yesterday i met again with yulia, with whom i'm planning on doing a language-tridem: she wants to improve her german+english and i need someone to correct my mistakes when speaking russian. so that's a great match.
after having set in a bookstore-cafe for a while correcting each others funny expressions (alright, maybe it's just me making up silly ways of explaining what i'm trying to actually say) we went for a walk through nightly st.petersburg, which is even prettier than piter at daytime - did i mention this before?!
another highlight was this little birdie, that i would have never detected myself. beside the fontanka river you see on the picture above there's a little statue of a bird called Чижик-Пыжик (Tschischik-Pyschik), recalling a russian nursery rhyme - about a student who drank too much wodka and as a result suffered from a bad headache...
i did a little research on Чижик-Пыжик and found out, that it's not only considered to be one of the most popular(!) statues in st.petersburg, but also that it has been stolen at least 3 times since it was set up in 1994, regardless of the fact that it's sitting on a ledge in the river embankment. so it'd cause quite some difficulties to reach it, as the following example shows, also including people having drunk too much, obviously:
you might have noticed that there are coins lying beside tschischik pyschik. it's a russian tradition to throw coins at all kind of memorials - if you hit, you're free to state a wish. i didn't manage to hit poor tschischik pyschik, but instead i got a "lucky ticket" on the bus when going home.
after having set in a bookstore-cafe for a while correcting each others funny expressions (alright, maybe it's just me making up silly ways of explaining what i'm trying to actually say) we went for a walk through nightly st.petersburg, which is even prettier than piter at daytime - did i mention this before?!
the palast's square at nighttime
yulia and "the giant grey men"
another highlight was this little birdie, that i would have never detected myself. beside the fontanka river you see on the picture above there's a little statue of a bird called Чижик-Пыжик (Tschischik-Pyschik), recalling a russian nursery rhyme - about a student who drank too much wodka and as a result suffered from a bad headache...i did a little research on Чижик-Пыжик and found out, that it's not only considered to be one of the most popular(!) statues in st.petersburg, but also that it has been stolen at least 3 times since it was set up in 1994, regardless of the fact that it's sitting on a ledge in the river embankment. so it'd cause quite some difficulties to reach it, as the following example shows, also including people having drunk too much, obviously:
you might have noticed that there are coins lying beside tschischik pyschik. it's a russian tradition to throw coins at all kind of memorials - if you hit, you're free to state a wish. i didn't manage to hit poor tschischik pyschik, but instead i got a "lucky ticket" on the bus when going home. you've received a "lucky ticket" or "счастливый билет" if the first and the last 3 numbers on your bus ticket add up to an equal sum (in my case two times 9). you're then supposed to eat your ticket and in consequence you'll become a lucky person. guess what i had for dinner.
