As Warren G. Harding said, "...a return to normalcy."

Last night I slept in my own bed. And by "my own bed" I mean the bed that I purchased last year. The bed that actually fits me (even when I am too tired to change it from a sofa into a bed). I can drink out of the taps and I'm eating vegetables again...and I had frozen pizza last night. That may seem like an odd first meal to have, but when you live in an apartment where the oven has been disconnected because it's supposedly a fire hazard (I don't know how the hotel administration could rationalize this. The quality of the wiring in that hotel was probably more of a fire hazard that having my oven on. For about a month our floor smelled like an electrical fire. It's good to be home.

I have roughly a week before I head back to the working world. I have much to say about my last few weeks in Russia as well as my general reflections on Russians as a group of people (or at least Petersburgers) and Russian society. Today however, I'm just giving you the chronological bits and pieces.

The last week alone has been pretty crazy. Last Saturday I met up with my friends Ivan and Anna to watch the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual affair in which every European nation submits one song/performer and then the people of Europe vote in who thier favorite. It's supposed to be one of those things that promotes unity, hope for the future, blah, blah, blah. It was probably was of the most atrocious things I've ever seen. Most of the countries didn't submit particularly exciting songs or performances. I think the most rediculous thing was the way that votes were tallied. Each country picks it's top 10 performances and the top three get the major points. I'd say about 80% of the countries gave their votes to neighboring countries. Both Serbia and Croatia gave their big points to other former Yugoslavian nations. Both Estonia and Georgia gave their top votes to Russia (trying to mend bridges perhaps?). The whole thing seemed a bit of a farce to me. But tons of people in Europe look forward to it every year.

Speaking of bridges, the contest ended so late that I couldn't get back to my side of the river before the bridges went up (which they do every night so that ships can navigate through the city). So I was stuck in the city centre for another 90 minutes before I could cross over and get home. When I finally got home I saw a police jeep pulling away and a man with a briefcase walking over to the entrance of my hotel where a policeman was standing. Some sort of barricade had been erected to prevent people from walking down the sidewalk towards the beach. As I got closer to the door I could see that there was a woman (I think it was a woman, it was hard to tell) lying prostrate on the sidewalk just outside the hotel. She had obviously fallen/jumped/been thrown out of one the higher windows of the hotel because her head had split open and it was pretty messy out there. When I left the hotel 6 hours later they had removed the body, but still hadn't washed the blood off the sidewalk (they still haven't done and now the asphalt is stained) and they hadn't picked up some of the smaller pieces of her body (the stray dogs of the neighborhood probably saw to that). It was quite shocking to those of us who are used to more thorough procedures...well, it was quite shocking in general. The whole idea of someone from the hotel dying, let alone seeing somebody lying on the ground with their brains spilled all over the sidewalk was a pretty heavy experience. We took it as an omen that it was a good thing we were leaving so soon...it wasn't one of the students and I don't think it was a minority or anything. But I don't need to see that again. Ever.

By comparison the rest of my last week was quite good...and that's excluding the fact that Canada won the Hockey World Championships (by the way, that last goal by Ricky Nash was superb). I had some relatively easy exams (oh, that reminds me, the other wierd that that happened about two weeks ago was that my grammar teacher came to class REALLY drunk. She reeked of booze.) and a long discussion in my conversational class about politics and culture in Eastern Europe. It was a really good discussion, but it was frustrating because that teacher absolutely insists on 100% Russian during the class, which made it very very very difficult for us to express ourselves. Still, the week seemed to go smoothly and we had a nice little ceremony where we got our certificates which prove we did over 300 hours of Russian at SPbSU.

Outside of class life was pretty crazy with trying to prepare for coming home. Katherine, Kat, and I went to Pavlovsk (where we went sledding that one time) and walked around, looking at trees and lawns and trying to escape from this mutt that was following us around for the first half-hour we were there. I spent most of my spare time this last week just walking around...sometimes for hours at a time. St. Petersburg really is at it's prime in spring, when the leaves are young and the sun is warm, but a walk along the river, though smelly, keeps you cool.

The flight went pretty well and we all remembered the relevant documents for leaving Russia. The snag came when our flight was delayed by over an hour because the cabin crew was "stuck in traffic." We had gotten from our hotel (which was on the far side of the city centre) to the airport in about an hour or so. We found it very unlikely that the traffic had changed so radically between the time we left our hotel and the time the crew should have left their hotel (which couldn't have been more remote than ours). Therefore we took "stuck in traffic" to mean "partied to hard last night and got wicked hangovers and slept in". It's Russia. Fortunately Lufthansa was kind enough to express our rears over to the Air Canada terminal for our flight to Toronto, which went without incident. I spent the night at my aunt and uncle's in Guelph, which was really great. They have a pretty sizable property out there so we went for a short walk around it on Sunday morning and found a turkey vulture nest. It was pretty neat. They then took me to the airport and I got home at about 5.30 last night. My sleep is still a little funky (and my digestion is REALLY funky), but I'm finding the adjustment pretty easy so far. I just have to remember that i don't have to always stand on the right side of the escalator so people trying to catch the metro can run past on the left.

So anyway. I'm home. I'm glad to be home. I have a week to relax before (hopefully) starting things up again after Memorial Day. More reflections to follow.