This is going to be a long one.

BUSY, BUSY, BUSY.

Don't think that I don't miss you all, I just don't have time to miss you.

SO. YESTERDAY. The love affair with phonetics is over. Yesterday was one of those days when the whole love affair with the Russian language feels over.

Phonetics was just painfully hard; our professor was explaining really complicated linguistic and phonetics stuff in Russian, clearly using a lot of technical language we had never heard before, so naturally we had no idea what she was talking about. She was making some gestures with her hands which we figured meant your tongue and the roof of your mouth or something. Finally she gave up and just said it to us in English, but it was still so complicated that I didn't completely understand it and then there was this whole thing with pronunciation where she just exclaimed, "You sound French! You are making your tongue work too hard! The French are all skinny and work too much, while the Russian are a little bit fatter and work a little bit less, so their tongues are more relaxed." What....?! No wonder we don't understand anything?!

And Wednesdays are just the days when I have three classes, so by the time I got to our Conversation section after lunch my brain was shot and it was about 35 degrees C in the classroom and I couldn't focus anymore. I was out of there the minute class ended at 3:45pm. I just needed to walk by myself.

And I did walk by myself, to my meeting with William, the general director of "Cool! English" magazine. I didn't want to mention anything before, for fear I would jinx things, but Misha is friends with William and William was looking for a native English speaker to be an editor and so I had an interview last week and low and behold I will be working there in the fall. So the meeting went so well it made up for the shitty day and made me feel that even if my Russian isn't great, at least I'm not bad at English.

So that improved my day and then my day improved even more when I went on a mini "picnic" (we had bread and chocolate and juice) with Grace, Abby and Malina. We went to that garden near Bryan's apartment, the name of which I always forget, but it's really chill -- you know, the one with all the little dogs wearing clothes. Oh, wait, that's every park in St. Petersburg. We just sat and talked about life and that was nice, and then Abby went back to her hostel and Malina, Grace & I met up with Adams to study in a café right by Kazan Cathedral. So that was good, but I got back late and was tired and then I was talking to Olga and I realized that I had been confused before, but Olga was born in 1960, not 1959, so she'll be 48 in August. Sorry, Mom, I know you were excited about me living with a '59er. And then I couldn't stay up anymore and I went to bed.

Then this morning I wanted to wake up earlier to shower before school but then I fell back asleep for 40 minutes and then scrambled to get my life together in a shorter amount of time than usual -- I was so scattered I made it all the way to Smolny before I noticed I had only put in one earring. Yes, it was one of those mornings.

But the day was fine -- I felt better about Russian again (it's such a bipolar rollercoaster of language learning here) -- and then this afternoon we had a cultural excursion to Кунсткамера. How to explain Kuntskamera....? Well, it was the first museum in St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great. But.... it doesn't have art, exactly.... it has Peter the Great's collection of "rarities." Basically, to put it bluntly, deformed human babies in jars. Where the hell is Erik Peterson when you need him? After his RISD drawing project of animal fetuses from the biology library, he would have loved this shit. Actually, he told me to go here while I was in Russia. Anyway. It was.... definitely the most bizarre experience of my time so far here in Russia, and that says a lot as I have had some pretty bizarre Russian experiences. First there is the fact that you are looking at fetuses in jars, then that they are human fetuses, and some are human babies, and then there is the fact that most of them are severely deformed -- two heads, fused legs, one eye, no brain cavity, etc. -- but then most bizarre of all is when you realize that all these fetuses are basically 300 years old and have been sitting, preserved, almost perfectly, in jars of peppered brandy since the 18th century. WTF. And all this is right across the river from the Hermitage, one of the greatest art museums on earth. Quite the juxtaposition. Also, definitely not the place to go when your sister is pregnant. Oh, god, Genny, if you are reading this, please don't think your child is going to be born with a headless parasitic twin attached to its chest. Though that was all I could think about as I was looking at our group of healthy, almost fully grown, adult students and thinking, "how the hell does anyone actually get born correctly???" It was a weird experience. Especially how the rest of the museum is a very tame and kind of boring collection of artifacts stolen from other cultures around the world. And the lamest part of it all was that I paid 50r to take photos ($2) and then the only room where I wasn't allowed to take photos was the fetuses-in-jar room, of course, and I wasn't into taking pictures of creepy mannequins in kimonos. So, I took no pictures on a cultural excursion for the first time, but if you really want to see the fetuses, check out these other people's (illegal) pictures.....
NOT
FOR
THE
FAINT
HEARTED.

Yeah, so after that clearly we needed to decompress. So a group of us -- me, Sasha, Adams, Noah, Grace, Louis, Emma, Bethany & Emily -- went to Stolle for coffee and met up with Abby. It was nice, we just sat and talked about how Abby's brother does improv and how most of us don't want to be professors but fear that's what everyone who goes to liberal arts colleges ends up doing.... though the whole time there was a small, adorable Russian boy toddler sitting next to us and I couldn't help imagining his head in a jar. Thanks, Peter the Great.

Eventually everyone left.... Noah went home for dinner; then Sasha; we thought Louis went out for a cigarette but then he just didn't come back, as he does; Emma, Emily and Bethany left en masse to go home; Adams went to try to buy sketchy Russian fireworks as tomorrow is the 4th of July. Then it was just Grace, me and Abby and we did some homework and talked about Fullbrights/Watsons and bread and our families. And then it was 8:30pm and I needed to go home to do various things like write articles for Cool! English and update this and sleep, you know, so Abby and I parted ways officially as she goes back to Moscow at 11:59pm on a train. We realized it was perfect though because the first thing we did together in St. Petersburg was have coffee at Stolle a week ago, so things came full circle and that is appealing to both of us.

So. Back at the apartment. Class tomorrow, complete with two tests. Then I think we're having a picnic to celebrate the 4th of July (planned by Bryan & Phillip), and then on Saturday morning we have to be at Lenin's Square at 8AM (yes, 8.... in the morning....) to get on a bus to drive 4 - 5 hours to Psckov where we will be until about 9pm on Sunday night. So, don't expect to hear much from me this weekend.

I hope all of you are enjoying the holiday and going to the FI bike parade and all the usual stuff. Love, love, love you all. Don't blow off your fingers on fireworks.