Well it has definitely been some time since I last got on here so I'm gonna have to sum up a lot of time in a few words. I'm in Moscow. It's great. It's not a place I would pick to live for a long time but it's good to live here just for the summer. It's really warm. There's still a little glow on the horizon from the setting sun past 11 pm. This past weekend our whole group went to St. Petersburg and it didn't get completely dark there at all. They call it "white nights." It was really neat. We went to a concert up there called "scarlet sails" which was a celebration of everyone graduating from school. We tried all night to flirt some tickets out of some of the graduating students and finally at about midnight we got some tickets. The concert had just started at 11 so it was still going on for a long time, and it was still light. It was a sweet concert. I'll be honest I think that people in St. Pete's are in general nicer than people in Moscow. We met a lot of random people all through the night and they were all really nice. Maybe because we were American boys....but whatever they were nice. We got into the concert just as MakSim was finishing up singing. She is one of my and Bryan's favorite Russian singers. We also saw Dima Bilan and a couple other good groups. Since it never really got dark we usually didn't come home til after 3. One night we came home at 3:45 and it was already getting light again and the street lights turned off (even though they didn't really need to be on in the first place).
Well after getting here we started school the very next Monday. Since I'm in the internship group I only have class Mondays and Wednesdays from 9-12:15. I really like our class. It's the first Russian language class I've ever taken and it's really cool to actually have someone teaching me rather than trying to learn everything myself. We have a test about every week and this next week we have a midterm. It's not difficult but I feel that I'm learning a lot. It took a couple weeks to get an internship for me because there isn't really anything in the engineering field over here. When I talked to the lady at the academy who is in charge of finding people internships she basically told me that engineering in Russia sucks and I don't want to do that. Another option that I had given them was to work in the energy field but she told me that energy companies are not open to foreigners. I can't figure out why they waited until after I arrived to tell me this, but I decided to make the best of it and try to find something in business. It took some pressing and prodding until I got a legit interview. It was at a real estate company called Knight Frank. From the interview it seemed like I would be doing a lot of translating which is not what I want to do. My resume had also been sent to Groupon and they had emailed me wanting to know when I could come in and interview. Usually everything goes through the office at the academy but nobody there was going to be able to get to it for a couple days so I just went about it myself and set up an interview with them. Just from walking into the office and sitting there waiting for my interview I knew that this was going to be a lot better than Knight Frank. I could hear people laughing and the atmosphere seemed busy interesting, while at Knight Frank all was quite and everyone was dressed up in suites. The interview was really simple and basic and they told me to come in the next day to start work.
Working at Groupon is awesome! They're still a very new company here in Russian and have really only been hitting it hard since about March of this year. There are several people here from Groupon International that are working on getting everything up and running the way it should. I am the assistant to the vice-president of Groupon Intl., Ole Ruch. He's from Japan and I really like working with him. It's crazy because pretty much he tells me to go do something but I have no idea how to do it so I ask as much as I dare and then I go about and figure it out. The best is when I'm supposed to go teach someone how to do something but have no idea how to do it myself!! It's really fun though. I like going to work and the end of the day just creeps up on me and then they sometimes even have to tell me to go home haha. I'm really surprised at how much they trust me with. I got to work on a deal the other day, pretty much take the physical contract and put everything into the company sales program, put together all the information for the advertisement on the web page, go through and proof it, etc. and when it ran it brought in around $200 grand in profit. I was talking about it the other day with someone and they said everyone was really astonished when they looked at it and saw that the deal was under my name haha. Honestly though I just did the dirty work, I didn't have to do any negotiating or anything like that I just did everything once the deal got to the office.
Well that's basically what I'm up to now. Just going to class and working away. Oh yeah, and I work Mon and Wed from 2-7 and Tue, Thu, Fri 10-7 but I rarely ever get out at 7 because there is usually something that I'm trying to finish up.
I'll try to keep this more updated so I actually have specifics to write about.
Peace world.....
