Customs definitely didn’t live up to my expectations when we
arrived in Saint Petersburg this afternoon. A complete lack of bureacracy may
be the way to describe it. No immigration card, no suspicious questioning, no
nothing. The guy behind the desk stamped a thousand things and handed me my
passport back with a smile. We were met by our RLUS representatives and I
somehow managed to volunteer myself to be the Petrozavodsk student
representative, much to the amusement of the Sheffield lot who almost definitely
will live to regret not volunteering themselves. When there’s a problem I’m
definitely going to be embracing the whole “naaaah just YOLO it.”
We had a long long 5-6 hour journey to Petrazavodsk where
we’ll be studying with a guy called Sasha leading us. He switched between
Russian and English pretty sporadically, was hard to keep up. At around 19:45
the roads started getting less paved and more gravelly which made for a bumpy
journey, and the view managed to stay the same the whole way there. Russia has
these tall thin trees, and apparently that’s the only type of foliage.
We were dropped off in groups to meet our hosts on the
street. For some of them it kinda looked like some guy saw a bunch of people
standing with suitcases and picked one of us to take with him and the guy in
charge of us just let him. So yeah, hope my friends are alright right now and
not kidnapped. I have a lovely lady called Valentina and she hasn’t stopped
talking at me for 2 hours now. Luckily we’ve totes bonded (I think) and I seem
to be able to contribute some form of conversation. It’s either that or she
just thinks I’m a complete and utter moron because I can’t hang my coat up in
the right place after 4 tries. My room is a pretty decent size and there’s a
bowl of apples on the floor in the corner along with a turnip and what is
either a watermelon or aubergine (I’m not so great at identifying fruit.) I’m
not entirely sure what’s up with the fruit thing so I’ll just leave it for now.
She lives right opposite the university and whenever I ask a question she goes
пять минут пять минут (5 mins, 5 mins). I guess every issue I have can be
solved by the fact that the university is just opposite. I got the nice grand
tour of the flat, there’s a working shower and she came into this miniscule toilet with me
to show me how it locks.
Turns out that last year my friend Sarah lived here too so
after I mentioned that she started periodically bursting into an anecdote about her breakfast
eating habits. Apparently it’s pancakes every day for breakfast; something to
look forward to! Or maybe it was potato dumplings with syrup; 3 months of no
Russian is taking its toll.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get some of the bureacracy I crave,
what with having to extend and change our visas and generally just register our
presence here. Time to be at the university is 11:20 so we’ll get a nice lie in
and hopefully there’s more of that to come.
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