I'm slacking in the frequent blog writing department, my apologies.
Tomorrow we're going to a few towns outside of Moscow and I have to leave my apartment around 7 in the morning, so this post will only contain two short stories:

First, a story of an unfortunate event:
The other day a few students and I tried to turn in the paperwork to get our student metro cards. Our program director said we could turn it in at the station by our university, so we went there only to be told "No no no, look at this list of stations and go to one of those." We looked at the list and went to the next station over because it was on the list. However, once we got to that station, we were again told "No no no, look at the list of stations and go to one of the ones which are highlighted in green." We finally made it to an acceptable station and stood in line for about an hour. The ticket counter closes at 7, and we were finally at the front of the line around 6:40.
This is where it gets fun.
We tried giving the lady our paperwork which the university had already filled out for us so that it would all be OK, but she said we needed to write more things on the papers. She then said we needed to make a copy of our passport, but make it in Russian. I don't know about you, but I never learned how to magically transform a passport into another language when copying said passport. Meanwhile, the line behind us was full of angry Russians who I'm pretty sure wanted to kill us because we were stupid foreigners taking up more time than they would have. It was about 6:59 by the time we gave up, and the line of angry Russians grew angrier as we walked away and the ticket counter closed behind us.
Best part of the story: a few other students went to a different station and had no problems whatsoever.
It was a very Russian experience.
(Cue The Beatles singing Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da)

Story number two:
After classes one day some students and I were sitting in a cafe. A few guys were sitting at a table near us. I was closest to them. They had a bright yellow umbrella and kept opening it and I looked over and I guess the look on my face said "I want that umbrella" because they gave it to me. Then they started speaking to us in German, but we had been speaking English so maybe they thought it sounded like German? I don't know.
Moral of the story, I now have an awesome bright yellow umbrella.



I hope life is treating everyone well!
Until next time,
gooooooooodnight.