First, a note on the name:

So, naturally, it occurred to us after we decided on "5 devushki" as the name of the URL of our blog that one, exhausted, jet lagged night in McDonald's that this is actually grammatically incorrect. In defense of our combined years of Russian study, we were all too cross-eyed tired and dead to realize that when counting "devushka" (the Russian word for "young woman") it should be 1 devushka, 2 devushki, 3 devushki, 4 devushki, and then, when you get to 5, it requires the genitive plural: devushek.

Forgive us, Alla L'vovna and the Russian Department, for our grammatical flaws. We are going to leave the name as is though for two reasons: 1) faithful blog followers (a.k.a. our parents) have already bookmarked the blog as such and it is unnecessarily complicated to change the URL and 2) if you say it "five devushki" and not "pyat' devushki" (using the English word for 5, and not the Russian) we figure it's excusable since it's Russkenglish anyway.

Now for a proper update on all the things we have been up to! My apologies for the delay, we only got the internet working in the dorm late last night upon returning from Yaroslavl and by then I was just too tired to write anything coherent.

-- E.B.