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!