Statues and Sunsets

Not really sure what to blog about today. For some reason, I haven't been in the greatest of moods this past week. I think part of it is being cooped up because of the weather. It's been the longest stretch of bitter cold (although they tell us warm weather is coming--in the low 20s next week! woohoo!) we've really had since we've been here.

I was talking to Maksim about accents and how you can frequently tell where a person comes from based on their accent. Maksim told me that when he travels to Europe, he tries very hard to drop his accent because the general sentiment towards Russia is not very friendly. I found this interesting because though we are several years away from the "old Russia" that many feared, we really are not so far away at all. And, unfortunately for Russians, I think a Russian accent is about the hardest kind to lose.

Oh, and I am proud (and a little relieved) to notice that a few things in Russian have become second nature. They may be basic phrases but I figure that still counts for something! I struggle in class because I get hung up on the verb conjugations and gender construction but I realize that when we're out and about actually using the language in its "natural context" it comes much more easily to me. That's not to say it's easy, but it's more practical. Hopefully, with practice, the conjugations will start coming naturally, too.

Today, Miles, Maxime, and I went to some kind of statue garden. It's a garden filled with statues of the pre-Soviet era, if I remember correctly. Many of them are old religious statues that were taken down at one point or another during that reign. One portion of the garden was devoted to statues of the heads of various Soviet leaders. It was beautiful because we arrived around sundown and it started to snow lightly as we were walking around the snowy paths with these neat statues. I've officially become obsessed with Moscow sunsets. Maybe because of the perpetual winter and the smog but somehow the sunsets are incredibly vivid--I think a large portion of the pictures I've taken so far have been of sunsets.

OK, I know that is a random blog post today. But I am feeling a little better so I figured I'd post again (because the world really needs to hear more from me...). If I think of more interesting things to say, I will post a more cohesive blog.

пока!