September 22, 2005

Though I was reminded again and again that I was sitting in the exit row (even by the colorful but dour Russian lady, Lubov Sarkhova, an erstwhile Brighton Beach resident who was sitting next to me reading Charles Dickens) the flight to 8.5 hour flight to Moscow was uneventful. I didn’t get much sleep, so the tiring influx of information threw me into a real fatigue as serious as that of the buildings on the way back from the airport. Huge apartment complexes that seem to be skinking into the ground, with boarded up windows, broken fixtures of all sorts, etc—mixed in of course with the occasional IKEA store and gaudy shiny shopping mall, flashy billboards of all sorts. Not exactly what I expected, but close. Buses on the freeway full of sullen-looking people, under a grey sky about to break open; shacks covered with corrugated metal; the ubiquitous apartment complexes, spotted with color, spreading out like children’s blocks about to collapse on each other.

The campus on which we’re staying—the Moscow Humanitarian University—is unsurprisingly not very human in its architecture. The typical Soviet style you know, the handsome people everywhere, the guys in leather, the girls in short skirts despite a hint of brisk wind, stare at us with a look of disdain. But that, Matt says, is just the Russian way—it’s not actual disdain but a curiosity that still feels a bit…desperate? Interested despite itself, despite a sense of native pride amidst a group of 30 Americans? I tried to enjoy my first Russian borsch in the cafeteria, a dismal Midwest high school affair, but it didn’t quite fulfill it’s initial promise. Almost… looking forward to more of the beet root. Tracy, a Peace Corps veteran (there are a few here) who served in Turkmenistan, told John and I of the crazy dictator there, whose recent reforms include abolishment of lip synching and men’s facial hair. Someone find that proto-fascist country some real enemies soon or dinnertime rice plats or fuchsia might be the next to go….

We had dinner with an official from the university, who delivered a number of toasts and told a joke, little of which I could hear due to the acoustics of the room and my seat at the very end of the long table. Tried to enjoy the chicken and cabbage and mashed potatoes. We had wine and pastries for dessert!

John snores loudly, assertively even. But that’s khorasho. I think it makes my sleep that much deeper.