Heather Worley Living in St. Petersburg, Russia

Hey everyone -
Things are going well...school is up and going, I'm attending classes.  Here's a short run-down of the happenings of the last week.
 
Love to all -
Heather:)
 
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Last Monday we showed up at school for a meeting with the new students from Oklahoma.  They also gave us our schedules.  I had no class on either Monday or Tuesday.  At lunch in the cafe I talked with Swiss guy studying here for a month, Gert.  It made me feel good that there are other people out there studying purely academic subjects (in his case, history and Russian language) who have no idea what they're going to do with them career-wise. 
  
Wednesday I theoretically had two classes, but my advisor scheduled our Russian class for the same time as my French class.  I figured that since I speak Russian much better than I speak French, I should go to French.
 
It was in my French class that I found out that we, all of us Americans, missed the ENTIRE FIRST WEEK of class.  I remember in December trying to get a spring schedule, and I saw on the schedule board downstairs an announcement stating that classes start the 9th of February.  The international office kept insisting they start the 16th, so I finally gave up and decided the sign must mean something else...I should have trusted my language abilities.  I'm still trying to figure out why they decided that missing the entire first week of class would be beneficial for us.  We would have had a full six weeks of break even if we came back on the 9th, and it doesn't seem the seventh week did much for us.
 
Wednesday at lunch we celebrated the 18th birthday of Katya, one of the first-year students here who I hang out with.  18 isthe big  birthday here - you can vote, be put in jail, be drafted (if you're a guy), drive, and buy alcohol (although no one cards here, so that's not as big of a deal).  Her friends brought a massive cake, champagne, orange juice, and a box of chocolates.  We all took turns dedicating toasts to her, and then she went around the table toasting each friend individually and then crossing arms (yes, like we do at weddings!) to drink.  We ate cake, chatted for a while, and then ran to class.
Wednesday night I read Stupid White Men, by Michael Moore.  I borrowed it from Adrianne.  I decided I needed to read it because I saw Bowling for Columbine (his latest movie), and the conclusion he came to was really, incredibly interesting and insightful.  His book, Stupid White Men, is also interesting, although the book as a whole is not as well put-together.  (If you are a conservative and decide to read it, you should keep in mind that although he dedicates more pages to trashing George Bush, his criticism of Bill Clinton is no less harsh - he just does it in fewer words.)
 
I didn't have any class Thursday, but I went up to school anyway just so I'd have something to do.  One of the Belgian guys (Kurt) from the Pskov trip was there, so he hung out with us for a while.  He doesn't speak any Russian, so sometimes we translate for him when he has to deal with people in the international office.  His biggest complaint about Russia - and I think this is hilarious - is that no one speaks English.  He's not offended that they don't speak Dutch or French or German, because he doesn't really expect anyone to know those, but the fact so few people speak English really frustrates him.
 
Thursday night I went out for coffee with Stijn.  He reminds me a lot of Grant Wilson (for those of you who know Grant) - although not objectively incredibly attractive, he's a real charmer, and can get away with just about anything (and, in fact,does).  He's told me some of his shenanigans from his visit to LA - he managed to get into some really high-class clubs and events simply by wearing a suit and acting like he was supposed to be there.  He's also a complete media junkie, and knows more about American pop culture than most Americans. 
 
Friday morning I had an early class (9 a.m.) over the history of St. Petersburg.  It's all foreigners taking this class, so while it's in Russian, it's easy to keep up with.  Quite a relief, really.  After that was my translation class, which got moved to a different time, so I don't know whether I'm going to be able to take it or not.  And then Russian and French.  I also discovered at lunch that they cafeteria has cinnamon rolls!  They don't have icing on them like American cinnamon rolls do, but just the fact that they had cinnamon on them is exciting.  A British girl I knew from OU told me once that Americans put cinnamon in everything, and she just didn't get it.  I thought she was being weird, but when these cinnamon rolls appeared, I realized she was right - we are very attached to cinnamon.  I also found one place in town that sells cinnamon shortbread cookies.  It's interesting the things you learn about your own culture in foreign countries.
 
Friday was the last school day during Maslenitsa ("Butter Week"), the Orthodox equivalent to Mardi Gras.  The week before Lent (Velikii Post, or the Great Fast, in Russian), people stuff themselves with bliny (buttery, crepe-like pancakes), because during Lent, strict Orthodox believers don't eat meat, yeast, or oil or drink alcohol - only vegetables and flat bread.  At school, they burned a scarecrow, an ancient peasant tradition that welcomes the coming of spring.  They also served bliny and oladi and some of the girls wore big traditional scarves and did a circle dance.  And then we all went inside because it was really, really cold.
 
Friday evening I went to a Mexican cafe with some girls from school.  I had an enchilada which turned out to be not bad, except that the sauce on top was mustard sauce.  And the salsa had dill in it (Russians put dill in everything!).  I also tried the fried bananas, which were decent except that they didn't drain the oil off.  We sat and chatted for about three hours, and I found out where the words "ruble" and "kopeck" came from.  Ruble comes from the verb rubit', which means to chop off, or to chop into bits.  They used to chunk off a piece of silver or metal and then weigh it, and that was how much it was worth.  And kopeck comes from "kopyo," which means spear, because on the back of the kopeck is a picture of St. Michael slaying the serpent with a spear.  (Or it might be St. George slaying a dragon - I can't tell the difference in dragons and snakes in icons, and apparently a lot of other people can't either, because I often will have one person tell me a particular picture is St. Michael, and someone else will tell me the same one is St. George.)
 
By 8:00 the cigarette smoke and the draft on my wet feet were making me feel a bit nasty, so I went home.  I now have a bit of congestion and a little cough, but it doesn't seem to be any worse than that.  My host father gave me a home remedy to help fix it.  He rubbed vodka on the bottom of my feet, wrapped them in a wool sweater (I couldn't find my wool socks), and elevated my feet above my knees.  Then he did the Russian equivalent of "kissing a boo-boo": he said, "Heather's getting better, the cat's getting sicker.  Heather's getting better, the cat's getting sicker."  They do this with little kids when they hurt themselves.  You set your hand on the injured knee (or whatever), say the kid's feeling better, and then point to the closest animal in the room and "give" them the illness.
 
Sunday, the last day before Lent, is the Day of Forgiveness.  Everyone is supposed to ask forgiveness of friends, neighbors, co-workers, anyone you could possibly have offended during the last year.  My host father asked forgiveness this morning in case he'd offended me, and I told him I didn't know the appropriate response.  He said they vary, but "khorosho" (good, all right), or "Bog prostit tebe" (God will forgive you) are the most common.  So I asked forgiveness, too.  This is also the day everyone goes to the park to have a picnic and stuff themselves silly with bliny, although I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that in this weather.  My host father said if the weather's good, we'd go, but it turned out not to be so great.  Sunday night I got another folk treatment - a mustard plaster.
 
Orthodox Lent is longer than western Lent, which would explain why it doesn't start on a Wednesday like western Lent does.  I'm not really sure how they count Lenten days, though.  I know that the 40 days of Lent we observe do not include Sundays (4 days the first week, and then six weeks of six days with Sundays being "feast days"), although most Protestants don't know that so they actually have 46 days of Lent.
 
Monday, in addition to being Chistyi Ponedel'nik (Pure Monday, the first day of Lent), was also Den' Zaschitnikov Otechestva (Defenders of the Fatherland Day, like our Veterans' Day).  School was cancelled, not that I had any classes anyway, and in the evening there was a fireworks show on the river.  Anya, Evgeny and I went out to the river to see it.  Every time they fired off a round, the buildings shook.  Not until we actually made it to the bank did I realize why - they were firing a cannon with every round of fireworks, and what with the echo off the buildings and the river, it was quite deafening. 
On the walk home through Alexandrovsky Park we came across an ice slide.  On a small hillside, the city had dug away some snow and hosed down the slope, and teenagers were sliding down it standing up.  Evgeny told me it's a Maslenitsa tradition, and in some places they do really big ones you can go down on sleds.  He said another traditional game is snow wars - one team builds a fort and the other tries to attack it.  We played on the ice slide for a bit and then continued on home.  On TV there was a live-broadcast of a concert for military officers.
 
My only class Tuesday was cancelled because the teacher is sick, so I spent the day wandering around the city and doing nothing.  At night we decided to go to a rockabilly club.  I went with Adrianne and Funmike ("Foon-mee-kay", not "fun-mike").  We had some very interesting moments when a guy named Andrei sat down next to us and offered to buy us a bottle of champagne.  He told me he's from Krasnoyarsk and is "almost a student," whatever that means.  He proposed a toast to America and to Africa.  We could not convince him that Funmike is an American, not African.  He said, "Well, to Africa, anyway."  I was trying to figure out why he'd sat down with us, because he seemed very interested in both Adrianne and Funmike, so I asked if he came alone.  He said no, he'd come with his girlfriend, which explained why it was so difficult to get a conversation going with him.  He was trying to keep an eye on her (she was dancing with some other guy) and talk to us at the same time.  In the end, I decided it was Funmike he was interested in, because at one point he actually kissed her hand, and then said, "Wow, to hold black skin in my own hand."  Soon after that he just got up and left (not even a bye, nice-to-meet-you) because his girl left with that other guy.
 
In a bookstore Tuesday, an elderly gentleman asked Funmike where she was from, and wouldn't accept "America" as an answer.  So she finally gave up and said her grandparents were from Nigeria.  Our teacher keeps asking her how they do things in Nigeria, and even though she says, "I don't know.  I've never been to Nigeria," he asks anyway.  They don't understand the idea of an American with black skin.
 
There are many Russians I've had a difficult time convincing that America is not a land of British people who cannot speak properly.  I tell them my ancestors are Irish, Spanish, English, and German, and many people are also Polish or Italian, in addition to a large number of people of Scandinavian, Chinese, African, Mexican, and Native American descent, and they just don't get it.  They still think we're basically all English with a little bit of other stuff mixed in.  So I'm always getting questions like, "They do it that way in England, too, don't they?"  And I say, "I don't know.  I've never been to England."  And yet they still expect me to know the answer. 
 
Americans, I've noticed, are sort of like this with Asian people...we can't really tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc., so we assume they're all sort of the same.  So it's not just Russians who do this.

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