The cold is bearable. It takes me 10 minutes to prepare to go outside, and it's always a struggle to decide how many layers to remove once you're inside. I've also caught myself beginning to describe food primarily in terms of its temperature. As in, "This soup is so warm! I love it!" However, so far, it hasn't been so cold that I haven't wanted to go out and explore. (One Russian guard captured what seems to be the prevailing local sentiment on the cold snap I arrived with: "Winter ought to be winter.")
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Spurred on by my chilly ears, I went and bought the warmest hat I could find today. It was a good adventure: I went to a fur expo at a fairground north of the city. In preparation, I learned all the fur vocabulary I could find. If you were wondering, in rough ascending order by price, furs come from rabbits, raccoons, beavers, sables, mink, martens, foxes, and wolves. I ended up with a leather hat with big puffs of raccoon fur around the edges. Either because I'm a shrewd bargainer or because they were so surprised to see a foreigner there, I got it for about 70% off. (My bubby would be proud).
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I've forgotten a lot of geographical knowledge since I last spent significant time in Moscow five years ago. At this point, I need a map to get anywhere. However, there are lots of places that spark strong sensory memories-- I suddenly recall where something is in the grocery store or on the embassy compound, and I remember eating specific dinners in specific restaurants.
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I'd forgotten how much I get a perverse sense of pleasure from trying to talk about things I don't know the words for. Today, I bought honey (there are so many kinds!) and a big bottle of mead from a little shop. To do so, I had to have a conversation that started with me saying "I've never had Russian honey before. What would you recommend for a first taste?" and which involved many, many unfamiliar words (describing various qualities of honey and the process of producing it.)
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You can't truly grasp what an insane variety of shampoos we have available to us until you shop in a foreign language. I spent 10-15 minutes in the supermarket figuring out the words for 'oily hair', 'long hair', 'thin hair', 'dandruff', 'volumizing', 'shine' etc etc etc.
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My place is bare and it's strange to be living alone. I need to force myself not to just spread my things out over the entire surface of the apartment-- after all, who would care? As a side note, it looks like my household goods shipments may be hung up in visa / customs red tape for a good long while, so my apartment is likely to remain bare.
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I've had jet lag about as bad as I ever have here, but everyone's been understanding of the fact that I'm not fully functional yet. I impressed my work sponsor to no end by the mere fact that I stayed awake until the end of my first day here. Resetting my sleep schedule is incredibly hard, though, since it's pitch black when I am supposed to be getting up. The sun doesn't rise until past 10AM, when my colleagues have already been hard at work on the visa line for a solid two hours. Last night was the first night I didn't wake up at 3AM, and I still ended up taking a two hour midday nap.
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