Roll Out Russia

Our last day was one of travel and that’s really it – we left the hostel at 8, made it to the airport pretty earlier, and jumped from St. Pete to Moscow before our long trek home actually began. As usual we were left to our own devices, although Evgeny did ask if I’d ever…

I’m Walking On Water (Whoa!)

Not walking on sunshine, whoa no! So it’s 2 am and we’re leaving the hostel in 6 hours, so there’s literally no time to write this post 😦 What I’m doing instead is posting all of my pictures, brief captions, and going back to this (and every other half-finished post) when I land in the…

We Came, We Studied, We Conquered

It’s been more than two weeks in Saint Petersburg now, and our time at HSE has come to its end. I can’t believe our last day of classes was today, but here we are; it’s Friday and we’re free. I don’t want to forget some of the ‘mundane’ parts of our daily life here, so…

Sold Out of the Service

Have you ever heard the Polish national anthem? No? Me neither; it doesn’t tend to come up in casual conversation for me. Alexander, however, is a man of culture and brought it up today (amongst many, many other topics). One of the lines is “Poland has not perished yet”, something he found particularly morbid yet…

Man! I Feel Like A Woman!

Nicholas II was a man of many endeavors. He really wanted to be popular with the people, and he had many attempts at this. One of his ideas was to produce stamps with his face on them, which led to chaos. The mail services shut down for a week as people faced inner turmoil. There…

Horsing Around Downtown

How many ways can a man assert his dominance? Let’s find out. One, two, three . . . done counting, done with the whole imperialism thing. The Russian Empire wasn’t though, at least not a century ago, as we talked about today. Our history professor Alexander wrote up a slide including all of the titles…

Please Just Stop The Music (And The Bus, And Everything While We’re At It)

You know it’s going to be quite the day when no one knows what’s going on. Apparently our class schedule has been switched around for the week and this wasn’t made clear. Hence our usually end-of-the-day professor Sergei coming in 10 minutes late because he just found out that he was needed at 9:50 instead…

Museum Madness: Literally Losing My Mind

The sweet sounds of pounding wood and a screaming lady don’t often welcome me as I start my day, but today seemed to be a special occasion. At 7 am sharp the whole room was startled awake by the rattling of a doorknob and insanely loud shouting going down outside of the room. I was…

Got Gold? Beets? Vodka?

I’m too damn wiped to write about it now, but enjoy all the pictures for now!! I’m putting a brief info bit for each block so y’all have some context for where the heck I was and why. I promise it’s gonna be a good post to revisit when it’s done though (to be linked…

Don’t Go Rushin’ Through Russian Art

Siberia seems like a wild place. So does a lot of Russia, but I’m bringing in the focus a bit. Today’s cultural capital/history class was all about talking traditions and different ways of expressing religion, looking into rural Russia before moving to Siberia. We started with Glocken aus der Tiefe: Glaube und Aberglaube in Rußland (Bells…

Sidelined At The Rink

I guess I can’t get enough of school, because the majority of my day was spent in one classroom or another. After what was probably the most interesting series of lectures we’d had so far regarding protest in Russia, more history madness, and Russian relations with the US and China, I was pretty intrigued and…

I Wanna See Your Peacock (Clock)

Courses today were the same old dealio, and after a long but interesting series of lectures we all headed back to the hostel. Our Russian buddies were planning on taking us to Государственный Литературно-мемориальный музей Ф. М. Достоевского, the Dostoevsky Memorial Museum constructed within the famous authors apartment. Unfortunately for them, most of us have…