About

The notions of freedom, open space, of getting the hell out of here, are instinctively suppressed and consequently surface in the reverse forms of fear of water, fear of drowning. In these terms alone, the city in the Neva delta is a challenge to the national psyche and justly bears the name of "foreigner in his own fatherland" given to it by Nikolai Gogol.
Joseph Brodsky, "A Guide to a Renamed City"

If St. Petersburg is a foreigner in its own fatherland, I don't know what to call myself. I am a foreigner in a foreigner. Meta-foreign. But excited about it.


This is who I am:

I am Katie, a junior at the University of Notre Dame who has been transplanted for a semester to St. Petersburg.

Here I am a foreigner in what I have, since age 5, believed to be my fatherland.

Here I suppose I shall be challenged.

But here I suppose I will have lots of fun anyway.

This blog is my travelogue, my journal, my record less of the strangeness of Russia than of my own strangeness against the backdrop of Russia.