15 June 2009

I feel like I’m losing all concept of time as a result of the ‘white nights.’ I didn’t sleep very well last night, so after I got home this afternoon, around 4:30 I decided to take a nap. I set my alarm for seven, but when I woke up I was still tired so I went back to sleep. When I woke up I opened my eyes and the sun was shining through my window, I thought I had slept through to morning and panicked that I had missed class…until I grabbed my phone and saw that it was 9:30PM!

Since I got back from my trip nothing particularly exciting has happened. Saturday I met up with An and we bought tickets to a boat tour around the canals of northern St. Petersburg. The tour itself was kind of boring, but it was a nice day and it was relaxing. He told me that he has already sent home fifty kilograms (110lbs), and that he still has a few packages left to send. I asked how he could possibly have that much luggage, and he told me that the majority of the things were books and souvenirs. In addition to that, he will still be taking home two suitcases. He’s already sent home more luggage than I have altogether…granted he’s been here twice as long as I have…but still that’s a bit much.

Hopefully this week An, Valentin and I will have our farewell dinner. An is leaving in a week and a half, and Valentin and I leave around the same time. Valentin told me he isn’t sure that he wants to have it at the dorm, however, because they have three new roommates now: a Canadian and two Americans, and none of them speak any Russian.

Last night Olga and I had an “incorrect dinner”. I say that, because everything we ate was made badly. She bought some new kind of bread to make meatballs that turned out to give them a strange taste, I apparently eat pasta wrong because I don’t use butter, the sweet pastry she had bought turned out to not have any sugar in it and tasted bitter, and I opened the Turkish Delight I had bought which turned out to have the consistency of marshmallow fluff. To join in the terrible dessert, she took out a bag of diabetic candy she bought when a friend came over last month. It’s nice that we eat together from time to time (we each make something and share), even if everything is ‘wrong.”

I picked up the forms last week, and today I received my first grade: an “excellent” in conversation. To be honest I was surprised, because with preparations for the exams and the trip, I haven’t been to a full conversation class in about a month. I figured if I was living with a Russian woman and I have a lot of Russian friends, it was more important for me to study and I could just talk with them for four hours and everything would balance out.

Today was actually a pretty interesting class. Our topic is ‘tourism’ and we talked about all the reasons why we would want to go or not want to go to a specific region of the world, for example economic stability, ecology, language barrier, etc.. Originally I had planned on collecting my grades this week and then I would be done with classes, but I saw some of the text from next week, and it discussed how Americans are considered the worst tourists…so I’m definitely going.

Tomorrow I can pick up my registration for my new migration card, and then I can start looking at trains to Moscow. I haven’t decided yet if I will just go down to Moscow for a day or two, or if I will take a side trip to Vladimir. I have wanted to see Vladimir for over a year now, and its very close…

The end of class was depressing today. Everyone is leaving in the next week or two, so everyone has started saying goodbye.

I read in the news this weekend that apparently two days after I left Minsk, Russia refused to import Belorussian dairy products as a result of failure to meet standards for something like two years. I guess that explains why there was such a big deal when I was in Minsk about the Russian citizenry recognizing the high quality of Belorussian groceries.

One last thing I wanted to mention from my trip to Ukraine/Belarus… When we were on the train headed to Kyiv, we made various stops on the way down. At one point we stopped in a city not too far from the border, somewhere out in the country, and an old woman got on with a big sack. She walked up and down the car advertising “Currency exchange! SIM-cards! Potatoes!” even the Ukrainian I was sitting with couldn’t hold back his laughter.… I feel like that pretty much sums up my experience here for the last five months.