In which I make my first public transportation mistake

Day 5. 8:23 am. It appears technology and I don’t get along any better in Russia than we did back home. My hair dryer appears to be stuck on ‘low’ (physically stuck), but that’s probably okay, because ‘low’ is still pretty blasted hot. And where in the name of all that is good and holy have my rechargeable batteries gotten to?

9:14 pm. Eventful day! I’m chuckling to myself at our communications within the group; we have very different language levels, so we talk to each other mainly by entertainingly mixed English/Russian text messages. Learning how to read and type with a Russian keyboard on a phone is an adventure all to itself.

Today being Sunday, the first order of business (after breakfast—kasha with jam, mmmmm) was mass at St. Catherine’s (Svieta Katerina). Cecilia and I wanted to attend the Russian-language mass, but that was at noon, when we were due at Kazansky Sabor, so we went to the English one. I won’t bore anyone with the details of my first Catholic mass, but I will say that it wasn’t very different from the Methodist services I’m used to. (And the singers were out of tune. Way. Out. Of. Tune.)

Next order of business: finding me replacement batteries (which I’ll probably regret buying once I find mine from home, but for now, they’re doing heavy duty in my camera) and Cecilia a plug adapter that fit French appliances. This involved walking up and down Nevsky Prospekt for about forty-five minutes, with Cecilia asking questions and me trying to decipher the directions, until we ended up inside the main shopping mall, Gostiny Dvor. Another half-hour in here and we finally found an elektricheskiy magazin, and the errand was successful. I purchased a couple of postcards in Dom Knigi, the city’s biggest bookstore (SO COOL!), and sat and wrote them in a café while we waited until the meeting time.

The afternoon’s activity ended up being “go take pictures of whatever landmarks you can find for two and a half hours, then report back to this restaurant.” A group of ten of us, led by two lovely Russian university students, Ira and Lera (Irina and Valeriya), toured some of the southeastern section of the city and took, oh, only about four dozen pictures. Those will be posted and captioned as soon as I have a place to put them. In any case, it was a beautiful tour, and great fun, being a rather silly group of tourists without feeling too silly about it.

Afterwards, I’m not quite sure how, about six of us ended up with one of the Russian tour guides and two of his friends on a less formal tour of the city (including the main hangouts for the St. Petersburg gay community…who knew?). Fyodor, Kiril, and Yuri wanted us to come back to a Soviet bar with them, but we begged off because of classes tomorrow. The rest of the group went in search of a bookstore, but I cut my tour short to make it home for dinner at six. (I ended up getting off the bus at entirely the wrong end of the street before ours, and being about fifteen minutes late anyway because I was walking the entire bloody length of Suvorovsky Prospekt. Thankfully, my host mother was very understanding, and my friends were on the phone to give directions.)

After dinner, two of Lyudmila Afanasyevna’s students from the medical school came over for a visit, and we sat at the table for a good two hours drinking tea and eating apple cake. I only understood about one word in five, but I was kind of surprised at how much that really was: the conversation centered largely on technical medical school talk, but it hopped around to music, vacations, Yuri’s choral and guitar experiences, Lena’s thoughts about dental school, and on and on. Occasionally, Lyudmila Afanasyevna would translate for me; Yuri spoke perhaps ten words of English and Lena none, but I could figure out enough to at least try to follow the conversation.

It must be said: listening to long conversations in a language you barely understand is exhausting. Time to hit the sack and prepare for our language placement test tomorrow (!!!!).