Sept. 2

Walked to the supermarket today as a group, 2 miles. The town surrounding it was much more like the kind of Russian town I thought we'd be living in: old, grey, boxy looking apartment buildings, stray koshkas (cats) everywhere, babushkas walking around with handkerchiefs on their heads…

Grocery shopping for the first time was really fun, but took a long time to figure out. One price tag on milk, for instance, said “80,89” which meant 80 rubles and 89 ??, about $2.70. One thing that was surprising was how many flavors of juice they had for sale: the juices took up an entire wall. After smelling the water that comes out of our tap, though, I can see why: it reminds me of how the dirty water smelled after we’d clean the line last summer at Gossner’s… sick. Apparently its safe to drink though, so I put in just enough Crystal Light to cover up the dirty cheese smell/taste and its good to go!

While most everything has been great, it has been kind of frustrating not having our internet working, or our cell phone (which we are supposed to be able to use to call our coordinator, who is our only English-speaking contact). Not being able to contact the outside world, along with the fact that we live in this gated house surround by huge rock walls… surrounded by other houses you can barely see because of the huge walls surrounding them… in the middle of this super dense forest… in, Russia… kind of makes us feel like we’re in this fake little fantasy world disconnected from all reality. The only people we really see are Peter (our royal gatekeeper), the people at the school, and a few serious-looking Russian men smoking outside their super nice black cars with those ultra-tinted windows on the small streets as we walk by.

Something else I got into today was my Rosetta Stone program. Work this summer left me very little time to play with it, and no mental motivation at all; therefore, it was nice to have a few hours with it. Basically, I love it! After just a couple of hours, I not only learned a ton of words (my favorite right now is “sandwich,” sounds like “boo-tare-brote” with the “r” sounds all rolled), but I know the sounds of 12 of the Cyrillic letters, which I’m excited to put into use.

Before dinner, two of my roommates and I decided to go on a walk around our little gated-in community. Here are a few pictures:


(The owner's house that we are right next to)



(The huge iron gate we have to go through to go anywhere)



(Me in front of an awesome "alley" sort of thing in our gated community)


(Our house above the mansion's garage)