Mind Grenades!

10/27/2010

Halfway! I’m ready for a break holy crap. This week has been OUT OF CONTROL! I’m ready for America as well, but hey, maybe this vacation will help me like Russia more. I’m to the point where I’m pretty sick of it. Oh, and I got to talk to someone about the changes from the Soviet Union.

I’m soooo excited to get to Finland and Sweden! Top countries rated to live in; I’m interested to see how it differs from America. I hope that somewhere in Stockholm they’re doing a satellite view of the Rally to Restore Sanity. I’ve heard that tons of countries are doing this, time for Google! Don’t expect a post next week, unless I find Wi-Fi and type it up on my Zune or Nook. On the Nook, the new one is not impressive at all. It’s just a glorified tablet, not nearly as awesome as the Kindle or regular Nook. But there’s an update coming, more speed yay!

They told us we would get sick of Russia, and its hit. I’m tired of almost everything, except the girls, those I’ll always like. I miss fresh air, air that you can breathe without gagging because of second hand smoke, exhaust, or B.O. It sounds great, I know. I can’t wait to step out of the plane and breathe in the fresh, extremely polluted air, of Utah. I miss dryers. My clothes are always crusty, it’s no bueno. My students broke a door off the hinges, I wanted to swear loudly.

I’m still having problems rapping my mind what Almer told me. I spoke with him for an hour about the Soviet Union and what it was like. The first thing he said was that there was no advertising. Imagine that, driving and seeing no billboards (except only a few could drive). It’s hard to imagine not being constantly assaulted to buy this or that. The next thing was about how everything was state controlled. They had a store close to their home that sold vinegar, salt, and two more things. Just that, nothing else, and you had to wait for hours in line. You had to wait in line for hours for meat. There was a 10-15 year wait for a car! You could trade flats, but you couldn’t get a new one. He said that Ray Bradbury wrote it almost how it was in Fahrenheit 451. Not Animal Farm, or 1984, but a book we mostly attribute to learning about the evils of banning books. The coolest thing he showed me was four books by Jack London. They were made in the Soviet times, and in order to get one book you had to bring FIFTY FIVE POUNDS of waste paper! I couldn’t believe it! I still can’t! The thing he said that made my jaw drop was, “Europe, America, they do not know what Socialism is.” Not word for word, but that’s the point he was getting across. Talking with him about it was a mindgrenade!

Well, now I’m going to get back to wishing I was stateside for the Rally, and watch the Colbert Report. Until next post!

20102010

20/10/2010

It’s 20102010!!!!!!!! I just realized this as I wrote down the date for this. I feel awesome because it can’t be 20102010 in the States! I’ve had a fairly eventful week; we went to St. Petersburg, which was great!

St. Petersburg was formerly known as Leningrad, so I listened to Leningrad by Billy Joel about 50 times in a three day period. It’s one of those rare occasions you get to do something like that. I’ve listened to Moskau by Rammstein about 100 times now. I’ve got to rent Room 429 and listen to Room 429 by Strapping Young Lad at least 42 times to keep being so unbelievably cool! Anyway I like St. Petersburg more than Moscow, I think. It was more orderly. People weren’t parking everywhere, the driving wasn’t as insane, the people were nicer, and it was overall an awesome city.

We went to two Museums while there, one was the Hermitage, the other was Peterhof. The Hermitage was unbelievably cool. Unfortunately my camera was dead, but I’ll steal some pictures from the other people. I saw paintings by Renault, Picasso, Da Vinci, and many more. One of the cooler parts was the armor room. They had armor from all over Europe on display and it was wicked! The part on India was surprising, mostly because of the weapons. They had long blades attached to gauntlets, katanas, and a bunch of other crazy stuff. My favorite section by far was the Ancient Greek and Roman busts. Seeing the depictions of Dionysus, Pericles, Perseus, and all of the Greek and Roman gods was so unbelievable. The biggest letdown was that the bust of Socrates was gone. That was a slap to the face.

Peterhof was something else all together. We walked around outside first, and in the back there’s a huge fountain with statues of all of the gods. It was easily the coolest fountain I’ve seen. Unfortunately they had it turned off for the year. The statues alone were worth seeing. We walked to the end of it where a dock is. You can see the coast of Finland from there. I felt so close to Logan! We stopped to feed some squirrels, one jumped on Jordan’s backpack and he freaked out. Nothing I haven’t done before though. The inside is nuts. So much gold! My favorite room was the library, of course. Some of the books they have in there (assuming they’re not replicas) must be hundreds of years old, and worth some money.

The biggest difference I noticed there was when we smiled at the girls, they smiled back. Maybe that’s why I like it better, who knows? I’ve got my huge trip coming up, and I’m psyched for that. I’m almost through The West Wing. I found that my Zune can hav .avi’s on it now, great success! Once I’m through with that I don’t know what I’ll do. Well, this is the end, da svidenya!

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=93499&id=1367655137 pictures

Boring post.

13/12/10

They warned us that about halfway through we’d get kind of sick of the country we’re in. I’m getting to that phase, but not entirely yet. I just miss a lot of things I took for granted back home. Like a house, a car, people with a sense of personal hygiene, and an actual bed. Bah, enough complaining. Some stuff happened, not exciting stuff, but stuff.

I bought a coat. A Russian coat is super hot. It’s one of those poofy coats, but I really like it. It got cold today. Unfortunately I won’t be here for the -40 degree stuff. I was looking forward to it too. We got actual snow today too. It was just small flakes fluttering in the wind. I was still excited.

Teaching is boring. We all have it down to a system. I filled out 4 lesson plans on Sunday; I don’t do anything on Sundays, just sit at the apartment and watch The West Wing. Two of my students have dropped, it has made class easier. I have one girl that’s not willing to do anything. She always speaks in Russian, which is against the rules. She’s the typical rebellious teenage girl. She pisses me off.

I’m going to St. Petersburg on Friday. That should be fun. I’ll be listening to Leningrad while I’m there to feel awesome. Boring update, but I feel obligated to post at least once a week.

Kiev and Back

10/06/2010

This last week has been insane. I guess I’ll just start with my trip to Kiev. For anyone who thinks train is the way to go, you’re wrong. Maybe it’s because we got the cheap seats, but still holy crap I hated it. Twelve hours in a cramp smelly cart with smelly Russians is no good. It was set up so there were four beds on the left side, vertical with the wall of the train, and two horizontal on the right side. On the way there I was on the lower left bed, and across from us was a much too friendly Russian. If you’ve seen Eurotrip he was kind of like the guy who kept bugging them in that, just less hands-on. He kept calling us his “America friends,” and told us not to sleep. Well he decided to leave and was trying to ask us to watch his stuff. He said watch my luggage, then pointed to his coat. We said it was a jacket, and he said “Nonono, soopere jzhacket!” That’s how super jacket sounds with a think Russian accent. That got us all laughing for a bit, and then we decided to go to bed.

Ardo was up later when he came back and said that he was looking lovingly down at me. It’s the hair, I know. The bad thing about traveling by train is that you have to cross the border. So they wake you up 2-3 times throughout the night and it sucks. I felt like I had no sleep the next day. Oh and some dip was trying to sell really loud toys and woke us all up about two hours away from Kiev. Eventually we got there, and the Ukrainian money is worth more than the Ruble so it was a bummer to exchange it. We met the ILP native coordinator outside the train station and she took us to our apartment.

So the day we got there was Friday, and for that day we did most of the tourist stuff. The thing that is super boring now is seeing all the churches/monasteries/cathedrals. Saturday. Two of the girls got lost as well. One of them lost their wallet, she thought she may have left it back at the temple, so her and another girl stayed behind. Well the whole group didn’t wait for them, and our cell phones don’t work out there, so we had no idea where they were. Ardo and I stayed at the apartment instead of going to the temple and we met up with the rest of the group outside of the statue to the Motherland, or something like that. Then we went to a a place called Lavra that had mummified monks. We were thinking it would be like Indian Jones style caves and the mummified monks sitting on stone blocks. Nope. They were in glass cases covered with cloth and you couldn’t take pictures. At least it was free. That was what we did during the day on Saturday.

Saturday nights in Kiev they shut down the main road for a concert/party thing. A few of us didn’t want to be lame so we went out to see Friendship Bridge. Friendship Bridge was given to Kiev after the USSR was disbanded. They call it the Bridge of Oppression for obvious reasons. Ardo, Jennifer, and I were at the bridge and we heard a louder concert. So we decided to go to it. We had to walk through a really dark forest path that was kind of intimidating looking back at it, but we were in the moment and didn’t care. We got to the bottom, crossed the bridge to a cool island thing, and right as we got to the concert it was over. Oh, it was on a beach, so I’ve been on a beach in Ukraine.

On our way back we kept hearing people say “angliski,” which is Russian/Ukrainian for English. We assumed they were talking about us, so instead of going back the way we knew, we went with the crowd to the city. We got lost. We wouldn’t admit it at the time, but we were REALLY lost. We walked for about 2 hours thinking we knew where we were going. We had no idea. We knew we had to go up (the city is sprawling over a small valley) to get to our apartment. The street we went up was spooky. Dark, speeding cars, lots of places for muggers to hide. Yeah it was really stupid. We got to the top and still had no idea, so just kept walking.

We always remember one building, and that building is McDonald’s. We saw one and headed in that direction. When we got closer we realized we had walked all the way back to the train station. I think the total miles we walked was about eight, I’ll get on Google maps and find out for sure. So we, being very tired, hired a cab to take us back.

Sunday came and we were exhausted. We had to vacate the apartment by noon so we left early to stash all of our luggage in the train station lockers. Then we went to the Chernobyl museum, which was unfortunately closed, but we found a Mexican restaurant. So we went back and go the rest of the group and headed back to get some Russian Mexican food. It was pretty good. My teaching group was pretty tired, so we decided to just go back and look around the souvenir place. That got boring fast and we decided to hang out in McDonald’s. We sat in McDonald’s for four hours. They had wireless and we were tired, don’t judge. It was pretty fun thought. After the four hours we went back to the station, met up with the rest of the group, and headed to the train.

They told us that most train stations still had squatters. In case you don’t know what that is I’ll describe it to you. It’s a small platform you squat on to poop. I didn’t know at the time that was all they had, so I had to go. I got a hole in one! I’m soooo proud of myself! The train ride back was less fun, we were all very worn out. The only woke us up two times this ride, so I slept a lot better. 12 hours later we got back to Russia and back to teaching. That’s my trip to Kiev!