So I would say today was pretty productive. I woke up, had breakfast (the continental breakfast here leaves something to be desired, but it’s okay…it did its job. I left the hostel not hungry and not needing to eat for a couple of hours), went to Sannaya Square. Called Deda’s friends. We’re probably going to meet after I come back from Novgorod, around the 30^th. I’m excited, this should be very nice.

Wandered trying to find the Railway Museum. Found it. It was closed. So I wandered some more, looking for more things on the checklist of things to see. Had a nice business lunch. And as I was wandering trying to find a particular church/cathedral, I ran right into St. Isaac’s Square. I knew this had to be an important place, as there was a large, aesthetically pleasing building with a Russian flag on it, a statue, and a gigantic cathedral. Turns out this was, in fact, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, but it was on a different map because this was technically a different section in my guide (they break up the cities into sections, so you can sightsee in one section, and then go to another, etc). I had planned on leaving the Palace Embankment section until I got back, but it seems as if I just ran right into it. So I went to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, which was ABSOLUTELY amazing. SO gorgeous. I can’t decide whether or not I like it more than the Cathedral of the Assumption. St. Isaac’s looks a lot newer. But oh man. I could have just stood there for hours.

Then happened to run into the Bronze Horseman. Pretty exciting. Also I think there were two people there who were supposed to be dressed up as Peter the Great and Catherine II. I’m not really sure what their purpose was…but I guess it was amusing to look at them (this was exactly what I wrote my essay on for Speech Practice…the prompt was “who needs an ordinary person?” (which, by the way, is a completely ridiculous and stupid question, but whatever) and I said that I did, because I like to people-watch, and if they didn’t exist, how would I occupy myself on the streets? I’m not sure she loved that essay). I also saw the Palace Square and looked at the Hermitage, but I’m coming back one day after Novgorod. I want to get there when it opens and then not leave until it closes. And then maybe I’ll go back again. We’ll see.

Found the Marinskii Theatre, and maybe want to see something there. They have a New Year’s Eve show, and Romeo and Juliet on January 2^nd. I guess I’ll see how much tickets cost. Mama Mia is also playing somewhere that is not the Marinskii Theatre, so I guess we’ll just have to see…

The moral of the story is that I did a lot of walking around today and my feet hurt a lot. Also I went to a Subway with wifi. What kind of Subway has wifi? And I ordered a sub but the girl put a ridiculous amount of sauce on it that I didn’t want at all. And it was white-ish, making me believe that a significant part of it was mayonnaise. But I scraped as much off as possible and then ate it. Which I was actually proud of myself for, given my aversion to condiments of all kinds. Not feeling so great right now though, so maybe that wasn’t a good decision.

Friday, December 28^th

Oh, okay, so I forgot to mention this yesterday. But you can’t buy tickets for the Electrichka (sort of like a train?) early. You have to buy them the day of. Which does NOT work out well for planning purposes, because what are you supposed to do if there aren’t any left? So I got to the train station this morning to buy my electrichka ticket 25 mins before my train left. Everything was fine. No need to worry.

Then I started freaking out though, because I guess there was one “Novgorod” stop before the ACTUAL Novgorod, so then I wasn’t sure where to get off. I was pretty sure that Novgorod was the end of the line, so I wouldn’t need to worry about these things, but I’m positive the overhead voice said “Novgorod” 45 mins before we got there. I couldn’t understand anything else though because it was really fuzzy. So then I was afraid that I would just be riding the electrichka for hours before someone found out and then I’d be kicked off the side of the tracks in the middle of Russia with a heavy blue adidas bag. But the first Novgorod stop was in the middle of nowhere and no one else was getting off, so I didn’t either.

This went on for about 45 mins until we actually arrived in Novgorod and I realized I had been right all along and there was no reason to freak out about it. So my phone wasn’t working last night when I tried to call hostels/hotels (my phone is being really annoying, actually, and only works about half the time), so I just wandered to the hotel recommended by Lonely Planet. And they had free rooms. So everything was okay.

So I put my stuff down and hunted down a café (which was much more difficult than it should have been. But I found a bunch of really fancy cafes, and CLEARLY I couldn’t go there in jeans, so I ended up wandering the streets for quite some time). Also there was a blizzardish thing today. Made walking difficult. But that’s okay.

Novgorod itself is pretty small. Even the kremlin is small. It’s really crazy to think about how old it is though, and how much history has taken place here. So I enjoyed just walking around the kremlin, being in a small church built in the 1500s, seeing old icons in museums, etc. I felt like I saw a lot today, which is good. The only bad thing is everything closes at like 5 or 6, even the churches, so after that I didn’t have any sightseeing to do.

Which actually was okay with me. I wandered around the town a little longer, stopped in a produktii (food) store to buy dinner (which consisted of a bulachka, an ice cream bar, and some apple juice, which was so much better than it sounds and was exactly what I wanted), headed back to my room, put all of my food products away in this snazzy little mini fridge the Hotel Akron provided me, and took a shower. Organized a bit. Watched Chocolat while having dinner. It’s now almost 10 and I’m ready to go to bed. Actually I was ready to go to bed at like 7, but that’s okay.

Tomorrow I’ll see more of Novgorod. Probably not everything, but I’m okay with that. My goal was to see all the necessities (which I’ll be able to do) and then as many churches as possible (which I won’t be able to do). But Novgorod has 30 churches. Making seeing all of them an unrealistic goal. Also I’ve already seen SO many churches and cathedrals here that I think I’ll forgive myself if I don’t see all of them. I love them, and they are SO pretty, but I can’t keep them straight anyway (except for the main ones, the little ones just all blur together). I hope the hotel has somewhere where I can store my luggage for four hours before my electrichka train back to St. Petersburg.

Speaking of which, I don’t know where my next hostel is located. And don’t know where there’s an internet café here. I think there’s a wifi café next to the train station, and I’ll probably need to have dinner anyway (at like 9 PM), so that’ll be a good choice. I can find the address and then actually find it. Sonya and Alya might already be there? Not sure. They’ll be there soon though, I do know that.

I hope my phone works when Deda’s friends try to call me back. It’s been REALLY annoying lately. I think I’ll just call them back at some point tomorrow just in case.

Also carrying all these bags around is like DEATH on my shoulder. Carrying around my black purse all semester probably wasn’t good for it either, but that AND a blue adidas bag? Man. I mean, I switch shoulders and everything, but my right shoulder is already messed up, and now I can feel it just…well, completely not where it should be. For example, I’m lying on my back right now and I can feel my shoulderblade jutting into the mattress. This is uncomfortable. I hope I can straighten this out when I get back, because if not, oh man. THAT will be a major problem.

Also, I didn’t thing this would be true before, but I think when I come back there’s going to be some major reverse culture shock. I’m not looking forward to it. I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE RUSSIA.

Saturday, December 29^th

So slept in till 9:30 today. Went and had breakfast at the café in the hotel (the same café, coincidentally, where Sonya and Alya had eaten the day before and I didn’t even know!) which was not very good. Well, the espresso was good. But anyway, went to see the art museum. Have I talked about museum experiences before? At every museum there are about 60,000 old women whose job it is to follow you around and make sure you don’t, like, destroy the art or something. So there’s always a woman sitting in every room closely watching you. And if there’s only a few women, they stand in the corner and follow you around as you look at things. It’s very unsettling. Also there were these women at the icon museum who were VERY concerned because I was evidently looking at things out of order. I mean, I might see something from a different church before finishing the icons from the first! What would we do? My entire opinion and icon experience will all out of whack (seriously, one woman for like 15 mins explained to me how the icons are grouped by church and time). I did not look at things “out of order” again.

Then I tried to go to the Chamber of Facets, which was closed. Tried to find an internet café to figure out the address of the next hostel (I need to start getting on that knowing-where-I’m-going thing before I actually arrive at my destination), but it seems the only working internet café is in the kremlin, which is closed on weekends (like, actual weekends, not the ones they choose). Walked around Yaroslav’s court. All the museum women there were really nice and friendly, except for one woman who yelled at me while I was looking for…some sort of museum, don’t remember. Also there was freezing rain in Novgorod today. Yesterday was a blizzard, and now freezing rain. This weather is AWFUL.

So I walked around some more. Then wanted to go to this Chocolate Café, but it looked too fancy for me. Why are there so many fancy cafes in Novgorod? I am POSITIVE the fancy café:people ratio is completely imbalanced. Anyway so then I was sad. And went back to this café and ordered borsht without sour cream, and got something that wasn’t borsht with sour cream. I picked out the sour cream but then tried to ask the girl if I could actually have borsht…and she claimed that it was, in fact, borsht. Her reasoning was “I ate it this morning”. I don’t care if you ate it this morning, that doesn’t make it borsht! It wasn’t bad though, so I really can’t complain.

OH. MY GOD. I forgot to mention this. So there was this photo exhibit around Yaroslav’s Court, about old Novgorod. So I went to see it. And there were these two women there, who, like all the other church museum people, were very nice. And then I saw this staged scene that I couldn’t really figure out…and one of the two women rushes up to me and explains how for only 30 rubles, I can have my picture taken with these scenes as many times as I want! And she can take them for me, since I’m alone, maybe, if I set up the shot with my camera, it’s digital so she probably doesn’t know how to use it (she said that, not me). Then she rushed to show me all these pictures of other people who had dressed up in strange costumes and taken pictures with wax figures, umbrellas, and chairs. So she was clearly very excited about this, so I figured I could spare the 30 rubles for 15 mins of entertainment for her. So she and the other woman fought over what I should wear (“no, she should wear the red hat, it matches the scarf!” “no, the black one would look better!” “No, she’ll wear the white scarf with that one!” “Well, fine, we can take lots of pictures though, let’s start with these one and then try the black hat”) and so on. Every time I had to set the zoom with my camera, but the woman didn’t always stand where I had stood, so a lot of times I’m really far away, or really close up. Also, even though I used image stabilization, they were always blurry. So after like 15 or 20 minutes and like 20 pictures, I have 3, non-blurry, completely ridiculous photographs. They also gave me a certificate with a kruglii stamp. Words cannot express the ridiculousness of this experience.

So then I went to the train station and bought my ticket for the electrichka. Sat in the train station, heard them say something about the train from Novgorod to St. Petersburg and watched as a lot of people got up. Decided that I would follow them and sat on a train. Hoped it was the right one, as I didn’t want to go back and check or ask anyone, and couldn’t understand the fuzzy voice overhead (and this isn’t from a lack of language skills, NO ONE could have understood what this guy was saying). 4 hours later I arrived in St. Petersburg. Mission accomplished.

Except I still didn’t know where I was going. But they had an internet place in the train station so I got on and found the address and whatnot. Except my time cut out right in the middle of facebook, so I’m hoping it logged me out automatically. That would be a disaster if not. This hostel is actually really really nice. In terms of decoration, anyway. Really comfortable. They supply towels. Nice kitchen. Free eggs, yogurt, and cheese (you really don’t know how big of a deal this all is. Free eggs! I could eat eggs all day long!). Although the 2 girls running it look a bit…ditzy. And some other girl staying here said they don’t really know how to do anything, so if there’s a problem they have to call someone else. They’ve done a nice job of hanging balloons and festive streamers, though. And they have wifi. Pretty great place so far. I would say it’s better than the one in Moscow, except the people here so far aren’t as fun and I have a major crush on the Moscow hostel owner (I’ve probably stated that already), who is not here in St. Petersburg.

I feel bad because I think I talked Sonya and Alya to death once I got here. I’m just so excited to see people who are a) not crazy Cubans asking me if I like them or b) Russian employees of the service industry or c) Russian women working in museum churches dying to take my photograph dressed up in ridiculous clothes.

I’m always thinking of things I want to note here but then forget. I need to write this stuff down.