1-27-07

IMPORTANT---Posts should be read in order of date, ie, scroll down to the earlier ones first. I write this on my computer and then post them online when I can. Also, I'm a moron, so some of them are dated '06 and one of them is posted twice. Whatever.

1-27-06

I am currently in the internet café near the Metro. It’s Saturday night and Kate and I met up here with our laptops to feel connected to the world again. It’s a nice feeling. You know what else was a nice feeling? Sleeping in this morning. I didn’t wake up until there was actually light coming through my curtains. Yeah, first time that’s happened. Marina also slept in. I had a nice hot shower and then an omelet. I wish I could start every day here like that.

Then I met up with the rest of the CIEE gang at Pushkinskaya Metro station and we boarded a train to Pavlovsk. Pavlovsk is the site of the palace of Paul I. The palace was a palace, nothing too exciting. Okay, that sounds stupid, but really. It’s just so ridiculous to walk into opulent room after opulent room in the house of a guy who was only tsar for three years. He was strangled to death in his other palace in St. Petersburg because of his unpopular policies. What could be so unpopular? Perhaps enforcing a citywide bedtime in St. Petersburg of 8 o’clock and expecting nobles to rise at 5am to work in the city. This came after the liberal late-night partying of his mother, Catherine the Great’s, era.

What’s really great about Pavlovsk is the grounds. It’s on a 400-hectare (Marina showed me a book about it after dinner tonight) parcel of land that’s largely birch and pine forest. This, combined with the fact that it snowed last night and today and the place was beautiful. I took a ridiculous amount of pictures, and I’ll see if I can figure out how to put some on here.

After that it was a long, cold train ride back. Dinner tonight indicated that Marina has, I believe, exhausted her culinary repertoire, as it was a repeat of my first night’s meal and my breakfast was a repeat of my first breakfast. That’s fine with me, everything was tasty. While I was eating dinner, I heard familiar music come from the TV. Marina must’ve seen me perk up, because she went and turned it up so we could both watch and listen from the kitchen. It was the Russian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire! I actually was able to get a question right that had the contestant and Marina stumped. The question asked what was Rambo’s first name. I was so confused just hearing the question because in Russian, the ‘a’ in Rambo receives the stress, so the ‘o’ automatically reverts to sounding like an ‘a’. This meant that they kept saying “Ramba” and I had no idea who Ramba was and no idea what his first name was. But then I realized they were also saying “Stallone” and made the connection. I watched the rest of it together with Marina and she translated for me the questions that I couldn’t understand.

She then gave me the book on Pavlovsk and showed me her TV program guide that indicated there was an American movie on and asked me if I wanted to watch it. It’s always nice to hear a poorly dubbed movie, so I watched about an hour of “Ashanti” starring Michael Caine and Peter Ustinov. After that, I came here, and here I am.

Today marks the 63rd anniversary of the breaking of the blockade of Leningrad during WWII. There were parades, which I missed because I was in Pavlovsk. There are also terrifying commercials on with pictures of things like the Bronze Horseman statue boarded up and search lights going back and forth over a dark St. Petersburg. The only noise in the commercials is the sound of an air raid siren and then the words “We Remember” come up on the screen. Marina mentioned the anniversary as I was on my way out the door. I really want to ask her about it, if she was here for it, but that’s kind of an awkward question to ask. If I do, I’ll write about it, for sure.