“America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.” –e.e. cummings

Two weeks after peering out over what I assumed to be Maryland (right before landing at Dulles International), I don’t think I had realized how different-same everything would seem after returning to the United States. I actually teared up once I saw the mainland, but now I’ve been tearing up when I think of last few months, their brevity, and how, the more I try to recall, the more it all becomes a joyously mangled cache of sorts. Barely identifiable.

Everything becomes a lot clearer once you’ve left home for a while but not simpler. This newfound clarity only further proves and admits to the overwhelming complexity of most things, the thin and finely stacked layers, the crumbs that are always left over from the experiences that allow you you grow in ways you had never thought of before. Thank you, Russia, for making everything a little bit more confusing and a lot richer for an unassuming Midwesterner. And thank you, America, for a sincere and unaffected homecoming.

Bear necessities: This is the sign above the traditional Russian store across from our campus. We had to request anything we wanted because all goods (vodka, bread, cheese, all of it) are placed behind cash counters. Hooligans often frequented this storefront with lots of cheap beer.

Cautionary tales: Here’s Joey as we gazed out over the so-called  “Bay of Finland.” Saint Pete’s was particularly frigid that day, and we had hiked out to this point only to find a lot of ugly, ghetto land reclamation going on. But I like this picture; feels like I took it 502 thousand years ago.

Last minute surprises: this super famous Soviet structure/statue was unveiled only a few days before our departure. They (meaning the Russians) used to flash an image of it before every film; sort of like the 20th Century Fox intro. Construction obscured our view, but the reconstructed monument was worth seeing nonetheless.

Coincidental canines: Of all the stray dogs I tripped across in Russia, this one, who resides in Sergiev Posad, was by far my favorite. As dirty as he was, I just wanted to hug him, call him Chewbacca, and tote him back to the United States. He was kind enough to pose for us for several minutes.

Legendary parallelograms: This square at Oxotny Ryad (awful transliteration) lies right in front of Red Square in the center of Moscow. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been there and back again. The first few times you see things like this (at least after living in Missouri for over 21 years), you can’t help but be a little gape-mouthed.

Shameless tourists: Here we have one of the few posed photos I actually make an appearance in. Joey and I are standing in front of the Church of the Spilled Blood in Pete’s (again, ages ago). For those of you who will actually see me in due time, I have to show you photos from inside the church: all mosaic, all the time. The place must weigh a million trillion tons. Besides that, I think the two of us look sufficiently silly/happy, which is all you can ask of a “golly, we’re in Disney World”-esque photo.

So, for now, that’s all folks. I’m kind of rethinking the blog right now, trying to figure out how to carry it over from this last semester. Features on life in Kirksville it is! I might be kidding. I might not.

I guess one of the hiccups that kept me from sharing our last week with you was the whole TORFL testing process that occurred on Monday and Tuesday. Basically, a vast majority of we program participants decided to take the state exam for Russian proficiency–lo and behold, I actually passed the elementary level. Not a triumph, but a small and respectable feat, I would say. The speaking portion made me pretty nervous, but I actually enjoyed the writing portion quite a lot. The whole testing process remains amusing to me only because Russians take testing procedures FAR less seriously than Americans do. Some of us had way more prep time for writing and speaking portions, there were indefinite start and stop points for the multiple choice exams, and sometimes there wasn’t even a proctor present in the room with us. That’s not to say that I was necessarily surprised. I guess I even appreciated the more relaxed testing environment. It was also great to see some American students freak out  as they experience this sudden lack of discipline.

Once we got through testing, we had a few relatively free days to say goodbye to Moscow, and we did. Joey and I made it out to Red Square one last time, saw the giant Christmas tree and the giant (exclusive) ice skating rink. By last week, daylight disappeared by 3:30 in the Moscow area, so we had the chance to catch some good photos of the lights strung around the square. I’ve never seen the tree in Rockefeller Center or anything, but the one the Russians had assembled looked pretty okay.

Another place we felt needed to be seen at least once more was Patriarch’s Ponds; it seems that we both have some sentimental value attached to it, and, honestly, I wanted to see it frozen. I was surprised to hear some British people chattering in the kiddy park–I suspect they were expats or something. Oh, and although I hadn’t seen them elsewhere, I’m guessing pull-sleds (kinda like prams) remain popular in Russia. Moms scooted their kids back and forth; usually when I tried to snap photos of the little bundley babies, their moms would jet off. So I’m left with pictures of colorful baby blurs.

I’m realizing as I get through this post that I may have to dedicate a few more to that last leg of my trip. As long as no one minds waiting for old news, I think I might actually do that. Anywho, all of these activities took place last Thursday and Friday, and I felt like they were the perfect things to do/see right before leaving. For me, leaving Russia seemed a timely sort of event; the winter really deadens many of the happier emotions usually associated with the holiday season. I certainly wasn’t unhappy those last few weeks, but thinking of the sunny winter setting in in America, I couldn’t wait. Not to mention that four months in Moscow felt like eight: life there, although quite livable, is a little rougher, a little less obliging. But, of course, that doesn’t make leaving any easier. I promise to post again very soon; the transcontinental flight was the dooziest of doozies.

The primary attraction within this little city consisted of an eons-old monastery established by the utterly impressive Saint Sergius. No one really told us what he did or how it was that he got this project rolling, but I’m sure it’s on Wikipedia for any of you who are actually curious. Of course, the grounds dazzled the eye and offered any number of photo ops, but, as usual, we could only actually enter about two of the (approximately) 10 buildings on the site. This is an especially Russian phenomenon: access in general is limited to 50% or less of all buildings, doors, attractions, parks, you name it. I wish I were exaggerating. An ongoing joke in this country, for me at least, involves the constant installation of fake double door and windows. They can be called fake in respect to how they function; the panes and frames and all that are all there. But of the two visible doors or windows, I guarantee you that only one of them can actually open and close. The others just sit there, stuck, letting light in. On a larger scale, large historical buildings often only allow walk-throughs of a fraction of the premises, claiming the other parts are being renovated or rented out as storage space or something.

Back to the trip! I enjoyed seeing the monastery (what I was able to see, anyways) and getting the guided tour through the super old, impressive stuff museum. I don’t mean to belittle it; it really is astounding to see what people were able to create without modern technology and machinery. BUT I preferred the perusing we did a few hours later after lunch. Anya, Brandon, and I walked around the more residential areas of the town just to see more traditional Russian dwellings. After all, the giant dormitory-style apartment buildings of Moscow in no way resemble the decrepit, brightly painted wooden houses of the countryside its smaller towns. We did see some corrugated fences and paper posters like these though–very reminiscent of our big metropolis and its layers of advertisements and grime and such. Surprisingly enough, Sergiev Posad’s streets and sidewalks were even more grungy than the ones we’re used to here. It’s tempting just to leave every pair of shoes I brought on this trip because they’ve been plastered with mud, beaten, and ripped on by one of the world’s least shoe-friendly urban areas. We’ll see.

I hope to have/make the time to post an additional entry before I leave (exactly a week from today), but I make no promises since the emotional and physical flurry of leaving might leave me a little scatter-brained. And I still have to write a half-assed paper on Russian culture that may or may not be about the difficulties of being a woman in this repressive culture. Besides that, I need to spend some quality time with some quality people. I believe I’ll be continuing the blog when I get home, both to wrap up comments in relation to the whole Russian experience and to document life as usual, its comings and goings, successes and failures, its milk and cookies.

Being away during such a ubiquitous celebration really reminded me of the five thousand miles laying between me and Foristell, Missouri. I guess it takes a holiday to do that, and I’m certainly looking forward to returning just in time to witness America’s grossly consumer-driven Christmas season. They’ve strung up some lights and flashing Christmas tree signs around Moscow, but nothing close to the musically coordinated light shows to be seen in the lowliest of Midwestern suburbs. As cynical as that all sounds, I do really love the season, and it’ll be the perfect buffer for the weirdness of having to return home after what feels both like an eternity and an instant.

At home, our tree has always been shoved into a corner, which leaves this little space in the back that isn’t exactly useful for any reason. But as kid, I would wiggle back into that space (if I did it now, I’m sure the tree would capsize) and lie on my back, looking up through the bottom of the tree. I just liked being back there not doing much of anything but squinting my eyes, letting the rays of the mini lights extend out further and back again. Thinking back on that, I realize how much bigger the world has become since then, how I’ve been able to crawl out from my small and obscure corner of Missouri. But I also appreciate how staring up through the Christmas tree can be just mesmerizing as the night lights of giant European city. Wonder comes in all sizes, I guess.

That being said, the simple things are really the ones we can count on at this point in the trip. We’ve hit a wall it seems, the “grab the guidebook so we can figure out what to do today–uhhh, we’ve already done all of these things” wall. Which means being satisfied with walks around certain parts of the city, including the Novodevichy Convent I visited about a week and a half ago. We couldn’t access more than one building (the Smolensk Cathedral’s being renovated until May), but perusing the slushy grounds and taking a lot of photos of buildings I couldn’t even begin to say anything intelligent about turned out to be activities worthy of the day. Even though our days here appear to be getting shorter and shorter–no real light after about 5 p.m. Of course, now I know why Russians write such long novels. It has everything to do with the 7-hour evenings.

Along with the Russian winter come any number of things: babushkas selling shawls and rabbit fur muffs, dogs sleeping on newspapers in the metro, kids looking like marshmallow monsters in Dr. Seuss-esque hats. What still baffles me is how early Muscovites don heavy winter coats, hats, and scarves. Anytime the temperature drops below 50 fahrenheit, these people get out their Siberian gear. And, they think you’re totally nuts if you don’t do the same. I’m thinking, “Really. Doesn’t it get down to the negative double digits here in January?” Sadly, I will not be around long enough to figure out how they dress for subzero temperatures. Maybe they wear moose skins. One could only hope.

When we went to look at the convent a week or so ago, we also stopped by the adjacent cemetery, mostly because a few super-famous authors are buried there, including Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol. Trust me, Americans don’t do monuments like the Russians do monuments; they go the whole nine yards for every Soviet war commissar, ex-dictator, and sports coach. This set of flowers adorned the grave of a man I assume was once a celebrity coach for the Spartaks. The fake flowers had aged quite a bit and turned strange shades of fuchsia and purple, making the assortment look sort of morbid and beautiful at the same time.

Speaking of death, I recently listened to a superb episode of This American Life entitled “Fear of Sleep” that, in its final minutes, addressed people citing fear of death as the cause of their insomnia, something I’ve thought of at least a dozen times in the past few years. The episodes runs through different scenarios of sleep deprivation: scary movies, disorders, etc. As a kid, I couldn’t sleep for days after seeing the least terrifying episode of The X-Files at Stephanie’s house. I would highly recommend it (TAL not X-Files), and it’s quite free on iTunes.

Peter and Paul Fortress, while impressive, proved less memorable than some of the other sites we visited that day. Although, a quick story about the noontime cannon: it went off at noontime, and scared me to kingdom come. Screaming, ducking, covering, the whole gambit.

We decided to go a-wandering after that whole escapade, met some Americans from the Boston region (traveling their way to New Zealand, of all places),  finally arrived at Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, and unexpectedly caught some militsia in the act of raking up leaves. Apparently they didn’t want us taking pictures because they promptly yelled at us from afar. Got it anyway. Funny anecdote #2: when given the option to view the cathedral museum or the colonnade, opt for the museum. Joey, Ele, and I opted for the colonnade because a) it was cheaper and b) it sounded like a more robust experience–we climbed no less than 250 stairs to the very top of this place. I wish I had caught it all on tape; the progression from “oh, more stairs” to “no, really when does it end?” to “this must be the friggin’ tower of Babel” is all rather humorous in hindsight. The payoff: a panoramic view of Saint Petersburg in all it’s wannabe European glory. Although, truth be told, the panoramic view was at least fifteen degrees colder than the view from the street.

And now we come to my most unbelievable story from the entire trip. For all I know, it could have been a case of mistaken identity, but I swear to any number of religious deities that I saw THE Orlando Bloom outside of a McDonald’s on Nevsky Prospect that night. The man I saw had the right build, right height, right face, everything. Seeing him also made me do a double take, which I don’t remember doing ever. A few days after returning, Joey and I looked into the plausibility of this coincidence only to find that Orlando Bloom does quite a bit of humanitarian work in Russia and has made a few trips to Moscow recently. But he was also in New York a few days prior to the alleged sighting. I guess we will never know, but I believe I spied and Orlando.

I can’t remember much of Friday beyond the big stuff: visiting Mikhail Zoshchenko’s apartment, visiting the Church of the Spilled Blood, and bargaining with a street vendor in Russian, German, and English. Confusion all around. We sort of stumbled upon the little apartment museum in a super ghetto complex (these sorts of things no longer surprise me) and were surprised to find that it hosted a wonderful collection of the author’s actual belongings and manuscripts. Spilled Blood, as per usual with the Orthodox cathedrals, gave me far too much to look at. The entire interior of this place is lacquered in tiny mosaic tiles–every single scene constructed from thousands of tiny pixels. The scenes from Christ’s life and his parables took me back to my Sunday school days, making me feel both very old and very far away from home as I understood it as a kid.

Overall, the trip to Pete’s ended up being one of those vacations that make you want to take another vacation after, just so you can recover from the whole experience. That being said, it was fantastic! (Even though I much prefer Moscow.) I have yet to visit Western Europe, and Saint Petersburg imitates that whole look and atmosphere rather well. We might as well have gone to Germany or France or some stereotypically European place like that, although I’m not sure any of those places have giants traipsing around monuments claiming to be Peter the Great. A Peter the Great with a drawn-on mustache who demands 100 roubles for a picture with him. Yikes.

The first leg of our trip included a visit to the Winter Palace, otherwise known as the Hermitage Museum. The Romanovs originally resided here for a better part of the year, but once the revolution occurred, it was turned over to the public as a heritage site and more recently as world-class gallery housing Russian and European art. Visiting a place this visually complex does a number on your brain. I couldn’t decide whether I should be looking at the luxurious interiors of the palace (the wooden inlays in the floor were especially captivating for me) or the paintings and tapestries hung on every available surface. I was delighted to find a Caravaggio in the museum and more Gauguin’s than I’ve ever seen in a single location, but, when it comes down to it, we walked around the Hermitage for the better part of five hours. A body simply wants to eat after seeing that much.

Oddly enough, I feel that brings me to the subject of weather in St. Pete’s, seeing as we had to battle it every time we wanted to find a toilet, another attraction, or something to it. Bottom line: pretty unbearable. The shock inflicted by the city’s general dampness on my poor, unprepared body left me a little cranky and tired for most of the trip. That’s not to say the whole break was a bust, but running through nearly freezing rain for a half an hour or more just made me want to die. The misty rains of Petersburg seep through everything: wool coats, penny loafers, and leather purses included. The place perpetually smells of cold rain. Which is nice if you’re huddled under a blanket somewhere deep within the bowels of a hostel.

One stop that remains intriguing to me is the mini park with Catherine the Great’s giant statue. Not expressly because of the statue or the lights that made the autumnal foliage look green but because it has a reputation for being popular among the homosexual community in St. Pete’s. When our tour guide informed us of this, my ears perked up: even after having lived in Russia for over two months, I’d never heard anyone speak of gays, lesbians, transsexuals, etc. or their place within Russian society. Lena, our omnipresent babysitter (that’s more or less her job description), explained to me that here, in Russia, homosexuality simply doesn’t factor into the equation for most people; Russians rarely wonder if a friend is gay or recognize any deviations in sexual preference. And, of course, she admitted to thinking the whole concept was rather bizarre. So I’ll be doing a little more research concerning that issue, which I suspect is related to this country’s aggressive macho culture.

I don’t actually intend to write a whole lot for this time around. Primarily, I just wanted to show you all some photos that give you a feel for daily life in Moscow. I do this for two reasons: 1) I’m really beginning to enjoy capturing the more ordinary aspects of our adventures here in the city, and 2) my brain is not functioning well enough to roll out an entire reflective entry at the moment. Plus, I know you all enjoy the photos. So here they are with little or no explanation. This first one (arguably my favorite from the trip thus far) depicts Joey squished in between some intensely Russian Russians in the metro several days ago.

After our balalaika concert on Thursday, we walked across a bridge spanning over the train station that hosts transit to and from Belarus. At night, the city often has this smoggy purple color. Moscow has barely any skyscrapers though, so you never feel too closed in.

A contemporary art museum a ways down from the Arbat is currently showing the work of Darya Dostal, an artist who works with composite photos and multimedia. This brick face image was included in the collection we saw, which displays the facades and arenas of Moscow in all of their bizarre (and color-enhanced) glory.

Various other blurbs I’ve written have probably  mentioned the metro more frequently than any other reality of the day-to-day here, but the fact of the matter is that transport via the Moscow Metro is nothing if not ubiquitous. I get on these trains (and see stations like this) at least twice a day. Often, we don’t wait on the platform any longer than 4 or 5 minutes. Watching people in the underground remains one of my favorite things to do. Which becomes obvious once I get giggly during rush hour–an experience that would make any Midwesterner either die laughing or die, period.

Dozens upon dozens of parks and walkways stretch through the city, both in the center and the outskirts. More often than not, the wide pathways are made of packed dirt and get plenty muddy once it rains for an afternoon. Lots of people here own dogs, but when they walk them, they let them off their leashes! The dogs also have no problem either running you over or tripping you.

Although giant swimming pools can be great, Christ the Savior Cathedral has recently been reconstructed since its original demolition during the Stalinist era. This cathedral is particularly enormous, but especially once we’re in the city center it’s not too uncommon to see two or three domed Orthodox churches from a single street corner. I this particularly like this picture because the a mother and her daughter (I’m merely assuming that’s their relation to one another) give the image a sense of scale. So yes, those doors are BIG.

Anyways, we are off to Saint Petersburg for a week as of Monday. GRINT has finally granted us a much-needed midterm break, not to mention a break from lovable, dirty Moscow and our grueling Russian lessons. I would imagine getting through that whole week in these tiny posts will be difficult. Until then!