A new post, just for you Kyle =)

So I’ve had some questions asked that I will attempt to answer. I'll have another post later on about the past weeks happenings with pictures, etc.

Yes, I finally got a cheeseburger with meat! but after some tedious explanations. And, when I was in Kazan, I asked Aygul and Ildar what to say which is ‘without vegetables’ but they weren’t sure, so today when I went I was more specific. It took about 20 minutes to get so I don't know if I will do it again, but it worked!

My normal day/week: I wake up around 8ish, take a shower, eat at 9, and leave at 930 to walk to school. Its about a mile, and class starts at 10. We get a short fifteen minute break at noon, which we usually conspire to stretch out longer by agreeing that no one goes to class at the scheduled time, and then we are out between one and three depending on the day. Wednesdays are the lecture days, and I don’t go until 1:30. Our teachers are pretty laid back about things, mine is very nice and understanding if we are sick or out of town or just decide to not do our homework. Between class and dinner, I’m usually at the dorms (which now have a no-guest policy so we’ll have to see how hard it is to get the homestay students inside for use of the internet/washer/and to have social lives.) I usually eat around 7 at home and then do homework or read. Saturdays we have an excursion to a museum of some sort, and we usually have a small excursion at some point during the week as well. Sundays are “free,” which in Vykhino means boring if you don’t go into the city and do something.

My homestay apartment is very typical Russian housing. It’s in a giant soviet style apartment building, nine floors. There is a front door that you enter through, and then you get to the elevator and stairs. The elevators in Russia are very tiny, you can fit four people, definitely no more than that in them. Once you get to your floor, there will be a door on each side of the elevator which is locked. Behind each one is two doors to two different apartments. For each apartment, there then is two other doors (one on top of another – picture a screen door and a normal one (except these are both giant scary doors) and each one has about four locks on it. Sometimes Oleg and Galina forget when I am gone and lock a few random locks on me so I have to buzz them to let me in. It takes a while to get inside, but I guess this is a reflection on the type of society they live in.
Once inside, there is a tiny entryway and three doors to each of the bedrooms. There is also a bathroom (bathrooms here are two separate rooms – one has the toilet, the other has the sink and shower, both of which use the same faucet that you have to switch depending on what you want to use) and then the kitchen is right next to that. The kitchens are often very small, as are the tables, and so far all of the chairs I have seen in them are short square stools that you can push underneath the table. Nothing ever matches, either, and this is actually a characteristic of Russia that is growing on me. There are crazy patterns on couches, wallpaper is nice, but usually paired with three other non-matching patterns in the same room. Just in my room there are two different shades of red Armenian rugs, pink flower wallpaper, an odd brown shiny couch, and bright orange curtains with checkered lace hanging in front. I also noticed that standard pillows here are square shaped, not rectangular like in the US, and they take up much more room on the beds.

To wash clothes here was an adventure for me. I’m pretty sure that the invention of the dryer has yet to reach Russia. Nor has the laundromat. Russians usually have washers in their apartments, or else they handwash clothes. Then they hang them up to dry, either in the kitchen, their rooms, or the bathroom (but I’ve found the bathroom is not a good place because that makes it harder to shower when you’re trying to not get things wet) My homestay has a washer, but I was confused about how it would work. After a long conversation with Galina, most of which was hand movements, I figured it out – I would pay a certain amount of rubles per wash. But, apparently I didn’t have it all figured out because then I realized that it was going to be much more because it was by weight. Basically it came out to the equivalent of 5 dollars for two pairs of jeans and a few shirts (and if you talk to my mom she can tell you that my shirts are not very heavy weight (aka not as warm as she would like =P)). Sooo, what to do? I was talking to the RA at the dorms (who was nice enough to let me set up my computer to access the internet) and he told me to just sneak into the dorms and do my laundry there (the program we’re on provided a washer for the American students on their floor). Still, it was interesting. You set a specific temperature…none of this hot/warm/cold stuff, and I still haven’t figured out if its actually in Celsius or not ( I think its actually Fahrenheit) and then you have other various settings like delicates/halfdelicates (yes, what exactly are those??)/woolens, cotton, etc, and those always seem to screw up the original temperature setting. Then I hang up my clothes to dry in Cody and Mike’s room, who apparently have not had any inquiries yet into why they have girls clothes hanging in their room.

Crime: it’s definitely here, no one every trusts anyone else. In the stores you have to store every little thing in a cubby before entering or else have it sealed in plastic so they can tell if you’ve put something in it or not. I’ve been told a restaurant nearby is run by the mafia…it appears to be true.
You see police a lot, but I try to avoid them because the only thing I’ve seen them do is stop foreigners and give them trouble about documents. Luckily my coat happens to be just like every other non-fur coat here so I can blend in somewhat better than others.
Pickpocketing happens, I guess, like everywhere else. Wearing those under-the-clothes-belts just marks you with a giant target asking to be robbed though. On the subway everyone puts there stuff on their laps and that’s pretty much all there is to it.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a police car. I saw an ambulance once, which made me thankful that our program gave us the phone number for an American style ambulance. The Russian one I saw was going much slower than everything else and definitely did not look like something I’d want to be in even if it wasn’t an emergency.

Food: I am given Kasha and Booterbrod every morning. Booterbrod is the Russian sandwich. Its open-faced, and then you put anything else on it – usually kolbasa (which is kind of like bologna but not). Kasha is mush – sometimes its cream of wheat style, other times there are oats thrown in with it so it’s a bit more oatmeal style. One morning I don’t know what style it was, but I definitely didn’t like it. Other homestay people tell me they get the same thing. The dorm people are given a bit more of variety – yogurts, etc. (they get candy bars at breakfast too!) In Kazan, it was cereal stuff and cookies/sweets with tea and coffee. Dinner is usually very Russian as well. ‘Salads’ here consist of a lot of one thing – a lot of beets, a lot of cabbage, a lot of carrots, topped with mayonaise. Dinner is often soups, like borsht, or something with potatoes. Pelmeni is popular, its like a weird low grade meat inside of a pasta thingy. Tea is given with everything. I have it at breakfast, dinner, and about three times a day in class. Water is always boiled. I’ve been told the water here isn’t safe because its actually treated TOO much with chlorine. I think that theres actually too much chlorine and the fact that it still isn’t clean even then. Either way, no one drinks it.