How to find Italy in St Petersburg

Keeping this blog up to date is not as easy as I expected since I have internet only in my hostmum's room which for obvious reasons I don't want to use too much. What's more is that for some reason the computers at school don't accept USB keys, so I can't just write offline and post during one of our frequent breaks.

Anyways, I've been here for two days and already starting to feel comfortable. Not with the language, of course; every contact outside school or the flat that involves more than pointing and saying thanks is REALLY challenging, but I've done my share of Nevskiy Prospekt and found out that Russia is still Europe, after all. After our school sponsored sightseeing tour this afternoon (which was entirely in (easy) Russian – I still understood quite a lot), we went to the Russian counterpart of Starbucks and enjoyed some delicious creamy hot chocolate – it's unfathomable to find something like that anywhere in China. That was Italy part I. Part II and another big surprise came when I visited my first proper Russian supermarket. I've been to some 24 h shops yesterday, but those are really really small and quite dingy. The supermarket near our flat (named 1814 after the date in which the triumph arc in front of it was built), on the other hand, didn't only feature Lays chips, Schwarzkopf shampoo and Danone yoghurt, amongst others, but also my favourite Italian cookies which are very hard to get even in Germany. Yummie! I really expected Russia to be much more different, but in comparison to China, everything here is quite „normal“ and Western. Am I disappointed? Well, the language is enough to put up with for the moment and I was very glad when I could buy Fenistil (had some serious fights with mosquitos during my first night) in a normal pharmacy (getting any Western medicine in a Chinese pharmacy is pretty unlikely).

My classes are okay, we have four lessons everyday, in which we talk a lot and try to actually do it grammatically correct. Tomorrow is my first „intensive“ lesson, where we're supposed to talk in very small groups for 2,5 hours ...

In terms of sightseeing I've been around Nevskiy Prospekt (where the school happens to be and which is actually the main street of St Petersburg) a lot. I was stunned by the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood and I did like the mint look of the Eremitage, but other than that I haven't seen anything yet. It's definitely a very big city and will take a while to explore, but then again, I've got three whole weeks :-).