Wednesday is excursion day and no classes. Yay! Today's morning excursion was actually pretty lame. On our Excursion List, it said "American Consulate," which everybody took to mean that we were going on a tour of the American Consulate. Which actually sounds kinda interesting and like it could be cool. However, this was actually just a lot of walking to have Meg be like "Look! There's the American Consulate! If you ever get in trouble, there's where to go! Okay, free time until 1:30!" There was one of those looks of disbelief passed around, you know, the one that's like "What the fuck? I just walked for forty-five minutes to look at the outside of a building?" Yeah. Pretty much.
I had lunch with Meg and we had sushi. It was really good, although expensive. I guess you get what you pay for though, because it was tasty and I didn't get sick. I'm always totally sketched out by the fish here. I'm sure that most of it's fine, but I'm not eating anything raw that looks or smells like it wasn't caught that day. We got a boatload of sushi (I'm not kidding--it came in a boat) and had seaweed flavored green tea. Yum.
In the afternoon was a canal trip. We all piled onto one of the canal boats and got an hour tour of the canals and the Neva, with a guide pointing out the major sights along the way. The weather was really nice (it'd been raining for a couple days before), but it was sunny and pretty warm. Lydia Borisovna told me that'd I'd freeze, so I brought a sweater, and my scarf, hat, and gloves with me. And my zontik, just in case. So because I'd brought almost every warm article of clothing I own with me, I only needed to button my jacket. Then I had to schlep everything else around in my ginormous bag the rest of the day.
After the boat tour, I met Lena to go buy a cell phone. Because I'm cheap, I didn't really want to buy a new one for an arm and a leg, when I could save a little money and get a used one. There's a bunch of used Nokia's around, and I found one with some kind of guarantee for a month or something. I figure that I'm not actually out more than forty-five bucks if it breaks though, which is the good news. And when the kids who are only here for a semester leave, I could take one of their phones if it turns out that mine's a piece of shit.
Phones here work the way that they do everywhere else except America. Meaning that here, you buy a SIM card and the phone, either together or separately, but you only buy as many minutes as you need. You pick your carrier, but there's no monthly plan. When you run out of minutes, you go to the store and buy more. SMS's (text messages) are usually a ruble or less, with all incoming calls from any carrier free. Outgoing calls are more expensive, usually 4+ rubles a minute, depending on who you're calling and all that stuff. It's a convenient system, unless you run out of minutes when all the stores are closed.
So all was well until I got home and put the SIM card in the phone and tried to get it to work. The phone would accept the pin number, but then it would say that the SIM card wouldn't register. This made me less than happy, to say the least. I spent some time on the phone with Lena, trying to make everything work, but it didn't. Tomorrow we'll have to meet and go back to the store where we got the SIM card.
I had lunch with Meg and we had sushi. It was really good, although expensive. I guess you get what you pay for though, because it was tasty and I didn't get sick. I'm always totally sketched out by the fish here. I'm sure that most of it's fine, but I'm not eating anything raw that looks or smells like it wasn't caught that day. We got a boatload of sushi (I'm not kidding--it came in a boat) and had seaweed flavored green tea. Yum.
In the afternoon was a canal trip. We all piled onto one of the canal boats and got an hour tour of the canals and the Neva, with a guide pointing out the major sights along the way. The weather was really nice (it'd been raining for a couple days before), but it was sunny and pretty warm. Lydia Borisovna told me that'd I'd freeze, so I brought a sweater, and my scarf, hat, and gloves with me. And my zontik, just in case. So because I'd brought almost every warm article of clothing I own with me, I only needed to button my jacket. Then I had to schlep everything else around in my ginormous bag the rest of the day.
After the boat tour, I met Lena to go buy a cell phone. Because I'm cheap, I didn't really want to buy a new one for an arm and a leg, when I could save a little money and get a used one. There's a bunch of used Nokia's around, and I found one with some kind of guarantee for a month or something. I figure that I'm not actually out more than forty-five bucks if it breaks though, which is the good news. And when the kids who are only here for a semester leave, I could take one of their phones if it turns out that mine's a piece of shit.
Phones here work the way that they do everywhere else except America. Meaning that here, you buy a SIM card and the phone, either together or separately, but you only buy as many minutes as you need. You pick your carrier, but there's no monthly plan. When you run out of minutes, you go to the store and buy more. SMS's (text messages) are usually a ruble or less, with all incoming calls from any carrier free. Outgoing calls are more expensive, usually 4+ rubles a minute, depending on who you're calling and all that stuff. It's a convenient system, unless you run out of minutes when all the stores are closed.
So all was well until I got home and put the SIM card in the phone and tried to get it to work. The phone would accept the pin number, but then it would say that the SIM card wouldn't register. This made me less than happy, to say the least. I spent some time on the phone with Lena, trying to make everything work, but it didn't. Tomorrow we'll have to meet and go back to the store where we got the SIM card.
posted by hillary at 7:54 AM
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