Day 3!

My first day in Russia! Today started off with a good case of the jet lag, so I woke up at 5AM and couldn't go back to sleep. We had to be up and ready to leave by 10AM, so I had a while. I read a little bit and loaded some pictures onto Facebook and then I showered and got all ready. I did straighten my hair which was a huge mistake, it rains a lot here. A lot. Anyways, we all got up and got all ready and left at 10! We headed straight for the school where we'll be teaching at and were showed around by Rodmilla the first and Rodmilla the second, our lovely school supervisors. And Alla, of course. We saw some of the adorable kids we're going to teach and I fell in love. They're so cute! Seeing the school and where I'm   going to be spending most of my time made my 1000 times more excited for this whole experience! After the school, we headed to the Metro. The Russian money is going to be the death of me. I know that it has a 30 to 1 conversion rate. So 100 rubles is like 3 dollarsish. That was weird when I spent 100 rubles for 3 metro tokens. I'll get used to it! We took the metro to downtown St. Petersburg, which is much more beautiful then the area we're staying at. I got in trouble for taking pictures down in the Metro because the Russians don't like it if you take pictures of it because they want to use the Metro if there is a war and they need to hide and they don't want the enemy to know what it looks like down there. Funny, huh? Anyways, we got off the metro and walked to the Russian school where we're going to take Russian lessons! I didn't know we would get to do that and I am SO excited! Seeing and listening to all these Russian words is making me want to learn it SO bad. It's such a hard language though. So we'll see how I do. We got to the Russian school and the man there, whose name escapes me, made us some student passes so we could get into the museums there for free. Usually, tourists have to pay a lot to get into museums so it was a pretty big deal to get these passes. We had to wait for him to make the passes, so we just hung around the school for a while. We had lunch at the school too. We had Russian pizza, which was SO good! Oh man. I think I'm gonna like it here. After lunch, we headed to the hospital for physicals. Weirdest part of the trip thus far. We had to have 4 things done; an ear test, a body physical, a blood test, and a swab of... our anus. hahaha! I still cant stop laughing that that happened. Don't worry, a weird doctor didn't do it, we did that ourselves. Still weird, but not as weird as it could have been. The doctors who gave us the other 3 tests didn't speak any English whatsoever, so we had to play a very funny game of charades to communicate with each other. One of the guys in our group, Andrew, went to Russia on his mission so he speaks fluent Russian, so if the charades wasn't working out so well, then we called him in to translate for us. Thank goodness he was there. After the shocking ordeal at the hospital, we left to go back to the apartment, we had to meet our excursion coordinator Sveta. To say she was peppy is an understatement. She was bouncing all around, telling us how excited she was to see us and how much fun we would all have together. I could not be more excited! Tomorrow, (Saturday the 8th) we are going to the Hermitage (this HUGE museum. If you went there 24/7, it would take you 2 1/2 years to see it all!) and are going to tour downtown St. Petersburg! Get ready for a picture overload on Facebook. It doesn't feel like I've only been here for 2 days, it feels like a lot longer. But I'm so glad I get to be here for 3 1/2 months! London didn't feel long enough at all, so St. Pete's should be the perfect amount of time. до свидания!  (Think Anastasia when you read that one)