A Tour of My Dorm

I have decided to give a bit of a tour around the international trainees' dorm, my home for the next ten months. 

The building, which is the same yellow as the rest of the Vaganova Academy buildings, is tucked behind the part of the academy that can be seen from Rossi Street. The building is several stories tall and much wider in one direction than in the other, so it acts as a sort of divider between two courtyards.

Here is the entrance that we use to access the dorms. Inside is an office where the keys to our rooms are kept. The office is staffed by several women (one or two are in the office or nearby at any given time), two of whom I am standing with in the picture below, who help take care of us, make sure that we have everything that we need, and check that we know what to do and where to go. 

A hallway with stone tiles on the floor leads to the foot of the first of many staircases that go to the floors where the rooms are located. I have six staircases to climb before I reach my room on the fourth floor.

Each floor houses about ten students in three small suites. This is the view down my hallway from the top of the stairs. The door leading to my suite is the first on the right. 

I have discovered that the best place to get wifi when the signal is weak is in the brown chair sitting in the next alcove down the hallway from the door to my suite. That is usually where I sit while I try (and try again) to upload my blog posts.

The first room in the suite connects all of the rest, and serves as a multipurpose mudroom/coat storage area/refrigerator room/hallway that also happens to have a full-length mirror. 

If one were to see only the number of coats that we have hanging on the rack in this room, it would be reasonable to believe that about ten people must occupy the rooms in the suite. There are actually only four of us; we just seem to have an awful lot of coats! We are divided between two rooms, two girls in each one. My room is behind the door on the right. The large white box in the left side is the refrigerator, which is obscuring the doors leading to the rooms with our toilet and our shower.

This is my side of my room. I have a bed and a nightstand all to myself, and my roommate and I share the chest of drawers, shelves, and closet, none of which are actually visible in this photo (since they were all either behind me or too far out to the side to be in the picture). I am using my one outlet to charge my electric toothbrush, which I had to balance on a tall stack of books on top of my nightstand to allow the plug to reach the outlet in its rather inconvenient location nearly six feet up the wall. (If I stand underneath the plug, the outlet will be several inches above my head, and I'm a bit over five feet and five inches tall).

I have hung a poster with a picture of Gillian Murphy over the head of my bed for inspiration. (Gillian Murphy is a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater and I admire her very much).

At the end of the hall is a lounge area that is shared by everyone on the floor.

We also share a kitchen, which has a sink, a stove, an oven, a microwave, and another refrigerator.

Perhaps you have noticed, and perhaps not, but this entire school is a very yellow place. Almost all of the walls in the dorm and the school are painted in various shades of yellow, and the outsides of all of the buildings are yellow. I suppose that it's a good thing that I like yellow!