Classes begin.

Ok, having a little more time today means a slightly more informative update. I have my schedule for the first week, which involves 3 days of school (2 hours of "Conversation", about what I'm not sure, and 3 hours of Grammar, oh joy of joys), and 3 days of tours. Yesterday was getting oriented at school, and some poor student had to take 20 of us to get cell phones, poor thing, and a quick bus tour of St. Petersburg which dropped us off mid-town instead of back at the school. Since I had walked to the school the first day, that meant learning how to use the metro and trying to remember where the metro was in relation to the school all at once, but I managed ok.

The metros here, however, are ridiculously far underground! On the way down, I decided to walk down the escalators, amazed that only 2-3 people shared the desire to get some exercise with me. After (no exaggeration here) 2 minutes on said escalator, and my calves starting to shake, I finally saw the end, and rested for the last 30 seconds. Suffice to say, I took the lazy way back up on the other end. I forget sometimes that living in a city necessitates exercise, as you have to walk everywhere, rather than drive.

I'm alive!

Sorry for the incommunicado for so long, but the internet is not as pervasive here as it is in the US. The short story (since I don't know how long I have here), is that I am here, I am safe, and while I can't say that I know my way around, I know enough to not get utterly, utterly lost (yet).

The flight in was relatively hellacious, as the flight from NYC to Moscow was delayed just long enough for me to miss my flight to St. Petersburg, and then the phones were not working right, I couldn't get a hold of anyone to let them know the new flight I was on, and I had to find my way to the house on my own. I won't lie, the fact that I had been awake and not-well-fed for over 52 hours at that point meant that there was some amount of breaking down on my part, and some amount of "oh god there's a crying foreigner on my hands!" on some very, very kind Russians' parts. However, all is well as of now, and I'll be getting a phone (and some teaching!) as of today, so hopefully no more horrendous feelings of being lost.

Countdown!

Three days til I leave and the jitters are starting to set in. I've got my passport and visa, my books should be arriving tomorrow, my packing list and flight itineraries are all printed out, nothing to do now but sit and wait. I hate waiting.

To pass the time, I've been playing around with a trial account on a French server in WoW. It's pretty mind-expanding, to the point where I couldn't sleep the first night because all the new vocab was running through my head, but I feel it's worth it. I'm debating letting my US account lapse when I get back and just poking around on French and Russian servers to improve those languages. We'll see.

So yeah, three days. Nothing to do but wait. And I'm sure that on the third day, I'll discover something vital that I (or someone else!) forgot to do, and have to run around like crazy. Good times.

Visa confusion.

Visas are in! I went to pick up my passport/ visa on Tuesday, and noticed that my name was in three different places: twice on the visa form itself (once in roman letters, once in cyrillic), and then again at the bottom of the visa, presumably for scanning purposes. Unfortunately, the bottom of the visa spelled my name "Lissandra Leqlani", even though the two on the form were correct. Paranoid, I called up the woman who'd gotten our visas taken care of, and she said she'd noticed that everyone's was misspelled. She contacted the Russian Embassy, and it turns out that they enter our names in roman characters, convert them to cyrillic for the system, then convert them from cyrillic back to roman for the scan at the bottom. Since the two alphabets don't correspond (there are perhaps 2-3 symbols that are the same in both), there are mistakes after the final conversion- they know about this and it's ok. Nice to let us know ahead of time!

So I have my passport and visa back, I have my tickets sorted out, finals are done as of today... Now I get to sit back and relax for a week before the adventure begins!

Address in St. Petersburg

Well, they finally gave us the info on where we'll be staying! True to my request (and insular nature), they put me with a woman living alone... don't know how old she is or what else there is to know... just that it'll be one person and myself. Hope for the best!

Anyhow, here's the telephone and address of the place I"ll be staying:

Telephone (home): 312-29-65. Cell: 8-911-948-00-87

Address: 195213 СПб., Казанская ул. д.45 кв.64, Ст.м. Садовая,

Roughly, this comes out to:

195213 St. Petersburg, Kazanskaya St., Building #45 Apartment 64, Metro stop: Sadovaya

(Apparently they do addresses from greatest to smallest, who knew? Only two weeks til departure!)

Ok, sorry for the run-on post, but I think I've got it figured out. I'll be about 20 minutes from a metro stop, though kinda far out from central St. Petersburg. I am ridiculously proud that I figured out the maps on my own, and fairly confident I won't get (too) lost now. There are at least 2 other students on my same metro stop, and the area looks fairly civilized and clean. Cheers!