Dear all,
About a month and a half down the road from my last blog update and quite a bit has changed in between. First of all, it’s no longer 37C outside (100F) but about -20C (-4F), I’m no longer in the Southern Hemisphere but in the Red Square, and I’ve accumulated more air miles in the last month than I have in the last few years combined.
Between then and now I’ve:
-->Finished off the semester at Macquarie with good results;
-->Gone to Melbourne and experienced living with a wonderful Australian family who I happened to meet in the Sydney Aquarium;
-->Spent an awesome post-finals week with Alicia in Tasmania oystering, snorkelling, and fishing;
-->Brought my count of airports I’ve spent the night in to three: Melbourne airport, leather couch near the baggage pick-up, pleasant chat with a Canadian backpacker around 3am;
-->Arrived in Sydney with 30 hours to final departure and turned in my internship work, cleaned the apartment, returned Katie’s sneakers, retrieved snorkelling gear, had a lovely goodbye evening at Manly with friends who I am busy missing, proved my hard-earned sea legs by winning a “standing on one leg on a moving boat” contest with Jonas the whale photographer, crammed four and a half months of my life into two 23 kg suitcases, said goodbye to my wonderful Sydney apartment and flatmates, made it to the Sydney Airport thanks to Jai, had my Vegemite stolen by the unfriendly security officials, bought some more Vegemite, boarded the plane… and… said goodbye to Australia. Four and a half months went by in a heartbeat.
26 hours later I was being hugged and lifted off the ground by my now extremely tall and handsome brother at 1am and without further ado, except for a short stop at Taco Bell, I was walking through the door of my 307 Ritchie Pkwy home to the sound of excessive tail-wagging and purring.
The next 6 days were spent catching up with Cody who came to visit for a wonderfully long 5 day weekend, conducting wedding planning research in Barnes and Noble, celebrating our third year anniversary in Tono, decorating the Christmas tree, and visiting all of the studying minds at UMD busy worrying about finals. I also managed to slip in a second attempt at Shrimp Scampi, in continuation of my gradual attempt to learn to cook “real people” food, and am proud to say that attempt #2 was much better than attempt #1. If Zdiska is reading this, I just want you to know that: no, the garlic did not turn bright blue this time☺
And now, now I’m in Moscow. Today I just returned from visiting the Moscow State University (MGU) with Jenya where she studies. Much more than a normal university campus, the main building (glavnoie zdaniya) reminds one of a beautiful fortress complete with statues, a wide circular driveway illuminated in light and suggestive of a history of horse-drawn carriages, and a fortuitous and awe-inspiring silhouette against the grey winter sky. Jenya craftily planned a way to sneak me past all of the security guards by lending me her friend’s student ID card, and so I got to see what being a student at this beautiful university must be like. We walked through marble halls, past small cafes and stands selling pens and notebooks, through dark halls with the outlines of anonymous busts emerging from the shadows, up the marble stairs where we came across a couple waltzing in a long empty hall, and into the student cafeteria which was complete with rose designs on the ceilings. The food was pretty good as well, especially for cafeteria food. Very typical Russian. I had fresh borsht, potatoes and a katleta, a slice of cake with red current berries on top, and compot (a Russian juice like beverage made by letting fruit from the summer sit in 3-L glass jars of water until it turns into a delicious juice). In fact, you are almost guaranteed to find jars of compot sitting in any Russian house you may walk into; we have about 10. Speaking of compot, Jenya and I ended up with five cups between the two of us, due to a miscalculation of “diner points.”
Well, I’m going to finish off here for now to keep this from getting too long. Enjoy this first album of my life in Moskva:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2032968&id=1125810475&l=12beb9fe59
Finally, I’d also like to wish everyone a Merry Merry Christmas! Even though no one really celebrates it here, I’m still feeling the Christmas cheer and wishing everyone a wonderful cozy morning of sitting around the tree with the family and opening presents. Hope you all get everything that you wished for!
Much love,
Tashi
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