Feeling touristy

Mama and Papa, if you are reading this, and I do hope so, I hope you enjoyed your stay in Piter as much as I did. It was great showing you “my” city and my home for the moment.

Yes, my parents stayed in Piter for five days and I was trying my best to offer them a diverse programme. I was killing two birds with one stone: I hadn’t done much sight-seeing myself, so I finally had a good reason to get started with discovering more of the touristy aspects of St. Petersburg I had missed out on so far. Last week, I was not only passing by Hermitage, but finally went inside. The same applies to the Peter-and-Paul-Fortress.

However, I also tried to show my parents a St. Petersburg off the beaten track and less touristy, like a big real Russian market, various rides on “Marschrutkas” and a nice coffee-break in our dorm room. You don’t get these impressions from a package holiday.

I came to realise that I had already gotten used to distances. We did a lot of walking and on the second day, my parents already knew that it would ONLY be another 15 minutes of walking, when I told them, “Oh, it’s just around the corner.”

We were quite lucky as far as the weather was concerned. It was clouded and windy, it rained a bit, but it was still not too bad and we could do some walking, some more walking and even more walking.

Now I am getting back to daily life here in St. Petersburg, but I am already looking forward to feeling touristy again in about two weeks when we are going to Moscow.

(anna)

Contacts, Contacts, Contacts

So many things have been going on lately, that I don’t really know where to start, but I have to share some thoughts, experiences or rather ongoings with you.

1st Work Experience: Lesson – Russians and Their Networking
Today we have talked to Vadim, the head of the English departement and also one of our two coordinators, about a PR-internship. Quickly he hooked us up with a very nice “девушка” (translated as girl or better to say young lady but actually Russians use the word “девушка” for speaking about any female, whether she is five or 99 years old, selling fruits in a shop or still playing with her dolls). Enesch, thats her name, again instantly hooked us up with another guy (Actually I think it is her boss).

Half an hour later she already called to tell us that she had talked to her director and that we just need to call him to negotiate with him ourselves. Well, tomorrow we are gonna do that. I am excited and also a little “scared” because of talking Russian on the phone with this guy. But it will work out just fine, I’m sure (That’s how I keep motiviating myself). I will keep you updated on that one. By the way this internship would be at an PR-agency called Agency Information Resources.

2nd Work: More Prospective Work
We have another internship option. A lady from the PR-departement of our Faculty would help us with. We have an appointment with her tomorrow.

3rd Interview: PR in Russia
I am excited because tomorrow I am gonna “interview” one of my teachers about PR in general and PR in Russia. The result you will find on this blog soon.

4th Language: Happy Just Because of Simple Russian Language Skills
I have the feeling that my Russian is improving any day. I am soooooo very excited. The downfall: It seems that my Italian and Spanish is just disappearing as quickly.

(carina)

Туфли or better boots?

There is this cliché that women think of shoes a lot. With us this is definitely the case at the moment. We are now sharing our observations with you – can you find some answers to our questions?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the highest heels of all?
No matter how old they are, no matter in which shape they are, no matter where they are, no matter which weather, what Russian women have in common are their shoes. Sometimes it seems as though they were competing for the “highest high heel in the country”. Sometimes we really admire how ALL of them can walk in these shoes.

Do you fancy my funky shoes?
The choice of shoes is really huge, some pairs are really super-funky. We have already found a lot of shops with funky shoes, but everyday that there is even more funk around.

How do high-heels affect architecture?
For weeks we have been wondering why the stairs in our faculty and also in other buildings are so flat – with sneakers you can easily take three at a time. As Carina was wearing high-heeled shoes today, she suddenly understood that they must be high-heel friendly stairs.

Umbrella or high-heels?
Today it is raining cats and dogs. One reason for wearing high-heels could simply be the rain and the pot-holes full of water. High-heels serve as stilts and women can walk over the water.

Any more questions?
We still have plenty and have already planned the next shoe project.

(carianna)

One month … and we are following the current

We are celebrating our jubilee. We have been to St. Petersburg for a month now. Time seems to be flying and maybe it’s because of the distances and the time you are spending in public transport that days seem to be over so much more quickly than at home.

We are expecting our first guests next week. That’s really crazy. We are looking forward to it, though.

We had a really interesting lecture yesterday. We watched some well-known Russian cartoons and discussed the picture of the Russian character and mentality that was drawn in them. One of the cartoons was about a hegdehog that fell into a river and decided to just follow the current.

Somehow we are “following the current” here. To some extent that is probably what you have to do. If you want to go by metro during rush-hour and you are already queuing at the entrance, you are kind of stuck. You are following the current.

We are following the current as we are trying to adapt to Russian lifestyle. There are times that we don’t have hot water. For a day or maybe two. That’s just what it’s like and we are fine with that. We might have been overwhelmed by bureaucracy during the first days, but when we got our train-tickets for Moscow (yeah, we are going to Moscow), we expected to be queuing at the train-station for some time. If this is the way things are done over here, we do them that way. We are growing and learning. Intercultural communication and understanding at its best – and we are happy about this experience.

(anna)

New image of Piter

Finally we have found the “real” Piter – no more product placement for Ikea, no more European stuff, just the real Russia.

Isn’t St. Petersburg lovely in the sunshine? The picture shows the Moika river from a bridge at Nevski Prospekt.

(carianna)

Paaaarty!

We were at a great birthday party here in St. Peterburg last night. Our friend Maria from Salzburg turned 24. We met Maria and Julia in our first week at the registration office. We heard them talk “Austrian” and just introduced ourselves to them. That was a good thing to do.

We were a cool bunch of people celebrating Maria’s birthday. Maria, Julia and the two of us from Austria, Marina and Mischa from St. Petersburg and Sara, Iva, Merle, Joanna, Hilmar and Daniel, who are from Germany.  We were invited for dinner. It was delicious. We just looooooveeee curry. Yummy! We had a lot of fun. We were really curious about seeing their appartment and it is very nice indeed. It is interesting to see how exchange students live here in St. Petersburg if they don’t stay in a dorm. What a luxurious bathroom they have – with a state-of-the-art toilet!

It was very interesting that we ended up talking about cultural and language differences between Austria and Germany. We had quite some discussions going on and tried to teach each other different specific “Austrian” and “German” words. Although we are in Russia, we also learned some new aspects about one of our neighbouring contries.

However, “partying” seems to be a universal language. We didn’t plan to go out that night, but sometimes, if the feeling’s right, you just have to obey. Going out in St. Petersburg, in our case, has two “catches”:

1. The bridges disconnect (and this will be the case until the end of November), so there are no connections between the mainland and the islands. You can party like Cinderella and make sure that you take the last metro and get back home around midnight.

But even if it wasn’t for the bridges, there is another reason for going out really long, respectively coming back home early in the morning.

2. The dorm is closed from 1 to 6 am. So if you decided to go out clubbing, you better party all night long.

So if I tell you know that we went to the Griboedov club, you might as well guess that we had to stay out all night long. It was not an all too hard thing to do.

Thanks again, Maria, for the invitation – we loved the food (!) and partying with you. Anytime again

(anna)

Showering and Getting Back to Normal

The shower I just took was the best one in my life, so I am going to write about it. Why that? I just appreciated it a lot because after all of this weird stuff happening yesterday, we have Electricity, Water (even hot one) and also Internet again or still.

That is really crazy and I didn’t expect it to be like that. I still feel that the happenings of yesterday were some exceptional circumstances. The crazy thing: Everything back to daily life but I am not yet.

See also: “Aquapark” in the dorms, Stress release after the “water attack”, The Water and Journalistic Thoughts, The Water and US Being Austrian

(carina)

The Water and Us Being Austrian

We have already written so much about our weird/crazy/exciting experience with the “big water in the dorm” but we wanted to have an own entry just to say thanks to all Russians and sorry for being so Austrian.

After all of this drama we have really seen that we must have seemed stupid and we actually somehow were stupid or our behaviour was, but to us there were just some an exceptional circumstances coming together: Being in a foreign country, not understanding the language and not knowing anything about how situations like that are usually handled over here/there – so we just behaved how we probably have to/or would behave in Austria. We got our stuff and waited outside – might not have been the best idea.

When we came back inside we saw all these people (or most) working, cleaning up and so on and we had just been waiting outside. Really stupid of us, that’s also how we felt like, but also grateful and thankful for all the help we got from great Russian people (You know who we mean, don’t you).

(carianna)

Stress release after the “water attack”

When we were outside of the dorm, not quite sure whether to dare to go back in, we decided to go to one of the close-by 24 hour supermarkets to get a stress-release snack there. For once, we are not talking about chocolate. The snack might as well just be an alcoholic cocktail. We also got some chips, that taste way too good anyways. Back on the way to the dorm, we were talking about how ridiculous we might look, because we were carrying around different bags, our feet were all saoked through, Carina was only wearing her slippers. It would have been worth a picture, but the camera had already run out of battery. However, we were just talking about our important belongings we were having with us – and that we were feeling sooo cold. And that we longed for warm shoes.

You have to know that I only bought new shoes this afternoon. It was not easy at all to get really nice shoes, and so I ended up spending a fortune on them. And when I say fortune, I do mean a fortune. Well, I was carrying the plastic bag of the shoe-store and kind of complaining about it.

Carina, “Well, I am surprised that you brought the shoes. But they are really nice shoes.”
Anna, “Well, actually I am carrying a 7000 rubels bag. I left the shoes in the dorm. I just took the bag to protect the laptop from the wet.”
Carina, “So you didn’t bring the shoes?”
Anna, “No, just the bag. Don’t you remember those evacuation pratices at school – you are always told to leave your stuff. And so I left the shoes in the room.”
Carina, “No, you didn’t?”

Well, there are situations where there are other things on your mind than shoes.

(anna)

The Water and Journalistic Thoughts

Just some thoughts that crossed my/our mind while this whole water thing was going on here in our dorms:

Communication Theory
It is a pretty interesting fact, that the feeling of safety and security kind of came back, when I realized that we actually had internet again. So it reminded me a lot of some of our lectures at FH: Like the thing with the “ZiB” (the Austrian news) that you actually feel safe just because of the fact that you can see the news at night. It doesn’t even matter which news there is, but you feel safe, because you see that there is news and that the broadcasting is working.

Sensational Stories
Now I know why (journalists) people are like they are. For the first time in my life I have experienced this (in German it would be “Sensationsgeilheit”, in English it might be something like) yearning for sensational stuff. When we were outside the building I just felt the feeling of wanting to go in there, taking pictures, asking people crazy things and publishing all of the stuff just in a few minutes. No, even better – seconds. Actually, I am doing something like “citizen journalism” at the moment because I am blogging (for you guys) – even though you probably don’t read it soon enough to be considered as news (or maybe yes?).

Being the First One to Publish
Andrea our neighbour also captured a video and we were talking to her about putting it on our blog (to be on here tomorrow because we couldn’t organise a cable today). It’s just so funny, the need to be the first one to publish something is really crazy. Also the fact that we are blogging at the moment is somehow like that (but that might also be a psychological thing: We just want to release stress by telling other people what we have just experienced).

Being attached and Not
When we were on our “stress-release-mission” (see also entry of Anna) we were talking about another interesting thing. It might have been easier for us to leave the dorm as for others – even though it is our home – we are still not (yet) as much attached to the dorms as other students might be. Yes, we are living here/there and we are considering the dorms our home but we still know that it’s not gonna be longer than three months. For other people it is their home – and so it might not be that easy for them to move out as it was for us. It was hard for us to to grap our most important things and we want and we do feel home here but it might not be as important for us since we actually know that in three months we have to DEtach again from here. Anyways what I wanted to say is: Either – Maybe people here just didn’t run away because they just couldn’t as it is there home. Or – Maybe we are just crazy and scared and FOREIGNERS (see entry The Water and Us Being Austrian).

(carina)