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