one week down, a lot to go

The last couple of days have been all right. I still feel somewhat isolated, but school is beginning to happen, so I'm no longer feeling a bit alone AND bored out of my mind. :)

Thursday, yesterday, included two classes - Thermal Physics and Russian Language. I met the Thermal Physics professor at the physics building at 11am with Irina. He speaks enough English that we'll manage, but it will take some patience on my part. To start, he asked me some questions to make sure I wasn't going into this totally clueless - do I know how to take derivatives, do I know what a harmonic oscillator is, etc. Then he proceeded to whip out the textbook that is used at HMC for Statmech!! He wanted me to look through it and see if it seemed to be the right level, so I just said "perfect!" since Prof. Esin had recommended the book to me and I even thought about acquiring a copy before coming to Russia but it just never happened. So I may actually get a decent Statmech replacement course! All we did after that was find an empty classroom where he could explain Moscow State University to me. It was actually pretty informative. The departments, or "faculties," are very separate and they're pretty adament about the order in which physics courses are taken. After an hour or so, some students had a class in the room we were in, so we wandered around in search of another room in vain. He showed me a library and a couple lecture halls where profs were teaching Optics and Theomech in Russian (weird), and I saw a bunch of students in the halls and stuff. This was the first inkling I had of this being an actual university - it looked like most of these students were actually studying and going to class and stuff!

The upshot of the morning was that it's me and the professor meeting two or three times a week (Monday and Wednesday for sure and maybe Thursday if need be) from 11-1.

The next adventure I delved into was along the lines of "Meredith eats lunch and finally goes to a post office to buy stamps and both of these things are complicated because she does not know her way around nor does she speak Russian particularly well." I've got a ton of stamps now, and I learned it's 22.5 rubles to send a letter to the US and 19 to send a postcard.

Russian language class was at 3, and that went quite well, except for the part where the professor didn't show up until 3:30. We actually got a load of homework, and that made me happy because it means I have something do to. (I know, I'm lame like that.) It's so cool to study Russian in Russia. It feels like I just stumbled across an entire country that happens to speak that silly code language I've been studying since 8th grade. :)

Today I had to get up in the morning *again*. So dreadful, I know. But for some reasons mornings aren't quite as bad here, except that I should be getting more sleep since I've fallen into the habit of staying up till 1am and then reading for half an hour and having to get up at 7:30 or so.

...there was just a loud explosion/large object falling noise in the direction of the hallway...

Anyway, today I had my first Politology class. Apparently "politology" is a bad translation of "political science," I think. I got there 10 minutes late because I was totally going to be on time - early even - until I realized I forgot my backpack in my room while standing at the bus stop. Sometimes I can be a real moron. But to my credit, I remembered to get my money pouch, jacket, boots, hat, scarf, gloves, and bus card! *sigh* so when I walked in, he had already started lecturing and I just started taking notes. It went for THREE HOURS. A bit of discussion here and there. We started off talking about empires and as time went on it turned more and more into just discussing current events. I really enjoy classes like this in small doses, but that was anything if a small dose. At least the professor speaks English pretty well and doesn't seem to have a completely backwards view on all things political. I do feel awfully ignorant about the world, though. Names and dates came up that I'd never heard of but it felt out of place to ask when everyone else clearly knew what was going on. Ah well, there wasn't too much of that, and hopefully we'll be doing research papers or something so I'll actually have to get out and learn some stuff, and then I can intelligently converse! The professor really likes talking, though - when class was over everyone awkwardly lingered for a good 20 minutes discussing current events, or rather listening to him talk about current events and nodding. Blargh. Not like I had anything else to do or anywhere else to be, I suppose.

Well Laura just got back from...somewhere...and we're going to go grab dinner in the cafeteria downstairs. Hopefully it's not completely terrible. I have no weekend plans beyond "I think Irina said she's getting tickets for the circus on Sunday," but when I mentioned this to Laura she said that Irina told her she couldn't get circus tickets and instead we were going to some conservatory. Like usual, I have no idea what's going on. wheeee!