24

Well, yesterday I entered and finished my first marathon.  I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, although if you're willing to prepare better than I did, by all means.  I would recommend Riga, however--my second time there, centered around that 42 km slog, was just as good as the first.  The city captures all of the rosiness of Eastern Europe without the painful self-consciousness the Russians bring to all things western.  The marathon, though, seriously, was a tremendous experience.  Tremendously, that is, difficult and fascinating.  You see, I was on pace through about 18 miles or so and felt strong as an ox, and then--I don't remember very clearly the moment, but I know it happened--my body simply ran out of calories.  Absolutely nothing left in the tank.  The effect was almost instantaneous, like being bludgeoned.  My longest run ever before this was 17 miles two years ago with Sam Morris at good ol' Davidson College, so everything after that was unexplored territory, and everything after 20 was like running on the moon.  That's about how slow I was going as well.  At some point early on I realized what a pathetic undertaking the marathon is, from one perspective: I had stopped to take a piss, and as I swerved back on to the course to join all the half-marathoners I thought, as I very well should have: "Okay, get back into the race, settle back into your pace"--as if I were running a mile, you know?  A second later I realized that I was running about 7 minute per mile pace--warm-up pace.  And that was my goal for the whole thing.  When I say pathetic I mean pathos; if I learned anything it's that, if this was hard for me, an eight-year runner, I ought to have the utmost respect for everyone who signs up.  

The most interesting game of all was mental.  At various points I contemplated giving up running entirely, Thanksgiving feasts, kilometers vs. miles, Kenyans, Moby Dick, everything, like a mad wheel of fortune that kept spinning faster the more my physical functions decelerated.  Finally I finished and enjoyed what must be the greatest reward of finishing a marathon: absolute liberation.  I felt absolutely free, because I didn't care about anything but sitting down somewhere and eating for a long time.  If I had had to vomit, I would have done so right there without a thought of it.  If I wanted to stretch, I would sit right down there on the ground and stretch.  My legs, of course, are killing me, but I didn't incur any stress fractures, and they ought to be better tomorrow.

I'm coming back to the U.S. in a week.  Talk to you all soon.

23

some things i learned from anton pavlovich

1

We descry on a drumlin

a figure in outline

who's tendriling earbuds

like crazy.

The skyline

against her

the color of iPod commercials.

And

lo

from

some

speakers

embedded

in

mold

a

man

shrieks

it

"Are You Gon Na Be My Girl?!"

2

'But best of all I'd like to live right here'

he said and pointered out the upper left

indention of convection currents' trails.

'The biggest vacuum cleaner there could be.

You see it's here, the scientists report--

the phatic past phantasmagoria,

the liver, magma, flash obsidion.'

I sat in Moscow, insofar as I

could find it, warming bones and marrow fat

within his upper left and molten bend--

a Soviet radiator drying socks--

and let the whole collection ooze and pour

about my head, corn syrup lava caught

throughout my hair before I arch my neck,

allow the gak to probe my back and send

eruptions of warm shivers to my limbs.

At last the past phantasmagoria:

in sum no more than a distraction's scab.

22

Last week I was drifting around Sokol'niki and found myself in the middle of a huge red-clad throng yelling obscenities.  Actually I wasn't drifting at all; I went there on purpose to see a hockey match with my friend Marina and her husband, Alyosha.  Just, it was such a startling experience.   It was a playoff game between Moscow's Spartak, in red and backed by thousands of drunken bull muzhiks, and Petersburg's SKA, whose side boasted about 40 fans down from Leningrad, in blue and spirited, but a bit cowed by all that angry flesh.  Since Marina's husband is from Petersburg, and they're the ones who invited me, we were going for SKA, and sitting in the small section at the end of the stadium reserved for enemies.  A riot-armored chain of Russian swat officers formed a circle around our little section to make sure nothing unpleasant went down just because of what was happening out on the ice.  For, sitting there--and this was the strangest thing in comparison to sports in the U.S., where it seems to me fans mostly keep things civil and the fights that do break out are between Ron Artest and Pacers fans--I never got over the impression that all those Spartak fans in red there giving us fingers, singing "We will, we will, f--- you" (you see, even your average Russian snow shoveler has enough grasp of English to fill that one out), howling, would surely have beaten us to death otherwise.   Not least of all because, well aware that they had a role to fulfill, our SKA fans would return these epithets with some of a similar strain aimed at Moscow.  Probably for the best, SKA, after being up 2-0 in the first period, went down 3-2 under a deluge of slapshots from a captain named Rybin, or Fishman.  As far as the hockey goes, you are all probably wondering if I even know the rules.  Well, no, not really, I can't say I do, beyond a very primitive understanding of penalty boxes and holding your stick up too high.  But I enjoyed it.  Quite a bit.  I won't say more because there's nothing more intelligent to say about it.  The whole experience really was a great one, so much enthusiasm and unbridled passion, but it was a bit tempered by the fact that the police held us at the stadium for an hour after the end of the match to allow all the jubilant Spartak would be-batterers to disperse.  And then, rather than simply walking us to the metro, the cops herded us all onto a bus headed to Petersburg, despite our appeals of "we live in Moscow!"  I seriously thought for a bit that I would find myself in Peter the next morning.  Finally, instead of dropping us off at a metro--any metro, please!--they just pulled over onto the side of a highway and let us out.  When I asked Marina and Lyosha why they didn't just continue on until they drove by a metro when it would cost zero additional effort, she returned, "In Russia we do everything one way, and that way is-- ass."  

21

Every day I wake up, eat some muesli that Eleanora Viktorovna has set out for me the night before, drink a cup of Nescafe, check my email, and set out on a run to the detskii (children's) park that is a couple of blocks away.  Training in winter is a bear; if it's cold I can only make it through five loops around the park; if it's only around zero C I'll run some more, but either way I've got to run through snow and over four months of icemud.  I used to complain about running on the beach through sand.  But leaving the apartment every day for a run is the best thing I can do to remind myself that I'm responsible for molding myself.  The Stockholm Marathon is May 30th.  It feels like winter started just about right after I got here, and I know we've got at least a month and half to go.  That makes it about six months.  I've been wearing the same crummy ski jacket for six months.  I go to the indoor skatepark when I can make it all the way out there--it's about an hour's journey from the center--but that only reminds me how badly I want to skateboard outside on roads without that disgusting ice aggregate.  In short, I've never looked forward to spring so much.  In fact, in Florida I used to lament spring's approach, because that just meant that summer was two weeks away.  

So the weather is wearing me down a bit, but otherwise I'm doing fantastic.  My Russian continues to chart progress.  I've gotten to the point where I can comfortably read texts and often divine unfamiliar words from their stems.  I'm in classes on "The Newest Russian Literature," "Russian Poetry of the Silver Age," and "History of 20th Century Russia."  And I'm taking German.  Most crucially, I've really developed a great circle of friends and am having loads of adventures.  There will be stories for all of you.  I'm planning on coming back to the great U.S.A. before June 4th to see my little brother graduate.  I can't wait to speak English again, at least for a little while.  Every time I speak it here I feel like I've lost half of its richness.  

20

Uh, huh

I've got quite a bit of catching up to do.  The rest of the Middlebury students left town around December 20th, after our final exam of the semester, so it's just been me and a Virginian named Robert Frasco and a steadily expanding circle of Russians and internationals here through Christmas, New Year's, Orthodox Christmas, Old New Year, and now the start of a new semester.  A history built on two calendars means twice as many holidays, and Moscow essentially shuts down, or stays up all night for two weeks straight, depending on how you look at it.  I labored under cloudy skies on applications and projects and reading novels and when the sun set went off looking for other stuff to do.  Eleanora Viktorovna and I have become quite good at telling each other stories.  On Jan 7th, Orthodox Christmas, I flew out of Moscow at 5:30 am and arrived in Vienna at 6:30 am.  After taking a bus into town, wandering around the train station's neighborhood for a few hours, and lamenting how deplorably I have let my German deteriorate, I checked into my hostel, which was called Wombat's and must certainly be one of the nicest hostels in the world.  It kind of reminded me of a college student union.  I spent three days in Vienna walking around very clean streets and museums and meeting other world travelers at the hostel before taking a bus to Split, Croatia overnight.  From there, in short, I took a ferry out to the island Hvar, slept in Stari Grad one night and Hvar Town the other, and took another ferry all the way down the coast to Dubrovnik at the southern tip of Hrvatska, the most singular city in the world.  I took a room in Dubrovnik for 100 kuna ($20) from a crazy guy named Ivo Gugic, who told me a lot of great stories about the travelers that have come through his place and was in all the best host you could ask for.  Croatia's Dalmatian coast is founded on tourism, so first of all nearly everyone speaks English, and second of all in the winter, when the water's too cold to swim and you can't lie on the beaches, nearly all of the infrastructure built up to accomodate all of the tourists is very inexpensive.  So although I didn't get to swim in that azure water, the weather was fine compared to Moscow's and I traveled very inexpensively.  From Dubrovnik I took another overnight bus to Zagreb, the capital, whence I took a train back to Vienna and flew back to Moscow.  Zagreb must be the most heavily-graffitied city in the world.  I didn't spend enough time there to do the city justice, and I would like to go back when I learn Serbo-Croatian.  I arrived in Moscow Friday night, went shopping Saturday for stuff like a headlamp and ski pants and gloves, and left late Saturday night for Appetiti, a small mining town just south of Murmansk.  An astounding 33 hours later we (5 Americans and a British girl) arrived, dressed in heavy layers, and met up with our Russian guides before heading out to the wilds.  I have never met a person like Igor Vladimirovich Arkhipov, our guide, and I will never forget him.  He was more full of life in his calmest moments than most people are when they're ecstatic.   We lived for a week in a tent, skiing up and down white-clad mountains on cross country skis, eating pasta with ketchup, freezing our hands while putting up tents and then warming them again by the stove.  These guys were as hard as nails, never complained of cold feet, and could work without gloves for 30 minutes without feeling the frost while my hands went dead after 30 seconds.  When they aren't slogging up mountains on 1000 calories a day and cutting down trees with their bare hands they're back at the base slugging vodka and belting out Russian songs over feverish guitar.  They were times when I cursed my decision to go, especially when it fell to me to prepare breakfast and I had to get up at 6 in the -10 C morning to fetch water from the stream, but this was really one of the most authentic experiences of my life.  In the north, angling your skis up a mountain pass, all of the self-consciousness of the city vanishes.  On the last day we packed all of our stuff on sleds, climbed on, and were towed behind snow-mobiles at 40 mph through the tundra, terrified the whole damn time of falling off and fearing frostbite from the wind chill tacked onto a frost of -20 C ( -2 degrees F).  As we swung through the last pass into the Khibini Mountains, the afternoon sun just above the red horizon, I caught a glimpse of Arkhipov swinging out slalom-style behind the snow mobile: he had decided to put on mountain skis and be towed like a water-skier into the city and was yelling "My soul is singing!"

I'll have pictures in a bit.   Right now my internet is too slow for the file sizes.

19

Just returned from Croatia and I'm off to Murmansk in the great white north (look at it on a map!) tonight; pictures and ghost stories when I get back on the 28th.  I'm well.  How are you?

18

In short, I spent the past week: at a concert of gypsy music, in aleksandrovsky garden, at cafe bilingua, at home, watching the english patient, reading russian science fiction since it's easier than Gogol, reading Gogol's The Government Inspector, playing ping pong, dodging traffic, skirting assembled police officers, listening to old yiddish folk songs, drinking beer in front of statues, learning bass parts for the new band, aimlessly browsing the internet, christmas shopping at the enormous outdoor market at izmailovsky, cursing constant cloudy skies, grimacing at cigarette smoke, playing the ukulele, embracing sour cream, thinking of the U.S.A. in many different respects, trying not to fall into too binding of a schedule that would too closely resemble Davidson, dreaming again of a rural life.  

17

Happy Thanksgiving, all; I'm thankful to report that I didn't spend Thursday evening reading Gogol and eating shchi, for a Middlebury in Moscow alumnus now working for the American Embassy here invited us all to her place to speak English and celebrate everyone's favorite holiday.  The meal was just what I needed, thanks to a few diplomats in the kitchen and the American food store on the other side of the complex (where you can buy Hellmann's mayonnaise and other classics), and the company was also rewarding.  At times it's surprising how little I know about the other students in my program--since all our conversation is restricted to Russian--so I enjoyed the chance to speak English with them very much.  The diplomats were also an interesting bunch, with plenty of international travel behind them, so we got to hear some good stories from a professional path that, by the looks of it, several students in our program intend to look into as well.  

Otherwise, the big news is that I'll be playing bass for a local band here, at least for a little while.  The guy I work for (tutoring English), who's beginning to resemble less an employer than a straight-up benefactor, told his wife, who sings for the group, that I can play bass, so yesterday I went over to their rehearsal and played around the fretboard a bit.  They're a very strange band--to be honest not exactly my style--playing an odd type of medieval pop-rock, but I'm stoked to be playing and practicing my Russian in such a non-academic situation.  Today I'm going to try to go to the big indoor skatepark here.

16

I'm forced to break my internet silence by the snow that has been falling silently for the past 20 hours or so, great flat flakes falling sideways by like a river.  Perfectly silent--that's the first thing my ears, accustomed to the thunderstorms of Florida's summers, noticed, and my face noticed how much more effort is required to keep it out of your eyes when the wind intends to blow it right under your hood.  Make no mistake, Moscow is no more peaceful--Russians, of course, pay almost no attention to snow, except to complain about global warming--but it is darker and a bit more alien, at least until I get used to walking around in snow and an early sunset.  A lengthy ski trip without the skiing.  Fall is beyond reclamation, I suppose.

But really--I am enjoying myself entirely.  A wise friend pointed out to me that my posts here are quite melancholy, something which hadn't occured to me because, unfortunately, I haven't been thinking much about this thing and, it would seem, when I sit down to write something here I unintentionally slip into the half soapbox/half forced irony front that characterizes all internet writing and is the main reason I hate blogs, something I have almost always been honest about.  Of course, I want to share my doings with you all more than I hate blogs, so here we are.  I beseech your patience, that's all.  

My life here is comfortable--perhaps too comfortable--and duly stimulating, and if there are times when it's not exciting as one comes to demand from a semester abroad it's on account of lack of effort on my part.  Most obviously, a lack of effort to go anywhere outside of Moscow's garden ring.  But it's a pleasant inertia, I can't deny that, mostly because it is a grand adventure as it is, being a foreign student in Moscow, and sometimes I'm simply tired.  Tired from Russian all the time, tired from boring classes--that's the plain truth of it: my classes are boring--tired from always hunting for new opportunities to make friends because most of the contacts I have here are unsatisfactory and unreliable.  There's no better Russian lesson, however, and, most important, I've learned the kind of tact that life in the U.S. failed to teach me.  Finally--and please don't worry about me--I don't write much exciting here because, well, exciting means an element of danger, and I don't want you to worry.  Adieu!

15

Alas, I didn't make it to Petersburg or any of the small outlying cities after all.  When my traveling mates and I showed up to the train station, the only tickets still available were overnight in an upright position, and we would have had to make the trip twice in three days, so we elected to sleep in our beds.  Secretly I was kind of keen to do it, but it was clear that the other two guys weren't.  Still, I'm quite glad that I stayed in Moscow, because several great, even terrific, things happened over the week or so I was here and didn't have class.  First, and best, of all, I found some work teaching English to wealthy Muscovites' children.  I won't say much  more since such practices are almost certainly unlawful, but it's been great.  Acquaintances in the higher social sphere here, you can't have too many of them.  Otherwise, I did a number of things of interest here in Moscow, including going to see Mozart's Requiem and running in a 30 km cross country race.  Last Tuesday was the Day of National Unity, but the holiday has changed so much with the years that most Russians don't even really know what it means--they're just glad for a day off from work.  I look at a stock ticker outside my window and all the arrows are red and aiming downward, and, however little I know about the U.S.'s financial crisis, I know Russia's is worse.

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.

6

Kazan--city of a million in the south of Russia, about 800 kilometers from Moscow, the capital of Tatarstan, a port on the Volga river. I spent a memorable five days there with the Middlebury group, eating Tatar food, wandering the boulevards, riding bicycles, trying to find a bookstore, and, most notably, enjoying my first Russian banya.



Anarchy in Tatarstan.
This is a shot of the city's main thoroughfare, a tourist-shop-lined boulevard that I must have traversed at least twenty times. It wasn't, to be honest, tremendously attractive as far as main streets go, but there was something Tatarskiy about it. Vendors selling fezes, most likely. Looking closely you can see the orthodox church that seems to anchor the whole street, the black spire in the middle of the picture.
You might ask why I don't take more color pictures. Between the landscapes and the unashamedly garish paints people choose, Russia is a nation of brilliant colors--to my eyes, at least, far more so than the U.S. Well, this is a picture of a forest near the Volga. The centerpiece of our trip, a bicycle excursion to a dacha out beyond the suburbs, wound through this forest for 20 kilometers. I will say without reservation that, in autumn, the sunlight slicing obliquely through the canopy and illuminating the ash leaves, this was the most fantastic forest I've ever been in. It was like a wood from an old Russian fairy tale, or a scene from Lord of the Rings--an element of fantasy enveloped the whole place. A very Old World scene. We emerged periodically to find a tributary of the Volga, lined with wooden dachas, lying serenely before us. And, alas, this picture simply does no justice whatsoever to the way it actually was. I've found that this is a recurring disappointment, and that's why I stick to b&w. One of the Volga's long, slender fingers. I only saw the mighty river from afar, but the sunlight was pouring down in shafts from holes in the clouds, like a blessing.
I mentioned fezes--Kazan is an interesting place, especially for the capital of a Russian principality, because it's history is in large part Muslim, in addition to Russian Orthodox. This is the city's principal mosque, situated inside its famous Kremlin. When we went inside, after donning surgical slippers to protect the floors, we saw that it is as extravagant as its exterior suggests. Our tour guide, standing there on the left of the photograph, talked so quickly, despite our numerous "please, slowly, please!" that it was hard to make out much of the history.
It was a joy to ride a bicycle again. I ride one everywhere on Davidson's campus, and after a couple of years of doing so walking places seems like a pitifully slow waste of time. It's time to read some Thoreau, I suppose. Here's our group, lined up at the gate while our guide, Rustan, cajoles an old babushka to let us pass.
Apologies for the darkness here: inside Kazan State University, a huge portrait of Lenin holding up a scroll reading "prav" (right, correct). We come to Rustan. As you can see, he's a small man, maybe a shade over five feet tall, and here he's cooking up some shashlik for our post-excursion feast. He lived for a long time in Kamchatka, I believe, and now leads a sort of tourist camp in Kazan. More than anything, he is the type of man you probably associate with Russia, in demeanor and behavior. He called me California, evidently because he thought Florida and California were the same place, and the vegetarian in our group vegeTABLES, stress on the tables. The night we stayed at the dacha was my first experience with a Russian banya, and Rustan ran it. I can't think of a more Russian activity. First we sat crammed in a small room built around a brick oven, in which Rustan would periodically pour water fortified with beer, and endured temperatures that must have been over 110 degrees and air that smelled of scorched beer and sweat. Opens up the pores, he said. I've never sweated so much--even training in Florida in the summer. Every once in a while we would retire to an adjacent room, where there was a hearty selection of meat, cheese, bread, and vodka. This went on for an hour and a half or so, and finally the night culminated in a frozen jog through the 0 C air down to the even colder river, where we all, of course, plunged in, and darted back to the banya. I was apprehensive, to be sure, because I have trouble even with the ice baths at Davidson, but Rustan was right: it really wasn't very cold at all, as long as you got back to the banya hastily. The body works itself up so much that it builds its own armor, I guess. There is a Russian work, kaif, which corresponds roughly to "high," in the sense of "sky-diving produces such a high." Here's to Rustan, and the Russian kaif.
He's drinking from the fountain, I think. Or stealing coins.
A longitudinal view of Kazan's kremlin. Kremlin simply means fortress in Russian, although the one in Moscow is certainly the most famous.
The central tower and the Tatar breaking free from his fetters.
And a final shot: some Moscow statues, pidgeons and their droppings.

5

At this moment I'm drinking a half-liter can of kvass, brand Ochakovo, because I forgot that kvass really doesn't taste all that good and smells absolutely abhorrent. But I actually kind of like it. It's not as sweet as Coca-Cola and tastes like you've been sowing wheat all day. Actually, when I got here someone told me that Coke was thinking about producing its own kvass because its cola was having trouble competing. Coca-cvassa.
More about beverages: yesterday I ran for the second time with the world-notorious Hash House Harriers, Moscow chapter, a self-proclaimed "drinking club with a running problem," British through and through. You're thinking, I know it, that it should have been founded by Russians drinking vodka. (The Moscow chapter does cross country ski in the winter). But no: it is about as British an institution as you can find, and you can read all about its formation here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_House_Harriers. The basic premise is a hare hunt: two or three "hares" set off with a bag of flour, marking a trail that's often hard to follow, and the rest of the pack, whoever opts to show up that day, come along later and try to successfully follow it to its conclusion. The Moscow bunch is composed largely of expat British and Americans and Russians learning English, with a few odd internationals here and there, and ranges in "youthfulness" from me to, say, about 55 or 60. So it's not the fastest run ever, you can imagine, and I'm not chalking it up under marathon training or anything, but this group is out of control--wild, notorious for a reason. I've seldom laughed so hard. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
During the run there's typically a game stop, something like tag or duck duck goose, after which everyone drinks some beer, which someone has been altruistic enough to lug along in a backpack. Then we set off again, losing and finding again the trail, and eventually the run's over. I've been able to get a decent number of miles in the past couple of times by circling back at each checkpoint and running back to the front. A habit which, as I'll get to right now, is bound to bite me in the ass in the least competitive running group ever assembled. After the run, when everyone's patting each other on the back, the club circles up in an assembly called down downs. In which there an enormous number of rituals and songs and behaviors and observations and rules (the only rule is that there are no rules) and hilarity and it would be impossible to do it justice here. But, in short, the grand master, with a mad hatter hat, gives out silly awards and penalties, after each of which the offending parties group in the center of the circle and, in time to a pub song, swig a cup of beer. The penalties and the way they are presented, the way the British accent perfectly complements British humor, are, no exaggeration, side-splitting. So many acute senses of humor in one place. Offences, to give a few examples, can include: front-running (yours, truly), putting your hand in your pocket, misleading the group, saying the word "think," and so on into perpetuity. There's really no end to the things you can do wrong, and nobody cares because it's just as much fun to be the offender as it is to laugh at the offenders. By the conclusion even the saints are swaying a bit. The funniest part, of course, is the way the grand master handles the whole thing. The guys who have performed the role so far have been astoundingly funny. The songs are also good: "He might be appreciated by his mother, but he's no use at all to us..." or "Try to drink it down but it goes the other way/ drink it down, down, down, down..." Don't worry, as I'm sure you must: I'm not becoming a dipsomaniac.