A few things I forgot to mention...

Unfortunately, this past week has been relatively uneventful in comparison to the others. We didn’t have classes on Monday and Tuesday because of “Men’s Day,” which is the counterpart to “International Women’s Day” and what the US celebrates as Father’s Day (except here it’s for all men, not just fathers). I’m not exactly sure why we had two days off; it seems like Russians just make up holidays to skip work and school. Anyway, to celebrate “Men’s Day,” or what younger Russians call День малчиков (Boy's Day), I went out to a Japanese restaurant with a few friends from GBT on Tuesday night. There, I met a few other international students from the other university in Irkutsk as well as a few Americans from the Middlebury program. Although it was exhausting to carry out conversations entirely in Russian, after a bit of sake everyone loosened up and it got a lot easier. I ended up having to rush home because my dorm curfew is 11:00 pm and I was at the restaurant until 10:30. My friends absolutely insisted that I go bowling with them after dinner and had a hard time understanding that I absolutely had to get back to my dorm or I'd be locked out until 7:00 am. Eventually they let me go and even paid for my cab ride home. All in all, it was a lot of fun, and it's been really great practice for me to hang out with my Russian friends.

There is really no other news for the rest of the week, so I'll take this time to go over a few notable peculiarities that I experience in my everyday life here in Siberia. First of all, by this point in the winter, we've gotten a lot of snow and the temperature probably hasn't been above freezing more than a few times since late November. Because of this, all of the snow has been compacted into a sheet of ice that covers all of the sidewalks. I've gotten surprisingly good at walking on ice, and I've found that it's in fact easier to wear heels because they dig in to the ice and provide some traction (and this is probably why all of the Russian women can wear stiletto heels all winter long). Secondly, because of the cold, it's necessary to wear both a hat and a hood at all times. However, I've noticed that wearing a hood seriously impairs your periferial vision and makes it very difficult to cross the street, especially since there are very few crosswalks. Wearing a hood also impairs your hearing, which is a huge problem when I'm walking to school with my Korean classmate and trying to decipher his Russian words through his heavy Korean accent and my hat and hood. Even on days when it seems warm enough to go without protective headgear, I've found that it's a huge faux pas to go without a hat. All Russians wear hats at all times, and if you're not wearing one, you get stared at by everybody on the street. In fact, my friend Ana got yelled at by an angry babushka who was very distraught that she wasn't wearing a hat.

Perhaps the most frustrating peculiarity is necessity to have exact change anytime you pay for something. When Russian businesses start their day, there is no system of having money in the drawer and so they usually won't have change for you if you hand them a 500-ruble or 1000-ruble bill. This is extremely frustrating because the ATM's only dispense 500s and 1000s, and most food items or other everyday purchases are between 10 and 50 rubles.

I guess all of this has become kind of normal for me, including the fact that I get my coffee out of a machine every morning for 12 rubles. It's really crazy how «at home» I feel after only 1 month. I feel like I've been living here for much longer, and my friends from my dorm seem almost as close as my friends at college. Although I tend to get homesick at certain points during the day, life has become pretty routine. I consider any temperature above -20 to be warm, have gotten used to washing my clothes in the sink (I will never again complain about doing laundry in a washing machine), and eating cabbage and buckwheat nearly every night for dinner. The random dogs barking and stray cats wondering around the dorm don't phase me anymore, and I've gotten used to practically having to push the babushkas out of the way to get on the bus each morning. My internet «dials up» and my tv only works if you position the antenna in a very specific way. Dear modern technology, I'm in Siberia. Find me.