Short Notice About My Whereabouts

The last few days have been really crazy: Just really shortly.

On Monday I met Dima and Mascha (Dima spend the last semester in Graz as an exchange student and Mascha is his girlfriend who also has been to Austria quiet a lot of times – and has even been to EIBISWALD) at the Faculty and they asked me whether we wanted to join them to go to Ryazan (Russian: Рязань) with them, where the University KVN-Finals (in Russian: КВН) would take place. I instantly agreed and so about 6 hours later at 12 o’clock at night Andrea (my roommate) and I met Dima and Mascha at some metro station where the bus to Ryazan awaited us*. We went on “board” with nothing else then a purse, a toothbrush, some chocolate and HUBBA-BUBBA AND an extra pair of socks.

The journey started and about 18.5 hours later we arrived in Ryazan. KVN-Finals started at 7 o’clock on Tuesday. It turned out that KVN is kind of a show or competition where groups compete against each other. The group that is the most funniest, that makes the best jokes, wins. In Russia it is a really popular game. Already in school there are KVN-clubs, in University still and then also for adults there are competitions. We went to the finals of the University competition because our Faculty team also competed there – actually they came in second. It was quiet interesting as there were four different contests and different kind of jokes were made – also some politicall ones.

But for Andrea and me it was especially funny because we didn’t understand all of it and after the contest, about three hours later, we already went back to Piter, again by bus, again about 17 hours of road-trip (but this time we could still get some proper food – not just chocolate and Hubba Bubba).

to get some idea about the distances and stuff, I created a google-map with the location of Ryazan

* Anna unfortunately didn’t feel to good, so she didn’t come along. ;(

(carina)

Random Thoughts About Shopping

Some interesting observations about shopping in Russia:

I have been wondering why in Russia there are a lot of stores where you first have to tell the lady behind the counter what you want (to look at) and just then can look at. Today I had “some” idea why that might be the case: Maybe as in Soviet times (and probably also before) there wasn’t that much choice (and maybe also not that much money) people would just go to the shops when they already knew WHAT they had to buy. So they would just exactly tell the lady behind the counter: “Please give me that and that!” and it wouldn’t take to long.

For me it’s interesting though because for us (Austrians) it’s just normal to go around the shops and just to look at the products but here I sometimes have the feeling, that I kind of have to buy the things, if I go in such a shop with a counter.

Anyways, another interesting thing is that there isn’t really any such phrase in Russian as “shopping” or “to go shopping” or to shop. There is this phrase “ходить по магазинам”, which means something like “walking around the shops”.

Funky Places to Situate a Shops
I already wanted to close this blog-entry but then I remembered that it might be quiet interesting to know, that in Russia, a lot of shops are just situated in the strangest places, where you wouldn’t at all expect a shop to be. You are walking along the street, might be on your way to a friend of yours, you enter the backyard through an iron-gateway (that might even need to be opened with a special numeral code) and then in the backyard you find a beauty salon, or a small 24-h-shop or anything else. A lot of shops are also situated in cellars – that might or might not be accessable or viewable from the main street.

Russia and its shops are just great I love them: They are open 24/7 and they sell anything you can dream of but hardly any Russian products.

Little time and short days

We are starting into our last week of university. It’s only three more weeks that are staying in St. Petersburg and as I am writing this and thinking of it, it is a pretty weird feeling. It’s 9 in the morning here and it is only starting to get light. Days here are very short and thus to me it feels like time is passing by even more quickly.

(anna)

Writing to Welcome Winter

Just wanted to let all of our readers know that although I was trying to hide and run away, I was caught. Winter has finally arrived. I might have felt a little bit of excitement when the first snow was falling down, but by now I have had enough of it.

Just before starting this post, I took some picture for you: that’s what winter looks like for us. It’s not even five pm and getting really dark again.

(anna)

Being Girly Again

Forever young … Andrea and I just got tattoos on our hands and we are chewing “Hubba Bubba” chewing gum. The Skittles over here are also great. Everybody loves candy, especially women. The sweeter the better.

hubbabubba

kiwi

erdbeer

bubba

hubba

cola

mango-maracuja

“And girls just wanna have fun …” could be the title of our small night blogging session. Because simple is easier than complex.

(andrea+carina)

Passion for Pirogs

One of the highlights the Russian cuisine has to offer are definitely pirogs. Pirogs are pies made out of yeast dough or puff pastry. There’s s a wide range of different stuffing – so there is a great choice in both sweet and salty pirogs. We have been eating a lot of pirogs, especially in one of our favourite cafés, “Stolle”.

It’s great fun cooking together with friends, so I gratefully accepted the invitation to participate in the pirog experience. Julia and Maria invited us to their place. The advantage of living in an apartment is definitely the fact that they have even an oven!

Besides Julia and Maria, the two hosts of this “perfect dinner”, Sara, Marina, Varpu and I myself were passionaly and eagerly involved in the preparations. But do too many cooks spoil the broth?  Let me tell you – we didn’t!

Yummy!!!

Having a few glasses of sparkling wine during the preparations, some good conversation and laughs, we were all really curious whether our very first pirogs would be as good as we hoped. By that time, even more guests – Daniel, Hilmar and Iva – had arrived.

The smell that filled the apartment was promising and when the pirogs were finally ready, they just turned out to be absolutely delicious …

Yummy!

We then went to the city center to see a concert of Markscheider Kunst, which was great fun as well.

(anna)

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)

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)

“Aquapark” in the dorms

The water made its way from the 10th floor to the ground-floor

Pipes broken in dorm – water almost everywhere

We were sitting at our desks, after a long day out, checking our e-mails, when we heard water dropping down. We wondered whether any of our roommates had forgotten to turn off the water in the kitchen properly. Looking outside, we saw water dropping down from the ceiling in the kitchen.

After a few moments of surprise, our roommate Mischa and the two of us also decided to have a look outside to the hallway, where more people, commotion and water were to be found. We didn’t really think a lot, just remembering scary news stories. Within secondes, we pakced our most important things – money and passports – and just left the building, yelling at local people that they better leave as well right away. We just thought that there could be some electrical problems or the whole building might just fall apart.

On our way downstairs, we were already carrying a backpack (just laptops and important stuff like toothbrushes), our purses and an umbrella. There were only few people leaving the building and we weren’t even sure whether it was better to stay or to leave. As everything happened so out of the blue, we were just very insecure about the whole situation.

We called our coordinators and asked them what to do, whether the dorms were secure at all. We don’t think that we were overreacting or making things worse then they were, we weren’t panicing, but we really wanted to get some reassurance.

After all, it turned out that some water-pipes had broken on the tenth floor and water was flooding down all the way to the ground-floor. It was a whole lot of water. Here’s a picture from the entrance area we took when we left the building.

At the moment, we are back in our room and we just hope that we can stay there all night long without any further interuptions (It is kinda crazy that the internet is actually working, but that brings back some normality).

We will definitely blog more about this crazy evening, but at the moment, we are just having a cocktail and some food for stress-release.

(carianna)