I’ve been here now for about a week and a half, and I can’t say I’ve seen a more beautiful city. It isn’t just the architecture, which was to be expected, but the White Nights bring a real magic to this place. On Saturday night, at around two am, I watched the sun rise with the bridges on the Neva after walking past the Hermitage Museum. It was like walking through the wildest dreams of my childhood. That sounds corny, but let me explain:
I was adopted from Simferopol, a city in Crimea. I spent the third year of my life in an orphanage, and the first two somewhere only God knows. Now this part is going to get a little silly, but bear with me. My favorite movie as a child was Anastasia. If you’ve seen it, you know its about a young orphan in Russia who finds out that she is really a princess. Perhaps it is a little bit far fetched to have dreamed that I, too, was really a princess (sometimes I also had a secret, long-lost twin) but, outside of daydreams, I strongly identified with her. She was like an older sister, a role model, and a very real influence in my life. We both, left at train stations, had humble and obscure beginnings. I wished that I, like her, could go from being “a skinny little nobody” to someone extraordinary. The first scene of that movie opens on to the Winter Palace, now the Hermitage. On Saturday, walking across that square, with the palace lit and the sun rising, it really did feel like some long-hidden and forgotten daydream had been achieved.
Just being in this city is achieving something for me, but I’m not here just to realize childhood daydreams. As much as learning Russian is apart of my childhood wishes, it is real work, and it is the part of my past that I hope will bring me into my future. Arriving here has shown me that I’m perhaps better than I thought I was, but that doesn’t mean that I’m very good. At orientation in DC, the told us that there would be good days and bad days in the languages, and I’ve definitely experienced both, consecutively, in fact.
Monday was not a good day. I was very tired and since all of my classes are completely in Russian, that certainly didn’t help. Conceptually, of course working your brain in a new language is tiring, but you don’t quite know how tiring it can be until you feel it. On monday, I understood very little of my classes and it was frustrating. I did click off after my second ad penultimate class. On the street, I tried to speak Russian, but halfheartedly, and just let it happen when shopkeepers and waiters spoke to me in English. The evening was a little better. A group mate of mine pushed me to speak Russian to him and the concerts I went to were very interesting. The first was Mendelssohn and a piano concerto, both of which were very impressive, but the best part of the evening was the second concert. After dinner at an Indian restaurant with my friends (yay! food with seasoning!), I went to a concert of Egyptian music. Because the Russia-Egypt game was the next day, there were a lot of Egyptians in Russia, and many at the concert. The music was of a contemporary Egyptian composer who performed on the piano. The music was entertaining, cinematic, which made sense because the composer has done a lot of film work. It definitely sounded like Egypt, but it most sounded like Egypt at the end. During the last song, the Egyptians in the audience clapped and sang in Arabic. Because the concert was held in the Mariinsky Theater, which is an enormous and beautiful hall, the singing sounded distant, yet, at the sam time, seemed to surround us. After we left, I spoke entirely in Russian with the Russian friend who brought me and went to bed very gratefully.
One final note about the concert before I move on to the better day: I have heard from music teachers that in Russia, the audience claps in unison. I can now safely say that that is very true. The collective still exists in Russia, and getting to feel it in that way, to be apart of it, was a peculiar experience to say the least.
Now, to yesterday (Tuesday) and my good language experience in class. To be honest, I rocked it. In grammar I talked as much as our resident know-it-all, and in phonetics, I was told I said the word completely perfectly more than once. Even in politics I managed to ask a question and contribute some to the class discussion. on the street was perhaps the best part. I went to a cafe for lunch, and not only did the waitress actually answer me in Russian, she didn’t even look at me funny when I spoke to her. After class, I had a non-alcoholic mojito and actually managed to do some much-needed vocabulary work. I haven’t talked much about my host family (don’t worry, I will) but the short end of it is that I can only understand like 30% of what my host mom says to me. Yesterday, however, we managed an entire conversation at dinner, with both of us talking!! I’m even comfortable enough to ask her to repeat herself!
In conclusion, I’ve had good moments and bad moments here, and in the next six and a half weeks, I’m sure to have many more of both, but at least now I know what I’m in for. As I sit here, on an island in the middle of a pond in one of St. Petersburg’s many gardens, watching people feed the fat pigeons while I write, I know how lucky I am to be here. To get to walk into a dream and work towards gaining a skill that I’ve wanted as long as I can remember makes me think that I might be slowly stumbling my way towards an ending better than Anastasia’s.
