The next installment

So, I've been here almost a month now, which in some ways feels like its gone incredibly quickly and in other ways has been endlessly slow (usually during class on fridays when my brain has completely turned to mush and I cant even remember how to conjugate a regular verb nevermind which ending to use for the plural prepositional case). I'm still having a good time though, the weather is pretty much like england in october, not very warm but not cold either, just rainy a lot of the time...

Languagewise everything is going ok, I'm starting to be able to have small conversations with people, even if it takes me ages to find the words and make a million mistakes. I've lost the fear of talking that I always had with german so I've found myself being the spokesperson in restaurants and at the train station. The pinnacle of my achievements was last week when I went to this outdoor statue museum type thing and managed to persuade the woman at the ticket booth not only that we deserved to pay the russian price rather than the foreigners price but also that we were students which meant that instead of paying 100rbls we only had to pay 10. Its one of my massive pet hates here that everyone is so obvious about the fact that theres one price for foreigners and a different one for russians, the one for foreigners usually being at least 5 times higher. While we were there, incidentally, we passed one of the most revolting buildings Ive seen since I got here, an enormous block of concrete which resembled a warehouse or a hypermarket more than anything else but turned out to be the gallery of russian modern art, irony of ironies.

Living in the host family has gotten infinitely more bearable now that the mother has come back from visiting her parents all last week. There was a highly traumatic porn incident the week before while she was away and I was seriously considering taking up Nastia's offer of staying at her place but it's all been much better with the mother around. She makes a massive effort to talk to me so I've been practicing speaking in the evenings for at least an hour every day which is completely knackering but really helpful. She also corrects all my mistakes so I'm not just wittering away nonsensically and I'm learning new words and phrases outside of class as well. Food has been surprisingly edible (though I'm still having to resist being force fed everything in the house) and I've had none of the issues other people have had with no fruit or vegetables and inedible meat covered in grease so all of that's going ok...

Last weekend was pretty fun. I went out for drinks with a really cool australian, an argumentative brazillian (somehow me managed to get into a discussion about richard dawkins of all things), verena the german girl from my class and a swiss guy who had just arrived. After spending hours wandering around trying to find a bar with a table free and rejecting an irish pub for being too full of boring british men, a restaraunt with a sauna in it, and an armenian bar where they walked off in the middle of taking our order and refusing to come back, we ended up in a bar underneath the ministry of foreign affairs where we managed to befriend a policeman who wanted to practice his english and he kicked some people off a table for us. Then the next evening Kathryn and Denis invited me out for drinks with some people they'd met in a bar the week before. We went to dinner in a restaurant round the corner from their apartment which had really good food but an absolutely hilarious menu. The english translations were so tragically bad that you couldnt even guess what the dishes were supposed to be, the highlight being in the fish section where there was one thing call 'assortment of exterminating gifts'. It wasnt even on the russian menu so we couldnt compare what it was supposed to be, so I'm still none the wiser. Gift means poison in german and swedish, but even then thats clearly not anything you want to see on a menu...After that we went to this really cool private bar underneath the museum of modern art (a different one that had actually gone through some kind of design process to build it) and drank muchos cocktails for free...the catch was that we had to mingle with a collection of very dull investment bankers who were all sitting around talking about work and discussing the financial crisis and how it was just like 1998 all over again, but we managed to mostly avoid them...

I ended up spending the night at Kathryn's because the metro closes at 1 and I've not quite plucked up the courage to attempt the moscow taxi system by myself yet. There are a few actual taxis here but theyre strictly only used by dumb foreigners and they cost an absolute fortune. The russian system is to stand by the side of the road with your arm out until a random car pulls over. You then explain to the driver where you want to go and argue about the price and then they take you there. The concept of getting into a random stranger's car late at night and then telling them exactly where I live just goes completely against everything I've ever been taught and its proving quite difficult to get over but I'm sure I'll manage it eventually...

Sunday I went round to Nastia's and she cooked me dinner and we had giggles and cake and stuff. Was really nice.. she lives like 15mins walk from my host family through a park so its a pretty walk (when its not raining). Also met one of her cousins who came over later in the evening which was nice. They babbled away in russian and I tried to understand...we got a bizarre system going where I would speak in english and the cousin would speak in russian and we would both more or less understand each other and Nastia translated the bits in between where we didnt get something.

This weeks challenge has been arranging the trip to st petersburg. I got as far as having booked a hostel and Nastia came with me and helped me buy my train ticket, but Verena managed to forget her passport (dont as me why you need your passport to buy a train ticket travelling entirely within russia, its just one of those 'its russia' things) so couldnt buy one for herself. The next day when we went back to get her one, all the tickets were gone so we've postponed til next weekend. This has involved 3 separate trips to the train station and many hours of standing in line. You get there and there's only 3 people in front of you in the line to buy tickets but everything takes forever in russia so it takes at least an hour for the queue to move forward (obviously through all this time youre being constantly vigilant against the people behind you edging their way forward and trying to cut in front of you). Once we got to the front I explained in as much russian as I could muster that we wanted another ticket next to mine, and the woman in the ticket office understood, but made no effort whatsover to dumb down either the speed or the language she was using to get me to understand. Eventually I worked out that we would have to take different trains to get there and back, at which point I gave up and rang Nastia to get her to help me change the tickets to next weekend since its clearly not fated to be this weekend. The tickets themselves are hilariously official, with holograms and stamps and printed on paper with designs all over it so you cant forge it. Its more elaborate even than the bank notes.

What else have I done? A couple days ago I finally made it to the patriarch's pond on a dog walk with Kathryn and this russian woman who she met (also dog walking). While we were there we bumped into two massively stereotypical expat housewives (one from america and the other from banbury so she waffled on to me about oxford for a while) walking their own dogs who immediately tried to recruit me into teaching at the american school and both me and Kathryn into joining the international (read bored housewives) groups here which we made noncommittal noises about and then decided later that we would go and check it out once and just make shit up about ourselves (having bonded with each other before about creating entirely new identities when being chatted up by irritating guys) and generally mock it later.

Last night we had another run in with tragic soviet service at a cuban restaurant where we ordered a bunch of tapas and the waitress proceeded to bring out a collection of dishes which were either completely different from what they were supposed to be or the wrong dish entirely. We had a bit of a fight with her about one of them, which we sent back and she took an hour to bring the right one out again, but by that point we'd moved on to laughing at a group of russian women who were dancing the two steps of salsa they'd learned in front of the live band, trying desperately to impress them in a space the size of a postcard, but there were good mojitoes so it was all amusing rather than irritating..