Apparently not just for porn anymore...

To the loser who hacked into this site: very funny, and get a life. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant what you were saying about it being your last post on the site, and if you sully my beautiful weblog with any more of your ramblings about how you're going to commit suicide, I'm going to finish the job for you. Anyway...
Last week felt as long as hell. The major event was that Stephanie and I joined a Russian choir, one that practices for six hours a week and has a concert coming up in mid-October. It renders my phonetics class irrelevant--who needs lectures about vowel reduction when you're one-fourth of the first soprano section and you're singing a folk song that involves sixteenth notes and a time signature that alternates between 5/4, 4/4, 3/4 and 2/4 and the words are "Razigralsya dobry kon, kopitochkom zemlyu byot, prosit by mnye tri rublya..."?
Other things: my Russian tutor and I went to St. Isaac's Cathedral and took pictures from the top of the collonade, from which you can see downtown St. Petersburg in its entirety. Here's a picture of us:

I should explain about the tutor. As part of our study abroad program, each of us gets provided with a Russian about our age with whom we're supposed to hang out--and, of course, speak Russian. Mine is Marina. She's my age but already has a job teaching English at an elementary school. She does this when she's not writing her thesis or teaching aerobics classes. I'd say our personalities couldn't be more different, but I have absolutely no idea how much of my personality gets lost in translation when I'm not speaking English. I mean, I can't be sarcastic in Russian--I'm still working on the proper intonation to use when asking where the bathroom is. My attempts at dry humor usually get corrected for their grammar before they can be appreciated to their full extent. What's left is an awkward foreigner who smiles, nods and states the obvious a lot. "Today cold. I like cheese." The other day, I actually had an entire conversation with my host mother about cheese. We can't really talk politics, but we can talk cheese.

Anyway. The cathedral was Tuesday. The choir was Thursday. Wednesday was a day-long excursion to Vyborg, an ancient castle up near the Finnish border that I'm sure would be fascinating if a) it hadn't been cold and windy and rainy, b) we'd had more than two hours to spend there, and c) if we hadn't had to spend a total of 5 hours on a train travelling there and back. Here's a picture, if anyone's curious:

Kind of cool, yes, but not worth it. At least I got through the first third of "Nochnoi Dozor," a popular Russian novel about vampires, on the train.