A letter home from study abroad
On Saturday, I rolled out of bed at about 10:25 for a 10:30 meeting with
Tim O'Conner, some ACTR bigwig. He was in town and wanted to have a
meeting with all of us to make sure we were happy, etc. Essentially,
we're all happy. This made Tim happy.
At about 1, Rachel (one of the brits) and I went out CD-ROM
hunting. It seems that she'd been having trouble finding an inexpensive
copy of Windows NT Server 4.0. I told her that I had a couple of ideas.
We found one on Arbat, though she decided not to buy it. They were also
selling copies of Windows "96" and "beta" copies of MS Office "97." All
of this for between 5 and 16 dollars per CD. Not too shabby.
Rachel and I had to be back at the dorm by four because a bunch of
people were going out to dinner at "Santa Fe" before going to see Swan
Lake at the Kremlin.
As we left the dorm, I was informed that we were not in fact going
to Santa Fe, but to Pizza Hut. The plan was to go to Pizza Hut on
Tverskaya, where there would be no chance in hell of getting 20 people in.
I convinced them that we should go to the Pizza Hut by Kievsky Vokzal.
When we got there, we discovered a line about 40 people long. The next
suggestion was to try "Chinese Take Away" down the street at the John Bull
Pub. (Incidentally, this pub is located in Kutuzovsky Prospekt 4, which
some of you may recognise as the building I lived in the first time I was
in moscow.)
It wasn't too bad. It was greasy, poorly prepared and the menu
didn't have much on it. In short, it's everything crap chinese is
supposed to be....except cheap. An order of pan fried dumplings was about
$5. Not outrageous...but not wonderful. Since we opted for takeout
rather than eating in the pub itself, the only place we could find to sit
was on the edge of the building itself which was almost wide enough to sit
on. It must have been the best advertisement the restaurant could have
asked for--20 western kids sitting outside shoveling food into their
mouths as fast as their chopsticks could carry it.
From there, I showed the brits how to get to the kremlin to see
their play and headed home to veg and write letters. I ended up having
tea with Carrie and Jeff and not writing so many letters...Well, that's
life. Carrie and Jeff had just returned from dinner at the Vietnamise
place that I'd been trying to get people to go to all week. Well, that's
where I'm headed in about an hour...so I guess I can't complain too much.
Wow, this is the first time in about a week that I've been caught
up on journal entries....neat...now I can slack off for four days again
;)