A Few More Pictures

Life rolls on in St. Petersburg as we continue to enjoy the summer weather, plan lessons, and slowly but surely adjust. In the past few days we had another extremely enjoyable evening with Masha (this time at her place:-) ), our landlord got us a vacuum cleaner and installed our landline telephone, and we had a relaxing lunch at McDonalds today with John Siegel and Jarod Zartman after working at the school for a few hours.

Today we had gorgeous clear blue skies and the temperature was deliciously cool after the heat of the past few weeks. People we know who live in other parts of the city have had much worse experience with the heat and also with mosquitoes than us, so we feel very thankful for our relatively cool and mostly insect free apartment. So far we've managed to avoid the rain that plagues the city so often but I'm sure we'll experience that in due time. Amanda and I took a walk down to the Gulf of Finland tonight (its only about a ten minute walk from our apartment). Here are a few photos that we snapped on the way. As you can see, its still pretty light outside at 8-9 p.m. here.




The cranes of the Baltic Shipyard can be seen in the distance in this photo.


Here I am basking in the sunlight a little after 8 p.m.


Finally, here is a photo of our school! Currently, work is being done to make some repairs on the roof and more work is being done on the inside. The building needs some repairs and a new coat of paint, but it really is a lovely building. Hopefully we will have some photos of our classrooms and more of the insides posted here soon. We just keep forgetting to bring the camera when we go there! Luckily, we walked right past the school as we headed toward the sea so we were able to get these pictures.


This is the front of the International Academy.


And here is a picture of the rear of the building.


You may need to click on this one and then zoom in to fully appreciate it, but it is taken from just behind the school. You can see the colorful outlines of a playground in the background and just behind that an archway. Just through that archway is the courtyard of our apartment building. This shows just how close we really our to the school!


Keep checking back for more to come!

-Matt

Peterhof

Today Matthew and I went to Peterhof. It took about an hour and a half to get to because it is outside the city but it was well worth it. There are several parts to it: the upper gardens, the lower gardens, and the palace. The grounds are massive with tons of fountains and the lower gardens are much more impressive because the palace was built facing the gulf of finland where guests would arrive from.

So here are pictures!

Above is Poseidon on the fountain and a church or chapel (we aren't sure which) behind it

Me with my Bliny. They are essentially like crepes and were delicious. A good choice over the cheesburger!

Next to the steps leading up to the palace

This statue/fountain is of Samson breaking the jaw of a lion. It is symbolic of Russia's overpowering of Sweden, their naval opposition. You can't really tell but it is massive (the lion is probably taller than Matthew).

It's Matthew!

Matthew touching the Gulf of Finland

This fountain had a sort of fan of spray that rotated
This is Matthew's favorite. It is a cascade and the slabs are checker board marble

A merman breaking the jaw of a whale. Assumedly symbolizing the same thing?

My best shot of the front fountains

From here you can see all the way out to the gulf

This is mostly a picture of Matthew's chest but I snuck a picture of the wedding couple because we saw at least 10 - 15 different wedding groups doing photoshoots. it's very common here to go around the city to tourist places and do wedding pictures and evidently today was THE day.

some evil looking fish fountains on our way out

And me trying to look like the statue (but you can't see the rest of my arms)

And finally, we saw a mallet trio in one of the gardens so we have a video!

Nicholas I

Here are some pictures from when we had dinner with Masha last week. The statue is Nicholas I and the domed building is St. Issac's Cathedral.

Apartment Improvements (With Pictures!)

Yesterday was a banner day in our journey to fully settling into our lovely little apartment here on Kanareechnaya Ulitsa. Thanks to a ton of help from Kevin, Tammy's (the headmaster at IA) amazing husband, we now have our very own water filtration system installed! This means that we now have a small faucet in our kitchen sink that dispenses filtered water that is safe for us to drink (there is bacteria in the water in St. Petersburg that can make you sick). So far, we've been buying bottled water to drink and brush our teeth with, but we were really hoping to be able to get a water filter.

So yesterday afternoon, Kevin and Tammy came over and took us shopping. Kevin had told us that he could help install the filter and offered to help us find a good one. We found one that we liked for less than we were prepared to spend, which is always a nice feeling. We also got our very own drying rack for our clothes as well (pictures below). It is a big, fold-out rack that we currently have sitting in our entry way. It is a lovely, Italian made model that proudly reads "Jolly Silver" on the packaging. Unfortunately, we couldn't find any additional fans, the other item we were looking for. We stopped at two big stores, but neither of them had any fans. Apparently fans are pretty hard to come by in the city right now, which made us 100 times more grateful than we already were for the one little fan we do have. Fortunately, today was pleasantly cool.

After we got back, I set to work "installing" the filter. What that meant was that Kevin provided all of the tools, expertise, and step by step instructions while I did the work. I learned a lot about plumbing and I'm flattered that Kevin keeps insisting that I installed the filter, but I realize that all we would have is a pretty looking box with a filter system in it without his extensive help. All told, the process of getting and installing the filter took over 3 1/2 hours, but seemed even longer in the sweltering heat of our tiny kitchen as I tried to fit myself under the sink to drill and wrench things while Kevin patiently tolerated my gross inexperience and ineptitude. On the upside, it did give Amanda and Tammy a nice chance to sit in the living room and talk:-)

So now with a drying rack, a working washing machine, internet, and filtered water, we are doing well:-D We feel very blessed by the helpfulness and generosity of so many people here who have helped us find things, install things, tell us to call them at any time (something we have taken advantage of several times), and in general done so much to make us feel welcome here in St. Petersburg. God has been extravagantly good to us! We've now been here for a full week, but it feels like so much longer than that. I'm so glad that we arrived here three and a half weeks before we start teaching, and I'm sure I'll be surprised at how much more adjusted we will feel two weeks from now.

-Matt

And now as promised, pictures!


Our giant key to get into our apartment!


Our drying rack, hard at work.


The packaging label that came with the drying rack. The words "Jolly Silver" amused us enough that for the moment it is hanging on our wall.


A view under our sink to see part of the water filtration system. This is the filter that we hooked up to the cold water pipe behind the sink.


And here is the faucet that dispenses clean, filtered, wonderful water:-)

Crazy Trip and More Pictures!

Yesterday we mostly worked on lessons and such but we walked around in the area as well and took some pictures!

An expensive new office building



Gates to a park we found



huge matroyshka dolls at a playground



Gigantic metal pegasus at the top of a building's pillars



Heavy metal is pretty big in Russia. This was written on the roof of a playground bench.

Our street sign!

On that note: we were going to go to a church that is directly down the street from us today. We have to take a bus to get there and the busses have been very slow so we were waiting and decided to take a private bus that said it stopped at the metro we needed. It did not, however, stop where we need to and we thought "we will just ride it until it comes back." But it stopped where we went to Lenta earlier this week, a good half hour metro and bus ride away from where we needed to be. We found it pretty funny though and I will prvide you with a map of what happened.

A is where we live

B is where we wanted to go

C is the Marinsky Theater which we passed

D is where we ended up

Good thing we are figuring this out now! We got back just fine and were able to go to church, all in all. We also looked up bus routes that actually work when we got back!

Food Shock

Things that are the same in Russia:

marbled cheese

sour cream

tomato paste

bread

pasta

nutella

rice

chicken

Things that are not the same:

beef (they don't bleed it)

cream (comes in percentages of cream content)

Pasta sauce (good, but more spice)

Things that are VERY MUCH not the same:

Sausage (see below)

It was salty and oozy. I kept thinking "It's going to firm up...It just needs to cook." But it never got better so we threw it away and had our pasta without meat.

Much better than this was the dinner we had with Masha on Friday night. We met her through someone at PFO and this was the first time we actually met her face to face! We had great Italian in the city center at a place whose name translates to "Dough" (they make their noodles, etc.). When we left the resturant, the sun was setting behind the statue of Nicolas I by Saint Issac's Cathedral. Pictures will be up when I have them! We had a great time!

Shopping excursion and dinner

From Amanda

I am as surprised here by how fast the day can fill up as I was in the States. Especially when you have to commute, things just take longer. Case in point, we made plans to meet someone we were put in contact with at PFO, Masha, this morning and decided to go to Lenta further away but where we knew we could walk to one.

This ended up taking about 3 hours from when we left to arrival back home. It didn't feel that long which is good! We needed to look for some home things, like towels and our own bed sheets (Tammy let us borrow some!), and the stores near us really don't have any of that.

We were looking at bedding and we decided on this terrible fake Asian bedding because we thought it was on sale. We also considered getting a drying rack (since we have to line dry clothes) but really didn't want to carry it on the metro so we didn't. When we went to check out two things happened:

1) We realized the ugly bedding was not on sale only after it was too late.

2) The cashier DID NOT want to give Matthew change and grilled him on what he had in his wallet before she gave up.

The last one was more funny than anything. Since we are foreign we can play the "I'm stupid" card but Matthew wanted to break the note he gave her even though he understood her. The aversion to change seems to be pretty common here. I read that service workers know they are on the bottom of the social scale and rebel by being surly to show they are not below you; having worked in fast food for years I can completely understand!

So we get our not-as-cheap ugly bedding home and I will provide you a picture of it!

We can't find sheets that will really cover both of us so we both have our own sheets. Mine are blue and fun designed and Matthew has the ugly ones!

We also realized that the brand name loosely transliterates to Krap ("krep").

There is also a great deal of stress placed on the non-need to iron them (listed 8 times under the picture of the iron). This seems to be because they have a weird waffle texture that you couldn't iron.

So overall we have sheets and are generally happy with them!

Dinner with Masha tonight!