Today we went to Nizhny and met with a number of important Russian politicians. That was very cool. They treated all of us students with respect and accomodated us all in a grand and amiable fashion. We sat at their table and were privelagged with the oppurtinity to talk with them and ask them questions. Everything was taped and we were interviewed. It will air on TV soon. Four hours there and seven hours back but it was worth it. I have pictures with four or five Russian politicians and one picture with the president of the republic in which Nizhny-Novgorod lies.

The trip to St. Petersburg was a lifechanging expierience. It is the most beautiful city I have ever seen. It is actually a little bit ridiculous sometimes--every building is a beautiful piece of history and culture. I was being bludgeoned over the head by beauty the entire time, without rest. Even the drug stores and everyday shops are museum-like castles. There is too much to say in one blog post or even two or three, and I don't want to write four so I will sum up a lot:
The Hermitage
The Canal full of boats running through the heart of the city
The palaces and museums (these two are often hard to distunguish)
The majestic churches which are actually to good for description
Walking though the streets and being able to look any direction and see a stunning building, fountain or garden

I could talk about the wonders of St. Petersburg for days. I have so much to say that I fear beginning in earnest because I don't know if I could stop.

I took about five hundred photographs, I can't describe them, I think that the beauty of this city can only be understood by being there. As I said, St. Petersburg was life changing, and it has frustrated my attempts to describe it.
This probably sounds rushed. It is . We have no internet at home so I am using the mcdonalds internet in cheboksary. The internet there is terrible and it could time out at any second. Therefore I must be economic with time.

Russian grammar is so complex and utterly incomprehensible in every way that I am having a hard time comprehending it. Grammar is occupying so much of me that I can no longer remember my twenty words a day. This is very disconcerting. I will give myself a week to heal from the wounds that the Russian language has inflicted upon me then I will resume stuffing twenty words a day into the burlap sack which is my mind.

Whoa! We just had a ridiculous hail storm that smashed peoples' windows and stuff. I have videos and pictures of course. They are coming soon. haha and I was just talking about how nice the weather was...

Today I went to the country house and had an unexpected encounter with a unique Russian holiday. On this day everybody visits the graves of their dead loved ones. Everybody in the family who's grave still exists we visited. We visited the grave of one woman who had been born in the nineteenth century. The graveyards were in the woods with trees sometimes growing out of the graves which is different than in USA. The graveyards are also very crowded, especially on this holiday.

From what I saw Russian graves are above the ground, not below. The body in question is normally at ankle level, so the mounds are pretty big.

On this holiday everybody even remotely related to the deceased person gathers around the grave and basically parties. Every time you eat or drink you must put a little bit down on the grave near the head. By the end there is usually quite a feast strewn out on the grave.
I also gathered from this holiday that the life expectancy in Russia is very low. I looked it up later and found out that it was 58 for men. I think that is the figure for Russia overall which means that I can hack of another ten years because my region is poor and more worried about day to day survival than living to ripe old age.

this was taken at 10:00 pm
The weather has been perfect for three weeks. It is usually about sixty five to seventy degrees with a hot sun and a warm breeze. I think that the summer is somehow Russia's way of saying sorry for the winter. There are only about three or four hours of darkness every night which is cool, but makes it harder to sleep. Like I said, the summer is really the opposite of the winter here. During winter there are only about four hours of light every day. In summer, everything is green and full of life, especially at our second house in the country. It is somewhat of a farm. They have chickens and cows and a lake with a lot of fish. The country house is beautiful this time of year.

Ok I was wrong when I said the "the WW2 victory celebration will be tomorrow". That was a different holiday--different but similar. The holiday, which is called "the ninth of may" is held, contrary to what I wrote earlier, on the ninth of may, not the second.

Today, (the ninth of may) I was at the heart of this celebration in cheboksary. There were parades and some jeeps and stuff in the street. I think a total of about five thousand people were in the parade in novocheboksarsk and at least twice that much in cheboksary. Each of them had their own genuine AK47. People would say "s praznikom!" and everyone yelled it back. There were a lot of drunk people who wanted to kill me and one of them stole my chocolate, but overall I'd say the good of the day outweighed the bad. My friends and I had a barbecue and then went to so the fireworks. They were stunning and promptly set the nearby woods on fire. The fire was big and it took about half an hour for the firemen to put it out. Only in Russia

On the way home an old, drunk man grabbed me by the hair and said laughinglly that he wanted it for himself.