We have the passport, visa, immigration form, and registration paper; student ID, metro card, bus card, dorm residence card; and some rubles. Without one of these things I would likely die, or at least be arrested forever.
Anyway, yesterday I did nothing and it was boring. Today (Sunday) I had a plan: I was going to get up, go to church at 11, eat some food somewhere, come back to the dorm, work on homework, then this evening go to some concert or opera or something with the group.
This is what happened.
Got up at 8:30, talked to Mike, took a shower, ate breakfast, headed out at 10. Took the metro from проспект вернадского to охотный ряд. It was a bit after 10:30 when I got there, and it should be a 20 minute walk to the church, so I set out in search of Тверская улица, supposedly a main street. Turns out I had my directions all backwards and instead of heading northwest, I headed northeast and then (upon realizing I'd gone the wrong way) southish. Still no luck, as I was still headed the wrong way. I walked across a bridge and took some pictures and tried to enjoy not knowing where I was. Here's some pictures I got from the walk:
It's a better picture of me than of where I was, but I was on a random bridge south of central Moscow. The river was pretty much frozen - weird.
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I like this one because you get a typical foreign city scene, only *ting* there's St. Basil's Cathedral! Pretty crazy.
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So...you'd better yield to all the right-turners planning to drive off a cliff and drown?? Oh, street signs...
Anyway, now back to my story. At any rate, I knew how to get back to the metro stop, and that was all that mattered. By now it was after 11 and I clearly was doing something wrong and it was getting cold, so I popped into ГУМ, the huge department store, and poked around for a bit. It's a 3-story mall, only all the stores are uppity and you feel like you can't walk in them because everything is super expensive and the stores are small and you'd likely be the only person in there. It was still interesting to window shop for a bit, and I grabbed lunch at a sbarro. (Of all fast food places, sbarro and some KFC ripoff seem to be the most prominent around here.) Here's a picture from ГУМ:
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By now it was after noon and I just headed back to the dorm. I told Laura my sad story, and we pulled out a map, and I discovered that St. Basil's Cathedral is at the south end of red square, not the north end, which would explain my backwards thinking. Ah well, I'll just try again next week!
A bit of a tangent - I realized yesterday evening that another Mudder, Katie Eliseo, is also in Moscow this semester! I had known this but somehow I'd forgotten until she sent me a facebook message last night. Turns out she's living just the other side of the closest metro stop, so I can take the bus three stops and walk 5-10 minutes and be at her dorm! I haven't done this yet, though, because I haven't been able to contact her other than via facebook and my plans for the afternoon were about to change.
At 2:15 or so, Laura texts me saying "we're meeting at 2:50 downstairs to go to the opera, dress up." um. right. So I throw on black pants. We get down there and it's just me, Laura, Dima, and Jenna - no one else is even going. None of them care about seeing an opera, they just have nothing better to do. (I, on the other hand, think it will be freaking fantastic to see an opera in Russia!) Dima is very good at not telling us what is going on, but it sounds like we're meeting friends of Irina's at the main university building and going with them to buy tickets for this evening. Well, long story short, we got there and decided not to go and came back. (It was a bit more complicated than that, and the full story involves other people wanting to ice skate and a sneak peak at a TINY dorm room similar to what we might have to move into.)
So my day has been a pretty typical exercise in trying to go to stuff and winding up doing nothing. I think one of the girls we met over at the main building is coming to visit us here, though, since she's a high school senior from Minnesota who is Ukranian but speaks Russian. (Didn't catch her name or what she's doing here.) She apparently was friends with last semester's KEI group and has a bunch of stories about how their logistics exploded in their faces, too. So that should be interesting to hear.
Anyway, that's been my day, and I still have a load of Russian homework to do, but it's all good. Laura went off to Рамстор to get some essentials like toilet paper and sandwich makings and I think a light bulb or something. Oh, excitement.
Stay tuned for Week Two: Meredith Actually Has A Week Of Classes, Maybe For Real This Time. :)
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