Happy Birthday to Leah!

February 21st was my 22nd Birthday, and the only one I will probably ever have in Russia so we had to celebrate. The day before I had been suffering with a wicked sore throat and was having difficulty talking so I took a sick day from classes (don't worry I got myself all caught up already) and stayed home to rest with the hope that I would be feeling better on Saturday. Luckily, this is exactly what happened.
Saturday morning, we all walked to Lenta (which is kind of like Costco in that it has absolutely everything, you just don't have to buy in bulk) where we bought a few groceries, sushi for lunch, a birthday cake and a bottle of "Soviet Champagne." A quick side note: it is actually illegal for this champagne to be called a champagne because it is not from Champagne, France . . . but oh well this is Russia. Plus it costs the equivalent of about $4 Canadian and tastes fantastic. While in Lenta I got a phone call from my best friend Chris, so I wandered around the store trailing my roommates and excitedly chatting away with him. Sadly for him it was 3 am, but it was fantastic to hear a friendly voice and to finally be able to explain to him in more detail what life has been like in Russia! I think he is living vicariously through me and is dreaming of his own trips to Europe even more so now.
After trekking home, and eating our sushi lunch, we headed to Nevsky Prospect (downtown) to see if we could take a city bus tour. However, when we got to the little kiosks for the numerous bus tours of the city, we had already missed the Enlgish tours of the day. Theoretically we could have taken a tour in Russian, but our vocabularies aren't overly great yet, and we wanted to be sure that we could take in as much info about the sites as we could, so we decided to wait and take a tour in English on another day.
When this initial plan didn't pan out, Ross, Laura and I headed for the Church-On-Spilled-Blood. It was fantastic! So glad we went to see it instead. Reminder: in a past blog I mentioned a bit of this church's history, it was built as a monument for tsar Alexander II who had been, before his assassination, attempting to set up a constitutional monarchy. It was actually built on the spot where, while he was driving through a square in his carriage, he was bombed. To this day, despite the floor throughout the rest of the church being made to look like a huge mosaic carpet out of various colours of marble (or maybe granite?), there has been left a large hole in the floor where underneath you can still see the old and slightly misplaced cobblestones which were dislodged in the explosion. On the walls of the church, covering all 6560 square meters (unsure of the conversion into feet sorry), are mosaic images of saints, biblical events and characters. It is absolutely stunning! I cannot imagine the amount of time it must have taken the artists to create such beautiful images and scenes all out of tiny, individually placed tiles. From floor to ceiling we saw images including: numerous orthadox saints; scenes from the bible such as: Joseph, Mary and Jesus' flight into Egypt; the Burning Bush, the Sermon on the Mount, Christ walking on water and healing people, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and on and on. On the ceilings of the domes, were the faces of Mary the Mother of God, John the Baptist, Christ, etc. The pictures are stunning, but in person this church is like nothing I have ever seen before. In my opinion, Alexander II could not have wished for a more beautiful monument.
After the Church-On-Spilled-Blood, the three of us who had gone to the church met up with Jessi and we all went together to an Italian restaurant for dinner (really great food, and nice wine!). Then, following dinner, we headed home where we sat down to eat cake, drink our champagne and toast with some vodka (this is Russia afterall). Heather, another Canadian student studying here with us, popped in to bring me some chocolates, and so she joined us as well. Jessi and Laura bought me a Jasmine plant, which is so fitting, because almost everyone knows how crazy I am about plants and for my last three birthdays now I have been given at least 1 every year. Sorry Ross, but the Crazy Plant Lady lives on, even in Russia. *(Question for Jeana: How are the plants? Ross especially inquires about the shamrock plant, the only one he loves.) Ross bought me a fantastic set of nesting dolls (matroshki): the largest one is of Lenin, inside him Stalin, inside that Khrushchev, inside that Gorbachev, and finally Putin. It skips Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Yeltsin, but oh well! It is a gorgeous set, all handpainted and looks far nicer than some of the mass produced ones we have seen in some of the shops. (Also from Ross, the Planet Earth collection, in Russian and Enlgish yay! so we can try watching it and see how much of it we can understand in Russian). - - - All in all, a great 22nd birthday, and one I certainly won't be able to forget anytime soon. P.S. thanks to everyone who passed along birthday wishes via my Mom, and happy belated birthday to Nichole, hope your 18th was fantastic(did you get my message cuz?).

Love from Leah

Ok I am back to the history now, but this is technically school related too because it is the history of the buildings which make up the Smolny Insitute. Our part of the school is just one wing of a larger building which is part of the Smolny Insitute, is called the Centre of Russian Language and Culture, and it serves as a centre for internationals from all across the world to come to learn Russian. The building was built between 1806 and 1808 and was initially a convent as well as a school for young aristocratic girls. However, in 1917 it became the first headquarters for the Bolshevik Central Committee. This is the building from which Lenin and Trotsky executed the Revolution, and afterwards ran the Soviet government. It was also where, in 1934 Sergei Kirov (who was essentially Stalin’s right hand man) the Leningrad Party Chief was assassinated. This didn’t actually occur in the building where we study, but one of the other buildings which makes up the institute. Today, the St. Petersburg Governor uses that part of the campus as their main office. It is so fascinating to me to be going to school every day in a building which I have heard about in my Soviet History classes at UVic, and to be wandering the same halls as some very famous Soviet leaders.
In the centre courtyard of the Smolny campus, and right outside the doors of our wing of the school, is the Smolny Cathedral. This baroque style cathedral is a beautiful sky blue colour and has golden-onion domes typical of Russian churches. We have not been inside yet, because lately there has seemed to have been a lot of construction going on inside, but we intend to go in someday soon to see the interior. As a final note, this cathedral, like many of the other historic churches in St. Petersburg, is not regularly used. It no longer has a congregation and regular services, but special events and services can be held their occasionally because it has been properly blessed, etc.

Musuem Madness

The Hermitage – aka the Winter Palace, stands along the Neva River in the centre of St. Petersburg and has on its other side Palace Square. The square has in its centre a huge monument dedicated to the Russian defeat of Napoleon in 1812 and is where Bloody Sunday took place in 1905 (which began the 1905 revolution), and again in 1917 was the scene of the storming of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution! (so much history) The Palace itself was the principle home of Peter the Great. During the reign of Catherine the Great (who purchased boatloads of art) it was turned into a gallery, later opened to the public during the reign of Nicolas I. Beginning the October Revolution, the famous cruiser the Aurora fired a blank shot signaling Lenin’s Red Guards to attack. A bit of damage was done to the building, but very quickly the Provisional Government who had been occupying the building was arrested. Today, the Hermitage is made up of five linked buildings and contains ridiculous amounts of art. We spent several hours there and still only saw a fraction of what is on display. Because we have Russian student identification, we get in for free so we intend to go back. We saw only one half of the first floor, which houses the Egyptian artifacts, and then Greek and Roman art. Although we found the exhibits interesting, there is far too much to take in, hundreds of artifacts and pieces of art. However, I very much enjoyed looking through the numerous rooms which contained the Greek artworks. Last semester I took a course on Greek Mythology and so I tested myself to see if I could correctly guess which mythological figure each marble statue was before reading the plaques. We saw several Aphrodites, Eros, many Apollos, Artemis, Zeus, Dionysus and on and on! It was fantastic. What we were both most interested in, instead of the art, was the architecture of the building. The rooms themselves are giant works of art impossible to describe. Every room was different from the last, with marble tiled floors, huge pillars, elaborately carved/sculpted/plastered ceilings, or with mosaic painted ceilings . . . absolutely unbelievable and there are hundreds and hundreds of rooms! I cannot wait to go back to see more of the building, to see the European Art (there are artworks by Rembrant, Raphael, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet, Picasso, Renoir, Van Gough, Matisse and so many others who are less known to me but I am sure are just as remarkable). It is absolutely awing to be in the presence of some of these artworks (ones from Greece which were sculpted nearly 2000 years ago, ones from famous artists like those I mentioned above) all while in one of the most historical buildings in all of Russia. Every square inch of the place is bursting with history (I am in heaven): the ceremonial hall (which has no less than 28 chandeliers), the apartments of the last tsar of Russia Nicholas II and his family (including the mythical Anastasia), the Jordan Staircase (google it! Trust me), the diningroom where the Bolsheviks arrested the Provisional Government (how I love early Soviet history), the Great Hall where massive parties were hosted, the throne room, the cathedral where many of the royals were married, and other rooms which Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and a host of other Russian royals ate, slept, entertained, etc. I could spend years wandering the halls of the Hermitage!

Why isnt this working?

Just for Dad - About our Classes

I hadn’t really realized until tonight when I spoke with my parents and Dad happened to ask “So do you guys go to school?” that I haven’t written about our classes or our school yet. I have been really caught up with all of the history and the sites here that I had completely forgotten. So this is for you Dad (I don’t enjoy school as much as the site seeing but I promise that I am attending actual classes here):
Firstly, when we arrived here (two days after we got here actually), we took a placement test at the school (the Smolny Institute of Russian Language and Culture) which placed us into various classes based on our level of knowledge in the language. Ross and I are both in the same class, which is made up of all Canadian students who have been studying Russian for 4-5 years.
SMI (an acronym for Mass Media), is taught to us by Mikhail Arkadyevich Krudyshev and is a course in which we read newspaper and other media articles. We are given these articles only in Russia, and we read them in class and for the most difficult words and phrases our teacher will translate them into English for us (Mikhail Arkadyevich’s English is really good). So far we have read two articles, one about the fears which Russians have, and another on what is most important to Russians. I find this class, and this teacher the most interesting, because we learn about the modern views of the Russian people, and also because Mikhail gives us great personal insight into the culture of Russia. He tells us many little anecdotes: about how you could determine which vodkas to purchase in the former Soviet Union, about what the laws are for drinking in public, about the current healthcare system here, how the city is still very inaccessible for people with physical disabilities. . . in general he has, apart from instructing us on current events, given us a lot of practical insights into Russia.
Grammar is taught to us by Marina Vadimovna Kuznetsova who is very sweet and has also given us tips on how to prevent our things from being stolen on the metro, etc. In her class we practice the strict rules of the Russian language. In Russian verbs are conjugated differently depending on who/what you are talking about. Ex. In English I would say: I like to swim. You like to swim. They like to swim. But in Russian the verb to swim is pronounced plavat – but to say I swim you would use plavau, you swim: plavaesh, they swim plavayot (sorry difficult to explain). The same is true for nouns and adjectives as well, the endings on words change in 6 different ways depending on how you are using them (this is called Cases, depending on what case you use, the ending of a word will change, and there are different endings within each case for masculine words, feminine words, neutral words, and plural words). Enough of that technical talk. Essentially we learn how to form sentences in Russian in the proper way – it’s complicated.
Conversation, is what we need the most help in, and is taught to us by Nina Petrovna Koloyartseva. She is a very interesting older woman, who tells us stories of what it was like to live through the Blockade of Leningrad during WWII. She has been teaching at our school for 52 years! She has seen so much history during these years too, she was born when this city was Leningrad, lived through WWII, lived through the reign of Stalin all the way up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and now lives in the new Russia which must seem so opposite to what her country looked like before. At any rate, in her class we practice speaking Russian by chatting about various topics. We have chatted about movies and she taught us specific phrases and questions to use for; we talked about the city of St. Petersburg and our cities in Canada and asked questions about their sites, their industries, their populations, etc.; we have also covered other things, like how to greet people and how to give complements, etc. etc. It is a bit difficult to absorb, but luckily we don’t cover too much too fast, it seems that she understands that if we repeat things for a few classes in a row, then it will become easier for us to remember them.
Literature, which we only have once a week (Grammar and Conversation we have 3 times a week, because they are the most important), is taught to us by Anastasia Sergeievna Grosheva and as you may have guessed, in her class we read Russian literature. Short stories, and poems; so far only a short story by Bunin and a poem by Alexander Blok. We read these in Russian, and then try to talk about the themes, symbols and such of them. This is rather difficult since we have never done this before in Russian and our vocabulary is a bit limited in this area, but our teacher seems to be fairly forgiving and generally gets the idea of what we are trying to say, even if we can’t quite get it out using the proper grammar.
Phonetics, which we also have once a week, is taught to us by Marina Alexandrova Ivanova. In this class, she teaches us the proper way to pronounce Russian words and phrases, and usually we read things to her and she will correct our pronunciation, or she will ask us questions and we will try to answer as best we can, and again she will tell us what we are saying wrong. This course is a little more difficult for us I think partly because our teacher at home was very forgiving about our pronunciation so we have developed a few bad habits I think. We have been saying many words in the wrong way for the last few years and it is a bit tricky to re-learn them.
Lastly, we are also taking a Film Course. Our teacher is Alexander (I can never remember his patronymic name, which is bad and I will explain later) Victorov and in his class we watch short film segments and then talk about them. We discuss the things the characters say, the subtle cultural things, and what we like about the movie etc. . . Again this is a course where we are made to practice speaking (which all our teachers agree is the area where we have the most room to improve). It is nice though, because we are learning some more colloquial expressions from the movies and from Alexander himself. He too, like some of our other teachers tells us great stories about what life was like in the Soviet Union in comparison to today, and talks to us about how regular Russians speak and think.
Patronymic Names: In Russia, a person’s second name, unlike our middle names, is not just a second given name that their parents have choosen for them. Instead they have what is called a patronymic name, which essentially tells people what their father’s name was. So using our teachers for example Mikhail Arkadyevich’s father was called Arkady . . . Marina Alexandrovna’s father was Alexander and so on. When we are in class, and in general when someone is addressing someone of authority or with politeness, they will call the person by their first name and their patronymic name, this is why it is bad that I have forgotten Alexander’s patronymic name. I would never want to call him only Alexander because it would be disrespectful. Someday soon I will simply have to apologize and ask him to repeat it for me, or spell it for me.

Love from Leah and Ross too (I seem to be monopolizing the posts lately)

Peeping Tom

Ever since we have gotten here, Ross and I have been having this issue, with having an unwanted spectator peering in on our day to day comings and goings. Even though we are up on the eighth floor where you think you would be safe, he is constantly coming to peer in through our windows to see what we are up to.
Explanation: His name is now Marshal and his is a pigeon! Sorry for the slight melodrama of my introduction but somehow it seemed necessary to fully drag my readers in. After all, this is a story about a simple pigeon and had I disclosed that at first, I may have lost your attention. Anyway, I have named him Marshal and his is a red-eyed, dark grey-coloured pigeon, with a crescent moon shaped white mark at the edge of his beak and he loves to sit on our window sill and while pretending to not pay attention to what we are doing, occasionally crane his little neck, and stand tall enough, so that he can peer in through our window at us! The little snoop has been spotted now about 4 or 5 times going through this routine, probably whistling to himself and pretending to look out over the park below us, but really he is there to monitor us (or marshal us, hence his name) . . . perhaps he is former KGB? We were able to snap a couple of pictures of him on the last sighting of him so I will attach one, it’s not very clear because of the grime on our windows, but you will get the idea.
Now that I am on the topic of animals, it might interest some people to know: that aside from the occasional smaller bird, pigeons have been the only “wildlife” we have seen in St. Petersburg. I guess maybe because they are hearty scavengers who can survive the winter here, and probably since any other birds that might ordinarily live here are all south for the winter in Sochi or some other such paradise on the Black Sea. At any rate, just a little observation. We have however seen many, many dogs! For some reason, everyone here has one, and one of our professors explains that it is because a) no one had enough money or food to be able to have dogs before, so they are kind of a status symbol in a way b)they wanted them originally for security c) and because people no longer have to live in communal apartments they actually have some space for pets. Another observation here, despite everyone living in apartments (no one has a detached house here like people have in North America, most people live in tall apartment buildings), is that there are dogs of all sizes. We have seen poodles in carrying bags, Dachshunds wading around in the snow, Dobermans, and even a brindled Great Dane (my favorite!) the other day while walking through the park on the way home. (Elisa we have even seen quite a few of Foxy’s cousins, it appears as though the Finish Spitz is a popular breed here) Most of the pets we have seen look as though they are well taken care of too, some wearing coats others fitted with boots, but occasionally we see rather sad looking ones which I try to forget about.

Museum Madness Part 2

The Russian Museum – aka the Mikhailovsky Palace:
Built between 1812 and 1825 for Grand Duke Mikhail Romanov, this is the consolation prize I was talking about before . . . it was built for him since he, unlike his brothers Alexander I and Nicholas I, never became tsar. Eventually, under Nicholas II this palace was opened to the public in 1898 as a gallery housing Russian artwork. Today, unlike the Hermitage, its collections are made up of only Russian pieces. The palace itself, which is located in the heart of St. Petersburg (only a block away from Gostiny Dvor, and Dom Knigi and Nevsky Prospect) and shares a central park with the Mikhailovsky Theatre where we saw The Nutcracker on Valentine’s Day last week, is a massive (yet again these Russian royals with super extravagant homes), grand looking building, (about the colour of Mom’s, and Uncle David and Aunt Shirley’s Kitchens), with tall white columns and a pair of lion statues flanking the main entrance’s stairs. Inside, spread throughout the rooms on both floors of the original building, and throughout the additional wing which was constructed in the early 1900’s are the museum’s collections. Firstly, we wandered through their rooms of religious icons! Russian churches and cathedrals are quite extravagantly decked out in artwork of the various orthodox saints, as well as numerous biblical figures, and these rooms contained some examples of these. We saw images of: the Crucifixion, the Nativity, and many different portrayals of Christ throughout his life; numerous depictions of Peter and Paul, at least half a dozen of the angel Gabriel, numerous of the Virgin Mary, and others. After these rooms, we entered the early 18th Century rooms which mostly housed portraits, and sculptures of various famous (and some not so famous, “unknown man”) Russian figures, as well as some depictions of mythological characters. Next were the pieces from the first half of the 19th Century and I think both Ross and I enjoyed this part of the collection the most. Again many portraits, often of people we didn’t know, so we didn’t have too much interest in these, but there were dozens and dozens of beautiful landscapes and other fantastic paintings. One of these being, “The Last Day of Pompeii” by Karl Brullov (1833), considered to be the “most important work – in the whole history of Russian painting.” It is a massive canvas depicting a scene of the citizens of Pompeii in the last few chaotic hours of the city following the eruption of the volcano (impossible for me to describe in detail since I am not up with proper terminology on art but we bought a very nice guidebook which has a great picture of it, so ask to see it when I get home). Some of my favorite pieces were those of Ilya Repin, an artist from the later 19th Century including “Ceremonial Sitting of the State Council on 7 May 1901 Marking the Centenary of its Foundation” (in a nutshell a very important meeting, and seated at the head of the table is Nicholas II); a beautiful painting of a couple waste deep in the rising surf of the ocean, she is struggling to keep her hat on her head, but he has his arms flailed out and looks to be enjoying himself immensely (again sorry for my simple explanations) called “What an Expanse!,” and lastly, perhaps my favorite, a painting of the 1905 Revolution showing a crowd of protestors waving banners and chanting, called “17 October 1905.” All in all it is a magnificent museum which you could easily spend days pouring over if you were more educated in art than I am. I definitely appreciated most of what we saw and thoroughly enjoyed the three or four hours we spent there. I may have to go back again before we leave to look through some of my favorite rooms again. (P.S. again the architecture was of greater interest to me than some of the art, think me crazy if you want to, but just wait until you see the photos in the guidebooks and you will get it. These people lived in houses that are artworks in and of themselves. I wonder if they really appreciated it?)