Rushing off to Russia

Hello friends,

If you are reading this blog, chances are you know who I am. For the rest of you, here goes: my name is Sean Keeley, I am a junior at Boston College majoring in International Studies, and I’ll be spending the next semester studying in the Bard-Smolny program in St. Petersburg, Russia. Over the next 4 ½ months, I’ll be using this site to share my observations, musings, and (hopefully) insights—providing a “window” into the city once called Russia’s “Window to the West.”

I begin my blog from an unusual starting point: snowed in to a Super 8 hotel in Queens, New York along with my dad. This is not, exactly, how I planned to spend my last night in America—the initial plan was to take a flight out of Boston tomorrow morning, in time to join up with the other students in my program for the group flight from New York. But nature had other plans—with a massive blizzard bearing down on the East Coast that threatened to cancel flights tomorrow, my parents decided get me down to New York today, in advance of the group flight tomorrow. Thus ensued an accelerated departure process, full of last-minute packing and errand-running and then a grueling six-hour drive to New York in the middle of a massive snowstorm. A huge thanks goes to my parents for taking time off work to help me get down to New York as quickly and safely as possible.

Tomorrow afternoon the real journey begins, and I suspect I will have much more substantial to say when I arrive in St. Petersburg. For now, though, I will try to address the question I’m most often asked these days, by friends and family and strangers alike: why Russia? Usually this question is asked of me politely and with genuine curiosity, but other people—and not infrequently, Russians themselves—seem seriously bewildered by my choice. Why, of all the countries in the world to study, would I choose somewhere so cold and remote and (as Western stereotypes would have it) so unfriendly?

It’s a fair question, actually, for which I do not have a single, coherent response. Instead, my interest in Russia stems from many sources—from the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which consumed much of my free reading during the latter half of high school; from the passions of Mr. Wilson, my Russophile of a high school teacher who first piqued my interest in Russia’s turbulent history and dysfunctional politics; and, finally, from the language itself. That is how I really got started down this path two-and-a-half years ago, as a first-year college student and language lover who simply wanted to try something new after several years of French.

Over the next few months, of course, I will be experiencing much that is new to me, and perhaps more than I bargained for! But I hope that through this blog, I can arrive at a fuller answer to that question—and I hope you will follow along as I try to figure it out.