Getting Busy

We are now starting to move full speed past the phase of carefully taking little doses of the city and only leaving the house for a couple hours at a time. One of the directors of the international programs at St. Petersburg State University told us our first day that they consider their program to be demanding by itself for just the language courses... we are also taking a completely second program on the side with the professor from CU (Artemi). The way the director phrased it: most their students don't want to leave, they cry, they hate to go... Artemi's students are glad to leave... What she means is that we are worked quite hard while we're here... its not a vacation. We are definitely starting to get into this. We have about 100 pages of reading for the history and culture portion of the class due by Friday alone. This is in addition to regular language classes, homework and practicing for the language classes, and of organized excursions. And we are still "travelers" on top of all this. We have to manage to eat when its hard to order or buy groceries because of our limited/non-existent Russian, and do laundry and all the regular duties of normal life combined with traveling (like finding somewhere to use the Internet...not always trivial). This week alone we went to the largest art museum in the world, the Hermitage (rivaled only by the Louvre in the Paris, but the Hermitage still has more art), we are going to 3 ballets on Friday, a river/canal tour Saturday, the Opera Sunday, and have had ample walking around and general exploring all over the city on top of this.

I can't speak for Lynee specifically, but I know I feel wholly inadequate in terms of my historical and art understanding. We have seen some of the most famous painters to live, such as Picasso, 2 of only 14 paintings by Da Vinci, Monet, Raffael, Rembrandt, etc... and I know virtually nothing about these historical figures, or the periods in which they worked: such as pre-Renaissance, post-Renaissance, impressionists, and others. It always seemed boring to me in school... art that is... but once you can actually look at some of the paintings and get an appreciation for what they meant when they were painted and that some of them now may be as much as $150 million a piece, it changes your perspective.

It is almost impossible to understand the history we are surrounded by. Virtually everywhere we go the city is packed with history. From the canals that thousands died to build in the harsh climate for Peter the Great, to the room we stood in yesterday in the Hermitage where Lenin and the Bolsheviks arrested the provisional government. It is difficult to understand the significance of the places we are visiting. This is probably boring and hard to understand without pictures... if you're even still reading at this point, but it has been pretty amazing to experience.

The language course is getting more challenging. We are already working on verb conjugation when we are still struggling with reading Cyrillic... but we must move at a fast pace. Our history readings are quite fascinating, and it gives a lot more depth to our visits. Overall we quite enjoy the food. The pancakes filled with various meat or desert fillings (called blini, a Russian traditional favorite) can be found on virtually every corner. We still eat a lot of McDonalds, but this is more because it is easier to order and they have free wifi.

Ryan and Lynee