Massively Parallel Procrastination

A letter home from study abroad

From jrvincent@wesleyan.edu Sat Sep  7 11:42:46 1996
Date: Sat, 7 Sep 1996 11:37:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jesse Vincent 
To: cmccoy@mail.wesleyan.edu
Subject: september 1 (fwd)



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 16:59:56 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jesse Vincent 
To: jesse@utopia.com
Subject: september 1

1 sept 96

Well, today we woke up at the wonderfully early hour of 1 pm.  After a
quick breakfast in the dorm's stolovaya (cafeteria,) about seven of us
hopped on the metro to Ismailovsky Park, which is known for being the best
flea market in moscow.  The metro stop opens onto a large hotel complex
which is a major mafia hangout.  Lining the street for about 1/2 mile were
older men and women selling everything from cutesy pull-toys to used books
to car parts and antiques.  Nothing really struck my fancy before we
arrived at Ismailovsky Park itself and I was forced to shell out the 1000
rubles for admission.  Once inside, I noticed that everything within sight
was trinkets aimed at western tourists.  (In the past, there were all
sorts of neat things for sale....it was primarily a _russian_ flea market)
They had a great selection of persian rugs...
I got in a conversation with a bookseller over books of cyrillic
fonts.  The only things he had were things I already owned or which didn't
have full samples of the fonts (I used to be into designing typefaces)
After he realized that I wasn't buying, the bookseller simply gave me a
paperback text on typography.  After surveying the matryoshki, batik
icons, bootleg CDs and works of "art," we decided we'd had enough.  On our
way out of the park, I bought shashlik (sort of a shish-kabob) for 25k
rubles.  I've always been warned about buying food from street vendors,
but it was really tasty. 
When we got home, I tried calling my friend Alesha and was
dismayed to discover that "no alesha lives here."
In the evening, most of our group decided that we couldn't
stomach another meal at the stolovaya.  We started walking down the street
with the intention of stopping at the first open restaurant in our price
range.  Once we had walked walked the two miles to the Arbat (a central
tourist/shopping district) we had kind of given up.  There were all sorts
of shaslik and shwarma vendors on the Arbat, but we were appalled by the
prices and kept walking.  By this point we were tired and rather far from
home, so we hopped on the metro.  In several metro stops there are
"Metro-Express" cafes.  These establishments, which started out as "Taco
Bell Express" are run by Pepsi and sell typical overpriced fast food.  We
had to change trains at "Kievskaya" and spent several minutes pondering
whether we were hungry enough to break down and buy food at Metro Express.
We came to the consensus that we would wait until we got to the  "Park
Kultury" metro station.  Well, we should have known better...By the time
we got to Park Cultury, the MetroExpress was closed.

Lesson for the day:  If you see something you want buy it.  
It might not be available later. (yeah, I know this was truer in
the old Russia, but it still applies)