Friday after classes we all went to this Georgian restaurant. It was basically our goodbye dinner since our last week is going to be crazy with finals and people trying to get to the airport. So our Brown professors were there and also our Russian teachers from the Institute. Not all of us were going to Moscow, so it was a nice way to have everyone together. The food was pretty good, especially compared to the Soviet Georgian dive that Golstein had taken us to earlier. It was nice to be in a more relaxed environment with our teachers. I didn’t realize how little English one of our Russian teachers knew, so we pretty much spoke to her in Russian all night which was fun. Teema and Makseem showed up too, kind of randomly. It was also nice to have some wine since it’s basically impossible to find it in Petersburg right now. The government is doing some kind of labeling thing where they have to recall all wine and mark certain imported wine with special seals that help to regulate their purchase. I don’t really get it. So right now all you can get to drink is vodka, beer, and Russian champagne. But Golstein worked out some kind of deal with the place so we were able to get some wine. Yup. He’s good at stuff like that.
Teema, Tania and Ohara:
Prof Dorontchenkov, Golstein, Ohara:
Mmm Meat:
After dinner I went home to pack for Moscow, since we were meeting at Vostaniya to take the midnight train. My host father’s nephew was over for dinner so I got to talk to him for a while. He was a really nice guy, but didn’t really speak English. He walked me to the trolleybus stop because it was so late already, which was pretty nice. I got to the station early where I ran into David who looked completely disheveled after being harassed by the police. So we sat around taking in the night time crowd and bought some snacks for the train ride, including the required beer and vodka (him not me). Eventually Prof Golstein and Alisa showed up and we made our way over to the Moskovsky Vokzal to meet the others. Unfortunately we had to hang around for a while waiting to see if Joel would show up. He has a horrible record of not showing up to things and he hasn’t been to class for weeks. No one really gets along with him, so half of us were hoping he wouldn’t show up at all so we wouldn’t have to be stuck with him in a cramped train car for 8 hours or whatever it was. Eventually we just had to go or else we’d miss the train. Of course there were then problems getting on the train because we all got assigned to different rooms in the train car, so we’d be bunking up with complete strangers. Not really something any of use wanted to do, especially since I’d heard horror stories about scary highway men type folk who steal all your belongings and kidnap you and who knows what else.
Once on the train we were able to shuffle things around some and others moved around a bit, so people who knew the most Russian were generally in the cars with Russians, and we tried to pair people up together so at least we wouldn’t be alone. Prof Golstein and Evdokimova were really helpful. I ended up in a little room with Zach, Ashley, and Lydia. It worked out ok in the end. We had a pretty fun time. The size of our room reminded me a lot of the dorms at NBS, so it felt just like home. Except the windows in the train car actually opened some. Luxury! The blankets were pretty nasty, but it was better than I had expected and my standards of decency and acceptability have plummeted of late, so who knows how I would’ve felt about it a month ago. Prof Golstein brought along some delicious bread which we broke into, along with other snacks, sweet wine, red wine, some other drinks, and Funky Juz this wretched soda type drink we had been seeing ads for (банкуфанки?) all summer and always wanted to try. We had been warned by several Russians that it was pretty foul.
I stole this from a friend:
Zach’s host brother’s explanation of it was pretty telling. Zach: so what exactly is baunkufunky? Zach’s host brother: the baunku is ‘do you want.’ And the funky is the juice. That’s about all we knew about it. So Zach had bought a can of the orange flavored one and brought it on the train to try. It wasn’t quite as bad as I expected probably because it was orange flavored and so kind of tasted like a bad version or Orangina.
Here’s Zach with the stuff:
The train ride passed fairly quickly. We played some cards, well mostly Ashley and Zach did that. Everything felt so ancient on the train, and the thing moved so slowly. There are all these locks on the door too to keep the robbers and stuff out, which was pretty cool. We got to bed fairly late (3am maybe), and I was so tired that it didn’t matter how uncomfortable the beds were or that we kept stopping at stations whose lights would seep in through the window and blind you. I was on the top bunk so wasn’t going to be moving much. None of us wanted to use the bathroom in the train because it was so disgusting. There was a hole in the bathroom floor through which you could see the wheels of the train and the tracks below. Scary. I won’t go into detail about just how revolting the bathroom was, but you can probably imagine. The one time I used it I just kept praying that I wouldn’t fall over, seeing as I was afraid to touch even the walls for any kind of balance.
I actually woke up early when Lydia got up to go to the bathroom, because when she didn’t return in a timely enough fashion and I heard the bathroom door slam and sound suspicious, so I woke Zach up to go check on her since my paranoid mind had already imagined a half dozen gruesome possibilities to fit my concern. So we both went out to find her only to see her looking out the window right in front of the door to our room. We walked around for a while not really wanting to go back to sleep. They gave us “breakfast” in the morning, and at the end of the car they have tea and coffee that comes out of this weird machine that looked like it was from the 19th century. It was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while. Prof Golstein said he remembered the same one from when he was a child. The cups were pretty neat too. I wish I had a picture, but they were really pretty metal type holders that held a glass.
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