10 April 2003

Today my Russian class walked to the train station to do some “on the ground recon.” I realized as we walked around, dodging small lakes of muddy water, that I’ve been so coddled and protected since I arrived and have slowly begun to do more for myself. It’s such a different experience that what I was in Costa Rica, when I did everything for myself from the get go. That was hard, I’ll admit. I realize that literally, I’ve been barely looking up very much, partly because of ice, but also b/c it’s like there’s only so much I can deal with at a time. Everyday I look up a little more and see something new – a store here, the vast horizon of high-rise apartment buildings, huge fields of mud destined to be soccer fields in the summer. I realize this is just the tip of an iceberg that I hope I can explore.

The other funny thing is that every time I learn a new word or grammar structure in Russian, I hear it, then immediately think, wow, what a coincidence that people are saying that today, right when I learned it! Of course, I realize that they’ve probably been saying this all along and I just didn’t understand before. Our language training is imminently practical and I think I’ll be able to navigate after training. People have been complimentary about my learning, which is encouraging.