I just ironed a shirt for the first time in my entire life. (Yelling downstairs to Mom the whole time...HOW MUCH WATER ARE YOU SPOSEDTA SPRITZ? WHAT PART DO YOU DO FIRST?)

They told us to dress up for Congress tomorrow...the director of my branch of the NGO is testifying at a hearing on the EPA, and the whole office is going. The last two days (my first two days) were a whirlwind of getting stuff ready. Preparing the written testimony, delivering it to the Hill, figuring out what to say for the oral testimony (I sat in on the meeting today where they tweaked it until it resonated the way they wanted), conference calling with fellow witnesses...My job was to research some of the witnesses on the other side, especially what they say about political interference with science in policymaking. Found something particularly juicy where one of them ripped into the report the NGO just published on low morale and censorship of EPA scientists.

It's been pretty hard to write, or even think about writing. In a way I wish I had documented my re-entry, but in a way I really couldn't have. My last few days in Russia, I remember feeling like I was parachuting back into my own culture again, and I could see the ground rushing toward me and knew that when I landed the impact would leave me doing painful bumpy somersaults for a while. It's taken me about this long to come to a rest, dust myself off, and take stock of the damage. Nothing's broken, but I don't think I could have written when I was bouncing around. I don't know where my voice would have been coming from. I can't think of another way to put it.

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.

Yesterday Роман and Катя and I went to Donskoy Monastery after our lesson. We got off at the Шаболовская metro stop (right by the Shukhov Tower, a radio tower I wanted to see because it's made of stacked segments of hyperboloids of revolution), and wandered for a while until we got to the Monastery. We went into the church first, which I was glad for because I was freezing. The dull gold and soft colors of the icons, and the smell and crackle of melting beeswax give it a kinder atmosphere than most.

We walked through the cemetery where famous writers, opera singers, politicians, intellectuals, and their families are buried under a great heterogeneity of statues, monuments with shellacked photos, obelisks, and less descript markers. We found Pushkin's uncle and grandmother, and the 20th-century comedienne Роман wanted to see, then went to a coffee shop to warm up.

We were talking, switching back and forth between languages, and Роман said wait, what's the difference between accept and except? I said accept is where you take something that someone gives you, and except is кроме. He said oh, I always confused those two, and 'expect.'

I said what gets me in Russian is the verbs of motion--приехала, уехала, поехала, объехала, проехала, выехала, вехала, доехала, заехала... Роман laughed because how could anyone mix up words that are so cleary different. He said I should do a comedy show where I sit there and am confused about Russian and say things like "вообше кошмар!" (kind of slang that means 'general nightmare!'...Роман about died when I came out with it earlier in the day. Think I picked it up from him.)

Russian verbs remind me of this toy I had when I was little. It was a cylinder, but hexagonal instead of circular. There were animals painted lengthwise on each side, and you could dial the cylinder so you got a fish head with a lizard back with tiger feet and a monkey tail or something. With Russian verbs, first you start with the prefix: у- if you're leaving, при- if you're arriving, по- if you're setting off, об- if you're going around something, про- if you're passing by or traversing the entire length of something, вы- if you're exiting, в- if you're entering, до- if you're finally arriving to, за- if you're just stopping by, пере- if you're crossing, под- if you're approaching, and от- if you're pulling away from. Once you've chosen that, you decide if you're walking, running, flying, going by transport, carrying, carrying by transport, or leading by the hand. Flying? Okay. Is it happening now/a continuing process (летать), or is it a completed action in the past or future (лететь)? Now you're almost there, just decide the time and pronoun. God help you if it's irregular. You finally end up with я скоро улечу из Москвы (soon I'm flying out of Moscow--turtle head, bat wings, polar bear feet), or он переходит дорогу (He's crossing the street--eagle head, fish scales, pig trotters). Of course if you're Russian your brain just pieces together all the Frankenverbs for you.

Natasha and I ended up making it to Sochi. She ordered the tickets on Friday and I picked them up at the ticket office, since I was in the city center. The sign on the door said 'open 9:00-20:00 daily, no breaks,' but I entered to find someone clicking around on a computer behind a hand-lettered sign that said 'lunch, 13:00-14:00.' It was 13:30. I said hello, she told me it was lunch break, I said something along the lines of "but the door spoke no lunch," and facing the prospect me, with my strange accent and riddle-speak, plopped irritably for half an hour in the dishlike plastic chair in front of her desk, she relented and issued me the tickets.

We flew out of Домодедово, Domodedovo, where Natasha used to work at the Duty Free. From the train, she pointed out her old apartment in Domodedovo city, the customs headquarters (until recently, controlled by the Georgian mafia...deciding what enters and leaves Russia is really lucrative), and the staff parking lot where one winter she found her car missing and assumed it was stolen until the snow melted.

Figuring airports out is always harder with two people, especially when one of you is thinking "she knows what she's doing, she speaks the language" and the other one is thinking "she knows what she's doing, she travels a lot." We had had a too-leisurely coffee at one of the new cafes overlooking the tarmac (I could happily spend a day watching an airport go through its airport-motions), and ran to the gate to make final boarding (since when is it 40 minutes before the plane takes off?)

We landed in Sochi two hours later. The city's starting to see the first little tremors of Olympification (2014, in case you forgot the hoopla this summer), starting with the airport. Planes arrive in the new wing, a small and bright space-age fiberglass tennis-bubble made of little polygons. They still take off from the old wing, which is basically an exceptionally neglected and sprawling Greyhound station.

Natasha wanted to stay in one of the huge sanitoria on the Black Sea, so we spent the first couple hours wandering around those. She had heard that they were cheap and deserted and had hot springs, so both of us were all over it. The first one we went to was neo-Greek, sprawed out over acres, and creepy as hell in the dark. We didn't find anyone at reception there and managed to escape without being attacked by a cloud of vampire bats or something. The next couple places we went to were at least manned (or babushkied as the case may be), but it turns out you need a prescription just to get in the door. We were turned away by crotchety old ladies who couldn't believe we actually had the presumption to want to pay them to stay somewhere, took a marshrutka back into town, and ended up in Гостиница Москва, Hotel Moscow, the crappy behemoth in the center.

The next day we took a bus to Красная Поляна, the big ski resort in the Caucusus. The road climbs from the sea for a couple hours, past only forest, a giant braided stream, and a few bee farms here and there, until it gets to the smallish resort. (Natasha, knowing it's the winter playground of the Moscow glitterati, was surprised it wasn't cleaner and more developed. I can't imagine what it'll look like when Olympics construction begins in earnest). We tromped around for a while, enjoyed the mountain views, rented a blowup sled, managed not to harm innocent bystanders, and caught the bus back down.

The next day we caught a taxi and asked the guy to show us around the city for an hour or so (Natasha's into asking anybody and everybody for directions, where to eat, where to stay, what to do). He drove us into the nontouristy neighborhoods--steep streets lined with houses of cement, corrugated metal, and chain link, with a celebrity's dacha on the prime hilltop real estate. Most people who live there will be displaced into new apartment buildings to make way for Olympics construction. The cabby, Nikolai, took us back to the airport for our 9 pm flight back to Moscow. Natasha really liked the place and wanted to stay, mostly for the sea and the slower pace of life. I'm glad I saw it, but two days was enough.