The First Few Days

Well I've been here since Monday and it's now Wednesday. So far it's been quite interesting. I don't think my feel have ever hurt so badly in my entire life.
My room isn't all that bad really. It reminds me somewhat of the new dorms but less nice of course. I have my own room which is very small but I have a bed, a big closet, a dresser with shelves and a desk. I'm also on the ninth floor so I have a fantastic view of the rest of the main building and the rest of the city. The main building is HUGE! It can house 30,000 students, has two cafeterias, a few cafes, a laundry room, multiple kiosks that sell everything from water to meat, a bank, ATMS, phone services, clothing stores, and numerous other areas where students recieve their books and buy notebooks, paper and pens. The building is so huge that it alone has it's own zipcode! Jim and I (Jim is an English guy who is using the same program I am and toured with me the first day I got here with the director) were trying to find our way to the рыка (Ree-Ka) which is an open air market and we accidently took an entire loop around the main building and that took us the best part of an hour! This is why my feet are now killing me because I was wearing highheels in an effort to fit in and my feet just can't take that.
The way the dorms are set up are very strange. The entire building is connected but yet in order to get to the main sector of the building you have to go outside your sector of the dorm and reenter throug the middle into the main part of the building. Also they issue each student a Propeskt which you have to show a guard inorder to enter the grounds of the University. Then when you enter your dorm sector you have to show another guard you student ID (I don't have one yet so I have to show them my passport) and my Propeskt so they know that I actually live in that sector. If you don't live in that sector you must leave your ID with the guard until you leave again. I don't think they allow anyone without a Propeskt into the main University/dorm area (unless of course you bribe the guards which happens often and works very well). A few hundred rubles is all it costs to get your friends into the dorm grounds. very strange indeed.
I finally met Molly (a woman Dr. Denner put me in touch with) She, Jim and I had dinner last night at a Georgian resturant. The food was amazing. I had a spiced chicken, something with eggplant in it that you put on the bread this Georgian specialty bread that has egg and cheese in it. SO GOOD!
When I first got here I had very little time to do anything. I wandered around and found CafeMax where I used the internet to make my first post and then I went back to my room and 30 minutes later Josh showed up with Jim ready to take me to the center of Moscow. First he showed up around the main university building where we live, then he showed us where to registar the next day (which is a completely different building), took us to the рыка and down to a shopping center that's basically a mall but smaller and it has a продукты (products) store where you can buy groceries as well as cloths and other things. It's like a mall with a grocery store. The Josh took us on the Metro and showed up where to buy passes to use the Metro and he then took up to the Lennin Library and walked from there to Red Sqaure. I didn't have my camera on me or else I would have posted pictures but we are taking a trip to the Kermlin this coming Sunday so I'll be sure to take pictures then.
Jim and I went to registar for class yesterday day and since yesterday they've made us take two of almost the exact same test to gage our level of Russian. We start class tomorrow at 10:50 with another girl, also from Florida (She graduated from UCF) and it's to be just the three of us in our class. That will be very interesting indeed.