Day 1.5

Everyone:

1. Dima Bilan looks grosser than ever, maybe even grosser than you thought possible. The life-sized billboards of him certainly caught me by surprise. [If you don't know who he is, google image search, then thank your lucky stars you're not seeing what I am.]

2. I appear to look like I know what I'm doing. In approximately six hours on the street (to be fair, about two hours of that consisted of my loitering creepily in metro stations), four people have approached me to ask me something. Probably something legitimate, although I can't be sure. Possibly they all wanted information about how to get somewhere, maybe they asked what time it was, they might even have inquired about where I got my awesome shoes. But the point is, I have NO IDEA what they wanted, which leads me to number three.

3. I haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing here. I mean, I can use the metro, but that may be the end of my abilities. Make change? Nope. Light a gas burner from a match? Maybe one time out of ten. Use my cell phone? Absolutely not. This makes me somewhat hesitant to charge ahead with my interviews/carrying on a normal conversation with a Russian.


On the plus side:


Our kitchen is larger than mine at home.














My room is fantastic and contains...












a statuette of Ferdowsi!

















Our entryway: to the left the exterior set of doors, to the right Danielle's room. Straight ahead: Ten Thousand Persian Proverbs, General Linguistics, Means of Connection of the Signifier and Signified in Modern Tajik Literary Language, and so forth.