Just got back from belly-dancing lessons at Mango's. I was the only one there besides the instructor, Кристина, a very kind, patient, cute, plumpish woman a few years older than me. She was great and it was really fun. I'm way too skinny to look anything but awkward doing it but oh well.

I stopped at the market on the way back to pick up some fruits and veggies, and I definitely got propositioned by Salim the Fruit and Nut Man ("You are beautiful, I want to be your boyfriend, do you like sex?"). Um, there's someone else. A hundred grams of cashews please. He's cool though, really. He's from one of the K-stans, I forget which, and he learned English at university in Egypt. Not sure how he ended up here. He helps me out with Russian and gives me free dried pineapple sometimes...about a week ago I bought some raisins from him, made raisin bars, brought him a few, and a few days later he invited himself over to learn how to make them. I was evasive and held out the naive hope that maybe he just wanted to be friends, but I guess not. Kind of frustrating.

last couple days

My (James') computer is finally back from the shop, and internet has decided to work again. Bonus!

On Sunday, Plum and Cabbage and I drove down to Подольск for the day. We stopped on the way to see the new apartment complex where Cabbage is moving next year. He's going to keep his job in Moscow apparently even though it's a bit of a schlep. Plum says he's not pressuring her to move in with him yet, though he has convinced her to come visit Mom for the weekend, which is a bit of a deal.

The day was gorgeous, and it was cool just sitting there in the car watching the Russian countryside go by. I'm still struck by the oldness of the houses and the standard-issue Продукты that line the streets. Those buildings have seen so much history, but at the same time they make me wonder exactly how much peoples' lives have changed in recent years once you get beyond the major cities.

We spent most of the day by the river, just lounging around and reading and munching on picnic-food purchased from the Spar below our apartment. There were a few other families there, but for the most part it was pretty quiet. For some reason the landscape looked like it couldn't possibly be in America. I'm not sure if it was the scale of the river, the flatness of the landscape, the type of vegetation, the quality of light, or what, but it was distinct from anything I'd seen before.

The night before, some of the teachers went out to celebrate Pawpaw and Baked Beans' birthdays. I'm a huge fan of Baked Beans, I don't mean anything derrogatory by the nickname, just that he's comforting and palatable and rather distinctly British. We went to the Depeche Mode bar, kind of by Mayakovskaya. It was fun...I adored the music of course. A few of us danced. I've never seen anyone dance like Lychee. I was kind of afraid to get in her way. Plum said Lychee once told her that she felt like she had a choice between being invisible and being weird, so she chose the latter. Now her way of relating to people (especially when Beach was over (college people can have their old names)) is to dominate conversations with unconvincing BS and demand to be filled in on everyone else's partially completed conversations. I don't mean to be as harsh as that sounds, I like her when it's just the two of us, but around other people her self-conscious weirdness is kind of impenetrable. I want to say hey, accept invisibility, then your actions will speak for themselves and people will admire your self-containedness and you'll no longer be invisible. Or something. She's moving to Krgyzstan soon. I'm sure I misspelled that.

I'm halfway through The Perversion of Knowledge, by Vadim Birstein. It's about all the terrible things scientists were made to do under the Soviet regime. Parts of it are interesting, like the details of the organization of the academies and their relationship with the government. There's also this great quote from one of the leading Soviet, um, evolutionary biologists...let's see if I can find it..."There is not, and cannot be, a class society in any plant or animal species. Therefore, there is not, and cannot be, here class struggle, though it might be called, in biology, intraspecies competition...All intraspecies relationships among individuals...are directed toward the securing of the existence and thriving of a species and this means, towards the increasing of the number of individuals of a species." (Lysenko) Wow. A lot of the book, though, is just a catalogue of all the prisoners poisoned by the Communists, which is less interesting.

Tomorrow I'll email Terry and see if he can put me in touch with the Environment, Science, and Technology department of the American Embassy so I can beg them for an internship. Tomorrow.

I'm scared of losing my English. Having to think about grammar rules day in and day out is starting to make me see my language not as something living that I can manipulate however I want, but as something static and dead with laws you can apply paint-by-numbers style to more or less convey your ideas. It's amazing how much of a leap it is from having a working proficiency in a language to using it with any sort of nuance. I doubt I'll ever get there in a foreign language...appreciation of nuance maybe but production no.

Last night I went over to Aubergine's to do my laundry. He lives in an huge block-of-flats complex near Medvedkovo, all the way at the end of the red line. He called a couple of his DJ friends while we were on the metro to see if they wanted to come hang out and drink, but to my relief they didn't. I don't know how he keeps the pace of life he does, or why he can't stand to be alone with himself. We spent a couple hours hanging out in his kitchen and talking. He reminds me a little of Alex S-C from the Cove, minus the misanthropy and plus some style. What I mean by the Alex comparison is that he really concerns himself with making sure people are okay, and he has the uncanny ability to draw out my innermost thoughts whenever we have a conversation more than about 10 minutes long. Next year he's going to be the Director of Studies for the school for all of Moscow, so he'll be teaching a tad and doing lots of observations and, as he put it, making sure everyone's okay. Plum thinks they gave him that job because with his drinking and all they can't trust him with a ton of responsibility, and she's probably at least partially right.

This afternoon I went to see a movie with Peach and her friend. The theater was by Novokuznyetskaya, and is one of the few with Russian subtitles rather than dubbing. The movie was called The Science of Dreams. It was about a guy who moved back to Paris to live with his mother after his father died of cancer (I've lost all perspective on how that should affect someone). He has bizarre dreams that often start while he's awake and fade in and out of his actual life...the dream sequences were visually really cool. Lots of paper cut-out animation and bizarre coloration.

Plum and Cabbage are back in her room, after going out to buy noodles. She looked like she had been crying when they went out but now I hear laughter. Hope she's okay.