forget Strömsö, we're in Russia

So

Day number two in the city of Peter the Great. 

When I woke up (I slept like a baby) my brain clearly had proceeded some Russian because it suddenly was easier to remeber words. It was still difficult to construct sentences but it was easier to remember words than yesterday. And that felt amazing. My level of being lost decreased.

The last post was a little erh I went off track and it was a bit messy, so I hope that this post is eh less messy.

Sightseeing by driving around in the city in a bus, is normally the most boring you can do when travelling. And we did it. Again. Just like last year. But luckily our busdriver, who guided us, is awesome. He has been so many times in S:t Petersburg that he knows a lot of interesting facts and so on. But even if he was awesome, the tour was way too long not to bore us. Fortunately i had some great friends with me.

When I before the trip looked at the list of the participants, I was happy to see that there would be a couple of awesome guys from last year with us, but sad that two other guys would not.

I was so wrong. The two guys were already in Petersburg on some kind of a short exchange and they joined us form this day on. 

During the sightseeing we stopped at two places, where we took some photos and where some bought some souvenirs. I did not.

You all know the traditional Russian furr hats. They are popular souvenirs. And people like to try to sell them at some tourist attractions. These are not made of real furr anymore and among the black hats you can find pink and violet ones. I think that our first stop was on the Vasilevsky island (right me if I'm wrong), where the huge red columns with the statues on are. Within just a small area there were like three salesmen selling these furr hats. And just one boy bought one. 

I can only imagine how fantasticly boring it must be to try to sell those hats. Or souvenirs at all, as long as you don't have a stand. 

And for the record, the hats were overpriced. 

Seriously, imagine that you're day in day out standing in the cold wind among silly tourists trying to sell some overpriced hats and no one even looks at you as you try to speak with them when they're walking by.

And you probably have a crappy salary. 

Sighseeing makes you hungry. 

And when you're hungry, there is one absolutely fantastic place to eat. 

Штолле (Shtolle) is famous for its pies, and I totally understand this publicity. There are different pies to choose from, e.g. cabagge, salmon, meat, mushroom and then sweet pies filled with quark (?), apricose or cranberry. I've eaten the salmon, meat, apricose and cranberry pies and they were so good. 

I said in the last post that tea is something that's going to keep harrasing you as long as you are in Russia. There are also some other water based things that you'll always be served no matter where you go, and one of them is 

Soup

Yes

There is no restaurant that doesn't serve soup.

Ok maybe McDonalds and Hesburger doesn't but the rest does. 

(Please right me if I'm wrong)

You see, first you get soup and then you get the maincourse. 

And at Штолле/Shtolle there is one absolutely fantastic soup that I never thought I would hear of, and that's sorrel soup. Suolaheinä suomeksi. It looks like seaweed, smells like seaweed, but it tastes so good. And then there's meat and a half of an egg. I recommend this soup. 

A piece of advice for you:

It can be very difficult to be a vegetarian or anything like that in Russia, it's not common in any way.

And another good thing to remember:

In this country it's not common to drink like water during the meal, you eat the soup as a starter and then you drink tea afterwards. And last year this was still a surprise for our experienced teachers. Last year our teachers were too Finnish to remember this and you can only imagine the cultural shock when there is not enough botteled water at the restaurant for us all because no one expected us to need any and we expected them to have some. The pies were ordered on beforehand and our teachers thought that water was self evident. This year the remembered this and we had some juice, морс (mors), made of lingonberry and cranberry or something like that. 

But seriously

That confusion

From both sides.

Marvelous.

One more thing that makes our bus driver awesome (remember that he's Finnish). The traffic in Petersburg is pretty horrible and jammed, just saying. When he noticed that he'd need to make a u-turn, he just made a u-turn on a super tight road with a lot of cars and it was perfect. Then he just stopped in front of this pie-place and  said "get out quickly, we're blocking the whole road".

He's awesome.

The pie lunch included fooling around with an iPad's camera.

Ah, right, the teachers had came up with this great idea that we should document our trip with their iPads, either by photographing, filming or in whichever way we wanted to retell the trip. I think everybody just took photos and wrote some texts. It was not smooth to swing that iPad around wherever you went.

The Hermitage (Эрмитаж) is full of art and there are 25km to walk if someone feels for hiking indoors. It's a complex of several buildings, including the famous Winter Palace.

Saint Perersburg is full of huge different coloured palaces, just saying.

Yes, the Hermitage, we walked around for an hour or two with a guide, and our teacher translated. It felt awesome to actually understand as much as 1/3 of what the guide said. 

We saw two paintings of Da Vinci and the famous golden clock with the owl, peacock and the tree. It was beautiful and very extraordinary. 

I didn't unfortunately take a picture, but i bet you can find one if you google.

The guided tour took longer than planned and we were behind in the schedule. And also before the guided tour in the Hermitage, we wandered around with the whole group for a while because we had so much extra time. After the extra time we had some more extra time because our guides were late (or something like that). 

And when people got nervous about all this, my teacher just said

"Forget Strömsö, we're in Russia!"

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

(Google the TV- program Strömsö if you don't know what it is, but the point is that everything always goes perfect in Strömsö.)

This art educational visit was the last program of the day and my host sister picked me up from the square outside. We and her cousin were supposed to go to the Summer Garden ( Летний сад) but it was closed. I was a bit disappointed because I have never been there, but well it's pretty obvious why it was closed, it's still so early in the spring sonthere's nothing to see.

Back home with the host family things went well. I basically spent the whole night talking with the parents about this and that, and they told me about a road trip they hade made with the whole family two years back, in eastern Europe. They showed a lot of pictures and it was so interesting! Last summer I road tripped through the US, coast to coast, but I somehow forgot to tell about it, I really didn't get a chance. I was too interested of their trip :D 

Something I wrote that night:

                         *

I'm just sitting there scilent, just listening and nodding to tell I've understood and when I try (notice my choice of the word) to speak they understand me but my grammar goes all wrong. But that doesn't matter as long as I'm understood. 

                         *

The son in the family, a seven years old funny little fella, was so cute. And their dog, he was so kind and cute and I and my host brother played with the dog for a while inside, even thought the apartment wasn't big at all. And we must have distured the mother so such when she talked on the phone oh my God.

Can I just talk about children and foreign languages. They talk fast and they're iger and shy and show-off and you think they are so cute but you only understand 1/4 of what they say, when you normally understand about half of what is said when someone older than 10 speaks a foregin language to you. But with a child, you just nod and smile and everything's alright because they think that you understood.Here you have my situation with my host brother explained. 

The worst is when they mix languages. I have a relative who is half swedish and half chinese, he speaks cantonese chinese and then swedish. Last time I met him he was around three years old and he had so much energy and ran around playing some super cool exciting game (alone). Once he stopped in front of me and my second cousin and started to tell us something, probably about the game. We understood the word "police" and the "Pew! Pew!" So it must have been one hell of a chase and a lot of action i have absolutely no idea. Please note that swedish is my mothertounge. 

Oh this went off track again, I'm sorry.

But mainly, nodding was my saviour until someone asked me something.

Hehe.

Here is a list of expressions, words and sentences that I really felt retard without, that are simply hard to live without:

Whatever/doesn't matter to me

Watch out!

I'm hungry

How do I lock the bathroom door?

I could..

Should I...

Are you ok/hurt?

No, that was not what I meant

I meant that... 

I tried

I learnt some of these during the stay. 

I found more persons during the day with fantastically boring jobs. For example, at the entrance of the Hermitage, there was a security control, this kind of metal detectors like on airports. Well, nothing ever happened and when something did, the guard just told you to keep on going. So the guard just sat there yawning. An other job at the same place was the "guards" in the actual halls with the art, those old grannies that are watching your every step and watched that you didn't touch anything or that you didn't use flash when taking a photo. I would manage for a summer but not longer, I would get terribly restless and start singing and jumping around or something like that. 

People that always look so done with everything are the bus conductors (note: not the drivers) and the guards at the end of the escalator in the subway/metro. Well, maybe I'd rather have that kind of job than no job at all.

I hope this post wasn't too messy. 

And it's a bit longer than the last one. 

I apologise for possible grammatical and spelling mistakes and

I'll be right back