Back from Italy, ready to face my last 10 weeks in Moscow. I feel like I've returned to the Land of Too Much Chaos, from my blessed vacation in the Land of Too Little Chaos and will return in a couple months, Goldilockslike, to the just-right.

Yesterday I was in my old Novoslobodskaya neighborhood for bellydancing, so I paid a visit to Salim the Fruit and Nut Man. (I swear, his raisins are unmatched in all of Moscow). He was over the moon about Obama winning Iowa (so am I...I'm falling for the change-over-experience thing hook line and sinker. I also love how after the defeat a Hillary spokesman said she has "experience making change." Nice save, buddy.) Salim follows politics pretty closely and reads a lot, mostly independent newspapers (the Russian government has a stranglehold over TV, but print media is freeish) and books by Muslim political scholars. He made it halfway through a legal studies degree in Cairo, but left because prospects for graduates of a Muslim university are slim. Refusing to return home to Uzbekistan because of the political situation, he became a Russian citizen six years ago and took the job that presented itself. His English seems better every time I talk to him. Apparently he used to be pretty fluent, but now he never uses it. Occasionally I think I see flickers of the sort of depression you'd expect from someone with a pretty sizable surplus of intelligence and motivation beyond what their job demands, but the vast majority of the time he seems cheerful.