Today’s Objective: The Mainstream Course

Friday I began the difficult task of trying to find a mainstream university course to take, that is, one with real Russian students. Its difficult for a number of reasons:

1). Расписение or the schedules….are, in the first place difficult to find and usually not posted until the day before classes start.

2.) The schedules….even after you find the schedule you still need to attempt to read it- this is almost impossible. Each schedule is arranged in various columns by time of day listed in roman numerals (you have to find out what time corresponds to what roman numeral in another part of the building and they are different for each schedule), class group and level, and most are filled in by hand in pencil. They are subject to change at a moment’s notice and there are no copies of the schedule, just one giant one on a bulletin board that each student needs to make a copy of in their own notebooks. Luckily a very kind девушка assisted us in reading the schedule for the history department.

3). The schedules….lets say you’ve managed to find the schedule, understand it to some degree, and are all ready and gung-ho to go to the class. Well, there’s a decent chance the class will have changed times without you knowing, or just have been canceled. They warn us about this before hand though it has yet to happen to me. However, as I will be trying out classes all next week I am eagerly expecting it at least once.

Its not really that bad but the first time you stand in front of a bulletin board for 20 minutes trying to figure out how to read the schedule it’s a bit disconcerting.

Anyways, Friday I tried out my first class. I had no idea what it was since the name wasn’t posted on the schedule. It turned out to be roman history and the professor was really nice and after class she asked me how I liked the city and I told her I loved being here though I was just starting to understand what “cold weather” really meant.

I really like the class and the people in it are very nice (I got the phone numbers of a few of them) the only thing is I’ve already taken Roman History and as nice as it would be to already know what is going on in the class I feel like that would kind of be cheating, not to mention it would be interesting to attempt to learn something new in Russian. Well, I have all of next week to see- I’ll be trying out at least one different class each day.

Хорошо, that's all for now, I'll continue this post later,

Счастливы!

-Гриша