So it rained a lot on Saturday… It was sunny on Sunday and today. I arrived to work around 8:30am and saw several puddles on the ground. I figured that was nothing and waited for the rest of the people to arrive. When they did, the supervisors said to come back at 2:30pm. I went back home, listened to some music, ate my lunch, and went on the computer.

I then went to work and found nothing cool. After work I went home again and had some dinner. Now I’m here talking to my friend from Kazakhstan on Skype, which is totally awesome because I hadn’t talked to her in a while. And she also helped me write some emails in Russian, so I don’t mess up too bad.

Yesterday (Saturday) was pretty uneventful, so I will not wire a blog post for it.

My host family has been asking me to cook some Mexican food. I only know how to make a few things, and getting the ingredients is pretty darn hard. I asked my real parents for some recipes over the phone, so they gave me a few. I asked my host family about some of the ingredients I would need for certain recipes. Some were in the dictionary, but they had never hear of them, and some were just impossible to translate, even using the Internet.

So I didn’t really get much rest last night.
After I posted the last blog entry, I was called to the kitchen to have some drinks and snacks.
Another guest came in, a young guy who I later found out was a friend of the family. He spoke Swedish too, so I had no idea what was happening. He also spoke perfect English, so I was able to talk later. Again, we had vodka and the ladies had some other drink. I’m glad the vodka bottle was not full to start with because they wouldn’t take no for an answer. I ended up going to bed around 12am again.

Today I woke up around 7am as usual. I showered and had breakfast as usual. I went down to the bus stop and almost got into the wrong bus. I forgot I had to go straight to work, and I was getting on the one to school.

I arrived to work around 8:40am, and since work starts at 9am, I had some time to relax.
I worked until 1pm (With 10 minute breaks every hour) and went to lunch with some friends. We got back around 2:30pm to start work again. I didn’t find anything very interesting today, most of the time I spent cleaning for pictures. During the last few hours, when I got to dig, I found several animal jaws, with the teeth still in them, and other cool animal bones. We also dug many pieces of ceramic pots, but those are very common.

Today I went to school and took my final exam. I’m not sure how I did, but I don’t think it was bad.
After class I went to work and arrived around 12pm. I worked for an hour and then had the lunch break. I went with some of my Russian co-workers to some underground cafeteria in a government building. I don’t know how they found it, but the food is good and not expensive. After lunch, we went back to work.

This morning I was faced with the same problem as before, I wanted a 21 ruble water bottle but only had a 500 bill. Instead of making the lady have to go get tons of change, I bought a bottle of vodka and a water bottle so that I would get less change. I wanted to get some Russian vodka to take home as a gift, so it really was not a waste of money, not to mention it is very cheap here.

After Russian class today, I headed straight to work. I got there around 12:45pm so they told me to come back at 2:30pm. There is an hour and a half break at 1pm, so it was pointless to start working then. I walked around the kremlin and then decided to get some food at a small restaurant near the dig. I was there for a while and around 2:15pm, I headed back to work.

Yesterday I forgot to take my allergy suppressing medicine (Claritin) and, as expected, I woke up around 6:15am sneezing and with an itchy nose. I have really bad dust allergies, and just sitting in my room, I can see the particles float around. It’s very dusty, but when I take claritin, I can manage.

After showering, I stayed in my room for an hour or two so I wouldn’t wake the family up. Around 9, we had breakfast. After breakfast I went to my room and took out my map of the city. I found some streets that looked interesting and planned a small walk to get there. I left the house around 10am. The streets were pretty empty, but as I got further away I started seeing more people. I walked into a movie theater and saw the posters of the movies they are playing. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place because I only saw two Harry Potter posters and another one advertising some sort of zombie-horror film in 3D, which should be interesting.
I kept walking, saw several stores, walked in to all the open markets I could find. Some of the fruit stands have things I have never seen before, but not a single one of them has mango. For some reason I decided to look for mangoes everywhere, I guess I was bored. I still haven’t asked any of the fruit vendors if they know where to get them, I might try that next week. I later managed to go to some interesting neighborhoods, the kind that makes me feel uneasy to walk through. I ran into a train station and decided to go the other way. I got back to the main street I was on before and went into a pharmacy to buy some latex gloves for work.
I forgot how to say gloves in Russian, so tried describing them to the sales lady. After I realized it was pointless, I took out the ones I used last week, they were full of dirt and ripped, she laughed. I then decided to head home, while looking for mangoes in other markets of course… I ended up buying some marshmallow-like things that looked good, but only after a few minutes of misunderstanding with the salesperson. She put them on the scale and pointed at the price, it said 2.55 p., So I took out a few coins to pay her. She said no and repeated the price. I heard twenty something this time, but the price on the scale said 2.55 p., so I tried to explain to the lady. She ended up writing down the number manually, apparently the decimal point was wrong on the machine, but how was I supposed to know?

Today (Saturday) was a very interesting day. I woke up about 10 times from 6am to 9am, when I finally decided to get out of bed. I showered and had breakfast with the family. After that, I went on the computer for a little and read some emails. Around 11am I left and got on a bus to go to work.

Since someone asked me how long it takes me to get to work, I timed myself each step of the way. I waited for the bus for about 15 minutes. I arrived to the final stop in another 15 and walked the rest of the way. The bus timings may not be accurate because it is Saturday, but the walking should not change a lot from day to day. I walked at a fast pace and it took me almost 20 minutes to get to the dig.

This morning, the sky was cloudy and the forecast said there was going to be rain throughout the day. I put on my jacket and went to school. After two hours or so, I looked out the window and the sky was blue and the sun was out. After Russian class, we went to some stores looking for a flag or something and later went to a museum with a lot of golden artifacts. They were mostly church related, like gold covered bibles, crosses, and other similar things.