Well the business visa went through! I can now travel in and out of the Russian Federation until the end of November 2017. I got to the Heathrow Airport a tad bit too early today so I’m sitting at a restaurant nursing a Guinness as I write this. I stayed at my sister’s place in Cambridge this past week, and we had a great time. It was wonderful to be able to catch up with her, my other sister Nikola, and my nieces and nephews. Also shout out to my brother-in-law Andy for keeping Guinness stocked in the fridge this week: team player.

[I was going to put more cool pictures of London/ Cambridge here, but apparently my camera too took large of pictures :/ ]

I took the train from Cambridge today around mid-day, and was to report to the Russian Embassy in London by 16.00 to collect my passport. I was a bit nervous this past week that it wouldn’t go through because of some careless error on the application. I took the tube and lugged my luggage not only to the embassy, but also to Heathrow. To all you students out there it cost roughly £6.00 in total for transport throughout London to get to the embassy and then to the airport. I think a London cab or Uber would have run me about £50.00 today when all was said and done.

So things I am excited for this summer: my internship, blini, banya, borscht, continuing to improve my Russian conversation, and of course all the other wonders that Russia has to offer. This summer won’t be all fun and games, but I hope to get in as much enjoyment during my last few months in the motherland as I can. I know in earlier blog posts I made a checklist of sorts regarding things I wanted to do during my time in Russia. I’ve checked off that whole list, except for the Transsiberian Railroad. After my experience during an 8-hour train ride in a Russian train, I thought that I had discounted this checklist item forever. Over the past couple months, however, I’ve had a bit more free time and as such have been planning what I want to accomplish with my remaining time abroad. I am in the process of convincing two or three of my friends from study abroad this past year to do the railway from Moscow to Vladivostok with me. It would be really awesome for them to come, but if they don’t I’m pretty sure I will still do it. It would be anywhere from a week to two weeks depending upon how long I spend at the various stops throughout Russia. I’ll post a route map below. Follow the dark blue route below that doesn’t veer off into Mongolia. The preliminary plan right now would be to stay in Russia to avoid the hassle of procuring another visa for China, but we’ll see what happens. I would start the trip at the beginning of August, giving me roughly two weeks before I need to fly back to the US to start my final semester at UPS.

Trans-Siberian-map

On that note, I am also really excited to finish my final semester at UPS. Of course, sad that I will be graduating and leaving that wonderful university, but happy that I haven’t squandered my time there. I feel like I have learned so much, and in such a wide variety of subjects. All of my professors have been top-notch, and I’ve loved the small class sizes. I could go on, but I won’t)

Anyway, I am going to head off to my gate to start the always wonderful security screening process, so bye for now.

-Andrew

14.05.17

It’s been quite the ride this past semester. Many “ups” and “downs,” trials and tribulations, but most importantly an incredible amount of personal growth and clarity regarding what I want to do with my life. Let’s face it; a large number of people (at least who I’ve spoken to) didn’t really have any clue where their true direction lay in life when they first began college. Sure there is always that one kid who wanted to be a nuclear physicist or an engineer when they entered college, and did it. I think that’s awesome, and wish I could have had that same level of future clarity regarding my life. I’m actually thankful it took me a few years of college to kind of carve a path for myself and figure out what I was passionate about. They said this at the beginning of my freshmen year at UPS, and I don’t think I quite understood it at the time, but their liberal arts degree undergraduate programs expose you to such a wide array of subjects and interests that you’re bound to find something you like (unless of course you decided to make every day thirsty Thursday).

Russian Police

I just finished my spring semester studying abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia. As I write this I am sitting on a national express coach on my way to Cambridge, England to meet up with a couple of my sisters, niece, and brother-in-law. I was supposed to continue on back to the USA with the rest of my fellow study abroad comrades, but one thing I’ve definitely come to learn during my time spent abroad thus far, is that plans change. Through a Russian conversation club downtown off of Nevsky Prospekt, which is the main street downtown in SPB, I was able to obtain a social media marketing and digital advertising internship over the summer with a Russian company. In order to do this, however, I needed to apply for a business visa from the Russian Federation. After a month of frantic calls and last minute edits to the online business visa application (which has to be spot on or it will be rejected), I finally was able to receive my invitation from the Russian Federation. In order to apply for any type of visa, whether it is for business, study, or diplomacy, the Russian Federation has to issue you a formal document saying you are welcome in the country. Of course leave it to the way Russia does things, and I ended up having to go to some sketchy hostel called “The Puppet Hostel,” the day before my student visa expired and my flight was booked out of the country to pick up my invitation. You have to apply for a visa outside of the Russian Federation. Since I have family in England and London is a common stopover for transatlantic flights, I figured I’d take the opportunity to spend some time with them while I sort out my visa. It is going to take about a week-or-so when all is said and done, and according to my invitation I can re-enter Russia on the 22^nd of May. My business visa will expire in November, and allows me to enter and exit Russia as I wish during this 6-month period. Of course my final semester at UPS starts the third week of August so I will be returning shortly before then. This type of multi-entry business visa is convenient because living so close to Europe it can be quite inexpensive to take a weekend trip somewhere and go on a mini-adventure of sorts.

Now you’re probably wondering why I didn’t just go home for the summer, or maybe you’re not 😉 With the exception of one person (Emily :P), I find that people who have lived in Russia for an extended period of time either love the country and want to become an expat, or hate it and are counting down the days until they never have to be there ever again. I personally have loved my time in Russia. I love the language, the people, the culture, and I wish I could say all the food but sometimes I just can’t do it. It’s not so much that the food tastes bad, just Russians typically do not add spice to their food, so you are stuck with a diet that mainly consists of root vegetables, meat, and bread with no flavor. Sure it is sustaining during those -15°+ winters, but sometimes I just need some hot sauce or paprika…something.

I think I mentioned this at the beginning of this blog, but the two main responses I got when I let people know I was going to study abroad in Russia for the year were: “Why Russia?” and “You’re crazy man.” I still can’t answer that first question, but I can definitely tell you I do not regret my time spent abroad. Like someone told me right before I left to study abroad, it is a life-changing experience to be able to get out of the “US bubble” and look back at America from a different vantage point. I know what they meant by this now! Having lived abroad I consider myself to be much more of an active global citizen than before. I am more sensitive to cross-cultural interactions and am able to examine everyday situations with greater depth of perspective than I ever could before. I hope I am clearly voicing what I have gained from my time abroad…sometimes it is hard for me to even express what I have gained. To address the second response, no I don’t think I’m crazy, but the country I’ve lived and studied in definitely has its’ moments.

Where do I even begin!? Talking with my classmates at the hotel today before we all parted ways, we of course were talking about war stories and the most insane things that happened. In a country where at the start the majority of us could not speak the language, more often than not you just have to fly by the seam of your pants and hope nothing bad happens along the way. As a matter of fact, attested to me by countless native Russians and based upon my own observations, a majority Russians live everyday like it is their last. Of course right there you can imagine how exhausting of a pace this can be to keep up on a daily basis.

The past 9 months or so I have had 18-hour days. Toward the end of the spring semester the sun started coming up increasingly early. A couple nights (mornings) ago I think sunrise was around 04:00. With how cumbersome transport could be to take me all the way to my homestay at the north of the city from my uni, often I was looking at ~45minutes one-way. This may not seem like much if you are driving, but I either rode the metro or marshrutki. Let me re-enforce my thoughts about the marshrutka from previous blog posts. During the winter the rides were fairly smooth because of all the snow on the ground. At times I was a bit afraid for my life, but they were smooth moments of terror! Once all the snow stopped falling and the ice melted, all of us passengers got to experience Russia’s poor infrastructure. The past month or so I’ve actually been getting motion sickness on the marshrutka, which is weird because usually I have a fairly strong constitution.

Alright, so transport is nuts, long days…white nights! I’m so incredibly excited to be able to spend the summer in St. Petersburg, Russia living and working as a true expat (even though if not for long). My fellow study abroad classmates and I decided that in order to call yourself an expat, you can’t be in the country through a study abroad program or something of the sort. White nights is a phenomenon in this region of the world, where for approximately a month or so, it is high noon 24-hours a day. Of course the answer to this solution is blackout curtains in your room, which I have in the flat I will be renting just off Nevsky, but still…nothing I have ever experienced before.

On a side note I also have to mention Russian pop and EDM because I have been saturated with it for 9 months. Whether I am watching the channel 5 Russian news with my tea in the morning, eating lunch in the cafeteria, riding the marshrutka home, or trying to go to sleep and my host brother had the tv on in the next room…it’s like my life has had a nonstop dance party soundtrack. Ok maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, but I don’t quite know how to convey how much Russian pop…so much Russian pop.

Russian 202

I don’t want to drone on here because 1) I know it’s summer right now and if you’re reading this you should be outside enjoying yourselves, and 2) I want to wait until I’ve finished my summer internship in Russia before I give you a really thorough perspective on what my year and Russia has been like. Bye for now!

-Andrew

Outside a fenced off building that appeared to be the former location of a soviet physics and science university.

A lot has gone on since I wrote last, which I’m sure you expected. I’ll start with my classes. My Russian language classes have been going really well. I almost have the alphabet memorized. I believe I wrote about this briefly in my last post, but I’ll get into a little more detail just in case anyone is interested 😛

I live 20 minutes from this place.

With Russian you write in a unique form of cursive. Each print letter like you would see in any publication or on a storefront sign has a corresponding uppercase and lowercase cursive letter. Each letter has a particular pronunciation with a hard sign and soft sign that separate consonants. More to come on my language classes…according to my “prepadavacia “ (professor) Inga, it takes students on average about a month to be able to read and write in Russian (which doesn’t seem like that long if you think about it).

St. Petersburg, Russia City Center Canal tour.

I also had my first 17^th Century Russian Literature class this past Thursday. Right off the bat the “prepadavatelitsa “ asked if she could teach the class in Russian and write in Russian cursive on the white board. Luckily the class all agreed to have her speak in English, but I had to ask her to write in English since I can’t quite read Russian cursive that quickly. This wasn’t embarrassing to me, but rather I just hope she doesn’t resent having to write in English. I’m really excited about the different texts we’re going to be reading in the class: Diary of a Madman, Anna Karenina, Eugene Onegin, Crime & Punishment, and a couple other titles that are slipping my memory at the moment (I’m sitting in the laundry room doing an early morning load as I write this). If our first class discussion is going to be the standard, then I don’t mind reading a few thousands pages this semester and conducting literary analysis on them (I really liked this class if you can’t already tell).

Peter and Paul Fortress

I received information about my homestay family from my program advisor earlier this week. I move into my homestay the 24^th of September! I got a babushka that lives a 15-minute walk away from the Politekhnicheskaya metro station. This is on the red line one stop from Akademicheskaya where my college is. She has hosted homestays for a few years now and usually takes students who are brand new to speaking Russian. Apparently she is a great cook, so needless to say I am really excited. I’m really looking forward to improving my Russian conversational ability (apparently homestays are one of the best ways to do this because of the constant interaction using the language). It is interesting the way rent & utilities are paid for during my homestay. I pay 600 rubles per day (about 10 USD), a onetime 1200 ruble fee for Wi-Fi for the semester (about 20 USD). Just take a mental note of how inexpensive the cost of living is in Russia in comparison to America. I have dinner with my homestay babushka this coming Wednesday, so more to come on that.

Neva River Canal tour

Note the title of this blog post, it means “Are you able to speak English?” When I went to order my food at Peterburgers, I threw out my usual tell-all phrase “Ya ni gavaru pa-ruski harasho,” (I don’t speak Russian well). The guy taking my order looked a bit annoyed or maybe even offended and said in clear English, “Well I speak English so that’s fine.” Of course when I tell Russians I can’t speak Russian that well, it’s not because I’m assuming they’re uneducated and unable to speak English. In terms of becoming aware of cultural differences, this interaction really helped me to realize how language barriers can present unintentional consequences. My interactions over the last couple of weeks have shown me just how important it is to learn another culture’s language if you want to interact with them decently.

Neva River canal tour shot

I still think it’s a little insane that I live about 20 minutes from that place. Anyway, this wasn’t as simple as planning a date in America, mind you, remembering that “Ya ni gavaru pa-ruski harasho.” That morning I went to pick up some flowers for her. In Russia you have to pick up an odd number of flowers because an even number indicates someone has died. None of the babushkas that sell flowers on the street corners here had flowers that looked any good, so I went into a flower shop next door to the metro station. The lady at the flower shop didn’t speak English so I spent about 20 minutes pointing, umming and ahhing, and quickly typing into a translator on my phone to try to speed the process along. This type of thing happens semi-often, but that just provides all that much more motivation to keep on hitting the books in my language class. All the signs in the metro are in Russian, with phonetic English names of the stops included on the maps. That week I charted out what route we would take to get to the restaurant, and scoped it out once when I was out getting a haircut in the city center with one of my suitemates.

That’s a lot of gold!

Speaking of my suite mates, the Slav Bros, one of them had to leave the program during the second week due to bereavement. He is a solid dude and I wish him all the best. People throughout the dorms have also been sick this past week (knock on wood, my immune system has just always been pretty good). Getting sick seems to be much more of a hassle in Russia, and I attribute this mostly to generally lower standards of hygiene and medical care in the country in comparison to America. Hey, Russia is apart of the BRICS “emerging” economies, so I’m sure this will improve over time.

Aesthetic

I’ve also had the opportunity to meet some other foreign students studying at Peter the Great, from places such as Bogota, Colombia, South Korea, and Iran. It’s been interesting to have conversations with them, examining how native English compares to textbook English. I also got to talk to Jose from Columbia in Spanish, which was pretty cool (apparently my Spanish isn’t all that bad).

The Amsterdam of the East

The Amsterdam of the East pt. 2

This past Friday the other Americans and I took a boat tour around the canals in the St. Petersburg city center. This was something I had wanted to do for along time. I got a lot of great photos. There was this Russian kid who kept running along the canals and waving at our boat as it went under bridges. He had most of us laughing by the end of the tour. Anyway, this has been a fairly long post in comparison to my other ones. I’m about to hit the gym and start reading my next book for my lit class. Thank you to those who have emailed me with suggestions and questions thus far, I’m glad I could give you some additional info! As always anyone else with questions feel free to email me: asexton@pugetsound.edu

Pacah,

-Andrei

Well I’ve been in Russia for an entire week, and what a week it has been! I originally did not think that I would be blogging this often, but there’s so much to talk about. Where to start…

High rise apartments in southern St. Petersburg, Russia.

I guess I’ll start with my classes. Now that I have a more solid class schedule, I’m taking: Russian Language, Contemporary Russian Society, Russian Literature, and The History of Russia from Kiev to the Rus. My language teacher Inga (not Ingra, pazhalusta Inga) has been making sure we don’t get too overwhelmed. Not surprisingly Russian is a difficult language to learn. There are 33 letters in the alphabet, and you write in one form of cursive, read in print form (as well as your own cursive), and then there is speaking of course. Don’t get me wrong, Inga is giving us a lot of work considering that the majority of us in our class are complete novices, but she’s not making it difficult to learn. M/W/F we have language class from 10:00-13:30 (they use military time in Russia). T/Th are electives days, with six hours split between whichever electives we chose. I can honestly say I am excited about all of my classes; true self-motivated learning here since UPS doesn’t offer any Russian language classes.

Some amazing architecture commonly seen throughout the city of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Now to exploring Sanct Peterborg (that’s how the local’s pronounce it).I have been out exploring the city everyday since we arrived. We’ve gotten lost every single day, but that’s fine with me. We’ve gotten off on the wrong stop on the metro & taken wrong turns in the Nevsky Prospekt, but we’re better for it. I’d say we’ve probably walked a good 15 miles every day getting to know the city. It can be a bit overwhelming living and studying in a completely new country where you don’t know the language.

The group of American students I’m studying abroad with, as I mentioned in my last post, are all a bunch of really smart and interesting people. We all meld really well and have the same mindset; we care about school and obviously didn’t choose to study abroad in Russia to go on a vacation.

Some of the American students, #florence2k16.

The food portions are about half the size of American servings, so whenever I go to order something I always end with “Bolshoi” (indicating a large size of that item). They never indulge my request, except for the Blini place down the street where I got a ton of strawberry jam and a bigger sized coffee the other morning (I think the ladies appreciated I was trying to order in Russian). Russians tend to drink tea instead of coffee, so finding a nice large cup of medium roast black coffee to start my day has been a big struggle.

A typical lunch of Georgian cuisine I eat here for less than 200 Rubles, or the equivalent of 2 USD, which is so much food that it’s my dinner as well.

As a part of studying abroad the American students and myself go on excursions and see different major landmarks throughout the city. We went to the Hermitage, which was crazy aesthetic. Just to give you an idea, apparently you would have to spend nine years to see every single piece of art in the museum. Through this program I have the opportunity to volunteer there, which I’m hoping will work out. We’ve been to Peter and Paul Fortress, where we saw the Russian soldiers march, and they let off a blank mortar round as usual at 12:00. We’ve also been to the summer palace of Peter the Great, where we got to see all of the amazing gardens, fountains, and gold coated cupolas. We didn’t get to go inside the main palace, but instead went through the Dacha, where the Russian royalty used to go to Banya. Banya is a great Russian tradition where you sit in a sauna, and cleanse your body of all it’s toxins.

The summer palace in southern St. Petersburg, Russia.

I know I put a couple of common touristy photos in here, but come on this is incredible. Getting adjusted to life here in Russia has been a bit of a learning curve, but overall I think my faculty advisor was dead right, “a life changing, once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Golden cupolas that capture the glare of the sun, according to one of our professors, “a Russian representation of God’s divinity.”

That’s all for now, more soon to come.

Pacah,

-Andrey