English - What a beautiful language!

...especially when accompanied by delightful Scottish accents! After ten weeks of misunderstanding and plain-old not-understanding; ten weeks of signs, notes, and menus in messy Cyrillic; and ten weeks of being unable to express myself or, even sadder, make puns, we arrived in Edinburgh and all it's English-language glory. We smiled at the Scots and they smiled back. It was a wonderful week that I happily spent catching up with my parents, exploring the city in the rain, and discovering the appropriate social context in which to say "cheers". Edinburgh is beautiful, friendly, quaint. I would go back in a heartbeat.

I have to tell a story about our return travels to St. Petersburg. It was not going to be an easy journey anyway. For starters, the Moscow-Domodedovo airport is a 45 minute train ride from the city, and we opted for the flight to Moscow and train to Petersburg to cut costs. Our total return travel itinerary looked something like this:

6:55am plane + 3hr layover in Heathrow + 12:45pm [5 hr long] plane + 45min Aerorail train to city center + Moscow metro + 3hr wait at train station + 8hr overnight train to Petersburg (leaving at 00:44) + Petersburg metro [+ 2 flights of stairs, for me anyway.]

We were crazy. Anyway, long-story-short, we ended up buying second- or third- class train tickets and didn't really know what we had coming. It was 00:35 (12:35am for non-military-time subscribers) when we boarded the train, exhausted after something like 16 hours of travel. At first it was just confusion. A long open corridor holding, I found out later, 54 bunks, awaited us, and after squeezing down the single-person aisle I found my bed number but no bed. The tiny thing pulled down from the ceiling at a ridiculous height, we had to find sheets and make it up (with people pushing past us in the single-person aisle constantly), and I shared the bunk with my gigantic suitcase. People just kind of looked at each other until the lights dimmed which was awkward, and I made a point to sleep curled around my wallet and passport. Survived.

Now we know why the tickets were so much cheaper.

Anyway, readjusting to Russian life has been more difficult than I anticipated. I waited in line at the post office for 20 minutes today and left because only one person was helped the whole time I stood there. Outside I remembered I had waited at least 35 minutes in previous post office-runs; I guess I have resumed having expectations of Western efficiency. Russia has certainly resumed its mission to impress me with its capability for inefficiency. I'm impressed, Russia. Looking forward to an interesting 5 weeks with you!

Until later, American friends!
-Emily