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Solfrid Cristin TAC 2012 Team Sputnik | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 169 of 270 13 July 2012 at 12:46am | IP Logged | ||
It's so interesting to hear about your experience in Russia!!! Sorry about your loss :( 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 170 of 270 13 July 2012 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Serpent - the ones I have seen here are all super stylish. And thank you, I was afraid that I would go right into the cellar again at another death, but I guess that even though it is someone I loved, it deosn't hit as hard as a parent, so I am doing ok.
DAY 5 IN RUSSIA Another great day in Russia. The weather was bad today, but apart from that everything was really nice. We went to the Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), and wandered around the grounds there while our Russian friends did their best to go through the Russian Tsars with us. I lost count in the end, and had to look them all up on the internet when I came back to the hotel. They seem to have been an unsavory lot of murderers and maniacs, but I guess that describes royal families in general if you go far enough back in history. I also had an almost 15 minutes long conversation with the taxi driver in Russian, who complemented me heavily for my excellent Russian. I thanked him, but said it was not true, and he protested "Yes it is, and I should now because I am a Russian." I love Russians. They are great at giving compliments. The fact that he chose to go into English with me a while later, did however confirm my knowledge that my Russian is far from good. Still, everyone likes a compliment :-) We happened to chance upon a little acapella concert in a little cabin on the grounds of the park called a grotto, and the acoustics were fantastic. We ended up buying a CD with Russian folk songs - I know nothing of those, so I figured it was worth it to get to know that particular piece of Russian culture a bit better. We had lunch at a lovely little restaurant right outside the compound where we had shaslik, which is soon becoming one of my favourite dishes. I also did an attempt at asking for freshly squeezed orange juice in Russian, but gave up, Too difficult. I have taken a picture of the expression though, and will try again tomorrow. The food in general is very good. I who remember my Soviet visit in the 80ies, with lousy food, am delighted to have everything from kamchatka crab to caviar - and at fair prices. In general you get what you pay for, so it is not extremely cheap, but you can get very high cuality food for a medium price, and medium quality for a very low price. In the breakfast room, some things are better than at home, some are not so good. I really like the juices they have, which are very tasty, and the coffee and the sausages they have are also really good. I am not too convinced about the bread though, which is soft and tastless, but then I am difficult when it comes to bread. I, who often make my own jam, am also not too convinced at the stuff that goes under the name of jam, and I was a bit surprized when it was impossible to get any sugar for the oat meal porridge. They only had sugar in cubes, which is not terribly practical on porridge. But those are only minor details, and something one must expect when one goes abroad. After all, if you want everything to be like home, you have to stay at home, and like I said, the food is in general very good here. I was also really touched to have a present today. Our Russian friends said they had something for us, and it turned out to be the film I had looked for when I first met Maxim - "War and Peace". I was so happy, because I had been unable to get it, so they gave me their own copy of it. Since Maxim is a film student, and a film collector, he had it in his collection. I really look forward to look at some of the films he recommended. So far I have been watching mainly American comedies translated into Russian, so to have a Russian film buff recommend the ones he thought were the very best, felt great. Since I am a shallow little thing, way too used to American films, I fear that some of the Russian films may feel a bit to rough for me, but I guess I'll appreciate them in time. And at least I do not get the English voices in the back. I bought a heap of Poirot films the other day, and they have the lovely combination of English and Russian sound at the same time, and subtitles that are so smudged, that I can not read them. I may throw in the towel and just watch them in English in the end, just to keep my sanity. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 171 of 270 15 July 2012 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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DAYS 6 AND 7 IN RUSSIA
I am absolutely exhausted after a vacation which has been so full of events and laughs and beautiful palaces, that I think I will need a week to process it all. Yesterday we went to the Winter Palace and the Eremitage, and it is everything I thought it would be. Lovely ceilings, great paintings and sculptures, exquisite chandeliers, gold, marble, and my new favourite stone, malakitt (probably spelled in another way) which looks like green marble. Love it. At the museum shop I would have liked to buy half the shop, but since neither my wallet nor availbale space in my house allows that, I ended up with three thin books:one of Russian fairy tales, one about Russian cooking, and one about the Russian tsars. And I expressed my extreme displeasure at someone in Russian for the first time. There was a long hall which led to the restrooms, which was used as a smoking room. No windows, no ventilation. I have not seen anything so bad since we had smoking wagons in the train back in the 80ies. I got sick, and smelled like a smoked herring just for passing through. When I got out I therefore looked up the closest employee, and informed her in an outraged voice, that people where smoking there. She just went" Yeah, there is a ventilator there". I informed her in no uncertain terms that there was absolutely no ventilator nor window there, that it was really bad, that she could not let that happen and that I had gotten sick. She just shrugged, and said "But what can I do about it" . I had a whole lot of ideas of what she could do about it, but unfortunately I had run out of Russian vocabulary, so all I could do was send her an angry look and walk away. Catherine, my Russian friend, just laughed, and said "I did not know you could speak Russian that well, and you sounded so assertive" (euphmism for "mad as hell, I guess...). We then passed by the Church of our Saviour on Spilled Blood, which was erected on the site where one of the Romanov tsars was killed,and which was a typically Russian church which looks a lot like the Vasiliev Cathedral in the Red Square in Moscow. We continued in the Summer Garden which is a little gem just 15 minutes from the main Street of St. Petersburg, Nevskij Prospekt, and ended the day with a trip on the canals. We started out at 22.00, which made us freeze our tails off, but due to the famous white nights in St. Petersburg, we had light most of the time, and we got to experience an absolute stunning sunset at the Peter Paul fortress, where the Romanovs are buried. Thanks to our Russian friends I have learned so much Russian history over the last week. I did not know whether Peter the Great and Cathrine the Great were spouses, or related at all, but now I have a much better grip. I will still read up a lot more though. Today we went to the Iousoppov palace where Raspoutin was murdered. Unfortunately we could not see the Raspoutin exposition, but we got to see the palace, which was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I got to speak a little Russian ordering meals here and there during the day, and caught the occasional sentence when my friends spoke, but all in all my conclusion was that for learning purposes, bringing a husband who is uninterested in the TL, and going around as a tourist makes it hard to get much practise. I did however manage to impress him tonight, when I called up the hotel and asked them to send the shuttle bus to the metro for us. And I found out something I have wondered about for a few days. In Norway it is an absolute no-no for men to walk into a ladies' room, but on a couple of occasions I had seen men going into the ladies' room here. I got the explanation today, when I realized that I had misunderstood the triangles which are symbols for the men's room and the ladies' room, so I was the one who had been going to men's room all over St, Petersburg for a whole week... So we have said goodbye to our new Russian friends, hoping that we will meet again in a not too distant future either in Norway or in Russia. St. Petersburg is definitely a place I would like to visit more often, and even my husband liked it here. We have had a nice hotel which has the disadvantage of beeing far away from the centre (it takes half an hour to get there) but it has the advantage of a big beautiful rooms, a nice staff, and waking up to birdsong every morning. I feel right at home here, and look forward to learning more Russian, so that I can communicate better. The main reason why I have not spoken more Russian, is that I lacked vocabulary, so I will definitely go home and learn more. The whole visit has been one big motivator! My only regret is that I did not get to see the team mate that I was supposed to meet here, but we will do that some other time! Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 15 July 2012 at 10:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5393 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 172 of 270 16 July 2012 at 1:03am | IP Logged | ||
That is absolutely hilarious! I don't know about in Europe, but in the US, the urinals in the men's restrooms would give that away real fast. =) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 173 of 270 16 July 2012 at 6:59am | IP Logged | ||
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@ Kerrie: The ones I went to were just smaller units with 2-3 cubicles, otherwise I would of course have
realised :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 174 of 270 16 July 2012 at 8:24am | IP Logged | ||
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How did you interpret the triangles?
(Lol just realized they're the opposite of the symbols in the Da Vinci Code :DDD) Edited by Serpent on 16 July 2012 at 8:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 175 of 270 16 July 2012 at 8:35am | IP Logged | ||
I thought the one with the point down were for women, and the one with the point up was for men. Well at least I have learned it wel and good now,,, 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 176 of 270 16 July 2012 at 8:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah but why did you think so? :D
The ladies room triangle makes me picture a dress like this :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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