Another crazy two days!

On Sunday I met Roxanne, who is staying with me and my host mom--we are the only two who requested a "double" in Moscow, so we were put together, which is great--she and I are different in some ways, but she's a huge sweetheart and we get along great. It's also really nice to have someone from home around so I feel less confused around all the time. For example, with Roxanne around I felt okay about venturing out into Moscow to go to the Internet cafe. Our host mom took us there and negotiated computers for us, but we got home all by ourselves. Luckily, I go pretty good at reading Cyrillic this summer even if I know absolutely no Russian, so I could follow the signs to the Metro and figure out which way to get on. Mostly we were nervous just because our papers aren't registered yet and so we'd be in trouble if the police stopped as to check our documents, which they frequently do, especially to obvious foreigners like us. But it went fine and we felt we'd accomplished something. We spent the rest of the day playing Canasta and cobbled together a version of Rummy from two totally different sets of rules. With no books, no computers, no TV and no way were leaving the apartment again, there wasn't a whole lot to do; all in all a fairly boring day, but it was neat to have a chance to hang out and get to know Roxanne. It's going to be great, actually--makes coming home at night a lot safter, for one thing, plus she and a friend are planning on traveling a lot and she's invited me to tag along whenever.

We boht had pretty restless nights, me from a combination of exhaustion, congestion, jetlag and nervous excitement. Luckily, my cold was mostly gone by the time Svetlana knocked on my door at 7AM--"Katye, stand up." The three of us met another student and her host mom at the Metro (which is less than a 5 minute walk from our apartment--awesome), and they set us free to get to teh Yugo-Zapadnaya stop, which is where the Academy of National Economy is. Waiting for us on the platform was Anastasia, or Nastya, as she likes to be called. Shes' the student coordinator, not too much older than us, and she takes care of all the things that we might need--after school she took us to get roubles from the ATM, notebooks, cell phones and 3-month Metro passes, plus she hangs around in the office all day just in case we need anything. Back to the morning, though--there are eight of us in the Intensive Russian class, with nine more students coming in a few weeks--only 17 total! It seems like a great group so far, though--we all get along and everyone is very excited to be here and to learn all the can from the crazy country.

At the Academy--where I guess I'll describe later when I can post pictures--we met Aleksandr Abashkin, or Sasha, the program director. He's fantastic; he's been in charge of the program for 15 years, and he's ridiculously warm and and friendly and funny and helpful. He gave us orientation, which was basically designed to scare the pants off us, which it did. We learned how to bribe the police. No, for real, if they catch you without your papers you can give them the equivalent of $20 to leave you alone. We don't have our papers this week because they're being registered, so if I get stopped we'll see if I can bribe the police knowing about 100 words in Russian. We learned how to say "I'm Canadian" in case anyone asks where we're from. We learned how not to get mugged or kidnapped. All good.

And then we began our first session of intensive Russian. We have two teachers for this class--Leeza, who teaches grammar, and Tatiana, who teaches conversation. Today we had a "special break"--we only had two hours of grammar, by which point we were fried, so they fed us pizza and let us use the internet. Today we began in earnest with five hours a day beginning at 9:45 AM. Since our host mom feeds us a real breakfast every morning and it takes an hour to get there on the Metro, that means I"ll be waking up at 7:30 AM, 5 days a week, for the next three and a half months. God help me.

After all the shopping and email-checking was finished, we headed back to the apartment. It turns out that five of us live on the same Metro line, all within two or three stops of another student, so we can come and go as a group. Svetlana fed us another tasty meal and we hit the books--I made crazy flashcards and wrote out all the words about a million times each. Cyrillic is one thing, but Cyrillic handwriting is ridiculous. It's like cursvie, and all these letters have nothing to do with their printed counterparts and have to connect in weird and unpredictable ways. Today, about the same--but I've got to run, so more tomorrow!