Привет from Leila, the newest intern at Liden & Denz St. Petersburg!

Всем привет! Hello everyone! My name is Leila, and I am currently studying at Liden & Denz. I have just arrived in St Petersburg, and after I have finished a two-week quarantine period I am really looking forward to exploring this beautiful city.

I have been studying Russian at Durham University in the United Kingdom for 2 years, and this year is my ‘year abroad’. This is a common feature of a modern languages degree in the UK, where you are expected to live abroad for a year so that you can really immerse yourself in your target language. As I also study Spanish, I spent 5 months in the South of Spain at the end of 2020. Before arriving in Russia, I was travelling in Ukraine for 3 months, and in Georgia for one month. 

Although I have never studied in person in Russia, I spent 4 months studying online with Tomsk State University earlier this year. I learnt so much about Russian culture and traditions through this course, so now I am so excited to be able to experience these things first hand. I came to St Petersburg as a tourist in 2017, but I found that three days was nowhere near enough time to even scrape the surface of this huge city.

I absolutely love learning Russian, and I get excited by the strange intricacies of the language. I even admit to loving Russian grammar, as it is all so complicated but somehow fits together to create a beautiful language. Russian literature also interests me, and I have read many classics in English. I love Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, and reading these short stories which capture the magic of St Petersburg is part of the reason as to why I was so desperate to study here. I am hoping that by the end of two months studying here I will be prepared to tackle some books in the original Russian, and not in the English translation.

I’ll be keeping the blog updated with tips for living in St Petersburg, stories and interviews, so please stay tuned!

Leila, currently studying at Liden & Denz St. Petersburg