My First Russian Lesson

On Friday I had my first formal Russian lesson. I'm pretty excited about it, because I felt like I'd kind of hit a wall. The first lesson wasn't really anything I didn't know, but it was good practice; and it's nice to have a formal time to sit down and study with someone.

I've known the alphabet for a while and I can read Cyrillic pretty well now, but there's a slight difficulty. The cursive. The cursive is ridiculous. I think it was specifically designed to make people who are used the the Latin alphabet go crazy.

It felt pretty good today as I walked home from school that I could understand different conversations of people. Ya panimayu luchshye chyem gavoryu ("I understand better than I speak"). I'm at the point where I can catch a few words in the sentence and I can construct and inferr the basic the idea.

On Saturday I went and tried out a Mexican food place just around the corner from me called "El Machete." I went in not expecting much. Everything is so expensive here, especially restaurants, that I was pleasantly surprised to find it very affordable. I ordered a burrito. It was horrible. It was NOT a burrito, actually. It was a tortilla with about 4 beans, weird rice, and a tiny amount of hamburger meat. It was an enchilada really, but it was topped with this weird Russian dill sauce. It really was awful, but at least it's kind of a cool place to hang out. I'm going to give it one more chance, try something different. See if I can find something there I like, because it's so close and it could be a nice spot to hang out at.