Here at last!

Wow! It feels like a very long time since I made the last post. It took over 30 hours to get to Moscow, but it was worth it. After the plane landed, we had to travel about four hours to get to Vladimir, the city where we are living. This is a picture of our group receiving the traditional Russian greeting, bread with salt.

I am living with a very nice family. My hostess is named Galina. She has two children who live with her, Anya, 17, and Sergei, 25. She also has another daughter Lena, who is 29 and married and has a little boy named Grisha. He is 6 and very funny! Only Anya speaks English well, so this is a challenge, but I can see that Galina is a very kind woman and she takes good care of me. Galina, Anya, and Sergei live in an apartment that has 6 small rooms. Most Russians live in apartments. Some have little weekend homes outside the cities called "dachas" where they grow vegetables and fruits and just relax.

Today we had our first full day of classes at the American Home here in Russia. We worked on our Russian language and etiquette. "Etiquette" is a way of saying manners. It is how you should behave. There are some different customs between Russians and Americans, so in order for us to be polite, we must learn the Russian customs. The Russian language is a little difficult to begin with because the Russians use a different alphabet than we do. They use an alphabet called the Cyrillic alphabet, and we use the Latin alphabet. So I am learning my letters and sounding out words, just like I had to do when I was in kindergarten! But it is fun. I just wish I could learn faster so that I could speak more to Galina. After lunch, we went on a walking tour of Vladimir. It was the original capital of Russia, before Moscow, and is very pretty and has an interesting history.

There are so many things that I could tell you about Russia, but I must be brief. I will try to only write a few observations each day.

- It is common in Russia for children to live with their parents until they get married because rent is so expensive. In the homes, most people do not have "their own" rooms. All rooms are shared, but each family member will sleep in a certain room and keep his or her things there. Right now, I am in the room where Sergei sleeps, but we do not consider it "his" room.
- The food is great! Lunches and dinners are usually salad (not salad like we think of it, with lettuce and tomatoes, but some kind of cold dish, usually with meat). Then there is soup. A famous Russian soup is borscht, made from beets. After that is the main course, usually some kind of meat and potatoes. Russians also like their dessert! There is especially a lot of ice cream, and I have heard that they eat it even in the coldest time of winter!
- It is 9:30 pm now and still bright daylight. Remember how we spoke about the longer days during the summer closer to the North Pole? This is an example. When I am in St. Petersburg, even farther north, the sun might not set until 1 or 2 in the morning!

This is already so long. I hope to write more tomorrow. I am having a very good time and learning a lot.