2 March 2009

Today was my first day of my new class. I only slept about three or four hours last night, so it was a long day. Between classes, I had about two free hours which wasn’t enough time to go back to the dorm, so I stayed around the university. I went with my friend Joanna to the post office to mail Dad my check for my taxes, and while we were there the woman behind the counter asked me if the letter was going air mail. I didn’t realize she was asking me a question, I thought she was just sorting letters, so I just gave her a blank stare. She asked me twice more, and I realized it was a question so I answered her. She gave me a strange look, and then said something I didn’t understand and walked into the back room. Joanna burst out laughing, and when I said “what, I didn’t understand, what did she say?” she told me that the woman had just told me to wait a moment…in German. I guess she figured I was having trouble understanding her and tried to place my accent.
After that she told me she had found a good place for me to get a hat (she was the one who took me last time I went looking), but lead me to a souvenir shop. As soon as we walked in and I saw signs in English, I started getting a bad feeling about it. we walked around, and was able to find hats made out of fake fur and a plastic lining for between thirteen and fourteen thousand rubles (almost five hundred dollars). They also had loads of fake amber jewelry, fake Faberge eggs, and a lot of other overpriced junk. We walked around for a while, and then I headed back to the university while Joanna went home (she had just accompanied me because she had nothing else to do either). I went back inside and found Pamela, the new girl in my group from Italy, and sat down with her in the study hall and we talked about Russian literature until it was time to go to class (she was in it as well). With new students arriving in the last couple weeks, there’s finally a few people in my group that don’t speak Chinese as soon as they leave the classroom. Now we have people from Italy, Holland, and Turkey.
The class was hard to stay awake through. Not that it was boring, but it was all information I had learned before. She talked about the origins of Русь, which we studied fairly extensively in Dr. Selimov’s culture class, Dr. Lehrman’s culture class, and to some extent in Dr. Kaufman’s course. The professor also went on for three and a half hours, with only a ten minute break in the middle. That was rough. Pamela sat next to me and told me a few times she thought I was asleep…which I feel bad about, but I very well may have been. For the last 30 minutes of class she showed us this video about Vikings with really bad sound quality, so every 2-3 minutes she paused it to repeat what the narrator was saying. At one point I recognized a clip from the movie “The Thirteenth Warrior” where Antonio Banderas joins up with a band of Vikings to fight mythical creatures in the forests of Scandinavia (based on a Michael Crichton novel). That really added a lot to the presentation, I think.
I didn’t make it to the bath house. Вова called me yesterday and said that nobody could make it, so we would be going either Tuesday or Wednesday night. I have plans to meet Олег Tuesday to work out, so I’m just going to go. If I get a call about the bath house, I’ll ask him to come pick me up, but I can’t spend the night sitting around the dorm like I did Sunday, just waiting for him to call.
This weekend I went and checked out the hotels for Brittany. Of the ones on the list she gave me, I think I found her a really nice one that was very inexpensive and in a good area. While I was walking around checking out hotels, I passed a hunting shop, and thought I would stop in to see if I could find any good camping supplies. It was a little scary, but I actually had enough money on me that I could have bought a rather large shotgun and/or a knife that looked like it was meant to gut an elephant. What a magical country.
Gary asked me if I was interested in taking over his apartment after he leaves, but I told him no thank you. Aside from my wanting to live with a family at the end of April, I just paid my rent for the month of March (he is leaving next week I think) and when I looked at a map, I realized it must take him well over an hour to get to the university every day.