Midterms and Pskov

The sun has disappeared completely from St. Petersburg and has been replaced by gray skies and rain. Great. I can't wait until the weather reverses. Although I guess I'm not missing that much -- I heard Oberlin was hit by snow yesterday.

This past week hasn't been very interesting. I had midterms for my two Smolny courses, both of which were extremely ridiculous. For my politics class in English, we had to write an essay entitled "30 years after WWII: my view." For my world music class, we had to listen to 12 different pieces of music and pick what country we thought they were from. One student convinced our teacher to write the possible countries on the board, and when we noticed we had only studied 2 out of the 6, the teacher replied "this is more a test of your musical intuition." Needless to say, this has not been an extremely academically challenging semester.

Yesterday, I returned from an overnight in Pskov, a small Russian town south of St. Petersburg. It was an excursion with my group and while I didn't enjoy all of the sightseeing, it was fun to simply hang out with the entire group -- something that hadn't happened for a while. Pskov is a pretty old city and we did a walking tour of it in the rain, which was unpleasant. The next day we went to Izbork, an even smaller city, where we saw old churches and fortresses. It was actually kind of incredible because it really felt like we were looking at ancient Russia. Most of this part of Russia was swamp land, which was extremely apparent where we were. Standing in these ruins looking at the murky ground made us feel like we were in Ancient Rus', possibly trying to ward off a Mongol attack. Then, we went to a monastary near by, which in my opinion, looked slightly like Disneyworld. Sorry for the lack of pictures in the past month, I'll try to have some new ones up by the end of this week.

Other than that, not much has happened. Friday night I was left home alone (my host mom was very afraid that in 24 hours I would starve, so she cooked about 3 days worth of food for me). It was kind of nice to feel like I had my own place, so I invited some friends over and we made real American chocolate chip cookies. They were delicious and my host family really enjoyed them as well.

I think the craziest part of our trip to Pskov was simply riding our bus on small Russian roads for hours at end. They were possible the worst roads I have ever traveled on. And the worst outhouses I have ever had to use.

Ok, well I'm going to go try to find the kosher store so that I can buy some matzoh to eat next week. I wish everybody a happy Passover (if you are celebrating it), and if not, have a good week!

Hannah