Tempus Certainly Does Fugit

This blog post is brought to you by one of my father's pet phrases, featured in the title.

I've been in Russia for over a month, now, and I can hardly believe I'll be Stateside in another three. My adoration for this city hasn't diminished at all, though this might change when the weather becomes less hospitable and the world goes dark for the winter. (My professors say that there will be only 4 hours of sunlight toward the end of the semester...) However, since I have managed to avoid breaking out the winter coat, gloves and heavy underclothing, I still think the weather here is pretty good in comparison to the stifling Arizona heat I left.

In my short/epochal time here, I’ve managed to check off a great deal from my bucket list. Here’s a small summary of what I’ve been up to for the past four weeks:

- Museums/Memorials/Palaces: Peterhof Palace, Hermitage, Leningrad Blockade, Peter and Paul Fortress, Pavlosk Palace, Russian Naval Museum, Wooden Architecture Museum.

- Trip to Novgorod.

- Churches/Monasteries/Cathedrals: St. Sophia’s, Church on the Spilled Blood, St. Isaac’s (though I didn’t go inside, so I guess it doesn’t count), Smolny, and one ten minutes away from metro station Chernyshevskaya that I don’t know the name of.

- Ate the most stereotypical Russian foods while in Russia: borsht (technically Ukrainian and even more technically, properly transliterated as borshch)*, shchi (pronounced “she” – cabbage soup, the Russian version of borsht), pelmeni (kind of like ravioli, but without spaghetti sauce – served with sour cream/ketchup. Tastes better than it sounds), kvass (fermented bread drink…again, tastes better than it sounds. Served on tap at some places, which I find hilarious), pirozhki (“pe-rush-KEE” – basically, rolls of bread with either meat, veggies or fruit inside).

- Have used more forms of public transportation on a regular basis than I ever have in my life: metro/subway (I’m a pro, now. I’ve actually been on every single metro line in St. Petersburg except for one), bus, cable car, taxi and, of course, walking.

- Have watched multiple American/English films in dubbed Russian: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Commando, Conan the Barbarian, Predator (it was a Schwarzenegger marathon that I watched solely to hear the Russian version of the Governator), Mulan, Brother Bear, Mel Gibson’s Hamlet (Hamlet’s famous soliloquy is just as epic in Russian!), and The Fifth Element (boy, did they get Bruce Willis’ voice wrong…).

- Took a boat ride on the Neva River.

- Watched the ballet classic Swan Lake and the opera classic Eugene Onegin (at the Mariinsky, no less!)

*I really don’t know why we transliterate borsht with the “t.” Maybe the Ukrainian pronunciation merits that letter? I don’t know. It’s the same letter that appears in Khrushchev’s name, but we don’t see a “t” in his…“Khrushtev” just looks weird. ANECDOTE: So the first time I read Khrushchev’s name in Russian, I was stunned at how short it was. It takes ten letters in English to express six in Russian. Also, Americans put stress on the first syllable of his name while in Russian, the stress is on the end. Same goes for Gorbachev. But I’m done being a grammar nerd.

I’ve been a busy little bee here in the Motherland, and that’s only a brief list of the places I’ve been. I’ve also been hanging around Nevsky Prospekt with my new tovarishchi (haha, old vocab word for you! Cool points to anyone who remembered it means “comrades”), spending some time with my host mom/family and, of course, going to school. Although the guided tours and mandatory excursions have waned since the first two weeks, I have a jam-packed schedule until I fly home in December. Next weekend, I’m taking a trip to Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of Piter where the tsars (hence “TSARskoe”) got away from it all and two weeks after that, I’ll be heading to Estonia. Then, in November, I’ll be going to Moscow for a few days, immediately after which my friend Dave and I will head out to Warsaw and Vienna for a week. I’m a full-blown jet-setter, now.

There are some things that I have flat out refused to do here in Russia, and here they are:

- Drink vodka. For those that don’t know, I rather hate alcohol, so vodka is completely out of the question. Fortunately, the only alcohol I’ve been offered was some champagne at a friend’s 21^st birthday dinner. No Russian has yet to offer me alcohol. (As a point of interest, the legal drinking age here is 18 and I was tempted to buy a drink for someone just because I can, but I wasn’t enticed enough, or magnanimous enough, to follow through.)

- Go to the banya. (Banya= sauna, sans the towel.) The people I know who have gone really enjoyed the experience (and some have started a banya club that goes out every Friday), but the idea of lounging around in...nothing...in a sweltering room with a bunch of women whom I don’t know is not exactly what I’d call scintillating. Sounds closer to mortifying.

- Ride in a marshrutka. A marshrutka is a mini-bus (think soccer mom van size or slightly larger) that a bunch of people cram into, shove over some money to the driver and tell where they need to stop. They, however, are responsible for knowing where the stop is and clambering out in time. For someone who is small and whom tall people think it okay to squish/overstep/overlook/violate personal space (what little actually exists here)…and especially someone who hasn’t quite gotten Russian street geography down yet and whose Russian is limited to basic requests and likes…using a marshrutka sounds positively terrifying.

I do have three months left to try vodka, go to the banya and ride a marshrutka, so I guess I have three months left to see pigs fly and hell freeze over. *Shrug*

Until next time,

Katya