Great! So this post is being written from my house in Russia because I found out we have dial-up and you can buy these little cards with roubles on them and pin codes and stuff to log-on. This is also how cell-phones and some house-phones work; they don't have much in the way of actual "plans". I kinda like it better? I dunno, I've never paid for an internet or cell-phone plan before so I don't have much of a standard for comparison.

Homestay: I have a host mom, a host dad, a host younger sister, and a host older sister. They are like 18 and 25, roughly? Mostly it's exactly like they told us it would be. They try to feed you ALL THE TIME, and most of the food is okay to good. You drink an amount of tea that makes any tea-drinking habits in the States you've ever encountered just seem sad. Every meal. Every single meal. Also between meals. And at things like, say, "events". They don't drink water. I was desperate for water and filling an empty pepsi bottle with water from the kitchen sink one night when my host father appeared and said to me "WHAT?! WHY ARE YOU JUST DRINKING WATER! HOLD STILL AND I'LL PUT SOME JAM IN THERE, MY BOY!" Then he did. As I stood there, he ladled a quantity of jam roughly equal in volume to Fraz into my bottle from a huge pot on the stove (I didn't think you cooked jam . . . ) Then we spent like ten minutes finding things to put water in so we could add jam. It was fun in a Twilight Zone kind of a way but I still have two liters of jam water under in a bottle under my desk.

We have a huge, huge, huge solid metal door. It has a big four-bar dead-bolt and a latch on it. Then we have another door with two deadbolts and a slightly smaller (only the width of my thumb) bolt. Then we have our last door. As far as I know, we never use the locks on that one.

I have my own room, which is nice. I spend most of my time in there reading books, because the lecture about strange ways to die (falling into open manhole covers, getting hit by ice, stepping on used heroin needles because I live in a bad heroin neighborhood, getting hit by ambulances which have been known to accelerate after pedestrians) included asking the police for help. Also it's not really safe to be out at night? Or drunk near people? This discourages me from living as though I were older than the age of 12. Home before dark. Read books. Do homework. Drink jam water with Dad while he explains his job where he makes tourist/sports centers? He talks ALOT about ski-lift design and business economics as specifically deal with ski-lifts.

At school they speak Russian all the time. It's not hard at all except for that. Even that's only hard in Siberian History (we can have like 20 pages of reading in these 7th grade history textbooks. even if my Russian was good, I still think I'd have to look up words like "cattle-herding" - though the word for "wooly rhinocerous" I was able to decode from context clues). Worst of all is the class about Baikal. This guy is not holding anything back and no one understands much of anything. We take the most hilarious notes that mostly consist of dates or numbers next to question marks (what happened then? is this how many tons of golomyanka nerpa eat every year?). Golomyanka are fish that nerpa, the earless seals endemic to Baikal, eat. Nerpa are one of the two really famous animals unique to Baikal. The other is a big tasty fish called omul. One day we learned a term than was defined as "a safe place for nerpa". Another day, trying to take notes based on the notes of the kid next to me, I looked over to see him studiously write "omul - delicious". He wasn't even smiling. I almost cracked up right in the middle of class.

We went to Baikal and saw nerpa in a way-too-small aquarium. Some of us ate omul. We went banya-ing. If you don't know what that is, it's where you sit in a little room and pour water on real hot rocks so that the room fills with steam. I actually thought I would die. Then you run into the lake. When we did this a week ago, the lake was 55 degrees. But it'll get colder. That part's fun. Also you drink tea (since this is an event) and take turns wacking each other with birch branches. Our RC told us you're really supposed to do it naked and rub honey on each other. Someone needs to alert the Frisbee Team to this; I think they'd like it. We also went to this town called Arshan were we drank vodka with these random boryati men who invited us to their table in this cafe-diner thing. We also went swimming in hot springs (Natalie complained that some guy kept watching us. apparently it was, like, awkward or something. we did manage to talk about it.) also we sauna-ed, which is the same except without steam and we jumped into a much warmer little indoor pool and this time we brought vodka. We had brought 3 bottles for two days for six people, so I figure that's decent enough.

That's probably enough for the straight event/situation-vomit. I miss Midd alot and all my friends. After the departure of the seniors at the end of last year and having to leave all the cool friends I made at Summer School, I'm actually considering making a drawn map of my friends. So I can remember them, and possibly begin a concentrated and life-long letter-writing campaign. You know those people who just have volumes of their personal correspondences complied and published and sold and quote after they die, just cause they're that cool? I could stand being one of those. I'm a little bummed because I don't actually know what to DO here. At college I was finally happy to admit that I didn't actually like extra-cirricular activities of any kind. I liked screwing around with my friends, being on the internet, going to parties (by which I mean our little dorm-room parties - those are the pinnacle of fun to me and I am only vaguley aware of what other people may regard as "actual" parties), and sometimes reading books. I liked doing history homework. That was what I liked. But here we have school, and we having being at home with your extremely-involved host-family, and we have transiting between the two while trying to remember to watch out for so many hazards they've warned us about that you start to think you're playing Frogger.

I think the trick is to actually just not be afraid. They pumped us full of all these reasons not to go out at night or do anything fun that is entailed by being a college student, or any young person, at home or abroad. So I just need to take some risks. Of course I won't. It's not like I'm dying to go clubbing or whatever, and I can't think of a lot else would require not being afraid to go out late at night or travel a little drunk to do.

Anyway, I hope you're all having a good time and you all better post or we're not friends anymore.