Yay for the overnight train trip. Sumana, Katie, and I ended up in a coupee with a Russian guy who mostly sat there and looked at us serenely, despite any attempts to engage in conversation. His name was Misha, and he claimed to be a programmer- I say claimed, because he really did look like a Mafia thug. He did tell me that "System Administrator" in Russian is "Systemnii Administrator," which at least sonuds plausible.
The hotel is *nice* by the standards we've gotten used to. I brushed my teeth with tap water for the first time in a month. Ended up in a room with Ross on the 25th floor. Tired as hell by the time we got there, though, after two nights of inadequate sleep. Even so, we started off with a bus tour... hit a bunch of nice viewpoints, including the huge Christ the Savior church (used to be a swimming pool). They dropped us off at Red Square. Many photos taken. After wandering off to get food, then returning, I had one of those "what the hell am I *doing* here?" moments as I walked out of the passageway to the sight of St. Basil's at the other end of the square, as though this object somehow was *supposed* to be in my field of vision. Yeesh. Speaking of cognitive dissonance, Olga Martiinyuk (one of the teachers) tagged along with the group, as did some peoples' tutors. There's something disturbing about one of your teachers, from a very regulated high-school-ish setting, walking around in a skimpy skirt and high heels with the rest (at least she's our age and nominally attractive).
After a bunch of wandering, we went back to the hotel for much-needed rest. A couple of us went to the Chinese restaurant in the hotel... the waitress, in a feat of profound linguistic confuzzlement, spoke almost no Russian. Trying to communicate that someone is a vegetarian behind two layers of language barrier is definitely interesting. I also had a Great Language Acquisition Moment... she had initially babbled something about giving us english menus, and rather than argue I just grabbed what she handed me, sat down, and read it. It took a full thirty seconds to realize I was blindly reading a Russian menu without realizing it. Yay!
Overall impression of Moscow relative to Petersburg... big. Goddamn big. Cleaner than I was expecting. I would've figured it to have a shithole look, like every part of New York I've ever seen firsthand. But the place was rather well-kempt, between the train ride, the bus ride, the bus tour, the metro, and the on-foot meandering. Petersburg is a wreck, and dirt, but there's a sense of construction all over the place (the signs saying "repair" literally every five feet are probably where I'm getting that). Moscow seems like it's on the flip side of that already, though the economic problems still shine through with the small children singing for money on the metro. Oddly enough, I'm mildly homesick for Pitr- this place is pretty, but too damned huge and hostile.
