The Fourth of July!

Is totally not a big deal here.

We celebrated by having dinner at Pizza Hut and stopping for our first Russian beers on the way back. We all picked the same one, except the boys got big bottles, and I got a small one. I'm not very optimistic about my constitution score. It's pretty good (Balticheskaya Klassika, which I have read is one of the more popular beers in St. Petersburg), but I wish I had some cheese. The fact is that I always wish I had some cheese - I'm not ashamed.

Pizza Hut is actually transliterated as "Pizza Hat". Unfortunately not Pizza Gut. (For some reason, most English words that begin with an H begin with a G in Russian, even though the "kh" letter is much more like an H. Examples: Garry Potter, and Gamburger.) I was hoping for Pizza Gut, but Hat is good too, even though it is not the Russian word for hat.

The whole experience was very silly. Out waiter was either one of the most enthusiastic people I ever met, or he was really excited to have real Americans eating in a Pizza Hut. He said good evening when we walked through the door, and I was so surprised by the fancytimes setup that he thought we couldn't speak English. We talked to him in English and Russian the whole evening - his English wasn't very good, and our Russian wasn't either. You can get a pitcher of wine at a Russian Pizza Hat, which we thought was amazing. We refrained, though.

I don't know if Rachel is reading this, but I thought it might make her laugh. Stila transliterated? Like the makeup? In Russian is a word that means "shame". It makes me chuckle, and wish I could find the Russian Sephora to get some lip glosses with Russian on them.

Otherwise, nothing much is new. In my class today, which was supposed to be Phonetics, we learned vocabulary and made up stories to go with some very sexist cartoons. I'll bring them home with me and scan them. They're pretty spectacular.

I've been delegated the Food Officer while we're here. As a group, we can't seem to make decisions, and at lunch time we wandered around the same enormous block in one big loop trying to find a food establishment that someone would have strong feelings for or against. Eventually, we ended up eating at Teremok again. I wish I had gotten the Kasha, my chicken had weird fatty bits in it.

We made the big list of things we want to do today - where they are, when they are open, and how much they cost. It's a long list, but we have a lot of free afternoons. We were invited to two parties, an outing to a club, and a concert today by classmates, but we just weren't feeling it. Which is sort of a relief for me, because I really don't want to do any of that but the concert, and that not today. I was worried that everyone else was going to want to party, and I was going to have to tag along for the sake of babysitting (drunksitting?) and staying together.

The plan now, depending on whether or not I stop being a chicken about asking my roommate to borrow her DVD, is to watch the Flinstones in Russian. Hopefully it lives up to its potential.