Щи да каша - пища наша

Nina Vasileevna and Vitalii Petrovich Ctetsenko are my host parents, and we live in a cozy 3 room apartment near Pionerskaya metro station.

Right about... here.

It's about a 50 minute commute to my building at St. Petersburg State on Vasilevskii island, so all in all, not bad.

Nina Vasileevna is retired with the exception of taking care of me, a task to which she puts forth a great amount of attention (and I am quite thankful!). If I could find a fault with her cooking, it might be that there's always a little too much of it located in my belly, but it pleases her when I eat a lot, so i try my best :).

Vitalii Petrovich is an engineer with a construction company. If I had a similar education, I might be able to more accurately explain exactly what kind of projects his organization works on, but as of yet my understanding is still a bit dim. He's Ukranian in terms of nationality and I learn plenty of interesting colloquialisms, phrases, expressions in Russian and sometimes in Ukrainian.

Here's a picture from our dinner last night, which lasted for four hours and two bottles of cognac.


If there are any specific questions about my homestay, please send 'em my way.

-Иван

Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears

My goodness! It has nearly been a month since my last entry and aren't I embarrassed... Naturally, much has occurred since mid-September and I can give you a quick rundown of the basics:

We had a week-long vacation from October 5th to October 12th, during which I was in Moscow with my friends Brad and Natasha. We took a night train from Moskovskii Terminal here in St. Petersburg to Kurskii Terminal in Moscow, arriving at 4:40 AM. Through Brad's connections with the Resident Director of ACTR's Moscow study abroad program, we got a nice room in the hotel/dormitory associated with the International University on Leningrad Prospect. The trip was a real blast and we more or less got our fill of tourism and nightlife. If you ever have the chance to visit Moscow, naturally I highly recommend it.

- As it turns out, a lot of my preconceptions about Moscow were off-the-mark. I had imagined Moscow as being almost entirely Soviet and rather drab, but in reality there's a lot of architectural variety depending on where you are in the city ranging from 'classical European' to Soviet to modern skyscrapers.
- Moscow is definitely an expensive city, and it's hard to tell how expensive a restaurant or cafe is going to be judging from its external appearance or interior decor.
- Red Square isn't nearly as big as I had imagined it. It's big, but not THAT big.
- Lenin doesn't look so good these days.
- Moscow seems to be more racially diverse than Petersburg (diversity of nationalities from former Soviet republics, naturally)
- Moscow has lots of cool boroughs and neighborhoods to explore, whereas Petersburg's hot spots tend to be located in the historical center of the city.

Here are some pics from the trip for you folks to enjoy... hopefully I'll add a few more in the near future.
http://picasaweb.google.com/jonwebah/MoskvaOct5Oct12

Also, the host fam and I are having our Resident Director Tim and Homestay Coordinator Lena over for dinner tomorrow night. I'm hoping some serious pictures will result and I'll finally be able to write that post about my homestay.

С любовью,
Джон