A letter home from study abroad
October 31, 1996
Halloween.
Well, happy halloween, kids. Today was a remarkably normal
day...nobody came to class in costume...nobody knocked on my door asking
for candy, etc. Too bad. It seems that halloween here is really just an
excuse for a bunch of expats to get together and go clubbing....which is
just what they do every saturday night anyway. I think the real problem
is that there aren't enough american children here...ho-hum.
Classes were unremarkable but terribly painful. (It was our first
day back in class after our excursion to the baltics.) I'm amazed at how
quickly this semester's been flying past......I guess this is best
demonstrated by the following calendar of the days of class I've got left.
November 1996 December 1996
S M T W T F S S M T W T F S
1 2 3 5 6
4 5 9 10 12 13
14 15
18 19 21 22
25 26
that's taking out the days i'll be with my mom in petersburg and with my
dad and prother here. wednesdays, as you have probably surmised by now,
are excursion days. It's really not all that much school...the last week
will probably be taken up with exams...which means i've got about 3.5
weeks of class left. The semester has gone by remarkably fast.
Oh, yeah, today....that's what this entry is about, isn't it ;)
So, after class, we had to stick around till about 3 for a meeting....I
killed the 45 minutes by reading a recent copy of the Moscow Tribune. You
can all breath easier now...the Mayonaisse Mafia has been been arrested.
Apparently, some guy was running a bootleg Mayo bottling operation and
selling his wares at a public market at an extremely low cost. As far as
I can tell from the story, the real issue was that he didn't have a
license and that his mayo "only consisted of 25% fat rather than the
requisite 65%" and contained no milk or egg products. The other gem of
news was that at least one russian phone company has dropped weekend rates
to the states to about $.60 per minute. If I can find a way to take
advantage of this, some of you might get a call from me at some bizzare
hour this weekend.
After the meeting, I headed out to try to get my dad and brother
official invitations for visas. So, I called the Travelers' Guest House
and got their address and prices. (TGH has the ability to fax them out
the same day....pricy ($35) but convenient.) I hopped on the metro and
got off at prospect mira. After about 15 minutes of walking, i found
building #5 on the apropriate street....they'd never heard of the
travellers' guest house...although a nice young woman had come by looking
for just such a place this morning...i'm glad that my friend grant also
gave me directions.....i'd been confused as he'd said "#50" and the lady
on the phone had said #5....after a brief trolleybus ride, i found #50 and
chided the woman behind the desk about getting me lost. By the time I
left, it was already 5:15 and total darkness was rapidly approaching.
It's been tending to get dark here at about 5:30....that's just _wrong_ at
least unless one has a nice fireplace to curl up in front of.
Tomorrow is my friend Liz's birthday and I headed off to Progress
(a western supermarket/department store) to get her a pair of little
speakers for her discman as a gift....alas, progress doesn't sell such
things, so I treated myself to a window-shopping spree in the supermarket.
I was amazed to see a woman giving away free samples of ice-cream -- just
like in a western supermarket. Another thing that caught my eye was
Kellogg's Frosted Flakes....which was an exciting discovery as they're
called "frosties" all over europe. Upon closer inspection, I discovered
that they were canadian. I'm dubious of the economy of shipping breakfast
cereal over from the states.
At the end of half an hour of browsing, my shopping cart contained the
following items:
1 Slim Jim
1 Can of Cherry Coke
2 Cans of Lemon Crush
1 Package of Cheddar Cheese
All these wonderful things came to a grand total of $6.66. (Yes,
exactly.)
From there, I came home.....After about an hour of hanging out, I
fell asleep.....I got about 2 hours of sleep before I was able to rouse
myself enough to write a journal entry for today. I think I might spend
some more time hacking at "What I did on my trip to the Baltics"...but
that's another story.