New Jerusalem and food...lots of food

I am sitting here trying to do my reading for class as I let my uncomfortably full stomach get less full, just in time to eat more. My host mom loves to feed me. She loves to feed me so much sometimes it's the last thing I want to do. She makes delicious food. I never thought beet soup would taste good. But it does! But, sometimes when I don't want to eat, I have to anyways or risk hurting her feelings. Often when I get home from school she will ask me, "Why didn't you eat cake for breakfast?" It's hard to explain through my very limited language skills that after two bananas, a plum, cereal, tea, and milk, I didn't feel like topping it off with cake. We also eat a lot of melon. I know that she was sad that I wasn't eating enough melon, so I made it up to her by eating 11 pieces in one sitting. Yesterday I ate eight pieces. She's going to call me into the kitchen in a bit to eat more melon. I guess we'll see how much I can eat today.

On Sunday the group went to New Jerusalem Monastery in Istra. It took about an hour to get there by train and it was a gorgeous day. We walked around the church and the monastery grounds and then had some tea at the museum there. After that, we walked over to a part of the grounds where they had a peasant's house (obviously rebuilt) from about 150 years ago. The house was constructed really well and it was really interesting to hear about how everyday people (well, at least the richer peasants) lived back then. When we were walking back to the train station, we happened across two painted statues. I have no idea why they were there, but they were pretty entertaining.

The train ride back was a little more uncomfortable. The seats were all taken and the train was a local train, rather than an express train, so it took quite a bit longer to get back. We were standing in the area where the passengers board the train for most of the ride, which wasn't terrible until a girl who looked about 13 (she was probably older) came into the area with an adorable little kitten and tried to put a cigarette in its mouth. It was definitely an experience being in a tiny area like that for so long with everyone.

It started raining again today. It is a really comforting noise and I love looking out the window to see it, but I think I'm going to wear waterproof shoes tomorrow. Tomorrow is the first day of my new internship, and I'm really excited to observe surgeries!

We are starting to make plans for Thanksgiving, and it looks like we are going to Egypt! I am really, really excited for it. During the month of November we'll hardly be in Moscow. The first long weekend (Nov. 4-7) we are going to Istanbul, Turkey. The Friday after that until the following Sunday we will be in St. Petersburg, and then we are going to hopefully be in Egypt for the final weekend of November. It will be really exciting and I'll make sure to take tons of pictures.

Classes, internship, and the zoo

On Tuesday morning, we had our academic orientation. All of the classes sounded so interesting that it made it hard to choose. Right now, I am taking 24 units, but I'm only allowed 23, so I have to somehow drop one unit. I am taking:
--Russian I
--Russian-American Relations: from the War of Independence to the War on Terror
--Economic Reform and Economic Policy in Modern Russia
--Foundations of Russian Culture through the Visual
--Six Centuries of Russian History through Architecture: Walking tour

The language class is a continuation of the intensive language program that we've been doing for the past three weeks. The idea of it sounds interesting, but it went kind of slow the first day. I think that once we get the readings it will be better. Our first econ class was just an introductory lecture, but it seemed pretty good. Professor Mau is very busy so I get the feeling we will get out of class early fairly regularly. I loved the Culture through the Visual class. We talked about the Russian Orthodox Church and its iconography. It was fascinating, and it seems like every class is going to be like that. I wasn't able to go to the walking tour class this week because I had an interview for my new internship, but I'm excited for the walking tour class as well.

Speaking of the internship, I am starting a new internship next week. I wasn't happy with the other one that I had, so I interviewed at the European Clinic of Sports Traumatology and Orthopedics. Every Wednesday I will get to shadow surgeons and observe orthopedic surgeries. The clinic is really nice - it would be a nice clinic even in the US.

After our academic orientation on Tuesday, we went to the Moscow Zoo. The entry was free for students - one of the first free things I've seen in Moscow. They had some really funny things in their zoo. After walking past the llamas and alpacas, we found our way to the raccoon cages. It was the saddest raccoon I've ever seen. There was only one in the small cage and he looked so sad! All of the cages looked really small and PETA would be all over it if they saw it.

On Wednesday night we saw Devil's Flower (the movie that looked like Twilight in the poster). It was hilariously bad. We were able to understand most of what was happening through our limited vocabulary, Nastia's translation, and the bad writing. You can see a little bit with this trailer.

Weekend in Kiev

Having been in Kiev, Ukraine for the weekend, I didn't get a chance to update my blog until now. So this will be a long one :) Also, it's kind of late because I'm working on my final for the intensive language portion of the program.

View down the train

Group with Kate (purple jacket) -
(Grace's photo)

On Friday after we got out of our classes, we headed over to the train station with tons of food for the 13-hour train ride. While we were sitting outside waiting for the train, we were all talking and joking around when a guy came up to us to ask us in a Texan accent where we were all from. It was a little funny to hear someone speak English without a Russian accent for a change. He said that he heard me first and knew we were American. I guess I'm loud :P He was very nice, though. After boarding the train, we were waiting and waiting for Sam. When the train started moving, we knew he had missed the train. Luckily, he speaks Russian and wasn't too thrown off by missing it. Sam was supposed to be in my little compartment area on the train (they weren't true compartments because we were in third class, which doesn't have walls) so I decided to make friends with the other two Russian people in my compartment, Kate and Sergei. When they realized I was with a group and that we were split up, they offered to switch places so we could be closer together. It was so nice of them to offer their seats to us so we told them to come back to hang out with us during the train ride. Mistake. Sergei didn't come back - I think he just wanted to sleep or something. But, Kate came back and turned out to be a little crazy. She kept waking up Mikael and saying she was going to sleep in his bed with him, grabbing Eric, crying to Taylor, and speaking really quietly to us in Russian so we didn't understand. She was really strange. She made some of the group nervous when she started obsessively talking about customs and even telling us to tell them that we were her friends. We, of course, did not do that and tried our best to ignore her.

In the middle of all the Kate craziness, the train stopped in the strangest place. It was dark outside but not too late when we stopped at a station in rural Russia. While that doesn't sound that strange, the number of people selling giant stuffed animals strapped to their bodies made it a little weirder. We got off the train and walked through the people, but it was overwhelming to be yelled at in Russian and knocked into by people holding giant crocodile stuffed toys. We got back on the train and "slept" until customs came by to wake us up. I didn't sleep well because they kept the lights on the whole time and the bed was too short to keep my feet from hanging over the people walking by. We made it into Kiev at around 5:30 am and started walking to the hostel. After a bit of an adventure trying to follow the directions, the really nice people at the hostel let us in to put our stuff down, take showers, and hang out in the common room until we were ready to explore the city.

Group in front of St. Michael's

After we left the hostel, we walked down to Independence Square. On the way we passed by a movie filming by what we learned were the Golden Gates of Kiev - the historic gateway into the city. It wasn't open at the time, but we got to peek through the gates and see inside.

Movie set with fake snow

One of the first things I noticed about Kiev was that it seemed much cleaner (especially the air) and friendlier than Moscow.

Once we got to Independence Square, we were able to meet up with Sam, who caught the later train and arrived at 8ish. We ate breakfast and then walked over to Saint Michael's Cathedral, which is apparently properly called "Saint Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery". It was a beautiful group of buildings. The original was built in the Middle Ages but it was demolished by Soviet authorities in the 1930s and rebuilt after Ukraine gained independence. Outside of the church, there was a little structure that people went inside and tried to balance coins on a fountain-looking thing. I have no idea what they were doing, but we tried to do the same thing. It didn't work very well.

 After we left St. Michael's, we walked over to St. Sophia's Cathedral, which was originally built in the mid-1000s AD (obviously a lot of it has been rebuilt/restored, but it still has some original things). We got to climb the bell tower, which gave a beautiful view of the city and the church.

After we left the church, we went over to Andrew's Descent, walked down it, and walked to the Chernobyl Museum. We got a guided a tour of the museum and it was interesting to hear about the Chernobyl disaster, since I didn't know much about it. At that point, we got really hungry and went to dinner at a Ukrainian restaurant, which was absolutely delicious. It was probably the best food I've eaten since I left the United States. It definitely beats out Russian food. We had our own room for dinner and had a great time. We were really tired after doing everything during the day, but we really wanted to check out the Ukranian National Opera, so we walked to the opera house and saw Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, which was great and extremely affordable (~$1.25 USD!!). After the opera was over we walked back to the hostel where we watched Indiana Jones and talked to some of the other people staying there before we passed out.

On Sunday morning, we woke up and got ready for another busy day. We ate two breakfasts: one at a Ukrainian cafe and one at a French cafe. The French cafe was absolutely delicious. I could eat everything in there for the rest of my life and be happy. After breakfast, we went to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra<, a monastery that had caves with bodies of monks in them. We had to rent skirts at the front because women weren't allowed to wear pants. We didn't know that before, but we had been warned that we should bring headscarves to wear when we went in churches or the caves. After we went to the caves, we walked over to a WWII memorial park. They had some cool statues and tanks, but I just sat and looked at it all from one place because I was so tired from walking around and not sleeping well. Then, we walked over to the metro and rode it back to Independence Square. We went back to Andrew's Descent to buy souvenirs again. Things were soooooooo cheap in Kiev! It was much, much more affordable than Moscow. Even the souvenirs that were targeted at tourists who knew nothing about prices were ridiculously cheap. We had planned to go to a Georgian food place for dinner, but when we got there, we found out that it had closed down. We discussed where to go after that and ended up deciding on an Indian restaurant. It was decent - not as good as the Ukrainian place, but I enjoyed it anyway. We went back to the hostel to pick up our stuff and headed back to the train station to catch our 9:30 train. We stayed up pretty late into the night having a great time, laughing and talking, and then slept until we got into Moscow at 10:30, in time for our morning class!

I completely fell in love with Kiev and had an amazing time. This is what being abroad is about. I put more pictures up at http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=HeidiGT&target=ALBUM&id=5519405336678094657&authkey=Gv1sRgCOfKlZGgkMqG5wE&feat=email so feel free to check them out!

A couple of group pictures

I wanted to post a couple pictures of the group so you could see the people I am here with. I stole a couple of these pictures from Grace. Enjoy!

Grace, Erin, Lilly, and Lisa at Propaganda

Teava, Grace, Me, Eric, Nastia, and Alyssa in front of Moscow State University

(From back left) Lisa, Nastia, Grace, Me, Erin (front left), Lilly, and Alyssa at the Mexican Restaurant

Just another day

I haven't been taking many pictures lately, so I think I'll let everyone know what daily life is like here. I live in a really big apartment building in a big complex. Everyone in Moscow (or what seems like everyone - I haven't seen any other styles of housing) lives in big apartment buildings all over the city. The picture to the right is a picture of the building next to mine. It looks just about the same. I live on the 13th floor (out of 15) and I go in Entrance 11. These places are so big every building has a ton of entrances. There are two elevators that come up to my floor - one normal sized one, and one ridiculously small one that always smells like urine. I don't know what's going on in there, but it doesn't smell nice. The apartment that I live in is very nice.

I have a large room with a really big window that looks at the other buildings nearby and a little playground/park area in the middle of the buildings. You can't really see it well in the picture, but there is an area that you can see between two of the buildings that looks like a forested area. It saved me from being completely lost a couple weeks ago when I tried to find a shorter way home and ended up getting completely lost. At that point, I didn't even know how to ask how to get to my place, and I definitely didn't know my address, but after wandering for a while and seeing the little "forest," I managed to make it back to my place without dying. 

Yesterday after class we went to the train station to buy tickets to go to Kiev, Ukraine tomorrow. We went all over the huge building/station a bunch of times before we finally found the right place to buy the tickets. After we got there, we spent quite a bit of time trying to tell the person telling the tickets which ones we wanted and figure out all the details (we had members of the group who actually spoke Russian negotiate everything). We planned to go both ways 3rd class, but they were out of 3rd class tickets on the way back to Russia, so we're going second class for that part. I'm really excited for everything. I don't think we know what exactly we're going to do there yet, but we're definitely going to the Sophia Cathedral, which was built in the mid-1000s AD. I also want to go to the opera, if it's possible, and just check out everything that we can while we're there. 

Random note about Russia - everyone told me that everything would be horribly expensive, but I've found some things are unexpectedly cheap. A full month of DSL is about $10. If you buy lunch at the grocery store, it costs less than $5. You don't have to have a cell phone plan - everything is prepaid and it's not too expensive. That isn't to say everything is cheap. Some things are definitely expensive, but there are quite a few cheap things. Only a little more than $100 for a round trip train ticket (with beds!) overnight to Ukraine! :D

WWII Museum and Propaganda

I haven't had much energy to write in my blog lately. I'm getting progressively more lazy, as will soon become apparent with the frequency of my posts.

As far as classes have gone, we have learned to read the cyrillic alphabet, to pronounce things (close to) correctly, a bunch of vocabulary, and to conjugate verbs in the present and past tenses. All of that in less than two weeks of class. My brain feels pretty full of random words, but now that we are getting to the point where we're learning grammar, I'm enjoying it a lot more. It is so interesting to see how languages differ in their sentence construction and ways of expressing ideas. I kind of wish I would have studied linguistics in school so I could have a more concrete understanding of the variations between languages and why they exist, but I'm doing fine just noticing how things differ from the languages I've already studied. The study materials here are not as extensive as I expected. No one seems to know what index cards are, let alone where to buy them, making studying random vocabulary much more difficult. They do, however, sell post-its, so I'm going to try to make something work with those. Also, I haven't found mechanical pencils anywhere. The only pencils I've found have been normal wooden pencils without erasers on the top. I bought some pens last week called "Teenager pens" solely for the entertainment I got out of the packaging.

Last week after our bus tour, we went on a river cruise through Moscow. We passed by a lot of things, but the story that I found the most entertaining was about the Peter the Great Statue. The story is that originally, Russia wanted to give a statue of Christopher Columbus as a gift to the United States, but after the US rejected it, they replaced the head of Columbus with that of Peter the Great and put it up in Moscow. I didn't think it was horribly ugly, but it is known for being one of the ugliest statues/monuments in the world.




Sometime during last week (I'm already losing track of the days), we went to a honey festival. I imagined a place that sold a lot of honey but had other honey-related fun things or souvenirs, but alas, it was just honey. And a lot of it. The festival seemed to go on and on, and they all sold honey that looked and tasted very similar. It was fun to try what was supposedly different types of honey, but I really couldn't tell the difference. Maybe I should take a honey-tasting class sometime. I guess they sold one other thing that wasn't technically honey - mead. We bought a tiny cup to split between three of us because we had never tried it before. It was decent, but it tasted so honey-like that after all the honey tasting, we didn't want any more after the mini cup. After we left the honey festival, we went to Tsaritsino Park, which had the most amazing fountain I'd ever seen. It was timed to go with the music that played on speakers around it.

On Friday, I went to my internship where I was supposed to meet with my supervisor, but she was nowhere to be found. I was a little frustrated because I spent two unnecessary hours on the metro for that, so I decided to go out with everyone that night to a club/bar called "Propaganda." It was fun there - pretty relaxed and not too crazy. But there are no laws against smoking indoors in Russia, so the air quality was pretty bad. It is bad everywhere, but it smelled especially bad in there. I left around 12:30 because I was afraid the metro was going to close. It closes at 1 or 1:30 and doesn't open again until 5:30, so I really wanted to make it home before it closed. Thankfully, I made it all the way home and I slept in pretty late on Saturday morning. :)

Today we went to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War (aka WWII). I'd forgotten most of the details I knew about WWII (sorry Mr. Johnson!) and had forgotten about how many people in Russia died during WWII. Millions died during single battles/sieges. It is hard to even fully comprehend the numbers. I'm going to start reading more about it, though, because Russians are very proud of their military accomplishments.

I'm working on getting my ballot for the November election forwarded to me, so if anyone who has studied abroad/lived abroad and voted has advice for that, please let me know!

Tour of the city

On Friday night we went to a Mexican restaurant just to see what it was like. As expected, it wasn't that great. They are very fond of oil in this country and after putting about an inch thick of cheese inside the tortilla, they drowned it in olive oil. It was a fun experience, though. They played a lot of very well-known music and they had dancing and live music after a while.

I've been taking note of all the American things they have here translated into Russian. Besides Starbucks, they have McDonalds, Coors Light, Red Bull, Coca Cola, BP gas stations, and a million other very familiar things.

Yesterday we took a bus tour around the city to check everything out. We started out by going to Moscow State University, which is a beautiful building in the highest part of the city.

(The University close up)

(The view from the hills by the University)

Apparently there are similar buildings around the city that Stalin ordered back in the day to be built, but this is the largest. After going to the university, we went to the Novodevichy Cemetery, which is the most famous cemetery in Moscow. I was a little dubious when we were going into the cemetery that it would be enjoyable, but there are famous people that even I knew buried there, like Mikhail Bulgakov (the author of The Master and Margarita, the book we had to read for the program), Anton Chekhov, Khrushchev, and Yeltsin. All of the graves had sculptures and were beautifully decorated with flowers and very well kept up.

We left the cemetery and went to a park that had a bridge that everyone getting married in Moscow went to. They have a tradition of putting locks on these "trees" on the bridge and if they did, it meant they would stay together forever. We saw quite a few wedding parties coming through and taking pictures, but I did not see anyone put any locks on the trees.


After leaving the park, we went to Red Square.
St. Basil's Cathedral was very beautiful and an interesting landmark, but it has always looked a little odd to me since all of the domes are decorated differently. Our guide told us that when they built the cathedral, the domes all looked the same and it wasn't until much later that they put the bright colors onto the domes. There is a shopping center in Red Square called "GUM" that has a bunch of very expensive stores and reminded me a lot of Stanford Shopping Center. We ate at their "Italian Cafe" - which meant pizza and salad. (I look very puffy in the picture because I was wearing about five layers - it was cold!)

For breakfast every day I've been eating "kasha" - what seems to be a buckwheat porridge but I understand it can refer to many different types of porridge. Also we have yogurt and tea at every breakfast. Yesterday and today for breakfast we had syrniki, a type of little pancake made from cottage cheese. They are delicious. Another food they seem to be very fond of here is sour cream. They put it on top of syrniki and in a million other dishes I've had. Their sour cream tastes pretty normal, but the milk has a funny taste to it. I'm not sure why that is, and if anyone has any ideas, please let me know. It is whole milk, but it definitely tastes different from the whole milk at home.

Ads and Starbucks

Today I had my "interview" for my internship at Medci Medical (formerly American Medical Center). I start on Monday, and though I'm not 100% sure what I'll be doing, I know they are trying to get accredited by some agency and I'm helping to review the changes that need to happen.

While on the Metro, we saw some very interesting advertisements. One was for a toilet bowl cleaner that had a very odd contest/loyalty program. If you collected the seven different pathogens from the labels of the cleaners, one could win a prize, one of them being health insurance for the winner and his or her family. Maybe after cleaning that many toilets, one really should have health insurance to deal with the cancer from all the chemicals from the toilet bowl cleaner. Another advertisement was for a toilet that you could put wherever you desired in your apartment (seeing a theme here?). I believe it is movable so you can put it anywhere your heart desires- your living room, your bedroom, the kitchen, or even in the hallway. http://www.sololift.ru/ It seems like a very strange idea. It made me remember that episode of the Simpsons when the Hurricane comes through and destroys Flanders' house and when the town rebuilds the house, the toilet ends up in the kitchen. (Here is a youtube clip that is pretty terrible, but you can see which episode it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J67codU6JEU&feature=related ). When it was on that episode, it was clearly a joke, but apparently, someone in Russia must have seen the episode and thought it was a great idea. I'd love to go to someone's house and see a random toilet in the living room. Haha. Besides the random toilet ads, there was an ad for what I thought was Twilight, but apparently was a completely different movie with a very similar cover just playing on Twilight's popularity. I'm putting the picture here so you can see what I mean. Doesn't it look awfully similar? I'm sure I will see a bunch more weird ads, so I will definitely try to take pictures when I see them.



After my interview, Nastia and I went to Starbucks to see how it compared to the Starbucks in the US. I knew that ordering an iced chai would be difficult since the word "chai" in Russian (written чай) means tea, so ordering a chai chai would be very confusing. Thankfully, I managed to order what I wanted (a venti iced chai - I didn't want to get too confusing by trying to say how I really liked it) and the cashier even spoke a little English when she realized I couldn't speak Russian and she even smiled (a rarity in this country). It tasted almost exactly the same, but it cost $8 - twice what it costs at home. It was almost work it though.



When we finished our overpriced but delicious drinks at Starbucks, we met the other people on the metro and went over to an art exhibition. Most of the artwork was photos, but there was a weird section that was very Andy Warhol-esque that focused mostly on Campbell's Soup. They had vegetables and some Astroturf and golf clubs, so naturally I had to practice my mini golf skills with a potato. I could have tried it with an onion, but I thought the potato wouldn't roll all over the room if I hit it too hard.

Starting to cool off

I am laying here in my bed looking out the window at a really exciting thunderstorm. It is pretty nice being outside and watching the rain hit the windows rather than my face as it did when I was walking home. After all the warnings about the hot weather in Russia, it looks like winter is coming early. It is already colder here than it ever gets at Stanford and I can only see the temperature going down.

Before I came to Russia, I was afraid that the food was going to be terrible. I imagined beets, boiled potatoes, and vodka. It's not like that would have been a terrible diet, but it definitely wouldn't have been my favorite. Cabbage seems to be a favorite here. I'm a huge fan of cabbage, so when I get cabbage soup for dinner followed by cole slaw and mashed potatoes, I'm really happy. Also, after every meal we have tea and chocolate. It's delicious.

I'm catching on to the language, but it's taking some time. Quick lesson:
In Russian, B=V, backwards N=ee and lowercase g=d. So you can see why I've been having trouble. We have learned the whole alphabet and about 100 words in the last two days. My brain is fried by the end of the day, but I'm making progress. I'm really excited when I'll be able to communicate with everyone so I know all the work is worth it.