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!