: the adventures of valerie :

so much to write, so little time!  i'm still in moscow, leaving tomorrow morning to start the trans-siberian journey.  after returning the tickets frances bought, changing locations and trains, we have settled on going to krasnoyarsk (in the middle of the map below).  lots of tickets are booked up, so we're on a slower train... it'll take us about 70 hours on straight train time, in platzkart (the lowest class sleeper cabins, which has 54 beds in 1 traincar).  we hear it'll be a dismal adventure from the russians we've been hanging out with, but how can we say no to an $80 ticket?

here's a link to a better map, and another map which will give you an idea of what i've been trying to decipher while i'm here. i am getting pretty good at reading (sounding out the letters) even if i don't know what it means.  frances has been nice about picking out words that are english cognates for me to read so that i can be proud of myself when i recognize words that mostly look like alphabet soup :)

the past few days have been great. we went to chekov for the weekend (one of france's friends from when she studied here drove us around, let us stay with his family, and showed us around the small town of chekov about 2hrs south of moscow), and celebrated a lovely russian girl's bday at a campsite on the oka river, a few hours outside of moscow.  there was vodka and singing and dancing, how russian!  very fun, except that the bday girl told frances to translate to me that she can see the future and she had a vision 2 years ago that we would visit her, and that she saw that i would die!  geez.  buzz kill?  she said to stay away from this weird dancing guy and don't go swimming at night. i survived the weekend, luckily.  even with that, i am so grateful for the very authentic russian experience i had, between staying with a russian family and eating potatoes, and eating potatoes down by the river with elton john and europop-dance music blaring from different campsites.  one of my first russian words include "patom" which means "later," in response to calls to drink more vodka.

other than that, lots of touristy stuff here in moscow, including seeing the kremlin, st basil's church (everything looks like it's right out of disneyland--so colorful!), many WWII memorials, and history and language lessons galore from frances (i can't possible repay her with the 3-4 days we plan to spend in china. she's been great!). 

i wanted to share 1 random cool thing here that our buddy from chekov explained to us-- when driving, on coming traffic will flash their lights to signal that we are coming up on police parked on the side of the road!  how nice is that??  the police are so corrupt here, they tend to pull people over for anything they can and demand bribes, so citizens have united in this one universal sign to slow down.  i think we should start that in the US...

running out of time at the internet, ciao! i'll respond to emails later, sorry guys!