We just passed through the customs check from Finland into Russia. I should have been writing here for the past few days, but I’ve been much too busy. So while I’m bouncing on the bus I’ll try to fill in the last week as much as I can.

CIEE Semester Abroad - St. Petersburg, Russia

Jan. 20 - May 15 2000

Left Lubbock by car, drove to Dallas. Dad had a business trip, and thought it would be safer if I flew out of here rather than relying on Lubbock air services. Visited Granmarie and Aunt Andy, and stayed with Andy for the night. A long drive, but it was nice to see some good dry scenery before I left. Warm for the season.

Left Andy’s early for DFW Airport. Mom and Dad saw me off a little past noon. Flew to New York for the night, since you can’t get from Lubbock to New York in time for me to make my FinnAir flight if I’d left Lubbock the same day. The flight was boring, and New York was a letdown. Big and stinky. Very cold, though; CNN says it was colder than Helsinki or Petersburg.

Checked out of the hotel and got to JFK for the flight. Had to wait around for a bit, but met with the rest of the CIEE gang. A pretty mixed group, but interesting people. Quite a few from Georgetown and George Washington. The FinnAir flight was long and boring, as I suppose trans-Atlantic flights are wont to be. The best part was the moving map that showed our position in real-time. I kept wanting to play with the controls, but stewardesses don’t like that. I watched the movies and listened to music and tried to sleep, but mostly I just paged through old magazines and talked to the Orthodox Jewish couple across the aisle from me about computer games.

Arrived in Helsinki at about eight a.m. local time, about midnight biological time. Finland is very beautiful, with pine forests covered in a very recent snowfall. Not nearly as cold as I’d feared; it’s actually quite pleasant outside. Met with Lyudmila as we deplaned, one of the proctors. She walked us to our bus, and we drove to the hotel. We stayed at the Hotel Korpilampi, a resort in Espoo, about an hour’s drive from downtown Helsinki. I roomed with Alex Greenstein, an interesting guy from GW.

We had a good lunch at the buffet (smoked fish, pressed fish, fish pate, and bread) and had liberty until seven. Most of us caught the bus into Helsinki with Dallas, an affable kind of guy who’s on the full year program. He came into Helsinki with Nathan (the other proctor, and Mila’s husband) and Mila to roll out the welcome wagon. He showed us the right bus and went with us. We started off at a bookstore, where we left Dallas and struck off on our own in a group of four or five. We wandered for a while, and blundered into an enormous art museum featuring an Edvard Munch exhibit. We were too cheap for the Munch special exhibit, but we sprang for regular student admission and wandered through a nice gallery of Finnish national treasures that were pretty obscure to us. About halfway through, an elderly lady approached me and told me about the painting I was looking at (a scene from a Finnish folktale about arranged marriages and mermaids). When she realized that we were all in a group, she walked us through the rest of the museum and explained each and every painting and sculpture to us. She knew the history of each and every work and its artist, and which pieces had just returned from showing abroad and which were about to be sent away. As we left, she volunteered to take us to the Church in the Rock (not its real name), which Bethany had wanted to see.

Along the way, she pointed out things like good places to eat, bus stops, and the train stations and cafes where Finnish ski soldiers were mobilized during the war “while their young ladies watched and cried.” We got the impression that she had been one of those young ladies. She schlepped across twenty blocks of snowed-in downtown Helsinki with us, until we came to an enormous pile of stone blocks roughly in a dome shape in the middle of an upper-class business district. Inside, the only person other than us was a lady manning the souvenir stand. The church was indescribably beautiful. I really hope my photos come out; I wasted most of my film in the museum, and only had a few shots left for the church. The interior preserved the dome shape, with stone walls and a brass-capped ceiling. The altar and the sanctuary were surprisingly small and understated, but the austerity was beautiful in itself. The baptismal font was a pile of shaped rocks to the right of the altar; there was also a cast-iron rack of votive candles five meters long and an enormous pipe organ to relieve the severity of the open space. I still have dreams about how quiet and peaceful the entire building was, and how beautiful it was with the sunlight filtering through the snow covering the windows. When we couldn’t spare another minute, we said goodbye to our guide and started walking back to the bus. The last thing I thought to ask her was her name; as nearly as I could tell, she said that she was Ms. Haakallah.

After a hearty breakfast (spiced fish, pureed fish, baked fish and cornflakes) we had some orientation sessions, which are ostensibly the reason we started in Finland rather than Russia. Well, that and it’s easier to get through the Russian visa regime through Finland than through Russia. Orientation took all day, but we didn’t do much. Mila explained the way things are, and Nathan explained the way we would see things. She’s Russian and he’s American (although he’s one of those rare people so proficient in his second language that very few Russians realize that he’s not a native speaker), so it was a good introduction to the schismatic way I imagine that I’ll be spending the next few months.

During the long lunch break Michael and Sandra and Liza and Michelle and I went swimming. An elderly schoolteacher came in while we were goofing off, and we watched her go from the indoor heated pool to the outside door and then dive into the lake, which was frozen over except for a ten-foot spot by the hotel. She came back in, and tried to get us to go with her. I was the only one who did (although Peter, Nathan and Mila’s eight year old son had done it the night before). As soon as I left the building, my feet started sticking to the ice on the ground outside. When I dived into the lake, my entire body went numb. I have never been, and probably never will be, so incredibly cold in my life. Hitting the water drove the air out of my lungs, and I could feel my skin contract. I only stayed in the lake for a few seconds, then I followed the lady back inside for a dip in the whirlpool. We did that a few times, then she had to go. It was lots of fun, but I really wish I’d had my camera with me. I’ll have to try it again sometime.

We finished sessions at about five, and broke for the day. I went with Alex and Maryanne and Mary to the city, where we thought we’d find some food. Alex is the GW student; he’s in International Studies too. Mary is premed, she wants to go into an MD./PhD program in immunology or something. Maryanne is an army brat; she’s lived in half a dozen countries and speaks great Russian. She has dual citizenship in the U.S. and in Austria, so she’s old hat at beating jetlag and finding good food abroad. It took us almost an hour to find a place that served affordable food; Finland is very beautiful, but very expensive. We kept stumbling into seedy bars, unobtrusively looking around to see if anyone had food on their plates or if they only served alcohol. We finally found a place to eat in the basement of a bar, and learned that in Finland you have to ask for your check, they don’t just bring it to you. It took us almost three hours to learn that. When we finally got our bill, the single (extremely good; Koff is a brand to watch out for) beer I had cost more than the rest of my meal put together. That’s a socialist country for you; cheap pasta, but expensive booze and a twenty-two percent tax on it all. Afterwards, we hung out in the bus station until it was time to catch our bus to the hotel. When we got back, we all drank Alex’s Greek wine and talked about Russia. I tucked in early, since I had to repack all my bags the next morning.

Got up early for breakfast (rice krispies, no fish) and to repack my bags, which I’d torn apart looking for film. After loading up, we took the bus on the road to Petersburg. Passing through Finland was beautiful, but the pine forests start to wear after a while. We stopped briefly for some sack lunches packed (I suppose) by the hotel; cheese and butter sandwiches, and some kind of wretched oily pastries stuffed with rice. My stomach rebels just thinking about it (although the jouncing bus might have something to do with it). From there we hit the Finnish border check (one guard who stamped our passports and flirted with all the girls) and drove on to the Russian border, which is manned by about twelve eighteen year-old guards packing automatic weapons and blotched green camo fatigues that make them stand out like dollar bills against the snow. Not a humorous bunch. Nathan says that they must all have some friends in high places to have such an easy posting. It didn’t seem all that easy to us, until we realized that the alternative was Chechnya. We made it through the check without incident, although Megan almost got busted. In the space on the declaration form for “Narcotic drugs and appliances for the use thereof” she wrote “One (1) Kodak camera” because hey, “It’s an appliance!” The guards didn’t care, though. They never even asked, just let her scratch it out and hand the form back over. They didn’t check our bags, either, and the woman stamping our forms didn’t speak English. We could have been smuggling dead bodies stuffed with gold, and even declared it, and they’d never have known. Note to self: bring thirty (30) kilos of heroin next time.

After crossing the border, we drove along a rough and snowy road for a few hours. The first non-military building we saw was a church done in the classic Russian style. It looked like St. Basil’s in 1/10th scale; a relatively small building but replete with gilt onion domes and vivid candy striping. Not much further on was a much larger cathedral, apparently built in the “enormous ugly fortress” style of architecture so popular in post-Revolution Russia. If it weren’t for the Orthodox cross, I would have thought it was a factory. On our right, we passed a few dozen of the most ramshackle and dilapidated huts I’ve ever seen. They were so amazingly pathetic that you could hear the sound of every jaw on the bus dropping. Just as someone was about to ask how people could survive in shacks like that, Nathan told us that they don’t. They were just tool sheds for nearby garden plots that were buried under the snow. Russia may be poorer than America, but we tend to overestimate its general decline. After that, we passed through a medium-sized town whose name I didn’t catch. I saw my first frozen-over river, complete with someone towing a sled with a child in it and a dog running alongside. It was so picturesque I wondered if it was staged for tourists.

We got into Petersburg fairly late, and unloaded outside the dorm. The dorm kids went off to their briefings, and we were split into groups for delivery to our host families. There were five or six of us in a microbus, followed by a boxy truck with our luggage. One person would be dropped off while they were settled, and the rest of us would wait in the bus (which was unheated, as far as I could tell) until we were ready to go on to the next house. I have never been so tired or hungry in all my life. I was third or fourth, and was so cold and exhausted and incoherent when we got to my building that I barely remembered English, much less Russian. I hauled my bags up the rather dingy staircase into a very tastefully decorated apartment, and after the minders had left Marina Michaelovna fed me a big bowl of borsch and I hit the sack. She’s the host mother. She used to be a translator for the technological institute; her bookshelves sag under the weight of Russian-English dictionaries in electronics, radio transmission, radio reception, robotics, cellular biology, and other neat stuff. She also translated from Japanese, but now she’s just a schoolteacher. That’s the decline for you. It was a good day, overall, but very tiring.

The first full day. We met early at the café outside the dorm (Elaine’s, or Єлаинес in Russian) for a big breakfast and we loaded up for a tour of the city. Maryanne missed it; when they warned us in orientation not to try to keep up with the locals in drinking contests, she thought it was a dare. She says she out-drank the Russians she was with, but she also spent the rest of the night vomiting and missed the “tour.” The windows were fogged up and iced over and we couldn’t see a thing. We were so tired we didn’t even really listen to the director, so it was basically bouncing up and down and staring at the seat in front of us for an hour. We stopped a couple of times to look at the Admiralty and the Bronze Horseman, and we toured the battleship Avrora (Aurora). That was neat. Some of the souvenirs the crew had collected were on display, and they were all great. There were dozens of statues of Marx and Lenin (Aurora is a famous ship from Revolutionary times) and little pins and huge red banners and flags. A portrait of the captain hangs on the wall below decks, framed in a plate of steel pierced by shot in some sea battle. I want a portrait of myself framed like that someday. We also changed money and bought metro cards, and spent the rest of the day unpacking and sleeping.

I’ve settled in at the apartment, and had my first day of classes. Smolnyi is beautiful. Just beautiful. The outer walls of the compound (there are a few different buildings, but we’re all in just one) are sky blue, with white and gold trim. The central building is a beautiful cathedral, and the entire complex looks like it came straight from the 18th century, which, of course, it did. Inside the rooms are comfortable, but the general level of technology reminds me of the Lodge. Well worn, but also well cared-for. We were divided into groups for classes, and I was placed in the third, most basic group. My two years of classes is a little behind what most people on the trip have had. Most of them have studied the language for several years, and most have been to Russia before. Also, the placement exam was damned hard. I’m sure that I knew the grammatical concepts behind a lot of the questions, but the vocabulary was so hard that I rarely knew what the question was asking. Very difficult.

I’m in a group with Alex, Michael (a nice enough guy, if overly dramatic), Mary, (whom I found out recently is engaged), Michelle, Bob (more on him later) and Mary Jane, a 40-year old woman with two kids who’s here as a prereq for a doctorate program. She’s interesting; she’s got two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s. She has no special interest in the Russian language as far as I know, but she has to learn another language to fluency level, so here she is. She and her daughter Claire are staying in the dorm until they get an apartment, which must be fun. I haven’t seen the rooms, but even just the elevators are depressing as hell. I’d hate to live there, much less be 12 years old and live there with no one to talk to but American college students who aren’t allowed to speak English. Still, she’s in a western school and they’re getting an apartment soon, so it’s copasetic. Shto escho. . . oh yes, Bob.

Bob’s . . . interesting. A nice guy, I guess, but kind of creepy. Stands a little too close and leans a little too far in when he talks. He talks very softly, like it’s all a conspiracy. We all knew that he was living with some people he knew here rather than in the dorms or in a Council homestay, but, well . . . One of our profs, the lecturer in the Russian culture series, grilled us about our home lives and our host families in an attempt to draw comparisons. In the process, it came out that Bob and Natasha (the girl he’s living with) are gf/bf (or a near approximation). Moreover, I think they met for the first time this week, as the rest of their “relationship” has apparently been by correspondence and telephone. Someone told me she answered an ad on the Internet. Apparently, Bob shows up, Natasha moves in with him (she’s Russian, but not from Petersburg, from somewhere south of Tashkent), and I guess goes back with him when he leaves. The disturbing part is that Bob is a few months shy of thirty and divorced and Natasha is just recently eighteen. When the prof heard that, she got pretty agitated (although I have to admit that her normal state is pretty agitated). She made some hurried remarks about how that’s “a very unusual situation,” but I’m not proficient enough with the language to have picked up on all the subtexts. She was definitely unhappy with Bob, though. Maryanne says that this is his second attempt at a mail-order girlfriend, as it were, his first Russian wife having split with the cash and the green card as soon as practical.

Another new person is LT. It’s short for Leantine I think, but we call her “eltee.” She’s another yearlong kid like Dallas, but even better with the language. She looks a lot like Elizabeth, except she’s completely nuts. She’s a Marxist and a feminist and a labor rights activist and an environmentalist and she dabbled in anarchy but thought the movement was lacking intellectual cohesion. Her post-grad school plan is to find a way to meld labor rights and environmentalism, based on some strike a few years ago where aluminum workers struck with Earth Firsters. She thinks it “really has a chance to take off in Russia.” I don’t know if she’ll starve or be offed by Pinkertons first. She’s tons of fun to talk to, highly intelligent, and she knows the best places in the city. She took us to the Idiot Café off of Nevsky Prospekt yesterday. It was great; so stereotypically Russian intelligentsia that it hurt. Pale, emaciated men hunched over tables scribbling furiously amidst waitresses in white sweaters and kerchiefs delivering huge steaming mugs of cappuccino, tiny bowls of cheap caviar, and a free shot of vodka with every order. The writers just exuded a great “It was a dark and stormy night. . .” vibe.

I’d love to go back and take pictures, but it would just ruin the atmosphere. I’d probably be beaten with stale muffins.

I’m starting to think that I didn’t study enough at Trinity. A lot of these people speak much better Russian than I do. I guess I’ll get better with practice. We got our student ID cards today, and they’re pretty neat. Little blue books with room for six years of university studies. They take them seriously, here. We’re not allowed to take them home as souvenirs; apparently the institute gets in huge trouble if they don’t collect as many as they distribute. This is the anniversary of the breaking of the Blockade, so we went out to get dinner and watch the fireworks. Dan, Justin, Meg, Michelle, Liza, myself and a couple others went to “Señior Pepe’s,” a fairly classy little Mexican place off of Gostinii Dvor (the enormous shopping mall/metro station on Nevsky Prospekt). Michelle was terribly depressed because she ripped her brand new leather pants on a corner in the café. The crushing injustice of it all made our souls quake. It was pretty good food, actually, and fairly authentic. Some guy, presumably the manager/owner, invited us all to a Superbowl party next weekend. Well, next week. The game starts 2:30 a.m. Monday, local time. I don’t know if I’ll go or beg off; that’s pretty damned early and the metros will be closed. We missed the fireworks; everyone got lost trying to find the place (which is actually off of Lomonsov street, where it’s dark and kind of seedy) and by the time we got out, we heard the last of the fireworks going off. Still, we had lots of fun. Russians know how to celebrate the ending of nine hundred days of starvation: eat ‘till you burst. Happy Siege Day.

We had our first excursion today, to Peter and Paul Fortress. It was amazing, but it made me wish they weren’t so strict about Russian usage on excursions. I understand the benefit of immersion, but I would have liked to have been able to follow more of the tour guide’s lecture. The Fortress is several hundred years old, built to counter the Swedes and the Finns in the Great Northern War (I don’t know what they call it in the West). They date the founding of St. Petersburg by its construction, I think. The walls are impressively thick and, being Russian, dripping with elaborate carvings and beautiful coats of arms. Inside the fortress is the cathedral, which is possibly the most ornately beautiful building I’ve ever seen. The outside was undergoing renovation, so all we could see was the scaffolding, but the inside was frosted with gold and artwork. Every surface was either gold, marble, or beautifully painted wood. The panels around the ceiling were interesting, but I couldn’t really see them all that well. The pulpit was wrapped in a spiral around a central column about six feet off the ground, and so weighted down with golden trim that it looked about ready to collapse. There was an enormous dais opposite the pulpit, which I think the guide said was used for the throne on state visits, but I’m not entirely sure. The altar was, of course, ornately decorated, but it was also undergoing renovation. The cathedral floor is dotted with little islands of coffins. Quite a few princes and princesses of the old line are interred there, in marble coffins struck with the Orthodox cross and inscribed with the names of the departed in Old Church Slavonic. It was beautiful, but personally, I’d rather be buried somewhere private. That didn’t stop me from getting lots of pictures, of course. Afterwards Michael and Garth and I went to Pizza Hut. Not very Russian of us, but it felt pretty good to know exactly what we were eating.

Mary Jane has a new apartment, and invited everyone over for a housewarming party. It was a lot of fun; the apartment is huge and very, very nice. It’s even in a good location, just behind the Chernashevskaya metro station, which is the one close to Smolnyi. We all brought something to eat or drink, as per custom. And, of course, some of the girls forgot that Mary Jane has a 12-year old daughter and brought vodka. Claire was fascinated by the furtive way they tried to hide it when they realized that she was there. She got Justin (a scruffily bearded and pleasantly jovial fellow) to start telling her what it’s like to be drunk. When he got to the saw about “Beer then liquor, never sicker, liquor then beer, in the clear,” he suddenly realized that he was giving drinking instructions to a girl too young to get into PG-13 movies. He covered pretty well though; “Uhhh, what I mean is, they both make you sick, and you should never try them. Ever.” Then Claire politely informed us that when she’s eventually allowed to get drunk, she’s going to throw up. Justin tried to discourage her, saying that normally that’s what you try to avoid, but apparently that’s the part she’s looking forward to. After the party, we all went to the City Bar. Everyone there spoke English, and we actually forgot that we were in Russia for a while, since we were listening to American music and hanging out with other expats. There were two things to remind us of where we were: the amazingly cheap food and drink (though expensive by local standards), and the shockingly cold water in the faucet in the bathroom. We left about two, and it felt good to remember where we were. I really like it here.

I didn’t make it to the Superbowl party last night; I had too much homework and I’m too disinterested in football to drag myself out at two a.m. and stay out until classtime. I met Dan and Molly and Meg at the bus from the metro this morning, and they looked like they’d been beaten with railroad ties. Dan was visibly in pain from some kind of uber-hangover precipitated by Russian beer, Molly was still a little spacey from having flipped end-over-end on a barrier chain while walking from Pepe’s to the Grand Hotel Europe and landing on her head, and Megan spent the bus ride trying to finish her homework in time for class without falling asleep with her eyes open. Apparently Pepe’s satellite dish had a mechanical failure, so they went to the Grand Hotel Europe to watch the game. I asked who won; Meg and Molly and Dan conferred for a few seconds, and told me that it was definitely either Tennessee or St. Louis. They thought it was St. Louis, but they weren’t sure, because at some point the hotel staff started trying to make them leave since they’d brought their beer with them and weren’t patronizing the hotel bar (the Grand Hotel can be pretty snotty). Sounded like a fun night.

We had our first Kinokurse today; at Trinity we watched Petchki Lavotchki, Utomne na Solntsem, Sibiriada, Malenkaya Vera, and other highbrow stuff. Today we watched some bizarre 60’s Soviet comedy that had an eerie similarity to Dobie Gillis. If Komrade Krebbs had made an appearance, I would have just given up and gone home for the day. Too weird. Later, I talked to Marina Michaelovna about movies. She agreed that foreign films are a pain to watch and usually stranger than they should be. She said she gave up on American movies after “Tram of Desire.” I didn’t like that move much, either.

I got Internet access today, but it’s a pretty sketchy deal. I’ll have to try to renegotiate; I can’t keep just buying ten hour blocks from the computer place down the street. To log on I have to borrow the phone cord from the telephone in the study, since the jack in my room is some kind of antiquated Soviet standard with five asymmetrical prongs. They probably have my computer monitored by now. Hello, Mr. Cheka. No subversiveness here, I promise.

Today is Florin’s birthday; he’s a German student who lives at the obshezhite with Alex and Maryanne and Mary and the others. The party started at about nine, which, by complete chance, was when I got there. A few days ago I was explaining to Mary the Jedi art of getting lost. Don’t worry, don’t make plans about when to leave or how to get there, just set out and have faith that if you don’t get there on time, you’ll get there right before the fun starts. So I got off of the Primorskaya metro stop, walked to the bus stop that I thought might be the right one, got on the first bus that came by, and paid my two rubles. I rode until I thought that it would be better to get off and hail a cab, and when I got out, I was right in front of the dorm. Not very exciting, but very Jedi. I was proud.

When I got there it was just Alex, Mary, Maryanne, Florin, a couple of Canadians and a weird Japanese guy who just made strange sounds and laughed all night drinking Baltika 7 (only 17% alcohol) and waiting for “the Irish” to arrive. Half an hour later, the lounge was full of people; there were Americans, Uzbekistanis, Georgians, British, Swedish, Danish, Canadians, Chinese, the Japanese guy, and assorted other nationalities (but oddly enough no Russians) casually getting sloshed and listening to hard core west-coast American rap. We spend the whole night waiting for “the Irish,” who, depending on who you were listening to, were either the two drinkingest fightingest guys to ever hit Petersburg who were going to drink and fight and fight and drink and drink and fight and drink and drink and fight and fight all night long, or the two most amazingly beautiful red-headed green eyed beauties who were also going to drink and fight and fight and drink until the wee hours. A couple of Irish did eventually show up, but they were entirely mundane, so I don’t think they were “the” Irish. The guy from Norway looks exactly like the front man for the Spin Doctors. I met a cute Swedish girl named Marie (red sweater in the pictures) and got her email address, but I lost it. Dallas knows her, he might have it. Regardless, it was a lot of fun.

I got lots of great pictures (I got a 35mm point and shoot of my own last week from a store off of Nevsky, incredibly cheap and incredibly neat. God bless the deflated ruble) of a dozen different nationalities trying their hands at American drinking games. I begged off of the game (“Flip-cup”) to take pictures. Watching Maryanne and Alex try to explain the rules in English and in Russian and the subsequent renderings in half a dozen other languages was inspiring. Actually, I begged off of the drinking altogether, for the most part. I left at around midnight since I had class the next morning, but the dorm kids were still going hard. Alex was starting to mosh by himself, which mostly entailed slamming into walls and headbanging. The next morning, I don’t think a single person in our class from the dorms showed up for class. After we left, they spent a few hours drinking and then went to the Christmas bar to drink some more. Alex swears they had fun, but then, Maryanne swears that Friday morning he was begging her to kill him. Their night ended with a rousing rendition of the Soviet national anthem with some Russians they met.

It occurs to me that I haven’t written anything about my average day, so here it is:

7:45 - Marina Michaelovna wakes me up by calling, “Colin, will you wake up please?” in English from the kitchen.

8:00 - Breakfast, usually of rice or grain kasha (porridge), buterbrodi (bread, sausage and cheese open-faced sandwiches), juice, coffee, and anything else she thinks she can get me to eat. She thinks I’m starving to death if I only eat one helping, and she’s convinced I’m fifty grams of sausage away from catching tuberculosis or some horrible wasting disease. She tried feeding me raw bacon for a while, but that didn’t last long.

8:30 - After getting ready, I lace up my boots and try to slip out before M. M. remembers to offer me the nose cream, which is some kind of Russian medicine designed to ward off the “gripp” (flu). The fact that I’ve had my immunization just makes her laugh. She laughs at me a lot, actually. She’s convinced that I have to apply this cream inside my nose to protect myself. Maybe it’s just me, but I have an inherent distrust of Russian medicine. After I leave, I walk about a block to the Vasileostrovskaya (“Basil’s Island”) metro station, where I catch the train though Gostinii Dvor to Mayakovskaya, where I switch trains to Chernashevskaya (Chernashevski wrote “What is to be Done?,” a 19th century revolutionary book).

9:15 - Catch the bus from the metro to Smolnyi. The bus is just for the six or seven of us to take the metro to school, and the driver has a complete lack of regard for the lives of anyone on the street other than us. He’ll bull through crowds of pedestrians and intimidate his way through traffic to get across the street so that we don’t have to cross to get to the bus. He’s a great guy. I think the woman who’s sometimes on the bus with us is either his wife, his girlfriend, or his boss.

[postscript: We lost the big bus sometime around the middle of February. Now we get a smaller, marshrutka-sized bus with a taciturn driver who listens to pulsing disco music or Metallica. Not as comfortable as the big zelyoni bus, but the soundtrack is a good way to get us jazzed for class. The boss/girlfriend has also been replaced, by “The Lady in Green,” a mysterious stranger who always wears a green coat and hat.)

9:30 - First class. We have Grammatika, Gazeta (newspaper), Razgovor (conversation), Kinokurse, a culture lecture and a literature lecture. Gazeta is optional, I could have taken Analitika instead, which is literature, but I’ve already read most of what they’ll do in class. Classes are “para,” two 45-minute sections of the same class, which is basically just a 90-minute block. There are two para before lunch, then lunch, then another para, except for two days a week. One day we get off at lunch, and the other we get off early for an excursion or tour (usually).

After classes, I walk back to the metro through an absolutely gorgeous park, replete with revolutionary monuments to the proletariat and a big statue of Lenin (across the street there’s still a statue of Derzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka) and scads of old men playing chess on benches and pillars, even when it’s -20. They only go away when it’s snowing, raining, or the children come out. I don’t know how they know, but you never see the kids and the old folks in the park at the same time.

Chess is the national pastime of Russia. Everyone plays, and to hear a Russian tell it, they’re all Gary Kasparovs. Some of the most popular souvenirs are the hand carved chess sets, which range from marble recreations of Peter’s armies and navies to Kandinskyesque abstract wooden carvings to simple blocky soapstone sets.

7:00 - After spending the day doing whatever it is I’m doing, M.M. feeds me dinner. For the first couple of weeks, it was the traditional two-course Russian meal of soup and main course, but with a Herculean effort I managed to convince her that that was simply too much food for me to eat. So now I get just the one course, often with a cup of broth or bouillon to help ward off the gripp, and a healthy side of chiding about eating more. I do homework or write email or read, and hit the sack around midnight.

Marina is quite experienced at hosting students, having kept quite a few. It’s a profitable hobby, since CIEE host families get $12 dollars a day to keep students, which is excellent money here. She talks about her other students all the time, and keeps pictures of them on the piano in my room. The only other pictures in the house are of her daughter and of her grandson, on whom she dotes. Not in the American way of giving him candy and presents, but in the Russian way of yelling at him. “Misha! Why haven’t you eaten? Put on a coat! You’ll catch cold! Do your homework! Don’t hang out with a bad crowd! Do you want to give me a heart attack? Misha!” There’s never any mention of Marina’s husband, and I make it a point not to ask. She’s old enough that it’s likely that he died in the war or was killed or relocated in a purge. The students all decided that it would be really rude to ask about any family members in that age group that seem to be missing, although our hosts probably wouldn’t mind. There are a lot of elderly people on the street, more than you’d expect, and they’re overwhelmingly women. It’s kind of amazing to see what an effect the Terror had on demographics, and to realize that that time still casts a shadow on the city.

We left on our first major excursion for Veliki Novgorod today. There are two: Nizhny Novgorod and Veliki Novgorod. Nizhny is small, only around 200,000 people, but very very old and very interesting. The entire town is practically one huge museum. The bus ride was about three hours, and totally uneventful other than the fact that Victoria failed to show up. (Nathan and Mila kept trying to get in touch with her over the weekend, but no one could find her. Turned out eventually that once she realized that she’d missed the bus, she crashed in Florin’s room for the weekend. That’s a whole other story.) We stayed at Intourist, the old Soviet institution for foreign visitors. The front of the building is decorated with a huge and intricate mosaic depiction of Mother Russia, draped in symbols of agriculture and industry and peace and progress and such. The rooms were nice, but decorated in a kind of 1920’s brothel way, with red velvet bedspreads and drapes.

We dropped our stuff off and ate, then hit the kremlin. Inside is St. Sophia’s, an amazingly beautiful cathedral. According to our guide, Natasha (who does all the Novgorod trips for CIEE), V. Novgorod was 80% destroyed in WWII, 50% by Nazis and 30% by Russian artillery. The cathedral is still being restored. It used to be a reliquary for three saints, but the Soviets disinterred and destroyed the remains as part of the campaign of atheism. The iconography in the cathedral is amazing; every square inch is decorated with incredibly vivid depictions of Bible stories and hagiography. After the museum, we traipsed back to the bus. I got some great pictures of an outing of school kids. They loved mugging for the camera, but I think we kind of scared their teacher by playing with them and asking them to pose.

When we got back to Intourist, we ate dinner and then Mary and Maryanne and Alex and some guy who came along for the ride all walked across town to a theater to watch “Konetz Tsvet” (lit. “End of Colors,” I think, but it was the Schwarzenegger flick “End of Days”) dubbed into Russian. The dubber for Schwarzenegger actually has a better voice than the real McCoy, but his dialogue just lacks without an Austrian accent. By the time we got back to the hotel, the party was going full-swing in Garth and Michael’s room. Almost all twenty of us were crammed in there, and we had a great time listening to rural Russian radio and passing around bread and cheese and kvass. I kept having to run out and get Cokes from the bar, since I was pretty much the only one not soused on really vile Russian pivo.

By the time I got back from my last soda run, the room was almost empty; there were just a few people there talking. The conversation eventually wandered to Bob and Natasha, his girlfriend; just as I was about to make some comment about how inappropriate the whole thing is, he walked in. He’d been standing outside listening to the entire conversation, and he was drunk enough to come in and try to explain everything to us. To his credit, he was really civil and mature about it, and the whole thing, while still inappropriate to me, is more aboveboard than we thought. It’s too much to explain here; besides, I’m still trying to figure out whether or not I still think it’s weird. Probably, although Bob is definitely not the guy we assumed he was.

We were up by noon and piled onto the bus, which took us to a monastery for more of the history. I’ve forgotten the name, so I’ll have to check the guidebook. I think it was St. George’s. It was, of course, beautiful. The iconography and painting in the church was even more amazing than St. Sophia’s. The central cupola is painted with a Christ figure on the inside looking down on the altar screen. It’s an eerie effect, and it must have been incredibly difficult to paint. I took lots of pictures, but not all of them came out. It was very dark in the church, and I didn’t use the flash for fear contributing to the damage to the paint. I bought a couple of small icons, which will make great gifts.

Afterwards, we went to an outdoor museum of wooden architecture that was a lot of fun. Some of the buildings (mostly homes and churches) were built without hammers or nails, just axes. Although I’m understanding more of the commentary as time goes on, I didn’t quite catch how that was managed. On the way out we found a traditional Russian sled merry-go-round and a slide, and we played in the snow for a while. Michael missed all of this; he found a gym near the hotel where some Finns and Russians from Nizhny Novgorod were playing “Ultimate Frisbee,” or, as he insists on calling it, just “Ultimate.” He seems to think that that was pretty cool. Personally, I think he missed out. Besides, I’m a little tired of hearing about how cool the “ultimate” game was. It’s just a little too “Gen-X” pseudo-hip for me.

Posle, we went back to the kremlin for a brief swing through the museum and lunch. The museum was very interesting, mostly iconographic art and sculptures with a good Novgorodan culture exhibit in the basement, but we only spent about half an hour there because everyone had been griping earlier about how tired they were. It was kind of frustrating for me; I felt great since I hadn’t been plastered the night before, and I wanted to see more of the museum. There were fragments of letters written on birch bark preserved in the culture exhibit from early pre-Muscovite settlements. The only one I heard translated went something like, “My son, I have paid X ingots of silver for your release. If you don’t come home, I will send people to bring you home.” No one knows who wrote it, why the son was a prisoner, or why he wouldn’t have come home, but it was pretty neat.

The restaurant was great. It’s built into the wall of the kremlin, and was nicely cozy and solidly built on the inside with cast-iron spiral staircases and huge oaken beams. The lunch was huge. We started with a very tasty salad, then potato soup, then chicken soup, then blinis and honey for desert, and then a huge dish of ice cream to finish. Five courses all told, with glass after glass of kvass and Turkish coffee. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten as much in my life. After lunch, we boarded the bus, and we were back off to Petersburg. It was a lot of fun, but I was pretty pleased to see my bed again.

Marie invited me to the City Bar today, which was a lot of fun. Most of the other guys on the group have disavowed it as “not Russian enough” and moved on to “Fish Fabrique,” which is a lot less Russian but supposedly a little cheaper. It’s true that there aren’t many Russians at the CB, though. I didn’t really know anyone there except Marie (other than Dallas and Alex, who showed up later en route to somewhere else), but I met Stuart and Finley, a Brit and a Scotsman on English teaching contracts in the city. They were both a lot of fun to talk to. Finley had another Scottish friend there, and they argued for about half an hour about rugby, soccer, and whether Edinburgh is better than Inverness. Afterwards, Stuart and Finley made fun of each other’s accents, and we chatted about rednecks in America and Russian food, and of cabbages and kings. Finley was pretty distraught about food. He said he left Scotland to get away from everything being boiled, and came to Russia where everything is fried. He swears he was offered a fried Mars bar at someone’s house, and was close to tears when he told me about his first host family frying pasta for dinner. I had a lot of fun, and it’s good to meet new people, but I need to start meeting more Russians.

Bit of a lazy slug this weekend. Didn’t do much of anything worth noting today, other than spending most of today at the Hermitage. It’s unbelievable, of course. I spent a couple of hours just in the statuaries, and almost as much time in just the two or three rooms of the Faberge exhibit. I couldn’t have possible imagined how enormous this place is until I tried to see even a small part of it in one day. The guidebook says that to see every exhibit would take months, and seeing every room would mean walking ten kilometers not counting backtracking. I didn’t believe everyone when they said it was better than the Louvre until I got here. Even the building is an unimaginable work of art. My favorite exhibits were the rooms preserved from the complex’s days as the Winter Palace; enormous ballrooms and beautiful studies and elegant “state chairs” (basically thrones). They have the rooms where Kerensky’s provisional government met and was arrested arranged just as they were then, with the clock on the mantle stopped at the minute they were arrested.

The lack of funds has hit the museum, though. The “state chair” of the Master of the Order of the Knights of Malta (as in the Maltese Falcon, which was cool) badly needs to be reupholstered, for example, and many of the exhibits need preventative renovation for which there simply isn’t any money. It was easy to see why as I left; the last exhibit as you leave is a display counter full of things confiscated from people leaving the country. Historians and private collectors have tried to smuggle out Faberge eggs, Imperial documents, centuries old icons and altar screens, and anything they could beg, buy, or steal while they were here. It’s sad. Someone even tried to smuggle out the Novgorodian Book of Hours, which is an enormously important text to Russian history but has no real monetary value. The selfishness of it is frustrating.

Speaking (in a roundabout way) of conspicuous consumption, we’re planning on going to Egypt for spring break. Flights are really cheap out of Moscow, and we can get a week in a four star hotel for about four hundred dollars. From the Baltic Sea and the Neva to the Red Sea and the Nile. I can’t wait.

Saw the opera Evginy Onegin today at the Mussorgsky Theater (saw Shostakovitch’s son conduct Beethoven on Wednesday, and the ballet Romeo and Juliet yesterday). It was beautiful, but very difficult to follow the lyrics. The opera was fun, but I preferred the ballet, even though I normally am more impressed by the human voice than by dance. Romeo and Juliet both danced very well, but the Signors Capulet, Mercutio, and the Abbot stole the show. Signor Capulet was especially good. He, Paris, and the Signora Capulet do a forced dance with Juliet that was simply incredible. It stole the show. Well, no, Prokofiev stole the show, but he doesn’t get to take a bow. The theaters here are just gorgeous. The Mariinsky is at least seven stories of tiered balconies, and our seats were perfect; first tier, front row. Mary said that tickets like that to such a world-class company would cost five or six hundred dollars in New York. They didn’t even cost that much in rubles here; I think the most expensive were the opera tickets, and they were only about a hundred rubles, around four dollars. I’ll have to be careful - I could easily develop an opera habit that I can’t afford to feed in the states. Standard prices for citizens are inexpensive, student prices are shamelessly cheap, but prices for foreigners without a student ID are comparable to American rates. I still want to see some straight drama while I’m here. Dr. Holl said that Shakespeare is great in Russian, and Twelfth Night plays soon. The next show is Mozart’s Requiem, but that isn’t for a few weeks. I missed the ticket buying for Gizelle and Swan Lake, but I’ll have plenty of other chances to see them.

Went with Alex and Mary to the Kupchino ruinok (market) today. It was a lot of fun - you can literally buy a basket of fish entrails and ankle-length Italian leather dusters at the same place. I didn’t find anything to buy (although the fish entrails looked tempting), but Mary found some clothes and Alex is still carefully debating the merits of buying some leather pants. When in Rome, I guess. Leather pants are unbelievably common here. I guess it’s the modish thing to dress like a pimp. Actually, some of the best shopping I’ve found here is at and around the metros stops on the ends of the lines. CDs with every song and every album compiled from whatever artist you want and computer stuff that hasn’t been released in the states yet are priced at a flat 65 rubles a disk, a little over two dollars. Pricier than at some of the ruinoks, I think, but still a steal. Literally. Most of it would be criminal in the states, but here I’m buying shoulder to shoulder with the militsia. Truly this is the promised land.

After, we went to Bob’s for a housewarming party. His old apartment had intermittent electricity and no phone service to speak of, so he just got a new one. Public opinion on Bob has reversed one hundred and eighty degrees. It’s now pretty much agreed that Bob is a great guy, and that maybe the only problem is that Natasha is using him for his American standard of living. [postscript: This lasted approximately one week. Subsequently, no one wanted to think about it at all.] Maybe. I don’t know either of them well enough to say, but Bob’s a good host. The party was great. We listened to music and drank vodka and ate pickles (in the classic Russian pairing) and razgovored late into the night, until we decided to go skating at a rink that’s supposedly only open from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. So we all bundled up warmly (it’s starting to get really cold again) and headed for the metro, with a small detour to play on the playground by Bob’s building. Ruby and Bethany and I were probably the only ones not completely trashed by that point. By the time we got to the metro, everyone else had gotten loud and kind of obnoxiously American. By the time we got on the metro, a few of us scooted down a bit further in the car so we wouldn’t be swept up in case the militsia nabbed them for public intoxication, which is technically illegal (although never enforced, so we needn’t have bothered). By the time the metro went one stop, everyone not in our group left the car. Everyone. A few drunken Americans chased an entire carload of people from the metro. I was pretty embarrassed.

By the time we got to the Sportivney stop, where the rink was supposed to be, the group had made a couple of new bosom buddies from some younger Russians we met along the way. They both swore that there was no such rink anywhere in the city, as did the flower shop guy and the roadside meat stand guy and the security guard who ran us down in the construction zone. That was fun (sarcasm). As we were tramping around trying to see if the enormous arena right next to the metro stop was the right place, Bethany noticed that we were going through a construction site, which definitely didn’t seem right. Bob chose that moment to decide that he absolutely had to relive himself, and the dark and rubble-strewn alley seemed, I guess, the logical place. Or maybe not, but he was definitely not thinking clearly at the time. As he was in the process of stumbling over to the alley, a guy with a flashlight came up on us and wanted to know why we were there. He wasn’t too pleased that Bob was doing his business on the corner of his building, but he was actually very pleasant and understanding about it all. He escorted us to a trailer at the front of the site, while Bob remarked loudly and frequently from the rear that he didn’t trust Russians late at night and the guy was just taking us somewhere to mug us. I hope to God that the guard didn’t speak English, because he was great. He asked a friend of his about the rink, and told us that he didn’t know exactly where it was, but he knew were it wasn’t, and told us the right general direction to go after politely but firmly escorting us off the lot. Immediately after, someone who shall remain nameless proved that men don’t have a lock on embarrassing public urination. The entire episode was embarrassing as hell, and I have resolved in the future to tell people that I’m an Australian. I can fake the accent if I have to. [postscript: Apparently, I have a Finnish accent. I finally asked a cab driver why Russians keep thinking I’m a Finn, and he said with my beard and glasses I look like a Finn (which is great, since everyone knows Finns are so damned handsome) and that I even sound like one. Wonder why?]

We did finally get to the rink at about 11:30, but it was midnight before I got skates. There were literally only about half a dozen pairs left to rent, and a line down the corridor to get to them. When I say “line,” I mean in the Novii Ruskii sense, meaning a crowd of people pushing and smoking and chatting and stepping on toes. The general theme is that if you aren’t at the front of the line, it’s because the guy in front of you hasn’t pushed hard enough, and you have to push him harder to get him motivated. I was lucky and snagged the first pair of skates that came my way; not only were they just the right size, Nathan said they were the only pair in the entire rink that would have come close to fitting. I skated for a while, but Megan stole the show. She wowed everyone; I’ve never known anyone so completely comfortable or graceful on skates. She said that she’s been figure skating competitively since she was a child. I was kind of embarrassed at first when she towed me around the rink because I wasn’t keeping up with her, but it was actually a lot of fun. We were the only inostranetz, and the whole experience was great. The snack bar actually sold buterbrodi s ikroi (caviar on bread) just like at the opera or ballet (except the bread was stale and the caviar smelled funny). Barring the fiasco of actually getting to the rink, we all had a fabulous time.

It’s been an upsetting day all around. We had an excursion to the Yusupov Palace today, where Rasputin was killed. Like all of the palaces, it was immaculately preserved and extremely beautiful on the inside, with concert and dance halls and studies and gorgeous artwork and sculpture everywhere. In the basement is a wax tableau of Rasputin and the conspirators; the story of his death is wilder in Russian than in English. I was amazed that I understood so many Russian phrases for how one dies. The interest and fascination was muted, though; quite a few of the group are from Georgetown, and a student there died recently. Megan got the call early this morning; apparently his heart failed after he slipped into a coma. All of the Georgetown kids knew him, but Megan was apparently pretty close to him and it hit her hard. It must be hard to grieve when you’re so far away.

It was a day for dying; on my way home from the excursion, I found a body literally at the foot of my building. It was a young man lying facedown on the pavement. No one passing by stopped to help or stay with him. I ran up the stairs to call the militsia from my apartment, but Marina Michaelovna wasn’t home and I realized that I don’t know the number for emergency services. I decided to go to the metro station and get one of the policemen there, but by the time I got downstairs they had already arrived and were loading him into an ambulance. The lights were on as the ambulance drove away, so it’s possible that he was just passed out, but I’m not sure. If he was dead, it wouldn’t even be the first body someone on the program has found. A few weeks ago Megan stumbled across a hit and run victim on her street. I spent all day in an ancient and beautiful palace, then came home and found a nameless man cold on the street. There are serious problems here, and no easy answers. The desensitization is frightening. Most of the people didn’t even look at the man on the ground; they just walked by and stared straight ahead. I actually caught myself doing the same thing without thinking, and that disturbed me as much as anything. I love this country, but there are some attitudes that I don’t want to take home with me. I’d like to think that it would have been different in the states, but I don’t know. An upsetting day.

A few days ago the ex-mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, died of a heart attack. As we were driving to school today, there was a line of people a mile long waiting outside one of the government palaces - we found out that they were mourners, waiting to see his body lying in state. At lunch, I realized that I still had my camera in my bag from the Yusupov excursion, and I found a couple of spare rolls of film in my coat. So I asked our culture/razgovor teacher if I could go to the funeral instead of to class, and she offered to drive me there herself. I declined, since it was only a block away, but I hoofed it over to the service to see what I could see. The line of mourners was at least a kilometer long, stretching a couple of blocks, so I took pictures of the crowd while I waited for it to thin out. There were mostly older ladies and a few younger people, but no one my age. Lots of spontaneous displays of emotion, like flowers stuck into the pillars outside the palace. Sobchak’s widow officially declared the incumbent mayor persona non gratis at the service, and blamed him for “hounding” her husband to death. It was very interesting. Putin was there, though I didn’t see him. The police were concerned that the Chechens might try something as a statement, so security was theoretically tight, but they weren’t very careful. I wandered around for half an hour with a big funny-looking camera pointed at soldiers and politicians and generals and went through the reception line with a big black canvas bookbag, but no one ever stopped me or asked to see the bag or whether or not I was there to blow up the building. I wasn’t, but it seemed like that’s the kind of thing you’d want to ask. It was a fascinating experience; a little taste of what’s really going on here in local politics and the minds of the people.

We took the night train from the Baltiskaya Voksal bound for Estonia; we were all pretty excited. There were thirteen of us, ready and raring to see Tallinn. When we got to the station, Molly and Meg seemed to be in a pretty good mood (Molly, another Georgetown girl, has an eerie similarity to Sandy from home). They and Dan had decided to get some drinking done earlier in the day, since alcohol wasn’t allowed on the train. They overdid it, though, and an ill wind blew that smelt of doom. And of pickles, since they’d had a few.

We boarded the train, and I was “lucky” enough to get into the same compartment as Meg and Molly and Dan. (Actually, despite the ensuing circus, it was pretty lucky - I’m a lot better friends with these guys after Tallinn, and this is a big part of the reason. It’s like war vets bonding together, but with less dignity.) The cars were sleepers, with four bunks and a small folding table to each cabin. Meg promptly passed out on the top bunk across from me, and didn’t really regain consciousness or sanity for the rest of the night. Molly and Dan were on the bottom, and they talked quietly for a while until the train pulled out. About ten minutes after that, the conductor came in to check our passports. Molly seemed pretty agitated, but I couldn’t tell what was happening since I was directly above her. After the conductor left, she kept muttering to herself; when I asked her what she was saying, she shouted, “I said I kept . . .” and lunged for an empty juice box as a combination of too much drinking and the rocking of the train made her violently ill (and not for the first time, as she hadn’t been able to keep herself from throwing up on the conductor).

A few minutes later, two soldiers showed up at the door of the compartment. While Dan wasn’t too far under the weather, I was the only really sober person in the room, but my Russian wasn’t nearly good enough to understand two agitated soldiers in full question and answer mode. We were saved by Tall Dan, the other Dan on the trip, who wandered by just in time to save Molly’s butt by covering for her. The soldiers kept telling us that she’d be put off the train if she was sick, or if she’d been drinking, both of which were true. Tall Dan managed to convince them it was just motion sickness, but they were skeptical. The upshot is that we spent the entire night trying to cover up Molly’s epic capacity for regurgitation, while occasionally checking to make sure that Megan was still breathing and that our papers were in order.

They weren’t, of course. Half of the people on the trip had forgotten their customs declaration forms from when we entered Russia, which is sometimes a big deal and usually at least an excuse for the guards to shake travelers down for bribes. We managed to get by without getting into trouble, but it was interesting. We couldn’t wake Meg up, so I filled out her customs forms and negotiated with the guards for her while Dan handled Molly (Dan spent the entire night nursing Molly, and showed more dedication and tolerance than any ten normal men. The guy’s a trooper.) When you think about it, the fact that a dozen American students managed to get across an international border with a comatose girl, her severely ill companion, and no paperwork is a testament to our Russian skills. I should also mention here that this was in no way representative of the way we normally spend our weekends; while this diary may sometimes seem like a list of drunken debauches, I tend to only write the more amusing experiences down. We are for the most part an easygoing and respectable group, and other than our little hospital cabin, the rest of the group had a peaceful and sober ride undisturbed by anything more than the occasional dispute at cards.

That and the heat. Whoever designed the cabins apparently forgot about ventilation, since the windows are sealed and there’s no air conditioning. Even in the Russian winter, four people in a small cabin raise the ambient temperature pretty drastically, and it bears remembering that even after a generous application of Michelle’s donated perfume our cabin had a uniquely piquant odor. By two a.m., the cabins were at least ninety degrees. It was nostalgic at first, recalling fond Texas summers and sweltering heat on all of those childhood night trains to Sweetwater, but it got pretty unpleasant. Most of us just lay on our bunks and tried to sleep or listen to music, but Megan decided to beat the heat by going insane. She’d spent the night sprawled in on the bunk wrapped in a sweater and overcoat, and hadn’t moved except to ask me to do her declaration for her and to sign it across the “For Official Use Only” and permit stamp box (without ever really waking up or realizing what was going on). Eventually, though, I think the heat got to her. Without warning she sat bolt upright, and her eyes darted all around the cabin. She leaned over the bunk to Molly, and asked, “Where’s my laundry? Will that nice lady give me my laundry?” Molly, ever concerned about her friend, said, “Yes, dear, of course. It’s all OK.” As Meg tumbled from her bunk and lurched down the hall to the back of the car, Dan and I conferred and concluded there was no laundry on the train, but that was OK, because there was no nice lady either. We saw Meg exit the car and go to the next one back, but the conductor escorted her back in a few minutes. After she got cleaned up we put her back to bed, and all was in order for our eventual arrival in Tallinn.

Tallinn is an amazing city. Estonia is doing the best of all of the former Soviet bloc nations, having had the foresight to drop the ruble like the proverbial handful of steaming bear dung right after the collapse. Following a few tough reforms, the country is doing extremely well for itself. Estonians, according to a guidebook in the hotel room, are a reserved people given to common sense and reflection. Obviously I was fated to be an Estonian, and only the language keeps me from up and moving to Tallinn. Estonian as a language was devised by crazed medieval monks who feared and hated the outside world, and it shows. The State Department calls it one of the hardest languages in the world for Americans to learn (along with the other languages of the Finno-Ugraic group). The city of Tallinn proper is basically a smaller but cleaner and friendlier Petersburg, but the real virtue of the place is the Old City in the center of town. There are lots of historical cities in the world, even in America (like Colonial Williamsburg). The difference is that Old Tallinn is a living, breathing, working medieval city that translates perfectly from the ancient architecture and winding cobblestone streets inside the towering city wall to a lovely district of shops, offices, restaurants, and city administration buildings.

We used English for the most part, since the country is overwhelmingly bi- or tri-lingual. When English didn’t work, we could use Russian, but we were careful since we didn’t know if we should expect any ill will towards the language so many people were forced to learn. It turned out not to be a problem. Dallas says that most of the police and army here are Russian by birth - Soviet soldiers and apparatchiks who were assigned here and just decided not to move back after the collapse of the USSR. I wouldn’t have, either.

We got in at about eight in the morning, and met a couple of kids from the hotel who guided us to the bus stop and to the place where we stayed. Dallas (who spent a week here last semester) had wanted to stay at the Barn, a hostel located in the middle of Old Tallinn (and right under an “Erootika Baar”) but they had no room for all of us. Still, our hotel was perfectly serviceable. We slept until about noon, then took the bus to the center of town and wandered. We saw amazing sights; the wool market, centuries old towers and halls, several cathedrals, the Baltic and the sea wall, and all the other sights that the city is justly famous for.

Afterwards, on Dallas’ recommendation we went to Old Hansa for dinner. Dallas was like a kid at Christmas - he talked about the buckwheat kasha and the steaks and you could just see his face light up with a big happy smile. It was a great restaurant. It’s a recreation of a sixteenth century merchant’s hostel, down to the candlelight and the menu. Dan ordered the bear, which was pretty good, and tasted pretty much like you’d expect bear to taste. Afterwards we watched a movie (Bringing Out the Dead, subtitled in Russian and Estonian) and went back to the hotel to get some sleep.

We were up fairly early and got a good start on the city. We bought our return train tickets and stored our bags at the Barn (and got lots of amusing pictures since the entrance to the hostel is right under the “Erootika Baar” sign) and went back into the city to sightsee. We spent all weekend in Old Town, and it only took us a couple of days to see most, if not all, of the region. That’s because Dallas knew what he was doing, and got us to walk around the city wall with him. It took a few hours, but the experience of walking along the bottom of that tall strong gray wall is something I’ll never forget. We walked and gaped and talked and joked and soaked up all the sights as we wandered over the stairs and battlements; we spent a good while at a promontory overlooking the rest of the old town, and cajoled an ancient old man into letting us climb the Nunne tower after closing time. We saw Fat Margaret and Tall Herman (other towers) and Old Thomas, the weathervane on top of the city hall who’s stood, sword in hand, for centuries. I never did get much in the way of souvenirs, since I could never decide what could possibly call to mind the whole experience other than all of the pictures we took. We eventually met back at the town square in time for dinner, and packed back to the train for an uneventful ride back home.

We saw Mozart’s Requiem tonight. It was, in a word, absolutely incredible. That’s two words, but one wouldn’t cut it. The orchestra was the Mariinsky house orchestra, one of the finest in the world, and the choir was unmatched. The entire experience was beautiful beyond compare; the Mariinsky is one of the best theaters anywhere in the world, and the performance lived up to the backdrop. Afterwards, we went to the Idiot for coffee and camaraderie, and talked until the wee hours. Walking home from the metro, the sky suddenly exploded into a snow flurry, and everything was white and peaceful in the space of a minute. By the time I got home I was covered in snow and my beard was icing over. It was glorious. The entire evening was a perfect example of the best the country has to offer.

Spent the day at Pavlovsk, one of the palaces around the city. It’s about an hour and a half away from St. Pete by bus, and very pretty countryside. The palace was, well, just like all of the palaces, I guess. They start to blend in after a while; big and pretty and yellow. Lots of the imperial-age buildings are yellow, for no apparent reason. The grounds the palace sits on, though, were spectacular. It’s a few acres of meticulously tended parkland, mostly forested with a few clearings and a handful of springs and streams and bridges. There are a few clusters of statuary scattered across the grounds, including one circle of the Greek pantheon that really impressed me. Small arched bridges and private chapels just past fields with tiny, frozen waterfalls made some of the best scenic backgrounds I’ve ever seen, and a recent snowfall was the perfect touch.

Leaving on a night train, don’t know when I’ll be back again. After spring break, I guess. After a few days in Moscow, we’ll be flying to Hurghada, Egypt. I can’t wait. Spent the night between Petersburg and Moscow, an entirely and disappointingly uneventful trip. I love the train stations. The interior halls are enormous caverns, bigger than airplane hangers and lined with little shops and kiosks with huge busts of Lenin in the center. Better than it sounds. The trains were much better than the ones to and from Tallinn: not too hot, and no border checks to wake us up in the middle of the night.

Got into Moscow fairly early, and we went to our hotel (Hotel Belgrade) for breakfast. It was, I think, the worst food I’ve ever eaten. Truly abysmal. An affront to common decency. Unfit for human consumption. Bleagh. The rooms were pleasant, but we made a careful note to never, ever return to the cafeteria before we set out for Red Square.

Overall, I’m definitely glad that I spent the semester in Petersburg, but I certainly liked Red Square. It’s a rectangular cobbled city square, defined by St. Basil’s cathedral, a museum opposite, GUM (an enormous shopping mall) on one side and Lenin’s tomb on the other. Lenin’s tomb was open, so we had to go through three layers of security - one to get into the square itself, one to get into the tomb, and a final check inside the tomb from some very attentive guards. There was less security at Sobchack’s funeral, where there were livelier dignitaries. The mausoleum building is actually fairly tasteful, on the outside at least. The building is marble, I think, mostly black with red trim and a huge sans serif “LENIN” above the door. There are stairs on the outside leading to the roof; Red Square is lined with review stands and benches for the old parades and holiday marches, and in the bad old days the big shots would watch from the top of the crypt.

Inside, visitors go through a couple of short hallways, and then around and in front of the big man himself. His bier lies in the center of a smallish room, and the line goes around one side, up a slightly raised platform by his feet, then around the other side and out. No stopping, standing, or making jokes about Night of the Living Dead allowed. Our tour guide called him “Plastic Fantastic Lenin,” and it fits, except I think he looks more like Styrofoam. He looks pretty artificial, regardless. He lies in state on a bier of filigreed iron and crushed velvet, flanked by two iron spears with heads worked into a hammer and sickle. It’s impressive, but a little tacky. A lot tacky. Definitely an interesting experience, though. We all disagreed on it; some people thought it was respectful, some didn’t, some thought he looked peaceful and natural, and some thought, like me, that he looks like he was stuffed like the birds in Psycho. We all agreed on one thing, though: it would be really cool if he were animatronic and waved at tourists. Or chased them. Don’t try telling the guards that, though. The joke doesn’t translate in Russian.

On a serious note, there’s a real debate over what to do with him. Removing him wouldn’t be unprecedented, since Stalin was yanked from the selfsame crypt after deStalinization, but there’s just not that much anti-Lenin sentiment around. It’s hard to know what to do with the guy, I guess, especially since he’s such a tourist draw.

Afterwards, we went right behind the mausoleum where there is a small state graveyard for heroes of the Soviet Union. Big Bill Haywood is there, which was weird, and so is Yuri Gagarin. I was very excited to see his resting place, but a little frustrated. He only has a small plaque to mark his grave (which he may not even occupy, according to our guide), while Derzhinsky has a marble bust and a prominent spot with the leaders of the USSR. Only premiers and state figures who died in office are buried there, so Krushchev is absent but Stalin has a big plot and, of course, big wreaths and floral displays even in the dead of winter. It was disturbing to say the least.

The rest of the square is wonderful, though. Basil’s is smaller than I expected, but just as beautiful (although I think St. Isaac’s and Spilled Blood in Petersburg both top it). The snow was fairly heavy, and I got some great pictures of the cathedrals and museums through the fall. GUM was just like any shopping mall, really, except one store had a display of an enormous model of St. Basil’s worked entirely the medium of Lego, complete with little Lego men sweeping snow from the cupolas. I was truly moved. We also saw the statue of Marshall Zhukov, the general who chased the Nazis out of Russia, and some other minor landmarks. After the excursions, we went back to the hotel for a much-deserved nap and a quick nosh at McDonald’s, which was less interesting than one might expect. Dan, who apparently is something of a fast food gourmand, was thrilled that the hot apple pies in Russia are fried, and not baked. Personally, I thought they tasted disgusting regardless, but hey, McDonald’s is McDonald’s the world round.

We rode the metros for a while, enjoying the gothic and ornate stations that must be seen to be believed, saw some of the city (the old Soviet Foreign Affairs building was spectacular. A huge, gothic skyscraper stamped with hammers and sickles and spiked with ornate towers and annexes designed, in Dallas’ words, to tell people “This is not a place where your problems will be solved. Go away.”) and finally wound up in the TGI Friday’s outside Red Square for dinner. Nothing really remarkable about it, other than the fact that we ate there every day that we were in Moscow. Not terribly native of us, but it was good and relatively cheap and there were no beets or smetana-intensive dishes anywhere on the menu.

Toured the Kremlin and the Armory today. The Kremlin tour was mostly a few cathedrals and landmarks. The only really spectacular sight was the first cathedral, which was covered on the inside with iconographic art. Literally not a single inch of space was left blank, and the patchwork effect was as interesting as it was beautiful. The Armory was a little more distinctive in terms of history, though. It’s a state museum that, despite its name, isn’t entirely devoted to military things. The first big exhibit was of courtly dress in the tsarist period, and was built around a huge glass case showing model after model wearing enormous embroidered and intricate dresses and men’s jackets that must have weighed a ton. One of Catherine’s dresses had a train nine or ten meters long. There were also displays of old arms and armor, from swords and shields to muskets and mortars. The most interesting exhibits were the diplomatic gifts, though. These are small but hideously expensive works of art and cultural significance whose only purpose was to be given to the ambassadors of foreign countries to show how powerful and magnanimous the giver was. They still do it today, but with less style. The British gave Russia a gold and marble lion three or four feet tall that must have cost a sizable fortune, but are clearly outdistanced by Finland, which gave one of the tsars a golden model of a castle the size of a writing desk engraved with each individual brick and loophole. Conspicuous consumption, indeed.

After the Armory we had free time again, and we wandered the city for a while until we felt the need to eat. We found a good Chinese place, but as we were about to order Dallas noticed that the numbers we had thought were the portions measured in grams were actually the prices measured in rubles, and way to expensive for our blood. So we beat a hasty and totally undignified retreat to TGI Fridays, where the same waitress from the day before took our orders and condescended to us in English. Afterwards, we wandered over to look at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and wound up throwing snowballs at each other for half an hour on the outskirts of Red Square. It was a good sendoff to Russia for a while.

We were up early for our much-awaited pilgrimage towards the sun. There were eight of us in Egypt, but only six of us left from Moscow - Dan, Molly, Justin (sans beard, since his girlfriend is protif the caveman look), Virginia, Michelle and myself all bundled up for the last time in a while for the (supposedly) short trip to the airport. Megan was leaving a few days after us; she hadn’t come to Moscow since she was entertaining her boyfriend in Petersburg and Claire, Justin’s girlfriend, was flying from her studies in Italy to meet us there.

We lugged our bags from the airport a block to the perehod (an underground street crossing), another block to the metro, and through the “crotch blaster” gates (Instead of turnstiles, the Moscow metro uses posts with sensors in them - if you pass the sensors too quickly or without slipping in a valid card, barriers that seem timed and sized perfectly for slamming into some poor bastard’s crotch come shooting out. It’s funny when it happens to someone else.) down the escalator onto the trains and back out again and to another line and back out again and up a few flights of stairs at Airport station. The entire exercise was made a million times more frustrating and difficult by Michelle’s enormous suitcase, which could hold a dozen normal bags and was, in her words, “absolutely necessary.” Of course, she couldn’t carry it herself, so Justin and I took turns with it. A bad omen for Michelle’s overall contribution to the trip.

We were tired and a little cranky by this point, but we had hours and we’d been assured that it was only a few blocks to the airport from the Airport metro station. Well, it was more than a few blocks, it was nearly a dozen. We finally stumbled up to an “Aero Vokzal” (“Air Station”) and were ready to celebrate and/or collapse when Justin noticed that it wasn’t even an airport. I’m not sure what it was, since it definitely had something to do with air travel, but we had to hire a couple of taxis from there to get us to the real airport. There’s nothing worse than a cab driver who knows you’re stuck. They wanted fifty dollars a cab to get us to the airport; by contrast, I can get from my apartment on the island across town to Smolney for about forty rubles, which is a little under two dollars. We haggled them down to twenty-five a cab, but they wouldn’t go lower and we didn’t have much of a choice. Megan told us later that if we’d gone to the right metro stop, we could have taken a marshrutka for fifteen rubles a piece, a tad over fifty cents. Bleagh.

When we finally got to the real airport, we were almost late but not quite. We got our tickets from the travel agent’s representative, then settled in for the long, long, long wait. The train stations were so well run and efficient and clean and pleasant and spacious and convenient that I guess I expected the airports to be a little less, well, insane. The Russian service industry thrives on a kind of subtle yet monomaniacal misanthropy, and Aeroflot is no exception. We waited for half an hour in line for the first security check, only to sail through the actual check by simply saying, “I have no money (U mne nyet deneg),” the same line you give to panhandlers. We waited longer in line to check in. We waited still longer in line for passport control (Although Justin entertained everyone in line by having a truly bizarre argument in Russian with a five year old in front of us “You are a pair of pants!” “No, you are a soccer field!” “Me? No, you are a horse!”) and doing camel impressions. We waited in line for the second security check. We did a lot of waiting.

Once we finally got through it all, however, the inner airport was quite nice. We picked up a few things at the duty free shop, including an enormous three or four liter bottle of vodka that Justin christened “Captain Boris.” (We never finished the captain, since we didn’t really drink that week - somebody on the housekeeping staff at the hotel got a really nice tip.) The airplane itself was another nice surprise. Aeroflot international flights are definitely up to international standards. It was a little cramped, but no more so than an American flight, and there was a definite lack of fire, chaos, disease, or barnyard livestock onboard in spite of all the stories I’d heard. Once in Egypt, we saw the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen out a plane window. The coast is framed by the Red Sea on one side and the mountain range on the other, making a truly picturesque approach. The flight was uneventful, but when we landed, all of the Russians broke into applause. I guess it’s a Russian thing.

Hurghada was wonderful from the very first moments. When we stepped off of the plane, it was warm outside, but with a very pleasant cool breeze. They loaded us onto a bus for a fifty-meter ride to the terminal, where we joined a crowd of approximately every other person on Earth in a room the size of a small lecture hall. A man from “QT Tours” met us, showed us where to stand in line, and walked us through the rest of the normal airport stuff. QT Tours is a subset of Vann Tours, which is a subset of Partners Arkos, the company we got our tickets from. Or maybe they’re subcontractors, I dunno. All I do know is that it’s odd for a company that specializes in giving tours to Russians to call itself “QT Tours,” since the letter “Q” doesn’t appear in the Cyrillic alphabet and Russians have kind of a hard time with it. The larger group we were with was mostly Russians, business and mafia types. Very few Americans or British ever come to Hurghada, since Western carriers don’t fly there. Mostly Germans and Russians, so we couldn’t forget our language studies even on vacation. Having an American passport was a plus, though, since it got us waved through Customs without even a second glance. They never even bothered to ask us if we had anything to declare. (Michelle’s noxious “Go to hell and tell them I sent you” attitude might have had something to do with that.)

When we finally finished in the airport, it was dark and downright chilly outside. We walked to some busses that were supposed to take us to the hotel, and had to fend off the most avaricious would-be porters I’ve ever seen in my life. I was walking towards the rear, not really paying attention, when I noticed that my bag was suddenly a hell of a lot lighter. When I looked up, another guy was carrying one of the handles. He wasn’t trying to take it, really, just taking some of the load off. Still, living in Russia makes one a little leery of strangers, so I pulled the bag back. He rattled something off in Arabic, and actually started to try to pull the bag away from me. When he realized that I spoke Russian (I use Russian with strangers whenever possible, since I don’t like standing out as an American), he told me that it was his job to carry bags “without pay.” I didn’t really believe him, but it took me a few minutes of tug-of-war to get my bag back. It’s just as well, since “without pay” is apparently Egyptian confidence man cant for “without pay until we get there, at which point I will shout abuse at you until you give me at least five dollars.” That’s what happened to Michelle, but she’s tough. She just shouted back until the poor sod left her alone. Picked the wrong girl to pick on, I guess.

I did get taken for a ride, though. When we got to the busses and loaded our bags, a man I thought was the driver walked up with a huge wad of money in his hand and said, “Dengui p’zhaluista,” or “Money please” while pointing to a ten dollar bill. I figured it was the fee for the bus - actually, he told me it was the fee for the bus - so I paid up. I noticed Dan yelling at me, but couldn’t hear what he was saying over the bus’ engine, and the clever bastard just pointed at him and then again at the money, telling me that I was supposed to pay for Dan, too. Since he had paid for visas I owed him anyway, but fortunately he stopped me before I gave that bastard more than another five. Of course he had been shouting that the busses were free. I’d like to think that rather than being stupid and getting robbed I paid fifteen dollars for a priceless lesson, but I’ll be damned if I can think of what that is. Don’t ever trust anyone, I guess.

I can’t say it worried me much - we were in Egypt, and that was all that mattered. Egypt.

The hotel, the Lillyland, is on a stretch of highway south of Hurghada lined on one side by hotels and on the other by a desert filled with unbelievable mounds of trash. There were nice clean pristine patches of desert, too, but everything near the hotels was like a landfill. Once the bus turned into the hotel, though, everything was copasetic. There was a huge gate fronting the road, which led into a short road back to the main hotel. Inside the lobby we surrendered our passports and got our room keys, but only after fending off more avaricious porters and negotiating a metal detector. Virginia said later that one of the big fat Russian guys we thought were mafia waited by the metal detector until no one was watching, then slipped around it. Nice to know our fellow tourists were well armed.

The rooms were laid out in a kind of village behind the lobby/administration building, centered around the outdoor pool, beach, restaurant, café, bar, theater, indoor pool, med clinic, convenience store, and shopping complex. It was a full service resort. Our room was off to one side, on the edge of the complex facing the road out to the highway. The rooms, except for the triples, were one room with an attached bathroom and a nice little porch; sliding glass doors were the only way into or out of the rooms. The triples had a couple of bedrooms and a couple of porches. Justin and Claire had a room to themselves, Megan had a single (since she was arriving late), Dan and Molly and Ginnie had dibs on a triple, leaving me to room with Michelle. I was less than pleased. Michelle is not exactly an easy person to get along with, much less cohabitate with, but what could I do? I pondered murder, but it didn’t really seem to fit with the whole “vacation” theme. I got a cot from the hotel staff and we all trundled off to dinner.

The meals were a lavish spectacle. Breakfast and dinner were paid for, and there was plenty of food to tide one over through lunch. It was a huge buffet-style spread, with “international” food and a few Egyptian staples. It was delicious. We were all tired of Russian food, with its emphasis on quantity over quality, strength of taste over tastiness, its reliance on sour cream (smetana), pickled everything, dill on everything, and garnish everywhere. The restaurant meals, therefore, were a welcome break. Every night we ate to bursting, and reveled in the sheer conspicuous consumption of it. Ginnie showed off her artistic side, turning plates of food into sculptures of farm animals and funny faces. Quite the talent.

After dinner that first night, we retired to Dan and Molly’s room to socialize. We sat on the porch and talked and made shadow animals long into the night, then hit the sack for a big day on the town.

Didn’t do much today. Just signed up for the two optional excursions (Desert Safari and Cairo; I really wanted to see Luxor, but it was too expensive), lay on the beach, and enjoyed the warm weather.

We chartered a paddle boat from the hotel and tooled around the bay for awhile. The water was beautiful, and we had a great time just paddling around and diving off the back. Justin and Claire walked along the beach along the side of the bay; Justin in his normal exuberant style managed to stomp on a sea urchin, and spent the rest of the week limping along. [postscript: Justin got his revenge. Before we left he found the urchin and bombarded it with rocks from the beach. That’ll teach it.]

After another superhumanly huge dinner, we told each other that we’d go back to our rooms for a bit to clean up and relax, then meet up at the triple room to chat and have a good time. Of course, after that much food, we all fell asleep instead. It was kind of a theme for the week; almost every day we’d make plans to get together late at night to hang out and chat, and we almost always wound up passed out after dinner instead.

Today was the desert safari excursion. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I would never have thought it would as unbelievably wonderful as it was.

We started early in the morning, when a few Jeeps pulled up to the hotel. There were three or four cars, some of which were already full from other hotels. We slipped in with the Russian tourists, but the guy in the full Nike track suit driving our car figured out that we were Americans pretty quickly. He was excited, since he doesn’t get a chance to use English very often, and for the rest of the day he took good care of us. His name was Alex; we found out later that he owns Saif Tours (an incredible misnomer, there’s nothing safe about them), which ran the safari, and he was a blast. He threw an arm around me and told me to sit up front with him and the other driver, and everyone else filed into the back (which was just a couple of benches bolted on to the floor running the length of the car). As we were leaving, a couple of guys with big, professional video cameras came running out of the hotel and vaulted up on the roofs of the cars. We pulled out and hit the highway, bumper to bumper with the Jeep ahead of us, the cameraman sitting on top grinning at me the whole way.

After a few minutes on the highway (with Alex racing the other Jeep down the road, occasionally driving on the wrong side of the road or swerving around donkey carts) we pulled off onto a dirt road and stopped. We waited there for about twenty minutes for the rest of the convoy. Molly passed the time dancing to the tape deck of one of the other cars and getting to know some of the Russians in the group. One of the big fat Mafia types was with us; he told Molly that he lived in the south and was here on vacation. When she asked what he did for a living, he got very quiet, looked at her for a minute, and said, “Manager.” He never did say what he was a manager of. There was a woman with him, whom I gave fifty-fifty odds of being either wife or mistress, and some kids at the hotel, but the little ones didn’t come along on the excursion. They were both actually pretty nice people.

Once the other cars showed up, Alex jumped in the car and got us going again. I was lucky to be up front, because it was the ride of my life. We literally raced across the desert offroading upwards of 100 kilometers (60 miles) an hour. We bounced so hard I had to keep one hand on the ceiling to keep my head from knocking, but the best part was the enthusiasm. All of the drivers were obviously having a great time, shouting and singing along to the wailing Arabic music from the cars and gesturing to each other. Alex loved to let another car pull ahead of him, then rev the engine and, still going fifty or sixty miles and hour, run up behind the other car and touch bumpers to give the people in the back a thrill. The looks on their faces were hilarious. Other times, it was a simple race to see who could top a ridge or cross a flat first. Sometimes, Alex or another driver would pull up next to another car and the diver would chat with the guy in the passenger’s seat for a minute or so, close enough to kiss, without ever slowing down. Alex’s favorite trick was to swerve in close to another car, reach out and bang on the side with his hand, gradually speeding up until he could give a high five to whoever was in the front seat. The view from the front seat was spectacular. The pictures are pretty sedate, until you look at the dust plumes and realize how fast we were going. We won almost all of the races, which might have had something to do with the fact that all of the drivers worked for Alex.

When we finally got where we were going, we pulled into a Bedouin village on the edge of the mountain range. I’m sure the village is just used for tourists, but it was impressive all the same. It was a collection of small, open stone buildings and a few wooden huts. All of the other guests on the safari were pulled off into small groups, and went through the village on mini-tours through set stations. Alex pulled us off to the side, gave us a little shady spot all to ourselves, and said that we wouldn’t have to sit “with all of those others.” He brought us tea, and told us to wander around at out leisure and to look at anything we wanted. We really got the royal treatment. We chatted with a couple of the drivers, Claire took a hit off their hookah (some kind of rose tobacco), and we poked around the village. Molly and I followed a little boy and his goat to the edge of the buildings, where two Bedouin women were making bread. We didn’t share any languages, but they gave us all the bread we wanted hot from the griddle, and it was incredible. Molly made friends with the village dog, a yellow mutt who loved to play. Molly, ever obliging, played with him all day long. Of course, when he wasn’t eating bread from her hand, he was eating camel dung from the ground, but Molly didn’t let that spoil her fun.

When we’d seen the village, we started hiking through the desert. Not far from the village was the well, which was unbelievably picturesque. I’m not sure if the well was really used or not, but it was in the middle of a clear, sandy patch at the base of a stony hill, with one wind-swept stunted tree shading it. It was really something to see. I went hiking away from the well, and wound up in the pass in the mountains. I got a good ways into the pass, but finally it was too choked with rocks to go any further. The sun cut through the channel in the rock, and I could feel the difference in temperature going from the sunlit pass to the shadows under the ridge. I could almost feel the pressure of the light from the desert sun. I sat and watched a train of camels circle then enter the village, and decided to come back.

It was a good thing that I did, since it was time for the requisite camel rides. The Bedouins who used the village acted as mahouts, leading the camels while tourists rode. One of the guides was a girl who was maybe eight years old, dressed in bright flowing robes. She was incredibly cute, and she knew it. She’s pose with her camel for all of the tourists, leaning against the saddle with a tough look on her face. When she was guiding the camel, she’d tie the lead rope around her waist since she wasn’t strong enough to pull the camel against its will. If the camel gave her trouble, she’d punch it in the nose to keep it in line. She was definitely one of our favorite people on the trip.

Camel riding is definitely an acquired taste. Granted, we were only kind of riding, since the guides were pulling the brutes, but it’s still a bouncy experience. The saddles are only marginally more comfortable than riding bareback, and camels don’t have suspension. Mounting is easy, but dismounting has a trick to it. The trick is that the camel drops to its knees, meaning you fall about six feet and land with a hard leather saddle between your knees. It’s a little startling at first, and it feels a lot like being kicked in the butt. The rides were a great experience, though, and it reminded me more than a little bit of being pulled on a donkey on the ranch in Mexico when I was a kid. I named the camel I was on “Don’t Pull Me” after that donkey.

After we’d finished seeing everything in the village, we piled into the vans for another short little trip. We went a few miles over into the mountain range, up a broad sandy approach to one of the peaks. It was a short climb from there to the top of the mountain; the string of people climbing and walking along the trail made me feel more than a little bit like a supplicant on a pilgrimage. When we got to the top, we strung out along the peak to watch the sunset. I can’t possibly describe how beautiful it was. The sun went down over the mountains, and the rocky desert looked so pure and clean and wonderful that it was a powerfully spiritual experience. I’ll count myself a lucky man if I see the like of it even just one more time in my life. It was a little bit melancholy, though; Dan and Molly and Justin and Claire went off as couples to enjoy the experience. It was the kind of thing you should really see with someone close to you to fully appreciate it. There was a German woman sitting by herself near me, and I think she was feeling more or less the same thing. I kind of like to think that we bonded a little bit.

The sun is supposed to set quickly in the desert, but I felt like I had been sitting there for days by the time it got dark. The catharsis was refreshing, and I was sad to leave when we mounted back up for the ride back to the village. Once we arrived, we all went in as a group to eat the meal that they’d been cooking for us inside. I’m not too familiar with Middle Eastern cuisine, so suffice it to say that is was good, good food. We ate three or four platefuls apiece, chatted with Alex some more, and enjoyed more special treatment (we were first to be served, first to get seconds, first for everything).

After dinner we drove back to the hotel, which was a much more peaceful and sedate ride. We stopped halfway back, and Alex turned off the headlights and took us onto a small dune to look at the stars. He tried to teach us the Arabic names of some of the constellations, but the language barrier got in the way. We were a bit distracted, since we weren’t really dressed for night in the desert and were pretty cold. We were happy to get inside, and happy to get back to our rooms, but that day in the desert is one of my strongest and most pleasant memories of the entire time I was abroad. Out of all of the cathedrals and monasteries I visited, that mountain was probably the most spiritually significant place for me, and I was deeply gratified by the experience. The time I spent traveling was something beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. I know for a fact that I’m a different person now than when I left, that I’ve changed after what I’ve seen and felt. That night in the desert was a large part of that, partly because I was ready for a spiritual experience. In a way, I guess, the mountain came to me.

We didn’t have anything special planned for today, so we decided to hit the town. Ginnie and Michelle had been the day before, while the rest of us were in the desert, and Justin and Claire wanted to go by themselves later, so Dan and Molly and I walked out to the road to hitch a ride into the city. We hired a cab and rode north to the city of Hurghada proper; we were told that the original city had been based on trade around a nearby port, but with the growth of inland cities the highway and tourist trade were more important now. Most jobs in Hurghada are based somehow on the tourist industry, so we didn’t have any trouble with languages. Almost everyone spoke either English or Russian. We were dropped off in the middle of the marketplace, and we started to wander. There were police everywhere, dressed in a nondescript black uniform with no real patches or badges. The assault rifles slung across their backs were enough to tell people they were the man.

We figured out the ground rules pretty quickly. Looking at merchandise, making eye contact with the vendors, smiling or breathing were invitations to be harangued by vendors. Shops were everywhere, from blankets spread in alleys to large, air conditioned tastefully decorated stores. Molly was sharp enough to dress pretty conservatively; although she must have been hot in slacks and a long sleeve shirt, she’s well-traveled enough to know that its better to follow local customs and grouse about how unfair they are in private. Still, if she walked more than a few paces ahead of Dan or me, she’d get dirty looks and at least once a motorist honked and yelled at her. She didn’t let it bother her, though; the only thing that really disturbed her was when we walked through the non-touristy part of the market and saw butchers slaughtering animals. Truth tell, it almost put me off of meat. It was awfully hot and unsanitary to be butchering meat outside, and the sounds were a little, well, offputting. The real kicker was the man sleeping (I hope) underneath a butcher’s table, covered in flies.

We lived, though the chickens didn’t, and found our way back to the more cosmopolitan section of the city. I’d love someday to go back and study the way the market was organized. Barkers were everywhere, trying to get us to come to their shop and see their wares. If we didn’t see anything we liked (or, more often, weren’t willing to pay the incredibly inflated prices), they’d encourage us to go to their ‘friend’s’ shop. At one of these ‘friend’s’ stores I saw the owner slip the first guy a handful of costume jewelry as he ushered us in. The stores shared customers, staff, and apparently merchandise in some kind of complex pattern. I don’t know if it was an official arrangement, or just swapping customers in exchange for a little gratuity, or quite how it all worked, but it was a well orchestrated and rehearsed process. At one of these stores, a barker asked us to go look at his friend’s merchandise; when we demurred, he promised us that we’d find something we liked. We went in, and found some unbelievably pricey silver jewelry and plates and such. Molly was ticked. She stomped outside and found the barker, and told him that she didn’t like the shop. That didn’t seem to bother him very much, but she was insistent.

“You promised us that we’d like that store. I didn’t like it,” she said.

He looked a little askance, and without looking directly at her, said, “It’s a very nice store . . .”

“It’s too expensive!” she snapped. “Now you owe us something.” That took him by surprise.

“All right,” he conceded. “Come to my store and I give you something.”

So we followed him through a web of alleys and narrow streets and wound up at a very nondescript shop with, in my opinion, much better (and cheaper) wares than the first place. Mostly stoneware, with a few blankets and cotton shirts for variety. He took Molly’s hand, and asked her if she knew anything about henna. He fished the tools out of a basket under the counter, and began to henna Molly’s hand while Dan watched and I browsed the store. I found a very starkly handsome stone bowl, and argued over the price while the shopkeeper inked a very intricate design on Molly’s forearm. I had read up on Arabic numerals before we left the hotel so that I could read pricetags, and I was sure that he was inflating the price from the sticker on the bottom of the bowl. I found out later that I had been reading it wrong and he was right, and felt terrible for doubting it to his face, but we walked out of that store very happy. Molly had a very artistic flowing and flowering pattern inked into her skin, and I got a good deal on my find. As we were leaving, I heard what I thought was music and poked my head around the back door of the shop; I almost stumbled over two men kneeling in supplication and prayer. Aside from some airport employees as we left the country, those were the only people I saw in Egypt at prayer even in the bustling city.

We found another cab to take us back to the hotel and went home for a good meal and a good night’s sleep - we were supposed to be up at two a.m. the next morning for the Cairo expedition. The experience in the city was extremely interesting. I’d thought that Russian culture was profoundly different from my American lifestyle, and in its way, it is. Just one day in an Egyptian city, though, threw a new perspective on things. As alien as Petersburg seems at times, it’s infinitely more familiar and homelike than Egypt. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

March 15th/16th - Egypt Day Five and Six

The telephone got me out of bed, but I didn’t really wake up until the girl on the other end started yelling. I was disoriented enough that I still don’t know if it was Ginnie, Megan, or Claire, but someone was telling me that I was supposed to be on the bus right now! and where was I?! and everyone’s waiting!!! I guess I overslept, but I might as well blame it on Michelle: she ignored the wakeup call. Or turned off the alarm. Or something. Anyway, we were really late for the bus. I grabbed everything I thought I’d need for the day excursion and stuffed it into a bag and bolted for the lobby. QT Guy (the man who met us at the airport) was not amused, and neither were any of the people already on the hell bus. There was the usual assortment of Russians and Germans, but at least I wasn’t the real focus of their irritation. Michelle was even later than I was, so I got to pretend that I was perfectly on schedule and I was as put off as they were.

The hell bus was, well, the bus from hell. The seats were built for underweight Oompaloompas, and I physically couldn’t sit normally in one of them. My legs just wouldn’t fit. Although the bus was crowded, my friends let me have a double seat to myself so that I could sit sideways in some measure of comfort (or at least lessened misery). The bus eventually set out and, after picking up some more passengers at another hotel, motored North towards Cairo. The scenery was really very beautiful, once the sun rose, but I had levered myself into a semi-reclined position and drifted off into a pain-induced hallucinatory coma. I didn’t really wake up until we got to the rest stop from hell, which was actually rather pleasant (except for the food and the bathrooms).

Finally, we got to Cairo. Our first stop was to pick up Dinah, our tour guide. We got our own guide to speak English to us, which was really great of the tour company. We talked to her at length over the course of the day. Apparently, she’s a doctor (or possibly a medical aid) and practiced in Britain, since she couldn’t practice in Egypt. She said that she spends some time every year in Egypt, and works as a tour guide to pay bills while she’s at home. An odd arrangement, but she was a great guide. Aside from pointing out the normal touristy things, she answered most of our questions about Egypt as a whole, the language, the culture, the whole kebab.

One of the first things she explained to us was the rationale behind the skeletal buildings we saw everywhere. As we drove into Cairo, it looked like downtown Belgrade. Highrise apartment buildings were open to the elements, with naked girders and superstructures. People obviously lived in the unfinished parts of the buildings, though; Dinah explained that completed buildings are subject to a special tax. Unless the owners or the occupants were reasonably affluent, then, it’s apparently common for residences in that part of town to be left perpetually “under construction.” It means that poorer families live in half-finished buildings, but I suppose that’s better than living on the street. We saw plenty of that.

The other nagging question she solved for us was the rationale behind the tent on every corner offering freshly slaughtered meat. It was like the entire city was host to a butcher’s convention. In a way, it was; Dinah told us that it’s a special Muslim festival that’s celebrated by slaughtering and eating meat. A kind of three-day meatfest. I think it sounds like a pretty good idea. It gave the city a particularly . . . unique bouquet for the day we were there. Not unpleasant, just kind of “ripening goat carcass”-ish.

We had lunch at a wonderful little downtown café, with the pyramids looming in the background. It must be nice to have that kind of view out your window every day, but I suppose it’d lose its charm after awhile. Heading to the pyramids after lunch, we passed over the Nile, which was a little anticlimactic. Nice, but not the kind of thing they stop the tour bus for.

What they do stop the bus for is the Egyptian National Museum. The museum was fantastic - it’s an enormous building, stuffed to the gills with artifacts and exhibits that are just unbelievable. The smallest side room would be the centerpiece of almost any other museum in the world. A bit limited in scope, of course, but the variety of holdings even in a museum dedicated to ancient Egypt surprised me. There was the expected smattering of canopic jars and burial accoutrements, plus Tutenkhamen’s regalia, but there were also wonderful exhibits of art and sculpture that really impressed me. We didn’t have much time in the museum, but Dinah did her best to show us everything important without skimping on the running commentary that gave everything a nice context.

After the museum, we moved on to the real reason behind the trip - the pyramids. We stopped at the edge of the plateau (the pyramids overlook modern Cairo from Giza, outside of town) to admire them from afar and to get a sense of their scale. After we’d oohed and ahhed and taken a few pictures, the bus drove us down into the sea of tourists at the foot of the monuments.

Seeing the pyramids was a wonderful experience. While it didn’t have the deeply personal resonance of the desert safari, I feel good that I’ve done one of those things you’re supposed to do before you die. We had the chance to go inside the pyramids, but we demurred. There’s nothing left inside them, so it seemed ridiculous to waste the time when there was so much to see on the outside. We climbed as high as we could without getting hassled by the camel-mounted police, took rolls of film of each other, and took turns being harassed by the locals.

By ‘locals,’ I don’t mean Egyptians. I mean the people who earn a living burning tourists around the pyramids. My own experience was pretty mild. I walked to the edge of the plateau to get a picture of the skyline over the Sphinx’s head, and was followed the entire way by a kid who was maybe ten years old riding a camel. He kept riding into my shot, yelling that I needed a picture of him. I didn’t bother, since he obviously wanted to money for the privilege, but he finally haggled the price down to nothing. So to keep him quiet I took a picture (which turned out pretty well) of him striking a pose with his camel. Naturally, the price shot back up to five pounds, and he wanted to be paid. I wasn’t about to pay the little confidence man, so I walked back to the busses. He followed me the whole way, screaming in at least three different languages. Three or four even younger kids took up the banner, and I was seriously worried about getting my pocket picked by the time I got back to the bus from hell. As we got away from the edge of the plateau, though, other beggars and camel-ride hucksters chased the kids off; I guess they were chasing business across somebody else’s territory. It was irritating, but nothing compared to what Ginnie and Molly and Megan went through. A crowd of kids, who were pinching and grabbing at them the whole way, chased them all the way to the bus. Cultural relativism is one thing, but there’s no excuse for that kind of thing. QT Guy seemed pretty incensed that people would be that crude, but Dinah just kind of shrugged it off. The ladies didn’t let it bother them, though. By the time we got to the Sphinx everyone had more or less forgotten it.

The Sphinx was amazing. We drove around the plateau in the bus and came around the front. The Sphinx sits with its back to the pyramids, more or less facing the city. Approaching it from the front, with the Sphinx staring at you with the pyramids over its shoulder clouded in blowing sand, is the closest I’ll ever come to being Indiana Jones. Dinah explained the story behind the Sphinx. In a nutshell, it started out as an outcropping of harder stone uncovered during the construction of the pyramids. The ruler at the time had it worked into a ritualistic guardian/monument to his rule, and it’s commonly believed that his face was the model for the Sphinx’s features. It’s been there so long that thousands of years passed during which the locals had no idea where it had come from. I think she said that its name means “fear” or “terror” in Arabic, but I’m not sure that I remember that right. She mentioned that the story of Napoleon’s soldiers shooting off its nose isn’t true. Slaves, taken as children from Eastern and Southern Europe, rose up hundreds of years ago and took power in the region. They were responsible for defacing the monument, according to her.

At the foot of the Sphinx is an old, ruined temple that was used for veneration. The temple is completely gone, worn away by time and thousands of years of visitors and robbers; all that’s left is the stone foundation, the walls and pillars that made up the rooms, and indentations in the floor marking where altars and idols stood. The ceiling is gone, so the effect is a small stone canyon cut into the ground, since the temple is below ground level. There’s not really anything to see here, since it’s just the basic foundations that are left, but the temple felt older than anything else we saw in Cairo. It was so worn and used that it just exuded a sensation of age, even with crowds of tourists coursing through it.

Coming up and out of the temple, we found ourselves on a low stone wall that ran parallel to the Sphinx. To be so close to it was just unbelievable. Dinah showed us how to “kiss the Sphinx” (if you stand facing the Sphinx in profile, a photo makes it look like you’re face to face with it) and told us more about its construction and preservation efforts. The Egyptian government is trying hard to restore and preserve the monuments as much as possible, but with such a huge influx of tourists it takes all the money and resources they can muster just to prevent any further degradation. Frequent sandstorms and the tourist traffic take their toll on the projects the government does carry out to preserve the sites; in the end, there just isn’t enough money to give all of the monuments, temples, and pyramids the full attention they need.

We were pulled away from the Sphinx earlier than we wanted, since the tour bus had a strict schedule to keep. As we were leaving the temple, Dinah slipped a fistful of cash into the hand of what looked like a random guy standing around the entrance. She explained, in a roundabout way, that he was a kind of guard or minder at the site. When she had a group coming by after hours or when the site was closed, he’d let her take them in anyway. In exchange, he got a nice little tip whenever she came through with a group. That kind of deal is apparently pretty common. As we left, we thought we might be seeing more museums, but they had other plans for us. We were taken first to a rather pleasant papyrus shop, where a Ghanian woman did a demonstration of how papyrus is made and what makes it different from paper. It was just a sales pitch, really, but it was still kind of interesting. I bought a pair of small papyrus prints, but forgot them at the hotel when we left the country. We got bored quickly in the shop, and moved outside to sit on the steps in the breeze. That was probably the most pleasant part of the excursion - the picture of us resting on the steps is the best shot I have of the friends I traveled with. After the papyrus shop, we were taken to a perfumery, a jeweler’s, and a handicraft shop. Each one was more boring and pointless than the last. None of us could afford the few things that seemed worth buying, and most of it was just crap. The tour company obviously had a deal with the stores to take patrons by at the end of the excursion. The Russian mafioso didn’t seem to mind shopping at all, but we got a little testy. In the perfumery in particular some of us got downright Ugly American. It was embarrassing, but we were all frustrated that they’d cut our time in the museum and at the pyramids short so they could scratch some shopkeeper’s back. Irritating, but our night was just beginning.

After we’d made the shopping rounds, we pulled out on the same hell bus we came in on. I wasn’t paying attention as we left the last store and almost boarded another tour bus, but Molly and Dan stopped me. Later, I almost wished they hadn’t. Just as we were leaving Cairo, the bus driver crested a huge speed bump (or maybe a curb) by hitting the gas as hard as he could. About four hours later, I woke up from a fitful sleep; I couldn’t figure out what it was at first, but someone pointed out that there was a rhythmic thumping coming from just under our seats. The bus stopped, and the driver and guides got out (sans Dinah, who stayed in Cairo) to look around. When they got back on the bus, they looked less than pleased, but we pressed on. The bus stopped and the inspection tour was repeated a couple of times in the next hour or so, but we kept going until we got the rest stop from hell. This was the same stop we’d visited on the way down, and the tour company definitely had some kind of arrangement with them. That shadowy you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours arrangement that kept cropping up. The shopkeepers in the bazaar had deals with each other, Dinah had an arrangement with all of the monument people, the tour company had a hand in all the pots; normally it was nothing to worry about, but this time the bus driver had pushed too far too hard on a bad tire to get to the rest stop he had a deal with. It was an inside tire, so there was no way it could be fixed easily, but rather than stopping outside of Cairo where he’d torn it on the bump, we wound up halfway between Hurghada and Cairo. The guides’ cellphones wouldn’t work this far out of a major town, so there wasn’t much anyone could do. We didn’t know any of this, of course. They told us it was a simple rest stop, and we trundled off inside to get a snack and use the restroom (free, since the kid taking money at the door wasn’t working late).

A couple of hours went by before we fully realized what was happening. We’d figured out that the bus wasn’t running fairly early on, but we didn’t really know what was happening until about midnight, when someone looked around and realized that most of the Russians were gone! The tour company had called from the rest stop for another bus, but it was a smaller taxi that showed up and took everyone it could fit. The guides didn’t bother to tell us that everyone else was leaving. In retrospect, I can understand why. There wasn’t room for us, and if someone had to stay at the rest stop for another few hours, better the young college students than the elderly couples that made up most of the rest of the group. We weren’t in an understanding mood, though. We were tired, hungry, angry, and pretty fatalistic about the whole thing. We wound up watching the movie Speed subtitled in Arabic on the tiny little TV inside the rest stop, while others tried to sleep on the bus. It was getting cold outside, though, and no one had really brought warm enough clothing to sleep on an unheated bus. It squatted by the road, leering at us the whole time. The guides got us a free dinner apiece, but our appetites were spoiled by the horrible, evil thing that had stranded us there.

Another hour or so went by before the second “bus” arrived. It was also a taxi, basically a minivan. There were the eight of us, plus three or four Russians who had also missed the first bus. Among the Russians were a young woman and her daughter; Dan and Molly had met her on the first bus and already hated her, although I never did learn why. They did learn that her husband was an American diplomat, and she was here on vacation. She kept fobbing her daughter off on an older woman who might have been her mother; the little girl must have been miserable, but she never complained that I heard. We did. There simply weren’t enough seats for everyone on the bus. A few people dug their heels in and insisted on another taxi, but we realized that we couldn’t split the group up and ask a fee people to spend another three hours in the rest stop. No one there spoke decent English, of course none of us spoke any Arabic - in a word, we were stuck. Well, I was stuck. In the front seat, with the driver and Michelle. It was a carnival of fear and misery. When we finally pulled out, everyone else was crammed in the back. I could hear them arguing about who got a seat and who had to crouch; there wasn’t even enough room to sit on the floor back there. I was in the middle in the front seat, sitting on the folded down armrest. The driver spoke only a very few words of English (unfortunately those words didn’t include “left” or “right”) and no Russian, and Michelle was in full bitch mode. The driver had the windows rolled down so that he could smoke. That irritated most of us, since it was cold and the smoke stank, but I thought better of trying to ask him not to smoke. It was about three a.m. by this point, and I wouldn’t have cared if he was snorting cocaine as long as it kept him awake.

Ironically enough, the Russian woman with the daughter was snorting cocaine. I didn’t know about it until after we got back, since I was up front, but they said that every so often she’d pull a compact out of her purse, pile some powder on the back of her hand, and snort it up. With her daughter sleeping right next to her, of course. I didn’t see any of it, but I had my own concerns. The driver’s music (the ever-present wailing Arabic tapes scattered on the dash of every car we saw or rode in) bothered Michelle, and she kept bitching about it. Her solution to the language barrier was to speak English slowly, condescendingly, and loudly, but we finally got her to understand that at that point, she had to be quiet or we’d pitch her overboard. The driver had enough on his mind. Every time we passed another car on the narrow two-lane highway, each driver would flash their brights two or three times then turn off their headlights! I can only assume that the point is to keep from blinding the other driver, but it scared the hell out of me. A pair of headlights would float up out of the desert over the horizon, explode into bright light a couple of times, then wink out. A few seconds later, the car would whiz by us in the opposite direction. I didn’t have any trouble staying awake for the three hours it took us to get back to Hurghada.

Odd as it sounds, as unpleasant as the drive was it was also one of the most beautiful experiences I had in Egypt. Every so often, as we droved along with the beach invisible in the night on our left-hand side, we could see the light from huge bonfires. Sometimes they were close enough to see the fires themselves, and the people standing around them as silhouettes. The driver tried to explain what was happening, but neither of us could understand the other. Later, I learned that it was part of the Muslim festival that we’d been told about in Cairo. The drive was a real test of endurance, but the image of those bonfires lighting our way home will stay with me for the rest of my life.

We finally got back to Hurghada, and after the drive had dropped off our resident cokehead and her family in town we managed to guide the driver to the Lillyland. It wasn’t easy, since we weren’t really sure of the way and he couldn’t understand us, but we got there. It was light by this time; we’d spent the entire night traveling in incredible discomfort. The lobby of the hotel was an incredibly welcome sight. The hotel staff insisted that we take boxed dinners that had been prepared for us when they realized that we would be late, but food was the last thing we wanted to see. Bed, though - when I saw my cot I though I was in heaven. I told Michelle that I didn’t care if the mountain was coming to Mohammed, I was going to sleep and I didn’t want to be disturbed. Since she had her own bed on the other side of the room, I thought I was in for a few hours of well-deserved rest. More the fool I.

We’d had a little trouble with our bathroom all week. The shower had no curtain (common to most Russian and Eastern European hotels, too) so the bathroom flooded with every shower, the toilet ran, and there were never enough towels, but I really never cared. If the bathroom was flooded or there wasn’t enough hot water, Dan and Molly and Ginnie had offered more than once to let us use their bathroom. That was enough for me. Michelle decided she had to shower before she went to bed, and I guess the hot water cut out on her. I woke up when she came storming out of the bathroom and snatched up the phone. She called the front desk and screamed, literally screamed, at the poor bastard who answered the phone for a couple of minutes. She eventually got bumped up to the manager, who sent some plumbers over to look at the shower. I decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and didn’t mention that I hadn’t really had any sleep for m