Sometimes it just takes a rainstorm

I had a feeling that yesterday wasn't going to be the best day of my life, but surprisingly it was saved by a rainstorm. In the morning we moved on to a new section of my Russian book...only passages and no more vocabulary, which was a little frightening but there's something kind of cool about reading about mythology and Confucius in Russian. Plus I tried these tiny little red berries that only grow in the forest here. I forgot their name but I have no idea what it was in English anyway. They were interestingly tart but not sour...very very small though.

The afternoon was what we were all dreading though. Because our class on Monday got cancelled, we had to go to class Friday afternoon instead. Plus, the same class had a conflict one day next week too, so instead of having double class like usual we had 3 sections of class in a row. Of the class that makes walking on hot coals sound fun if it meant you didn't have to listen to this guy anymore. I'm sure he's very knowledgeable but he is totally disorganized, his thoughts don't seem to be connected to each other, and the majority of the time I don't understand what's going on. Now, that's hard to endure for an hour. But we had almost 5 hours of class because he went 40 minutes over what we were supposed to have. At the end no one was even pretending to be taking notes or caring, it was so ridiculous. To top it all off, a HUGE thunderstorm started right as we were packing up to leave. I mean really.

So we waited about 5 minutes and it stopped raining so we ventured out to the metro station. Apparently there are about 3 drains in the whole city because we had to ford a river to cross the street! It was like Oregon Trail - to cross the street and potentially be soaked up to my armpits and lose the food and oxen or go around for days?? We made it relatively dry (at least from the knees-up) to the metro station. And walking through the river-streets made me feel like a little kid again jumping in puddles

But the other end was a different story. About 40 people were standing just inside the door to the station waiting for it to stop raining. It was raining hard but not too bad and I had my umbrella. Plus I was starving so I wasn't stopping for anything! About halfway home it started to rain a little heavier but I was only getting partially wet. In trying to shield my bag - which is thankfully somewhat water proof (I knew I chose that one for a reason!!) my umbrella was dripping occasionally down the back of my shirt but I was within 4 minutes of home so it didn't really matter.

Then suddenly it was torrential downpour. My umbrella was keeping my face dry and that's about it. My skirt was soaked, my shirt was soaked, my hair was plastered to my head and I stepped in a knee deep puddle. It was so pathetic, ridiculous, and completely unavoidable that I just had to laugh out loud. I'm sure all the other people running for their lives thought I was crazy as I giggled, soaked head to toe. But it was just what I needed to brighten up my mood.

Later that evening there was a party for the international kids at our school here. For a while it was just my group and a few other people but we had a lot of fun and made it back on the metro before it closed and we had to find an alternative route. Today a few of us are planning on heading over to a palace built for Catherine that she never actually lived in but that supposedly looks like Versailles. Hopefully it'll be awesome!