World by Noelle

Dispatch from St Petersburg

Posted on August 6th, 2006 by tallgirl.
Categories: travel, russia.

This dispatch comes at 23.08, in St Petersburg. It’s still light outside. And it’s close to midnight. Strange… but, regardless… we arrived on Friday night, after a long train ride, and went straight to the center where we’ve spent a lot of our time. After brief introductions, we checked into our very cute little hotel. Since I’m “the girl” in my group from the USA, I get my own room - yippee! I walked out of the train station, and so many things came rushing back to me! YEAY!!! I asked Yaroslav if he might be able to help me find my host family, and he thinks he may have found my host mom, but is hopefully going to cross-reference her with what I think is her husband’s name. The database he has has ages, but not street names… how’s that for odd??

Our group here in St Petersburg consists of a guy from Moscow - Alexei, who we met on Thursday, a woman from Kazakstan - Natasha, our translator and organizer Yaroslav, his brother Vyatislav, his wife Julia, and a girl from St Petersburg named Dina. We also have a woman who is the “director” (for all intents and purposes, I think), named Marina. It’s a very good group, and we’ve gotten into some of the meaty stuff - we discussed the history of terrorism in Russia and the USA. We also discussed the definition of terrorism. Monday we are talking about Islam, Christianity and Terrorism and the church in the States and here in Russia’s response to terrorism. It’ll be good.

Today we went to a Russian Orthodox church for service and then to some sites outside of St Petersburg that dealt with the war - there was a diorama museum of the Siege and a park of the Nevskii Spot.

I look forward to actually posting pictures tomorrow or the next day… since it’s close to midnight, I need to sleep. I can’t wait till I have pictures from all around St Petersburg! WOO!

But, we’re here and all safe (I know my family knows that, but everyone else may not know it yet…).

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