A letter home from study abroad
Well, on sunday, I got up at about 11 and met my friend Sara for lunch at about
1....as we had no better ideas, we ended up at russkoe bistro...their piroshki
with mushrooms are pretty good....we walked around for a while and eventually
ended back at my dorm where we hung out and talked. At some point my
sometimes-roomate george showed up. I argued with george about religion for a
while before he left.
In the evening, sara and I decided to go out for indian
food...unfortunately, the place listed as the most reasonably priced indian in town
was about $20 per dish...so we walked to a chinese place that was supposed to be
close....it looked really low quality...for middletown residents, this means tiny
portions of sub-fortune wok quality food at triple the price...with a fifth of the
selection.....so we ended up at the starlight diner.....The Starlight is a "diner"
that was physically imported from the US. The atmosphere is very western....the
portions are big, the prices are reasonable, the food is GOOD and the place is
staffed by teenagers and 20somethings...all of whom are apparently only allowed to
speak english, even though they are all russians....(i spoke in russian to her, yet
she persisted in responding only in english)
The guys at the next table were obnoxious american journalists...one of
whom apparently was a reporter for the NY Times...he kept himself busy telling his
friend all about how he almost went bezerk after the challenger explosion....it
seems he was covering the story for the times and asked NASA's Information Officer
what the temperature at Cape Canaveral was at the time of launch. The response was
that that information was classified. The reporter "had to be bodily dragged away
by other reporters." As they were leaving, the reporter made a point of explaining
that the meal was on the times and that he hadn't actually used his own AmEx card
in 17 years. My Western Omlette was really good...as was the vanilla coke.