From Russia With Love
Jun. 20th, 2010 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redorchidsI'm back!
Russia was... an interesting experience. Not as bad as I'd anticipated. Or, more like, the things I'd thought would be really bad (such as cleanliness and crime) weren't and things I thought would be fine (such as shopping, eating out and asking for directions) didn't work at all. Our hostel was amazing. (Soul Kitchen Hostel, if you ever go to St Petersburg, go there.) Food was good too (though about twice as expensive as I'd thought. St Petersburg is NOT a cheap city, omg), and the public transit system (that I'd heard lots of negative things about) turned out to be both dirt cheap and work really smoothly. On the other end of the scale were things like people in restaurants being a) rude b) unable to speak or understand a single word of any language other than Russian, even in "western" places like Subway and c) constantly trying to rip us off. Two things we learned quickly were definitely to count out exact change in advance and be prepared to never get the food we actually ordered.
The choir competition went well, performance-wise. We kicked ass up on that stage. It was a pretty amazing feeling. Unfortunately, the competition in itself turned out to be not-so-serious-or-structured, which meant both a bunch of administration problems and that judging was of the very subjective variety where the judges just put down a number between 0-100 for each choir depending on how well they liked them in a way that felt very arbitrary when comparing results with the performances we saw. (In more structured competitions there are protocols, with points awarded, usually per song, for a number of aspects such as musicality, stage presence, precision, transitions etc, but not here *sigh*. We still won gold in both our categories, but then every participating choir except a youth choir from Turkey (who was, frankly, pretty bad) won gold, so... (and they still won bronze, despite being off key and not at all together for most of their songs)). It was a really cool experience though.
In other, more fannish news, my BBB is posting tomorrow! I'm excited. (Anyone who has any recs for other BBBs that have posted in the past week? I need to catch up. :))
Also, I have this new, pretty ridiculous plot bunny for a How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days AU (which might originally be![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
reni_days's bunny, or one that we flailed over together a long while back, lol) where Brendon is the How To-guy at a gay male version of Cosmo (working with Ryan (fashion and trends) and Pete (who keeps getting dumped by his boyfriends after a week and can't figure out what he's doing wrong)) and Spencer is the star advertiser at Firm Something who is about to lose a huge account for a company specialising in luxury gay lifestyle products (no idea exactly what that means yet) to Bill and Gabe (aka the superduo) because, apparently, they have convinced Spencer's boss that a straight man such as Spencer could never know gay men well enough to worm his way into their hearts and wallets with a campaign. (All of which naturally leads to Spencer insisting that he totally knows what gay guys want and is tricked into a bet where he's to make a guy fall in love with him in ten days or Bill and Gabe gets the account. Enter Brendon, out on assignment to find a guy and drive him away in the same amount of time for an upbeat article. And then, well, you've seen the film. :DDD)
Russia was... an interesting experience. Not as bad as I'd anticipated. Or, more like, the things I'd thought would be really bad (such as cleanliness and crime) weren't and things I thought would be fine (such as shopping, eating out and asking for directions) didn't work at all. Our hostel was amazing. (Soul Kitchen Hostel, if you ever go to St Petersburg, go there.) Food was good too (though about twice as expensive as I'd thought. St Petersburg is NOT a cheap city, omg), and the public transit system (that I'd heard lots of negative things about) turned out to be both dirt cheap and work really smoothly. On the other end of the scale were things like people in restaurants being a) rude b) unable to speak or understand a single word of any language other than Russian, even in "western" places like Subway and c) constantly trying to rip us off. Two things we learned quickly were definitely to count out exact change in advance and be prepared to never get the food we actually ordered.
The choir competition went well, performance-wise. We kicked ass up on that stage. It was a pretty amazing feeling. Unfortunately, the competition in itself turned out to be not-so-serious-or-structured, which meant both a bunch of administration problems and that judging was of the very subjective variety where the judges just put down a number between 0-100 for each choir depending on how well they liked them in a way that felt very arbitrary when comparing results with the performances we saw. (In more structured competitions there are protocols, with points awarded, usually per song, for a number of aspects such as musicality, stage presence, precision, transitions etc, but not here *sigh*. We still won gold in both our categories, but then every participating choir except a youth choir from Turkey (who was, frankly, pretty bad) won gold, so... (and they still won bronze, despite being off key and not at all together for most of their songs)). It was a really cool experience though.
In other, more fannish news, my BBB is posting tomorrow! I'm excited. (Anyone who has any recs for other BBBs that have posted in the past week? I need to catch up. :))
Also, I have this new, pretty ridiculous plot bunny for a How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days AU (which might originally be
reni_days's bunny, or one that we flailed over together a long while back, lol) where Brendon is the How To-guy at a gay male version of Cosmo (working with Ryan (fashion and trends) and Pete (who keeps getting dumped by his boyfriends after a week and can't figure out what he's doing wrong)) and Spencer is the star advertiser at Firm Something who is about to lose a huge account for a company specialising in luxury gay lifestyle products (no idea exactly what that means yet) to Bill and Gabe (aka the superduo) because, apparently, they have convinced Spencer's boss that a straight man such as Spencer could never know gay men well enough to worm his way into their hearts and wallets with a campaign. (All of which naturally leads to Spencer insisting that he totally knows what gay guys want and is tricked into a bet where he's to make a guy fall in love with him in ten days or Bill and Gabe gets the account. Enter Brendon, out on assignment to find a guy and drive him away in the same amount of time for an upbeat article. And then, well, you've seen the film. :DDD)
