after a full day

So much to tell and so little time!

Yesterday I had my first Russian dinner, at a place called му-му (moo-moo). You guessed it - cow theme. (Karen Brown and family clearly need to come visit me!) It was like a cafeteria in that you get a tray, but not like a cafeteria in that the food was good and you paid per item. I got three times more food than I should have...oops. But it was good to actually eat after days of my stomach not wanting much of anything in it. It's still touchy and I woke up with a cough and scratchy throat today, but I for one am hoping this is the beginning of the end of this dreadful disease.

Right now I'm at the medical faculty building at MSU, we're waiting for Irina to process our passports and visas so we get student IDs and then can validate our visas so they don't kick us out of Russia tomorrow. It's good times.

I don't have much time, so I'll just tell one story for now - In Which Meredith Has A Lot Of Dirty Clothing And Just Wants To Do A Few Loads Of Laundry.

I've gone nearly two weeks without doing laundry, living out of basically one suitcase of clothing. (I left Monday 1/29 but last did laundry the previous Saturday, so I actually packed one pair of dirty pants.) Anyway, point being, two weeks, tons of laundry, running out of pants. Rumor had it that there was a laundry room on every floor of the dorm and you had to get the key from the person stationed on that floor. So once I was up, showered, not sitting on the toilet, and dressed, I headed to find said person. Much incoherent Russian babbling. Finally I got a straight "не работает" - the machine on my floor was broken. Great. So I went up to the 11th floor. Also broken. Down to the 9th floor. In use. Argh! (Each of these discoveries of course involved me wishing I had remembered key words from Russian class such as "laundry.") Down to the 8th floor. Here was a very nice lady who was only mildly frustrated that I wasn't able to understand her well, and showed me to the laundry room. Success!, I thought, hauling my huge bag of clothes.

Not so fast. First, there was only one washing machine, and it was small. (A 5-kilo machine, I was later told, if that means anything to you.) And of course no dryers. And a bunch of knobs and settings that don't mean much to me. So I pick some important clothes to wash, a couple sweaters, a couple pairs of pants, some socks and underwear. Maybe half of what was dirty. Shove it all in there. Guess as to which slot the soap goes in. Start turning knobs and pushing buttons and the dang thing won't start! So out I go to talk to the nice lady, who shows me how to properly slam the door, and informs me that I put the soap in the wrong spot. All is well, I ask her how long it will take and she says 20-25 minutes (I thought?? Numbers are hard to understand when babbled amidst other words).

By now it's noon so I head back to my room to see if Laura is back from the store with food, and hurrah, breakfast time! We chow down on bread, juice, "pizza," and she tries some dried apples and spits them out they taste so bad. She tried to buy cheese to go on the bread but accidentally bought...chocolate cheese. Oh, Russia. Anyway, a good 45 minutes pass and I ask if she'll help me get my laundry since it's going to be heavy and wet and I want to put a second load in. She agrees and down we go to the 8th floor...aaaand the machine is still going. We ask the lady how much longer, and she says 25 minutes. Hmmm? Freaking long wash cycle! Then we suddenly get word that we're supposed to meet up and leave soon, so we head up to the guys' dorm room. Turns out everyone's headed out the door and my laundry is still in the wash, so I go back over there (it's GOT to be done by now) and...no such luck. But I tell the lady I need to leave, so she does something to the knob to speed it up and in a minute or two I am yanking wet clothes out of the washer into my mesh laundry basket and telling her thank you so much, большое спасибо.

Moral: I still don't know what's up with the cycle taking so long, but I need to do another load tomorrow...hooray.

One last funny tidbit. Jeff just made a very apt remark about how time works with Irina (and from what we've seen in general around here) - "it's like in football, where they say '10 minutes remaining' but they really mean an hour." YES. :)