The first few days

I have met my host mother.  And she's not nearly as scary as I thought she'd be.  Her name is Yulia Georgievna and she is a retired little grandmother with grown twins and some middle school-aged grandkids.  She's the matriarch of this apartment, spending her days around the house and cooking food and such.

Kinda like this, only sans scarf and with spiky blonde hair

Her husband is Vladimir Nikolaevich.  He's a professor of.......something......at a nearby university.  He's very taciturn and I only ever see him at the dinner table.  When he's not teaching or eating he shuts himself in his room and watches TV while coughing up a lung. The only full sentence the guy's ever said to me was a question.  I wear a little gold ring on the ring finger on my right hand.  In America, that's nothing.  Here in Russia, that's where your wedding band goes.  So the first night this 70 year old Russian man asked me point blank if I was married.

Yeah no.  Not married.

So yeah.  Host family.  They have a cat too, named Risi, which is the Russian word for lynx (Yulia thought she had the same ears as them).  She's extremely fat and has a bell that jingles while she wanders around the apartment.  Risi absolutely loves attention, and she gets fed whatever dinner I didn't eat, hence why she's ginormous.  I was so excited because cat!!  Aaaaaaaand then I found out she has massive claws to match her massive bulk.  They're long enough that when she bats at my leg for attention, I can feel them digging in.  And she jumped up on my lap as I was trying to get up and dug into my jeans when I tried to pick her up.  Ouch.  So now the cat and I are in a perpetual war where I admire her cuteness from afar or in the hallway and she can stay out of my room and not sink her claws into me, on purpose or by accident.

Then there's the school.  I have an hour and a half commute to school, by both metro and bus.  I leave the apartment, locking the apartment door and the hallway door on the way and buzzing out of the gate, walk down the dark streets of St. Petersburg, and muscle my way onto the metro.  Good news is, I'm at the end of the line so I'm the first stop in the morning.  I get a seat every time.  Bad news - Russian rush hour is the worst thing I've ever seen.  And Russians have no concept of personal space.  They'll wedge in until you are literally pressed up against the person in front of you and then keep pushing.  And to catch a train when it's that crowded??  Think of Tokyo where they have people to push more commuters onto the train.  The Russians do that on their own.  And there's usually only one escalator open, so then you wait in that sea of sardined people for an age and a half to get to the escalator to exit.  Or in my case, switch trains and do it all over again.  When I finally exit the metro, there's a bus that takes me straight to school.

Smolney Cathedral

The school itself is kinda awesome.  It was commissioned by Peter the Great's daughter, who wanted to be a nun.  She said that if she had to assume the throne, she'd abdicate after a few years to pursue the religious life.  The convent was still in the process of being built when she had to take the throne.  The life of a tsarina was more appealing than she thought it would be, and so she never abdicated and died ruler of Russia.  Catherine the Great repurposed the cathedral complex and used it as a school for noblewomen, teaching them languages, literature, dancing, embroidery, and anything else the Russian nobility needed to know at the time.  Her institute was shut down after the revolution of 1918.  Currently, it is a part of the St. Petersburg state university - more specifically, it is the department of politics.  My classrooms are in the building directly behind that cathedral, in the rooms intended to be nun cells.  So yeah.  My university has a cathedral.  Bam.

Classes so far have been interesting.  This week there's only the language classes - electives start next week.  So I can sleep a little later in the mornings and not stress out so much.  Yesterday I had grammar and conversation classes.  My grammar professor was the one who proctored my placement exam (which was aggravatingly long and by the end of it I was picking random letter answers I hadn't used in a while).  She's pretty good.  We're starting with location and placement, so the verbs and adverbs and directionals associated with telling people where stuff is.  In Russian, it's kinda annoying - there are three question words based on if you are static, if you are moving towards something, or from where something came from.  Almost all of it was stuff that had been covered at AU, so I'm not too worried about that class.  Also, for all that I can't explain how my own language's grammar functions, I'm not too shabby with my Russian grammar.

Conversation class is gonna end up being my favorite, I know it now.  The professor is Mihail, and he's just a happy, welcoming, enthusiastic person.  For the first class he went around asking names, then asked the class what we wanted to talk about for the semester.  Each topic we gave him (cuisine, fashion, sports/Olympics, traditions, music, TV, film) was met with comments and more questions about what we already know in that category.  For the food and film topics, Mihail even started rattling off movies that were playing and restaurants we should check out.  The rest of the class was spent reading and discussing a short sheet on Russian traditions, such as not whistling in the house (your money will "walk" away) or shaking hands over some sort of threshold (one of you will die).

This is gonna be great

And then there is phonetics.  I had that today, and I was late getting out of the apartment today.  Apparently my host mom thought that I needed to leave by 10:45, not be at the metro ready to step onto a train at 10:45.  The people I was meeting left without me as I was on the escalator down, I slipped and fell on the marble stairs (yeah, we have marble in the metro) 'cause I was rushing and hit my backpack on the ground.  I thought it might have broken, but I couldn't check, nope nope nope, I had to get to school.  I caught up to my friend and we walked the rest of the way.  I was still a minute or two late, so I was all flustered getting into class and I didn't have time to coat check my coat (yeah, we have that too) or get a water or some OJ (there's a fresh squeezed orange juice machine that squeezes the oranges in front of you) so I was dehydrated and all that jazz.  The lady was very nice, but she talks so softly.  And her computer has super crappy speakers and half of our exercises today were listening to the computer and writing things in columns.  Not only could I not hear more than half of what was said in the dictation, I don't know the words so I couldn't categorize them.  Ugh.

Other than that, things aren't too bad here.  I can't drink the tap water - it's got parasites in it, so people here in St. Petersburg either boil their water and chill it, or they buy bottles in bulk.  My family boils water, but I keep bottles and things around so I don't drink it all ('cause I will).  There's a 1.5 liter bottle sitting on my desk right now and I get smaller bottles at Smolney campus when I show up for class.  By the way, that giant bottle of water cost less than $1.  Lots of food is a hell of a lot cheaper here - lunch at the school cafeteria comes out to around $5 and if I want chocolate the king sized candy bars are about $0.50.  On the other hand, things like technology and clothing and such are super expensive.  It balances out, I guess.

So yeah.  This is my life for the next four months.  Not too bad.