15. Final (or not?)

So, the time came to write the final post for this semester. It will be again (see #7) devoted to the evaluation of my progress and hopes for the next semester.

The most remarkable for the whole semester thing is that David wrote me in 2d draft of my final essay that I had finally understood the importance of clear paragraph's structure and the topic sentences in particular. That really made me more confident in my abilities to learn, as I thought I could never learn these important things, and to write, as now I understand how to make my writings readable. Though, I still prefer more unrestricted and free structure to formal, but I realaise, that in some cases only formal structure could be acceptable.

Also, after this demester I filnally feel sure about my punctuation. I know that there're a lot of other rules to learn, and I made a lot of mistakes even in this blog, but now I just feel the ground under my feet when reread my writings, trying to find punctuation errors.

The other thing that I appreciate is that now I can understant standard american speech wighout any difficulty. Thanks to our great lecturer. However, I wonder whether he uses some special strategies to be inderstood better?

And the last thing is that I learnt that American and British English do have a lot of differences in spelling, and I should be careful about it when I write papers.

Thing that I'ven't learnt is about the complex sentences which I tend to write. I actually have no idea how it occurrs because when I proofread my paper I hardly can find even one of them. All seems normal to me until David returns my drafts. And I even don't do it to show off; I just do it because I do it. There is a lot of work to be done!

Now I have to talk about my next semester... I realaise that David is a great lecturer, and his syllabus for English 202 looks very attractive, but, unfortunately, I have to choose between David Atteberry course and the course of Stephen Hoyt who is also a great lecturer as I've heard it. I wanted to take his 202 course because he is leaving NES next year, and I wanted to use my last opportunity to listen to his course. Then I planned to take Davis's 300 course. But as far as I know now, David is also leaving Russia next year, so I'm in the face of a tough dilemma, and this situation makes me very sad(

Last time this year I say thank you for reading.

14. waiting for London

I've already posted some information about my previous New Year holidays in blog #10. This time I'm not going to spent my New Year in Russia again. With my family we've found an opportunity to visit one of the most fascinating cities all over the world - London. I admire it for many reasons: for beautiful inimitable architechture, bright cultural and entertaining life including thaters and cinemas, museums and shoping malls, and of course, it's famous transport - first underground system in the world and famous double-deckers.

I have a lot of things that I want to do there. I want to take a ride on a London eye, visit royal palaces, cathedrals and houses of Parliament, watch the royal guards and famous ravens, see a couple of original british and american films that will not appear in russian cimemas, explore the very complicated underground system, visit some shopping centres and many other things. And of course I will make pictures at every step. When I come back to Moscow I will definitely post some of them here and upgrade this post.

Now when I watch London photographs, I can only guess how it all looks like in real life. And I looking forward to seeing it with my eyes. If you have some advices to give or experinces from London to share, please, leave them in the commets below.

Thank you for reading. Pictures to be posted later :)

13. The last essay for the course.

I feel a bit sad about this post because recently I've ended my final homework assignment for this class. It means that our course has come to its end. Evrything seems sad when you realise that it's over... Well, now I go back to my essay that is dedicated to public and private transportation.

The main difference between this essay and all previous ones is that this time I had to use my knowldge and factual information provided in different sources more than my own experiences. That's why you should be more careful with essay's logic than you always are. It requires much more efforts! I managed to finish the assignment only because of my dedication to the topic which I've chosen. Special attention should be given not only to your essay, but also to the sources you're working with.

The best thing in my essay, I think, is that I included many specific information which could not be obtained by simple reasoning and thus accessible to everyone. I hope that readers (David...) will learn something new form my essay. While working with the sources I discovered that we've already tried to learn some useful mathematical applications to talk about my topic professionally (such as Brauer Theorem), although I still cannot understand most of articles covering my topic because of lack of mathematical knowledge.

I realise that my essay has plenty of weaknesses. Some of them are due to the reason of lack of skills I mentioned before. But most of them, I suppose, are again connected with explicity of my thoughts (thesis,  topic and concluding sentences!) and wandering away from the topic I discuss. Also, I'm afraid I used too mechanical arguments that cannot convince people to believe what I wrote about.

Unfortunately, only David, I think, could understand what I discussed here because he is the only reader of my essay by now. Maybe, when I get 3d draft returned, I post it here, so you can read it and share my opinions about it. Thank you for reading.

12. Public transportation

A couple of my course-mates (and even our lecturer David) have already posted blogs about traffic jams and things related to them. Main *heroes* of such stories are usually suburban trains (*electrichka's*) and metro carriages, large green or blue snakes jam-packed by people. Though I also experience a lot of discomfort while commuting to HSE/NES and back, I cannot tell you that something very extraordinary or terrible happened to me during my short trips which usually take 20-30 min. But as I'm a big fan of public transport, I have always dreamt about organizing some perfect transit system here in Moscow.

When I stuck in a traffic jam or riding in stuffy and gloomy carriage deep under the ground, I usually think what if we could travel not under or on the ground but above it. I think of "flying buses" or helicopters on sky routes above the city, sadly knowing that it impossible at least for now. But yesterday I came upon one interesting article in Russian Forbes which discussed another type of aerial transportation - aerial cableway. As it turned out, it has a lot of advantages: moderate construction cost, accessibility for passengers, and breathtaking views, which attract lots of tourists. Here is an amazing example of such transport system: a cableway in New York to Roosevelt island. As said in the article I mentioned dwellers of the island enjoy it and still use it despite opening a metro station there some time ago. More examples of such systems could be found in mountainous countries such as Venezuela or Switzerland.



Another beautiful, but too complex to construct example of underground system you can find in Wuppertal, Germany. I saw this picture more than 5 years ago and since that time I've imagined how things like this one could be developed in Moscow. But soon I received an evidence how such systems fail in Russian conditions: Moscow monorail system costed and still cost so lot to Moscow tax payers that government discusses now whether it could be closed and demolished. Well, maybe monorail is not the best option for transportation in Moscow, but I think that the main problem is that government (like adventurists) made a lot mistakes while planning this system and corruption strengthened its effect. So, I believe that new type of transportation could be introduces to Moscow to solve its transportation problems. The main point is that government must really do rigorous transportation planning if it doesn't want Moscow to stop in a transport collapse.

11. internship

Well, my opinion about this issue is somewhat confused because I do not actually know much about this topic, and because in Russia the situation with internship is quite different: I don't think that we have unpaid internships at all, but at the same time salaries that are paid for the work made are too low even to call it *salary* (it's better to say *pittance*); internship is compulsory part of education, and it doesn't free you from your diploma work. Now I'm going back to American system of inernship. I agree with the first writer more because, first of all, I also tend to think that unpaid internship brings mess to  the labour market, and, secondly, unpaid jobs always create wrong stimuli for empoyers and employees as well. I think all work that you've done must be paid appropriately.

I also share concerns of the second author: *caveat emptor* situation is really woth considering. At the same time author's overall positive attitude towards unpaid internship seems to me too optimistic and unsupported. The quots of happy students sounds a bit insincerely. Indeed, if your parents and you cannot afford to pay all the costs of unpaid internship without any payoff, you actually cannot apply to this vacancies. This point creates undesirable situation when only wealthy students can acquire the needed experience, and therefore get the higher position than their less provided for coursemates who can be actually more suitable for the vacancies they cannot get due to lack of experience.

Sorry for my confused argumentation. Thank you for reading.

10. Paradiso

The greyish view from 17th floor, NES building

A week of neither cold nor warm, neither sunny nor rainy wheather can lead anyone to depression. During the dark november evenings the only way to escape from the dreariness is to remember sometheing bright and colourful that happily hapenned in your life with a cup of hot milk and honey.

I usually dream of my visit to Sri Lanka last year, when from such "greyishness" we arrived at sunny and warm cost of the ocean. It really looks like a picture from paradise: coconut trees, vast sandy beach, and the huge wavy ocean, in which I could swim for more than 3 hours at a time.

My typical day began with waking up early in the morning and having a breakfast which consisted of dairy products (though I suppose Indians do not drank any milk due to their religion) with some local jam. Than I went swimming and swam all the morning to the dinner, which could not be refused because you desperately want eating because of the sea climate. Than my parents and I had nap, played some games such as table tennis, and went back to the beach. It got dark very fast, and beautiful equinoctial night sky with thousands of stars with the moon which beautifully highlighted clouds appeared. We went to have another meal, and I ended my day with browsing the net, talking on Skype or chatting in facebook with my dearest friends.

One day we went for some excursion to feel the local atmosphere. We saw elephant farm, drank pure Ceylon tea, and visited its former capital Kandy where British governor used to live. At the evening our group visited the beautiful gardens of the Cenral park where we discovered many amazing trees and plants and even found a tree planted by Yuri Gagarin :)

After swimming or eating nothing could be better than lying on the beach reading something interesting. Due to my school programme I had to read *Master and Margarita* there. It was very interesting reading, and the thing that amazed me most was that on our way back during the night flight somewhere in the sky over the Indian Ocean I read an end scene where Woland with main heroes also fly through the night sky! So under the moon and over the night ocean I could lively imagine how these events could occur. Mystic. That's how I ended my trip to paradise)

Thank you for reading.

9. two countries, one hope.

Most Russians think about America (namely, America - this title's used more often than the U.S.) as such a mythic country in which they never will be and never have been to, but about which they hear practically every day in the media. They listen to American pop-stars, watch American moovies, and some time ago they learnt the history of cold war at school. So, there a lot of stereotypes and prejudices raised by both our media and Hollywood. What is America? I think that the most popular answers would be: sheriffs, copps and Wild West, Chuck Norris and terminator, New York and skyscrapers, capitalists and the CIA... I tried to invent the most typical answers, still I realise that it's my own choice based on my way of thinking. Nevertheless, in my opinion, people see only these exotic things and don't see the main point. We are both the nations of dreamers, and here I want to present you my evidence:

These statues are symbols of the future where we'd like to live in: The Statue of Liberty, whose lamp illuminates the way to the American Dream, symbolises Freedom and Liberty, the sweet American Dream itself, and

Worker and Farmer (or "Kolkhoz") Woman, who are walking up to the skies of sunny communistic tomorrow, shows permanent dreaming of bright future in Russia whether we believed in God and Tsar or in Communism.

You can see that the Dream is indeed one for both countries: it's a Dream of hapinnes; it's an ideal towards which we are moving. Moreover, it is visualised similarly! both statues hold in raised hands items related to the future: a torch which enlights the world and shows the right way and a sickle and a hummer - working tools by which the bright future will be created.

Time goes by; epoches come one after another,  bringing new ideas and new idols, but our hopes and dreams are stay the same as they have always been for our people. It's a thing to think about. We are close in the way we dream. So, why don't we join our efforts in making the better future?

Thank you for reading.

8. The Book

The end scene.

You see, this is the last book I finished reading past week. I'd been reading it for more than 2 weeks because it was very difficult to read about all these mishaps that haunt the main hero, Holden, during his straying among buildings of New York. He wanders along its streets, like in a desert; he is so close to his home, but he is desperately homeless. Every injustice makes him suffer, and causes a storm in his soul. He is very irritable and he can involuntarily hurt the others. He is a kind of ethical tuning-fork for the author...

And for me... My sister, who'd adviced me to read it, said that I'd better read it now because later I just wouldn't understand it. And by the end of my reading I realised why. At that moment main hero explains what he wants doing in his life. He wants saving children, playing in the rye, from plunging over the cliff into the abyss, from the cruelties of the adult world. Now I'm by myself stay on the edge of the new life, but now I'm more confident about it because this book and its heroes will serve me like a compass in the ocean of passions, intrigues, and hypocrisy, that is espcially necessary right now.

Thank you for reading the post about my reading)

7. Evaluating progress

I feel my English classes like a flow that took me at very the beginning of my education, and never let get out from it. It is interesting to learn in this class, and you easily get involved by all these readings, lectures and writings, despite the fact that sometimes I find some kind of activities too fomal and not creative enough. Now this flow brought me so far that an attempt to remote all this learning process back to the early beginning and to compare my present and previous knowledge and skills seem to be rather difficult. And I just don't want to do it, because reflection always causes disquietude in me. Also, I don't know what pictures could fit the current theme of the blog. But nevertheless...

I think that the main thing I've learnt here is about comprhension. Firstly, I realised that my listening skills improved a bit. Every time I come to the class I realise that need to stretch less my atention to understand instuctor's speech than I did it last time. Secondly, I started organize my speech in order to be understood better. And the last thing I think I'm still failing to learn is to present my ideas clearly in writing. It is easier to provide your ideas in speech because you're using different kinds of support except the language proper.

F. Tyutchev wrote in his poem "Silentium":

How can a heart expression find?

How should another know your mind? 
Will he discern what quickens you? 
A thought once uttered is untrue. (brilliantly translated by Nabokov)

Well, but, according to the goals I set, silence is not a way out for me, and I still need to get over these insurmountable difficulties during all my life. The most intersting part of the task of better self-expression is to learn new useful and vivid words and phrases which could help me discuss wider range of problems with native speakers. The most boring, but still very important not only for writing in English — is organising my ideas in a logically clear way. And I hope this class and this programme will help me perfect my skills more. Also, I hope that the second part of our course will be even more involving and exciting, and as we've already learnt some basic information, the course will teach us to something brand new.

6. Monsters, inc.

I'd like to devote this post to my favourite animated film - Monsters, inc. I watched it not so long ago, I guess that it was about 7 years. I just came to the shop wanting to buy a videogame and bought a cassette with this wonferful film instead. Later I realise how lucky I was that saw this film. I watched it again and again, and soon learned practically all the phrases and dialogues by heart. Then there came other films and other beautiful stories, we put our cassette recorder away, and I haven't seen it for many years... And once suddenly I saw it on tv. I didn't have much time to see it, but made a point to see it again on my own cassette. Now I also want to see it in English :) 

Let me introduce you my favourite heroes:

Mike Wazowski, or *googley-woogley* as Celia (his snape-heared girlfriend) calls him, is definitely my most beloved hero :) He is of my favourite colour, and he has the same name as I have. In spite of his optimistic lifestyle he always takes things seriously. 

 

J.P. Sallivan or just Sulley (or Kitty, as Boo likes to call him), a top-level scarer, but caring and attentive, monster as well) They are the best friends and colleagues who are always together, and it always makes me smile when I see this huge and thoughtful monster with small talkative and smiling googley walking and speaking with each other.

Another main hero (-ine) whom you love from the first sight is charming toddler Boo (as Salley names her) with a very funny baby gibberish vocabulary :)





And finally, the most mysterious person of the whole film - Roz. She is a strict administrator for the scare floor F and keeps all the keys to the children's closet doors. At the end of the film it turns out that she is #001 agent of CDA - Child Detection Agency.

She also takes part in many *bloopers* (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG2T7upUVAk&feature=related) that are shown after the film. The soundtrack song - If I didn't have you - is just awesome.

I hope I encouraged you to watch Monsters, inc. if you haven't watched it before, or to see it again if you watched it.

Thank you for reading.

5. like never before

This summer I went on the most intersting and educational trip of all my life. For the whole week my parents and I moved from one Italian city to another visiting different places and museums in each of them. First, we landed in Venezian airport "Marco Polo" and the next two days we were floating in small and fast Venezian vaporetti discovering the ameneties of the "Adriatic queen". The next stop of our trip was in Florence, and this town (or city) with its countless galleries really made me think, I mean, ponder, study, discover and learn something new and compare it with the knowldge I had had alredy before. This story is about how I spent more than 5 hours in the Uffizi.

The first lesson which I learn was the lesson of Christianity. The stories such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Annunciation, The Coronation of the Virgin, The Baptism of Christ and portrayals of the Holy family inprinted in plenty of masterpieces created by Giotto, Duccio, Cimabue and Lippi not only gave me an opportunity to feel the history (as these canvas were painted more than 500 years ago) but also made me plunge into the source of the vast ocean of the European culture (to which I also belong but didn't realised it so before - I saw how our Orthodox culture and Catholic culture diverged - but they both have the common source). As well as I was given a good chance to learn many interesting English words :)

The Renaissance halls taught me the second lesson. Then I had to recall all the historical and mythological knowledge I had and add them to the knowledge I used in the previous halls. So, you can see, it was quite a competitive task! Botticelli, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Caravaggio (whose canvas I saw this winter in Pushkin fine arts museum), Rafaello, Perugino and Titian painted on the Christian themes and on Mythological themes as well. For example, Botticelli's works include The Birth of the Venus, The Triumph of Spring, The Madonna of the Pomegranate and already familiar to me The Adoration of the Magi. As  I visited all these rooms, I discoverd that there were more than 4 Annunciations and Adorations of different masters. My favourite Annunciation is by Sandro Botticelli (I mean, the one, which is in the Uffizi; later I discovered that he has another 2 Annunciations о_О), here it is:

The colours are warm, and portarayals of Gabriel and Virgin seem to me to be more sympathetic and heartfelt than anywhere else... Also it was on the desktop of our Russian teacher's computer :)

By this moment we had visited less than a half of the whole exhibition. I was still trying to see as much canvas as possible, but the amount of the mental work which I've alredy had done made my head ache. I was very glad to find there masterpieces of Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck and other artists of XVII-XVIII centuries, but it was very hard to find out what really were on those canvas...

Well, it's a good reason to come back there again, isn't it? There is still a lot to learn. But due to its richness my first lesson there I will remeber forever. It is never late to learn.

Thank you for reading.

4. Here comes the autumn

My calendar :)

This Monday was the first day of October, and rain and a cold, piercing wind were an unpleasant surprise to us, who got used to the warm days of the late September. Practically all the trees turn golden yellow from summery green, fading and preparing for a long dark and frosty winter. People have also been started preparing: they look for the warm sweaters and jackets, buy and lay in stock honey and cranberry or currant jam (which my Granny prudently produces for us in summer) and try to be mentally prepared when suddenly (it always occurs suddenly) winter comes (though it seems to me that the only people who are not preparing are communal services which started to repair (or it's better to say tinker) pipes with hot water..).

Cafes these days are crowded, because everybody wants their warm cup of berry tea. This week I've already been to 2 of them: my favourite 2-storeyed Shokoladnitsa (La Belle Chocolatière or Das Schokoladenmädchen - the cafe network is named after this canvas) on Kitai-gorod and Tsiferblat (Clock-dial-plate), where you pay for the time spent in it. And I decided to buy a french press - a very popular tool in such cafes - to make my own favourite "sea-buckthorn"  (as my vocabulary says) tea which helps me, I hope, to get the vitamins and gather the strength for a cold winter and difficult studies.

So, I want to ask you, how are you preparing for the winter? You can leave your answers in the comment section below :D

3. Homes, places we've grown

There is a place that I love with all my heart, where I feel special, cosy and secure. This place is my school where I spent 10 wonderful years...

Yesterday I came to visit my teachers with two former classmates who joined me later. We arranged to come by the time when all classes were dismissed, so that we didn't distract our teachers from their new students. As usual I passed through the school gate and met chains of students who came out of school laughing and feeling a great relief that this goddamn school is over for this day... If they could imagine what I feel now.

I entered into the square yard of the school, where once beautiful flowers and bushes were fading. Then, I went by the statue of "mal'chish-kibal'chish" (a hero of the civil war, the heritage of the soviet past, and though the historical context is quite disguisting, this story and this boy is an example of brave heart and true devotion - that's why we admire him) remembering that my classmate promised to hang herself on it if our Physics teacher would give her B for the final exam. I smiled to the school guard but it seemed to me that he didn't pay me much attention (maybe because I still look like a schoolboy). I went trough the hall to the stairs looking around to catch the changes that occured in school since the time I'd been studying there. But nothing  changed except for the one: a large sheet of paper, where the photos with the graduates of the previous year were, was replaced with the new where our photos are. All other things were the same as usual. It soothed me, made me sure that whenever I would come this place all things would be as they used to be when I graduated....

The snow-covered schoolyard in early december

Now, back to my school. It has 3 passages on each floor (the whole building has a square shape with a yard inside) and with a great delight I paced all of them inhaling the school air and peeping in opened classrooms. My destination was on the 2d floor where our classroom used to be. Fortunately my class teacher was there and we could have a nice talk with a cup of tea and some bisquits. That day I met a lot of my classmates too. 

My school is definitely my second home.

Oh, all that I know,

There's nothing here to run from,

'cause everybody here's got

Somebody to lean on... (c)

Thank you for reading.

2. The second post or what happened past week

{What's happening, guys?! So today we're gonna start with something really simple: (1+x)^n >= 1+n*x. Try to prove it using the method of mathematical induction :D }

Hello, people! :)

Now I'm hesitating over the choice which topic I'd like to discuss here this time. Since the free choice is the hardest choice for me as inexperienced blogger the best I can do is to describe some events that happened some days ago.

Try to find me in this crowd)

Last Saturday night (for some unknown reason I've remembered Katy Perry's song Last Friday night :) I was in Gorky park (and here I recalled Scorpion's Wind of change) enjoying German street festival where everybody could help themselves with Bavarian sausages (Bayerisch Würstel) and famous german beer with pasties (с пирожками :) - this only for adults, of course, children could delight in communicating with a big yellow Haribo (registrated trademark) teddy-bear who gave them packings of fruit-jellies (that actually had the same bear-ed form) for good behaviour. The highlight of the whole evening was the show performed by german singer Jan Delay and the orchester (with an eccentric name Disco Nr. 1) which plays with him over the last few years. It was absolutely fantastic! A singing (and jumping :) with the perfect backup accompanied by trombones, piano and guitars and plenty of kinds of drums! Form time to time Jan tried to interact with us with the help of a presenter but soon we all understood that no assistance is needed, language barrier was successfully surpassed) And at the end my friend managed to catch the thrown drumstick)

The Theater, Arbat street, 26

The Building of Foreign Department,
Smolenskaya ploschchad (square)

Next day I visited The State Theater named after E. Vakhtangov (famous russian and soviet actor and director who championed Stanyslavsky's ideas) to watch the renewed version of Shakespear's play Twelfth Night, or What You Will. And though it's a comedy (the comic effect was even heightened because all female roles were performed by men - it was absolutely hilarious when Viola (played by Andrey Kuzichev) in the disguise of a male was reasoning about how cruel the love may be, and how flighty women in love may be) there are some significant and serious points to be discussed. We laugh but at the same time we start thinking about the complicasy of love (what is love? baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more :), about how our identity can dissolve in it, about the love which can bring to madness, fear and spiritual insight. In a word, I loved it. After the play I could catch glimpses of night Moscow while I was bussing to the metro station.

Farewell, guys ladies and gentlemen ;) Thank you for reading.

1. my first post

Hello, World! (Special greetings to English-201 :)

I've never had any experience of writing blogs, so I decided to call this blog, as you can see, "My first blog". And this is going to be my first post in my first public blog :) Well, actually it is not public yet because of my privacy settings, but...

I was born here, in Moscow, went, as practically all children did, in a kindergarten (I like this word because it is so german :))) and had the time of my life untill I went to school. And though I enjoyed the eductional process I found it quite hard. My most favourite subjects at school were Physics and Geography. I love Physics because I've always wanted to understand how it all works, how our world is ordered. And Geography was my favourite just because I like visiting different places. It's very interesting to explore the world (again, it's just another side of  the huge word "world'') especially when you don't leave your home! You know, I'm not a big fan of trekking or things like that. And though the pure nature fascinates me I find exploring the narrow streets of some European town more interesting and pleasant.

Berlin Hauptbahnhof is something supernatural!

The most amazing experience of my life...

Actually, cities are my biggest love :) I've already been to such metropolises as Berlin and Rome and I was totally bewildered (in the meaning "amazed", if it certainly exists at all) by their history, culture and just by their structure or order, I mean, it's very interesting to see how a city lives: how people get to the work, what places they visit to relax or to amuse themselves and what supports the existance of a city. And here I come to the idea (though it's  commonplace) that it looks like a body: public transportation is the blood vascular system of a city, power stations are its heart, parks are its lungs and so on) Well, I'd better stop this lyrical digression :)

When the time came to choose the discipline which I would (and still will) learn at college, I chose Economics because it helps to explore the world from one more side, from the side of people who inhabit it. Economics shows how people make decisions and communicate with each other in order to become wealthier, how people are organised in one big system and how their decisions affect this system.

And due to the fact that our world is multilingual, the process of exploration will be much easier when you are able to use the language that is commonly understood (more or less). That's why I'm also very interested in studying English and Deutsch or German (both of them are also languages of science). I'm fond of reading English classical literature and watching British comedy shows. One of my most favourite is *A bit of Fry and Laurie* :) though for now it's rather challenging for me because you have to concentrate all your attention to understand fluent and sophisticated language. But I hope that this course will help me to cope with these difficulties (a bit).

My interests also include listening to the music, learning playing the guitar, painting and maybe something else but I can't remember it :)

I think it should be enough for the first time, so good-bye! I hope you weren't bored while reading this. Sorry for my grammar, punctuation etc.)

P.S. Welcome to Russia, David!