Being fed up with Brit boys with baggage, American girls not on my wavelength, only talking to Russians in class, and the departure of most of the teachers I had gotten close to, I went to hospitalityclub.org. It's a website full of profiles of people who are willing to host travelers/need places to stay themselves/want to meet people from elsewhere. The (honor-system) deal is you have to host for about as many nights as you stay with people. (I used it a lot when I was traveling around Europe, and now owe a TON of nights of putting people up (haven't broached the subject to Plum yet). I met tons of great people in the places I visited--art students in Hungary, psychology students in Krakow, Harry/Andy/Simone in Vienna, Tina in Belgrade--plus it was nice not to pay for hostels.)

There are about 2000 people registered on the site in Moscow. I poked around it for a bit, found a few cool-sounding women in their 20s (and one 64-year-old American woman who has been here for 16 years and sounds awesome), and sent them messages that said hi I'm Rhubarb, I'm from Washington, I've been here a few months teaching English and I'd like to meet more people, want to get coffee sometime?

Ира wrote back and said sure, let's go to this outdoor photo exhibit near the Чеховская metro (Чехов being Chekhov, the writer). The булвар, the tree-lined pedestrian-street-within-a-bigger-street, was lined with beautiful nature photographs by an artist named Steve Bloom (or Стев Блум, as the plaques said). Ира and I perused about half of it, stopping the longest at the antarctic shots of penguins and polar bears. A generator failed, the exhibition went dark, and we headed for an outdoor cafe in the Эрмитаж Park.

Ира's been living here about 3 years. She was born in Siberia (as were many people here) but her family moved south a few years later. She taught English for a while in her hometown after she finished school.

She has unruly reddish-brown hair, artsy thick-rimmed glasses, and a quick laugh. She defies the Russian-girl stereotype of the done-up девушка on the prowl (девушка ("dyevushka") vaguely means "girl" or "young woman," and in some contexts has connotations of sexual availability (on second thought, maybe that's only expat usage)...it's also what you call the waitress (no "Hi I'm Tammy" nametags here), and what a stranger says on the street to get a woman's attention).

Ира has a job with a company that develops language-learning software. She used to work in marketing (she liked the people-aspect), but now her job is to find mistakes and usability issues in the software (she missed being exposed to languages). She might go back to teaching--the students loved her and she found it really rewarding. (With my teaching job, I sacrificed community and closeness for independence and more of a life outside the school, a choice I usually don't regret.)

We had a great conversation, lost track of time, bolted for the metro, and got there just after its 1 am closing. (Luckily cabs from the city center aren't too expensive...well, the official ones are, but the vast majority of "cabs" here are just people with cars). I hope I see her again soon. She might join my belly-dancing class.