In Moscow

August 22, 2008

I don’t know when I will get wireless access or for how long, so I will type this up now and send it when I get the chance. For a while I was scared to even turn on my computer because I didn’t yet have an adapter, but now I’ve purchased one so I don’t have to worry about how to use my two and a half hours of battery life.

Things do seem to be going well here. I am in a homestay with a woman named Karina. I decided not to tell her that was one of my gerbil’s names. One of the plusses of a homestay is that breakfast is provided. The apartment is currently being renovated, so there is a bathtub in the hallway (thankfully also one in the bathroom) and there is no bathroom sink. She does have a refrigerator/freezer almost the size of ours, plus one in the hallway. I don’t know if it is also part of the renovation or if she just has two. My room is fairly large with plenty of hanger space. Today I just wore whatever was unwrinkled, but there is an iron here, so I don’t have to go to work rumpled.

I met the boss who will be going down with us to Volgograd. Well, I don’t know if he will actually be riding the train at the same time, but he is here now and will be there as our boss then. His name is Ivor and he’s from Scotland. He seems really nice as he helped us with all of our paperwork and gave us suggestions on where to get food, calling cards, etc. It helps that the DOS people (the bosses of interns) seem to have all been interns themselves at one point or another.

I also met a girl named Sarah who just graduated from Tulsa State and will be with me in Volgograd. That makes three of us that I know of. The other girl won’t be getting in until tomorrow (Saturday) evening. Sarah speaks more Russian than I do as she had two years of it in college. She studied Russian history with an English minor.

Sarah and I went down to Red Square together after we were done with paperwork. We saw a lot of impressive things, like St Basil’s cathedral and the Kremlin, from the outside, (Lenin’s tomb seemed closed today), but mostly we proved to ourselves that we could figure out how to get places on the Metro all by ourselves. It is very nice to be in a place with a good Metro system. The stations are all over the place, so it isn’t hard to find one and automatically know how to get back. The lines look very complicated, but they are color-coded and fairly straightforward.

Oh, I did want to tell you about the drive from the airport to the apartment. The man, Alexei, who picked me up spoke no English but was very nice and helpful anyway, even carrying all those bags down a flight of stairs at the airport. On the road, though, he was a little scary. Normally in the fast lane, at least in America, a person might ride the tail a little of a slow car if he wants to be obnoxious, but here Alexei would just flash his lights and speed up, giving no choice. Other people were doing the same thing, so I guess they know to expect it. The airport is a ways out of the city, but that gave me a chance to confirm that there is corn growing here, too. The problem came when there was highway construction. Apparently they don’t announce it here in advance, and it made the trip take about two hours. Still, I’m settled in now, at least until I have to move after two weeks. I’ll meet most of the rest of the interns tomorrow at 5 when there is a get together in a restaurant right by the school. Mostly my plan is that tomorrow I will sleep as late as I can to try to catch up on sleep and get into this time zone, go grocery shopping, and see if I can find the internet somewhere.

PS I will add more later, but figuring out the system took too much time and now I'm late to supper.