| Moscow... is... Moscow.
I really, really liked Moscow.
But let me start my entry from a little further back, specifically from Tuesday the 28th when I got up at 4:00 in the morning to say goodbye to Natasha.
After I had gotten back from my string of trips in mid-July, Natasha had left for her dacha. Finally, though, I called her on the 28th to find that she had only gotten back from her dacha two days before but the next morning at 8:00 was leaving for a vacation in Europe until mid-August. In other words, I hadn't seen her in a month and now was suddenly informed that I was never going to see her again. But that was impossible. So, we decided that the next morning at 6:00 we would meet on October Square and go walking.
It was strange to go out that early in the morning and see how quiet it was. The sun had already been up for a half an hour by the time I left the house, but the only people out were people sweeping shop steps. I didn't even have to wait to jaywalk Leninsky, which is the main street of Barnaul, almost like a highway near busy October Square, as there were barely any cars. So I met Natasha in this empty city square at 6:00, and we walked until Russia Theatre and talked for two hours and said goodbye. It's still not connecting. Nothing is connecting... I say goodbye to people and I don't understand.
I got home around 9:00 and fell asleep until noon. In the afternoon, Yulia and I decided that that day would be a good one to watch Bowling for Columbine on Russian DVD, but we don’t have a DVD player so we called the Kondratyuks who said we could use theirs. (We had been talking about Detroit recently, in which she will live this coming year, and somehow got around to Michael Moore... and I mean, I can't let my host sister get sent to Detroit without knowing who Michael Moore is. I mean, come on. Stop glaring at me.) We started off for the Kondratyuk’s work at the southern edge of town at 1:30, where we waited for an hour and a half until the Kondratyuks finally finished doing what they were doing. Then we went and picked up Andrei Malkov, Veronica Kondratyuk, her boyfriend, and this Spanish dude whose sister had known Veronica for two weeks two years ago and was crashing in the Kondratyuk’s house for a week as he traveled Russia alone by train for a month. (He had sort of worn in his welcome at this point, and had stayed way longer than expected. Can you imagine how nuts this kid is, though? He barely even knows any Russian!) Then we all finally went out to Lebyashka, the little village-y thing where the Kondratyuks live, and watched our DVD which, judging from the way she was glued to her seat the entire hour and a half, scarred Yulia for life. Then after having finished the film and eaten dinner, Yulia went home to “study” for another of her stupid exams, but I was invited to stay the night along with everyone else at the Kondratyuks, which of course I did.
This was fun. We didn’t do anything particularly interesting, but it was just fun talking and hanging out (and eating lots of pizza and shashlik). I admit I also particularly enjoyed how Veronica kept making fun of the Spanish guy in Russian (since he doesn’t understand Russian) and Andrei kept laughing and then switching over and trying to defend the defenseless foreigner; it made me feel special now that I can understand all these cruel jokes about foreign people in Russian. (At Lake Teletskoye we were with an American woman, and there was only one glass of wine left on the beach: “The wine’s almost gone.” “I want it!” “No, we should give it to Gail (the American).” “What for? She’s not looking, and she doesn’t understand what we’re saying anyway! Give it to me!” This causes everyone to look at the clueless Gail and crack up – especially me.)
Finally late at night we watched Ocean’s 11 IN ENGLISH, since we all understand English; Veronica goes to school in Oxford, England, Andrei in Toronto, Canada, the Spanish guy speaks English, I’m… American, and Veronica’s boyfriend likes to pretend he understands. English is cool.
We got to sleep around 5:00, only to be woken up the next morning at 10:00 by Janna, who turned on all the singing animals in Veronica’s room until we had whined so much that we were awake. Then I had breakfast and left, though Andrei stayed to help Larissa and Veronica with finishing the PowerPoint presentation about Rotary Exchange that Larissa would be presenting that afternoon to an organization called “Open World.” Larissa had only told me the day before about this conference, and that of COURSE I would have to speak at it, along with my dreaded Rotary jacket, so after Valera dropped me off at Tsum (our biggest store) and I walked home, I slept half an hour and got ready for the conference.
I only had to talk for about five minutes and nothing of import happened during that, though something else did: a lady from Altai Pravda was there to ask to interview me. Hopefully that will happen sometime before I leave; I mean, I HATE press and presentations and so on, but I think this will be worth it just so I can say I’ve been in a “Pravda” paper.
After the conference, I walked straight over to Hotel Siberia with Inna Gorbutenko for the last Rotary meeting, which was extremely boring, though at the end I had to say goodbye to the Stroitels which was depressing. I also put in my Last Happy Dollar, though it wasn’t nearly as good of a dollar as the one I put in the week before, when I did my final presentation, but whatever. I finally got back home at around 10:00, when I suddenly realized that HEY, I was going to Moscow the next morning at 9:00am! So I packed and packed, and got another six hours of sleep, just like the night before.
Fortunately, this time I got to fly out of Barnaul airport rather than the big Novosibirsk airport, so there was no three-hour car trip involved. That was strange, as I guess I associate long grueling car trips with flying; when I left the States, I had to leave from Detroit rather than Tri-Cities, as well, so this was the first time I’d ever just hopped in a plane and not felt all gross and sleepy.
I was terribly excited leaving this time, as it would be my first time to The Moscow, and so hoped to sit with someone interesting for once so I could talk, but unfortunately it was some dude totally uninterested in starting conversation despite the fact that he didn’t do anything but play solitaire on his laptop for the whole trip. It did get interesting, however, once I got off the plane. Ilya, the guy I was supposed to meet, called me on my cell phone as I was on the bus from the plane to the airport, and so I answered but couldn’t hear a thing he was saying. I totally guessed that he was wondering where I was and so said I was still on the bus, but of course that wasn’t what he was asking. After a few seconds of trying to figure out what he was saying, though, I finally just said “one minute!” and hung up. I had supposed that the Moscow airport would be like all the other airports I had been in in Russia and so that he would be waiting right there at the door, but instead I had to go through this maze of halls until I got to the front of the airport, where at least a hundred people were crowded looking for people coming off the plane. When I didn’t see him, I called Ilya again, and finally after a minute we found each other in the crowd. (Man, I love my cell phone.) Okay, so this is the less interesting part of the last week, but I’m done with writing for now. Part II still to come… |
OH MY GOD! I just looked at my old Fotopage with the American photos on it for the first time in ten months, simply because I totally forgot about it... and... OH MY GOD! I WAS SO THIN!
