Recap

After being here for two months, this blog is starting to become a week in review. Haha. Well, here is a recap of last week: (sorry for the shortage of pictures! I'll start taking more!)

Monday: After classes, I was hanging out with Elliot and managed to convince a bunch of Marines to meet up with some of the Stanford people who were out for the evening. It was a ton of fun to get everyone to meet each other. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and it was a pretty relaxed night.

Tuesday: I met up with Elliot and Justin and after hanging out for a while, headed over to Liga Pap to meet up with a bunch of the Stanford group. Everyone seemed to have a great time, and we even got our requisite boys-doing-tridelt-hand-signs picture. :P

Elliot, me, Jean, and Justin. Delta <3

Wednesday: Ellen and I went to our internship, but they were confused why we hadn't arrived early like we had for the two preceding weeks. We saw a couple surgeries - one ACL repair and one shoulder surgery that was pretty cool, but not as fun to watch as the calcaneal repair a couple weeks back.

Thursday: After classes, a group of us went over to the embassy to talk to a Foreign Service Officer about careers and internships in the Foreign Service. It was really interesting to hear about the different aspects of life as a FSO. I'm considering taking the FSO test when I get out of the Peace Corps and maybe continue my nomadic life. I have to brush up on US history, but I'm sure I can manage to do that in the next two and a half years.

For dinner, Elliot and I went to a Mexican food place called La Cantina. It was delicious! I finally got the burrito I've been craving for the last two months. It wasn't quite a La Roca burrito, but it was pretty dang good and still makes my mouth water when I think about it.

Friday: For the walking tour class, we started by meeting by St. Basil's cathedral and touring around inside. It was pretty cool and it had the steepest stairs I've ever seen/climbed. After we left St. Basil's, I realized I didn't have much time to get home and change before dinner, so I had to skip out on the rest of the walking tour (I'm not enrolled in the class) and run home. I got home in record time and managed to change and get back out the door super quickly after explaining to my host mother that I wasn't going to eat dinner at home for the second day in a row. I thought she was going to be upset, but she seemed fine. Elliot took me to a restaurant called "The Apartment" (http://theapartmentmoscow.ru/about/). It was possibly the best food I've ever eaten in my life. We had a bottle of red wine that was really good (and I don't normally drink red wine). We had a plate of calamari for our appetizer that was on a bed of greens and cherry tomatoes. When I used to think of calamari, I thought of breaded and deep-fried rings of squid, but this was just straight calamari cooked in wine. It was great! For my entree, I had roast duck, which was exquisite. I'm a big fan of duck, but I've never had it cooked that well. Elliot had the lamb, which I normally don't eat (it breaks my rule of not eating babies…), but I tried and it was sooo good! For dessert, we both ordered the crème brûlée and sorbet because it looked amazing, and it exceeded our expectations. It was creamy and caramelized perfectly on top. After that, I had an amazing berry mojito. Everything I ate or drank there made me want to stay there forever. That's going to be a hard date to top.

Saturday: In the morning we went to the Pushkin museum and saw a bunch of paintings by artists that I actually knew! (Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Picasso, etc.) I don't know a whole lot about art, but it was cool seeing names that I recognized at least. After I got home from the museum, I was planning on staying home the rest of the day, but Nastia and I decided to go shopping instead and to try to find a dress for me to wear to Marine Corps ball in November and a Halloween costume. I was dead set on getting a sailor costume since this will likely be the last time for a couple years that I will be wearing a costume on Halloween. I know I was being hard-headed but I really wanted a sailor costume. I didn't find one last week when we went shopping, but Nastia asked the woman at the store, and she showed us a rack with sailor costumes. They even fit! So, I bought a costume and I'm really looking forward to wearing it. We didn't find a dress, so we decided to go see a movie instead. We saw the new Katherine Heigl movie "Life as We Know It" or "Жизнь, как она есть" since it was in Russian. I bought a large popcorn before we went in, expecting it to be a normal-sized thing to share between two people. It ended up being a giant bucket that I was a little embarrassed to hold. It could have fed about ten people! Anyway, during the movie, I understood most of what was going on, but very little of the actual dialogue. It was still fun, though.

Sunday: Today I went shopping with Jean and Nastia for a dress to wear to the Marine ball. I realize that it is a month away, but I couldn't find any dresses that were appropriate anywhere, so I figured I should shop while I had the chance. After going to tons of stores in the huge mall, Jean suggested we go to bebe. I had almost lost faith in finding a dress, but we found some long evening gowns in the back that were promising. Jean found one in my size that was exactly what I was looking for and it was 50% off! It was perfect, so I ended up buying it. I really like it, and I'm really excited to wear it!!!!