Mail call!

Friday, 6:05 pm. Wow. Time for a VERY extended week-in-review post. :)

First, most important, and to which a full email will be devoted in a few minutes: I received a piece of mail today! It wasn’t the package from home (sorry, Mom), but it made me possibly even happier: a birthday card from Grandma and Grandpa. Two days before my birthday. PERFECT timing. I nearly cried, I was so happy. Thank you so much. That just made my month right there. :D:D:D:D

Sunday turned out not to be devoted entirely to my essay, when one of my host mom’s students came over around eight pm. I’d heard many a mention of this Dmitri before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I finally met him…but now I understand what my host mom means when she describes an ‘ochen simpatichni malchik.’ :D Without gushing too much…he’s wonderful (and SO CUTE)! We sat and had tea and cake for a good two hours and arranged a movie date for the three of us (Dima, Lyudmila Afanasyevna, and myself) Tuesday evening. I managed to acquit myself fairly well in a mixture of English and Russian, and I think Dima speaks about as much English as I do Russian, so we muddled through somehow. Sleep may have been a little while in coming Sunday night. :)

Monday: classes and orchestra rehearsal. Major thanks to Lyudmila Afanasyevna for leaving dinner out on the stove, as I ate and dashed out the door only to almost run smack into her on the steps. Our concert’s been moved up a day, and while I still don’t know for sure what time it is, we’re playing in the actual Philharmonic Hall on Nevsky Prospekt!!!! I get to play on the same stage as the St. Petersburg Symphony! I can’t believe it! :D

Tuesday: classes, then the planned evening. I met Dima in the station two down from the top of the blue line; naturally, I was running late, but for once, it wasn’t my fault. I don’t know why we sat underground near Gorkovskaya for a while, but at least I made it there. We saw a movie called What Men Talk About (О Чём Говорит Мужини), a Russian comedy about gender differences…thankfully, not a romantic comedy. I may have only understood about 30% of it, but Dima and Lyudmila Afanasyevna translated assorted bits for me as the movie went along, so I got a few of the jokes (and some interesting new Russian slang (heeheehee)). Before we went home, my host mom decided that we needed to go grocery shopping, so we wandered around a MASSIVE supermarket and talked for quite some time about music and assorted other cultural differences. All in all, it was a very pleasant time, made more pleasant by the fact that Dima wants to come with my host mom to my concert! (And he’s convinced that he’s going to wear a tux. Not quite sure if that’s appropriate, but it makes me giggle.)

Wednesday: classes, then English teaching. Listening to the class coming up with adjectives to describe each other’s personalities was both educational and, frankly, quite amusing. They’re really quite good, but I do derive some amusement from hearing their sentence structure and idiomatic usage. Then again, the class feels free to giggle at some of my Russian mistakes, so we’re all even. I’m not sure quite how we segued into a ‘borderline inappropriate terms’ section of class, but I think that may have been Olga Vladimirovna’s own amusement for the evening. :D Wednesday was also St. Patrick’s Day, but I swear, every Irish pub in the city was packed to the doors. Wes, Brenna and I met late in a tiny little bar at the far end of the city and sang Irish songs and made Irish toasts for an hour and a half. Still a blast, more so because we didn’t have to shout over anybody or surgically remove anyone’s elbows from our guts.

Thursday didn’t quite end up as planned, because of a text message from Jarlath which I received in the middle of Wednesday’s class. Sometime last week, several students were handed a “copy-editing test” from the St. Petersburg Times, the city’s English-language newspaper. From the results from that, two students were chosen for a small internship, and those two students turned out to be my friend Eve and myself! We went after classes to the office, somehow negotiated the guard desk (bloody strict entrance policies), and were each shown to a desk and handed the occasional page to go over with a fine-toothed linguistic and stylistic comb. It was a slow day, and the deputy editor apologized, but hey, I got all of my English class’s essays graded, and Eve got a large chunk of Madame Bovary read, so there was no time wasted. :) I’ll be going back on Thursdays; the newspaper comes out Tuesdays and Fridays, so they use the services of American student copy editors the days before. I’ll still be attending two orchestra rehearsals a week, though, so Angelina (the manager) gave her approval when I texted her. I get to put my grammar police work on my resume! I’m ridiculously excited! :D

And that brings us to today: fairly normal classes (including a fascinating series of literary culture lectures in Russian Civ), and a belated St. Patrick’s Day party planned for this evening. Which reminds me, if I’m going to attend, I’d better go change. We’re going to Tsarskoye Selo tomorrow, so I swear I’ll manage to post pictures on here! Stay tuned! :)