3-31-07

3-31-07

6 days since I last wrote an entry. This does not mean that I’ve been some kind of blob of inactivity, however. Quite the contrary. Instead, what happens is that I’ll get home and say to myself, “Oh, I only did X today, that’s not really worth writing a whole blog entry about.” But the problem comes when 6 days later you’ve got a pile of Xes to write about. So let’s see if I can piece together everything that I’ve done this past week.

Monday, I just took the bus home. Marina was out when I got home about 4ish so I just read and do the things I needed to do, freeing up Monday night for me to go to Kofe Haus after dinner and post the last two entries and photos.

On Tuesday, we went to Subway because it was Tuna Sub day. Then Hannah, Mattison, Becky, and I walked over to St. Isaac’s Cathedral and went up into the Colonnade. St. Isaac’s is the tallest building in central St. Petersburg; so on a sunny day it provided some amazing views. It was kind of smoggy, though. We then wandered over to New Holland, an island formed by the canals near St. Isaac’s. Then we wandered some more, eventually ending up at home for dinner with Marina.

Wednesday’s always an awkward day, because there are only 7 people in the program who don’t have an afternoon class. This past Wednesday the “Where to get lunch after school” situation was complicated even further by the fact that 4 of the seven people were at the Russian Museum for their Analitika class. (Gazeta doesn’t go on field trips, it would seem.) So Hannah and I just decided to take a marshrutka to Subway, because it was Italian BMT day. Subway two days in a row sounds excessive, but the sandwich of the day is such a fantastic deal we can’t turn it down. We had a near-disaster on the marshrutka, though. Before getting on, I said to Hannah, “Hey, can you pay for me? I’ve only got 500s.” You see, on a marshrutka, the driver makes the change himself while driving. So if you’ve got a super large bill (In this case, the marshrutka ride was 17 rubles—an inappropriate price to use a 500 ruble note on), the driver will get super upset at you. Hannah says, “Oh, yeah, sure, no problem.”

Then we get on the marshrutka and Hannah looks in her wallet and realizes that she, too, only has 500s. Panic. Luckily, there was a businessman next to us who had 5 100 ruble notes. Paying with 100 rubles for 34 rubles is much more reasonable. We then had nothing to do so we wandered down Nevsky a bit and ended up at Café Max to check our email.

Thursday was a short day, and Marissa, Mattison, and I went after school to the football stadium to check out ticket prices. Saturday (today) there’s a huge match between Zenit, the St. Petersburg team, and Spartak, a Moscow team. I wasn’t particularly interested in going to a match where there’s a certain chance of violence, but I wanted to check the prices for the game in early May against a team that ISN’T from Moscow. Of course, the stadium does not sell tickets for future games. That would make far too much sense.

We then wandered over to the Artillery Museum. Inside, we looked at lots of cannons and display cases full of guns. There was also an arts and crafts station where you could color your own little soldier, so we did that. Mattison’s colorblind, so his ended up being a little Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat-ish. We drew a crowd to watch us color. I’m also pretty sure that we’re in a bunch of pictures that a mom kept taking of her son coloring. Whatever, I’ve got my little paper soldier, Pierre Kennard. Outside, they have old Soviet artillery that you can climb up on. So, of course, we did. Something about coloring just makes you feel like you’re 6 years old again.

Yesterday, our original plan was to go see the second half of Paragraph 78. We instead went to a concert put on by Jarlath, one of our coordinators. It was a good time. The other highlight: Dinner at Carl’s Jr. Now, I know that that sounds kind of gross. I mean, it’s a Carl’s Jr. But you must understand—they have free refills. They are the only place in this country that has free refills. They also have free WiFi, so we might be going there after classes on Tuesday for lunch.

Today, we went to Kronstadt. Kronstadt is an island in the Finnish Gulf, designed by Peter the Great to be St. Petersburg’s first line of defense in case of a naval attack. The attack never came, and a city of 50,000 has grown up on the island. We took the long marshrutka ride (there’s a bridge) out and the wandered around in the sun on the coast for a while. After some wandering, we found a Chinese restaurant and had a horrible lunch with rude service, the taste of which could only be washed out with ice cream. So we had some of that. Katie’s guidebook said that there was a fortress worth seeing, and it took us forever to figure out which bus to take to get there. We got off where the conductor on the bus told us to, and we followed her directions, but we ended up just wandering through a housing project and then ending up in a scary field that looked like the perfect place to dump a body. So then we came home.

I think I’m going to take my laptop into the city and use the WiFi at QuoVadis. It’s cheaper than Café Max’s. But who knows what I’ll actually end up doing.