End of the Week Sum Up

(a fragment of a painting from the Russian Museum)

Much of the rest of my week was spent at home. Feeling sick from the heat or food or whatever, and then getting a cold didn’t help the situation. Additionally, classes were insanely long this week. 5 hours of language two days a week, 4 hours of language plus hour and a half of lecture two other days, and then on Friday an hour and a half lecture and then a two and a half hour lecture (standing the whole time) in the Russian museum. (Kind of feels I’m in a high school schedule again as far as hours a day of class.) Not to mention my two-hour long round trip to class everyday by metro, foot, and trolleybus, which is always late (6:30 wake up call for the bucket bath, 6:00 if I want to actually call the US). Not great when you’re already feeling ill.

Random instructive statue from the Russian museum:


The Russian teachers here are really, really scary too. Our grammar teacher is the worst. She’s an ox of a woman, with dyed black hair, big glasses, a light black down on her severe upper lip that only twitches into what one might call a smile to laugh at my misconjugation of a verb. She also wears the exact same outfit for as many as four days in a row, so she doesn’t smell the most pleasant (I’m serious, in Russia it’s perfectly normal to wear the same outfit much more than once—I’m starting to do it too, since I didn’t bring enough clothes and I haven’t ventured into Russian fashion yet). Imagine a 19th century Latin grammar Nazi crossed with a Soviet school marm, who still muses about her days in the young Pioneer club as a girl. That is she. (Did you notice the proper grammar there?). She really enjoys throwing out random verbs (both imperfective and perfective, since Russian verbs have pairs like that) and random nouns and then making us one by one in front of the whole class conjugate or decline them into all their respective persons or cases. I get so nervous whenever she calls on me that I inevitably mess up even the simplest verb. Whenever you don't understand a word or case in Russia she barks it out in Russian again one syllable at a time, while leaning forward and staring straight at you. Intimidating. She also loves announcing your grades out loud as she hands back your test (5 being the highest grade here). I’m not sure how well her two-pronged method of humiliation and fear are working, but maybe I’m learning something.

This was our classroom (it's also the art room), before we got moved to an uglier one:


Thursday night I went to bed at 6:30 pm and didn’t wake up till morning. Just as a warning, if you’re ever in Russia don’t tell your host family you’re feeling ill. Eena’s first reaction was to close the window in the kitchen and my bedroom—since drafts are bad for your health, even when it’s in the 80’s. She then tried to make me eat the most garliced orange colored soup I’ve ever tasted (disgusting, but it did sort of clear my sinuses), and when I failed to eat much of that, out came a plate of sausages and cabbage. I didn’t really eat either and explained that I only wanted tea. But they wanted me to drink hot milk (everything has to be hot when you’re sick here it seems). I then tried to explain how in America we think it’s bad to have dairy when you have a cold (I even looked up the word for sinuses). This was apparently news to them. Milk in tea (which I love normally) is only for when you’re sick. I asked for honey instead, and that seemed to make my throat feel better. I think I’m becoming less accommodating and less worried about offending them the longer I’m here, maybe because I’m realizing the alternative (getting sick) just isn’t worth it anymore. After my tea, Eena brought forth a small, dark brown bottle filled with some unknown liquid (cough syrup, although there was no label). I hadn’t seen medicine bottles like that since I had worked in a museum last summer going through their medical supplies inventory. I declined the cough syrup too. I’m not being a very good Russian.

So pretty much everyone else Thursday night went out to some bar that had live eurotrash type music. I guess they ran into a Princeton guy and his friend who had gone to Exeter with him (why am I not surprised) and whom he had randomly run into in Petersburg. I’ve realized that the Princeton kids are friendlier if you get them away from each other. The Harvard kids here have been really nice though. Don’t you love Ivy inferiority and superiority complexes? Anyway, it sounded like a fun night, but sleeping was really good too.

Friday was the Russian Museum, which was more fun than last week’s lecture on 18th century art (boring, sorry if I offended anyone). This week was Sentimentalism and Romanticism, which was more interesting, since I had taken a class Freshman year on early 19th century history of art in Western Europe. It was interesting to compare (although I don’t think Russian art is all that interesting until you get to the late 19th century, with the exception of icons which weren’t even considered “art” for a long time).

I thought this was a funny shot--the couple contemplating Christ's crucification and this jaunty pagan lad looking on:


This is the Russian Museum:


The most amusing part of Friday was the gypsies in front of the museum. I had been waiting to see some since I’d heard they were everywhere, especially in front of museums, monuments, and cathedrals (good chance to pick pocket the awe struck tourists). There were two little boys and a little girl who had very interesting features—darkish red skin and hair with very penetrating eyes. Tania’s host mother had warned her not to look into the gypsy children’s eyes, because “they’ll hypnotize you and steal your money.” Well, I didn’t get anything stolen, but O’hara did. Dill (an extremely popular seasoning here for pretty much everything you can think of) has been a running joke in our group, since O’hara hates it and it continually appears in enormous quantities on everything she orders. We got her bottles of dill for her birthday, which was recent. So as she was putting this bottle of dill into her bag, “the little gypsy shit” (as she put it) ripped it out of her hand. O’hara’s face was too funny to be described, and the fact that someone would want to steal a seasoning. The gypsy seemed very excited about it though and proceeded to walk around balancing it on her head. I’m sure she’ll enjoy it more than O’hara will.

Speaking of O’hara, she might not be able to stay, because she just found out that she made the US women’s national team for hockey, which is a pretty big deal. She’s been practicing with a lot of the guys’ teams here, but if she can’t get enough ice time she might have to go home and train. We’re hoping she’ll be able to stay because she’s a lot of fun to hang out with and is always bringing random hockey guys to dinner with us. We’ve been surprised at how much Russians want to hang out with us. We always wonder whether they have their own friends, or maybe it’s some kind of novelty to have American friends. It seems as if we’re developing a growing entourage of Russians (primarily via O’hara). They’ve all been very nice, especially Teema (Golstein’s godson), and very helpful at getting us around Petersburg and home safely. O’hara’s hockey guys have been really sweet, even getting her a dozen red roses for her birthday (delivered on the ice after a game) and accompanied by “Happy Birthday” sung in Russian. The other goalie also gave her his #20 jersey (since it was her 20th birthday). Sweet.

Friday afternoon was walking on Nevsky followed by more sleeping, since Saturday was to be a long trip to Peterhof.