A letter home from study abroad
November 1, 1996
Well, today was Liz's birthday and I intended to pop off after
class to get her a present...except I ended up waiting around till we got
our monthly stipends so I wouldn't have to cash a travellers' check to buy
it. Leslie convinced me to make guacamole.... (I already had the
avocado...i found it at a fruits and vegetables kiosk a few days ago) We
went out to buy the lemon and got a plate of chopped tomatoes and onions
from the stolovaya. katya lent us some chili powder and a clove of
garlic....to our surprise, it tasted pretty good.
Once we finally got our stipends, Jerry and I headed off to locate
a computer market that we'd been told about...On the way there, jerry
convinced me to get some shwarma...mine was ok...but his was
excellent...it seems that he paid with a 50,000 ruble bill and got 90,000
rubles in change.
jerry had been told that it ran on fridays, saturdays and
sundays...after about 1/2 an hour of wandering, we found the right spot
but it turns out that the market only runs on saturdays and sundays...so
we headed off to liz's for the party...stopping at kievsky market on the
way for me to find liz's present....well, they didn't have it there, so I
ended up deciding to try again later....well, as we were walking from the
metro to liz's apartment, i saw the walkman speakers i wanted to get her
in a kiosk window...but everybody was walking way too fast and if i'd
stopped, i would have been seperated from the group and gotten lost.....
The party was um...interesting....there was a snarling yapping
puppy dog running around all evening and jocelyn and I were the only ones
there who didn't get completely wasted. I stopped drinking afer about 5
toasts...but between about 8 people we polished off 10 bottles of beer,
4 bottles of vodka and three bottles of champagne. By the end of the
evening, shiloh was running around screaming about how leslie bit her and
leslie was just rolling on the floor. liz was telling everyone that she
loved them and jerry just kept falling over into things. It was quite a
scene. Jocelyn and Jerry and I decided to cut out of the plan to go to
the "Hungry Duck" later, as we weren't really up for _more_ drinking. it
appears that by the time they got to the metro later, everybody else
realized that they weren't either...i think it had something to do with
the fact that they couldn't stand up anymore. ;)
jesse