sunday fun

Yesterday - Sunday - was terrific!

To start, I slept in, which is always a good beginning to a day. I didn't do much until around 2:30pm, when I changed into my black orchestra dress, grabbed my viola, and headed to the metro to get to my orchestra concert. I was luckily successful in finding the venue (a random library in a part of town I'd never been to before). I got there a bit before 4 and soon we began doing a last run-through before the 5pm performance.

Around 4:30, I called Irina to tell her how to get to the library from the nearby metro stop, and she along with four others (Jack, Jeff, Celina, and Jessica) made it in plenty of time to watch! It turned out we were all playing standing up, and we were in a smallish room with audience chairs on three sides of us. I also made the proper choice in wearing black, because everyone had SOMETHING black on, and many if not most were in all black.

The concert went well but boy was it long. To my surprise, I only played in about half the pieces! There were two random sopranos who did a handful of pieces with just piano, violin, and cello, or with only one of each instrument, or (this was the best and most random and least expected) with viola-de-gamba and piano!! I seriously had no idea any of this was going to happen. And in true Russian form, the program listed all the pieces by first and second half of the program, but the order within those halfs was arbitrary. Oi.

The parts I did play in were great, though, and at the beginning (after the obligatory 15 minute lecture beginning around 5:10) they gave me a flower because I was their guest performer from the US! The whole gig didn't end until 7:30. At this point I learned that Irina had taken the others to a park in the morning, and they had proceeded to eat lunch at му-му and come straight to the concert. Sadly they weren't hungry for dinner (I was starving) and I missed a chance to eat at му-му!! But oh well.

On the way back, Irina decided it was better to take a yellow "clown car" from Kievskaya metro station instead of just taking the metro back to Universitytet. So that's what we did, though I'm still not completely sure why. Once back at the main building, I went over to Jeff's room since other people were over there and wound up eating two sandwiches since he had sandwich makings (hoagies, salami, mayo, spicy brown mustard from the embassy).

After a little bit, Dorothy (who we met through Irina and also lives in sector ж) came by saying she wanted to play football. For some reason, she owns an American football, and apparently she and some of the group have played football this semester. I think this is mostly due to Jack, who is a huge sports fan and knows way too much about football. Regardless, I was willingly dragged along, and we played for a good hour or two in the dark on the asphault outside the entrance to our sector. First it was guys vs. girls but that was a terrible idea (guess which team kept scoring), so we mixed it up and I wound up on a team with Jack, Jessica, and a Japanese girl whose name sounded like Yassica.

Now I really don't care anything about football, but this was actually really fun. Nobody cared that I sucked. (That was key.) Jack planned out relatively simple plays and we more or less executed them. The defining moment, though, which probably made Jack's week, was when we were about 1/3 of the way down the "field" and on 3rd or 4th down or something (that is, we needed to score).

Here's what happened. Jack said "okay, this is the second best play in football." (The first is something called fumblerooskie I think, I forget.) "It's called the hook and ladder. I'm quarterback. Yassica, you're on the right, you just run straight out. Jessica, you're on the left on the inside, you run like a fishhook and I'll throw to you. Meredith, you're on the left on the outside, you run at an angle, kind of slow at first, and then once Jessica gets the ball she'll pass it backwards to you and you'll run to score a touchdown." Uhhhh yeah right, we thought, but gave it a shot because that was the whole point.

And we totally pulled it off! It was beautiful, somehow Jessica successfully caught AND threw the ball, and I was in the right place at the right time to catch the ball, and then I just ran to the "endzone"! Pretty sweet. And Jack had this goofy grin on his face for the rest of the time we were playing.

So, that was Sunday. Today has been remarkably lazy, as it is the "pre-holiday," but I finished listening to the Harry Potter 2 audiobook and got a bunch of astronomy work done. I also got an email saying I might be able to go to Chile in August with my summer research advisor!! And tomorrow I'm meeting Snezhana somewhere for lunch and finishing any work I still have to do.

The only bad thing about all this holiday business is that the cafe is closed, so my food options are a bit more limited than usual. Oh well, grapes and instant noodles and granola bars are the solution! Back to it. (And I'll post pictures sometime soon, too.)