Whew! It's hard to believe it's already been a week since I arrived! Well, really more like five days, since I was in the air on Monday and Tuesday, but still. Then, when I think about each individual day and how jam-packed it seems, it's surprising that it's only been five days and not longer!
The flights went fairly well, but jet-lag is a tricky thing, I've been finding - every time you think you've gotten over it, it pops up again. The day I arrived I was completely exhausted - I'd only had about two hours of sleep in the last thirty-four, so I was practically falling asleep on my feet! (And actually almost literally did that - after a two-hour drive from the airport, I ended up standing on the landing of my apartment with all my luggage for almost an hour - the school had forgotten to give me the key to the main entrance to the apartment, so I had to wait until some very nice neighbors came along and unlocked the door for me! That was an extremely frustrating experience - to know that on the other side of those few inches of door there is a bed waiting, but you can't get to it!) I must admit, my first impression of Moscow was not, "Wow, I'm in Russia!" or, "Wow, everything seems so different!" It was "Wow, I'm so tired I can't see straight. Please point me to somewhere I can collapse." At any rate, I gave myself a day or so to get over the jet lag - not trying to do any intensive sight-seeing, taking generous naps - and by Thursday I thought, "OK, it's been long enough. My body should be back on schedule now." Yeah, right.
I went grocery-shopping Tuesday afternoon, with ambitious ideas of actually buying food to cook, but ended up coming home with bread and apples - my brain just couldn't handle the input of trying to buy things when I couldn't remember the Russian names for them and when the store was set up so that each type of product was behind a different counter and had to be bought individually. The next day, I found a supermarket and decided to get organized - I wrote up a list and even looked up the Russian words for most of what I needed. Once I got inside, I confidently set out to fill my cart. But - jet lag again - when I started converting the prices from rubles to dollars in my head, I figured on $1 = approx. 3 rubles, instead of $1 = 30 rubles. Suddenly everything seemed monumentally expensive! Six apples cost twenty dollars! Honey was two hundred dollars! Somewhere in the back of my head I realized that this was ridiculous, but the rest of my brain was so busy trying to find things on the shelves and navigate through the sea of shoppers (I think half of Moscow decided to visit the store while I was there) that it wasn't until I got home that I realized I spent less than thirty dollars. Of course, now I have to go back so that I can get everything I frantically cut off the first time - cheese to put inside my sandwich bread, sauce to put on top of my pasta, honey to put in my tea...
I laughed that one off and decided it was the last vestiges of jet lag dying out. The next day, I set off to buy some little things that I would need to have/know before Monday's training session started: an umbrella, a Russian-English dictionary, and the location of the nearest Roman-Catholic Church. I left the apartment with directions and determination, got across the street, realized that Google Earth must have been wrong about the location of the store, and then had my purse-strap break suddenly. Since it was too heavy to carry around without a strap, I retired in disgrace to my apartment to stitch it up. Sitting and fuming over my needle, I realized I was almost in tears, and that set off alarm bells - "Crying over a purse? Wait a minute..." I decided to leave the errands for another day and fell asleep for almost three solid hours.
In the last couple of days, the mistakes have slightly decreased in magnitude. Yesterday I accomplished all the errands I had put off from the day before, and the only indication of the dreaded "JL" was that I got slightly lost and ended up at one point crossing the same street three times before I figured out which direction I was going. Today, oddly enough, I ended up waking up at 3:30 A.M. and staying wide-awake for the next few hours. I don't know if that's jet lag or my brain just being dumb...and my only mistake today was to confuse a 100 and a 1000-ruble bill and make the lady behind the metro ticket counter think me off my rocker - so I'm getting better and better! (Of course, now watch me do something monumentally stupid tomorrow...)
But I'm getting used to things here, and actually finding it a lot easier to communicate than when I was here two years ago. Since I haven't taken any serious courses since then, I guess maybe it's just all the movie-watching and book-reading and independent studying I've been doing - and, of course, the three-day intensive one of my good friends subjected me to shortly before I came - thank you, Tamara! :)
Well, it's late here, so I'd better go - I have my first day of training tomorrow, and from what my flatmate says, it's pretty intense! I'm going to upload a couple of pictures of my apartment because I know some of my friends (Beth and Arianna ;) ) were curious, and then I'm going to call it a night! I hope all of you in NC did alright in the hurricane!
My room
the study
the kitchen
the view from my apartment window - there is a playground through the trees, so I get to hear children playing all day long - it's a happy sound :)
The flights went fairly well, but jet-lag is a tricky thing, I've been finding - every time you think you've gotten over it, it pops up again. The day I arrived I was completely exhausted - I'd only had about two hours of sleep in the last thirty-four, so I was practically falling asleep on my feet! (And actually almost literally did that - after a two-hour drive from the airport, I ended up standing on the landing of my apartment with all my luggage for almost an hour - the school had forgotten to give me the key to the main entrance to the apartment, so I had to wait until some very nice neighbors came along and unlocked the door for me! That was an extremely frustrating experience - to know that on the other side of those few inches of door there is a bed waiting, but you can't get to it!) I must admit, my first impression of Moscow was not, "Wow, I'm in Russia!" or, "Wow, everything seems so different!" It was "Wow, I'm so tired I can't see straight. Please point me to somewhere I can collapse." At any rate, I gave myself a day or so to get over the jet lag - not trying to do any intensive sight-seeing, taking generous naps - and by Thursday I thought, "OK, it's been long enough. My body should be back on schedule now." Yeah, right.
I went grocery-shopping Tuesday afternoon, with ambitious ideas of actually buying food to cook, but ended up coming home with bread and apples - my brain just couldn't handle the input of trying to buy things when I couldn't remember the Russian names for them and when the store was set up so that each type of product was behind a different counter and had to be bought individually. The next day, I found a supermarket and decided to get organized - I wrote up a list and even looked up the Russian words for most of what I needed. Once I got inside, I confidently set out to fill my cart. But - jet lag again - when I started converting the prices from rubles to dollars in my head, I figured on $1 = approx. 3 rubles, instead of $1 = 30 rubles. Suddenly everything seemed monumentally expensive! Six apples cost twenty dollars! Honey was two hundred dollars! Somewhere in the back of my head I realized that this was ridiculous, but the rest of my brain was so busy trying to find things on the shelves and navigate through the sea of shoppers (I think half of Moscow decided to visit the store while I was there) that it wasn't until I got home that I realized I spent less than thirty dollars. Of course, now I have to go back so that I can get everything I frantically cut off the first time - cheese to put inside my sandwich bread, sauce to put on top of my pasta, honey to put in my tea...
I laughed that one off and decided it was the last vestiges of jet lag dying out. The next day, I set off to buy some little things that I would need to have/know before Monday's training session started: an umbrella, a Russian-English dictionary, and the location of the nearest Roman-Catholic Church. I left the apartment with directions and determination, got across the street, realized that Google Earth must have been wrong about the location of the store, and then had my purse-strap break suddenly. Since it was too heavy to carry around without a strap, I retired in disgrace to my apartment to stitch it up. Sitting and fuming over my needle, I realized I was almost in tears, and that set off alarm bells - "Crying over a purse? Wait a minute..." I decided to leave the errands for another day and fell asleep for almost three solid hours.
In the last couple of days, the mistakes have slightly decreased in magnitude. Yesterday I accomplished all the errands I had put off from the day before, and the only indication of the dreaded "JL" was that I got slightly lost and ended up at one point crossing the same street three times before I figured out which direction I was going. Today, oddly enough, I ended up waking up at 3:30 A.M. and staying wide-awake for the next few hours. I don't know if that's jet lag or my brain just being dumb...and my only mistake today was to confuse a 100 and a 1000-ruble bill and make the lady behind the metro ticket counter think me off my rocker - so I'm getting better and better! (Of course, now watch me do something monumentally stupid tomorrow...)
But I'm getting used to things here, and actually finding it a lot easier to communicate than when I was here two years ago. Since I haven't taken any serious courses since then, I guess maybe it's just all the movie-watching and book-reading and independent studying I've been doing - and, of course, the three-day intensive one of my good friends subjected me to shortly before I came - thank you, Tamara! :)
Well, it's late here, so I'd better go - I have my first day of training tomorrow, and from what my flatmate says, it's pretty intense! I'm going to upload a couple of pictures of my apartment because I know some of my friends (Beth and Arianna ;) ) were curious, and then I'm going to call it a night! I hope all of you in NC did alright in the hurricane!
Ну что не плохо, мне нравиться! А тебе?
ReplyDeleteYay, I love this post! Ok, I'm late arriving at your blog, but I had no idea you were going to Moscow for 10 months! Lucky you! Please do post more pix of daily life. The apartment looks very Russian :)
ReplyDelete