Week 3
I’m now entering my third week here and things are going a bit better.
This weekend was the White Nights Festival. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what this was before going, and after going, I still can’t quite describe it. To the best of my understanding, the holiday started out with the story of a young girl who always said that the man of her dreams would come for her on a ship with crimson sails. Finally he did, and they lived happily ever after. This became a legend and all St Petersburg students started celebrating (aka drinking themselves to death) on this day, which is always on a weekend around the Solistice. I arranged to go see whatever there was to see with some friends from the program…taking the metro to meet them, I realized that this was a much bigger deal than I’d thought. It was so packed that someone got crushed in the metro doors (which don’t have censors), and Nevsky Prospekt station, where everyone seemed to be getting off, was a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare.
We wandered around the city from 10 until 4 in the morning, when the metro re-opened, and saw a lot of people and places that, true to what seems to be the nature of the city, ranged from the grotesquely filthy to the truly beautiful. The Neva river was glowing in the moonlight and classical music was playing…people vomitted and urinated on street corners…fireworks lit up the sky….a little girl played with fire in a bar at 3 o’clock in the morning…an enormous ship with crimson sails took off from the banks of the Neva….there was so much broken glass on the street that every step on the walk home crunched. This is such a bizarre place.
My host mom mentioned something about a new world record for alcohol consumption being set, but I wasn’t able to understand whether she was talking about the White Nights or the enormously popular Beer Festival that took place the next night.
On Saturday I went with Robyn and some girls to a classical concert at the Mariinsky, which is the old Kirov Theater. We got the cheapest seats possible for about $2 each, but it was still superb. We heard Shostakovich’s Symphony No 2 « The October », Brahms’ Concerto for Violin and Orchestra and Rachmaninov’s Concerto for Fortepiano and Orchestra No 3. My favorite was the Brahms, which was lovely and expressive, since the Shostakovich, which I was expecting to like the most, had a horrid vocal interlude that was basically an enormous choir belting out this revolutionary march at the top of their lungs, with the symbols going ever 5 seconds. Anyways, this is the « Season of Shostakovich » at the Mariinsky, so maybe I’ll go again and hope something better, since I do really like Shostakovich (unfortunately they already played No. 7 « The Leningrad »).
The beginning of this week will be stressful, since on Tuesday I have an hour long presentation in my Spoken Russian class. My topic is Ethnic and Religious Minorities in St Petersburg, which I chose and am really interested in. Too bad I can’t do the project over about 6 months and in English, because then I could actually do it justice.
This weekend was the White Nights Festival. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what this was before going, and after going, I still can’t quite describe it. To the best of my understanding, the holiday started out with the story of a young girl who always said that the man of her dreams would come for her on a ship with crimson sails. Finally he did, and they lived happily ever after. This became a legend and all St Petersburg students started celebrating (aka drinking themselves to death) on this day, which is always on a weekend around the Solistice. I arranged to go see whatever there was to see with some friends from the program…taking the metro to meet them, I realized that this was a much bigger deal than I’d thought. It was so packed that someone got crushed in the metro doors (which don’t have censors), and Nevsky Prospekt station, where everyone seemed to be getting off, was a claustrophobe’s worst nightmare.
We wandered around the city from 10 until 4 in the morning, when the metro re-opened, and saw a lot of people and places that, true to what seems to be the nature of the city, ranged from the grotesquely filthy to the truly beautiful. The Neva river was glowing in the moonlight and classical music was playing…people vomitted and urinated on street corners…fireworks lit up the sky….a little girl played with fire in a bar at 3 o’clock in the morning…an enormous ship with crimson sails took off from the banks of the Neva….there was so much broken glass on the street that every step on the walk home crunched. This is such a bizarre place.
My host mom mentioned something about a new world record for alcohol consumption being set, but I wasn’t able to understand whether she was talking about the White Nights or the enormously popular Beer Festival that took place the next night.
On Saturday I went with Robyn and some girls to a classical concert at the Mariinsky, which is the old Kirov Theater. We got the cheapest seats possible for about $2 each, but it was still superb. We heard Shostakovich’s Symphony No 2 « The October », Brahms’ Concerto for Violin and Orchestra and Rachmaninov’s Concerto for Fortepiano and Orchestra No 3. My favorite was the Brahms, which was lovely and expressive, since the Shostakovich, which I was expecting to like the most, had a horrid vocal interlude that was basically an enormous choir belting out this revolutionary march at the top of their lungs, with the symbols going ever 5 seconds. Anyways, this is the « Season of Shostakovich » at the Mariinsky, so maybe I’ll go again and hope something better, since I do really like Shostakovich (unfortunately they already played No. 7 « The Leningrad »).
The beginning of this week will be stressful, since on Tuesday I have an hour long presentation in my Spoken Russian class. My topic is Ethnic and Religious Minorities in St Petersburg, which I chose and am really interested in. Too bad I can’t do the project over about 6 months and in English, because then I could actually do it justice.
posted by Julia | 5:59 AM
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