Day 2 of Exploring

Today was the placement exam. That was painful. I will find out tomorrow how I did. Either way I am excited about starting classes...yes that is nerdy, but that is normal for me. After the test and lunch a group of 5 of us decided to go check out some things. We really wanted to go to Gorky Park. However, it was raining when we got there, so we didn't get to see too much. But it was still pretty awesome. For some random reason there is a mock up space shuttle in the park with the U.S.S.R written on.  Still not sure why that is there, but it looked cool. Oh, and there was a little house in the park. I believe it was for Baba Yar ( a character from a Russian folktale). It is crazy to final see everything that I have heard so much about.

We added a person to our group of explorers today. Her mother is Russian and father is Serbian, but she doesn't know a lot of Russian. However, she has an accent, this came in handy. The rest of us would figure out what we needed to say and then we would have her ask a Russian our question. She also knows a good amount of the history of some of the areas. Our group of 5 actually works well together, because we each know certain things about Russian culture, history and language that we then can teach each other about. I have learned so much by just going out and exploring the city. I love the independence we have here. After we have class or do whatever is on our schedule we are all free to do whatever. This is when we have begun to split into 2 groups: The explorers (my group) and the drinkers (the other group). However, we are about to become the coffee addicts. One of the girls accidently 2 double shots of espresso, thus having 4 shots of espresso. We have to have coffee at least once a day to survive, because of all the walking we do.

Food: the food is much fresher and less processed here. I believe it has a lot more calories and carbs in it then American food, but, we need all of those calories to survive the 10 or miles of walking each day. I had  chicken for breakfast this morning, it was good, but I definitely prefer my cereal. Lunch was a sausage pasta, which was really good.  Then for dinner I had bought this bag of seafood with noodles. I am pretty sure I at octopus and squid and snails. It was interesting, I will see how my stomach feels about it tomorrow.

Our Russian faces while battling the rain.