Greetings from St. Petersburg

Здравствуйте! As promised, I am writing from Russia. I have completed 4 out of 6 weeks of classes so far, so that means I'll be going home in just over 2 weeks! Even though I've been learning Russian for less than a month, I've learned A LOT already. The class I'm taking is an accelerated one that combines the first two semesters of college Russian into the 6 weeks that we are here. I remember commenting on the first day as we were doing our homework that I would "worry about the correct way to write all of the letters over the weekend" since we had just learned the alphabet in class that day. (The reason I made that comment is that handwritten Russian is cursive, so some of the letters look completely different from when they're printed). Little did I know that we would be learning verb conjugations the very next day. After some practice with those, learning some vocabulary and a few other things, we moved on to cases and learned them (all of them) in one class. Since then, we've gone over aspects (which required us to learn past, simple future, and complex future verb conjugations) and much more.

On a more interesting note, St. Petersburg is known for having "White Nights" in the summer, which have been interesting to experience. The sun currently sets at about 10:30 PM and rises at about 3:30 AM, although it never really gets completely dark!

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I must have gotten distracted because that's the last I wrote from Russia. I'm back home now and thankfully the jet lag hasn't been bad at all. I think I have my previous trips back from Asia to thank for that! Anyway, I'll be uploading another post later with mostly pictures since this one already has quite a few words. I am also excited to say that I will be posting more videos on my organization's YouTube channel about my experiences studying abroad, finding opportunities to do so, and about life as a college student, how I got there, etc. I will be sure to post them here as well, and I really hope that someone will find them to be helpful!

Thanks again for reading my blog, and I'm sorry that it's been so long since I last posted!

Victoria