Keep your top on

Many days are like this, mind wandering. I can’t seem to keep my attention on the important things I should be reading, so I just listen to sweet music and read frivolous articles online. It’s almost been three months in Moscow, which means we have only three months left. Before we came, the idea of moving to Russia seemed like a quaint, far off idea, like owning a house. Now it’s my here and it’s half-way over. One thing I’ve definitely realized, it that maybe living abroad is best lived in hindsight. My everyday is filled with normal living – brushing my teeth, making sandwiches, typing on the keyboard, crossing streets. I can’t always sit back and take it in, the smells, the noise of voices speaking a language I don’t understand very well. But after we’re gone…it’ll be there, in beautifully filtered pieces. The smell of pirozoky in the metro stops, the cold of cobblestones on Red Square, the taste of waxy yellow potatoes. It will all feel special then.

The top photo is of the fireworks over the Kremlin after the Russia MTV Music Awards, second photo. Jason and I got tickets through TPAA. It wasn’t quite the gala event I expected…Jason and I stood on some scaffolding near an open and chilly entryway while Russian pop, rock and rap (indeed, it is as bad as you might imagine) acts paraded around the stage and the industry’s big names and faces disinterestedly wandered around below us. Some of the people were great to watch, like the young Dima Bilan, a popular pop singer whose enthusiasm for winning was so sincere he was nearly shaking. Not cool? Two pairs of breasts flashing the crowd during Kasta’s, a Russian rapper, act. I thought the girls looked tacky. I certainly think nudity has an appropriate place, even in entertainment, but it’s not next to a group of over-weight and under-rhythmed white rap guys with BMWs serving around them. Looks like someone’s trying to hard…

Tonight’s my first day of teaching English and getting paid for it. Jason has suggested the trick is to smile a lot. Indeed, American’s are smily. I’ve had to train myself out of smiling at strangers in semi-awkward situations, like stepping on them on the train. Accept the stepping; it happens to everyone.
Bottom photo – the view from our balcony in our new apartment

Julia Ormond-o-mania

Here's Jason, me, the TPAA staff, and Julia Ormond. A real-life ce-le-bri-tee. She's here to promote AIDS awareness in Russia, which is desperately needed, hence, the need for our organization. She's actually seemed very nice...warm and unpretentious. It's remarkable to realize, though, how important celebrity endorsements are for causes like this. In the last two days, our organization has been on TV stations, front pages of newspapers, and tonight, MTV, when she's presenting the Staying Alive award to our spokeswoman, a young woman living with HIV. Serve a good dish, and everyone comes to the meal. And wow, she's real pretty (gush!)

Goodbye pink scarves

The weather has turned. The mornings are gray and almost damp, and the temperature never reaches above 55. It's fall in Moscow, and the leaves have turned red, orange, gold almost overnight, and are falling onto the ground in loose clumps. The change from summer to fall was so sudden that I felt as if, without warning, everyone had changed into leather jackets and long pants. The berries and dill have disappeared from babushka vendors - now I see straw slippers and hankerchiefs. It's not so bad though...just different. I would expect warm afternoons and full apple trees in September at home...evenings still buzz with locusts and call for long walks and beer gardens and pink sunsets. There's no lingering here. But at least you can sense change, which always seems a bit exciting. Pull out the warm jackets, unfold the sweaters...something's coming.

This is Puskinskaya metro station...during rush hour.

With a little help from my friends

Last night Jason and I met up with Denis (right) and Denis (left, affectionately called Denis Dva, or 2) to listen to the Joe Cocker concert on Red Square. We didn’t have tickets, of course, but sat down at a local beer garden where we could hear the music clearly. As usual, our conversation over beers and vodka and Pepsi was a mix of Russian and English, my sentences in Russian usually peppered with English words. The nights here are already around 55 degrees, though the leaves haven’t turned colors, and it’s still a good time to hang out on the street and drink beers.

The strange combination of a bilingual conversation, Russian beer, and familiar English music made me feel content and lovingly nostalgic…I started to think about friends and memories from the last few years. Shots with Ransom, Liz, Devika, and Jen R. at my dad’s house, long, late-night walks with Joe, crawling into bed with Ben and Judd, hearing Jarrod belting out Speakerboxx tunes in the shower, tap dancing with Eli in Oberlin’s Tappan Square. My health hasn’t been so great in Russia and sometimes I get down, wanting to feel warm Grinnell sunshine or the stuffiness of Chicago bars or the noisy, smoky blast of walking up the stairs at the Feve. Russia is a beautiful country, its people extremely hospitable and friendly in the right contexts, but since I can’t speak Russian very well, I don’t always feel like I can understand everything around me, or feel comfortable in anonymity, like I used to in Chicago. Moscow seems like one big, pulsating movement, but I can’t help feeling outside.

Not all days, of course. Joe Cocker, good friends and lovely fall nights, help.

Gat some

Here's a picture of Paul Heider, which I promised him that I would send to his mom. So Paul's mom, here you go!


Here is my obligatory tourist picture, Jason and I in front of St. Basilica's Cathedral in Red Square. You can't see it very well in the picture, but there was a huge dump truck that threatened to run us over.








Left: Young well-to-do Russians lounging during the Tiger Lillies show in Moscow. One of the girls flagged me down afterwards and gave me her email to send her the photos. I thought she was pissed, but she said told me they looked, "Super", which is the English word du jour.

I got a bit of spam mail from "Vanilla K. Statehood" today, who encouraged me to "Come and gat some." Yes, Mr. Vanilla, perhaps I will.

Step One: Get past Step One

I created this blog so I might actually chronicle some of my time here in Russia. Of course, I bought a paper journal in the romantic hope I might write in it, but that failed after the first entry. I'm a fan of romantic notions, but rarely a participant. I'd like to think I am the type of person who would capture my trip here in vivid, written detail. Or that I would spend my evenings holed up in a warm Russian apartment toasting vodka to international friendship. In reality, I spend too many evenings getting drunk with other expats at skinty expat bars that cater to the Western businessmen and the ubiquitous Moscow prostitute crowd. I do own, however, a pair of certifiably-Russian, pointy shoes that I use to protect myself from random document checks. "She has pointy shoes! Must be Russian!"

I'm in Moscow with Jason, my fiance, doing an internship at TransAtlantic Partners Against AIDS, where I'm a policy intern. I research policy on AIDS, and write little one-page papers on much bigger papers. I teach English, take Russian lessons, and play around with my new camera. And I cook, a lot.