Hi from Шереметьево, Sheremetevo, airport. My plane takes off for JFK in about an hour, then on to DC. The past week or so I was planning on sitting down and scouring university websites (UMD, CMU, CU-Boulder...Berkeley said no) to prep for my visits, but I ended up spending a lot of time with friends instead. I must have been really wierd company because my brain is in about 16 different places

Natasha and I threw a party on Saturday, which turned out to be really fun. A ton of people showed up. It was great to see people meeting each other and exchanging phone numbers and whatnot. I think I got asked 3 or 4 times if someone (usually Natasha) was single. It wound down after 6 am, when our neighbors couldn't take it anymore and cut off our mutual electricity. Crafty.

I just got a text message from Katya..."Rhubarb,hi!:-)how are you,are you in the airport yet?aren't you late like Roman? [who missed his plane to Thailand a couple weeks ago] :-)Rhubarb,your are brave and your russian friends with you for ever!!!Happy journey!" Shit now I'm crying in the middle of the goddam airport. Time to go to the gate.

Reverse culture shock moment #1: I just got off the phone with Mom. We were talking about my visit to Colorado next week (?!) She asked if I was going to rent a car, since with some companies you only have to be 24...but wait, she said, I guess that's still a few weeks before your birthday. My first thought was no problem, I'll just bribe them. Picture me at the Hertz counter..."Is there anything I can do to...help with this process?" *idly fingers purse-zipper*

I just cleaned out all my teaching stuff. I threw out most of it--the old lesson plans, the discussion questions on little squares of paper, cut-out pictures of people from magazines (adjective order...grey Italian wool scarf, not wool grey Italian scarf), the handout for the last day of class when I made apple pie and they had to put the verbs in the recipe (mix, chop, stir, bake...), my abstract-noun cards (guy on a ladder peering into the distance, ballerina in a parking lot, Boris Yeltsin's funeral, woman with baby, heightwise lineup of all the James Bonds, campsite...which one of these is courage? leadership? risk? responsibility? choice? violence? time? why?).

I saved a couple lesson plans. Soon I'll be amused at how well I once understood modal verbs of deduction or the difference between defining and non-defining relative clauses. I also saved my jotted notes for when I told a story about my Tibet trip to introduce phrases of mixed-baggedness (although, however, in spite, on the other hand, even though, despite...), and the plan for one of my first lessons, with everyone's name at the top in the order they were sitting...ANDREY VERA VADIM ELENA ARTUR MIKHAIL ELEONORA KOSTYA.

It's kind of sad to throw out all that work from the past year (paper recycling? ha), not that I regret for a second leaving the job.