Novgorod and a day off.

This is a long post, bear with!     

     This past saturday was a trip to Novgorod, a city about 2 hours' bus ride from St. Petersburg (with the world's slowest driver, though I will admit the road was pretty awful).  We met at a southern metro station at 8 am, which meant breakfast at 6 am. This would have been pretty awful if it weren't for the white nights, which, while not officially started yet, means it's broad daylight from 4 am to 10 pm. So at the very least, the day was light (if rainy) when I had to get up that early. 

Our first stop, outside the city, was St. George's monastery, built an incredibly long time ago, and beloved by someone. Sorry to be flippant, but I've been here 2 weeks, and seen over 50 churches, chapels, mosques and monasteries, and after a bit, they all start to blur together. This particular one had a lovely bell tower, which can be seen in the middle of the picture here (I swear they had us park by the kitchens, the smell was heavenly!). It was also about 20 feet from a lake that varies between 7,000 and  30,000 square kilometers, depending on the season. Seems a little imprudent to me, but oh well. Needless to say, it was more than a little swampy, and the mosquitoes were a) quite prevalent, and b) the size of small dogs. Ok, perhaps a bit of an over-exaggeration, but not by much! Only by having my hair down, long sleeves with my hands tucked in them, and long pants, as well as a scarf over my head and fanning my face often did I manage to

Weather change.

The weather has reverted back to typical St. Peterburg weather, which is very similar to Washington state- chilly, damp and drippy. Quite the change from Colorado, and while I miss the warmth, my allergies are now completely gone, yay!

   Wednesday was... quite the "adventure". We had been told we were to visit the Pavlovsk palace, so most of us dressed for indoors walking. What Artemi had failed to mention, though, is that there was a 2 mile hike on dirt (read: mud) trails to get there! I was very much reminded of Washington and Hawaii on the way, as it was through a deciduous forest with ferns for undergrowth, and where there was any grass, it was supported from underneath by moss. Quite beautiful, moreso because I was actually dressed for the weather! (My backpack, however, is not waterproof, it turns out. The dictionary I have is now quite the worse for wear.)

Pictures, take 4.

Gah! Ok, eventually I'll figure this out. What did you miss? The hour of trying to figure everything out so I don't look like a retard posting huge pictures or having broken html on the page. Lucky you. Ok, so, without further ado (hopefully), here goes.

This is the St. Isaac Cathedral, one of many amazing edifices (edifi?) around the city. This is pretty close to where I live, and I look for the dome when I get too lost in the area. There is a pretty impressive statue opposite it, and the "square" (Isaacscki ploshod) that contains the statue and cathedral is roughly the size of a decent city block. The trees are part of the random network of small parks scattered throughout the city. Since it's the only thing (I think) keeping the pollution at bay, I suppose I should enjoy them, but this week has been pollen-count-from-hell, so my enthusiasm is a touch dampened. I've already burned through my entire supply of kleenex for the trip, but it finally rained last night and I can breathe again. 

This right here is a fabulous thing. The stoplights at major intersections (and some of them are HUGE) have walk timers, showing how much longer you have to wait to get 

the next walk light, or to get across the street before you become a target. A minor touch, but as an inexperienced city dweller and pedestrian, I love it.

Week 2!

Well, I've been here for one week, and so far I haven't died, been threatened, or otherwise come to undue harm. It does amaze me that the other females on the trip are making the guys walk them home, and will only go anywhere in a large group... which means they only hear English. I have walked at least half of the city on my own, and have not yet even felt uncomfortable, much less concerned for my safety. It does help that the nights never truly get dark- we aren't quite at the white nights yet (that's late June), but the best it ever gets, even at midnight, is late dusk-type lighting. Regardless, I have gotten spectacularly lost at times, and occasionally have had to rely on my horribly limited Russian to figure out where the heck I am, and how to get back. It's wonderful, and I love doing it.

Ironically, one of the reasons I've walked the most is that I'm (still!) trying to find the bookstore here. Apparently it's on the lines of a Borders back home, with Russian and foreign books at reasonable prices (ok, maybe only kinda like a Borders), and it's located right across from a metro stop in a huge building that used to house the Singer sewing machine company. Somehow though, perhaps because of my dislike of taking the metro when it's not needed, I cannot seem to locate it! I have walked the entire length of the road it's on, which is over a mile and a half, but I swear to you, the store disappears when I get close to it. Ah, well, it just means the success of finding it will be sweeter when it happens.

Classes begin.

Ok, having a little more time today means a slightly more informative update. I have my schedule for the first week, which involves 3 days of school (2 hours of "Conversation", about what I'm not sure, and 3 hours of Grammar, oh joy of joys), and 3 days of tours. Yesterday was getting oriented at school, and some poor student had to take 20 of us to get cell phones, poor thing, and a quick bus tour of St. Petersburg which dropped us off mid-town instead of back at the school. Since I had walked to the school the first day, that meant learning how to use the metro and trying to remember where the metro was in relation to the school all at once, but I managed ok.

The metros here, however, are ridiculously far underground! On the way down, I decided to walk down the escalators, amazed that only 2-3 people shared the desire to get some exercise with me. After (no exaggeration here) 2 minutes on said escalator, and my calves starting to shake, I finally saw the end, and rested for the last 30 seconds. Suffice to say, I took the lazy way back up on the other end. I forget sometimes that living in a city necessitates exercise, as you have to walk everywhere, rather than drive.

I'm alive!

Sorry for the incommunicado for so long, but the internet is not as pervasive here as it is in the US. The short story (since I don't know how long I have here), is that I am here, I am safe, and while I can't say that I know my way around, I know enough to not get utterly, utterly lost (yet).

The flight in was relatively hellacious, as the flight from NYC to Moscow was delayed just long enough for me to miss my flight to St. Petersburg, and then the phones were not working right, I couldn't get a hold of anyone to let them know the new flight I was on, and I had to find my way to the house on my own. I won't lie, the fact that I had been awake and not-well-fed for over 52 hours at that point meant that there was some amount of breaking down on my part, and some amount of "oh god there's a crying foreigner on my hands!" on some very, very kind Russians' parts. However, all is well as of now, and I'll be getting a phone (and some teaching!) as of today, so hopefully no more horrendous feelings of being lost.

Countdown!

Three days til I leave and the jitters are starting to set in. I've got my passport and visa, my books should be arriving tomorrow, my packing list and flight itineraries are all printed out, nothing to do now but sit and wait. I hate waiting.

To pass the time, I've been playing around with a trial account on a French server in WoW. It's pretty mind-expanding, to the point where I couldn't sleep the first night because all the new vocab was running through my head, but I feel it's worth it. I'm debating letting my US account lapse when I get back and just poking around on French and Russian servers to improve those languages. We'll see.

So yeah, three days. Nothing to do but wait. And I'm sure that on the third day, I'll discover something vital that I (or someone else!) forgot to do, and have to run around like crazy. Good times.

Visa confusion.

Visas are in! I went to pick up my passport/ visa on Tuesday, and noticed that my name was in three different places: twice on the visa form itself (once in roman letters, once in cyrillic), and then again at the bottom of the visa, presumably for scanning purposes. Unfortunately, the bottom of the visa spelled my name "Lissandra Leqlani", even though the two on the form were correct. Paranoid, I called up the woman who'd gotten our visas taken care of, and she said she'd noticed that everyone's was misspelled. She contacted the Russian Embassy, and it turns out that they enter our names in roman characters, convert them to cyrillic for the system, then convert them from cyrillic back to roman for the scan at the bottom. Since the two alphabets don't correspond (there are perhaps 2-3 symbols that are the same in both), there are mistakes after the final conversion- they know about this and it's ok. Nice to let us know ahead of time!

So I have my passport and visa back, I have my tickets sorted out, finals are done as of today... Now I get to sit back and relax for a week before the adventure begins!

Address in St. Petersburg

Well, they finally gave us the info on where we'll be staying! True to my request (and insular nature), they put me with a woman living alone... don't know how old she is or what else there is to know... just that it'll be one person and myself. Hope for the best!

Anyhow, here's the telephone and address of the place I"ll be staying:

Telephone (home): 312-29-65. Cell: 8-911-948-00-87

Address: 195213 СПб., Казанская ул. д.45 кв.64, Ст.м. Садовая,

Roughly, this comes out to:

195213 St. Petersburg, Kazanskaya St., Building #45 Apartment 64, Metro stop: Sadovaya

(Apparently they do addresses from greatest to smallest, who knew? Only two weeks til departure!)

Ok, sorry for the run-on post, but I think I've got it figured out. I'll be about 20 minutes from a metro stop, though kinda far out from central St. Petersburg. I am ridiculously proud that I figured out the maps on my own, and fairly confident I won't get (too) lost now. There are at least 2 other students on my same metro stop, and the area looks fairly civilized and clean. Cheers!