Frankenstein's monster wears Jimmy Choo

This is my week off and all I want to do is relax and watch movies. One truly annoying thing about my building is that there is absolutely no insulation from sounds in the hallway. It's not the people talking as they stomp their way up and down the stairs, it's that they do it at 2 in the morning while wearing high heels and feel the need to walk up and down a few times before they find the floor that they want. Many times I will be awakened by someone trying to open my door (sometimes with a key, sometimes just trying the handle) or knocking and ringing the doorbell again and again. I try to have a little respect by getting some clothes on before answering, but they are usually gone by the time this happens (remember, it's the middle of the night!!)

Being loud and rude is just a cultural thing here (so to them I guess it isn't rude) but at times it gets annoying. I can overlook the spitting and the nosepicking, but really annoys me is the way they can't walk in a straight line. When I first got here I was constantly having to avoid misguided little Asians from plowing into me. Now I have learned to just go with the flow and not move out of their way. It helps that I am a foot taller than most and have a bit more solid of a frame. Sometimes I get this short-lived feeling of excitement when I nearly body-check a particularly rude looking Korean man [I assume he is looking this way because he has just seen an incredibly handsome weyguk (foreigner) ] but then quickly realize that everybody is doing it to everyone else and I am the only one noticing that this is not normal (for me at least).

The only positive is that I don't grab for my pockets every time I do feel a bump (like I would in Czech) and if I do feel like picking my nose, no one will look on in disgust.

Big disappointment today. I was planning on taking trains from China all the way to Czech but I found out that a Belarus transit visa (just to go through the country, not stop and visit) costs 5 times as much as it does for any other nationality. So I am going to boycott Belarus and take a plane from Moscow to somewhere else (which will cost as much as the transit visa to Belarus!)