Vinaigrettes. Wait, what? Oh, vignettes.

I have made it through the first week of classes. Whew! I think for the most part they’ll be interesting, but they really tired me out this week. It’ll get better as I get settled into a routine. Currently it’s looking like Monday’s going to be a busy day for me: class 9:30-14:00, internship 15:00-19:00, and then elective class 19:30-21:00. But the rest of the week I’ll just have class till 2 every day, and then I’ll be free, so it looks like I’m going to have plenty of time to study, work out, and be social.

Internship

On Wednesday Lena, our program coordinator, took me and Berney to meet our boss and coworkers at the InterJournalist Center, where we’ll be doing our internships. It sounds like we’re going to have plenty of serious work to do, and I’m looking forward to getting started. Inna Genadievna, my boss, listed several possible projects for me, including translation work for their bi-monthly journal, making contacts to try to increase distribution of the journal, searching (and applying, perhaps) for grants, and even teaching English. Berney will be involved more with organizing seminars which the center puts on every couple of months or so.

New Friends

Last night Alina and Tanya, our new coworkers, took Berney and I to see various parts of downtown. I’d seen them all before, of course, but driving around for a couple hours really helped me get reoriented and remember where stuff is. Then we spent a couple hours at a newish club called Sochi. Excellent atmosphere. I had the Greek salad. Russian feta cheese has not improved since my last trip here. ;) Alina and Tanya are young and sociable, and I’m really hoping we’ll get to be pretty good friends by the end of the year.

50 Cadets

My apartment building shares a courtyard with a dorm for cadets in some military or aerospace academy (not quite sure which, there are a lot of academies around here). Several times a day a clump of cadets in fatigues traipses through the courtyard on their way to or from class. Usually they march in neat rows, but one thing interferes with their military discipline: they’re replacing some pipes in our courtyard, which means there’s a gigantic trench that cuts through the pavement. To cross the trench, you have to walk over a narrow plank bridge, wide enough for one person. As you can imagine, it takes a bit longer than usual to get all those boys across the courtyard because of the bridge (affectionately called a mostik in Russian, which for some reason I always think of as a “bridge-lette”). Ok, keep this in mind as I go off on what seems like an unrelated tangent.

Today I decided to go running in the park near my building. I fell off the fitness wagon about three weeks before the end of the program in Middlebury, and although Galina’s been feeding me well (steamed veggies and salmon earlier this week, yummy!) and I’ve been trying to watch what I eat, I haven’t been eating as well as I’d like. As today was sunny and warm, I decided that today was the day to get back in the saddle.

[Ok, real tangent: I have to admit to a cookie binge the other night, after the steamed veggies and salmon. 500 grams of chocolate priyaniki. That’s like 3000 calories and 365 grams of carbs. My intestines and eating schedule are still recovering from that stress-induced disaster. The funny thing is, I don’t feel stressed out. At least not to the extent that I did upon my arrival in Piter in 2005. But the fact that I don’t want to do my homework and I find myself wanting to eat all the time, even when I’m not hungry, suggests that I am indeed under some stress. I can only hope that I will get adjusted faster than I did in 2005, when it took until the middle of the spring semester before I was comfortable in Petersburg. Also, I won’t be buying any more bags of cookies. Can’t trust myself to eat just two or three.]

Although jogging is starting to get more popular in Russia, it’s still not really accepted to run on the sidewalks along the streets. Even if people didn’t stare at you like you’re a freak running down the sidewalk, I wouldn’t run on the streets here anyway: too many pedestrians to get around, and the car pollution makes deep breathing both nearly impossible and dangerous for your health. In the park people still look askance at me as I run, but as there are fewer people in the park than on the street, it doesn’t bother me.

I donned my usual exercise attire: hot pink running shorts, a black tank top, and my iPod strapped to my arm. This is definitely not the costume I would wear to try to blend in, but what are you going to do? A woman running in the park already doesn’t blend in, so I may as well wear what’s comfortable. After my jog (5 times around the park jogging and twice walking, and I almost died. I’m so out of shape. Also, is tea really acidic? My stomach felt all burny), I triumphantly returned to my courtyard. To my dismay, my return coincided with the arrival from the other direction of a clump of cadets, who were coming toward me across the mostik. My apartment is on the other side of that bridge; I had no option but to simply wait as all 50 of those boys crossed the bridge in single file. I’m not kidding you, every single one of them looked me over like I was insane, sweaty gym clothes, bare arms and legs, tattoos and all. I’m sure they were just curious, but it was incredibly uncomfortable to just stand there as they filed past, not hiding their stares. I’ve never felt so on display.

This reminds me of something I’ve noticed a lot more this time: Russians are always checking each other out. It’s not really accepted to smile at strangers on the street or even make eye contact, so it seems like they look at each other much more furtively than we might in the US. Last time I was here I was so worried about the possibility of having to interact with another person that I stared at the ground all the time as I walked. This time I’m not afraid to look at people, and I catch them looking at me too. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s so obvious that I’m foreign (not that I care anymore if they know I’m foreign), but I’ve definitely noticed it. I can’t say I’m not doing it too – I check out every pair of women’s shoes that I see coming my way. :)

The Laughing Buddha

Galina has this horrible horrible statue of the happy Buddha that actually laughs. But it’s not pleasant laughter, it’s this blood-curdling maniacal giggle. What’s worse, it laughs at random. I’m not sure what sets it off, but I’ll just be sitting in my room, minding my own business, when this creepy laughter from the other room suddenly breaks the silence. Shudder. Galina said it woke her up the other night, and she was so freaked out that she put it out on the balcony so she wouldn’t hear it the rest of the night. That begs the question: why does she have the damn thing in the first place? Or why doesn’t she take the battery out? The thing has laughed at least half a dozen times since I got home from my jog. Maybe I’ll take the batteries out.

Flash Cards

Except for in Russian Word Formation class, where we were given systematic lists of words to learn, I stopped making and using flashcards to help learn vocabulary ages ago – I found that it took a lot of time to make them, and then I rarely reviewed them. However, I think it might be time to give them another try. I have simply tons of new vocabulary that I’ve written down from class and from life just this week alone, but it’s all so random and unrelated that I don’t think I can learn it just from my little notebook. Also, in the past I’ve gotten away with not reviewing vocabulary very much because I was working to learn high-frequency words. Most words I simply eventually memorized because I heard them in day-to-day speech. Now, however, I’m working to learn lower-frequency words – the kind you find in academic settings and written language, but are unlikely to hear in a normal conversation. That kind of vocabulary is much more difficult to absorb, at least for me. If anyone has any strategies or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear from you. Actually, I’m always happy to hear from you in general. :)