bridges

Missed last night because the internet was down. No catastrophe because it was just about a normal day. Today and yesterday I’ve been walking a good deal. I walked home from school yesterday, and today I walked both ways. Later today, Ariel and I met some people from the program and their neighbors at a bar which we also walked home from. So today, I walked more than seven miles!

We intentionally stayed out late enough to watch the bridges go up, photos of which are in this album. The bridges go up every night, and so those of us on islands (most of us) have to be home before then unless we want to stay out until early in the morning. A bit inconvenient, but on the bright side, we get to watch the bridges go up!

Our homework load has increased considerably. It’s not much more difficult, but very time consuming. The type of drilling that is monotonous but I suppose will make it so that I never, ever, ever, ever forget certain things.

I suspect that if we stopped reviewing things and started to include some new material, the concepts that we’re going over now would still be seared into my brain. It’s not as if familiarity and facility with the basics is not necessary for the more complicated subjects. But it’s only been a little over a week, and perhaps I am impatient.

On our way home from watching the bridges go up, we stopped at Лента Lenta, the 24-hour supermarket on the way home. I really wanted to buy lox. Instead, I branched out and bought some kind of pickled fish, or fish in some kind of liquid, the type that Стас Stas, our Russian TA from Williams, would make us eat. I figure I'll buy lox when I'm a few more weeks in and having culture shock.

They tell me that I'll have culture shock, that everyone does. I believe them, but I kind of want to just have it and get it over with. I definitely don't have culture shock now; I'm still enamored by just about everything Russian, even the things that seem like a pain. These things include not being able to use a credit card, restricted access to bridges when we need them most urgently, public transportation that only sporadically announces where it is about to stop. None of these things bother me! I think regular readers of this account will know when I have culture shock. I'm told it's inevitable.

I watched the sun set and rise in the last couple of hours. It was a bit cloudy, and therefore almost dark at one point.