It was a
chilly night in the Karelian town of Petrozavodsk. I was sitting in the lounge
at the table doing some homework about various differences in the religions of
the East and West of Russia (potentially anyways I needed the dictionary for most of it tbh).
Valentina is seperating the berrys, she’d collected from her dacha, from the
stalks as she had been doing for the previous 12 hours non stop. Suddenly she
looks at me and asks if she can tell me a secret. I jumped at the promise of
some gossip and invited her to come and sit opposite me so I could understand
what she was about to tell me. For some weird reason, proximity directly
correlates to comprehension. She starts a story about Sarah who lived here last
year and how she enjoyed her beer. I already know this about Sarah and it’s one
of the main reasons I like her. Girl knows how to partaaay. Unfotunately
Valentina has nothing celebrotary to say about the fact that Sarah can have 6
beers in one night. She starts telling me how it makes you feel terrible in the
morning and makes you do bad things. Car accidents happen, you walk in the
street without looking, you talk to people you don’t know. Suddenly she’s
started on shots of vodka and how they kill. I kid you not, vodka kills.
Although it does also heal according to her (my insect bite medicine). Anyways
she told me that at our local cafe there are big, bad men who stand there and
look for tourists talking in a different language and follow them home and
maybe kidnap them with axes. I was furiously looking up vocab in my dictionary
as she got to this bit so it may have been sword or something similar, but
either way, not so nice. I assured her that I enjoy Pepsi-Cola and of course
the occasional apple juice if I’m feeling craaay as the finger pointing started.
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| This man sells cucumbers on the street like nobody's business. |
We had our
first sushi today and all I can say is that you get ALL the sushi for NONE of
the money. They had a brilliant vegi platter that I and Olivia shared and some
vegan stuff too for Eva. For some reason, Russian sushi includes a lot of
Philadelphia creme cheese and they even have a Philadelphia Mania platter. I
didn’t try to explain why this was occuring, just consumed. We’re all used to
the horrors of Yo Sushi – basically a lot of money for very little food but for
£5-6 you get a massive platter that
legit would last 3-4 meals if we hadn’t eaten it all in 1. I’ve never felt so
sick from 1 meal but also oh so satisfied. They also like to put a lot of fried
cheese in general. I feel like maybe it’s Amerian inspired – something the
Yanks would come up with but somehow haven’t.
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| All the sushi |
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| Sovietski ice-cream |
I came home today to find a cute little lady in our lounge.
She was speaking Russian, English and French and the combination of these 3
confused me no end. Turns out her parents live in the flat below and Valentina’s
known her all her life (she doesn’t get herself into `situations` with beer or
vodka). She explained to us (en Francais bien sur), that she works at different
faculties in the University and needs someone French and English (Clara et moi)
to help her with some of her politicy-type classes in foreign languages at her
faculty. Her mum is picking up me and Olivia on Thursday afternoon to take us
to the school. Hopefully this means we’ll make some new Russki-type friends and
have something to do with our days after classes finally!
11.9.13
Had our
first experience of a Russian school fire alarm today. It’s this loud bell with
someone saying something over the speakers pretty incomprehensible. As the
typical foreign students we are, we all just stayed in our seats until the
teacher herded us outside where we stood with the rest of the students excited
at the prospect of wasting some learning time. We went back into our class and
started our second lesson. When the bell went off again the next teacher
decided we were to stay and ignore the possibility of fire. Fair play. There’s
never normally a fire when the alarm goes off. However when we ventured outside
the classroom, there was indeed smoke billowing out from a door about 20m to
the left. This did not put of the prospect of knowledge and we perservered with
hearing about the news in Russian. Potentially we’ve all inhaled something we
definitely should not have today. Hope it’s not life-threatening.
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| At least it's not snowing yet |
I asked
Valentina yesterday about whether the shops close when the snow comes because
appaz it comes in October and lasts until about February. She basically laughed
me out of the room. I tried to change it into a logical question and ask about
the little kiosks which surely don’t have heating, but alas, this also provided
vicious guffawing. I told her how the schools close in England when we get snow
and she waved me away so she wouldn’t have to deal with such nonsense.
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| The herds of babushkas selling their vegetables. |
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