Fifty kopecks for a kick in the head.

Alright, there's a little story to go with that title.

There is a beautiful courtyard in the middle of the School of Philology campus, where there are plantings and lovely trees and benches, and also a lot of lovely bronze statues. Some of them are just boring philosophers, but most of them are charmingly mythological- a couple of fawns making faces at each other, for instance, or a dachsund with a tragedy mask on his face and a comedy mask on his butt. Students seem to treat these statues as little shrines of academic success- they wedge coins into them or leave them at their feet.

The most popular deity is the vaguely buddha-esque hippopotamus that is by an entrance to one of the departments- she's lying on her side in her great folds of fat, smiling broadly and almost wiggling her toes. She almost always has a big pile of fifty kopeck and one or two ruble coins around her. (People, besides leaving her money, rub her belly.) Then the second favorite is The Little Prince, which is a jester sitting on a throne of fat books, reading a book in his lap, and then off to the side there's a little tiny person sitting on the books- you get the understanding that the jester is huge and we are the little guy. I get the feeling that offerings to the Little Prince for special occasions requiring particularly scholarly luck, while the hippopotamus is for all around fortune.

Anyway, I'm totally into all the supersitions here, and so whenever I get a pocket full of (nigh on worthless) fifty kopeck coins, I leave them at a shrine. The last time, it was the hippopotamus, but yesterday I thought, hey, I had a test this morning, I feel like leaving something for the Little Prince. So I got out my fifty kopecks, bent over to put them in front of him, and as the money leaves my hand BAM! Ow. I had forgotten that he had his legs jauntily crossed and that one of his very pointy shoes was right there in front of me.

So, now I can truly say that I have paid fifty kopecks for a kick in the head.

(The next person to leave him an offering, I saw, put a hand over his shoe before she bent.)

Other than that- Cinderella last night was a blend of modern and classical, and I loved it to BITS. It's sort of a children's ballet, which just meant that both the serious arts lover and the little bouncing girl in me were royally entertained.

It also turns out that one of my teachers knits, and she was ecstatic when she saw me knitting in the front row at a lecture, to the point that she announced that we had a knitter in the auditorium before remembering she was supposed to be introducing the lecturer instead. Slightly embarrassing, but it's worked out as she knows where a real gourmet yarn shop is, and can't wait to take me there next week. She's a cool woman, and we get along really well.

The lecture, after that, was really cool- it was given by a pair of translators, who were of course multilingual, clear, and eloquent. They talked about the history of translation, which is really fascinating in Russia- remind me to tell you all about it when I get home.

My host mom said this morning, as she made her son's VAT of porridge, that I eat like a bird- little and quickly. What can I say?