In Soviet Russia, abroad studies you!

So it looks like St. Petersburg is the destination next fall, assuming ACTR likes me--and they damn well better, considering I've been winning medals in their essay contests and speaking competitions for the past five years. Thanks to ACTR I've written Russian essays about how I was the love child of Mariah Carey and Pablo Picasso; about how the best place to live is jail because you don't have to work and you get free food; and about how I get all nostalgic when I go to Starbucks. I've also experienced a table full of judges, most of them elderly babushkas, laughing at me after I told them I had eaten dumplings in Russia. I still don't know why that was. The phrase "zagadochnaya dusha russkogo naroda" (mysterious soul of the Russian people) comes to mind.
I decided not to worry about gaining weight before the trip to Russia. If I live with a host family, I'll probably pack on at least five pounds the first week. When I went there the last time, the first words out of my host mother's mouth were "kushai, kushai, kushai!" (eat, eat, eat.) For the first few days, I didn't know what kushai meant, and I assumed it was a filler word--the Russian equivalent of "like" or "um"--because the mother kept dropping it into random sentences. "How was, eat, eat, school?"
Speaking of weight: how horribly wrong is it to look at an art project consisting of casts of people's bodies (from the neck to the hips), put on display in the campus center in honor of "Eating Disorder Awareness Week," and, somewhere in your subconscious, feel a little happy buzz at the realization that you're thinner than they are? I probably shouldn't be admitting that, should I?