I've been here a month now. Yep, a full month, full in many ways. Or at least two.
This weekend was a busy one, with visits to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, the Dostoevsky Museum, and St. Isaac's Cathedrale. Good thing I don't have class on Monday, because my homework has been piling up. Here's a brief sketch of the shape of my week:
Monday: no class. I do work at home in the morning, and go to Smolny in the afternoon to check my email, etc.
Tuesday: Phonetics and Conversational Practice from 11 to 2:30 with a half hour break. Poli-sci class «Why Do I Hate You?» at 4:40 which I might end up dropping if the professor expects me, as an auditor, to write the massive papers.
Wednesday: SMI/AVK (I'm not sure what that stands for: we read the news) and Literature classes from 11 to 2:30
Thursday: Grammar at 1, then «Translating Literature to the Screen» (in Russian) from 4:40 to 8.
Friday: «Stalinist Culture before WWII» from 4:40 to 8.
Either on Friday or Thursday (I'm pulling for the former), I am to have piano lessons, for which I must practice somehow. My options are limited to Smolny pianos, which are available before nine in the morning and after eight at night. Urg. Sundays we often have excursions, such as the one yesterday to the Cathedrale. Excrusions are always followed by lunch, and yesterday's was at a Greek restaurant. I was excited until I realized that it was a Russian Greek restaurant, and the assistant program manager had ordered chicken Kiev for everyone. What?!
Also, I'm not sure my last post got sent out to everyone it needed to, so I will try to fix that. Stay healthy!
Monday, September 24, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Kasha da shchi
I must confess that I haven't eaten any shchi (traditional cabbage soup) thus far, or much borsch, for that matter. Two meals a day are provided by my host mother, who isn't a hardcore бабушка (babushka), lunch is a sketchy affair, and when we got out to a restaurant as a program, it's as likely to be Chinese as anything else. I can't say I'm sorry to not be completely immersed in Russian cuisine. I mean, the cuisine is not one of the selling points of Russia, as it is for, say, France or Italy. If you are curious about what Russians traditionally eat, google it. If you are curious about what I eat, read on.
Завтрак/Zavtrak/Breakfast
Here's where I get my kasha. Every morning, there are two packets of kasha (general term for porridge) of the instant oatmeal variety. Tatiana Ivanovna rotates through four different brands (three? five? I haven't been keeping close enough tabs) of varying quality and quantity. She usually makes sure the flavor of the packets match, but lately I've been getting more and more mismatches. This morning, for instance, I had one packet of oatmeal with banana and one with strawberry. No worries, I think those fruits blend well enough.
Along with my kasha is a piece of fruit. I've had bananas all this week, which is fine with me, I love bananas with my breakfast. There's usually a glass of juice as well, and typically a plate with a couple pieces of bread and/or or a stack of biscuits/cookies/some sort of sweet. Bread is becoming less common with my meals – I think Tatiana Ivanovna noticed that it usually goes uneaten. I'm not a big fan of sweets with breakfast, but they go really well with tea, and I'm a hungry-morning sort of person, so I eat the cookies or the, um, пирожное (pirozhnoe). I don't really know what to call any of it in English. Strudel, maybe?
Lunch (not обед [obed], because it's not a three course, sit-down meal)
Lunch is a haphazard affair. Tuesday and Wednesday, I am at Smolny over the lunch hour. I either pack something to eat or go out or get something from the café on the third floor. If I bring something, it's usually dried fruit and nuts to snack on. For example, I found some REALLY palatable figs the other day, more delicate and softer than anything I've had in the States. I also bought some mediorce dates and some old peanuts. But if I want something more substantial, I can bring some sort of sandwich. Last Tuesday I brought black bread with hummus (Патэерсон [Paterson], a chain supermarket, more upscale, sells the stuff, to my delight) and sliced tomato. I also have peanut butter to make PB&J, but I am hesistant to draw on this finite resource.
The third-floor café sells a variety of hot dishes, from macaroni and sausage (т.е. hot dogs) to греча (grecha – buckwheat) with fish covered in smetana (light sour cream), bread and fried. This dishes are displayed behind glass and reheated in a microwave upon purchase. I try not to think about how long any given dish has been sitting there. I mean, I can't imagine that the case is refrigerated. I usually stick to rice with vegetables or one of the salads. Note: salads in Russia rarely, if ever, include lettuce. Salad means diced vegetables, pickles, peas, shredded carrot, etc. And they are small, about the size of your fist.
The café also sells пирожное, of course, with apricot or cabbage or some other sweet filling. People on our program buy a lot of Ritter's Sport's chocolate. Forty rubles for 100 grams, man! I bought a lovely pear once for fifteen rubles (sixty cents), and a banana for the same price, but then I realized that I could buy a banana at a магазин (magazin – store) for six rubles. I could probably get them even cheaper at a рынок (rynok – market), come to think of it.
There's good eating in the neighborhood, for sure. In fact, on the same street, there are two branches of the vegetarian restuarant called Тройский Мост. I ended up there several times in the first couple of weeks because two of my program buddies are vegetarians. It's cheap good food, with a lovely selection of salads, including салат из баклажан (salat iz baklazhan – eggplant salad), tasty, but heavy -- sold by the weight, my friend, and I like to keep my lunches around a hundred rubles.
Ужин/Uzhin/Supper
I'm always exicted for supper because usually I'm home late. My three night classes end at eight, figure half an hour to 45 minutes for transportation, and I'm usually not home before nine. So I'm def. hungry and looking forward to the HUGE portions that Tatiana Ivanovna serves me. Suppers consist of a starch, a vegetable dish, fruit, and some sort of sweet. Let's get some lists going:
Starches (from least frequent to most): rice, pasta, grecha, but mostly potatoes – boiled, fried, but most often instant, sometimes with mysterious chewy bits.
Vegetables (not all inclusive): boiled caulifower, bean sprout salad from a can, peas and carrots from a can, frozen vegetable mix, squash cooked with onion and tomato -- now that was a dish that lasted two glorious days, oh it was so good. At first I thought Tatiana Ivanovna was cutting up melon into the frying pan, and I expressed my surprise. Then she informed me that it was кабачок (kabachok – my dictionary defines it as «vegetable marrow,» but at the time I understood it to be squash). And then I felt like an idiot.
Fruits: orange, слива (sliva – plums, which are smaller and oval; tonight I had seriously tiny ones grown locally), apple – I've had but one decent apple while here. Usually I get small, flavorless apples with the texture of an overused pillow.
Sweets: I only want to mention хавла (khavla), a sort of pressed sesame seed paste cake. Ok, that sounds terrible, but seriously wonderful. It's one of my favorites, up there with the dense, round cookies that dip so nicely in chai and the small pies discovered just today during a break in Stalinist Culture Before WWII. Grandma, it's like they took one of your pies and shrunk it down to size of half a tennis ball, the crust and filling are so good.
Overall, my sweets consumption has increasd alarmingly and my pizza consumption has dropped from its dizzying heights over the summer to approximately nil. Spices are a rarity, the major players being salt and pepper, and not much of the latter. I'm not getting nearly as much dill as I expected, not nearly as much eggplant as I want and as Carly receives (who doesn't even like it!), and шашличный кетчуп (shashlichny ketchup) is my condiment of choice. Regular ketchup tastes weird.
Well, there it is. I'm getting enough to eat, the food agrees with me, and I'm figuring out Russian grocery stores, slowly but surely. Before I end this feast of a post, I would like to apologize for the copious amounts of parentheses. The reasons for this are the following: first, I had a request to transliterate the Russian words I use, and second, I really enjoy using parenthesis. If it bugs you, let me know and I'll try to reduce. If you have any other requests, write them on the bottom of a jar of peanut butter and send 'em my way.
Завтрак/Zavtrak/Breakfast
Here's where I get my kasha. Every morning, there are two packets of kasha (general term for porridge) of the instant oatmeal variety. Tatiana Ivanovna rotates through four different brands (three? five? I haven't been keeping close enough tabs) of varying quality and quantity. She usually makes sure the flavor of the packets match, but lately I've been getting more and more mismatches. This morning, for instance, I had one packet of oatmeal with banana and one with strawberry. No worries, I think those fruits blend well enough.
Along with my kasha is a piece of fruit. I've had bananas all this week, which is fine with me, I love bananas with my breakfast. There's usually a glass of juice as well, and typically a plate with a couple pieces of bread and/or or a stack of biscuits/cookies/some sort of sweet. Bread is becoming less common with my meals – I think Tatiana Ivanovna noticed that it usually goes uneaten. I'm not a big fan of sweets with breakfast, but they go really well with tea, and I'm a hungry-morning sort of person, so I eat the cookies or the, um, пирожное (pirozhnoe). I don't really know what to call any of it in English. Strudel, maybe?
Lunch (not обед [obed], because it's not a three course, sit-down meal)
Lunch is a haphazard affair. Tuesday and Wednesday, I am at Smolny over the lunch hour. I either pack something to eat or go out or get something from the café on the third floor. If I bring something, it's usually dried fruit and nuts to snack on. For example, I found some REALLY palatable figs the other day, more delicate and softer than anything I've had in the States. I also bought some mediorce dates and some old peanuts. But if I want something more substantial, I can bring some sort of sandwich. Last Tuesday I brought black bread with hummus (Патэерсон [Paterson], a chain supermarket, more upscale, sells the stuff, to my delight) and sliced tomato. I also have peanut butter to make PB&J, but I am hesistant to draw on this finite resource.
The third-floor café sells a variety of hot dishes, from macaroni and sausage (т.е. hot dogs) to греча (grecha – buckwheat) with fish covered in smetana (light sour cream), bread and fried. This dishes are displayed behind glass and reheated in a microwave upon purchase. I try not to think about how long any given dish has been sitting there. I mean, I can't imagine that the case is refrigerated. I usually stick to rice with vegetables or one of the salads. Note: salads in Russia rarely, if ever, include lettuce. Salad means diced vegetables, pickles, peas, shredded carrot, etc. And they are small, about the size of your fist.
The café also sells пирожное, of course, with apricot or cabbage or some other sweet filling. People on our program buy a lot of Ritter's Sport's chocolate. Forty rubles for 100 grams, man! I bought a lovely pear once for fifteen rubles (sixty cents), and a banana for the same price, but then I realized that I could buy a banana at a магазин (magazin – store) for six rubles. I could probably get them even cheaper at a рынок (rynok – market), come to think of it.
There's good eating in the neighborhood, for sure. In fact, on the same street, there are two branches of the vegetarian restuarant called Тройский Мост. I ended up there several times in the first couple of weeks because two of my program buddies are vegetarians. It's cheap good food, with a lovely selection of salads, including салат из баклажан (salat iz baklazhan – eggplant salad), tasty, but heavy -- sold by the weight, my friend, and I like to keep my lunches around a hundred rubles.
Ужин/Uzhin/Supper
I'm always exicted for supper because usually I'm home late. My three night classes end at eight, figure half an hour to 45 minutes for transportation, and I'm usually not home before nine. So I'm def. hungry and looking forward to the HUGE portions that Tatiana Ivanovna serves me. Suppers consist of a starch, a vegetable dish, fruit, and some sort of sweet. Let's get some lists going:
Starches (from least frequent to most): rice, pasta, grecha, but mostly potatoes – boiled, fried, but most often instant, sometimes with mysterious chewy bits.
Vegetables (not all inclusive): boiled caulifower, bean sprout salad from a can, peas and carrots from a can, frozen vegetable mix, squash cooked with onion and tomato -- now that was a dish that lasted two glorious days, oh it was so good. At first I thought Tatiana Ivanovna was cutting up melon into the frying pan, and I expressed my surprise. Then she informed me that it was кабачок (kabachok – my dictionary defines it as «vegetable marrow,» but at the time I understood it to be squash). And then I felt like an idiot.
Fruits: orange, слива (sliva – plums, which are smaller and oval; tonight I had seriously tiny ones grown locally), apple – I've had but one decent apple while here. Usually I get small, flavorless apples with the texture of an overused pillow.
Sweets: I only want to mention хавла (khavla), a sort of pressed sesame seed paste cake. Ok, that sounds terrible, but seriously wonderful. It's one of my favorites, up there with the dense, round cookies that dip so nicely in chai and the small pies discovered just today during a break in Stalinist Culture Before WWII. Grandma, it's like they took one of your pies and shrunk it down to size of half a tennis ball, the crust and filling are so good.
Overall, my sweets consumption has increasd alarmingly and my pizza consumption has dropped from its dizzying heights over the summer to approximately nil. Spices are a rarity, the major players being salt and pepper, and not much of the latter. I'm not getting nearly as much dill as I expected, not nearly as much eggplant as I want and as Carly receives (who doesn't even like it!), and шашличный кетчуп (shashlichny ketchup) is my condiment of choice. Regular ketchup tastes weird.
Well, there it is. I'm getting enough to eat, the food agrees with me, and I'm figuring out Russian grocery stores, slowly but surely. Before I end this feast of a post, I would like to apologize for the copious amounts of parentheses. The reasons for this are the following: first, I had a request to transliterate the Russian words I use, and second, I really enjoy using parenthesis. If it bugs you, let me know and I'll try to reduce. If you have any other requests, write them on the bottom of a jar of peanut butter and send 'em my way.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Top Ten
The handbook I got from our program managers, Bryan, covered a lot of useful information about what we could expect from our time in Russia. Nevertheless, more than once I have been caught off guard by some Russian... thing.
10. The widespread use of the Latin alphabet. I thought that once I got to Russia, everything would be in Russian, but English is everywhere. Many stores, usually more upscale, have their name spelled out in English. Products advertised on TV, besides food and cleaning products, generally have English/America/French names. Almost every тетрадь (tetrad') or copy book has English on the cover.
Sidetrack!
I have three such тетради (tetradi): one says «Lovely Fruits» and has a variety of fruits arranged in a grid pattern, the other says «Purple Power» and has an eggplant on it, and my школьный дневник (shkol'ny dnevnik) (grade book that I'm using as a day planner) has «aranciamania» superimposed on a large orange and lined up next to it are three grapefruit halves. Other classmates have these red copy books with black felt lettering on them – on says «YES», the other says «NO». It's pretty much hilarious to the American students. Or maybe just me.
9. Light switches on the outside of rooms. From the hunt for the light switch of the bathroom at the hotel to the hunt for the light switch of the kitchen in my apartment, I am still baffled as to why rooms are wired this way. It makes early morning pranks so easy. “Sasha, turn the light back on, I’m trying to take a shower in here!!”
8. Washing machine in the bathroom. I was initially surprised when I saw the washing machine standing across from the bathroom sink in my apartment, but it makes sense when you think about it: a) the dirty water goes straigh into the tub and B) where else would the thing be? The kitchen?
7. Cars driving and parking on the sidewalks. 'Nuff side.
6. Spitting on the street. I knew about the dog poop on the street, I had been warned that Russians don’t clean up after their dogs – they think it’s dirty to do so, and we think it’s dirty not to – but what bugs me more than dodging Sharik’s business is spotting Ivan’s expectorations. In any case and unfortunately, I need to spend more time watching my step than gazing at…
5. The amazing sky. I don’t know why the clouds look closer here than in the States, but I do know that I live a stones throw from the Gulf of Finland, and the sky is often filled with these enormous puffy clouds that take on the most gorgeous hues come sunset. I can’t do justice to the skies of St. Petersburg with words.
4. The plethora of small grocery stores. I call them “produktis” because they all say Продукты (prah-DU-ktee, foodstuffs) on the outside, but that’s like calling a grocery stores “foods” because that’s what they sell. Plus, I’m inflecting an inflection by adding an ‘s’ to the already plural ending, ы. The point is, there are SO MANY places around town, around the metro stations, around the bus stops to buy food, or flowers, or stockings. Even coming from a consumerist society, it's a little much. But, as Amy pointed out to me, there's five million people in this city, and they all have to eat. And give flowers. And 2.5 million of them have to wear stockings.
3. Ремонт (reh-MONT: renovation), everywhere. I considered counting all the construction sites that I pass on my way to and from school, but it would require such sustained concentration and counting that I'd rather spend my time reviewing vocabulary. Not only are sidewalks being torn up all over the city, but scaffolding draped in green mesh surrounds every other building. Internal ремонт is just as wide spread. I went to the fourth floor bathroom at Smolny – a large desk blocked the door, on which was an explanatory sign: РЕМОНТ. I walked into the second floor bathroom – two sinks lay in the corner, and two new ones stood in their place on the wall, the manufacturers' stickers still in place. Furthermore, doing ремонт in one's apartment is THE thing to do. The apartment above Amy's treats her to the sound of drilling and hammering on a regular basis. I myself was privey to a Power Drill Recital just last afternoon.
2. Classes meeting only once a week. No one told me that Russian college classes meet only once a week! I was shocked when Bryan (program manager) revealed this fact during orientation. Later, I asked him why he didn’t put that in the handbook. “Because no one would come to Smolny,” he said, “if they knew classes only met once a week.” Apparently, people from the States would consider once-a-week, three hour classes not challenging enough. As for myself, I’ve had plenty of homework to chew on throughout the week. I’m really just bummed that all of my classes, besides Russian Language ones, go until 20:00. And of course, class doesn’t get out right on time, you stay to chat with whomever, you wait a while to catch the bus, and BAM you can’t get home to dinner before nine. Moreover, if I do end up taking piano lessons (which seems more unlikely with each passing day), and I have to rely on the pianos at Smolny, then I can only start practicing at eight. Or whenever the professor teaching in room 402 returns the key to the room.
1. счас/шас. (shash) I don't think anyone told me that Russians say this all the time. As near as I can figure out, it means подожди or or «hang on» or «wait a second.» Maybe I wasn't paying attention in class when we went over this or something, because everyone says it and I had never heard it.
That's all for now, folks. Tune in next time for an update about what Hannah eats, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel
10. The widespread use of the Latin alphabet. I thought that once I got to Russia, everything would be in Russian, but English is everywhere. Many stores, usually more upscale, have their name spelled out in English. Products advertised on TV, besides food and cleaning products, generally have English/America/French names. Almost every тетрадь (tetrad') or copy book has English on the cover.
Sidetrack!
I have three such тетради (tetradi): one says «Lovely Fruits» and has a variety of fruits arranged in a grid pattern, the other says «Purple Power» and has an eggplant on it, and my школьный дневник (shkol'ny dnevnik) (grade book that I'm using as a day planner) has «aranciamania» superimposed on a large orange and lined up next to it are three grapefruit halves. Other classmates have these red copy books with black felt lettering on them – on says «YES», the other says «NO». It's pretty much hilarious to the American students. Or maybe just me.
9. Light switches on the outside of rooms. From the hunt for the light switch of the bathroom at the hotel to the hunt for the light switch of the kitchen in my apartment, I am still baffled as to why rooms are wired this way. It makes early morning pranks so easy. “Sasha, turn the light back on, I’m trying to take a shower in here!!”
8. Washing machine in the bathroom. I was initially surprised when I saw the washing machine standing across from the bathroom sink in my apartment, but it makes sense when you think about it: a) the dirty water goes straigh into the tub and B) where else would the thing be? The kitchen?
7. Cars driving and parking on the sidewalks. 'Nuff side.
6. Spitting on the street. I knew about the dog poop on the street, I had been warned that Russians don’t clean up after their dogs – they think it’s dirty to do so, and we think it’s dirty not to – but what bugs me more than dodging Sharik’s business is spotting Ivan’s expectorations. In any case and unfortunately, I need to spend more time watching my step than gazing at…
5. The amazing sky. I don’t know why the clouds look closer here than in the States, but I do know that I live a stones throw from the Gulf of Finland, and the sky is often filled with these enormous puffy clouds that take on the most gorgeous hues come sunset. I can’t do justice to the skies of St. Petersburg with words.
4. The plethora of small grocery stores. I call them “produktis” because they all say Продукты (prah-DU-ktee, foodstuffs) on the outside, but that’s like calling a grocery stores “foods” because that’s what they sell. Plus, I’m inflecting an inflection by adding an ‘s’ to the already plural ending, ы. The point is, there are SO MANY places around town, around the metro stations, around the bus stops to buy food, or flowers, or stockings. Even coming from a consumerist society, it's a little much. But, as Amy pointed out to me, there's five million people in this city, and they all have to eat. And give flowers. And 2.5 million of them have to wear stockings.
3. Ремонт (reh-MONT: renovation), everywhere. I considered counting all the construction sites that I pass on my way to and from school, but it would require such sustained concentration and counting that I'd rather spend my time reviewing vocabulary. Not only are sidewalks being torn up all over the city, but scaffolding draped in green mesh surrounds every other building. Internal ремонт is just as wide spread. I went to the fourth floor bathroom at Smolny – a large desk blocked the door, on which was an explanatory sign: РЕМОНТ. I walked into the second floor bathroom – two sinks lay in the corner, and two new ones stood in their place on the wall, the manufacturers' stickers still in place. Furthermore, doing ремонт in one's apartment is THE thing to do. The apartment above Amy's treats her to the sound of drilling and hammering on a regular basis. I myself was privey to a Power Drill Recital just last afternoon.
2. Classes meeting only once a week. No one told me that Russian college classes meet only once a week! I was shocked when Bryan (program manager) revealed this fact during orientation. Later, I asked him why he didn’t put that in the handbook. “Because no one would come to Smolny,” he said, “if they knew classes only met once a week.” Apparently, people from the States would consider once-a-week, three hour classes not challenging enough. As for myself, I’ve had plenty of homework to chew on throughout the week. I’m really just bummed that all of my classes, besides Russian Language ones, go until 20:00. And of course, class doesn’t get out right on time, you stay to chat with whomever, you wait a while to catch the bus, and BAM you can’t get home to dinner before nine. Moreover, if I do end up taking piano lessons (which seems more unlikely with each passing day), and I have to rely on the pianos at Smolny, then I can only start practicing at eight. Or whenever the professor teaching in room 402 returns the key to the room.
1. счас/шас. (shash) I don't think anyone told me that Russians say this all the time. As near as I can figure out, it means подожди or or «hang on» or «wait a second.» Maybe I wasn't paying attention in class when we went over this or something, because everyone says it and I had never heard it.
That's all for now, folks. Tune in next time for an update about what Hannah eats, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Life is an exam
... and I'm studying every night. They don't call it a Two Week Language Intensive for nothing. I've been writing short essays every night, puzzling over the details of prepositions, practicing my vowels, and looking up words words words all the time.
This week is also the first week of classes at Smolny. Monday, I visited a class taught by a professor I could understand pretty well, but the workload was too heavy for my causal interest in the History of the Russian Empire. Next, I went to a class which I thought was "Language of the City," but turned out to be a comparitave art course. Thanks to reading the posted schedule wrong, I had gone to the wrong room. Tuesday, I was a little over ambitious and visited three classes. This means that I had Russian from 9:30 to 13:00 (with modest breaks), then 13:00 to 16:20 with a ten minute break, then 16:40 to 18:10 and again from 18:30 to 20:00. And the last class was in the computer lab — it was hot. The professor went over time about two minutes and I was ready to push him over, I was so ready to leave. I got home late and had to wash my clothes, eat dinner, and hang up clothes before starting on my homework. UGH.
Yesterday was much less intense — I got to eat a real lunch and arrived home before rush hour. Today is also more laid back. I'm going to a class I signed up for — Russian Classics on the World Screen, but that doesn't start until 4:40, so I have another good hour and a half for homework and studying grammar -- tomorrow we have some sort of evaluative test. I'm not clear on what exactly is happening.
In other news, the weather here is great. Really breezy and wonderful. Huge clouds and all. Also, I got a bus card, so I can ride the bus any time, any where as much as I want until the end of the month, all for 385 rubles. Yesssssss.
If you want to bring a smile to my face, leave a comment or send me an email (jastramhi[AT]gmail[DOT]com). I would love to hear from you, dear reader. It's true.
This week is also the first week of classes at Smolny. Monday, I visited a class taught by a professor I could understand pretty well, but the workload was too heavy for my causal interest in the History of the Russian Empire. Next, I went to a class which I thought was "Language of the City," but turned out to be a comparitave art course. Thanks to reading the posted schedule wrong, I had gone to the wrong room. Tuesday, I was a little over ambitious and visited three classes. This means that I had Russian from 9:30 to 13:00 (with modest breaks), then 13:00 to 16:20 with a ten minute break, then 16:40 to 18:10 and again from 18:30 to 20:00. And the last class was in the computer lab — it was hot. The professor went over time about two minutes and I was ready to push him over, I was so ready to leave. I got home late and had to wash my clothes, eat dinner, and hang up clothes before starting on my homework. UGH.
Yesterday was much less intense — I got to eat a real lunch and arrived home before rush hour. Today is also more laid back. I'm going to a class I signed up for — Russian Classics on the World Screen, but that doesn't start until 4:40, so I have another good hour and a half for homework and studying grammar -- tomorrow we have some sort of evaluative test. I'm not clear on what exactly is happening.
In other news, the weather here is great. Really breezy and wonderful. Huge clouds and all. Also, I got a bus card, so I can ride the bus any time, any where as much as I want until the end of the month, all for 385 rubles. Yesssssss.
If you want to bring a smile to my face, leave a comment or send me an email (jastramhi[AT]gmail[DOT]com). I would love to hear from you, dear reader. It's true.
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