying, but it's not the end of the world.

So, there's a ton of stuff I could talk about, but I'll go with some pictures.

Here is a typical dinner scene at my host mother's place. Usually, it so happens that the other student living there and I eat dinner at different times, though last night we ate together. Sveta, my host mother, often stays around and talks to me while I eat, or sometimes puts the radio on (though I understand little of the radio-voice). There's always plenty of food--this particular meal was on Saturday, I believe, and as you can see there's some tea, hot dog sort of thing, potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes, white table bread, apple-water, and a cookie. Last night we had chicken with rice and potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes, black bread, and a cookie.

That reminds me--I haven't actually said much about what I do every day! On weekdays I get up sometime around 8 and take a shower (there's hot water now!), then get dressed and go in for breakfast. My host mother always has hot kasha (hot cereal), milk, tea, and some sort of bread thing for me, though sometimes it's cold cereal, and twice she made bliny (Russian pancakes). There's also some kind of sandwich or breakfast lavash roll sort of thing. Fortunately for me, she's a very good cook most of the time even with limited resources, and I've come to really enjoy breakfast. Dressing for the weather can be difficult here because the mornings were often very chilly during the first month, and it often rains unexpectedly, though the past two weeks have been warm. Then I walk to the institute, which takes about 20-25 minutes, and recently I've felt comfortable listening to my iPod while I walk too. Check out the map a few posts back on my blog if you want to see exactly where I go. Class starts at 10. I've been sleeping better lately, though there's still some lingering congestion from the cold I had two weeks ago, and there have been more mosquitoes recently too. Class is two hour and a half sections, then lunch provided by the café at the institute. At lunch, as with everywhere in the institute building, we must speak "only" Russian, and I can tell you that conversing in Russian is already much easier, and it seems easier and easier to communicate in general. After lunch there's an hour to study or go online or whatever (except on Wednesday, when we have an extra class section for Phonetics practice). At that point, depending on what day it is, there's either an excursion somewhere in the city, a theatre class, or a "choir" class (singing Russian songs). After that, I tend to spend a bit of time on the computer, usually doing email and such. Then I go back home, my host mother gives me dinner, and I may nap or try to do homework right away. Of course, every day is different, and I will often walk around with other students in some area of the city in the afternoon, maybe going to a café or something. I always prefer to eat dinner back at my host-home, because, well, it's free and plentiful.

Yes, the bridges go up every night! Actually, I didn't experience the concept of "night" until my third weekend of being here, because it never got darker than twilight. The river is really beautiful when eveything is all lit up. That's the moon, of course, and the Hermitage is on the left behind the bridge.

Anoher scene from the Tall Ships' Races. The words on the mural translate to "Sea of Possibility"--a really excellent idea! I thoroughly loved the regatta, and I visited the ships all four days that the event was going on. Someday I'd love to be on the crew of a tall ship!

Aboard the Седов, the largest ship at the festival. It's a Russian ship, from Murmansk! And it's awesome--check out the wikipedia page (above), and their official website.

These guys are generals, from the Hall of Generals (don't remember what it's actually called) at the Hermitage. Don't they look like they could be talking to each other, like the magical paintings in Harry Potter?

From Дом Книги (House of Books).

This is one of the strangest places I've encountered in Russia or anywhere. It's a café, not far from the university building where we have class, called Miks Cafeteria. The sign in front there literally translates to "enormous sandwich." So I went there with my friend Susan (she shared my love of the tall ships), and the food and general atmosphere of the place on the INSIDE is far and away more bizarre than its outward appearance. The place has a "Route 66" theme, with interior decor like some sort of American diner from a parallel universe. Their sandwiches are unlike any food I've ever heard of before--a weird amalgam of general ideas from American and Russian cuisine, but it's unlike either one. The sandwiches are square flat white things that contain fillings like potato salad or "hamburger." They have names like Russianized English words (Russianized English is hilarious, by the way--you get words like Biznes-Lahnch (business lunch), Gamburger (hamburger), and Parkovat'sa (to park one's car). The menus at non-Russian restaurants are especially great. Anyway, this Miks Cafeteria was really interesting. They also had milkshakes that can only be described with the word... pastel. Like drinking pure cream, with a bit of flavor and sugar. Quite good though.

Here I am at the Artillery Museum on Saturday. It was fascinating, but some aspects of it were terrifying. They had a lot of missiles on display--I can really only explain this with more pictures:

This is the Red Scare. One of the museum's gigantic halls was filled with about two dozen missile carriers, rockets and missiles, and rocket trucks. This is a diagram of one of the missile's trajectory. It's not labeled, but you get the sense that its destination is some American population center. In that room I began to really get a sense for the fear that the Cold War held on the world.

There was also an exhibit about this guy, Kalashnikov. It's called "The Man, The Weapon, The Legend." He invented the AK-47, literally transforming warfare all over the world. There were literally wall-to-wall assault rifles hanging in that exhibit, with certificates from various militaries and organizations such as the National Rifle Association of America, commending him on his work. It was a very, well... humbling, sort of experience. Yet also frightening.

Dostoevsky's grave. We went to a churchyard/monastery thing yesterday and also saw the grave of Tchaikovsky. What really interested me about the place, though, was reading a Latin inscription on another one of the monuments and realizing that I understood almost all of it. Then a Russian woman asked me whether I understood it, and I started to translate the Latin into Russian for her, but she seemed to lose interest very quickly. Still, it was really exciting for me, and I remembered how much I enjoyed studying and translating Latin, and I thought how curious it is that we don't spend any time on translation in the Russian class here, and I miss that. I'm still reading Notes From Underground and really getting a lot out of it.

Scene from July 3rd. This was the Friday before July 4, of course, and the university café staff wanted to give us a special "American Picnic" sort of lunch. It was great!

Finally, a bit of graffiti I saw yesterday. My experience here, as I have said before, has been up and down in many ways, but I feel that I'm starting to settle into it. It's absolutely true that culture shock is inevitable--at least for me, it hit me in a much more textbook way than I realized at the time. There are many thoughts swirling around my head as I do a lot of growing up, but the future in general for me doesn't worry me so much. So like the graffiti says, it's best to think that everything will be alright. I'm learning so much here. As my brother told me a couple of days ago, it's impossible to imagine beforehand how the experience of actually living abroad will affect every part of your being. He's right.