Be Our Guest

I haven’t blogged in a while (A Weil?) but I have a perfectly valid excuse: I’ve been hosting three wonderful Petersburg imports.  Liz, Anna and Lauren are all doing Fulbright research projects in Peter the Great’s “Window to the West,” and came down to check out the “Gateway to Siberia.”  Of course I endeavored to show them a great time, but I was relieved to hear Lauren say she was surprised by how cool this city is.  And Lauren knows from cool cities; besides Petersburg, she’s lived in Denver, CO and Portland, OR.  So her approval means a lot.

While they were here, we did what any group of expatriated Americans would do in a foreign city: checked out the famous cultural sites and ate a ton of food.  We saw the ballet Don Quixote, visited the photography museum and Romanov site and did lots of walking.  We went to my favorite club 2KY and did lots of dancing.  We made yummy meals (spaghetti bolognese, vegetable curry, roast chicken, eggplant parmigiana) and went to a restaurant that makes pies according to ancient Russian recipes (I tried rabbit!).  Last night, Liz’s Bulgarian friend who lives here made us a traditional pork dish from his country.  Delish!  Also Lauren and I have been experimenting with the wide variety of fruity alcoholic drinks available in every Russian grocery store.  So far, our favorites are Graper, which tastes like grapefruit juice, and Orange Funky Juz, which tastes like orange soda.  For having such a high alcohol content, they’re very refreshing!

Two days ago was yet another enigmatic Russian holiday: Defenders of the Motherland.  In Soviet times, this was Red Army day, but it’s morphed into a sort of soldier-appreciation day.  Because the most popular of these memorial days is Women’s Day on the 8th of March, some people treat February 23rd as Men’s Day.  So we congratulated all the men we met, either jokingly or seriously depending on their ages.  On Friday there was a huge snowmobile show under the bridge in the city center.  The number of people there was astonishing, and just as interesting as the show itself.  In fact, there were so many people there, it took us quite a while to find a spot from which we could see the daredevils riding their snowmobiles off huge ramps and flipping in the air.  With everyone craning to see, it felt like the 4 of July. 

I guess that’s about it.  The girls sat in on a couple of my classes, but you can read about that on Lauren’s blog (http://laurichka-samizdat.blogspot.com/).  Now I’m alone again, naturally, and trying to figure out what the hell to do with all my free time.  What a weird problem to have!