adventures abroad

back home

2007-05-28T01:58:00.000+04:00

One last post to let everyone know I made it safely back to the US. I actually arrived on Wednesday night, but the wireless internet wasn't set up until a couple of days ago, and there was an incident with my laptop involving a glass of apricot juice.

Anyway, thanks for following along!! It was quite the adventure. And now I move on to find even more adventures. Feel free to send me an email or give me a call!

heading out

2007-05-21T09:45:00.000+04:00

Time to pack up the computer and head out to find a taxi and then a plane. What a crazy adventure this has been!!! Looking forward to seeing all of you in person back in the land of burritos and air conditioning...

:)

Russian BBQ

2007-05-19T21:07:00.000+04:00

Once again, Kiev didn't happen. This time there wasn't enough interest and the timing was just plain horrible. I kind of wish I got to go to Kiev, but I guess this means I'll just have to come back to this part of the world and visit some other time!

Today was pretty awesome, though. It was Dima's birthday, and he invited the group out to his cousin's dacha a bit west of Moscow. (A dacha is like a summer cottage, but it's more like a small nice-ish house-type thing with a small yard that is by definition in a particularly un-useful location.)

It went something like this. This morning I met with my physics professor one last time to get my final homework back. There was no final or anything...he just told me that I don't think physically about problems very well and instead just try to use math and formulas. Interesting assessment that I don't quite agree with, but I do see where he's coming from.

Then around 11:45 I headed to the metro to meet people at the metro stop Fili, and it took nearly an hour to get there all told. We hurriedly bought tickets for the "electrichka" (electric train) and crammed into an already-full HOT train car. It was 80 degrees today, all day, and not only does Russia not believe in air conditioning, it apparently doesn't believe in deodorant either. Whew. So that was a long, hot, sweaty 40+ minute standing train ride.

When we finally got off the train around 2pm, we were clearly outside Moscow. You can tell because there are individual (albeit typically small and run-down) houses, a pothole-ridden road with no form of public transportation, and piles of litter in boggy areas on either side of said road. So we set off walking...for at least 30 minutes. In the hot sun. We go through the most random alleys and fenced-off areas. It's like suburbia America only poor, and everyone has crappy fences and no one has garbage collection.

Anyway. It's about 2:30 by now and we encounter a couple walking towards us who turns out to be Dima's cousin's parents, the owners of the dacha we're headed to! They lead us the rest of the way. Their plot of land is small but cozy in a very Russian sort of way. The grass is unruly and smattered with dandelions. The dacha itself has light green cheap siding and is two stories, but quite small, probably 1.5 to 2 times the size of the Krislocks' summer cabin on Spirit Lake. There is a small backyard with what looks to be a garden and a tree, as well as a brown building that we learn houses two things: a toilet and a BANYA!! (go google that right now if you don't know what it is. basically a 100C+ steam room followed by a freezing cold shower, but that doesn't begin to describe it.)

It was a 100% Russian afternoon. I didn't go in the banya myself because I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt...only three of the guys did it since it wasn't awkward at all to just sit around soaking wet in their boxers afterwards. We played durak (Russian card game). We played darts. They played badmitton with a whiffle ball while I tried to read a book and kept getting pelted with the whiffle ball. There were about 12-15 people in total, half of which were Russian friends of Dima's cousin, so there was very much a language split but it made the whole thing even more authentic. Then we had a BBQ using coal (not charcoal) which smelled gross, but cooked the chicken just fine. There was authentic black bread, homemade vinegret, and some kind of weird Korean carrot dish that prompted the Russians to get the English words "Korean" and "carrot" confused much to everyone's amusement.

After a fantastic time, most of the American group headed out around 6pm, and I only got back to my room at 8:30. Now I am eating a ridiculous amount of chocolate ice cream and just relaxing, because I'm exhausted. This was the first time in MONTHS I'd actually been out in the sun! So I kind of feel like you do after a long day at the beach, just exhausted from having gotten so much sun, even though it wasn't nearly enough to get tanned or burned.

Just one more full day in Moscow. Shall include packing and possibly a trip to Gorky Park to ride roller coasters. I keep noticing little things I'm going to miss or little things I'm looking forward to, but never consciously enough to take note. Jenna says she misses three things: customer service, mexican food, and pedicures. Couldn't have said it better myself, though pedicures probably woudn't be #3 on my list.

And now for some pictures (warning - there are a lot!):

05-2007

one week?

2007-05-15T23:31:00.000+04:00

I've got less than that much time left here, and it's a little odd!

Today was my first "last thing" - I went to my last Chamber Orchestra rehearsal. Got pictures with the group and they gave me a CD of the concert I played in. That was one thing that worked out SO well...count on music to bring it all together when nothing else does. Here's the picture -

Yeah, so, for some reason half the people aren't completely in the picture and the other half aren't smiling. Oh, Russia. Anyway, this is most of the Chamber Orchestra I've been playing with all semester - there are probably a half dozen not in the picture. Of note: the guy next to me who you can't see is Andrei, a fellow violist. The other violist wasn't at rehearsal tonight, her name's Inna. Also Sasha, the head of the group, is the guy on the right with his violin.

Also today, going chronologically backwards just for kicks, I ate a quick lunch at the cafe. And since I knew what I wanted, I just told the waitress when she brought me the menu: caesar salad with chicken, broccoli soup, and peach juice. (I swear I still can't quite say "peach" right, it's kind of annoying, but they didn't have any so I asked for apple instead, which I *can* say.) Then out comes my salad. You never know what order they'll bring stuff in. A few minutes later, she brings me my apple juice and...a plate of blini with cream, peaches, and jam. Uhhhh that is not broccoli soup. But I didn't say anything because (a) I was in a hurry, (b) I'd had this before and it was quite good, albeit dessert-y, and (c) I didn't want to admit I had apparently ordered blini when I thought I ordered soup. The words are nothing alike. Half of me wonders if the waitress just decided to play a joke on me to see how I'd react. At any rate, the moral: it's back to pointing at menus.

I also learned that Russians can't handle digital cameras. You'd think with random tech stores at every third metro stop selling digital cameras back to back, many Russians would own digital cameras or at LEAST have seen one and maybe even used one before. But good heavens, when I asked for a picture with my physics prof this morning I swear it was about the end of the world. (It wasn't easy at orchestra either, but that was nothing compared to this.) I gave my camera to a woman professor who always comes into the room we have class in towards the end to set up for her lab. They had to babble in Russian for at least 30 seconds to figure out "look at the screen and push the button." And then it took her two tries because of the slight flash delay. Oi. Here is the result -

Me with Sergei Nikolaevich Gorshkov, my Thermal Physics professor.

And now it's time for bed pretty soon, because the rest of this week will continue to be busy and I still have no idea if I have weekend plans or not. So it goes. :)

the weekend

2007-05-14T01:37:00.000+04:00

Unfortunately, the Kiev trip was cancelled at the last minute because Irina is sick. So it looks like I may not make it to Kiev, though there's still a possibility we might go next weekend. The only thing is, my plane ticket home is on 5/21 departing Moscow at 2:20pm, so depending on the timing of trains and how long it takes to officially "check out" of this country, that may be cutting it close. Stay tuned as always.

So I had a rather unexpected lazy weekend! That doesn't mean it wasn't welcome, though. To start, Politology didn't happen on Friday when the professor simply didn't show up. I was already planning to meet Laura that afternoon to go to a souvenir market, so I did, and just as that adventure began I wound up text messaging half a dozen people about rescheduling Politology for next week. Oi. And then it started to rain. The good news was, I got a few things at the market and then Laura and I ate at му-му! All in all not a bad Friday (minus the waking up early for a class to be cancelled part).

Then Saturday was the grayest, gloomiest day you've ever seen. I slept until 1pm or so and ate a leisurely meal at the cafe while doing a bit of homework and reading. Then I wrestled with my computer for a while and Skyped Mike, Dad, and Lynne for a total of about 3 hours. Yep, that was Saturday.

Today, Sunday, was looking to be similar to Saturday except the weather was nice! Around 5pm, Laura texted me asking if I wanted to join her on a boat tour of Moscow. This seemed pretty random, but hey I'm all for random things, so off I went. It was great! It really helped tie Moscow together in my mind, since when you travel everywhere by metro you don't really get a good idea of where stuff is relative to other stuff. We went along the Moscow river from Kievskaya metro station all the way to Proletarskaya, weaving our way through the center of the city. Took a ton of pictures that I'll eventually post online. That took a good 2 hours (not including finding each other, finding the place where the boats left, and buying tickets - another hour or two) and then it was 9pm. We were starving, so back to metro Universityet we went and into the Ramstore mall for dinner. I had Rostik's KFC (a chain vaguely associated with KFC but not as good, though their "zinger" sandwich isn't bad) and she had a piece of pizza and blini from Teremok. A very excellent afternoon/evening.

Soon I'm heading to bed, because tomorrow I actually need to get stuff done. In the next week there's a lot to accomplish, and a fair amount going on. I need to complete my astronomy research, do some homework for Thermal Physics and Russian Language, and come up with a presentation for Russian Studies Seminar. Nothing's scheduled for Monday, but that should keep me busy. Then I have two class on Tuesday plus I'm going to go to orchestra to tell everyone thank you and good bye. There's a make-up Politology class scheduled for Wednesday and I'll probably also have my last astronomy research meeting that day. In addition to the normal two afternoon/evening Thursday classes, Peter Scherpelz's Dad will be in Moscow and I'm meeting him for a late lunch. Friday will bring my final Politology class. I also need to do laundry and pack sometime, which could be complicated if I try to go to Kiev. Whew.

I suppose you could say this is the beginning of the end...pretty crazy! Part of me wonders "where has the semester gone?!" but the other part remembers February. :) For now, bedtime.

victory day

2007-05-09T22:19:00.000+04:00

Today is Victory Day, and dang do Russians know how to celebrate holidays! I went out to run errands today and all the buses had little flags on them like during the previous holidays. There was a guy carrying a huge Russian flag and waving it like mad as he crossed the street near the metro stop. And outside Ramstore, there was a military band playing!

Just now, about 20 minutes ago, there were fireworks VERY close by, the entire main building was shaking and resonating. I looked out my window but unfortunately it doesn't face in the proper direction. So, I ventured outside to get a better view of the fireworks, and saw they were coming from at least two places - one probably near Victory Park and the other RIGHT on the other side of the main building! It was a little chilly and I didn't have time to walk all the way to the other side of the main building before the show stopped (remember this building is HUGE, it's probably at least a mile to walk around the whole thing). Still, the sound was amazing, and I could see some fireworks over the top of the building and from the other direction.

The streets I can see are still wall to wall with traffic, honking, and people are shouting excitedly. On hindsight this makes sense since the university is relatively close to Victory Park and I guess all 15+ million people decided to go there tonight. Dang. The US seriously needs to step it up a notch when it comes to holidays.

back from St. Petersburg

2007-05-08T14:19:00.000+04:00

...or Санкт-Петербург as it is actually called.

Unfortunately I'm now sick. Headache, throat, cough, exhausted, the works. Not too terrible but enough to prevent me from going to class this morning. We'll see about the afternoon.

But aside from getting me sick, the weekend was great! We left on Friday night (technically Saturday morning) on a 1:30am train. Oh man, overnight trains. My only other serious train experience was a 40-hour Amtrak stint back in the US. While that was pretty much the worst thing ever, some elements of this were worse and some were better. +beds to sleep on. -the bathroom. That pretty much covers it. Isn't it illegal for train toilets to just flush onto the tracks in the US?? Well...not here. There's a reason they keep the bathroom locked for the first 20-30 minutes.

Anyway, we got to St. Petersburg around 10:30am Saturday. I slept all right and was immensely thankful for the silk travel sheets given to me by Joan and Mary!! It was waaaay too hot in the little compartments, and I was with Irina and two random Russian guys. Fantastic.

We set out straightaway for the hotel so we wouldn't have to haul all our stuff around. (I packed everything into my backpack and a new shoulderbag I bought recently, plus a plastic bag to hold some snacks and souvenirs.) For some reason all the трамвайs weren't running so we had to take a bus which was a bit more of a pain but worked out okay. The hotel was...nothing special. We each got a bed, there were two beds per room. I made use of my silk travel sheets yet again. The towels were a joke and the TAP WATER...dang...I'll never complain about Moscow water again! This stuff was brownish and smelled bad.

Anyway, we also ate breakfast/lunch in here somewhere before finding the hotel. A random fast food blini place. Once we had checked into the hotel, we set off to be tourists! St. Isaac's cathedral and the colonnade, the Hermitage museum, dinner, another cathedral where they were having a service, a boat tour, and finally back to the hotel. It stays light so late there!! The cathedrals were amazing and it was neat to see an orthodox service taking place. Chanting echoes magnificently in the huge cathedral, and there was a choir up in a loft in the back. The Hermitage was HUGE, there was no way to do it justice in three hours, but it was free for students and really neat. The boat tour went along a bunch of canals and out onto the main river. If it hadn't been bitterly cold I would have enjoyed it a lot more, but oh well. At that point it was 9 or 10pm and the sun was just beginning to think about setting.

We got up Sunday and had a complimentary breakfast in the hotel after a less-than-lovely shower. (The main problems - the terrible water and really dimly lit bathroom.) This breakfast wasn't nearly as good as the one we'd had in Suzdal, but it wasn't bad either. Omelette/quiche type thing (bland but ok), bread with butter, cheese, and salami, and a roll with odd honey. I asked for apple juice instead of tea and they charged me 20 rubles, sigh. We headed out around 11am. First stop was a church/cathedral called "Savior on spilled blood" (it's more natural sounding in Russian). It's similar to the famous St. Basil's Cathedral on the outside, and inside everything is in mosaic. The sheer quantity of cathedrals is enough to blow you away - to say nothing of the care and detail put into them!

Next we went to a market and spent quite a while poking at souvenirs. I got some neat stuff. Next we ate lunch at Subway. It was fantastic, unlike the Subway I went to in Moscow that was basically terrible. I had an Italian BMT and a chocolate chip cookie. Yay! Anyway, we were going to take a boat to Peter and Paul's Fortress followed by a palace and gardens located in Petergof, a small town just outside St. Petersburg. But it started raining and for some reason the boats weren't going there that day, so we instead took the metro and got on a bus for at least an hour that took us all the way to Petergof! En route we had a very random discussion about 9/11 and US government conspiracies, led mostly by Nick and Jack. The gardens were huge and beautiful. However, spring hasn't quite gotten that far north yet (we're talking 60 degrees latitude), so nothing was in bloom and the fountains were still turned off. We all got a chance to touch the Gulf of Finland (huzzah!) and had a nice leisurely time strolling around. A nice contrast to Irina's typical breakneck walking pace.

When we got back into St. Petersburg, it was getting on towards dinnertime, probably 8 or 9pm. We walked around a bit until finding a restaurant probably best translated as "Fat Friar's Pub." They had Russian food and tons of beer and little else, so everyone except for me and Jack got beer. We ate and chatted for quite some time since our train didn't leave until 1:30am and there wasn't much else to do. Around 11:30 we headed out, though, and walked all the way to the train station. It was finally mostly dark outside, and not too cold. We sat in a pizza place until 1am when they closed, eventually got on the train, and showed up in Moscow 10:30 Monday morning.

I forgot to say - "we" included just Irina, Jeff, Jack, Celina, Nick, and me. David went with his Russian girlfriend Olga to St. Petersburg a few days earlier and they did their own thing, though we randomly ran into them twice. Dima, Felix, Laura, and Jenna opted to also go up early and do thehir own thing, but we met up on the train back. I think Jessica is in Prague for some reason. Jill stayed in Moscow because she's training to run a marathon I think. I'm not sure what Alex is up to, and that about covers it.

Now I should see about eating something and hopefully getting un-sick. This coming weekend we're planning a similar weekend trip to Kiev, only we'll leave and return a bit earlier/later since it's a little farther away. It would be nice if I wasn't sick for that, and it would also be nice if I could do my physics and Russian homework as well as my astronomy research and go to class without coughing up a lung.

As always, stay tuned. And for those of you who managed to read this far, here's a link to photos from the weekend.

St. Petersburg

headed north

2007-05-04T19:58:00.000+04:00

First and foremost, some pictures:

A typical scene at Плошадь Индиры Ганди. Only the trolleybus broke down for some reason and people had to push it. How many Russians...? :)

Me at Tema Bar - my drink has a starfruit slice!! It was appropriately called "around the world," and it was delicious.

With Katie at Tema bar - yet another Mudders in Moscow rendezvous

More recently at the "iron curtain" party. Russian hats!

At the orchestra concert - the room where we put all our cases and stuff. (I'll hopefully be getting pictures from other folks of the actual concert...since I was playing in it I couldn't take any myself.)

Fellow violist Andrei makes some last minute bowing changes. (That's my viola on the table, along with the baroque bow I've been borrowing.)

We're headed to St. Petersburg sometime this evening...rumor has it we're leaving at midnight, but that has yet to be confirmed. I'm 90% packed. We'll (probably) take the train tonight, be there Saturday, spend that night in a hotel, be there Sunday, and come back to Moscow on another train Sunday night that arrives into Moscow bright and early Monday morning. I'm excited to see yet another place that isn't Moscow!

Gotta make this short because I'm hungry! But my astronomy research is going quite well - I put in a ton of time on that since returning from Vladimir and Suzdal and will be able to produce some kind of light curves in the time I have left. So, that is pretty neat. Thermal Physics continues to go well, though we haven't gotten to chapter 7 yet and I'm afraid a fair bit of that material is important. Oh well. I was the only one to show up to Russian Language yesterday (and there are now four of us in that class). Apparently a fair number of the group has started traveling independently, and a bunch of them are already in St. Petersburg! Once again, silly me for staying in Moscow and doing schoolwork. Aside from that, though, I had a fantastic time May 1 meeting up with Snezhana and another student who apparently goes to CMC, Natasha! We ate at му-му (yes!) and walked around the city center and I bought a nice green bag that says (unobnoxiously) "Mission for peace" on it. Finally I have the tote bag/purse I've been wanting since March.

Time for food and with luck I'm off for an adventure in St. Petersburg!

sunday fun

2007-04-30T20:04:00.000+04:00

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.)

an accidental five day weekend

2007-04-28T12:31:00.000+04:00

See, my class yesterday (Friday) was cancelled, and today and tomorrow is actually the weekend, and then Tuesday is a holiday (May 1) so clearly Monday is a pre-holiday. Add it all up and you've got...an accidental five day weekend!

I don't have too much planned, but that's okay because it means I can get some more astronomy work done. One thing that's definitely going to happen is an orchestra concert Sunday afternoon at 5pm!! I just hope I can find the library we're performing at...I have a small piece of paper with a scribbled map of where to walk from a metro stop, but there was much debate as to which was the best way to get there. Oh boy.

I'm hoping to meet up with Snezhana on Tuesday. She was the Russian Language Resident at Oldenborg at Pomona College my sophomore year. It would be neat to see her again.

Yesterday my big adventure was Ramstore. Honestly it wasn't too much of an adventure, but it is interesting how I've seen the Ramstore mall change since I've been here. A very odd way to mark the passage of time, but there it is. A bunch more places to eat have opened up in the food court. I can't quite figure out why McDonald's is so popular here, either. There were a bunch of other fast food-ish type places when I was there yesterday, yet everyone was lined up at McDonald's! It's nuts. Admittedly I've had McDonald's a few times here (whereas I basically never eat there at home). One nice thing in general about food here is reasonable portion size, I've noticed. Even at fast food places, a regular fries and coke is...well, reasonably sized. When I eat at the cafe in the main building, the portions are just right and I am usually full when I have cleaned my plate. There's an idea.

I've gotten most of my summer and fall sorted out, which is good. It's a pain trying to coordinate with people back in the States when I'm 11 hours ahead and they sometimes expect things in person or on paper. Then again, now I see why it was impossible to know anything about the schedule or plan in Russia before arriving. Everything here MUST be done in person and on paper!! I finally received HMC's fall registration packet in the mail on Thursday (my registration had been two days prior). Thankfully I did everything via the internet. It made me quite happy to have a colorful piece of paper in my hand detailing the next academic year's schedule, though. What a concept - a schedule! :)

I think in May, (maybe?) we'll be going to Kiev one weekend and St. Petersburg another. After all, there are really only two weekends left (I'm not counting the last one since that's the "pack up and tweak out" weekend). But it's all a bit uncertain because some of the people who travelled independently outside of Russia had the wrong papers taken when they reentered or had a stamp put in the wrong place or heaven knows what.

That's all for now. I haven't taken hardly any pictures since the Vladimir and Suzdal trip, but hopefully I'll get a chance to take some this weekend.

weekend pictures

2007-04-23T19:40:00.000+04:00

Vladimir & Suzdal

enjoy!

vladimir & suzdal

2007-04-23T18:55:00.000+04:00

What a fantastic weekend!!

A total of 11 of us headed out a bit after 7am on Saturday on the metro. We boarded a bus around 9am bound for the Golden Ring city of Vladimir. It took four hours. The bus was like a charter bus, only pretty old with uncomfortable and sometimes broken seats, and every seat was occupied before it left. We all slept most of the way, but when I wasn't asleep, I saw bunches of run-down cottages on the road out of Moscow. The road itself wasn't in particularly good condition - potholes, random sidestreets, occasionally divided 4-lane and occasionally 2-ish lanes with no real dividing line.

When we arrived, it was, as Jeff put it, a "wintry mix." (Rain, hail, sleet, snow combination.) We gathered our things and found a pizza place where we had lunch. Very Russian - they told some of us that they only had coke light and others that they only had regular coke. Irina told us to pack light because we'd be carrying our stuff with us all day in Vladimir. I must say, it was quite a relief to get out of the huge city that is Moscow! Vladimir is around 300,000 people, but it felt downright tiny in comparison to Moscow. We saw a "golden gate" (conveniently placed in the middle of a roadway), about five newlywed couples, a snazzy cathedral, a random tall brick museum building, and a nice park area with a beautiful view. Apparently it's good luck for newlyweds to drive around the golden gate three times, and one of the wedding parties we encountered seemed to think that if three times was good luck, fifty was even better.

Thankfully the weather improved as soon as we'd eaten and aside from a chilly breeze it was beautiful out. Partly cloudy but simply splendid. By around 6pm we were thoroughly exhausted, so Irina decided it was time to head on to Suzdal. She called three taxis which arrived surprisingly quickly, and in we piled. I was in a taxi with Nick and Jack, and the driver spoke no English but was determined to converse with us in Russian. Didn't get much out of the conversation beyond the fact that Soviet times were great, that the roads were like glass back then and you could get free medicine. (As we drove along the most potholed road ever - the main road between Vladimir and Suzdal that lacks painted lanes.)

We were bracing ourselves for a terrible hostel-like hotel in Suzdal, but were pleasantly surprised when we pulled up to the "Sokol Hotel," a recently renovated 3-story yellow building. We checked in with minimal hassle (by Russian standards anyway), three to a room, and each room had two rooms in it - one with two single beds and one with a sofabed, chair, and TV. Plus a small entryway and nice bathroom! Definitely a notch above the dorms we're all living in. I was with Irina and Celina, and Celina volunteered to take the sofabed since she was sick and was probably going to snore.

Once we were settled, we all met in the lobby to go to dinner. Suzdal is a town of about 12,000 people and easily makes the top 10 list for "coolest places I've ever been." It was simply wonderful! Fresh air, a bit too tourist-centric but just a splendid small Russian town. Horses and buggies as prevalent as cars (but neither in abundance), an open market area, tons and tons of churches, a friendly atmosphere, and public restrooms that actually have toilet seats. What more could you want?

We headed first for Suzdal's Kremlin, which is my new favorite Russian building, because its onion domes are dark blue with gold stars. :) We were going to have dinner at the restaurant there, but some kind of large group was taking up the entire restaurant complete with musicians and dancers! So Irina led us to another restaurant. It was quite good, they even had a few menus in English, and we had a great evening. Traditional Russian food but actually *tasty* unlike so often at the University Stolovayas (cafeterias).

After dinner we pretty much crashed at the hotel, though I think some folks stayed up all night playing cards. Not me - I was asleep by midnight and didn't get up till well after 9am. Plus I was in a real bed and not a wannabe saggy sofa with random metal bars... :)

It turned our our hotel was even MORE awesome than we thought, because breakfast was included!! All you had to do was show up in the restaurant on the 2nd floor by 11am, and you had yourself an authentic yummy Russian breakfast. (I got there around 10:30.) Pancakes (blini) and "fried cheese biscuits" (which apparently can be really tasty if prepared right) with sour cream (smetana - runnier than in the US), sliced ham and cheese and a slab of butter, sliced white bread and a roll with poppyseeds on top, a glass of orange-mangoish juice, blueberry yogurt, and coffee or tea if you asked. WOW. I win. I'd been wanting a Russian breakfast ever since coming here but (a) didn't know where to go to get one and (b) am never awake early enough.

After that amazing start to my day, Celina and I packed our things and knocked on the guys' room next door to see if they were about ready to check out. Jeff was about to take a bath while Jack and Nick were watching a movie about baseball dubbed in Russian on TV. We informed them of the noon checkout time, and after not too long we were all poking around the nearby market buying random souvenirs.

Soon, Irina rounded us up and we walked a little way to a monastery. After once again gathering our student IDs and paying 10 rubles for everyone and issuing thin paper "bileti" (tickets) to us, Irina led us in. It was quite pretty, the weather was gorgeous and we enjoyed walking around the grounds and looking in a few buildings/churches and gift shops. Then randomly there was a bell concert - for about 10 minutes, some guy(s?) in a bell tower started playing all these huge church bells. No real melody per se, but really neat to watch and listen to.

After a little while we headed back to the other end of town to visit a collection of wooden houses and things that were all brought to Suzdal to be salvaged and made into a museum. We were getting a little "museumed out" at this point, but it was still fun. It was getting on towards 3pm though, and realistically it was going to take 6 hours to get back to our dorms in Moscow, so we headed to get some lunch at the restaurant in the Kremlin (this time there wasn't a huge party).

The food was overpriced but not bad and the service was terrible. For instance, I ordered a coke and the waiter told Irina (at the other end of the table) that they were out of coke so I sat there thirsty for a good 20 minutes before managing to inquire, and he tried to walk away before I could ask for a sprite instead. Still, we had a good meal, but we didn't get out of the restaurant for over an hour and we didn't get back to the dorms in Moscow until 10:30pm. One of the taxis from Suzdal back to Vladimir got pulled over and fined for speeding, and the bus ride back was long and uneventful.

Overall I had a fantastic time - just getting out of Moscow was (literally) a breath of fresh air. If I ever come back to Russia, I don't think I want to be based in Moscow, because it's just too big. The more places I go and the more things I see, the more I realize that I am *not* a city person.

Today's been pretty much "back to boring" with Thermal Physics and catching up on emails and such. I'll make another post soon with pictures from the weekend trip (I took nearly 200 in 2 days!), but for now I'm off to grab some dinner.

catching up

2007-04-20T15:27:00.000+04:00

Funny thing - somehow a week passed! It's been back to same-old same-old, if you can call Moscow that. I've had a pretty typical week, and (I think) we're going on an overnight trip to Vladimir and Suzdal on Saturday and Sunday! That should be fun - my first time out of Moscow since arriving here in February.

Some of the other people in my group have travelled on their own in the past couple of weeks...two took a train to Tallin, Estonia and also took a boat to Helsinki, Finland, and another two went to Riga, Latvia. Another went to Poland, and yet another to Germany. I suppose instead of traveling around Europe I've actually been *gasp* going to class. :) And Mike's visit was essentially a spring break. If I'd known ahead of time I'd have my passport, and if he hadn't already been traveling around a lot, we would have likely gone somewhere in addition to Moscow. Still, all this talk of traveling has made me realize that there's a lot to see in the world, and there's no way I can begin to see it all on this trip!

Anyway, a few tidbits from my week.

Monday evening I was having dinner in the cafe, reading my book and mindlessly eavesdropping on a conversation across the room...wait a second...they're speaking ENGLISH!! A minute later I introduced myself to two girls also from the US and living in the main building, Brainne and Whitney. We ate together and chatted. They're both doing a Russian Language program. We exchanged phone numbers, so hopefully I'll get to see them again sometime.

Tuesday I learned all about gross little things called participles. (The difference between "the operation done by the doctor was successful" and "the operation, which the doctor did, was successful" - sentence 1 uses the participle сделанный with "doctor" in dative case and sentence 2 uses a который clause with "doctor" in nominative case.)

Wednesday was a pretty typical day complete with Thermal Physics, lunch at a Столовая, and the afternoon spent on the computer sending emails, doing homework, trying to sort out the summer, etc. (By the way, this summer it is looking like I will be living at Mudd and commuting to Pasadena for an astronomy research position at the Carnegie Observatories. But I have yet to receive an official confirmation, so please don't hold me to that just yet!)

Thursday early afternoon I got a text message from my Russian Language and Russian Studies Seminar professor cancelling both classes...so I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening listening to the Harry Potter audiobook while doing some serious astronomy numbercrunching.

Thursday was also Jenna's 21st birthday, so a bunch of us headed out to a bar called Tema that night. I decided on a whim to text Katie since I hadn't seen her in a while and see if she wanted to join us. She had just woken up from a nap but said she would call if she and some friends decided to come. I met Jenna and some others at the metro stop around 9pm and we headed out! Luckily the bar was close to the Proekt OGI bar I'd been to with Katie and co., so I was actually able to help find our way there. We also ran into a surprisingly non-sketchy young Russian couple who saw us standing at a street corner speaking English and debating which way to walk, and they helped us, it was great. :) We got to the bar a bit before 10pm. It wasn't exactly empty, but it WAS easy to get a table! They had a HUGE cocktail selection as well as plenty of delicious food. And after we'd been there maybe 10 minutes, Katie called! She was with three friends at the nearby metro stop, so I gave them directions to find us, and soon our group became 12 or 15. We managed to get two neighboring tables and everyone started chatting - I felt very happy for bringing two groups of people together!

This morning (Friday) I opened my curtains to find another ethernet cable outside my window. This one runs straight from top to bottom and must be pretty slack, because it tends to oscillate back and forth like a confused pendulum in my peripheral vision, which can be a bit distracting.

...and I just got word that we're meeting at the metro stop at 7am tomorrow to go to Vladimir and Suzdal. EARLY, gross. But, I suppose we can sleep on the train.

meredith + mike + moscow

2007-04-14T23:17:00.001+04:00

...equals a seriously good time.

Wednesday, April 4
Michael Bigelow lands in Moscow's Sheremetyevo 2 airport around 3pm. I am headed there to pick him up, but I severely underestimate the time required to get to the airport (2 hours!), so I am an hour late, but it is all good.
The Bad News: no hotel. Irina wasn't able to find a nearby hotel with rooms for all eight nights, plus I couldn't check into a hotel with him without my passport. Plan B? Sneak him into the dorm overnight and let him sleep on the floor, hope that I get my passport back Friday, and make a hotel reservation beginning Friday night.
After presenting all this and getting him and his stuff safely to the dorm, we ate at the cafe in sector в and crashed.

Thursday, April 5
Mike was still jet lagged even though he came here from Amsterdam (two hours behind), so we slept in and didn't do much. Besides, he couldn't leave the dorm because we might have trouble sneaking him back in for the night. I went to class in the afternoon/early evening and returned with шаурмы for dinner.

Friday, April 6
I had a 10am class (Politology). Mike was going to join me, but he was very much asleep so opted instead to appropriate the bed when I left. He got up around 1pm. We ate lunch and spent the afternoon getting my passport back (yay!) and checking into a hotel (Гостиница университетская). That evening, we went on an adventure to the restaurant/bar "Sixteen Tons" I'd been to several weeks ago. We had a nice more or less Russian meal and Mike finally got to see something other than the main university building!

Mike and me walking from my dorm in the main building to the bus stop

The lighting was beautiful so I took a picture of a new view of the main building

Here's Mike during our evening at Sixteen Tons...

...and then he took a picture of me!

Saturday, April 7
We stayed out kind of late Friday, so Saturday we slept in ridiculously late. Discovered that the hot water only works for the second person to take a shower, which happened to be me... :) Mike had a few "what is wrong with this country" moments, I was amused and understanding, and eventually we headed out in search of some food and an ATM. We headed to the center of Moscow and ate in the food court of the Ohotniy Ryad mall. Mike had a few upset-stomach-run-to-the-bathroom incidents but thankfully that didn't last too long. Next up was a concert in the Большой зал of the Moscow Conservatory! We got there in plenty of time to take our seats and enjoyed a fantastic concert. It was four piano soloists playing with an orchestra (one at a time of course), and all the players were superb. One of the pianists even played an encore! After the concert, we headed to Red Square so Mike could see it at night and took a few pictures. Superb evening.

Mike in front of St. Basil's Cathedral at night (red square)

Mike being silly in front of a window at the department store ГУМ

Mike and me inside ГУМ

Sunday, April 8
Happy Easter! This morning we headed to St. Andrew's Anglican Church. We got there on time and managed to find seats no problem, though it was pretty full. It was a good service complete with string quartet and the Bishop of the Diocese in Europe presiding! Pretty cool stuff. After church, everyone was encouraged to head across the street to an Easter brunch in a hotel reception room. We were a little hesitent but figured we'd check it out because, well, it *was* time to eat! It turned out to be fantastic - they'd pulled out all the stops for the bishop. Random shishkebabs, buffalo wings, skewered fruit, sketchy fish on bread (hey it IS russia), grilled cheese, cakes, muffins, eclairs, and wine and juice. Delicious.
We didn't do much that afternoon, because a snowstorm rolled through. Yes, you read that right - a snowstorm on Easter. I got a bit of homework done and Mike read a book. That night for dinner, we took the metro a few stops to go to му-му (the cow-themed buffet style restaurant), and it was super! That place is probably my favorite place to eat here - cheap but super yummy. Mike said something about how the restaurant gave him a glimmer of hope for Russia, which amused me.

After church - the bishop is blessing some cakes and desserts they collected to give away

View of the main entrance to the church as people file out on their way to brunch

Mike and me heading back after brunch - yep, it's beginning to snow...

My favorite picture from the week!! Mike's wearing my fuzzy Russian hat, and standing in an Easter snowstorm.

Monday, April 9
This morning I had Thermal Physics, and Mike came with me because he wasnted to meet "a real Russian" (my professor). The result? When someone came to claim the empty classroom we'd found, he decided to end class early, and spent several minutes telling us about a Panorama Museum and place called Victory Park we should go see if we got the chance.
We had a late, slow lunch (but in a good way, not in a "why are the Russian waitresses ignoring me" way) at the cafe in sector в. I tried to figure out what was going on with my summer programs while Mike read and took a nap. That evening we were thinking of going to the only Mexican restaurant in Moscow, Pancho Villa, but while on the trolleybus Laura called and invited us to join the majority of the group at Boarhouse! So off we went, arriving a bit before 8, just in time to take advantage of the 4-for-1 drink deal and half off food deal. (At 8pm it became 3-for-1, so it wasn't exactly a bad deal.) Mike got to meet most of my friends here, everyone bought everyone else drinks, and it was a fun night.

Mike and me at Boarhouse

Tuesday, April 10
Another lazy, slow morning, because we had the whole day until my orchestra rehearsal that evening to do whatever we wanted! We pulled out the Moscow guidebook and found the park that my physics professor had suggested. We decided to experience Arbat Street first. Mike bought a military-style Russian hat (though he continued to borrow my fuzzy Russian hat through his visit since it's not exactly cool to wear a fake police hat around Moscow). He also got a small oil painting of St. Basil's Cathedral. We ate a bit of lunch at Teremok and some more at Yolki Palki.
Next, we took the metro a few more stops to what the guidebook said was Victory Park. Unfortunately the guidebook lies, but we had a nice walk and found a random arch and eventually found the park! It was a beautiful day, the only really nice day during his visit, so we enjoyed walking around outside and poked into the WW2 museum for a little bit. Then we headed back so I could go to orchestra, grabbing "toast" from Kroshka Kartoshka on the way.

Mike poses with Pushkin on Arbat Street

My favorite metro station - in the shape of a Soviet star, the station Arbatskaya on the light blue line.

Mike in front of the random arch we stumbled upon, near Victory Park

Random picture of me

Mike and me upon finding Victory Park

View from a random grassy hill - you can see the main university building on the left and three towers on the right that are near the medical faculty.

There were people flying kites on the grassy hill!! So Mike and I decided we need to go fly kites sometime.

In front of a random church proclaiming "Christ is Risen" (in Russian) (in gold letters, because everything is better in gold)

Pillar memorial in front of the WW2 museum (it's super tall, you just can't see that in this picture)

Inside the museum - a memorial to all the fallen Soviet soldiers

At orchestra that evening

The chamber orchestra rehearsing a movement without violas

Wednesday, April 11
Mike's last full day, and I had nothing scheduled - huzzah! We slept in and lounged around once again. We talked about several options , and eventually decided to go to the Space Museum in the afternoon and Pancho Villa (Mexican restaurant) for dinner. Well, we went to the proper metro stop, but then we couldn't find the space museum so we walked around a random area called ВВЦ that has a bunch of museums and fountains and arches etc. We rode a huge ferris wheel!! It was part of a very sad-looking, empty fairgrounds area, but it was still fun. (We had a closed compartment because the open ones cost more and it was pretty cold.) We walked around some more, found what is probably the space museum but we still weren't sure and by now it was closed anyway, and decided it was time to take the metro to get dinner.
Dinner was Mexican Food!! They almost didn't let us into the restaurant because we didn't have reservations, but I told the guy we'd be happy sitting at the bar so he let us in. Downstairs, I asked a waitress if we could wait for a free table, and about 20 minutes later we had a table (I win!). So delicious...a random band showed up around 9pm. It was funny because they were all very much Russian but dressed as Mexican. They were too loud but not bad. After a delicious meal we headed back to the hotel, packed some things up, and crashed.

Mike in front of another random arch

Mike and me in the park area in front of the arch

Ferris wheel!!

View of a Stalinist building from the ferris wheel

View of the sad, mostly-empty fairgrounds

Mike took a picture of me while I was on the phone...

Then he came up to me, put my hand like you see it, and took a picture before I could turn around and see what was going on!

Best Mexican restaurant menu commentary EVER

Mike at Pancho Villa - I had an avocado margarita (yum!) and he had something called a "gin fizzz" I think it was (because 3 z's are better than 2...?)

Thursday, April 12
Mike's plane left at 12:15, and he wanted to be there by about 9:30, which meant we had to leave by 8am, so naturally we left at 9am. Oops. Checking out took longer than it should have, and I'm still not sure if Mike got the proper registration stamp or not, but he made it back to States without being fined or anything. We got to the end of the green metro line a bit before 10am and sat in a yellow "clown car" as Mike dubbed them for a good 20 minutes before it was full enough for the driver to be willing to leave for the airport. Got him there at 10:45. Somehow he managed to make it on his 12:15 flight, and his bag made it too, and his connection in NYC was no problem. I swear I need some of his airplane karma!!

***

So, that was the best week I have had...well, since I began this blog! Pictures and all. Since Thursday I've been trying to get back into my "normal" routine, going to class and catching up on homework and reading loads of HMC emails. I'm definitely sad that Mike isn't here anymore, but it was WONDERFUL to share Moscow with him!

That's plenty for now. Congratulations for making it this far. :)

dear spring, come back!

2007-04-06T09:33:00.000+04:00

Unfortunately, Moscow decided to switch from highs of 60F and sunny to highs of 40F and rainy a couple of days ago.

But it's really okay, because Mike is here visiting!!! :) Talk about technical difficulties with getting him from the airport and finding him a place to sleep...oy. But, all is well, and life is good, and there will be pictures sometime, and I just wish I didn't have classes and homework this week...

Ah well. Anyway, I need to dash off to Politology. More later.

photo time

2007-04-01T21:07:00.000+04:00

Marsha (Aunt Rebecca's friend) and me at the food court near metro station Kurskaya.

Шаурма!! (That's Shaurma for you non-cyrillic readers, the 60 ruble Russian wrap/burrito things you can get at any metro station that are somewhat sketchy and amazingly delicious.)

Nick demonstrates the devised method of transporting the "pinata."

CHIPS AND SALSA AND GUACAMOLE!!! In Russia!! I ate a lot... :)

Jeff in the kitchen, attacking the turkey-that-was-supposed-to-be-chicken.

More samplings of delicious foodstuffs...yum!

Milling about in the main room of the apartment a few minutes before all the food came out.

Group shot! (Sorry it's blurry...on "party mode" if you don't have an extremely steady hand, it comes out blurry, and since I'm actually in this photo, I had little control over how steady the photographer's hand was.)

Gathered outside to witness the pinata.

Jack takes a swing!

Alex succeeds in knocking the cardboard/newspaper/shiny paper contraption off of the main part of the pinata (a 5L water jug filled with candy).

David takes a turn whacking the remains with a stick, because come on, what else do you do with a candy-filled plastic jug hanging from a tree by an ethernet cable?

Back inside - the aftermath.

Fast forward to today: Novodeivichy Convent (Cloister). A view from inside the walls. There are a ton of graves there, and apparently there's also a cemetary outside the walls but we didn't even get to it.

Another sight inside the cloister walls, slightly less attractive and complete with a...cannon.

This girl was so quintessentially Russian I just had to take a picture. I think she was trying to play with a squirrel that had gone up a hole in the tree...reminiscent of "To Kill A Mockingbird" for some reason.

Inside a museum looking at various icons and other church-y things (most of which contained a lot of gold).

View from a window of the museum.

Another museum - this room had cannons and guns and various pointy metal objects. It struck me as odd that a convent (theoretically a place of God?) had so many weapons and combat-related things.

Quite possibly my favorite picture yet. :) (This is Irina, our on-site coordinator, and I basically handed her this sign and took her picture, then the others with us thought it was hilarious and had her pose so they could all get pictures too.)

fiesta!

2007-04-01T02:27:00.000+04:00

Today was the much anticipated Mexican Fiesta!!

It was quite the undertaking - yesterday afternoon, Jack, Jeff and I spent several hours (they more than I) completely cleaning out an old Soviet apartment belonging to Ilias, an awesome physics/engineering professor. We donned masks because we were stirring up so much dust. New windows had recently been installed, thus making the dust even worse. My job was basically to wipe stuff down with damp rags, and then I helped rearrange furniture and do chair traige.

Today, Jill managed to acquire a bunch of Mexican food from the US embassy, and some of our group spent a fair chunk of the afternoon cooking at the newly cleaned apartment! Around 6-7, everyone showed up. Whereby "everyone" I mean at least 20-30 people: the majority of our group from the US, a few Russians we've met while being here, Irina and her friends including someone from Germany, and a guy from Iran we met in the old dorm whose parents tagged along since they were here visiting, and of course Ilias. Quite the diverse group!

The food was terrific, though by US standards it was probably nothing special. Still, finally getting some Mexican after TWO MONTHS was excellent!! We had corn chips, guacamole(ish), salsa, refried beans, corn tortillas, ground beef, chicken which I think was actually turkey, shredded lettuce, tomatoes/onions, grated cheddar cheese, normal sour cream, and of course tequila. Then we had cake, because it was Alex's birthday (27) and Jake's birthday is Monday (23).

But the best was yet to come - a pinata of sorts. Jessica took it upon herself to create a pinata from a 5L plastic water jug filled with candy. She put a cardboard box and a bunch of torn up newspaper around it and decorated it with blue and silver holographic wrapping paper that Jeff happened to have. To get it to the party, she and Nick attached the contraption to a skateboard and essentially "walked the pinata" all the way via an ethernet cable leash.

At the party, after we'd eaten and had cake and taken a group photo, everyone headed outside to an old Soviet playground that served as a kind of courtyard for the apartments. They hung the pinata from a tree and Jeff controlled its height at a distance via the length of ethernet cable. Jack swung first, then Alex, who managed to knock the cardboard and newspaper off leaving just the plastic jug hanging. A few others took a swing at the plastic jug, but the only thing that broke was...the stick. :) So finally we took it down and passed out candy.

Something about the whole pinata experience was just fantastic! And I don't know, but I loved having people from at least four different countries in a random old apartment in a corner of Moscow come together for (of all things) a Fiesta.

(pictures to come, for now I'm going to bed.)

and another thing

2007-03-28T21:42:00.000+04:00

Here is proof of not one but TWO Mudders in Moscow!! Yes we're awesome!

accomplishments

2007-03-28T19:08:00.000+04:00

Today has been a good day. I accomplished two things, and I wore SANDALS!! It was nearly 60F today, and now that we've had DST it doesn't get dark until 8 or so, and I have decided I love seasons.

The two things I accomplished:

1) I got IRAF to play nice. (I met with the astronomy professor and I learned about how to do photometry with PSF fitting, and it appears we were able to fix a couple of the problems I was having with IRAF in general.)

2) I printed a sheet of color photos on photo paper. (So that Mike can have an ID when he's in Russia.) Imagine a world without Kinko's and where no one owns a printer and you'll get a rough idea of just how accomplished this made me feel.

Also I bought COLD vanilla coke (harder than it sounds) today and am going to go eat dinner as soon as I finish this so that I don't forget and it doesn't wind up being 10pm and I'm hungry.

In yesterday's accomplishments, I Skyped Mike in Ukraine! (Technically I used Skype to call Catherine's cell phone - she's in the Peace Corp and he's visiting her as part of his tour de Europe.) But he is alive and well and jet lagged and in Kremenchuk for another day, then back to Kiev, then on to Amsterdam, then to Moscow!!

I haven't written much lately because not much exciting has been happening...I've been going to class and doing homework and running errands and sorting out room draw and picking classes for next semester at Mudd and spending too much time on facebook. That about sums it up. I am VERY EXCITED for one week from today! It's going to be such fun showing Mike my life in Russia. :) Until then, onward and upward...

marching through march

2007-03-23T15:35:00.000+03:00

Perhaps it's silly, but I don't feel comfortable going shopping anyplace other than a grocery store by myself. Probably because all the little shops in malls are overpriced and no one is in them so I feel like I can't poke around by myself. What I wouldn't give for a Target or TJ Maxx...and I don't even like shopping!!

Mainly I want four things - a jacket that is medium-weight, shoes that are closed toed but not super-duper winter boots, nice "evening out" clothing, and a midsized purse. The annoying part? I have all of these things...at home. (Though I'll admit I am a bit lacking in the nicer clothes department.)

Materialism aside, global warming is seriously messing with Russia. It has been in the 50s and sunny for a week now. (No, David, I don't always complain about the weather.) :) In and of itself this is wonderful, but everyone I've talked to has said this is the warmest March they can remember.

This weekend was potentially going to be a trip to Vladimir/Suzdal or someplace else, but that isn't happening for...some reason. Instead, I'll probably go find my Aunt Rebecca's friend, Marsha, who is here in Moscow for a long weekend doing some stuff with the local Quakers, of whom there are about 10. I met up with her yesterday for lunch after a long series of incorrect directions and getting lost a la Moscow, but it was great to see someone I kind of knew from home, and I could speak FAST ENGLISH to her!! On a side note, Chinese fast food in Moscow is not particularly special, but ice cream is, though you have to order at least two scoops to get the equivalent of "one scoop" in the US. You have been warned. I miss Coldstone-sized portions.

Enough of my rambles, here are some pictures!

The back of a HUGE monument to Yuri Gagarin lit up at night. This was taken as part of the "Meredith got on a bus she thought would take her to get шаурма but instead wound up in a totally different part of town" adventure.

Moscow has telescopes!! Or, at least a building where astronomers hang out. There are bigger telescopes nearby, too, though the light pollution here is along the lines of that in LA. Anyway, this is about a 15-20 minute walk from my room, and it's where I go to talk to my research advisor.

Walking away from the main university building toward the Moscow River. This was about a week ago when the snow was still around.

I don't think any photo I take of this place can fully impress upon you how huge it is, but here's a pathetic attempt! My window is...just kidding, it's actually around to the right side and you can't see it in this picture.

Beautiful night sky. This is the view I get when I walk from sector в (part of the main part of the main building) to sector ж (where I live). It's an odd fenced off courtyard area that's mostly paved.

These guys were playing in the metro Ohotniy Ryad when there was mass confusion as to when and where everyone was meeting to go to the spontaneous Monday night concert. I stood and watched for a bit, and they were pretty dang good! They had a somewhat limited repertoire, but it was very cheerful Vivaldi-esque music and they had excellent ensemble.

BALALAIKA!! This was one of the many amazing performances at the Monday night recital. This guy was fantastic, and I finally got to see and hear a balalaika!

The ceiling was really cool in the recital hall, too. :)

If Rachmaninov wasn't dead and buried somewhere, his socks would have been knocked off by this cellist's performance. Sonata for Cello and Piano, op.19, 3rd movement if that means anything to anyone *cough*Peter*cough*. He also played a piece by Tschaikovsky called Petso-Caprichioso (ok so that's the phonetic translation from the Russian, not sure how it made it into English). Both were fantastic.

The latest view from my window - no more snow! Framed with ethernet cables! Lovely back alley with litter and dumpsters!

My still-unnamed plant, now at home in a new pot. (Sorry, but all your name suggestions just weren't quite right. And I have no idea what kind of plant it is. Green? OH - I've got it! That's the plant's name - зелёный! That's both a fun Russian word (pronounced zel-YO-nee) and an extremely obscure Star Trek reference that probably only makes sense to me.)

Sunset from my window. The fact that I can see the sun setting from my window means that the seasons are changing, because my window faces more or less west and when I moved in here the sun set too far south for it to be visible. Huzzah ethernet cables...

Crescent moon and beautiful blue sky that isn't quite done justice in this digital photo.

Walking back from orchestra rehearsal.

Telescope! I found a fun back way to walk back from the astronomy institute, and it took me past a few telescopes like this one that were trying to hide in the trees.

Whew, that was a lot of photos, maybe next time I'll have some with me in them. That's a bit difficult when I'm the one taking the photos, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.

spring, music, and ice cream

2007-03-20T17:15:00.000+03:00

First and foremost: spring has sprung!!

That's right, one degree warmer in Moscow in the afternoon than in Claremont in the wee hours of the morning! And sunny to boot! Man, living somewhere with seasons is fantastic.

Storytime. So last night, I got back from Russian language class around 5:30, and texted Jack to see if anything was going on. Turns out he and Jeff were just about to get on the metro to meet Irina at Ohotniy Ryad metro station at 6pm to go to some kind of classical music concert! I was all, whoa, hold on, why didn't anyone tell me about this, I'm coming too......so I called Irina and she said "sure, I'm running late too, see you a little after 6." And off I went, grabbing a pancake thing filled with chicken at a Teremok stand on the way.

It became apparent that I wasn't going to get to the meeting point until 6:30, so I started texting people, but when I arrived I didn't see anyone I knew. Fantastic. Finally about 15 minutes later, Irina managed to round us all up from the various misdirections we'd all headed. There were probably 10 of us who were there. We followed her down side streets until finally at about 7:05 (the concert was supposed to start at 7) we arrived at a small little concert hall. But Irina knew one of the performers and had asked them to postpone starting the concert a few minutes. (Apparently that actually works here!) We filed into a very small, rectangular recital hall and sat down. And then the most amazing recital I've ever been to began.

It was seriously amazing. And the fact that it happened on the spur of the moment made it even better. The whole thing was two and a half hours with intermission. There were piano solos, violin solos, violin with piano, flute and clarinet with piano, classical guitar, cello, and, best of all, BALALAIKA!! I got a few pictures. Everyone was an insanely good musician - this is the Moscow Conservatory after all. They all played magnificant pieces, too. For instance, Chopin Ballad no. 3 (piano), Saint-Saens Introduction and Rondo-Capriccio (AMAZING, violin), Sarasate, Tshaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, random Russian people I hadn't heard of. Two of the pieces I think I played in the accompanying orchestra at CCO - the Sarasate and one of the Tschaikovsky pieces (both violin solos). There was something about Russians playing Russian music that was simply fantastic. And the cellist blew me away. The whole thing blew me away. It was amazing. I also went through an entire roll of Halls' cough drops - but I didn't cough during a performance! I spasmed silently a few times, but I survived.

After all that awesomeness, we headed to Asia Cafe for dinner/snacks around 10pm. This being Russia, we didn't get out of there until midnight, and I didn't get back to the dorm until nearly 1am. But it didn't matter, what a wonderful evening.

Today I have been getting little things done, namely laundry. I enjoy doing laundry here, because usually I get to spend an hour practicing my Russian by having a conversation with another person who is annoyed that the laundry room isn't open. "Do you know when it is open?" "No, I have already been here 20 minutes." etc. And then it becomes "where are you from?" and "what do you think of Russia?" and all that fun stuff, and an hour or so later the laundry room lady arrives and you finally get to do your freaking laundry. Only this time there was the added bonus of "you have a bad cough and need to go to a doctor." Um. It's not that bad. Really. You should see me in LA smog.

And last but certainly not least - ice cream! I wanted an ice cream bar and decided to get adventuresome and buy one that didn't have a picture on the front and was written all in Russian. I deciphered "ice cream," "chocolate," and "vanilla," and figured I couldn't go wrong. I win! I essentially bought a huge brick of vanilla ice cream with little chocolate shavings/flecks in it. YUM. Ice cream makes everything better.

Okay, now it is time for me to go get my laundry.

another weekend

2007-03-18T17:40:00.000+03:00

Last night was an adventure to be sure!

I met up with Katie and a few other people from her Math in Moscow program at the metro университет stop. We took the red line a fair way, a bit past the center of the city, and set off to find a place called Проект ОГИ. A kind of "alternative club" as described by waytorussia.net.

Well if by "alternative" they meant "hard to find and really smokey," they were correct! Thankfully we were following someone who had been there before. We got there around 9pm, had some snacks and drinks, and just chatted for a while. Finding people here who speak English and you can just TALK to is wonderful! Plus Katie's birthday began at midnight, so it was a good excuse to have a fun night. I ordered a quesadilla, and I tried to get it without mushrooms, but apparently that wasn't possible, and I saw why when they brought it out - it was essentially a diced mushroom quesadilla. Oops. Oh well, Katie got to eat a pile of diced mushrooms and I got to eat fried tortilla with bits of cheese!

Some more of the Math in Moscow people joined us a bit later. It's a pretty small place and it's in a basement, so we had to fend random Russians away from our centrally located, relatively large table. I forgot to mention, unfortunately there was a 350 ruble cover charge, but we weren't about to turn around so we just paid.

A bit after 10pm, a band appeared, and they weren't bad. I am, however, terrible at classifying musical genres, so don't ask me what kind of stuff they played. Slightly too loud and in Russian? :) They had two female singers, and three or four guys playing percussion, guitar, keyboard, etc. The singing had a bit of an Imogen Heap edge to it, but the similarity ended there. Anyway, it was too loud to have conversations well, but not so loud that my ears were screaming "leave now or die." So that was good.

They played for a good hour and a half, and then Katie got all excited because it was almost her birthday, and she had to have a shot at midnight as per Mudd tradition. We sang for her, loudly and not in unison or in tune. The place was starting to close down, though, so we headed out pretty soon after midnight. The metro stops running at 1am anyway, so it worked out just fine. I couldn't believe how smokey all my clothes and hair smelled - it was gross! But aside from that, it was a pretty fun way to spend a Saturday night in Moscow.

This morning I went to church, and this afternoon I've done nothing productive. I'm about to tackle Thermal Physics and Russian Language homework. May also grab some cheap dinner from the cafeteria in a bit. Nothing too exciting planned for this week...I'm honestly looking forward to a "normal week," if you can call it that. :)

fun little thing courtesy of aunt pam

2007-03-18T17:36:00.000+03:00

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

gray day

2007-03-17T13:47:00.000+03:00

lovely.

Deadly plane crashes aside, all is well here.

Moscow has basically melted in the past week. There's a bit of dirty snow on the ground here and there, but it got as warm as 45 F yesterday and the only recent precipitation has been rain. It's nice that spring is on its way, but it makes me wish I'd brought something in between a sweatshirt and heavy duty winter jacket.

In the past two days I've had a lot of Politology class. A couple tidbits of recent Russian politics for your amusement:

1) Around 1997-8, the Russians spent a ton of money to spread negative propaganda about this one government guy so he'd resign. Then the government asked him a year or so later to negotiate on their behalf to borrow some money from the International Monetary Fund because they were broke and he was the only guy who had a chance. He agreed, and the IMF said "okay we'll give Russia $20 billion." Then the $20 billion completely poofed and Russia went bankrupt. No one knows what happened to it.

2) There can be no more Deputy Prime Ministers than there are rooms on the fifth floor of the white house. Except for when they decided there should only be 1 or 2 or there could be as many as they want.

Oh, Russia. Today is a lazy gray day and I haven't done much of anything. On the agenda: food, homework, probably going out with Katie and some of her friends to celebrate her 21st birthday. The next two weekends we have planned excursions - one to Vladimir/Suzdal and another to Novodevichy Cloister, so it seems like I won't have too much free time relatively soon, which is fine by me!! Of course, the best part is that Mike will be here in three weeks... :)

I randomly met a guy named Andrey while doing laundry a week or so ago, and he wants to practice speaking English with me (I think Jack from the KEI group is going to join us). It's been a little, well, Russian, trying to coordinate it, though, because every time he'd text me saying he was free I'd be in class and vice versa.

I've got a question for all you avid readers - what would you do if you were in Moscow? Is there something huge I'm forgetting about? A place I need to visit, something I need to buy, a food I need to eat? I'll also entertain requests for souviners, though I can't guarantee anything until the day I pack to come home. :)

I'm hungry so it's time to make some instant noodles! Then I'll see if I can't get my cygwined IRAF to actually reduce some data. (Translation: I'll do some astronomy stuff.)

Oh, just got word from Katie - at 8 we're going to a place called Proekt OGI. Looks like an artsy club of some sort...should be a fun adventure!

ah, tuesday

2007-03-13T14:38:00.000+03:00

Today has become one of those days where suddenly nothing is happening.

Last night I got a call from Natasha from the chamber orchestra saying not to come to rehearsal Tuesday evening. This morning I decided to sleep in because I was tired and didn't have class in the morning. I was going to take a shower, but the hot water wasn't working, so I got dressed. Then the hot water started working again. (Figures.) Just a few hours ago I learned that Russian Studies Seminar is going to be rescheduled and is not happening today.

So, since I have little else to do, here are some photos!

Outside the circus (a week or so ago), heading in. To the right are a bunch of crazy carnival rides, including one called "Crazy Bus" that we found quite amusing.

Artistic photograph of colorful liquids at an undisclosed location with anonymous people who may or may not be present. No seriously, I love this photo.

Alex Padua, me, Alex Von (KEI), Nick, Jessica. Outside our old dorm just before moving.

My new room! Small but cozy, and the best part is it has all my stuff set up in it. Of special note: the stupid metal frame and wood board that is part of the bed.

This time the view is from by the window. Out the door there's a very small entryway with a toilet to the left, the rest of the bathroom to the right. Jessica's room is on the other side of the wall in this picture. Bonus: map of Russia that was cut in half and on the back of my door to block the light. I decided to hang the sketchy throw/rug thing over the door instead and salvage the snazzy map for the wall.

David, Dima, and Felix pose in the metro station on the way back from our Women's Day dinner.

My pink rose in my mug that has a picture of a pink rose on it! :)

The Большой Зал ("Big Hall") where we saw La Traviata on Sunday. We got there late and people had taken our seats, so we moved during the first intermission. During the second intermission a few of us went to the bathroom and the third act started without us, so we were allowed to sit in the balcony. Upshot: 3 different seats. It was fantastic, though, especially since I'd played in the pit for La Traviata for Richland Light Opera's performance senior year of high school. I didn't remember the plot well but I did remember the music. This performance was interesting because the orchestra was all on stage and it was quite large - I guess they didn't have a pit. And of course no subtitles or supertitles, and programs cost 40 rubles and were in Russian, so hooray for having no idea what was going on the entire time!

I decided to walk back from class in the medical building yesterday a bit after 5pm. It was the first time I was able to sense that spring was around the corner, and it was really neat, so I took a bunch of pictures and enjoyed the walk.

Another picture from the walk back to the main building.

Another picture from the walk. It was really nice to be able to walk on sidewalks and not have to dodge ice or puddles!

This is the outside of sector ж, the sector of the main building that I live in. See all those cables? That, dear readers, is the internet.

Last but not least: the view from my window, plus my new potted plant (I'm taking name suggestions) and various foodstuffs in the "refrigerator."

yesssss

2007-03-10T00:09:00.000+03:00

Here are some reasons why life is fantastic right now.

2) I'm thoroughly moved in to my new room in the huge main university building.
3) I have internet access (!)
4) The MSU Chamber Orchestra is fabulous.
5) Astronomers exist in Moscow, and one of them has a bunch of CCD images of a supernova that I get to play with (a la IRAF and photometry)
6) I bought myself a potted plant.
7) There are places to eat around here.
8) Speaking of eating, the guys took us out to a restaurant called Дядя Ваня last night and it was yummy, plus they got us flowers (it was Women's Day).

and the number one reason why life is fantastic right now:

1) Michael Bigelow is coming to Moscow on April 4!!!

Only possible improvements on my current situation: ice cream, guacamole, clean socks, a comfortable bed, a computer that easily supports IRAF. Two of those things are possible, the others will have to wait, but no matter.

Also, tomorrow is Saturday and I am sleeping in.

moving out, hopefully

2007-03-07T00:28:00.000+03:00

Tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, six of us are moving to the main building, me included! FINALLY. Though it's too bad we can't all move together. Ah, Russian bureaucracy...

So, hmm, let's see. Monday was pretty cool, had some physics and some lunch and some language. I'm reading "Contact" by Carl Sagan right now and it's getting super exciting to the point where I don't want to put it down! Monday night a bunch of us went to Boarhouse, this bar/restaurant place where they have 4 for 1 drink specials prior to 8pm on Monday nights. Meaning, you order one drink, they bring you...four. Then I think it becomes 3 for 1 until 10pm, etc. I also had a burrito!! I don't know what it is with me and burritos. I think Jenna and I are in agreement that a Chipotle burrito would be about the best thing ever right about now.

Speaking of burritos, I have discovered the next best thing a la Russia: шаурма (shaurma). It's like...a burrito, actually, only, well, Russian style. Wasn't that descriptive. Oh, just come visit and try one for yourself. :)

I packed most of my stuff up Monday night in anticipation of moving today (Tuesday), but no such luck. Alex Von from KEI met with the group today prior to our Russian Studies Seminar class, and he cleared up a lot of stuff with regards to classes and housing. Though half of what he had to say was along the lines of "I'm sorry Russian bureaucracy sucks." hmmmmmm, yeah. But good news: I'm meeting with some astronomy professor (I think, anyway) this Friday to discuss research options! And we're going to an opera this Sunday, and apparently Irina knows some people there who might be able to connect me with another orchestra or musical ensemble.

So cross your fingers for a smooth move to the main building tomorrow evening! With luck and, well, more luck, I'll be moved in tomorrow night and have internet by the weekend. (Thursday March 8 is a holiday - Women's Day - so I doubt I can get much of anything done then, but on the other hand no classes means a day to settle in.)

Someone in the group came up with a good one today (I forget who it was) - "In Russia, you don't reschedule classes; classes reschedule YOU." true that.

church and circus

2007-03-04T22:56:00.000+03:00

Interesting fact of the day: the Russian word for church is церковь, and circus is цирк. (Those sound pretty similar and I therefore find it amusing that both occurred today.)

Church was good, and there were more people this time! Afterwards there was some kind of youth bible study group that I got semi dragged off to (but it was not like I had anything else to do anyway). Apparently the group had just gotten restarted, and it was awkward for me because I was pretty clearly the new one but there was never an opportunity for introductions or anything. One guy who is from...Kenya? Nigeria? (one of those two and another guy is from the other) was leading it. His English was passable but not excellent, and we read "The Good Samaritan" in some old fashioned thee-thou language and he basically talked about it for half an hour. Stuff we'd all heard before so far as I could tell. At one point he decided to teach us to respond "Alleluia!" when someone says "Praise the Lord!"...which is okay I suppose, but a little more outwardly exuberant than I'm used to, plus it's Lent and I definitely have it ingrained that "alleluia" is not an okay word during Lent.

Anyway, I'll probably give it another shot next week, most of the people seemed pretty cool (plus they speak English!).

Tonight we went to the circus, which was an experience. I'm not sure how okay I am with all the animals they have...everyone says they have a great life, etc., but I just don't know. There were bears, cats, a monkey, a dog, horses, porcupines (I think), and elephants. I don't know, they just didn't look overly happy, it doesn't seem like animals should be trained to that extent. To the cats' credit, they were pretty obstinant, so way to go, cats! The coolest parts in my opinion were the magic tricks where people curled themselves up inside boxes and reappeared as another person, etc. There were also some pretty quality trapeze artists and dancers, "Clown Harry," and a giraffe unicycle that put South Dorm's to shame.

So, now I have been to the circus, and in Moscow of all places! I'm off now to finish up some Thermal Physics homework and call it a night.

food is delicious

2007-03-03T22:44:00.000+03:00

Today's adventure: Arbat Street.

It all started when Jenna said last night that she and Celina were thinking of going to Hard Rock Cafe for lunch today (Saturday). I mentioned that I'd never been to a Hard Rock Cafe, so we proceeded to google it and lo and behold they had a menu online, and it contained NORMAL FOOD. Which sounded pretty fantastic. So it became Jenna, Celina, Jessica, and me, traipsing off into soggy Moscow in search of the Hard Rock Cafe located near the Arbatskaya metro station (and on old Arbat Street).

Soon we learned that there are two metro stations called Arbatskaya. They are not in the same place, they are not connected via an underground walkway, and they are not on the same line. Oh, Moscow.

Anyway, after walking in a circle we found Arbat Street! Unfortunately it was raining and the ground was bricks/cobblestones/whatever that is technically called, and it was covered in a lovely combination of melting ice and mud. It was just above freezing, but it felt downright balmy compared to recent weather.

We were pretty hungry since it was nearly 1pm by now, so we headed straight to the restaurant. Normally I couldn't care less about "American" food, but it's been a month guys, and this was fantastic. The waiters all spoke English and the menu was in English. We ordered a ridiculous amount of food. It went something like this.

Appetizers: we ordered 2 - nachos and a chicken quesadilla. CORN CHIPS AND GUACAMOLE!!!! you have no idea. and the quesadilla had pineapple in it and was quite good.
Drinks: it's not so annoying being not 21 when you're in Russia. all together we had a cosmopolitan, a long island iced tea, a white russian, and a coffee with bailey's. and of course some bottled water.
Main course: I got penne with grilled chicken and alfredo sauce, and a side caesar salad because I really miss salads. it also came with garlic bread, which was a nice bonus. the others got burgers and one got some kind of steak.
Dessert: vanilla ice cream. plain and simple and delicious, split four ways.

We were then thoroughly in a food coma. The whole meal took some 2 hours, but we didn't mind, it was great! Random music videos from the US playing in the background, yummy food, good company. The only non-ideal thing was the occasional cigarette at a nearby table, but such is Russia. It is now 11pm and I haven't had dinner and I'm not hungry. It was THAT much food.

After the meal, we all bought Hard Rock Cafe shirts and headed out to explore the Arbat. It was still drizzling, but we took some random pictures and popped into a souvineer shop and I bought a Russian hat from a street vendor!! I was very proud of myself for talking him down 50 rubles (yes I know that is only $2 and I probably could've gotten a better deal if I had attempted to converse in Russian, but he seemed eager to talk to me in English, so I wasn't exactly going to argue). Anyway, now that winter is ending I have a snazzy winter hat a la Russia. Pictures forthcoming I'm sure.

Then for some reason we decided to venture up to the north part of the city to go to an odd assortment of electronics and DVD stores. This took a while and I didn't buy anything, but there were a LOT of sketchy Russian DVDs and computer programs.

Next it took 2.5 hours to come from that place to the universityet metro station, get money from the bank that doesn't charge me a $5 fee, buy some food at ramstore, and get back to the dorm. Trolleybus 34 has been seriously hating me lately.

That's about it! Tomorrow is Sunday and I plan to go to church, and rumor has it we'll be going to the circus in the evening. the adventures continue...

it is decidedly March

2007-03-02T14:21:00.000+03:00

Happy Friday!

Today started off a bit less than ideal. I still didn't have my bus pass and I had to get to class at 10, which meant getting up relatively early. When Irina finally came to give us the bus passes I was in such a hurry to get to the bus stop that my scarf fell off on the side of the road and I didn't notice until I was sitting on the bus!

I frantically texted Irina and Laura to see if they could search the dorm and the route between the dorm and the bus stop, but no response. I got to class early, but everyone else was half an hour late since their bus broke down just behind mine. And then David walked in the door with my scarf!! Apparently it fell of just before I went to cross the street and sat in a gross pile of slushy snow for about 10 minutes. So, thankfully I got it back, and once I wash it (it smells like gross presently) I'll be super sure to wrap it around my neck and not just drape it on my shoulders every time I head out.

Class (Politology) was fine, but I'm just glad we didn't have a double class since I don't think I could handle 6 straight hours of Russian Politics... :)

In other news, I just heard that Alex Von (from KEI) is coming to Moscow next week to help sort out some of the problems that have arisen with classes and scheduling and everything. Dang. Everything save research and a textbook and possibly another musical group is a-ok for me, but it seems some others haven't been so lucky.

Oh and newsflash - rumor has it we're not moving to the main building tomorrow. Surprise, surprise.

Yesterday afternoon I met up with Vincent, the guy I met at church last Sunday. I figure he's Russian and knows Moscow better than me, maybe we'll go somewhere scenic or he'll show me a random tourist attraction. Instead, we rode the metro one stop and wound up at...McDonald's. Which I found slightly amusing. He wanted to hear all my impressions of Russia and how I thought it compared with the US. It's hard to say "everything is disorganized and it's really cold" without sounding overly negative, because I don't have a negative impression of Russia, but both of those things are true!! Anyway, it was pretty random, and for the record, vanilla milkshakes at McDonald's taste the same in Moscow.

Think I'm going to head out now. (I'm in the computer lab in the medical faculty building since people are kind of lingering about here and the internet doesn't limit me on how many MBs I can use.) No plans for the weekend, really...I heard something about the circus on Sunday, maybe for real this time. We Shall See.

universal phenomena + photos

2007-02-28T21:54:00.000+03:00

Last night I attended a rehearsal of the MSU Chamber Orchestra!! I got a phone call Monday night from a guy named Sasha who spoke decent English. He said Dima had called him and told him I wanted to join, and gave me directions to a place not far from the main building and said to show up around 7:15 Tuesday night.

I did, and it was fantastic.

They're an authentic Baroque chamber group, and last night there were about 6 violins, 3 violas including myself, 1 cello, and a singer. Since MSU doesn't have a music department, this is kind of the few random students who play a stringed instrument but aren't at a conservatory. Man, music is fantastic, and even though they have different words for "up bow" and "down bow" and "don't take this repeat" and "start at measure 67," it worked pretty dang well. Then at break, it became a game in which everyone drank tea and interrogated the newcomer American (me). In Russian. Which was, quite frankly, terrific, because I'm actually somewhat capable of talking about myself in Russian. Things like "I am from Washington State and go to school in California," "I have played viola since fifth grade," "I am studying physics but still want to play in an orchestra," "I like astronomy and want to become an astronaut." It was a bit of a brain strain, but experiences like that are honestly what I CAME to Russia for!!

I also met a girl named Julia who plays viola. She's 18 and in her 2nd year at some Moscow Art institute. She spoke about the same amount of English as I do Russian, though recently she'd been studying German so it threw her off a bit. And she is awesome! Exactly the kind of person I was hoping to eventually meet. And so I discovered my first universal phenomenon - violists. We're everywhere, yet we're unique in our love of the viola, and we're awesome.

So, that will keep me busy on Tuesdays and Fridays (yes, Fridays) from 7:15ish until 10pmish. (sidenote: here is one instance where I *love* the "ish" on timeframes.) I had to tune my viola a half step down since they're so authentic and Baroque, and I may have to use a Baroque bow and acquire gut strings. We'll see. It's only been one rehearsal, and I don't exactly speak the language.

Today I discovered another universal phenomenon at lunch in the cafeteria in the physics building: physics majors. They had stacked a bunch of empty plastic bottles into a huge tower in the middle of a table:

I don't know what it is about little things like that, but I love it. Another instance from last week - someone spectacularly dropped their tray in the large cafeteria in the main building, and everyone applauded. People are great sometimes.

The latest: we may be moving Saturday. Yeah. With that, here is a picture of the building we're currently living in:

There are 22 floors, and if you count from the top (22) down to 10, my window is the one you can see on the farthest left hand side.

Tonight Laura, Jenna and I ventured out to find an Indian restaurant, and we succeeded! We had Samosas, and I got Chicken Tikka Masala with one of those mango yogurt drinks. We should've ordered family style, but live and learn. It was in a building called Sputnik Hotel, near a huge tribute to Yuri Gagarin. Pretty sweet. Here's Laura with me at the restaurant:

And Jenna with me outside the building the restaurant was in (note "Sputnik" at the top in cyrillic):

After dinner, we headed back to the dorm but first stopped at a convenience store to get some delicious pistachio ice cream. Excellent decision if I may say so.

While I'm in picture mode...here's one I managed to get inside a trolleybus (I spend at least an hour of my life each day in one of these, and usually they are packed with people):

And this was taken near the art gallery we went to on Sunday:

Here's Jeff sitting in a random chair:

Tomorrow is March, which is odd. It means I will have less internet access - I only purchased 1000 MB since we are probably (hopefully?) moving this weekend. It means I had to get a new metro pass and Irina is supposed to give us new bus passes. It means I may begin to hear from summer programs. It means spring had dang well better show up sometime, though I'm kind of dreading the transition from winter to spring since it will be slushy and gross. So it goes.

the rest of the weekend

2007-02-26T18:48:00.000+03:00

Saturday: slept in and did two loads of laundry. Around 5pm, things started happening - Irina told us to meet her downstairs to extend our dorm cards, my second load of laundry was done, and Katie texted me saying they were heading to a bar and she'd call when they arrived to give me directions to join them.

Instead of actually getting new dorm cards, they wrote something like "really okay until 2/26." (This took a good 40 minutes.) But today we FINALLY got new cards, good through March 9. Which is not super far away. So, who knows what's up.

I devised a clever way to hang my sheets to dry in the bathroom and felt very clever, and then our entire suite minus Laura's room smelled like wet laundry for about 24 hours.

Katie called around 6 and gave me directions to a bar called 16 Tons. It involved taking the red line metro to the center of Moscow, transferring to the purple line, and going a few more stops. Laura agreed to accompany me on this adventure, and come 7 or so we made our way there (turns out I don't own, or at least didn't bring, adequate "we're going out to a bar or club" clothing, silly me). As usual walked around in circles a bit, but in the end all was well. It was great to see Katie!! I don't know her very well aside from "yeah she's a Mudder in my class," but it was still awesome, plus she had a few friends from her math program with her as well as two Russian girls kind enough to show them around. These people spoke English, the menu at the bar was in English, I had a delicious cocktail of some variety and a fantastic caesar salad, and life was good! We had to head back around 8 or 9 though, because apparently their dorm has a weird "you can't get back in after 11pm" rule.

Their dorm is quite nice, but it's nowhere near a metro stop and they don't use the buses, so suddenly I got a new perspective on my daily commute...at any rate, it was great to meet the other people in the math program! We all chilled until midnight or so, and when Laura and I decided to leave the guards didn't want to let us out because apparently we hadn't checked in properly. I had no idea what they were saying. It was odd being the best Russian speaker (aside from the Russian girls they were with) of that group - none of the math folks knows much if any Russian it seems. Still had no idea what the guards were yelling about, so with Katie's help we played the "dumb American" card and he exasperatedly let us out. weird.

Important Discovery Of The Evening: after midnight, buses only run in the direction opposite of which you want to go. SERIOUSLY. Laura and I wound up walking all the way back to our dorm, which took a good 45 minutes (though admittedly 15 of that was spent standing at bus stops hoping for a bus to come). LAME. and cold, but not as cold as it was last week, or we may have died.

Sunday: went to church! It was fantastic!! Hard to find in typical Anglican/Episcopal tradition, but suddenly there's this cute small cathedral-esque building and you walk in and all these people are speaking English to you with British accents and offering you a bulletin and saying "welcome"! They used the CW (Common Worship) book, not the BCP as in the US, but much of it was similar. The whole service just felt great, I was incredibly glad to be there. I met a few random people, too - a British priest visiting Moscow on sabbatical, a guy from the US who writes a column in The Moscow Times, a Russian named Vincent who is randomly Anglican and speaks good English. Seriously good times, I am going every week if at all possible. It struck me how fitting that it was the first Sunday of Lent...Meredith gives up the US for Lent or some such. :)

Next up was failed logistics a la Russia. The plan was for me to meet up with the group to go to a museum. I took the metro to an orange station that has an underground connection to a green station and accidentally came up at the green station, so I called Irina and told her this and pulled out a map and figured out which direction the orange station was in and started walking. She thought I was somewhere else, and once I was 3/4 of the way to the orange station she calls me for the umpteenth time and says "come back to the green station and meet us down by the trains!" ...so anyway it took until 2pm for me to find her and thus the group. I grabbed Масдоналдс for lunch (hey you've gotta get McDonald's in Russia right?) and off we headed to the Tretyakov Gallery, a HUGE art museum. They claim it takes around 3 hours to go through it, but I only got a bit past halfway in 3 hours, and then we left. Honestly I was past my "look at paintings" saturation point anyway, but DANG is that a huge museum!! Some of the paintings take up entire walls. I even recognized a few and felt slightly more cultured. :) I got an audio tour, and all I have to say is they must pay those people per word. "The pastel greens accentuate the stark contrast of the bold background, enhanced by a bleak portrayal of youthful innocence amidst a chaotic city scene typical of the eighteenth century." BLARGH. Overall, though, it was three hours well spent.

Then we headed back to the dorm, I had instant noodles (hooray) for dinner, and did my thermal physics and Russian language homework. Laura used a good chunk of my remaining 3000ish MBs of internet that poofs at the end of the month to watch TV shows such as "the office" and "ugly betty." I mostly just half-listened while doing homework, which I think was more amusing than watching.

Today (Monday, not technically the weekend, but still): slow buses made me late to thermal physics and the first 30 minutes was spent listening to how I should go see ballets at a nearby Children's Ballet center. (The rest was spent discussing adiabatic thermal processes and deriving fun things like specific heat. Somehow doing a full derivation as physics makes it 10 times more interesting than it was in frosh chem.) Then lunch at the cafeteria there - I need to figure out how to order food more effectively - and a bit of last minute Russian homework over at the medical building prior to Russian language class. I like Mondays, I have things to do!

Also, I noticed it is staying light slightly later!! Dusk is closer to 6pm versus 5:30pm!!! This means spring may actually happen sometime before May, which is good.

Think I'll go watch a newly downloaded BSG episode on my laptop and enjoy some more instant noodles. Oh yeah, living the good life here in Moscow, college style. :)

fatherland defenders' day

2007-02-24T13:52:00.000+03:00

Happy (belated) February 23!

Here in Russia, Feb. 23 is Fatherland Defenders' Day (День защитника Отечества), which originally means something about the Russian Civil War, but it's come to be popularly known as more of just a "guys' day" (a counterpart to March 8, which is women's day). Let me just say, Russia really knows how to do holidays. None of the US "hmmm I think Monday is something...presidents' day? ah well, I don't get the day off anyhow" stuff.

As such, a few cool things happened.
1) no classes - now there's a concept, unlike at Mudd, when there's a national holiday a university gives its students the day off!
2) I was told that we (the women) were cooking dinner for the guys and wound up being in charge of a salad and dessert
3) there were fantastic fireworks at 9pm

Lack of classes meant no Politology at 10am. And since a typical morning consisting of getting up, talking on Skype, taking a shower, eating breakfast, and getting to class takes a good 2.5-3 hours, I was happy to sleep well past 7am.

Around noon, Jenna and Jessica came down to talk to Laura and me about the dinner we were going to prepare. (Apparently Celina and Nick had decided it was going to happen, and I figured what the heck, nothing else to do anyway and I'm pro-food!) I was a little vague on what all the main courses entailed, but everyone was talking about tons and tons of pasta and sauce and meatballs and chicken, so I figured I'd do a salad. If I was in the US I'd whip up some killer guac...but no can do here. Next best thing - a salad containing avocado, little mozzarella cheese balls, tomato, and red onion. And of course lettuce, and some kind of dressing called "dressing salad sauce" (translated straight from the bottle).

So off we went to Рамстор, the big grocery store only a few bus stops away. Thing is, an excursion to Рамстор (that's ramstore for you non cyrillic readers) always involves most of an afternoon, especially when it's busy. The lines are outrageous, and just getting to and from there is a bit of an adventure, not to mention finding things once inside.

We made out pretty well (except Jenna left her empty backpack in her cart and it got stolen...she had to re-find all the items in her cart and is now lacking a backpack). Got back around 4pm or so, and soon realized no one had procured dessert, so that task was given to me since all I had to do was chop stuff up. They originally wanted dinner to be at 6, which got pushed to 7, and then 7:30, and wound up actually being a bit after 8. It's the Russian Way.

Anyway, it was a fabulous meal!! Everyone loved my salad, we had WAY too much pasta but it was all good, Jessica made those tomato with mozzarella cheese things I love so much, and Советское Шампанское started flowing. (That's Soviet Champagne.) It was great to eat a "normal" home cooked meal. Then right around 9 as everyone was finishing eating and I was about to serve dessert, fireworks started going off everywhere! (Dessert was some kind of chocolate covered cake with foamy cakelike batter and swirls of something resembling cool whip inside, and vanilla ice cream on the side.) Everyone opened up the windows - WIDE - and the temperature promptly dropped to below freezing indoors. But no one cared, because as Jeff put it "we're at the epicenter of a ring of fireworks!!" The view from the 17th floor was phenomenal. Then everyone ate dessert - the ice cream was exquisite - and vodka appeared along with a few silly rounds of "Indian Poker" and around 1 or 2am everyone dispersed.

I managed to meet some people last night, though - a guy and a girl from Oregon (small world!), a guy from Iran, and a girl from France who's been living in Latvia recently. She was awesome, one of those eccentric travel the world and live out of a suitcase and speak 8 languages kind of people.

Now it is Saturday, and today is laundry day for me. I'm actually washing my sheets right now, so I'm hoping they'll be able to dry by the time I want to go to bed tonight. I talked with Katie from Mudd briefly yesterday, and she's going to call and see if anyone from my group wants to join her and some from her group as they're led around to some bars and/or clubs by a couple of Russian girls they met. (I think that's the plan, anyway.) So, that should be an adventure, if it happens.

I think that's a good motto for me. "That will be an adventure, if it happens."

the weather

2007-02-22T00:26:00.000+03:00

I think this pretty much says it all, courtesy of weather.com -

Oi.

curlsicles are amusing

2007-02-21T17:16:00.000+03:00

Remember, it's a good thing when I don't update this for a couple of days, because it probably means I actually found something else to occupy myself with. (Either that or the internet broke, or my computer crashed, or I froze to death.) But at the moment it's more the "I actually have kind of a bit of a life," emphasis on the "kind of" and "bit."

Thermal Physics! He lectures slowly due to the language barrier, but the class seems to be going somewhere. We meet two or three times a week for about two hours each time. I really need to get my hands on a copy of that Thermal Physics book, though, which is currently Irina's mission, though she has about 20 million other logistical concerns to sort out at present, so we shall see.

Russian Language! It's fantastic to have a course teaching a language that I enjoy learning and that is practical and useful. I actually chatted with the lady on the 9th floor when Laura and I went on a mission to do her laundry. (Okay, so "chatted with" may be a stretch, but work with me.) I don't mind having a lot of work in that class because it's interesting and applicable and even fun.

Other stuff! ...doesn't exist. Well, techically I'm in Russian Studies Seminar, but more than anything that's a good way to see the entire group once a week. All told, there are about 15 of us. Four are not living in the dorm, and four actually speak Russian. (There's an overlap of three there in case you're wondering.) I'm also in Politology, but that's only met once, and it's a course I'm not overly enthusiastic about. But compared to what I've heard about some professors not speaking comprehensible English, I figure I've got it pretty good. That, and all my classes are actually happening. I may be the only one for whom that is the case.

Research, on the other hand, is not happening yet. Apparently the guy that the other guy who I met with was going to talk to over at the Space Institute is in Germany. I feel kinda like I'm trying to dial an 800 number and am on terminal hold. But hopefully, sometime before May, knock on wood etc., I'll be able to at least *visit* the Space Institute, and ideally get some kind of research position there. Stay tuned on that front.

Orchestra is also not happening yet. I saw a poster advertising the MSU Chamber Orchestra at the main building the other day and asked Dima (speaks Russian and lives in the dorms) if he could call the number and see if they want a violist. So far he's been told to call back later...four times. Irina says there's another connection she has with someone who could get me in some kind of musical group, but who wants to bet that'll happen anytime this month? I figure the most extreme scenario is I find myself playing in TWO groups, which would frankly be amazing. I just want to have some group to play viola in, because it dawned on me the other day that I haven't *really* played in two months!! Not okay.

As to the living situation, rumor has it we're going to be moving from this dorm (kind of far from the university) the the university main building. Slight detail...our admission cards for this dorm expire tomorrow. I think everyone's ignoring that fact. There's about another ton of paperwork to be done before we can move, and it's still not completely certain that we WILL move, though it seems to be more and more likely. Only thing is, the longer I stay here the more annoying it will be when Irina announces "okay everyone pack up, we're moving tomorrow!" I've accumulated some stuff (lamp, hot pot, food, textbooks) that will make moving a bit of a pain. But for now, and as always, one day at a time.

Also, it is COLD. Seriously. Today's high was 4F (don't think it quite made it), and tomorrow's forecast is "bitterly cold...dangerous wind chills as low as -25F." Fantastic. Meantime, Claremont, CA has a "severe weather warning" along the lines of "it might rain." ......

I do have some good news, though - Mike is going to try to visit me! It'll probably be in April as part of a trip to visit friends and family in the Netherlands and Ukraine. Details forthcoming. And of course all of this depends on him managing to get plane tickets and a visa, etc.

Among minor accomplishments: I FOUND SALAD IN A BAG!! As well as little balls of fresh mozzarella cheese. So Russia may not believe in corn chips or refried beans, but I'm doing pretty well as far as food is concerned. In my perfect world I'd eat out a bit more, but most other people in the program want to save money and that means just occasional trips to the grocery store. Along the lines of Russian cuisine, I've had borsch, pelmeni, piroshki, juice, ramen, kasha (like oatmeal), and amazing hot chocolate. (I realize that things like juice and ramen sound silly in context, but both are MUCH better than what you normally find in the states. I suppose it's at the cost of no corn chips...)

The other day I sampled two other "Russian" cuisines - Domino's and Subway! Dima, Nick, and I popped into Domino's and ordered a large pepperoni pizza for lunch. It took about 20 minutes, and we got the most deliciously greasy pizza EVER. I don't know, sometimes greasy pizza is just amazing, the kind where orange grease seriously drips everywhere, and this was one of those times. The Subway, however, left something to be desired. The turkey and ham slices were indistinguishable - square and blotchy. No choice as to cheese variety - American straight from the plastic or none at all. I got "that yellow sauce" (some kind of mustard?) and veggies including lettuce, which was white. Odd.

Hopefully somewhat soon I'll be able to meet up with two people here: Katie Eliseo, another mudder studying abroad in Moscow with a group of students from the US doing a program called "Math in Moscow." The other is Snezhana Zheltoukhova, who was the Russian Language Resident at Pomona my sophomore year.

I'll leave you now with this random tidbit: I glimpsed a crescent moon at twilight last night between layers of clouds and it was really cool. Even though I'm 11 hours away from home and no one here speaks English, we really are all on the same boat. spaceship. planet. you get it. :)

stories AND pictures, whoa!

2007-02-18T16:51:00.000+03:00

Before I tell you all about today, I thought I'd show you a pile I put together of useful documents when visiting Moscow:

We have the passport, visa, immigration form, and registration paper; student ID, metro card, bus card, dorm residence card; and some rubles. Without one of these things I would likely die, or at least be arrested forever.

Anyway, yesterday I did nothing and it was boring. Today (Sunday) I had a plan: I was going to get up, go to church at 11, eat some food somewhere, come back to the dorm, work on homework, then this evening go to some concert or opera or something with the group.

This is what happened.

Got up at 8:30, talked to Mike, took a shower, ate breakfast, headed out at 10. Took the metro from проспект вернадского to охотный ряд. It was a bit after 10:30 when I got there, and it should be a 20 minute walk to the church, so I set out in search of Тверская улица, supposedly a main street. Turns out I had my directions all backwards and instead of heading northwest, I headed northeast and then (upon realizing I'd gone the wrong way) southish. Still no luck, as I was still headed the wrong way. I walked across a bridge and took some pictures and tried to enjoy not knowing where I was. Here's some pictures I got from the walk:

It's a better picture of me than of where I was, but I was on a random bridge south of central Moscow. The river was pretty much frozen - weird.

I like this one because you get a typical foreign city scene, only *ting* there's St. Basil's Cathedral! Pretty crazy.

So...you'd better yield to all the right-turners planning to drive off a cliff and drown?? Oh, street signs...

Anyway, now back to my story. At any rate, I knew how to get back to the metro stop, and that was all that mattered. By now it was after 11 and I clearly was doing something wrong and it was getting cold, so I popped into ГУМ, the huge department store, and poked around for a bit. It's a 3-story mall, only all the stores are uppity and you feel like you can't walk in them because everything is super expensive and the stores are small and you'd likely be the only person in there. It was still interesting to window shop for a bit, and I grabbed lunch at a sbarro. (Of all fast food places, sbarro and some KFC ripoff seem to be the most prominent around here.) Here's a picture from ГУМ:

By now it was after noon and I just headed back to the dorm. I told Laura my sad story, and we pulled out a map, and I discovered that St. Basil's Cathedral is at the south end of red square, not the north end, which would explain my backwards thinking. Ah well, I'll just try again next week!

A bit of a tangent - I realized yesterday evening that another Mudder, Katie Eliseo, is also in Moscow this semester! I had known this but somehow I'd forgotten until she sent me a facebook message last night. Turns out she's living just the other side of the closest metro stop, so I can take the bus three stops and walk 5-10 minutes and be at her dorm! I haven't done this yet, though, because I haven't been able to contact her other than via facebook and my plans for the afternoon were about to change.

At 2:15 or so, Laura texts me saying "we're meeting at 2:50 downstairs to go to the opera, dress up." um. right. So I throw on black pants. We get down there and it's just me, Laura, Dima, and Jenna - no one else is even going. None of them care about seeing an opera, they just have nothing better to do. (I, on the other hand, think it will be freaking fantastic to see an opera in Russia!) Dima is very good at not telling us what is going on, but it sounds like we're meeting friends of Irina's at the main university building and going with them to buy tickets for this evening. Well, long story short, we got there and decided not to go and came back. (It was a bit more complicated than that, and the full story involves other people wanting to ice skate and a sneak peak at a TINY dorm room similar to what we might have to move into.)

So my day has been a pretty typical exercise in trying to go to stuff and winding up doing nothing. I think one of the girls we met over at the main building is coming to visit us here, though, since she's a high school senior from Minnesota who is Ukranian but speaks Russian. (Didn't catch her name or what she's doing here.) She apparently was friends with last semester's KEI group and has a bunch of stories about how their logistics exploded in their faces, too. So that should be interesting to hear.

Anyway, that's been my day, and I still have a load of Russian homework to do, but it's all good. Laura went off to Рамстор to get some essentials like toilet paper and sandwich makings and I think a light bulb or something. Oh, excitement.

Stay tuned for Week Two: Meredith Actually Has A Week Of Classes, Maybe For Real This Time. :)

one week down, a lot to go

2007-02-16T18:20:00.000+03:00

The last couple of days have been all right. I still feel somewhat isolated, but school is beginning to happen, so I'm no longer feeling a bit alone AND bored out of my mind. :)

Thursday, yesterday, included two classes - Thermal Physics and Russian Language. I met the Thermal Physics professor at the physics building at 11am with Irina. He speaks enough English that we'll manage, but it will take some patience on my part. To start, he asked me some questions to make sure I wasn't going into this totally clueless - do I know how to take derivatives, do I know what a harmonic oscillator is, etc. Then he proceeded to whip out the textbook that is used at HMC for Statmech!! He wanted me to look through it and see if it seemed to be the right level, so I just said "perfect!" since Prof. Esin had recommended the book to me and I even thought about acquiring a copy before coming to Russia but it just never happened. So I may actually get a decent Statmech replacement course! All we did after that was find an empty classroom where he could explain Moscow State University to me. It was actually pretty informative. The departments, or "faculties," are very separate and they're pretty adament about the order in which physics courses are taken. After an hour or so, some students had a class in the room we were in, so we wandered around in search of another room in vain. He showed me a library and a couple lecture halls where profs were teaching Optics and Theomech in Russian (weird), and I saw a bunch of students in the halls and stuff. This was the first inkling I had of this being an actual university - it looked like most of these students were actually studying and going to class and stuff!

The upshot of the morning was that it's me and the professor meeting two or three times a week (Monday and Wednesday for sure and maybe Thursday if need be) from 11-1.

The next adventure I delved into was along the lines of "Meredith eats lunch and finally goes to a post office to buy stamps and both of these things are complicated because she does not know her way around nor does she speak Russian particularly well." I've got a ton of stamps now, and I learned it's 22.5 rubles to send a letter to the US and 19 to send a postcard.

Russian language class was at 3, and that went quite well, except for the part where the professor didn't show up until 3:30. We actually got a load of homework, and that made me happy because it means I have something do to. (I know, I'm lame like that.) It's so cool to study Russian in Russia. It feels like I just stumbled across an entire country that happens to speak that silly code language I've been studying since 8th grade. :)

Today I had to get up in the morning *again*. So dreadful, I know. But for some reasons mornings aren't quite as bad here, except that I should be getting more sleep since I've fallen into the habit of staying up till 1am and then reading for half an hour and having to get up at 7:30 or so.

...there was just a loud explosion/large object falling noise in the direction of the hallway...

Anyway, today I had my first Politology class. Apparently "politology" is a bad translation of "political science," I think. I got there 10 minutes late because I was totally going to be on time - early even - until I realized I forgot my backpack in my room while standing at the bus stop. Sometimes I can be a real moron. But to my credit, I remembered to get my money pouch, jacket, boots, hat, scarf, gloves, and bus card! *sigh* so when I walked in, he had already started lecturing and I just started taking notes. It went for THREE HOURS. A bit of discussion here and there. We started off talking about empires and as time went on it turned more and more into just discussing current events. I really enjoy classes like this in small doses, but that was anything if a small dose. At least the professor speaks English pretty well and doesn't seem to have a completely backwards view on all things political. I do feel awfully ignorant about the world, though. Names and dates came up that I'd never heard of but it felt out of place to ask when everyone else clearly knew what was going on. Ah well, there wasn't too much of that, and hopefully we'll be doing research papers or something so I'll actually have to get out and learn some stuff, and then I can intelligently converse! The professor really likes talking, though - when class was over everyone awkwardly lingered for a good 20 minutes discussing current events, or rather listening to him talk about current events and nodding. Blargh. Not like I had anything else to do or anywhere else to be, I suppose.

Well Laura just got back from...somewhere...and we're going to go grab dinner in the cafeteria downstairs. Hopefully it's not completely terrible. I have no weekend plans beyond "I think Irina said she's getting tickets for the circus on Sunday," but when I mentioned this to Laura she said that Irina told her she couldn't get circus tickets and instead we were going to some conservatory. Like usual, I have no idea what's going on. wheeee!

picture post!

2007-02-14T16:40:00.000+03:00

***okay, I had to redo some of the captions because Blogger ate the first six photos when I was trying to make the photos actually appear. this should NOT be this difficult, but you all should be able to see photos now, so enjoy!***

From 02-2007

This is me freezing my face off in NYC! If you squint, you can see the Statue of Liberty off to the left behind me. It was quite cold, I was just beginning to get sick, and this was before Russia beat good sense with regards to hat wearing into me.

From 02-2007

The original Pooh and company at Donnelly Library in NYC! It's funny how old and patched up they look...nothing like today's Disney toys. Piglet is so small! I do wonder if there's a Roo, Owl, or Rabbit out there somewhere. Who knows.

From 02-2007

Room 222 at the Broadway Hotel & Hostel in NYC. My bed is the top one with all my stuff on it. Weird that I lived here for six nights...

From 02-2007

We just arrived in Russia! This is some of the US group waiting for dorm assignments. It's probably 2pm but we think it's 6am and we feel like we haven't slept at all. Plus I am dying of some weird illness. Anyway, in the back L-R it's Jenna, Jeff, and Celina, and Nick and David are in the front.

From 02-2007

My room! Especially of note: hideous wool blanket, lack of internet connection, and 5 liter bottle of water.

From 02-2007

My suitemate Laura in her room. It's similar to mine only mine is intended for two people so it's bigger and has two beds and two desks. Commentary: Laura is very happy to have a room and has not slept in quite a while.

From 02-2007

Obligatory bathroom photo 1 of 2: the sink. Especially note the random hot water pipe that sticks out from the wall on the right. It's right in the head-banging zone when washing your face, and if you touch it for more than a second you'll probably leave with a burn. Safe.

From 02-2007

Obligatory bathroom photo 2 of 2: the shower. Funny looking but not bad.

From 02-2007

The Kremlin wall! I really liked the texture and coloring of the snow on the red brick and green trees juxtaposed with the yellow up above.

From 02-2007

Me being cold in front of a Kremlin tower. The photographer - who shall remain nameless - didn't frame it very well, because there's a red star made of ruby at the top of the tower and that was the point of the picture. (Well, that and having a picture of me freezing in Russia.) :)

From 02-2007

I love the lighting in this one. We're inside the Kremlin walls now, a few minutes before they shooed us out. You read about those gold onion-domed things, but they're really there and they're quite the spectacle! (I don't know the people in the front, but there are a few from our group in the background.)

From 02-2007

Near the metro station "othodniy ryad." I amazed myself by holding the camera this still while shivering. I'm not sure if this is technically Red Square or not, but just through those brick archways on the left is most definitely Red Square, and that's where we headed next.

From 02-2007

Laura and Jenna posing for the camera in Red Square with St. Basil's Cathedral in the background. So much light pollution, but so beautiful!!

trying to go to class

2007-02-14T11:10:00.000+03:00

In Russia, classes take you. They weren't kidding.

Yesterday (Tuesday) I had a meeting with some kind of astrophysics professor to discuss research options. Once I finally found Irina at a cold bus stop an hour after we were originally going to meet, we walked over to the Institute of Mechanics. The professor we met with spoke enough English that we could communicate, and he told me that I could work with him to model accretion disks on neutron stars. He showed me an intresting (but very theoretical and math-based) paper and asked me about my interests. So I told him I leaned more toward the experimental side of things, and I didn't know what kind of opportunities there were in Moscow for observational astronomy, but his project sounded somewhat interesting, because accretion disks are cool. (I did this using a very limited vocabulary, hand gestures, and a few random Russian words just for kicks.) Upshot: he's going to contact some of his colleagues at the Space Research Institute (go here if you're interested). So sometime next week I'll meet with someone from there, and he made it sound like I might be working for a PhD student, but that's fine by me so long as I get to do something interesting!!

In the middle of this adventure, Irina got a call from the Russian Studies Seminar professor informing her that he'd be late for the 3:30 class. So I had time to grab some food at the cafeteria (not particularly special) and met all the other US students in the classroom a bit after 4. (Russian Studies Seminar is the one class we all have to take.) The prof finally showed up, he was actually the same one who I'm taking Russian Language from, and we went through a powerpoint lecture of some basic information about Russia. Things like the flag, the big cities, the population, the holidays. He told us there will be a test at the beginning of each week's class covering the previous week's material...lovely. So it wasn't stellar but it wasn't bad either, and I will definitely learn stuff in that class since I know next to nothing about Russia!

That class was supposed to get over at 5:30 but it ran until nearly 6 since it started so late. Then we had to wait around for textbooks, it was rush hour so the bus was ridiculously slow, we decided to get some pasta and chicken and cook dinner as a group, and we didn't get back to the dorm until after 8. At this point I made a miraculous discovery: THEY FINISHED INSTALLING INTERNET!! Thankfully I had the good sense to go pay for service yesterday since I had a feeling they would finish installation. I paid 640 rubles for 5GB of download (I think, it was kinda vague) through the end of the month. So, hopefully I won't use all that up. :)

Anyway, we cooked dinner and ate in the girls' room up on the 17th floor, and soon it turned into a bit of a drinking party because you can get $2 vodka and one of the guys had a mini-keg. And maybe I'm just a vodka snob, but I'm sorry that $2 stuff is TERRIBLE. Plus this being Russia, the shotglasses were plastic and disposable and probably held 3 ounces.

Then a bit before midnight, David got a text message saying that the Politology class had been rescheduled and was meeting at 9am tomorrow. Great. I was planning on talking to Mike in the morning around 8 for a good hour and then sleeping in...so much for that plan. Got up at 7 and made it to the bus stop around 8:30 and happened to get on the Bus From Hell that decided to make everyone get off just after the university metro stop. So I had to wait for ANOTHER bus, and by now it was 9:15. I've figured out that I need to allow an hour to get to class, which kinda sucks. When I showed up around 9:30 I thought I'd find class in session and be the awkward one out for walking in late. I climbed the stairs up to the fifth floor, turned the corner, and found...the other three students sitting in the hallway. Not 10 seconds later, they all got text messages from Irina saying class was cancelled. What The Heck.

So, that is my story. Don't know what else I'll be doing today, I may go on an adventure to a post office (though I'm beginning to doubt such things exist) but I'm afraid to wander too far lest Irina text me saying I need to go somewhere. Tomorrow I have Thermal Physics at 10am and Russian Language at 3pm, so at least that'll keep me busy. And if Politology really did move to Wednesday, that means I have no class on Friday, which is both nice and weird.

Overall, I just want to immerse myself in classes and research and music and sometimes it feels like all I'm getting is typical American college parties - complete with drama - and standing around in the cold waiting for nothing to happen. Logistic frustrations aside, I'm really doing pretty well. I tend to oscillate between feeling completely out of place and relatively comfortable. Now that I have internet I feel a bit more connected to the world. But it's only been one week. I'm sure as soon as I'm really settled it'll be time to move to the new dorm. Then again, I signed up for an adventure, didn't I? There'll be plenty of academic stress back at Mudd senior year. My horoscope for today put it well: "even if you can't change the world, you can change your attitude." That's becoming my motto.

Oh yeah - and happy valentine's day! It's a bit refreshing to be somewhere where valentine's day isn't a big thing. I bought myself a dark chocolate bar yesterday, and it's pretty tasty. That's all for now.

monday, take 1

2007-02-12T22:42:00.000+03:00

Trying this again - hopefully the computer won't freeze this time.

I slept in a bit this morning since my first - and only - class wasn't until 3pm. It was nice, but when I woke up and pulled open the curtains expecting either cold and clouds or cold and clear, I found...cold and smog. ew. Just like at school, only with the added bonus of at least 7 smokestacks in the distance spewing heaven knows what into the air. lovely.

We did get our schedules late last night! Here's mine:

Monday: Russian language 3-5pm
Tuesday: Research meeting 1-3pm; Russian studies seminar 3:30-5:30pm
Wednesday: --nothing--
Thursday: Thermal physics 10am; Russian language 3-5pm
Friday: Politology 10am-1pm

And that is all I know. Well, that plus room numbers and professors' names. (To answer your questions, no I don't know when thermal physics ends, and no I don't really know what "politology" is.)

Tomorrow I'll find out more about the research stuff, so the Tuesday time above is probably just a one time starter meeting for now, but who knows. Laura (suitemate) went into town with Irina (on-site coordinator) today to meet a professor about her biology research and had an...interesting experience. Not all bad, just a bit trying and odd. Kind of like how the medical students found out they can't take the "operate on rabbits" course they signed up for until May because they spontaneously decided to renovate the building and they don't have any rabbits.

But enough about what I don't know yet. Here's what I do know - between Russian supermarkets and the Moscow bus system and my ability to be confused, I managed to be 40 minutes late to my first class today. (The good news is I'm now living off more than bread and cheese spread.) But it wasn't really a big deal. I can't decide if I like the ubiquitous tardiness here or not...I'm afraid I'll come back to the US and start being early to everything or something! yeah, right. :)

Anyway, the first thing I got after quite the bus adventure was a Russian language placement test. So I took it, and he graded it, and I got 37/50, which was not half bad considering Victoria (speaks Russian but doesn't have great writing skills) got 45 and Nick (lived in Kaliningrad for a few months not long ago) got 19. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's not failing Russian tests. Then we did stuff typical of a language class - a couple handouts, a reading and questions about the text, and overall it was quite good. I have a bit of homework, but no textbook yet. Minor concern in the scheme of things.

There was a bit of confusion figuring out dinner tonight, so I wound up just eating back in my dorm room, which was okay but a bit lonely. We all need to work better at navigating the bus system and coordinating our activities. By the way, the traffic in Moscow is horrific. It's like LA meets New York only it's cold and everyone's pissed off about it. I'm not exaggerating here, either. The metro is the way to go.

Well, as always there's more to tell but this lovely computer lab closes in 3 minutes and I need to get some sleep! Someone came into my room today and moved some drawers and a coiled gray cable with no end appeared on my desk. I hope they don't think that's an internet connection...but I suppose it's a good sign because they're working on it. Keep your fingers crossed. Goodnight!

weekend fun

2007-02-11T16:56:00.000+03:00

Couple of things before I begin rambling -

1) sorry about the bad characters, apparently Blogger doesn't support Cyrillic, which is lame, but oh well.
2) I really really want to post pictures, but have no way to do so until I get internet in my room, which may or may not ever happen given this place's track record, so please hang in there!

Okay, so, today is Sunday, and I have done nothing. It's been nice. Was thinking about trying to go to that Anglican Church, but I didn't have the info written down and the service was at 11am and the internet room opened at noon. Irina is coming by sometime tonight to give us our schedules for tomorrow (this "handing out of schedules" has been postponed about 4 times now, but that is apparently the Russian Way). Yesterday, on the other hand, was Saturday, and I did the opposite of nothing, which is a lot!!

Saturday was our first opportunity to stop being disorganized foreign students getting ready for school to start and start being tourists. We all took the metro smack dab into the center of Moscow and got to see the Kremlin and Red Square! To start, it was (you guessed it) COLD. This time I had on long underwear and my heavy duty gloves in addition to my doubly sipped down jacket, polar tec hat, and baby alpaca scarf. (Which is wonderful, by the way - thank you again to Aunt Rebecca!)

Let me explain the process of getting into the Museum of Armory in the Kremlin. It goes something like this -
1) stand in line in the cold
2) have Irina speak Russian to buy tickets for half the price a foreigner would pay
3) stand in line in the cold
4) go through a metal detector and be told "continue" even though it beeps
5) stand in line in the cold
6) show your ticket to a person and go inside (not cold!)
7) check your coat and get a little plastic thing with a number on it
8) give the plastic thing to the people handing out audio tour devices
9) scan your ticket at a turnstile and enter the exhibits

Just for reference, that was simple, straightforward, and painless. It's all relative, folks. :) That said, the museum was pretty neat. It would probably have been neater if I knew something about Russian history beyond "it was cold and there were tsars." But that's what I'm taking classes for! There were a couple rooms with snazzy old gold and silver things, many of which were given to Russia by various European countries. (Historical Fact #1: Russia seriously likes gold.) There was a room of armor and swords and guns and stuff. (Historical Fact #2: Russia fought in wars, and it must have sucked because it was so dang cold.) There was a room of chariots, and it had sensors that flashed lights and said "do not touch!" in Russian and English if you got too close. There was also a room with snazzy clothing worn by famous Russians. (Historical Fact #3: Russians have always worn clothes because it is so cold.)

After the museum, it was starting to get dark, so we wandered around the grounds of the Kremlin before they kicked us out. Saw a big cannon and a bunch of gold onion-domed buildings. It's funny because you see pictures of those buildings and you think "sure, Moscow Russia, okay" but seeing them is something else.

Next we headed to a nearby shopping mall for dinner at the food court. It was an experience! The first thing we saw was Sbarro (сбарро in Cyrillic), but the rest were unfamiliar. I wound up eating with a few others at place that serves blini, or crepe-like pancakes with stuff in them. We got four different ones and a dessert (fruit) one and shared. I liked chicken and ham & cheese. Not so much salmon or mushroom. (The salmon had potential, but it tasted...vaguely raw.) On a slight tangent, one thing that I have found about Russia is that they have excellent juice. None of this "hunting through the juice aisle to find one that isn't all high fructose corn syrup" business.

Anyway, then we realized Jeff had left his backpack at the museum, so Irina went to fetch it, and everyone save me and two others opted to get 40 ruble beers. (Remember $1 is about 27 rubles.) It amazed me how the food court had several bars and beer on tap everywhere just as much as it had places to eat. Irina came back a while later successfully, and then we went into actual Red Square. It's all lit up at night, and Felix randomly turned to me and asked "have you ever seen such a night sky?" I looked up and it was purple and orange with light pollution and clouds. "Actually yes, every night at school back home." Oh Claremont. But despite the light pollution, seeing St. Basil's cathedral lit up was something else, reminiscent of Disneyworld only real and without the terrible music being piped in. Sadly I only got a few pictures before my camera's batteries died. After a bit more standing around in the cold, we just headed back to the dorm and had a lazy evening and crashed.

Oh, before I forget - if anyone wants to try to call me, we do have cell phones now! I claim no responsibility for outrageous international calling fees, I only know that receiving calls is free for me :) Also PLEASE mind the 11 hour time difference from the west coast! My full number is +79267047303. On the phones here you actually dial a "+" but I think just using a country code of 7 will do the trick, and the city (area) code is 926.

That's all for now. Tomorrow I have class - but I still don't know where or when!! Hopefully I'll get internet in my room this week *cross fingers* and starting tomorrow I'll have an idea of how my life will be structured from here on out. That will be good - you all know how I like having things well scheduled. :)

Thanks for the comments and keep them coming! I'll post pictures as soon as I can.

after a full day

2007-02-09T14:46:00.000+03:00

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. :)

the adventure continues

2007-02-07T21:30:00.000+03:00

Today I made it to Russia. Technically speaking it was a combination of today and yesterday, and I haven't slept for more than, say, 3 hours since the night before last, though admittedly my day was 8 hours shorter than normal. (Don't think about that too hard.)

Good news - everything eventually worked out, plus I got to see Rachel Berkowitz for nearly an hour before leaving the hostel!! It was awesome, seeing someone I actually *know*, plus I hadn't seen her in forever to start with. Took the super shuttle to the airport. Met up with 8 or 9 other KEI folks (the few others were either already in Moscow or had booked their flights independently). Aeroflot tried to give Alex a hard time since he was changing all our tickets, but they worked something out because we all got on the plane in the end.

Bad news - I AM SICK. That whole "I have a little upset stomach and then a minor sore throat" episode? On the plane and then afterwards it turned into "Meredith wants to curl up and die and go to the bathroom every 15 minutes." Not lovely. So I got quite my fair share of aeroflot bathroom experiences. Man, the whole trip was just nutty. Everything worked out fine in the end, but each step along the way took four times longer than it seemed like it should have. The plane ride itself was as expected - 9 hours and change. But there were no movies due to "technical difficulties." The food was nothing special, and to me and my upset stomach it was downright abysmal. Oh aeroflot. When we finally got to Moscow, Irina (the on-site coordinator) was supposed to meet us all at the airport, but she was nowhere to be found once we got through passport control and customs. We had an awkward "uhhh does anyone have her number?" moment until finally she showed up, it was noon by now, and we all thought it was 4am. The process of getting to the dorm took about forever, too, just because of the logistics of a bunch of random taxis and cramming bags into corners. By now I was REALLY feeling terrible, so it was all I could do to not throw up in the taxi as we drove all the way through Moscow from Sheremetyevo (the airport) to the dorm.

Anyway, obviously we made it. I don't know the name of the dorm, but it's not the huge Lomonosov building as originally expected because there was a fire/explosion/something bad there last April or some such. Rumor has it we're here for two weeks or so and then we'll be up and moving AGAIN to rooms that are in the huge building and thus more central to everything. Right now it's a good 30 minutes walk (in the -20 C weather) to the main part of the university where our classes will be. But one thing at a time. First, we had to check into this lovely dorm. Let me start by saying, Moscow is not run by computer. It's run by cranky old folks with glasses who fill out way too much paperwork. The process of actually getting a room was unbelievable. We weren't able to settle in until nearly 5pm. SO MANY FORMS. All of which were in Russian, none of which completely made sense. Anyway. Long, painful story short - I got at my Pepto Bismol for starters. And I'm in a suite kind of similar to my suite in South last year, only one of the rooms is a single and the other is a double and they share a mini entrance and a bathroom. And it's on floor 10 of something like 22. Laura is in the single and I have the double to myself! Technically one of the other girls is supposed to be in the room with me but she's staying with her grandmother, so I've been told to "make it look like it's being lived in." er, right.

After all this, we headed downstairs to get dinner (or some meal anyway) at the cafe in the dorm. It's basically bad cafeteria food, only Russian style, so heavy slash unidentifiable. yum. not. I poked at potatoes and buckwheat and what we decided to call "deep fried cheese biscuits." Because, well, that's essentially what they were.

Next it was off to the turn-dollars-into-rubles place, followed by a convenience store. It's hard to get the hang of rubles. It's roughly 30 rubles to the dollar, so you're like "I have 1000 rubles!" but it's not really all that much. We now have essentials such as bottled water and toilet paper.

All I know for now is that I'm relatively glad to be here, more or less in one piece. Hoping I don't go through all my Pepto Bismol during week 1. Classes don't start till Monday, so we're likely going to be sorting out logistical things between now and then, and going through some kind of orientation. Who knows. At this point, it's all one big unknown, but you know what, I have a bed and water and toilet paper and even laundry detergent, as well as a few pretty good friends it seems, so it's all good.

What else can I say...stay tuned! I'm going to get some sleep. In a bed. YES.

NYC, part 4

2007-02-05T18:53:00.000+03:00

Today was COLD. I know, I'm not in Moscow yet, but still. Trust me. I also got sick. Not deathly ill or anything, just upset stomach followed by sore throat, and deciding to venture out into the COLD (16 degree Fahrenheit plus windchill that takes it down to 0 Fahrenheit) weather was probably not the best idea ever.

Oh well. I just reserved a super shuttle to the airport because I don't want to deal with hauling all my crap through the subway. $51 for three of us. lame, but probably a good idea.

I find it ironic that in the last 24ish hours I've gotten 2.5 ideas of where to find people I know. siiigh. But, I'm ready to get out of here. Feeling more like going home than heading to Russia after this nutty week, but so it goes, so it goes.

I did manage to see the Statue of Liberty today, though there was no way I was going to pay $12 to freeze my hands off (no seriously, I had on gloves and they were painfully numb). Then I went to the library and saw the original Winnie the Pooh! That required some serious subway navigation skills.

Now I'm going to go chill, rest, nibble on food, take tylenol and/or cough drops. le sigh.

NYC, part 3

2007-02-04T14:40:00.000+03:00

So far today:

-determined it was below freezing when my hair turned into "curlcicles"
-nearly froze my ears off
-went to St. John's Cathedral for the 11am Choral Eucharist
-ate Indian food for lunch
-got back to the hostel
-went to David and Nick's room on the 6th floor and am managing to steal wireless
-am attempting to get last week's BSG via torrent, it's currently...3.1% downloaded. yeah.

Not feeling like doing much. Want to go to the NYC Library and see the original Winnie the Pooh (thanks to Aunt Pam reminding me that I once told mom "if I ever go to New York I will go to the library and see Pooh!"). Am debating going to art museums (Met, Guggenheim, MoMA), but they all cost money and are on the east side of Manhattan. Would like to visit ground zero still. By the way, it is odd that "ground zero" is now code for "where the WTC used to be." Probably don't want to bother to go to Ellis Island because it's cold and costs money, but I want to at least *see* the statue of liberty. I'm assuming that's possible.

The internet is cool!! :) Anyway, that's all I know for now. I'm kinda ready to be done with this phase of the adventure, I think. The church service was neat - the cathedral is GINORMOUS and as a result everything echos like crazy. An organist's nightmare, but makes all the chanting of "the Lord be with you" "and also with you" etc. really beautiful. Also makes incense okay since there's so much volume for it to diffuse into and you don't get a coughing fit. But to me, cathedrals like that are places to visit and smaller parishes are places to come home to.

NYC, part 2

2007-02-03T21:01:00.000+03:00

Today was Wicked.

As in, Wicked the musical, and “wicked awesome.”

I could see how one could begin to justify living in New York City if it meant going to Broadway shows. On the other hand, this place is still nutty, and it’s probably a much better place to visit than to live! I’m afraid I’m still very much from eastern WA. :)

Really all I did today was saw Wicked. Though beforehand I had an excellent lunch involving an avocado/tomato/mozzarella wrap and a mango smoothie. At the show, I got a sweet shirt that says “defy gravity.” It was LONG, and I had an EXCELLENT seat, and the whole thing was simply fantastic. I’ve always loved The Wizard of Oz, I had a Dorothy phase just like I had a Winnie the Pooh phase and a My Little Pony phase. This musical incorporated all this great stuff from the original story and just ran with it. So many good songs, such an amazing production. (And yes there was a viola in the pit orchestra! If I had five lifetimes, one of them would definitely be spent as a violist playing in pit orchestras.) It’s just too bad that normal people who don’t live in New York can’t see awesome musicals like this very often. All the more reason for Hanford High School to keep up the drama program!!

It got over a bit before 5 (yes it was nearly 3 hours long), so I wandered down a few blocks to Times Square. Silly me, I thought it was an actual square, like one block with a “this is Times Square” sign, but it’s more just a few-block-chunk of obnoxious advertising with a bunch of people walking around. This odd, flashing blob of consumerism made the rest of Manhattan seem relatively, well, normal. So, now I can add Times Square to the “been there, done that” list. Made me wonder how much power is used each day just to light those silly ads…sigh. I also contemplated trying to see Les Mis tomorrow but they didn’t have any reasonably priced tickets and I figured, well, I’ve played in the pit plus seen it done twice professionally (in Seattle and LA) plus I just splurged on Wicked, so I think I’m good for now.

And now I’m back at the “Broadway Hotel,” which is code for “hostel on 101st street,” and I’m lamenting at the impending $2 for 20 minutes of internet. My roommate situation has changed a bit – minus Franzesca, plus Oliver, a guy from France who thought he was checking into an actual hotel and not a hostel, so we’ll see how long he actually stays here.

All in all, I’m really enjoying myself pretty well. Trying not to think too much about how very odd my situation is. That’s all for now.

NYC, part 1

2007-02-02T23:13:00.000+03:00

I need to get out of New York because everything costs too much money! If I was going to school I’d have something other to do than “hey I’m bored let’s pay $20 and go to a museum” and I’d also have some food around to eat rather than “hmm I’m hungry let’s pay $10 for lunch,” etc. Plus, rumor has it the rest of the world has internet access, not to mention cell phones. *grumble*

That said, I’m really doing my best to enjoy the adventure that has come from being stuck in New York for 5 days and 6 nights. I now know the difference between Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens (though my adventures have been limited to Manhattan thus far). I bought a weeklong unlimited metro pass and have learned how to navigate the New York Subway. I have a new appreciation for all the angst Holden Caulfield felt subjected to. And aside from a growing pile of laundry and a distinct lack of shelves, life is good.

Yesterday (Thursday), David, Nick and I went downtown to visit the folks at KEI. I was baffled by 10 story buildings, 12 elevators in said building, and 5 lawyer’s offices on the same floor as the KEI office. New York is nice to visit, but I’m beginning to realize that when my gut tells me I probably belong in the western US, it is correct. Anyway. The first thing the KEI folks (Eduard – head of the program, Alex – in charge of the Russia stuff, Sarah – friendly newbie) do is order pizza for everyone. And then they present us with our passports and visas (valid for entry beginning 2/6/07). And then they give us a folder packed with New York City tourist info and proceed to rattle off long lists of things there are to do in the city. *brain overload!!* I start coming up with my own list of things I’d like to do, and they’re kind enough to let me borrow a laptop and poke on the internet for a bit.

Meredith’s “I’m stuck in New York and need stuff to do” list:
-New York Philharmonic concert
-St. John’s Cathedral service
-“Wicked” musical performance
-eat Indian food
-Natural History Museum (esp. IMAX and planetarium)

At this point, I reflect for a moment and realize that the only things keeping me from doing all these things are 1) no one I know to go do stuff with and 2) don’t want to spend an insane amount of money.

Response to 1): I’ve always wanted an excuse to go do random stuff by myself and not feel awkward, why not now? Response to 2): I’ll do my best to get student discounts and eat cheaply.

I begin to discuss how I would love to attend a New York Philharmonic concert with Sarah, and she says something like “you know, I would like that too, let’s see what they’re playing and if it’s not too expensive maybe we can both go!” Ten minutes later we have $14 tickets for that night’s 7:30 performance!! It was SPECTACULAR. Her boyfriend came too so she got a third ticket at the last minute and I wound up sitting by myself, but it didn’t matter.

The conductor was Esa-Pekka Salonen, who is basically my hero now (I’ve seen him conduct the LA Phil before and he is AMAZING). First they played Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin, which was quite good, though I’m not a huge Ravel fan. Then came the world premiere of Salonen’s Piano Concerto!!! It was THE premiere. Not one of those “we played it last weekend but it’s still the world premiere” things. This was the 100% first ever performance of a FANTASTIC piano concerto, it even had a nutty viola solo, I was completely blown away by the whole thing. Salonen conducting the world premiere of his own piece with a pianist he’s been collaborating with for years, Yefim Bronfman. A-MAZ-ING. Then we got an intermission, whew. The final piece was Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which is a terrific piece of music. I’m quite certain I’ve played parts if not all of it before, possibly in CCO? Well, whatever, this was fan-freaking-tastic. The ending of that piece was so majestic, so loud, I kept getting a rush like you do when music or movies have spectacular moments. We’re talking a completely full stage (there were 12 violas!), chimes, percussion, brass, winds, strings, everything. Best. Fourteen. Dollars. EVER.

So that was Thursday. Then came Friday (today). Slept in a good bit which was nice. Headed out with David and Nick to the Natural History Museum, but they agreed to first accompany me to the Wicked box office to see if I could get a ticket for a performance this weekend. SCORE!! Not the cheapest purchase in the world, but I have been dying to see this musical for years, the seat I got looks excellent (though I’ll admit it’s all they had left), and I’m going to see Wicked tomorrow at 2pm!!!

Next it was on to the museum. The guys had actually already been, but they still wanted to see the planetarium show since it was closed when they went before. It was called “Cosmic Collisions.” We all went to that, and it was pretty good but not spectacular. Someday I want to help make a fantastic planetarium show. Then I went to the IMAX film “Roving Mars” and the guys headed back to the hostel to take a nap. It was all about the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and though they didn’t say much that I didn’t already know, it was very well done and I love seeing things on the IMAX screen! I spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the museum. It was interesting to see which exhibits were popular. Most folks loved the animal exhibits, especially Ocean Life and North American Mammals. There was an excellent “Hall of Biodiversity” that showed how humans negatively impact animals’ natural habitats. It was sad to see so few people in that part of the museum – it’s much happier to learn about whales and grizzly bears than face the fact that we’re seriously messing up our planet. But anyway. It was also funny in the “Cosmic Pathway” section, how every time it referred to the universe being 13 billion years old the number 13 was on a little metal circle that had been added in later.

So, I feel a little lame sitting around doing nothing on Friday night, but on the other hand I don’t care. The guys ran off to some nightclub that goes from 10:30pm to 4am…really not my thing. Don’t know what I’ll be up to tomorrow night, either, or Sunday afternoon/evening, or Monday. Probably visiting a laundromat on Monday, actually. How fascinating.

aaand I just got a new roommate! Oh hostels. His name’s Lou and he’s from LA, only he’s been studying abroad in France. I love it – the German foreign exchange student trying to find an apartment (Franzesca), the movie producer apprentice from New York on her way to LA (Jewelle), the token male stopping in New York for the heck of it (Lou), and the displaced Washingtonian just trying to get to Russia (me).

Enough for now. I think I’ll watch some Firefly and contemplate how odd life can be sometimes.

hello adventure!

2007-02-01T10:30:00.000+03:00

Well damn, this adventure has gotten off to a rock rolling start!

I’m sitting on a bunk bed in a hostel on 101^st street in New York City right now. It’s 7:21pm on Wednesday, January 31, 2007. Here with me is Franzeska from Germany. She’s studying abroad in New York and has to live here until she can find an apartment. She seems really cool and her English is excellent. Also staying in the hostel are two guys on my study abroad program, David and Nick. I haven’t gotten to know them very well yet (in fact, Nick ran off to an Incubus concert) but they seem like nice guys. They’re both from Oregon – west coast represent!

Right, so, you probably want to know WHY I’m in a hostel in New York and not on a plane to Moscow. Funny thing, that.

It goes something like this. Aunt Rebecca and I left her house this morning at 8:30 so I could catch my plane at Reagan airport. I left my cell phone at her house (can’t use it in Russia anyway) and didn’t think to check the voicemail before I left. I got to JFK with no problems at 11:30. Then came the fun game of getting my bags and hauling everything through the nuttiest airport ever from Terminal 9 to Terminal 1. (Remember that I’m used to an airport with 5 gates…and this place has numbered TERMINALS.) I find something called an airtrain and ride that in a circle to get where I’m trying to go. By now it’s a bit after noon, and I’m hungry having eaten only toast several hours ago. But there aren’t any food places readily apparent and wandering really sucks since I have 2 50-lb bags, a 25-lb backpack, and a 15-lb viola to lug around. So I get honey roasted cashews and apple juice from a newsstand for like $7. Read my book for a while. Alex (the guy from KEI) is supposed to show up between 2 and 3 with our passports and visas, so I keep my eye out for him (though I don’t know what he looks like) and any other students who should be congregating here.

Time passes. I read my book. I eat my cashews. And it’s around 3:15 when it strikes me that wait a second, Alex has not shown up, I see no one who looks like they’re with KEI trying to go to Moscow, I’d better look up Alex’s phone number and find a pay phone and call him and see what’s up. (Meantime I have a conversation with a random old guy about how they screwed up his Russian visa and it didn’t start being valid for a few days after he was intending to fly there.)

Just as soon as I open my computer to find Alex’s phone number, a guy comes up to me and asks “are you Meredith?” rather urgently. I look up and say “yes!” It’s Alex. And the first thing out of his mouth: “I’m afraid I have some bad news.” Uhhhhhh lovely.

Long story short(er) – Russian bureaucracy SUCKS. Like, a lot. They arbitrarily decided that student visas won’t work for five business days after being issued, and given as how they were issued yesterday (Tuesday Jan 30), that means none of the KEI students can enter Russia until February 7. We have now all been rebooked to leave JFK the evening of next Tuesday, February 6. Meantime I had the option of flying back to DC and continuing to crash with Aunt Rebecca, or staying in a hostel here with random people and bumming around New York for a week. Either way KEI will pay. I had to decide quickly and figured what the heck, I’ll go with option B.

So here I am. Eduard and Alex (both from KEI) drove me out here and paid for the hostel and then left. I think we’re supposed to meet them at their office at noon. (We being me, David, and Nick.) I don’t know where said office is or how to get there, but the other two guys have been here for a few days so they’re the resident experts (they were actually intending to do a New York stopover since they’d never been here before).

I wish there were people I knew here. Like, anyone. I know if Mudders weren’t at Mudd I’d probably know some people in New York, or semi-nearbyish, but I racked my brain and Aunt Rebecca’s brain and neither of us could come up with anyone we knew in New York for me to crash with. So off to a hostel I went. Got here around 5:30 or so, and David and I went and got some dinner while Nick went off with some random guy from Brazil to the aforementioned Incubus concert.

People here are nuts, by the way. For one they all have protected wireless networks, so it’s going to take a bit of creativity to actually post this blog entry. There are taxis everywhere. People honk just for kicks. They act like living in a big city is normal or something, and it’s no big deal to be rude to everyone else. I’m sorry, and I know I’m from Richland of all places, but people need to CHILL OUT.

I have NO F-ING CLUE what to do with myself for the next five days. So anyone who knows anything about New York, help me out?? I seriously am clueless. Like I said, I wish I had someone I knew here. Anyone. Another Mudder. Mike. Dad. Lynne. Rebecca. Pam. Dad’s former college roommate’s long lost brother in law. But so far, no such luck. Thing is, doing touristy things for a couple days is swell and all, but I just had a day of being touristy in DC surrounded by two days of travel and I’m ready to *be* somewhere already, you know? Half of me wants to just say screw it and go back home. But that half is being told to shut up and enjoy this crazy adventure we call life. Silly me for leaving my cell phone. I just knew all that good airplane karma was going to turn around and bite me in the butt. :)

greetings from the "other" washington

2007-01-30T22:54:00.000+03:00

I made it to Aunt Rebecca's house just outside DC no problem. Got here last night and spent today sleeping, doing touristy things, and eating mexican food! Good times for sure.

I'm afraid I'm using up any good airplane karma I may still have. See, on the second flight I'm in 11F, a window seat (I always get window seats). Turns out something silly called "economy plus" ends at row 10, which is an exit row. And then I realize, wait a second, there is no seat in front of my seat!! So for some unknown reason, I had a cheap ticket and more legroom than I could possibly use while the people in front of me had more expensive tickets and less legroom. hehehe. The only bad part was that some poor guy's seat was supposed to be 10F...which didn't exist. But he found some other seat and all was well.

Today I slept till noon (which was only *really* 9am, so give me a break), got some $20 bills turned into larger bills so I don't have to carry a wad of cash, and then Rebecca and I went out to the new Air & Space museum at Dullus airport. It was really cool!! To start, hardly anyone else was there. That is the only way to do museums or other attractions like that - when it's virtually empty. They have the space shuttle Enterprise as well as a bunch of snazzy airplanes and other random space things. (two things of note - the Enola Gay and an air france supersonic jet.) There's also an observation tower that gives you a great panorama of the area, and since it's right by the airport you get a fantastic view of all these planes taking off and landing. The only things we didn't do was see an IMAX film (the mars rover one was only at 1pm and we got there around 3) or ride in a simulator (it cost $7 and no one was manning the station when we wandered over there). But it was a great way to spend an afternoon.

This evening we went out to dinner in DC with a couple Rebecca knows through her Quaker meeting. They've both been to Moscow several times and had all kinds of great stories! (we'll pretend that many of these stories didn't involve getting sick or being ousted from an apartment or almost being arrested.) :) But it turns one or both of them will be in Moscow towards the end of March, and I got their contact info. I really do love random connections like that.

that's all for now. time for me to get some sleep because I've got a 10:25 flight to New York, a meeting with Alex from KEI to get my passport and visa (for real this time) at the JFK airport, and a flight to Russia at 5:45. did I ever mention how odd this is?? but part of me will be glad to just GET THERE already. I think. I don't know. right, bedtime. :)

headed out

2007-01-28T16:46:00.000+03:00

there isn't much to say, aside from this:

this weekend has been fun, I still have a few pounds to shed from my suitcases, and tomorrow morning begins an adventure of unparalleled magnitude.

(also, with regards to my visa, everything got sorted out and I should be receiving it in DC on Tuesday via FedEx.)

here's to the journey ---

it's already begun

2007-01-24T10:11:00.000+03:00

So, I got an email last night saying that we're sorry, but Russia just decided that all student visa applicants need to have an HIV test to get a visa. So, would you please go to a local clinic and get a same-day result HIV test and fax it to us no later than Friday, ok thanks, bye.

sounds easy enough until you call the health district place in Pasco and they tell you "oh, usually it takes two weeks to get a result!" um. not okay. called the lab that processes the test: "oh, we have a 48 hour turnaround time, but we send all the samples to Spokane to actually be processed." LOVELY.

I suppose it's always something. I'm off to play "run around in circles and make people get stuff done"...

contact info

2007-01-23T17:40:00.000+03:00

Now that you know when I'll be gone, here's how you can reach me! The best way is going to be via this journal or via email. If you really want to talk to me, though, you should get skype. My skype name is Janewaypi110. And for the really daring, I can be reached via snail mail at:

Meredith Rawls
Russia
117192 Moscow
Lomonosovsky prospect, 31 building 5
Moscow State University
Faculty for Fundamental Medicine
International Department

A word to the wise: it takes about forever and a half for mail to arrive plus everything has to go through customs. So, as much as I would love to receive cash or avocados, please don't send anything valueable or perishable. :)

Dad just walked by: "do you want to try to smuggle Alex over there?"
me: "where? to Russia?"
Dad: "yeah."
oy.

welcome

2007-01-11T17:04:00.000+03:00

Welcome to the first installment in my new online journal! I'll be writing in here as regularly as possible once I get to Russia. So, this is a place where you can read about my adventures. I'd also love to hear your responses via the "# comments" link below each entry!

PLEASE NOTE - what I say is not necessarily a reflection of anyone else's beliefs. I'm going to write about people, places, events, opinions, and feelings. As well as whatever else I want to. Please take nothing personally. Do feel free to share this journal with anyone who you think might enjoy it.

That aside, here is some preliminary info about my trip...

depart for Washington DC on 1/29/07
depart for Moscow, Russia on 1/31
arrive in Moscow on 2/1

depart Moscow on 5/21
depart Washington DC on 5/23
arrive home late on 5/23

Welcome to the adventure!! I hope you enjoy the ride.