The State Library and Lenin's masoleum

Hello everyone, another awesome week in Moscow and I hope everything is going great for all of you as well! As you can probably guess from the title, this past week I went to the Russian State Library, formerly Lenin's Library. It's the biggest library I've ever seen in my life, and apparently one of the biggest in the world. All that AND it still mostly goes by the card catalog system. I saw a cathedral sized room of card catalogs, and that wasn't even all of them! Pretty cool, and the reading room is so big and beautiful with great views and a nice statue of Lenin reading a book to encourage you while you study or do research.
But even better than the Russian State Library, in my opinion, was seeing Lenin's mummy- a lifelong dream of mine. Once you get passed security and check your cameras, you walk right next to the Kremlin wall, where many people are buried, and finally get to enter Lenin's masoleum. It's pitch black in there, the only light being in spots where military guards stare ominously at you, chastising you if you whisper or put your hands in your pocket. You descend further down these stairs that you can hardly see, and finally enter his "tomb," where the leader himself lies in a very communisticly red open casket (that sort of looks like a sleigh). It was unreal to think that I was staring at Lenin's real body. I got to see him for all of 30 seconds and then was hustled outside to look at the graves of other Soviet officials, including Stalin. Apparently for many years Stalin had laid to rest with Lenin, but they moved him out back a few years ago. I feel like that might really piss Stalin off, but apparently your wishes are ignored once you're dead in Russia. Lenin wanted to be buried with his mom, but he's stuck for the ages being gawked at by morose mummy junkies like myself. Oh well.
Besides that I took a tour of the city in a bus, and also walked one of the ring boulevards around the Kremlin. That was neither fun nor interesting, our tour guide would tell us things I could've figured out myself, like "this is a statue of Gogol" (like we couldn't read the large, well placed letters G O G O L). It's so, so cold (about 40-50 degrees). I know I sound whiny but they refuse to turn on the heat until October, and my apartment and especially my room are freezing. This is exacerbated by the fact the Russians have this thing about "air circulation," and my "Russian Mom" comes into my room and opens the window when I'm not home! I go to bed wearing long underwear, sweatpants, and two layers of shirts.
School is going very well also. Our teachers are very personable, very genuine, and occasionally very insulting. One teacher the other day was going over a word list in Russian and asking what they mean in English. We had no clue, they were all political words, but he insisted you could derive the meaning no matter what the word. When we said we didn't know, he threw up his hands and said "did they TEACH you english in the United States? If you want to study Russian, you have to know ENGLISH first. Dont you KNOW english?" this from the man who told us that "one fourth is not the same thing as one quarter." Well, what can you do (except nastily deride him behind his back)...
I've got to run, I've got American-Russian club this evening! Much love, hope you're all safe and sound, feel free to email me at ell012@bucknell.edu. I only get to check about once a week (I'm working on wifi but lets just say it's going badly!)