Cha-cha-cha-changes!

I realize it has been an incredibly long time since I have posted so I will attempt to fill you in on all the details of what has happened since I last wrote. 

As you have probably guessed by the title of this post there have been many changes upon my return to Russia. As some of you may know I went home for the month of January ergo the lack of posting. I figured most of you know what it is like to live in America so I thought that a post would be moot. So anyway I returned to Russia on February second and in true Russian style I found out on January 31^st that I would not be living with my host mom anymore. As you all are probably right now I was quite shocked. On the 31^st I received a facebook message from Ashlin that my host mom was sick and could no longer host me. Now, after much indecision in the days leading up to my return, I am safely settled in the dorms with Anna as a roommate! Her host mom turned a bit crazy in the past few months and so we are now living together.

The dorms are right in the center of Volgograd directly across from Мамаев Курган (the big statute of Mother Russia). While I miss living in a host family and Volzhskiy I am quite glad that I have a 10 minute tram ride instead of the hour and a half bus ride. Anna and I have a double in a suite with two other people. Our one suite mate is Zina. She is a Chinese teacher at the university and she speaks no English so we are using our Russian a lot more to communicate with her. She has lived here quite a while and has been very helpful while we get adjusted to the dorms. She has also generously told us we could use some of her stuff for cooking until we get everything we need because now we have to cook for ourselves. Fortunately we have a kitchen in our suite and we have been very triumphant with our cooking endeavors so far. For the past week we have mostly stuck to frozen pizza (courtesy of Anna’s host family) and frozen pelmeni, but tonight we branched out and actually made a meal! We successfully made chicken that we breaded with our homemade breadcrumbs and these delicious spices we got from the market for only about $1.50. With the contribution of rice by our other suite mate, Florian (I will tell you about him in a minute), we had a full meal that was quite delicious if I do say so myself. Tomorrow we plan to make soup so wish us luck with that. I feel so domestic!

Now onto Florian. He is a German teacher at the university from Austria. He arrived on Thursday and he is really nice. He speaks near perfect English and no Russian. So we have offered to help him out if he needs anything. We had him in our room for tea last night so we have made a new friend!

In other news we started classes yesterday and even had class today. Classes are almost all the same except for grammar. Our new teacher is really nice but works us really hard. We had two classes in a row with her today and it was just Anna and I so we really worked on some things that were confusing us. So of you maybe wondering why it was only Anna and me and the answer to that is: it is FREEZING COLD here. As a result of the temperatures today, albeit was warmer than yesterday, Ashlin’s and Sarah’s host moms kept them home. Next week we should all be there though because the temperature is actually going to be above zero. It will be interested to see how they like our new grammar teacher too.

Other than that there is not too much new we don’t really do anything really exciting that we didn’t do last semester, but if we do anything awesome I will be sure to fill you all in. Till that happens, if it does, I will bore you all with my everyday droning as often as possible

Пока :)