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.