Settling in Moscow

(My student ID that I have to present to guards like 50 times a day)

The last few days I've just been settling into my new environment. Since nothing here is done easy, the only way I could get internet in my room is by going to another student who lives in my dorm. Apparently this guy is the most useful guy ever. Not only does he control all the internet but also sells tobacco and alcohol. He has quite the business set up in his room. Anyways, once he came down to my room, he pulled out the Ethernet cable that comes into my window. And yes there is no internet wiring inside our building it's all outside going from window to window like a huge spiderweb. But after paying about 20$ I now have internet from now until I leave.



So yesterday was our first "Russian Seminar" class which is every Saturday. It's just covering Russian Culture which is something I consider myself to be very knowledgeable about. So I didn't learn too much new. Plus our teacher's English isn't the best, or at least that's what I'm hoping after she said things like "This is Ivan the Terrible, he was our most cruel and mean Tsar, he did a lot of cruel and mean things"... yeah. But one cool thing about the class is that after each lecture we take an excursion to a museum of some sort. Like yesterday we went to the History of Moscow Museum.

Later that evening, our friend Bernadette who has been studying here since last September told us about a great Georgian (the country not the state) restaurant. So once we got there we went up to the second floor of this building and found a casino in what used to be a restaurant. This comes a day after Bernadette had led us around downtown Moscow next to Mayakovskaya Station to find a shopping mall that didn't actually exist either.

But even though we didn't find those original places we were looking for, we did find some things that were still pretty cool. For example, we went to Patriarch's Pond which is that location of the first scene of Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita". Then instead of a Georgian restaurant we found a great pirogi place which sold really cheap and good food.




One of the last really fun things that we did was buy ice cream from ГУМ (the huge shopping mall that makes up one entire side of Red Square, pronounced as goom) and go outside in the 10 degrees to eat it. The best part was that it doesn't melt while walking around. So you could be out there with your ice cream for hours with no problems at all.