Anyway, I'm sitting here stuffing my face with Cadbury's chocolate (nom) and thought it was about time I wrote a little bit about my second week in St Petersburg - I still keep having random moments of realisation that I'm actually in Russia - eeeek!
So, on the babuska front I'd say all is going well, her husband returned from the dacha (summer house) at the weekend and although he seems like a lovely guy, for some reason we cannot understand a word he says, it has got to the point where we greet eachother with a little chuckle, then he says something and I laugh again (unless he has a serious face and then of course it's best to just nod) and that is how our conversations go. Lovely.
But alas, we are getting on really well in this flat and have been allowed to cook for ourselves this week which has been nice - we made a little chicken pie and our babushka looked at it as though it was the strangest thing you would ever eat but it was in fact very yummy (in case you were wondering!).
There are some house rules which we try our best to follow, my personal favourite is that we are are not allowed to wash up (something about being economical), closely followed by not being allowed to speak in English in the corridor (not too sure why, little bit suspicious!).
In all seriousness (or about as much seriousness as this blog can take) our babushka really is lovely and told us that she worries about us when we're out late, makes sure we've had a good day at school (yes I feel like I'm 7 again) and checks her outdoor thermometerthingy to advise us on whether or not we need a coat etc! Very, very sweet.
Moving on, I feel like this week has been a bit more chilled than last week, speaking (/trying to speak) Russian makes a person very sleepy, but it has been fun all the same. I got myself some volunteer work at the Hermitage which involves many things, one of which is speaking in Spanish to tourists which should be fun. On my first day I was just sent to some mystery ecological room to proofread this looooongg English text about rock formation, now, I don't see how having a native English speaker do this job makes any difference as I could not understand the majority of the words in the text, but hey, I felt important!
People seem to get quite excited when they find out we're English - had a funny moment on an escalator (probably the longest escalator in the world, takes about 10 mins to go down, no exagerration) when a group of school boys overheard us talking and asked us where we were from. When we said England they were like "woww" and then reeled off all of the English football clubs they could think of, after that they weren't really sure what to do and kind of just stood there listening to us (what do you do in this situation?!).
Today we went on a boat trip on the River Neva and it was stunning, so worth doing, I'll put some pictures up in the next post.
Sorry for the babbling, hope you're all having a nice weekend,
love Лиза xxx
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| A cool stone guy in the museum - wish I could tell you who but I can't say I bothered translating the Russian! |
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