Ok, so I finally have some time to write this thing. I realize that if I try to write what happened the last two weeks in detail, I will never finish, so here’s a quick summary.
My flight back from Russia was not too bad. I was awake for like 24 hours straight, so it wasn’t fun. I arrived home about 11:30pm on Sunday night.
On Tuesday morning I had my wisdom teeth pulled. I was pretty miserable for the first two days, but after that, it was fine. By Friday I was eating sushi and other strange things.
Today I took a train to St. Petersburg. I left around 8am and arrived around 11:30am.
I took a taxi to the hotel, but since check-in was not until 2pm, I left my bags and walked around the city.
I went to the artillery museum, which I enjoyed a lot. I then walked some more, took the metro, walked again, and got back to the hotel. I finally got my room and went out again.
Yesterday was my last day of work. Other than that, all I did was buy a few gifts for people.
Today is my last full day in Novgorod. Unfortunately for me, this trip has almost come to an end. It seems like it all happened very fast. I can’t believe 50 days can feel like 5. Well, I can believe it, I just don’t want to.
I packed most of my things already, but as always, I will not be done packing until one minute before I have to leave tomorrow morning. I will be taking a train to St. Petersburg tomorrow morning. I will probably go to a museum, stay in a hotel overnight, and finally go to the airport Sunday morning.
Sorry for not posting as often as before, I have been quite busy over the last few days. I spent some time yesterday getting my reservation for a hotel in St. Petersburg. I will go there Saturday morning. As expected, I didn’t buy anything yesterday. I did walk around a mall to see what was there though.
This morning I woke up at 7am without my alarm clock. Since it has been rather warm, I am forced to leave my room windows open to let the cool air in, unfortunately, this also lets the sounds from all the cars, trucks, buses, people, and everything else on the street. Since I started going to work at 10am instead of 9am yesterday, I realized I have to take different buses. Somehow I manage to pick the only route that changes with the time of day to go to work. Now I have to get on a similar bus, get off at another stop, and switch buses. I guess that’s fine because I only have one more day of work.
Today I showed up to work only to find out there was no new group of students. I was really looking forward to meeting new people. Since only the supervisors and the locals were there, we didn’t do a lot of heavy work. We mostly cleaned and measured everything for the pictures and drawings. They later told me that for the rest of the week, work was starting at 10am, not 9am, which was a nice change. I will only work for three more days, so it’s not really a problem.
Today I woke up fairly early, even thought I went to bed late. I spent some time on the computer while the rest of the family woke up. I didn’t really do anything interesting. I listened to music, read some stuff, and relaxed.
Later in the evening, two of my sisters friends came over and we all had a nice dinner. My sister cooked some Swedish dishes, which were very good, and we later had cake and ice cream. They talked about many things, I didn’t really understand most of them, but every once in a while something would make sense. When they ask me questions I don’t understand, I am usually able to answer them after a quick hint in English, but I was so tired, I didn’t know when they were talking to me. It was pretty funny when I heard someone say something and then everyone stops talking and looks at me. I do know how to say “You were talking to me?” in Russian, so at least I can ask. We ended up talking about Facebook and mySpace and I tried explaining in Russian why Facebook was better, but failed miserably. I also found out there is a Russian clone of Facebook, which was pretty funny.
Yesterday I set my alarm to turn on at 8am because on Saturday work starts at 10am. At 7:30am I was woken up my my host mother telling me I was going to miss work. Apparently she didn’t hear me when I said work started later on Saturday, but oh well.
I went to work from 10am to 2pm, it was the last day for the group of students from Moscow, so I wanted to go say good bye. I didn’t find anything because we mostly did cleaning. By cleaning I mean taking all of the dirt from the wooden logs and other things in the ground. Once they are very nice and clean, they photograph them from all sorts of different angles with very nice digital cameras.
Today we found some interesting artifacts at the archaeological dig. I found some sort of carved wood thing, we didn’t know what it was, but they said it was important. One of my digging partners also found a frying pan, which was very interesting. It was pretty much a round piece of metal but the fact that it is from 1000 years ago, makes it very interesting.
After work, I went home and had dinner. During a dinner conversation, we started talking about my family, and the grandma said she wanted to see pictures of my family. I brought my laptop and started showing her. Later, my host mother came and sat down. After some time, the grandma left, and later, my sister showed up. After my host mom left, I kept going with some pictures of Mexico, Miami, Rochester, etc… Around 12:30am we decided to continue tomorrow and go to sleep. It was very nice to spend time with the family, the pictures always cause conversations to start, and I get to practice my Russian. I still need to work on the words for nephew and niece, which I keep confusing with the words for a traditional Russian meal.
Yesterday was not very eventful, except for the stupid fish. I was going through the dirt (wearing my dish washing gloves) and felt a sharp sting on one finger. It ends up that a sharp fish bone broke through the glove and stung my finger. The top broke and stayed in my finger. It took me about 10 minutes to get it out. Now whenever I grab anything, it hurts. I hope I don’t get some 1000 year old disease from the thing, that sure would confuse doctors.