Anyway, it's quite nice being back. I like living in this apartment with Lauren a lot. On Saturday, I actually only left the place for about 15 minutes to go to the grocery store with Cathy & Carrie to get things to make fried rice for dinner. On Sunday I only left for about an hour, and today I had to venture out longer to do some Smolny-related tasks, but for now, I'm taking a couple vacation days before classes and insanity start up again this week.
So, it's not so interesting for you to hear about how I've been lounging around in my pajamas and putting up postcards all over my walls, but instead let me tell you about my little eleven-day adventure getting myself from Boston, all across Europe, and back to Russia. Yes, I did it alone, and yes, look I am still alive Mom, check me out.
BOSTON ----> PARIS..................
It started fairly uneventfully, flying out of Logan on Monday night 1/26/09, a five hour lay over in the Dublin airport where I slept on a window ledge, arriving in Paris on Tuesday afternoon 1/27/09. I took a taxi to my hostel in Montmartre, and the first person I met in Paris was the cabdriver who..... spoke Russian. He was telling me about a flash drive or something and couldn't think of the word in English, only in French, and he asked, "Do you speak French?" "No, I speak Russian..." and he said "Ahh! Ты понимаешь русский язык!" ("You understand Russian!"). It was so bizarre. I wasn't expecting anyone in France to speak to me in Russian, especially not the very first person I talked to there. Anyway, he's a Serbian guitar player and told me that in school there they first learn Russian, then French, and then either English or German so by the time they graduate from high school they should know four languages. I was impressed, but he said, "Well, it's not actually that good because the teachers can hit you."
PARIS..................
By the time I arrived at the hostel, I had barely checked in when Erin B showed up in the lobby of my kind of funky, kind of pretentious, kind of hipster hostel. So I said fuck it and forgot the idea of showering or napping or settling, and went right out with her for coffee. This was actually probably the best thing to do for jetlag, and Erin B and I talked so damn much and she kept me so entertained that I was able to make it to a normal hour before crashing to bed in the hostel. That first night we spent a long time drinking coffee, and then went down to the Seine and looked at the Louvre and some other sights all lit up at night, and then we sat and chatted more while Erin ate a kebab (French version of schwarma sort of). Erin also introduced me to the Parisian metro that night which I hadn't ridden on since the last time I was in Paris over ten years ago.... Their metro is just nuts. There are so many more lines and stops than necessary it seems after the minimalist St. Petersburg metro where the stops are up to a 40 minute walk apart.... the amount of stops on the Paris metro seems frivilous. But it was fun as hell to ride, and I loved the older clunkier cars with the doors you have to throw a mechanical switch to open when the train stops.
That whole first night in Paris was just super surreal for a number of reasons.... being back there for the first time in so long, and Paris being the first place abroad I remember traveling to (not like I remember Japan or Hong Kong) made me really excited about traveling all over again, it reminded me of that new thrilling feeling. It was also weird because I have a much larger passive knowledge of French than I thought I would from those three years of studying colors and foods and Haiti at Nashoba, and so I could actually understand most of what I read and what people said to me, but I couldn't reply. My instinct has become that whenever anyone addresses me in a language that is not English to reply in Russian. Unfortunately, the rest of the people I talked to in Paris where not Serbian and had no idea what I was saying until I remembered where I was a switched to English. The last way that Paris was super surreal though and also kind of hilarious was seeing how it is the city that St. Petersburg wanted to try to be so desperately and failed miserably at. They got some aspects right -- being built on a river, cobblestones -- but the charming little winding streets and the unbelievable food..... not quite. Though when Erin and I traded stories of our study abroad experiences, it seems we face a lot of the same problems: apathy, rudeness, everyone hating their jobs, nobody wanting to help you out, bad driving. Just Erin has access to better food.
On my first full day in Paris, I woke up and made my way up the hill of Montmarte and then up an additional 300 steps to the top of the dome of the Sacré-Coeur where I had a huge and cloudy view of Paris where I noticed for the first time what an odd structure the Eiffel Tower really is.
After this I managed the Paris metro alone and to find Erin and her friend from her program to meet up for lunch. We went to perhaps the most stereotypical little French café, homey and delicious (Erin and I both had miniature basil ravioli) complete with a golden-red cocker spaniel named Cannelle (French for "cinnamon," something I remembered from trying to bake an apple pie in Paris with Dad one fourth of July long ago). Erin then had class for a couple hours, so I made my way wandering up towards Notre Dame Cathedral -- exciting because the last time I saw it it was covered in scaffolding being cleaned -- and made my way back to meet up with Erin and her friends again to go have tea in the Mosquée. Yes, only in the mosque in Paris is there a beautiful elegant old-fashion tea room where you buy red and golden glasses of mint tea with honey and perhaps the best bahklava I've ever had in my life, everything costing one, solid, heavy, old-fashion-feeling 2 euro coin.
Erin and I then spent the afternoon walking around the Marais district which is old and funky and Jewish. We took the metro again to the Charles de Gaulle-Etoile stop and took a look at that big old Arc d'Triomphe and wandered up to Erin's host family's house as they had invited me over for dinner. Erin's family definitely wins for perhaps the most adorable, young, attractive French couple ever. Husband and wife, 36 and 31, and their little 2.5 year old daughter, all cute with dark hair and glasses. They made me dinner of honey chicken and honey pasta and we were able to have a pretty good conversation considering my severe lack of knowledge of French and their broken English. I hadn't realized how much my French vocabulary had increased due to how many words the Russians stole from France. Our dinner even ended with this nice apple digestive liquor that is made on the husband's family's vineyard in Normandy.
After, Erin and I went on our own little date for dessert -- chocolate mousse and mulled wine -- and sat outside at a café under the warming heaters. God, how French. And then we met up with some of her Tufts people but failed at doing anything exciting, but it was late by this point anyway so we went home.
On my second full day in Paris I had to go to some art museums, of course. This day was a little chaotic though because there were strikes all day -- the "greve"-- meaning that the entire second floor of the Louvre was closed because it was a public museum and they didn't have enough people to work. But the Louvre is so damn big we had enough to see anyway without the second floor.
For a break after the Louvre we met up with Erin's friends again, this time including, yes, FATIMA AZIZ from Nashoba, how nuts is that, and we went to this pretty tea room Frenchy place called Angelina's for hot chocolate. The plan had been just to have hot chocolate there and go elsewhere for lunch after (as their hot chocolate alone is 7 euro let alone their 25 euro sandwiches...), but as their version of hot chocolate is basically three whole chocolate bars melted into a glass with a handful of whipped cream on top, we were too full to eat anything more, so after Erin and I went to another museum. We tried to go to the L'Orangeire, but failed as it was closed due to the strikes, but the Jeu de Paume, the photography museum of Paris, was open. I got to see Robert Frank's photos of the Americans and then also his views of Paris, which seemed all too appropriate. I was quite happy.
We wandered through the Tuileries gardens, recreated a photograph from my youth, tried to go to the Pompidou but it was also closed due to the strikes. Then Erin and I went back to the Marias district, and I paused to take a photo of some graffiti someone did of Obama dressed as Superman and an Austrian man who was standing next to us smiling and chuckling at the graffiti as well gave me his email address to send him the photo. See, Nunni? They love him over there. Erin and I then proceeded to eat the best falaffel in the world, and meet up with her friends to go all the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower for the view at night. That was pretty damn spectacular, fog and mist and all, the only strange part was the beacon of a search light that looked like an alien space craft landing in all of my photographs.
For my last day in Paris, Erin had class in the morning so I entertained myself by going to the Pere Lechaise cemetery. I absolutely loved the place, mossy and sunny and full of these old, elaborate gravestones that were a wet dream to photograph. I shot an entire roll of film just in that cemetery. Not only that, I found some famous people's stones: Jim Morrison, Gertrude Stein, Frederic Chopin, Georges Bizet, Edith Piaf & Oscar Wilde.
I met up with Erin and her friend Sarah for lunch -- we got take-out Italian food from shop that smelled as good as the food tasted -- and sat out on a bench on Saint-Germain to eat it, then going to the Café de Flore where famous writers used to hang out back in the day, apparently.
And now, here is the totally nuts part of my last day in Paris: before my train left at 8:00PM, Erin and I managed to go to two more museums AND have a cute little dinner of crepes on the top of Montamartre. I'm still not sure how we pulled it off, but we got ourselves to both the l'Orangeire and the Dali Museum (which is at the top of about a billion steps). It was totally worth the chaos and ankle strain, as at the l'Orangeire I got to relive my childhood visit to Paris, seeing that same Matisse painting of the depressed girl not wanting to practice the violin that I connected to so much when I was younger (another photo-recreation was done).
So with Erin waving me off at my train at the l'Est station, I continued my way East towards Berlin.
PARIS ----> BERLIN..................
I have only two comments about my uneventful train ride from France to Germany, as I slept most of the eleven hours:
1. Western European trains are unbelievably clean compared to Russian trains. Holy shit. I went into the bathroom wearing just socks and there was toilet paper provided and no urine all over the floor.
2. There was not just a dog in my six-person cabin with me, but a fucking CAIRN TERRIER. Waldo in coloring, but looked all like Gus. He belonged to a French middle-aged woman and her elderly mother who were traveling together, and he took a liking to me and tried to snuggle with me on my bunk at one point, but the woman wouldn't let him.
BERLIN..................
Melissa found me bright and early on Saturday morning 1/31/09 in the central Berlin train station. Upon seeing each other, Melissa and I realized that the last time we had hung out was over a year ago, in the snow, in Harvard Square, as Melissa hadn't come home for her spring break last year and I was already in Russia by the time Melissa got back to Massachusetts in June. This being realized, we decided we needed a huge chunk of time just to sit and talk. First we sat and talked in Melissa's apartment, drinking Colombian coffee brought back by her German roommate's boyfriend, the most typically-Melissa apartment in the world full of Tin-Tin posters and organic food and bright white walls. We then sat and talked more in Melissa's favorite café, not too far from her house, the Café Bilder Buch, and then we went back and talked more and prepared to go out for "The Night of the Long Museum."
My timing was perfect for this night, as it is the one night in the year when all the museums in Berlin (all 1,000,000,000,000,000 of them) stay open until 2am. Melissa had already purchased us tickets and spent hours pouring through the booklet of all of the museums trying to decide which ones I would like the best. First though we had some curry fried at Curry 36, known for their currywurst, and then Indian food with Melissa's friends from her program. We then started with the Gay Museum as it was right nextdoor to the Indian place.
.... TO BE CONTINUED.
I'm going to watch Harold & Maude now with the roomie.
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