Rained Out

On Saturday, in celebration of Pioneer Day, the members of the local LDS Institute of Religion planned a picnic/outing to the beach. Of course, in countries of the former Soviet Union pioneers conjure up other images. Some of them jokingly suggested that we should all dress up in white and red for the day.

We met at the Finlyandskiy Train Station and got on a local train (elektrichka)


to head out to the place that had been picked for the picnic. After a 45 minute train ride, we got to our station and got out, just as it was beginning to rain. Several of us were game to wait it out or proceed to our picnic locale in spite of the rain, but we were outvoted, and instead waited about an hour for the next train going back to the city. Fortunately there was a covered area to wait in.


And then I wasn't very good at taking pictures of most of the days activities. Of course, by the time we got back to St. Petersburg it was not raining at all. We went back to the Institute Building to eat our picnic food and play some ping pong and pool and sit around for a while, and from there went over to the Field of Mars to sit in the grass and do some of the stuff we would have done on the beach (frisbee and volleyball). It was a fun, chill afternoon.

After sitting around at the Field of Mars for several hours we headed over to Subway for dinner, where we especially had fun drinking out of really long straws (lots of regular straws stuck together). As you can tell from Masha's face (while Sasha looks on), it was quite a bit of work to get anything from the cup all the way to your mouth.



It was actually a really fun day, and it was nice to just spend time hanging out with people instead of running around the city trying to see sites.