I have arrived alive and well and with only minor jetlag. All of my luggage arrived on time, as did I. In fact, everything has gone perfectly so far with a few minor exceptions.

Most notably is the fact that the high-speed internet access in my hotel is *exclusively* wireless, and the old loaner crap laptop that I have with me only has a 100bT NIC (which, btw is not even built into the laptop; this thing is ancient). So for the time being I am borrowing Doug's computer and my access will be sporadic.

The other problem is that it is really freakin cold here. This isn't actually a problem, I just hadn't unpacked my big down jacket yet when we went out for a walk yesterday afternoon and my softshell was insufficient. There was a light snow and very low clouds (to the point of it being foggy) when we arrived, so we didn't do much sight-seeing. We just wandered around looking for resturaunts with English-speeking waitors (took two tries). We ended up at the humorous "Cafe Americanskiy American Bar & Grill." Food was good, if not really American. Decor was humorous—license plates for Colorado and Nevada flanking a... sombrero... yeah. I had chicken carbonara, a decidedly Italian dish. Quite good. Waitresses name was Nina, so I found out how to spell that in cyrillic. (HNHA, but the N is "backwards" and I don't want to look up how to do goofy unicode characters right now).

After dinner, at about 5pm, we both just went back to the hotel and crashed. I woke up at midnight, took an Ambien, and went right back to sleep. Perfect. This morning, we're meeting one of the LANL interpreters, Nellie, for breakfast. Then it's a full day of wandering aroudn Red Square and shopping. Fuzzy hats, concentric dolls, tombs of Lenin, onion domes. And freezing coldness. Wooo!