Greetings From Moscow

It was a long and interesting trip into Moscow, but somehow I arrived safely. Somewhere in this process, I seem to have completely lost my sense of time. One quick nap on my second flight somehow made it near impossible to sleep last night, even though I had only slept a few hours after waking up to drive to O'Hare. I arrived into Domodedovo on time and got a ride home from a driver who worked for Language Link named Alexei. Unfortunately he didn't speak much English and, despite my efforts, I still can not speak much Russian. You don't really realize your limitations until you attempt to speak to a native speaker.

One of the things I noticed on the drive over was that Moscow has lot of advertisements. They are on both sides of the road and even down the center of the highway. We didn't really get into downtown Moscow, but we did drive through the city.

Moscow has blocks of apartment buildings that look remarkably identical. Some of the buildings look to be 30-40 stories tall. Most of them don't have colorful names like American apartment complexes, but are instead designated a number (I am living in dom (building) 8 on Ulitsa (street) Malaya Kalujskaya in case anybody is interested). My apartment building is much smaller than many of the apartments I came across on the drive over, maybe 5 or 6 stories.

I share my apartment with an American guy, but he isn't here yet. I am all on my own for the next couple of days, which I will probably spend trying to learn some Russian words, touching up on my grammar, and maybe trying to do some shopping. On Sunday, I will meet up with the other new teachers and go to take care of some paperwork. Anyways, here are some pictures of my new apartment:











You can also find some other pictures at this site:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mingsb2