Yesterday was Наташа's birthday. I was really glad I could go, since I missed her wedding a couple months ago.

The party was in their apartment, a nice, sunny (ok, when there's sun) 3-room place by the same metro stop as the oil and gas magazine. She and her mother had spent the last couple days making this amazing spread of food--beet salads, little salmon sandwich-wraps, tomatoes with something garlicky on top, bread with butter and caviar, fruit salad, and a fish-jello type thing I wasn't as much a fan of. All of her friends brought flowers, which were in vases all over the floor.

Her friends are a fun, fairly artsy bunch. Many of them spoke some English, and my Russian's starting to get good enough that peoples' personalities take on higher resolution. Some of them were Наташа's friends from university, others were people from Женя's architecture firm or people they had met skiing in Europe last year (they're going again this winter. I might drive with them to Austria, which would be sick...originally they wanted to go to the States, but Наташа couldn't get a passport in time). I had a good laugh with this guy named Igor who kept acting like I would offend his whole nation by not consuming my bodyweight in vodka and pickles ("Not George Bush and Putin. To Rhubarb and Igor!")

People went to a club afterward, but I caught the metro home just before it closed. I spent all of today on grad school stuff, then saw Seeded Grapes off on the train to Kiev (she quit, after about a month here). We were pretty different, but we had that intangible American thing in common that gave us a comfortably shared sense of what to talk about and how to talk about it (Artichoke calls it self-satisfaction, I guess I'd call it a certain sort of energy). I might be seeing her in Kiev soon, depending on what my options are for getting a new visa once the language school cancels mine (I told you I quit, right?).