The office complex of the oil and gas magazine has its own little cafeteria. For about $4, you can get a salad (Russian salads are finely chopped, sometimes cooked veggies held together with plenty of mayo adhesive), a bowl of soup, meat, and potatoes or rice or cabbage. My favorite meat option is a little cylinder of chicken, lightly breaded on the outside, that erupts butter when punctured. The cafeteria lady is a grandmotherly sort who thankfully finds my crappy Russian amusing rather than burdensome.

Natasha, my new flatmate, eats at an old Soviet-style cafeteria every day too. To get to it, you walk past the Burberry and Tiffany's boutiques in the city center, through an archway, back from the street a little ways, and into the basement of an old rundown building. The cafeteria lady is glowering, built like a brick, and has probably worked there since 1960. Yesterday, Natasha told me, she was in line behind a guy who asked for lemon-water. The cafeteria lady said "Лимон?? Что лимон?" (Lemon? WHAT lemon?) Natasha ordered brown bread and herring, typical Soviet lunch, and the woman gave her a little smile.

Yesterday the Russian soccer team beat Andorra (a tiny country on the border of Spain and France that I hadn't heard of until a few months ago) to advance in the European championship. My students were talking about it today, in a sort of nonplussed, ironic way. Wait, I said, Russia won, aren't you proud? No way, they said, the Russian team is crap, and they're just going to get humiliated when they play the good European teams. Everyone agreed. It was strikingly not American--back home, I think people would love the underdog status and see it as almost an advantage, because it would be such a good story if we won.

The metro is a PETA nightmare. As it gets colder, the fur coats are coming out--some look like they're made from multiple entire animals, and are older than a system of government or two. I usually can't identify the animal, but a couple weeks ago I saw a scarf that was a chain of three little foxes, each biting the tail of the next.

I'm getting to people-watch more now--at least that's my positive spin on having to take public transportation everywhere since moving out to the boonies (I left the city center for Строгино, an old resort section of the city that overlooks the Moskva River, by Шукинская metro). I take the metro in on the nights when I teach, and a tram to the oil and gas magazine.

The other people on the tram are overwhelmingly elderly, and mostly women (the life expectancy of Russian men is 56). I pretty much never get a seat, either because it's crowded or because I feel bad watching some octagenarian hold on for dear life around the curves. I honestly wonder where they're going all day.

Russia is aging (I'm not sure how true that is of Moscow, which has about 10% of the country's population but is extravagantly unrepresentative of Russia as a whole). There's a public service ad in the metro that says "Наша страна нужно ваш рекорд--Россия [I forget] 3 человек каждый минут," "Our country needs your record, Russia loses 3 people every minute," and has a picture of a beaming woman holding three identical Photoshopped babies. I'm not sure if the agewise topheaviness I see is a result of the population decline, or if it's because the Russian elderly are more integrated into daily life and less confined to nursing homes and Florida-equivalent as Americans are.

Russian has two words for "you," ты and вы. т sounds like t, в sounds like v, and ы is a vowel that doesn't exist in English but I think it happens for a split second in the middle of the word "squeal."

Ты is your friends, your family, and anyone your age or younger who you meet informally. Вы is most people you meet for the first time, anybody in a transaction, and people who are substantially older than you. Of course people are rarely that categorizable, so I often find myself trying to talk around the word "you" (which is pretty acrobatic and usually impossible given my Russian), or I just go with вы because it seems better to be uptight than disrespectful.

The idea of two words for "you" at first just seemed like it created unnecessary hierarchies and minefields of opportunities for awkwardness. Creepo Ed's friend Sam made me start to see it differently (he also argued pretty artfully that feminism destroyed the Western world, which was really engaging once but would probably get tiresome fast). He talked me through how our meeting would have gone if it had happened in Russian. When he met me at the door, we both would have been вы. Sitting around the kitchen, he would have switched to ты for me, but I would have stuck with вы since he's a good 15 years older. Then, when we were in his living room, a couple bottles of wine deep, listening to Depeche Mode and making bad 9/11 conspiracy jokes over our game of Jenga (I was totally winning until Ed knocked it over with his knee), then he would have been ты also.

The more the language starts to permeate me, the more I can feel the distinction between the two words and how it reinforces the way you should relate to someone. Being called вы makes me poised, being called ты makes me smile, and either makes me more sure of myself because I have a better sense of who I'm talking to.

In some of the younger, more Western-type companies, everyone is ты around the office, I guess to create the atmosphere of hey, we're all buddies here. I wonder how much that lightens things up and makes people comfortable, and how much it sacrifices peoples' respesct for each other and hides the power dynamic that's there whether it's spoken or not.

I almost went home for Christmas, thanks to Prime Minister Zubkov. He announced out of the blue that Russia is ratcheting up immigration laws, mostly in an effort to get even with Western standards (it's a ten-fingerprinting, interrogation, waiting, expensive nightmare for Russians to get US visas--"Are you sure you don't want to stay in America? Why? Under what circumstances might you stay? Why don't you want to stay? What do you have against America?" Honestly, my students have stories.)

So now, the tons of Americans and Brits working here with no permit can't just buy 6-month business visas, settle down, get paid in cash, and pop over to Kiev or Helsinki every 6 months. Now you can only spend 90 out of any given 180 days in Russia, and you have to renew in your home country.

The language school is one of the only businesses around that can issue year-long multi-entry visas with work permits. So I would have saved myself a big headache by not quitting a couple weeks ago. In my rush to figure out how to stay in Russia, and be on a plane instead of in jail the next time I go to the airport, I asked the editor of the oil and gas magazine if she could help me out through the business. She (surprise) went through the roof. She doesn't have time for this, other people have done my job and haven't etc etc. I had assumed that her business was in the same ballpark of legitimacy as the language school, and hoo boy was I wrong. She can't issue work invitations. She doesn't even have a work permit for herself, she pays her employees in cash US dollars (way illegal), and I'll eat my hat if she declares any taxable income.

But I didn't know this, so I asked her to have a 2-minute conversation with Big Midwestern Underground Fungus. He wanted to see what her situation was before he'd agree to give me a month-long grace period on the visa, to make sure she wouldn't get him in trouble. She flat-out refused to talk to him ("I don't know who he is. You probably don't understand what I mean by that, Rhubarb, because you haven't been in Russia long enough. I DON'T KNOW WHO HE IS.")

I ended up solving the visa thing by negotiating with BMUF to teach just one class in exchange for visa support until it expires in April. He's desperate for teachers, I'm desperate for a visa, and both of us were trying not to show it. In the end I'm glad to be independent of the editor. I don't think I want to work very long for someone who talks to her employees the way I'd maybe talk to someone who just shot me in the leg (although Лена and I have plans to rent "The Devil Wears Prada," which I'm looking forward to), and partly because her business is wicked sketchy. Apparently that's how Russia has been running since the 90s, but things are changing now and it's bound to hit the fan sometime.

It's a gold mine of info about the Russian oil and gas industry though. I just wrote an article on an interview I did with 2 students who are going into the oil industry. (She decided last minute that she wanted me to interview them instead of sit in while she did it, so I had about 5 minutes to prepare then she sat there the whole time and interrupted when she felt like it.) The two guys are studying at a program run jointly by top science universities and a big Russian oil company. The universities have the theory and brains, and the company has the money and practical problems (How do you extract the exceptionally globby oil from Sakhalin II? How can you use seismic data to tell where it is?) They were really sunny about working for the company and even talked about "corporate patriotism." Big oil doesn't have the moral mixed-baggage that it does in the States. They're going to Houston soon, and I put them in touch with Tyler from the Tibet trip. I love when I can fit my incongruous worlds together.

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?).

I spent most of today working on my application to Berkeley (their Energy and Resources Group-- erg.berkeley.edu). It's an interdisciplinary program that covers everything from the physics of solar cells to the history of the environmental movement to the macroeconomics of nuclear power plants to policy issues surrounding renewable energy. I'm quickly and unwisely getting my heart set on it, but there's really nowhere else like it. The main guy there has his name on everything energy-policy related, from journal articles to congressional testimony to last September's Scientific American. When I look at papers by other profs all over the country, I swear he's a co-author about half the time.

In keeping with easing back into my American life, I had a precious can of Campbell's split pea soup for dinner. I love how the can warns you not to cut yourself on it--Russian cans couldn't give a crap, and barely take responsibility for what's inside them much less what you could do to yourself on the empty packaging. The "Save these labels for your school!" was rather adorable as well.