traveling to russia

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I'm going to study abroad in Russia in two days (yay!), and I could use a little quick advice from you all! It's mostly not linguistic, so I'm sorry for being off-topic, but I'd also like to screw up cultural stuff as little as possible.

First of all, I will be staying with host families. I have assorted housegifts, but I am not sure how to go about giving them. Do I put them at the top of my bag so I can hand them to the hosts when I meet them, or get them out later, or what? Is there something special you say (besides general thank yous)?

Second, open question: what else should I know? Do you have any random advice that I might not have learned in class, or particularly useful phrases? (I'm in my third year of Russian, and I'm terrible at conversation, but pretty good with grammar and a dictionary.)

Third, I'll be there over Easter. What is the greeting? I know there's one in a couple other Orthodox cultures along the lines of "Christ is risen, indeed he is risen" so I assume there's one in Russian, and I'd like to be able to share it if I have the chance.

Fourth, and least interesting, I've been advised by the program advisor that we will be doing some train travel, and trains don't fit bags larger than 21"-14"-7". My suitcase is 25"-16"-9". I haven't done much train travel and I don't know what our trips will be, but we may be taking trains from one homestay to another, so I don't know if this is going to be a big problem. Would it be rude of me to e-mail the program advisor back to ask (I haven't met her), or should I just start throwing out stuff to leave home? I really, really don't want to be rude.

Thank you very much for any advice!