Nizhnii Novgorod

I am in Nizhnii!

My university where I am taking Russian classes and living in the dorms is in an awesome city called Nizhnii Novgorod. I have been in the city for a week now and I love it! The people here are much more friendly than in Moscow and I love living in the dorms. The picture on the right is of me and another girl in the program Crystal in my dorm room wearing our "house coats" that some previous exchange students left behind. We adopted these house coats and we wear them all the time.

We started our classes last week; language and history. Language is really hard but the locals who are living in the dorms help us with our homework. We start doing homework and then the locals come in with music to have dance parties. That happens pretty much every night.

Yesterday we went to a Russian version of a sana called the banya. It was so much fun and we decided that we are going to banya every weekend. They have an ice cold pool in the banya to jump in and birch branches that you hit each other with to "beat out the evil spirits".

I also went cross country skiing yesterday! It was my first time so I fell down a lot but by the end I could stay standing for a few minutes. Next weekend we're going snowboarding I'm so excited!

Everyone's running around right now cause it's dinner time and they can't wait to eat borsch.