Last English for Some Time

So this summer I'm at Middlebury doing the old Russian thing and I'm not allowed to speak English, so I'm gonna put down a few final thoughts.

First, Middlebury is beautiful. I never really considered it while doing the college search but it is in an absolutely pristine part of the country. We're surrounded by small, forested mountains, the campus is all white stone architecture, and the buildings are all very interesting.

Second, I have awesome roommates here. A quick note about the room. My room is a quad and is quite honestly way worse than any Carleton quad. The first thing that struck me about the room was the apparently useless wall that divides the entryway from the kitchen. This wall is not only useful in and of itself, but it also has a window in it. It doesn't have a common room to speak of, just the entryway, small kitchen, bathroom, 2 singles and a double. I'm living in the double with a guy who's studying Russian and IR at George Washington and is very social and outgoing. The two singles are occupied by older men. One is a foreign service officer being sent to Moscow (OMG) who just got married, he graduated from Bates and majored in Econ, I'd guess he's around 28. The other roommate may be the coolest person I've met at Middlebury so far. He's Ecuadorian, but was born in the US, and is around 40. He lived in Kansas for a time about a year and a half, but is currently in San Juan. He lived in Kazakhstan in 1990 studying Russian but his group was targeted by anti-American factions after the Gulf War broke out, so he's here fulfilling his goal of learning Russian. He worked for Microsoft on the XBox team. In short, I couldn't ask for a better set up.

There are several FBI guys learning Russian, us college students have been gossiping about them the whole time.

Third, we watched an excellent Russian film tonight called "White Sun of the Desert." It's an Eastern, or the Russian version of a Western. It's got great dialogue, it's funny, and although the action is fairly amateurish it is effective. The interesting thing about the film is that according to tradition, every cosmonaut has to watch the film before going into space. This applies to everyone who intends to go to space in a Russian vehicle. Therefore, every single astronaut for the next few years has to watch this film before going into space. It was also banned initially, but Brezhnev loved it and debanned it.

Fourth, so I took this stage combat class and our teacher filmed our final fight scene. BUT he hasn't e-mailed it to us yet, so as soon as I get it, it's going up on the blog.

So yeah, I'm surrounded by kids who basically want to do what I want to do, and it's awesome. I've been having nerdy conversations about Russian lit and history all day, and I couldn't be happier. Oh, I also live across the hall from a UPenn distance swimmer, so we're gonna go to the Natatorium and train this summer. So you better be ready for the alumni meet!