Long Days and soon-to-be Long Nights

Well it's Thursday, and I'm still recovering from a long Monday, frankly. Three hours of class in the morning leads to a forty-five minute session with a tutor -- not too bad, all things considered. We usually get out of class around 2 or so, which leaves a good chunk of day for whatever one's heart desires (usually a coffee or a beer). On Mondays, however, I have my спецкурс ('spetscours'), which is an elective course I'm auditing with Russians. The спецкурс is a bit of a marathon - it lasts four hours from 4 to 8 pm. Factor in an hour for transport and it means I leave in the morning at 8:30am and return home at 9pm.

The Спецкурс
'Modern Systems of Human Rights Defense' is a course outlining the history and current governmental and jurisprudential means of defending human rights. In our reader, which comes in at around 1,000 pages, there are translations of an early English bill of rights, the Virginia bill of rights, the US bill of rights, et cetera. So far, the course has been useful in terms of learning Russian lexicon as it relates to human rights, but also to other subjects such as law, economics, politics. Our professor is of Georgian descent and has spent time studying in Boston, which means he speaks English beautifully, but on the rare occasion in which he uses it with us, we generally choose to answer in Russian.

Here's a pretty picture that I took a little while back -- the view is from the southern bank of the Neva, looking onto Peter and Paul fortress.And another photo to whet your appetite for my next post which will be about my homestay and family... this is the view from the window of my apartment on Hercules avenue: