Here in St. Petersburg it takes a long time to get anywhere. There are too few roads in the city to accomodate all the cars here and the city itself covers quite a large area.

I am currently staying on the north-eastern side of the city. When I leave the apartment it takes me about five minutes to walk to the tram stop. From there depending on how long I have to wait for a tram or trolleybus it can take from anywhere between 10-30 minutes to get to the metro stop. Once I'm on the metro I don't have to worry about traffic jams or delayed trains (The SPb metro is VERY efficient) but it still takes between 20-30 minutes to get to the city center.

Yesterday I went to a big shopping mall on the outskirts of St. Petersburg with my GREAT friends Sanya and Lena.(I was looking for swimming trunks...more on that later.) It took about an hour from I left my apartment to get to the metro stop where I was supposed to meet Lena. After that we had to ride on the metro to the very end of one line and then get on a shuttle bus which took us to the mall (which has one of two IKEAs in the city, by the way). That took about another half hour.

By the time the three of us left the mall it was rush hour and it took us almost a full hour on the shuttle bus to get from the mall to the metro. From there it took me another half hour to get to the center where I was supposed to pick up my registration documents. After finding out that the registration bureau didn't yet have my documents, thus essentially making my trip to the center a total waste, I got back on the metro and traveled another half-hour to the south-west corner of the city to go visit some other friends. After exiting the metro, I got on a mini-bus and rode on that for about fifteen minutes until I finally arrived at my destination.

At the end of the night I got back on the metro and rode on the same line (through fourteen stations) until I got back to the north-east side of the city. That ride alone took about 45 minutes. After that I got on another mini-bus (Mini-buses cost a few more rubles but there are a lot less trams and trolleys late at night so the mini-bus is much more convenient) and rode that for a few minutes and then I finally got home.

All in all, I spent somewhere between 3.5-4 hours yesterday using the St. Petersburg public transport system. And I didn't even leave the city.

Does anybody know where the "OFF" button is for the snow???

Yesterday it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed here in St. Petersburg. After it stopped snowing I had to wait for 30 minutes at the bus stop for a bus to take me to the metro station yesterday evening and then once I had taken the metro into the center of St. Petersburg none of the sidewalks or roads had been plowed or shoveled in the center, thus making it very difficult to walk to where I was going. If this would have been the case in America, I would have complained the whole time about the fact nobody was out taking care of the snow--in fact, I was quite disgusted a couple weeks ago when after an overnight snowstorm in Hartford, my university still had not plowed its parking lots or shoveled its sidewalks by 10:00 AM. However, here not only was I not surprised that nothing had been done to remove the snow, but it didn't even bother me that I had to trudge through it all.

I guess my body still thinks that it's in Connecticut because I'm still having trouble sleeping at the times when I should sleep and being alert and active at the times when I should be alert and active. Normally I haven't had many lasting problems with jetlag, unless we count my very first trans-Atlantic trip to Paris when I was sixteen where I threw up everything I ate for two days after arrival until I ate some McDonalds. After that I felt fine. :) Anyways, the jetlag issue has kind of been frustrating but this morning I was able to sleep till 7:30 instead of 5:00 or 5:30. Progress?

MOSCOW!!!!

Just had an awesome two days in Moscow.

I flew out of New York on Tuesday ad nine uneventful hours later landed in Moscow. During that time I:
-Chose lasagna over chicken for dinner
-Watched Harry Potter 6
-slept for about a half-hour
-stared blankly at the seatback in front of me

I was one of the first people in line for passport control but it didn't matter so much because I then had to wait forty minutes for my checked bag. After avoding eye contact and quickening my pace while walking by the customs officials, I met up with my friend Kamil at the airport and then we got on a bus for an hour to get into Moscow. I had forgotten that every woman in Russia covers from head to foot in fur during the winter time.

The first evening there Kamil and Olya (friends from Moscow) gave me an extra ticket to a DIMA BILAN concert. For all of you who don't know about DIMA BILAN, he's basically the Russian version of Justin Timberlake. He's HUGE here. And I got a free ticket. This was a big deal. Oh, and the emcee for the night was Oksana Fedorova AKA Russia's very own Miss Universe. It was pretty crazy and I was definitely the only American there. To fully appreciate the superstar who is DIMA BILAN, here's one of his videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L0fvNkoL00

He sure can rock a mullet, huh?

Yesterday I finally got to catch up on A LOT of sleep. (Stayed with some friends in Moscow. Five people share two bedrooms in their apartment. With me there were six. It's always a party there.) Last night after having a bit too much fun hanging out in the center of Moscow we might have arrived at the train station a couple of minutes too late to catch my 10:20 PM train to St. Petersburg and might have had to buy another ticket on a train about two hours later. Oops. :) Moscow is great though so I didn't mind one bit having to stay there another couple of hours.

The train ride was tedious. Usually you just fall asleep on the train and wake up in St. Petersburg in the morning but the train was ridiculously hot (about 80 degrees inside the train) and I was put on a top bunk with about 14 inches between me and the shelf above my head. Didn't get any sleep at all. Instead I spent my time listening to NPR podcasts I downloaded before I left and watching movies. My iPod Touch and I have never been closer. On the train there were also these two older women on the bunks below me and once they heard me speak they were all like, "You're from the Baltics?" I then smiled and told them I was American and that set them off on a shower of compliments--"You speak Russian so well!" "Your pronunciation is perfect!" "You're so handsome!" "Do you have a beautiful Russian girlfriend" "etc." And people wonder why I come over here so often...

Now I'm in St. Petes. It's great. Duh.

I'll put up pics from Moscow soon.

Poka!

On your marks, get set...

...but before we say "GO!" here's an update from New York City!

First of all, I have to confess something. I've turned into one of those snobby Connecticutians (My original term for people from Connecticut.) who seem to think in their (very large) heads that they are in all reality residents of New York City when in all reality they live in a completely different state. Case in point: This morning I was flying into New York's LaGuardia airport from North Carolina. There were lots of people on the plane who were on vacation for the holidays in the city. It was too easy to pick them out. As the plane flew by Manhattan, 90% of the passengers had their noses glued to the windows and many started giving a veritable tour of the city (Like they know anything...) from the air. I am sure that for many of them it was a very exciting moment seeing New York City for the first time--It is, in all honesty, quite an impressive sight--and perhaps an appropriate response for one such as myself who is boiling over with Christmas spirit would have been, "I can nostalgically recall the sense of awe and wonder I also felt when I first set eyes on that most impressive and majestic of cityscapes." However, we must remember that jolly and perky as I am during the holidays, Connecticut has turned me into a snob. My instinctive response was more along the lines of, "Geez people, get a grip. It's just the city. Could you maybe try to quit ruining the last five minutes of what was a peaceful flight for me?" So yes, although it is a full two hours for me to drive to NYC from Hartford, I too have joined the ranks of Connecticutians who get annoyed by "outsiders" who come in and invade "my" city.

The highlight of my day was sock shopping--I am after all from NYC and we must carry on with our everyday lives while we live in this behemoth of a concrete monstrosity. I got on the bus at LaGuardia which took me to the subway which brought me to the place where I'm crashing tonight (Thanks Caleb and Patty!) and then I got back on the train to midtown. I went to Macys, got too annoyed by all the "outsiders" crowding the aisles of the store, and then went across the street to H&M to buy socks so that I can now add some dark socks into the mix of all the white ones I packed for my trip.

I then walked up to Rockefeller Center to see the big Christmas tree (which, by the way, I always thought would be bigger) "because I had to" and took the obligatory self-portrait in front of it. I felt embarrassed to get my camera out. "Outsiders" were everywhere (I think there were probably more tourists in Manhattan today than I've seen even in the summertime.) and I felt like I was condescending to their level to pause for a moment to take a picture in front of one of "their" iconic Christmas landmarks. I mean, good grief, I'm FROM the city, remember? I can't wait till the holidays are over so I can get back to life as a regular resident of Connecticut, I mean, New York City.

...

My camera cord is at the bottom of the abyss that is my bottomless backpack. The posting of the self-portrait will have to wait. Now don't let yourselves get impatient about it like us New Yorkers...

Flight from JFK leaves tomorrow afternoon around 4:00. See you on the other side...