oddgirl’s blog

Been here for about 23 hours and here’s my bullet points:

• Security at the airport was kinda lax. While waiting around for the driver to pick us up, we saw at least one guy just walk right around the metal detector. I’m less worried if about my shampoo being over 3 oz. now.
• There is a lot more neon here than I expected to see
• Very few people here speak English. Very few. And I don’t speak any Russian.
• The subway is hard. I flunked out of subway today: We bought tickets and initially failed to figure out how to use the turnstiles correctly (my co-worker’s thighs are now bruised). After getting through the turnstile, one of my cohort got dizzy on the very steep escalator and almost passed out. When we finally reached the bottom we tried to figure out what station we were at and what station we were trying to get to, but it turns out that matching Cyrilic characters on the station wall to the Cyrillic characters on the subway map is really hard. Finally gave up, rode the long escalator back up and took a cab.
• Cabs in Russia are not terribly legitimate. I think basically we got into a guy’s car with him and he drove us where we wanted to go for 500 rubles.
• Snow is beautiful
• I love pubs
• My co-workers are very fun to hang out with
• Moscow is pretty amazing and getting to come here is one of the coolest things to ever happen to me, even though there are other reasons that it has been hard.