So in my mind, it's been the same day since Wednesday when I woke up before leaving Houston, and now it's 7 pm local time on Friday here in Tomsk. I got some sleep on the planes, so that's how I'm alive, but I'm not going to have trouble sleeping tonight.

It's also been a very...strange day. Even though I was only there for four hours, Moscow was half-stressful, half-hard-to-stay-awake, and I was pretty much homeless here in Tomsk from 6 am until noon or so.

The first reminder that Russia is a weird place came when it started snowing at 7:30 am, and continued off and on until 11 or so (though none of it stuck). Furthermore, I found that the guy I thought I'd be renting an apartment from apparently disappeared, leaving his phone number to some pharmacy. So I spent the morning in a cafe periodically calling real estate agents until I found out that the waitress had a friend who worked at a real estate place, and through her friend I found an apartment.

Not that that was easy, either. They waited a while to tell me that there'd be a pretty substantial finder's fee, and only after some heavy bargaining did the price come down to something reasonable (but still annoying). So only after all that could I actually sit down and relax in my apartment and watch Game 1 of the Cavs-Magic series with Russian commentary. It was a very appropriate end to my day (except for being at the internet cafe now) in that it was just like the rest of my trip here so far: strange, cool and kind of off-putting, but at least I learned some new words.