1-29-07

1-29-07

I am wearing sock liners and fleece socks and slippers. My feet are still cold and probably won’t be comfortable until right before I take off my socks to shower.

Moving on, yesterday was the scavenger hunt. This was a 7-hour long scavenger hunt. It’s probably the most exhausting experience I’ve been through in this country, so far. 7 straight hours of running from location to location, taking pictures of things and buying things and taking tramvais and the metro and every possible means of transportation for 7 straight hours. And then not winning. At that point, I really didn’t care. I’d say that the scavenger hunt was about the voyage, not the destination, but the voyage exhausted me so much I’d rather not think about it.

However, my personal high point of the scavenger hunt was that I successfully hailed my first gypsy cab! Woo! Our group had split up and after Anthony, William and I ended up at the Armenian cemetery instead of the Armenian church, we took a gypsy cab back to a metro station to meet up with our team. We were told that, if possible, a girl should negotiate the price because they’ll always get a discount, and that the negotiator should, if possible, be the person with the best Russian. Surprise, surprise, I was the girl and the one with the best Russian out of the three of us. So I stepped off of the curb and assumed the hailing position. No, it does not involve showing any leg. Although I did take my hat off. The hailing position is just to stand with your right arm slightly raised out from your body, roughly at a 45-degree angle. Lo and behold, within a minute a guy pulled up and we got a nice cheap price. He had goofy Russian pop playing and blue zebra-patterned seat covers. So that was that.

After the scavenger hunt, I came back here and absolutely devoured my dinner. While I was eating, I noticed that Marina was watching the figure skating special “Plushenko and Friends.” They love Evgeny Plushenko here. Or, as Marina corrected me, he prefers to just go by “Geny.” She took her food in to the living room to watch, and after I was done I joined her. If it’s not the Olympics, I’m not really a figure skating fan, but at that point I was so exhausted it was kind of just flowing over me as opposed to me actively watching it. After about an hour of figure skating, I did by homework and collapsed.

Today nothing of note happened, but Marina informed be that it was –13 this morning. That’s Celsius. Tomorrow I’m thinking that I’m going to post this from Kolobok after school and then just take the Metro home. Classes are understandable and homework is busy work. Back in Indiana, I only had one class that had this kind of daily busy work schedule, and that was Russian. The rest of my classes were lectures. But here I’ve got Grammar, Phonetics, and Conversation with nightly work in addition to Gazeta, Civilization, and Literature. Sigh. I guess this means I’m settled into a routine, which is what I wanted so dearly back earlier this month.

I took a few pictures yesterday, I’ll upload them now so that I can post some of them the next time I’m online on this computer. I’ll also try to post some more pictures from Pavlovsk, instead of just one of a lion and the same picture of a kid and some birds twice.