for the first time in my life, i led a seder this evening. back at the hotel, after a long day’s wandering with jess and krissy to the grand synagogue (this after walking through catharine the great’s summer palace in pushkin). i bought a box of matza at the shul, exchanging a few words of hebrew with one man and yiddish with another, and determined that it didn’t make sense to try to attend the seder tonite. we have to catch a train to moscow this evening; there simply wouldn’t be time. disappointment carried me, and my box of matza, back in the street, which was at least blessed with quiet sunlit air. guideless and in a strange nontouristy area, werealized we were in russia — russia — for real. we made our way to a metro stop, wrangled the system until we finally made it work, and arrived back at the hotel around 5:45.

i’ve never been in this kind of situation before. i had no idea what customs to obey and in most cases how. but looking at the hotel buffet, i realized i could pull off some of the parts of the seder. i helped myself to a hard boiled egg and some gefilte-like fish. as krissy started asking me questions and showing interest, i invited her in and got more ambitious: garnish that looked like parsley served as green vegetable; cranberry vodka, free at the door, could be wine for the ten plagues. i told her the stories behind the objects which is a commandment in and of itself, only i’d never explained why these actions were traditional to someone who didn’t know before. by the end, i was buoyant.

happy pesach everyone. four more days of this holiday in this country. hope i can do it; but at the moment, i’m optomistic.

i don’t know what’s wrong with me — i half feel like i have mono. everywhere i go, i get tired. anne made fun of me in budapest because whenever i had a drink i started to droop. even the other nite at the spanish bar, sipping the strongest and smallest white russian i’ve ever had, my eyes kept slipping shut. maybe it’s just that i’ve been ononon: first midterms with ben here; then two nites on andrea’s floor playing tour guide; then budapest; then immediately st. petersburg. i think i’m approaching saturation, which isn’t good considering i have still have russia to go. it’s been much seeing new things, and maybe what’s more exhausting, talking to new people. that’s why parties at the barn tended to put me to sleep. social interaction knocks me out. at least recently.

i’m at a computer in the hermitage right now, as huge gorgeous and ornate as we’d been led to expect. the exterior is one of the most beautiful buildings in st. petersburg, catharine the great’s winter palace. i can’t help but wonder, as i appreciate, that’s it’s odd that the country, or at least our guide, seems so proud of these romanoff relics. one room alone had twenty-four chandeliers. isn’t that representative of the excesses that sparked the revolution in the first place? people are still starving: couldn’t you pawn a table of lapus lazuli or two and finance some public works programs? why didn’t the revolutionaries do that, anyway, when they had socialism on the brain?

last nite we saw our first ballet. since i’m unfamiliar with ballet, i don’t know if my issues with it were related more to the performance (an uninspired Esmerelda) or the dance itself. there isn’t much room for personal interpretation or thought: since the communication and storytelling is all nonverbal, it’s exaggerated, symbolic, archetypal. you think, watching it, essentially the same things everyone thinks. sure, it’s pretty, but there isn’t much else to it, i feel, unless you have a deep knowledge of ballet and can understand what hard work it is keeping on your toes like that.

passover starts tomorrow. i apologize. i think that’s the root of my sudden onset of malaise. i don’t like being away from home on passover. worse, i spend the first night on a train. we’re going to try to find a seder but there are no guarantees. ah well. someone eat some macaroons for me, wouldja? (hey ben, remember, a year ago i was pulling my hair out in fear and stress cuz you were about to meet my family? memories.)

st. petersburg is, at last count, ten times more attractive than budapest. it helps that today is lovely: blue as an eye, cold as a banker’s heart, as my father would say. my father would love this city; i can’t imagine why he was so reluctant for me to go. i bought a cute little russian propaganda poster in st. peter and paul’s cathedral. the vendor translated half of it for me and i said, I’ll take it. something about reading. who knows? it’s cool.

anyway, i lucked out once again. on the plane, i was seated precisely next to the person i would have wanted to be seated next to if i’d been the kind of person who wanted things. krissy’s in my film class and, oh lordy what a coincidence, good friends with anne. so she and i chatted and laughed and decided to room together, and we’ve been hanging out since.

yesterday evening a group of us left the hotel moscow to see where our feet took us. that, as it turned out, was down amazingly clean streets into the heart of the commercial district, and more precisely into a spanish style bar/restaurant. two american men behind us were bein’ boisterous, carrying on to the indifference of their paid company, two silent russian women. all of a sudden two pitchers of sangria appeared on our table, courtesy of the men, both capitalists in their forties and by that point plastered. we put the free drinks to good use, launching into a marathon game of I Never. a third pitcher supported the first two; undaunted, we polished that off as well. the men requested little in return. in denmark, such a gesture would mean that we’d all have to sleep with him, but i guess luckily they were preoccupied.

despite going in without knowing anyone really, i’ve been having a good time. the russian princess and i get along better when we don’t talk politics. food will be a problem come pesach — i subsist on breadstuffs as the alternatives mostly consist of meat. but i’ll cross that bridge yaddayaddda. meanwhile lots of bus tours, walking tours, taking pictures of gorgeous pastel palaces and onion-domed cathedrals, lots of lectures on peter the great. tonite our first ballet; we see another, Swan Lake in fact, in moscow. i haven’t seen a ballet in years. and then they allow us a whopping two and a half hours in the Hermitage, a museum so huge it would take months to see it all.

additionally: (sorry for the extra posting. of course you could consider before you sigh that it may be a while before i find another computer, seeing as i’ll be in the cold, fleshy arms of mother russia)

another of the loveless girls has fallen. i can feel her beaming through the monitor. powerful stuff, springtime. i wish i were at swat to see its effect on the bunnies, though watching my blossoming beauty here works too. i went and hung out with her this afternoon to gab about our respective times apart. then i rode the train back into town with her and her new, earnest beau, AC. we parted ways: they headed to the planitarium, i to the dfi to catch An Ideal Husband. a continuation of my british theme, perhaps, although i didn’t think of that in advance. beautifully acted, entirely what you expect. three fabulous women leads, and it’s especially fun to watch rupert everett play a straight man. he brings new meaning to that phrase. and why doesn’t anyone ever talk about how good jeremy northam is? ahh fluff.

kind of scared for russia, to tell you the truth. what could match first the week with ben and then this past week? having so many variables makes me nervous. not to mention (might as well be petty, eh?) that i’m really tired of consistently cloudy weather. it was 18 degrees for five minutes in budapest and i heard the door slam as my resistance to winter grabbed its hat and skid out the door. i want flowers and sunshine. i want dancing girls in white lace frocks. i want lazy indolent bantering — oh dear. i think i want to be in an wilde film adaptation myself. this always happens to me. guess i’ll have to go to russia for the distraction or i’ll be dreaming in charm and easy conversation for weeks. wish me luck, everyone.

a few hours ago i was in hungary. tomorrow i’ll be in russia. isn’t it crazy? i got up at 4:30 this morning to catch a shuttle to the airport, leaving anne adorably fuzzy-headed and squinty in our bedspread-clashes-with-the-sheets-clashes-with-the bed. my mouth still tasted of the wine we drank last nite as we entertained and were cooked for by the brits, two bens we picked up the previous day almost right after i posted. all four of us were searching for the labryniths fabled to be beneath the castle. once down there discovered the maze, though old, is an enormous joke. “fossil finds” start appearing, roped off and with descriptive signs, about half-way through, of “homo consumerus”: cell-phones, computers, an ATM, a huge coke bottle. and we assumed the hungarians didn’t have a sense of humor just because they never smile.

it was an altogether enjoyable time, despite mediocre food, no nightlife, and a crazy landlady (she burst in while we ate dinner, suspiciously eyeing our male guests and trying to browbeat anne into changing rooms for the extra night she’s staying even though she’d already paid for ours.) the charmingly-accented benz, though a good deal older than we, treated us like contemporaries. they complimented me on my sarcasm as well as my anti-social button, though in a gesture reminiscent of my one true ben, reminded me in a dead-pan voice that irony is a low form of humor. we spent a lot of time trading dirty jokes and learning each others’ slang.

anne and i lucked out: going from never having spoken to spending 36 hours straight together could have been horrific. instead our approaches, tastes, reactions, and moods overlapped brilliantly. the turkish baths, an authetic 500-year old structure filled with pools of various temperatures filled in turn with women of various ages over 60, totally naked and doing stretches, made for an unequaled bonding experience.

i don’t know when i’ll next hit up eastern europe but i doubt i’ll have more fun.

moving as quickly as possible — anne and i found a cute very american coffeetype shop w/ a computer. not too american: lattes are $1.20. everything’s like that in budapest: cheap; most things are also, we’ve discovered, bland. our landlady is the exception. the guidebooks advertise her as charming. that doesn’t begin. the accomodations are something else. our room, a white highceilinged room with a melange of awful furniture with a whopping 14 different floral patterns, is at least in the center of town, more or less. we’re coming from a turkish bath experience and moving towards, along the blue danube, the castle with its vast underground maze. the parliament is gorgeous; especially interesting juxtaposed with the run-down post-communist buildings that compose much of the city. here and there other structures, churches and synagogues, take your breath away but largely this is closer to warsaw than prague.

all the same, we’re having a great time. i’ll write more when i have the chance. (this is like a postcard!) oh, and it’s so bizarre to be in a place where literally almost no one speaks english. but we’re adjusting, slowly, slowly.

yet another movie to add to my grudging admiration list: a beautiful mind. caitlin, andrea and i lunched at the good croissant’en (gucci sandwich shop) and made our way — via DIS to check for my dawdling package and buy beverages, and Tiger, the funky dollar-store equivalent — to Palads, the circus-colored multi-screen movie theater. we hemmed and hawed over our options and settled, although the selection made no one particularly happy. i’d been rather against the movie since adam returned from the theater spitting and cursing. he hadn’t been that riled up since Planet of the Apes.

each of us put our respective baggage behind us and decided if this is the film that’s going to sweep oscars, we may as well see it. we emerged as surprised as we’d been initially lukewarm. we agreed on the following: (a) it shortshrifts the woman. what about her life/painting/math ability/career/happiness? she stood behind her man. admirable. surely she deserved a little more indepth examination than the movie afforded her; she could have been more of a person and less of a Wife. and the film fails the ms. test right off the bat as it only has one female character. Apollo 13, if you recall, had the same flaws.

(b) the ending is silly. we all agreed that living functionally with schizophrenia should have been the ultimate original achievement he has looking for. if he managed to be a good father and husband and teacher and member of society with that plague, that’s more impressive than a Nobel.

on the other hand, crowe’s performance is as excellent as everyone says it is. there’s no way around it (sorry adam): it’s a quality movie.

oh mercy. the lp has left us. by “us” i mean andrea, caitlin (friend #2) and me — i spent the night here again, bobbing along happily in de-nial. thus far it’s been successful: yesterday we went wandrin into the city. they had intended to go see Kunst pre-airport. that didn’t happen. we dished out cash for disappointments of various flavors and split ways.

we met up again at my dorm, an hour after the prescribed time because they lost themselves on three different busses. i had whiled away the time quite content in the computer lab, debating whether to do this, emailing, chatting with charming miss lana about rosie.

i fed them dairy-free chocolate via ben, which gave me the opportunity to survey the new, varied crowd: frazzled/glowing andrea, and friends 1 and 2, as much opposites as the rp and i are. then we were off. as requested, i led them on a brief tour through colorful sketchy nitetime christiania to my favorite restaurant there, tucked away in the back, an organic veggie place (dirt grown food dirt cheap!).

they invited me to come see election w/ them and a.c., who promised to join. i gave in to the allure of spending one more night on andrea’s floor, thoroughly enjoying reese witherspoon, and continuing to talk film with caitlin (a major therein at yale). a.c. and andrea had an awkward-precious new-lovers moment when we tactfully left them alone outside that made andrea both frazzle and glow more violently.

and tomorrow to budapest for my own foray into new and different territory. but first, pastry.

the girls iz showering. i’m so lowmaintainance compared to most people i know (read: lazy.) i slept over here at andrea’s last nite, as i’m prone to do; friend #1 sara is still here and friend #2 caitlin arrives in a matter of hours. i knew long before i went that i didn’t want to go back home post- belle and sebastian — it was hard enuf being in the apartment alone in the rational light of day. andrea acquiesced (“of course! *hugs* ” etc.) getting to vega turned out to be quite an endeavor. it required about an hour and a half of much cold standing around and more walking, which my tired feet in my thin holy socks could little endure. i didn’t need to repeat the experience on the flip side, especially since getting to andrea’s from there was ea-sy

must dress now, the girlz are done prepping and primping and i’m still in [andrea’s] pajamas. concert then and girl company now provided much comfort: and got me to stop wallowing in sentiment, waa-waa-waaing to folksongs under my comforter.

after crying periodically through a terrific collection of art exhibits at the national art museum, and an overpriced cheese sandwich in a dimly lit bar/cafe, the only one open in a three block radius, where men in a corner debated my nationality, i decided to take my weariness home and stop inflicting it on norrebro. a woman with tangled brown hair joined me in my triangle of sunlight by the busstop, smiling. that’s not too common here: ben, noting that pedestrian expressions range from dour to stern, said i should give smiling lessons. this rare woman (she’s only visiting copenhagen, perhaps that explains it) and i began talking and took our conversation on the bus with us. i asked her impulsively if she knows where vega is.

she in turn asked the younger, freckled woman sitting next to her and the two of them began to debate in danish. a man across the aisle joined in. at last the younger woman told me she had it; i handed her paper and pen, she made good use of the two, i tusind taked all around and i deboarded at my stop, revived. sun seemed to applaud my effort by making an effort of its own to force through the clouds.

eerie and affecting in total; definitely an experience, and more or less ben’s-and-my last together of the trip. differences of opinion, miscommunications, textbook communiciations, long talks, and tears all taken into consideration, it remains a week i wouldn’t change a minute of.