Unfortunately, the weather seems to be extremely slowly reverting to the common stereotype I was previously warned of. Gone are the Indian Summer-esque afternoons and in comes the tedium of the grey sky and constant threat of rain. Rather reminiscent of my time this Summer in Switzerland to be honest.
Realising that I've almost completely neglected to actually describe the city in any great depth, I'll give it a go here. In lieu of any proper content, I'll try and put across my views on how things actually are. My initial impressions of Petrozavodsk are that, walking around, there's almost a sense of "what could have been". Walking down Prospekt Lenina, the main road running through the centre of the city, the architecture really is very nice, and wouldn't look particularly out of place in a lot of big European cities, the bank of the lake is another really pleasant place to be, the Russian authorities haven't neglected this area too much (apart from the abundance of asbestos floating about, but we'll overlook this one under artistic license I guess...), and consequently, there's an abundance of monuments to times-gone-by of former Soviet glories littering the vicinity.
Where the town completely shoots itself in the foot though, is the day to day maintenance of the place. The pavements are in, for want of a better way of putting it, an atrocious condition. When it rains, the unevenness of the pavements creates a polka-dot pattern of puddles strewn across it. The main roads aren't a great deal better either. After visiting Sofia back in January 2010, it seems to me that this is just the way they do things in this end of Europe, the sublime to the ridiculous often in the same field of vision.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I dislike the place at all, I think it's a very nice, quaint place to be, and the surrounding environs look very nice. But it all looks like a glass bottle version of Russia as a whole, opposites living together, and creating something which, to the Western European, looks a tad strange.
The university itself is in a very nice looking, centrally located building. But even the university looks at times a bit strange, the overbearing nature of the Russians means that a lot of the time it feels totally alien to university at home. There's nothing like Bar One, in fact, most of the people you see dashing around the corridors don't even look old enough to be drinking; lessons are segregated by a recording of a school bell (which I'm still regarding as a welcome novelty to be honest...); and there's a canteen which gets rammed at lunchtime, everything sometimes seems a bit reminiscent of times gone by before I went to university.
Having said all that, it doesn't mean that it's not very good, I'm still really enjoying what we're doing at university, the lessons are engaging, and I'm learning all the time, something I'm not really used to doing on a regular basis. And I'm still enjoying living here, it's something that I'm still surprised hasn't effected me more than it has.
Foodwise, it's certainly been an eye opener. Think for a minute about what you eat for tea in England, and a for a lot of you, you'll realise that you eat a very large amount of foreign food. It's completely different here. So far, everything I've eaten has been about as stereotypically Russian as you can imagine, and weirdly enough, it's absolutely delicious! The only gripe I can possibly come up with is that literally everything is fried, everything. The family I'm living with are still lovely, and bring me copious quantities of tea. Fantastic.
Moving swiftly on, I'll revert to explaining what's happening in my all new Russian hive of activity (sometimes). Yesterday Tatiana and I traipsed through the forest to the supermarket, which is incidentally absolutely huge. If you've ever been to Costco or Makro, you'll understand what sort of scale I'm on about. Having bought numerous items from there, sorting my internet out became a new priority, having used up all my Megafon download limit... A quick trip to Beeline and a new internet plan later, and that's sorted.
It's looking like Kizhi is back on the cards this weekend too, our first, long overdue (well, a week anyway), excursion from the town. Learning our lesson, we're booking tickets earlier and just keeping fingers crossed for the weather, even though this is the exact situation Sod's Law was invented for.
I realise that I've just managed to create another behemoth of a post out of almost nothing, but this is what evenings here are designed for. Hopefully some fortunate soul absolutely loves this, and to them, I salute. But thank you anyway for reading because you feel some sort of moral or social obligation :D.
До следующей встречи! x
No comments:
Post a Comment