Making Russian Moves

That's me in front of the Church of the savior on Blood (Xрам Спаса на Крови). It is at the site where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated on March 13, 1881. It was a very pointless and violent assassination that caused a lot of problems.

Today was cold and rainy. Not terribly rainy but every now and then there would be a few raindrops. Nothing my jacket couldn't handle. I saw some ridiculously crazy stuff! Like you wouldn't believe! I don't know where to start!

Let's start with the look that Russians (vendors, teachers, people in the street) give me when I speak grammatically perfect Russian with little or no accent. The shock on their faces is indescribable. It's like "What!? What was that?! Where did that come from? Did he just say that?" One of the best feelings in the world catching someone off guard like that...*

My school is in a very nice neighborhood. There's a huge fancy fitness center/Jewish community center in a very nicely built building and the other buildings in the area are new and very modern. HOWEVER! My school is in this old run down horrible looking structure that has that same Soviet resonance to it... On the inside the school wasn't much better... It looks like an underfunded public high school and not the big huge fancy university I had pictured it as being. Looks can be deceiving though. Students from Brown, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford would not continue to come to Nevsky Institute if did not have some merit.**

We didn't have class today but just a brief orientation/tour of the school and neighborhood. There's so much cool stuff here! Hopefully I'll get to go over everything I see in more detail as the summer progresses.

After school we went closer to the center of St. Petersburg with my Russian professor from Brown. She's cool. She took us on the Metro and told us to go and explore on our own and have fun. We did. This is a huge city! The streets are huge, the buildings, the rivers. Everything!

Random thing I noticed! All the cars here are dirty! Really nice Mercedes Benz's and Ford's and Chevy's and Beamers and Japanese cars too. I guess there are no car washes here...

Anyway! I rode the metro all by myself! And found my way back home. By the way. The metro in this city is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It should be one of the wonders of the world. Everything is in marble and it's like 5 Miles underground... (not really but it's really really deep underground cause of all the rivers in the city) and the stations are spacious and really big and grand. It's like the common man is royalty.

I have been appointed the leader for bar/club/pub excursions tonight. I'm going to show some of the kids in my program around my neighborhood. Which is really nice. So I'm going out to meet them now. In future blogs I'll incorporate some more Russian words (слова) and more photos.

Stay tuned