Footwear Boutique Square

Sunday, 1:15 pm. An exciting weekend has culminated in a day that I am declaring to be Hang Out In Your Long Underwear and Listen to Billy Joel Day. For once, it’s not snowing, but Erica so kindly informed me yesterday that it’s supposed to drop down to -20C this coming week. Aaaaaaaargh.

Wednesday evening's English class was canceled due to illness on the part of Olga Vladimirovna, which wouldn't have been an issue, except that I had to go all the way to the university to find that out from a note on the door. :P The public transportation system and I are getting to know each other very well indeed. I stopped at the bookstore by Ploshchad Vosstaniya on the way home, to make myself feel that the trip was worthwhile, and I bought a bilingual copy of Hamlet! It's a little ridiculous how happy that makes me. :D

Thursday: classlike things happened! We’ve all chosen pieces that we’re going to be working on individually for phonetics; I gather this will be part of our final exam. Most of the group picked readings from our worksheets, but I chose an Anna Akhmatova poem we’d been given as part of a Russian Civilization packet. If I remember nothing else about Russian literature, ‘Voronezh’ will be the one thing that sticks with me. :) After classes came a rather slow-moving orchestra rehearsal, during which I learned the importance of leaving with the group; I was in the bathroom as the rest of them were filing out, and they managed to lock me in. >.< After a comic minute or two of banging on the door and shouting, I decided that wasn’t going to get me anywhere and climbed out the window. Into a waist-high snowdrift, but, better than being stuck there. At least jeans dry. :) I then joined a large group at a little club near Sennaya Ploshchad where Jarlath’s cover band was playing. It was loudtacular (thanks, Becca!), it was crowded, and it was great fun. Highlights of the evening included Jarlath singing Freddy Mercury and Michael Jackson, and the girl who performed three sets later singing the Chicken Dance song in Russian. :D

Friday: more classlike things happened! We had grammar with the phonetics teacher, which always makes us appreciate our grammar teacher more and more. Don’t get me wrong, Olga Sergeevna certainly knows her stuff, but grammar class turns into ‘nitpicky pronunciation of new vocabulary’ class. :P After class, we had a cultural exchange event of a kind I’d never thought of: a Russian-American rock concert! Several Russian students and a handful of American students, plus Jarlath, played some favorites for each other and discussed them throughout. It was a blast, frankly, and plans for the next one are already in the works. Evan and I are putting together a couple of numbers that will be a little surprising, in a good way. :) I came home intending to spend the evening transcribing music from the videos I’d taken of Russian chorus. When my computer wouldn’t play the movies I’d been able to take on my camera, this turned into going out to a café for cheesecake with Erica and discussing musicals for a fantastically long time. (And, eventually, I found a freeware program that will actually let me play .mov files, so the transcription can proceed.)

Saturday: I met Matt, Erica, and Misha downtown somewhere in the middle of a day’s shopping. I thought I had carefully timed my arrival (read: run late enough) that I would have missed most of the shopping, as I love these people, but I still hate to shop. As it turns out, I met them in a café, but that was merely the refreshing break before a tour of what I swear was every shoe shop in God’s green creation. (…actually, that doesn’t work, as that would imply that Russia is currently green. God’s icy creation, perhaps.) I don’t actually know what Sennaya Ploshchad means (‘Sennaya’ is not in my dictionary), but it might as well mean Footwear Boutique Square; I think we visited two dozen within two miles. And our dear Misha managed to NOT ACTUALLY BUY ANYTHING until his trip back home. Eventually, he left, and Matt and Erica and I found one of the dozens of quirky little hole-in-the-wall cafés this city has to offer and sat and talked over coffee and pishki. :) I went straight from there to the university area, ordered dinner in a Teremok (without betraying that I’m an American! Hurrah!), and went from there to rehearsal. As far as I can tell, rehearsal went fine, though Andrei Vladimirovich did leave halfway through, so the latter part of rehearsal was a little more relaxed. I managed not to get locked in this time, and went dancing with a group of Americans later in the evening.

So, today is to be spent writing the beginnings of my Russian Civilization essay that’s due right before Moscow. Nina Mikhailovna’s instructions were rather vague (not a surprise), but this is just supposed to be five pages on our impressions of our first two months in Russia. I’ve basically been writing this essay all along, in that case; I just need to distill my blog entries into five pages that flow. Of Fish and Frostbite, Greatest Hits, perhaps. :D I’ll sign off and get to work, in that case. Stay warm!