In Which I Travel About

After a fairly long break from my blog, I feel it's time to give an update on my life. When you, faithful reader, last heard from me, I had a moustache, and my host had just recently returned from the hospital. Much has happened in the meantime, such as me shaving my moustache, and our mid-term vacation. We had ten days off from the end of October to the beginning of November, and people in the group went their separate ways. Two girls went east to Irkutsk and Mongolia, and two girls went west, one to Spain, and one to Prague. One went south, to Tbilisi, Georgia, and one went north, to Arkhangelsk. I, however, went with three friends first to St. Petersburg and then on to Moscow. We had originally planned on going to Novgorod as well, but that just didn't work out. After a twelve hour train ride from Yaroslavl' to St. Petersburg in which we befriended the strange Russian couple that was across from us on the train, we arrived tired and stinky to our hostel fairly near the center of the city. We did a lot and saw a lot in St. Petersburg, and I'm not going to go into everything that happened. What I will say is, go to St. Petersburg. It's a really beautiful and interesting city, though I don't have much nice to say about the weather. It rained a good portion of the time we were there, and we only got around 4 hours on sunshine in 4 days. Oh, and we had about the strangest coincidence I could possibly have expected – as we were getting on the train in Yaroslavl', I noticed three American girls getting onto the same train car. I thought it was interesting that there were other Americans in Yaroslavl', but didn't think about it beyond that. Then, when we arrived at our hostel, the three Americans were there waiting to check in. It turns out that they are volunteering in Yaroslavl' at orphanages and such. And then the next morning, we heard a few people in the hostel's common room speaking with English accents about Yaroslavl'. We went out to investigate, and it turned out there was a group of English students studying in Yaroslavl' that had turned up at the same hostel in Petersburg. So there were three separate groups of people, all studying or volunteering in Yaroslavl', staying at the same hostel. Weird. Anyways, after four days of doing the normal touristy things, seeing my good friend Davey, and meeting with my freshman year Russian professor who moved back to Russia, we got on a train headed for Moscow.

We arrived in Moscow in much the same manner in which we arrived in Petersburg – tired, smelly, and not really wanting to do anything. We didn't really do anything that day, other than shower and nap. In all, we spent four days in Moscow seeing all the sights, though I didn't actually get a chance to go into the Kremlin. Fortunately that will likely be rectified in December when my sister, father, and aunt arrive for a tour of Moscow, Yaroslavl', and Petersburg. We met up with my friend Alexis, who is also a Macalester student, who is studying with Middlebury in Moscow. We went to the cemetery where many famous Russians are buried, such as Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol', Nikita Khrushchev, and more recently, Boris Yeltsin. Our last day there consisted of going out to the Sparrow Hills (formerly known as the Lenin Hills) for views of the city of Moscow, and of my favourite building, Moscow State University (MGU). I would say the highlight of my time in Moscow was walking down to Red Square at midnight with a friend, in light snow. They light up all the buildings on the square at night, and GUM was covered in Christmas-type lights. It was really beautiful. We returned to Yaroslavl' last Monday, tired and loopy, and somewhat poorer. But it was a really fun trip, though I'm glad I'll be able to go back to both cities to see the things I missed.

Oh, and by the way – if you're interested, I put up some of my pictures from St. Petersburg on Shutterfly, and am working on getting the pictures from Moscow up there as well. The address: fromtherodina.shutterfly.com