Yesterday wasn’t very interesting so I didn’t feel like writing something. I walked around the Kremlin and that’s pretty much all that is interesting.
Today has been more fun. I got up early, showered, had breakfast, and headed to class. The bus I got on was extremely packed, I went in the front-most door and ended up standing pretty close to the windshield, right next to the driver. It wasn’t a problem until he started asking me to move around so he could see if there were any cars coming in an intersection. The second bus wasn’t nearly as full and I actually got to sit down.
It has been raining all day, and it’s starting to get annoying. Today I woke up relatively late (for my standards) around 8:30am. I showered, had breakfast, did some homework, and read a magazine. Around 4pm, after we had lunch, I called my parents, who are now in NYC. They flew back from Europe yesterday, I hadn’t called since I left the USA.
I then watched part of a French film dubbed in Russian, I think it was ok, but I had no idea what was going on. I also went out to a small shopping place where I saw a music store. I bought three CD’s, each one 80 rubles, which is less than $4. The funny thing is that they have the songs in mp3, and each CD has 200 songs. I guess the royalty rates here in Russia are very low, it’s not like the place was sketchy or anything, they had the regular type of cd’s too.
I don’t think I am getting enough sleep. Yesterday I almost didn’t go to talk with the English class because I was taking a nap. I was extremely tired throughout yesterday and ended up going to sleep late. Today I woke up early again to go to school. I didn’t have as hard a time staying up as yesterday, but its still annoying.
Today I did not have art class, so I headed home right after Russian class around 12:30pm. As soon as I got home, I fell asleep. I was later woken up to have lunch, after that, sleep again. Around 5 or 6 I woke up again. I did some homework, spent some time on the computer, and had dinner. As usual, I learned a few new words during my dinner conversations, and was quizzed on the ones I am supposed to know, which I always forget. It is 10:30pm as I write this, the sun is still out, but I am still tired. I think I’m going to go to bed early today so I can enjoy the day tomorrow. I’m not sure what I will do, but I sure will have a better time if I am not tired.
Today was awesome. For the first time my alarm woke me up, every other day I woke up before it went off, which means I was really tired. I went to class and struggled because I was very tired. I finished my painting in the art class (Which was the last art class of the trip) and later went home. I tried doing some homework, but my efforts were futile. I lay in bed and fell asleep instantly, which almost never happens. I set my alarm at 4:50pm so I could get up and catch a bus around 5pm. When the alarm went off, I must have turned it off because my mom woke me up around 5:15 to ask me if I was supposed to be somewhere. So I ran off and got in the bus.
Today was an interesting day. Since it is July 4th, the group of study abroad students wanted to get together and have dinner. I was shown the location of the restaurant on a map, I already forgot the name, but it was French, and sounded funny.
I woke up at 6:40am, which is about normal, oh, I have not written about last night! Ok, last night was even more interesting. A friend of my host family’s sister came over during the day. Around 9pm I was in my room bored and getting ready to go to bed. I went to the kitchen to see what everyone was up to and saw very nice wine glasses on the table and was quickly told to sit down. We drank wine and whiskey, ate some cheese with bread, and later some tea. Everyone was talking very fast, but I was happy whenever I understood anything. Two hours went by, I was enjoying myself, everyone else was too, my only problem was that I didn’t really know what we were celebrating. A lot of things went through my head, but most just didn’t make sense on a Tuesday night. After we stood up to leave, I asked my host mom and she told me we were celebrating the fact that my sister got an excellent grade on one of her final exams. I think it’s pretty cool that we celebrate those things, that is some great motivation, and everyone was so happy.
Today has been a very interesting day. As usual, I woke up around 5:30am, showered, ate breakfast, hung out and left around 8:10am to go to school. In class I learned some new words, how to conjugate almost every verb, and some other stuff. In the art class, I finished my very ugly painting from yesterday and started working on a new one. The teacher showed us some sample works that are traditional of this area of Russia, and told us to either copy one or make our own. I decided to take ideas from the pre-made ones and give them a touch of my own crazy imagination (or lack thereof.) The sketch has a castle with the sun shining on it, a house with a cloud and rain over it, some mountains, and two fish. I started coloring it and realized I cannot mix colors to save my life. I wanted a light green, mixed some green with white, but managed to get the ugliest color possible. I then tried to get a light brown by mixing brown and white… another miserable failure. After I saw how the teacher mixed colors I realized that putting water into the mix made a big difference, finally I got some decent colors. Unfortunately it was too late for one of the mountains, it has that very ugly green, oh well.
Today was my first day of classes. I got about three hours of sleep last night, I woke up around 12 for no reason and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Around 7am I took a shower and ate breakfast with Владимир. We then took two buses to get to school, it took about 15-20 minutes, which I believe was very fast. While I was in the bus stop, I saw some buses that were completely packed with people, thankfully, the ones we took were fairly empty.
I flew to NYC on Wednesday and stayed at a friends house. I met a few of her friends, went around the city, and had a lot of fun. On Friday, I took a cab to the airport and met with the people that were going to Russia.
The first flight was from JFK airport to Helsinki. It took a little over 7 hours, so it was not bad at all. I didn’t sleep at all, I watched two movies, a few shows, and listened to music. Another interesting thing was that in the row in front of me, there was a 3.5 week old baby, it was so small! I’m not sure why the parents travel with such a young baby, but it seemed to go ok, the baby did not cry for more than a few seconds.
So I woke up around 4am and could not fall asleep. I’m bored.
On Friday I went to my friend’s house, we had some good food, played some wii games, and had fun. After that, I don’t quite remember what I did, so it must have been nothing.
Yesterday (Saturday), I watched a movie or two in the morning, did nothing most of the day, and later went to a Chinese buffet to get lunch/dinner. After that I saw the new Fantastic 4 movie, which wasn’t as bad as people told me, so I was happy. I went to the supermarket, then home, and went to sleep around 10.