Visiting the fam.

So on Tuesday night I picked up some flowers as a belated Womens' Day present and made the ten minute walk over to Vladimirskaya/Dostoevskaya/my old neighborhood to visit with Olga and whoever else happened to be home.

This was the second time I have visited since being back, the first time I completely neglected to write about as it happened right at the beginning of chaos/my funk. The second time going back though really made it feel much more, I don't know, real I guess, definitely not a one-time thing, and firmly secured the fact that I will always have Olga, Misha and Katya as my surrogate family in this country.

Olga had told me before to call anytime, she's always home, and I'm always welcome, and so on Tuesday around 2pm I gave her cellphone a ring and she told me to come over in five hours at 7pm. Of course she had tons of food ready for me -- including my favorite salad of hers with corn, rice and shredded chicken (or is it tuna? I'm actually never sure) and really delicious tort with wild berries and plums -- and kept commenting the whole time on how much weight I have lost since she last saw me and how I gained weight while I was at home eating my mom's food, but now that I am taking care of myself I am getting thinner by the day. She tried to make me eat a third piece of cake while I was there, but I could only handle two.

We just sat and drank tea and watched The Simpsons and Family Guy dubbed in Russian, just like we did all the time last year, and she told me all about her friend from Italy who visited and another friend who had come over that very day who she hadn't seen in twenty-six years but whom Misha had found on vkontakte (Russian Facebook) recently. Misha and his fiancée Lera joined us for a bit before they went out, though I missed Katya and Stas apparently by apparently only a few minutes. I was there for four hours, and I spent about an hour of that showing Olga photos of Agnes that I had taken while at home, and the newest ones Gen sent me from Agnes trip to Florida, such as this gem:


The most exciting part of Tuesday night's visit for me though was that I was officially invited to Misha's wedding ceremony on the morning of Friday, April 10th. I was really honored that they want me to be part of that event, and I have to be sure to dress nicely and take about four thousand pictures. It shouldn't be hard.

Anyway, I'm really happy that things didn't become awkward or weird after I moved out. It's better, I think, because I can go over now feeling like a real, wanted, invited guest, not just some random student paying to live there (they, of course, never made me feel like that, it was just something I made up in my own insecurities), and I can go on days when I feel like chatting and not on days when I don't, and then at the end of it all I can go home and have my space, but know that I still have all of them and that they're still part of my life.