St. Petersburg is pretty cool. My first impression was that it is just really like Manhattan (it is... a lot of turn of the century stuff). Today, though, it was finally nice and clear out (cold, too, but that made it better). It really felt like "the North."
Anyhow, I struck out on my own today and checked out the Ethnographic Museum, and Peter's cabin. Went down Nevsky, found Dom Knigi, but it's being worked on and is closed. I tried to go to the Buddhist temple (read they had a Buryat restaurant there), but wasn't sure where it was, and turned back.
Had Carl's Junior for dinner (we had Pizza Hut last night, and Uzbek the night before).
Looking forward to getting back to Moscow, it really feels like home now.

All right, things are going pretty good. It's been a little bit of a boring week, but if all goes well we'll be in Vladimir and Suzdal this weekend. Hoping to escape the Soviet architecture, it's a little overbearing.

Also, I'm getting the metro pass tomorrow, I hope, so then I will be able to do a lot more. Also getting the guts to stick my credit card in an ATM machine, finally called my company last night. With money and cheap metro, I think things will be much more exciting.

I'm also putting up some older pictures. VDNKh, a Soviet exhibition center that's now full of shops, the pavillions are all in varying states of decay though they keep the fountains going. There's a picture of Logan with the Kremlin in the background, and a camel at VDNKh. Also Swan Lake at the Bolshoi. These were all taken by Meredith; I haven't loaded any of my pictures up on a computer yet.

Okay, this is two weeks old, finally getting to post it... I will hopefully get a metro pass on friday and got a lot of really cool stamps at Izmailovo.

I really love it here, it's a little different, but you can pretty much get anything you need in Moscow, and my school's at an excellent location (right off Tverskaya...). The buildings themselves are older and kind of dilapidated, but
nothing worse than Texas public schools. For Cody people, my dorm is a lot like the Elks club.

Class is pretty good; we have class in Russian with other international students (themed courses... current events, grammar, literature- where we're reading Chekov stories, not too shabby). You can also take courses with Russian students- started taking Mongolian on Tuesday (I have to catch up with everyone else, but that's going pretty well so far), and I've been going to an anthropology class (pretty interesting to see how it differs here from in the US). I've met lots of interesting Russians, and can actually talk to them in Russian. A lot of people I've met here have some English, but not a ton.

Everything is still going pretty well... Yeah, I'm really glad that the Russian is working out for me... I was pretty scared before coming. It's weird though, it's much
easier in some situations than in others. When I just meet a Russian around school or on the street, it's pretty easy to talk, but if I'm in a store or have to ask someone at school for something, sometimes I get kind of freaked out and have
more trouble.

We haven't done too much; just the Tretyakov, Novodevichy, and also saw Master and Margarita at Taganka and Don Quixote at the Bolshoi (had to stand again, but it was also only 20 p., less than a dollar) A little too much theater for me, actually. We might go to Izmailovsky this weekend. We're getting our student metro passes on Friday, hopefully (we finally got our passports back), so after that we'll probably really be mobile!