A Day in the Lyfe: Weekend Edition

So Janet, if that last post chronicled just your normal school week, what exactly do you do on the weekends? We can’t assume you cease to exist on the most valuable two days of every week. Well, reader, I’m a little busy sitting here questioning the contents of my lunch (cabbage fried with hotdogs and ham?! Maybe?), but I guess I have time to answer your question as well.

And the answer to that question is that it varies. Every weekend here has been an adventure of sorts, so I think I’ll just recap them all here. Don’t worry, there’s only been like two. And a half. Since today is Saturday.

The first weekend

Friday: We took a boat tour along the Moscow River. It was a beautiful day. We got to see many of the main attractions such as the Kremlin, Soviet skyscrapers, bridges, Cathedral of Christ the Savior, more bridges, and the best thing, of course, St. Basils. Which I thought I was taking a ton of pictures of, but turns out my camera was lying to me so I only ended up getting one rather lopsided picture of half of it since someone’s head got in the way. Ah well.

After that we were led to some Monastery in a questionable area, and then our guide just kind of ditched us. So some of us wandered around and found a Chinese buffet. Which was kind of a fail since you have to choose which size plate you want and then you only get to fill it up once. I prefer the obese American way to do buffet. But maybe that’s just me. I don’t think we did anything interesting after this. Clearly not since otherwise I’d probably remember it.

View of the Kremlin from the Moscow River

Saturday: Our plan was to go to the Pushkin Museum. Which of course there are like three of. The one we found was not the one we intended on finding. We ended up at the State Museum of Pushkin, which was essentially a museum of all of his old junk. But I got to see the original copy of his short story “The Queen of Spades” (“Пиковая Дама“), which I wrote a paper on this year, so that was pretty cool. We also made friends with this little old babushka working in one of the exhibits, and although we didn’t understand what she was telling us to do, she was very helpful.

We found lunch after this at a little restaurant on a sad looking side street. From the outside, the restaurant looked rather questionable, but it was legit. Legitimately delicious. Plus they were playing the TV show Vampire Diaries, or Дневник Вампира, on the TV right by our table, dubbed in Russian of course. For once we didn’t mind our slow service, since that just meant we got to watch more of the show.

Sunday: I went with a friend to explore Gorky Park, which is probably my favorite place in all of Moscow. It was a gorgeous day to just walk around outside, look at nature, and explore. After this already long adventure, we headed to Gori Leninskiye, where you can see the entire Moscow skyline (after an exhausting hike up a steep mountain. “Gori” means mountains, by the way). It was a beautiful view, and it was impossible for any picture I took to truly capture it. A short walk away from this is MGU (Moscow State University), the oldest and largest university in Russia, so we walked around that for a while too.

After this extensively long day in the sun, I come home to be greeted by my host mom, who exclaims in horror about my sunburn, which had only just become evident. Instead of being like, here’s some aloe, like pretty much any normal person, she was like, we’ll just have to slather you up in sour cream! Luckily, the look of horror on my face put an end to that suggestion, and she scavenged out some foul smelling ointment, which probably hadn’t been used since Brezhnev’s time. Better than dressing up in condiments though I guess.

Last Weekend

Friday: Our excursion was to the Red October chocolate factory, which was by far the tastiest tour I’ve ever been on. We were literally eating chocolates by the handful as they came off the conveyor belts. And then even after all that, they sent us home with a gift bag of deliciousness. Not that I would actually know since I gave it all to my host family, being the wonderful guest that I am.

That night I went to see the ballet. But using the word “see” is kind of misleading here. We went as a group of students, meaning we got incredibly cheap, discounted student tickets, meaning we got the worst seats in the theater, meaning that we couldn’t actually see the stage from where we were sitting. This shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise though, considering the fact that “Uncomfortable seat” (неудобное место) was actually written on our tickets. But всё хорошо, что хорошо кончается, because at least now I can leave Russia saying I at least heard a ballet there. It’s kind of a required experience in my opinion.

With our new friends Sergey and Sergey

And then we went out for drinks afterwards so that was fun. We had been hanging out with this guy Sergey at the ballet, so afterwards we met up with Sergey’s friend Sergey and went to a bar. It was one of those places you never would have found had you not known a Russian. We had to creep behind a fence and walk to the back of a building and then go down a bunch of steps into a kitchen and the go through a doorway or two and suddenly we were in a really hip, hole-in-the-ground kind of bar. They didn’t want to serve us since our group of six people was too big (what?) but then the second Sergey had a quick word with the manager and we were suddenly sitting down, watching the futbol game, drinking beer (which was buy one get one free, holla!), and engaging in a mostly Russian conversation. It was a successful night.

Saturday: We had to wake up unfortunately early in order to attend our resident director’s mandatory lecture on the cross-cultural differences between Russians and Americans. It was four hours of him basically bragging about everything he thinks he knows about what he calls psychology, which is really just very biased sociology. And then the pizza we were all promised was never delivered so our whole group of students just ended up walking across the street to the Papa Johns and eating it there.

That afternoon was my first time hanging out with my tutor. We went to Kolomenskoye Park and wandered around there for the day. I got to see Peter the Great’s cabin in its unoriginal location. My one comment about that is that he was a really tall dude, and that doorway was too short even for me. This guy built a whole new capital city, you’d think he’d be able to get the dimensions on his tiny cabin right.

Sunday: Feeling behind on all my readings and realizing how overwhelmed I am by all the new words I need to memorize, I spent the day siting in my room drinking tea, eating chocolate, and making flashcards. And then studying my flashcards. And then napping. And then back to the flashcards. I will probably look back on this day as my first and last day as a productive student in Moscow.

This Weekend

Friday: Yesterday we had our excursion to MosFilm, Russia’s largest movie studio. Considering that I had only seen maybe three movies produced there, it honestly wasn’t that interesting of a tour. And I was improperly dressed to handle to surprisingly chilly and occasionally drizzly weather.

We later went to the Cosmonaut Museum and saw all sorts of space type things. Like the first Sputnik. Yep. And some stuffed dogs named Belka (Squirrel) and Strelka (Arrow), the first creatures from earth to make it to space and back (obviously they were not stuffed back then). We also had an encounter with a very rude museum lady, who yelled at us for taking pictures, although there were no signs forbidding it. Apparently to take pictures you have to buy a special ticket. After finding out we were American, she commented to our Russian friend, “They’re from America. They’re not poor. They can buy the tickets if they want pictures.” Yeah, because I want to spend an extra 200 rubles just to get a picture of your stupid display on space foods (actually, I kind of do wish I had a picture of that. They ate tubes of borsht in space!). But still. A lot of Russians have this terrible jealous hatred against Americans. Combine that with an already existing inclination towards bluntness, and sometimes it’s just really discouraging. But then we all got ice cream at a nearby park and felt a whole lot better.

Kasey’s tutor invited us to a party at her boyfriend’s apartment, so we bought a bottle of wine that had a cat on it and headed on over. I really like party etiquette in Russia. Guests all bring gifts to share with everyone in an unspoken agreement, which takes a lot of pressure off the hosts, who go all out anyways, since Russians, mean-hearted museum ladies aside, are really warm and generous people. This might sound kind of cheesy, but it’s true. When you’re a guest in someone’s home, the host typically puts a lot of effort into making you feel comfortable. This is usually done with food and overfeeding you, something everyone living with a host family on this trip experiences everyday. But the party was a lot of fun, since her boyfriend is actually an American, and his friend was from Australia, and there were really nice Russian girls and guys there. The conversations easily drifted in and out of Russian and English. Also we played charades, and I successfully acted out “illegal arms shipments.” That in itself makes for a successful night.

This party really made me happy to be here. I’d say in general I’m happy and excited that I’m finally living out this dream of being in Russia, but there are definitely moments and even days where finding the excitement to deal with yet another cashier or waitress or person on the street who despises you for being a foreigner is really challenging. Being at that party, and every time I hang out with Russian tutors and their friends, I’m reminded of why I’m doing this and why I’m here and why I love studying Russian.

And it’s not because I love to make flashcards.

A Day in the Lyfe

So we’re about a third of the way through our stay and things have finally kind of normal-ed out here. I realized that I’ve rambled a lot about generalizations about Russians and cross-cultural differences, but I have not gone into too much detail about my daily life. What exactly do I do day after day? Well, today you’re all in for a little treat, because I’m about to go into excruciating detail about my life as a summer student in a Russian University. R U READY?!

7am: Waking up in the morning. Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs. Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal. Seeing everything, the time is going, tickin’ on and on, everybody’s rushing. Gotta get down to the bus stop, gotta catch my bus. I see my fraaaands..

Oh, whoops, sorry guys, this is just my schedule on Fridays.. Back to the real deal now that I have your attention. Or maybe I lost it with that. Eh. With as lame as that song is (Rebecca Black in case you missed the reference), it does summarize the first half hour or so of my day fairly well. I do wake up at 7am, and I do get fresh, which in Russia is not always an easy feat. I wish I had cereal, but my host mom only buys me “dannisimo” brand Danon yogurt. So in her war against my waistline she of course only chooses the choco-loaded flavors, which of course include chocolate cocoa-puff type toppings that you’re supposed to add to the already richest tasting yogurt you’ve ever had. This as you can imagine, while delicious, is no nutritious staple to any balanced breakfast. I used to at least be able to find some fruit to pair it with, but ever since that birthday party over a week ago, my host mom’s been force-feeding us leftovers, some of which include very, very ripe fruits from the fruit basket she had assembled. I think she’s refusing to buy more fruit until that stuff’s gone, but the flies hovering around it in our kitchen have done a better job devouring it than either me or my host sister have..

7:35ish: I leave my apartment and head for the metro station, which is a pleasant 5-10 minute walk away. I get to walk along a sidewalk through a little park and observe the wildlife. Which mostly just consists of stray cats lounging on benches. There’s even a small area where the little old grandpas feed leftover breadcrumbs to swarms of birds.

7:45-8:30ish: Commute to the University. Takes a long time. And this is the time estimate for when I powerwalk like a Russian and play a game of weaving through the metro crowd I either like to call the “move it or lose it people” or “jerk imma cut you” game, depending on how the day began. I find it’s been good to get my morning rage out before starting class. I have a lot I could say here, but I think the metro deserves a separate blog post.

I owe this machine my life.
It owes me about twenty dollars.

8:30-9am: This small period of time has become essential to my survival of each day. It is during this time that we all separately arrive and congregate around this magic drink-making machine. For only about a dollar you can have your pick from a wide array of caffeinated beverages. I’m a fan of the long espresso shot, which provides me with maybe enough energy to make it up the stairs to our first lecture of the day. It is also during this time that we share the ridiculous things our host families said or did or served for dinner the night before or breakfast that morning. There’s definitely your fair share of “you’re wearing THAT today?!” stories, and of course, the classic, “The meal looked great until she slathered it in sour cream/mayonnaise/ketchup” line. 

9am: Lecture. This is the one class all thirty of us have together before being split off into our small groups for the rest of the day. Since we’re here for a shortened semester, they’re giving us a sort of taste-test of all the normal lectures. For example, for the first week and a half we had the History of Russian Music, and right now we’re studying Geography. I really liked the music professor; he is just a very energetic, passionate guy. And I could tell this by the small heart shaped sweat stain that would seep out from his shirt and grow bigger and bigger throughout lecture everyday. His love for the subject was clearly evident. He would get so excited about certain compositions that when he would play a YouTube video or recording of them he often couldn’t restrain himself from playing along on the piano. Cool guy. And the geography teacher is a nice guy too, but geography? There’s a reason we don’t waste our time overly studying it in the US, and I’m pretty sure it’s because we don’t want our high school drop out rates to skyrocket. If I had to sit through as much geography as the average Russian I would have considered dropping out myself. We spent an hour talking about berries today. BERRIES. What on earth is there about berries that should ever take that long to discuss?!

10-12: Classes. Everyday our class schedules are different, but the classes we are taking are: Grammar, Conversation, Literature, SMI (kind of a politics course), Video, and Phonetics. For the first two weeks, they kept randomly cancelling our phonetics class and replacing it with an additional two hours of grammar everyday. My group might as well have moved into Depression Town, because it was just uzhasno.

Noon: Lunchtime! As can be expected, that yogurt I have for breakfast everyday doesn’t always hold me over until noon. So I’m usually pretty excited come lunchtime. We all head over to the Stolovaya, or cafeteria, which is located in the dorm building right behind the university. The food there is pretty cheap and very Russian. I usually go for a salad or a light soup, and then get talked into (or just forced) to get a ‘second course,’ which is usually some kind of mystery meat substance plus a carb like rice, pasta, or mashed potatoes. Then you just move on down the line and pay at the end. I’m convinced the stolovaya ladies are trying to rip me off, as they have on multiple occasions seemingly charged me random amounts for things. For instance, I got the same meal as the girl in front of me in line, yet they charged me twenty rubles extra! And then they always yell at you for not having exact change, even when they clearly have enough to make change themselves. Lunchtime is always a fairly interesting experience.

1-3: More classes. Depending on which classes you have during this second half of the day, you’re either straight up asleep or you’re just powering through. Phonetics, for example, seems to go pretty quickly. That professor is hilarious, as is the general theme of the class. We just go around the group trying to produce Russian sounds and failing. Plus, since this professor just had bronchitis or something, she’s super paranoid we’re all going to get sick. The other day she spent like fifteen minutes yelling at me and another girl for not wearing sweaters on this like 80-degree day. We made sure to have our sweaters on for class the next day so we were rewarded by her exclamation of: “Мои добрые, умнейшие женщины!” and then she went on to berate the boys about why they weren’t wearing undershirts not that it mattered since they’re not going to live as long anyways or something. Hilarity.

So then the day ends and we all meet up outside to figure out what, if anything, we want to do next. Some days we’ll go exploring, some days we’ll sit in a café and soak up the free wifi, and other days we might just go home. On Thursdays from 5:30-7 we have an optional American Club meeting. It’s supposed to be a way to get to know Russians who want to meet Americans, but so far its been about a 25:4 ratio of Americans to Russians, soo it doesn’t seem to really serve its purpose too well. But basically our resident director will pick a topic and we’ll split into groups to make lists about it and then share our lists with the whole group to discuss. Last week we taught the Russians about American slang, which basically turned into how to swear in English.

I should also note that we only have classes on Monday through Thursday. On Fridays we go on excursions to various places in Moscow. Last week, for instance, we toured the Red October chocolate factory. Best. Day. Ever. I was so shocked by how generous they were with their samples, and there was actually a point during the tour I didn’t think I could handle eating more chocolate. And this is saying something for a choco-holic like me. It was heaven. The week before that we took a boat tour on the Moscow River, and tomorrow we are touring MosFilm, Russia’s huge movie studio.

But back to my suuper interesting daily schedule, I typically get back home anywhere between 4 and 8 on a normal weekday. I like my family for how relaxed they are about when they eat. There have been a lot of nights where I’ll get home late and they still won’t have eaten dinner yet, so we’ll feast together. And then there’s other nights where I’m on my own and can just scavenge whatever I want out of the fridge. After dinner, if we aren’t all in a rush to go off and do whatever, we usually have tea and desserts. This is the best time for me to practice speaking Russian with them, since my host mom’s mouth is usually full of food, meaning I have time to get out a complete thought before either she or my host sister break into another quick-tongued argument about whatever and such. I have found that they are in general much better speakers than they are listeners..

Most days, at least as of lately, end with me falling asleep on my homework. Which, if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to do now. Спокойной ночи!

Alcohol and The Russian Tween Scene

Many of you, at least my fellow university chums, are probably wondering what drinking is like in Russia. And if you’re not wondering what it’s like, it’s probably because you’re already picturing rich streams of vodka, in replacement of water, flowing through the city, gushing out of fountains and into the outstretched hands of every thirsting citizen. Hate to break it to you, idealists, but the more realistic image, unfortunately, is mostly just a bunch of empty beer bottles strewn along the sidewalks, which very frequently end up getting kicked around by the absentminded pedestrian, shattering and leaving splinters of broken glass for you to step on in the road. Pretty glamorous, huh?

Well, because of this, and due to the fact that the horror stories from orientation are still too fresh in my mind, I have up to this point been avoiding the drinking scene in Russia. I’m a little embarrassed to admit the fact that I’m actually just too terrified of it all. The fact that a group of students from our group went out last weekend and one guy, as they were leaving a bar, got punched in the head (completely arbitrarily and ended up unconscious for like twelve hours), doesn’t really change my point of view on the situation either.

However, it seems to me like drinking for Russians is like fast food for America; we acknowledge that it’s bad for us, but we go for it anyways, because it’s just such a part of our culture. I’m kind of tired so this might be a terrible analogy, especially to Americans who don’t identify our culture with fast food. But I’ve gotten into so many random conversations with random Russians about fast food since being here, and they just think it’s so interesting. Fast food seems like more of a novelty to them than a place to go for an actual meal. This makes sense, and I think I touched on this earlier, but dining out in Russia is no quick ordeal. It’s expected to be a very social, drawn-out experience. Although they have many fast food restaurants here, I don’t think they view them the same as many American families might.

This is just like how we have a very different approach to drinking than Russians. And this part obviously differs between demographics, since different people definitely drink for different reasons. College students, for instance, tend to drink to get drunk. Most Russians don’t tend to do this to the same extreme. One of the guys in our group was telling me how he was trying to explain a beer bong to his Russian tutor. The concept completely escaped her. Another Russian told me that drinking to get drunk is for homeless people.

Also on a semi-side note, it’s really kind of funny what Russians view as American drinking habits. In our literature class today, for instance, we watched a Russian film from 1962, which was about some hooligan-type Americans in the Wild West who kidnapped this annoying little boy and got ransom money for him. And that’s the entire story. The interesting tidbit, though, was during a brief scene during which the two kidnappers were having lunch. In Russia, it is very typical for men to fill up a large glass with vodka and drink it straight at a meal. They do this even during business lunches, which, according to our American-hating professor, are apparently a whole other plate of cookies and Americans will just never understand them (okwhateverdude). But anyways, this Russian film was trying to portray American life. So during their “business” lunch, these two men in the movie filled their tall glasses up to the brim with whiskey, (which is the All-Americans drink, after all) and just drank it like a Russian would drink a glass of vodka. While this is probably not completely unheard of in the US, it definitely isn’t culturally equivalent.

So while I have so far been a little lame and have avoided bars and clubs for drinking, I haven’t completely refrained from this culturally valued activity. In fact, I like to think my first experience with alcohol in Russia is far more memorable and interesting than any bar fight or wild clubbing adventure anyways. Can anyone guess where this experience may have taken place? Anyone?

Well you guessed wrong. It was at my host sister’s sixteenth birthday party. That’s right, my first time getting somewhat drunk in Russia was at a SIXTEEN YEAR OLD’s birthday party with her [insert adjectives used to describe a tween]-type friends. Oh the hilarity (and tragedy) that ensued.

First, (girls) let’s just try to transport ourselves back to that time period. You know, the days of training bras, baby acne, and head-to-toe body glitter. When the only thing a girl wanted more than to marry a particularly dreamy male pop singer was simply to be accepted by the cool kids. Ah, the good ol’ days of angst and self-involvement. Now picture me, with my twenty-one years of life experience, sitting at this dinner table, surrounded not only by people speaking Russian must faster than I can comprehend, but also by people at this stage of life. What do I have to discuss with these girls? Nothing. What did I pick up from listening to their conversation? Only that they apparently they all have crushes on this guy Andre, who to me just sounds like a straight up hooligan, dining and dashing all the time and apparently not handling his liquor very well.

So as if all this wasn’t already awkward enough, the queen bee of the crew, Julia, showed a very clear dislike for me from the get-go. I kept hearing the word Amerikanka followed by glances and giggles as I just sat there unable to express any kind of thought at the tempo required to stay in the conversation. Even one of the Russian girls in the group seemed to be at a complete loss of words in the presence of this girl. This is all clearly beside the point of whatever point I was even trying to make (at this point I have no idea what I’m even doing anymore other than the fact I need to stop using the word ‘point’)..

The alcohol part of this is probably where I was aiming. So the set-up of the birthday party was just a nice four-course dinner at our house for Vika and her friends. I was forcefully invited to join this event by my host mom (although if I had had the choice I still would have wanted to pig out on all the delicious Russian foods anyways, just maybe without the company). So even though I know that in Russia people love giving toasts for all occasions, I expected that maybe it’d be done with sparkling grape juice or something more suitable for the teen-tween-type age bracket. Much to my surprise, there it was, a big bottle of…tequila? The mixed responses of the girls at the party were just priceless. Julia, of course, was acting all experienced like she’d been lovin on alcohol for years (when in actuality I didn’t see her touch her drink after the toast was made). And then the other girls just scrunched up their faces and continued to dilute their drinks with soda after every minuscule sip. My host mom didn’t want to save the bottle for later, so like she does with all the food we have, she practically forced us to finish it off. So that is how that happened.

And after it happened, I found that Russian words started pouring out of me much easier. I even found some common ground with these girls: Dima Bilan, Russia’s number one pop star, of course. Why I hadn’t thought of it sooner I do not know. But suddenly we were all dancing, singing, and I even got clued in on some of their previous gossip, about which I have been sworn to secrecy (Sorry guys, tweens-honor!). The best part was I got to wow them with my knowing all of the words to the song of the Crocodile Gena, which I was actually disappointed I had to bring up on my own. It is the famous Russian birthday song, after all. You’d expect them to sing it all day long. That’s what I do on my birthday..

But anyways, there you have it. My first experience drinking in Russia. Conventional? Probably not. But since when is anything here conventional?

They call me Jane. That’s not my name. That’s not my name.

I have officially been living in Moscow for a week now! And boy does this past week feel like a year. And a half. Give or take a few days. It’s crazy to think that a week ago I didn’t know where I’d be living, hadn’t started classes yet, had absolutely NO idea how the metro worked and was horrified by the thought of it, and couldn’t order food to save my life. That last one is still a struggle fest, but I have definitely come a long way since getting off the plane last Friday.

That being said, in a week I have experienced things about this country I like and things that are definitely going to take some getting used to. During orientation they showed us a diagram of a rollercoaster-looking scenario titled “culture shock.” It starts with elation and excitement and drops down to shock and discomfort and goes up and down pretty much forever. There’s even reverse culture shock for when you go back home. This week I have gone up and down so many times from feeling like “This place is awesome! I can’t believe I’m here!” to “This place is terrifying! What am I doing here?” But then there’s so much random English everywhere sometimes I forget I left home altogether.

The following list is not meant to be a negative one. These are just some things I have noticed or experienced within the past week that will require some adjustment:

1. Lack of toilet paper everywhere. Also lack of toilet seats.
2. Ordering food and not being understood (or saying anything for that matter and not being understood)
3. Not understanding what’s being said. For instance, my host sister talks really fast. And loud. But mostly just fast. During dinner I just sit quietly and every once in a while I think they remember I’m there and they ask if I understand. Of course I don’t. I wouldn’t understand an American speaking English that fast!
4. The smell of BO that constantly permeates the air.
5. The fact that I feel like I stick out as a foreigner all the time (especially when I open my mouth). I accidentally said ‘sorry’ on the metro the other day instead of the Russian term ‘izvinitye’ and the look of shock from the guy as he was exiting and the stares I got for the rest of the ride were unbearable. Pretty sure the babushka next to me tried scooting away.
6. A new hyper-awareness of dirt and germs. Especially in the metro. You can seriously feel the germs cling to you as the doors open and the humidity created by the crowd of people seeps out. Also grabbing a handrail, which is inevitable, is incredibly disgusting when you stop to think about how many non-handwashers have held onto the same spot.
7. Constant thirst. Since we can’t really drink the water, we have to buy bottled water, which depending on where you get it can be kind of expensive. Tea is usually the cheaper option, but isn’t a great thirst quencher. Also seltzer water is really popular. But that stuff just gives me mad burps and then leaves me with more thirst than I started with. No thank you.  
8. The fact that Russians get way too close to you. This morning there were like three people on the metro and some guy comes in and sits in the seat right next to me. Practically on top of me. In Russia this isn’t seen as strange as it is in the US, where we looove our personal space. I miss my personal space.
9. Spending a lot of time on the metro. Which means spending a lot of time with smelly old guys, babushkas, Russian hipsters, overly gropey couples, men wearing strangely fitting exercise pants (its an epidemic!), businessmen distracted by their ipads, stiletto sluts, cranky children, and your run-of-the-mill-hooligans. There are some normal people in there too I guess, but they aren’t as interesting to watch.
10. And finally, I can’t tell if my host family forgot my name already or if they think it’s a nickname, but they’ve started calling me Jane. That’s not my name.

Patriotic penguins, tiny toilets, and Russia’s privacy policy

It’s only been a couple of days since my last post, but I’m already overwhelmed by everything I have to write about. Everyday feels like a few days all shoved together. I don’t know if it’s my jetlagged mind or just the fact that we do so much everyday, but it’s been really hard to place everything in time. It feels like I’ve been here a few weeks, when in reality it has only been about five days since I left the States.

We had our first big Moscow site-seeing adventure yesterday, but due to large amounts of rain it was more like a ‘look out of the foggy window of a bus and try to make out shapes of buildings’ kind of a thing. But it was still helpful to find out where exactly in Moscow we are located and review all of the amazing things we get to see on our future excursions (which will hopefully take place on non down-pouring days). But still, we got to drive by all the buildings I’ve heard so much about in my classes and I just got so excited. There were tears in my eyes at one point, which I successfully passed off as rain on my face, because this experience is truly amazing. I was either thinking that, or I was crying due to exhaustion. But seriously, there is so much incredible history behind everything here that I honestly couldn’t help becoming an emotional nerd for a moment, especially as we caught a short glance at St. Basil’s Cathedral. It is glorious. I can’t wait to see it from the street and not from a rain-covered window on the wrong side of a moving bus.

As a brief side note, tomorrow is Den’ Rossii (Russia’s day), which is a new, kind of laughed at holiday amongst many Russians. But essentially there will be concerts in Red Square, which will be televised, along with celebrations everywhere. There is no work or school, and because it is taking place on a Tuesday this year, Russia just went ahead and turned this weekend into an extended holiday so many people had today off as well. This has kind of thrown a wrench into a lot of our plans, largely due to the fact that the opposition (Russians against Putin’s reelection) is planning a demonstration. The details of it, like most plans made by all Russians, are continuously in fluctuation, so it’s been really hard for our group of 30 students to plan going anywhere. Large groups are automatically seen as opposition groups, and gathering in them in public places is prohibited. Although the protests are “legal,” they are strictly monitored by the politsia, who arrest participants arbitrarily. Even people caught walking past them have been arrested. We were going to walk around the Kremlin tomorrow, but due to all of this, that plan was thwarted. Instead, I think we’re going to tour the Arbat and possibly watch fireworks at the end of the day.

Back to the events of yesterday though, which are what I intended to be the main point of this post, we finally met our host families! So far I’ve only met my Russian mother, Sveta. She is a sweetheart, and I feel like I really lucked out, because I feel like we will get along really well. She’s a woman in her forties and works at a kindergarten down the street. She blows kisses at me every time we say poka (goodbye) and doesn’t try to overfeed me like most Russian hosts. She’s hosted about ten American students before, so she’s really good about making sure I understand what she’s saying, and not intruding on my privacy. I don’t know if I already mentioned this, but privacy really doesn’t exist in Russian households. There’s not even a Russian word for it.

I’m not going to go on a long ramble about why that is, but a lot of it stems back to the days of Kommunalka, or communal apartments. The mentality of this remains, especially since apartments are still very small and there’s a lot of people who need to live in not a lot of space. But that’s also just living in a big city for ya.

So last night after getting home and giving me the grand tour of the apartment, Sveta beckons me into the living room area to keep talking to me. I walk in and she’s ripping her shirt off, changing out of her outside clothes (since Moscow is a freakishly dirty city, people come home, put on tapochki or slippers, wash their hands immediately, and change out of their street clothes). So I’m just standing in the doorway, kinda shocked, just thinking, ‘woah, nice to meet you.” This was definitely a golden example showing the value Russian’s give to personal space.

The other example would be the toilet. In Russia the toilet is in a separate room from the shower and sink. And this room, in my apartment especially, is tiny. It’s basically just a toilet. Like, my knees touch the door when I use it. A major thing you start to notice about Russia is the quality of things. Let me rephrase: the poor quality of things. Toilets in the US are typically made of porcelain- our porcelain thrones, if you will. In Russia, toilets mostly consist of some sort of crappy plastic material. Let’s just say they’re not too sturdy. At orientation we actually heard a story about a guy who was living in the dorms, and was using the toilet one time when suddenly it LITERALLY split in half beneath him. That is not a sight I ever want to have to even imagine, much the less live through. I am not joking when I say that this has become my number one greatest fear during my stay in Russia. And that’s saying something considering the other seriously scary shit that goes down here. But back to the privacy issue, you can imagine that in a room that small there really is no hiding anything.

But apart from the toilet trouble, I love my apartment. I have three pet birds, whose chirping I still find charming (will keep you posted), a fridge full of wonderful Russian food at my disposal, and a room filled to the brim with stuffed animals and Russian books. What more could I ask for? Oh yeah, I get to use the family’s wifi (Russian’s typically have a weird view on this and won’t share) AND I have my own TV, on which I’ve already watched several hours of Russian MTV and strange game shows. Right now I’m watching some show from the 70s featuring the tro-lo-lo guy. Pretty sure it’s actually called “Mr. Trolo.” He’s just singing and swaying about. I wish we could all be that carefree. We’d end a lot of the world’s problems. Which I feel protected from at night since I have a large stuffed penguin wearing a Russian flag watching me sleep. Sweet dreamsss.