14

Right--visuals.  This is my bedroom, and it's not really this messy.  I have to keep up the appearance of cleanliness when I'm living with strangers, after all.

The kitchen/dinner table, where I tuck into my victuals every morning and evening.  Eleanora Viktorovna prepares great meals--meals, that is, that consist of more than just one course.  Hot chocolate and tea every time you walk by.
The living room and Grandfather Clock.  These windows face Novoslobodskaya Ulitsa, which is busy pretty much 20 hours a day.

This is the baby Mozart piano in the living room.  If you lift the lid you'll find a bunch of papers, and I think it's too out-of-tune to play either way.

13

The title has changed, for I've moved into my new apartment.  It is, in a word, супер.  Super.  It is quite old, for one, like my university, from which it is only five minutes on foot, but it has aged in a very attractive way and the cares my host babushka has taken with it are everywhere in evidence.  Her daughter and husband are/were painters, and paintings crowd all the walls.  I ought to have some pictures up shortly, but I will hazard a short description of my living space: a small writing table with a lamp stands before a window overlooking Ulitsa Novoslobodskaya, across the street are similar buildings in which people are occasionally seen working, ramshackle bookcases made of furniture odds and ends line the walls under old oil paintings, the walls are some sort of olive, if i recall correctly, an old comfortable irregularly shaped bed not quite long enough for my legs stands opposite the table.  Quite cozy, and a place where I can finally do some work.  

Eleanora Viktorovna has been hosting students for more than seven years, if I heard her correctly, and she has pictures of them all lining the kitchen wall and tales of them all along with breakfast every morning.  Another student, a Polish girl named Monika, lives across the hall from me; we get along famously, for the most part, and she's invited me along to several outings with the other students in her program, mostly British, so my circle of acquaintances continues to expand.  

I feel good.  This week is our fall break, so I hope to make it out to St. Petersburg and some of the small very Slavic cities surrounding Moscow.  Still, expect more from me, because I now have the time.  

12

A number of odd characters on the metro recently. A fellow with no arms, his amputated limbs protruding from a striped t-shirt, an old woman wailing hoarsely with foam on her lips, a young man carrying around an old tinny boombox and listening to loud house music, swarms of dandies wearing all black. Standard protocol is just to bury your head in a book or listen to music that you can't hear anyway because the shrieking of the tunnels is so bad. There are times when the Moscow Metro in the name of V.I. Lenin resembles a nightmare more surreal than frightening, characters from Beckett strolling about. And then you emerge from Okhotniy Ryad, the Kremlin stands before you, a Ferrari is parked behind you, the streetlamps are gilded, the windows you pass reveal a wealth to which you could never even summon the courage to pretend, and in your stomach you are simply perplexed.

11

A frightfully busy week means, I'm afraid, a dearth of posts. Alpinism training with AlpClub and, luxury of luxuries, I've actually had two restaurant-prepared meals this week. Tuesday at one of Moscow's (and therefore probably Russia's) only Indian restaurants with some American students here studying theater, Wednesday with the Middlebury group at an ostentatious Georgian restaurant looking, strangely enough, like a pirate ship with a bucolic Caucasian vineyard inside it. A bottle in a ship. But there was a picture of Condoleezza Rice on the wall, and it's on the Arbat, so it must be well-regarded. I'll make a pdf of the blueprints and post them. It's a luxury to dine out, of course, because it's impossible to eat at Moscow's restaurants on less than $20--no free water, alas, but they're glad to give you Evian--but worth it all the same in good company, because suppers here seldom wrap up in under three hours. And the food is often very well prepared, and the menus are often very difficult to make sense of. But the wheel of fortune gave me lamb soup at the first and some cream sauce chicken dish at the second, so no complaints. Well, only one: the meat at both restaurants--perhaps this is typical--was made more of bone and gristle and fatty skin than flesh. Apparently they don't have the same chicken fattening facilities here that we do in the good ol' sun belt. But tasty, all in all, and, as for the Georgian food, a cuisine I've been meaning to try ever since I read Steinbeck's A Russian Journal, an addition to my list of favorites. None of the Americans here understand why there aren't more Georgian restaurants in the U.S., since they should be able to play the same exotic draw Thai places do and they're just as good.

Also, after scouring the RGGU website for her name, I managed to track down my Russian AT from freshman year, Natalia Polishchuk. A marvelous coincidence, really--she works at the same university I study at, which really is quite a small place in the enormity of Moscow. Like being by chance on the same city block among a hundred million. Natalia speaks terrific English--she had a copy of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland in her office--and she showed me some of her favorite spots around the university; I was glad for the opportunity to talk about Moscow and Davidson with her, because, in particular, she has a unique perspective, being a Muscovite and quite familiar with parts of the U.S. that aren't New York or Miami, and a sharp insight. This morning I sat in on her English class, where they're reading Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, had the pleasure of explaining who Captain Ahab was and why he's a significant figure, spoke a bit about the election, since they were curious, and, interestingly, got to see language learning from the other side of the glass. They apologized about their English, and I pointed out that my Russian was surely worse.

10

At Makdonalds--thought I'd stop by to check it out since it's the closest free wi-fi.  For old time's sake I ordered a double cheeseburger and a coke.  The cashieress smiled discretely when she heard how American my pronunciation of Coca-Cola is.  The soda was flat, but the dankburger tasted basically the same as those Lewis, Mark, Jeremiah, and I used to pick up at the Atlantic Beach McGnarly's after the dawn patrol.  They have raspberry pies here instead of apple, and the line is always four across and ten deep.  Kids are out front playing rugby.  They ought to be in school, though, so I don't know what's going on.  

9

A page from my travel journal:
"A month has passed, and I cannot stave off the conclusion that my life out here in Mitino is for the most part a pathetic one. Wasted time and physical softening at every turn, leaning upon my friends back home in the U.S. instead of scattering my craven instincts and penetrating the world here, as I so desire to do. Peculiar, because I feel more immediately outgoing, more prepared to play be the rule we should all play by all the time--nothing matters much, even if you do see these people again--than at home, for sure, but at the same time I'm paralyzed by timidity and, so I like to think, language. I can't tell if my inability to converse freely in Russian is truly a stumbling block or another mental fabrication. But enough! I'm convinced that the living situation in which I've been placed here is indeed a net thrown over my spirit. I simply live too far away from the Moscow I came to seek out. The prospect of 90 minutes on the metro and, worst of all, the wretched buses is, at worst, unbearable, and at best makes me content to sit here in my room and scan the same stale words over and over. I know it's the real experience, the real Russia for a large population; perhaps my constitution is simply not ready for it. But don't tell a Sao Paulan escaping the slums that he's living the genuine Brazil behind! It's not a point I'm prepared to be stoic about, for I'd much, so much rather be in the center, or an easy ride away, where the culture draws itself in. I've learned that, in the enormity of the city, people do not step up to solve your problems for you, and I gnash my teeth at the coordinator who stuck me here when other students got the golden ticket, but she's kind and, recognizing in my foul humor the weight this has become for me, wants to help me out. With luck, I'll be in the dormitory or closer to the center soon enough. I love my host parents, but the truth is I rarely see them, so I'm not getting any speech practice anyway, the food is uninspiring and insufficient, and I tire of cleaning the dog's shit off the floor. I will miss plundering their bookshelf for The Little Prince and One Hundred Years of Solitude [in Russian] all the same."

I wrote this a week ago. For my own delectation, of course, but I figured it would be a convenient way to describe my situation. I've painted a rosy picture for you all, you see, and although this was written at my nadir, when it was very easy to despise everything, there are times when I do not feel like celebrating my surroundings. On the weekends, when I get out into the city and feel free, everything is splendid; but to come back to Mitino and solitude after a day of classroom toil is often simply bleak. So I've decided to move, and in two weeks I will be living near the Novoslobodskaya metro station, a--I still can't process this--five minute walk from the university and immersed in Moscow central. My new hostess and the apartment are what I, at least, have come to associate with quintessentially European, and the room in which I will be sleeping looks out on Novoslobodskaya boulevard, wide windows receiving enough sunlight most of the day to make artifical lighting unnecessary. There's a small desk that reminds me of the kind Hemingway would have labored at standing right under these windows where I can work. And at the thought of what I can do, what I can see, with those three hours not spent standing on public transportation, my heart swells. A new chapter begins.

8

Another day of brilliant weather, supplemented with old guys out doing calisthenics in the park. Last night I forewent the concert, instead opting to see a performance put on by the theater students of Moscow University for the Performing Arts (or something to that effect--basically, the state art school). It's title was Black Square, or From Simple to Complex, and it was brilliant. Completely. Word repetition necessary. High school drama was enough to engender a run first, think later response to student theater, and I usually pale before artistic dance, but this was--well, very well done. For one thing, it was comic throughout, taking a clever and sophisticated approach to an SNL-style framework and using sound effects and music piped in over the black box's speakers very effectively. It was all in Russian, of course--except for one gratefully received scene parodying an English language class in high school--but a lot of it was slapstick and strange, modern dance, and I was glad to feel that I didn't miss too much. That's probably why I liked it so. An example: one short was a young man dressed up as a cockroach, in a brown tunic with feelers sprouting from his head, crawling about and underscoring the absurdity of an insect's path around a room, until the sound of a book comes smashing over the speakers and he wilts. Physical comedy, yes, but thoroughly pleasing physical comedy.

7

Best weather Moscow's seen in a month today. Around 70 degrees, with only a small band of clouds off to the north. And--rejoice!--no class on Fridays, so I went for a pleasant run in the park, even stopping to do some pull-ups on the bar that stands, for some reason, by itself in the middle. There were an unbelievable number of women with strollers out rolling around; sometimes it seems like women out-number men two to one here. The lingering mark of a violent twentieth century. I've been able to get quite a bit of reading done, probably to the detriment of my Russian acquisition, but I excuse myself: those bus rides are long. Just finished Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, trying to educate myself a bit, and am working on reading Joyce's Dubliners closely. Also, a slower project, reading Gogol's The Inspector General in Russian. Tonight there are a few good concerts, so I'm headed to the center.