Now,
at week 4, the students have an established routine. On the bus to
school at 8:30. Class till 1 or 2. Then they are free to wander the
city, go to musuems, or come home to do homework. Either with their
roommates or on their own, they forage for meals/cook for themselves.
Then it's bedchecks at midnight and the cycle starts again the next
day.
At
this point, a lot of students are overwhelmed by Russian. English is
only occasionally encountered here and for a language student, every
interaction with the target culture only seems to reinforce how
little progress you've made. As a result, a lot of students end up
retreating from the language, hiding out in their room, reading
Facebook, listening to their iPods, eating pasta for dinner every
night. This is a very familiar and predictable dynamic.
We
take them on weekly excursions to museums around the city, but even
this becomes part of the routine. However, June spices things up a
little (not by getting them to use Russian more, but at least by
getting them out of their rooms). Tomorrow we leave for the ancient
city of Novgorod for the weekend. Then in a few weeks, we'll go to
Moscow. This should improve attitudes
And
last night, we took a boat cruise on the Neva – the main river
through the city. These boat cruises are a big event here. In the
spring and summer, when the Neva is free of ice, large ship traffic
travels from upriver along the Neva and out to the Baltic and on to the Atlantic. There
are hundreds of bridges along the city's rivers and the ones that
connect inland areas with the ocean are too low to pass under, so
those ones are drawbridges.
On a
schedule, starting around 1am, the bridges along that traffic route
start going up. Thousands of people gather on the embankment to
drink, hang out with friends, and watch the bridges go up. There are
also dozens of boats, like the one we rented last night, which go
from bridge to bridge and watch them go up. It's very dramatic. At
this time of year, the sky is truly dark for about an hour. Dusk
quickly turns back to dawn. And everything along the embankment and
on the bridges is brilliantly lit.
I made
a short video here. It starts with a view of the Hermitage Museum,
the former Winter Palace which was the beginning of the Russian
Revolution. Then you see Palace Bridge followed by other islands in
the cityscape. It's such a beautiful view.
This
sort of perspective reminds me of what one of Dostoevsky's characters
says, "I love humanity, it's the people I can't stand."
