Language and Experience Help

[kenosis.livejournal.com]

Hello and greetings,

My name is Jason and I'm a Social Studies teacher from Chicago. I was accepted for a scholarship to study for a month this summer in Vladimir, Murom, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, and I figure I'd better try to learn a drop of the language as quickly as possible. I can transliterate from Cyrillic to Latin font but that's about it ... anyways, I went to the local bookstore in hopes of finding a good book or book-cd set that could operate as a crash-course in Russian, but there were a great many available. Are there any that any of you could recommend?

Also, as a Russophile that's never had an opportunity to see Russia, can any of you recommend anything that I should (or must) do while in anyone of those cities? Thank you in advance - from reading the posts on this community I am amazed at the warmth and friendliness you have, and I appreciate any and every bit of help I can get.