Of Farewells and Chocolates

Today was both quiet and fun filled.  Things started when we went to the University, not for classes, but for a farewell party, of sorts.  Владимир Алексеевич and a couple of staff members who had been involved in helping our class gathered coke, grapefruit juice, and a really rather yummy variation of pizza from the Caucasus region, put it in the teachers lounge, and basically we all got together and talked, mostly in Russian, about how things had gone, and about home.  The pizza came in three varieties: meat, cheese, apple and капуста, aka cabbage.  It didn’t involve any sauce, and it was sort of like a calzone it was stuffed into the crust.  It was very yummy, and highly filling.  We didn’t get any where near finished with it all, although I do believe the others cleaned out the meat option pretty well.  It was a lovely way for us to end the month, in my opinion.  I am going to miss my teachers, even if I won’t miss Татьяна Алексеевна’s thrice blasted scenarios.  The faculty has also been really nice and accommodating.  I hope wherever I end up in France is half so nice.
After the farewell party, the four of us set out to achieve a long cherished goal.  You see, next to the university, there is..... a chocolate factory.  It’s a very good chocolate factory, that makes very good chocolate, and it has a little store that sells chocolate in the form of candy and cakes.  Thus, we decided long ago that by the end of this trip, we were going to buy a cake.  And we were going to devour it gleefully.  So, today we finally did.  We wound up coughing up 64 rubles a piece to buy a торте кармен, which turned out to be a sort of cake with a cream filling.  The top was covered by a layer of milk chocolate, and (having now eaten my portion of said cake) was incredibly tasty.  I highly recommend Болшевик chocolates to anyone who finds themselves in Moscow.  One of their stores is on Leningradsky Prospekt.  Look for it hard enough, and I’m sure you’ll find it.
Post cake purchase, we headed back to the dorm for a while, and then Carley and I proceeded to the final adventure for the day: the statue park.  You see, there is a park filled with interesting statues across the street from Gorky Park.  It’s rather fascinating.  Some of the statues are beautiful and captivating.  Some are ordinary and less than captivating.  A good number are creepy and captivating.  But still, it was definitely an interesting place to spend an afternoon, even if some of the statues were a little freaky.
Then we headed back to the dorm.  End of story.


On a rather sobering note, today marks my very last day in Moscow.  It’s rather sad and depressing, but I’m almost glad to be going home.  Moscow suits me in some ways, yes, but not, I think, because of Moscow.  No, the Russian capital suits me because it reminds me of another capital city in a different country.  I like Moscow as much as I do because it is so much like Bratislava.  I mean, they’re not exactly the same, but they are similar enough with similar enough languages spoken in the streets that in a way, it feels like Bratislava.  So, I feel at home here, but not for the right reasons.  I feel like I haven’t been able to give Moscow a chance to really be itself because of that.  At the same time, my experience here has been so radically different from my adventures in Bratislava that there’s no way I could ever mix the two up.  I would never place Moscow’s traumatizing metro escalators in Bratislava, any more than I would place my late night walks home from two trolleybus stops early here in Moscow.  I would never mistake the обшежити for the panelok where I lived with the Klimešes or the Lapinovs.  Still, I’d like to come back here some day.  It’s a nice place, and I’d like to get to know it better.  I just hope I’ll have more than a month to do so.

Of Convents and Duckies

Saturday, May 26, we spent traipsing around the Novodivechy (hold me to that spelling, and it will certainly be incorrect) Convent.  It was pretty enough, I suppose, but I wasn’t a huge fan.  It has some lovely history attached to it, though.  Peter the Great locked his sister up there after she participated in some sort of rebellion against him.  If I remember correctly, it was built by Ivan the Terrible.  I have to admit, I find it rather ironic that a Tsar dubbed  the Terrible was responsible for the creation for so many holy sites.  Just have to point it out.  At any rate, the interior of the convent was closed to visitors because it was the weekend, so we just looked at the exterior.  As I said, the buildings were very pretty, but nothing spectacular.  I don’t have very many photos, more because the convent is one of the (many) sights that forces you to buy a camera ticket in order to legally take photos or shoot video.  That is not to say that we haven’t occasionally, errrr.... fudged that particular rule, but I didn’t really see much point in doing so for the convent.
After the convent, we went to the attached cemetery.  Now, this one was more interesting, as the cemetery is one of the more famous ones in Moscow, harboring the decaying forms of people such as Chekov, Yuri Gagarin, and what was that guy’s name again?  Boris Yeltsin, or something?  Maybe you’ve heard of them.  It was interesting.... for a while.  Then the parade of gravestones got to be just a tad bit... repetitive.  In other words, you can only go for so long staring at tombstones, no matter how impressive they are, until you start wanting to smash them, because it’s so boring, and your feet hurt so much.  It gets even worse when your camera card fills up- then you have nothing to distract you from the boringness of it all.  That is, of course, the problem with guided tours- you have to stay with your group, and you cannot jump ship as you so long to do when you feel the time is right.  Still, several of the gravestones were seriously impressive, so it wasn’t a complete waste.
After the cemetery, the group split up.  Carley and I headed around a nearby lake in search of a statue funded by Nancy Reagan.  You see, there are a lot of ducks on that lake (ok, so I think it’s more of a pond, but everyone else called it a lake, and who am I to question popular opinion?), and they contributed to some sort of good mood in Mrs. Reagan during her visit to Moscow with her husband.  Thus, she commissioned a statue in honor of the duckies.  It’s a mother duck followed by a small army of ducklings (with a military sense of discipline, apparently, as they’re all in a straight line).  The statue is quite adorable, really.  
And.... that’s all really.  We went back to the dorm and crashed, reveling in the fact that we didn’t have anything else to do for the day.

Of Fountains and a Lack of Coherence

Forgive me if I'm slightly less than coherent.  I'm moderately intoxicated at the moment, and  while I think I'm capable of stringing words together correctly, I might be wrong.  
... Don't look at me like that, it's perfectly legal for me to be intoxicated, in both Russia and the US.


At any rate, to recount day two of our St. Petersburg adventure, we went to the Peterhof.  The Peterhof (for the millionth time, don't hold me to that spelling) is the home of Peter the Great.  It was the castle that he built (or technically, it's the castle that his daughter Elizavaeta I built on the sight of the much more modest castle that Peter I built) outside of St. Petersburg.  It's a very lovely place, with huge gardens.  We may not have seen all of it, but we saw plenty.  Sergei (our tour guide) cheefully informed us that we had probably walked a total of five kilometers in the three or four hours we spent there.  


The Peterhof is stunning.  It's a huge yellow Baroque style building with lots of gold gilding.  It has the same sort of feel as Versailles, only significantly less gaudy and over done.  As we approached the front, we cooed and took pretty pictures of the gold statues that were all over the place.  Nadia and Sergei told us that it would be better to wait until later to take our pictures.  This was confusing advice, to be sure, but we followed it.  The reason why they wanted us to wait, we discovered mid-tour, was that those statues?  Were part of a really huge and gorgeous fountain.  One of many, as it turned out.  There are 150 fountains at the Peterhof, and most of them are very unique.  When I get back to the states (and a reliable high speed internet connection) I shall post some of the pictures, and describe the fountains.


While we were there, we also got to look around at the main building of the castle, which is in the process of being restored.  You see, the Germans landed there and totally trashed the place during World War II.  After the war was over, the Russians began restoring the place.  They've got a ways left to go, of course, but it's all in the interior.  The exterior is stunning.

You can't drive to get to the Peterhof.  It's on an island, and there aren't any bridges.  You must take a ferry of a sort.  The ride will last for a good 45 minutes.  It's a lovely ride, with lots of pretty views.  I highly recommend it.  We took the ferry, and while I personally think that the ride up was better as we got most of the back portion of the ferry to ourselves, gratis early morning hour.  On our way home, I wound up sitting next to some middle aged German guy who didn't think me worth noticing.


We had lunch on our way back to the hotel.  Nothing fancy, mind you, just the Russian variation on hot dogs from a stand near the Winter Palace, but they were very good, and not too god-awfully expensive.
Also on our way home, we stopped at what I consider to be one of the top scariest places in Russia:  The deepest metro station.  Well.  It certainly terrified me, although I don't think it had any affect on the others.  I can certainly tell you that it didn't bother the others anywhere near as much as it bothered me, but then, no one else freaks out because of heights.  It got so bad that Nadia (who was in front of me) turned around and asked if I was ok.  Carley had to explain that I was really afraid of heights, and the down escalator was freaking me out.

For dinner, we ate at a great little Russian food restaurant.  It wasn't  too expensive, and I even got a rather yummy traditional Russian soufle cakey thing.  I don't remember what it was called, but it tasted awesome.  After that, we were planning to go see the bridges open (some of the St. Petersburg bridges open like drawbridges at night.  It's rather nifty to watch), but we got a bit... sidetracked.  First, it's the Eurocup for soccer right now, and so we thought "Oh.  It's another two hours until the bridges open.  Let's pop into the Irish Pub across the street from the hotel and see if we can catch a game.  And maybe something a little stronger than soda." Note that this meets everyone, including Nadia.  You have, of course, anticipated the punch line:  One soccer match and a rather strong cocktail later and a half, it's pouring down rain, and we're all too late to catch the bridges anyway.  Oops.  Oh well.  It was probably more fun anyway, and certainly explains why I'm slightly less than coherent.   I'm pretty sure that meets my alcohol quotient for the night.


Aaaaaand..... that's about it.  I'm dead tired at the moment, and am looking forward to sleeping a little bit more tomorrow morning.  G'night!

Of Early Mornings and Rivers

Now, normally, I begin with a recap of one of the past events of this sojourn in Moscow, but today we are getting something just a liiiiittle different.  It goes along with the insanity that surrounds me for the nonce.  It's 12:33 am at the moment, and this is more or less what's outside my window:

Ok, so maybe it's a bit darker now, but it's still quite light outside.  You see, I'm not in Moscow at the moment.  I'm in St. Petersburg, and while I may not be seeing one of the famed "White Nights", it still stays light freakishly late. 


Welcome to St. Petersburg, a relatively young city by European standards at roughly 309 years old (for those of you who can't be bothered to do the math, that's 73 years older than the United States of America), the home of many Tsars starting with Peter the Great, and the cultural capital of Russia.  Here you will find wonders such as St. Isaac's Cathedral, the Winter Palace, and many others.  St. Petersburg is.... not like Moscow.  How to put this.... Moscow reminds me of Bratislava.  It's a bit grimy, the people can be a bit standoffish, and it's very Soviet in its monuments and architecture.  This isn't to say that the older architecture isn't there, it's just that it's not as visible, and tends to be collected into certain areas.  St. Petersburg, however, reminds me of Paris.  It's clean, it has the old style architecture, and the people are slightly less stand offish.  I'm not sure which I prefer.  St. Petersburg is nice, of course, but I like Moscow.  It suites me, somehow, although that may just be because it feels like my host city.  Still, St. Petersburg is definitely a great city in its own right.


Let's see.... this morning started entirely too early- Carley and I woke up at 5:00 am- so that we could get to the train station by 6:45 to catch the fast train to St. Petersburg.  Thus, we spent the next four hours cheerfully whizzing across the landscape.  Trains are such fun.  I love them dearly, and am happy to have the opportunity to ride one.  Alas, they aren't as much fun as the old school trains in Slovakia; they're much more like trains in France.  Oh well.  Nothing's perfect, I suppose.  I was the only one to stay awake the entire trip as well, which made things a bit dull at times.


After the train, we dropped our bags off at our hotel, and went and got lunch.  It was quite good, and pretty cheap.  I had a cream and bacon soup, tea, and some sort of blini involving chicken for 99 rubles.  Not a bad deal, really.  After lunch, we wandered down the main street, before eventually stopping in a fancy confectionery, simply because dang it looked pretty, not to mention yummy.  We all wound up buying macaroons of differing varieties because they were fairly inexpensive, and looked intriguing.  I had mango, and it was quite good.  As we walked around, I had the great joy of discovering that the batteries to my camera died.  Joy.  Thus, I spent the rest of the day using my cell phone to take pictures.  Those are going to be interesting to get onto the computer....


After walking around for an hour or so, we went back to the hotel to check in and freshen up a bit.   The hotel is nice, for all that the corridor door hates me and is therefore very complicated to operate.  After our little break, we met our tour guide (who thankfully speaks English), and went for a driving tour of the city.  We saw St. Isaac's Cathedral, Alexander's Cathedral (I believe that's the name), a monument to Russia's navy, and a former prison who's name escapes me.  Dovstoyevsky was imprisoned there for a time, as was Lenin's brother.  We walked along the Nivah for a while, and I even got the chance to stick my hand in it.  Thus, I have officially touched the Nivah River.  (Again, any and all spellings are subject to extreme butchering.  Don't trust them.)  We also got to see a rather nifty battle ship called the Aurora.  By "see", I really mean "passed by in the car and stopped for three minutes tops to take some pictures".  Still, we saw it, I have pictures, and as Nadia said, no trip to St. Petersburg is complete without seeing the Aurora.


That's about it, really.  After the tour, we got some dinner, and collapsed in mangled heaps in our rooms.  5:00 am wake up calls do not an active evening make.  

Of Souvenirs and Rain

As today is another quiet day, I shall recount the tale of the weekend, which is the same tale for both days, really.
You see, we went souvenir shopping.  There’s a really excellent souvenir market on the outskirts of Moscow.  There, you can buy your souvenirs for better prices than the expensive souvenir shops on say, Arbot street.  Thus, armed with vast quantities of rubles that we really should have been using to feed ourselves for the next week, we descended upon the market Saturday afternoon.
It was quite a good marketplace, really.  Lots of people, many of the salespeople willing to negotiate (slightly) on prices.  More so if you were Russian, of course, but still a bit for the many foreigners who came.  We had been advised to speak in Russian by the people who had told us about the place, so we were prepared.
It was chaos.  So many people, so many goods... so much everything really.  It was almost a trifle overwhelming.  But we were determined, and on a mission.  I think I kept my head the best.  I was positively frugal.  I think I spent a total of 2,100 rubles over the... well, I’ll get to that later.  At any rate, that equates to roughly.... $70.  That bought me souvenirs for multiple people including myself.  I think most of the others went far, far past the 4,500 ruble mark (about $150). See, Dad’s frugality has rubbed off on me!  All in all, we spent so much time hunting around for good deals that we ended up not having time to get everything we wanted.  Thus, we came to the only possible conclusion: We had to go back on Sunday.
The only catch?  Sunday provided the joy of pouring down rain.  I mean pouring as in, Endymion Parade at Mardi Gras in 2012.  We still went, because we did need to go.  We really did.  I, however made my plans to go in, get what I needed, and escape.  I had something like three things left to get, so it wouldn’t be too difficult.  Besides, the buckets of rain meant that I wouldn’t be tempted to stay and get something else that I really, really didn’t need to get.  And it was so.  I went in, I got what I needed, I got out.  I sent a text to the others telling them that I was escaping the rain and would see them when they were done, and hopped the metro back to Белорусская (that’s our station).  From there, I sloshed back to the dorm, and enjoyed drying out time, figuring the others would be back within an hour or two.  After all, it was our second trip, and it was incredibly soggy.  Three hours later, the others come back, and we absconded to an internet café for a good connection.  
You want to know the really crazy part?  The others went back there again today.  They may keep the market, as far as I am concerned.  I still have money to eat at the cafeteria for lunch instead of having to have two meals of ramen a day.  Frugality really is a good thing in this regard.

Of Panoramas and Departures

I have successfully managed what I had previously considered impossible: I have been seated and  ordered at a Russian café with minimal difficulty.  Thus, due to my incredibly good mood, I shall offer you a blog while I bask in my success.


Thursday marked our visit to the Бородинский Панорама (and seriously, if you’ve been holding to my spelling of Russian prior to now, in this case don’t).  The Panorama is... rather amazing, frankly.  I couldn’t get any pictures because they forbid picture taking unless you bought a rather expensive camera ticket, but it. was. EPIC.  Imagine, if you please, a circular room that is something like eight meters high, and fifteen meters around.  Then put on the wall a fairly detailed painting of a battle sequence.  Add to that what seems to be a continuation of the painting... in 3-D.  We’re talking the remains of burnt houses, a fake horse corpse, grass, the works.  It’s terribly impressive.  The rest of the museum pales in comparison.  It has ver nice exhibits, to be sure, but it’s nothing special.  
Now, as to why exactly we would have this panorama, it’s all very simple.  On September 7, 1812, there was a rather epic battle that took place outside Borodino, Russia (a small town not too far from Moscow).  Like most great battles in those days, your cause of battle was a power hungry Napoleon.  This battle was the turning point in the war between Russia and France, eventually leading to the Russians being able to kick the French out of the country.  It’s commemorated every year with a parade, to my understanding.  This year, due to the fact that it’s the bicentennial celebration of the battle, it’s going to be an incredibly huge deal.  Shame we won’t get to see it.  Oh well.  At least we got to see the Panorama.  The panorama itself was the centennial commemoration of the event.  French painter (something I find rather ironic) Franz Roubaud was commissioned to paint it in 1912.  It took him 11 months, a really rather impressive feat that deserves a commemoration in and of itself.


Thursday also marked Valentina Borisovna’s last day in Russia.  From Friday on out, the four of us were on our own.

Of Paintings and Icons

So, as we aren’t really doing anything today (and frankly, I say thank God) I’m just going to write about yesterday’s excursion to the Третьяковская Галерея, an art museum close to the center of Moscow (I think.  This is a rough guess based on how far we went on the metro, and what I could see in the distance.)  Now, art museums I know, gratis a mother who was very fond of dragging her children to any art museum she could and forcing us to wander through them for hours on end.  Sometimes this was fine, like when we went to a Degas exhibition when I was seven or eight, and.... other times it ended in two seriously bored and annoyed children under the age of twelve.  Actually, it usually ended in two seriously bored and annoyed children under the age of twelve.  The end result is that while I have grown to appreciate art museums more in the past few years, I am still very wary of them and have a tendency to ignore a good chunk of the art in favor of what pieces interest me.  I’m not very happy when I don’t get to do this.  
Guess what?  When your teacher is giving you a guided tour, and he’s running on a limited time frame, you don’t get to wander around at your own pace and pick your paintings.  
The Tretyakov Gallery (as it’s called in English) is smaller than most art museums that I’ve visited.  Perhaps that’s why it’s a gallery instead of a museum.  I’m a little hazy on the historical details, but if I remember correctly, it was originally someone’s private art collection, which has since grown through donations and the like.  It has some really interesting pieces, including several more prominent Васнецов originals.  This would be paintings like “Богатыри” and “Иван-Царевич на Сером Волке”.  I think “Витязь на рапусте” is there as well.  All the same, some very nice Васнецов paintings.  Of course, there were a lot of other paintings as well, especially religious icons.  Icons are very important in Russian, because of the Orthodox church.  A lot of them are really beautiful, and fully meriting of their own portion of the gallery.  We didn’t focus on them very much, which despite the similarity between most of them, is a bit of a shame.  Still, it was nice to wander around an art museum and take in the art.  I just wish that I could have wandered around on my own for a while, without having to worry about keeping up with the rest of the group.  
By the time Владимир Алексеевич had to leave, Susan and Katie were pretty much done.  Carley and I both had things we wouldn’t have minded going back to see again, but we were getting towards the end of our ropes as well.  So, we ended up leaving early.  I did get some nifty things at the museum store, as they were incredibly cheap, and I hold out hope that the Третьяковская Галерея will be on the list of museums that offer free admission to students on the third Sunday of the month so I can go in and take a look around on my own.  Maybe I could get a better look at those Васнецов paintings, and some of those icons.....


By the by, I finished Game of Thrones.  It wasn’t all that long, and no, I didn’t ignore Moscow for it.  Blogging, very possibly, but not Moscow.  On another side note, I have concluded that I will probably be writing on this after I return to the US.  Such is the price of not blogging consistently.

Of Boat Rides on Rivers

Wednesday, May 23 was heralded by both of our classes.  The morning was dedicated to conversation with Татьяна Алексеевна, and the afternoon was граматика with Владимир Алексеевич.  Both were fairly standard.  I successfully stumbled my way through my dialogue, primarily because I just had to ask for the directions, and listen to Carley’s response.  Nothing too special. 
No, the special came after the classes were over.  Valentina Borisovna took us and Isabelle to go on a boat ride on the Moscow River.  Perhaps it wasn’t too terribly eventful, but the view of Moscow from the river was great!  I got some nice pictures from it as well.  I shall see if I can manage to post some of them, but with the crazed internet connection here, I make no promises.  Now, the boat had an interior and an upper observation deck.  We probably would have hung around the upper deck the entire time, except for one itty-bitty problem: it was freezing.  The first week or so of our trip, Moscow was experiencing an usual cold spike.  Thus, things like sitting on the upper deck?  Yeah, not happening.  Still, I braved it in sporadic periods, got some really nice pictures, and had fun looking out the windows when I started to get a little too cold.
Other than that, we got some blini on our way back to the dorms, and that was more or less it.  Not a lot, but something.

Of Васнецов and Fairy Tales

Today we went to Grammar class, and then proceeded to an excursion to the Дом Музей, a museum made out of the home of the famous Russian painter Виктор Михаилович Васнецов,  Most of his famous works are of Russian fairy tales, which means that I am fully capable of cooing over them, and wanting to read or re-read the original story.  I am going to find a way to get my hands on a copy or poster of one or two of his paintings.  I am.  This is not a joke.  Of what I’ve seen, my favorite is tied between “Katschei the Deathless”, “Flying Carpet”,“The Frog Princess”, and a portrait of his son, Миша.  Please note, these names are approximate translations, and should be taken with a grain of salt.  At any rate, he liked to paint images from fairy tales.  I’m very fond of fairy tales.  I like reading them, and I like playing with them in the context of stories.  Thus, I am very fond of his paintings.
As for the rest of his house, it was a fairly standard house of that time, with four rooms you could actually go into and a large room upstairs, although I’m not exactly sure what purpose it served in the original house.  Now it serves as a gallery for some of his paintings.  Very impressive.  Almost as impressive as the бабушка who came and scolded Владимир Алексеевич for giving us a guided tour.  Apparently, she was unhappy with him because he wasn’t part of the museum.  Don’t look at me, I didn’t understand the argument enough to figure it out.
And... that was it for the day.  Nothing too amazing, I know, but that’s ok with me.  I like the calm.  I like that I’m settling in here, and I like that I get to see nifty things without that taking over my life.  As an added bonus, Carley’s almost finished her copy of Game of Thrones, and is willing to let me read it once she’s done, which should give me something to do at night and on the metro.  Besides, I’ve heard good things.


... I promise I won’t forget to go see Moscow because I’ve gotten lost in it.  Honest!

Of Conversations and МГУ

Tuesday, May 22 marked the start of what I would come to decide was my personal Hell during this study abroad: Conversational Russian class.  For four hours, my classmates and I were grilled on questions that I could pretty much half follow, unless Татьяна Алексеевна a particularly easy question, or far more likely, a particularly difficult one, at which point I would be either fully capable of answering, or completely clueless.  So, for two hours before lunch and two hours after lunch, I experienced the joys of feeling like a total and complete idiot.  The closest thing I have to comparison would be the first summer I spent at Lac du Bois.  I knew French.  I knew a decent amount of French.  Did I know enough French to deal with the counselors giving me instructions in French?  Yes and no.  Yes, I had the skill level, but I didn’t have the vocabulary, and I definitely didn’t have the ability to deal with normal conversation speed.  Thus, while I wound up improving by forcing myself to kick my comprehension skills into high gear, for the first few days were a bit miserable.  
I don’t speak as much Russian as I did French the summer after eighth grade.  I don’t have the skill level to kick my comprehension into high gear just yet.  I’ll get there eventually, but I’m not there, and I won’t be getting there this summer.  Thus, Conversational Russian is a mean and nasty class, and it’s only going to get worse when she gives us homework.  
You see, Татьяна Алексеевна likes to do dialogues.  This would be fine, except she wants us to come up with them on our own.  Which again, would be fine, if we were doing them on subjects that I could actually talk about.  Ordering from a restaurant menu, perhaps, or something similar.  However, she had us write dialogues about transportation and giving directions.  I haven’t covered that in my Russian classes yet.  I’m lucky I know “на права” and “на лева”, also known as “to the right” and “to the left”.  Oh, and “переход”, to cross.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to write a dialogue about giving directions when you are incapable of doing so, and not just because your sense of direction is somewhere below negative seven?  Let me tell you: Very.
On the plus side, the last member of our little group got here after lunch.  Her name is Susan, and she was held up in New York for a couple of days.  She couldn’t leave with us because her visa hadn’t come in yet, and then when she finally could leave, there was apparently some sort of screw up with it, so she got stuck for a few more days.  Still, it was good that she finally got to Moscow, and, more importantly, that Татьяна Алексеевна proceeded to pounce on her for most of the remaining two hours of class.
After classes, Valentina Borisovna took Carley, Katie, and me to МГУ.  МГУ is the abbreviation of the Russian name of Moscow State University, which I can only pronounce on good days, and will probably never be able to spell, so I like most people will call it МГУ.  It’s a very pretty campus, which is fitting for one of the largest and most prestigious universities in Russia.  As I understand it, the university is more math and science oriented, so it’s not exactly where I would have ended up.  As I am a foreigner, it’s even less likely.  From what I have been told, their Russian as a foreign language classes are lousy.  Not the point.  After wandering around to look at buildings for a while, we went to see the panorama view.  You see, МГУ is situated on a hill overlooking the Moscow River.  There’s a viewing point just outside the campus, and it is breath taking.  Sure, I can’t look straight down without freaking, but I can look out just fine.  The view of Moscow is spectacular.  Katie and Carley were even psycho enough to take a ride down the hill a bit on a rickety looking ski lift for a better view.  I passed, as did Valentina Borisovna.  Just goes to show, we are the sane ones.

Of Quiet Days and Adaptors

Today was in all honesty, pretty quiet.  We had Граматика, which was slightly more incomprehensible than usual, and then we went back to the dorm.  We didn’t have any excursions planned, which was nice, and we pretty much just relaxed.  We did go out to Москафе, a nearby café that has wireless internet.  It’s a bit over priced, but if you get one of the more reasonable items on the menu (I paid something like $7.17 for a large milkshake-like thing.  A little on the expensive side, I’ll grant you, but more reasonable than most) and sit there for an hour and a half to two hours solely to use their internet connection, it all evens out.  Thus, Carley and I each got one item off the menu, and went for the internet..... before we proceeded to realize when Carley’s computer started to die that while we had both brought chargers, we had both forgotten a very important little piece of equipment called an ‘electrical adaptor’.  Boys and girls, let it be a lesson to you: If you want to use your computer for an extended period of time in a foreign internet café, you’d best be sure to pack an adapter for your charger, because if you don’t, you’re not going to be going anywhere on the internet after an hour and a half or so.  Trust me, we know.  We tried.  
After this... less than pleasant revelation, we returned to the dorm, and have lurked here ever since.  As I said, a less than fascinating day.

Of First Glances at the Red Square

So, other than the typical apologies for not posting, because I never get around to writing the blog, let’s get this show on the road. 


Monday, May 21, we went to class for the first time.  We had three hours worth of Граматика and one of Видео with Владимир Алексеевич, our grammar instructor.  Yes, his name is Vladimir.  No, no one makes any comments about Dracula.  It’s not exactly an uncommon name around here.   Back to the point.  
Граматика is, while grueling at times, usually fairly comprehensible.  It’s taught primarily in Russian, with the occasional insertion of an English word or phrase, because although Владимир Алексеевич’s English is decent, it’s far from sufficient to explain things like the use of certain pronouns in Russian speech.  Thus, it’s mostly in Russian.  I can usually follow enough to stumble along.  That doesn’t mean that I understand everything, mind you, but most of my lack of comprehension can be traced back to one truly evil grammatical form called the verb.  Russian verb structures are tricky, and we have just barely scratched the surface in my Russian class at Ole Miss.  Unfortunately, when one is trying to figure out which preposition to use, or which verb form to use in relation to a preposition, not really getting verb structures at all can be fairly problematic.  Oh well.  Perhaps I will understand them better by the end of this month.  I rather doubt it, but it’s worth a hope.
Видео is basically the study of Russian film.  We watch short films with fairly basic vocabulary, and go over a transcript of the dialogue.  This way, we improve our vocabulary, and get to hear people speaking Russian.  As an added bonus, we get a bit of Russian culture.  On Monday, we watched the first of the Чебурагшка short films.  Чебурагшка (that’s Chiburashka for those of you who can’t be bothered to learn Cyrillic) is a Russian cultural icon.  He’s a.... well, he’s a Chiburashka.  No one, not even he himself, knows what he is.  Most accurately, he’s probably the Soviet answer to Mickey Mouse, and is a sort of bear-mouse hybrid thing. All the same, he’s fuzzy, and rather adorable, so we forgive him for being of no determinate species. 
After classes, We went with Sean, Isaac, and Valentina Borisovna to the Красная Плошадь, better known to English speakers as the Red Square.  It was certainly very impressive.  St. Basil’s Cathedral is stunning, and the Kremlin is nothing if not impressive.  We just did a look around, not so much a tour of anything.  Still, there was plenty to look at.  St. Basil’s Cathedral is after all, incredibly colorful and pretty.  I can almost see why Ivan the Terrible wanted to keep the architects responsible for it from creating anything else equally wonderful.  Still, I am more than happy to acknowledge that putting their eyes out for doing their jobs was more than a little extreme.
On our way back to the metro, we went to Гум, a seriously famous Russian mall.  Now, for those of you who aren’t exactly sure on what Гум is, think the Champs-Elysées.  Put it under a glass roof, and give it very pretty architecture.  Then take out any store that was actually in the price range of most middle class citizens.  That is Гум.  We got something to drink in one of the cafés (my bottle of water was nearly twice as expensive as usual), and sat at a table on a walkway over looking the three floors of designer stores below us.  I was traumatized.  Sitting that close to an edge overlooking a two story drop with a snowed glass looking floor?  No.  No thank you.  That’s even worse than the escalator to get to the metro!

Of a Saturday's Outing

A second Real Time entry for your reading pleasure.  Enjoy!

Today, we visited... a convent.  It was a really pretty convent, yes, and I did enjoy it, but at the same time, it was the type of place that I want to go investigate on my own, maybe with an English guide book, or after having looked it up on the internet.  The Novodevichy Convent was built by Ivan the Terrible, and one of Peter I sister’s was locked up there after she was involved in some sort of attempted over throw.  Sad, really, but I guess there are worse places to locked up.  At any rate, the convent was pretty, and I wish that I could have wandered around there at my own pace, or gone inside (the convent’s interior is closed to the public on weekends).
After the convent, we visited the neighboring cemetery of the same name.  It’s where a lot of really famous people are buried, from Tchaikovsky’s brother (Tchaikovsky himself is buried in St. Petersburg) to a man named Boris Yeltsin.  You might have heard of him.  He was the first president of Russia, or something equally important.  At any rate, under the guidance of Vladimir Alexeevitch, we wandered around the place, taking in the graves of various and sundry important people, and their rather impressive grave markers.  Still, while I am willing to admit that it was rather nifty to see Chekov’s grave, I wish we had spent significantly less time there, especially after my camera card decided to have full memory.  It was worth seeing, though.
Other than that, Carley and I wound up taking a long walk around the nearby pond, and got to see a statue of a mother duck and her ducklings commissioned by Nancy Reagan.  It was rather cute, and I’m glad I got to see it, but by the time we got there, I was tired and kind of cranky.  Therefore, I was not in the best spirits.  Nope.  Not at all.  I was definitely glad to be going back to the dorm.  Before we got on the metro, we stopped and got some 35 ruble (that’s about.... $1.17) ice cream that was really good.  Russian ice cream, like all European ice cream, is significantly better than it’s American counterpart.  Why Americans feel the need to make their ice cream incredibly heavy when it’s obvious that the lighter European version is so much better, I shall never know.  
At any rate, we eventually made it back to the dorm, and other than an attempt to finish off various perishable goods now that we no longer have ready access to a refrigerator.  In other words, a dinner that was more enjoyable due to company than actual content.  So Carley and I are cheap.  Deal with it.  After dinner, we settled down to enjoy Russian homework and relaxing.  Carley attempted to get an episode of Game of Thrones, which.... didn’t really work out.  Slow internet, you see.  She did manage to get ten minutes of it before concluding that the internet was much too slow to be any good for downloading huge long episodes.  Shame, that.  Oh well.
And... that’s all, really.  Just a typical Saturday.  

Of the First Sunday in Moscow, Part the Second

After our little store adventure, we headed back to the dorms to munch on our new food products, Valentina Borisovna came to fetch us for the afternoon’s excursion: Arbot Street.  This is a long pedestrian avenue in Moscow.  It’s one of the city’s oldest streets and there is absolutely no traffic there.  None.  Cars aren’t allowed there.  So, the only killer drivers you have to watch out for are the bicyclists, who are deadly enough in their own way (I swear, they don’t really try to dodge you.  No, they don’t!).  It’s also where a lot of painters set up shop to sell to the tourists and other people.  Some of their artwork was really beautiful, and it’s rather a shame that I couldn’t take pictures or buy them- the canvases and their frames would have been way too heavy for Delta’s free baggage check weight limit!  I did buy one smaller piece, though.  Now all I have to do is decide whether I’m going to give it to someone else, or if I’m going to keep it for myself.  We shall see.

Lots of other nifty things are on Arbot street.  There’s a monument to Pushkin, for example, because he lived in a house there.  The house is a museum about him now, in case you were curious.  Let’s see.... There’s the statue for the famous singer whose name escapes me.  One of his songs was about Arbot street, so I suppose it’s rather fitting.  While we were there, Pushkin’s opposition was making speeches by it.  We didn’t stick around (Lots of police officers were there, and worrying about them asking for papers?  No thank you.) but there were a lot of people who did.  Ah, the joys of politics.  We wound up eating at this little cafeteria style restaurant called MуМу.  The food there was good, identifiable (Well, mostly.  With a bit of help from Valentina Borisovna, at any rate.) and best of all, it wasn’t too horribly expensive!  After МуМу, we pretty much went back to the dorms and crashed for the night.

Now, МуМу was not the only place we explored on Sunday.  No, we were also introduced to one of Russia’s traditional foods, which is absolutely amazing: блины.  Блины is wonderful.  It’s incredibly yummy, provided you get a good interior, it’s filling, and it’s cheap.  We have discovered a lovely little блины store in our neighborhood, and I have plans to try every variety of блины that they offer, provided that it doesn’t sound too disgusting.  And by the time I leave, I will try блины с икрой.  This is not an option!  It’s like, the most traditionally Russian food I can think of (Ok, so borsch is the most traditionally Russian food I can think of, but блины с икрой makes a close second) and it must be tried.  Besides, I like that sort of thing.  Given my feelings about sea food, fish eggs should be right up my alley.  (For those of you who haven’t shoved my random Cyrillic into Google Translate just yet, блины с икрой is blini with caviar.)  

Let’s see..... that’s about it for our first Sunday.  Nothing too horribly earth shattering, but fun all the same.  At least, until our feet got tired.  We did get to take the metro, though, and I always support the metro, because it is public transport.  Not to mention that I just like metros.  I blame Paris for this.  Metro stops in Moscow, by the by, are not like metro stops in Paris.  They made a conscious effort to make each one individual and pretty.  I’m still debating whether I approve of this or not.  I’m leaning towards the not; having lots of statues or painting or marble in your metro stations just seems a tad bit ostentatious and out of place to me.  Better to spend the money on something worthwhile and keep it simple and uniform.  What I most certainly do not approve of is incredibly long, high escalators to reach the metro platforms.  No.  I do not approve of this at all.  Nope.  Not in the least.  They’re terrifying.  I have to keep my eyes shut the entire time on the way down, or I get close to hyperventilating.  Those escalators are not nice to people with a fear of heights.  They really aren’t.

Of Коло́менское and the Church of the Ascension

So, this is the first Real Time blog entry.  As in, these events happened today, May 25.   Enjoy!



Today we went to  Коломенское, the sight of the Moscow summer palace of the Tsars before Peter the Great.  It took nearly fifty minutes on the metro, but it was totally worth it.  The palace was torn down in the....1700s, I think, but it’s been converted into a park of sorts, with a couple nifty things like a house where Peter the Great lived, and the like.  But the best part is the Church of the Ascension.  It’s a small church, more like a chapel, really, built by Ivan the Terrible.  It’s incredibly beautiful, and has a rather amazing icon that takes up an entire wall.  It’s been completely restored, and it’s just awesome.  Even better are the chapel’s acoustics.  They’re... well, I don’t know the details, but I can tell you that they are very, very, very good.
You see, one of my classmates, Isabelle (a French woman who has joined our little Ole Miss group) plays the piano, and had heard something about the acoustics of the chapel.  She managed to ask the person supervising the chapel about the acoustics of the building (I think our teacher helped).  I wasn’t really paying attention, as I was focusing on the icon, then I suddenly heard her call my name.
“Huh?”
“Женя, you sing, don’t you?”
“Yeeeeaaah..... why?”
“Great.  Stand there, and sing.”
“What?”
“Stand there.”  I moved to where she pointed, roughly in the center of the icon, about three feet away from it, facing out.  “Back a little.”  I backed up.  “Other way.”  I turned to face the icon.  “There.  Now, sing.”
So, after a moment or two of hesitation and mental song selection, I did.  I can now say with complete honesty that I have sung a solo in front of a small audience in the Church of the Ascension.  It was.... it’s a little hard to describe.  There’s always something special about singing a song to God, for God in a house of worship, especially when it’s one of the old, impressive European cathedrals or chapels, and the Church of the Ascension is no exception.  What’s more, that chapel has some seriously good acoustics.  It didn’t sound like it was just me singing, there were echoes and a certain richness of sound that’s hard to match.  It was incredibly eerie and haunting.  Susan has the last three seconds or so of my singing on video, and I’ve got to say, even through the recording, it sounds so... different from the way I normally sound, and definitely in a good way.  It was something that I will remember for the rest of my life, and will probably gush about to anyone who will listen.  
I have just experienced the high point of my singing career, and very possibly of my spiritual life as well.  Singing solo at the acoustic center of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is also a church of your religion, even if it was just the first verse of “It Is Well With My Soul” for a small handful of people visiting the chapel, isn’t something that you get to do every day.  Am I gushing?  I don’t care.  It was a gush worthy moment.

Of The First Days

So, this is the first post in the blog, aaaaand.... I've been here for almost a week.  Oops?  In my defense, there isn't internet in the dorm.  None.  I've been using my Kindle to get the occasional quick email home, but a blog or long newsy email?  Nope.  SO not happening.  Thus, I started typing up what was going on..... until I got distracted by other things.  To make a very long story short, I'm going to be posting something like this:
Post 1 for the day:  Catch up.  This'll be stuff that happened in the first week that I just hadn't gotten around to typing up properly until a later date.


Post 2 for the day:  Real time blog!  This'll be what actually happened the day of the posting.  


This process will continue until I catch up with everything, at which point I will just post what happened that day.  I'm going to try to be very good and post everyday.  I do not promise that this will actually happen, mind you, I just figure that since I'm only here for a month, I may as well do my best to get something up every day.


Thus, I offer you the first post, which contains the first day and a half or so of my month here in Moscow.



First day in Moscow!  Or, well, second day, really. So far everything’s been going pretty well.  There have been a few mishaps here and there, but nothing too horrible.  Still, it’s a relief to be here after all the fun glitches with getting my visa on time (and I wasn’t the only one who had them).  In all honesty, other than the fact that all the writing is in Cyrillic instead of using the Roman alphabet, Moscow reminds a lot of Bratislava.  The Soviet era architecture, the Slavic language, just the general way people behave, it’s a lot like Slovakia.  So, all in all, it feels a little bit like coming home.  So far, I really like it here.
We’re staying in the dorms of the International University at Moscow.  The dorms are pretty standard, two people per person.  They each have their own ваная and туалет (please don’t hold me to that spelling) so we at least don’t have to use community bathrooms.  I mean, they’re really, really small, but still, better than having to try to deal with Russian small talk at this point.  In other news, like most European places, there isn’t any air conditioning in the dorms.  It’s cool enough that we can just use the windows, though.  We just leave them open all the time, and the air circulates.  It works, and we don’t really have to worry about leaving the window wide open due to the fact that we’re on the seventh floor.  If we were on one of the first couple floors, I’d probably be more worried about having the doors open.
The first day, we mostly ran around doing the necessary little things.  We arrived at the air port, got picked up by Nadia, the director of our program, went to the dorms, and filled out the necessary paperwork there.  Then we met up with Isaac and Sean, two older students from the Ole Miss Russian program.  They’re here finishing up a semester-long study abroad.  It’s been great having them here, because they know all the things like where the cheapest food is, where the reliable ATM machine is, where the reliable money converters are, etc.  Plus, they’re both really nice, funny guys.  At any rate, we then proceeded onward to exchange dollars (or in my case, euro) into rubles.  Right now, the rate’s pretty good: 30 rubles to the dollar.  After we had some rubles, we went out to lunch.
Lunch was.... interesting to say the least.  We went to a little café called Пальмира that wasn’t too far from the dorms.  Valentina Borisovna was at first adamant that we use the Russian menus, before realizing that Carly, Katie, and I were staring at the items in stunned horror due to total and complete lack of comprehension.  Isaac very quietly started helping me translate the menu.  Eventually, I would up getting something called грибы кокот, which was this incredibly yummy melted cheese and mushroom thing, for something like 120 rubles.  On the downside?  Isaac and I forgot to look at the amount in grams, and it turned out to pretty much be an appetizer that wasn’t quite enough to constitute a meal.  Still, it was quite good, and I wasn’t all that hungry, so I was ok with that.  Meanwhile, Carly, Isaac, and Sean ordered a sea food omelette that looked pretty good to me... but not to Isaac, who had apparently just ordered what Sean ordered without bothering to check.  His look of disgust when he unearthed a squid tentacle was priceless.
On a side note, Russia has been quite willing to cater to my pescatarian ideals.  They’re quite fond of sea food, so I’ve been able to have that whenever I need to get meat, or get something involving mushrooms.  I may cave and try пелмены, though.  I’ve been told they’re really good, for all you never want to tell an American what’s in them until they actually eat them.  That usually means that they include some form of meat that would be considered totally disgusting by American terms.  The last time I tried something like that, I ate tartare, one of the few foods for which I would seriously consider giving up the pescatarian thing.  It really must be done.
Back to the story.  After lunch, we went electronics shopping.  Valentina Borisovna needed to get a Russian SIM card for her Moldovan phone, and at least one of us needed to get a cell phone that would work in Russia.  As I had the sole unintelligent American phone of the group, I was nominated to try and see if a Russian SIM card would work with my phone.  They didn’t.  As such, I wound up purchasing a very cheap, this-phone-will-operate-on-the-most-basic-level-and-you-will-be-content-with-such type phone along with a SIM card for about 990 rubles.  Basically, I bought a phone and a month’s worth of calls and text for about $33.  Better still, the phone should work with a French SIM card, so when I go over to France for three months, and really DO need a phone, I’ll only need the card.  Reuse is a very good thing!
After that, we headed back to the dorms, got settled in a little more, then headed down to the dormitory’s snack bar.  There, you can buy snack food, drinks, or a very light dinner for a decent price.  I wound up buying the Russian equivalent of instant mashed potatoes and a bottle of Nestea and ate there.  Afterwards, I headed back upstairs, and tried to read for a little while before collapsing in an achy, exhausted heap on my bed at around 6:30 pm.
You have, of course, anticipated the punch line.  I woke up at around 5:35 the next morning, and my body refused to go back to sleep.  Thus, I spent a quiet, rather uneventful morning reading on the windowsill, and looking out at a really rather beautiful sunset.  Carley (my roommate) woke up and went back to sleep sporadically throughout the morning, before deciding to stay awake around 9:00 am.  At 10:10 or so, we went down to the snack bar to get a breakfast of сочник и чай.  Around 11:30, Sean and Isaac took us to show us the ATM with the lowest withdrawal fee and a little grocery store in the general vicinity.  It was a very nice little grocery store, although the experience of purchasing things in a language you can barely speak is always a little harrowing.  This is where knowing how to count really comes in handy: If you know the numbers, you can understand how many rubles they want you to hand over!


So, that was the first day and a half or so.   Maybe it doesn't seem like much, but it was certainly enough for me!