Massively Parallel Procrastination

A letter home from study abroad

Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 17:02:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jesse Vincent 
To: jesse@utopia.com
Subject: september 3

Hmm...september 3 was just yesterday and already i can't remember what I
did....hmm...oh yeah....The day started at 8 am (ugh!)  We got up and got
ready for our first "real" day of classes.  Breakfast consisted of rice
and sausage (as usual) 

Our first class started at 9:30.  There are four of us in what I
think is the more advanced of two groups.  Throughout the day, Alicia,
Lucile, Jocelyn and I got to tell our life stories three times.  Phonetics
was interesting... We learned the proper location for one's tounge while
making "t" and "d" sounds in Russian.  (In english, your tounge will end
up touching your upper teeth.  In russian, it should never move from your
lower teeth)  After that, we had a 20 minute break.  At 11:30,
"conversation class" started.  We got to describe ourselves and then were
forced to ask each other enlightening questions.  It wasn't until
conversation class ended that we realized that we didn't have a lunch
break.  Our final class, literature, ran from 1 to 2:30.  Since we didn't
yet have our texts, we got to tell the professor about ourselves yet again
(sense a trend?)  Some how, we got on to the subject of painting...which
led to a discussion of types of paint...the russian word for oil-based
paint is the same  as the russian word for butter....this _somehow_ got us
into a discussion of vegetarianism...at which point our professor informed
us that "vegetarians don't like butter."  I was impressed, as this is
usually not the direction a russian would err in.  Some day, they'll get
the hang of vegetarianism.

After class, we had several hours to screw around.  Alicia,
George, Leslie and I decided that we _needed_ to check out "Russkoe
Bistro"  which is sort of the local answer to McDonalds.  R.B. sells
Piroshki (miniature pie-like things filled with various things), Bublochki
(not sure how to describe them), pies and various other things.  I'd
wanted to try piroshki c gribami (with mushrooms) for several years, but
never happened to see them for sale, so I bought one of those.  I also
went for a piroshok c myacom (w/ meat) and one c kartoshkami (w/ potato.)
They were all very good, but I liked the piroshok c gribami best of all.

After that, we went home to the dorm.  Everybody else went off to
pack. (we had about an hour before we met our host families.)  I went
straight for the phone line and hooked up my alligator
clips.  I was delighted to find about 10 responses to my first letter
waiting for me.  One person's gatewaying it to a mailinglist and another's
toying with the idea of putting it up on the web.  I'm quite amused.

I packed in about 5 minutes...forgot a bunch of things, but that's
ok because we're trying to keep our dorm rooms for the semester. (just to
have some more crash space.)  Nobody got lost on the metro ride over to
the ACTR offices, where our families were waiting.  All of our families,
that is, except mine and Alicia's.  My host sister showed up before
alicia's, but I saw her the next day, so somebody must have shown up
eventually.  My host sister, Tanya or Anya (it says Anya on the sheet of
paper, but I could have sworn she pronounced it "Tanya") is very ...
western...  her sunglasses were hooked on her shirt, she was wearing a
baseball cap and blue Doc Martens.

We took a trolleybus most of the way home and walked the last two
blocks.  She bought a watermelon and some cake/cookie sort of things.
After we got home, we ate.  She works at the local TV station and plans to
school to become a producer or a director (the word's the same and I
haven't yet deduced which she meant...hell, I'm not sure I even know the
difference)  She told me that she had to go to work at 1 am.  She does a
bit of everything, if I understood her correctly.  My family consists of a
babushka (grandma) who's 60, a 45 year old mother who teaches at MGLU
(where I'mstudying,) a 23 year old brother who's a junior at mglu, the
aforementioned 21 year old sister, a 6 year old son, a dog and a cat.  I
have yet to meet the boys (both named oleg), the babushka, the cat or the
dog.  They're all in the country at their dacha.  My room appears to
double as a living room most of the time.  It seems comfy enough....we're
on the 6th floor of a 6 floor apartment building.  We've got 5 rooms...my
room has a balcony.  The only faucet in the house with hot water is the
shower, which has a massive gas heater attached to it.

Anyway, they gave me a key and then left me alone to veg for a few
hours.  I ended up going to sleep around 12.

hope i'm not boring you too much.

jesse