A Stroll on Vasilievsky Island

Wednesday we had our first test--контрольная работа in Russian, or literally "control work." It was... well, it was pretty easy. Putting (regular) singular nouns into plural, basic conjugation in past and imperfect future tense, some simple questions (where are you from, etc.) and an easy text. I finished extremely early, and Ludmila Nikolaevna told me to go take a break for a while--until three o'clock, or about an hour and a half.

I had nothing in particular to do, and no means of amusing myself if I sat around in the little school cafe. So I decided to have a little stroll around Vasilievsky Island. First stop was a little bookstore that I get notebooks from; I stopped in long enough to not actually buy a notebook and looked around the music. They had MP3 CDs of classical music for sale, which strikes me as a lovely idea; you could easily get much of a particular composer's work onto a single CD or two, depending on the quality. Do they have these in the States?

The Apteka below is just across the street from the bookstore. After a few pictures, I headed up the street to Bol'shoi Prospekt, the first of the three major streets on the southern part of the island, and found a pedestrian mall that connected Bol'shoi and Srednii Prospekts. Lots of stores and restaurants; I'm going to have to come back and visit a few. Also a cat covered in sticky notes and a slightly whimsical statue of everyone's favorite despot, Peter I.

Further up, on Malii Prospekt, I found an antique store on the corner. I'd have loved to take pictures, but the proprietor didn't seem happy to have me in there in the first place--I think I had the look of "not going to buy anything" about me. There was a lot of of stuff there, both Tsarist and Soviet. I didn't particularly look at prices, because in fact I was not going to buy anything. Russian Customs is known to get irritable about "items of cultural or historical value," commonly known as antiques. It's not impossible to get out of the country with antiques, but you basically need, at least, to go through some extra Russian bureaucracy to be allowed to. So, while I would've loved some genuine tsarist-era stuff, there was no way I was going to mess with it. I'll be happy with a bottle of vodka when I leave the country.

This was part of a day that saw me racking up some 18,000 steps, according to my iPod's pedometer, for an estimated total of 900 calories burned. After school, I stopped in at Dom Knigi and picked up an inexpensive copy of Dickens Bleak House to help keep the boredom at bay when I'm not at class or out wandering the city or whatever. I think I may have to see how much of Dickens I can get through before it's time to head home (and presumably leave Natasha with a much larger library of English lit than she'd had previously).

Posts, you may've noticed, have been a bit sparse of late; that's in large part because there's not been a whole lot going on this week. Hockey and the above stroll were the highlights. This weekend I'm planning to venture to City Bar, the city's best known expat hangout, to see what the scene's like there. Also in the works: a possible visit to Gostiny Dvor for an umbrella that's not broken and some Russian practice with one of the English gents I met a few weeks back.

Strolling on Vasilievsky