Wednesday, August 28, 2013

What Does a Bear Have in Common with Chamomile?

Location: 7 1/2 hours west of Russia, in the Baltic Sea

Hey everyone! This is it: the night before our first port of call. We will be arriving in the city of St. Petersburg at around 0800 Thursday morning. That is 9pm Wednesday evening for all you Pacific Standard Time folks!

Now those who know me (which hopefully most of you do) know that I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to researching things. I spend hours and hours at it. I have been known to be in the process of looking something up for a short assignment and then to get distracted by some interesting fact which I then spend the next several hours reading all about. For this voyage, I have spent a huge amount of time putting together nice little info pages for countries, currencies, finances... The list goes on. You may be surprised to learn then that I have managed to go through this many years of schooling and independent research with a relatively limited knowledge of the history, culture, and geography of Russia. It's cold, big, it used to be part of the USSR, and the US wasn't so thrilled with them back in the Cold War. I may be exaggerating a bit, but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge.

Well, not to proclaim myself an expert on Russian affairs now or anything, but I think I have just born witness to the most thorough yet condensed overview of the country of Russia that has ever been given. I'm pretty sure the Geography professor on this ship is going to be hoarse tomorrow morning, because he just lectured with great enthusiasm on the topic for the last... three hours? I'm not really sure, because I had logistical and cultural pre-port meetings beforehand in that same room. Yes ladies and gentlemen, I just spent the last 5 hours straight sitting in the student union hearing everything from "Don't go places on your own," to "Don't drink too much vodka," to "*insert everything you could ever want to know about the geography/history of Russia here*" to "Seriously! Easy on the vodka!"

....Woo! Who's excited for Russia!?

So now I'm allowing myself to relish a mug of hot chocolate born of one of only two instant hot chocolate packets I gained at a B&B somewhere along the way in England while firing off this quick blog post (which is thus probably fraught with grammatical errors. Bear with me! Oh, did you know that bears are considered a symbol of Russia, and that the national flower is chamomile? Are you starting to have trouble following a train of thought with all of these parenthetical remarks sprinkled about?) before getting the stuff together that I will need for tomorrow morning, taking a shower, and finally getting to bed. It's going to be a long night!

I would like to take a minute though to mention again how much I love receiving your comments; seriously, I wish I had time to reply to them individually here, but then I'd never have time to update the blog itself! That would be a bit unfortunate.

Okay, I'd seriously better start getting ready now. Love you all!


  

3 comments:

Unknown said... Best Blogger Tips[Reply to comment]Best Blogger Templates

Oh wow. You're going to be in St. Petersburg in an hour!! I'm so excited for you. I hope your alarm clock is working well :)

I've always found Rusdian history to be interesting, probably because they never taught us about it in high school and ruined it with a bunch of dry facts and dates. Some of my favorite courses in college were Russian film making, and the history of literature in Russia ( aka censorship). The later was taught by a Russian author who had been encouraged to leave the country. Very interesting. We'll have to compare notes when you get back.


Have fun!!! And yes, don't overdo the vodka. Really!


Aunt Shirley

M said... Best Blogger Tips[Reply to comment]Best Blogger Templates

After all that, you had better at least try the vodka!

Unknown said... Best Blogger Tips[Reply to comment]Best Blogger Templates

there's no harm trying at least that vodka! thrilled w/ the pictures, real great, love the place a s well, thanks for sharing.