Well, this blog thing isn't working too great, because I still just don't take the time to type, though I found free internet in the school library a while ago. So, here's the last few weeks.

Vladimir and Suzdal- we went on the train with Olga, who was at Beloit last year. As soon as we got on the train, practically, people got up and started trying to sell things (chocolate, duct tape, doorbells...). I think Olga was really embarrassed. Really though, Russian trains are not that bad. like a school bus at the worst, and better than Amtrak for timing etc. Though we had some trouble coming back. More on that momentarily. So, we took the train for about three hours to Vladimir. It used to be a more important princedom than Moscow, but then the Mongols wiped it out. Later, the Soviets industrialized, so now if you go up to monastaries on the cliff above the river, you can see a nuclear power plant. Anyways, Vladimir was interesting, though there wasn't too much there. After about an hour, got on the bus to Suzdal. It was completely stuffed-- I mean people standing in every available place even, and it was about a 40 minute ride. Suzdal is much less industrialized than Vlad. We walked around for awhile, several monasteries. There was a market still in the main square kind of area, and several people pedaling horse and carriage rides. The most interesting thing about Suzdal was that it is still full of old Russian houses… I saw no apartment blocks. A fair number of these houses were still pretty well kept up too. By this point, though, Logan was all “I want to go back to Moscow…” Anyways, around when it got dark, we went into this restaurant and got some borscht and bliny. It was just us and some Japanese teenagers (only other foreign tourists I think we saw). So, after that, we had to take taxis back to the bus stop, where they wouldn’t sell us legit tickets in the building, you had to buy them from the guy on the bus. Olga was again embarrassed, I think. The bus was really comfortable, though, nobody standing and there was heat. We didn’t have too much of a problem getting on the train back to Moscow, though there was a stop over in this village, Petushki… anyways, we followed some Russians and ended up on the wrong train (there were no signs). So we had to go to the front of the train, jumping over passed out people, and when we got there, the conductor guys basically said they didn’t give a shit about what happened to us. So we had to jump out of the train (it was stopped) and run back to the platform, maybe ¾ of a mile away. And it was cold. I also forgot to mention that Talia was with us, she came from Estonia to see Olga and doesn’t speak any Russian (she isn’t Estonian, was just doing study abroad there). So anyhow, we made it back to Moscow okay, though we had to carefully select a wagon that wasn’t full of drunks playing cards and guys pissing in corners.

Overnight trains are pretty nice. We took the 5 PM train to Petersburg, and it was nice. In Petersburg we had an apartment... really nice and cheap ($30 a night). We were also nicely located near a Carl's Junior (also ate at the Uzbek place next door, and Pizza Hut). We went and checked out the Hermitage the first afternoon, were there for about five hours. We didn't make it through. There is actually a pretty nice display of Chinese, Middle Eastern, etc. stuff on the third floor, but it's not well taken care of... I think the exhibit has been the same for the last 80 years or so. After that, walked down to the Bronze Horseman (it's maybe %150 size of The Scout, but still pretty impressive.) I guess we also went to the Saviour on Spilt Blood, cathedral built after Alexander was assassinated. It's pretty great, interior covered with mosaics. The next day we say Peter and Paul Fortress, it was a bit of a let down, lots closed. But I got to see the Cosmonautics museum. The third day, struck out on my own, went to the Ethnographic museum, and then to Peter's cabin. Both were definitely worth seeing. Overall, I think that Peter is mostly old buildings of the type you can see most anywhere (turn of the century) and a lot smaller than Moscow. There seems like a lot less to do there. But, the canals are impressive and so is the Neva. Also, I liked it a lot better on the last day when it wasn’t raining.

So, I started going on walks with this kid Dima, who I met through a penpal website. He’s 19, so we are the same age, and he has been teaching himself English for about 3 months. We can hold conversations in English and Russian, and both learn a lot. The first place we went was VDNKh, which is now less nice because they turned the fountains off, and we went on a weekday at around 4 o’clock. They were playing Whitney Houston and “It’s Raining Men” and the like, and there were few people around, so it was kind of creepy. Last weekend we went to Kolomenskoe, which was a tsarist estate, started by Ivan the Terrible’s father, or maybe even earlier. Peter lived there after the Streltsy killed his family, and now they’ve moved other old buildings there, so there are several churches and a cabin Peter built when he was working on Arkhangelsk. I didn’t see the latter, but I’ll probably be back. We went into the museum, where Dima told me that he isn’t much for history. Luckily we found some 17th Century clock mechanisms on the top floor, that satisfied him. We’re planning on going to the Museum of Nuclear Technology at some point. Anyways, at this part there’s also a ravine, and once you cross it’s hard to get back because they’re working on all of the bridges. After we finally got back to the entrance, we went to McDonalds. Biggest difference there is sizes, though you can still get everything as big as you can in the US. Russians all seem to really like the sweet and sour sauce. There’s also this thing here called the GreekMac. Is that in the US now?

Last weekend we also went out to a bar with Ildar, Nadia and Olga (who were at Beloit last semester), which was fun, it’s too bad we can’t hang out with them more often. But like pretty much all the Russians here, they have to commute home on the metro for about an hour. The place we went was kind of German themed, but they were having a Celtic band when we got there, so that was kind of confusing. Anyways, though, the beer was really good. Afterwards we walked back to school through some snow singing what we could of the Soviet anthem, avoiding the militsia who were out in droves because it was the Day of National Unity (what they made up a couple of years ago to replace the anniversary of the October Revolution).

So, those are the bigger events, I guess. Now I’m planning on going to Budapest, meeting Joanna and others from her France program. I just have to get a train/plane ticket. The train is 28 hours, I guess, but long trains like that sound like a lot of fun (Meredith just got back from Kazan, etc. this week). After that, I will hopefully go to Samara with the school. There is supposedly some kind of international student conference at a school there. I gave them money for the train ticket today, I hope this works out. One of the teachers who was planning it got sick and has disappeared, and they even replaced her this morning. So now I have a guy teacher, Mikhail Mikhailovich, who seems pretty cool. Anyways, I want to go to Samara pretty bad, it’s in Tatar land, south of Kazan.