Day 1 - Things I forgot to mention

[evil_loki]

It's about 5am and I've been up since 3:30am, not quite used to the time yet and we were so tired after dinner last night that we just went straight to bed at about 8pm. We'll try to stay up tonight though to balance it out a bit, I think we're still sleeping on Australian time.

Anyway I realised after posting that yesterday that there were a bunch of things I forgot to mention, so I'm just going to post them here in point form.

• I got snowed on for the first time ever yesterday, I've been to the snow, but never when it's actually snowing, only when it's old and melting, this was just light snow coming down, and despite it getting in my eye a few times, it was pretty damn exciting. This was of course after only being in the country for about an hour.

• Being able to see where the plane is both on map and on camera is a really cool novelty and I spent a lot of time just checking in to see what country we were flying over.

• I'm still not quite sure why Etihad gave me a pair of socks in the kit they handed out, I guess they're for if you're not wearing any and want to take your shoes off, but still, very odd.

• The fashion here amuses me, so many awesome fur coats and tacky outfits, I think I'm still finding it slightly novel just to see how Russian people look, which is understandable considering I'm in Russia.

• I managed to get myself a watch, I was planning to buy one from the market we're going to today, but I ended up having a look at the duty free while still in Melbourne and picked up a really nice silver and white Pierre Cardin watch for $100. I really should have used some of the Australian Dollars on that instead of paying by card, but oh well. I need to get it adjusted though as obviously it's a bit big by default. I'm not sure whether I'll find a watch place here at any point, but either way, since I prefer metal bands I was expecting this anyway.

• We did find out that the bank near by will exchange Australian Dollars, but we might not be able to do that until Monday. That's fine though, we'll still be in Moscow and it'll be nice to not have it sitting there. I'm going to pay by card as much as possible though as taking the equivalent of $250 out of the ATM cost my almost $13 in fees yesterday.

• I feel like such a tourist making people speak to me in English, but whatever, everyone at the hotel seems to speak pretty good English which is a nice blessing. I'm sure we won't be so lucky everywhere, but it's a nice start when you're jetlagged. I'm sure we'll do just fine either way, it seems to be pretty easy to get through most situations with mostly gestures and minimal words, for the rest I guess we'll just American tourist our way through it. XD