The sun here practically never sets. Honestly! It's daylight outside for about 23 hours. It's not bad though. I still get plenty of sleep and I think the city looks really pretty at night when the sun is just starting to set. The entire sky is peach colored with blue beautiful shades of blue between 10pm and 3am. It gets dark at 4 and the sun comes back up at 5.
I joined a gym here in Russia. And it is incredible! The facilities are really nice and I've got a Russian coach (тренер). The basketball court there is so sick too! It's European style so the lines are a little different. I paid a lot to join this gym for just a month so my goal is to to go there every morning before class and workout.
I've been doing homework a lot today. Nothing too crazy or exciting. Last night I kicked it with the Harvard students again. These Russian girls came up to me and started bombarding me with questions about their English grammar and different nouns. And then they wanted to know all about me and what I was doing here. The same thing would happen constantly throughout the night with other Russians...
The alcohol policy here is absolutely absurd. It can be bought 24 hours a day 7 days a week and it's available on every corner. When I first got here my host mom told me that alcohol was a major problem in this country. And I agree. It can be consumed openly on the streets like a bottle of water and public drunkenness is not a rarity.
random. It was about 3:30am last night and there was a girl and a horse. she wanted me to pay her 200 rubles to ride it. I explained to her (in Russian) that in Texas my family has several horses and that I did not want to pay to ride her horse in the middle of the city at 3:30 in the morning.
I am not sure what the other Brown students have been up too. They like to speak in English entirely too much. Most of the Harvard students have had at least 2 or 3 years of Russian. So that's my reason for hanging out with them. It's not a very good idea to be with a lot of people that are speaking English loudly in public.
I'm thinking about submitting this blog as my final project for my culture class. Which I KILL everyday. Partly because I took Russian/Eastern European History for an entire year this year but it's also really interesting and I love doing the readings. After readings Pushkin's "Autumn" I have now selected Fall as my favorite season.
Oh yeah we went to the Russian Art Museum yesterday! I saw some very beautiful Medieval Russian Icons! I Prayed in front of one. Our tour guide was really smart and very informative. But he talked SO SLOW and his accent made his English so difficult to listen to. Wish he would have just lectured in Russian.
And I saw some of the other places that students were living yesterday... Let's just say I got played... But I like to think I'm getting the authentic Soviet Russian experience living here. My house is not as westernized as the others. And the combined smell of the cat and dog and cigaret smoke in here is more than one can bear. It takes me like an hour to eat dinner every night cause I'm trying to breath through my mouth and eat at the same time.
The best smelling place and most amazing place is the metro! It's like a mile underground but it's so nice! Everything is marble and I feel like I'm a king in a palace when I'm on my way to school! The metro stations here are by far one of the most impressive wonders of the world. They don't smell bad and they're not grimy like the ones in New York. I haven't seen any rats and the rails are not littered with trash and there are no bums or homeless people living and/or urinating there.
There other picture is from one of the metro stations and it's one of the less fancy ones! It's not great picture but the mosaic is huge and it's really magnificent.
That's all for now. Back to the homework grind.
Stay Tuned.
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