Wednesday, September 01, 2010

      I’ve been terrible with keeping up with this damn blog lately, and for that I am sorry. It’s been an eventful past few days, though (with the exception of yesterday, actually, but one day out of a week ain’t bad).

      I suppose I should start with my birthday, which was Monday! We took our language placement test and it was hard. Like, beyond comprehension difficult, and it wasn’t just me it was everybody (which makes me feel 1000% better). We sat in a room with all of the Beloit students, Philip (from Germany, who is really wonderful) and some students from France, England and Germany. Our proctor asked us all questions verbally in Russian and then we each had to come up with a question to ask her. Then we took a grammar test, which to me felt like 70% wild guesses and 30% educated ones.

      After that, we all kind of dispersed and I went off in search of this bar called Karma Bar. It was a total and absolute failure, but all was not lost because I got to walk around our area of the city for about 2 hours and I got stopped by a cute guy who asked me something that I totally didn’t understand, although he was very nice about the whole thing.

      In the end, for my birthday we went to get dessert and drinks (a birthday mojito for me!) at Yolki-Palki, which was where we went for lunch the other day. I got ice cream, which seems like a useless detail but I have to say, Russian ice cream is absolutely unbelievable. So yummy and rich.

      After that, we all went back to my room, had a few beers, and tried to figure out exactly what to do. We didn’t have to meet with Marina until 2:00 the next day so Philip suggested that we go out to a club or a bar. The catch was that the dorm and the metro both close at 1:00 AM, so we had to make a decision about whether to stay out all night (until dorms/the metro open at 5:00 AM) or go out for a few hours and come back. Hana and I researched and found a cool club/bar called Propaganda, so we (myself, Hana, Philip, Ashley, David and Kate) headed out to the metro to get to the center of the city.

      We got there and searched around for what felt like forever (with Hana asking quite a few people for directions – lots of them very cute and all of them extremely helpful), but when we finally got there the bouncer told us that the kitchen was closed and the bar was empty. Also, it was a Monday night. (Secretly, I think that he was face controlling and we were simply not up to standard but who knows – I tend to be a little paranoid)

      We ended up going to a little bar next door called Bourbon Street, which was New Orleans-themed. The menu was super expensive, so I tried to get the cheapest thing on the menu, which turned out to be a shot of (really really good) vodka served with a slice of lemon. We stayed for a few drinks, and by that time it was midnight. Half of us (Hana, Philip and myself) ended up staying out all night, which I have to say was the greatest decision I’ve made probably all week. Truly.

      We finished our drinks, and then decided it was time for a change of scenery. We ended up at one of those thousand little street vendors that sells literally EVERYTHING you could ever want. Flowers, magazines, beer, fruit, meat, ice cream. Everything. Philip treated everyone to beer, and he bought me a German brand to try (it was very good, even though I don’t necessarily consider myself a beer connoisseur). While Philip and I were talking, Hana met a guy whose name I cannot remember, and he got her phone number and pointed us in the direction of a bar down the street.

      When we got there, it was tucked into a little alley and most of the lights on the sign were totally burnt out. There was a bouncer outside the door and a group of extremely creepy, grabby guys, We were a little weirded out, but actually once we got inside the bar/restaurant/club was pretty dead and the waitresses were really nice. The music was terribly loud, though, and we left after a drink to find, as we would find Philip repeating upwards of about 100 times that night, an adventure.

      Our next adventure, it turned out, was to meet an itinerant Chechnyan man who did not want money, but simply to talk to people. He told us (through Hana, who ended up doing most of the translating for us) that he fought in the war and he described the meat they fed to the army, and after all was said and done (about 45 minutes later) we took pictures with him and he kissed my and Hana’s hands.

      After, it was time for a bathroom break and we picked a Kofe Haus (of which there must be thousands in the city – sort of like Starbucks but with alcohol and meals as well) to regroup and sit down. While we were figuring out something else to do, a man across the restaurant got our attention and asked if we would help him practice his English.

      As it turns out, he was born in Kazakhstan of a Kazakh mother and a Russian father. He really wanted to go to the United States and he loved (and knew absolutely tons about) basketball. He knew players, playoff winners, everything. We stayed and talked to him for a while, and Hana noticed that one of the lenses of his glasses was missing and he told us that he had not slept in days. We left the Kofe Haus at about 4:30 in the morning to find something else to do.

      Hana noticed that we must have been very close to St Basil’s cathedral, so we went picked a direction and walked. Oddly enough, the metro station we had gotten off at the beginning of the evening was only a few blocks away from St Basil’s. At that point, we were the only people on the streets aside from a vendor right near the cathedral and the occasional militsia and guards outside St Basil’s. Philip needed another beer (as was the theme of the evening) and so we stopped at the vendor to purchase some. Again, he treated, saying that since it was my birthday I should not have to pay for beer. The vendor was a really nice woman who asked what we were doing up so late. We told her that we wanted to see the sun rise over St Basil’s and she called us adorable.

      So that is where we ended our night, sitting on the edge of the underground sidewalk, drinking cheap beer and being utterly silent. As it got sunnier it also got colder, which was miserable for Hana and I but Philip was happy as a clam. He took so many pictures but I hardly think any of them could have turned out that great considering his physical condition at that point.

      We ended up taking the metro back to campus at around 8:30 and crawled straight into bed. We all had to be in korpus 3 the next day to meet Marina, and our “lesson plan” for that day turned out to be watching a video showing the sights of Moscow downtown and when St Basil’s came on the screen it was really very exciting for me.

      The rest of the week has been rather unexciting. Short little trips into the area surrounding the campus, but other than that no major events and not a lot of sight-seeing. Hopefully I will take more pictures to post later (of Red Square perhaps?).

      Anyway, there are more plans for later in the week. On Friday we are going to take a boat trip down the Moscow River. Then, the weekend and the city’s birthday which should make for an exciting time.

      Until then!

      Emily