A letter home from study abroad
Ok, so i've lapsed..again...it's monday night and i'm just writing about
saturday.
Saturday started about two hours after friday ended, when Carrie
and Shelly crawled over me to get to the door. They decided that they
needed to go home as soon as the metro opened....(at 6 am) I, on the
other hand decided to sleep as long as I could. I finally got up at about
9:40 and Nancy suggested that we have breakfast at the American Bar and
Grill....Now, mind you, I was supposed to call my friend Nadia between 10
and 11 because I was supposed to spend the day at her family's
dacha...Well, I called four times and got an answering machine every time.
It's really too bad.. I've been here for about 5 weeks and I have yet to
see her.
At least breakfast was good. I had a western omlette and
coffee..for seven dollars. that's not too bad for this town, these days.
The coffee was bottomless...and it was real...not this instant shit that
russians are so into. The omlette (obviously) couldn't compare to
O'Rourkes, but it was quite tasty. (So, of the Middletown contingent,
who's up for O'Rourkes the first Sunday I'm back in town?)
It was such a beautiful day that we decided to walk the several
miles from Pushkin metro to Kievsky Market. On the way, we stopped in
several stores looking for brown sugar, as i'd gotten it into my head that
I wanted to bake chocolate chip cookies. Unfortunately, russians have
never heard of "brown sugar"...it's just a foreign concept to them. As we
passed through red square, we noticed a large circus tent....yep the
"World Festival of Circus Arts" was in town. So, we bought tickets for
sunday and made plans to meet after dinner, try out this sushi place I'd
heard of and go to the circus...but that's another day's story.
When we finally got to kievsky market, we wer kinda hungry, so we
started to accept the samples of various salads that numerous korean women
told us that we "needed to try" Most of them were pretty good and we
actually bought a bag of carrot salad to munch on. After sampling one
salad, I made the mistake of asking what it was..."Calamari"...i'd just
eaten squid that was being sold on the street....but, it's three days
later and i'm still alive. At the market, I got a jar of fresh honey and
a small sickly aloe plant that was desparate to be transplanted..the jar
of honey cost about 6 bucks and the aloe plant cost about 30 cents.
After that, (it was about 5 pm) it was onto the metro and home to
vegetate...Somehow, I don't think I got to bed too early....but i didn't
do anything really interesting.