Mainstreaming it up...

A pleasant day to you all! Hope life finds you all in great health and spirits this fine Saturday afternoon (or morning for most of you)!

Thursday was the busiest day I've had since I've arrived and taken care of organizational issues related to registering my passport/changing my visa. In the morning I had Stylistics and learned how to basically take a complicated text and summarize it in the form of a tezisny plan. After class I had a bit of a break and then sat down for my long-awaited mainstream class, ictoria muzikal'ny kul'tury Evropy, or to put it simply, Music History. It will be a difficult class in the sense that I'll need to pay particular attention to the professor, and even then I should accept that I won't understand everything, assuming she'll be speaking at a typical pace for a Russian native speaker, in other words, ridiculously fast. The good news is I'm already familiar with most of the music we'll be covering in the course, thanks to the camaraderie and long-suffering students of History of Western Music who had to endure a year of stress prepping for listening exams and writing down the dates to basically every single composer who ever existed, lol. The sad news (from my point of view) is that here we started with the rise of opera in the 17th century, thus skipping out on the medieval period (which on the whole I"m not in the least bit sorry about), and the Renaissance as well...including Josquin and Italian and English madrigals...clearly an epic fail. :((( Oh well, we did listen to Dido's "When I am laid down" aria so that was cool, though it would have been cooler to listen to the chorus after.

After class, which ended early, I got ready for the special elective course I signed up for, devoted exclusively to Russian fairy tales (skazki), which not only excites me for the very reason that I'm writing my MA thesis about them (primarily, if not exclusively from a pedagogical point of view), as well as for the fact that I can directly use the text that was given to us as one of my secondary source materials, but for the sheer fact that we get to read fairy tales, learn about Russian traditions and mentality, and naturally, watch representations of fairy tales on screen, from some of Russia's most talented animators and directors. Both of these classes meet one after the other on Thursdays, and that combined with my morning class in Stylistics makes for a very hectic, but informative and all around enjoyable day.

Monday begins our history class, which means that finally my schedule will fall into place. I should mention that each class in Russia is one para in length, or 90 minutes (two 45 minute segments) Two classes on Monday (10:30 and 2:00), one on Tuesdays at 10:30 but I haz choir Tuesday evenings from 7:00-9:30, and Thursdays I have class at 10:00, and then from 2:00-5:15, with a short break after Music History). The upside is that Wednesdays and Fridays I don't have class, but I'm sure I'll be using wednesdays for meetings/reading/research. The downside is I'll have to do homework for the weekend on Fridays and Saturdays since I"m in church all day on Sundays and don't want to do homework after a full but awesome day of singing and praising God. Looking forward to the history class, and hoping that it doesn't require a tremendous amount of reading and writing. The music history class doesn't seem to require a lot of work, except for presentations when the class begins to be conducted as a seminar (a lot of Russian classes are conducted as lectures, as seminars, or lecture/seminars), and an oral final, which I'm already terrified about. That being said, I'm going take time for myself, enjoy choir and church, keep up the blog and hopefully talk to friends and family. I seem to have a very long break, so I will almost certainly be coming home (the second semester doesn't start until February), but exams run into January, so I"m hoping that I can take my final early. Even if I can't make it home for Christmas, I will definitely plan on being home for a few weeks, but I won't know more until well into the semester, so stay tuned for upcoming information about that. Meanwhile, I think a nice hot meal, shower and warm bed all await me (I'm feeling rather tired today, so it looks like I'll be having an early night, especially as I need to be up early for church). Talk soon moi druz'ya!!!! Love you guys! Peace out!