Random Thoughts Part I

I'm on my way to class but wanted to share some very random thoughts...will post again early next week after our excursions to Peter and Paul Fortress tomorrow and Novgorod this weekend.

Keep remembering things about the past couple days that I should have included...for example, when we got off the plane we were greeted by a lady holding what looked like a ray gun or something. It was a heat scanner, apparently they're extremely worried about the swine flu so if you have a fever you are immediately suspect. Luckily no fever here.

Next random piece of information, apparently my veins were really hard to find today because it took him 3 tries to draw the blood for the HIV test. Not so fun having band-aids on the inside of both your elbows, but he was funny about it saying "welcome to Russia" and things.

Something else that is interesting, the metro is really deep here, the deepest in the world supposedly, which means that the escalator ride alone can take 2 minutes. And in that amount of time, depending what day and time of day it is and where you are, you can see some incredible displays of pda. Apparently 2 minutes is much too long to simply talk to each other, couples young and old get nice and friendly on the ride down and back up the metro escalators.

Keep forgetting to tell you - but the health insurance that OU made me buy is apparently really great (its what one of the guys who works here has) and they have direct pay with a clinic called Euromed where all the doctors speak English and are Western trained etc. So in case something does happen there won't be any worries, its just down the street from school I guess.

Mosquitos kind of like Guatie, they wake you up by buzzing in your ear.

Saw a woman with a big Newfoundland dog today trying to get it to do something that it wouldn't do, and it was bigger than her so it wasn't moving. I felt kind of bad for it since it was such a big dog and I'm sure it lives in the apartments since no one here has houses, but it was just a very funny sight.

Thanks for making it to the end of the randomest of posts so far. See you early next week! Love - b