It was a very eventful first trip abroad!
I stayed on Vasilievsky Island with a 63 year old woman who didn't know a lick of English. I could see the Gulf of Finland from my bedroom window and spent many a night on the nearby beach (beach meaning: a polluted trash pile full of drunken and semi-nude Russians). Because Petersburg is so far north, at the height of summer there's 24 hours of daylight. The sun just barely dips below the horizon, but the skies are still light. White Nights are awesome, although it's a little hard to sleep when it's bright outside at 1am.
I had an hour-long commute to school every morning, taking the metro (the deepest subway system in the world; it's a 10 minute escalator ride just to get up and down) and the trolleybus to the Smolny Institute.
Highlights of the trip included getting groped by two army guys named Sasha during the overnight train ride to Moscow and partying with a mafia wife.
I'll write more soon but I'm about to miss the bus a second time.
