St.Petersburg Church, comedy, and hot wings

Well Hai readurs!

Today was our first full day in St.Petersburg and I did a lot of fun things, yay. I woke up in the morning, and instead of joining the group and going to a Lutheran church (I think), Thomas and I went to a Russian Orthodox service in a monestary by the river. Before we got there we got very lost, and ended up walking a lot more than we should have. Luckily the church has a very large gold dome that is impossible to miss once you reach the river. As we walked through the entrance, we got very depressed because there were a lot of beggars, most of them were missing at least one limb. It made me sad that I didn't have smaller bills or coins with me. Anyways, also when you start walking in, there is a lot of bread for sale. In fact the church itself was selling bread (maybe for the service? Or possibly it was blessed in some way). Well, we finally got into the church and I dropped my jaw. The church was mongolarge, yet not overwhelming. The designs, trims, lamps, icons were spectacular. I can honestly say that it is the best church I have seen so far. The choir sang beautifully. It was not as dark and erie as I had expected, and it often blurred "glory chords" that I often hear in Lutheran services. The best part of the service was the end, when these HUGE gold doors closed off the altar, and then an even larger green curtain drew behind it. We found a map of Petersburg on our way out, and we had realized our first mistake when trying to find the church, and corrected it, yay.

So we still got lost, even with the maps aide, which tells you that, despite being gridlike, it is very easy to get lost in st.petersburg. We ended up stopping because we had no clue where we were. We looked around for about 4 minutes, and we realized we were only a block away from our hostel, and that we had been to the corner we were standing at 3 times the night previous. We proceeded to laugh, and eat at a Shawrma hut. Thomas got his favorite little Shawrma, which is basically a gyro with different meat, and I got a piece of rotiserie chicken and delicious fried potatoes with strange russian ketchup on top (it has a cinnamony kick to it, Yumerzz!). Okay, so then we had class, which was pretty laid back, just went over some important stuff, like to not wash my cucumbers in the water because I might get Geardia (spelling help?). P.S, the cucumbers (3 big ones) were only 80 cents on the street.

Onwards, we went to a play called Too Clever by half. The theater was very small and very personal. The seats were positioned on two sides of a longer corridorlike shape, with doors on both sides. Kind of strange, but I think it worked very well, and transitions between scenes took absolutely no time at all, which made me a little sad because my butt hurt on the wooden bench, and I couldn't get up the whole time without being a theater pooper. My impressions of the play were such: Acting was superb, script was very funny, lighting was a little bit annoying because the audience had a spotlight on them, Entertainment was a 14 out of 10. I liked this one a lot. We also spoke to the actors and actresses after, and they were very nice and absolutely histerical. They should just film them interacting and sell it and make lots of money.

After the theater, Katie, Claire, Thomas and I went to a place called Hot Wings, because whats more Russian than hot wings? (sarcasm joke). Well, the waitress was very nice, and we ordered some delicious hot wings and fatty fried things, which was more than enough to make us happy, BUT the night got even better. Some random old Russian (on a Sunday night), began to sing LIVE Russian ballad music. The guy was absolutely incredible, and was very happy that we were clapping for him. Did I mention we were the only ones in the restaurant? So we had this Live singer signing corny Russian music to Americans, absolutely lovely. On the way back we did NOT get lost, and that made me feel much better, and now its 1 AM so I should probably go to sleep so I can have delicious continental breakfast at 9 (boiled egg, cereal, tea, cheese, bread).

-Jenechka Bashirovich