That night, in the study Ivan was staying in, he sat at it's desk, writing. The notebook that he had been using before he and the others had awoken in this place, he discovered earlier that he still had it on him, tucked inside his jacket pocket. Although it hadn't exactly functioned as a journal, that was what he was using it for now. He decided he would record his experiences here in it, but not for the reasons Rakitin was taking note of so many things; Ivan wasn't writing these things down to tell other people about them. He was writing it for himself. Unlike Katerina, he wanted to familiarize himself with all of this as well as he could, unable to take the stance that he may of been better off not knowing. Because if he didn't, he wasn't sure how he would ever be sure that this all really happened to them, and the idea of a potentially debatable reality was something that sincerely scared him. Ivan was the sort of person who would sooner believe his own handwriting than another conscious person telling him, "it happened". The circumstances were, after all, so bizarrely unique, it was hard to picture at this point there being a time in which they'd all discuss this event as a thing of the past.
He was attempting to recap some of the things he'd discovered today; surprisingly, there were a lot of new things the five of them found without even having to venture outside. For example, the machine that had made noise outside his room this morning. When he'd gone out to see what it was, the kind elderly woman had said, "I'm sorry, did the vacuum wake you?" Vacuum. He knew the word in some sense. In terms of science, it was a volume of space that was empty of matter. Which made no sense in correlation to what she'd said, so he wasn't entirely sure he had heard right. In this study he'd found several helpful books however, one of them being a dictionary. It was there he checked for this word. Under the fifth definition he found a vacuum cleaner or sweeper. Interesting; he noted it. Other words weren't so easy to locate, because he hadn't heard them yet. He would draw his thumb down the page, giving a soft "ah," when he found something, and then would have to flip a couple hundred pages to the left, to search some more. It's an English dictionary, of course, so when there are inventions he's never heard of and he has to check what they're called, it required a lot of cross-referencing from what he did know. Thus, interspersed in the journal he was keeping were words in their English form, with there being no Russian equivalent.
Eventually he hit a wall on one term, and would need to ask someone in the morning about it. Thankfully, the language barrier actually worked in their favor for once, and made asking questions like what is this? easier; it didn't indicate the fact they came from over a hundred years in the past, when these things didn't exist, but just that they weren't aware of what the English word for it was. That seemed as good a place as any to stop for the night. Instinctively, he turned his head to the side-- he typically kept his candle on his desk on the left side. But, there was no candle there. Instead, there was a metal pole attached to the desk's side, and at the top of it was a small dome which encased a white globe that emitted light (something which wouldn't be invented for another nine years in their time -- 'light bulb' was one of the first words they all picked up on). Right... the man who lived here showed him this. Reaching up to the top of the dome, he felt for the knob that was there, and with a couple of turns, the light disappeared. Ivan's hand hovered there for a few moments longer, however, before he turned it a few more times. Light once again flooded onto the desk. He wasn't as obvious with his amazement regarding the inventions in this world as the younger ones were; the feeling was closer to some kind of quiet admiration for what mankind had been able to accomplish in this gap of time, a whole century, that had occurred in the blink of an eye for them. He turned it off again, shortly after that.