Ogopogo!

This entry was supposed to have gone up on Wednesday, but for some reason didn't publish then - darn blog!

Last weekend Andreas and Sandra, my two friends from Munich went home to Germany. It's a strange situation here with friends coming and going all the time, since everyone at the language institute is here for different amounts of time, some only a month or two while others like me are here for half a year or more. They invited me to visit them in Munich, an offer I'll definitely take up! It's great how everyone's so happy to invite you to come and visit them in their home country when they hear you're planning to travel! We went out Saturday night to a bar just off Nevsky Prospekt as a sort of send-off for Andreas and Sandra. It was a really nice evening, though cut short by the fact that we had to leave at midnight becasue the bridges connecting downtown to Vasilievsky Island where I live are raised for a few hours every night for shipping and the metro also shuts down, so we had to scamper out to actually get home! It's kind of irritating; you either have to have an early night and be home by about 1am or stay out all night and come home at dawn. Or just stay on Vasilievsky Island, but there nearly as much there at night as on Nevsky.

I was surprised to find another Canadian at the bar that evening, the first one I've met here, a French Canadian guy from Montreal called Gerome. Despite his basic English and my terrible French, we talked and talked and talked - it was just so nice to finally meet someone else from home, even if he lives on the other side of the country and is a staunch Quebec seperatist! When I told him I was from BC he got excited and said that for ten years he's been trying to remember the name of some monster that lives in a lake in BC somewhere... did I happen to know what he was talking about?? Of course he was talking about the Ogopogo, the legendary monster that lives in Okanagan Lake right by Penticton! It was the strangest thing, talking in a bar in Saint Petersburg about the Ogopogo, of all things! Quite a coincidence he should ask about it, especially since I had just written a short paragraph about the legend in an assignment for class the day before (we had to write a fairy tale from our country and that was the best I could come up with!). And then to make things even more weird, the next day I was watching TV and just flipping through the channels when I came to a music video by a crazy Russian metal band called Strakh ("Terror") that was really awful BUT the song they were playing was called (in Cyrillic letters) O-go-po-go! Well if that doesnt take the cake, three Ogopogo incidences in three days in Russia of all places... bizarre.