Goodbye Russia

By now, it's Friday.  I've been gone for several days now, hoping that it won't hurt as much to write this up with some distance and time.  Didn't really work.

The wonderful thing about this study abroad was that I made so many friends, and gained a family.  Yes, it was halfway around the globe.  Yes, it was in another language.  But when it came time to leave, the tears came streaming down my face.

I didn't want to leave my city, I didn't want my friends to scatter back to the four corners of America, and I didn't want to say goodbye to Yulia Georgievna and her husband, Vladimir Nikolaevich.  My host family had become such a big part of my life that I couldn't bear to leave them, and I seriously dreaded when the taxi would show up and I'd be forced to say goodbye, possibly forever.  It was all the harder because my host mom was also fighting tears.  To try to make us both stop crying, she looked me in the eye and smiled and said that I'd be coming back in the future.  And next time I'd bring my mom and my dad and my boyfriend and my brother, yes, even Ben can come.

So tears still streaming down my face, but now with a little smile, I got in the cab and my life in St. Petersburg was left behind.  A couple hours later I was on a plane, flying off to England to meet my aunt and uncle and cousins.

Thus, my time in Russia has come to an end.  No amount of words here can describe the thrilling feeling of living abroad in another culture, in another language, and becoming immersed in it.  I can't force my emotions into words, either written or spoken, to describe my time in Russia.  Just know that it was challenging, it was enlightening, and you come back not quite the same person as when you left.

And I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Procrastination makes perfect - a finals update

Hello hello!!  Soooooooooo it's that time of the semester again.  That's right - finals season is upon us.

SEND HELP I BEG YOU

Everyone else has been freaking out and turning into zombies for their own finals.  Now it's my turn.  I'm spending my last week - that's right, my LAST WEEK in St. Petersburg - in a little ball of stress studying for tests.

But but but wait a minute.  If it's finals week, why am I posting an update??  I should be studying, right??

WRONG!!!

Over studying means more stress and more stress means Caitie starts to freak out for no apparent reason and random freak outs means I does poorly on said finals.  I'll go back to studying for each test as they come.

In the meantime, happy finals!!  I'm gonna go play with Risi.

Smolney

It's almost the end of the semester, I've a week to go, and I still haven't posted about my school and what it looks like.

I should fix that.

For comparison, this is where I went to high school.  My friends and I used to joke that we went to school in a castle.

We had arrow slits and everything, and English was taught where the stables used to be

Now here is my school in St. Petersburg.  This is the front of it.

Smolney cathedral, in all its majesty

Glorious, no??  The cathedral is the first thing you see when you walk onto the school grounds.  This massive blue, white, and gold structure with the giant bell out front - that's the entrance.  There are wrought iron gates to the sides where you walk into the old monastery/convent complex (Russian only has the one word - monastery - for both).  Walk all the way behind it and you reach a little sign by a door.

The politics department

This is me.  The CIEE program runs out of the political science department here at St. Petersburg State University.

So quick - some background info on Smolney.

Smolney's cathedral complex is super baroque, having been originally built for Elizabeth I (daughter of Peter the Great) way back in the first half of the 1700s.  Well, Elizabeth took the throne and died before the convent was finished, so no nuns ever lived here.  Instead it just kinda sat there until this woman came to power.

Russia's beloved and not actually Russian empress, Catherine II

That's right.  Catherine the Great saw the Smolney complex and had the brilliant thought of turning the never-opened convent into a school for noblewomen who weren't so well off.  They could come and learn the fine art of being a lady of the 18th century, with classes in foreign languages, needlepoint, and music, among other lessons.  Problem was, Catherine the Great HATED baroque style.  She wasn't willing to tear down the complex, so she simply had the next architect build the additions in a different style.

They still left the baby blue paint job though

If I haven't already mentioned it in previous posts, Russians (and Eastern Europeans in general) are the masters of repurposing buildings.

Then everything changed when the fire nation attacked.

LENIN FOR PEOPLE'S PRESIDENT, 1917 (no tsars allowed, too bourgeois)

The people revolted, the tsar abdicated and was sent into exile with his family.  On the heels of the revolution, Smolney closed its doors in the early 20s.  It was left on its own as the country around it stabilized and went to war again.  The Germans had about as much of a brain as Napoleon did, and had quite a decisive loss against the new Soviet state.

Idiots.  Didn't you learn from Napoleon?? Never pick a fight with Russia

As the years passed, people began to look at Smolney again.  It's a pretty big complex, and one of the tallest points in the city here in St. Petersburg.  And it was just sitting there......Someone decided that it was only fitting to put another school in there.  And so the Smolney cathedral complex became a part of the St. Petersburg State University.

Ok, that's enough history.  Back to me.  I mean, the present.  You know what I mean.

Quick, here's a picture!!

This is one of the upper halls where I have chorus.  Other CIEE classes meet up here, and it gets more light than the ground floor does.  But this is generally what the inside of my school looks like.  Pink walls.  White molding and fancy detailing.

Fancy chandeliers

And the staircases have fancy wrought iron detailing.

So fancy 

The ground floor classrooms are the original locations for what would have been the nuns' cells.  Each room is well sized for one bedroom, and all the windows have gates and locks on them to prevent burglars from breaking in and stealing things.  Though what there is to steal, I haven't the faintest idea.  They can take my homework though.

Just take it, please

The international relations wing of the complex was recently redone.  Not gonna lie, I didn't want to go back to my own department after I saw the renovations.  The halls were so light and clean from the fresh coat of paint and touched up woodworking.  It was glorious.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh it's so pretty.  I want my part of the complex to be just as pretty, but renovations have yet to come around to us

If you pay money in the cathedral itself, you can walk up to one of the belltowers.  From there, you can see the surrounding area and across the city.  On a sunny(ish) day, the sun glints off of all the cathedral towers and off the water.

Just look at that view.  Look at it.  Yes

Also, if you time it just right, a guy sometimes comes out of the cathedral and rings this giant bell.  I heard it for the first time as the school shuttle trundled up to the gates.

BONGGGGGGGGGG BONGGGGGGGGGG BONGGGGGGGGGG

Here ends my tour of my school.  Now for the last week here.

Yay??

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Not yay.

Pskov and the Great Bus Adventure

More program travelling!!  Yay!!

.......not yay, you say??  Must be the Pskov trip.  Here's what happened.

On Wednesday night, I stuffed my backpack to the gills full of clothing and food while also helping Yulia Georgievna make little meat pies for breakfast.  There was a lot of dancing around the kitchen and her granddaughter Dasha and I had a mock sword fight with a spoon and a rolling pin.  My host mom also gave me enough food to feed me for an entire day and said that they were also leaving early the next morning for their dacha (Russian summer cottage).  So morning dawned bright and early (far too early) and we all set off for our separate destinations.

My destination for the weekend was two towns nearish to the border with Latvia and Estonia.  The first is Pskov, which is about 4 hours away from St. Petersburg by vehicle.

Pskov from afar

It's an old town, built back in the early days of Russia's history, the first mentioning of the town just barely into the 10th century when a prince married Olga, princess of Pskov.  It's got a kremlin (fortress with wall) and a nearby monastery and feels like something out of Robin Hood's era.  The second town is another 2 hours beyond Pskov called Pushkinskie Gori, where Pushkin both grew up and lived while in exile from St. Petersburg.

So idyllic.  Perfect place for the writer/poet-to-be to grow up

May I take a moment to mention that the 1st of May is a Russian holiday.  And that the way Russians do holidays (correctly, may I add) is that if it lands on a Thursday, the entire weekend is taken off from work.  Despite this, we were assured that everything would be fine.  Everyone would've left for their dachas already, and the roads would be clear.

No one, not even the coordinators who've done this many times before (and who've left on Thursday, May 1st before), could've expected what happened.

There were two different sites of construction that no one knew about, and more than a few car accidents along the road.  Traffic was appalling, to put it mildly.  We were moving at a rate of 10 km an hour for a while, and that was lucky.  It took us almost 9 hours to reach out halfway point to Pskov, and 11-12 hours to make it to Pskov itself and "lunch".  This was also with us leaving at 8:00 in the morning.  Eeesh.  To make it worse, there were no stops for bathrooms in that first 9 hours to the halfway rest stop.  My fellow students were doing the awkward dance waiting for the one on-bus bathroom to free up.  Not me though.  I am the human camel.  Long car rides with no bathroom breaks??  No problem.

Be careful though.  We spit

Also the bus was a double-decker.  That was TOTALLY AWESOME and made for good vantage points for applauding our driver on his superb driving.  How did he drive, you ask??  Why, like any other good driver.  He switched into the oncoming traffic lane and played chicken with the oncoming cars.

It felt a bit like that, not gonna lie

Oddly enough, that wasn't what our bus ended up being pulled over for.  The entire top deck was crowding the windows to see what our driver was doing with the cop and to exclaim about his badassery in driving a bus full of Americans breakneck towards our weekend destination.  That cop was wicked efficient though.  He pulled us over while talking with another car already pulled over, then proceeded to flag down another car while talking to our driver.  I think he was just bored and wanted something to do other than watch traffic crawl by.

He just wants a friend......

By the end of the bus ride, everyone's food was gone.  No one saw that coming.  All the host mothers give enough food to feed an army always, and think that that's just gonna tide you over for lunch.  We all legitimately ran out of food on the bus.  By the time we pulled into our hotel at Pushkinskie Gori, it was midnight.  I grabbed my stuff, found my room, and burrowed under the covers.

The new day dawned sans long bus rides.  Thank heavens.  Friday ended up being a walking tour to Pushkin's childhood village, Mihailovsky.  There, we wandered around the village and inside Pushkin's old home.  That place had some spectacular views, let me tell you.

It was SO COLD in Mihailovsky.  We all packed for warmer weather, not for a super drop in warmth and a light bit of snow.  But everything was so pretty, even with us all shivering.

More awesome shots of Mihailovsky

Wandering around the village, with all the picturesque scenery, we found a statue of Pushkin.  This was the source of much amusement as it was Pushkin "post banya", as I dubbed it.  Essentially it was the writer-poet lounging around with just a skimpy towel  across his lap.  To make things funnier, all these older Russian women were insisting on taking pictures with Pushkin, and they felt the need to lie next to him.  Pasha, one of our program coordinators, said duh they're doing that - this is their last chance to lie with Pushkin.  We all died at that.

From there we went to an active monastery, which means all the girls suddenly sport the latest fashion of the Orthodox church - headscarves.  My little silver scarf wrapped 'round my head, I went with my group to see the final resting place of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.

That night was shashlik (kebabs) and banya!!  This was the first time I've been to the banya here in Russia, and I'm kinda sad I haven't gone before now, nor will have a lot of time to go again.

For banya, you can either go naked (as the Russians do) or wear a bathing suit (as most of the Americans do).  My group was the last to go, starting at 9:30pm, and we all entered the hot room in our bathing suits.  There were two tiers of seats, one close to the floor and one close to the ceiling - all of us sat at the top.  In the corner by the door stood a wood burning stove with many big rocks placed on top.  Next to it was a bucket of water.  To make the room hotter, you splash water on the rocks and wait for the wave of heat to hit you.  Best way to do banya, or so I'm told, is to stay in for a little bit, then leave to jump in a pool or douse yourself in a shower, then return.  Repeat as necessary.

Honestly, the pool jumping is more fun

For my banya, there was an open air pool just down the short hallway.  The first time we went to go get soaked, we jumped in the pool.  And it was freezing - quite obviously so, since it was snowing a bit earlier in the day.  It made it better to run back inside and back to the warmth.  Once we'd warm up and couldn't feel any cold, back out we went.  That is, until we slipped on the deck.  Turns out our jumping in splashed a lot of water over the side.  The entire pool was ringed in a thin layer of ice, and there's six of us steaming in the cold night air trying to skate our way to the pool.  Someone slipped on the ice, and so the shower became far more appealing than the pool.

This is about the same time we realized that we could make the room hotter and bypass the fact that we were running out of water by wringing our hair out over the hot rocks.  We should've guessed that something would come of that.  Just over an hour of chatting and banya-ing had gone by, we maybe had 10 minutes left of our hour and a half banya slot, and yeah. The floor had a wooden platform - freestanding - that wasn't too high off the ground, and it had become soaked with our running in and out from the pool and the showers.  I slipped on it while wringing my hair out over the hot rocks.  BAM!!!  My elbow hit the stovepipe.

Yeah.  It hurt.  But it wasn't nearly as bad as it could've been.  I left the hot room immediately to go stick my arm under numbingly cold water in the shower until I couldn't feel it anymore.  I then returned to see if I could finish up the last few minutes of my banya, or if I had to call it quits.  Then I slipped again.  Someone caught me this time, but if I had actually fallen, that time I would've gone face-first into those rocks.  That essentially told me to get out now and not have near misses with pain anymore.  For the rest of the night, if my arm twinged in pain, I went and soaked it in the shower or put a cold compress on my burn until my arm went numb again and I couldn't feel it anymore.  Worked well enough, as now I can't feel my burn at all, though it's still a pretty angry shade of red several days later.  The pain was mostly gone by the following morning, and nothing a bit of ibuprofen couldn't solve.

The following day was the day we headed home.  Everyone piled back into the bus and we headed to Pskov to tour the kremlin like we were supposed to the first day (before it turned into an all-day bus ride).  Our poor guide.  Between the kremlin and the monastery we went to, she was having problems with children being obnoxious.  At the kremlin, they were just running around underfoot.  At the monastery, they were blowing whistles and yelling practically in her ear.  Poor thing.  Her patience was stretched very thin, and not because of anything the Americans did.

She did take us to an interesting place behind the monastery.  There are three natural fountains there, and legend says that one grants health, one grants love, and one grants wealth.  You may drink from two, but if you drink from all three you get nothing.  The guide said her husband went on a business trip to Pskov and drank from the fountain of love - the following month he met her and six months later they were happily married.  I know people who have drunk from natural springs and had horrendous health problems from parasites in the water, my own boyfriend among them.  It's such a popular site, and the fountains would be closed to tourists the moment someone got sick from them (or more likely, a bunch of people got sick, from the sheer volume of tourists that were there).  So I threw caution to the wind and drank from the fountain of heath and the fountain of love.  The water tasted fine.  And I haven't gotten sick from it yet.

Let's hope it continues that way......

After the monastery, everyone very warily got back in the bus.  With only one minor catastrophe, we headed back home.  Thankfully, with only 2 hours extra stuck in construction traffic.

All in all, I liked the trip.  And everyone I talked to said they wouldn't have minded the 16 hour transit from St. Petersburg to Pushkinskie Gori if they had been prepped for it.  Or if they had more food and another bathroom break or two.  The trip itself far outweighed any mishaps on the road we encountered.

I'm glad we went.  I don't wanna get on another bus in the next few years.  I've had my fill, thanks.  Next time, I'll take the train and meet you there.

Travel Week pt. 3: Lithuania

Last installment of Travel Week.  It's about time I got this one in.  It's been practically a month since this trip.  I procrastinate far too much.

The last part of Travel Week was in the beautiful Vilnius, capital of Lithuania.

The final stop on our Baltic tour

The ride from Riga was pretty uneventful, again on a bus.  I was so exhausted that I ended up sleeping most of the way, headphones plugged in.  When we got there, we trusted Google Maps to tell us how to get to our hostel from the bus station.

It totally failed us.  Thanks a lot, phone

My phone told us the hostel was over an hour away by foot.  Turns out it was about a 15 minute walk from the bus station.  Womp womp.

Anyway, Vilnius was nice.  We took another one of those free tours from the city center around Vilnius,  This one was looooooooong, but we saw a ton.  It started in the main square, took us through several back alleys around the hostel area, back to the square, and around the entire city.  We ended up on a hill with a pretty good panorama of the city, down to a park, and to Lithuania's very own independent hipster republic.

I kid you not.  The people say this district declared independence because it was too hipster for the rest of the city.

So artist. Much hipster. Wow.

The Independent Republic of Užupis used to be a very rundown part of Vilnius, way back when. Then artists started moving in. Our guide told us they went door to door introducing themselves as new neighbors and artists-in-residence. Soon the district cleaned itself up, crime dropped dramatically, and it became a really nice place to live. The constitution of Užupis states that everyone has a right to live by the river, that everyone has a right to live their own life, and that a dog has the right to be a dog. Also that everyone has the right not to be loved, but not necessarily. Here is an example of such logic.

Sooooo miraculous mushrooms. Yes, no, or whatever floats your boat

It was definitely a very artsy community. I liked it, though it was really really small. Also we ducked into the little convenient store and got cactus juice to try. I need to find this back home - it was delicious and tasted a bit like a less tart green apple AirHead.

We then got annoyed because as it turns out, Užupis' independence day is on April 1st. That is the only day you can have your passport stamped for the republic and get/use the money of the Independent Republic of Užupis. The rest of the year, Užupis functions as just another district of Vilnius. We arrived in Vilnius on April 3rd.

Damnit

The tour continued by heading down the hill behind Užupis and to the narrowest alley in the city. It's not technically on the map, and it isn't named, but our guide took us there anyway. It was so tiny that there was maybe enough room to move my arms about 3 inches away from my body. And I am a small person.

Other things on the tour.....there was this church.

St. Nicolas' church

And there was this statue.

The knight and his trusty steed. So majestic

And this bit of graffiti that was put up during and survived the Soviet regime during Lithuania's occupation.

Also our lovely guide

On the opposite wall of the alley, there is a newer piece of graffiti in the form of flowers. The locals say that's what the woman is looking at, or for. She's looking for spring.

For out own time, we explored the city and went up to the old bastion on a hill by the riverside.

Also known as the BIGGEST WIND TUNNEL IN THE CITY

On each floor, there was a mini museum for different artifacts and suits of armor and different events in Lithuania's history. You could also go look out all those windows on each floor to see what they overlooked and how it could've been so effective at protecting the city. And of course, the view from the top was quite spectacular.

Look at the city, all nicely laid out below

What else.....the last night we decided that we should stop denying it and realize once more that we are broke college students. So we pitched in and bought veggies and pasta and chicken and I made stir fry for dinner at the hostel. The hostel owner even generously gave us a bottle of Lithuanian wine to drink, saying we needed to try it before we left her country. It's made of berries instead of grapes, and for a red wine it wasn't too shabby (wine is still not my drink of choice though).

The following day was off to the airport and back to St. Petersburg. We went from the sunlight of Travel Week in the Baltics through a cloud layer that seriously took 20 minutes to fly through to come back to my city here. And thus, our adventures came to an end.

That was Travel Week.