So I have officially been here two months now. Wow, that went fast.

In the last week, once again acting a tourist and visiting sights like the Kremlin, Lenin, GUM, VDNKh, the Cosmonaut’s Museum and even trying the Gulag Museum for the first time, I realised that while these places are still strange and interesting to me, they are now fundamentally part of my everyday life. And, as I learned when living in a hostel for a week- the dorm life has begun to feel like home.

I’ll reflect on the Cosmonaut’s Museum and Gulag Museum at another point in time, right now I wanted to do a bit of a disclaimer.

It’s going to be a busy month for me. Not only are essays and exams coming up, more friends are coming to visit, and SNOW is (hopefully) on the horizon, but I have also signed up for two blogging courses that I hope will give me an idea of developing this site, but also lead me to reflect on my experiences somewhat differently. As such, you should be able to expect something new on this site almost every day this month. I’m going to try to convert the challenges to Moscow- related things, but I’m not sure what’s coming up, so we will see how successful that is!

Task 1 today was: Introduce yourself, and take a picture of ‘home’.

I’ve largely managed to avoid this because I linked the blog to friends and family. Long story short- I’m a student, primarily English and German speaking, in Russia. For more or less of a year. Why? Because I signed up to do it on a Masters course. Why? —that one is harder to answer– mostly because I think I like being outside of my comfort zone. And I definitely like meeting new people and learning new things by doing/trial and error.

Why a Blog? Because I know people throughout the world that I want to keep in touch with, but time is lacking and time zones are challenging. Because I want something to return to when I need to reflect on my journey, and because on the way I want to create something I am proud of. And because I benefited from others’ travel blogs in the past, and hope I can help at least a few other people on their own journeys.

And by the look of it, my journey might be quite a bit longer than just this year in Moscow…