an exploratory initiative

I was sitting in my room just now and I started flipping through the Lonely Planet that I tossed into my luggage at the last minute. I quickly realized that the time has come to be a tourist as well as a student.

To be fair, I have been doing plenty of touring. Lots of churches, all of the cultural hot spots, and the like. But all of those things are with Smolny and the group. Also, they're all in a sort of similar vein. The churchy vein.

So now that I have my bearings in the city and a relatively concrete understanding of public transport, I can start to explore. Exploration will begin...tomorrow! I tried to get a couple of people go go exploring tonight, true to my form of getting ridiculously excited about my latest thought and tossing everything else out the window in reckless pursuit. My social targets both calmly explained to me that it's kind of late, everyone is pooped, and we could do something fun tomorrow.

Just to clarify, by "exploration" I mostly mean finding some of the cafes, parks, and concert venues, and whatever else Lonely Planet talks about. Really, I just want to do some more things that aren't in the schedule they gave us.

Also, I'm becoming friends, I guess, with Саша Sasha, the boyfriend. By becoming friends, I mean he's always happy to see me and always tries to feed me alcohol and helps me with Russian pronunciation. A jovial fellow. He told me he could show me around the city if there's anything I'd like to see or do. I told him I'd like to do whatever he does with his friends, a suggestion that made Саша Sasha laugh hysterically. But I think after regaining some composure, he agreed to my proposition.

We're having a 4th of July picnic on Sunday, the 5th of July, and then we're going to a баня banya!

The last few days have been mostly consumed by homework. This isn't so bad because I've founds some homework buddies, a development which perhaps explains why the last few days have been mostly consumed by homework.