So I’m back in school. It looks like I’m taking 4 classes: Global Climate Change (booo), US History: Gender and Sexuality from 1630-1850 (yaaay), Spanish 3 (booo), and Intro to Russian Culture (yaaay).

I love my Russian professor. She actually taught my brother Russian, so it’s pretty cool to finally have a teacher in common with him. I am quickly falling in love with Russian culture, and here are two paraphrases from my professor that indicate why (please read with a heavy Russian accent for full enjoyment):

“Russians have very different sense of time. For them, history is very close to them still. They say, ‘Of course we’re behind all the other countries, we were under the Mongolian yoke for two centuries!’ That was in 1240, get over it already! Or do you know of any country that is still mad about Napoleon’s invasion? They see a man in the street with mismatched clothes who is very cold, and they say, ‘Ah, must be a Frenchman!’”

“In Russian Pravda [early set of Russian laws], the fine for severing a man’s arm is not that much more than it is for damaging his moustache. Russian men love their beards. Peter the Great wanted Russian men to look more like the French, so he demanded that they shaved their beards. Oh, the men wept. They were so sad, it was the worst thing for them. Afterward they would keep their beards with them so they could be buried with them. If they did not have their beards, they thought, how would they be recognized in Heaven?”