Things I Love About Russia (con't) And MORE :-)

Ok, here are a few things I forgot last time:

1. I went to the grocery store with Lena, my host mom and there was an entire aisle of vodka...no joke...an entire aisle. It was crazy. Plus the aisle of beer, the aisle of wine and the aisle of other liquors. It's crazy.

2. I love Novgorod. The city is amazing! It's not too big but still fairly cosmopolitan. There are losts of place to get tea or coffee or beer. It seems you can walk anywhere but the bus system is also very nice.

3. White nights. It gets dark here is Novgorod at about 11:30pm. Until then it's lighter than twilight. I love it. You can have such a long day full of wonderful things. We do a lot of walking around the city; it's such an old city and there is so much to look at. All the churches and parks are so beautiful.

4. Mayo/ketchup. This sounds funny I know, but the mayonaisse and ketchup are sold in these bag that sort of seem like the bags craisins come in, but there is a little nozzle on the top that you take the cap off and you squeeze the mayo/ketchup out. It's wierd but totally cool.


In other new, my lessons are going pretty well. I am keeping up fairly well in my language class. I feel like I am learning more Russian and some of my Russian friends are helping me with my language, espcially my бабушка, Toma, who is awesome. She makes me speak Russian and I am learning a lot of conversational stuff.

Art class has been really fun. We are learning a technique of painting that includes decoration after the painting that almost makes the work look like patch-work. Then it is laquered over to make it shiny. We start Russian history next week. It is actually kind of hard to spell in English right now as I've been operating in Russian for a week.

As far as food goes...the food here is pretty awesome. I really like all the food I've been served by my family. Eggs, oatmeal, bread, bananas, apples, strawberries, yogurt, tea, vegetables...it's all been delicious. Also, I think I've eaten a ton of pizza since being here. I've been in Russia for 6 days and I've gone out for pizza thrVee times. Twice with my classmates and once with my Russian friend Misha (Миша). I've had some other Russian food but I can't remember the names. It's all been delicious though!

We got to Staraya Russya on Saturday so that will be fun. I've already been all over the Kremlin and Jaroslav's Court. Even the river is so beautiful.

It's getting too hard to type/spell in English. More later :-)

Love&Miss Everyone!