whoo hoo!! success.. .lol the little thinkgs that make your day in Russia..

I'm in the computer lab that usually doesn't let you get on the blog the right way, but i had typed this enormous message to my mom so she could post it later if i couldn't .. but the technology god somewhere heard my pleading and just got frustrated with my never ending attempts to get here and it finally let me! lol ok here is most of the info from the weekend.

When we got to Lago Naki it was raining.. imagine that. It was a 3 hour bus ride to the campground, but the views were amazing. It is almost a 'resort' in the style that camping goes. We stayed in A frame cabins with wood burning stoves... not exactly roughing it since there was also a kitchen that cooked us 3 full meals each day. The only thing was the bathroom. It is really difficult to explain actually to make you truely understand....
There was no toilet seat.. mostly because there was no toilet. It was a metal building much like the ones found at track meets and such.. there were even stalls, and the floor was tiled too. But there were no doors on these stalls, and the toilet was seriously a hole in the ground. To make it better, this campground has a legend about "Yeti" too... so they had big footprint stones placed on either side of this hole... I'm not even going to go into detail just for the sake of the men that might be reading this, but ladies, remind me to tell you of the experience. It really was to a point that you felt you should use the 'civilized' bathroom but you would actually be more comfortable just going to the woods... which we did a couple times.
All in all thought the grounds were beautiful and there was a small pond with the most annoying frogs .. tons of them. They sounded like squalling babies i swear. I have it recorded but i'm not sure how good that recording it. There were a couple dogs and the cutest puppy in the world up there. The campground owner even said i could take her if i wanted her, but obviously i couldn't. I'm not sure how well a part german shepard/wolfish would make it in texas.
We went to a cavern nearby on Sat. morning, which was much like Carlsbad or something, but much smaller. I have lots of pictures of the mountain region here. That afternoon we visited a Monestary which is situated in the top of a mountain. It really was amazing. It had been detroyed in the early 1900s and has served many different purposes since (prison, school, hotel resort..) but in 2002 (i think) it was returned to its original purpose as a monestary. It is a Russian Orthodox, but someone said that the Catholic Church recognizes it... It was really beautiful and i also have a recording of the bells being played by hand.. now THAT was amazing. We even hiked to the top of the hill it was on to a natural spring which has been blessed by someone and is now considered holy water with healing powers, so of course we took advantage of that..
The next morning we packed up to leave and stopped for some to go white water rafting. I wasn't going to go because i didn't want to be cold and wet, but once we got there and i saw the river ect. i couldn't resist. We changed in to 'windsuit's and took on the White River.. named so because of the rapids. The part we were on was only a category 1, very easy but still enjoyable. I"m a little sore today... We got home and did some laundry, took real showers, etc.
Today we started class which is a total of about 3 hours. It is interesting stuff i guess. I plan to be on the consumer side of marketing and business so some of this stuff if really irrelevant to me, but i guess you take all kinds of classes you don't feel you'll ever need.
I think that is the short of what has gone on the last couple days. There is just so much it is hard to remember everything. Im keeping a journal and i think i've covered most of what was written there! 1 week down 3 to go. Thanks for keeping up with me. I really am trying to get a chance to put up pictures, but its so hard just to get a computer sometimes, you don't complain that it still uses hard floppy disks and is seriously from the early 90s...

There is not really much planned for the rest of today, some laundry and rest from the trip mostly... i'll have more soon - kait