Olga and I met at bellydancing. I had seen her there for a month or so, but we didn’t talk to each other until last Wednesday. We showed up at noon, as always, but instead of finding our usual teacher Kristina we were surprised to find Sasha, an excitable 19(ish)-year-old with a 100-watt smile, about to start her striptease aerobics class. Between my crappy Russian and Olga’s not-much-better English, we pieced it together that Kristina had rescheduled the class for Fridays, then we decided hmm, well we’re here, might as well stay. (Olga later performed for a friend in the hospital, and tells me they both about died laughing).

Olga was thrilled that I’m American. I keep waiting for somebody to respond negatively to my nationality, but everyone I’ve met here, to a person, thinks it’s fascinating. She invited me to have dinner with her and her husband a couple days later, in their studio a few blocks from Novoslobodskaya.

They have separate apartments in different parts of the city, but spend much of their time together in the little studio. The whole multi-storey building is a block of studios that, I gather, are slowly being converted to apartments (none of them have their own bathrooms, though, there’s just one in each hallway).

Olga’s husband Vladimir does most of his work there. He’s a cariacture artist, and his pen-and-ink drawings have appeared in big-name Western publications (I’m almost sure he said Time and Newsweek, but if not, they were of that ilk). He was also the art director for the satire magazine Krokodil, pretty much the only of its kind that the Communists let slip by (I remember it came up in my Communism and its Aftermath class in college).

I pored through a stack of his drawings (anyone was fair game, from Russian politicians and celebrities to Bill Gates as a python to Lenin and Putin playing chess to Al Gore riding a donkey backwards) and he explained the ones I didn’t recognize. He’s been honored by the Russian Academy, has shown his work all over the world, and has a thank-you note from Bill Clinton for a portrait. I wish I could tell you more of his thoughts on being a satirist under Communism, but it didn’t feel right at the time to ask the big cliched What Was It Like questions.

Dinner was brown bread, different kinds of cheese and sausage, radishes, green onions, stewed pork, a block of Ukrainian bacony fatty (delicious) something, pickled cabbage, and a veggie-plate of cucumber, pepper, and tomato. I was there for hours, just chatting about life in the city and America and Russia and Vladimir’s art.

Vladimir can express pretty much whatever he wants in English, even if he can’t find the exact words and grammar (Olga’s not as far along). They ask me questions about language and I happily answer them. A lot of the teachers don’t hang out with Russians because they suspect they just want free language practice, which seems like a strange mentality to fall into—people are accommodating you by speaking a language you can understand, but you act like you’re some sort of expensive language-vending machine and save your conversation for those who can afford it. It’s funny because even if you insist on viewing me and Vladimir as a transaction of learning, I could teach him everything I know about English and still feel like I came out way ahead.