A Home Away From Home (or rather, the dorm)

September 27, 2009

I am amazed again and again by how small the world is.  Not only did Luke Davis and I go to the same elementary school, but apparently his mother does a lot of volunteering at St. Johns and my parents know her decently well.  This connection is on top of the fact that his college roommate and best friend is my dad’s best friend’s son.  And now we are both living in Moscow.  Weird.

I have pretty much moved into the Davis apartment.  My fellow MiMers are joining me here on a fairly regular basis to enjoy the oven, comfortable beds, and washing machine.  It is fantastic for me to be able to get work done while laying on a couch with candles lit and wireless internet.  I’m enjoying their apartment thoroughly and it is going to be tough to give it up when they return from the US in a couple weeks.

This week I finalized my class schedule here and continued the never-ending cycle of homework and applications.  I am getting very close to being pretty much done with grad school applications which is a giant weight off my shoulders.  I am still putting quite a bit of time into applying for the NSF (National Science Foundation) fellowship because they need me to be very specific about past and future research.  I also have less than two weeks until I take the GRE Math Subject Test.  I’ve convinced myself that my acceptance or denial from graduate school is riding on this exam (may or may not be true, but DEFINITELY plausible) so I’m trying to study as much as possible.

Saturday morning I went to the Bolshoi theatre to see a ballet with Dan and Christina.  We learned that if you arrive an hour before the performance there are a limited number of student tickets available for 20-50 rubles (<$2 !!!).  We saw Cipollino, the story of a town of vegetables.  It was very cute and the dancers were amazing.  The Bolshoi main stage is (and has been for 2-3 years) under construction so we saw the ballet on the “new stage.”  I’m bummed I will not be able to see the Bolshoi main stage because the new stage was beautiful and I can only imagine what the main stage looks like.

Week three of classes is complete and I feel like I’m settling in to a normal routine with not many exciting things to blog about.  Next weekend our group is going to Vladamir and Suzdal (two rural towns on the outskirts of Moscow), which should be a fun adventure.