Some days it's just not happening. The language. Or the mouth. Or maybe the brain. The words just won't come out. Some days Russian just isn't happening. It's like I have no mouth. There's nothing to open, no speech apparatus. Mute. The lips are made of lead. They just don't open.

 

And it's frustrating. So frustrating! It's tiring. So tiring!

 

And other days, it just flows, and I'm not sure whether I ever spoke another language! Well, that's not actually true.. Not that well. But better at least! And I'm not even sure what's going on those other days. It's like I just can't bring myself to speak. And those who know me, can imagine the pains it would cause me to not be able to talk.

 

On a more cheerful note! I'm currently really excited about going to Rovaniemi next weekend, and then two weeks later I will be starting my (rail)road trip through Finland to my favourite Haparanda and onwards to the ever glorious city of Skellitta.

 

Things I'm enjoying at the moment:
- We're getting closer to Christmas

- Snow and temperatures below zero

- Swedish music

- Finnish language

- Skellefteå municipality has found funding for their summercamps (this is something that is greatly needed for many kids!)

 

Things I'm not enjoying at the moment:

- My year abroad project

 

 

Miellyttävä patsas

 

Epämiellyttävä patsas

This is a small statue not far from where I live. It's seriously creepy.

Alright, just cause you've waited for such a long time, you'll get another cheeky little update!

A while back I was riding the bus with a classmate when we noticed a poster for a concert by a group called Нервы (Nervy - nervs). I though it looked like it could be fun, so I looked up the band when I got home and discovered I really liked them! So last night I went to the concer together with another classmate (not the same).

 

The concert had a great atmosphere, "despite" the audience consisting of teenage girls (and some of them had their parents sitting on the side). Both me and my classmate were really surprised a group like this would go home that well with that group of people!

 

The music was a mix of heavier rock, with some more pop sounding songs. Overall it was a great concert and the band (and the audience) really knew how to rock! The first song in the encore was a 15 minute rock jam. Good stuff!

 

The best song of the evening was probably Май bye, or the crowd pleasers Глупая or Вороны.

 

All the best and good night :)

On Sunday the 15th of September some of us international students decided to go to Kizhi, an island in lake Onega which is the home of some amazing wooden churches and buildings from the late 17th century/early 18th century (one even from the 14th centry!!). Be cause we're students and students generally are of a more 'economic' nature we went on the cheaper trip, which also happened to be 3 hours longer (one way).

 

After having endured 4 hours on a ferry, we arrived at the island and soon noticed that we were fortunate enough to catch one of the last days of summer (which had already left Petrozavodsk). Once there we were given a guide (funnily enough the Russian word for guide is gid) who took us round the island telling us about the different buildings. Although it was hard to understand everything he said, we could still gather a lot of interesting facts about the churches and the lives of the peasants that used to inhabit the island. For instance the churches were built completely in wood - including the nails!

 

The Kizhi island is on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites and a pride of northwestern Russia and Karelia. If you're interested you can read more about it here.
        

One of the more interesting this that happened on the trip was a very drunk Russian man started bothering our company on the trip back to Petrozavodsk. He asked us where we were from and what we were doing there. This, he exclaimed, was his country and his Karelia and his Petrozavodsk. Even though the man was quite harmless (although threatening at some points) it was quite a disturbing experience. In a way I'm glad to have seen racism close at hand - something very rare for a white european man. It was great, though, to see how the rest of the people on the ferry were very helpful and protective of us foreigners! The best was when the man was mumbling to himself, of which I thought I recogniced some obcenities, and a woman in her late 40s told him off saying something like: "Man! Don't speak like that!"

 

Over and out.

"Det här är vad man ser när man tittar ut över mitt kvarter"

Some of you might wonder where on earth I lay my head at night - and that is a really good question. Like for many international students I've been offered accommodation with a Russian babushka (=grandma/old lady). My babushka is 75 years of age and has been hosting international students for ten years or so. She lives in a four room flat on the 7th floor in a big block of flats, and is kindly letting me one of those four rooms.

 

When you're renting from a babushka there's always an option to pay a bit more and get meals included (babushkas are renouned for feeding people large amounts of food). I, however, was too cheap for that - believe it or not. It's been pointed out to me that if you want dinner included you're quite restricted in that you have to be home a certain time, and I figured that my usual breakfast - coffee and a piece of bread - is not going to cost me anywhere near 100 euros a month, which the included breakfast would have cost me. I do slightly envy those who get great Russian food provided tho...

 

I'm really pleased with my accommodation this far. The room is a good size and the flat is really spacious! The neighbourhood is.. I don't know quite how to describe it! It's lively in that there's lots of people about - kids playing, people walking to/from the shops etc. It's not too far from town and uni, only 10-15 mins on the bus. It seems quite calm from what I've noticed these first two weeks.

 

Fun fact about my neighbourhood: There are supermarkets e-ve-ry-where. At the bottom of my house there's a supermarket and a meat shop (?), across the road there's a supermarked. Across the other road there's a small shopping center and a market. It's almost as if there's a supermarket every 100 meters.

 

I'm going on an excursion this Sunday, so hopefully I can provide you with some nice pix from that after the weekend!

 

До встречи!

 

As I've moved here as part of my university degree and studying is the main thing I will be focusing on while here, I guess it's only fair I tell you a bit more about it! I'm currently, at the same time as being an official UCL student, enrolled at Петрозаводский государственный университет, or in English - Petrozavodsk State University. Because that's a pretty lengthy name and because Russians love their abbreviations it's mostly just called ПетрГУ (they do the same thing calling it PetrSU in English). It was founded in 1940 as the Karelian-Finnish State University and was known as such until they changed it's name in 1956. According to its website it has "more than 18 500" students, 85 chairs and 17 faculties. 

 

Yours truly is enrolled as an international student for the year to come styding Russian and Finnish. We've already started with two hours of Russian each day (an academic hour in Russia is 45 mins - so two hours is really one and a half). This will probably increase next week when another teacher (who's been away) is coming back, and we will have the double amount of classes. My class consists of three people at the moment, Clara from France, Grace from England and Myself from Schtaan.

 

I will start Finnish in the beginning of October, and I've been told that the Finnish classes meet only for four hours a week. At some point I will meet with the Finnish tutor for an assessment of my level. What is really exciting is that I will be in a class with Russian students. I'm hoping the classes will be taught in Finnish, cause although it'd be hard, it'd probably be lots easier than having to switch between Russian and Finnish in class!

 

A quite random addition to all of this is that I'll be taking a course called Korea in International Relations. Say what?! Yeah, that's what I thought as well. I was absolutely convinced that they said Karelian culture - I mean, that would be logical for Karelia, right? Anyhow, the course will be taught by a professor from the Central European University in Budapest. The reason I'm taking the course is that it's quite small (4 ECTS/HP), it's only till December and that I figured it's a good way to get to know people (also, it's free)! Hopefully it won't have to regret it...

 

All of this might seem like a lot - 4h of Russian a day 4h of Finnish a week and this Korean stuff and my Year Abroad Project (which I'll tell you about at another time!). I'm not too worried tho. The 'hours' are quite short as I mentioned earler, and the 2h a day that we've done this far have been quite a swift experience. I'm actually looking forward to getting more work to do!

 

We briefly touched upon abbreviations, so to finish off I'll give you some famous Russian ones:

 

KGB (КГБ) - Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Bezopasnosti - Committee for State Security 

Komsomol (комсомол) - Kommunisticheskij Soyuz Molodjozhi - Youth Department of the Soviet Communist Party

GUM (ГУМ) - Glavnyj Universal'nyj Magazin - Main universal store

 

And a crazy one:

 

Rosglavstankoinstrumentsnabsbyt - Glavnoe upravlenie po snabzheniyu i sbytu stankov kuznechno-pressovogo oborudovaniya, instrumenta i abrazivnykh izdelij pri Gosplane RSFSR (the main management for supply and sales of machine tools forging equipment, tools and abrasing equipment of the Gosplan of RSFSR.

 

And it doesn't stop there, cause Gosplan and RSFSR are abbreviations of Gosudarstvennyj Komitet po Planirovaniyu (State Committee for Planning) and Rossiyskaya Sovetskaya Federativnaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic). Wow. You can really see the need for abbreviations, right?

 

So long!

Dear friends!

As many of you know I have once again pulled up my roots to try and replant them in yet another place, in another country. This is the fourth town around (haha) and it's the second largest place I've lived with it's somewhere around 260 000 inhabitants. Yes, you've guessed right: it's good old Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Republic of Karelia in north western Russia.

 

The reason for this seemingly random move is that I have to spend a year in Russia as part of my degree at university. To choose Petrozavodsk as the place of study was not too hard as I can continue to study both Finnish (it's very close to Finland) and Russian.

 

About this time, exactly one week ago I was sitting in a train station in St Petersburg, waiting for the screens to tell me which platform the train to Petrozavodsk was to depart from. Now, I'm sitting on my bed in a concrete block of flats in the suburb Kukkovka in Petrozavodsk. This first week has gone past so quickly!

 

I'll give you some short information about Petrozavodsk just to get this thing started!

- Petrozavodsk was founded in 1703 and celebrated 310 years this summer

- It is founded the same year as St Petersburg and by the same person - Peter the Great

- In the 2010 census it had 261 987 thousand inhabitants

- In the same sensus it was the 71st largest city in Russia (it would be the 4th largest if it were situated in Sweden)

- Being the capital of Karelia it also has a Karelian/Vepsian/Finnish name: Petroskoi

- The city was occupied by Finland in 1941-1944

- It's situated by the Onega lake