“American Babies are like Cucumbers, they’re Plump and Juicy”

Hey all! Sorry I didn’t write a blog for last week, but I was pretty blogged out after my epic recollection of the Volga River cruise. But, luckily for you, I’m going to write about both last week and this week, so you don’t miss a day in my exciting life (please note the sarcasm). Last last Friday on our excursion we went to Circus school. And this isn’t just any circus school, folks. This is the only Circus University in Russia, and it just happens to be located right next to the gym I work out at (not that I ever knew it was there). We got to watch the students (age 16-20, I think) practice their acts, whether it be juggling, balancing on a tight rope, gymnastics, or magic tricks. There were a bunch of young boys in tiny spandex shorts juggling right in front us us, and it really creeped me out, reminding me of some Charles Dickens novel, with young boys sell their “wares” while a sketchy old man gets the profits in the background (the sketchy old man being the circus school director who was talking to us).This one really talented girl sat on a giant metal ring suspended from the ceiling and did all these crazy contortions on it and hung off of it by her foot. I think the boys were really interested, because this girl also happened to have huge boobs and apparently didn’t believe in sports bras. I really thought every time she hung upside down in her spandex tank-top, one of the girls was going to fall out. Then we moved from the main big top area to a back room where a bunch of boys were doing tricks on a trampoline, a couple of girls where doing handstands, and this Greek god of a Russian man doing the rings (the kind they have in the Olympics). He was tall and blond and had light eyes and every girl in our group couldn’t stop staring at him. At one point he went to wipe his face with his tank top, and as he showed his completely ripped stomach, I whispered to Emma, ‘This is like circus porn.” After the gratuitous hot man, we got to see their class rooms, where the students take math, literature, science, etc., as well as the circus arts. Then we got to sit in (or stand in, rather) on a ballet class. The teacher was a scary, old Russian woman who made sure her students performed their best in front of us. One of the boys in the back of the group couldn’t keep up and she told him to just stop dancing. He looked so upset and had to stand in the corner for the rest of class. Another one of the boys was pretty overweight and was leaping around in shorts and a tank top. I normally would be able to keep it together, but he had this massive smile on his face like he effing loved ballet. I couldn’t help but laugh. We left circus school having seen dancing, jumping, tumbling, flipping, contortions, and one very sexy circus man. It was phenomenal.

That night Erika and Paige texted me (or SMSed me, if you want to be European), saying they wanted to go out dancing. I was really excited for this, as we hadn’t been out to a club since we got here, and all of us were a bit scared to go after a girl in our program got sent home after a particularly awful night of clubbing. I only had two hours notice, and it takes me an hour to get anywhere in Moscow, so I took the world’s fastest shower and booked it out of my house. While waiting at the metro station for the other girls to arrive, I bumped into one of my tutors. He thought it was a crazy coincidence, as there are millions of people in Moscow and over a hundred metro stops. He was waiting for his girlfriend (also my tutor) and said “the reason for which I am here is Kyle.” I was kind of confused because Kyle is a boy in my program who is friends with Ivan and Elvira, but I wasn’t sure why they would be meeting at 8:00 on a Friday. Later when Erika, Paige, Kat, and Julia showed up, Erika mentioned that it was Kyle’s birthday party that night, and the birthday group was meeting at the exact same metro an hour later. It was kind of awkward because none of us had heard about the party and obviously had not been invited, so we left the metro before the other group arrived. Julia really wanted to go to the giant bookstore by the metro station, Biblio Globus, one of the few that has a good selection of English books. We perused the store for a while and then Kat and Julia decided to go drop in on Kyle’s party, while Erika, Paige, and I decided to just go to the club, because we felt awkward about crashing the festivities. Erika had brought a Nestea bottle half full of Kahlua, so we three sketchily looked around for a good place to pre-game on the street. It’s illegal to drink on the street in Russia, so we had to find somewhere out of the way. We ended up picking a little nook under an awning, being hidden by a giant van. Under Paige’s giant umbrella, we took turns sipping the Kahlua, when the rain decided to come pouring down. We made a run for the club, Propaganda, which turned out to be a restaurant that only turned into a club at midnight. Since it was only 9:00, we obviously needed to kill some time. We bought some delicious cocktails and drank them until Julia and Kat arrived. They said Kyle’s party had to move somewhere else because the original restaurant they were in was having a concert and trying to make people pay more to watch it. Julia called up her two friends that she was meeting up with, and we went out on the street to find them. I can’t remember the girl’s name, but Julia knew her through the Middlebury Russian summer program. The girl brought the guy she is seeing, Maxim, who was so incredibly attractive, I gave her props. He was French Canadian and knew almost no Russian, which I can’t even fathom while living in Moscow, but he’s surviving. We collectively decided that we needed food, so we went to the Moo Moo we had seen on the way to the club. Moo Moo is a cheap cafeteria style chain restaurant which has Russian food and is cow-themed. It’s really popular with students. When we got to Moo Moo we quickly realized that we’d stumbled upon where Kyle’s birthday party was relocated to. Feeling even more awkward, we grabbed our food and drinks and went to the basement to eat. Annabel and Nastya came down to say hi to us and eventually convinced us to come up and say hi. We went over and sat with the birthday group, wishing Kyle snyom razhdenia. I felt really bad, but Kyle didn’t seem to mind. Around 11:00, Moo Moo kicked us out, and the entire group made its way back to Propaganda. Somehow when we got back in, only Annabel, Anton-Reese (of Spakonee Noch, Anton), Julia and her friends, Kat, Paige, Erika, and I were left. We sat at a table until the dance floor opened up and started dancing to the techno music the DJ was spinning. We decided that because the metro closed at 1 am and reopened at 6 am, we would just have to stay all night until the metro reopened. Annabel left around 12:30 to make the metro, but the rest of us kept going strong through the increasing annoying house music. Around 2:00, we definitely hit a wall. We were all sober, exhausted from bopping around for two hours, and getting sick from the cloud of cigarette smoke, so we took a break and went up to the balcony area to sit down. While we were up there, an extremely drunk overweight girl proceeded to pole dance with the stair banister and a couple of other girls joined her at various places along the railing. It was kind of creepy. Behind them a couple was heavily making out, so it was kind of like we were in the front room of a brothel, with smoke everywhere and really dim lighting. We tried our best to rally, dancing for half an hour, then resting for half an hour, although I will have to say, Anton-Reese was in the zone, dancing surprisingly well by himself to the terrible techno music until 3:00 am, when he announced he was peacing out and just left. I’m pretty sure he walked home, which is insane as he lived about an hour away and it was 3:00 am. At this point the rest of us were loathing house music, as it had no melody and was the same beat, and effectively the same song, for the last 4 hours. Around 4:15 am, we decided we could take it no longer and left, finding a 24 hour Coffee House down the block. We stayed there, drinking coffee and hot cocoa, until 6 am, when we wearily walked to the metro. Basically I felt like I was dead, and all the other people on the metro that early looked like it, too. I finally got home around 7:00 and passed out in my bed. Of course, I could only sleep until 10:00 am, as I have a giant window in my room and the sun was too bright. The funny thing is that Paige has a really overprotective host mother who won’t let her out of the house after 8:00 pm, but somehow her coming home at 7:00 am was SO bad, it became an accomplishment, and her host mother proudly told all of her friends how Paige stayed out all night until the metro reopened. My host mom just texted me at noon asking me where I was, and I replied I was in bed, and she just said ok, didn’t see you when I left. My house is pretty lax. So the moral of the story is that clubbing until 6 am, especially when house music is involved, is a really not as good of an idea as it sounds. Actually that doesn’t even sound like a good idea, it sounds terrible.

The rest of my week was considerably normal. My host mom started feeding me again, which is pretty great. Food has become one of my number one issues in Russia, and I’m pretty sure that’s true for most of my classmates. If I were to draw a food pyramid of my current food intake, the bottom biggest part would be dairy. I don’t think it’s possible to get through a meal here without consuming some type of milk product. There’s yogurt, sour cream, butter, milk, kafir (will talk about that later), cheese, tvorog (like cream cheese) which is used in desserts and also in cirniki (like fried mini cream cheese pancakes) which is a breakfast food, and ice cream. Kafir is this super nasty milk product that Russians love. It basically tastes like spoiled cream, and they drink it instead of milk. There’s also a kafir soda, I can’t remember the name for it (maybe fen?), and that’s like drinking cheese soda. The next level up from the dairy products would be watermelon. My host mom is currently force feeding me watermelon at alarming rates. She bought one from the watermelon cages by our house and is freaking out that it’s going to spoil. I am so sick of watermelon and she literally tried to get me to eat a fourth of one a couple of nights ago. She claims she loves watermelons, but I feel like I’m the only one eating the damn thing. Above the watermelon level would be the beet level. I eat borsch probably twice a week, eat so many salads that contain beets, and my host mom just made vinigret again, which is essentially beet – cabbage sauerkraut. I always know vinigret is coming because she has this giant rock sitting on top of a white ball in a big cooking pot on the counter for about three days before the vinagret appears. She tried to explain to me why she has the giant rock surrounded by beet juice, but she only said its part of the preparation. So yeah, now we have a giant pot of vinagret in the fridge. I’m pretty sure my insides are permanently dyed fuchsia now. Above the beet section would be bread, and then in a teeny, tiny corner on the top would be fruits, vegetables, and meat. Oh, and covering the pyramid, oozing down from the top would be all the oil, butter, and fat the Russians put on everything they cook. My stomach hates me all the time and I’m basically malnourished, but at least I’m getting fed!

This week, classes were particularly interesting, not so much for what we are doing in our lessons, but for what our teachers said. Clearly teachers in Russia don’t try to be PC. I’m sure they don’t even know the meaning of the word. To give you some of the best quotes from this week, I have the following:

• Our male geography teacher asking all the girls how many babies they were planning on having
• Our CMU (Mass Media) teacher saying “American babies are like cucumbers, they’re plump and juicy.”
• Our CMU teacher asking us what color Jesus was, with white, black, and arab not being the correct answer.
• Our Phonetics teacher pulling out a stuffed animal dog and talking to it for 5 minutes before telling us she was reciting a poem about a dog, and then proceeded to make us recite the poem to the stuffed dog, too.
• Explaining to our conversation class teacher the difference between punks and hippies (she didn’t know). Big Ben said in Russian that hippies smoke pot and said that hippy women don’t believe in showers or shaving. The female teacher asked, ‘They don’t believe in shaving where?” And Ben replied, “Everywhere.”
• When we told our phonetics teacher we were discussing Chekov before class, she whipped out about 20 photos of Chekov, that she of course had lying around.
• Our geography teacher was describing the central Asian people to us, as “The people who clean our school and the streets, those are Tajik people. The people begging in the metro, those are the Kirgiz people.”
• When Jenna told our literature teacher that it was her mother’s birthday that day, our teacher said, “How wonderful! And do you know what your mother wants most? Grandchildren. She’s waiting for them, Jenna.”

I’ve also started going to the gym almost everyday with Paige. She used to train for marathons, so she is really hardcore about working out. She’s basically being my personal trainer and it’s awesome. Hopefully I’ll come back from Russia super fit. Although with the amount of walking I do to even get to the gym (from my house it’s an hour and a half away), I should be in tip top shape in no time. The gym is slightly ridiculous. The women there are never actually working out. They come with their hair down and in stomach showing outfits and have a personal trainer, who is always a good looking man. There is so much sexual tension, you could cut it with a knife. The only other kind of exercise I’ve seen women do is the hula hoop. I’m not even kidding, they just stand in front of the mirrored wall and hula hoop away. Paige and I must look like roaring lesbians, coming in together every day and working out so hard we actually *gasp* sweat. I’m sure people think I’m nuts for doing push-ups and crunches. So to recap: Russian women are extremely beautiful and inhumanly thin, but they don’t work out. I will figure out how this works before I leave in May. It’s one of my goals. Then there is the women’s locker room. Oh boy. The first day Paige and I went in there to change into our gym clothes, there were about 5 or 10 women just waltzing around buck naked. And it’s not even like they’re in the process of changing or coming from the shower. These ladies blow-dry their hair nude, talk to each other nude, text on their cell phones nude. I’m sure if they were allowed to, they would leave the locker room in the buff as well. Paige and I have gotten a little more comfortable with it, but I really hope we don’t come back nudists.

On Wednesday after working out, Paige and I went to another university’s Russian American club. The girl running the club was someone Paige knew from Bucknell. We met up with the girl, Taylor, and Emma at the Hovoslobodskaya metro station, and headed over to Taylor’s school, Moscow State University of the Humanities. Her college was AMAZING. It was five giant buildings, and even had some semblance of a campus. Our school is only one building and looks more like a shopping mall than a university. There were so many students at her school and they all looked normal. Ok, well by that I mean, not as decked out in designer labels as my school and they actually looked over the age of 18. Taylor showed us her dorm room, which was also really nice, and then we went to the club. It was a round table setting and there were super delicious cookies there (again, my life here revolves around food). We talked about our first impressions of Russians and Americans, and this one Russian girl would not shut up. She seemed a little "special" and kept saying "I have friends everywhere. From Ohio to Texas. From Maine to California. From Canada to Illinois. Everywhere. My dream is to go to US. It is my dream. I have friends everywhere." She would wait about five minutes in silence and then start up her friends speech again. It was to the point where she would interrupt other people talking to tell us about her friends in Massachusetts. The other Russians were laughing and I was trying really hard to keep it together because she may very well have been special, but then she started bragging about how good her English was and how people think she can't be Russian, she has to be American. That made me laugh, as the rest of the Russians in the club all had better English than her. It was really bizarre. On the way home that night, I passed by the 24 hour Indian food restaurant which is never open, and right in the middle of my path was a giant dead crow. It's the special kind of crows they have over here that have grey torsos and black heads and wings (like they are wearing a sweater vest). I did my best to walk around the bird carcass without getting sick. The best part of it all is that the bird was still there for the next two days, right outside the restaurant. All I could think of is that this is where bird flu comes from. Finally on the third day, the dead bird was gone. I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when I saw its rotting carcass under a tree on the side of the path. Nice. I think finally one of the street dogs must have eaten it, but it's good to know Russia does such a great job at disease control.

This Friday we went to Polyanaya, which is the country estate of some famous wealthy artist. Not too many people came because it was going to be an all day excursion. We all got on the tour bus at 11:00. Paige shared her Ipod headphones with me and we listened to some quality Russian techno music and then to Abba, which was fantastic. It took about an hour and a half to get there. It was absolutely freezing outside, and they plac we were at was basically in the middle of some woods. When we were waiting for Jon to buy the tickets to go in the house, a really cute dog came up to us, and Jan tried to speak to it in Russian. When he actually got it to sit, he gave it some food. Then another wet, stubby dog came over. It had white paint behind its ears, which I have no idea how it managed that. Finally we made our way over to the artist's house. It was a beautiful place, with genuine paintings covering all the walls, and all these mini artifact collections like mammoth bones and relics from Egypt. The family I guess had been an entire family of artists, but since most of them were female, only the male son got to go to art school and become famous. We got to wear those awesome slipper things we wore in BDNKh that let you slide across the parquet floor. After we toured the house, Jon brought us to a little room, which had a diorama in it. Apparently the artist made it in his final year of life, and it kind of showed. It was like a story for small children about a trip around the world, and the picture would be lit from the front and show one scene, and then it would change to being back lit and would turn into a totally different picture. It was sort of cool, except the story that went along with it that the Russian woman was reading was like "And this is the choo choo train. Woo-Woo! It is traveling to Venice, which has lots of water and Italians." Matt, who was sitting behind me, was eating an apple really slowly because I don't think we were meant to have food in the room, and all of a suddenly he started laughing and the rest of us all caught the giggles too. Even Jon. It was pretty bad. After the diorama, Jon told us we had two hours to kill in the middle of this forest on a cold day, so we walked down to the beach on the edge of the Oka River and played in the sand for a little. We were incredibly bored so we walked back up to the house. While we were there, a couple of chickens came out from behind a fence and approached us, begging for food, if chickens can really beg. They kept getting really close and Matt wanted to feed them part of the hardboiled egg he was eating, but we thought it was a little too disturbing. We passed the rest of the two hours in the café, getting coffee to stay warm. In the cafe, Paige went on a little rant about the song "Beggin'" by Madcon. I don't know if you guys have this song in the US, but it's EVERYWHERE here. It's at least one person on the metro's ringtone every morning, it's on a couple of commercials, and the music video is always playing on MuzTV. Paige hates the song but knows she'll have to buy it on iTunes in a year or two because it will remind her of Russia. We finally left at 4 pm, getting back to Moscow around 5:45. It was kind of a pointless excursion, but then again, most of them are.

On Saturday, I went to the market at Izmayaleva with Allison and Jenna. It's a giant souvenir market that you have to pay 10 rubles (fifty cents) to get into. They created this huge tacky castle just for the market and there is a giant wooden windmill which you can see from the metro entrance. On the way to the market, we saw a bear which I think you could take pictures with. In front of the actual market was this pseudomarket of all Central Asian vendors selling fur coats. As we walked through, some of the creepy vendors said "Senorita, I love you" in English and then proceeded to grab out bags and arms and butts. It was like molestation alley. Once we got past that and into the real market, it was fantastic. There were matrushka dolls, and scarves, and soviet memorabilia everywhere. You could bargain for the price and I ended up getting a bunch of stuff for a good deal. When I was looking at furry hats, the vendor came over to be and said in English, "Rabbit, freshly killed," while petting the fur. I think that tells you guys a lot about Russia. I'll probably end up going back later to get more souvenirs before I leave.

Ok, so I love all you guys very very much. I'm doing my best to email you all this month, but of course my Georgetown email is being super sketchy and not letting me access it. Oh and anyone who is reading this, if you will be in Spain or France from Dec 17-Jan 4th, let me know! We need to meet up, as I will be there with the lovely Erin Ernst! Ok, that is all for now. Until next time (when I can get internet service) - Hilary

Volga River Cruise, Part IV: “All The Ladies, Come Follow Me!”

The next morning we had our usual breakfast on the ship and then all headed outside to get ready to go to Saratov. I was actually pretty interested in Saratov, because Ivan Khomutov, the hockey player that used to play for the Albany River Rats and lived with my friend Beth, was from there. As we were gathering in groups in front of the boat on shore, Kat and I saw Gunter walking by, scanning our group. He had a really disappointed look on his face, and then we realized he was looking for Allie, to no avail. Poor Gunter. As usual the Moscow kids and the St. Pete kids went on different buses, and we headed off to Saratov. Saratov seemed like a typical working class city. There wasn’t actually that much to see, apart from a pack of street dogs, a couple of monuments, and a panorama of the history of Saratov, with parts of churches falling into the sea and mountains having deteriorated to their wood and plaster base. The most interesting part of the panorama was the Beeline ad above it. Beeline is a telephone provider like AT&T in the US, and all their ads feature someone in a black and yellow striped shirt or scarf or dress looking absurdly happy. If you didn’t know Beeline sold phone service you would think they sold contented families or meaningful relationships. I’m not even kidding, there’s not even a phone in any of their ads. This particular ad had a beautiful girl in a black and yellow striped scarf and shirt lying in autumn leaves, grinning like a fool. So there she was, happy it was fall, with the miniature city of Saratov crumbling beneath her.

After we saw the main city area of Saratov, our guide took us to a WWII Memorial more on the outskirts. Allison, Paige, Erika, Julia, and I all sat in the five seats in the back of the bus again, although this time I started to feel funny. My nose kind of burned and my throat got really dry. By the time we got off the bus at the memorial, I felt incredibly dizzy like I was drunk and couldn’t keep my eyes open. I asked Allison if she felt the same way, and she said she did, adding that we had probably gotten slight carbon monoxide poisoning from the exhaust of the bus, which obviously was being filtered back into the vents in the back of the bus. So I swayed all the way to the memorial, which had old Soviet trains and tanks and a really huge, but moving white monument with metal birds on the top, representing all the deaths that occurred in the war. Between war and famine, 40 million people died in Russia around the period of the 1940s and 1950s. That’s insane. From the top of the monument, we got a great view of Saratov (and much needed fresh air, in my case). After the memorial, the guide dropped us off at this marketplace where Jon had told us to buy food for the train ride back tomorrow because we wouldn’t find food anywhere between now and then. By this point, I was super out of it from the bus. I felt like I was really intoxicated and sleepy at the same time, and it was hard to walk in a straight line make sense of what was going on. The marketplace was in this giant one floor building with rows of vendor’s stalls, all next to each other. One row sold cookies and candy, another fruit and vegetables, and one, unfortunately, sold meat. The meat vendors were something out of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The first I recognized of the meat section, was a man cutting up a dead cow with an ax. There were heads and legs hanging everywhere, with flies circling them all, of course. Annabel asked one of the vendors if she could take a picture and the woman held up a pair of cow lips and smiled. And, to remind you, Saratov is an actual larger modern city in Russia. So I don’t even want to know what the remote villages east of the Urals are like. I wasn’t going to buy too much for the train ride back to Moscow, but then Matt came up to me and reminded me that we would be on the train for 19 hours, so that scared me enough to sensibly buy some cheese, crackers, apples, pomegranate, a massive bottle of water (reppin’ the two-liter BonAqua, woot-woot), chocolate monkeys, and I also bought two bottles of champagne for the winning team of the scavenger hunt.

When we got back on the boat, we had lecture again, this time with the history teacher from Vladimir. He was incredibly interesting and had these great visuals he drew himself. He had a really soothing voice, unfortunately so soothing that it put half of the room to sleep. I looked across the room and Mikel was passed out while sitting up, his mouth wide open. To the right of him, one of the St. Pete girls made no pretenses about sleeping and used the edge of the couch as a pillow, with the girl sitting next to her resting her head on her shoulder. After seeing them, I didn’t feel so bad about dozing off every now and then during the lecture. In Samara, the girls had been talking about how beautiful Julia’s dress was that she was wearing and we decided that since it was our last night on the boat, we should make it dress night. I put on my brown and teal dress (now known as the Prostitute dress. See a few blogs back), Kat put on her dress she bought in a Russian shopping mall and Annabel wore this beautiful red Marilyn Monrow-esque dress that was perfect for swing dancing, which was perfect as we were learning Jive in dance class that day. I was absolutely terrible at it. Jan has the patience of a saint. It also didn’t help that I couldn’t see the teacher when she was demonstrating the steps. I definitely elbowed a lot of people in the shoulder and took down blond Nastya more than once. Annabel ended up dancing with one of the Russian deckhands. He was super ripped but also a bit drunk and apparently was supposed to be working because his boss came in towards the end and dragged him out. After dance lessons I gave Julianna from the winning group of the scavenger hunt the bottles of champagne, and she gave me a big hug. It was cute.

For our last night on the boat, a bunch of us just ordered cocktails from the bar. We all wanted to have one last dance party to the terrible keyboard music. The old man came out with a huge grin on his face, knowing he had a built in audience of young drunk Americans. At first he played his usual Michael Jackson opener, and then followed that up with yet another Michael song. By the time he hit Michael Jackson song number three, we were sensing the alarming trend. Allie went up to him and asked if he could play anything more recent, and he replied that he didn’t know anything past 1992. We ended up dancing to 6 Michael Jackson songs in a row, including Thriller. Even the 80s didn’t have that much consecutive Michael Jackson. It was difficult, but us Muscovites are used to making a really lame situation into something fun (VDNKh, anyone?). At the end of his set, we asked the piano man for one more song before he left. Of course it was terrible, but I don’t think he’s had that receptive of an audience since…well since1992. After dancing, we all headed out to the deck. Kat disappeared with Rees, one of the Vladimir boys, so I kept myself entertained by talking to Chris the Marine, also from Vladimir. We had a really intense conversation about the army and the role of politics in the US, and then decided to go looking for the lovebirds. We couldn’t find them, so giving up, I went and joined in on a huge conversation going on by the doors. I sat down on Paige’s lap and realized it was Jon and Nathan arguing intensely with Julia and Rhiannon about the meaning of love. It was a little to much for me at the moment, so I left and found a bunch of Moscow kids lounging on one of the couches on the third floor. They were all interested in where Kat was, with Mikel asking if they were “making kissies.” I replied that I didn’t know, but that I had the room key, so nothing was going down in my room. On the way back to my room, I found Kat and managed to ask her what happened when Rees was in the bathroom. She replied nothing, just a lot of talking. I told her that was super lame, as I had no love life and needed to live vicariously through her, so she better get some action. Then I went to bed, resting up for our last city, Volgograd.

The day before, Carlos had been telling me he was going to “rock my world tomorrow,” to which I either replied “Oh, please,” or “Stop being a creeper, Carlos.” Well, on the last morning, Carlos got up early and gave the morning wake up call and announcements over the PA system that goes into everyone’s room. The funny thing is that I was in the shower when this happened, so I didn’t even hear it. When we were waiting for our last tour bus of the trip, Allie saw Gunter and told him that she needed one last picture with him. He got all excited and waving his arm like a boy scout troop leader said, “All the ladies, come follow me.” He lead Kat, Allie, and I over to where the front of the boat was docked and proceeded to take a picture of us, even though we wanted a picture with him. After he took his picture, Allie explained to him in German and English that she wanted a picture WITH him, so I finally got a picture of Gunter with his favorite American. We returned to where our groups were waiting for the buses, and Gunter wished us safe travels back and good luck in life. I saw a tour group of older people already climbing up the stairs to the buses in the distance and asked Gunter, “Isn’t that your tour group?” Gunter looked over as the tour guide waved the number on the stick she was holding, indicating that Gunter better haul ass to catch up. He replied “Ja, Ja!” and sped walked away to catch up with his fellow elderly.

I didn’t really know what to expect in Volgograd, but it was fantastic! First of all, we had an amazing tour guide. He was an older man, maybe in his late forties or early fifties, with jet black hair and blue eyes. As Julia said, “He wasn’t hot hot, but I mean, if I was his age and his wife, I’d think ‘Man, I really lucked out.” He had on a cream colored leather jacket, a touristy Boston shirt, the kind with the bubble letters filled in by scenes from the city, and white leather pointy shoes that were brown on the tips. Stylish. He brought visual aids with him in a leather portfolio, which seemed super professional to us, seeing as how we were “excursovod” experts by this point. We went and saw the remnants of a tractor/tank factory that survived the battle of Volgograd, the main square of Volgograd, and then we went and saw the craziest war memorial ever. As we got closer to it, we just saw this giant angry stone woman holding a massive sword appear over the hillside. We walked up past a beautiful reflecting pool and went up stairs which had on either side stone walls which had soldiers engraved in them and sayings like “I will fight to the death” and “Glory for the motherland.” As we walked up the stairs, intensely patriotic music was playing along with clips from war speeches and the sound of machine guns. It was like we were in some Soviet war propaganda film. Once we got to the top of the stairs, there was a big statue of a super muscular man holding a machine gun, which (with perspective) looked like he was in front of the giant woman statue on top of the hill. It was supposed to represent a Russian soldier defending Mother Russia. I only know this because there was an English speaking tour group behind us. Next we walked into this gloomy tunnel seemingly carved into the hill and came out into this stunning circular room with had a giant statue of a hand holding a torch in the middle of the room, with a giant flame coming out of the top. There were two Russian soldiers standing on either side of the flame, and you could put flowers on the plaque on the ground in between them, which represented the fallen in the battle of Volgograd. There was a large circular hole in the top of the room, which let in enough light to make the shiny walls sparkle red and yellow. It was incredibly beautiful and it was completely silent except for the solemn music playing over the speakers. All around the circular wall were the names of the Russians who had died in the Battle. We also got to see the changing of the guards, as those who were on duty couldn’t move at all, so I think they switched places relatively frequently. The process was super formal and precise. After we left the memorial, we saw a beautiful stature of a mother holding her dead son. The son’s face was covered t represent that not only Russians died during the battle, but that war kills both sides. Then we walked up to the giant, and I mean giant, statue of Mother Russia. The enormity of it was just absurd. It was kind of like having the Statue of Liberty in the middle of the country side. I bet it was even bigger than the Statue of Liberty, actually. The whole thing gave you an incredibly Russian patriotic feeling, which is impressive considering we were a bunch of Americans.

When we got back to the boat we had to quickly pack up our stuff and put it outside our rooms so the deckhands could bring it to the buses so we could head off to the train station. While I was packing, I noticed someone hovering around the doorway, where I had left the door open. I looked over and realized it was one of the Russian deckhands that Kat and Paige had smoked with during the scavenger hunt. He had a camera in his hand and made a motion like he wanted to take a picture. For a second I was like, WTF? But I figured what the hell and posed, giving two thumbs up. He took my picture and looked at it in the viewer and smiled and left. It was kind of bizarre. Then I saw Allie in the hallway, so I joined her to say goodbye. At the moment, Gunter came by and asked if we were leaving. Allie replied yes and he wished us safe travels again. She said something to him in German and he said the same word back and then he gave her and I a huge bear hug that we definitely a little creepy. When he left, I gave Allie a look of incredulity and asked her why the hell she would ask him for a hug. She laughed and said that all she had said to him in German was goodbye, the hug was of his own accord. She later told me that when she was getting on her tourbus to go to the station, Gunter actually came on the bus to wish her goodbye again and say he would miss her. So we left our slightly creepy German stalker old man on the Academic Grushkov and headed off to the train station.

When I got on the train, I found out that I was sleeping in the same little section as Jon Smith, which was incredibly awkward. But then I found out that all the St. Pete and Vladimir kids were on the next car attached to ours, so that made me happy. I went over into the other car and talked with Allie and finally learned how to play Durak. I gave her one of my extra apples, calling it a friendship apple. She commented that it was a huge apple and I replied that’s because it’s a whole lot of friendship. Around dinner time I went back into my train car and shared dinner with Allison, Rees, and Kat. We had a communal style dinner of cheese, sausage, bread, crackers, and pomegranate, with each of us adding something to the dinner pot. It was getting a little awkward after dinner, with Allison and I quickly becoming the third and fourth wheels to Kat and Rees, so I left that section of the car and went over to talk to Big Ben and Katie and Jan. In the section next to Katie’s, Aleksander Ivanovich, Jon, the dance teacher, and a few other teachers and RDs were drinking a lot and having a good time. In Katie’s section, there was a crabby old woman who apparently had gotten into a fight earlier with Aleksander Ivanovich about his drinking and threatened to call the police on him and get him kicked off the train. Crazy train drama. Aleksander Ivanovich went through our whole train car, making us try this terribly lemony tasting apply fruit that he said he picked from his own garden. He didn’t know what it was called in English and made us try to guess. Finally he made the last kids on the train look up the name for it in the dictionary and it turns out it was quince. Bleh. That night, a lot people wanted to check out the dinner car, and they all came back with stories of the “Medved” (bear). Apparently there was a really drunk 50 year old Russian man in the bar, with his shirt halfway unbuttoned and was growling like a bear. The only reason the students put up with it is that he was so drunk that he was paying for everyone’s drinks. By the time Kat and Rees went into the dinner car to try their luck, he had spent most of his money and told Kat he would only buy her French fries with meat, to which she said no thanks. I actually slept well that night, only waking up once to put on a sweater as it got freakishly cold halfway back to Moscow. When I woke up, I got in line for the bathroom and had to use Jon Smith’s toothpaste as mine was at the bottom of my suitcase. You know you’re finally comfortable with your RD when you borrow their toothpaste. We were all sitting around in my cabin, Jon, Big Ben, Erika, Little Ben, and couple of Russians, when Allie came over and sat down. I offered her another friendship apple, and she said she had some gossip for us. I asked what it was and she said, “Guess who didn’t sleep in their own bed last night?” “Kat!” I said, and Allie explained how she went by Chris the Marine’s section and he put a finger to his lips in a shush symbol and pointed down at the bed below him, where Allie saw a little blond head snuggling with Rees and realized it was Kat. I guess our expressions of surprise were so loud that Jon woke up from his nap and asked what happened and I replied that we were gossiping. Of course, he wanted to know what we were talking about, so finally we made Allie tell him. Jon got all excited and said he was going to go see. He asked is he should bring his camera with him, and we all shouted no! (Jon likes to take creepy pictures of us). He said that he wanted to go into the other wagon and act all concerned and say that he was missing a student and we might need to stop the train to find her. Jon left and came back about 10 minutes later, even more excited than before. “They made a fort!” he said. He explained that when he went to go look, there were sheets and blankets hanging from the top bunk all around them. Jon started making jokes that we should plan their future for them, and he saw a lot of Moscow – Vladimir trips in their future. Erika started naming their first children. Kat would later tell me that it was the worst experience of her life to wake up from spooning with someone to see Jon Smith, the geography teacher, and the director of the program all staring at you from behind a blanket fort, which she, for the record, did not construct. As we rolled into Moscow, Daniel Potts stole my Cosmopolitan magazine in Russian and read it for a good hour, Carlos taught Jon the “Rolling the dice” dance from Knocked Up, and I played one last game of Durak. It was sad to finally arrive at the train station, our amazing vacation over, and back to grey, depressing life in Moscow. We’d seen almost all the way down to the Caspian Sea, witnessed more Lenin and WWII monuments than most people see in a lifetime, and laughed so hard most days that we cried. I’d say all and all it was a great trip.

Volga River Cruise, Part III: “To Health and To Victory”

The next morning at breakfast, as I walked over to the buffet, Jon stopped me and asked “tee zhiva?” which means, “You’re alive?” I didn’t understand him at first, but then I realized he was making a joke about me being drunk last night (which I actually hadn’t been). It was official, the wall was down. Jon was a human. As I ate breakfast with Allie, Kat’s friend from American University, who I can’t say enough good things about, and Kat, an old German man who somewhat resembled Sigmund Freud in a rugby shirt, walked by, waving to us an wishing us “guten appetite.” Julia had said he’d met her and Annabel in the hallway before breakfast and in his broken English had asked “Do you want some meat?” Julia guessed he’d been trying to say “do you want to meet,” but it freaked them out all the same and they hauled ass to the dining room. After breakfast, we left the boat to see Samara.

In Samara, we had the worst tour guide known to man. She was a pretty woman, but chose to tell us about sights after we passed them or point things out that we couldn’t see from the bus. We drove past this sick monument with about 9 people depicted on it, one on a horse, a couple crouching with guns, others carrying wounded. Julia and I were practically drooling to get off the bus and reenact it. Of course, the bus didn’t stop there, nor did it stop at Stalin’s bunker, where the other tour group got to go into and see his meeting room, where he would have lived and slept, and they even got to use his telephone. Our tour guide did point out however, all the shops in town where you could buy baby clothes, if you lived there, and where people went to school. The only place we stopped was by this giant silver monument of a man holding a v symbol which kind of reminded me of a giant Chrysler hood ornament. On our way to see a Russian Orthodox church, we passed by this graffiti in English on the sidewalk that read “Beer Sex Drugly Cats.” I’m not quite sure what drugly cats are, but I’m sure they’re fascinating. Paige had Erika, Daniel, me and Emma, act out the beer, sex, drugs, and cats respectively. Erika just looked drunk, Daniel looked like he was having sex with the sidewalk or at least attempting to, I used my scarf (which I brought in case of Russian Orthodox churches, thank you very much) as a tourniquet and pretended to be doing heroin and Emma game herself ears and whiskers. Hopefully I’ll steal the picture from Paige. It’s pretty great. After we took the picture, on the way to the church, Jon came up to me and with a completely straight face said, “I spoke with the RD from St. Petersburg and his students are saying you’re pretty wild.” Paige and Emma looked worried, but I just went “Har, har Jon,” because I had figured out this was his joking style. Although it did make me quickly recap what I had done the previous night before coming to the conclusion that yes, it was just a joke. After our brief church visit, our tour guide dropped us off in the main city area and gave us an hour to shop. Paige, Erika, Kat, Julia, Emma, Katie and I saw these signs for a market place sketchily located down an alley, but once we followed the arrows to a two story building and inside were a ton of venders, selling clothing and toys and all sorts of things. Julia bought an epic belt that had non-sensical phrases on it like “lets make love ruby Tuesday” and “find touch seashore” and “stronu man date booooga.” It was the best 8 dollars spent on the entire trip. Then Kat discovered the scrunchie jackpot. We all bought the tackiest scrunchie we could find to wear for the scavenger hunt that night. Two nights back, over drinks, Paige had suggested we have a treasure hunt on the boat to entertain ourselves. I asked her if by treasure hunt she meant scavenger hunt, and thus the idea was born. I’d been collecting ideas of funny things to do over the past day and a half, thinking it would just be the Moscow girls participating, maybe the Moscow boys at most, having no idea how big it would become later. So after seeing most of Samara, I can say the best thing the city has going for it was the graffiti.

When we got back on the boat, we resumed our rigorous schedule of sunning ourselves on the deck. While everyone was getting toasty, I went around and asked various St. Petersburg and Vladimir students what I could include about them to make the scavenger hunt funny and relevant for their groups. I got some quirks for a couple of kids and also got some good information about the RDs. Then I went over to sit with Allie and Kat at one of the tables to get more information on the Vladimir group. While I was interrogating poor Allie, the old German man from breakfast came over to our table and handed Allie his business card. He pointed out that he had written down his email on the card. I read the card. Apparently his name was Gunter Sievert and he was an architect. Then he talked to Allie in his broken English about emailing her parents and she replied to him in German (which she picked up while studying in Argentina, she’s amazing). Then Gunter told us he was going to “make a photo of us” and whips out his digital camera and saying “chis” (cheese), takes a picture of Kat, Allie and I. After looking at it and proclaiming “it is goodt,” he walks away to go talk to another old man on the other side of the deck. I was about to burst with laughter, but Allie said “wait for it, wait for it,” until he had gotten out of earshot. “What the hell just happened,” I asked her, out of breath from laughing. “Oh, you mean Gunter?” She asked. “By the way, it just makes it so much better that I know his name now. Well, yesterday I saw he was wearing a Nebraska University t-shirt, I know exactly where and in what store they sell them, and I figured what are the chances a foreign tourist has been to where some of my family lives, so I went up to talk to him. Apparently he hasn’t been there, but a lot of his family lives there. He told me all about how they moved there in the late 1800s and how he really wants to go visit soon. So he got all of my information so could meet up sometime in Nebraska. I mean, I told him I won’t be back there until at least August of 2009, and I’m pretty sure we’re not going to meet up before he dies, but I really want to go to Munich and thought I could stay with his family there when I go. So yeah, now he has my home address, my mother’s and father’s cell phone numbers and emails. Which is pretty safe.” And that is Allie for you. Amazing.

Soon it was time for lecture again, but this time I had something to keep my occupied. Paige and Allison agreed to help me hand copy my scavenger hunt list, seeing as how we needed about 7 copies and were stuck on a boat. I assigned completely arbitrary point values to the tasks, trying to vaguely keep in mind how difficult they would be to actually do. Those I assigned 500 points I thought would be impossible (I was later proved wrong). I kept ripping sheets from my lame little Russian graph paper notebook out and we undertook the project while Alexander Ivanovich rambled on about the various areas of the Volga and its natural resources. At one point Jon gave me a funny look, as if he couldn’t figure out why I was so vehemently taking notes to this obviously mind-numbing lecture. We continued copying the lists on deck, with Jon and Alexander Ivanovich clearly getting suspicious and asking what we were doing, to which I sketchily replied “neecheevo” (nothing). With a small break for dance class again, to learn the Vienna Waltz with Jan, we finished up the lists in time for dinner. Here is the final list, with added explanations to help explain why I chose certain tasks and help with inside jokes:

Rules

Photo documentation needed
Takes place from 9:30 to 11:30 pm
If a task involves a person, they can’t know it’s for the scavenger hunt.
If you combine any of the tasks, you get double points.
The winner gets glory and an $8 bottle of champagne.

The List

1. Get a photo with all of the RDs. (10 points) Bonus: +20 points for every article of the RDs’ clothing you are wearing.

2. Get a fish ball (aka last night’s dinner) (50 points) (Explantion: The night before, we had these crazy nasty meat ball things made of fish for dinner. Carlos always asked for seconds of dinner, but even he didn’t want more fish balls)

3. Get a picture with the woman who plays the keyboard in the bar (25 points) (Explanation: Every night this woman played terrible songs on her keyboard. I’m pretty sure she’s the wife of the male keyboard player. No one would listen to her and she would just say “spaceebo, spaceebo” at the end of each song to an empty room.)

4. Ask Cain (St. Petersburg) to dance (100 points) (Explanation: Cain is the scary psycho killer ballet dancer who helped out with dance class. Enough said.)

5. Feed Jon (RD, Moscow) (50 points) (Explanation: Due to his lack of enthusiasm when I offered him a cookie, I figured he might not accept food from students)

6. Get a photo touching Matt’s (Moscow) hair. He can’t know you are doing it (100 points) (Explanation: Nathan, the RD from St. Pete really inspired me on this one. Plus it’s just so fun to touch Matt’s hair.)

7. Find out the cost of a sauna (10 points) (Explanation: Paige came up with this one)

8. Get a fantastic orgasm (200 points) (Explanation: All I have to say is, Thank you Julia. We purposely left the wording ambiguous because I’m pretty sure all the people who were going to participate didn’t know it was a drink at the bar)

9.Smoke a pipe (500 points) (Explanation: It’s not the smoking so much that was a challenge, but rather that I only saw one pipe on the whole ship, and an old Danish man was smoking it)

10. Take a photo of the geography teacher (Moscow) and Galina Mikhailevna (Moscow) sharing an intimate moment (200 points) (Explanation: Both of our teachers from Moscow acted on the surface like they hated each other, because Alexander drinks like a fish and Galina hates drinkers, but we totally caught them shopping together in the grocery store in Kazan and Alexander would take pictures of Galina when she wasn’t looking. They’re actually in love. They just don’t know it yet.)

11. Ask 5 men you don’t know “boxers or briefs” and write down names and preferences (200 points)

12. Buy Tom (RD, Vladimir) an ice cream (100 points) (Explanation: Apparently Tom is addicted to ice cream, and the real challenge here was to find out where or if they sold ice cream on the boat).

13. Construct a human pyramid on the deck (25 points)

14. Get a picture with all of the Vladimir kids (25 points) (Explanation: There are only 8 of them, but this turned out to be harder than expected because they all played on different teams during the hunt).

15. Get a life jacket lesson from a deckhand (100 points) (Explanation: Our first day on the bat, we had a boat safety lesson in Russian (how safe!) with the Cruise Director. One poor Russian deckhand looked so pained as he was demonstrating how to use the lifejackets properly, I thought it needed to be recreated).

16. Talk to Ben Roberts (Moscow) about Germany or Mark Twain. (100 points) Bonus: +50 points if both in the same conversation (Explanation: Little Ben is in my small group for classes and probably every other word out of his mouth is about Germany or Mark Twain. Big Ben will always look at me and roll his eyes when it happens).

17. Take a whiskey shot with the geography teacher (Moscow) (500 points) (Explanation: Jon is always telling us how Alexander Ivanovich is a whiskey aficionado and Little Ben, who had to share a room with him, said that he brought 3 giant Nestea bottles with him on the cruise, and they weren’t filled with iced tea…)

18. Do a cartwheel in the hall (10 points)

19. Get Nathan (RD, St. Petersburg) to convert you to Mormonism (500 points) (Explanation: The St. Pete kids told me that Nathan originally came to Russia to ‘convert souls’ to Mormonism, but he subsequently lost his faith, smokes 3 packs a day and takes shots with students.)

20. Ask Cain (St. Peterburg) about self-defense (200 points) (Explanation: Creeper McCreeperson is also a self-proclaimed Martial Arts expert who does not hesitate to use his skills on foes).

21. Find a cork screw (50 points) (Explanation: This was out of pure necessity. We had a bottle of wine we couldn’t open for three days).

22. Eat “lowshad” (horse) with the geography teacher (500 points) (Explanation: Matt, Mikel, and Big Ben had been telling us that the night before Alexander Ivanovich told them to come into his room and he gave them horse jerky to try. I was so jealous).

23. Take a photo with a frisbee (25 points) (Explanation: The St. Pete kids told me that they had a couple of guy Ultimate players who played with a St. Pete team and brought frisbees with them everywhere they went.)

24. Get Dennis (St. Petersburg) to go off on a 5 minute rant (Hint: talk about breaking a 1000 ruble bill or about Russia’s inefficiency as a country) (100 points) (Explanation: Dennis was a cute boy from St. Pete who ruined everything when he opened his mouth. He was one of those people who just sound so stupid when they talk, you think your own IQ must have dropped a couple of points for having listened to them).

25. Find out the name of Bekah’s (Vladimir) guitar (50 points) (Explanation: She carries it around everywhere with her. It’s name is Sascha, FYI)

26. Get Carlos (Moscow) to swear (200 points) (Explanation: I was told Carlos did not swear due to his religion. This turned out to be false. Damn it.)

27. Get “Big Ben” Beresford (Moscow) to sign a piece of paper with one of his old man sayings on it. I.e. – a kettle of fish, horses for courses (200 points) (Explanation: Big Ben is always saying he is so much older than us ( a whole 4 or 5 years), but he really does act like an old man in the sense that he uses all these phrases and expressions that no one under the age of 75 has heard of. We started calling him “grandpa” and asking him to “tell us stories about the war.” He actually went along with it, by saying starting off his stories with ‘well kids, back in my day…”).

28. Find out who Magnus is and find out what his name is in Danish (200 points) (Explanation: Magnus was the youngest of the 45 Danes on the boat. He was late 20s and Allie befriended him one night and got her drinks paid for by him).

29. Find out how many rooms are in the boat (25 points)

30. Get Matt from Mississippi (St. Petersburg) to sign a Disney song (100 points) (Explanation: This kid, two nights before, had sung both the male and female parts to A Whole New World out on the deck. Not flamboyant at all. )

31. Get into a conversation with Charles (Vladimir) about Russian politics (200 points) (Explanation: I had met Charles during orientation in DC and thought he was the most obnoxious person ever. After sitting at his table for dinner the night before, I discovered he was quite entertaining, if you didn’t take anything he said seriously. He went off on a 10 minute diatribe on what he would do if he ruled Russia. Hint: It would be a dictatorship and corporal punishment would not only be allowed but encouraged).

32. Get into the engine room (500 points).

33. Take a Titantic-esque picture on one of the decks (10 points)

34. Take a shot with Nathan (RD, St. Petersburg) (100 points)

35. Take a photo with the cruise director (50 points)

36. Fit your entire team into a cabin room bathroom (100 points)

37. Make Alec (St. Petersburg) play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the guitar (100 points) (Explanation: One our first night on the boat, he broke out his guitar for a Nirvana-inspired sing along.)

38. Ask Katya (St. Petersburg) why she came to Russia. She must answer: to meet Russian men and/or Sergei (200 points) (Explanation: The St. Pete kids gave this one girl a hard time because she already had a Russian boyfriend. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of jealous)

39. Get Allie Bartle (Vladimir) to dance (100 points) (Explanation: She hadn’t really danced yet in Russia and she has some of the most fabulous white girl dance moves EVER.)

40. Do the worm on the dance floor in the bar (50 points)

41. Make an announcement over the microphone system at the bar (500 points).

42. Find one of the ship’s Danish tourists (100 points) (Explanation: We’d been told there were 45 Danes on the boat with us but hadn’t actually met any yet).

43. Get a cigarette from one of the Russian deckhands (200 points) (Explanation: The night before the sketchy deckhands had come up on the deck with us while we were drinking and smoked in a corner while some of the St. Pete girls flirted with them).

44. “Make a photo” with Gunter Sievert, everyone’s favorite German tourist (500 points)(Explanation: Why should we be the only ones with the pleasure of knowing Gunter?)

45. Have Annabel (Moscow) rap to you (500 points). (Explanation: Annabel is the tiniest white girl you have ever seen. And she can do anything. She’s basically a superhero).

46. Get your drinks paid for by a non-ACTR person (200 points) (Explanation: This was inspired by Paige and Erika getting their wine paid for by two old American men at the bar the night before)

47. Ask Pete Austin (St. Petersburg) about hammers, Bruce Springstein, or the weaponization of space (200 points) (Explanation: This is what the St. Pete kids said this boy talked about all the time. I don’t know. I don’t ask questions, I just write.)

48. Wear a scrunchie from a Russian (200 points). (Explanation: The reason there’s only 48 tasks and not 50 is that I got to the end of the sheet of paper at number 48 and said, eff that, and cut the last two off. You can do that when you’re the creator of the game.)


At dinner that night, I told everyone at my table about the scavenger hunt and tried to make sure they would do it, when Rhiannon, another Moscow student, came over and said “You’re doing the scavenger hunt, right? You better! It’s going to be great!” Rhiannon is 26 and applying to grad school, so I really didn’t think she’d be into something so childish, but she went around to every single table at dinner to advertise for the scavenger hunt. I don’t know why, but I can’t thank her enough. Everyone was to meet on the deck at 9:30. We pre-gamed in my room for a little bit while Paige corn-rowed Kat’s hair, and then we hung out in Mikel’s room. When 9:30 rolled around, the girls and I headed up to the deck. I was really nervous that no one would come and it would just be us 5 doing crazy stuff around the boat, but when I got up to the deck, there were SO many people there. Maybe 25 or 30 people. Somehow Jon and the geography teacher, Alexander Ivanovich, had heard about the scavenger hunt too, and were asking if they could play. I handed up all the lists to each group (I think there were 6 or 7 groups of six people) and told everyone to let the games begin.

Before I could even look at the list, Allie had gone into the bar, where the older passengers were having some sort of seminar, and pulled Gunter out, telling him we needed to “make a photo.” Of course, he looked confused but super psyched. We got a group photo with Gunter and already had 500 points. Before he could make his way back into the bar, I think another group figured out who he was and asked him for a picture, too. Basically Gunter was a rock star for two hours that night, and he completely ate it up. I remember at the end of the night, seeing him talking to someone on the deck at 11:30, which is WAY past his bedtime. I also saw one of the other groups taking a picture with some strange old foreigner, and then only after words asking him his last name. It turns out they had the wrong Gunter. Who would have guessed there would be more than one?

After our Gunter picture, team Scrunchie, which consisted of me, Kat, Paige, Rhiannon, Allison, and this random boy from St. Pete, Matt, who liked singing Disney songs, we decided to go in for the kill. Going for double points, Allison bought a fantastic orgasm from the bar and we decided to “feed it” to Jon. In typical Jon fashion, he sniffed it first, because we are not trustworthy especially when bearing gifts, and then he took a sip. Later that night he would go on to give sips of it to various people, saying “I just shared my fantastic orgasm with you.” Next Team Scrunchie decided to move to the 3rd floor to get out of the crowd of scavengers and get some more of the tasks done. However, on the way down the stairs, an elderly couple stopped us and asked if we were doing a test, as we all had papers in our hands and we running around. I told them we were playing a game, and they asked what kind and we explained. I could hear in the background another group of students asking some other old people if they knew who Gunter was, which made me happy. The old couple told us the game sounded like fun and were about to go on their way, when I suddenly thought of something. “Hey, where are you from?” “Oh, we are from Denmark.” “Yessssss.” We had our Danish tourists. Before we took our picture, Rhiannon asked them to teach us something in Danish, so they taught us how to say hello, how are you. We were terrible at it, and the old woman clearly let us know that, but they were happy to take a picture with us and be involved in the game. When we finally made it down to the third floor, Rhiannon did a cartwheel in the hall, and Matt from Mississippi apparently was one of the St. Pete Frisbee boys, so he went back to his room and got his Frisbee for us. Paige did a handstand while holding the Frisbee in her mouth. We didn’t get double points for that, it was just fun. Next, we squished all of us in a cabin room bathroom (which was fun). Then Kat spied some deck hands through the glass door marked “Crew Only.” They were smoking out on the side deck, so we nominated Kat and Paige to talk to them for a cigarette. Paige knocked on the door and they motioned that Kat and Paige could come outside with them. Of course, when they asked for a cigarette, the deckhands didn’t have any, so one of the boys had to go back to his room t get them. Kat felt bad about that, because she didn’t really want the cigarette, it was only for the game, so when he came back with it, Kat and Paige felt obligated to smoke with the deckhands. It took forever and while there were doing that, Rhiannon went to go check on the fish ball situation, which apparently was that they didn’t have any left and why the heck do we want them? I’m still not sure who Rhiannon asked, possibly a waiter, but props to her. Then Rhiannon, Allison, Matt, and I decided to stake out the sauna because four of the St. Pete boys were in there, and we needed them for four of the tasks. When they still hadn’t come out after 15 minutes, we gave up, not wanting to waste our scavenging time waiting on half-naked boys. Kat and Paige still hadn’t returned, so I went opened the crew only door and said “You don’t need to seduce them, just get a cigarette.” Kat and Paige told me to come outside because they were trying to explain to the deckhands what was going on. I don’t know if it was the beer I’d had or the adrenaline from the hunt, but I took it upon myself to tell the guys in Russian all about the game and then explained it to them. Kat added they should play, but they said they had to work later. I then told them that if anyone asked them for a cigarette, to say no. They smiled and agreed. All is fair in love and Scavenger hunts.

Finally finishing their cigarettes, Kat and Paige came back in the hall, just as another group was carrying around a bright orange life jacket, presumably coming from their safety lesson. Everyone was really into the hunt and being super competitive, it was great. Suddenly, I saw Aleksander Ivanovich rushing by with a serious look on his face, and for a second I thought he was really offended by the scavenger hunt, the task abut he and Galine immediately coming to mind. I had a momentary mental justification that if I got in trouble or even thrown out of the program for the hunt, then at least I’d go out for doing something really awesome. But my fears were for naught, for a few seconds later, Julia, Mikel, Annabel, Matt, and David (another one of the teams) came rushing by with huge grins on their faces. They were having shots with Aleksander Ivanovich. Not fair. My group followed them to his room on the ship, where he promptly shut the door in our faces as the other group was passing around shot glasses. We heard laughing from the room and finally they came out with even bigger grins on their faces. We made Rhiannon talk to our geography teacher, because her Russian was the best, and ask if we could do shots next. He decided to give our group a hard time and acted like he didn’t know what we were talking about. Rhiannon’s strategy was to then pretend like we didn’t know anything about it either and that we didn’t even know what whiskey was. Aleksander Ivanovich totally came out of left field and told Rhiannon she was a terrible dancer, and that watching her dance with Big Ben at dance class had made him laugh. She was a little offended (she was actually one of the better ones, I thought). Then out of nowhere, Jon speedily walked by with his camera and said “I’m not playing, but I’m on your side,” and took a picture as he went by. After some more verbal sparring with Aleksander, he finally let us in his room. He gave us each a metal shot glass that he had a stack of, and took down his prized bottle of Jameson whiskey and poured us each half a shot. Apparently he didn’t let any of the girls from the other groups drink, but seeing as how we were all girls (having lost Matt from Mississippi somewhere in the shuffle), he didn’t seem t have a problem with it. It was hard to get him to let us take his picture with the shot, but we finally did. He made a toast, in Russian, “To Health and To Victory” and then we downed out shots, the whiskey burning as it went down. Kat told me the next day, that in he slightly intoxicated state, she thought he had said “To Health and to Obed” (instead of Pobeda aka Victory), with “obed” meaning lunch. She didn’t understand why we were toasting to lunch, but just thought, ok, to lunch then, bottoms up. That was probably the best part of the scavenger hunt, drinking with our professor. Only in Russia could a middle-aged male teacher bring 5 girls into his boat cabin to drink hard alcohol. And that’s pretty fantastic.

After the shots, we went to the boat’s second bar to find Julia and Annabel talking to the bartender and waitress abut something. The rest of their group was sitting at the tables, so taking a break, my group joined them, waiting to see what happened next. Julia later told me that she explained to the waitress that she needed to microphone for a silly game they were playing, and the waitress replied that it wasn’t silly if we were all running around the boat with huge smiles on our faces. Julia and Annabel got the microphone, which ended up not working, but undeterred, Annabel said into the microphone in Russian, “Hello everyone. Thank you for this opportunity on this beautiful boat. Thank you and goodnight.” And then she bowed. They were racking up the points. On our way out of the bar, we saw Big Ben in the hall and asked him to sign one of his phrases. Allison wrote down “That’s another kettle of fish,” and Ben took the paper, just looked down and it and frowned, making a tsk tsk sound. He said, “If you’re going to quote me, make sure you do it right,” and crossed out what she had written and wrote, “that’s a whole NOTHER kettle of fish.” He then signed it and drew a maple leaf next to it, saying “If it doesn’t have the maple leaf, it’s not authentic.” Big Ben is the best fake Canadian ever. Apparently for every group he wrote down a different saying, each one as corny as the last. After hitting up Ben for his autograph, we attempted to finish a couple of tasks back on the deck, including meeting Magnus, getting Little Ben to talk about Germany, trying to get Carlos to swear, and talking to Charles about politics. While this went on, one of the other groups brought Tom an ice cream, to which he replied, laughing, “No more ice cream. Tell the other groups, no more!” Apparently it was his third sundae of the night. We then saw through the glass door that Allie was in the bar, so we went in and began to dance with her, to accomplish one of the tasks. Before we knew it, we inadvertently started a dance party, and all of the Moscow kids and assorted Vladimir and St. Pete kids joined, twirling and twisting and having more fun than one would think you could have dancing to muzak from a crappy keyboard. At one point, Gunter made a guest appearance, popping in by the door and kind of bopping up and down before leaving again. Between songs, I somehow mustered up the courage to ask the keyboardist in Russian if I could use the microphone for a second (busting out my uzpolzobat verb, mind you. Tricky), and he just handed it over. We had Matt from Mississippi sing “A Whole New World” in Russian on the mic, for double points, and then finished up the dance party. Before we knew it, it was 11:30 and all the groups had made their way to the bar. I thought everyone would be cool with saying they had a good time with the hunt and that was that, but every group wanted me to say who won. Not exactly in the best state to add, Allison took half the lists and together we totaled up all the points. It was so incredibly funny to see all of Jan’s pictures proving he had done the tasks, reading on another group’s list that they asked boxers or briefs to the old German tourists (including Gunter. He wears boxers, FYI. Although I really doubt if he understood the question). Another group made it into the boiler room. It was crazy. And then a really pretty, polite girl from St. Petersburg, Julianna, gave me her list, and I began to tally her points. Her group had done EVERYTHING and for double points. Nathan, the RD, who had been MIA the whole time, they had managed to find and had him convert them to Mormonism WHILE taking a shot with him. They got a cork screw FROM the boiler room. They got their drinks paid for BY a Danish tourist. They found the sauna boys. They got Annabel to rap, having paid her with a vodka shot. They even smoked a pipe. While every other team had between 3000 and 5000 points, they ended up with 9000 points and I immediately declared them the winners. They seemed really happy and Julianna told me how much fun she had doing it. A lot of people came up to me and told me they had a good time. And so many people were involved – the dance teacher was on a team, the Russians who came with us were on several different teams, the old tourists enjoyed talking with us and being a part of the game, all the teams were a mix of the three city groups, the staff of the boat thought it was funny and by the end, Aleksander Ivanovich must have been feeling no pain, seeing as how, according to the lists, he did a shot with every single team. I went to bed that night happy, exhausted, still a little drunk from the whiskey shot, and in disbelief that I somehow organized such a ridiculous and successful event that involved an entire cruise boat.

Volga River Cruise, Part II: “I Look Like I’m Wearing A Red Condom For My Head”

The next day we had a lot of time on the boat before we docked in Kazan, so we all headed up to the deck to enjoy the sun and the beautiful scenery we passed by on the river. Jon brought up Russian scrabble for some people to play and others played the card game Durak (fool), which I only learned to play on the train ride back to Moscow. A bunch of us Moscow kids and some Russians decided to play charades, but to make it Russian charades, which severely limited our vocabulary. We acted out things like “babushka” (grandma, or just an old woman in general), Tseretelli (this crazy Georgian artist who makes tacky sculptures all over Moscow, the names of movies, some of our teachers from university, and then Annabel acted out Carlos but pretending to rub an imaginary person’s arm. Carlos is very touchy-feely with men and women, and we all put up with it for a while but now people are starting to say something, which just makes it even funnier. Jon wanted to play, so I told him to act out “Rysalka” (mermaid). It was a little sub-par, more like a fish sitting down, but it was good for Jon. After charades it was time for our lecture with our geography teacher. All three city groups had to attend, and our geography teacher talked about Tatarstan (the region) and Kazan (the city) that we were about to visit. My interest quickly waned, so I instead drew a picture of the back of Anton’s head, because he was sitting in front of me and blocking my view of the lecture visuals. It surprisingly came out pretty good for being on graph paper with a pen. After what seemed like forever, the lecture finished and we all went back to our rooms to get our bags and coats so we could head out into Kazan.

We all headed out to the tour buses, with Moscow going in one bus and Vladimir and St. Pete going in the other. Erika, Paige, Allison, Kat, and I decided to sit in the five seats across the far back of the tour bus, instead of the pairs of seats on either sides of the aisle. We laughed the entire time, cracking jokes and telling stories. It felt like we were in middle school and it was the cool kids’ section. When we finally got out of the bus, we stopped at the Kazan Kremlin. Kazan was probably my favorite city. It has a strong Islamic influence, so all the architecture has a Middle-Eastern influence. It’s stunning. Of course at the kremlin, there were a bajillion wedding parties. One in particular featured bridesmaids with silver, tight dresses that looked like metallic trashbags. It was pretty hot. We walked over to a beautiful blue and white mosque, and the tour guide said we were going in. That’s when I saw all the girls pulling scarves out of their bags and I realized I needed to cover my head and hadn’t brought anything for the occasion. Panicked, I asked Jon if I needed t cover my head. At first he said no, and then realized what I was asking, and said, yes of course. Everyone else had hoods or hats and I had nothing. Luckily (or not so luckily, as it turned out) Big Ben had his red bandana thing that he wears around his neck that he let me borrow. It’s the same shape and stretchiness and a leg warmer, except it’s made out of thin material and you wear it in a circle around your neck and it keeps it warm and looks like a bandana tied around your throat. Well, I fanagled it so it covered all my hair, but it ended up looking ridiculous. I basically looked like an alien with no hair and a really long neck, and everyone couldn’t help but laugh when looking at me. Of course, a million people took my pictures, so I’m sure it’ll be gracing facebook sometime soon. I gave Big Ben this sad look and said, “It’s like a red condom for my head,” which made him laugh more. The mosque was absolutely beautiful, but it was hard to hear what the tour guide was saying because my ears were being completely covered by the bandana. When we finally left the mosque, I thanked Big Ben for the red head condom and told him I never wanted to borrow it again. Of course, the next stop on our tour was to a Russian Orthodox church, where you also have to cover your head, but luckily Erika had a hood on her sweatshirt and used that and let me use her scarf. The church was beautiful as well, with icons covering the wall, and the whole place smelling of incense while a choir sang on the altar. We went into another church and then walked around the kremlin, with its beautiful towers and buildings. We even saw the tower where, as legend has it, Ivan the terrible was supposed to marry a Tatar princess, and she told him she’s only marry him if he built the tallest tower in the land in a week. She didn’t think he could do it, but he did, so the night before the wedding she threw herself off the top of the tower and that was the reason Ivan the Terrible destroyed Tatarstan, out of vengeance. We had a really short time after the tour to explore the main pedestrian street of Kazan before we had to get back on the bus. Everyone looked so different from Moscow, and then we realized it was because they were smiling. I definitely want to go back next semester and explore some more. It was my favorite city of the trip.

That night Kat and I invited a bunch of the girls in our room to drink because we had more space as a double than those in the quads. We all shared wine, champagne, and beer, and discussed how sexually frustrated we all were, with no boys around to hit on. The boys in our program are so sweet and funny, but we are all like brothers and sisters, which I guess is great for learning and friendship, but really boring on the romance front. Kat was complaining how hard it was not having any prospects, and Paige just turned around and said, “I haven’t told you about my sexy dream with Hanson, have I?” We said no and got very wide-eyed. Paige goes, “Well, it was about two weeks in and it’s been a while, you know, and one night I had a dream that Hilary, Erika, and I were at a concert and we ended up meeting the Hanson brothers, and I was having sex with the oldest one (and I don’t even think they are cute!) and then my host mom walked in and started yelling at me. Yeah, it was pretty fucked up. God, I am so desperate right now.” We all agreed that it was going to be a LONG eight months. Then Allison mentioned owning Harry Potter cards, to which we replied she must show them to us. They were from the fourth movie and each card had a scene from the movie. Erika told us Paige could tell fortunes, so Paige proceeded to make up fortunes by passing out the cards face down and saying “This is who you will marry,” “You will throw this one off the boat,” etc. Apparently I’m supposed to marry a crazy man in a cage and Kat is meant to throw Dumbledore off the boat. After our fortunes, we went up to the deck of the ship and joined everyone for drinks. Paige and Erika had this terrible tasting honey beer, which was more like honey hard alcohol, and Matt, Mikel, Daniel and Grey were drinking “Ohota” this really cheap, disgusting bear that comes in a plastic bottle and is the highest alcohol percentage you can have before it stops being considered beer. We aren’t allowed to bring vodka or other hard liquor on the boat, so the boys were just trying to get the best bang for their buck. At one point the geography teacher, who was also a little drunk started asking us why we were drinking what we were drinking. When it came to me, I tried to explain in Russian that I was drinking Baltika Lite (Baltika being Russia’s cheap generic beer) because I didn’t want to get fat, but I pronounced the word for fat wrong and it came out like Tolstoy, the author. Everyone laughed and the geography teacher pronounced that I was a little “choot-choot” which is hard to translate, but in this context means a little drunk. Sadly, at that point I wasn’t, I just always mix up the stress for fat and for Tolstoy. Later I did get a little drunk, especially after helping Paige finish off her honey beer, which did not taste as bad three beers in. At one point Matt dared me to lick Big Ben’s ear, and I actually tried, but did not only because I couldn’t reach that high. Mikel was a flirting machine, spinning in circles when he went from one girl to the next, especially concentrating on a St. Petersburg girl who I named “Carrie Fisher” from her resemblance to Princess Leia. I also recall the RD from St. Petersburg and a girl from the St. Pete program all of a sudden touching Matt’s hair, to see what it would feel like (he gets that a lot, as his hair is super curly and blond). The RD proclaimed it felt like goat’s fur, and Matt was slightly insulted. Kat and I went to bed with the room still spinning, but all and all it had been a good night.

The next morning was not so pleasant. I woke up at 6:00 am to take a shower and actually made it all the way to undressing and pulling the curtain around half the bathroom, when a wave of nausea swept over me and I thought “Whoa, I can not do this right now.” It also didn’t help that I was on a boat and it was rocking back and forth. I wrapped my towel around me and went in our little hall by the closet and lay down on the ground. Kat was not awake yet, but I really didn’t care either way. After about 5 minutes, I felt ready for attempt number two. After my successful second time in the shower that morning, Kat and I headed out to our excursion in Ulyanovsk. Ulyanovsk, formerly Cimbirsk (as all Russian cities have gone through at least 4 name changes since 1900), is the birthplace of Lenin so of course it was practically Leninapalooza. Our tour guide was like “This is where Lenin went to school. This is where Lenin walked to school. This is where Lenin occasionally stopped to throw out some trash.” It was bordering on the absurd. Because Carlos was late to get on the tour bus, the tour guide woman decided to make him her “special assistant.” He had to write down everything important she said and take pictures and at every stop she would ask, “Carlos, Carlos, where is Carlos? He should write this down.” Jon just egged it on by telling Carlos what questions to ask the woman. We all thought it was pretty hilarious, myself especially, because he had given me a really hard time about the red head condom the day before. On our way over to our first (yes, there was more than one) Lenin museum, there was a pretty epic monument featuring one man holding up a sign on a post with an icon on it, and another riding a horse to victory. Annabel asked our tour guide for the number on the post she was holding which indicated our group, and I couldn’t figure out why until I looked over at the monument and she, Daniel Potts, and Mikel were recreating the monument right in front of it, with Annabel being the man with the icon, Daniel being the horse, and Mikel riding him. It was fantastic. I don’t personally have the picture of it, but I will try my hardest to steal it from someone, just for your enjoyment.

After the first Lenin Museum, which told us about Lenin’s House, we then got back on the bus to go to Lenin’s House. It was a tiny little place on a quiet street. It was pretty moldy inside, although I only know this because Julia is highly allergic to mold and her eyes were incredibly bloodshot. All the rooms were set up like there were when Lenin lived there. It was basically like, here is where Lenin’s dad wrote his letters, here is where Lenin slept, and here is where his 5 brothers and sisters slept. We saw Lenin’s backyard, complete with a croquet set (what a bourgeois pastime! Gasp!), and walked through Lenin’s garden. Then our geography teacher proceeded to quiz us on the kind of trees and shrubbery around us, as if we possessed the vocabulary to identify a linden tree or a flowering bush in Russian. On the way back to our bus, we witnessed a pretty frightful sight. There was a woman facedown on the sidewalk, her face in the leaves, and her legs bent at such an odd angle that I thought she was dead. Wouldn’t that have put a damper on the trip. We all got on the bus, but from the window, we could see random men crowding around her. Finally one of them lifted her head and there was blood dripping from. I was really convinced now that she was dead, but she started twitching and moving, and someone got a cloth to wipe her face off with. Before we left, I could see the men helping her up and walking her somewhere, presumably to get help. I guess she must have tripped on the sidewalk and hit her head really hard, but it was incredibly scary. If there was anywhere I would be likely to see a dead body, it would definitely be in Russia.

Back on the boat, it was the nicest day yet, about 80 degrees and impossibly sunny. Paige, Erika, Allison, and I all got out lounge chairs and slept in the sun. Katie, Julia, Jen, and Jenna joined us in our little corner of the boat. The better looking boys from the St. Pete group were behind us, sitting without shirts us and joking “we should totally charge admission.” Modesty. How refreshing. After acquiring more freckles on my face, we all went inside for our “special tour” of the captain’s quarters and engine room. It’s the kind of thing that elderly tourists eat up, but we were kind of like, WTF are you saying, as we unfortunately lacked nautical vocabulary, and also, it’s super hot in here, can we move on yet? The engine was room was kind of cool, as they led us through the grated area by all the roaring machines. After the tour, Jen and I were craving sodas, so we bought some from the bar and we and Allison went and got cookies to share from our rooms. We had a little cookie sharing table (in Russia, you share food all the time. I’ve begun to buy more than I want because I know I won’t be the only one eating the food), and Jon came by and I offered him a cookie, and he gave us a strange look and asked what was wrong with them. We then realized Jon didn’t trust us giving him food. As if we’d poison him that blatantly. Give us more credit. After cookie sharing came dance lesson time. The dance teacher on board was a woman who gives lessons in Moscow at my school and taught Jon to dance for his wedding this past summer. I guess part of her getting to come on the trip was agreeing to give us lessons. That night it was the Cha Cha. Almost all the students showed up, with a surprising number of bys turning out. The teacher chose this really tall, creepy guy from St. Pete to be her partner, because he had formal ballet training. The boy, Cain, introduces himself as “Cain, you know, like the world’s first killer.” Apparently he’s really sweet and like a giant teddy bear, but he gives me too much of a Jack Nicholson in The Shining vibe. We all had to partner up, and before I could get stuck with an awkward partner, I grabbed Jan, because I felt both comfortable and non-threatened by him. Well, as it turns out, Jan is a phenomenal cha-cha dancer. His little shoulders get moving to the beat and his hips sway from side to side. It was so much fun, and now I can say that I know how to cha cha. Nice.

That night somehow I found my way down to Ben Beresford’s room, where basically all the Moscow students were congregating. Jon had said it was impossible to fit more than 14 people in the cabins, but we had about twenty. It was so cute, with four of us sitting on each bottom bunk, a couple people on the top bunks, and then various people sitting on chairs in any free space left in the room. We were all joking and laughing, with Julia bringing up the fact that were was a drink at the bar called a “fantastic orgasm.” Of course, as is his superhero ability, Jon pops up out of nowhere whenever you A) are saying something about him or B) are saying something awkward. So Jon came in just as Julia was talking about giving someone a fantastic orgasm (the drink). Jon told us we were being too loud and we should probably close the door. We just figured he’d come to yell at us for all drinking in one room and being noisy, but then he went to close the door, with him still inside the room. I think we all got this look on our faces like, oh shit, party’s over. But then Jon proceeds to lean on the wall and told us that everyone was saying what a great group we are, how nice and respectful we are and how we like to just have good, clean fun. We were so surprised he said this and we felt all warm and fuzzy inside. He then told us we were a lot better than some of his other years, where he had absolute horror stories. And then, with his awkward grin on his face, Jon asked is we wanted to hear some of the stories. Of course we all said yes like a bunch of schoolchildren at story time, and then Jon told us some pretty shocking stories, probably more from the fact it was him telling us them, than the actual content. Some things are sacred (even for me) so I will only tell you one of the Jon stories that was related during Jon story hour. Apparently Jon’s first year being an RD, he took the group on a trip to St. Petersburg. He was checking on all the coupes (because they actually sprang for them back them), when he got to the last coupe and it was locked. He knocked on the door, and the students inside said just a minute. About 5 minutes late they unlocked the door, and Jon went inside to find them all completely naked and drunk. It was three boys and three girls, and nothing sexual was going on, they just really thought it would be fun to travel to St. Petersburg naked. Jon just told them to stay in their room and not leave and to think about putting clothes on soon because the train was arriving in half an hour. Jon left and came back 15 minutes later and they were still not dressed. He had to beg them too put their clothes on, and they promised they would, so he left again. A few minutes later Jon heard a scream. Apparently one of the drunk boys had left the room to pee (sans clothing, of course) and the conductor, a woman had seen him and screamed, causing more Russian women to see what was wrong and scream too. And that was one of the tamer stories. All I have to say is, wow. Jon has lived through some pretty outlandish experiences. After story time with Jon commenced, we all went up to the bar feeling like we’d broken some new ground with him. In the bar, they had an older man playing cheesy early 90s songs on his keyboard, and by playing, I mean moving his fingers to those prerecorded songs the keyboard comes programmed with. But at this point we were all drunk/ warm and fuzzy from Jon story hour, so all of us Moscow kids got up on the dance floor and danced out little hearts out to The Police and Madonna. Big Ben pulled out some sweet dance moves circa 1982, and at one point Mikel and Anton had a brief dance-off in the middle of the circle. It was so much fun. After the music commenced (the player’s bedtime was 10:30) we headed out to the deck. In the bar I had been talking with a boy from St. Petersburg named David who had been on the Lenin tour with us. I think I picked the wrong person to talk to, because he was really intense about our conversation, and when I left to go to the bathroom, he apparently was asking everyone where I had gone. Out on the deck, I rejoined David so I could meet some of the other St. Pete kids. As we were talking, Jon came over and I said hi, and he couldn’t tell who I was, so with the camera that never leaves his side, he took a picture in my face so he could see who I was. Jon then threatened to take more pictures, and we said no, and then he told me not to be bad. I think that was his idea of joking. Jon was joking now. Progress.

Volga River Cruise, Part I: “Spakoynee Noch, Anton”

Hey guys! I hope you all are having a good October so far. I had such an amazing time on the Volga River cruise. I’d been feeling a little depressed in Moscow so the cruise was the perfect remedy. It was about 60 or 70 everyday, beautiful and sunny, and I can honestly say I can’t remember the last time I’ve laughed so hard or for so many days in a row. My ribs actually hurt.

On Thursday, October 2nd, we were set to leave at 11:30pm from the Kurskaya train station. Because we were leaving so late, we still had to go to class that day. I live an hour away from school, so I decided to bring my huge, obnoxiously blue duffel bag to school with me to save time after school. Way to be inconspicuous. After school, Paige, Erika, Kat, and I started coming up with some “goals” for the trip. Goal number one was who we wanted to pursue, if you will, during the cruise. Paige was pretty adamant about hers being the RD for St. Petersburg, Nathan. He’s 31 and pretty funny and pretty cute. However, he is a very hip dresser and perhaps a little too metrosexual, and Erika and I we kind of hinting to Paige that he might me gay. She just said that was an extra challenge. Our other goals ranged from reenacting as many Titanic moments as possible before it got to obnoxious, buy and wear some scrunchies (they are still very popular in Russia. The women even match them to their outfits.), make numerous sailor/seamen jokes, and getting Jon (our RD) to smile. I think this list of goals really set the tone for our trip.

After finishing the list, I followed went with Kat to her apartment, which is pretty close to school, to put my duffel bag there until we left. When we got to Kat’s apartment, her host mom / babushka greeted us. She was SO cute! She was so friendly and happy to see Kat and incredibly nice to let me drop off my stuff in her house (Russians are very protective of their homes and personal space, and for good reason). She gave me some tapochki (house slippers) to wear, but as I slipped them on, I realized they were WAY too small. Maybe a size 4 to my size 7 ½ size feet. She asked if they were ok, and I lied, luckily my jeans were pretty long so they covered up the fact that my heels were hanging a good two inches off the back. I was waiting in Kat’s room for her to pack, and I noticed several pictures of a college-age looking American boy hanging from the frame of her dresser. For a minute I thought it was a sibling of Kat’s, or her boyfriend, but then it dawned on me. “Kat, that’s not Chris, is it?” She looked up from stuffing clothes into her bag and replied, “Now you know what I have to deal with.” Kat is always telling us about how her host mother goes on and on about Chris, a former host student she had from Boston and apparently the second coming of Jesus. Chris did this, Chris did that, Chris made SO many Russian friends when he was here, Chris could bring about world peace, etc. So not only does Kat have to hear about the famous Chris at every meal, but he now stares out at all the time, his cheesy senior class photo grin silently mocking her while she sleeps.

We returned to school for Russian-American club, which we have every Thursday. Most people went home to have dinner and pack, but because I couldn’t, Kat and I decided to go out to dinner nearby school. Kat saw Nastya, one of the Russian girls from Russian-American club and a tutor, smoking outside school, standing by her suitcase. Kat whispered to me that Nastya probably wasn’t going home either before the cruise and we should invite her to dinner as well. I had a sudden feeling of awkwardness because Natsya doesn’t speak English, and my Russian is terrible, but I am SO glad Kat invited her. She said yes, finished her cigarette, and we headed off to the restaurant. We ended up having a two hour dinner speaking in Russian and learning a lot abut Nastya. She likes all the same bands as Kat and has as much trouble with English as we do with Russian. I felt like I’d accomplished something after that dinner. After dinner, the three of us walked back to Kat’s apartment, Kat and I needed to get our stuff and Nastya didn’t want to walk to the metro alone. When we got to the platform at the Kurskaya Metro, we were a little early. As more and more people arrived, we quickly realized Jon was going to be late (of course). While we were waiting in our large group, these two drunk Spanish-speaking men were coming up to everyone and trying to talk to them in Spanish. It was really creepy and they sought Carlos out because they heard he spoke Spanish well. One of them gave Carlos his business card and proceeded to go into this elaborate handshake with him, presumably because Carlos is black and the Spanish-speaking man thought that’s what you do with black people. Jon finally showed up and asked us if we knew those guys, and that’s when they finally went away. On the way up the escalator from the metro platform to the train station, a different creepy man stood next to Paige and started harassing her. “Big Ben” (we have two Bens, so we have to differentiate them. Big Big Ben is 25, has dark hair, is from Canada and likes to say a lot of old man phrases, and Little Ben is blond, from Wisconsin, and really enjoys talking about Germany and Mark Twain.), anyway, Big Ben was standing on the stair right next to Paige and didn’t do anything. We gave him crap for that. Of course, AFTER Paige got harassed, Jon made an announcement to watch our things and to tell people off if they are harassing you. When we got to the train station, I really wanted to buy something to drink. I went over to the vending machine and put in 35 rubles. When I pressed to number I wanted however, the machine didn’t register that it was still in stock. I thought I was going to lose my money, so I quickly pressed the coin return button. In Russia, there are 1, 2 and 5 ruble coins. For some unknown reason, the machine decided to return my 35 rubles in the form of 1 ruble coins. The coins came spitting out onto the floor and quickly filled up the coin return, so much so that I couldn’t get my hand in to take them out. Grey came over and helped me get all the change out, all 35 coins, which I then had to redeposit one by one in order to actually get something to drink. And that is life in Russia for you.

We finally got on the train to Nizhny Novgorod at 11:30. We had gotten seats/beds all in the same train car, but interspersed were random Russians who varied in temperament from civil to crabby. For those of you who have never been on a Russian train before, or for those of you who had enough sense to pay for a coupe, riding in the plat car is certainly an experience. There are six beds per little area, four on one side of the aisle, like two sets of bunk beds, and then another two on the other side of the aisle, also set up like bunk beds. Although imagine bunk beds without ladders which also have to double as storage space and seats as well. You pull a grimy “mattress” (thick comforter) off the top shelf above the higher bed and put that on your “bed,” with your blanket being a sheet. On the way to Nizhny Novgorod I was in a “cabin” (not like it has doors, more like a section) with Anton and Allison, my classmates, blond Nastya (friend of the other Nastya that I went out to dinner with and also a tutor), a random Russian girl, and an old Russian man. Before the train took off, blond Nastya kept making out with her boyfriend, which was super awkward because I was sitting next to her and Anton and Allison were sitting on the bed/seat across from them. At one point the boy stopped kissing Nastya, stared at Anton and said in Russian, “What are you looking at.” Unfazed, Anton, just replied in his deep, slow voice (in Russian) “Nice suit.” The Russian boy begrudgingly introduced himself. I thought he was coming on the trip with us, but he left before the train took off and ran alongside the train outside our window as it rolling away from the station.

Once the train took off, I decided to change my pants. I was wearing jeans and it was practically a sauna in the train, as the windows don’t open and there are over 60 people in the car. I got out some boxers that ended up being a lot shorter than I remembered, and decided to change on the top bunk of one of the beds. Anton even moved over under where I was so he couldn’t see me while I changed. Somehow I thought it would be a good idea to have my legs facing the aisle. Allison gave me her jacket to cover up while I got my jeans off. I had finally wriggled my jeans off and was about to put on my boxers, when at that moment, the perfect storm of awkwardness hit. The old Russian man was trying to set up his bed, so he brought his wife in from the next section to help, along with the Russian girl who was already in our cabin. The conductor came through to take our tickets at the same time the woman selling tea came by. At that moment, the old man asked Anton to put one of his bags on the shelf above where I was lying, without pants. So the next few seconds went something like this: Allison sees what’s about to happen and gets this pained look on her face, I see what’s about to happen and just brace myself for the most awkward situation ever, Anton lifts the bag above me, sees that I am without pants, makes some sort of startled expression, but continues to shove the bag up on the shelf so it doesn’t fall on me. Because of his exclamation, the ticket collector, the tea seller, the old man and his wife, the Russian girl, Nastya, and Allison all look up at me. And then time stood still. Gradually everyone peeled their eyes off me and I put my boxers on. But when I tried to get out of the bed, I fell out due to the lack of ladders, and finished my stumble into the public aisle with the stance gymnasts do after completing a floor routine, hands raised in a “thank you, thank you” manner. We weren’t even on the cruise yet and eight people had seen me in my underwear. Quite an achievement. When we went to bed that night, I ended up sleeping on a top bunk across from Anton. Before this trip I’d never really talked to Anton, but now I definitely felt bonded. Before I went to sleep, I said, “Spakoynee Noch, Anton” (Goodnight, Anton). He looked over for a second, got a small laughing grin on his face, and said spakoynee noch as well.

We arrived in Nizhny Novgorod around 7:30 am. Tired and greatly in need of a shower, we were all herded onto a tour bus by Jon. We got a tour of the city in Russian, seeing important sites and parks. After our bus tour, we were brought to this recreation of Nizhny Novgorod as it was in the 1200s. Nizhny Novgorod is famous for its old wooden villages, the kind you would picture when you think of ancient Russian life in the forest. It was beautiful in the outdoor museum, as I guess you could call it. It’s the height of fall now, so all the trees were beautiful reds and yellows, yet it was sunny and warm outside. The tour guide at the village brought us into all the big wooden houses and explained to us (obviously in Russian) what each room was used for, showing us old tools and decorations. She was super into it, and explained everything down to they very last wooden spoon. The whole time we were talking around, Jon was surprisingly not paying attention, and started playing with a kitten while his wife looked on. We were all shocked. There was Jon, crouching in the leaves, using a stick to get the kitten to play with him. At one point Julia uttered “Oh my God, Jon has a soul.” It was bizarre. Meanwhile the tour guide woman was getting pissed because we were all watching Jon and not her. After the forest house museum thing, they brought us to another museum within the city. This museum was extremely pointless, as it had all the same things the forest museum had except under glass. We were all really hungry and progressively more and more tired. After the pointless museum, the tour guide from the bus decided she needed to point out important buildings around the city. I was so dizzy and exhausted, if looks could kill, that woman would have been dead twice over. We finally made it to a pizza place, slava boga, and then proceeded to the kremlin of Nizhny Novgorod. In Russia, when you get married, it’s a tradition to visit 5 or 6 important sites in your city and take your wedding photos there. I guess Nizhny doesn’t have that many memorials, because everyone and their brother was getting married at the kremlin. Russian brides tend to favor dresses large enough to fit a small army underneath and bridesmaids dresses so tacky even a hooker would have to say, no thanks, I’ll pass. At one point, Matt, Mikel, and Annabel, who are all in a small class group together at university and somewhat known for their hijinks, were walking down these winding stairs when a wedding party came by to get their pictures taken on the same stairs. Rather than move out the way, the three of them stayed in the photo, smiling from ear to ear as the wedding photographer took their pictures. All of us below the staircase clapped for them, proud to know these American wedding crashers. The wedding party thought it was funny too. I think having tourists in your wedding photos is pretty common here. As we all looked out from the kremlin walls, getting a panoramic view of the city, I saw a huge cruise liner coming into to shore. I joked that it was our boat, expecting us to have some remodeled soviet-era tugboat, when Jon announced to the group that is was our boat. It was a miracle.

We were finally allowed on the boat. Kat and I had somehow been roomed together, and in a beautiful double room that had a ton of space and a view of passengers getting on and off the boat (perfect for knowing if we would be late getting off the boat for our daytrips of not). The room had a closet and a refrigerator and our own bathroom and shower. The bathroom was interesting. The showerhead was in the middle of the room, so when you wanted to take a shower, you pulled a curtain around half of the bathroom, blocking off the toilet and door from the spray of water, but inclosing the sink and mirror in with you, with the floor having a grate in it. It was kind of creepy having a mirror while you showered, but also kind of fun when you could brush your teeth and shower at the same time. Annabel and Julia discussed the possible trifecta of going to the bathroom, brushing your teeth, and showering all at the same time, but sadly, I don’t think it was ever accomplished. We got dinner served to us in the lovely dining room, sharing the room (and the boat) with elderly German, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and American tourists. The mean age for the two groups (us and them) was 20 and 70, so the dynamic on the boat was quite interesting. The young male Russian deckhands were psyched, as we were the youngest group they’d had all season. We were on the cruise not only with the Moscow group, but with the St. Petersburg and Vladimir group that we had met at orientation in DC, as well as Russian tutors, a dance teacher, and various teachers, including our geography and phonetics teachers. That night we all brought out the beers we had purchased in Nizhny (per Jon’s advice) out on the dark deck of the ship, and gathered around tables, talking and watching the stars and laughing and getting to know each other. For one of the first times in Moscow, I didn’t feel so alone. It was only the first night, but it was pretty fantastic.