The First Week

Hello everyone!

I know I promised you all a blog while I was in Russia, so here it is. Sorry it took me so long, but I was unable to get internet on my computer until just a couple of days ago. Wireless internet, although it can be found in many cafes here, is not very prevalent in homes. In fact, my family doesn't even have a computer. But more about that later. I'll start from the beginning.

Our group of about 20 American students arrived in St. Petersburg last Thursday. On Sunday we met our host families. I am living with a host grandmother, mother, and 6 year old sister on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, to the north of the city. They live in an apartment building like most Russians that live in the city. I have my own room and so does the grandmother. The mother and the sister both sleep in the living room. We all sleep on couches except for the grandmother. Although this sounds weird, it seems pretty common in Russia. Alot of people sleep on couches here instead of beds. My host family is really nice. My grandmother does all the cooking, and she is an excellent cook. It's a very nice change from me making pasta in my room every night! I also, as I said before, do not have internet in my house. It doesn't seem to be that common here. I had to go to the phone store and buy a mobile modem so that I could get internet. It works really well though, so I'm pretty happy about that.

School is going well. We had our first week of classes last week. I have a 40 minute commute to school every day, which is pretty average for most people in my group. Some people are lucky and live pretty close to the school, which is in the center of the city. But I would say the majority of us live pretty far away. At school I am taking 5 classes: grammar, phonetics, conversation, politics, and literature. I think the politics class will be really interesting. It's basically the history of Russia during the 20th Century, which I really don't know much about. Plus, the teachers seem pretty cool.

So, far, in my free time I've just done alot of walking around the city. Yesterday my friend and I went to the Bread and Milk Festival. It was pretty fun. There were lots of stands selling bread and milk products. We got to sample alot of bread. I found out that they even have Finnish bread here, so I of course went and bought some today. I am very excited to have it for lunch tomorrow!

Well that's about all for now. I'll update some more when I have more interesting stuff to talk about. And I'll try to put up as many pictures as I can. For some reason right now it's not uploading my pictures, but hopefully I can get that to work in the future.