"I am from America, Baby"

I know my last entry was about the heat, but Iosif just said something that is very telling about both the heat and the government here. I remarked that I was taking a cold shower today because of the heat. His response was that I should savor it because tomorrow warm water will flow from the cold tap.

Why is this? Because tomorrow it is predicted to reach nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which in America means that the water is still more or less cold. They don't bury their pipes in Russia, though, so the piping system basically is a huge radiator. This is expecially true when one considers another little Russian peculiarity - hot water, like most other things here, is centralised. It is heat at a large water heating plant and piped alongside the cold water pipes. This is probably something that contributes to the selective hot water droughts in summer. It's simply too easy to turn off the water here. Some of the more conservative estimates that we've heard have put energy loss between heating plant and consumer at about 50%, making it a BIG DEAL (that is, it would be in a country that cared about it's limited environment had a limited environment).

But enough about heat. I've been coming to the realisation lately of just how much my Russian language skills have improved since arriving here (or rather, since joining the advanced class). This is by no means a statement of fluency - I am nowhere near fluent in Russian by any measure. However, my conversational skills have improved dramatically, primarily as a result of hammering a bunch of verbs into my vocabulary by brute force because none of my textbooks or professors ever really emphasized verb usage. So it has been quite enlightening to realise that for the last two weeks or so, I've been undergoing a rapid but hardly-noticed change from speaking in well-thought out phrases to whole conversations of sentences constructed on the go. I've even developed a sense of humor with my host family. It is an exhilarating experience to say the least when you suddenly realise that you are actually for real speaking another language, understandably, and with a native speaker.

Not only that, but I also caught a pretty major grammar mistake that Iosif made at dinner tonight (I didn't dare correct him, of course - Mummy didn't raise me to do that). It's actually quite understandable when you think about it. There are three main sets of prepositions used to describe location and motion to/from somewhere or something depending on the type of word being described - there are many exceptions to the rules regarding each set and I am always just throwing out prepositions and hoping something gets right. For some reason, "Ukraine" uses the prepositions that are usually reserved for events and small outdoor locations. It is the only country not to use the large, enclosed locations set of prepositions, and nobody has given me a concrete answer as to why, although I'm pretty sure it has to do with the origins of "Ukraine," which means "at the border" in Russian (and coincidentally, the preposition used for "at" is from the set of prepositions used to describe location in relation to people . . . go figure). So I was quite astonished when Iosif spoke like a normal person and treated the Ukraine like any other country; that is, he used the wrong set of prepositions to describe a motion within and then from the Ukraine. I hope the long drawn out explanation of the Russian language's locational prepositions has not detracted from the original purpose of this paragraph - to demonstrate that I am beginning to notice the mistakes of native speakers in their normal speech. It is not nearly as exhilarating as speaking more freely, but exhilarating nonetheless.

That said, we had a tour of one of Intel's MANY Russian offices today in Russian, which was kind of cool, but honestly a little weird (not in the least helped by the fact that one of our presenters left me her e-mail address at the reception desk). It was more or less a presentation of Intel - that is, propaganda for Intel. It probably would have been a little more appropriate for prospective employees or new hires, but I guess I really shouldn't be complaining about sitting in an air conditioned room and eating free food for three hours.

Afterwards we went to a park in the Krylatsky Hills (the same neighborhood where the office was) and had an amazing panorama of the city. This place is on the North-West side of the city. Most of the panorama's you guys have been getting are from the South. It didn't strike me until I saw from this view just how massive this city is. The population of 14 million probably should have been my second hint - the first should have been the drive in from Sheremetjevo after the flight in. The Metro map would have been helpful too. However, when I looked out on that view of the skyline and hardly recognised any of the buildings except for the business park Moskva-City and a few very distant towers or Wedding Cakes, it struck me like a slap in the face that this city IS Russia. Peter, by comparison, has 5 million people, and although I'm not sure what the exact numbers are for the rest of the provinces (that's their name for the "smaller" large cities), I know that Moscow is the largest by a long shot. It's pretty overwhelming.

I learned a lesson from that as well (I say lesson, I've learned it many times before) - IF YOU HAVE A SMALL DIGITAL POINT-AND-SHOOT CAMERA, TAKE IT WITH YOU EVERYWHERE YOU GO. You never know when you'll end up in Krylatskoje.