In a new country, everything is strange, and forces me to learn many lessons, and to change my habits, rapidly.
I appreciated this when I started thinking that great entertainment, and even fine art, was represented by different fragments of multiple showings of a dubbed version of Casper, the Friendly Ghost. This was the best background that Russian TV could offer.
I had not realised how lazy about foreign languages, and reliant on tour guides and organisers, I had been until forced to rely on my own resources for everything I do. I have been aided by using a Russian phrase book (thank you, Lonely Planet), and today learnt how to say 'hello', 'thank you', and 'green tea'. I went shopping in a nearby shopping centre for groceries, and had a very light lunch there. The waitress was very patient and very helpful with the linguistic fumblings of a complete idiot. Trying out a few words in the language of a new country does seem to generate a friendly response.
One of the things I had sorted out as part of my planning was to arrange my communications - phone and internet - in what I thought was the cheapest and most efficient manner by purchasing an international SIM and preloading it with enough money to cover most, if not all, my trip (five months). This has already provided many lessons. First of all I have to reenable the data connection and SIM PIN every time I use the card. Getting this sorted out has taken me two countries (The Netherlands and Russia), a phone call to the SIM provider service desk, and multiple attempts. I do now know what I am doing in this respect. In addition I have found that I need to completely control how my phone links to the internet - no "always on" data connection; establish a connection only while I need one, and not a second longer; and to be aware at all times of exactly what I am doing with the connection. In spite of these lessons, loading the pictures yesterday completely blew away all my pre-loaded money. I had converted the pictures in my usual way from the camera. This was not a good idea - I need to apply all the size optimisations I know about for publishing to the web. What this means for this blog are that I need to publish less frequently; I need to include fewer photos; and those photos I do include need to be optimised to a very high degree.
I have also learnt that Russia is still very much a cash economy. Most places do not take plastic. In addition my hotel will not put a meal onto the room bill (the first time in any country I have ever experienced this) and required actual roubles. Only some of the ATMs accept Mastercard or Visa - most seem to be a domestic money transfer network only. Eating in a hotel is always expensive, but the cost of meals in Russian hotels seems to be expensive even by those standards. So I had to get out more cash to cover many of the things I had anticipated paying for by card.
Other lessons of the day: going one stop on the Metro, shopping, and then returning by Metro to the same station caused me to get lost. The exit from the northbound line, and that from the southbound line emerge in completely seperate buildings, seperated by railway lines, major roads, and different layouts, car parks, and connections to other places. Addresses in Moscow have a twist that I was not familiar with. The number on the road leads only to the city block, not to a specific building. The buildings in a block are then numbered in an arbitary manner (order they were built?). So my hotel is 41 whatever road, building 7. Just to make life a little difficult, the building number is not printed on any of their publicity material. Then the buildings are very large scale with many, unlabelled doors. This is how I visited my first Russian surgery - the door I went into first when trying to enter my hotel.
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