Last night was awesome! After I rested for a bit and made some tea, I decided to meet my friends on Nevsky Prospekt and go out to the bar. We hit up two bars last night. The first was Fidel on Dumskaya Ulitsa, where it was 100 rubles ($3.50) for a half liter of beer. So we each had two of those and sat talking for a few hours. We also discovered that Russian bars have the best bar snacks ever. There are no nuts or anything, but instead, there’s these little crunchy snacks shaped like rings. Paula knows what I’m talking about; I can’t remember what they’re called right now. Then we hopped the metro to Cherneshevskaya and meandered down to a discount bar called Fishsomethingorother. I don’t remember exactly, it was long and in Russian and I had a liter of beer in me, ha! Vodka ensued of course. The problem with going out at night in Saint Petersburg is that the bridges go up and the metro stops running around 1am. So, if you’re not careful, you can get stuck on the wrong island or on the mainland. At around 12:45 last night, Kara and I realized that we were cutting it extremely close. After throwing down some rubles on the table, we ran like hell to the metro station, crossing a major road and hopping two fences in the process. We slipped inside the last metro out and made our merry way home. Today we decided to ask one of the girl’s host-mom if we could crash on her floor one night so that we wouldn’t have to worry about getting back before the bridges went up/the metro stopped running.
One of the girls went to church this morning so we didn’t get started until noon today, which was great because I got to sleep in till 10am! Our mission today was the VODKA MUSEUM! It was all about the history of vodka, all the different types, different types of distillation, and also had advertisements and propaganda for vodka for all different time periods. While it was hard to find, the museum was totally worth it and was very cool! Also, it made us work for it since all of the labels and descriptions were in Russian. The museum was full of pictures of famous distillers, all the different types of glasses and carafes used over the centuries, manuscripts of instructions, posters, Russian vodka glasses, and tons and tons of bottles! Towards the end of the museum, it talked about the Soviet attempts to get vodka out of the Russian culture, and of course, how that failed. There was also some stuff about how vodka culture changed with the victory following the siege of Leningrad (St. Pete’s) during WWII. At the end of the museum there was a vodka tasting. There were three different types of vodka: all were traditional but with different distillation processes, so there was a range from rougher to smoother finishes. We drank all of our vodka and decided to hit up a Teremok stand for blini since none of us had eaten much before we went to the Vodka Museum (probably not the best idea).
A ham and cheese blini later, I was on my way to the Vasiliatrovskaya metro station and I stumbled upon an awesome pedestrian street leading up to the station itself. There were coffee houses, cafes, shops, bars, and a park (down the middle) along the street with tons of benches. People were milling about everywhere and some place was playing quiet jazz at the time. I’m definitely getting off the metro early some days on my way back from school to sit and chill for a while, maybe have some tea too. I went back to the producti too, picking up more OJ, some priyaniki, and this yogurt-smoothie thing we have here in Russia called Chudo (sooo good). It was there that I obtained my first kopek piece. Kopeks are like the red-headed step child of Russian currency. You don’t normally see anything listed as costing kopeks (other than text messages) outside of the produkti or supermarket. Most things are whole rubles (100 kopeks to a ruble). So now I have a 50 kopek piece in my wallet. I guess I’ll just return it to circulation at the produkti the next time I go!
We laid out our post-class schedule for this week, and tomorrow is “dead people day.” We’re going to the Aleksander Nevsky Lavra (Monastery) and some cemeteries, as well as next door to the Smolny Institute to see statues of Marx and Engels.
Love to all!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment