Шла Саша по шоссе и сосала сушку...

Блог 4

           On my more rebellious days here in Russia, when my host mom isn't home, I occasionally walk around the house without my slippers on. It gives me a sense of being home, not wearing slippers. See, here in Russia it is very rude to wear your shoes in someone's home. You take your shoes off at the door and they give you a pair of tapachky (slippers) to wear, or in your own house you have your own special slippers. It's rude to walk around in bare feet or just in socks, so when I'm alone I will sometimes walk around in shoes or in my socks… The problem is that now I can't do it. I feel this overwhelming guilt when I do, like if Larisa Sergeevna saw me she'd be so terribly disappointed. I'm very sad because now I stand at the door to my room about to go to the kitchen in my socks and inside it feels wrong. I automatically turn around and put my tapachky right back on… This is about as eventful as my week has been. 

Hanging out with Alexander Menshikov in the
Russian Museum!

          So this week… This week was pretty standard. Not much went on with class. We have definitely settled into a routine. It is getting harder for even the professors to stay awake during our 90 minute classes. My worst day is Tuesday because I am in class from 10:00 until 5:00 p.m. with only a 30 minute break in the middle. Very annoying. My phonetics class is the surprising dark horse of my courses, being my unexpected favorite. The professor is this beautiful woman (which is why the guys in my class bother to show up) with long dark hair and the classic Russian bangs. She is tall and skinny and wears all black dresses with tall black boots and always has a bright red manicure. Very dramatic. If I hadn't made the decision early to find everything in that class hilarious, it would be miserable, but she laughs at everything and listening to people repeat tongue twisters (in Russian, skoragavorky) over and over again becomes hilarious with enough imagination. Those with the worst accents/ strongest American accents make class worth it because she'll just stare at them as if they've grown two heads when they can't roll their Rs or pronounce a soft L. She seems to find the fact that I think everything is hilarious equally as entertaining, so I think we have a good thing going.

A close up of an amazing work, The Last Day of Pompeii,
a truly enormous work by Karl Bryullov.

          While my teachers may like me, I am finding it surprisingly difficult to meet Russian people my age. We were at SPB on Friday (because where else does one ever bother to go?) and a Russian, Slava, came up and started talking to us and it was all going very well until we started talking to his friends. To say they were racist would be the understatement of the century. There were a few men in the booth behind theirs who were (this may be indelicate) from Nicaragua and Brazil and who were black. My friend, the ever amazing Sasha/Alexa went up to them to chat and the Russians with whom I was speaking were shocked that she would bother. They proceeded to tell me how far below Russians and white people these black men were, and said many other things that made me more than uncomfortable. It is, of course, their country and I am a guest, but we decided that maybe we'd go talk to Sasha's new friends instead. We made friends with the Brazilian Navy Seals who speak Portuguese, Spanish and Russian very well and were very pleasant. Slava stayed with us for a while, and all seemed to go well. The trouble with this is that all of them started to become a bit overfriendly. This is the trouble with trying to meet people here. They hear you are American and come to the instant conclusion that you are looking for more than friendship. I am still working on finding real Russian friends to simply hang out with and talk, but so far no luck.

My new favorite painting, A Parisian Woman,
by Alexander Deyneka.

          The nicest people I have met are always the waitresses that find the fact that our Russian is just awful hilarious. Saturday was a very interesting and fun day with very nice waitresses and very confusing adventures involving bowling. The day started with a tour of the Russian Museum, which is by far my favorite place on earth, so far. I could live in that museum and be completely happy. The stories and portraits are truly stunning. I love hearing stories about Catherine the Great and the work that Russian artists put into their amazing pieces. Even the modern section was stunning, if confusing at times. I bought a few posters while I was there, which was very exciting because they are old Soviet propaganda posters, mostly against Hilter but also a lot about joining together to defeat, this or that enemy. They're pretty much awesome. The tour was very good. So good, in fact, that we gained two Chinese tourists for the entire tour who kept stepping in front of everyone's pictures.

Can't remember the name/artist but truly stunning.

          After the museum we went out for lunch. It was my friend Rhiannon's birthday (technically it was on the 29th of February but that presented some difficulties this year) so we grabbed lunch (101 rubles for borsch, blini, and tea!) and decided to go bowling. Bowling here is very confusing. I believe that the Russians imported bowling alleys but forgot to import actual bowlers to show them what to do. Watching them bowl was definitely a highlight of my trip. While I am terrible, I'm pretty sure I don't look absolutely ridiculous while doing it. It was very difficult to get a lane, shoes, and understand exactly what was going on because I was the only one willing to talk to anyone in Russian. My head always gets very tired when I become the group spokesperson. Lots of translating. Finally we figured out that, no, we were not in fact allowed to open a cake and eat it there, so after interesting bowling and being lied to about when a lane would be open for us, we left and went to a restaurant. We weren't allowed to eat cake their either, but after about 1:00 a.m. they seem to stop caring. It was very enjoyable, even after having to call two taxis, one of which did NOT look legitimate in any way. The language barriers make for interesting times, especially when I'm being counted on to get everyone to the right place after the metro closes. Today is Sunday and I was going to go to the Kuntz-Kamera museum today which is both free and full of weird scientific oddities collected by Peter the Great. According to Wikipedia it was the first museum in Russia and focuses on anthropology and ethnography. I decided I'd rather shower and do homework, but I will be going sometime this week so I won't give away any spoilers just yet!

          I think I have decided that these blogs will be coming out on Sundays, since those are my days with the most down time. I don't want to promise one every Sunday, because not all weeks give me something to write about. This week was a bit dry, except the Russian Museum and birthday adventures. Hopefully I'll have some interesting things to say, but in the mean time I would like to take a second to thank everyone who has been reading this! I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoy writing it. I love sharing my adventures with all of the people I love and this will make it easier when I get back! I won't have to catch anyone up on my last four months! Thanks for reading, guys!

Here's a super groovy song that I sing for phonetics class all the time. Hope it gets stuck in your head as often as it does in mine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJxEkEFMNcM