6th September
Its Sunday night, and its been a rather incredible day. Started off with a torrential downpour – I was soaked from the waist down except for my Wellington boots which continue to be the best money I ever spent – on the way to the metro to head into town for Mass. After Mass I was planning to introduce myself to a few of the people who seemed to be regulars, but there was no need. They immediately came up to me after Mass and said, where are you from and how long will you be here etc. after realizing that I was going to be a regular at Mass. One of the choir members, Kenneth, asked me to join the choir so in two weeks I will be showing up early to practice with the choir, though its very informal. I would go next week, but we are going to be on an excursion to Novgorod. After introducing themselves, a couple of the ex-pats invited me to their weekly coffee gathering after Mass. So we walked across the street and pushed some tables together in a corner of a coffee bar. I think there were four couples and four or five kids, a couple of the women are teachers at the international school while most of the men work at the consulate. Two are in the military, and one is here on a scholarship that is rather similar to the Boren so we had a good discussion. They were all interested in whether I wanted to join the foreign service and had some amazing stories to tell. One of the couples is older and have been in the foreign service for more than 40 years. Another couple are actually German! And she is incredibly nice so we are going to talk in German as much as possible. They have a daughter that they’d like me to meet and talk about college things with, I think she’s starting to look into various universities. Everyone was incredibly nice and interested in what I was doing and what my impressions of the city were. The older couple is headed back to the United States in a few weeks, St. Petersburg was only a temporary posting, and offered to take anything I wanted to mail back with them. I might take them up on it if they are still here in two weeks. It was a wonderful morning, we had coffee for about an hour and a half and it was absolutely lovely, when we all split off they all said ‘see you in two weeks, have fun in Novgorod’, I can’t wait to see them all again.
After coffee with my new favorite ex-pats it was almost time for the scavenger hunt that had been cancelled last week due to rain. Well we started it today, but about an hour in we got an SMS from Jarlath saying it was cancelled because they didn’t want us getting sick. So Tom, Wesley, and I went to the Cathedral of the Spilt Blood – with a detour to the extremely fancy bathrooms of the extremely expensive Grand Hotel Europe on Nevsky. The Cathedral was absolutely gorgeous, more mosaics than I think I’ve ever seen in one place. Pictures will hopefully be up soon, though of course I cannot do the real thing any justice at all with my little camera. And now its time for bed, up early to head to school to hopefully skype with the parents and brother! Then class all day. I’m working on a list of random notes about St. Petersburg life that should appear up here very soon, and head to facebook to check out all the new pictures! As always, please please please comment and email and tweet and whatever, I absolutely love love hearing from all of you!! All the best - B
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