First Day

                Today was an interesting day.  I woke up early and so I decided that I wanted to be productive and so I handwrote in my journal for an hour.  Then I was woken up by Oleg.  He had prepared me breakfast.  Breakfast was eggs with some cheese slices and brown bread.  It was tasty.  Then I took a shower while Oleg took Misha (7 year old) to school.  Oleg came back to take me to the school where I will be teaching.  The school is like a 5 minute walk away so that is nice.

I was the first one at the school and met Ludmilla, both of them.  There are quite a few things that are still not known and so Monday will be an interesting day.  A lot of things are going to be figured out on the fly.  I found out that I won’t be teaching Monday morning and so that is awesome.  It is definitely going to be interesting to be the only one in the group that speaks Russian.  I don’t need translation but I am not the one in charge of translation.  Alla, the native coordinator, is the one in charge of that.  She does a pretty good job of it.  The principal Ludmilla doesn’t allow her very much time to translate what she says though.  I wonder how much everybody else understood of seeing the school.  I know that I will understand a lot more than everybody else.

We then went from the school to the metro station to go to the center of the city.  Alla had come of the girls buy tokens and Jessica went to the window and said, “Tree.” (Russian for three) and the lady gave her 3 tokens and she walked away.  But it was funny because she walked away before she was given her change and so that was one of our first moment where there was a Russian person talking to one of the girls and they, of course, didn’t understand.  We went into the city first to get our pictures taken for our student passes.  Then we went to the place where we are going to be getting Russian language lessons.  I was a little sketched out because we were going down this rather narrow street (there was room for a car to park and place to drive through and that was it) with graffiti on both sides of the street.  The guy we first talked to spoke English very well.  He almost sounded native.  Very close but not quite.  As he spoke more than it was more apparent that he was Russian.  Then he also said some things to Alla in Russian and it was like. “Yep, he is Russian.”  We waited there for a while but then got smart and said, “We will be back.”  We went on the streets and went exploring.  We went back near the metro station because there was a Russian Orthodox cathedral there that we could go and look around in.

This was the first street we saw.  Beautiful!

After we got off the metro stop and back up on the street I said, “And this is why I chose St. Petersburg.”  It was a beautiful street with ornate buildings lining both sides of the street.  It was really beautiful.  I love it!

This building and the next one were actually right next to each other.

We ate Russian pizza, which actually wasn't bad pizza for Russian standards, at the Language place and then we were on our way.  We got a cheese pizza, 2 pepperoni pizzas, a mushroom pizza, and a vegetable pizza with corn, bell peppers and tomatoes. I only ate the pepperoni pizza.  All the others didn't really look tasty to me.

You can see a little bit of the last building on the right of the picture.

We then walked across the center of the city to a health clinic.  We had to be checked out to make sure that we were healthy and not carrying disease.  Again everybody was glad again that I spoke Russian because nobody at the clinic spoke English.  Things were going really smoothly at first and so Alla left to go to her “summer home” (her garden home outside of the city).  But things kind of got rough and people needed translation.  I remember why I don’t want to be an interpreter and didn’t really want to be an assistant to the president during my mission.  It is a big responsibility to translate for people.

At the clinic we were asked a couple questions: 1. How is your breathing?  Can you breathe? 2.  How are your ears?   Have you had any problems with them?  3. How are you gums?  Good?  Then the doctor proceeded to check my ears to see if he could see anything.  The doctor said that my ears were completely full of ear wax.  “Completely full, on both sides!” was what the doctor said.  He also asked me if I ever have problems hearing.  It was funny.  Then I went into the next room and got my blood pressure taken and asked if I ever have had a problem with fainting because I had high blood pressure.  This doctor thought that it was because I was nervous, which was true.  Normally I don’t have high blood pressure.  Then the last doctor was the weirdest.  She had us take a swab to the butt.  Then she took a little blood sample and that was it.  This time was definitely better than my first time to a hospital, well a real hospital with Elder Kurbatov.  That was when we got kicked out.

From there we went back to the metro station and went back to Marci’s (head teacher) apartment.  We met with Sveta to talk about our excursion of St. Petersburg for tomorrow.  Sveta will be the one that will help us to see the city and make sure that things go well.   We then started to do some training but everybody was so dead and so I went back to my host family’s apartment and got on the internet.  It was only the second time on the internet.  I am going to be on the internet a whole lot less here in Russia than I was in America.  Part of that is because it hasn’t been working when I try to get on.  I am not sure why.  I need to talk to Oleg about that.

Last night, I had (plain boiled) pelmeni with bread and candy prepared by Oleg.  Tonight, I had (plain boiled) noodles with sausage (hotdogs) and candy prepared by Anya.  I guess it is normal for only one parent to be home at a time.  Last night Anya had a party at work and so was home late.  Tonight Oleg went to Finland to go fishing.  They have better fishing over there.

Then because it was like 10:30pm it was time to go to bed.  Living with 2 little boys will encourage me to go to sleep earlier.  Well at least get in bed earlier.  I will see about writing either on the computer or in my book what I did for the day.  Entries will not be this detailed because being the first day I wanted to be pretty explicit and detailed.  Plus I had more time and desire to write.

That about covers everything.  I haven’t completely adjusted to the time difference, meaning I am not sleeping at the right time.  The first night I went to bed at 10:30pm and woke up at 6:50am which is normal.  Tonight I went to bed at about 11pm and then woke up at about 5am.  Plus I was really tired right before lunch and again at 7pm.  But I didn’t nap.  I just stayed awake.  I should say that I woke up at about 5am because I actually had a little diarrhea and it got in my pants and was wet so I woke up and then couldn’t go back asleep.  I cleaned myself up and then started writing.  I wrote for about an hour and a half and now going to try and go back to sleep for a couple hours.  We shall see how it works.  I Love Russia and I love being back here.