2-11-07

2-11-07

What an uneventful day.

Slept in til 10. Had apricot blini for breakfast. Hung around in my pajamas, reading the English language St. Petersburg Times I picked up the other day. Hannah messaged me to meet up at Kolobok at 1, and Marina left for somewhere at 11:00ish, so I basically just took my time getting ready and took a couple of pictures around the apartment before heading out.

Today started out just as startlingly sunny as yesterday, with the sky a deep blue. The Metro was almost deserted which meant I could sit down. This was especially nice today, because I had my laptop in my backpack, as well as my large dictionary and heavy copy of 501 Russian Verbs. It was like lugging a bag of rocks.

Met up with Hannah, grabbed a small lunch there. Then the two of us spent the next two hours just goofing around on the internet, uploading pictures and the like. Anthony randomly happened to walk in while we were there and joined us with his laptop. Once our batteries died, Hannah and I started comparing notes for our absolutely ridiculous Grammar test tomorrow.

I’ve complained to people back home about this, and it’s still frustrating. Back at IU, or any school, you pick the classes you’re going to take the semester beforehand. You get a chance to check out the class, the professor, talk to people who’ve taken the class, etc. But here we’re just in a set schedule; the only choice was between Gazeta and a literature analysis class. Long story short, our grammar teacher is driving all of us nuts. She’s a nice enough person, but we’re all just frustrated because her emphasis has been more on us memorizing verbs than, say, learning any grammatical concepts. So tomorrow we have a test that’s essentially a vocab test over a huge number of verbs. Plus, the other day she was still going even though time for class was over, and one of the guys in the class, Joe, told her that we were 5 minutes over. She told him that her watch said we were only 2 minutes over and she wanted to finish what she was talking about. So she kept us another 5 minutes.

Maybe I’ve just gotten used to IU where everyone gets up the very second class is over, and they spend the last 5 minutes of class gathering their notes and zipping their bags and whatnot. Long story short, as I said to Emily, my Russian is improving, though I’m pretty sure a large part of that is due to activities taking place outside of the classroom.

This is, of course, with the exception of Phonetics, which we all absolutely adore. Our Phonetics teacher, who we refer to only as “Fonetika” looks just like the mom from the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, so sometimes I just refer to her as “Cheer Up Charlie.” She’s always so prim and proper but the class lends itself to hilarity and she’s well aware of that and isn’t afraid to laugh at us when we sound like idiots.

After I got back here, I called Emily to make up for our missed opportunity yesterday. Had some rather tasty mushroom soup for dinner, along with mashed potatoes and a salmon patty. Me? Eating mushrooms? I know! Called Mom and Dad to chat for a bit as well. Weekends really lend themselves to calls home, so maybe I should start figuring out whom I’m going to call beforehand. I already know I need to call Maggie, and now that Emily’s given me her number, I’ll try to do that next weekend.

Not this coming weekend, but the weekend after that, we have a three-day weekend, as Friday is a national holiday. We won’t have our multiple-entry visas yet, so a weekend trip to Tallinn, Estonia is out of the question. Instead it’s looking like a few of us might try to take one of the days and head out to Tsarskoe Selo (Or Pushkin Palace, as it’s located in the town of Pushkin). It’s the site of the famous and mysterious Amber Room, so it could be an exciting visit. We know we all want to go to Peterhof too, but that’s not really worth it until May when the fountains are running.

I’m trying to solidify my plans for travel week, but I’m going to refrain from discussing them, as they are still quite gelatinous. This week should lead to lots of people figuring out what they’re doing for sure and purchasing tickets, because the sooner you buy them, the cheaper they are.

It clouded over and started snowing while we were in Kolobok, so it looks like tomorrow will probably be another gloomy day. At least it’s short. I was just thinking about how I’m ready to go to sleep (It’s not even 9:30) even though I slept til 10 today. This would sound like traditional college student laziness, but I’m pretty sure there’s a good reason for it.

At about 2:30 this morning, the person who lives above me started building a birdhouse or something. No, I don’t know what they were doing, but whatever it was required lots and lots of hammering. And it wasn’t like they were doing something else that maybe sounding like hammering, this was hammering. I was half-asleep and contemplating what they could possibly be doing for half an hour. When it started, I remember thinking, “Oh, well, he’ll just get this one picture hung” and it’ll be over. Why I was so convinced that it was normal for someone to hang a picture at 2:30 in the morning is beyond me, but I was only half-awake.

It continued. I imagined him choosing this time to lay a new hardwood floor, because it really sounded like those nails were going straight into the floor. He stopped for a minute or two, which allowed me to edge a little closer to sleep, so when he started back up again I was absolutely convinced he was building a coffin. I know it was loud enough to wake Marina up, because I heard her go to the bathroom. He stopped after about half an hour. It’s odd because the building is generally fairly quiet. Of course, there are people returning late at night and whatnot, but I’m used to that from school. So maybe I’ll go ahead and go to bed now. Sounds like a good plan to me.