• I knew that there would be a bunch of CCCP-themed souveniers and touristy bars, but the Soviet Union is mentioned in nearly every news report, everyday.
• On “Kto xochet stat millionerom?” (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) half of the questions start with “V sovyetskie vremena…” (In Soviet times…).
• Artists interviewed on television are labeled as being from the USSR instead of the name of the present-day republic.
• Traditions like “Dyen zashchitnika Otechestva” (Defender of the Fatherland Day) are still preserved and posters announcing the holiday are decorated with the hammer and sickle, even inside metro cars.
• I walk past a statue of some evil KGB elite everyday on the way to school.
• There are at least three metro stops named after socialists, including the one I get off at for school – Chernyshevskaya.
• The music of the national anthem hasn’t changed since the 1940’s and even though the lyrics don’t mention communism or Lenin anymore, the guy who wrote the modern-day lyrics is the same person who wrote the Soviet anthem.

At the same time though, the communist party in Russia doesn’t have much backing. Its proponents are mostly over 60 years old, and a majority of the party is going to die out soon. The frenquency of USSR mentions dosen’t have much to do with supporting communism, I think it’s just a result of how everyone was raised. I imagine it’s difficult, even after 20 years, to completely forget about an institution that you were forced to support, believe in, and even fight for.

I think that once this generation of people who lived the majority of their lives in the Soviet Union fades out, Russia is going to go through some major changes. A lot of my teachers have said how even though the USSR is gone, a lot of its top leaders near the end are still in government positions – I’d be interested to see how the younger generation (which is extremely small, it’s actually a big problem here) plans to steer the country.

Last weekend we took a trip to the city of Novgorod, a 3.5 hour bus ride from St. Petersburg. Novgorod is considered a “more Russian” city than St. Petersburg, so it was nice to get a feel for what the true Russian lifestyle, history, and architecture is all about. The main sites in Novgorod are churches… there are A LOT of churches. Besides ornately painted icons covered in Old Church Slavonic, we saw some homes that served as examples of how Russians used to live in Novgorod.

Besides museums and churches, there wasn’t much else to do in Novgorod – the most interesting looking cafe required reservations so we couldn’t even go there! On our way back to St. Petersburg though, we stopped in the city center to visit the Maslenitsa festival. Maslenitsa is a week-long Russian holiday (“Butter Week” in English) whose history I won’t even attempt to recite, I’m sure Wikipedia has some information.

Basically what we gathered was that during Maslenitsa you eat a bunch of blini (which are like pancakes, but better) and on the last day they burn a figure that looks like a babushka. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but it was fun to be a part of it – walking from the city center to the beach and watching the figure burn. It was an actual cultural experience, which was a nice change from attempting to understand culture through museums.

The past week has been mostly routine, we’re all getting into the Peterburgian groove. Our next major trip will be to Moscow, and that’s coming up around March 25. Our spring break, or “Russian travel week,” starts on March 28 in Moscow and goes until April 4. A lot of people are busy planning their week, I think most are going for the warm choice of Istanbul for the week.

My friend Zoltan and I decided to go a more historical/cultural route and are planning on traveling the Baltic countries near St. Petersburg together. Warsaw (Poland), Vilnius (Lithuania), Riga (Latvia), and Tallinn (Estonia) are currently on the list, so we’ll see how well we can plan that out.

The best way to describe Pavlovsk in the winter is to say it looks like the December page of a calendar. A forest full of Christmas trees (or whatever they’re actually called) leads you to a massive imperial palace on the hill:

After the palace tour a friend decided that as a child born and raised in Southern California I never got to fully experience the joys of sledding down a snowy mountain. It made me remember the time my sister and I rode down Mt. Baldy on my dad’s car mats, but besides that she was pretty much right so we rented two “vatrushki” (inner-tubes… and apparently a student ID and 600 rubles is not a good enough deposit for a plastic tube because the lady yelled at me for quite some time) and joined the crowds. In LA, kids have Disneyland, here they have the slopes of Pavlovsk – there were so many little Russian kids out and about! A lot of the slopes were safe for kids, but there was one pretty intense drop that all the adults were doing, so we eventually joined there. Connecting the two inner-tubes together and going off the huge jump there was probably not the best idea, but it was pretty fun getting several feet of air and coming in for a crash landing.

Back in Petersburg, I decided to go to my new-found Mexican restaurant (Latin American, rather) for the second night in the row. I think the waitress recognized me, maybe I can become a regular. It obviously doesn’t compare with Mexican food in California, but for Russia it is pretty impressive. They even had dancers and a live band playing Gypsy Kings in the restaurant.

After dinner we headed to a “kinoteatr” (movie theater) behind Nevskiy prospekt and watched “Voobrazharium Doktora Parnasa” (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus). It was a really good movie and insanely visual, but at the same time very confusing… I feel like it wouldn’t have made much more sense if watched in English.

Today there are no excursions planned so it’s errands time for me. My top quests for today are to buy new headphones and to somehow watch LOST!!

My first day made a good impression, I think I’m going to be enjoying my courses here. Today I had grammar, conversation, and ethnic studies. Grammar is probably going to be more like the courses I took at USC. Conversation was more challenging right off the bat, so that should be an interesting class. The rest of my classes, including ethnic studies, are taught in English and are not supposed to be academically challenging but instead informational/engaging. I’m looking forward to ethnic studies, which is going to be about the different ethnic groups in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and how conflicts between them shaped Russian history. Here’s my schedule:

Oh yeah did I also mention that my classes are in the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?

It was during Columbo that I was first unable to convey my point in Russian. The first episode we watched was from the 1990s and the second was from the 1970s – in the second episode Columbo ALWAYS had a cigar in his mouth or a glass of alcohol in his hand. I was trying to point this out and comment on how smoking and drinking has been phased out on American television, but it just didn’t work. I probably sounded something like “It’s interesting how Columbo to smoke and to drink in the seven but right now no smoke.”

My other observation made while watching Columbo was that people watching American television shows in Russian get a very unfortunately poor experience. There is one man dubbing all the male voices and one woman dubbing all the female voices in the show, and they rarely use emotion or inflection in dialogue. Although this is probably good for the Russian economy, I don’t really think it’s a better viewing experiencing than watching with subtitles. At least with subtitles you know how the dialogue is originally being spoken. All the grittiness of Columbo’s voice is lost with the Russian voice-over. Movies are a little more professional though, they seem to use multiple voice actors.

As a side note, I’ve been playing a lot of charades with my host family (not literally playing, but we often act out what we’re trying to say). Some of my favorite words/phrases to act out or have acted out to me so far have been: pipe (sophisticated expression with your hand like you’re holding a wine glass), icicle (grab some ice from the freezer and make a dropping motion from it), electric chair (point to the chair and shake), lethal injection (give yourself a shot), evidence (act like you’re scattering papers across a table), and gallows (motion like you’re hanging yourself, of course). Electric chair is actually a really straightforward translation, but for some reason I thought they were asking about those massage chairs you find in Brookstone.

Also here’s a photo of the queen of the apartment:

I was dropped off first from our group because the apartment I’m staying in is further south in the city than most others. I’m now living on 6th Krasnoarmeyskaya ul in a third-floor apartment with death traps looming above:

My host mother Svetlana Borisevna and her “koshka” (kitty) Yassa (who will undoubtedly serve for some great lolcat photos) greeted me when I arrived at the apartment. I’m staying in her son Kostya’s old room, which is really well decorated! Fantasy books, photos, and a silver sculpture of Vladimir Lenin line one side and more Russian books, a CPU heat sink, a TCP/IP poster, and a hanging hard drive the other – I think we’d get along. Here’s my bed area and the view outside the window:

My first home-cooked Russian dinner started without a moment to waste! Potato soup, rice, chicken, and salad olivie was on the menu. Svetlana and I talked about both our hometowns and families (“Moyu sestru zovut Taleen, kak stolitsa Estonii – My sister’s name is Taleen, like the capital of Estonia”)… she first guessed that I’m Greek, and if my name were Alec Ananopilosis I might have played along. Communicating is… interesting. I think I understand about 75% of what she says, the other 25% either gets a smile and nod if no response is required otherwise it’s “Ya ne ponimayu” (I don’t understand). Svetlana can read English but doesn’t know too much vocabulary, so she has a handy dictionary to help me understand once in a while. My dialogue on the other hand is pretty simple for now, she says I’ll be a pro by May though.

Friday morning I watched the Rugrats movie in Russian with my “kasha” (porridge) breakfast (I need to watch more children’s cartoons, they’re way easier to understand). At 10:30 we headed out to meet the CIEE group for a city tour. The walk to the metro station was my first real look at the surrounding area because it was already dark when I arrived the night before. The metro station (Tekhnologicheskaya stantsia) is VERY close by, so that’s going to be a big convenience. We took the metro (full of blank-faced people in fuzzy hats) to Petersburg’s hub, Nevskiy prospekt, and met everyone at “Kazanskiy sobor” (Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan) to board the tour bus. We drove to most of the major sites of the city – palace after palace, church after church! St. Petersburg is a very beautiful city… there is only one modern-looking building, everything else looks like it came from the 19th century (and it pretty much did). The main river flowing through Petersburg, the Neva, is frozen over and covered in snow right now, so it makes things look even nicer. Unfortunately I forgot to take my camer, but I’ve got plenty of time left to take photos. We also got to see the university where we’ll be studying, which is the political science department behind the Smolny cathedral (not at Smolny College like I said before). The cathedral is amazing, and the building I’ll be studying in is just as ornate.

That night at dinner I met Svetlana’s husband Andrey. We had dinner together and watched the Nigeria vs. Algeria soccer game then “Perevozchik” (Transporter… Jason Statham is surprisingly less badass when dubbed in Russian). Unlike what some of the other students in the program reported about their host fathers, Andrey is really friendly and talkative. We mostly talked about the sports teams in Petersburg and Los Angeles (and how I’m supposed to hate on the Moscow soccer team and its crazy fans).

Here are some more photos from a walking tour (Nevskiy prospekt, The Hermitage, …aaaand monkeys dressed as babies)

Stepping onto the tarmac at Pulkovo airport was like an epiphany, I didn’t know such levels of cold existed. But now that I’ve bared the single digit and negative degrees, I know what to expect and it’s definitely manageable. I don’t think I’ll be going for long hikes in this weather, but it’s really not all that bad when dressed properly. I need to invest in a balaclava, that’s all I’m missing to feel comfortable outside right now.

I’m staying at the Hotel Pulkovskaya Park Inn, which is pretty far from the Petersburg city center, until Friday when we go to our homestays. The area outside our hotel is the Ploshad Pobedy (Victory Square) and there’s a massive monument in the center dedicated to those that survived and fought against the Nazi blockade of Leningrad for 900 days between 1941 and 1945. Here’s the view from my hotel:

Pretty much the whole day Thursday was dedicated to orientation and getting an introduction to “practical activities” like how to use the metro. We’ve been eating all our meals inside the hotel restaurant so far – mainly potatoes, rice, beef stroganoff, and today, borshch.

Tomorrow is our academic orientation in the morning and in the afternoon we’re moving in with our “Petersburg families.” I’m excited to see who I’ll be staying with, and how far I’ll actually be from the CIEE study centers. Internet is a bit expensive (or if free, then scarce) so I may not be around to answer emails or texts until Monday. Hopefully my homestay is near a McDonald’s, I hear they all have free WiFi. Also I added a little flickr feed on the right side of the page to show my latest photos!

Tomorrow I’m leaving LAX at 8:45AM and from there heading to Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C. (flight about five hours) then Vienna, Austria (about eight hours) and then off to St. Petersburg (about three hours), planning to arrive on January 27 at 3:00PM (4:00AM in Los Angeles).

Wednesday’s high in St. Petersburg is 2ºF. I have no idea what that means or feels like, so this should be interesting…