A short goodbye

So it’s been a long time since I’ve written. One hardly knows where to start. All the details blur. But tonight is my last night here before I embark on a tour of eastern Europe/Balkans. It is hard saying goodbye to people; I’ve made some incredible friends here. And Petersburg will be a new world again when I return for white nights in June. It seems like I somehow snagged my foot in this city—people come and go and change, and I’m still here. I leave tomorrow, or today now, for Prague with a friend of mine here, Geoff. I’ll see Corinne, a friend from home, for a day or so there as well. We'll be there 5 days, Geoff then heads west, and I east, through Slovakia, to Budapest, Hungary, where I’ll be staying with a friend, before hopping a 24 hour long train across Romania to meet up with my friend Zack in Kiev, Ukraine. We hope to spend some time there before going south to the Crimea, then over to Odessa, through Moldova, travel around the Romanian countryside, head down to Bulgaria, where we have friends, before finally making it to Istanbul, where we’ll be staying with another friend. I should be flying back to Petersburg around June 11th or 12th. I was fortunate enough to receive a grant to do research here this summer, so I should be in Petersburg through the end of July before returning to the states to do some more research at Harvard and NY Public Library. At this point all I have is a plane ticket to Prague and a hostel room there. Everything else is still up in the air, but that’s what makes an adventure I suppose. And that doesn’t bother me as much as it probably would have used to. I feel like I can handle most anything now. Little could shock me or really bother me anymore. Perhaps that’s what Russia does to you. You have to accept so much here, so much that has no explanation, otherwise you start to lose your mind—you know you can control nothing.

In the meantime, if you should want to email me (which you should, since there's a pretty decent chance I might never talk to you again if you don't), you should use my gmail account (Stern.Elizabeth@gmail.com), or my yahoo one if you already have it. Brown webmail hates eastern europe. I'm not sure how much I will be able to check it during my travels, but I'll do my best, and respond to you when I can.
I'll also try to post more and fill you in on my semester and of course my upcoming wanderings when I return to Piter.