Adventures in Russian Food #3

Lol Wut?

Tasty though.

Adventures in Russian Food #2

Сырок (syrok) is a type of curd snack that is commonly found in pretty much any store which sells food in Russia. It tastes kinda like cheesecake, but possibly a milder flavor. They come in multiple flavors (like vanilla, chocolate, raspberry...), with biscuit or without, and are covered in chocolate.

Vanilla Flavor

They cost 5-10 rubles a piece (less than 50 cents).
I'm not gonna lie these things are the most delicious things on the planet. Like gastronomical rapture. My best days start out with one of these guys. I know, cheesecake for breakfast. Kinda weird, definitely a little #eatingmyfeelings but my host mom seems to think it's normal to consume these so early. I'm not going to argue.

Click for Full Effect

Сырок is better than Lobster Shack. Just sayin'

PS- I definitely found a recipe for these. It's gonna be dangerous.

Trapped: How I Managed to Survive Imprisonment Within a Russian Apartment

Russians seem to like doors, like, a lot. For my apartment alone, not only is there the door to the building, but two sequential doors for the entrance to the apartment. I have heard that the number of doors can double if you have an older building as there are twice the entrances (one for people and guest, one for trash and servants). With these doors come many keys. Right now, I have a fob for the outside door, a key for each apartment door, and a key for the deadbolt. Also, the keys don't look like keys in America. Rarely will you have the flat, grooved key with ridges for the pins, but you will have either a dungeon-y key, a four-sided ridged key, or a circular key with holes in it for pins.

So on Monday morning, I woke up, had breakfast, and got ready for school. By the time I actually got around to leaving, the other two in the apartment had already left. Ready to leave, I unlocked the inner door and pulled the handle. Nothing. It wouldn't even turn all the way. Confused, I checked the deadbolt to find my key wouldn't turn (yeah, use the key on the inside and outside). After that I was sure that the deadbolt was unlocked as it had never been locked before.
I began trying every combination of door usage I could think of: lock door, try deadbolt, move lever-thingy (I still don't know what it does), lift door handle up. For a while, I thought I had forgotten how to use a door.
After about 20 minutes of playing this game, a slight feeling of panic set in. My hozyaika was at the dacha and everyone else was at work and I sure a hell wasn't going to call them to explain in pseudo-Russian that I was locked in the apartment. My first thought was, "Is being locked in the apartment an excusable absence from school?" My Russian friend from Kazan said 'probably'. Relief.
I called one of the program coordinators to describe my predicament. She then called my host-father (could have skipped the middle man), who then called me.
Problem #2--I don't understand Russian over the phone, not at all. So about 5 minutes pass with what sounds like frustrated yelling over the phone, and I am no closer to escaping.
My host mother then calls, and I can at least understand her a little bit, usually, but today it sounds like more frustrated yelling. After negotiating with this for about 5 minutes, I finally figure out the secret to operating the door.
Freedom. And I only missed one class.

Pavlovsk

The next program sponsored excursion was to Pavlovsk, which despite being a REALLY cool place, I guess I just wasn't feeling it that day. So I present to you: WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovsk_Palace

Read up. It's got some pretty cool history, all of which we learned on the tour. Picture permits were 70 rubles and I purchased one even though I have yet to actually be checked for one. I have a feeling you don't ACTUALLY need to buy one. Nevertheless, I took pictures of everything to the point of probably annoying the tour guide.
Cool story though: We took an elektrichka to Pavlovsk, that is to say a commuter train. This means the types of transportation I have taken in Russia now include:

Bus
Trolleybus
Metro
Marshrutka
Elektrichka
Boat
Cruise Ship
Hydrofoil
Airplane

I hear there are helicopter tours for rather cheap. Hmmmmm.

Orientation Redux

So I probably forgot the most important part of the entire orientation experience: Meeting your Host Family. My host family consists of a Host Mother, her husband (I never see him), her son (rarely see him), and her granddaughter, who is visiting for a semester before going back home. So on the last day of orientation, they loaded us onto a bus and away we went. I was part of the last group to get dropped off and while they said the bus would be ready for us at 5, it didn't pick us up until 7ish due to 'dacha traffic'. Dacha traffic is a wonderful phenomenon that happens on Friday as people get off work. Basically everyone who has a dacha in the country gets the hell out of Piter at the same time. This causes all major and even minor roads jam up. So 7-ish rolls around, and off we go. There were around 25-30 people on our bus with luggage; it was a tight fit. We dropped off some people who lived close to the hotel first and then made our way to Petrogradskaya Storona. I do not live here so I settled in for the long haul, little did I know how long it would actually be.
It took us a while to realize that this process of dropping people off was taking far longer than it should. We also started noticing the same businesses and streets moving past us. As it turns out, we had been driving in circles for at least 3 hours. By this point we had just about finished dropping off half the group. After a few more trips around the same city block, we made our way back to the city center to drop off the rest of us. Luckily for us, we had a heritage speaker on board and she filled us in on what was happening. Apparently the bus driver had no idea where he was going, hence the circles. Also, the bus we were on was scheduled to go to Finland at midnight (yes it was that late).
A little before midnight, we pull in behind the October Hotel and the driver kicks us off. After 20 or so minutes of waiting street-side with our luggage, a replacement bus shows up. As a group, we were all still quite jet-lagged and the 6 hour bus ride was not helping things. We were all pretty delirious near the end; laughing at just about anything, most likely stupid things.
I was third from the last to get dropped off at a reasonable 1:30am. Upon entrance to the apartment, my host mother promptly fed me, which was greatly appreciated as I hadn't eaten dinner before the hell-on-wheels fiasco. Dinner consisted of soup--mmmmm. And after I had eaten everything, she then made (read: force fed) me 8 blini with black current jam. Those were delicious and I now have the privilege of saying that I have double-fisted pancakes.

Sweet Church OMG CATS

Last weekend, we all went on our first excursion – a trip to Valaam. Valaam is a grouping of islands on Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe. Primarily, it is one of the holiest sites in Russia. We set out on the Alexander Suvorovsky, a cruise ship-like thing. The boat had a restaurant and two bar/club things. The trip involved overnight transit there, a day on the islands, and overnight transit back. I thought I would have gotten motion sickness but the ride there was incredibly smooth. The cabins were small and the toilets were those weird German shelf-toilets (didn't handle toilet paper either).

In the morning we went on a hike of the big island where our tour guide showed us the various churches on the island. Our tour group was in Russian and I understood everything up to the point when I stopped paying attention. The hike reminded me how much I like being outdoors, away from cities. Having spent most of my time over the last five years in Minneapolis, this was a refreshing escape.

The scheduled item for the afternoon was an excursion to the actual monastery on Valaam. The monastery is one of Russia's oldest and to my understanding, is pretty well populated with monks and temp monks. We took a smaller boat from the bigger boat over to the monastery and the ride was nauseating. Not only was the rocking sickening, there was an audio-tour happening over the speakers in Russian and English. The Russian sounded like the the Metro (think, teacher from Charlie Brown) and the broken Runglish did not help the nausea.

Believe it or not, visiting monasteries and churches is not one my favorite things to do. Sometimes I feel like once you've seen one Russian Orthodox Church, you've kinda seen them all. I know there are the iconic ones that you MUST see, but in general, iconoclasts are iconoclasts. Plus, there were people actually praying and lighting candles and kissing glass-covered icons while we were there, and I feel that our three groups of 30 people were interrupting what was probably a rather important experience for them.

Regardless, there were cats on the island, and cats fix everything. Every time my group passed a cat, our attention immediately fixated on the cat. The tour guide could have been spinning plates on a unicycle, but there was a cat, and that was more important. And because there was a cat, all warnings and advice from orientation flew out the window as many people pet and picked up the cats. I did not, because ring worm and fleas suck.

That night on the way back home, I went to the nightly discotheque on the ship. A pint of Tuborg for 50 rubles? Yes, please! Woke up the next morning feeling refreshed and went home. Rush hour on the metro=never again.

Scary Scary

A week ago on Friday, I got to school super early and decided my time was better spent going for a walk. I started out by touring the embankment; seeing lots of nice apartments and some not so nice ones. After about an hour of that, I headed back to the campus along Шпалерная Улица (Shpalernaya Ulitsa). On the left is an open square of sorts with a monument in the center. Thankfully during the bus tour, the tour guide introduced this statue as Felix Dzerzhinsky. Behind this statue is a rather run-down looking building with no obvious signage or labeling.
On that particular day, a woman happened to be taking pictures of the building, not the statue. She was also really close to the building; taking a picture and then feeling the surface or inspecting a crack in the cement. It was then that I saw two armed personnel exit the building, approach her, and escort her inside. After returning to the campus, I talked to one of the program coordinators about what just happened. As it turns out, that building is a branch office of the FSB.
I took pictures of both FSB buildings in Kazan last year...And I want a picture of that Dzerzhinsky statue.