Moscow State University

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Renee and I decided to explore the area called "Sparrow Hills", which is a hilly part of Moscow that overlooks the center of the city. It is quite beautiful with a large wooded area and the Moscow river at the edge of the woods. Since Moscow State University was close by, we decided to take a look at it. MSU is enormous with 33 floors and is quite impressive from the outside. We wanted to see what the university looks like from the inside. So, we decided to try to get in with the student ids from our university. Thankfully, the guards didn't look at our ids very hard so they didn't notice that they were for a different university.
The inside of MSU is even more impressive than the outside. Huge marble columns and marble floors are on the first few floors. The second floor has tons of statues of famous people who have studied at MSU. There were also tons of rowdy students messing around and hurrying on their way to class. MSU felt like a real university, unlike my university which usually feels like a high school. But then my university houses a high school, so the high school feeling of it should be no suprise.
Dorms are connected to the university and there are all sorts of shops. Book shops, fruit and vegetable shops, grocery shops, gift shops, ect on the first floor. There are also at least three cafeterias. The cafeteria we ate at was called "Cafeteria number 3". The food was better and fresher than at our university's cafeteria, though it was a bit more expensive. I had egg fried beef, some sort of rice and meat dumpling, an egg and pepper salad, a jelly roll, and compot (sort of like juice but isn't as sweet and has berries in it). Lunch is my main meal of the day nowadays so I try to eat a lot for lunch.
We had a great time walking around. Now we are off to one of our last group meetings. I invited Oksana, a Russian friend to come to the meeting and meet everyone.

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Photos

Tallest tower of MSU
Notice the hammer and sicle towards the top

Stores in MSU
Notice the grocery store and the sign in Russian for the beauty salon. Because of course you need to have a beauty salon inside your university.

Comments

[kakdela]

Moscow State
You are so lucky to have stayed in Moscow state, it is much more ornate that St.Petersberg University which is very gloomy and desolate. The beauty salon in the school reminds me of how well dressed the russian women always are, our student group felt very out of place in our american scrub clothes =)