My 'lost day' of Thursday pretty much went as expected. We had an early morning with a very welcome and thoughtful speech from Dr Davidson, the ACTR head honcho, and then we basically went straight to the airport. While it’s definitely super stressful to be going through the motions in a strange airport, we still made it unscathed for the most part. Well, except for the fact that like 12 of us didn’t have real seats on the airplane. It didn’t make any sense until we realized that the flight was oversold, and they were looking for people to bump, and ACTR was their choice for the bumping. Instead of losing my seat, I actually got upgraded to a window seat on Economy Plus (Yay!). I got close to 8 hours of sleep, if not more. It was so incredible, the melatonin worked like a charm. Funny story: apparently at one point I fell asleep on my new friend Mikhail’s shoulder, and the Russian lady, assuming Mikhail was Russian, asked if I was his fiancée. He said no, and she said thank God, American women don’t know what they want, her son married an American and it was the worst mistake of his life, yadda yadda. She then proceeded to give him the phone number of her niece in Moscow and told him to call her up to meet. (!)
The Moscow end of the airport, what with immigration and customs, went pretty well too, as did Baggage Claim, to the best of my knowledge, no one lost anything. We did our best to switch to Russian as soon as the plane landed, but I’ve quickly realized I know next to absolutely nothing about Russian, I have a truly miniscule vocabulary. The weather when we got here was crap – raining and freezing, I was shivering down to my core. I was in a horrid mood when we got to the dorms, one that sadly remained as we made our way through town learning the layout, mostly because everyone seems to know exactly where they are after two days and I am always lost. I figured there was no way I would be able to function like a normal person. John took us out to change money and navigate a little, see the internet café and such. He left us then to our own devices for dinner. Jenny, Matt, Mike and I went to a restaurant called ёлки палки or something close to that. It’s sort of similar to the feeling of an Applebee’s. The others have really good Russian, but if they weren’t with me I would never have been able to function there. I understood when they asked how many, but not smoking/non-smoking. I understood ‘what to drink,’ but not when she asked me how many milliliters. I had a really delicious dinner – these little dumpling things in chicken broth, and you took the dumplings out with a fork and dipped them in sour cream. Very Russian and super delicious. My only regret was that I forgot I was allowed to order beer – the others got Baltica 7 and I was stuck with stupid Lipton Lemon Iced Tea. But everything else was awesome, and so so cheap! My whole dinner was about $8 with tip.
When we came back, we discovered that there is free wifi in the elevator lobby. Evidently this wifi covers most of Moscow, and you can get on either with a top up card or for free by watching commercials every 15 minutes. While it’s funny to see all of us jammed in the windowsill looking for a connection, it’s a really social spot, and we made friends right away with some of the Russian students at our university! All of them are from Moscow – there’s Vika, Katya, and Igor. It was so strange, they were smoking and drinking right there in the lobby – not something that would happen back in Centennial Halls or J-Mac, to be sure! When they offered us some, we knew we couldn’t pass it up, if not only for the story of drinking in an elevator lobby with Russians our very first night.
Matt and I had heard back in the states that that night Infected Mushroom was playing Moscow. We were quite obligated to attend such an event! We were crazy lucky- the club was pretty much across the street from the dorms. We got a liiiittle lost, but eventually found it, pretty much by following the ground-rattling bass from the club’s music. Let me tell you, everything you might have heard about the Moscow club scene seems to be true. I can’t even describe properly how incredible the lights were. Lasers galore, with a huge telescreen with changing light patterns and pictures that made the djs into silhouettes. The music sounded phenomenal, a DJ called DNA opened, and I’ve never danced for someone’s entire set with as much energy as that! Other myths proved true – expense… $50 to get in, $13 for the Red Bull and vodka I ordered at the bar. Definitely didn’t do any conversion rates in my head for that drink… though, it was my very first drink from a bar, so I guess it’s okay. Another fact – they really don’t close. At 1am, I looked expectantly for Infected to come on, since I’m used to clubs closing at 2. Niet. Another (mediocre) DJ came on and played… until 2:30. Longest set EVER, and I was ridiculously tired. There is nowhere at all to sit in that club. As cute and Russian as my new heeled boots are, they are NOT foot friendly for 4 hours of dancing. The club doesn’t close until the last person has left, and that was evident when Infected Mushroom started playing (finally) at 230 am. Luckily Matt and I got huge second winds, and they completely tore it up. The show was totally fabulous, I’ve never been so excited in my life! Unfortunately, waves of dizziness and dehydration were taking over (we Americans could sadly not partake in the water fountain, and water bottles ran like $6) so we had to leave before Infected was done, but all in all I have no regrets about our experience. We hobbled back to the dorm at 3:45am, to discover… the door was locked and the lights were off in the lobby. We couldn’t remember if the dorm had a curfew or not. A little wave of panic hit as Matt and I considered how best to sleep on the street, when we spotted a high doorbell which awoke a grouchy guard who made a big show of checking our resident cards, visas AND passports, and who only became more grouchy when I needed the key to my room. However, I indeed made it back in one piece without being pickpocketed, which means in my mind the night was a total success!
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