A letter home from study abroad
Monday, September 30
Today, I got up to discover that there was not hot water...so no
shower :( I'll cope. For breakfast, I had fried eggs....sometime in the
past week, I made the wonderful discovery that you can ask them to fry
you eggs or find you a cup of yogurt....yay...real food.
Classes were ok....today in "culture" we learned about how lenin
came to power....basically by making empty promises to a desperate
populace. Oh yeah, last week the culture prof was telling us about how he
recently read dianetics and how it was a personal revolution....scary.
After class, I hung out for about an hour and a half before
meeting up with my friend emily to visit our professor Suzanne Fusso
(she's here for a few weeks because she's on sabbatical for the semester)
As we were actually going over suzanne's friends' house, emily asked if we
should bring a gift....Suzanne suggested a bottle of vodka. Unfortunately,
we were unable to find a bottle of the appropriate brand in a reasonable
size...so I ended up buying a smaller bottle of Stolichnaya and a larger
bottle of Zolotoye Koltso (golden ring) on the principle that if we ended
up drinking it, it would be better to have to consume less. (I'm not a
big vodka person) When I met up with emily, she countered with the advice
that if we had to drink one, we'd come out better drinking the good stuff.
She further suggested that if she presented it, the message would be more
along the lines of "here's a gift for you." and if I did so, the message
would be "here's a bottle of vodka, shall we bother with cups or not?"
She gave it to suzanne's friend's father who happened to be the only man
who was home. He went out shortly thereafter and we only ended up having
a little bit of vodka and grapefruit juice sitting around with suzanne and
her friend.
It turns out that her friends are really cool artists. The
woman's a great sculptress/illustrator and the man's illustrations are
really cool--one that we saw was a grotesque alphabet along the lines of
Edward Gorey (is that his name?) but much sicker and much cooler. We were
presented with illustrated editions of the first translation of kipling
into russian. Their 12 year-old daughter did the illustrations 3 years
ago..wow.
We were treated to all sorts of fun stories including one about
how the apartment had been bugged in the 80s because they had foriegn
friends (suzanne.) Apparently they found out some time ago when a workman
showed up to remove the very expensive mic implanted over their kitchen
table. weird.
When I got home, I decided to make that occasional call
home..Unfortunately, my friends with phones weren't home and I didn't have
any telephone tokens....so i tried a penny...it didn't work...nor did a
dime. So, I slammed the reciever on the coin insertion slot. that
worked. Now I can make free phone calls.
A while after I got home, my friend Carrie came by and offered me
pasta. When we got to the kitchen, we discovered that somebody had
spilled something in the oven. This girl was rather upset as she
was about to cook chicken. She had decided to deal with it by turning the
oven up to max heat and burning the crap out of whatever was inside.
After that, I hung out and did homework for a while...then I got
online...then I read a bit of a hunter s thompson book jerry lent me.
i'd forgotten how funny he is. it's about 1:30 and I've just gotta be up
by 8. g'nite kids.