1-month check in

This week marks my one month in Russia. That went by quickly. I would thus like to spend this next post on my second-favorite activity after making plans: evaluating their success. Hurrah! So, without further ado, my goals:

Average no more than 30 minutes per day in communication with America (including email, Facebook, phone, and video chat).

On average? I think this has been a success. The original idea, however, was to limit communication in English, and that has been going not-so-great. It’s hard to chat with the other students in Russian when we all know English so much better.

Also, to balance out the days with actually zero contact with America, there are always those days with hour-long Skype calls, plus long hours searching for job listings on the internet…

Learn to pray in Russian.

Success-ish. I’ve been borrowing the Catholic Morning Prayers in Russian, which helps. The bulk of the text is straight from the Psalms, some of which I’ve memorized, which means I don’t have to look up all of the words I don’t know. And when I do look up words I don’t know, they are the sorts of words helpful for church interaction. Beyond that, I’m still working on it.

Find a place in St. Petersburg where I can swing dance. Wear my amazing (-ly obnoxious) new $6 dance shoes. Be the exotic American doing exotic American dances like, the way they do them in America.

I did find a place. Several places. But I have not gone to any of them, because they are either really expensive or have dances 12-4am. One of these days.

But otherwise, keep the obvious Americanness to a minimum.

Abject failure. I packed too much plaid.

Read at least one “for fun” book in Russian. Even if it’s a children’s book.

Not yet. But working on it. I found The Chronicles of Narnia in a bookstore here, but I’m still holding out for something… different. Preferably written originally in Russian.

Remember to take my dietary supplements and vitamins.

Yep! (did you hear that, Mom? I’m doing it! I still got sick, but I’m taking those vitamins!)

Attend a Russian church. Make friends with the local бабушки (read: little old church ladies).

I have been attending a small Russian church every week. There are actually no little old church ladies there—I mean, this is a small church. I’d wager 35ish people, and half of those are under the age of 8.

But the “Russian” part of this equation is coming out to be more important than I thought. Most Protestant (and, for that matter, Catholic) churches around here are very full of expats. The Lutheran churches have services in Swedish, Finnish, or German… the nondenoms have them in English… the Catholic churches have them in Polish or French… but mine is all Russian, all the time, which of course makes a 40 minute sermon exhausting, but understanding is getting easier and easier.

Don’t be too annoying about rooting for the good ol’ USA during the Olympics.

I watched the USA-Russia hockey game in a restaurant/sports bar, surrounded by Russians. Of course I was annoying, just by my very Americanness.

Update this blog at least twice a week.

I think I’ve done that? I don’t know. I write all of these posts in a Word document and post them as I have internet on my computer, so I haven’t been keeping good track.

Get more sleep than I do at ND on a regular basis (so, more than 6.5 hours/night).

This has been a success, for the most part. I heard from an expat friend of mine here that language immersion means that you require 2 hours of sleep beyond what you usually require. So, 8 hours of sleep here has about the effect of 6 hours of sleep in America. So I’m glad I can usually get 8… except I think I’ve still only slept through the night 3 or 4 times this whole month.

Stay in a hostel.

Not yet. It will happen. I hope.

Visit every free museum in St. Petersburg.

I’ve been to the Hermitage, a travelling exhibit, a monastery, and two church-museums. I have like 80 left. I am already getting tired of museums. It may not happen.

Do not end up leading/directing/in charge of anything. Except maybe weekend excursions with the other students.

Lolz, of course this hasn’t happened. I’ve already been named экскурсовод (excursion-director) by my classmates. Also, I’ve gotten involved with Cru here in Peter, and this week I was asked to lead the icebreaker at English Movie Night! Did I accept? You bet!

Learn 12 words/day, and use them again.

I haven’t been keeping a list, exactly. Flashcards instead, drawn from the 6 separate lists I’m keeping (for each class, and for myself). I’ve been super disorganized about this. I need to change that pronto. I’ve tried several different systems for keeping track of my new words all in one place, but none of them are working well for me.

So: I don’t know. On class days? Definitely. On free days? Probably not quite 12.

Keep a journal, minimum 150 words/day*

I’m currently about 500 words behind in my journal, because I have a bad habit of skipping a day, and then the next day not wanting to write about two days’ worth of events so skipping that day too, on and on for a significant length of time. Or just skipping a day so as to write three emails and a blog post.

Read 3 news articles/week.

To say it plainly: no. I’ve read a few, and several poems, but this is something I also need to figure out a schedule for.

So, for what it’s worth, there’s how I’m doing. More to come soon regarding:

PDA in Russia

Sightseeing around the center city

Church life

Why literary culture in America is declining, as explained by Russian

Maslenitsa

revenge of the public transportation

We’ve had a whole unit in conversation practice class on transportation. The first day of the unit, we spent a good amount of time discussing the relative plusses and minuses of public and private transportation, and which type (as a whole) we prefer.

Now, I am through and through a child of the suburbs, and we just don’t do public transportation. Even if we did, I might still prefer private. I have many reasons for this, and I made them clear. I don’t like the way public transport smells; I’m not a huge fan of being surrounded by strangers at the times of day when I’m most tired; I really don’t want to constantly watch the zippers of my coat pockets to make sure that nobody’s hand has found its way inside.

I think that Public Transport heard me whining. It said to Itself, “We will make Katie pay. No—better still, we will pay her. Because you know, she already pays us regularly.” I have seen such maniacal yet devious planning in the minds of very few entities throughout my life as I have in that of Public Transport (hi Andrew).

So Saturday, after a lovely (gross, rainy, cold) day of romping about the city seeing some of the достопримечательности (tourist sights), my tutor and I planned to go to this traveling exhibit on the Romanov dynasty (so, basically, the greater part of the history of imperial Russia). That was the plan. This is what happened.

• 6:40pm: arrive at metro Nevsky Prospect. Walk through to the green line. Ride two stops while listening to Schnittke. Epic.
• 7:00pm: walk from metro to nearby Subway, where tutor and her friend have been eating.
• 7:10pm: arrive at bus stop where we will wait for a marshrutka to take us to Lenekspo, where the exhibit is.
• 7:15pm: get on marshrutka. Almost get killed by un-announced-ly closing doors. Pay fare.
• 7:30pm: arrive at Lenekspo.
• 7:35pm: arrive at exhibit. Am turned away because the place closes in 90 minutes and the line is too long to add anybody else. Am secretly glad because my feet hurt.
• 7:40pm: arrive at new bus stop.
• 7:50pm: get on trolleybus that looks right. Pay fare.

Now the rest of the story doesn’t really matter, because it only involves more public transportation misinformation (you mean you aren’t running your whole route tonight? awesome) and more metro. This, the trolleybus, is the part where it gets interesting.

I didn’t have exact change for the trolleybus (25 rubles). I gave the conductor a 50 ruble bill, expecting him to hand me somebody else’s recently-paid fare, which would make sense. There are a lot of different ways you can easily make 25 rubles, from a 20-ruble bill and a 5 coin, or two 10 coins and a 5, etc.

No.

That would be way too simple. Way too accommodating.

Instead, the conductor reached into his pocket and pulled out a stack of coins like I hadn’t seen since I repaid a $2 debt to my dad with 195 pennies and a nickel (true story). I, astounded, accepted the pile and went back to my seat. I decided to believe that it was 25ish rubles. There were too many coins for it to be otherwise.

Later I counted. It came to 29 rubles, mostly in 1-ruble and 50-kopeck coins, with a few 2s thrown in (100 kopecks = 1 ruble). So, this is equivalent to me paying for a $1 item with a $2 bill and being repaid with 25 nickels. Yes, I came out 25 cents richer for it, but isn’t it a little inconvenient? And what exactly am I supposed to do with all of those nickels? Most people don’t like you to buy things in their stores with nickels.

Maybe I’ll buy my next trolleybus ride with it.

the Russian banya

Perhaps it seems strange to you that the only things I seem to post about are Americanish things, just in a different place. School, eating, shopping, getting sick… all of those I could do very easily in any geographical place.

Want to know something I could not do in just any geographical place?

Sit in a 110° C room while somebody pours cold water over unbearably hot rocks and somebody else hits my back with a wet, leafy tree branch, thus spraying boiling water on everyone else in the vicinity.

Obviously.

Every Wednesday, we go on an excursion to somewhere in/around St. Petersburg instead of going to classes. This Wednesday we went to a banya, which is kind of like the sadistic combination of the Finnish sauna and the Turkish bath. While in the first it is very hot and dry, and in the second it is very wet but just warm, in the Russian iteration it is very hot and very wet.

I know what you’re wondering: yes, my hair looked awful afterwards. Просто кошмар.

This semester, our group is too small for luxuries like splitting up guys and girls. So, in various states of dress ranging from I-forgot-my-bathing-suit-so-I’ll-wear-undies-and-just-wrap-this-sheet-around-me to I-forgot-my-bathing-suit-so-I’ll-wear-shorts-and-a-tank-top (and, of course, a few actual bathing suits), the nine students + RD + RD’s assistant sat in a room together and sweated. Then we left and jumped into a pool that I think had ice floating on top. Then we went back into the other room and sweated some more, and this time some students requested to be beaten with the vennik, or “broom” (wet, leafy tree branch). Rinse. Repeat.

We also spent some time in a more neutral room in between rounds, partaking of the secondary historical function of a banya (after self-torture): socializing. Some people drank beer, some people drank water, we all shared the 50-cent loaf of bread I brought, we played cards, we chatted… it was great.

And then we decided it would be fun to start sweating again (why). I don’t know if I’ve ever been so hot in my life, including the summer I lived on the fourth floor of an unairconditioned dorm during the Subsaharan Vortex (am I allowed to make that up? hope so).

And then we went back out into the Russian winter and tried not to catch pneumonia from our quickly changing body temperatures. Nobody's died yet.

when I like Russia better than America: education

It always feels a little funny, to realize, “Oh! I wish we did it like this at home. This is so great.” Recently, I’ve had a lot of those realizations in class. Obviously, not all of these are workable in the regular American education system, but they’re still worth noting.

1. lots of class time. With language learning, it’s so helpful to have 5 hours a day having basically a conversation with a very intelligent, informed, and patient native speaker. The structure helps, and the fact that they are long and frequent means that I’m less likely to forget between classes.
2. little homework time. Assuming I do the homework carefully, look up every word I don’t know, etc, it’s safe to say I have 30-40 minutes of homework for every 90 minutes of class. That’s absurd. But what it means is that I have time, energy, and motivation to do what could be called “studying,” but which usually only appears in America the night or two before a test. So, I can journal in Russian for 45 minutes a night, reread all of my notes every day, make flash cards… and still get enough sleep to actually retain things.
3. quality homework time. The fact that we all live 30 minutes away from each other means there’s none of that “let’s study together” nonsense, unless both people know that it’s actually useful. 90% of the time, it’s not useful. In America, we know this, but we “study” together all the time anyway. Meaning that all of the mountains of homework we have take even longer than necessary, and we retain even less than we would in the first place.
4. small class sizes. I’m sure this has something to do with the fact that there are 9 students in my program to begin with. But it is really nice that my biggest class has 4 people in it (and it feels huge, because usually there are just 2 of us). The pace of the class is 95% adjustable to what we need.
5. super cheap cafeteria. This isn’t exactly a question of education, but still. The fact that I can get a bowl of borscht and a large potato/chicken dumpling-pie-thing for the equivalent of $1.80 is pretty cool. Or, if I go to the “expensive cafeteria,” I can get the same thing (admittedly, tasting better) for $3.
6. all Russian, all the time. I thought I would hate this. I found 75 minutes at a time of half-and-half-Russian-and-English really stressful, back at home. But putting it all in Russian, using my dictionary when I really need to, and just putting my brain in “Russian gear” for long periods of time is a lot less exhausting than switching back and forth constantly.
7. “just try.” I have never been so convinced that the quality of thought behind my answers to questions in class was irrelevant. When the topic at hand is “what type of transportation do you like best, and why,” it helps to have an idea of what I actually think (so I have something to say), but I don’t have to convince anybody. I just have to spout words in an intelligible manner. If it’s unintelligible or wrong, someone will tell me—I don’t have to worry about getting it right on the first try, because this is not an argument I actually need to win (where timing would be super important, or I wouldn’t be able to just try again).
8. tutors. So I can’t actually speak personally on this one, since my tutor didn’t respond to any of my texts, and I just recently got a new one (yay!), but from what I’ve heard/seen, the “talk with a native speaker your own age for two hours a week” model works really well.
9. “we do it till you get it right.” Our Resident Director told us, “You can spend all semester on verbs of motion, if that’s what you need.” What he meant was, “You WILL spend all semester on verbs of motion, if that’s what you need.” Talk about motivation to get something down… there is no relief if you don’t.
10. room to be …bad, or good. In talking with my friends in the top of the three classes, I’ve realized that we all have our gaping weak points. I am one of the better grammarians among everybody, because of the formation I got at school, and because my brain works that way. I’m also one of the worst conversationalists among everybody, because of pretty much the same reasons. Being graded according to your progress in the language instead of a concrete standard means that I won’t be tempted to leave my grammatical knowledge where it is and let my conversation catch up, and the others will still want to speak better at the same time as learning weird grammatical rules.

Basically, I’m glad I’m here. Like I said, not all of this would work in America, but it works here, and it’s very good.

shoe shopping in Russia

Oy. I hate shoe shopping. A lot. Shoes are, generally, expensive, and once you wear them outside, you can’t return them. Also, I’m picky. Therefore, it is a high risk activity. I don’t like high risk activities.

However, this week it became necessary. You don’t know how necessary shoe shopping is until your snowboots break (yes, break), and your Russian babushka professors get on your case. And when the Russian babushka professors get on your case, they spend 20 minutes in class telling you just how necessary it is for you to buy new shoes, and then they spend 20 minutes in the other class telling the other students that they need to ensure you buy new shoes. Okay, yes ma’am. But still… hate shoe shopping.

they broke.

I went to this place called “Galleria.” I didn’t know what it was, except that apparently all of the shoes in the whole place were on sale. Good grief. It was like the Mall of America, I think, except maybe bigger. There must have been at least 50 stores that sold only shoes, let alone the 300 others that sold shoes + other things. So this was overwhelming, to put it mildly.

Besides that, it did not take long for me to figure out that I could not pull my normal American model of “how to buy shoes” for this errand.

So here is a maximally efficient way to describe the situation.

What I Usually Do

• Go to a store.
• Pull out boxes for 3 different styles of shoe in 2 sizes each.
• Try them on, weed out the ones that are immediately “no”s, try on the rest again.
• Choose a pair, buy it.
• Go to the next store.
• Do exactly the same thing.
• Rinse & repeat, up to 5 or 6 times.
• Take these 5 pairs of shoes home, sit on the decision for a day or two, return the ones I don’t want.
• If “the ones I don’t want” are not 4 but rather all 5 pairs, start from the beginning and do it again.

Reasons Why This Doesn’t Work Here

• Most stores are of the Macy’s sort of model, where you have to ask to try on a certain shoe in a certain size. The employees will only bring out one at a time.
• I don’t mean one pair. I mean one shoe.
• Carrying five pairs of shoes home on the metro/bus sounds like a gigantic pain.
• I’m operating on cash. 5 pairs of boots would come out to 10,000-20,000 rubles. I, on principle, do not carry that much cash EVER.
• It’s very weird in Russia to return things once you’ve bought them.
• I hate shoe shopping, and I’d rather only have to drag myself out once.

What I Ended Up Doing

• Looked at shoes in ~7 different stores.
• Dismissed somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 otherwise viable options, because I don’t really want to spend $200 on a pair of boots when I don’t even have my mom with me to confirm that this is a good idea.
• Dismissed somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 otherwise viable options, because they weren’t waterproof.
• Dismissed somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 otherwise viable options, because they weren’t well-insulated.
• Dismissed somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 otherwise viable options, because seriously do all Russian women wear 3 inch heels all the time.
• Tried on a total of 2 pairs.
• Dismissed them both because of reasons.
• Bought a can of waterproofing spray at Payless and determined to just wear three pairs of socks with the brown leather boots I already have, which didn’t break in half.

So there is my tale of woe. I hate shoe shopping. Do I really need snowboots anyway? I don’t have to be outside that much, and this year is warmer than usual. Right?