Holiday weekend!

Monday, 3:15 pm. Another holiday! This is International Women’s Day...though apparently it’s not particularly international, mostly a Russian holiday. I celebrated by sleeping in, as did Lyudmila Afanasyevna. :D Misha’s coming over in about two hours for dinner, and then the three of us are going to a show this evening—a Cuban dance spectacle! No, I don’t know why this particular show, but I think it was Misha’s idea, and it sounds awesome. Maybe I can practice translating between Spanish and Russian!

Saturday’s orchestra rehearsal went quite well, though attendance was down; not sure if people actually work on Saturday nights, or if they hadn’t gotten the message. I have discovered that Andrei Vladimirovich knows who I am, and though he speaks only a few words of English, he does his best to throw a couple of them into his speeches for my benefit. I don’t usually need it, but I appreciate the effort. :) I seem to be acquiring a reputation among my Russian acquaintances for being eager to participate, but very quiet. I suppose it’s true, mainly because I can understand Russian a whole lot better than I can speak it. I do really enjoy the listening, though. Russians as a whole are not…how shall I say…reserved?...so they’re very interesting to just listen to. :D

After rehearsal, I met up with a large group of friends and a bunch of us went dancing. Lyudmila Afanasyevna was out, so when I got home and couldn’t sleep very well, I spent a couple of the wee hours of the morning sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea and reading Tom Clancy. Come to think of it, reading The Cardinal of the Kremlin in English while in Russia has a certain irony to it… :) I slept in on Sunday and met my new friend Ilya at the Hermitage! Sobesedniki are really just supposed to meet up and practice our conversation skills, so we wandered around the museum for three solid hours talking…not necessarily about the art. Ilya writes music and plays guitar and piano, is very well read, and (thankfully) has a great sense of humor, so those three hours flew. At one point, we were standing in front of a painting of angels playing musical instruments, trying to guess the chord being played by an angel holding a five-string cello. :D (We couldn’t figure out the tuning of the cello, so we decided C was probably a safe bet.)

I did not end up going out Sunday evening, which is really just fine. Erica and Matt and I have been trying to plan an outing to see Alice in Wonderland all weekend, but the two of them ended up going this afternoon. I’ll go see it with someone else later. :) For now, it’s just me, the Bruce Springsteen mp3s Ella gave me last week, and War and Peace. Lyudmila Afanasyevna is cooking some sort of special dinner for when Misha comes over, but she kindly shooed me out of the kitchen, so it’s R&R time. :)

12:15 am. Very interesting evening. Honestly, I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

First, meeting my host brother for the first time! I’m not sure why I’ve been thinking of Misha all along as “my host brother” rather than “my host mom’s son,” especially as I’ve been in Russia a month and just met him tonight. Misha is such a large part of Lyudmila Afanasyevna’s life, though, that I guess I think of him as family just as much as I think of her as family. :) In any case, he’s pretty awesome. He just got back from a weekend of snowboarding in Finland, brought me Finnish chocolate (always a good start -heeheehee-), and insisted on speaking English because he wants to practice, though his is very good already. (I have to admit, I was also fascinated by his Fu Manchu-style mustache-goatee-thing, but I tried not to show it.)

Separately from the part about the show: lessons from riding around DC with a certain internship boss are true. European drivers (maybe just Eastern European) are NUTS. I’m probably glad I can’t convert from English to metric in my head yet, because I couldn’t tell how fast we were actually going when Misha drove us to and from the theater. On snow-covered roads, with blowing snow and intermittent traffic, most US drivers would be more careful. Russian drivers merely crank up the heat a notch and swerve around the truck that’s already halfway into the other lane because of the erratically parked cars. Tonight was fairly easy on the traffic front, too, because of the holiday. Workdays are dangerous. I’m not generally a reckless person, but crossing Suvorovsky Prospekt to the post office (perhaps seven minutes away from the apartment) has nearly made me into road pizza at LEAST three times…or maybe road pashtet instead. Come to think of it, there’s no reliable way to tell what pashtet is actually made of. Yet another reason to stay away from prepackaged food you can’t identify by sight.

/end rambling. The evening’s entertainment was a show called Kings of Salsa...not exactly what I thought I’d be seeing when I came to Russia, but a nice surprise. If I were hired to review the show, I’d put more detail. As it is…let me just recommend that, if they come to the States, you wait a couple of years to go see them until they’ve had more practice. And if any of my Audio Technology major friends want a job where they’d be certain to be doing good with their skills, please go apply to Kings of Salsa. All in all, though, it was great fun. Lyudmila Afanasyevna and Larisa Nikolaevna, her best friend who came with us, have decided that they want to learn to salsa—especially the shimmying part. :D I picked up an advertisement for a salsa studio near the Petrogradskaya metro stop that has free lessons on Fridays, and I’ve convinced Erica that we need to go one of these weekends. Now, if only we had a couple of men willing to join us…

I’m not sure yet whether this is a Russian thing in general or a Lyudmila Afanasyevna thing, but we sat and had tea and cake before the show, and we sat down and had tea and cake AGAIN after the show. Not that I’m complaining, of course. Any day off needs something like tea and cake, especially if it’s good cake. :) It seems that any social occasion involves tea, something to eat, and usually a series of toasts with something other than tea. Such occasions, with at least three conversations going at once in Russian and about half a conversation in English, are mentally exhausting, but they’re quite fun. And they make me miss my family back home something fierce.