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.