Wow, what a week. On Thursday I bought tickets for St. Petersburg, which, when I think about it, makes me super excited and super tired at the same time. Hm. Anyways, I got the tickets and was walking around looking for a pumpkin( I had been searching in vain for a pumpkin ALL WEEK, and had yet to find one) when Marina called and asked if I wanted to go to the opera. It was super last minute and I hate that kind of stuff, plus I had American Club, but when I said this to her she exclaimed "the opera is BETTER than american club!" I had to agree with her there, plus she refused to let me pay, so I said ok. She told me to go home быстро and so I ambled to the nearest bus stop and waited for one of my buses, 70 or 82, to come.
I've been taking the bus the whole time I've been here, and never really had a problem with it. It's a pretty simple routine: go to bus stop, wait for correctly numbered bus, get on said bus. Well, number 82 showed up and I got on and after about 5 minutes I realized, to my dismay, that the bus was going THE WRONG WAY. Apparently there are TWO number 82 buses and one just takes you in a huge loop around Leningradsky Prospekt. I started to panic because I knew I had to get home quickly, but then I figured I'd just wait until I saw a metro sign and get off and then haul ass on the metro to get home. I must have had a guardian angel, or maybe just the patron saint of pumpkins, looking over me because I got off the bus, ran to the metro station and there, there was an old babushka, holding a beautiful, maybe a little misshapen with tumor like bulges, pumpkin. I warily approached her, not wanting to seem to desperate lest she raise the price. Except here's the problem: I was never taught how to open an encounter like this in class. They don't really teach you how a regular Russian person would approach a homeless woman and ask to buy her pumpkin. So, doing the best I could, I came up and said "Pumpkin." This apparently did the trick because she immediately went into how it was a really, really nice pumpkin and it was so many grams and whatnot. She gave me a price, 130 rubles, and I tried to haggle it down but she wouldn't budge. So I bought the pumpkin and then she tried to sell me kefir in a really sketch bottle. I said no and bolted down the subway. I ran through two transfers and pushed people out of the way, my pumpkin cradled in my arm.
I eventually got home and changed for the opera. As we got to the theatre I learned that this was more of an "avant-garde" type of theatre, so instead of seeing the regular old Mazappe I got to watch Maria, wife of Mazeppe, slaughter a watermelon onstage with an axe to represent the execution of her father while a dozen brides stood in a boat and sang. It was weird.
I got home and carved the pumpkin, a picture of which is above. I couldn't decide what sort of face I should go for, so I tried to incorporate all of them. I think he looks hopeful, Erika says he looks hungry.
Halloween I went to a cemetery, how appropriate, and got to see Gorbachev and Mrs. Stalin. It was just how I imagined a Russian graveyard might be, brambling and weedy, crowded and beautiful but lonely. It was so different from the cemeteries I've seen in America and France. Then we went to the monastery next door and there was a black kitten, pictured above. Oh my god, so cute. I almost cried at how cute it was, I went into spasms at the cuteness of it.
We were supposed to have a halloween party but it was cancelled, boo, so I stayed home and read a Stephen King novel, which really put me in the Halloween spirit, with my lit pumpkin sitting on my desk. Actually, I felt pretty depressed, I hate to not celebrate to the full extent, and usually reading Stephen King makes me more uneasy than anything else, and this was no different.
Today I sat around doing nothing much, though I did buy pastries. Then tonight we all went out and met up at Chistie Prudy, the "hippie" part of town, only to discover our beloved hang out place which we fondly referred to as "the beer tent" (owing to the fact that it was just a tent and you bought beer there) has been torn down. This was indeed a blow but we quickly recovered thanks to the CD place blaring Britney Spears. We went to McDonalds and bought coffee, then went to the hippie park and poured Kahlua in the coffee and stood around, chewing the fat. We then walked a few blocks down to Kitai Gorod to meet John, our resident director, who had invited us to a club where a band he liked was playing. We got there and he informed us it cost 700 rubles just to GET IT. This is like 30 dollars, but it seems like so much more. You could buy SO MANY Big Macs with that! That's several half liter Baltika No. 7 beers! John could sense that this was not a popular plan, as people asked him if there were any considerably cheaper places to go around. He gave a few options and then said in a tentative voice "but you guys are already here! come on... just go inside. It'll be fun!" Something about his pleading got to me, probably as he intended, and so me, Kat, and Mikel all stayed to party with John and the others left. It wasn;t much of a party seeing as after I paid 700 rubles to get in I was left with exactly 90 rubles. That would have bought one beer, so I passed. We talked for a while and then the band came on. John described it as "alternative rock" and said it was a "hard rock band that had mellowed out." It basically sounded like a slightly more upbeat Pearl Jam in Russian. But their energy was infectious and we all danced and had a really great time. Plus I got to see John jam, which was adorable. Then a drunk chick forced her way to the front, where we all were, and began to basically grind on me while throwing her hair in Mikel's face. Not cool. And the guys behind me where moshing a little bit, but I could tell they were just really excited and into it so I didn't mind.
Anyways, that's it for now. I have a few more days of school (yesss thank you crazy russian holiday) and tomorrow I'm going to this really awesome russian market.
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