Vui ne znaete, gde mogy kypitz . . .

Telephone midterms are by far the weirdest things I've ever experienced.

Situation: I am renting an apartment in Moscow and need furniture. So I call an ad left in the lobby of my building. I ask this person, who knows no English, played by my professor, if they are still selling stuff and where I can buy stuff if they don't have it.

Tre bizarre.

However, I have to give mad props to the Slavic department because I am actually learning and using Russian. Not that I can have conversations with Dima, his mother, Ivan or Anna in Russian yet, but if I ever need to purchase furniture from them. I am set. I could probably have conversations about UCSB with them, and their alcohol preferences (which better be vodka or congac). My speech is ochem limited. But I am actually learning.

This is more than I can say for the Italian department, where I have learned absolutely nothing that I didn't know in high school. Oh, except for the passoto remoto. Which is fucking useless.

Now if only I had Cyrillic fonts on this computer, the title of this entry would look right. (Though I realized just now that I was typing the letters to make them look like the Russian and not how they would be pronounced in English. I spelled "gde" as "rge"--which is how it is actually spelled in Cyrillic.)

Long live the Octoberists.