Definition Theorem Number Next

Monday was a big Russian holiday- something roughly equivalent to Veteran's Day. Pretty much everybody here had it off, but on Saturday we had still not heard anything about it from our program's coordinator, so I fired off an e-mail to see what was up. This is the response I got:

Dear Sean,

Yes, you'll have classes tomorrow. Our program ignores all holidays.

Sincerely,
Irina

I think it's safe to say that I've involved myself in some sort of voluntary gulag.

Also on the topic of holidays, next week is "Pancake Week." At last, I've found a place to call home.

As a personal celebration of the imminence of pancake week I went out to a club last night. It was called the Club Bilingua, and unfortunately I didn't just forget to type the l - the two languages in question were Russian and Spanish. I thought I might have more success communicating in Spanish than I have thusfar in Russian, but it turns out that having another language I barely speak thrown in interchangeably only compounds the difficulty. Still, I had an excellent time, and in a clever twist the concert that evening was sung largely in Catalan, so nobody could understand it. And we had fantastic seats; we had been graciously invited out for the evening by Anna, one of the girls hired by the program to assist us with the basics of living, shopping, and fending off the KGB, and she knew the concert coordinator so we had a reserved table up front. All in all I spent the evening feeling very metropolitan if entirely clueless.

In a few hours I'm taking a midnight train to St. Petersburg for the weekend. Unfortunately I'm a technologically inept hillbilly so I'm still using the original 16mb compact flash card my camera came with five odd years ago, so my ability to convey this experience to you will be sharply limited. Still, at the current exchange rate of 1000 words per picture, my next post should treat you to considerably more information, so stay tuned.

As long as I don't run out of batteries.