It's been about a week since our last post so we thought it was time to bring everyone up to date once more. This past week was full of meetings at school and time spent in planning courses and lessons. It's been fun and exciting to getting to know the other teachers and making concrete plans for our classes. Tomorrow is the First Bell day, where we have a beginning of the year ceremony and students receive their schedules, locker assignments, and we go over some procedural things, and Tuesday marks the first official day of classes. So just in case you thought all we did was go around and see cool things, we'd like to note that we haven't forgotten that we came here to teach and we've been hard at work preparing for classes.
But since all work and no play is no good, we do have some pictures from our most recent excursion.
Yesterday we had the pleasure of exploring the island of Kronstadt with our friend Masha. We went and visited her grandmother, who lives on the island, and spent the day walking around and exploring the area and especially the harbor. Kronstadt is the island that guards the entrance to St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland and used to be a major naval base. There are still various naval installations on the island and we saw quite a few sailors and ships. You can read a bit more about Kronstadt here if you're interested.
After spending most of the afternoon on Kronstadt we took a hydrofoil back to the city. It was a lot of fun to approach the city from the water and it was a really good deal at 96 roubles (compared to the 500 roubles we would be charged as foreigners to go to Peterhof by water, which is closer to the city than Kronstadt). After getting back in town, Masha took us to a wonderful Greek restaurant off of Nevsky Prospekt. We enjoyed a good meal, complete with live music and dancers. A little bit of ice cream from Baskin Robbins topped things off for the night.
It's been great to settle in these past four weeks without having to start teaching immediately, and we have been very grateful that we had this time to figure out how to do things, and to make some mistakes and learn from them. But now the real work begins as we start teaching. As things get busier we may find it a bit more difficult to update here as often as we'd like to, but we will do our best to keep it up to date!
And now, some pictures from yesterday's excursion:
The Naval Cathedral on Kronstadt. Unfortunately, it is under extensive rennovation at the moment so we couldn't see it. There is a picture of it without the wrappings in the Wikipedia entry that I linked to above.
A statue of Peter the Great, the founder of St. Petersburg and Kronstadt.
The stars of our show!
A candid shot I took and decided to post, which probably does not please Amanda or Masha:-P
Ships in the harbor at Kronstadt.
A submarine.
Amanda and Masha.
I took this picture of a ferry as we went past it on the hydrofoil.
One of the small islands that ring the harbor at Kronstadt, also taken from the hydrofoil.
Kronstadt from the hydrofoil (complete with authentic water-streaked window!)
The Peter and Paul Fortress, which we passed as we went back into the city.
A picture, which I am rather fond of, that I took just as we were about to go under the Troitsky Bridge.
The hydrofoil we took back (well, technically only half of it)
And to finish things off, a great shot of the Winter Palace that Amanda took last night.
That's all for now!
-Matt
