Blogs from Moscow, Northwest, Russia, Europe - page 62

Before arriving in Moscow, we should've booked a hostel over the internet, but we didn't, which in hindsight was a bad idea! Everything was written in the Russian alphabet, and nobody spoke English, and we immediately found people quite rude. Someone eventually told us where to find an internet cafe in broken English so that we could get directions to a hostel. We printed out a map of the moscow metro, and managed to find a hostel (about 6hrs after arriving at the train station!). It was a funny hostel, which wasn't technically a hostel, as there was hardly ever any staff there, but we got a key so we could come and go as we pleased- fairly apt as the hostel was called "Home from Home". Didn't do much in Moscow apart from going to ... read more

It has been interesting to hear everyone's tales of their adventures. Other students traveled to Romania, Hungary, Estonia, Amsterdam, Israel, and England. Ironically enough the only student who had a serious problem during her trip went to England. Someone stole her purse on the metro. In it was all her money, her passport, Russian visa, and other important documents. Without these documents she cannot return to Russia. So for the last week she has been going to the American embassy everyday waiting for her new documents to arrive. She is still in England. Things have been going okay since I got back. I miss Ukraine a lot. It was so nice to live as part of a family for a while. And I miss the warmer weather-it is getting pretty cold here. And of course I ... read more

I took the train to/from Moscow all by myself today without too many problems. I was actually proud of myself for making it on my own. I tried to surprise Dasha, but she did not take the train today to classes so I was on my own. On the way there, I got to the station about 35 minutes. I think the lady understood me the first time, but I asked for a ticket to Moscow a couple of times until she was hitting the desk "asking for money." I am glad I knew about how much because I did not understand a word she said. I then walked about the market for a few minutes to kill time and stay warm as it was snowing this morning pretty hard. Hard enough, it would have caused ... read more

Yesterday was an interesting day. It started out fairly normally. I went to lunch with everyone at the cafeteria and it was about the same as usual. As usual the "Coat Nazi" yelled at all of us who tried to sneak our coats into the cafeteria and made us go out of the cafeteria and hang out coats in the coat room. She always patrols around the cafeteria on the look out for coats. She seems to consider it the main duty of her job. And, as usual, the cafeteria ladies put sour cream in the borsch. I didn't tell them fast enough that I wanted to have borsch without sour cream. Russians think it is very strange whenever people ask for soup without sour cream. My previous host mom always used to lecture me about ... read more

Well, it finally snowed here. It may have before today, but today was the first I saw it. We were taking one of the consultants back to the airport and as we got out to get his luggage, it started snowing. They were small wet flakes, but it was snow. Afterwards Misha dropped me off at the Metro to bum around the city. I had planned to go to StarLight (Bryant will know what I am talking about) for an "American" breakfast but never made it there as I got hungry and wanted a cup of coffee before then so I find a small cafe that had an English menu and had the Captains CCM omlet, basically a Denver omlet and no, I do not have a clue what Captain CCM stands for but that was ... read more